Liveness: Performance and Neoanimism in Late Capitalism

Catalog description

Has the “affect economy’s” 24/7 live shifted medial maps distinguishing live from object arts? As animacy and inanimacy warp, do orientations to duration, participation, and relation shift? Can liveness extend to the Paleolithic in today’s “new materialist” imaginary? If "Cinema is Dead," does it join theatre as a zombie form? Modernist “animism,” “totemism,” and “primitivism” provide a backdrop to recent returns to animism in Chen, Bennet, Latour and others. Does theatre’s separation from ritual and possession demand rethinking via “relationscapes” and the critical turn to affect theory? Art/performance, theatre, cinema will be under discussion, from Euripides Bacchae to Gucci Bacchae.