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This book focuses on the work of several artists, mostly photographers and mostly born in the 1970s. Their age matters because they have lived their entire lives in a world in which aesthetic ambition has been mainly identified with a certain critique of form and meaning (call it postmodernism) and in which the struggle between capital and labor has been mainly won by capital (call it neoliberalism). This book argues that these aesthetic and political conditions are connected, that, for example, the ongoing hostility to the idea of the autonomy of the work of art is related to the ongoing inability to understand what it means for the productivity of labor to rise while its share of income falls. More precisely, the book is about the way in which the critique of form makes the very difference between labor and capital-–the difference of class-–invisible, and about the ways in which the new formal ambitions of the works analyzed here invoke as well a new set of political ambitions. What these artists give us is not quite a class politics but, more important for art, a class aesthetic.

During the past two decades curators and artists have shown a distinct interest in religion, its different traditions, manifestations in public life, gestures and images. Since the early 1990s in Europe and the United States many artists critically re-appropriated religious, motifs, themes and images to produce works that cannot qualify as ‘religious,’ but remains in a dialogue with the visual legacy of mostly the Western, and more specifically the Catholic, version of Christianity. The book explores the complex relationship between contemporary art and religion. It focuses on the ways artists re-appropriate religious motifs as a means to reflect critically on our desire to believe in images, on the history of seeing them, and on their double power – iconic and political. When embedded in contemporary artworks, religious motifs become tools to address issues that are central to the infrastructure of, and the distinction between, different eras or regimes of the image: the rules that regulate the status of images and their public significance, their modes of production, circulation and display. The book examines the important motif of the acheiropoietic image (not made by human hands). Its survival and transformation in contemporary image-making practices provides a conceptual matrix for understanding of the reconfiguring relationships between art and religion. The book discusses a number of exhibitions that take religion as their central theme, and a selection works by Bill Viola, Lawrence Malstaf, Victoria Reynolds and Berlinde de Bruyckere who, in their respective ways and media, recycle religious motifs and iconography, and whose works resonate with, or problematise the motif of the true image.

This book examines the significance of traumatic experiences both in the individual lives and works of artists and in contemporary international cultures since World War II. The book considers some of the most notorious art of the second half of the twentieth century by artists who use their bodies to address destruction and violence. The chapters in this book focus primarily on performance art and photography. From war and environmental pollution to racism and sexual assault, the book analyzes the consequences of trauma as seen in the works of artists like Marina Abramovic, Pope.L, and Chris Burden. Assembling rich intellectual explorations on everything from Paleolithic paintings to the Bible's patriarchal legacies to documentary images of nuclear explosions, the book explores how art can provide a distinctive means of understanding trauma and promote individual and collective healing.

In a world increasingly dominated by the digital, the critical response to digital art generally ranges from hype to counter hype. Popular writing about specific artworks seldom goes beyond promoting a given piece and explaining how it operates, while scholars and critics remain unsure about how to interpret and evaluate them. This book aims to demonstrate how such critical work can be done. This book offers close readings of varied examples from genres of digital art such as kinetic concrete poetry, computer-generated text, interactive installation, mapping art, and information sculpture. For instance, the book deciphers the complex meaning of words that not only form an image on a screen but also react to the viewer’s behavior; images that are progressively destroyed by the human gaze; text machines generating nonsense sentences out of a Kafka story; and a light show above Mexico City’s historic square, created by Internet users all over the world. The book combines these illuminating explanations with a theoretical discussion that employs art philosophy and history to achieve a deeper understanding of each particular example of digital art and, ultimately, of the genre as a whole.

Distant Wars Visible brings a new perspective to the enduring question about the efficacy of conflict photography and other forms of visual advocacy. In the twenty-first century, visuality has been a pivotal technology in the United States’ militaristic pursuit of its national security objectives as well as in critiques of the nation at war. This book analyzes both mainstream media and alternative and radical visual projects to understand how representations of U.S. militarism navigate in, through, and around national security logics. Visual witnessing, I argue, often remains bound up in national security agendas even as it may stretch beyond those agendas into other terrains of possibility. In the past several years, important new studies have been published about human rights, militarism and visual cultures. In conversation with these texts, this book’s interdisciplinary critical feminist approach consider how factors like gender, race and sexuality construct often competing visualizations of identity in a range of media from graphic narrative and film to conflict photography and battlefield souvenirs. The analytic of ambivalence offers a critical methodological approach that examines how contingencies and contradictions in visual culture shape the politics and ethics of witnessing. Distant Wars Visible’s main objective is to gain further insights into how the ethical imperative that motivates the desire to look at human insecurities in times of warfare is intimately bound up in the politics of recognition.

