Strikingly diverse in scope, participation, and campus sponsorship, the “Fantasies of the People” conference convened by Professors Devin Fore, chair of the German Department, and Kerstin Stakemeier of the Academy of Fine Arts, Nuremberg, on March 28-29 drew participants from a spectrum of roles and disciplines. Contributors included artists, curators, and scholars of art, art history, English, film, gender studies, German, history, linguistics, media studies, performance studies, philosophy, and rhetoric affiliated with institutions from across the globe.  

Over two full days, participants unpacked iterations, interpretations, and consequences of fantasy from the nineteenth century to the present in four panels and three artist conversations. The conference’s theme reverberated throughout campus, evidenced by the impressive breadth of support.  It aligned especially well with the “Media and Meaning” program of the new Princeton Humanities Initiative, which was a key sponsor of the conference.

“The theme of the Humanities Initiative, ‘Media and Meaning,’ provided the perfect framework in which to explore the expressions of collective fantasy across a variety of media ranging from still photography in the early twentieth century to the meme culture of our own present moment,” said Fore. 

Director of the Princeton Humanities Initiative and Professor of Art & Archaeology Rachael Z. DeLue agreed: “It was fascinating to hear from scholars and practitioners from such a wide range of disciplines who are thinking about so many different media and formats and making connections between media cultures of the past and the socio-political conditions and media technologies of the present—this is exactly the sort of inquiry the ‘Media & Meaning’ initiative is designed to foster.”

“The conference surveyed the ascent of fantasy over the last century, highlighting its importance as an alternative to the Romantic imagination at the current moment." 

— Professor Devin Fore, German Department Chair

Situated at a dynamically interdisciplinary intersection, the conference drew support from over a dozen other campus entities, including the Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton Humanities Council, Department of German, Program in Media + Modernity, Akademie der Bildenden Künste Nürnberg, Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, Department of African American Studies, University Center for Human Values, Department of English, Department of Near Eastern Studies, Program in Near Eastern Studies, Department of Comparative Literature, Department of French and Italian, Classics Department, Department of East Asian Studies.

Fore and Stakemeier opened the conference by contextualizing fantasy’s evolution.  Summoning figures like Marx, Freud, Novalis, Adorno, or Sartre, to name a few, Fore and Stakemeier traced conflicting arguments on the nature of fantasy as generative or deadening in the frameworks of art production, labor, religion, philosophy, sociology, and nation-building. “The conference surveyed the ascent of fantasy over the last century, highlighting its importance as an alternative to the Romantic imagination at the current moment,” said Fore.  

The Panels

In the first panel, “Dissociating Modernity,” Maria Chehonadskih (Queen Mary University of London), Priyamvada Gopal (University of Cambridge), Jenny Nachtigall (University College London) and Ruba Salih (University of Bologna) examined fantasy as mode of cultural decolonization through “communitarization” or the activation of peoples’ fantasies that contest the colonial parochialism of the bourgeois aesthetic imagination.

Panel two, “Fantasies of (Dis)alienation,” advocated for assembling experiences of alienation into shared disalienations. Panliests included Eunsong Kim (Northeastern University), Fumi Okiji (UC Berkeley), Elena Vogman (Bauhaus University Weimar), and Maxi Wallenhorst (Leuphana University Lüneburg).

The third panel, “Fantasy’s Properties,” Denise Ferreira da Silva (New York University), David Joselit (Harvard University), and Jason Read (University of Southern Maine) examined the properties of individuation and the deindividuating forces exploited by the colonial totalization of the property form. 

“A couple of talk formats, especially the performance-like multimedia lecture by Fumi Okiji and the fragmentary/poetic commentary by Eunsong Kim, inspired me to think differently about my expectation for scholarship’s forms. I felt a bit more free after seeing them.” 

— Terence Washington, Graduate Student in the Department of Art & Archaeology

Working across art, anthropology, political theory, and the history of psychiatry, the final panel explored the present state of the fantasies of the people, with Nadia Bou Ali (American University of Beirut), Anselm Franke (Zurich University of the Arts), Hannah Proctor (University of Strathclyde Glasgow), and Simon Strick (University of Potsdam) contributing.

The Artists

The conference’s scholarly program was punctuated by three artist conversations that connected “technical fantasy” to contemporary art practices.

Rachel Haidu (University of Rochester) interviewed New York artist Constantina Zavitsanos, who works in sculpture, performance, text, and sound and deals in debt, dependency, and other shared resources. Michelle Kuo, Chief Curator at Large and Publisher at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), spoke with Berlin-based artist Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, who employs animation, sound, performance, and video game development to archive and amplify Black Trans experiences, intertwining lived realities with speculative fiction to reimagine and retell their stories. 

And finally, Professor of Art & Archaeology Hal Foster interviewed New York-based artist Matthew Barney, who works in a variety of mediums but sees himself primarily as a sculptor.  Barney described carrying his own training and experience of violence as a football player into his work, mapping the feedback loop between desire and discipline in the athletic body. He uses football player Jim Otto and magician Harry Houdini to visualize psychological states, seeing Houdini as closing his body to make a creative space and Otto as porous and willing to “let it all go on the field.” 

A chase scene between the two ensues, with Houdini evading Otto by changing from male to androgynous to female to taking the form of a bagpipe before the cycle begins again. This animation of psychological forces takes place across a variety of media, culminating in Barney’s celebrated five-film series, the Cremaster Cycle. Barney led the audience through stills from each film, anchored by the local myths of the filming location, beginning in Idaho and ending in Budapest. Foster noted “you’re accused of sensationalization of violence, but what you’ve done is ritualize it.”

Summing up his experience of the conference, A&A graduate student Terence Washington found it impactful and thought provoking. “The combination of Denise Ferreira da Silva’s and David Joselit’s talks made me think about how artists and artworks can help us recalibrate our relationship with order and reconsider what we call ‘normal,’” he said. “A couple of talk formats, especially the performance-like multimedia lecture by Fumi Okiji and the fragmentary/poetic commentary by Eunsong Kim, inspired me to think differently about my expectation for scholarship’s forms,” he continued. “I felt a bit more free after seeing them.”