PERSONA SEMINAR RECAP: WEEK 7
For week 7 of our seminar meetings, we considered Hal Foster's concept of mimetic excess, in which an artist performs, and often exacerbates their role within a structure of oppression as a form of critique. Initially employed through the use of persona by Dadaist artists responding to the traumas of WWI, mimetic excess persists as a strategy within contemporary art. Using Foster's analysis of Max Ernst's persona Dadamax as a departure point, we considered the over-identification Chris Krauss performs in I Love Dick through the lens of mimetic excess.
We also looked at the work of Ernst's contemporary, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, a poet and artist working in assemblage and readymade sculpture. Recent research has suggested that Freytag-Loringhoven was the person behind the pseudonym R. Mutt, "author" of Duchamp's Fountain. We looked at a few sculptural works by Freytag, one that she titled after Duchamp, and read one poem that involves Duchamp as a character to build on ideas of parasitism begun in the previous week’s discussion of Krauss.
We also thought about the automaton as a form of mimesis. As a sort of “non-personality,” the automaton performs their societal role without thinking. This bare-minimum form of identification reproduces and clarifies the most basic functions of a position through simplification, rather than mimetic excess’s deconstruction of normativity through amplification.
To close the session, we arrived at an impasse on the continuing viability of mimesis as a critical strategy. We considered Lauren Berlant’s concept of "cruel optimism,” in which we misidentify our positions, meaning that we perceive ourselves as what we are in fact mimicking. Mimicry only persists as a useful critical strategy if one can understand the distance between one’s position and the object of mimesis, which Berlant’s project calls into question.