The Post Anthropocentric Turn in Contemporary Art

Abstract

The article examines the reaction of modern visual art to the paradigm shift in the socio-cultural understanding of man taking place today. Researchers define the new discursive field as posthumanistic. The ambiguity of the concept of posthumanism becomes the reason for referring to the term post-anthropocentrism, which more appropriately describes both the direction of thought of the last decades and the main vector of the development of present-day art. The author puts forward the concept of a post-anthropocentric turn realized in art. The main purpose of the article is to substantiate and describe this turn. Using concrete examples, various art contexts are considered, including: visualizations of the “world-for-us”, “world-in-itself”, “world-without-us”; an appeal to the interspecific community; a statement of the symmetry of human and non-human actors in the work. The research is based on the works of representatives of critical posthumanism and speculative realism. The author concludes that contemporary visual art, conceptualizing and radicalizing the main ideas of post-anthropocentrism, creates many alternative ideas about the situation in which a modern person finds himself. She also notes the transgressive potential of this art.