Artistic Agency Research Articles

Calculated Randomness, Control and Creation: Artistic Agency in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

The recent emergence of generative AI, particularly prompt-based models, and its embedding in many social domains and practices has revived the notion of co-creation and distributed agency already familiar in art practice and theory. Drawing on Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and its central notion of agency, this article explores the extent to which the collaboration between the artist and AI represents a new form of co-creation and distributed agency. It compares AI art with artistic movements such as Dada, Surrealism, Minimalism and Conceptual Art, which also challenged the notion of the autonomous artist and her agency by incorporating randomness on the one hand and rule-based systems on the other. In contrast, artistic practice with AI can be described as an iterative process of creative feedback loops, oscillating between order and disorder, (calculated) randomness and calculation, enabling a very specific kind of self-reflection and entanglement with the alienation of one’s own perspective. Furthermore, this article argues that most artistic projects that explore and work with AI are, in their own specific way, a demonstration of hybridity and entanglement, as well as the distribution of agency between the human and the non-human, and can thus be described as a network phenomenon.

Cinema, Displayed

Abstract This essay details that which is arguably the essential nature of a ubiquitous kind of visual display prominently involved in a great many phenomena that people have in mind when they think and talk about the cinema. My argument begins with a summary and critique of an important precedent, Noël Carroll’s essentialist definition of the detached moving image display. The remainder of my discussion concentrates on the structure and dynamics of a particular sort of luminescent display. This display is essential to what I call the cinematic display. As I understand it, the cinematic display is neither the or a medium of cinema nor perforce a vehicle for artistic content. It is, rather, a luminescent display in service of someone’s presentational intentions. I conclude with thoughts about the ontological relation between cinematic displays and works, the latter tentatively defined as a display of expressive or artistic agency.

Shifting the Focus: Intra-acting with Diverse Agencies and Happy Objects in a Day Center of Disability Services

The article is based on the author’s experiences of facilitating creative movement groups in a disability services day center. Through artistic and performative research, she investigates different forms of agency in and around the movement groups. She draws on theoretical perspectives from critical disability studies, feminist new materialism and affect studies, par­ticularly focusing on Sara Ahmed’s (2010) notion of the “happy object,” to challenge the human-centric view of arts education and artistic agency. She proposes a shift of focus in arts education from individual agents to the intra-action of diverse agencies in art making, teaching, and learning in diverse contexts.

Review: Collective Creativity and Artistic Agency in Colonial Latin America, edited by Maya Stanfield-Mazzi and Margarita Vargas-Betancourt

Review: <i>Collective Creativity and Artistic Agency in Colonial Latin America</i>, edited by Maya Stanfield-Mazzi and Margarita Vargas-Betancourt

The art of playful mess: Co-choreographing the early years dance pedagogical practices

This article presents explorations of co-choreographing the early years dance pedagogical settings through dialogical and intra-active approaches in the context of artistic research. It discusses how to choreograph the pedagogical settings in such a manner, that the distribution of the artistic agency would become more equal, and the complex relational aspects and diversities would have time and space to emerge. The significance and possible consequences of co-choreographing the dances as well as the pedagogical arrangements will be also examined, followed with practical examples of what might the materiality of the space suggest and how to respond to it. The paper presents the Storyboard Method as a drawing-based method created by children for co-creating and writing choreography. It proposes the Storyboard Method having potential to open possibilities for working together with all ages and different linguistic skills in a participant-driven and playful manner. The work also suggests that by deconstructing the adult-child dichotomy and re-distributing the authority of knowledge, for example, through drawing-based playful methods, we could enhance the respectful encounters and allow the messy and complex qualities of creativity to emerge and enrich the artistic work.

