Journal of Aesthetics & Culture最新文献

{"title":"Guilt-based filmmaking: moral failings, muddled activism, and the “dogumentary” Get a Life","authors":"M. Hjort","doi":"10.1080/20004214.2018.1447219","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20004214.2018.1447219","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT To date consideration of negative emotions in the context of cinema has been largely limited to the issue of why spectators would be drawn to films that target psychological responses such as fear and disgust. The aim here is to consider the phenomenon of negative emotion as a motivating factor in the context of, not spectatorship, but film production. The focus is on documentary filmmaking with a strong ethnographic dimension, the camera being used to record the circumstances and culture of an ethnic group to which the filmmaker does not belong. Get a Life by Michael Klint (in collaboration with Claus Bie) is presented as an instance of guilt-based filmmaking, the filmmaker having repeatedly foregrounded his own guilt as a decisive factor in the film’s making. A so-called “dogumentary” film based on filmmaker Lars von Trier’s “Documentarist Code,” Get a Life is shown to rely on moral notions that are consistent with the future-oriented and redemptive aspects of the phenomenon of guilt. The filmmaker’s rhetoric foregrounds the idea of “making a difference” for the Nigerian victims of a devastating flesh-eating disease (noma) and further purports to challenge the norms underwriting TV reporting on the “Third World.” Analysis of Get a Life, however, reveals it to be a failed work on moral grounds. The filmmakers’ self-importance, deficient self-understandings, and self-deceptions regarding the bases for their putative actions on behalf of others are identified as especially problematic. The relevant failings warrant attention at a time when filmmakers from privileged cultures increasingly pursue performative-style documentary filmmaking, fueled by purportedly moral intentions, in a variety of contexts in the Global South.","PeriodicalId":43229,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Aesthetics & Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2018-04-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20004214.2018.1447219","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42668493","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":"Gold Coast (2015) and Danish economies of colonial guilt","authors":"Lill-Ann Körber","doi":"10.1080/20004214.2018.1438734","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20004214.2018.1438734","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The article discusses Daniel Dencik’s feature film Gold Coast (2015), about the last phase of Danish colonialism in today’s Ghana, as an example for recent representations of Danish colonial history. Combining historian of ideas Astrid Nonbo Andersen’s exploration of Danish narratives of “innocent colonialism”, Gloria Wekker’s concept of “White Innocence”, and film historian Thomas Elsaesser’s model of “guilt economies” as a feature of the legacy of perpetrator nations (2014), the article provides a framework within which to examine figurations of colonial guilt and innocence in Gold Coast. The main argument is that the film’s treatment of colonial guilt primarily takes the form of maintenance of innocence. It thereby contradicts the challenges currently being pitted elsewhere against the narrative of innocent colonialism.","PeriodicalId":43229,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Aesthetics & Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2018-04-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20004214.2018.1438734","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47828476","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":"Ecology as pre-text? The paradoxical presence of ecological thematics in contemporary Scandinavian quality TV","authors":"J. Bruhn","doi":"10.1080/20004214.2018.1438729","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20004214.2018.1438729","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The Scandinavian middle classes have been trained in feeling guilty and shameful about their social and economical privileges as well as these privileges in combinations with gender and/or ethnicity. But “eco-guilt” or “eco-shame” has hardly been represented properly in cinema and TV series to this day. In this article, I want to offer a kind of prediction, rather than a description, of what may be an upcoming major theme in Scandinavian visual narratives: eco-guilt and eco-shame. I see signs of this in the recent TV series Jordskott from Sweden, the Norwegian Okkupert and the Danish Bedrag, but my point will be that the ecological issues here are used as a useful background or a dramaturgical starting point rather than as a major theme: as pretexts, in the double sense of the word. The use of ecology as pretext in Scandinavian TV series will be the subject of this article where I intend to focus on the way that the question of eco-guilt seems to be an alluring and tempting as well as repressed thematic, a fact that can be read out of the three series’ paradoxical opening sequences.","PeriodicalId":43229,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Aesthetics & Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2018-04-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20004214.2018.1438729","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48053457","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":"The semiotic impulse: experimenting with Peirce’s diagrammatic love","authors":"Chryssa Sdrolia","doi":"10.1080/20004214.2018.1435151","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20004214.2018.1435151","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article explores the relevance of Peirce’s cosmological concept of love for politics, focusing on its expression as an evolutionary process of semiosis. More specifically, it argues that in Peircean semiotics love becomes the impulse motivating the creation of signs but without resorting to a transcendental structure that would attribute the source of their meaning to the human subject. Rather, it is shown that if love is said to be creative at all, this is only to the extent that it is a metaphysical diagram by which nature signifies itself into manifold worlds. The first part of this paper traces the articulation of