| This dissertation analyzes contemporary art practices that employ historical imagery in terms of how they disrupt modernist time and shift how viewers conceive their relationships to the past. Examining the figures of the ghost and the junk collector, who both materialize this disruption, this research addresses how they both propose community with the past. Considering the ethical limits and possibilities of these figures, this project then advances a model of community that occurs on non-identificatory terms. In addition, this dissertation articulates a way of enlisting images to shift the nature of attention, addressing how we might attend to those who are excluded from or who exist outside of our own present.;This research focuses on artistic and curatorial strategies that facilitate an affective engagement with traces that been discarded either physically or epistemologically. Examining photographic projections by Shimon Attie, the exhibition of Ydessa Hendeles's photographs of teddy bears, the presentation of the Without Sanctuary photographs of lynching, and the dialectical staging of images of Socialist utopia by Susan Buck-Morss in her Dreamworld and Catastrophe project, this dissertation addresses how each of these works produce an alternate social life around the recovered trace and create an opening to the past. It argues that such critical re-stagings occur through several conditions: the clearing, or a site where one realizes affective continuity with the past, and the interval, the divide across which perception and memory extend themselves, constituting unique and multiple experiences of time.;While this dissertation discusses the ethical possibilities that visual culture practices propose for a social life around the trace of the past, it argues that this engagement must be constituted via the terms of the trace whereby the image is neither static nor reified, but creates an opening in time that is the viewer's unique present. This structure of possibility is modeled through several videos produced as part of this dissertation. Juxtaposing still and moving images that depict the same scene at different points in time, they enable viewers to experience a form of presence in which they attend to absence, duration and temporal multiplicity.*.;*This dissertation is a compound document (contains both a paper copy and a DVD as part of the dissertation). The DVD requires the following system requirements: Windows MediaPlayer or RealPlayer. |