Collective Creativity and Artistic Agency in Colonial Latin America by Maya Stanfield-Mazzi, and Margarita Vargas-Betancourt (review)

Collective Creativity and Artistic Agency in Colonial Latin America by Maya Stanfield-Mazzi, and Margarita Vargas-Betancourt (review)

Performativity of JaF art agency on the land, city, and its surroundings

This study aims to see the performativity of terracotta through the process and the culture of the roof tile production industry in Jatiwangi District, Majalengka Regency, West Java. This research used qualitative methods, and collecting data used a combination of three methods: literature study, participatory observation, and semi-structured interviews. After the data is collected, the next step is data analysis using the concept of performativity and art agency. JaF emerged by taking on the role of a change agent, inviting Jatiwangi residents, especially roof tile industry players, to survive together and stay true to their native culture using participatory arts engagement. Perform various artistic activities with Jatiwangi residents to declare that they exist. They are using artistic approaches to narrate defensive actions, holding various forms of art festivals to show their progress in Jatiwangi. This is due to the performativity of roof tiles as the initial trigger, the community, and the development of Jatiwangi as an "art factory" into Jatiwangi Art Factory (JaF). So, in JaF, roof tiles, artisans, artists, cultural actors, terracotta, and the "art factory" brand is a performance agency in the land, city, and surroundingsPerformativitas badan seni di daerah, kota, dan sekitarnya di JaFPenelitian ini bertujuan untuk melihat performativitas terakota melalui proses dan budaya industri produksi genteng di Kecamatan Jatiwangi, Kabupaten Majalengka, Jawa Barat. Penelitian ini menggunakan metode kualitatif, dan pengumpulan data menggunakan kombinasi tiga metode: studi kepustakaan, observasi partisipatif, dan wawancara semi terstruktur. Setelah data terkumpul, langkah selanjutnya adalah analisis data dengan menggunakan konsep performativity dan art agency. JaF muncul dengan mengambil peran sebagai agen perubahan, mengajak warga Jatiwangi, khususnya pelaku industri genteng, untuk bertahan bersama dan tetap setia pada budaya asli mereka melalui keterlibatan seni partisipatif. Melakukan berbagai kegiatan seni bersama warga Jatiwangi untuk menyatakan bahwa mereka ada. Mereka menggunakan pendekatan artistik untuk menceritakan tindakan defensif, mengadakan berbagai bentuk festival seni untuk menunjukkan kemajuan mereka di Jatiwangi. Hal ini dikarenakan performativitas genteng sebagai pemicu awal, masyarakat, dan berkembangnya Jatiwangi sebagai “pabrik seni” menjadi Jatiwangi Art Factory (JaF). Jadi, di JaF, genteng, pengrajin, seniman, aktor budaya, terakota, dan merek "pabrik seni" adalah agensi pertunjukan di tanah, kota, dan sekitarnya.

Toward a Responsible Artistic Agency: Mindful Representation of Fat Communities in Popular Media

Abstract When fat people are depicted in popular media, we often take their behavior to be representative of all fat people. How one fat person acts becomes representative of a broader pattern of behavior that all fat people are presumed to share, shaping the way we understand fatness. This way of generalizing presents fatness as a singular experience, reducing fat people to a monolithic narrative that often reinforces anti-fat bias. How do we avoid this reduction? How can we responsibly depict fat characters without perpetuating negative stereotypes about real fat people? Using the case of “Fat Thor” from Avengers: Endgame, I propose the beginnings of an account of responsible artistic agency which can be used to improve the ways that marginalized communities are depicted in art, with a particular focus on fat communities. Central to this account are two features: inclusion of and deference to members of the communities depicted from a variety of backgrounds throughout the production process, and mindfulness of the preexisting narrative web built around the communities depicted. I will use this discussion to highlight the need for a drastic shift in how we consider marginalized populations in art—in reimagining both who tells their stories, and what stories are told on their behalf.

Abstract States: Modernism in Lebanon, Syria, and Turkey

Abstract A decade after modernist art history's tentative embrace of postcolonial modernisms, a new crop of books are leveraging this disciplinary acceptance to examine hitherto shrouded aspects of the field. Anneka Lenssen's, Beautiful Agitation: Modern Painting and Politics in Syria (2020), Zeina Maasri's, Cosmopolitan Radicalism: The Visual Politics of Beirut's Global Sixties (2020) and Sarah-Neel Smith's, Metrics of Modernity: Art and Development in Postwar Turkey, (2022) offer candid appraisals of postcolonial modernism's exposure to colonial and nationalist institutions, Cold War cultural networks, and the hierarchical effects of canonical modernism. Reviewed together in this article, these books reveal the distinctive orientations of modernism in contiguous Syria, Lebanon and Turkey along with the methodological value of formalist methods to assert artistic agency. Through refractive readings of artworks and other materials, Lenssen, Maasri and Smith invert disciplinary anxieties about postcolonial art's political subjection, making a case for postcolonial art's perceptiveness to the instability and abstraction of the institutional forces to which they are subject.

