The practice of multispecies relations in urban space and its potentialities for new legal imaginaries

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (0) ◽  
pp. 148-161
Author(s):  
Teresa Dillon
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Human Species ◽  
Art Practices ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
Urban Commons ◽  
Liberal Individualism ◽  
Ontological Position

This article explores what it means to enact multispecies relations in urban space. This exploration is rooted in contemporary art practices that create living frameworks through which encounters with non-human animal cultures, histories, rituals and justice are manifested. Such works play with the legalities and categorizations of ‘animal’ and ‘nature’ by exposing the nested reasonings and protocols that continue to propagate hierarchical species logics. Consequentially such work, alongside scholarship on earth-bound legalities, looks to how law can foster more just multispecies orderings, which aspire to create more equitable conditions for all. To scaffold such transitions the article makes the case for how a constant, public, educational and social rehearsal that unknots histories of liberal individualism is required in order to shift the ontological position of the human species. This rehearsal is set against the backdrop of climate emergencies and the call for a more expansive notion of the urban commons. The closing reflections point to how the Earth’s inviolability must necessarily be placed at the centre of an approach to urban making that is complemented by an intersectional set of innovative cosmologies, actions, manners and ways.

Screening Statues

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Jacobs ◽  
Susan Felleman ◽  
Vito Adriaensens ◽  
Lisa Colpaert
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
Film History ◽  
Two Dimensional ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Experimental Art ◽  
Broad Scope ◽  
Art Practices ◽  
Extensive Reference

Sculpture is an artistic practice that involves material, three-dimensional, and generally static objects, whereas cinema produces immaterial, two-dimensional, kinetic images. These differences are the basis for a range of magical, mystical and phenomenological interactions between the two media. Sculptures are literally brought to life on the silver screen, while living people are turned into, or trapped inside, statuary. Sculpture motivates cinematic movement and film makes manifest the durational properties of sculptural space. This book will examine key sculptural motifs and cinematic sculpture in film history through seven chapters and an extensive reference gallery, dealing with the transformation skills of "cinemagician" Georges Méliès, the experimental art documentaries of Carl Theodor Dreyer and Henri Alekan, the statuary metaphors of modernist cinema, the mythological living statues of the peplum genre, and contemporary art practices in which film—as material and apparatus—is used as sculptural medium. The book’s broad scope and interdisciplinary approach is sure to interest scholars, amateurs and students alike.

scholarly journals The Persistence of Primitivism: Equivocation in Ernesto Neto’s A Sacred Place and Critical Practice

Arts ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 111
Author(s):  
Camila Maroja
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Art History ◽  
Native People ◽  
Amazon Rainforest ◽  
Critical Practice ◽  
Sacred Place ◽  
Art Practices ◽  
Environmental Work ◽  
Global Art ◽  
Venice Biennale

During the 2017 Venice Biennale, the area dubbed the “Pavilion of the Shamans” opened with A Sacred Place, an immersive environmental work created by the Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto in collaboration with the Huni Kuin, a native people of the Amazon rainforest. Despite the co-authorship of the installation, the artwork was dismissed by art critics as engaging in primitivism and colonialism. Borrowing anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s concept of equivocation, this article examines the incorporation of both indigenous and contemporary art practices in A Sacred Place. The text ultimately argues that a more equivocal, open interpretation of the work could lead to a better understanding of the work and a more self-reflexive global art history that can look at and learn from at its own comparative limitations.

With the Declining Significance of Labor, Who Is Producing our Global Cities?

2015 ◽  
Vol 87 ◽  
pp. 137-164 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Goldman
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Land Values ◽  
Global Cities ◽  
Municipal Governments ◽  
City Life ◽  
Rural Workers ◽  
Formal Employment ◽  
The One ◽  
Urban Commons ◽  
Indian Cities

AbstractThis article engages the question of what happens to labor as Indian cities become transformed into “global cities.” It does so by focusing on the convergence of three interrelated trends over the past few decades: the informalization of labor, the making of global cities, and the financialization of the economy. The article explains the effect on labor, capital, and urban space of this concatenation of trends. It challenges the conclusion of urbanization scholars who emphasize how labor has been largely excluded and bypassed by the growing urban economy. Instead, the article demonstrates, by using nationwide data as well as examples from Bangalore, that as labor is being displaced from formal employment and as wages become compressed, the urban commons is becoming a more valued terrain. On the one hand, displaced urban and rural workers must increasingly rely on subsistence practices and depend more upon the city's public spaces and goods to survive. On the other hand, these spaces, vital to city life, are becoming attractive to indebted municipal governments and aggressive financial investors for their speculative land values, and hence have led to greater insecurity and dispossession. The global city, therefore, is being built in large part with workers' wageless labor. Consequently, the struggle between capital and labor has reached far “beyond the factory” and farm, to the urban commons, sites simultaneously key to the majority's survival and integral to the urban speculative project of financialization.

