1,720,987 research outputs found
Art and politics continued: avant-garde, resistance and the multitude in Documenta 11
No full textThe article examines the wider ideological framework operative in one of the most important events of the contemporary international art scene: Documenta 11 in Kassel in 2002. The author considers various aspects of Documenta 11, which is not however approached as a group art show but as a curatorial initiative responding to the challenge of 'globalisation' as orchestrated by capital and the networks of resistance to the latter. The author considers in particular the deployment of key terms such as 'avant-garde', 'postcoloniality', 'postmodernism' in the Documenta 11 discourse as well as the curatorial engagement with recent political theory and specifically Hardt and Negri's concepts of 'empire' and 'multitude' to propose a reading of Documenta 11 that does not exclude its function as spectacle
Researching Culture/s and the Omitted Footnote: Questions on the Practice of Feminist Art History
No full textThis book chapter, included in the section 'Heteroglossia: The Hermeneutic Trap', considers the function of feminist art history in an intercultural context. 'Hegemony' and 'ideology' are two of the critical concepts deployed to approach feminist art history as a subversive but also highly visible discourse on art originating in the West, the practice of which in an international context raises a number of issues concerning the power dynamics of research. 'Research' is here understood as a complex activity, positing the individual (researcher) and her subjects in a process of interaction that is necessarily ideologically bound. By using examples from her own research in Eastern and Southern Europe, the author considers the different and asymmetrical positions a feminist art historian can occupy today in diverse but interconnected social contexts that exist in a global space of material and cultural hierarchies. What can be 'translated' from one social context to another, via the practice of feminist art history, as well as those 'difficult' aspects of research often edited out of the final art historical text, are two of the key issues raised in this essay
'Five o' clock on the sun': three questions on Feminism and the moving image in the visual arts of non-Western Europe
No full textInvolving extensive fieldwork in various European archives, the article examines women's engagement with film and video as art across diverse spaces of non-western Europe. The article pursues an original angle by discussing Estonia, Hungary and Greece in the same context. The aim is to displace the exclusive function of the former 'eastern' bloc (masking differences between discrete 'eastern' realities) as the token European periphery with regard to the belated emergence of feminist politics in media arts, seeking to mobilise instead a dialectical reading of diverse European 'others'. The essay attempts to challenge the domination of western geographies in media histories, articulating a number of theoretical concerns that can be seen to underpin an alternative feminist history of European film and video art. It is one of the first articles to argue for the need of a comparative feminist study of European media art histories and to call attention to film and video art in terms of spatial politics rather than questions of temporality
(Post)modernism and Feminist Art History: The Reception of the Male Nude in Twentieth-century Greek Painting
No full textThis article, based on the author's PhD (Reading University, UK, 2000), examines the processes and discourses leading to a hegemonic framework of meaning in art history and criticism in 20th-century Greece. The ideological construct of the periphery (versus an assumed centre), the quest for a national subject in art and the inconclusive debates on modernism and postmodernism constitute key issues in this enquiry, which takes as its case study the interplay of present (dominant) and absent (suppressed) meanings in readings of the male nude, with specific reference to the work of Greek artists Yannis Tsarouchis and Aspa Stassinopoulou. The article, the first study of the subject in a materialist-feminist context, uses the reception of the male nude by the 20th-century Greek art scene to raise more general issues concerning the reasons that often lead to the marginalisation of feminist politics in the art discourse of the self-identified 'margins' of modernism
How to be seen: an introduction to feminist politics, exhibition cultures and curatorial transgressions