Since its inception in the 1960s, the earth art movement has sought to make visible the elusive presence of nature. Though most often associated with monumental land-based sculptures, earth art encompasses a wide range of media, from sculpture, body art performances, and installations to photographic interventions, public protest art, and community projects. This book analyzes the development of the earth art movement, arguing that such diverse artists as Robert Smithson, Ana Mendieta, James Turrell, Jackie Brookner, Olafur Eliasson, Basia Irland, and Ichi Ikeda are connected through their elucidation of the earth as a domain of ethical concern. The book contends that in basing their works’ relationship to the natural world on receptivity rather than representation, earth artists take an ethical stance that counters both the instrumental view that seeks to master nature and the Romantic view that posits a return to a mythical state of unencumbered continuity with nature. By incorporating receptive surfaces into their work—film footage of glaring sunlight, an aperture in a chamber that opens to the sky, or a porous armature on which vegetation grows—earth artists articulate the dilemma of representation that nature presents.

Celebrated due to the aura of mystery attached to his rediscovered works in the twentieth century, Georges de La Tour’s paintings continue to be an object of scholarly interest and public fascination. Exploring the representations of light, vision and the visible in his works, this interdisciplinary study raises seminal questions regarding the nature of painting and its artistic, theological, and conceptual implications. If the visible presents an enigma in La Tour’s pictorial works, this is because familiar objects of visible reality serve as emblems of an invisible, spiritual reality. La Tour’s pursuit of likeness between image and the natural world bears the influence of the Catholic Reform’s call for the revitalization of religious imagery in the wake of Protestant iconoclastic outbreaks. Like the books shown in his paintings which are asking to be read, La Tour’s paintings are examined not just as visual depictions but also as instruments of insight, which ask to be deciphered rather than merely seen. La Tour’s paintings show how the figuration of faith as spiritual passion and illumination challenges the meanings attached to the visual realm of painterly expression. This study shows that La Tour’s emphasis on spiritual insight opens up a broader artistic, philosophical and conceptual reflection on the conditions of possibility of painting and its limitations as a visual medium. By scrutinizing what is seen and how and by questioning the position of the beholder, his works encourage meditation on the role of painting and its engagements with the visible world.

Since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 — the formal end-point of the thirty-year modern ‘Troubles’ — contemporary visual artists have offered diverse responses to post-conflict circumstances in Northern Ireland. In Ghost-Haunted Land — the first book-length examination of post-Troubles contemporary art — Declan Long highlights artists who have reflected on the ongoing anxieties of aftermath. Conscious of the simultaneous optimism and uneasiness of the peace era, each of these artists has produced powerful, distinctive work that reflects on legacies of the Troubles years and represents the strangeness of Northern Ireland’s changing landscapes: places marked by traces of enduring division, haunted by lingering spectres of the unresolved past.This wide-ranging study of post-Troubles art addresses developments in video, photography, painting, sculpture, performance and more, offering detailed analyses of key works by artists based in Ireland and beyond — including 2014 Turner Prize winner Duncan Campbell and internationally acclaimed filmmaker and photographer Willie Doherty. The art addressed in Ghost-Haunted Land is acutely attentive to specific regional circumstances in Northern Ireland; but it has also developed in dialogue with international art during this period. ‘Post-Troubles’ contemporary art is thus discussed in the context of both local transformations and global operations — and many of the key points of reference in the book come from broader debates about the predicament of contemporary art today: about its current place and purpose in the world, and about the politics and aesthetics of its dominant forms.

The history of modern art is often told through aesthetic breakthroughs that sync well with cultural and political change. From Courbet to Picasso, from Malevich to Warhol, it is accepted that art tracks the disruptions of industrialization, fascism, revolution, and war. Yet filtering the history of modern art only through catastrophic events cannot account for the subtle developments that lead to the profound confusion at the heart of contemporary art. In Industry and Intelligence, the artist Liam Gillick writes a nuanced genealogy to help us appreciate contemporary art’s engagement with history even when it seems apathetic or blind to current events. Taking a broad view of artistic creation from 1820 to today, Gillick follows the response of artists to incremental developments in science, politics, and technology. The great innovations and dislocations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have their place in this timeline, but their traces are alternately amplified and diminished as Gillick moves through artistic reactions to liberalism, mass manufacturing, psychology, nuclear physics, automobiles, and a host of other advances. He intimately ties the origins of contemporary art to the social and technological adjustments of modern life, which artists struggled to incorporate truthfully into their works.

