Papers by Branislav Jakovljevic
The last play about the Yugoslav wars performed while these conflicts were still happening was Pe... more The last play about the Yugoslav wars performed while these conflicts were still happening was Peter Handke’s Voyage by Dugout, or the Play of the Film of the War, which opened in Vienna’s Burgtheater under Claus Peymann’s direction on June 9, 1999, the day when the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia signed a peace accord with NATO. This ended the air bombing campaign, which turned out to be the last in a series of armed conflicts that had started almost a decade earlier in Slovenia. This paper follows the metaphor of the dugout which emerged in this play and reappeared in a number of fiction and nonfiction pieces that Handke subsequently published. It takes the reader to some of the key locales of the Yugoslav conflict: the international war crime tribunal in The Hague, Bosnian villages, the streets of Belgrade, and enclaves in Kosovo. This journey reveals that Slobodan Milosevic’s regime waged a war not only against its neighbors, but also against its own citizens, and suggests Handke’s complicity in this warfare.
TDR, Mar 1, 2007
The book is divided into five chapters: The first two discuss aspects of manga and sh gekij in te... more The book is divided into five chapters: The first two discuss aspects of manga and sh gekij in terms of common social and artistic motifs; the last three review the history of Japanese theatre from premodern times to modernization and Westernization, to conclude with the sh gekij ...
Primer acto: Cuadernos de investigación teatral, 2000
International Journal of Museum Management and Curatorship, Dec 1, 1996
Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, Oct 1, 2009
In OctOber 1992, the UnIted natIOns secUrIty cOUncIl reqUested the secretary-general tO appOInt a... more In OctOber 1992, the UnIted natIOns secUrIty cOUncIl reqUested the secretary-general tO appOInt an ImpartIal cOmmIssIOn tO examine and record the atrocities committed in the wars in the former Yugoslavia. Two years later, this commission produced its final report. Some of the goriest pages in this catalogue of infamy are dedicated to the explosion on the Markale open-air market in central Sarajevo that took place around noon on Saturday, 5 February 1994. The report describes it as "the worst attack on civilians during the siege" of Sarajevo, citing that it killed at least 66 persons and wounded 197 (781). This explosion can be said to represent the turning point in the Bosnian war, which by that point had lasted some twenty-two months without any reasonable resolution in sight. David Binder, a New York Times reporter and the author of the most detailed account of this atrocity to date, writes that it provoked the first engagement of NATO in European hostilities since it was founded four decades earlier and the first involvement of U.S. forces in combat in Europe since the beginning of the Cold War. Within days it also drew Russia into the hapless circle of Balkan problem-solvers, along with a unit of Russian peacekeeping troopsthe first entry of Russia into the former Yugoslavia since Joseph Stalin's break-up with Josip Broz Tito in 1948. (70) 1814 theater of atrocities: toward a disreality principle [ P M L A t h e o r ie s an d m e t h o d o log ie s
Amfiteater, Jun 30, 2023
While the emergence of new forms of performance writing in the 1960s and 1970s did not eliminate ... more While the emergence of new forms of performance writing in the 1960s and 1970s did not eliminate traditional forms of drama, they radically transformed the role of textuality in the theatre. This article argues that when liberated from the rules of dramatic writing and even syntax and grammar, performance writing brings an illocationary logic into textual production. The article concludes with a preliminary consideration of differences between experimental writing strategies and the latest text-generating AI.
Amfiteater, Jun 30, 2023
Pojav novih oblik uprizoritvenih pisav v šestdesetih in sedemdesetih letih prejšnjega stoletja si... more Pojav novih oblik uprizoritvenih pisav v šestdesetih in sedemdesetih letih prejšnjega stoletja sicer ni odpravil tradicionalnih dramskih oblik, je pa korenito spremenil vlogo besedilnosti v gledališču. V članku zagovarjamo tezo, da je uprizoritvena pisava, osvobojena pravil dramske pisave in celo sintakse ter gramatike, v besedilno produkcijo vnesla ilokacijsko logiko. Članek zaključimo s preliminarnim razmislekom o razlikah med eksperimentalnimi strategijami pisave in najnovejšimi oblikami umetne inteligence za generiranje besedil.
