Authentic Emotion and Body-subject: Are these Tears Real?

Article by Bara Kolenc published in Maska (Performing Arts Journal) vol. XXIX, No. 161–162 (spring 2014)

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The article discusses the phenomenon of aversion to exaggerated emotionality, characteristic of contemporary art. At the backdrop of historical subjectivity from the beginning of the 20th century to the present day, defined by the dissolution of the authenticity of the Self and the emergence of a deconstructed, mediated subject, the author addresses the causes and conditions of this phenomenon. She tackles the questions of representation and the unrepresentable, which she traces through the aesthetic of realism and its demand for authentic emotions, modernism and its denial of indication and postmodern artistic practices, which are paradoxically defined not only by a general scepticism toward the authentic, but also toward the absolute inauthenticity of the raw mediation of signs and stand-in structures.