Aesthetic Strategies Research Articles

‘First Pluck the Eyes Out’: mutilation in the poetry of Wopko Jensma

Although the act of mutilation is a widespread cultural and aesthetic practice, its pathological manifestations prompt shock, dismay and serious concern. Wopko Jensma has appropriated these qualities of aberrant mutilation to foreground social despair in bizarre cameos of racial oppression and underclass misery. Jensma’s use of mutilation as a poetic resource is typical of his experimental style and departure from convention. His poetry of fragmentation, bizarre pathological motifs, selfmutilation, sado-machoism, and conflicted speakers dispersed across multiple subjectivities undermine the reductive politics of racial essence and privilege the marginalized in society. Image, narrative and diction coalesce in dissonant aesthetic strategies to express the anguish and psychological annihilation emanating from human degradation and despair.Keywords: Mutilation, social despair, oppression, experimental poetry, dissonant aesthetics

Post-Human Aesthetics of Apocalypse

This paper aims to illustrate the transformation of point of view in apocalyptic/dystopian genre films, abandoning the lamenting tone in favor of other species. It also intends to exhibit the aesthetic strategies conforming to the shifting tone of these genre films towards a post-human stance. It can be argued that the conjuncture which is shaped by several coinciding narratives of crisis from the Anthropocene to the more recent political crisis of rising Populism led Posthumanist discourse gain prevalence. The paper will try to link the shifting tone of genre films with the lineages of Posthumanist discourse and contemporary collective anxieties. Through analyzing the voice of narrative and its visual language, this paper will attempt to layout significant characteristics of post-human aesthetics in apocalyptic/dystopian genre films. Article received: April 23, 2019; Article accepted: June 15, 2019; Published online: September 15, 2019; Review article

Pope’s Perversity: Tastemaking in Liberal Culture

Abstract Alexander Pope envisioned his poetry as conducive to a social order shaped and guided by taste. However, unlike later arbiters of taste who sought to project idealized norms, Pope used techniques that were oppositional, individualized, materialist, and perverse. His aesthetic strategies aimed at achieving homogeneity across diverse populations without normative prescriptions. Pope drew on the skeptical notion of the “ruling passion” to model his understanding of taste as a social process. Construed solely as a model of personality, his theory is frequently dismissed; read as a model for tastemaking, it becomes intelligible. While Pope’s classicizing moral and aesthetic values can seem distant from the assumptions of our late liberal culture, the techniques he uses to “rule” tastes indirectly remain fundamental imperatives in liberal aesthetic culture.

‘A pedagogy of the image’: Chantal Akerman’s ethics across film and art

This article elucidates the complex ethical paradigm at the heart of Chantal Akerman’s work and thought, arguing first that her ethics are as concerned with the figure of the self as they are with the figure of the other and that, second, these ethics exist as much in the spatial and durational structures of her work as in the content of her images. In this way, this article contends that approaching Akerman’s work through the question of ethics allows one to see consistencies across her film and installation work, even as her aesthetic strategies shift across the different dispositifs of the cinema and the gallery or museum. Addressing these shifts, I offer the concept of Akerman’s ‘ethical pedagogy of the image’ – a term that implies both a method and a site of instruction. Drawing on these two meanings, this article ultimately reveals that Akerman’s pedagogical aim involves turning viewers’ ethical attention back on to themselves – to offer a prompt and a space for reconsideration of their own ethos.

Mediating the real: Treme’s activated aesthetic

This article explores how Treme (HBO 2010–2013) deploys reflexive aesthetic strategies to produce a critique of governmental and municipal corruption and negligence following Hurricane Katrina. Set and filmed in New Orleans, Treme negotiates additional complex layers given that many events referenced are real. The series reworks normative representations of New Orleans typified by an overdetermined authenticity in a reflexive interrogation of recent experience and historical memory. I argue Treme develops an ‘activated aesthetic’ through two textual strategies: opening credit sequences and ‘televisual moments’, mobilising these aesthetic devices to develop a complex, explicitly politicised representation of post-Katrina New Orleans.

Aesthetic Strategies of Trance-gression: The Politics of Bodily Scenes of Ecstasy

Choreographic bodies are empowered by modes of expansion and transgression. Focusing on the energetic processes that lead to such empowerment, this article discusses the perceptual politics of trancelike scenes in the work of contemporary European choreographers and performers. As a body-mobilizing choreographic strategy of out-of-body and out-of-mind experiences, trance is closely linked to critical and utopian ideas, bodily transgressions, and crossed boundaries. While Mary Wigman treats trance as an incantation which contains the powers that it unleashes, contemporary choreographers like Doris Uhlich or Meg Stuart, expose the body to powers that nearly disintegrate it. As opposed to Wigman-style modernism, contemporary dance stages movement as a tremendous event that exposes performers and audiences to experiences of transgression.

