Recent Art Projects Research Articles

A Filter Theory of Photography

Filters – both technically and in a wider sense of the term – provide a new way of theorizing photography. Most obviously, filters sieve things, persons and data out of flows; more specifically, they are key to the non-optical formations at work in image production based on neural networks in machine learning. In this essay, we argue that theorizing photography from the perspective of filtering reconfigures photography as the entire field of material elements and processes involved in the production of an image and presents the photographic image itself as a distribution across a field of perception that includes various forms of technical sensing and formation. Ultimately, attending to filtering as the technical realities as well as aesthetic propositions in recent art projects allows us to understand photographic conditions as a wider and more general set of environments in which image-events occur with many kinds of causality and manifestation.

Communicating Friedrich Engels's return to Manchester: Arts and cultural event, history lesson, or call to action?

There is increasing interest by academics and mainstream media in the relevance of Friedrich Engels's writings for understanding contemporary economic and political issues. Still, Engels's writing about the adverse effects of the capitalist economic system on the health and well-being of workers, the environment, and society in general remains marginalized. Two recent art projects which saw the installation of statues of Engels in Manchester, the city in which he lived and wrote The Condition of the Working Class in England, have created avenues by which Engels and his writings can be communicated to a larger audience. In this paper, we explore how filmmaker Phil Collins's finding and placement of a Soviet-era statue of Engels in Manchester has been communicated as an arts and cultural event, a history lesson, and a call to action to right the injustices generated by the capitalist economic system. The greatest number of communications were reviews and notices of the installation or documentary as arts and cultural events. The arts and cultural and historical aspects of Engels's return to Manchester were dominant across all communications while calls for action were common in the mainstream news reports and blogs. References to capitalism and its effects were seen in mainstream news reports and reviews and arts notices. We conclude that the involvement of the arts and cultural community in political work may be an important means of promoting responses to increasingly intolerable economic, political, and social environments.

Mapping practices and the cartographic imagination

This paper claims that maps and the “act of mapping” have the capacity to disrupt symbolic horizons concerning representations of space constructing aesthetic, political and subjective worldviews. These worldviews constitute modes of subjectivity that challenge the notion of the Cartesian subject, and put forward a “situated” concept of subjectivity. Through an intertextual analysis of Deleuze and Guattari, and Heidegger’s late essay “Building Dwelling Thinking,” Moro pursues a possible redefinition of mapping as assemblage or gathering point of the fourfold. This redefinition in turn indicates the becoming-space of a narration that constitutes particular kinds of world views and subjectivities. The lines between narration, mapping, and mythology are further blurred in recent art projects, where through the ‘cartographic imagination’ artists deliberately deconstruct the rational appearance of the map to expose current political impasse in a globalized world.

Indigenous approaches to the past: ‘Creative histories’ at the Hyde Park Barracks, Sydney

Abstract This article discusses a recent art project created by the Wiradjuri and Kamilaroi artist Jonathon Jones, which was commissioned to commemorate the opening of the revitalized Hyde Park Barracks in Sydney in early 2020. Jones’ work involves a dramatic installation of red and white crushed stones laid throughout the grounds of the barracks, merging the image of the emu footprint with that of the English broad convict arrow to ‘consider Australia’s layered history and contemporary cultural relations’. This work was accompanied by a ‘specially-curated programme’ of performances, workshops, storytelling and Artist Talks. Together, these elements were designed to unpack how certain ‘stories determine the ways we came together as a nation’. As one of the speakers of the Artist Talk’s programme, I had a unique opportunity to experiment with what colleagues and I have been calling ‘Creative histories’ in reference to the way some artists and historians are choosing to communicate their research about the past in ways that experiment with form and function and push disciplinary or generic boundaries. This article reflects upon how these two distinct creative history projects – one visual art, the other performative – renegotiate the complex and contested pasts of the Hyde Park Barracks. I suggest that both examples speak to the role of memory and creativity in shaping cultural responses to Australia’s colonial past, while Jones' programme illustrates how Indigenous artists and academics are making a profound intervention into contemporary understandings of how history is ‘done’ in Australia.

