Project Details
Projekt
Standstill - Scenes of Stasis and Latency
Applicants
Professorin Dr. Barbara Gronau; Professor Dr. Reinhold Görling; Professor Dr. Ludger Schwarte
Subject Area
Theatre and Media Studies
Art History
Theoretical Philosophy
Art History
Theoretical Philosophy
Term
from 2013 to 2020
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 244378360
The research project examines the way two highly comprehensive phenomena of aesthetic self-time (eigenzeit) – stasis and latency – function within the visual and performative arts of the 20th and 21st centuries. It is to be clarified how, in modernity, stagings of standstill become capable of reflecting and disrupting normative regimes of time. In contrast to current (self-) determinations of modern time as endless progress, as exact timing or technical acceleration, this research project seeks to lend substance to a different discourse on time, which points at the interruption, the stopping and pausing as means of a critical almost utopian search for hightened presence. The standstill is not to be conceived as a simple negation, but rather as a reversible figure, similar to a pendulum, which, in its highest amplitude takes a hold and anticipates its future movement. The specifically artisti strategies of intensifying the present by producing a standstill are to be analyzed in three perspectives: as interruptions of action in action art and performance, as decontextualization and self-time of material, and as the relation of social stagnation and its depiction in filmic artefacts. We propose to conceive this standstill as a double movement, as both pausing and anticipating. Within standstill, the standing is completed by latency as an invisible movement, something, which is effective, but not (yet) apparent. It is the implicit part of each present. The concept of latency indicates that – next to the time that counts, the time, within which one perceives and the time, in which something happens – another time exists which ought not be visible, because it would demonstrate the contingency and violence of the respective temporal regime. In scenes of standstill, – that is our hypothesis – the present splits up: sequences and patterns loose their self-evidence, something not yet manifest gains shape. In reverse, within the intensification of presence, the alterability of latency can be experienced.
DFG Programme
Priority Programmes
