THE RAVING AGE: HISTORIES AND FIGURES OF YOUTH

This 2-days symposium is organized as part of the research project The Raving Age. Histories and Figures of Youth (theravingage.com). This research project questions what has come of youth – a conceptual, aesthetic, and political figure that was born with modernity – in the visual arts, popular culture, and the humanities. Conversely, the project addresses what the problematic category of “youth” has brought about in contemporary art and thought. By exploring the processes by which youth is constituted through its forms of representation, this project seeks to grasp it as an allegory that will help rethink the “contemporary” through its most lively milieu.

From the consideration of childhood as an ideal for the modern conception of human psychology and political subjectivity (Tristan Garcia) to the violence exerted on it by the world of adult domination (Gisèle Vienne), from the cinematic representation of ages as a vector of historical invention (Eric Baudelaire) to adolescence as a cosmological allegory of our world-building techniques (Federico Campagna), and from the ageist politics of “youth music” (Guillaume Heuguet) to hyperpop as the invention of new, “cringe” relations between sincerity and artifice (Julie Ackermann, Lorenzo Benzoni & Luca Frati), these two study days will explore the manifold dimensions of the concept of “youth” as strategic sites to engage with the politics of time and the aesthetic categories of our age, its ends and its beginnings.

Day 1 will happen in French, Day 2 in English. The Q&A sessions of both days will happen in French and English.

DAY 1 - Monday, 27 March

9.30 am

Welcome coffee

10 am

Introduction

10.30am

L'innocence de l'œil et le bonhomme-têtard. Esthétisation et épistémisation des dessins d'enfant au XIXe et au XXe siècle. Tristan Garcia

12am

Lunch break

13.30 am

Extra Life, Screenings and conversation with Gisèle Vienne

3 pm

Break

3.30 pm

Anabases

Screenings and conversation with Éric Baudelaire

5 pm

Conclusion

Apéro

8 pm

Screening of Jerk (2021) and conversation with Gisèle Vienne at Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne: https://vidy.ch/fr/evenement/gisele-vienne-jerk/

(For interested students, discounted tickets will be available at the theater)

DAY 2 - Tuesday, 28 March

09.30 am

Younger than you: talking with post-future adolescents, Federico Campagna

11 am

break

11.30 am

“Youth Music”, ageism and the politics of time, Guillaume Heuguet

1 pm

Lunch break

2 pm

Pop Hardcore: why did pop become so extreme? Julie Ackermann

followed by

Immaterial forever: representations of queer adolescence through the hyperpop community, Lorenzo Benzoni & Luca Frati

4 pm

Conclusion

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L'innocence de l'œil et le bonhomme-têtard. Esthétisation et épistémisation des dessins d'enfant au XIXe et au XXe siècle.

Tristan Garcia

"Enfance" est un concept stratégique. L'un des moments-clef des oppositions autour de ce qu'est l'enfance est l'émergence, au milieu du XIXe siècle, à la fois d'une curiosité esthétique et d'un intérêt épistémique pour les dessins des jeunes enfants. Jusqu'alors négligées, les productions graphiques des plus jeunes deviennent des œuvres en soi, qui peuvent être exposées (à Hambourg, à Londres, à Paris), mais aussi des modèles pour les artistes (la "classe d'art juvénile" de Frank Cizek, au sein de la Sécession viennoise). A partir du moment où John Ruskin évoque une "innocence de l'œil" dans son traité de dessin, le graphisme enfantin devient aussi un possible idéal de l'œuvre d'art moderne autonome, produite par jeu, désintéressée, spontanée, délivrée des conventions sociales adultes.

A cette voie, qu'on appellera "la voie de Ruskin", on opposera "la voie de Spencer": au même moment, dans ses très influents articles de pédagogie, l'évolutionniste Herbert Spencer prend pour exemple des stades de développement de l'intelligence humaine les stades de développement du dessin d'enfant, qui servira désormais de test de l'évolution de la motricité, des émotions et de la cognition, jusqu'à l'élaboration du célèbre "test du bonhomme" par Florence Goodenough. Ce test servira à pré-établir le "degré d'intelligence" de nombreuses générations d'enfants et accompagnera l'élaboration des normes modernes de la jeunesse, de la répartition en classes d'âge, de la définition de la déficience mentale aussi bien que des "enfants surdoués".