Cute Jews: Modernist Photographic Forms and Minor Aesthetic Categories in ‘Jüdische Kinder in Erez Israel. Ein Fotobuch’

Abstract Jüdische Kinder in Erez Israel was the last overtly Jewish-themed photobook published in Germany before the Holocaust. Although it consists only of a six-page introduction by the scholar-activist Bertha Badt-Strauß, one page of captions, and twenty-one photographs by photographer Nachum ‘Tim’ Gidal of adorable young children in Mandatory Palestine, its propaganda mission transcends its diminutive size and surface superficiality. This article interprets this photobook as an example of the photo essay, a modernist form that emerged from Weimar Germany’s unique media environment, in which photographs assumed rhetorical and argumentative functions generally associated with written language. To encourage German Jews and particularly German-Jewish women to emigrate, Jüdische Kinder in Erez Israel creates an allegory of the children’s vulnerability by eliciting responses associated with the minor aesthetic category of ‘cuteness’. To this end, it draws on two important photo essay genres of interwar Germany: photobooks and illustrated magazine photostories about cute children and about Palestine. By synthesizing these discourses, Gidal and Badt-Strauß create a cultural artifact that aims to establish positive, affective relationships between German-Jewish readers and Mandatory Palestine, and to convince the former to visualize and embrace the latter as they might imagine their own children. In this way, Jüdische Kinder in Erez Israel broadens our understandings of both the media constellation from which photo essays emerged, and how this form helped broaden the visual lexicon and aesthetic strategies central to the project of Jewish cultural and political regeneration.

Terror films: The socio-cultural reconstruction of trauma in contemporary Israeli cinema

Ben-Moshe Yael, Ebbrecht-Hartmann Tobias, Terror films: The socio-cultural reconstruction of trauma in contemporary Israeli cinema. “Images” vol. XXV, no. 34. Poznań 2019. Adam Mickiewicz University Press. Pp. 69–86. ISSN 1731-450X. DOI 10.14746/i.2019.34.05.
 The public discourse in Israel regarding events such as the Holocaust, war, or terror attacks mostly failed to embrace the trauma caused by such events, and to integrate their effects in the collective memory. According to trauma theoreticians, the location of trauma in the discourse is related to the character of trauma as a non-narratable memory, since personal trauma exist in the void, thus marking a missing memory. This paper explores the notion of trauma in contemporary Israeli cinema as it was reconstructed during and after the Second Intifada (2000–2008). The paper focuses on feature films reflecting on experiences of terrorist violence, among them Avanim (2004), Distortion (2004), Frozen Days (2006), The Bubble (2006), 7 Minutes in Heaven (2009). These films embrace parallel elements structuring a worldview, in the private as well as the collective sphere, thus shaping the surroundings as a mirror of the self and the subjective traumatic experience as a reflection of a complex social reality.A particular focus of our analysis will also be on aesthetic strategies that cinematically express rupture and distortion of terrorist violence and trauma, especially moments of suddenness and disruption in contrast to duration and circular repetition, elements of a specific temporality of trauma that also shaped the narration and style of recent Israeli war films, such as Waltz with Bashir (2008) or Beaufort (2007).

Spiste horisonter og Tre piger og en gris

This article compares the sexual differences in two Danish avant-garde films. It suggests that the Danish feminist, collective film Three Girls and a Pig from 1971 with an actual castration of a young pig established a deconstruction of a phallic economy in line with the theory of the French feminist linguist Luce Irigaray. In comparison with the artist Wilhelm Freddie’s and filmmaker Jørgen Roos’ surrealist film, Eaten Horizons from 1950, this deconstruction may contribute to a feminist reinterpretation of the latter’s sadist and cannibalistic fetichization of the female body. Furthermore, the comparison sheds light on formal and aesthetic strategies, such as the surrealist magic and illusionism contrasted to feminist bodily realism, and the transgressive potentials of the bodily rituals in the two films.

Minimal gestures: Displacement, affect and urban experience in A hora da estrela/The Hour of the Star (Amaral, 1985)

Regarded as a landmark in Brazilian film history, Susana Amaral’s A hora da estrela/The Hour of the Star (1985) received critical acclaim when it was released in the 1980s, and continues to receive scholarly attention, especially from feminist, ideological and sociological perspectives. This article examines the film’s use of aesthetic strategies that produce affective and sensorial experiences from a phenomenological position, rather than providing a sociological reading of the protagonist’s condition as a migrant. I argue that Amaral’s focus on the film frame and duration, which favours the close-up, mirror images and still-life images, reveals the protagonist’s minimal gestures, which give rise to affects. From a discussion of the concepts of the time-image, haptic visuality, mimesis, I contend that these embodied and affective spatial experiences construct the protagonist’s sense of self and subjectivity instead of a psychologizing portrayal of her condition as a migrant.

