The aesthetics of anger: Spatializing emotions through intermedia practices (original) (raw)
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NORDIK XII (2018), Copenhagen University, Denmark. Abstract: Emotions can be physical experiences. They may cause an unpleasant pressure on your shoulders, contract the skin over your collarbones, or make your arms or chest burn. They can fill your body with aggression, cause a pleasant warmth in your abdomen, or obstruct your breathing. This paper discusses emotions as physical and material phenomena—as matter— and the possibility to understand them as an artistic medium that, comparable to clay, plaster or paint, can determine the character of artworks. To explore emotions as artistic medium, I shall consider art scenes as “emotional communities” structured by systems of feelings (Ahmed, 2004, Rosenwein, 2010, 2002). Such structures prescribe certain relations between a given aesthetic expression and its supposed emotional force in particular settings. One does not have to agree with a system of feelings, or even share its dominant emotions, but within an emotional community it will still bind certain aesthetic gestures to particular emotions. This, in turn, affects inclusions and exclusions, art historiography, and judgements of quality within the community. In this paper, I will analyse three art performances by Anna Linder, Line Skywalker Karlström and Jenny Grönvall, which use the emotion of shame to problematize art scenes as emotional communities, from queer feminist perspectives.
PROVOCATION—PROTEST—ART. A Ménage-à-Trois
Protest. The Aesthetics of Resistance, 2018
Protest. presents and reflects on present and past forms of protest and looks at marginalized communities’ practices of resistance from a wide variety of perspectives. The publication shows how protest draws on irony, subversion and provocation from a position of powerlessness, for pricking small but palpable pinholes into the controlling system of rule. “Make Love Not War,” “Soyez réalistes, demandez l’impossible,” “Keine Macht für Niemanden,” “We are the 99%”: The last decades have been accompanied by a constant flow of resistant statements and methods in view of the prevailing conditions. When something is able to reach from the margins of society into its very center, it forges ahead in the form of a protest. It masterfully and creatively draws on contemporary signs and symbols, subverting and transforming them to engender new aesthetics and meanings, thereby opening up a space that eludes control. Illustrated with expressive photographs and posters, Protest. considers social, culture-historical, sociological and politological perspectives as well as approaches that draw on visual theory, popular culture and cultural studies. In the process, the book takes into account in particular such contemporary developments as the virtualization of protest, how it has been turned into the fictional and its exploitation in politics by power holders of all shades.
This study looks at a selection of artistic texts that serve as testimony to what is called "workplace harassment," "mobbing," or "workplace bullying ." This is the first part of a three-part series relating to harassment and also to the transformation that comes out of artistic communication. First, I establish a general approach in order to situate a number of artistic resistance works created during the process of workplace harassment and psychological violence, particularly in relation to surveillance and watching. Then, using the same methodological approach, the subsequent texts explore the topics of isolation and the collective dimension of creation as a means of overcoming situations of violence. Beginning with experiences that involved anonymous messages, along with situations of being watched and symptoms of hyper-watchfulness as a target of harassment, a series of works emerged, mainly as art objects, which take on a greater meaning when exam...
Canadian writer and artist Marc James Léger asserts that today's socially engaged art is mainly a socially enraged art. He reflects on a current meeting of Artist Organisations International (AOI) to ask what cultural revolution and avant-garde art might mean today. This essay is part of the research theme Commonist Aesthetics [www.onlineopen.org/commonist-aesthetics\].
