Transgressive Art Research Articles

A Reconsideration of Aesthetic Value and Moral Value of Artwork - An Immoralism Approach

While contemporary art, famous for its abstract form and transgressive nature, is prevalent in the artistic world, the artistic world hasnt established an objective aesthetic evaluating system that allows viewers to fully experience the aesthetic value of transgressive art, which is the most radical, offensive, and morally problematic art form among the contemporary arts. The article reviews the two traditional evaluative approaches, Autonomism and Moralism, and discusses their limitations. Then, the article introduces the concept of transgressive art and Immoralism. The author also recognizes the theoretical gap that fails to illustrate in what perspective viewers can fully understand the aesthetic value of transgressive art. The article then establishes that the moral value of transgressive art lies in the fact that moral defects can contribute to its aesthetic value if the artwork is viewed from a receptive and reflective perspective. The article is significant in filling the theoretical gap and establishing a more systematic evaluative system.

The transgressive art of walking: entanglements of urban activism and tourism in South Tel Aviv

ABSTRACT This article studies the entanglement of urban activism and educational tourism, considering its constraints and potential for political agency, as manifested in guided walking tours of south Tel Aviv. Through an analysis of the historical and geographical context of south Tel Aviv, the article emphasises the necessity of a spatial analysis for unpacking the politics of racial fear and the reception of asylum seekers. In parallel, the article emphasises the connections between seemingly distinct conflicts, cultures, and geographies, which need to be better understood in urban studies. It further stresses the need for innovative methodologies to unpack strategies of political participation, belonging, and agency in cities shaped by the exchange and flow between multiple geographies and by the looming presence of the past.

The “Aesthetics of Existence” in the Last Foucault: Art as a Model of Self-Invention

Abstract This article discusses the “aesthetics of existence” developed by Foucault in the late “ethical” stage of his work, aiming to clarify its complex significance through its relationships with ethics, critique, and, in particular, art as a model of self-invention. The main claims are that aesthetics of existence is a new type of self-formation molded by technologies inspired not only by the ancient ethical self-formation but also by modern art understood as creative self-production; thus, aesthetics of existence is an active form of aesthetic education, in the particular sense of an ontological self-formation. To argue these claims, the author advances a line of analysis alternative to typical readings, which see it as related exclusively to the ancient “art of living” or its modern revival in the Nietzschean project of self-fashioning. The focus is instead on the Baudelairean and Kantian roots of Foucault’s work—modernity as a critical attitude and the transgressive art of the self of the dandy—as keys to understand the reframing by him of the art of living into a modern aesthetics of existence. This appears as a critical-transgressive invention of the self, which could contribute to constituting new subjectivities and alternative norms for the entire social body.

Monsters of Inequality and Waste: The New Realism of Antonio Berni

This article examines the ways in which the work of the Argentine artist Antonio Berni (1905–1981) proposes renewed forms of realism engaged both with aesthetics and the socio-political order. Through the examination of Berni’s trajectory and with a special focus on Berni’s monsters made from reclaimed waste, this study draws on Jacques Rancière’s notion of dissensus to argue that art and politics come together in Berni’s monstrous constructions in the way in which they overturn customary modes within the realist representational order and simultaneously engender a transgressive and controversial art. In this, Berni’s work constitutes an original and daring proposal speaking to then-urgent political problems, such as unequal capitalist relationships and poverty, as well as delivering new insights on current ecological calamities.

The Bully Pulpit: trolling the trolls with polysemous monstrosity

Abstract The photography of Haley Morris-Cafiero partakes in a larger feminist response to the vitriol of online misogyny that implicates the current moderation environment of online social platforms. This analysis illuminates Morris-Cafiero’s work of transgressive feminist art, using the body as a means for subverting the gaze of online misogyny and fat-shaming and presenting it anew. Morris-Cafiero uses self-portraiture to remark on the subject of online harassment as both the recipient and the sender. Bringing gendered histories of monstrosity into conversation with contemporary gendered online harassment, this article argues that the work of The Bully Pulpit exemplifies a new conception of polysemous monstrosity through which to understand the presentation of self, both for the artist and her trolls.

