Editorial [PDF]
Kurt Borg, Aaron Aquilina: University of Malta, Lancaster University
The Power of Imagination? Aesthetic Autonomy and Critique in Contemporary Art [PDF]
Tünde Varga: The Hungarian University of Fine Arts
The need for the flexibility of “aesthetic frameworks”, and to expand this framework beyond the Western notion of aesthetic autonomy and/or universality in contemporary art, has become more emphatically transparent in the past two decades. One of the problems of the contemporary art scene is that the inherited framework of the Western notion of art seems too narrow, and does not suffice to account for art’s present scope and varied forms. The art practices of the “global contemporary” challenge the Western concept of art as a universal given, and also pose the question of how widely understood the boundaries of “art” can be. Thus, there is the recognition that aesthetic autonomy is not a given, but rather a socially constructed reality dependent on its post 18th century institutional background. In search for a more inclusive and relevant framework, then, art theory and art practice turn to the “imaginary” and to art as a form of critique in defining contemporary art and imagining new forms of citizenship claiming social relevance for art.
Towards a Sensibility of Infinity: the Abyss and Anish Kapoor [PDF]
David Prescott-Steed: LCI Melbourne
This essay critiques notions of the abyss as articulated through the “void” artwork of Anish Kapoor, whose practice is informed by the primary physical sensation of insignificance that elicits the sublime as a condition of emptiness. At once grounded in a Western art-making tradition and influenced by the Indian cultural tradition into which he was born, Kapoor challenges the limits of representation and the reflective power of art to evoke discourse on the groundlessness and indeterminacy of our late-modern cultural condition. This essay demonstrates how Kapoor’s concave forms and homogenous surfaces, along with his dark, dense pigments, are attempts to create impossible spaces—at once finite and seemingly infinite—that invite the viewer beyond the threshold of a sensorial uncertainty. Thus, while the abyss per se evades adequate determination, it is by mapping these creative responses that connections can be made between those concepts intangible and quotidian.
Hot Wheels, Cool Cars, and an Aesthetics of Simulation [PDF]
Andrea Austin: Wilfrid Laurier University
This article considers Mattel’s miniature cars, Hot Wheels, and the aesthetic meanings of the word “cool”. It addresses the material object (the toy cars), the graphic art, and film representations in order to trace four specific aesthetic relationships: first, the relationship between shine, reflection, and transparency as necessary components for the assessment of “cool”; second, the ways in which these attributes also function as visual coding for Baudrillard's “hyperreal”; third, the ways in which this coding forges associative links between fantasy and simulation; and, lastly, the coincidence of this coding with evolutionary instincts. Following the development of the toy cars in the 1960s through to the 2000s, a development which has culminated in a media network that includes graphic art and animated feature films, as well as the toys and accessories, this article argues that the car, the act of driving, and the aestheticisation of reflective surfaces not only help to define the word “cool” but have also become defining symbols of technological postmodernity.
Cosmological Creativity: an Aesthetic World Perspective [PDF]
Luca Sinscalco: University of Milan
This article is based on the recognition of two significant and opposite directions in the history of aesthetics, especially regarding the topic “creativity”: the subjectivist, willing, modern paradigm embodied by the figure of Genius and, in contrast, a mythical, symbolical, and imaginative idea of cosmological creativity. The latter worldview will be deepened via an analysis of Martin Heidegger’s theory of Geviert (Fourfold). Heidegger’s conception will here be taken as a clear and fruitful example of how a more symbolic hermeneutics that aspires to overcome modern dualism can be conceived and in turn renew both aesthetics and hermeneutics. In this light, images—correctly understood as symbols—acquire a “bridging” power: creativity becomes the switch from one level to another, and the artist plays with the world just as the world plays with the artist. This correspondence between artist and creation, subject and object, is therefore described not as a rational adequateness between two static elements, but as a constantly dynamic process in which the connection between microcosm and macrocosm is based on the rhythm of Being.
