Philosophy of Visual Art

Contemporary art is a category that can admit art made in any medium, form, genre, and style. However, this unprecedented heterogeneity can make it difficult to understand what makes contemporary art distinct from other kinds of art. In this article, I aim to provide an account of what makes art contemporary. I develop my position by focussing on philosophy of contemporary art emerging from the so-called analytic tradition. I argue that though these philosophers have reckoned with many of the puzzles (...) posed by contemporary art’s heterogeneity, they fail to provide compelling theories of what makes art contemporary. In response, I propose that the best way to understand what makes an artwork contemporary is by understanding how it attempts to grapple with the issues of its own historical condition of ‘contemporaneity.’. (shrink)

This article is a reflective case-study presenting and analysing the findings of ‘Thinking Is Seeing’, a practice-led research project we conducted between March and April 2017 under the Tate Exchange platform. The project focused on Tate Liverpool’s _Constellations_, the pioneering way of exhibiting works from the Tate collection motivated by thematic, chronological, or interpretative links identified through extended curatorial research. -/- The philosophical background informing our research is the role that perception apportions to thought: a _constellation_, literally a collection of (...) celestial objects, or more widely a set of any other things, events, (art)works, and experiences signifies a process of identifying connections, categorising meanings, drawing inferences. In other words, it signifies _thinking_. As Norman Maclean puts it: ‘All there is to thinking […] is seeing something noticeable which makes you see something you weren’t noticing which makes you see something that isn’t even visible.’ (_A River Runs through It and Other Stories_. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017 (=1976), pp. 105–106.) This organic relation between thinking and seeing, where the one is but a prerequisite for the other, also echoes Theodor W. Adorno’s notion of a ‘constellation’: ‘Becoming aware of the constellation in which a thing stands is tantamount to deciphering the constellation which, having come to be, it bears within it.’ (_Negative Dialectics_, translated by E. B. Ashton. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973 (=1966), p. 163.) -/- Against this background and given that the aim of the _Constellations_ is —to quote Francesco Manacorda— ‘to empower people to come and make their own thinking inside these rooms’, we investigated the ways in which _Constellations_ work as an exchange between art, curatorial gesture, and public engagement. What difference does it make to one’s appreciation of, say, Barnett Newman’s _Untitled Etching #1_ when one attends to those features of the work that make it part of a given curatorial narrative (like a _Constellation_)? Do members of the public feel empowered to challenge the perspective of the curator in recognising affinities within a _Constellation_ and construct new narratives? -/- In order to tackle these research questions, we deployed participatory research during three public interactive workshops, which incorporated philosophical inquiry through structured discussion, reflective questioning, and shared criticism. This article shows how the practice of philosophical inquiry within the community, helps us understand that _seeing_ art happens through _understanding_ art and _vice versa_, while empowering participants to articulate exciting new interpretations. (shrink)

In Immaterial: Rules in Contemporary Art (2022), I argue that in creating contemporary artworks, artists articulate rules for artwork display, conservation, and audience participation. Artists' communications about these rules are work-constituting, and the process of refining the rules (and thus the work itself) sometimes continues long after the work is first displayed. In a critical notice, Diarmuid Costello questions the power that my view gives to artists' remarks about their work, which often seem offhand or whimsical. Especially when such remarks (...) are made long after the work's initial creation, Costello suggests, taking them too seriously may undermine the work's integrity or value. In this reply, I argue that even when artists' remarks seem whimsical, they are often engaged in the sort of fine-grained, aesthetically responsive creative activity that might characterize an artist's work with a physical material like paint or clay. I also outline some strategies that my view affords in situations where an artist's new communications seem to significantly alter the work in an undesirable way. (shrink)

This article proposes a locative function as a defining feature of situated art. All artworks orient their beholders, but situated art is characterized by this context-sensitive orientation entering the work’s content. In so doing, it facilitates ‘here’- and ‘now’-thoughts, not only towards the “real” situation encountered (the work’s outer orientation) but to the work’s “virtual” or “bracketed” realm (its inner orientation). These orientations overlap, but do not necessarily align; indeed, situated works often construct a tension through a deliberate miscalibration of (...) these orientations. But what is the mechanism by which such works afford indexical thought towards their worlds? Drawing upon Gareth Evans’s account of demonstrative content, I contend that sensory imagination—conceived in Evans’s terms as an additional conceptual component—plays a necessary role in negotiating demonstrative thought towards two (or more) separate spaces conceived as “here.” This is something the beholder brings to the work. (shrink)