Transgression of art forms in modern Ukrainian plastic theater

The purpose of the article is to identify the specifics of the phenomenon of transgressive art in the Ukrainian plastic theater of the 21st century. Methodology. The phenomenological method is applied (to identify and comprehend the semantic level of the phenomenon of transgressive art in the modern Ukrainian plastic theater); methods of art history, figurative-stylistic and art-compositional analysis (for the theoretical justification of the trends of the theater of plastic art, determining the specifics of the director-production activities of A. Belsky, identifying the components of the stage image of plastic performances and analyzing their rhythmic structure) and other scientific novelty. Scientific novelty. The philosophical concept of transgression to the field of plastic directing has been extrapolated; the problems of the transgression of art forms in the modern domestic plastic theater are considered on the example of the performances of the Academy of Motion by the Kryvyi Rih Theater of Musical Plastic Arts; it was revealed that the theater of plastic arts is one of the transgressive practices of contemporary art, which is characterized by the dominance of strategies expressed in the transformation of the figurative structure of physicality. Conclusions. The study of the stylistic characteristics of the Ukrainian plastic theater revealed the intensification of the experimental search for new ways and forms of expression, the focus of the directors on the transition of the process of meaning and formation to a new level of understanding of life. The performances of the theater of plastic arts are always encoded messages that require thoughts and feelings in the process of decoding the tension, since seeing and comprehending the directors' search for a new “world dimension” is not always easy for the viewer. Transgression symbolizes the desire of the modern plastic theater to move away from classical attitudes towards absolute transcendence, to overcome the boundaries of consciousness, and to find possibilities for new positions of corporeality. The position of the director of the plastic theater, in our opinion, is primarily aimed at rethinking a certain concept or image fixed in theatrical practice, in the context of the search for innovative ways and methods of plastic directing that are adequate to the modern sense of worldview.

Immorality and Transgressive Art: An Argument for Immoralism in the Philosophy of Art

Abstract The position of immoralism in analytic aesthetics and the philosophy of art holds that a work's moral defects can sometimes contribute to its artistic value. This position has suffered massive criticism in recent years. In support of immoralism, I present in this paper a new argument by examining immorality in the artistic genre of transgressive art. I argue that in the category of transgressive art, due to the nature of immorality that is a transgressive and liberating force against morality's authority, being immoral can contribute directly to an artwork's artistic value by contributing to the realization of its artistic aim.

Aesthetic Practices of the New Right – Fake and Post-Truth as a challenge for transgressive art and cultural practices

Aesthetic Practices of the New Right – Fake and Post-Truth as a challenge for transgressive art and cultural practices

The Positive and Negative Provocativeness of Transgressive Art As a Manifestation of Its Multimodality

Feelings such as moral disgust, protest and antipathy are increasingly understood as the most important aspects of cognitive processes in moral psychology and reveal the complex structure of human nature and culture. Transgressive fiction, cinema or visual arts which are characterized by a graphic representation of violence and different traumatic experiences, are a strong ethical stimulus. In this article, transgressive art is viewed through the prism of its multimodality. The article examines both the positive and negative roles of transgressive art in the constitution and the confirmation of the boundaries and limits of social acceptability. By acknowledging the risks of aestheticization of violence that can expand the ethical boundaries of a person as a witness, this study also elicits that transgressive art offers a safe environment for exploring taboos without consequences for the audience. Although transgressive art depicts various violations of moral norms, it does not deny the boundaries of what is permitted, but only confirms them.
 Keywords: transgressive art, multimodality, transgression, moral norms, public morality, ethical boundaries, screen violence

The Meaning of Human Relations in Existential Philosophy and Its Reflection in Contemporary Art

