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Using the way in which artists from the former Eastern bloc perceive the experience of EU integration and transition from a Soviet past as a conceptual launching pad, this book explores how artists critically inhabit a permanent state of 'in-between' to capture the simultaneous existence of multiple and overlapping temporalities. Transitional aesthetics are artistic strategies that disrupt and interrogate ideologically loaded trajectories of cultural, social, or political transition. Examples of such trajectories include the movement from totalitarianism to democracy (post-socialism), from war to freedom and reconciliation (post-conflict), and from the edges of Europe to its centre (inclusion in the European Union). These transitional states include: the future orientation of (failed) socialism and the perpetual present of global capital; the history of unresolved past conflicts and reconciliation through 'transitional justice'; nationalist obsessions with the past and the cultural appeal of kitsch and retro objects in fashion, film and music; and the uncertain future promise of EU membership and resurgence of global right-wing populism, headed by figures like Berlusconi, Le Pen, and Trump. Transitional Aesthetics shows that apprehending time in contemporary art is fundamental to capturing the lived experience of a permanent state of instability; particularly relevant to Europe in the contemporary moment. In a world that has entered 'accelerated transition' towards instability, understanding this experience has broad and resonating relevance for politics, art and society.
Since the end of the last dictatorship in 1983, Argentina’s visual artists and art-activists have been central to campaigns to demand the criminal prosecution of those initially granted amnesty and to a variety of commemorative projects. In The Art of Post-Dictatorship: Ethics and Aesthetics in Transitional Argentina Vikki Bell examines this involvement and intervention. She argues that the problematics that arise within the aesthetic realm cannot be understood solely through an art-historical approach; instead, they must be understood as a constitutive part of a broader collective endeavour. In this sense, the ‘art’ of post-dictatorship is not something that belongs to art or the artists themselves, but is about how the subjectivities and imaginations of new generations are constituted and entwined with questions of response, ethics and justice. It concerns how people align themselves between the past and the future. This book will be an invaluable resource for those studying the law, politics, art and sociology of contemporary Argentina as well as those concerned more widely with transitional justice and the politics of memory.
Since the 1980s, transitional justice mechanisms have been increasingly applied to account for mass atrocities and grave human rights violations throughout the world. Over time, post-conflict justice practices have expanded across continents and state borders and have fueled the creation of new ideas that go beyond traditional notions of amnesty, retribution, and reconciliation. Gathering work from contributors in international law, political science, sociology, and history, New Critical Spaces in Transitional Justice addresses issues of space and time in transitional justice studies. It explains new trends in responses to post-conflict and post-authoritarian nations and offers original empirical research to help define the field for the future.
Tracing the logic of media history, from the baroque tothe neo-baroque, from magic lanterns and automata to film andcomputer games.
Drawing on novel case studies, this book provides the first substantive theoretical framework for understanding transitional justice and visual art.
In her persuasively argued study, Patricia Pulham astutely combines psychoanalytic theory with socio-historical criticism to examine a selection of fantastic tales by the female aesthete and intellectual Vernon Lee (Violet Paget, 1856-1935). Lee's own definition of the supernatural in the preface to Hauntings questions the nature of the 'genuine ghost', and argues that this figure is not found in the Society of Psychical Research but in our own psyches, where it functions as a mediator between past and present. Using D.W. Winnicott's 'transitional object' theory, which maintains that adults transfer their childhood engagement with toys to art and cultural artifacts, Pulham argues that the prevalence of the past in Lee's tales signifies not only an historical but a psychic past. Thus the 'ghosts' that haunt Lee's supernatural fiction, as well as her aesthetic, psychological, and historical writings, held complex meanings for her that were fundamental to her intellectual development and allowed her to explore alternative identities that permit the expression of transgressive sexualities.
