Choreographies of the Living

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carrie Rohman
Keyword(s):  
Visual Art ◽  
Contemporary Literature ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Felix Guattari ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Human Endeavor ◽  
Theatrical Performance ◽  
Aesthetic Practice ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The Aesthetic

Animals seem to be everywhere in contemporary literature, visual art, and performance. But though writers, artists, and performers are now engaging more and more with ideas about animals, and even with actual living animals, their aesthetic practice continues to be interpreted within a primarily human frame of reference—with art itself being understood as an exclusively human endeavor. The critical wager in this book is that the aesthetic impulse itself is profoundly trans-species. Rohman suggests that if we understand artistic and performative impulses themselves as part of our evolutionary inheritance—as that which we borrow, in some sense, from animals and the natural world—the ways we experience, theorize, and value literary, visual, and performance art fundamentally shift. Although other arguments suggest that certain modes of aesthetic expression are closely linked to animality, Rohman argues that the aesthetic is animal, showing how animality and actual animals are at the center of the aesthetic practices of crucial modernist, contemporary, and avant-garde artists. Exploring the implications of the shift from an anthropocentric to a bioaesthetic conception of art, this book turns toward animals as artistic progenitors in a range of case studies that spans print texts, visual art, dance, music, and theatrical performance. Drawing on the ideas of theorists such as Elizabeth Grosz, Jane Bennett, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, Una Chaudhuri, Timothy Morton, and Cary Wolfe, Rohman articulates a deep coincidence of the human and animal elaboration of life forces in aesthetic practices.

Autonomy as Aesthetic Practice

2014 ◽  
Vol 31 (7-8) ◽  
pp. 81-95
Author(s):  
Sven Lütticken
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
Political Autonomy ◽  
Aesthetic Practice ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The Aesthetic

This essay examines various conceptions of autonomy in relation to recent artistic practices. Starting from the apparent opposition between modernist notions of the autonomy of art and theorizations of political autonomy, the text problematizes the notion of the autonomy of art by using Jacques Rancière’s notion of the aesthetic regime. Focusing on the importance of the act and performance in the art of the last decades, it is argued that while political and artistic autonomy may never quite converge, aesthetic acts can under certain circumstances function in both the political and the artistic register, simultaneously or successively. The aesthetic act thus stages a passage from the artistic to the political, and vice versa.

Absent the Archive

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lia Brozgal
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
Visual Representations ◽  
First Responders ◽  
The State ◽  
Subjective Experiences ◽  
And Performance ◽  
October 17 ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
First Time

Cultural Traces of a Massacre in Paris: The October 17, 1961 Anarchive is the first cultural history devoted to literary and visual representations of the police massacre of peaceful Algerian protesters. Covered up by the state and hidden from history, the events of October 17 have nonetheless never been fully erased. Indeed, as early as 1962, stories about the massacre began to find their way their way into novels, poetry, songs, film, visual art, and performance. This book is about these stories, the way they have been told, and their function as both documentary and aesthetic objects. Identified here for the first time as a corpus—an anarchive—the works in question produce knowledge about October 17 by narrativizing and contextualizing the massacre, registering its existence, its scale, and its erasure, while also providing access to the subjective experiences of violence and trauma. Cultural Traces of a Massacre is invested in exploring how literature and culture may “do history” differently by complicating it, whether by functioning as first responders and persistent witnesses; reverberating against reality but also speculating on what might have been; activating networks of signs and meaning; or by showing us things that otherwise cannot be seen. This book provokes important questions about the aesthetic, ethical, and political stakes of representation.

scholarly journals In the Trace of Gerardo Mello Mourão: The Inter-Gender Hybridism and the Formation of Epiliric Poetry in Contemporary Brazilian Literature

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 35-50
Author(s):  
Junior César Ferreira de Castro
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Research ◽  
Contemporary Literature ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Brazilian Literature ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
Deductive Method ◽  
The Aesthetic

