{"title":"Fashioning contemporary art: a new interdisciplinary aesthetics in art-design collaborations","authors":"N. McCartney, J. Tynan","doi":"10.1080/14702029.2021.1940454","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14702029.2021.1940454","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT A surge in creative collaboration between fine artists and fashion designers might be troubling the art world, but these mergers have prompted little debate within academic research in the visual arts. Various artists now work directly with fashion designers, and though often derided by the art press, the growth of inter-disciplinary collaboration reflects a shift in how art is perceived, especially in relation to popular culture. This discussion considers historical moments when fashion and art found common cause, but we view the distinctive qualities of recent collaborative ventures as an entrenchment of postmodernist aesthetics in both realms. Since the mid-twentieth century, art-fashion interplays have disorganised disciplinary boundaries, but they also illustrate the unsettling effects of neoliberalism on cultural production. By exploring the fashioning of contemporary art through the work of various artists and designers, including Matthew Barney, Vanessa Beecroft and Yayoi Kusama, we ask whether shared concerns in art and design around power, spectacle and the somatic might signal the emergence of a new interdisciplinary aesthetics.","PeriodicalId":35077,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Visual Art Practice","volume":"43 1","pages":"143 - 162"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87411212","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Affirming Aboriginal identities: art production in central Queensland","authors":"B. Fredericks, Abraham Bradfield","doi":"10.1080/14702029.2021.1917906","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14702029.2021.1917906","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Alongside Toonooba (the Fitzroy River) in central Queensland, Australia, a series of flood markers are embedded within the earth, commanding attention to the river that flows on one side and the colonial infrastructure of Rockhampton on the other. Honouring Land Connections is an artwork that asserts Indigenous voices, marks Indigenous spaces, and encourages visitors to engage in conversation with Indigenous culture and art. This paper considers Indigenous art as a form of social action. Firstly, it discusses the value of such art projects, and presents an Indigenous perspective of their meaning, addresses their role in creating and embodying culture and identity, how they express and share culture, along with collaborative approaches, and the importance of learning on and from Country. It concludes with a discussion of the political and cultural meaning created through art, suggesting that it is impossible for a public artwork like Honouring Land Connections to not be political. This article explores how art facilitates an interactive social space through which Aboriginal artists affirm, negotiate and share their identities while challenging preconceptions of place and identities reminding us that Aboriginal presence outlasts the moment of its production and imprints itself on the landscape and people’s consciousness.","PeriodicalId":35077,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Visual Art Practice","volume":"91 1","pages":"31 - 47"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77538046","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Folk culture China in the China Pavilion, Venice Biennale: repositioning ‘Chineseness’ in contemporary art discourse","authors":"Wang Jiabao","doi":"10.1080/14702029.2021.1921484","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14702029.2021.1921484","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In this article, I explore how Qiu Zhijie’s curation of the exhibition Continuum – Generation by Generation at the China Pavilion of the 57th Venice Biennale offers a new understanding of ‘China’ and ‘Chineseness’. It is neither a reproduction of literati arts nor a critical use of symbols of socialist China, but an appropriation of Chinese folk culture to re-envision the central role of China in the global art scene. This new form of Chineseness is what I call ‘folk culture China’. Although the curator attempts to challenge the existing interpretation of contemporary Chinese art widely circulated in the art market, the curatorial strategy deployed in this exhibition inherits a culturalist view of Chinese culture by re-nationalizing folk culture as the essence of Chinese culture that sustains Chinese civilization. Folk culture China also highlights the importance of collaboration between folk and contemporary artists in which the former can remind the latter of the collective spirit embodied in craftsmanship, which is the core of the Chinese mode of art-making. More importantly, folk culture China is an anti-nation-statist discourse that paradoxically repositions China from an object of the Euro-American-centric contemporary art system to the center of the world.","PeriodicalId":35077,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Visual Art Practice","volume":"1 1","pages":"81 - 96"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81708180","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"An ecoaesthetic of vegetal surfaces: on Seed, Image, Ground as soft montage","authors":"J. Parikka, A. Gil-Fournier","doi":"10.1080/14702029.2021.1917858","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14702029.2021.1917858","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Engaging with Harun Farocki’s notion of the soft montage, our visual essay builds on our recent Seed, Image, Ground video project (2020). Commissioned by the Fotomuseum Winterthur, the moving image piece addresses the surfaces of vegetal growth in relation to the surfaces of media such as screens and images. While the video is a central reference point for this visual essay, our aim is not so much to theorise our own moving images and their juxtapositions and rhythms. Instead, in this article, we present a series of surfaces and scales that appear in and through the images. Images build upon images and this constitutes the practice-led approach in the temporal unfolding of the video. In other words, the video works as a temporal articulation of image surfaces across and upon living surfaces. Hence the central motif of the video essay and this accompanying text is to ask ‘what do images of growth look like?’ We also employ Celia Lury’s notion of ‘problem space’ to consider the methodological potential in the split-screen practice and its relation to Farocki’s soft montage.","PeriodicalId":35077,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Visual Art Practice","volume":"22 1","pages":"16 - 30"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74199433","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Operating in alternative photography: agency through prolonged photographic acts","authors":"Vicente Pla-Vivas","doi":"10.1080/14702029.2021.1917908","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14702029.2021.1917908","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The popularisation of digital photography has widened the gap between mainstream photography and alternative photographic processes. Analyses of the so-called post-photographic era have largely ignored the production and reception mechanisms beyond the hegemonic digital turn. Likewise, scholars and artists working with alternative photography processes have focused on technical proficiency, separating themselves from the photographic ontological theories of the last decade. Nevertheless, some contemporary alternative processes photographers (such as Chris McCaw, Meghann Riepenhoff, Eduardo Nave, Thomas Bachler, and Susan Derges) attempt to emphasise the physicality of the chosen medium and to integrate it with the significance of the image through a methodological operation of the capture time. This article aims to review the theoretical frame of the post-photographic era to encompass the ideas and contributions of these alternative process photographers, focusing on the artists’ agency on photographic communication.","PeriodicalId":35077,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Visual Art Practice","volume":"17 1 1","pages":"64 - 80"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73236191","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Painting encounters with environments: experiencing the territory of familiar places","authors":"A. Watson","doi":"10.1080/14702029.2021.1925856","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14702029.2021.1925856","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Paintings and other symbolised image systems contribute to the way we see and understand the world, however accurate or flawed they may be. My research contributes to this conversation by investigating how to make paintings that allow environments to be creative protagonists rather than passive objects of representation. I do this by drawing from the painting practices of Julie Mehretu and Ingrid Calame to look at how their work registers the experience of place and use these findings to guide my practice-based research, contextualised by ‘new materialist’ theory. The research shows how unpredictability in the process of painting allows the experience of place to be registered in ways that are responsive to materials and the site; how gesture is used to reveal something about the material and the immaterial world; and how the conversations happening between different levels of experience and modes of representation in the paintings help to yield a dense and complex view of place. Through this study, I have found that paintings can make manifest the relationships between process, gesture, environments and artists and in this way can reveal the experience of place in unexpected and multifarious ways. GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT","PeriodicalId":35077,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Visual Art Practice","volume":"117 1","pages":"113 - 130"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76936103","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Inclined language: a visual, material practice","authors":"I. Rozas","doi":"10.1080/14702029.2021.1933835","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14702029.2021.1933835","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This paper addresses the experiential field of artistic pieces that incline language and words to work from their sound, material and rhythmic dimension. They are poetic and sound works freed from the verticality, rectitude and weight of the semantic. In our ordinary experience of language we forget the physical existence of words, their sounds, their rhythms. Without that physicality, words become transparent, completely resolved into what they mean. To incline them means to give them sound and rhythm. It means to make them material, bringing them to our attention and reconnect with their physical existence: the possibility of becoming an image. From the concept of inclination developed by Adriana Cavarero as a relational model against verticality – to rethink a subjectivity marked by vulnerability – it is argued that inclining language, allows us to question ourselves about the ways in which sound relates to images, as it will be seen through works by Itziar Okariz