Weapon of choice: installation art and the politics of emotion
University of Wollongong Thesis Collection, 2012
This practice-led research project, Weapon of Choice: Installation Art and the Politics of Emotion, explores the complex set of relations between the felt, social-political and mythosacral spheres involved in migration. The project asks how installation art can be the means for responding in Australia to the feeling encountered in moving between Poland and Australia. Critical inquiries into this question reveal the links between feeling and politics, and show how systems of knowledge shape human and mythical bodies as well as the borders between secular and sacred spaces. More specifically, the research asks how the established institutions of a place claim control over the borders between visible and invisible worlds, involving secular and sacred spheres, as well as between inner and outer territories. The project investigates how traditional Polish folk devotional practices and contemporary art practices, such as those of Ilya Kabakov, Marina Abramović, Louise Bourgeois, and Magdalena Abakanowicz, resist the politics of control over those boundaries. This critical inquiry has brought together a variety of interconnected methodological approaches and theoretical tools to produce a visual art installation and a thesis. With an underpinning of practice-led research (Carter 2004; Smith & Dean 2009; Sullivan 2010), the study has further drawn on methodological approaches for investigating the felt dimensions (affect, emotion and sensation) of place and of artworks (
De te fabula narratur! Violence and Representation in Peter Weiss’s The Aesthetics of Resistance
Terrorizing Images
In Regarding the Pain of Others,S usan Sontag launched as till ongoingd iscussion about the effect of mass mediated images of atrocities in ap ublic sphere saturated with images. On the one hand, she argued, images of suffering human bodies have the capacity to produce av iolent affect in the beholder and make the pain of the other incontestably, insupportablypresent.The vivacity of the image, and even stronger, the indexical veracity of the photograph, puts two bodies up against each other in an encounter that somehow seems to undercut the process of mediation. Twos imilar bodies, posited in two incomparable universes, creating ad issonant interplayo fp roximity and distance that keeps resonatinga dverselyi nt he beholder.I mages of atrocities, by wayo ft his logic, have aspecific capacity to createconcern; Sontag mentionsthe role of press photos in the rise of protests against the American warfare in Vietnam in the 1960s and in the awareness of the conflict in Bosnia in the 1990s, but examples are legion: famines, tsunamis, migrant vessels. On the other hand, though, we know onlytoo well alsothat this affect willeventuallywane when we are put,asSontag has it, "on ad iet of horrors by which we are corrupted and to which we are graduallyb ecomingh abituated" (Sontag 2003:1 06). Here, it is as if mediality clicks in again and we seenot the painful testimonyofs uffering,but the innocuous first order reality at hand, the newspaper next to the morning tea, or the flickerings creen on the wall. The acuityo ft he affect elicited by an improbable encounter across time and space eventuallyrecedes, aligningwith the surface of the medium again. This incessant maneuvering between shock and habit,b etween affect and numbness,i si tself indigenous to modernity,t oaform of life engulfed in more sensuals timuli thanc an be processed in an orderlym anner. Walter Benjamin adopted Freud'si dea of consciousness'ss hock suppression mechanisms when glossingBaudelaire'spoetic impressions from meandering the city streets to pinpoint the need to regulate what to take in and what to discard (Benjamin 1974: 109). The ubiquityo fm ediated images increases this pressure, supplementing the hypertrophyofstimuli in crowded environments with instant,real-time stim-OpenAccess. ©2020 Frederik Tygstrup, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the CreativeC ommons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License.
University of Chotral Journal of Linguistics and Literature, 2019
Anger is a basic human emotion which has a force for constructive or destructive ends. Its expression in any circumstance can be a trigger for a desire to change a prevailing situation. In all cases, anger is a fundamental component of art. This study examines the use of anger in Osborne's Look Back in Anger and Osofisan's The Chattering and the Song. Osborne and Osofisan are two writers who are very anxious to change their societies through their art. In spite of differences in their origin (Osborne was a Briton while Osofisan is a Nigerian), they wrote at a time of certain social and political upheavals in their countries. They also share similar concerns and attitude towards art. My focus in this paper is on the early plays of Osborne and Osofisan where anger is strongest and where their artistic triumph is most poignant. Working within the formalist approach, the paper reveals that in Osborne and Osofisan, extreme anger is both material and style and is what marks their art out. The reification by the intellect provides a potent instrument for investigating society. Anger becomes the point of departure for their art, it is not mere hysterics but a cerebral one and it is the motivating force for their writings.