In its configurative and representational basis, contemporary literature has established a warm dialogue with the classic and modern canons for the formation of literary genres that distance themselves from the poetics in force in order to establish their own aesthetics since the contemporary is in maintaining this gaze fixed on the present by returning to the past to deny or affirm it as the tradition of the new or the new of tradition (PAZ, 2000). The present study is justified in raising the reflection on the form of the epic and the lyric based on the transformations that occurred over the centuries to found an epic-lyric poetry as a renewing style of contemporary Brazilian poetry, the object of this research, which is based on the works Invention of the sea and Os peãs, by Gerardo Mello Mourão. The objective is to demonstrate the resistance of the epic in the current world by the hybrid composition that is established in the act of its production by the exteriority of the real along with the narrator's subjectivity. The problem of intergeneric hybridism is developed through bibliographic and qualitative research with intermediation of the deductive method and through the aesthetic-philosophical bias to demonstrate that it becomes the guiding element of this avant-garde style capable of establishing historical events through the temporality built by the world text. This whole discussion is centered on Aristotle (1992) and Boileau (1990), going through Hegel (1997), Lukacs (2000) and Bakhtin (2010) until arriving at Staiger (1997), Lima (2002), Greenfield (2006) and Kristeva (1995), showing that the epic-lyric poem is supported by the pluridiscursive dialogism maintained between the nature of the stylization of the lyric and epos as a style and not as a novelized process.

Sea Urchins and Circuses: The Modernist Natural Histories of Jean Painlevé and Alexander Calder

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-211
Author(s):  
Patricia E. Chu
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Sea Urchins ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Machine Age ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The One ◽  
Natural Historian

The Paris avant-garde milieu from which both Cirque Calder/Calder's Circus and Painlevé’s early films emerged was a cultural intersection of art and the twentieth-century life sciences. In turning to the style of current scientific journals, the Paris surrealists can be understood as engaging the (life) sciences not simply as a provider of normative categories of materiality to be dismissed, but as a companion in apprehending the “reality” of a world beneath the surface just as real as the one visible to the naked eye. I will focus in this essay on two modernist practices in new media in the context of the history of the life sciences: Jean Painlevé’s (1902–1989) science films and Alexander Calder's (1898–1976) work in three-dimensional moving art and performance—the Circus. In analyzing Painlevé’s work, I discuss it as exemplary of a moment when life sciences and avant-garde technical methods and philosophies created each other rather than being classified as separate categories of epistemological work. In moving from Painlevé’s films to Alexander Calder's Circus, Painlevé’s cinematography remains at the forefront; I use his film of one of Calder's performances of the Circus, a collaboration the men had taken two decades to complete. Painlevé’s depiction allows us to see the elements of Calder's work that mark it as akin to Painlevé’s own interest in a modern experimental organicism as central to the so-called machine-age. Calder's work can be understood as similarly developing an avant-garde practice along the line between the bestiary of the natural historian and the bestiary of the modern life scientist.

Mutable Views

2019 ◽  
pp. 52-70
Author(s):  
Johanne Sloan
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Landscape Art ◽  
Experimental Films ◽  
Contemporary Artists

This chapter addresses the contemporary renewal of landscape art in Canada, arising at the intersection of visual art and cinema. Artworks, installations, and experimental films are discussed according to four categories: figure/ground, spatial illusions, the historicity of landscape, and digital scenery. Landscape—as a distinct art historical genre, conventional cinematic background, and ideological ground—has historically played a key role in Canadian visual culture. The contemporary artists and filmmakers in question have remade landscape in pictorial terms by remixing legacies from the visual arts and cinema and also in political terms, by calling attention to the damaged natural world of the Anthropocene, confronting Indigenous claims to the land, and foregrounding struggles over nationhood, identity, and collective memory.

scholarly journals Portrait of the artist as a philosopher

2021 ◽  
pp. 105971232199468
Author(s):  
Jeannette Pols
Keyword(s):  
Know How ◽  
The Past ◽  
Aesthetic Practice ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Relationship

The response asks about the relationship between artist and audience in the RAAAF artworks. Is the artist an Autonomous Innovator who breaches the ties with the past and the environment? Or is the aesthetic practice located in the creation of relationships around these objects, hence expanding the artwork by using know-how, experiences and enthusiasm of the audience/users?

