Still Photography Workshop II: Art, Personae, and the Performance of Selves

Still Photography Workshop II: Art, Personae, and the Performance of Selves is a Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies class taught by Robert Seydel.

Course Description
The arts of personae or masking have a long history in the various creative fields, and are increasingly employed as tools of the literary and visual imagination. Personae derives from the word for person, and is encapsulated in the figure and work of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, who wrote of himself: "There are more I's than I myself." In fact, his oeuvre, which he came to designate The Fictions of the Interlude, constituted a company of more than seventy-five distinct authors, each with his own biography and aesthetic intentions. "To pretend," he said, "is to know ourselves." This masking, fictional invention of artistic personae and their works will be the focus of our semester. Besides Pessoa, we will study the literary and visual works of, among others, Eleanor Antin, Jorge Luis Borges, Marcel Duchamp, Joan Fontcuberta, Peter Greenaway, Andrew Lanyon, Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison, Ilya Kabakov, Kenneth Rexroth, Armand Schwerner, and Araki Yasusada, a fictionalized Hiroshima poet about whom there still remains confusion. But centrally, we will fashion our own fictional personas and the works that compose their careers, defining the provisional and the plural, the self and the other, as our field of endeavor. Students will be responsible for a number of preliminary assignments, and for defining and composing a large-scale photographic (and/or other) work, and a related research paper. Prerequisite courses include Still Photography Workshop I or an equivalent class. Practitioners of literary and other arts disciplines are also welcome. NOTE: Enrolled or top 5 waitlist students who do not attend the first class session risk losing their place on the class roster. Lab Fee.