and Gertrude Stein. A leaning that also dialogues with the ways of deviation from the established language proposed by Julia Kristeva and Hélène Cixous. In turn, we re-experience our relationship with the materiality of language, the act of listening, as well as the visuality of sounds.","PeriodicalId":35077,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Visual Art Practice","volume":"1 1","pages":"131 - 142"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90041863","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"No creation without destruction: images of childbirth and Candice Breitz's Labour","authors":"Tereza Stejskalová","doi":"10.1080/14702029.2021.1917907","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14702029.2021.1917907","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The following essay explores a video installation by Berlin-based artist Candice Breitz (b. 1972) titled Labour (2019) which presents us with graphic images of childbirth in reverse viewed from close up. The work casts light on the absence of birthing bodies in photography, moving images or other forms of visual art presented at art institutions, a topic not reflected upon in academic literature. Also, by portraying childbirth simultaneously as dying and killing, Labour starkly differs from mainstream visual culture representations, which tend to evade the more messy and unruly aspect of childbirth. The author situates the work in the context of recent interventions in theory and literature as well as Labour's feminist art precursors. These art works present us with a fearless, uncensored picture of the reality of childbirth in which the possibility that lives are rerouted, and people are damaged both physically and mentally, is palpable. As testaments of traumatic events that resist erasure from memory, these objects of art dissociate themselves from the present dominant ideologies surrounding reproduction to gesture towards an alternative future in which conditions for reproduction would be radically different.","PeriodicalId":35077,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Visual Art Practice","volume":"1 1","pages":"48 - 63"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82340358","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Worlds without humans in the time of Anthropos: on David Claerbout's photo-filmic strategies","authors":"S. Oscar","doi":"10.1080/14702029.2020.1848282","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14702029.2020.1848282","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT David Claerbout is a contemporary artist working in the field of photography, film and digital animation, employing a range of aesthetic strategies to address shifting ideologies of vision: attention to light and time; the erasure of narrative in cinematic representation. This paper considers the political import of such strategies from an Australian perspective, in light of recent environmental catastrophe and extinction in the Anthropocene, whereby the depiction of worlds without humans occupies a space in the collective imagination signifying ruination. The paper examines Claerbout’s recent works, Olympia (the Real-Time Disintegration into Ruins of the Berlin Olympic Stadium over the Course of a Thousand Years) (2016) and The pure necessity (2016). It argues for the relevance of his work to posthumanist writings on extinction; for instance, Claire Colebrook and Joanna Zylinska, whereby the human desire to visualize ‘the world without us’ is problematized as an overtly anthropocentric celebration of human vision. I argue that Claerbout's expanded photo-filmic practice reveals how artistic production might tackle the problem of responsibly providing frameworks to consider the world outside of an anthropocentric viewpoint. Considering his work from such a framework, I ask, what does it take to represent the world without us?","PeriodicalId":35077,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Visual Art Practice","volume":"50 1","pages":"1 - 15"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-11-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88742339","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Makers’ voices: four themes for material literacy in contemporary sculpture","authors":"Ellie Barrett","doi":"10.1080/14702029.2020.1844945","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14702029.2020.1844945","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Material has come to be acknowledged as an important source of political and social meaning due to recent philosophical and sociological debates concerning ‘material agency', particularly linked to theorists such as Alfred Gell, Bruno Latour and Jane Bennett. This has clear implications for art: it explores the effects material has on human behaviour and vice versa. In contrast, art criticism commonly positions material as secondary to metaphysical interpretation. Critics such as Rosalind Krauss and Lucy Lippard avoid analysing material's multiple sources of information. As a result, we as viewers are ill-equipped to examine the meanings it embodies. This paper presents sculpture as an appropriate framework from which to engage with this problem, as it remains a discipline which creatively explores material in three-dimensional space. Four themes have been developed from the analysis of qualitative interviews carried out with eight emerging UK sculptors in order to work towards a condition of ‘material literacy’ in contemporary art practice.","PeriodicalId":35077,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Visual Art Practice","volume":"15 1","pages":"351 - 372"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79108360","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}