Looking In: The Art of Viewing (Critical Voices in Art, Theory and Culture)

Take the Money and Run? Can Political and Socio-critical Art “Survive”?

---

They change how we look at the world, beyond the frame. Pliny the Elder 23— Pliny the Elder, Natural History , 15th century.

Critical Voices in Art, Theory and Culture

In his book Natural History , Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder addresses zoology, astrology, botany, and all subjects he deemed worthy of their own history, including several chapters dedicated to craftsmen, artists, and architecture. Pliny traces the origin of painting , suggesting that it began when man tried to trace his own shadow.

Xie He 6th century. Hundreds of years ago, art was an explicit competition. Even then, however, the standards were subjective. Other measures are more technical or formal: Often considered the first art historian, Giorgio Vasari. Jonathan Richardson the Elder — Jonathan Richardson, Self-portrait , In , British painter and collector Jonathan Richardson the Elder.

In a essay , Marijke Jonker posits his enduring influence on aesthetic critiques. This structural approach established the pattern for art criticism for more than a century to come. Yet La Font offered more than just a framework for writing reviews. In another essay , Katerina Deligiorgi notes that since the days of Plato, philosophers have considered the morality of art itself. In Enlightenment France, La Font was eager to integrate his revolutionary views into his writings some scholars suggest that he was critical of the king in the years leading up to the French Revolution.

In , at the height of the Enlightenment, Denis Diderot. Diderot began visiting the salons at the Louvre in This melding of art and life presents new forms of collective civic experience and is based on communication and exchange. The past decade consolidated an alliance in the field of cultural production between the states, corporations, the art market, and private sector. Culture is the social process through which we communicate meaning in order to understand the world, build identities, and define our values and beliefs.

In the late s, theorist Fredric Jameson argued that the social space was completely saturated with the image of culture.

Main menu additional

According to this declaration, culture plays a crucial role in social and economic development, since the cultural and creative industries generate jobs and income and attract investment. Despite the high expectations we might have regarding the value of culture, however, the effects and benefits of showing politicized art and organizing cultural discussions and exchanges are unpredictable. The relationship between the cultural and political spheres that is, the instrumentalization of culture in the name of politics is nothing new. In transcending this contradiction, I am interested in explicating why art subsumed to the demands of the cultural and creative industries, subsidized by the state, market, and corporations is considered a privileged field of politicization and even an integral part of political action and voice when it comes to anti-hegemonic practices.

What are the implications of this for committed, autonomous art? With the advent of industrialized culture, however, once mass society became interested in cultural values and began to monopolize culture for its own ends, transforming cultural values into exchangeable values, a fusion between art and politics occurred in the greater cultural sphere.

1. Politicized Contemporary Art

These include the internet, society, culture, means of mass communication, and symbolic and affective regimes. Within the Infosphere, cultural currents flow across cultural space, changing the language and forms of self-representation and the meaning of reality. In the context of the Infosphere, it has been said that political activism implies spreading and sharing the desire to change lifestyles, and that social movements are the vehicles for spreading desires and implementing changes.

Neoliberal policies tend to erode ways of life.

On one hand, creativity and culture lie at the heart of the struggles that social movements engage in, because their primary means are information and communication technology, which are instrumental when it comes to challenging existing power structures and creating alternative means of dialogue. On the other, we have to consider that politics has become a question of epistemology, a means of expression and a technique for making certain topics intelligible—topics which gain relevance the more visible they are in the media and sociopolitical fields, enabling them to mobilize emotions such as fear, insecurity, indignation, and anger.

This distinction brings to light the abysmal disconnect between committed criticism and national strategy, between politics as a means of circulating content and politics as official policy. It could even be argued that politics as a means of circulating content benefits the power structure under the logic of repressive tolerance freedom of expression is a sign of a healthy democracy: It runs the risk of reducing politicized art to a simple beautification program in gentrified neighborhoods, museological factories, and corporate parks. Changing forms of life is not about creating a reality antagonistic to the prevailing one, because it perpetuates the blockage of what could be.

