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In some of its performances, contemporary visual culture displays its distant roots in old rituals. This phenomenon has been noticed particularly since the 1980s, when it has been a tremendous rejuvenation of interest in the study of ritual and a proliferation of new theoretical approaches, reflecting the discipline’s shifting definition of the nature of culture.
This course aims to bring forth to investigation some cultural paradigms revived and transformed by contemporary culture in new visual events and poetical discourses. In order to facilitate the analysis of artists’ works and for comparative reasons, a summery of patterns in comparative religion and ritual will be provided to students to instruct them in grasping the logic and the mechanism of myths, rites as cultural patterns attached to these performances. Thus, concepts provided by historians of religion and culture (M. Eliade), and anthropologists (van Gennep, V. Turner), as well as philosophers of the metaphysics of presence (Plato), and modern theorists of deconstruction (Heidegger, Nietzsche and Derrida) will be outlined. The teaching materials span from illo tempore (beginnings of the humanity as a creative force) to contemporary artists of visual culture, especially Pina Bausch’s dance, Grotowski’s theatre, Tarkovski’s film, as well as Viola’s video installations, in which the renewal of ritual patters was obvious, reflecting old cultural paradigms. The aim of the course is to inquire whether the formal vocabulary inspired by Classical schemes of rites which has been used in contemporary performances could create the same effect as their models, or may have just help constructing new insights and contemporary understandings of these cultural paradigms.
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