Digital subjection Art in the Technology Trap

Artistic practices have now been dominated by an aesthetic regime that has revolutionarily transformed them, making works the result of free play - free from ethical meaning and the requirement to comply with rules - suspend the logic of perception. All norms and principles governing the production of performances, including the hierarchy of topics, have also been abolished. The images, which are subject to constant redistribution, have become part of this modified space of experience. We live in a world filled with images and understand this world through images. That is why defining the status of an image in contemporary culture, together with the dominant aesthetic strategies, may be the basis for understanding the processes taking place within it. The dynamics of technological development made visuality a prerequisite for the redefinition of the social world. Visibility is thus a political criterion, and thanks to new media the authorities can control and subjugate individuals more effectively.

‘To Unearth the Layers of Forgetting’: Reading Boy, Lost as a Postmemoir

ABSTRACT This article reads Kristina Olsson’s Boy, Lost: A Family Memoir (2013, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press.) as a postmemorial text. The memoir centres on the moment, six years before Olsson was born, when a thirteen-month-old baby was abducted from Olsson’s mother’s arms. The article relies on Marianne Hirsch’s (2012, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press. ProQuest.) theory of postmemory to examine the way the memoir is motivated both by the confusion Olsson feels about the way her own life was shaped by this hidden, traumatic past and by the responsibility she feels to write towards a sense of justice for her mother. The article dwells on the ethical concerns that arise at the point of tension between the writer’s desire for recovery and the mother’s silences, and it examines the aesthetic strategies Olsson employs to negotiate this tension. The article also draws on Meera Atkinson’s (2017, The Poetics of Transgenerational Trauma. New York: Bloomsbury. ProQuest.) work to discuss the way Olsson situates her family’s trauma within the context of the cultural and social factors that precipitated it. The article argues that Boy, Lost offers a methodology for an ethical postmemorial project through the way it balances Olsson’s story with her mother’s and with the country’s.

Roman som skuespill: Sjangerhybriditet i Erlend Loes Stille dager i Mixing Part

Abstract Erlend Loe’s novel Stille dager i Mixing Part (2009, Quiet Days in Mixing Part) focuses on a marital crisis of a Norwegian couple on vacation in Germany. The husband, Bror Telemann, is a dramaturg who dreams of writing a major play, and he tries in vain to begin to write one. The novel is a third-person narrative, but it actually contains few narrative passages: most of the text consists of dialogues. The text is, in fact, a hybrid of two genres – part novel, part play. This seems to be a consciously chosen aesthetic strategy on Loe’s part. The main thematic aspects of Stille dager i Mixing Part are tied up with drama and theatre in various ways. This article shows how genre hybridity, aided by intertextual allusions, contributes to representing these main aspects.

Worlding through gendering: Female agency, artistic practices and spatio-aesthetic dynamics in and for cities

Abstract The aim of this paper is to examine the emergent practices of worlding by shifting the focus to the varied forms of female agency taking place in contemporary graffiti, street art and muralism. Given that the position of women has been underestimated in existing scholarships of worlding, (post)subcultures and contemporary art in East Asia, the questions of multiple roles of female agency, signifiers of femininity, and a more nuanced understanding of their impact to the spatio-aesthetic dynamics of public space are becoming ever more relevant. While contemporary graffiti is mainly seen as the domain of masculinity, the diversified manifestations of street art and muralism are more accepting for female participation and self-expression. Through critical analysis of the complexities of female agency and feminine aesthetics, the paper demonstrates how the transformation of contemporary graffiti into acknowledged forms of contemporary art has provided unseen possibilities for women to engage with what I call “worlding through gendering”. I posit that even if feminine signifiers or feminist aspirations might not be a dominating strategy in these artistic practices amidst the ever-growing transcultural urban environment, women protagonists are contributing towards new forms of worlding through aesthetic strategies and forms of female agency. They create situated experiments how to be global in cities in East Asia and worldwide.

History as trauma and the possibility of the future: Theo Angelopoulos’ Voyage to Cythera

Theo Angelopoulos has described Taxidi sta Kythira (Voyage to Cythera) (1984) as an attempt to ‘exorcise the past’ and offer the Greek audience a possibility to face the future without the traumas of the past. This article explores the question of the extent to which we can exorcise the past and asks if a future is possible without acknowledging the traumas of the past. Drawing upon cultural trauma theory, the article analyses the Greek Civil War (1946–49) as a cultural trauma for the Greek Left, especially concerning the recognition of political prisoners and exiles. Psychoanalytic theory, on the other hand, suggests that a fundamental characteristic of trauma is the un-representability of the event itself, as a traumatic event is only known through its persistent reiterations. Through its multi-layered narrative structure and aesthetic strategies of deferral and displacement Voyage to Cythera stages the trauma of the Greek Civil War for both the returning exiles and the generation that followed. As a representation of presence through absence, the article considers Voyage to Cythera in terms of Thomas Elsaesser’s concept of the parapractic text and Max Silverman’s notion of palimpsestic memory whereby the film does not exorcise the past as such but reveals a past haunting the present. The article concludes with the reflection that a traumatic past has a tendency to return however much we may wish to lay it rest.