La historia del arte en Colombia no es una disciplina consolidada, sino más bien un espacio en constante disputa, reconfiguración y cuestionamiento. La escritura del arte en el país se ha desarrollado a partir de múltiples esfuerzos, aunque con una marcada fragmentación que refleja las tensiones propias de su contexto social, cultural e intelectual. Este ensayo busca reflexionar críticamente sobre los problemas y las posibilidades que enfrentan las narrativas historiográficas del arte en Colombia, considerando tanto sus elementos teóricos y metodológicos (...) como su inserción en debates más amplios sobre la historia, la cultura y la política. La reflexión sobre estas ideas fue el objetivo del I Encuentro de Historia del Arte que se realizó en Cartagena los días 16, 17 y 18 de noviembre de 2022. El evento fue organizado por el Comité Colombiano de Historiadores del Arte y representa un momento significativo en el proceso de consolidación de la disciplina en Colombia, un campo que aún está en proceso de profesionalización y que enfrenta desafíos particulares debido a la complejidad histórica y cultural del país. (shrink)

In this article I reply to commentary on Immaterial: Rules in Contemporary Art (Oxford, 2022) by Shelby Moser, Darren Hudson Hick, and Guy Rohrbaugh.

This is a précis of Immaterial: Rules in Contemporary Art (Oxford, 2022). Contemporary art can seem like a wilderness of unwieldy installations, decaying materials, immersive environments, and audience participation. It can be hard to know what to focus on and how to assess the value or meaning of what we encounter, since so many artworks use non-art materials and techniques and defy familiar conventions. In Immaterial: Rules in Contemporary Art, I argue that these developments, disparate as they may seem, can (...) be understood by shifting our focus to the rules that artists articulate in creating and deploying their works. Rules have become an artistic medium that artists customize to achieve specific artistic statements and aesthetic effects. Rules are partly, and sometimes wholly, constitutive of the very structure of the artwork; grasping the rules associated with a work is thus crucial to understanding its nature. Articulating these rules, which may be quite specific and fine-grained, is part of the act of artmaking, and the rules bear meaning just as essential physical objects do. (shrink)

This article offers an approach to baroque forms as a mediation to question and reflect on the perspective of the vanquished in Latin American history. To achieve this, it explores the relationship between the colonial experience and the current crises in the region, highlighting the importance of authors such as Bolívar Echeverría, Bonfil Batalla, Serge Gruzinski, José Luis Romero, Pablo Casanova, and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui in the understanding of the social history of the Colony. It also analyzes the emergence of (...) a social life marked by miscegenation, cultural disputes, and the coexistence of disputed cultural codes appropriated by baroque forms. In addition, it examines the aesthetic-political strategies of the Baroque era as possible concrete historical references that allow us to imagine other critical models and aesthetic forms of intervention to prefigure new possibilities of the real in the present. This approach offers a novel perspective for understanding the inherent civilizational crisis of colonial sociality and its implications for contemporary society. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore the philosophical apprehension of the face through art history in order to signal a moment of rupture in the contemporary times of the face and its signifying relationship to the subject. Drawing from Francis Galton’s nineteenth century photographic experiments on analytical portraiture, one sees how the face when conceived as an atlas, functions very differently for the subject and its recognition than when understood as a mere image. With the advent of futuristic technology like AI (...) and machine learning feeding in much of our technocratic imaginations, where does the face and its constituency lie? Modernist artists found in the face, various motivations of their own – it was a field to explore their own subjectivities and those inclined towards the transcendental managed to liberate the subject from its image i.e. the face. This manner of freeing the subject of its image and thinking of the face as a structure of the subject, has potential to help us imagine new kinds of polyvalent subjectivities, as can be seen in works of contemporary artist- philosophers like Hito Steyerl. This paper articulates this journey of the face which began its story as the constitutive technology of the subject in the 19th century but today find its best reckoning as an insufficient one, in our quest for understanding new post-humanist subjectivities. (shrink)

Video-objects are often discussed in terms of their ability to reflect upon the speed of our narcissistic culture, but less acknowledged is video’s agency to perform electronic events outside of human experience. This article engages in scholarship interested in the space of video operations where lived and imagined, real and virtual phenomena are experienced at the threshold of perception. Bringing into this conversation a discussion of The Waves (2003), an interactive installation by video pioneer and media critic Thierry Kuntzel, the (...) article moves away from the time/movement nexus grounded in a filmic understanding of the image to position video-memory as the emergence of a volume of time. Different from the time-image and movement-image of cinema, the volume-image of video defines a mode of engaging with multiple temporalities within the continuum of the video itself. Constituted progressively through layers of ever-changing signal processes, the volume-image of video technology is an open field, a transductive zone where multiple intensities create new representational rhythms, which disrupt the durational model of time so often attached to human experience. (shrink)

In this book, the author explores how video-image technology shapes our psychic and social environments from an art historiographical perspective. We know media technology is dramatically shaping our political and epistemological landscape: this book foregrounds the emergence of performative video images as a key factor in the revaluation of culture and politics. -/- Performative Images draws upon the work of video artists and activists in France between the 1970s and the early 2020s and focuses on significant practices with technology. Video (...) art and video activism are analysed together in the book to revaluate key concepts in media studies and foreground a performative approach to the theory of image technology. -/- The book engages works in visual culture, performance studies, digital studies, critical race theory, and feminist methodologies to account for the changes brought about by video technology in social and psychic life. Performative Images is about art and activists’ engagement in video technology—an engagement that unsettles the hegemonic narrative of dominant media, as well as the apparently politically neutral dimension of communication technology. (shrink)