diagrammatic love in Peirce’s naturalised concept of the sign as part of his response to the dilemma between construction and reality concerning the interpretation of experimental phenomena. The metaphysical and methodological consequences of this response are then taken up in relation to a different articulation of the same dilemma, this time implying that in order for love to be political it would either have to lose its cosmic character or else its relevance for human concerns. As a conclusion, the paper explores the potential link between diagrammatic love as experimental ethics of semiosis with what has come to be known as the “cosmopolitical proposal”, exemplified in the work of Isabelle Stengers.","PeriodicalId":43229,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Aesthetics & Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2018-02-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20004214.2018.1435151","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44809721","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":"Capitalocene, clichés, and critical re-enchantment. What Akomfrah’s Vertigo Sea does through BBC nature","authors":"J. Nilsson","doi":"10.1080/20004214.2018.1546538","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20004214.2018.1546538","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In the montage of archival and original material that makes up John Akomfrah's three-channel video work Vertigo Sea (2015), the frequent use of footage shot by BBCs Natural History Unit (producers of series like Planet Earth) stands out as an unusual choice. This article explores aesthetic-political implications of how this material is subtly repurposed, with focus on one of the interconnected issues dealt with in the work: nature and the Capitaloscene. What does Vertigo Sea do to and through these BBC nature images? Which artistic strategies are involved and for which ends? Is the kind of ecological pathos already framing the original material itself critically transformed and if so in which senses? Does Vertigo Sea merely go for a reproduction of the natural beauty often attributed to original material, and as simply juxtaposed with terrible images, or does the repurposing also entail an alteration of the very notion of natural beauty? This article critically explores all these questions mainly through the frameworks of Situationist détournement, Deleuze's ideas about art and clichés, and Adorno's notions of authentic art, re-enchantment, and natural beauty—frameworks that are conversely critically discussed through Vertigo Sea. It aims to reveal Vertigo Sea as on the one hand an experiment in finding vital artistic strategies for re-enchanting (in non-idealizing ways) planetary nature in the Capitalocene, and as on the on the other hand a thematization of the difficulties in doing so. While appearing among a contemporary art scene increasingly concerned with local and/or global relations having to do with ecology in this new era, Vertigo Sea presents us with a highly original case primarily through its unusual choice of main source material and its complex treatment of this material.","PeriodicalId":43229,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Aesthetics & Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2018-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20004214.2018.1546538","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44969785","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":"Negotiating the past: addressing Sámi photography","authors":"S. Lien, H. Nielssen","doi":"10.1080/20004214.2018.1490137","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20004214.2018.1490137","url":null,"abstract":"There is currently a growing worldwide interest in the Northern and Arctic areas in relation to natural resources, ecology and climate change. But the attention has also been directed towards the question of indigenous rights and the matter of preserving their culture. In June 2017, the National Assembly in Norway sanctioned the establishment of a Truth Commission in order to shed light on a difficult past, involving the oppression and injustices committed towards the Sámi and Kven populations. At the same time Sámi contemporary art attracts wide attention on important international arenas such as Documenta in Athens and Kassel. Negotiating the past is an integral part of ongoing political and cultural processes. Photography is in an important entrance to the past as well as the present. Hardly any cultural form has been more important than photography in the ways Sámi people have been perceived. This special issue of Journal of Aesthetics and Culture explores past and contemporary photography practices connected to the Sámi areas or Sápmi. It raises the following questions: What does the photographic legacy contain? How has it been formed and used? How have tensions between indigenous local agency and the gaze of dominant others been addressed both historically and in the contemporary society? Much of the photographic legacy related to Sápmi is coloured by the ways in which Europeans imagined the Sámi. In this sense it forms part of a NordicEuropean colonial visual culture and perceptual regime, and as such largely conforms to understandings of racial difference, ideas of cultural evolution, and the various agendas of the civilizing missions. The photographs manifest projects ranging from the development of racial typologies to ethnographic classification; they were tools of administrative control and surveillance; they formed part of arctic explorations and Christian missionizing and civilizing projects like education, health and hygiene; and they were distributed in the Western marked as exotica. The contributions to this special issue all address different perspectives related to historical and present uses of photography. Sigrid Lien discusses the nineteenth century photographic practices of scientific explorers travelling to the North, with a focus on the images from Sophus Tromholt and Roland Bonaparte’s expeditions in 1883 and 1884. The rather limited existing literature about these photographs is divided in two directions. One points to contemporary artistic reengagements as repatriation of visual heritage, while the other strives to articulate the various degrees of objectification of the Sámi sitters (individuality or typology). However, Lien argues that the photographs in question not only reflect the