The aesthetics of anger: Spatializing emotions through intermedia practices

Abstract

Abstract Art has always been a transgressive way of exploring in-between and liminal aspects of human experience. Within the current era of social upheaval and crisis, it is of great interest how extreme emotions can be aestheticized and examined under new interdisciplinary lenses. Anger has constituted an excluded emotion – often a taboo within rationalized social norms – although the politics of repression in various threads of contemporary life are often a provoking factor. Yet, it has always been an emotion with not only great expressive qualities but also located near wisdom, virtue and wrath. Can anger be spatialized through intermedia practices? How can the aesthetization of such an emotion reveal political aspects of such works of art? The current article seeks to explore the potential and aesthetics of anger in contemporary art and in particular how it becomes performed, spatialized and mediatized with poetic and political implications. Having as the starting platform the philosophical, cultural and socio-spatial aspects of emotions within wider contemporary affective structures of the everyday, it explores such an emotion through different trajectories (philosophical, cultural, spatial) and forms of artistic expression, ranging from video art and installation to hybrid performances and documented walking actions. Therefore, the article focuses on a number of artists including the works of Bill Viola, Pipilotti Rist, Claire Fontaine, Lanfranco Aceti, Regina Galindo and Bill Psarras.