Research on the “Double” Motive in the Novel Blueprint

The German female writer Charlotte Kerner has created a series of works on the theme of science and technology to explore the relationship between people and technology and nature. One of the most striking features of his work is the frequent appearance of the "double" motive. This phenomenon is most evident in the book Blueprint. This article explores the "double" motive in the novel Blueprint from the perspectives of "mother-daughter doubles" and "person-painting doubles". This paper analyzes the aesthetic effect of its performance, and then studies the relationship among the motive, the author's aesthetic strategy and the theme of the work. In addition, it is concluded that "double" is full of dialectical philosophy of opposition and unity. It not only highlights the author's aesthetic strategy of paying attention to the dual combination of character and dialectical movement in character shaping, which makes the character of the character more full and contradictory conflict more intense, but also endues the work with the depth of human nature.

What is the ‘Silent House’?: Interpreting the international appeal of Tokio Films’ Uruguayan horror La casa muda/The Silent House

This article focuses on the micro-budget Uruguayan horror movie, La casa muda/The Silent House (Hernandez, 2010), as exemplar of the difficulties that Uruguayan filmmakers face in production and (international) distribution and the innovative means that they develop to negotiate these issues. Like many Uruguayan films, La casa muda premiered internationally (at the Cannes Film Festival) and, as outlined in the article, it follows a similar aesthetic and narrative ‘backgrounding’ of the nation (the deliberate erasure of indicators of national identity, such as national monuments) to that of Uruguayan art films. Nevertheless, its production history and journey to international prominence remains rather unique. This distinction reinforces the importance of the festival circuit in facilitating the production and distribution of Uruguayan art films, but, also – as is less often discussed – the television industry and especially the Internet as counter-balances to the dominance of Hollywood’s outreach in the region. Moreover, the ‘ambiguous’ nature of the film’s narrative and iconographic content illustrates how Uruguayan filmmakers simultaneously meet, and depart from, international audience expectations. Ultimately, La casa muda is not of interest specifically for being a Latin American horror film, but because it travelled internationally using the same distribution platforms (the festival circuit, DVD release) and aesthetic strategies as many preceding Uruguayan (and Latin American) art films, only this time to confound established expectations of films travelling these routes.

Shakespeare, Art and Artifice: An Interview with Stuart Sillars

Ahead of the publication of his forthcoming book, Shakespeare Seen: Image, Performance and Society (Cambridge, 2018), Stuart Sillars sat down for an interview with Perry McPartland. The discussion revisited a number of topics that Sillars has explored in his various publications on Shakespeare, including Shakespeare’s aesthetic strategies of transformation, the relationship his work takes to the visual, and the uses to which Shakespeare puts aesthetic artifice. The interview was conducted in two parts over a very nearly adequate Skype connection in the summer of 2018.

Beyond Man of Marble: deconstructing the shock worker myth in Polish documentary

This article examines a wave of documentary films about former shock workers (Stakhanovites) and model workers that were produced in Poland in the 1970s. These short works by Bohdan Kosiński, Krzysztof Kieślowski, Wojciech Wiszniewski, Marcel Łoziński and Irena Kamieńska were esthetically innovative and politically daring attempts to present a more truthful vision of workers’ experience in the Stalinist period. Focusing on the iconic figure of the shock or model worker also allowed these filmmakers to begin identifying and dismantling the ossified forms of socialist realist discourse. The article analyzes the different esthetic strategies they adopted, as well as the way in which their films were representative of a broader shift away from cinéma vérité and the archival compilation film in the direction of what Polish film scholar Mirosław Przylipiak has termed ‘creative documentary’ (dokument kreacyjny). Finally, through an analysis of the differences between original script and finished film, it argues that these documentaries played a crucial role in both the formal and thematic evolution of Andrzej Wajda’s film Man of Marble (1977).

PERFORMANCE DO ROMANCE: LER A FICÇÃO EXPERIMENTAL DE JOSÉ-ALBERTO MARQUES

Este artigo centra-se, num primeiro momento, na análise de Narrativylírica para, de seguida, mergulhar na constelação de romances experimentais de José-Alberto Marques. Pretende-se mostrar como diferentes obras do autor, cada uma com a sua especifi cidade embora tendo em comum similares princípios concetuais e estratégias estéticas, cumprem o desígnio do experimentalismo de construção de sentido com base em processos de experimentação disruptivos das estruturas constitutivas da própria obra.