Ukrainian Territory A Artistic Agency: a Synthesis of Ukrainian Folklore and Popular Music Art in Sound Recording

The basic principles of the development and synthesis of Ukrainian popular and folk (folklore) art of the late 20th – early 21st centuries are investigated in the article. Peculiar attention is paid to the work of the Territory-A artistic agency (ideologist and project masters are producer Oleksandr Bryhynets, presenter – Honored Artist of Ukraine Anzhelika Rudnytska), which managed to find the methods and forms of introducing Ukrainian culture into radio and television spaces, to replenish the creative fund with sound recordings of Ukrainian origin, to distribute popular song in modern arrangements in the mass-media spaces and to popularize Ukrainian folk traditions among young people by initiating festivals called EthnoWinter, EthnoSpring, EthnoSummer and EthnoAutumn. The main analysis of the synthesis of Ukrainian popular music and folklore is dedicated to the theme of revival of archetypal tunes of Western Ukraine, the creation of new compositions based on them and their popularization among the audience, the promotion of ethnic music on television and its importance for national culture in general. Also noteworthy is the first Ukrainian large-format Territory-A hit parade on ICTV channel, which has broadcasted domestically produced videos three times a week for five years (1995–2000), on the revealing new names of young performers as a leading prototype for subsequent art projects such as Star Factory, X-Factor, The Voice of the Country, etc. Besides, attention is focused on the issue of the Musical Week newspaper, which has improved eventually the style of magazine published works. The Territory-A artistic agency is known as the publisher and order performer, famous for its hit parades of video- and audiography among Ukrainian popular music artists on the ICTV All-Ukrainian TV channel. It is emphasized in the conclusions on the necessity of such artistic ideas in the future. This, in turn, positions the revival of national culture and symbolism in the sphere of self-identification of Ukrainian art among the people of other cultures.

“Be Creative, Be Friends and Share Cultural Experiences”: Genre, Politics, and Fun at the Junior Eurovision Song Contest

Abstract This article examines children’s political agency in the context of the Junior Eurovision Song Contest. The Eurovision Song Contest is widely recognized as a political arena—a space for nation branding and soft diplomacy, narratives of European musical and democratic harmony, and protests over global political events. But despite filling similar roles to their adult counterparts, the young performers’ age and the organizers’ emphasis on ensuring the event is safe and fun mean these dynamics are frequently downplayed or overlooked at Junior Eurovision, with significant consequences for how we understand children’s political and politicized roles in international cultural spaces. I work with Lauren Berlant’s concepts of genre and the juxtapolitical to argue that recognition of children’s political—as opposed to artistic—agency by adults is tempered by both the format of Eurovision as entertainment and by broader conceptions apparent in international discourses of children as apolitical innocents. I suggest that while each of these genres can work separately to quiet the political dimensions of events, issues, and identities, it is Junior Eurovision’s double-edged status as a spectacular musical event and one starring and aimed at children that keeps the young performers from being recognized as having political identities and agency twice over.

Women’s agency in art and science

Women in the field of art and science have an unquestionable presence worldwide that exceeds their visibility in the general visual art scene. When cataloguing women’s range of practices and exploring their agency in art and science, a new model of inclusivity and access to the public sphere for all individuals working in art emerges. First, these are contributions reflecting on projects being carried out by women in the broadest interpretation of the term – individuals who identify themselves as women, cisgender, non-cisgender, transgender, gender fluid and independent of their sex and gender. Second, these are contributions that reflect on research methodologies, collaboration strategies, knowledge sharing, as well as public vs. personal, embodiment and materiality.