Since the turn of the millennium, protests, meetings, schoolrooms, reading groups and many other social forms have been proposed as artworks or, more ambiguously, as interventions that are somewhere between art and politics. This book surveys the resurgence of politicized art, tracing key currents of theory and practice, and mapping them against the dominant experience of the last decade: crisis. Drawing upon leading artists and theorists within this field – including Hito Steyerl, Marina Vishmidt, Art & Language, Gregory Sholette, John Roberts and Dave Beech – this book argues for a new interpretation of the relationship between socially-engaged art and neoliberalism. Kim Charnley explores the possibility that neoliberalism has destabilized the art system so that it is no longer able to absorb and neutralize dissent. As a result, the relationship between aesthetics and politics is experienced with fresh urgency and militancy.
In 2008 an Iraqi artist was waterboarded as performance art. In 2010 artists upturned police cars in Russia. But what exactly do we mean by militant art and aesthetics? Bringing together the philosophy of art and politics, Martin Lang provides a comprehensive examination of militant art activism: its history, its advocates and the aesthetic theory behind it. Protest art is not a new concept and yet this book argues that after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 distinctly 21st-century forms of art activism emerged. On the one hand these became militant as artists retained belief in the possibility of radical political change through art. On the other hand, this belief developed in a hostile environment, when anti-terror legislations reclassified activists and artists as terrorists. Through first-hand interviews and experiences, Militant Aesthetics sheds light on numerous international case studies of modern art activism and the different ways they can be classified as militant. Many artists and collectives, including Grupo Etcétera in Buenos Aries, are prepared to break the law and risk arrest for their art. Others like Thomas Bresolin's Militant Training Camp utilise military uniforms in violent performances that connect with public anger, and artists such as Zthoven in the Czech Republic occupy, hack, antagonise and disrupt in increasingly militant ways. Combining these examples with the pioneering thought of Badiou, Žižek, Rancière and Mouffe, as well as up-to-date scholarship from Bishop, Léger and others, Lang investigates the instances, attributes and rules of militant art in order to introduce a new overall theory of 21st-century militant aesthetics.
Therapeutic Aesthetics focuses on moving image artworks as expressive of social psychopathological symptoms that arise in a climate of neoliberal cognitive capitalism, such as anxiety, depression, post- traumatic stress disorder and burnout. The book is not about engaging with art as a therapy to express personal traumas and symptoms but proposes that a selective range of contemporary moving image artworks performatively mimic the psychopathologies of cognitive capitalism in a conflictual manner. Engaging with a range of philosophers and theorists, including Bernard Stiegler, Franco 'Bifo' Berardi, Judith Butler, Félix Guattari, and Eva Illouz, Maria Walsh proposes that there is no cure, only provisional moments of reparation. To address this idea, she uses the concept of the pharmakon, the Greek term for drug which means both remedy and poison. Through this approach, she maintains the conflict between the curative and the harmful in relation to moving image artworks by artists such as Omer Fast, Liz Magic Laser, Leigh Ledare, Oriana Fox, Gillian Wearing and Rehana Zaman. As transitional spaces, these artworks can enable a toleration of anxiety and conflict that may offer another kind of aesthetic self-cultivation than the subjection to biopolitical governance in cognitive capitalism.
Working Aesthetics is about the relationship between art and work under contemporary capitalism. Whilst labour used to be regarded as an unattractive subject for art, the proximity of work to everyday life has subsequently narrowed the gap between work and art. The artist is no longer considered apart from the economic, but is heralded as an example of how to work in neoliberal management textbooks. As work and life become obscured within the contemporary period, this book asks how artistic practice is affected, including those who labour for artists. Through a series of case studies, Working Aesthetics critically examines the moments in which labour and art intersect under capitalism. When did labour disappear from art production, or accounts of art history? Can we consider the dematerialization of art in the 1960s in relation to the deskilling of work? And how has neoliberal management theory adopting the artist as model worker affected artistic practices in the 21st century? With the narrowing of work and art visible in galleries and art discourse today, Working Aesthetics takes a step back to ask why labour has become a valid subject for contemporary art, and explores what this means for aesthetic culture today.