Cosmopolitics and Biopolitics. Ethics and Aesthetics in Contemporary Art

Cosmopolitics and Biopolitics. Ethics and Aesthetics in Contemporary Art
Author: Modesta Di Paola
Publisher: Edicions Universitat Barcelona
Total Pages: 127
Release: 2018-03-19
Genre: Education
ISBN: 8491680691

Cosmopolitics and Biopolitics seeks to trace cosmopolitical aesthetics understood not only as the union of art, science, and the right to survive, but also as the prism through which artistic practices are developed around questions connected to transculturality, migration, nomadism, post-gender subjectivities, social and natural sustainability, and new digital technologies. This book’s authors fashion a narrative that moves in the territory of “inbetweenness”, between hospitality and hostility, between welcoming and conflict, between languages and intermediate languages, science, and survival in a world that is “common” more than global.

Mutating Ecologies in Contemporary Art

Mutating Ecologies in Contemporary Art
Author: Christian Alonso
Publisher: Edicions Universitat Barcelona
Total Pages: 164
Release: 2019-01-08
Genre: Art
ISBN: 8491681558

What role might art exert in light of the challenges posed by climate change, resource depletion, and the diverse political and cultural crises our societies face in the twenty-first century? The hypothesis guiding this book is born of Félix Guattari’s claim that in confronting the multi-faceted problems of our global political economy we need to develop a more complex analysis of nature, culture and technology, shifting from catastrophic, end-of-the world narratives to productive, generative, trans-species alliances for the sake of the sustainability of life on the planet. Because capitalism is no longer understood merely as a mode of production but as a system of semiotization, homogenization, and of transmission of forms of power over goods, labour and individuals, only the emergence of other relational subjective formations would be able to counteract the fixation of desire towards capital and its diverse crystallizations of power. New social practices, new aesthetic practices and new practices of the self in relation to the other are summoned to undertake an ethical-political reinvention of life. As Guattari argues, it is about reappropiating universes of value and paving the way for the emergence of processes of singularization involving a mutating subjectivity, a mutating socius, and a mutating environment. This book is engaged in thinking about the conjunction of the ecological turn in contemporary art and the attention given to matter in recent humanist scholarship as a way of exploring how new configurations of the world suggest new ways of being and acting in that world. Contributors investigate the means by which art can act as an existential catalysist, providing ways of changing our modes of relation beyond traditional modes of representation and, in doing so, instituting transformation.

Institutional Change for Museums

Institutional Change for Museums
Author: Marianna Pegno
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 203
Release: 2024-08-14
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1040111076

Institutional Change for Museums: A Practical Guide to Creating Polyvocal Spaces demonstrates how museums can enact institutional change by implementing systematic and structural approaches to anti-racist, anti-colonial, and anti-elitist practices. This practical guide brings together museum and heritage experts, artists, organizers, and cultural workers to present thoughtful, polyvocal critiques and solutions for conceptualizing museums of the future. These authors embrace hybrid identities, complicate concepts of nationalism, straddle disciplines, and extend the concept, function, and literal place and definition of the “museum.” The book shows that museums must cultivate practices that center people, interrogate colonial legacies, take new approaches to curatorial ethics and caring for objects, and imagine new strategies for asserting the relevance of museums, to create institutional change. This resource challenges traditional approaches to museology by offering scholarly research and case studies alongside personal narratives and speculative fiction. Institutional Change for Museums will be an invaluable resource for museum professionals and cultural workers, including curators, educators, and researchers. It will also be beneficial to those studying or researching in Museum and Heritage Studies, Cultural Studies, Feminist Studies, Visual Culture, Social Justice, and Postcolonial Studies.

Cosmopolitan Strangers in US Latinx Literature and Culture

Cosmopolitan Strangers in US Latinx Literature and Culture
Author: Esther Álvarez-López
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 159
Release: 2023-03-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 100083705X

This book presents a study of the figure of the stranger in US Latinx literary and cultural forms, ranging from contemporary novels through essays to film and transborder art activism. The focus on this abject figure is twofold: first, to explore its potential to expose the processes of othering to which Latinxs are subjected; and, second, to foreground its epistemic response to neocolonial structures and beliefs. Thus, this book draws on relevant sociological literature on the stranger to unveil the political and social processes behind the recognition of Latinxs as ‘out of place.’ On the other hand, and most importantly, this volume follows the path of neo-cosmopolitan approaches to bring to the fore processes of interrelatedness, interaction, and conviviality that run counter to criminalizing discourses around Latinxs. Through an engagement with these theoretical tenets, the goal of this book is to showcase the role of the Latinx stranger as a cosmopolitan mediator that transforms walls into bridges.

