the Cooper Union School of Art Interdisciplinary Seminar

Kaja Silverman

Behold the Invisible

This lecture took place on December 2nd, 2008 at 7:00 pm in the Wollman Auditorium at the Cooper Union

Lecture introduction

From “Destroyed Room” (l979) through more recent works like “Overpass” (2001) and “Dawn” (2001), “visibility” and “invisibility” have been the dominant concerns of Jeff Wall’s art.  In his earliest Cibachromes, “invisibility” means “ideological mystification,” and Wall seeks to undo this mystification by making things visible.  However, his relationship to visibility and invisibility soon began to change, and from the l990’s on, the people, places and things in his photographs are more likely to turn away from us than toward us. In her talk, Silverman will discuss this shift, and provide a detailed reading of Wall’s 2001 work, “After ‘Invisible Man’ by Ralph Ellison, the Preface.”

About Kaja Silverman

Kaja Silverman is Class of 1940 Professor of Rhetoric, Film, and History of Art at the university of California at Berkeley. She is the author of eight books, including The Threshold of the Visible World (1996), World Spectators (2000), and Flesh of My Flesh (forthcoming from Stanford University Press), as well as numerous articles, on topics ranging the female voice in cinema to photography an time-based art.

Relevant Links

• Readings for this lecture are available on the student login page.
• Kaja Silverman in conversation with Leo Bersani
• Books by Kaja Silverman