Critical Visualities

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Critical Visualities

Friday, October 31 in rm. 4406 (English Lounge) @ 4 pm

While empirical evidence suggests that the average museum visitor spends only 27.2 seconds looking at a painting, the organizers of “Critical Visualities”—Wendy Tronrud, Danica Savonick, Hilarie Ashton, Duncan Faherty, and Eric Lott—invite you to spend up to four and a half minutes performing a reading of a visual artifact or experience that has pierced, haunted, silenced, or outraged you. Catalyzed, in part, by a summer of public art in NYC, from Kara Walker’s A Subtlety to Danh Vo’s We the People, we seek to fall into even more aesthetic encounters with the visual—encounters that can trouble and are so often troubled themselves.

What do visual artifacts and experiences make possible and what are their limits? Like sound, visual experiences spill into the unspeakable, the “then and there reverberating in the here and now” (Muñoz) for which we may not yet have a language. Whether it’s a photograph, painting, sculpture, film, protest, Prezi, or patchwork quilt, experiences with the visual may offer a fleeting glimpse of “the wild” that exists beyond institutions, allowing us to “see more and see differently and feel a new sense of wanting and becoming” (Halberstam).

Presentations may touch on ekphrasis and ecstasy, temporality and titillation, embodiment and collision, deconstruction and the undead.

As with Critical Karaoke, the question remains: What can possibly be said, thought, or felt, in such a short space? On a day of visual trickery and purposeful confusion/hiding/reveling (in the sense of the carnivalesque), what comes up in visual spaces that is new, unseen, familiar, close, loud? Which roles are chosen for people or objects, and which are rejected?

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