Chicana Portraits

Chicana Portraits
Author: Norma Elia Cantú
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Total Pages: 432
Release: 2023-10-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0816551839

This innovative collection pairs portraits with critical biographies of twelve key Chicana writers, offering an engaging look at their work, contributions to the field, and major achievements. Artist Raquel Valle-Sentíes’s portraits bring visual dimension, while essays delve deeply into the authors’ lives for details that inform their literary, artistic, feminist, and political trajectories and sensibilities. The collection brilliantly intersects artistic visual and literary cultural productions, allowing complex themes to emerge, such as the fragility of life, sexism and misogyny, Chicana agency and forging one’s own path, the struggles of becoming a writer and battling self-doubt, economic instability, and political engagement and activism. Arranged chronologically by birth order of the authors, the book can be read cover to cover for a genealogical overview, or scholars and general readers can easily jump in at any point and read about an individual author, regardless of the chronology. Biographies included in this work include Raquel Valle-Sentíes, Angela de Hoyos, Montserrat Fontes, Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Norma E. Cantú, Denise Elia Chávez, Carmen Tafolla, Cherríe Moraga, Ana Castillo, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Sandra Cisneros, and Demetria Martínez. Contributors Cordelia E. Barrera Mary Pat Brady Norma E. Cantú María Jesus Castro Dopacio Carlos Nicolás Flores Myrriah Gómez Maria Magdalena Guerra de Charur Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs Georgina Guzmán Cristina Herrera María Esther Quintana Eliza Rodríguez y Gibson Meagan Solomon Lourdes Torres Raquel Valle-Sentíes Jen Yáñez-Alaniz

Poetic Biopolitics

Poetic Biopolitics
Author: Peg Rawes
Publisher: I.B. Tauris
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2016-08-06
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9781780769127

As the French philosopher and social theorist Michel Foucault defined the concept, 'biopolitics' is the extension of state control over both the physical and political bodies of a population. Poetic Biopolitics is a positive attempt to explain and show how the often destructive effects and affects of biopolitical power structures can be deconstructed not only critically but poetically in the arts and humanities: in architecture, art, literature, modern languages, performance studies, film and philosophy. It is an interdisciplinary response to the contemporary global crisis of community conflict, social and environmental wellbeing. Structured in three parts - biopolitical bodies and imaginaries, voices and bodies, and social and environmental turbulence - this innovative book meshes performative and visual poetics with critical theory and feminist philosophy. It examines the complex expressions of our physical and psychic lives through artefact, body, dialogue, image, installation and word.

The Political Power of Visual Art

The Political Power of Visual Art
Author: Daniel Herwitz
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2021-04-08
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1350182400

Visual art has a ubiquitous political cast today. But which politics? Daniel Herwitz seeks clarity on the various things meant by politics, and how we can evaluate their presumptions or aspirations in contemporary art. Drawing on the work of William Kentridge, drenched in violence, race, and power, and the artworld immolations of Banksy, Herwitz's examples range from the NEA 4 and the question of offense-as-dissent, to the community driven work of George Gittoes, the identity politics of contemporary American art and (for contrast with the power of visual media) literature written in dialogue with truth commissions. He is interested in understanding art practices today in the light of two opposing inheritances: the avant-gardes and their politicization of the experimental art object, and 18th-century aesthetics, preaching the autonomy of the art object, which he interprets as the cultural compliment to modern liberalism. His historically-informed approach reveals how crucial this pair of legacies is to reading the tensions in voice and character of art today. Driven by questions about the capacity of the visual medium to speak politically or acquire political agency, this book is for anyone working in aesthetics or the art world concerned with the fate of cultural politics in a world spinning out of control, yet within reach of emancipation.

CHINESE SURPLUS;BIOPOLITICAL AESTHETICS AND THE MEDICALLY COMMODIFIED BODY

CHINESE SURPLUS;BIOPOLITICAL AESTHETICS AND THE MEDICALLY COMMODIFIED BODY
Author: ARI LARISSA HEINRICH.
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2018
Genre: Aesthetics
ISBN: 9781478091035

In CHINESE SURPLUS Ari Heinrich dissects the figure of the medically or artistically commodified body in Chinese culture and popular science. Providing a history of how bodies have been thought and seen to mirror the nation, Heinrich charts the trajectory from an imperial idea of the body as a machine with interchangeable parts to current representations in which the parts are worth more than the whole and may be harvested at will--what he calls a diasporic form of the body. In seeing the body this way Heinrich makes clear his case for a new method he calls biopolitical aesthetics, one that uses the tools of literary and visual culture analysis to restore agency to aesthetics in the production of meaning in life during contemporary biopolitical times.

Art and Posthumanism

Art and Posthumanism
Author: Cary Wolfe
Publisher:
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2021-12-28
Genre:
ISBN: 9781517912833

A sustained engagement between contemporary art and philosophy relating to our place in, and responsibility to, the nonhuman world How do contemporary art and theory contemplate the problem of the "bio" of biopolitics and bioart? How do they understand the question of "life" that binds human and nonhuman worlds in their shared travail? In Art and Posthumanism, Cary Wolfe argues for the reconceptualization of nature in art and theory to turn the idea of the relationship between the human and the planet upside down. Wolfe explores a wide range of contemporary artworks--from Sue Coe's illustrations of animals in factory farms and Eduardo Kac's bioart to the famous performance pieces of Joseph Bueys and the video installations of Eija-Liisa Ahtila, among others--examining how posthumanist theory can illuminate, and be illuminated by, artists' engagement with the more-than-human world. Looking at biological and social systems, the question of the animal, and biopolitics, Art and Posthumanism explores how contemporary art rivets our attention on the empirically thick, emotionally charged questions of "life" and the "living" amid ecological catastrophe. One of the foremost theorists of posthumanism, Wolfe pushes that philosophy out of the realm of the purely theoretical to show how a posthumanist engagement with particular works and their conceptual underpinnings help to develop more potent ethical and political commitments.