On s'attardera ensuite sur la mise en parallèle, à partir des années 1860 de dessins d'enfants, d'œuvres de peuples alors dits "primitifs" et de peintures rupestres du Paléolithique supérieur : l'enfance, par l'étude de ses dessins, a permis de mettre sur le même plan l'enfance de chaque individu, l'enfance de l'humanité toute entière et des peuples infantilisés, considérés comme de "grands enfants", dans le cadre de théories évolutionnistes dites "de la récapitulation".

De ces usages du dessin d'enfant on tirera enfin la thèse selon laquelle la définition de l'enfance (quand elle commence et quand elle finit, sa part naturelle et sa part sociale, son découpage en stades de développement) joue toujours un rôle stratégique dans le découpage des catégories de notre humanité : en découpant les âges de la vie, ce sont aussi les populations, les cultures, les genres et les classes sociales qu'on découpe et qu'on ordonne.

Extra Life

Projections et conversation avec Gisèle Vienne

La pratique artistique de Gisèle Vienne est traversée par l'articulation entre nos cadres perceptifs et les rapports de domination que ceux-ci tendent sans cesse à naturaliser, à faire apparaître comme inévitables, atemporels, sans histoire. Dans les travaux de l’artiste, cette articulation prend la forme de l’apparition récurrente de certaines formes incarnées de la jeunesse : les rituels de l’enfance, la morphologie mécanique de la marionnette, ou encore le corps adolescent sont saisis - souvent par le langage chorégraphique - dans leur rapport de résistance ou de révolte à “l’éducation à la cruauté” que leur impose l’espace social. Cette conversation sera l’occasion de traverser les catégories politiques et esthétiques qui structurent les recherches artistiques de Gisèle Vienne, à partir d’extraits de plusieurs de ses pièces filmiques et chorégraphiques.

Anabases

Projections et conversation avec Eric Baudelaire

Dans un important corpus d'œuvres filmiques conçues depuis 2010, Eric Baudelaire articule l'écriture documentaire et l'enquête historique, produisant une indiscernabilité entre faits socio-politiques et fictions de mémoires inventées. Dans cette articulation, une figure émerge régulièrement à travers son oeuvre, celle de la représentation des âges : enfants, jeunes, mais aussi octogénaires, qui apparaissent dans les films de l'artiste comme les protagonistes des rapports entre la mémoire politique collective et l'expérience subjective de la destruction ou de la création, entre le temps historique et les régimes d'invention de la tradition, ou encore entre le document visuel et ses régimes de vérité. A partir de plusieurs films de l'artiste (L'Anabase de May et Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi, et 27 années sans images, 2011 ; Also Known as Jihadi, 2017 ; Un film dramatique, 2019 ; When There Is No More Music to Write, and Other Roman Stories, 2022), cette conversation prendra la forme d'une "anabase" (figure philosophique et littéraire chère à l'artiste, qui renvoie à une structure narrative composée d'un embarquement, d'une errance et d'un retour) à travers les âges et leurs représentations, et explorera les liens des travaux d'Eric Baudelaire à la représentation de l'âge comme allégorie de l'histoire, mais aussi et plus largement comme vecteur d'accès privilégié aux catégories et idées qui animent sa production artistique.

Younger than you: talking with post-future adolescents

Federico Campagna

We are born as infants, then we grow young, adult, old and finally we die. Nobody seems to be able to escape the linearity of time. And yet, as metaphysicians and scientists do not tire to repeat, time is not something that really exists, let alone exist linearly. It is possible, for example, to be young and old at the same time – as it happens to those who have been alive only for a few years, but within a world that is nearing its end. In this talk, philosopher Federico Campagna will try to shed some light on those who will be young in a young world: the post-future adolescents who will create a new reality after the end of the one we inhabit today.

“Youth Music”, ageism and the politics of time

Guillaume Heuguet

The relationship between youth and popular music is an issue for critics and theorists. Lawrence Grossberg argues, for example, that while popular music (from pop to rave) is seen as music through which youth express themselves and which express a certain idea of youth, the youth in question is in fact mostly constructed as such by a specific generation, the baby boomers. The musical discussions that oppose "Gen Z" and "the boomers" seem to react to this ethnocentrism of age. Against this background, my talk will explore how, in popular music, age might be brought into play as a critical category in the same way as class, gender or race. I will shed light on how these musics do or do not mediate ageism – that is how, by expressing and informing our sensibilities, they participate in reproducing ageism or contesting it. Indeed, if there is a social relationship of power that we would call ageism, then it seems that it concerns the young as much as the old, thus almost everyone: it can then seem difficult to identify a material basis to gather those who would then be on the wrong side of this relationship, for example excluded from positions of economic power. Moreover, the distinction of the ages seems to operate as much by the exclusion as by the valorization, even the fetishism of certain ages. I will thus try to show how current popular music, from rap to techno, reflects these problems, not only by addressing them explicitly, but also by intervening in a sensitive and critical way on our experiences of time, which we depend upon for intergenerational political alliances.