Intellect Books, Sep 1, 2013
ARTMargins, Feb 1, 2022
Within the span of only four years, two books on the same subject and with almost identical title... more Within the span of only four years, two books on the same subject and with almost identical titles were published on two sides of Europe: Hans Prinzhorn's Artistry of the Mentally Ill (Berlin, 1922) and Pavel Ivanovich Karpov's Creativity of the Mentally Ill (Moscow, 1926). Whereas the first book was recognized as one of the key steps in the “discovery” of the psychotic art and its eventual mainstreaming, the second one quickly fell into obscurity. Its author perished in Stalinist purges of the 1930s, together with a number of his colleagues from the Russian Academy of Artistic Science (RAKhN, 1921-1931), in which he served as the head of the Commission for the Creativity of Mentally Ill. This article is the first in-depth study of Karpov's book and his theory of creativity, which he based on his extensive collection of the works of his patients (which was also lost in the purges). The article argues that his approach to psychotic art is completely independent from Prinzhorn's. Instead, it places this book in the context of the specific form of Kunstwissenschaft that was practiced in RAKhN, suggesting that this placement is of primary importance for understanding Karpov's methods and aims. More specifically, the article argues that in his research on the creativity of the mentally ill, Karpov engages in a productive dialogue with the philosopher and prominent RAKhN member Gustav Shpet's work on epistemology from the same period. The result is an original contribution to the clinical literature on art of the mentally ill patients.
Art Journal, 2004
Ineffability and Sublimity in Suprematism The Blank Malevich is on a roll, and everything suggest... more Ineffability and Sublimity in Suprematism The Blank Malevich is on a roll, and everything suggests that the resurging interest in his work has just reached its high point. It began in Russia, where over the past decade the art historians caught up with their own past with commendable quickness and rigor: the publication of Kazimir Malevich's complete writings in five volumes under the editorship of Aleksandra Shatskikh is certainly a groundbreaking achievement, and Yevgenia Petrova's work on Malevich's legacy in the stacks of the Russian Museum in Leningrad is no less significant.' In France, the publication of Andrei Nakov's catalogue raisonn6 of Malevich was followed by the major exhibition staged at the Mus6e d'art moderne de laVille de Paris.2 At the same time in Lisbon and Madrid there was an attempt to approach the master of Suprematism from a different angle with an exhibition dedicated to Malevich and cinema.3 In 2003-04, Malevich rolled westward as the exhibition Kazimir Malevich: Suprematism moved from the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin to NewYork on the way to the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas.4 Unfortunately, outside of Russia the renewal of interest in Malevich's visual work has not been accompanied by a comparable reconsideration of his theories (the notable exception is the Iberian show). As a result, Suprematism, one of the most decisive attacks on convention in the history of modern painting, is receiving conventional museum presentations. However, a turn to its original theoretical premises reveals Suprematism's resilience to aesthetization. Malevich painted Black Square in 19I5. He immediately presented this work as a breakthrough and a milestone in his artistic career as well as in the history of art in general. It seems to have had the power of a revelation. In what now looks like a masterly stroke of avant-garde self-mystification, he reported that he could not sleep, eat, or drink for an entire week after he finished the painting. Over the following twenty years, he repeated the Black Square three times in the same technique (oil on canvas), and then whenever and wherever he could: in his lithographed books, on the buttons his Vitebsk students carried on their lapels and sleeves, and appended to his signature. In 1918, he painted White on White. Another milestone; another breakthrough-from polychrome to monochrome-white Suprematism. If Black Square was a revelation, then White Square was the ultimate act of painting-and the herald of its end. His first solo exhibition, which opened in March 1920 in Moscow, was a Suprematist tour de force; one room after another was covered with nonobjective paintings, and, according to numerous witness accounts, the last room contained empty canvases.5 It was part of a much broader renunciation of painting, which in itself served as a declaration of the end of art. Then, in a sudden return to easel painting, between 1927 and 1928, he produced a series of "post-Impressionist" works, which he backdated to the period between 90io and 1916, thus forging a development parallel to Suprematism.6 To this series belongs the painting Female Figure, which features the outline of a woman reduced to basic geometrical forms. Atypically for this series, most recognizable for the faceless human shapes in open fields, painted in bright colors, I. Kazimir Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii v pyati tomakh, ed. Aleksandra Shatskikh (Moscow: Gilea, 1995-2000). Four volumes have been published so far. Translations from these volumes that appear with this article are by Branislav Jakovljevic. Yevgenia Petrova, Kazimir Malevich in the Russian Museum (St.