The Afronaut and Retrofuturism in Africa

The Afronaut and Retrofuturism in Africa Paul Wilson (bio) In a 1964 newspaper article addressing his fellow citizens, edward makuka nkoloso, founder of the Zambia National Academy of Science, Space Research, and Philosophy, declared, "I see the Zambia of the future as a space-age Zambia."1 For nkoloso, sending an astronaut into space would affirm the nation's status as an independent state, equal or even superior to Great Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union. Although his do-it-yourself space program eventually disappeared without any governmental support, recent art projects that purport to document this and other space programs in Southern Africa have given the African astronaut, or afronaut, a renewed cultural relevance. Such projects nurture a desire for an African space age that is at once nostalgic and utopian, intertwining the optimism of decolonization and the Space Race, and anticipating a future free from the geopolitical or racial inequalities of the past or present. As such, they do not merely recall the past or propose a future but explore the anticipatory dimensions of redirecting, revising, and repurposing futures from the past. Although the afronaut first emerged as a cultural trope in the African diaspora, these recent artworks relocate it within postcolonial histories of Southern Africa.2 The artworks share elements of retrofuturism, a [End Page 139] fascination with or desire for a retrofuture: that is, a future imagined in the past. Spanish photographer Cristina de Middel, for instance, reconstructs the fragmentary history of the Zambian space program in a photobook and exhibition titled The Afronauts (2012). Her warm and evocative photographs visualize the program not as it was, but as it might have been in an ideal past. The United States-based, Ghanaian filmmaker Frances Bodomo also addresses the Zambian effort in her short film Afronaut (2014). Although the film is set in the past, she revises the story to reflect contemporary ideas about race and identity. The Angolan artist Kiluanji Kia Henda presents an account of another space mission in his photographic installation Icarus 13, The First Journey to the Sun (2007). This putative documentation of a space flight from Luanda to the sun claims to take place in 2006, but many of the visual elements that Henda uses to signify futurity, such as the soaring monument to Agostinho Neto in Luanda, reference specific moments in Angolan history. Retrofuturism in these artworks raises critical questions: What are the cultural politics of longing for a future imagined in the past? What is to be gained by appending "retro" to futurism in Africa? Retrofuturism is a subset of a broader global art practice in which artists use archival materials to explore and reinterpret history. This so-called historiographic or archival turn has spurred a contentious debate in the art world since its emergence in the late 1990s. Dieter Roelstraete writes, "art's obsession with the past, however recently lived, effectively closes it off from other, possibly more pressing obligations, namely that of imagining the future, of imagining the world otherwise."3 His claim resonates with theories of modern art but presumes that an artist's interest in the past is antiquarian rather than dialectical. Other art historians characterize the practice more favorably. Mark Godfrey claims, for instance, "the artist is a historian who can open up new ways of thinking about the future"; and Hal Foster asserts that "archive art" can turn "belatedness into becomingness" and "'excavation sites' into 'construction sites.'"4 Inke Arns argues that artists can mine the past for unfulfilled possibilities that can be used to "extrapolate a possible future."5 However, located as they are in the final paragraph of their respective texts, these rhetorical gestures toward the anticipatory dimension of artistic engagements with the past remain underdeveloped. Consequently, retrofuturism can seem overly nostalgic, uncritical of the past and unconcerned with the future. [End Page 140] Discussions of retrofuturism in science fiction and cultural studies revolve around similar questions about its historical and political inclinations: Is its primary orientation toward the past or toward the future? Does it reactivate dormant utopian impulses and inspire new ways of envisioning the future, or does it indulge in what Rob Latham describes as the "dubious...

Abitare spazi passati. Dinamiche del ricordo nell’arte italiana contemporanea

The article analyses some recent art projects focused on the description of the relationship between humans and their living spaces. The main topic of the discussion is the use of memory, personal or collective, as an istrument to realize a shared narration and a connection between the different members of a community.

Eco-aesthetic dimensions: Herbert Marcuse, ecology and art

AbstractIn his last book, The Aesthetic Dimension (1978), Marcuse argued that a concern for aesthetics is justified when political change is unlikely. But the relation between aesthetics and politics is oblique: “Art cannot change the world, but it can contribute to changing the consciousness … of the men and women who could change the world.” (p. 33). Marcuse also linked his critique of capitalism to environmentalism in the early 1970s: “the violation of the Earth is a vital aspect of the counterrevolution.” (Ecology and Revolution, in The New Left and the 1960s, Collected Papers 3, 2005, p. 173). This article revisits Marcuse’s ideas on aesthetics and ecology, and reviews two recent art projects which engage their audiences in ecological issues: The Jetty Project (2014) by Wolfgang Weileder—which used recycled material and community participation to construct a temporary monument within a wider conservation project on the Tyne, N-E England—and Fracking Futures by HeHe (Helen Evans and Heiko Hansen)—whic...