To modify forms ways of life instead of building a distinct reality—negating the established way of life, its institutions, its material and intellectual culture, its liberal morality, its forms of work and entertainment—is self-repression. What must be taken into account is that some recent social movements have been fighting to maintain their ways of life—their privileges—rather than to change them. Besides artistic production that is at the center of social movements along with communication, critical theory, and self-organization, as we have seen , there is autonomous art—that is, art that is not created specifically to serve social movements or causes.

More than other forms or expressions with the possible exception of film and theater , art that is produced for museums or biennials occupies a privileged space of politicization, while simultaneously being intimately linked to neoliberal processes. By this I mean that today art plays the twin roles of compensating and reducing the effects of neoliberalism, while at the same time actively participating in the new forms of predatory economics and geopolitical power distribution, thus contributing to the transition to the New World Order.

By being at the center of population displacement processes in impoverished urban areas in order to renovate them and generate capital in other words, gentrification , and by abetting speculation and urban marketing, branding, and cultural engineering. Cultural engineering embodies corporate and government interference in the design and form of living spaces, because it means developing projects with the goal of constructing realities in which culture acts as a fundamental element of innovation, dynamism, and individual and social welfare.

For example, culture has been used to revive economically depressed areas, develop educational strategies, and design social spaces. By being present in every corner of the world as an instrument of intervention and improvement—and to promote liberal values—contemporary art also helps normalize neoliberal policies. This sort of thing is possible because cultural expressions are easily integrated into the global panorama of states of emergency, militarized zones, and permanent war, which have become the norm in the early twenty-first century.

When it comes to contemporary art, we must also consider that the bourgeois order that sustains the economy—along with the internal conditions of producing, exhibiting, and consuming art—are strictly taboo: We must also take into account that society disproportionally rewards A-List artists, curators, and other cultural producers in a way not unlike it rewards managers or CEOs of massive corporations, conferring on them direct membership in the new oligarchy.

To conclude, could politicized art, as Hito Steyerl argues, as art that focuses not on what it shows but on what art does and how it does it. These two works arose through the ironic self-reflexivity of the conditions of producing art, reiterating the predominance of an enlightened false consciousness and propagating the ideology of cynical reason: Cultural institutions are the administrative organs of the dominant order, and cultural producers actively contribute to the transmission of free market ideology across all aspects of our lives.

Dissatisfied with competing under the terms laid down by the creative and cultural industries, the production of committed autonomous art would be posited as a precarious working site and would reawaken the hostility between society and culture rather than placating it with pseudo-political products for self-indulgent consumption. Addressing everyone, it would release itself from the circulation of content, interrupting it, communicating nothing.

Politicized autonomous art would make visible that which does not exist from a different point of view, spreading the contagious attitude of those who have nothing to either gain or lose. Irmgard Emmelhainz is an independent writer, scholar, and translator based in Mexico City. Click to start a discussion of the article above. The most useful aspect of this commentary for the action—research project was that it revealed the underlying dangers in two common responses to looking at art and making what seems like a reasonable interpretation: The personal response is a vital part of any reading of a work of art, but it must be tempered by the discipline of looking with both depth and breadth and the courage to challenge even our most basic assumption about a work.

It also introduced the notion of instability into the experience of interpretation, which was a recurring feature of the project. One might argue that the issue of authority is particularly pertinent to art teachers. But teachers do not need to be an authority on all potential meanings of art works they and their pupils encounter. Each day of the summer school took one of the four Ways of Looking frameworks and tested and expanded it through a mix of gallery-based activities and discussion of excerpts from set texts.

Taking the personal approach as the first framework for looking is a principle located within constructivist learning theory which posits that the construction of meaning depends on the prior knowledge, values and beliefs of the viewer, who finds points of connection and reference between these aspects of themselves and the art work. They are not the same thing. It is about the connections a viewer brings to their reading from their experience of the world. While on the one hand personal responses can provide fertile ground for exploration, if treated unreflexively they can stymie interpretation as the art work is submerged beneath the poetry of personal association, reaching a discursive dead end.

