Contrary Virtuosos? Paradoxes of a Liminal Figure

This essay explores the figure of the ‘virtuoso’, as theorized by Paolo Virno, Isabell Lorey and others, as the contemporary contrarian par excellence. In particular, the essay looks at the role of language for virtuosity, and what analytical purchase might be offered by the notion of contrarian speech. Through a close reading of Peter Greenaway's Goltzius and the Pelican Company (2012), we will analyse the virtuoso's relationship with freedom, politics and power in connection with themes of creative enterprise and the public realm. The film permits us to explore virtuosity as contrarianism, that is to say: it helps us see how both mediate between freedom and servility, between ideas of self-grounding agency and a subjugating governmental logic and between different notions and practices of publicness in relation to symbolic forms of authority and power.