asymmetries between the photographer and the sitters. Situated in a larger visual economy of exploration, they also appear as identity performances of the academic male subjects who produced them—who made use of photography in order to s","PeriodicalId":43229,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Aesthetics & Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2018-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20004214.2018.1490137","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48462160","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":"Idealist theories of sport in relation to art","authors":"D. Shorkend","doi":"10.1080/20004214.2017.1422923","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20004214.2017.1422923","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT If what can be described as “ideal” in relation to art may be somewhat abstract, then in this article I will apply the basic notion that the ideal is that which links the invisible (thought-content) and visible (the form, “frame”, “vessel”) to that of ideal as it manifests in sport. For, since we cannot speak intelligibly about x without some image or word, sport “pictures” or shows are an ideal in specific forms, some of which is certainly artistic, rendering a watered-down version of the ideal (abstract), though no less a reflection thereof. In such terms, it is not that sport is “lower” than art; rather it concretizes the abstract in a less intellectual format though no less powerfully and meaningfully. It draws from art and spreads its message downward, as a material framing device of the ideal that satisfies not only a need to relate and socialize, but an intuitive grasp of the hope for a better, more ideal existence. In these respects, sport like art necessarily has moral implications which will be developed toward the close of the article with a view to determining the manner in which the ideal shapes both sport (and art).","PeriodicalId":43229,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Aesthetics & Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2018-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20004214.2017.1422923","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48173995","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":"Erratum","authors":"","doi":"10.1080/20004214.2018.1510649","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20004214.2018.1510649","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43229,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Aesthetics & Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2018-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20004214.2018.1510649","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49507904","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":"Nostalgic photographs in the contemporary image ecology: the example of Tyrrells crisp packaging","authors":"Karin Wagner","doi":"10.1080/20004214.2017.1421375","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20004214.2017.1421375","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article concerns how nostalgic photographs are circulated in new contexts such as packaging and social media. The purpose is to explore the ontological transformations of photographs in the contemporary image ecology, blurring the categories “analogue” and “digital”. What new meanings and materiality can old photographs acquire when for instance put on packages that are used, thrown away, recycled and sometimes upcycled? The crisp producer Tyrrells is used as a case study, since quirky old photographs is a vital part of their packaging design, as well as on their website and social media channels. The company makes use of Monty Python-style collages to conjure up the English eccentric and their marketing communication is characterised by ironic nostalgia. Although the package is a throw away object, it can be upcycled by craft makers and sold at online marketplaces, which means that the photographs continue their circulation, from analogue film and cameras, to press agencies, to the printed page, to stock image databases on the Internet, to crisp packages and birthday cards, to Facebook and Instagram, to crafted bags in digital marketplaces and so forth. The package has a twofold appearance, as a physical object and as a virtual object on the web, both of which constitute the other. The ontology of the photograph has changed, since the different forms of appearance can no longer be disentangled from each other and join hands in the trajectory of the photograph in the contemporary image ecology.","PeriodicalId":43229,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Aesthetics & Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2018-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20004214.2017.1421375","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46462624","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":"Our histories in the photographs of the others","authors":"Veli-Pekka Lehtola","doi":"10.1080/20004214.2018.1431501","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20004214.2018.1431501","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Returning old photographs to Sámi communities has been a part of modern repatriation policies, trying to recollect the Sámi heritage from museums, archives and collections outside the modern Sámi area. It is not only important to return items, such as photographs, but also to reconstruct the knowledge around them: to re-identify the old encounters and stories. The article suggests that the earlier interpretations have emphasised the inter-ethnic relations between the Sámi and the majority societies. When returned to local levels of Sámi communities, however, to be interpreted through the lenses of the Sámi subjects, the photographs tell multiple visualized stories about intra-ethnic “our histories”, the recent past of families, kinships and small Sámi communities. The article is based on my experiences and the projects that have been carried out in Finland in the past 15 years, repatriating photographs to Sámi societies.","PeriodicalId":43229,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Aesthetics & Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2018-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20004214.2018.1431501","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46886406","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}