Theatre Journal, 2002
In the last decades of the twentieth century, J. L. Austin's performative speech act theory emerg... more In the last decades of the twentieth century, J. L. Austin's performative speech act theory emerged as one of the most passionately contested philosophical ideas. 1 There are many reasons for this. One of the most significant is that a performative speech act reintroduces the referent into linguistics: it brings language, so to speak, back to the body and to the stormy question of identity. The general performative speech act theory oversteps the disciplinary boundaries of analytical philosophy and enters the domains of poststructuralist theory, feminist theory, and, of course, performance theory, to name some. This is, in part, due to the brilliant clarity and simplicity of Austin's idea to "isolate" utterances "in which by saying something or in saying something we are doing something." 2 The other source of what seems to be the unending actuality of Austin's theory is the way in which, not so brilliantly, he excludes certain performative utterances: "a performative utterance will, for example, be in a peculiar way hollow or void if said by an actor or spoken in a soliloquy. .. Language in such circumstances is in a special way-intelligibly-used not seriously, but in ways parasitic upon its normal use-ways which fall under etiolations of language" (22, italics in the original). Paradoxically, this attempt to exclude literature from the theory of performative speech acts attracts literary critics, and rightfully so; the performative speech act theory not only introduces "plain speech" to philosophy but also establishes powerful connections between literature and its surroundings, between writer and reader, or writer and critic. That is, until we hit upon Austin's I would like to thank Peggy Phelan, who read this work at the various stages of writing, and Yelena Gluzman and Matvei Yankelevich for being insightful and loving readers. I am also grateful to Susan Bennett, David Román, and the outside readers of Theatre Journal for their valuable comments and suggestions. 1 Reception of Austin's theory in the seventies was marked by the Jacques Derrida-John J. Searle debate on the pages of the journal Glyph, while in the eighties Jean-Francois Lyotard's theory of postmodernism added to Austin's theory a new valence and a whole new set of contradictions. Alain Badiou, one of the most prominent French thinkers of the 1990's, adamantly rejects Austin's theory and philosophical projects that rest on it. 2 J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), 12, italics in the original. Subsequent references will be included parenthetically in the text.
Theatre Journal, 2005
In my essay I propose that this author's dramatic works, unpublished during his lifetime, can... more In my essay I propose that this author's dramatic works, unpublished during his lifetime, can be properly assessed not according to their aesthetic properties or their stageability, but only as dramatizations understood in the sense of actualization, or discursive staging, of an idea. As a case in point, I take several of Kharms's works on the theme of the Fall from grace as dramatization of the idea of anthology as a conceptual field that includes not only the works, but also the body of the author himself.
Performance Research, May 4, 2014
Performance Research, Jun 1, 2010
PSi15: Misperformance, Misfiring, Misfitting, Misreading, it is clear that the first part of the ... more PSi15: Misperformance, Misfiring, Misfitting, Misreading, it is clear that the first part of the long and vaguely descriptive title of this shift (‘The Unperformable: Student Cultural Center, Performances of Identity, Mathemes of Reassociation’) has been derived from Judith Butler’s writings on performativity and its limits. There is no need to rehearse the debates that emerged in the wake of Butler’s first book Gender Trouble (1990). Limiting this discussion to tracing the notion of the unperformable in the work of Judith Butler, it is enough to note that in Bodies that Matter (1993) she picks up on her notion of gender as a ‘constituted social temporality’ (1990:191) in order to respond to some of her critics and to clarify her notion of gender performativity. In what has since become a textbook distinction between performance and performativity, Butler writes: In no sense can it be concluded that the part of gender that is performed is therefore the ‘truth’ of gender; performance as bounded ‘act’ is distinguished from performativity insofar as the latter consists in a reiteration of norms which precede, constrain, and exceed the performer and in that sense cannot be taken as the fabrication of the performer’s ‘will’ or ‘choice’; further, what is ‘performed’ works to conceal, if not to disavow, what remains opaque, unconscious, unperformable. The reduction of performativity to performance would be a mistake. (1993:234, italics added).
Art Journal, Sep 1, 2011
The question concerning documentation, reenactment, and exhibiting of past performances points to... more The question concerning documentation, reenactment, and exhibiting of past performances points to the temporality of before and after; of sequentiality, endurance, and survival; of the materiality of traces and their permanence. It also points to the reversed order of writing in performance: the kind of “textual” production intuited by the early modern theater, according to which labor is not ever lost but, paradoxically, remains forever irretrievable.
TDR, Sep 1, 2010
In the decade following 9/11, the Wooster Group staged three landmark 17th-century plays, Phaedra... more In the decade following 9/11, the Wooster Group staged three landmark 17th-century plays, Phaedra, Hamlet, and La Didone. This turn to baroque theatre is both a comment on American culture of the first decade of the 21st century and a significant departure in the history of the group itself.
Uploads
Papers by Branislav Jakovljevic