Pop Hardcore: why did pop become so extreme?

Julie Ackermann

Understood as a manifestation of love for artifice, hyperpop is the name of an aesthetic rebellion that emerged in the early 2010s and appropriating commercial pop music in order to deconstruct it by exaggerating or distorting its characteristic motifs. This conference will examine hyperpop as a cultural style that relies on but also transcends music and can be applied to other cultural productions. It will explain its post-internet context of emergence (attention economy, acceleration and platform capitalism) and understand it as an digital actualisation of the "camp" style theorized by Sunsan Sontag. It will try to understand the specificity of this extreme style focused on fun, and the new aesthetic category it relies on : the cringe, an awkwardness the hyperloop style celebrates to enhance a new kind of sincerity in a context of digital and cultural irony and nihilism. 

Immaterial forever: representations of queer adolescence through the hyperpop community

Lorenzo Benzoni & Luca Frati

To grow up queer means forgetting the linearity of time. It means mistrusting chronology and to multiply timelines. Understanding identity as a never ending flux of transformations, and adolescence not as a biological age but as something that can happen multiple times, over and over again. Queerness is the key to decomposing social norms and expectations (regarding gender, but not only). If there are no more fixed states, as a consequence there could be infinite states, if there is nothing concrete to hold on to, there is complete freedom: IMMATERIAL FOREVER. This title quotes in fact the work of late musician Sophie who, through their thought and production, triggered new reflections on gender and opened up new spaces for queer youth to thrive. Beginning with Sophie, this talk questions the connection between queerness and hyperpop, framing the latter as an elected space for the former to express and determine itself.

Hyperpop is increasingly becoming a container for queer kids to find their safe space and a caring community. The genre itself is fed by queer artists and their experimentations, which often depict youth and take it as their focal point. Taking mainstream culture as an example, it is possible to understand the relationship between the representation of the queer subject and the feeling of post-ironic despair inherent of hyperpop, a genre that reached the mainstream during a time of total disorientation and disillusionment (the pandemic era and its aftermaths).

This reflection on the theme is proposed by ECAL alumni Lorenzo Benzoni and Luca Frati as artists who are navigating contemporary culture and are deeply interested in every shade of pop. It has to be intended also as a selection of references that are dear to them and are feeding both their practices.

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Tristan Garcia, né en 1981 à Toulouse, enseigne la philosophie à l'Université Lyon-3. Il est l'auteur de nombreux romans, dont La Meilleure part des hommes, Mémoires de la jungle, Faber, 7, Âmes et Vie contre vie, aux éditions Gallimard. Il a publié plusieurs ouvrages de théorie, de métaphysique (Forme et objet; Laisser être et rendre puissant, PUF) ou d'études culturelles (La vie intense, Autrement; Nous, Grasset; Kaléidoscope, Léo Scheer).

Gisèle Vienne est une artiste, chorégraphe et metteure en scène franco-autrichienne. Après des études de philosophie et de musique, elle se forme à l’Ecole Supérieure Nationale des Arts de la Marionnette. Elle travaille depuis régulièrement avec, entre autres collaborateurs, l’écrivain Dennis Cooper. Depuis 20 ans, ses mises en scènes et chorégraphies tournent en Europe et sont présentées régulièrement en Asie et en Amérique, parmi lesquelles I Apologize (2004), Kindertotenlieder (2007), Jerk (2008), This is how you will disappear (2010), LAST SPRING : A Prequel (2011), The Ventriloquists Convention (2015) et Crowd (2017). En 2020 elle crée avec Etienne Bideau-Rey une quatrième version de Showroomdummies au Rohm Theater Kyoto, pièce initialement créée en 2001. En 2021 elle réalise le film Jerk. Elle prépare actuellement une nouvelle création dont la première est prévue pour la Ruhrtriennale 2023.