scholarly journals «The Great Neurosis» of Jacques Loysel and Alfred Kubin

2020 ◽  
pp. 144-149
Author(s):  
D. O. Martynova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Mental Illness ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Visual Image ◽  
Lost Generation ◽  
Disciplinary Power ◽  
Graphic Artist ◽  
Art Practices ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Pathological Image

On the example of the work «The Great Neurosis» by the French sculptor Jacques Loysel and «Europe» by the Austrian graphic artist Alfred Kubin, it is described and analyzed how artists gave characteristics of changes in their eras, using the same visual image associated with a mental illness. It is proved that while Loysel’s artwork was associated with the latest discoveries in medicine, then Kubin’s artwork was reinterpreted in a new way, reflecting the problems and experiences of the «lost generation». From this it follows that the example of the works «The Great Neurosis» and «Europe» by Loysel and Kubin can be traced not only to evolution, but also to the introduction of the pathological image of the “hysterical body” both in the art of the XXth century and in contemporary art practices. Such a study demonstrates the relevance and signifi cance of studying the links between, as well as the analysis of the impact of mechanisms of institutions of disciplinary power on the visual arts of various eras.

‘What is the meaning of a safety-pin?’ Critical literacies and the ethnographic turn in contemporary art

2013 ◽  
Vol 16 (5) ◽  
pp. 507-520 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kris Rutten ◽  
An van. Dienderen
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Literacy Practices ◽  
Ethnographic Methods ◽  
Literacy Practice ◽  
Symbolic Representations ◽  
Art Practices ◽  
Critical Literacies ◽  
Situated Literacy ◽  
Safety Pin

In this contribution we address the concept of critical literacies by analyzing how symbolic representations within subcultures can be understood as an engagement with specific literacy practices. For some time now, cultural studies researchers with an interest in literacy have depended upon ethnographic methods to document how members of subcultural communities mobilize literacy practices to achieve critical ends. But the extent to which ethnography actually grants researchers access to subcultural perspectives on literacy has come into question. In this article, we aim to problematize and thematize the ethnographic perspective on literacy in general – and subculture as a situated literacy practice in particular – by critically assessing contemporary art practices that focus on the representation of subcultural identities. We therefore specifically look at artwork by Nikki S. Lee, who focuses on subcultures in her work through ‘going native performances’.

A Victorian Wrenaissance: Historical Narrative at St. Paul's Cathedral

2021 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 389-422
Author(s):  
Dory Agazarian
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Italian Renaissance ◽  
Architectural Theory ◽  
Historical Discourse ◽  
New Methods ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Christopher Wren ◽  
Liberal Individualism

The condition of St. Paul's Cathedral was central to concerns about the perception of London over the course of the nineteenth century. Designed by Sir Christopher Wren, it faced public criticism from the start. Unlike gothic Westminster Abbey, St. Paul's was an eclectic amalgam of gothic and neoclassical architecture; its interior was never finished. Efforts to decorate were boxed in by the strictures of Victorian architectural revivalism. This is the story of how academic historiography resolved a problem that aesthetic and architectural theory could not. Throughout the century, cathedral administrators sought to improve the cathedral by borrowing tools from historians with varying success. In the 1870s, a solution emerged when historians reinvented the Italian Renaissance as a symbol of liberal individualism. Their revisionist Renaissance provided an alternative to pure gothic or neoclassical revivalism, able to accommodate Wren's stylistic eclecticism. Scholars have traditionally plotted disputes about St. Paul's within broader architectural debates. Yet I argue that these discussions were framed as much by historical discourse as aesthetics. Turns in Victorian historiography eventually allowed architects to push past the aesthetic limits of the Battle of the Styles. New methods in Victorian historical research were crucial to nineteenth-century experiences of urban space.