Kant and Henry on Kandinsky and Abstract Art: Concerning the Inward Turn in Art [PDF]
Rômulo Eisinger Guimarães, Robert Farrugia: Federal University of Santa Maria, University of Malta
For Kant, beauty has less to do with what the object is and more with the way it affects us; for him, an aesthetic judgment on beauty is not a determining but a reflecting judgment. Thus, a genuine aesthetic judgment on nature or art is not about knowledge of what a thing is, or what that painting objectively represents. Rather, the less we pay attention to those concepts, the purer the experience of beauty which nature or art gives us. In his essay Seeing the Invisible, Henry praises Kandinsky for his innovative formulation of abstract art; an art which seeks to turn the artist and the spectator radically inward. Henry argues that, after Kandinsky, art no longer seeks to represent the world; rather, it shifts its focus on what Kandinsky calls the internal. Henry’s claim is that the purpose of art becomes a way that allows us to see what is not seen and cannot be seen. This essay demonstrates to what extent it is possible to draw a connection between Kandinsky’s art and theory through Kant’s notion of pure aesthetic judgments and Henry's radical phenomenology.
Notes for an Aesthetic Approach to Walking [PDF]
Luca Vargiu: University of Cagliari
Walking has been dealt with from various points of view and by various disciplines and practices, including art and aesthetics. In order to encompass such a phenomenon in an adequate way, an ad hoc terminology has been often coined. Among the terms that have been appositely created, at least four are worth mentioning: ‘odology’ (John Brinckerhoff Jackson), ‘hodological space’ (Kurt Lewin, Jean-Paul Sartre and Otto Friedrich Bollnow), ‘strollology’ (Lucius and Annemarie Burckhardt), and ‘walkscapes’ (Francesco Careri). However distinct and somewhat divergent these may be, the four approaches labeled with these four terms all focus their attention to the relationship between body and space, considering walking as a fundamental moment of the bodily experience of space. For this reason, they can be fruitfully put in relation with the artistic practice of the so-called ‘walking artists’, such as Richard Long, Hamish Fulton, and Michael Höpfner, who pursue the same purposes.
Exploring Means of Transgender Agency through Aesthetic Theory and Practice [PDF]
Casey Robertson: York University
This essay explores the complex relationship between gender and aesthetics, namely through the lens of the transgender movement. After a brief study of the challenges related to the history of gender variance and normativity, the essay will follow the trajectory of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, focusing primarily on the conception of the sublime, and move to explore connections with the work of gender theorist and public health advocate Benjamin T. Singer, whose work develops a rhizomatic model of the transgender sublime. Utilising this framework, the discussion will then examine connections and parallels with the work of Rancière and later Gianni Vattimo. The final section will then explore the concept of aesthetic emergencies from Santiago Zabala, Vattimo’s pupil, who associates both Rancière and Vattimo with this concept while at the same time drawing from Heidegger’s writings. Through a re-examination of the sublime and the work of these theorists, this paper will illuminate potential new connections, pathways, and possibilities for the transgender movement, aesthetic theory, and political engagement.
Stacey Abrams: Never Conquered. Always Black. [PDF]
Gail McFarland: Georgia State University
The November 2018 Georgia gubernatorial race ended with charges of voter suppression, a stolen race, and a candidate who refused to concede. While, in American politics, candidate concession is entirely optional, the spirit and action of non-concession in the Georgia election challenge was complicated by issues of race and gender. The work of radical scholar and poet-activist Fred Moten offers a useful space for analysis of the final non-concession speech of Georgia gubernatorial candidate, Stacey Abrams. For this analysis, the presentation of Abrams as both the object and subject of her political message is found in her televised non-concession speech. Employing Moten’s unique perspective, drawn from critical theory, black studies, and performance, with important notes from Richard Iton on the Black fantastic and Phillip Auslander’s suggestions of the power of liveness and technology in media and performance, the aesthetics of race, gender, and culture are here used to examine the image and sound of Abrams and her non-concession speech as a site of both resistance and fugitivity.