Babur, Akbar, and the Transformation of Gwalior's Rock-Hewn Tirthankaras

During his 1528 sojourn in Gwalior, the first Mughal emperor, Babur (r. 1526–1530), encountered numerous colossal Digambara Jain Tirthankaras fashioned from outcrops in the Urvai valley. He recounts in his memoirs how he ordered the naked “idols” destroyed. While this famed episode of iconoclasm in the Bāburnāma is well known to scholars, three paintings portraying Babur's trip to Gwalior that survive from the multiple illustrated manuscripts commissioned by Babur's grandson Akbar (r. 1556–1605) have eluded close examination. This article probes the divergent representational strategies employed by the artists of those folios tasked with depicting the same scene. I demonstrate how one artist pictorially transformed Gwalior's rock-hewn Tirthankaras into animate idols, another alluded to yet elided their portrayal, and a third bypassed entirely the thorny issue of their representation. I argue that those illustrations constitute a visual emendation to Babur's memoirs that effectively exonerated Babur from any charge of desecrating inert Jain icons—an act by then incongruous with Akbar's policy of ṣulḥ-i kull and the strong Mughal-Jain relations at his court. This proposition is further supported by an original translation of an excerpt from Siddhicandra's (d. ca. 1666) Bhānucandragaṇicarita, a Sanskrit text composed by a Jain monk at the Mughal court. Ultimately, this study contributes to critical discourses on iconoclasm, artistic agency, Mughal-Jain relations, and historical memory by exploring the theoretical issues concerning the depiction of rock carvings and idols in the pictorial afterlife of Babur's encounter with Gwalior's rock-hewn Tirthankaras.

Creativity, agency, and stability: Perceptions of Canadian musicians working across the cultural domains.

This research study aims to illuminate Canadian musicians' portfolio careers across the cultural domains. Previous research has highlighted the career paths of music graduates directly after graduation, and other research has highlighted the experiences of well-known performers or pedagogues. However, little is known about music graduates who persist and establish careers in music. We interviewed twelve musicians working in a variety of Canadian cultural domains to understand their work and career paths. Their stories elucidate how artists balance income stability, artistic agency, creativity, and professional challenges to create impressive and fulfilling portfolios that enable them to use their music-based knowledge and skills in various ways. Findings from this study provide a more nuanced understanding of the scope and nature of music-related work in Canada and how artists integrate artistic and creative abilities with community needs and economic stability. These findings offer insights for emerging musicians and music graduates and have implications for educating and supporting artists who wish (or indeed need) to work across cultural domains.

Racial Democracy, Visibility, and the History of Colonial Brazilian Art

Since the nineteenth century, the history of colonial Brazilian art has highlighted the work of Afro-Brazilian men, specifically those with a white father and Black or parda mother. Antonio Francisco Lisboa, known as Aleijadinho, is the subject of countless books, exhibitions, television shows, and films. In addition to such famous men, dozens of other Afro-Brazilian artists are known and much scholarship has examined iconography and style with ties to African cultures. This extensive and important work has led to major exhibitions demonstrating Afro-Brazilian contributions as central to Brazil’s past and present. Although intended as celebratory, the language and framing structures scholars use to discuss Afro-Brazilian artists from the colonial period are founded in white supremacy. The conception of Brazil as a nation where everyone is of mixed race, and therefore devoid of racism, is partly responsible for Aleijadinho’s fame. This essay will clarify how this narrative of harmonious racial mixing and the focus on the visibly African perpetuates white supremacist interpretations of colonial Brazilian art and limits the study of Afro-Brazilian artists’ work. I will propose ways to reframe workshop practice and improve connoisseurship using, among other cases, the lawsuit directed toward the white painter Manoel da Costa Ataíde that named the Afro-Brazilian artists who created one of his commissions. The essay builds on existing scholarship, acknowledging the violence of enslaving artists and promoting lines of inquiry that consider the agency and cultural positioning of Afro-Brazilian artists and patrons as subtle, ubiquitous, and heterogeneous.

