Destruction against Violence. Destructive tactics for representing violence in art (original) (raw)
Related papers
2007
Author(s): Laqueur, Thomas W.; Maciello, Francine | Abstract: During the spring semester of 2007, the Center for Latin American Studies hosted an exhibit of Fernando Botero’s Abu Ghraib series of paintings and drawings which depict the abuses committed by U.S. soldiers at that notorious Iraqi prison. In addition to holding a public conversation with the artist, the Center also organized a series of lectures to elaborate on the themes evoked in the artworks. The two essays included here were originally prepared for the panel discussion “Art and Violence” held on January 31, 2007. In “Fernando Botero and the Art History of Suffering,” Thomas Lacquer, the Helen Fawcett Professor of History at UC-Berkeley, explores the “historicism” of Botero’s art; the longstanding role of suffering in his work; and what distinguishes the experience of viewing Botero’s paintings of torture from viewing photographs of the same acts. In “Art and Violence: Notes on Botero” Francine Maciello, the Sidney an...
Reflections on the Aesthetics of Violence
2019
Violence has long been a factor in human life and has been widely depicted in the arts. This essay explores how the artistic and appreciative responses to violence have been practiced, understood, and valued. It emphasizes the difference between the aesthetics of distant, disinterested appreciation and the engaged appreciative experience of violence in the arts, and insists on the relevance of their behavioral and ethical implications.
Aestheticization of violence and politics of perception
Academia Letters, 2021
This article describes the relationship between the phenomena of contemporary experiences and perceptual models arranged as political practices. For such description, the reflections exposed by Walter Benjamin in his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction are used, as well as the dissertations of Susan Buck-Morss in the text Aesthetics and Anesthetic: Walter Benjamin´s Artwork Essay Reconsidered. The work emerges from a philosophical study about the aestheticization of violence and its cognitive corollaries. The argument that expresses the relations between contemporary forms of aestheticization and models of cognitive disposition is described from the political formula of perception. What do the politics of perception hold? How do they operate? How is its presentation? Perhaps, the most synthetic way to answer is with a transposition of the elements in the sentence. Politics of perception means that perception is political, that the later operates in the former. Politics takes perception as its ground and, in it, unfolds the exercise of its power. In order to carry out this practice, politics goes through different facets and blends itself with sensitive forms that are its aestheticization. How is politics mimicked to affect perception? In different cultural manifestations, politics finds niches for its operation. Since the technological revolutions of the twentieth century, politics formed a binomial with the spectacle. The degree of such compromise goes through various nuances, and the borders with the absurd are minimal. Politics has become a spectacle. The highest gesture witnessed by humanity is the spectacle of death, in particular war. War became an aestheticized spectacle inserted in the contents of the world of television and, thanks to politics, it was possible. Field battles, live executions, crossfire, bombs, attacks and massacres circulate on the web with unstoppable force, and the way they are presented is equally disturbing. The user experience on the web is a stimulating chaos of various references. Before and
The significance of artistic practices regarding violence in Mexico
The piece (fixed image or in movement) is a way of communication. This statement has different meanings: on the one hand, the piece as a collective construction with social and historical sense, on the other hand, the symbolic interactions with its visitors, as with its anchorage to an specific time by pointing out violence in Mexico, on top of its argumentative and semantic content. All these elements prompt an interpretative analysis. These contemporary audio-visual speeches lead towards an interpretation, and not a unique or unequivocal interpretation of a fact is not aimed, but, to contribute with an understanding of a certain phenomenon that can be explained through culture, history and the language in a unique and irreplaceable piece. The current iconic production in Mexico incorporates the use of digital technologies (blogs, virtual social networks, etc) and streets as ways to express and represent a speech which stands for some other displays which do not obey commercial parameters, instead they seek action and collective production to face or discuss violence in our country, since this production outstands due to its peculiar aesthetic proposal and its social commitment.
Visual Anthropology Review, 2015
This article argues that a visual focus on suffering bodies can obscure the power relationships that result in inequality and injustice through (1) obscuring the mechanisms and perpetrators of violence, (2) not disrupting dominant conceptual frameworks, and (3) not leaving room for solutions. I use a corpus of films made about and by a Mexican social movement in San Salvador Atenco to ask a practical question: How might we represent issues of structural violence without focusing on images of suffering and victimization? The solution that these films present is a focus on what I call "scenes of confrontation." [Atenco, documentary film, Mexico, social movements, structural violence] bs_bs_banner
The Sublime and Depictions of Violence in Some Contemporary Artworks
International Journal of Education and the Arts, 2009
Images of extreme and ever more graphic violence are a part of contemporary culture. Since students cannot avoid them, such images should be addressed by aesthetic educators. But this will require a theory for the analysis and evaluation of the aesthetic properties of violent imagery. The main thesis of this essay is that depiction of violence in certain recent art works can be understood as aiming at aesthetic perception of the sublime. We develop a model for interpreting works in this way by first presenting and then drawing on Kant's analysis of aesthetic perception of the sublime. Our thesis is important for both aesthetic and moral education. According to Kant's remarkably sensitive analysis, aesthetic perception of the sublime plays a large role in developing moral and social awareness. Using Kant's theory as our main source, and drawing on some recent artworks for illustrative purposes, we offer an analysis of how artistic depiction of violence may promote moral and social awareness. We nevertheless consider images of extreme violence morally problematic, and outline a model for educating reflection on the morality of using them.
boundary 2, 2017
This article analyzes Benjamin's enigmatic essay of 1921, “Critique of Violence,” together with related fragmentary writings from the postwar period (including the “Theological-Political Fragment”) and, from 1931, “The Destructive Character.” Benjamin's deconstruction of violence (Abbau der Gewalt) is seen in the context of phenomenology. In addition, texts by Hermann Cohen and Georges Sorel are studied as principal sources, and critical commentaries by Herbert Marcuse, Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, and Werner Hamacher are discussed. Violence is considered an essentially moral phenomenon, a function of human actions and intentions; strictly speaking, there is no natural violence. The critique of violence itself bespeaks a kind of violence. Benjamin's critique of the reifying “mythic violence” that founds and administers the law presupposes an expiatory “divine violence” that reveals myth as such and thereby opens the possibility of justice beyond law and beyond the m...
Review: Implicated Viewers: Looking at Violence through Contemporary Latin American Art
“BASTA!” at John Jay College’s Anya and Shiva Art Gallery, revisits the relationship between violence and contemporary art in Latin America. Curators Claudia Calirman and Isabella Villanueva present works by 14 artists from Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Guatemala, Peru, Colombia, and Venezuela. Latin American artists have always exposed social struggles of their countries, but “BASTA!” focuses on the conflict between representation and reality — inherent in the use of violence as a theme for art. “How to represent violence without aestheticizing it to the level of the banal?” asks Calirman.