| The aim of this project was to build pedagogic, critical, and aesthetic infrastructures through which the comic can be engaged as a scene of disturbance, a regime of corporeal technique, and a particular mood within aesthetic forms. |
The aim of this project was to build pedagogic, critical and aesthetic infrastructures through which the comic can be engaged as a scene of disturbance, a regime of corporeal technique, and a particular mood within aesthetic form. The comedic pokes fun at inelastic seriousness and inserts the threat of inappropriateness into painful scenes. Yet the study of the comedic is underdeveloped in contrast to the study of tragedy and catastrophe. We looked at incongruities of status and mind as social problems and problems of comic form. In addition to addressing these in theory and history--in a special issue of Critical Inquiry and a major conference on painting's humors--we explore the comedic through performance. We expected the performance or bodily component to be revelatory conceptually. Central to our concern were the phenomena of self-mastery, physiognomy, mimicry, bodily citation and gesture. What consequences do bodily habits and formal conventions have for the comic? What are the binding and liberating functions of format, genre, and archetype for the experience of mood, pleasure, and laughter? How do social ecologies of production contribute to these scenes? How do particular media, such as painting, theoretical writing, or performance, shift the comic encounter with pleasure and aggression?
George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor
University of Chicago
Lauren Berlant (1957–2021) was a world-renowned scholar who examined what sentimentality means in American culture for gender, sexuality and politics. They sought to define the desires and emotions that compel people to create forms of life that support a sense of belonging, and the complex ways...
Artist, Director of Programs and Fellowships at the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry
Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry
Zachary Cahill is an interdisciplinary artist and the Director of Programs and Fellowships at the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry. His work examines the nature of propaganda, politics, nation-building, religion, and society. Cahill’s practice focuses primarily on a fictional nation, the USSA,...
Associate Professor, Department of Visual Arts
University of Chicago
Catherine Sullivan has created film, theater, and installation work nationally and internationally. The performers in her works are often coping with written texts, stylistic economies, re-enactments of historic performances, gestural and choreographic regimes, and conceptual orthodoxies. Her...
