Roland Barthes
(Cherbourg, 1915-Paris, 1980)
Breaking away from academic criticism in the postwar
period, French critic and semiologist Roland Barthes
developed an innovative approach inspired by modern
linguistics, psychoanalysis, and anthropology. His
wide-ranging analyses covered literature, film,
photography, painting, and music, but also the writings
of the historian Michelet or the theater of Racine. In Mythologies
(1957), Barthes analyzes the representations of petty
bourgeois ideology to demystify the ideological system
present in everyday objects and stereotypes. With Writing
Degree Zero (1953), he addresses the history of
signs in literature. He was interested in the auxiliary
systems of language through which values are indirectly
transmitted. He was also one of the founders of the
magazine Théâtre populaire, which was a forum for
artistic, social, and political contestation.During the
1960s, the years of the "structuralist
adventure," Barthes, following the linguist
Ferdinand de Saussure, attempted to constitute semiology
as a "science that would study the life of signs
within social life." Key writings of this period
include Elements of Semiology (1964) and The
Fashion System (1967). Here too the principles of
articulation and combination of the language system serve
as a model for analyzing discourse in literature, film,
music, and even clothing. During this period, Barthes
joined the group that had formed around the leftist
review Tel Quel. With his Critical Essays (1964)
and New Critical Essays (1972), he proposed free
readings of La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère, Robbe-Grillet,
Loti, Bataile, Voltaire, Proust, Flaubert, Queneau,
Tacitus, and Kafka. In The Pleasure of the Text
(1975), the text is freed from theoretical discourses to
generate a subjective discourse, a style affirming the
intense pleasure (jouissance) of writing in contrast to
the indifference of science and the Puritanism of
ideological analysis. In Camera lucida (1980),
he offers a personal reading of photography.
Bibliography of works in English translation:
Writing Degree Zero (1953, tr. 1968). Mythologies
(1957, tr. 1972). On Racine (1963, tr. 1964). Critical
Esssays (1964, tr. 1972). Criticism and Truth
(1966, tr. 1987). The Fashion System (1967, tr.
1983). S/Z (1970, tr. 1974). Empire of Signs
(1970, tr. 1982). Sade, Fourier, Loyola (1971,
tr. 1976). The Pleasure of the Text (1972, tr.
1975). Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (1975,
tr. 1977). A Lover's Discourse: Fragments (1977,
tr. 1978). The Grain of the Voice (1981, tr.
1985). Writer Sollers (1979, tr. 1987). Camera
Lucida (1980, tr. 1981). The Responsibility of
Forms (L'Obvie et l'obtus, 1982, tr. 1985).
The Rustle of Language (1984, tr. 1986). Incidents
(1987, tr. 1992). Raymond
Bellour (France, 1939- )
Critic and theorist of literature and film, Raymond
Bellour is a senior researcher at the CNRS (National
Center for Scientific Research) and conducts a seminar at
the University of Paris. He was one of the founders of
the French film review Trafic, to which he
contributes regularly on both film and video. He has
edited several key film anthologies, including Le
cinéma américain (1980) and Le Western (1966).
His study L'Entre-Images : Photo, Cinéma, Vidéo
(1990) analyzes the passages between images and the video
image's power of transformation: "Between photo,
film, video, the inter-image space (l'entre-images) is a
passageway. The place where images pass today."
Bellour also served as co-curator with Christine Van
Assche and Catherine David of the well-known "Passages
de l'image" exhibition at the Centre Georges
Pompidou in 1990. His most recent work is an essai on
Chris Marker's CD-ROM Imemory (1997).
Bibliography of works available in English
translation: Eye for I: Video Self-Portraits
(New York: Independent Curators Inc., 1989). With Laurent
Roth, Qu'est-ce qu'une madeleine? A propos du CD-ROM
Immemory de Chris Marker(Brussels and Paris: Yves
Gevaert Editeur/Centre Georges Pompidou, 1997, bilingual
French/English).
Edited works: With Elisabeth Lyon,
"Unspeakable Images", Camera Obscura 24 (1991).
Jean-Luc Godard: son + image (New York: Museum
of Modern Art, 1992).
Body Art
While Body Art is an outgrowth of the happening, it
differs from them as an individual act not intended to be
repeated. In most instances, photographs and videos are
the only traces of the action and come to replace the
work itself. Among the key figures of Body Art are the
Americans Vito Acconci and Denis Oppenheim, the Italian
Gina Pane, the Frenchman Michel Journiac, and the Swiss
Urs Lüthi. Body Art is rooted in poetry. Acconci went
from words to the page and from the page to the body,
while Journiac's Le Sang nu (Naked Blood,
1968) expressed his desire to make the body a language of
creation. For Acconci and Pane, bodily action was
accompanied by psychological preparation, notes, and
sketches; the action came to an end when the artists felt
that the situation had been altered. The aggression of
the audience was a major element of Body Art, with the
work's aesthetic depending on its ability to disrupt the
public's ways of thinking and put an end to its passive
state. Effort, risk, and pain, but also posturing and
travesty, were essential aspects of Body Art. The
Austrians Hermann Nitsch, Günter Brus, Rudolf
Schwarzkogler, and Otto Muehl were to occupy an important
place--between happening and Body Art--because of their
brutal actions that combined all the behaviors hidden by
society and thus forced viewers to call themselves into
question. A number of other artists, including Bruce
Nauman, Lucas Samaras, Terry Fox, Chris Burden, and
Gilbert & George, were to make their bodies a
privileged terrain for their work. The first major
exhibition of Body Art was held in Paris in 1975 at the
Stadler Gallery, which published the first Body Art
manifesto.
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