This book traces the history of “kinaesthetic knowing,” a form of knowledge associated with the movements of the body, in Imperial Germany. The figures that play central roles in the book invented new pedagogical techniques with the conviction that there existed a non-discursive, non-conceptual way of knowing that could nonetheless compete in its rigour with reasoning realized through language, concepts, or logic. In doing so, they drew on the findings of the new discipline of experimental psychology. The book is structured around four techniques: a practice of comparative looking in which the eye was assumed to draw its own conclusions independently of the mind; a method of beholding that prioritized automatic and affective response rather than intellectual contemplation; a manner of drawing that abandoned the principles of imitation and composition and gave free rein to the movements of the body; and, finally, the practice of designing, a constellation of artistic techniques whose goal was to manipulate form, line, colour, and space rather than follow academic rules regarding orders, proportions, and composition. Some went so far as to argue that this alternative epistemological principle could become the basis of the human sciences at large. The faith in the epistemological value of kinaesthesia was short-lived but proved crucial: it was upon the foundation of this other way of knowing that many concepts and practices central to twentieth-century modernism were established. Primary amongst them was the formalist thrust of modern design education.

Literature and art have always depended on imitation, and in the past few decades quotation and appropriation have become dominant aesthetic practices. But critical methods have not kept pace with this development. This book reopens the debate about quotation and appropriation, shifting away from naïve claims about the death of the author. In interpretations of art and literature from the 1960s to the present, this book shows how artists and writers use quotation not to undermine authorship and originality, but to answer questions at the heart of twentieth-century philosophies of history. The book argues that quotation is a technique employed by art and philosophy to build ties to the past and to possible futures. By exploring quotation’s links to gender, identity, and history, it offers new approaches to works by some of the most influential modern and contemporary artists, writers, and philosophers, including Walter Benjamin, Guy Debord, Michel Foucault, Marcel Broodthaers, Glenn Ligon, Sharon Hayes, and Vanessa Place.

Solvent form examines the destruction of art—through objects that have been destroyed (lost in fires, floods, vandalism, or similarly those artists that actively court or represent this destruction, such as Gustav Metzger), but also as a process within art that the object courts through form. In this manner, Solvent form looks to events such as the Momart warehouse fire in 2004 as well as the actions of art thief Stéphane Breitwieser in which the stolen work was destroyed. Against this overlay, a tendency is mapped whereby individuals attempt to conceptually gather these destroyed or lost objects, to somehow recoup in their absence. From this vantage, Solvent form—hinging on the dual meaning in the words solvent and solvency—proposes an idea of art as an attempt to secure and fix, which correspondingly undoes and destroys through its inception. It also weaves a narrative of art that intermingles with Jean Baudrillard’s ideas on disappearance, Georges Bataille and Paul Virilio’s negative or reverse miracle, Jean-Luc Nancy’s concept of the image (or imago as votive that keeps present the past, yet also burns), and Giorgio Agamben’s notion of art as an attempt to make the moment appear permeable. Likewise, it is through these destructions that one might distinguish a solvency within art and catch an operation in which something is made visible through these moments of destruction when art’s metaphorical undoing emerges as oddly literal.

What is it like to be an animal? This book aims to find out from the inside, from underneath the fur and feathers. In examining this question, it bypasses the perspectives of biology or natural history to explore how one can construct an animal phenomenology, to think and feel as an animal other—or any other. Until now phenomenology has grappled with how humans are embedded in their world. According to philosophical tradition, animals do not practice the self-reflexive thought that provides humans with depth of being. Without human interiority, philosophers have believed, animals live on the surface of things. But, the book argues, the surface can be a site of productive engagement with the world of animals, and as such he turns to humans who work with surfaces: contemporary artists. Taking on the negative claim of animals living only on the surface and turning the premise into a positive set of possibilities for human-animal engagement, the book considers artists—including Damien Hirst, Carolee Schneemann, Olly and Suzi, and Marcus Coates—who take seriously the world of the animal on its own terms. In doing so, these artists develop languages of interspecies expression that both challenge philosophy and fashion new concepts for animal studies.