Adrianna Michell (University of Toronto)
The aging, ailing, and dying artist makes for a central figure in criticism across age studies, disability studies, and aesthetic theory more generally. While “the late artist” makes for an expedient delineation of aesthetic and temporal foci, the rhetorical attachments to “lateness”—that is, the tardy, truant, and dead—introduce issues of embodiment and capacity into any discussion of end-of-life artistic output. Thus, despite a continually renewed interest in “late style” from Theodore Adorno to Edward Said, there remains an unresolved tension within the term’s critical deployment: does the discourse of “lateness” overburden aesthetic theory and the aging artist? Despite theorizing “late style” as not a biographical but aesthetic issue, that late style “does not abdicate its rights in favour of reality” (Said) still remains in tension with the reality of the body. That is, how does the lived experience of age or debilitation inflect both the formal qualities of lateness—the late style artwork itself—and the ideology of late style—the critical impulse to define and deploy “late style” as a coherent aesthetic theory. The tension between the biographical and the aesthetic requires no resolution; indeed, it marks the productive site within which this panel situates itself. Thus positioned, how might the discourse of lateness give way to semantic relatives like “latency” and “belatedness,” terms which likewise index an exhausted temporality? How do disability, age, and theories of embodiment intervene into existing discourse? And finally, this panel asks: Does the discourse of “late” style delimit the aesthetic representation of aging and death? Or, crucially, if late style is no longer a productive term for understanding the relationship between embodiment, time, and artistic representation, then what other terms arise?