Post-Mass-Media and Participation

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Mass Media ◽  
Research Group ◽  
Felix Guattari ◽  
Necessary Condition ◽  
The Political ◽  
Democratic Participation ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
New Generation

Three decades after Félix Guattari introduced the concept of "post-mass-media" as a necessary condition of media participation, it is by no means self-evident that his reaction to events leading up to 1989 would still attract a new generation of scholars today. Yet, the concept continually reappears to address the role of technology in democratic participation and the relation between the aesthetic and the political. Originating in discussions of the DFG research group Media and Participation, this issu

An Age-Old Question: Optical (A)llusions, (In)Decency, and (In)Justice in the Trial of Japanese War Criminals

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
James Burnham Sedgwick
Keyword(s):  
Temporal Logic ◽  
War Crimes ◽  
International Justice ◽  
World War ◽  
Post Conflict ◽  
War Criminals ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The Aesthetic

Abstract Timing complicates all dimensions of post conflict redress. Moving too fast suggests prejudice. Going too slow delays accountability and closure. This paper challenges the temporal logic of international justice. The prosecution of aged defendants created aesthetical dilemmas for war crimes operations in post-World War ii Asia. The unsettling optical allusions of frail perpetrators in court — shadows of their former selves — left many observers conflicted: it looked indecent, it felt unjust and underwhelming. The unseemly punishment of weak defendants undercut prosecution attempts to brand perpetrators as monsters. Disappointed reporters and trial authorities fixated on the shabby dress, waning physique, and benign senescence of once-sinister villains. Few questioned the accused’s guilt. Many felt unnerved by the optics. Ultimately, this paper shows how the staging and performance of justice impacts a court’s effectiveness. Unrelenting accountability, bringing all war criminals to justice, feels right. Yet, the aesthetic complications of prosecuting aged accused may not be worth it.

scholarly journals Serbian music criticism in the first half of the twentieth century: Its canon, its method and its educational role

Muzikologija ◽  
2008 ◽  
pp. 185-202
Author(s):  
Aleksandar Vasic
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Negative Attitude ◽  
Music Criticism ◽  
Educational Mission ◽  
Violin Concerto ◽  
The Public ◽  
Educational Role ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Professional Critics

Serbian music criticism became a subject of professional music critics at the beginning of the twentieth century, after being developed by music amateurs throughout the whole previous century. The Serbian Literary Magazine (1901- 1914, 1920-1941), the forum of the Serbian modernist writers in the early 1900s, had a crucial role in shaping the Serbian music criticism and essayistics of the modern era. The Serbian elite musicians wrote for the SLM and therefore it reflects the most important issues of the early twentieth century Serbian music. The SLM undertook the mission of educating its readers. The music culture of the Serbian public was only recently developed. The public needed an introduction into the most important features of the European music, as well as developing its own taste in music. This paper deals with two aspects of the music criticism in the SLM, in view of its educational role: the problem of virtuosity and the method used by music critics in this magazine. The aesthetic canon of the SLM was marked by decisively negative attitude towards the virtuosity. Mainly concerned by educating the Serbian music public in the spirit of the highest music achievements in Europe, the music writers of the SLM criticized both domestic and foreign performers who favoured virtuosity over the 'essence' of music. Therefore, Niccol? Paganini, Franz Liszt, and even Peter Tchaikowsky with his Violin concerto became the subject of the magazine's criticism. However their attitude towards the interpreters with both musicality and virtuoso technique was always positive. That was evident in the writings on Jan Kubel?k. This educational mission also had its effect on the structure of critique writings in the SLM. In their wish to inform the Serbian public on the European music (which they did very professionally), the critics gave much more information on biographies, bibliographies and style of the European composers, than they valued the interpretation itself. That was by far the weakest aspect of music criticism in the SLM. Although the music criticism in the SLM was professional and analytic one, it often used the literary style and sometimes even profane expressions in describing the artistic value and performance, more than it was necessary for the genre of music criticism. The music critics of the SLM set high aesthetic standards before the Serbian music public, and therefore the virtuosity was rejected by them. At the same time, these highly professional critics did not possess a certain level of introspection that would allow them to abstain from using sometimes empty and unconvincing phrases instead of exact formulations suitable for the professional music criticism. In that respect, music critics in the SLM did not match the standards they themselves set before both the performers and the public in Serbia.

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