The features of human intercourse in contemporary consumerist society are at the centre of philosophical thought on personal existence; therefore, the first part of this article deals with the concepts of human relations in most distinctive existentialisms, i.e., Jacques Maritain’s Christian existentialism, Karl Jaspers and Albert Camus’s laic philosophies. The philosophical thought on alienation, consumerist attitude to others and even oneself is reflected in a lot of contemporary art movements as well. The creation of art is reconsidered as thematization of a lack of human inward and intimate touch, as relationist activity, as an involvement of publics into the communication and joint search for new existential experiences, for changes in our understanding of ourselves and of the world around us (Participatory art, some works of Transgressive art and Transhumanist art). There are art movements especially commissioned to reinstate of confidence, mobilize of coherence in transforming crisis. The engagement in community art practices helps a person to break the continuity of the flow of suspiciousness, hostility, and despair as well as to regain awareness in the meaningfulness of being together.

I Came from Planet Pluto

I Came from Planet Pluto B. B. P. Hosmillo (bio) This time I have no interest to tell you that I came from planet Pluto. No strength to explain my remoteness. I rather want to deceive, distract my memory. I don't want to remember the following sentences: A breath that smelt like the sea flooded the room.The room was not a room for having no walls.The morning was all fog it was dusk.Electric hands, sandy blizzard-cold hands came out of nowhereand they seemed to know instantly where the sorrow was,which was also the place of the heartbeat.A touch could swallow the sorrow but would notsince the sorrow was screaming.If only the sorrow talked instead all would be fine.Sometimes touch was useless apposite to say it was an attack."Is there no hurt in your body?""There is a dream in my body." [End Page 111] "What is that dream?""There is no hurt in my body." I had been in each of these sentences, mostly fidgeting, gabbing about forgiveness, or how to say sorry on behalf of those who have, will not, counting slippers, and shoes, of strangers in terminal A, B, and C of Think Transit, looking for someone who would tell me "you could find a life to display in that city" and not "off-limits is expecting you everywhere," arguing that I too could alas walk away as if profuse—until troubled-up the bus I woke up in and fey the road in which nobody could enter, nothing could happen. [End Page 112] B. B. P. Hosmillo B. P. P. Hosmillo is a queer and anti-colonial writer from the Philippines. He is the author of Breed Me: a sentence without a subject / Phối giống tôi: một câu không chử dề (AJAR Press) with Vietnamese translation by Hanoi-based poets Nhã Thuyên and H f ai Yc en. His writing is anthologized in Bettering American Poetry 2015 and has appeared in SAND: Berlin's English Literary Journal, the Notthingham Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and Transnational Literature, among many others. His interviews can be read in Misfits Magazine (UK) and VIDA: Women in Literary Arts. He is the founder of Queer Southeast Asia: a literary journal of transgressive art, a poetry reader for BOAAT Journal, and occasionally a guest poetry editor for Cha: An Asian Literary Journal. He is currently the Associate Expert at the International Information and Networking Centre for Intangible Cultural Heritage in the Asia-Pacific Region under the auspices of UNESCO (ICHCAP) in South Korea, where he is writing his next book. Copyright © 2018 University of Nebraska Press

Can Levinson's Intentional-Historical Definition of Art Accommodate Revolutionary Art?

In this article, I examine whether Jerrold Levinson's intentional-historical definition of art can successfully accommodate revolutionary art. For Levinson, an item is art if it was intended to be regarded as some prior art was regarded. But revolutionary art involves a regard that is “completely distinct” from preexisting art regards. I consider and reject Levinson's proposed solutions to the problem of accommodating revolutionary art. I then defend an alternative account of transgressive art regard. Unfortunately for the intentional-historical definition, the acceptance of transgressive art regard in conjunction with some recent theories of the development of human behavioral modernity may commit the definition to including nonart, prehistoric tools