In Pursuit of Cultural Equity: DEI Grantmaking Practices of U.S. Local Arts Agencies in Community Context

As grantmaking intermediary organizations, local arts agencies (LAAs) play an important but under-researched role in realizing cultural equity—the incorporation of underrepresented groups and counternarratives into democratic discourse—in thousands of local communities throughout the United States. In deploying their diversity, equity, and inclusion grantmaking practices, LAAs vary in the degree to which they proactively encourage the artistic expression of underrepresented groups, such as immigrants and racial-ethnic minorities. Little research has been directed at the relationship between the relative population size of underrepresented groups in an LAA service area and an LAA’s likelihood of having a formal “race-ethnic targeting” policy, the proactive channeling of arts economic resources toward underrepresented community groups. Framing our analysis in sociological race relations theories, we examine patterns of association between an LAA’s likelihood of having a formal race-ethnic targeting policy and the percentage foreign-born of the residential population in an LAA service area based on 462 LAAs of the 2018 Local Arts Agency Profile collected by Americans for the Arts, a national dataset of LAAs that we augmented with U.S. Census demographic data on LAA service-area populations. We conclude by deriving from the curvilinear pattern of findings a “representation thesis” on the community social contexts in which proactive LAAs tend to target race-ethnic minorities for distributing arts economic resources.

Earth System at Risk: Challenging Environmental (In)Justice

Earth System at Risk: Challenging Environmental (In)Justice

Surfacing woman-consciousness in Reza de Wet’s On the Lake

Reza de Wet is one of South Africa’s most acclaimed and translated playwrights. On the Lake is one of her most under-researched plays. It forms part of a trilogy of Chekhov-sequels all of which premiered in South Africa before they were eventually published by the Brittain based Oberon Books in 2002 as A Russian Trilogy, thereby reconsolidating De Wet’s international stature. On the Lake’s Chekhovian source text is The Seagull. De Wet crops Chekhov’s dozen-plus cast of characters to five, restricting them to female characters, all contained in the framing perspective of a protagonist-cum-centre-of-consciousness, underlining as such her surfacing of Chekhov’s concern with throttled female artistic agency. On the Lake is discussed here as De Wet’s dramatization of the co-incidence and correlation of a woman’s artistic awakening with psycho-sexual emancipation amidst and at odds with a patriarchal regime. De Wet recasts The Seagull’s Nina Mikhailovna Zaryechnaia as the protagonist in On the Lake and dramatizes her gradual evolution from an actress into a playwright and her shedding of her emotional dependence on her former lovers. On the Lake is read in comparison with an unpublished draft of it that offers insight into De Wet’s writing process and the motivations underlying the final published version. I make a case for De Wet’s optimism regarding the artistic and psychological self-actualization that her protagonist achieves. In view of De Wet’s resistance to the moniker feminism, Curb’s term woman-conscious theatre is engaged to place De Wet’s project in a wider field of woman-centred drama.

Geometry in Art? Scenes of a Colonisation of the Look and the Thinking in Mathematics Education

Background: Wouldn’t the transformations of artworks over time be the most convincing record of how geometry was historically practised and transformed? Now, it seems that research on geometry, whether as a theory or a school subject, leads us to a no less important problem linked to its effects and modulations on subjectivity. In mathematics education, one sees the agency of art for a very specific purpose: learning geometry through art. However, geometry is not just a set of theorems, concepts, and forms to be apprehended; it is also a device that, imprinted on our thinking, makes us talk about the world and its things. That is, it participates in the game of relations of power, knowledge, being, life, and nature, producing truths reiterated and subordinated by the ways of looking, thinking, and representing. Objectives: This article aims to analyse aspects of the relationship between geometry and art that put into practice a colonial matrix of power in mathematics education. Design: To do so, some scenes are presented, such as body-scene, space-scene, and nature-scene, considering geometry and art in its historical and educational forms. Setting and Participants: It is supported by art, art history, and research that articulates art and geometry. Data collection and analysis: Examples of the use of geometry in art are raised, analysing, through visuality, the functioning of a practice that produces and reproduces the presence and effects of the coloniality of power, knowledge, and being. Results: A geometrised fictional reality is revealed and conditioned by the ways of looking, thinking, and representing, in which geometry, operated with art, conforms and puts into practice a colonial thought, fostering the destabilisation of power and knowledge relations. Conclusions: Finally, the question is: Are we creating in our educational practices possibilities of deterritorialisations, lines of flight, decoloniality, to venture with other attitudes within the disciplinary devices in mathematics education? Therefore, it is necessary to think more about the truths put forward than to affirm them: for a new ethical, aesthetic, and political ethos in mathematics education.

