The Contemporary Art of the Nature Morte in the Age of Artificial Life Forms: The Metafictional Illusion of Life in Installation Art and Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein

Observing the artistic response to the illusional nature of artificial life forms in the field of installation art, contemporary writers often allude to conceptual artworks through ekphrastic means to “grasp the texture of the contemporary real” (Virilio 4) in a technologically “transformative moment” (Boxall 4). A “reality hunger” for the contemporary brings together a “burgeoning group of interrelated […] artists in a multitude of forms of media” (Shields 3) to experiment new forms across disciplines through ekphrasis, which “strikes to explode” the “stuffed package” of a culture “containable with its shaped word” (Krieger 233). In her essay “Art Objects” (1995), Jeanette Winterson shows her interest in contemporary conceptual art as she writes that “the true artist is interested in the art object as an art process” and establishing a connection to the future instead of being interested in the final product (12). Her definition of art coincides with that of conceptual art as it seeks to analyse “the ideas underlying the creation and reception of art” (Shanken 433), and thus takes on the framework of the meta-critical process from conceptual art with “the use of scientific concepts and technological media both to question their prescribed applications and to create new aesthetic models” (Shanken 434). Deriving from the artistic landscape of conceptual installation art and its interactions with science, Winterson borrows the subject of the nature morte and the metafictional framework to address the clashes between artificial life forms and the human civilisation by alluding to artworks such as those of Damien Hirst in her novel Frankissstein (2019) when writing about cryonic bodies: “It’s a little like an art installation in here isn’t it? Have you seen Damien Hirst’s pickled shark in a tank?” (106). Based on the interdisciplinary interrelations between installation art and contemporary literature, this paper will read the dialogue between Winterson’s ekphrastic subject of the nature morte in Frankissstein and contemporary installation art, including works of Hirst, Cai Guo-Qiang, and Guillaume Paris, as a response to the rise of artificial life forms with respect to their metafictional and illusional nature as AI will become “fully self-designing” (Winterson 73).

Bodies, Temporality, and Spatiality in Chen Chieh-Jen’s Lingchi: Echoes of a Historical Photograph (2002) and Factory (2003)

This article discusses Taiwanese artist Chen Chieh-Jen’s (1960-) two early videos Lingchi: Echoes of a Historical Photograph (2002) and Factory (2003). By revisiting a historical photograph taken by a French soldier in 1905 and articulated by French philosopher George Bataille in 1961, Chen reworks the internal genealogy of imperialist violence from late-nineteenth-century China to 1990s Taiwan in Lingchi. Lingchi reenacts a victim in the process of execution (death by a thousand cuts) from an old photo, which interrogates the violence of photography on a dying person and Bataille’s fetishisation of the cultural Other. In one scene, the camera enters the subject’s bodily orifices and shows two scenes: the sites of imperialist invasions in the early twentieth century as well as two laid-off women workers in 1990s Taiwan. Factory reorganises this group of laid-off women workers to work in the abandoned garment factory as if they stage a silent labour strike. This reenactment not only plays a prolonged and endless labour conundrum but also reveals the unequal economic relationship between Taiwan and the United States in Cold-War Taiwan, a continuation of imperialist domination in the postwar period. This article explores two dimensions: First, the aestheticisation of the suffering subject in Lingchi and how it debunks the Western gaze. Second, their communal subjects (the women workers) and the scenes in Lingchi and Factory reflect the continuation of imperialist domination in Taiwan under globalisation.

“I always place my bet on Red”: Comrade Detective and the Spectre of Communism

The paper analyses the buddy cop TV show Comrade Detective in the light of Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx (1994) to demonstrate how it launches a satiric critique of the American state and diplomatic machinery in the aftermath of the fall of the Second Bloc. I argue that this visual text, released in 2017, addresses three contemporary global concerns—the dominance of the USA in a unipolar world, the neoliberal celebration of consumerism, and finally, the rise of right-wing religious fanaticism—through a satiric recreation of the bygone regime of communist Romania of the 1980s.

Growing Up during the Great Depression in Aotearoa New Zealand. A Comparative Study of Shonagh Koea’s The Kindness of Strangers (2007) and Renée’s These Two Hands (2017)

New Zealand writers Shonagh Koea (1939 - ) and Renée (1929 - ) grew up during the Great Depression and its aftermath. Their memoirs challenge the official rewriting of New Zealand history when both authors claim that they belong to the working class. Indeed, New Zealand has long constructed itself as a class-free nation, contrary to the UK. The traumatic experiences which occurred when the writers were young affect them on two levels. They impact them personally, but also culturally. Not only has the working class often seen its history erased and silenced, but Renée also testifies to the part played by colonisation and segregation in the cultural trauma of the Māori community.

Darwinian Aftermaths

The outgoing Editor in Chief reflects upon the thirty-second issue of FORUM and the theme of 'Aftermath'.

Tracing Cinema as Anticolonial Resistance through the Archives of "Présence Africaine"

This article considers the relationship between the journal Présence Africaine, and cinema as a vehicle for anticolonial thought and practice. Drawing upon archival research on the writings of Paulin Vieyra, the article explores the continued resonance of his work today, whilst also problematizing the historical silencing of Francophone African women filmmakers.

"A lady to take care of us at last"

This essay explores the depiction of the “New Woman” figure in J. M. Barrie’s Peter and Wendy (1911). By exploring contradictory modes of femininity, Barrie’s novel points to the ways in which established norms of masculinity at the fin-de-siècle were defined and frustrated by their relation to an unstable feminine ideal. The following essay will argue that the novel’s inconsistent depictions of femininity point to an end-of-the-era anxiety surrounding the emergent New Woman, an ambivalence which is symptomatic of the wider social and political uncertainties that defined the aftermath of the nineteenth century.

Representing the Incomprehensible

Criticism of Michael Herr’s Dispatches (2015) and Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007) can be divided into two mainstream interpretations. On the one hand, they are both marked as psychic trauma texts. Herr’s writing of Dispatches can be read as a therapeutic process that allows him to deal with his trauma experienced as a war correspondent during the Vietnam War. The intimate and domestic trauma in DeLillo’s Falling Man focuses on the disconnected lives of a couple and their child in the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center. On the other hand, critics have aligned each text with the national trauma narrative. This article aligns itself with the latter interpretation. I propose, through a postmodern reading, that the national trauma narrated in both Dispatches and Falling Man is an example of Lyotard’s “incredulity toward metanarratives” (xxix). I argue that both texts represent the failure of the metanarrative of American Exceptionalism; the ideology that defines the essence of America as the embodiment of “supremacy” and “power”. Narrative fails in each text when the nature of each conflict deconstructs this metanarrative of national identity. This deconstruction arises from the way conflict appears to alienate Herr as author, and DeLillo’s characters from preconceived notions of knowledge. As a result of this, both authors explore the fictive nature of the human condition to present the national trauma caused by each conflict.

Exploring the Representation of History and 'Slow Violence' in "Philadelphia Fire" and "The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven"

After connecting history to urban spatiality in Teju Cole's Open City, this paper develops Rob Nixon's articulation of "slow violence" to demonstrate how John Edgar Wideman and Sherman Alexie's novels depict issues of authenticity in storytelling, highlighting the limitations of representing the effects of “slow violence” on the cultural, physical, and economic welfare of marginalised communities in the aftermath of major violent events.