Visualizing Feeling: Affect and the Feminine Avant-garde
2011
This book has three interconnected aims: to challenge the dominant characterisation of the art of the 1960s and 1970s as anti-aesthetic and affectless, to introduce feeling to the analysis of late modern and contemporary art, and to thereby properly acknowledge the specific contribution of leading women artists to this period. The book focuses on four well-known and highly respected North and South American artists of the period: Eva Hesse, Lygia Clark, Ana Mendieta and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. I show how their work transforms the avant-garde protocols of the period by introducing an affective dimension to late modern art. This aspect of their work, while frequently noted, has never been analysed in detail. "Visualizing Feeling" also addresses a methodological blind spot in art history: the interpretation of feeling, emotion and affect. It demonstrates that the affective dimension, alongside other materials and methods of art, is part of the artistic means of production and innovation. This is the first thorough re-appraisal of aesthetic engagement with affect in post-1960s art. CONTENTS Introduction 1 Minimalism and Subjectivity: Aesthetics and the Anti-Aesthetic Tradition 2 Feeling and Late Modern Art 3 Participation, Affect and the Body: Lygia Clark 4 Eva Hesse’s Late Sculptures: Elusive Expression and Unconscious Affect 5 Ana Mendieta: Affect Miniaturization, Emotional Ties and the Silueta Series 6 The Dream of the Audience: The Moving Images of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Conclusion: Which anthropomorphism? Book endorsements: "At last, here is, a book that lifts the ban on affect imposed on art criticism and theory by the "anti-aesthetic" school that has been dominating the scene in the last forty years! Taking her clues from four of the best women artists whose work spans the period, Susan Best convincingly demonstrates that if you close the door of the house of art to feelings, they enter through the window. What’s more, this is valid for the supposedly ‘anaesthetic’ art movements - minimal and conceptual art - that form the contextual background of her case studies: they are no less aesthetic than the art of the past or the most recent present." -- Thierry de Duve, Historian and Theorist of contemporary art and Professor at University of Lille "Susan Best's remarkably lucid and paradoxical project begins the process of recovering feeling and emotion in late modern art. Her landmark study of four women artists - Hesse, Clark, Mendieta and Cha - rescues both the feminine and the aesthetic from the ghetto, by an astute combination of psycho-analysis and art history." -- Dr. Ann Stephen, Senior Curator, Sydney University Museums "Visualizing Feeling develops a compelling argument for focusing on precisely the centrality of affect and feeling in any understanding of the art of the 1960s and 1970s, where it seemed that affect no longer had a place. In exploring the work of four powerful and sometimes neglected women artists, she shows how it is paradoxically where affect is consciously minimized that it nevertheless returns to haunt the art work as its most powerful force. Art works affect before they inform, perform or communicate. Sue Best demonstrates that by restoring the question of affect and emotion to the art work, new kinds of questions can be asked about the feminine in art, questions that affirm the personal and political power of these works of art." -- Elizabeth Grosz, Rutgers University, author of Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth, Columbia University Press, 2008 Reviews: Choice, Feb (2012), Art & Australia, 49.4 (2012), Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, vol. 12 (2012), Cassone, Feb (2013), Parallax (2013).
In discussing various forms of struggles, three different types of injustices are highlighted and related to subjectivity and the arts. It is argued that in neoliberal societies these struggles and injustices have become intertwined to the degree that agentic socio-subjectivity is no longer experienced or conceptualized. Admitting that art embodies neo-liberal contradictions and often supports the status quo, the possibilities and limitations of aesthetics are reflected. Arts’ critical agenda of addressing power and resistance is portrayed through examples regarding economic-political injustices and injustices of representation, recognition, interaction, and subjectification in the visual and performing arts. Aesthetic conditions for the possibility of resistance in the arts are presented with the conclusion that street art may be a better candidate for challenging the status quo than traditional art. It is argued that aesthetics is an area of life that provides sources for fighting injustices.