Earth Forces: Contemporary Land Arts, Technology and New Materialist Aesthetics

This article addresses recent art projects that are discussed under the notion of new materialist aesthetics. This term is used to elaborate connections between these projects and their methods and recent discussions of the nonhuman and posthuman philosophy. The article also elaborates some positions in technological or 'media art' practices that work on hardware and infrastructure but also on the geophysical underpinnings of media. It expands on more geocentric perspectives in art and aesthetics through connecting a range of such projects by a contemporary artists including Martin Howse, Jonathan Kemp, Ryan Jordan, Terike Haapoja, Jamie Allen and David Gauthier to the body of land art (as represented by Robert Smithson) and current new materialist discussions.

Challenges of Re-politicisation

The relation between politics and art is increasingly debated within contemporary political philosophy and critical theory. This article focuses on Chantal Mouffe's negotiation of this relation, which forms an integral part of her agonistic pluralist project. In particular, it aims at critically exploring the role of artistic practices in re-politicising a largely de-politicised, post-democratic public space. What are the challenges such a re-politicisation poses? However, although re-politicisation can be the only response to post-democracy, it needs to avoid its own absolutisation/idealisation. From a radical democratic point of view, the need for re-politicisation is thus a need for a post-utopian, self-critical, cautious, agonistic re-politicisation. What is the role artistic practices can play in this enterprise? Recent art projects by Antony Gormley and William Kentridge are presented and discussed in order to illuminate the political relevance of contemporary art. They both seem to embody elements central in Mouffe's agonistic pluralism and can also develop it in new directions.

The Aesthetics of Emptiness: Sky Art

The sky and celestial phenomena surround us everywhere, all the time. However, they have not received due attention in philosophical discourses dealing with the environment, or in our daily experience. I explore some examples of recent art projects that facilitate our aesthetic experience of the sky and celestial events. These art pieces are analyzed in terms of the different ways in which they embody the notion of ‘emptiness’, a Buddhist term for reality that is written with the Chinese character for sky.

When the Walls Aren’t White: Site-specific Art in Non-art Museums

This paper will critically examine site-specific art in Australian heritage sites and museums, in particular the way in which artists have responded to, resurrected or in some cases 'created' a sense of Place. Since the early 1990s, there has been a growing trend in Australia of artists being commissioned to make work in non-art museums, frequently in the form of site-specific art that relates to a site's sense of Place. For many artists, loaded semiotic spaces, such as the historic houses or heritage sites referred to in this paper, provide rich material to which they can creatively respond. Such art has the ability to revitalise tired or inconsistent archives and displays, revive buried pasts, present alternatives to a museum's 'official history', as well as attracting a wider and varied audience. Two recent art projects undertaken in Tasmania, Australia, will be used to illustrate my argument: the Port Arthur Project and the Trust project. The Port Arthur penal settlement, now largely in ruins, was the site of a large art exhibition in 2007, with 23 artists making work in dialogue with the site. Port Arthur's paradoxical status as a historical site of incarceration and horrific abuse, its current popularity as a tourist site, and the strange beauty of the sandstone ruins on the tip of the Tasman peninsular, make it an obvious target as a loaded site for artistic response. Likewise, Trust (2009) utilised historic houses around the state, such as Home Hill and Clarendon House. Participating artists were commissioned to research the site, its original inhabitants, or its general history, with the aim of producing original artworks that contribute to our understanding of these usually neglected historic homes. © Common Ground, Lucy Hawthorne, All Rights Reserved.

Between Reason and Sensation: Antipodean Artists and Climate Change

The author, drawing on her experience as a New Zealand artist who has collaborated with meteorologists, suggests that artists may enter climate change discourse by translating (or mis-translating) scientific method into sensory affect. She examines three recent art projects from Australasia that draw on natural phenomena: her own Anemocinegraph (2006–2007), Nola Farman's working prototype The Ice Tower (1998) and Out-of-Sync's ongoing on-line project, Talking about the Weather. The author cites Herbert Marcuse's 1972 essay “Nature and Revolution,” which argues that sensation is the process that binds us materially and socially to the world.

Expanding the Concept of Writing: Notes on Net Art, Digital Narrative and Viral Ethics

In these experimental notes, the artist reflects on his Net art trilogy, composed of GRAMMATRON, PHON:E:ME and his most recent art project, FILMTEXT, a digital narrative for cross-media platforms. Investigating issues such as digital screenwriting, Net art, digital “thoughtography” and an emergent artificial intelligentsia, the artist theorizes an expanded concept of writing to better explain his project as an evolving, practice-based research initiative, focused primarily on the interface of art, technology and storytelling.