Kaja Silverman on Jeff Wall

“Visibility” and “invisibility” have been the dominant concerns of Wall’s art. In his earliest Cibachromes, “invisibility” meant “ideological mystification,” and Wall sought to undo this mystification by rendering things visible. However, his relationship to visibility and invisibility soon began to change, and from the l990s on, the people, places and things in his photographs are more likely to turn away from us than toward us.

In her talk, Silverman will discuss the aesthetic, philosophical and political implications of this shift, and provide a detailed reading of Wall’s 2001 work, After “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison, the Preface.

Kaja Silverman is Class of 1940 Professor of Rhetoric and Film Studies, University of California at Berkeley. She has a Ph.D. in English and studied at the Brown University and the University of Santa Barbara, California. She has received several Fellowships and Grants, including the Humanities Research Fellowship (2005), the Clark Art Institute Fellowship (2003) and the President’s Research Grant, University of California, Berkeley (1982 & 1993). Silverman is contributing editor for Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society, Discourse, Differences, Studies in Gender and Sexuality and October. Her recent publications include Flesh of My Flesh (forthcoming from Stanford University Press, New York 2008), James Coleman, ed. Susanne Gaensheimer (HatjeCantz, Munich 2002), World Spectators (Stanford University Press, New York 2000) and she is currently working on The Miracle of Analogy. Silverman is on the advisory board to the Film Committee of the Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society and The Humanities Institute, State University of New York at Stony Brook.

The lecture of Kaja Silverman has been organised in cooperation with lecture series ‘Now is the Time: Art & Theory in the 21st Century’. For more information on Kaja Silverman’s participation in the ‘Now is the Time’ lecture series, please visit www.nowisthetime.nl.