Hardy, Galileo and the Art of Transgression

Les rapports conflictuels que Thomas Hardy entretenait avec ses editeurs sont notoires. Sa profonde et constante frustration face a la contrainte sans appel de revoir ses textes pour les rendre acceptables aux yeux d'un lectorat soucieux de bonne moralite ne l'est pas moins. Si ses romans furent ainsi soumis a un travail de reecriture et de corrections qu'il ressentait comme autant de « mutilations », la nouvelle et la poesie furent pour Hardy des lieux de liberte d'expression. Genres moins formalises ou plus confidentiels que le roman, ils eurent bien souvent raison de la vigilance des censeurs de la bienseance, et seuls deux poemes furent tout d'abord refuses pour publication. Dans la tourmente de ses dernieres annees en tant que romancier, peu avant de decider de se consacrer entierement a la poesie, Hardy, amer, remarquait ainsi dans son autobiographie que si Galilee s'etait exprime en vers et non en prose, l'Inquisition l'aurait laisse en paix.

Taste: A Media and Cultural View

Taste: A Media and Cultural View

A Taste for the Transgressive: Pushing Body Limits in Contemporary Performance Art

A Taste for the Transgressive: Pushing Body Limits in Contemporary Performance Art

Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of Transgression

First published in hardback in 2007, Cinema and Sensation rapidly established itself as a major intervention in contemporary French cinema studies. Its theorizations of the technologies and materialities of recent film-making in France have become as invaluable a resource to film scholars working on tactility, embodiment, affect, and the sensorium, as the work of Laura U. Marks, Vivian Sobchack, and Emma Wilson. The volume's publication in paperback attests its scholarly popularity and will prove a relief to the many scholars who have been profoundly influenced by it. Beugnet offers a deep critical perspective on the current cultural and political dynamics of France, via a perspicacious study of contemporary French art cinema. She was one of the first to analyse with full scholarly rigour the period in the late 2000s that saw the rise of pornocratic and hyperviolent film-making in France, named pejoratively by James Quandt as ‘The New Extremism’ (in ‘Flesh and Blood: Sex and Violence in Recent French Cinema’, Artforum International, 42.6 (2004), 126–32). In Cinema and Sensation Beugnet explores the implicit and explicit cultural imaginaries that subtended that moment in image-making, uncovering geopolitical critiques of the gendered, sexualized, degraded, and eviscerated bodies on screen in films by Catherine Breillat, Bruno Dumont, Philippe Grandrieux, Vincent Dieutre, Claire Denis, Olivier Assayas, and others. A detailed and culturally specific philosophical framework of contemporary French thought, which also gestures beyond a purely French or francophone remit, informs Beugnet's critique. She intertwines readings of Antonin Artaud and Georges Bataille with contemporary art theory from October Group critics Rosalind Krauss, Yves-Alain Bois, and Hal Foster on formlessness. Incisive readings of Gilles Deleuze's concepts of becoming, visagéité, hapticity, and (with Félix Guattari) immanence are united with recent scholarship from Laura U. Marks, Barbara M. Kennedy, and Rosi Braidotti. Psychoanalytic theory informs the hinterland of Beugnet's conceptual frameworks, yet beyond Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva she also integrates post-Lacanian scholarship from Nicole Brenez and Stephen Shaviro. Phenomenology, too, is a structuring signpost for the complex relationships between embodiment and disembodiment, subjecthood and objecthood, world and body that unfold in Beugnet's delicate negotiations of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's writing with more recent film-phenomenological discourses from Vivian Sobchack and Stanley Cavell. The most striking and eloquent aspect of this volume, however, is the evocative manner in which Beugnet writes about the films themselves. Her senses are attuned — invested even — in the intimate, otherworldly proximity of filmic images and sound; this she communicates with grace as she winds sinuously through a labyrinth of non-dualistic thinking, and hybrid, materially self-aware cinema. Drawing on Jean Epstein's claim that the image thinks, she writes: ‘Films do not just provide life-like testimonies on their contemporary world; as flowing, embodied forms of thought, they can help us imagine ways out of the dead ends down which dual thinking leads us’ (p. 17). Artaud's ‘third path’ (p. 22) between cinematic abstraction and psychological realism is precisely the location of Cinema and Sensation: it is both a way out and a way forward for film theory and cultural critique.