Gutted buildings: the hapticity of demolition in Émile Zola’s The Kill [PDF]
Ella Mudie: Independent Researcher
Émile Zola’s La Curée (or The Kill as it is commonly titled in English), the second instalment in the French novelist’s magnum opus Rougon-Macquart cycle, has had an unconventional reception in the Anglophone context. With its deep imbrication in the geo-politics of Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s large-scale urban renovation of Paris, the novel first captured the attention of the postmodern geographers during the spatial turn of the 1980s. More recently, the critical focus has shifted to its materialism and the disruptive nature of the novel’s affects. A key leitmotif in the novel is the ‘gutted building’, the demolished architecture that was a product of the haussmannisation of Paris, a preoccupation that straddles both the spatial and affective registers of the text and which is distinctly haptic in its tactile interfacing between body and environment. Focusing specifically on the hapticity of demolition in The Kill, this essay examines how affects complicate both the didactic intent of the novel and Zola’s principally deterministic focus on the influence of milieu and environment on human behaviour.
W.G. Sebald and the Poetics of Total Destruction [PDF]
Gabriel Zammit: Independent Researcher
This article considers the literature of W.G. Sebald from a perspective which develops an aesthetics of destruction and characterises Sebald’s work as responding to the failure in constructed modes of experience and expression. Focussing on The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, and Austerlitz, this essay first examines the manner in which the previous two centuries have disabled the direct representation of the universally-felt erosion of experience. Walter Benjamin will be crucial in contextualising Sebald’s diagnosis. The essay then examines Sebald’s response and argues that Sebald crafts a literature wherein images, relegated to a dubious realism, are related to one another in mosaics which accumulate into a dense structure where the experience of the text mirrors its content. Sebald’s poetics of destruction has the double effect of saying and performing, therefore negotiating a new ethics of the gaze which steps around the pitfalls of paradigmatic expression. Sebald mobilises syntactically fluid textual instances in a performance of absolute magnitude which causes the experience of reading his texts to occasion the sublime. This will be understood through the conceptual architecture set out in Kant’s Third Critique and will lead to an examination of the ethical dimension implied therein.
Hong Kong’s Cinema of Cruelty: Visceral Visuality in Drug War [PDF]
Aubrey Tang: University of California, Irvine
This essay argues that repulsive images of the violated internal body can function as political resistance in modern political cinema. By examining the visceral visuality in Johnny To’s action film Drug War, this study illustrates how the internal body resists, aesthetically, China’s socialist judiciary and Hong Kong’s capitalist economy. When such forcefully imposed sociopolitical ideology becomes too contradictory for the people to accept, common narrative strategies no longer suffice. In turn, visceral images of disgust may appear as rationally uncontrolled reflections of the social reality. In Drug War, these reflections are characterised by onscreen involuntary bodily reactions, when the cinema virtually becomes a disembodied extension of a political abject’s body. With reference to the theories by Bertolt Brecht, Antonin Artaud, George Bataille, Julie Kristeva, Fabio Vighi, and Gilles Deleuze, this article finds that the corporeal expressions in Drug War signal that a modern political cinema of Hong Kong can emerge, even without the presence of positive Hong Kong characters, but only with a type of corporeal abjective subjectivity of Hong Kong consciousness.
The Aesthetics of Vomiting in Nietzsche’s Philosophy [PDF]
Markéta Dudová: Masaryk University
Through the historical link of the aesthetic with the concept of the sublime, this article allows the former to not only encompass the beautiful but also include within it a darker side, one which enables us to connect it to the concept of disgust. Following the theories of Immanuel Kant, Jacques Derrida and Friedrich Nietzsche, this essay proposes that disgust and vomiting are forms of the aesthetic and the sublime, not their “other”. Further, the essay relates vomiting to the expressive and emetic functions of language—two important concepts in theorising aesthetic thinking carried out by M.H. Abrams in his analyses. This article discusses the possibility of employing the emetic function in order to structure a text and presents Nietzsche’s works as an example for understanding nausea and vomiting as textual practices, or as aesthetic ideals, on which texts are based.
A Review of Portugal’s Global Cinema: Industry, History and Culture, edited by Mariana Liz [PDF]
José Duarte: ULICES-ULisboa
