170502 UE The Art of Failure (2022W)

What ideas of success and failure shape our work and projects? This also raises the question of what we understand by success or failure and how the framework for this view is set up. Jack Halberstam also suggests leaving room for the unexpected and a mode of transformative thinking and creative work that is in motion between 'high theory and low theory, high culture and low culture', that also makes use of archives other than conventional ones and operates on several levels at once, be it by borrowing from pop culture and avant-garde performances, for example. The starting point of this seminar is also the analysis of social hierarchies produced by norms of gender, sexuality and "whiteness". "Failure sometimes offers more creative, cooperative, and surprising ways of being in the world, even as it forces us to face the dark side of life, love, and libido." (Halberstam, Jack (2011), Queer Art of Failure) In the course we will analyze artistic works (film and video art, performances and installations) and texts in which moments of failure are taken up and played through in terms of their potential and unexpected consequences.