So It Vanished: Art, Taboo and Shared Space in Contemporary Aotearoa New Zealand

In February 2012, The Dowse Art Museum in Lower Hutt, near Wellington, planned to host So It Vanishes, an exhibition by acclaimed Mexican artist Teresa Margolles, whose often shocking works seek to highlight how dispensable human life has become in the parts of Mexico riven by drugs wars. Margolles’s installation would have used infinitesimal amounts of morgue water in a bubble mixture dispensed into an empty, silent room in the same building that sacred Māori treasures are housed. The incorporation of water used to wash corpses in So It Vanishes, particularly in proximity to cultural treasures, would have been deeply offensive, indeed dangerous, for Māori people. Following objections, the exhibition was cancelled. This article analyses the cancellation of So It Vanishes and seeks to answer whether and how transgressive art and indigenous beliefs may be reconciled in contemporary Aotearoa New Zealand.

Transgression and Oedipal Politics in Philip Roth's SABBATH’S THEATER

Philip Roth's Sabbath's Theater (1995) portrays the protagonist Morris Sabbath as an ingenious puppeteer whose transgressive life and art are steeped in Oedipal conflicts. At first glance, however,...

Aftershock: the ethics of contemporary transgressive art

Accused by the tabloid press of setting out to 'shock', controversial artworks are vigorously defended by art critics, who frequently downplay their disturbing emotional impact. This is the first book to subject contemporary art to a rigorous ethical exploration. It argues that, in favouring conceptual rather than emotional reactions, commentators actually fail to engage with the work they promote. Scrutinising notorious works by artists including Damien Hirst, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Richard Billingham, Marc Quinn, Sally Mann, Marcus Harvey, Hans Bellmer, Paul McCarthy, Tierney Gearon, and Tracey Emin, Aftershock insists on the importance of visceral, emotional and 'ethical' responses. Far from clouding our judgement, Cashell argues, shame, outrage or revulsion are the very emotions that such works set out to evoke. While also questioning the catch-all notion of 'transgression', this illuminating and controversial book neither jumps indiscriminately to the defence of shocking artworks nor dismisses them out of hand.

CULTIVATED TRAGEDY: ART, AESTHETICS, AND TERRORISM IN DON DELILLO’S FALLING MAN

“We are not free and the sky can still fall on our heads. Above all, theatre is meant to teach us this.”( The Theatre and Its Double, 60)On September 11th 2001, the sky did just that and the photogenic skyline of New York City came tumbling down. In a controversial New York Times article, Karl-Heinz Stockhausen termed these events “the greatest work of art in the whole cosmos” and although this outraged the nation at the time and was quickly suppressed, it does not make the theoretical approach any less valid. Don DeLillo’sworks and his ongoing exploration of authorship and terrorism are an encapsulation of Frank Lentricchia and Jody McAuliffe’s observation that “the impulse to create transgressive art and the impulse to commit violence lie perilously close to each other.” Exponents of the 'Gesamtkunstwerk' or 'total art work' advocated an attack on all senses and emotions. Wagner and Runge, amongst others, believed that if one unified the visual, aural and textual arts into one completely integrated whole, the effect on the audience would be of such power that great personal, and consequently social, change or revolution could be effected (Grey 1995). Artaud developed these principles further in his 'Theatre of Cruelty' by moving from representations of an experience to providing the audience with the actuale xperience. Watching his play Plague, Anaïs Nin found that instead of “an objective conference on the theater [sic] and the plague” the audience members were forced to undergo the experience of “theplague itself” (192). Vomiting was actually induced in various spectators. Artaud the playwright acts as Artaud the aesthetic terrorist, assaulting the senses, the body and the consciousness of his audience. DeLillo states in Mao II that the writer should “make raids on human consciousness” in order to “alter the inner life of the culture” (41). This transgressive, frequently invasive, theory of art is focused towards creating social and psychological transformation and bears a striking similarity to acts of terrorism, which are allegedly employed to engender social change.