Thus, the process of developing interpretations was achieved through expanding on personal responses and building up new habits of looking at art through a programme of activity centred teaching in the gallery.

Popular culture studies

This activity invited teacher researchers to reflect on and extend their immediate responses to a work. After a short period of looking one minute at Anslem Kiefier Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom , , the group wrote down their initial responses to the work in a stream of consciousness format: The battle for power — nature or mankind? One person was allotted the role of interviewer, the other interviewee. This reflexive critique of an initial personal response aimed to uncover some of the biases and assumptions upon which readings of art works were made.

Diagrammatically mapping the process of enquiry demonstrates how fertile a personal response to an art work can be when treated reflexively. Already this response is literally located in a specific world view — an aerial one. This prompts a layering of associations — she relates the river tributaries to cracks in concrete, which in turn become metaphorical cracks in notions of republics and nationhood.

A consideration of her emotional responses to the work records feelings of fascination about the ideas in the piece and its method of production. Thinking about the processes involved in making the work leads her to wonder what the seemingly random paths of the ants might represent — which in turn invokes thoughts of rationality and chance. In the plenary session the teacher-researcher spoke of how intrigued and surprised she was by this process of tracking her responses.

Her diagram references particular world views and knowledge brought into play by the art work, for example a political language of republics, nationhood, invasion, force and power and a philosophical language of belief systems, of free will, reason and chance. The dialectical approach provided checks and balances on personal responses, enabling the interviewee to stay focused on the art work. In the fast-moving world of contemporary visual art it can sometimes seem that the only constant is change.

This makes keeping up with subject knowledge something of a challenge. Teaching pupils the skills of interpretation in such a precedent-defying discipline as contemporary visual art poses the question of the status of knowledge. The anti-traditional nature of contemporary visual art means that there is no accompanying stable or substantive body of knowledge, but rather a plethora of theoretical and critical texts which ebb and flow around and within the art.

Finding a way into an art work which has meaning for pupils does not necessarily tally with knowing everything there is to say about an artwork. Teacher-researchers were invited to curate a route of between three and five works through the galleries using the Looking at the Subject framework as a way of making links between the works. The selected works could demonstrate how artists had expanded or problematized the overall theme of the display.

However, it is fair to say that the resulting routes were muddled; rather than making arguments for connections based on what could be seen, links were made through referencing a priori chunks of knowledge about the artists or the art works. The routes were not a set of interpretations but instead a collective, disjunctive effort of rehearsed information which was not based on visual evidence. This makes possible the contradictions between many viewpoints and a single viewpoint, which is where dialogue starts.

A priori knowledge can limit the way we look by tripping us up into making false connections and leading to a discursive dead-end rather than coming to a place of open ended-ness. In considering the artwork within the framework for enquiry which focused on its objecthood, we commenced with a brainstorm about the variety of ways contemporary art conveys meaning through its material and formal qualities.

Activities which make it difficult to recreate the chosen work pushed the teachers to focus on one aspect of the art work, extrapolate and develop it. This led to a focus on the decisions behind formal qualities in the work. Deliberately limiting options only using collaged gummed paper, reducing a work to five lines, etc. It allows them to avoid the pressure of feeling they have to demonstrate skill once again this is about avoiding the temptation to fall back on a position of authority.

The examples from the Looking Logs suggest the importance of allowing time for a purely physical response to an art work based on its objecthood. Questions are posed and thus the discussion opens out. At the centre of this diagrammatic enquiry into the hard-edged mirror cubes is a circle: An Exploded View , T is interpreted through a collage which extrapolates the strong formal dynamics of the work and the careful placement of objects in what initially seems a random, chaotic arrangement fig.

• Atención frotadores: ¡ondas de choque! ¡ondas de choque! (Spanish Edition)
• The Night Road
• Magick (The Magick Series Book 1)
• 70ies Erotic Photography Vol.09: Erotik Fotos der 70er (German Edition)
• Edgar Allan Poe and the Lightning Bolt Theatre
• Conservatives, Liberals, and the Fight for Americas Future (Ebook Shorts)