Angel De Cora, Karen Thronson, and the Art of Place: How Two Midwestern Women Used Art to Negotiate Migration and Dispossession by Elizabeth Sutton

Reviewed by: Angel De Cora, Karen Thronson, and the Art of Place: How Two Midwestern Women Used Art to Negotiate Migration and Dispossession by Elizabeth Sutton Emily C. Burns Elizabeth Sutton, Angel De Cora, Karen Thronson, and the Art of Place: How Two Midwestern Women Used Art to Negotiate Migration and Dispossession. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2020. xix, 168 pp. $49.95 (paper). Histories built on comparative case studies often lead to new discoveries by focusing on examples that are both parallel and divergent. This is the model undergirding art historian Elizabeth Sutton's comparative study of Ho-Chunk artist Angel De Cora and the author's great-grandmother Karen Thronson, a Norwegian immigrant to the Midwest. Pairing these two figures' stories and the spaces of subjugation and assimilation that operated for both Native nations and Scandinavian immigrant communities in the [End Page 197] Midwest allows readers to consider the power of objects to engage with place, identity, culture, gender, and memory. Sutton argues that these artists, contemporaries who never met, both engaged in community-building through art production to, in Sutton's words, "connect with place and validate self and group identity" (1). The act of creating in a variety of media—and in particular engaging with long-standing practices in their respective communities—helped these individuals to navigate their identities in the context of expected assimilation. There is much to recommend in this discussion, that centers on female makers and challenges art history's traditional hierarchies that tend to devalue craft. Sutton's focus on minoritized experience recasts ongoing narratives of settler colonialism and cultural subjugation. The text also takes seriously the possibilities of "visual coding" (24, 56) as a strategy that Thronson and De Cora employed to speak to U.S. and non-U.S. audiences simultaneously. This question—what modes of cultural expression could be non-threatening to dominant culture—offers the book's key investigation of artistic agency and messaging. The text also highlights the role of organizations and publication outlets for communicating ideas of identity. The study, however, leaves some important questions tantalizingly unanswered. There is a promising synergy between the presentation of handicraft from Scandinavia and Native American design in ladies' magazine cultures (83), but this is not probed further. The crucial scholarship by art historian Elizabeth Hutchinson on De Cora's navigations of modern and Native identities is listed in the bibliography but is not cited or directly engaged in the content of the book, although the author does come to similar conclusions about how De Cora strategically sought to build a compatibly Native American and modern artistic practice. A dialogue with Hutchinson's conclusions on this topic would have also enabled greater clarity of Sutton's contributions, especially in her original research of design projects by De Cora's female students at Carlisle Indian Industrial School and the ways that De Cora encouraged her students to develop individual expression via a larger understanding of Native American art practices in the early twentieth century (108–116). I also would have appreciated a citation for her use of Lakota interpretations of color in the Carlisle student work (112) as well as some discussion of De Cora's painting in the Native American boarding school exhibition at the Universal Paris Exposition of 1900 when her participation in several other World's Fair displays is noted (57). Tonalism as an aesthetic practice, which De Cora employed, is never really defined or productively [End Page 198] engaged as an aesthetic (48, 65), which makes it difficult to trace the artists' adaptation of it. The project might have benefited from further integration of the main figures. Each chapter oscillates between the two subjects, and the brief conclusion does not fully show how they are complements or foils for each other. Do we really see either figure more clearly in this comparison? An extended article focusing on key similarities, such as immigration and dispossession, might have been more effective as a comparative study. Indeed, while the artists share a gender identity and the use of art to connect with their respective communities, certainly the experiences of Norwegian immigrant women and Native American women significantly diverge in...