Au sortir d’une recherche en sciences politiques, Eric Baudelaire a choisi la pratique artistique comme outil de son regard critique sur le monde, à travers le film, la photographie, l’installation performative et le texte. Son œuvre sonde un réel travaillé par les systèmes de représentation qui structurent les sociétés contemporaines : systèmes politiques, judiciaires, économiques, informationnels. Elle scrute ce qui n’est pas conforme à ces systèmes, ce qui déraille, se retourne, erre, bascule hors lieu. Dans ses expositions, il incorpore ses films au sein d’installations comprenant d’autres oeuvres et documents, mais aussi des performances, des publications et une programmation publique, notamment lors du projet APRÈS (2017) au Centre Pompidou et The Secession Sessions (2014) qui a débuté à Bétonsalon à Paris, puis voyagé à Bergen Kunsthall, la fondation Kadist à San Francisco, et Sharjah Biennial 12. Ses dernières expositions monographiques ont eu lieu à Spike Island, Bristol, Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, CRAC Occitanie à Sète, au Witte de With à Rotterdam, à Tabakalera, San Sebastian, au Fridericianum à Kassel, au Beirut Art Center au Liban, à Gasworks, Londres, et au Hammer Museum à Los Angeles. Il a reçu le Prix Marcel Duchamp en 2019, et publie la monographie FAIRE AVEC chez Paraguay Press en 2023.

Federico Campagna is an Italian philosopher based in London. His work focuses on the relationship between metaphysics, world-building and intellectual history. His latest books are Prophetic Culture: recreation for adolescents (2021) and Technic and Magic: the reconstruction of reality (2018). He is Associate Fellow at the Warburg Institute and Critical Fellow at the Royal Academy Schools in London. He is the co-founder of the Italian philosophy publisher Timeo and works at the UK/US radical publisher Verso.

Guillaume Heuguet holds a PhD in media studies from Sorbonne University. He works in France as a professor of art history and contemporary art at ESACM and as a publisher at Audimat Éditions. He founded the music label In Paradisum, the magazine of musical and social criticism Audimat and the magazine of technological criticism Tèque. His research work focuses on media technologies, popular music and the relationship between aesthetics and politics. He is the author of YouTube et les métamorphoses de la musique (INA / Bloomsbury), the reader Penser les musiques populaires (La Rue Musicale, with Gérôme Guibert) and has edited the collections Trap (Éditions Divergences / Audimat) and Chill (Audimat).

Julie Ackermann, born in 1994 and graduated from Sciences Po Paris in 2018, is an editor, a translator and a cultural critic interested in pop culture through its margins. She has written about contemporary art in catalogues and magazines (Mouvement, Les Inrocks, Beaux Arts Magazine, Slate, Antidote...) and now focuses her research on music, and especially hyperpop. She has written an essay in Audimat on this subject and is working on a book about it for Façonnage éditions. 

Lorenzo Benzoni, born in Bergamo in 1997, is a multidisciplinary artist. He studied visual arts at Accademia di Belle Arti G.Carrara and ECAL. His work is linked to cultural time and its dynamics, perceived from a western GenZ point of view. He recently published his first book Trying to Get to Heaven Before They Close the Door (Mare Publications, 2022), while organizing release parties and talks between Italy and Switzerland. He had his first solo show in One Gee In Fog (Geneva, 2023) and is currently working on his first musical project with the italian producer Komatsu San, entitled Oleander. 

Luca Frati is a visual artist working with performance, writing and drawing, who recently graduated from ECAL. He is interested in exploring the queer experience through the use of fiction and the embodiment of hyper femininity. His latest performance, Prayer is whatever you say on your knees, tells the dream of being a popstar in order to reflect on faith intended as trust in one’s own agency. His master thesis, titled Cross my heart. A collection of materials around care, is an exploration of care as an anti-capitalist tool and as a way to build community. In March 2023, he wrote a text to accompany Ines Maestre’s solo show at Wynx Club 3000, Zurich. He is part of the independent publishing house Mare Publications who is focused on promoting the production of young artists while exploring new forms of publishing. Their latest release is Dove non batte il sole by Alberto Cornoló, with a text from Lorenzo Bernini.

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Concept  and organization

Philippe Azoury, Stéphanie Moisdon, Vincent Normand, Shirin Yousefi

For further information, please contact: 

shirin.yousefi@ecal.ch

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“The Raving Age. Histories and Figures of Youth” is a research project supported by ECAL/University of Art and Design Lausanne and HES-SO/University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland.

theravingage.com