No full textThis is an introduction to an edited book, and develops insights that arise from the new research collected in the book as well as a critical reading of feminist literature on contemporary art practice and museum studies. One of the defining features of this introduction (and the whole book) is that it eschews the categorization of feminist criticism/practice into questions of 'generation' or 'geography' which has dominated accounts of feminism and art since the 1990s, and instead identifies a series of problems that have structured engagements between feminism and art exhibition across time and space. The text suggests that we should analyse exhibitions as instances of encounters between feminists and institutions; and/or as an aspect of feminist practice that has tried to realize a particular and distinctive form of exhibition; and/or as a dynamic of 'othering' that calls the one (and the other) into existence through the curatorial process. A defining and original feature of the introduction is its insistence on exploring all of these questions in the context of economic history of this period (rather than the more established frameworks for feminist enquiry of cultural history or psychoanalysis) as a principal feature of this are of study which concerns art, life and labour
Terminators, monkeys and mass culture: The carnival of time in science fiction films
No full textThis article is concerned with time in science fiction films. The authors' contention is that the current fascination with the time travel motif can be understood in terms of an oppositional cultural narrative running counter to dominant forms of temporality within capitalism. Such an approach allows a negotiation of the wide (mass) appeal of films based on the time travel motif without resorting to the primal scene fantasy. The argument, attempting a Marxist reading of the construction of time, challenges the views which dismiss mass culture as merely escapist. Specifically, the authors argue that the potentially subversive element of time travel films lies precisely in a particular conceptualization and experience of time and history as cyclical and in flux. Drawing on Bakhtin, this understanding of time is antithetical to the temporalities generated within late capitalist societies where time emerges as both linear and fragmented. Through the reading of films such as Twelve Monkeys, Terminator and others the authors attempt to show that time in this context entails a possibility of intervention in history (both personal and social) and is presented as non-linear and non-teleological
Social documents: the mediation of social relations in lens-based contemporary art
Full text linkThis thesis examines the trajectory of the ‘social document’ in contemporary art since 1989.
Though art’s turn towards documentary modes has now been widely noted, this study
establishes a longer, more complex engagement with the dialogue between the lens and the
situational immediacy of artists’ social interventions. I argue that the social documents that
arise through the reconfigured artwork can be connected with the demand for the
circulation of social knowledge and increasingly urgent questions of realism, a methodology
that divided the avant-garde and neo-avant-garde of the 20th century. Central issues
broached by the thesis include the demand for the extraction and re-articulation of truth,
the role of visual representation in the address to totality and the emergence of
(independent) knowledge and (critical) pedagogy as key sites of struggle.
My analysis begins, in Part I, with a selective mapping of the historical terrain through which
I offer re-readings of prescient works produced in the 1960s and 1970s in a range of
capitalist and state socialist contexts including Mary Kelly, Grupo de Artistas de Vanguardia
and Sanja Iveković. I then move on to a more detailed appraisal of the ascendancy of the
social document in art following the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the consolidation of
global capitalism, situating its various calibrations in relation to what I call biopolitical
globalisation. Part II takes a thematic approach to the material, using case studies to examine
a) the curatorial narrativisation and production of social documents, b) the relevance of
feminist elaborations on theories of social reproduction to analyses of the social document
and art history, c) the persistent invocation of ethics in discussions of works that document
the social subjects of the new economy, d) the implications of addressing the social
document as a realist enterprise. Artists discussed in Part II include Anton Vidokle, Martha
Rosler, WochenKlausur, Dani Marti and Pilvi Takala
Art as Property
No full textWhat type of property is a contemporary art object? Clearly it is an object that may be bartered, and in one sense this is how we understand both its status as property and its value. But it is also clear that an art object is usually understood to have value in different ways, ways that differ or displace their value in terms of simple barter. Here I will argue that the ways in which art’s transaction value shifts from one form of contemporary barter (call it exchange value) to another (call it auratic or mystic value) makes it a special kind of property. This is not to mistake the fact that all commodity form barter works within a framework of mysticism and displacement, nor to suggest that the pricelessness of art is totally distinct from other luxury goods that are regularly exchanged for undisclosed (or proxied) sums. But I will argue that art both condenses and mystifies its transaction as property, and as such is inventive of further forms of capital development
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
- …