A Book Review in the Form of a Polemic Chad Elias's Posthumous Images: Contemporary Art and Memory Politics in Post-Civil War Lebanon and the Old New World Order

ARTMargins ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 69-86
Author(s):  
Ghalya Saadawi
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Social History ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
World Order ◽  
Memory Politics ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Post War

Chad Elias' 2018 book Posthumous Images: Contemporary Art and Memory Politics in Post-Civil War Lebanon attempts to deal with the question of post-civil war representation, image-making and contemporary art from the perspective of memory studies in Lebanon. Dealing with a particular group of artists working since the 1990's in installation, video, film, and performance, the book attempts to create a relation between their artistic propositions and narratives on the one hand, and the post-war reckoning with the missing and disappeared, the history of former Leftist combatants, neglected space programs, reconstruction and urban space, on the other. The book has a series of shortcomings and structural, theoretical blind spots that this review essay attempts to redress. For instance, Posthumous Images has no framework for the notions of communities of witnessing, collective memory, or post-war amnesia that seems to underpin its claims, as they seem to figure only nominally. In these theoretical omissions, the essay argues, the book adopts and furthers the ideology human rights as this relates to the politics of remembrance, as well as to Lebanon's neoliberal post-war realities. Moreover, it lacks a rigorous art historical frame to study the given artworks formally, or theoretically, leaving the book open to a post-historical method that disavows a critical, social history of art needed for an analysis of post-civil war and post-Cold war art forms in Lebanon and beyond.

scholarly journals Parallelotopia: Ottoman transcultural memory assemblages in contemporary art practices from the Middle East

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (5) ◽  
pp. 493-513
Author(s):  
Gabriel Koureas
Keyword(s):  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Ethnic Violence ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Ethnic Communities ◽  
The Past ◽  
Art Practices ◽  
Etel Adnan ◽  
Dynamic Exchange

This article engages with the conversations taking place in the photographic space between then and now, memory and photography, and with the symbiosis and ethnic violence between different ethnic communities in the ex-Ottoman Empire. It questions the role of photography and contemporary art in creating possibilities for coexistence within the mosaic formed by the various groups that made up the Ottoman Empire. The essay aims to create parallelotopia, spaces in the present that work in parallel with the past and which enable the dynamic exchange of transcultural memories. Drawing on memory theory, the article shifts these debates forward by adopting the concept of ‘assemblage’. The article concentrates on the aesthetics of photographs produced by Armenian photographic studios in Istanbul during the late nineteenth century and their relationship to the present through the work of contemporary artists Klitsa Antoniou, Joanna Hadjithomas, Khalil Joreige and Etel Adnan as well as photographic exhibitions organised by the Centre for Asia Minor Studies, Athens, Greece.

A Glut Of Faces

Public ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (60) ◽  
pp. 142-155
Author(s):  
Kristina Fiedrich
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Facial Recognition ◽  
Art Practices ◽  
Visual Expression ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Singular Representation ◽  
Increasing Trends

The face is a bodily surface that visually, historically and politically locates identity. Under the scrutiny of facial recognition and biometric software, the face can take the place of a whole identity, becoming a rigid singular representation. This paper draws connections between the increasing trends in surveillance and biometric technologies, and their manifestation within contemporary art practices. Specifically, I look to artworks that engage traditional portraiture and representations of the face, all the while manipulating expectations of the face-as-portrait. Artworks included in this project are Ursula Johnson’s L’nuweltik (We are Indian), Gillian Wearing’s Self Portrait at Twenty Seven Years Old and Anthony Cerniello’s Danielle. How has the face come to be represented in contemporary portraiture, and might these representations suggest a shifting logic of identity, away from the face? Art as visual expression is considered in relation to surveillance as another outcome of visual culture that highlights a continuing desire to categorize the subject within a social order.

The workshop of filthy creation: or do not be alarmed, this is only a test

2009 ◽  
Vol 35 (4) ◽  
pp. 835-857 ◽  
Author(s):  
BERNADETTE BUCKLEY
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Art Practices ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Made In

AbstractIn this article I explore the nature of the relationship between art and terror/ism and ask why identifications between the two are so routinely and often insistently made. In so doing, my aim is twofold. Firstly, I explore the possibility of there being a deep-seated structural link that exists between art, terror/ism and creativity. In other words, I ask if terror is a necessary corollary of the ‘creative event’. Secondly, I explore explicit examples in which artists have sought to create or to emphasise this relationship, from the perspective of Contemporary Art practices. In the spirit of experiment rather than of judgment then, this article sets up a series of trials in which art and terror/ism are philosophically, aesthetically and politically blended. It asks where else should such tests be conducted, if not in relation to the artwork and in particular, in relation to those artworks which toy with terror/ism and those artists who claim on some level, to be ‘terrorists’? How is the ‘artist-as-terrorist’ to be interpreted and understood alongside existing definitions of both terrorism and of Art? And finally, what role does imagination play in the construction of experience?

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