Die Hochschule für Künste Bremen (HfK) gehört zu den wenigen Kunsthochschulen in Deutschland, die die Fachbereiche Musik, Kunst und Design unter einem Dach vereint. 2018 richtete die HfK Bremen eine bundesweit einzigartige Professur ein, die an der Schnittstelle dieser Fachbereiche angesiedelt ist. In diesem Rahmen entstand der durch den bildenden Künstler, Performer und Musiker Raphael Sbrzesny initiierte fachübergreifende Laborraum, die „Interpret*innenkammer“, der die Qualitäten einer Probebühne, eines Proberaums und eines Ateliers in sich vereint. Über fünf Jahre und in rund 50 (...) Projekten konnte sich in der Folge eine Form der künstlerischen Lehre entwickeln, in der sich Theorie und Praxis, Affirmation und Kritik, Traditionsbewusstsein und Gegenwartsbezug auf neue Weise miteinander verbinden. Im Zentrum der polyphonen Werkstatt stehen kooperative und kollaborative Arbeitsformen, erweiterte Konzertformate, ortsspezifische Interventionen mit einem Fokus auf öffentlichem Raum sowie große transdisziplinäre Performanceprojekte zwischen Design, freier Kunst, digitalen Medien und Musik. -/- Die Publikation Interpret*innenkammer – Polyphone Werkstatt. Sound, Performance & Konzept ist als offenes Archiv angelegt, das in 50 Heften verschiedene interdisziplinäre Lehrprojekte rund um die Professur für Kreation und Interpretation mit den Schwerpunkten Sound, Performance und Konzept an der HfK Bremen dokumentiert. Mit Beiträgen von Fabian Goppelsröder, Christina Scheib, Judith-Frederike Popp, Wolfgang Ullrich, Bastian Zimmermann und Raphael Sbrzesny. (shrink)

Contents: - positioning Pound’s contributions to theory – aesthetic organicism - Emerson, Pound, and the aim of language - Confucian philosophy and Pound’s tradition.

In this paper, an overview is presented over the complex phenomenon of artistic authorship against the background of its historical, medial and social conditions before discussing some thoughts about the similarities and differences of artistic and aesthetic authorship as well as their implications for conceptions of subjectivity.

How do individuals and communities respond to negative aesthetic experience? Historically, philosophical aesthetics has devoted much thought to positive aesthetic experience, including the beautiful, agreeable, charming, and tasteful. But this is only a partial picture. Some aesthetic experience displeases: the ugly, disgusting, and horrific are but a few examples with which aestheticians have grappled in recent decades. The aversive and visceral nature of disgust has generated particular interest. But as Carolyn Korsmeyer points out in _Savoring Disgust: The Foul & the (...) Fair in Aesthetics_, there is also a paradoxical attraction to that which arouses disgust. Following Kant and Korsmeyer from the Western philosophical tradition, I claim that the aversive-attractive response is integral to disgust’s power to motivate aesthetic engagement. On the one hand, people might feel its force and refuse to engage with that which disgusts. On the other hand, unshakeable interest may spur active responses including the exchange of judgments of taste; protests of a given artist, work, or exhibition; or even violent actions intended to damage or destroy a particular work. While the negative dimension of disgust response is often regarded as a liability from an aesthetic standpoint, disgust also has a corresponding productive dimension that has important implications for communities. In this chapter, I coin the term “generative disgust” in order to explain the productive capacity of disgust to inspire communal, often subcultural, activity. On my view, generative disgust has two orientations – destructive and constructive. Both forms activate the community in question based upon the valence of the group’s comportment towards a particular work of art. As such, destructive generative disgust galvanizes the community and spurs increased activity based upon negative response to art, whereas constructive generative disgust galvanizes the community and spurs increased activity based upon positive response to art. I explore two examples that reveal the dual character of generative disgust in communities: Andres Serrano’s _Immersion (Piss Christ)_ (destructive deployment) and Bryan Fuller’s _Hannibal_ (constructive deployment). In the case of _Piss Christ_, the intensity of generative disgust spurred some Christians to police moral-religious boundaries and restrict aesthetic expression in order to protect a community. Their activity culminated in vandalism and destruction of Serrano’s photograph. In the case of Hannibal, the intensity of generative disgust, combined with hedonic ambivalence inspired the “Fannibals” (the Hannibal fandom) to forge community, make art, and to try to find the show a new home when it was not renewed by NBC. Both instances manifest how generative disgust can incite aesthetic engagement and increase organized activity on the part of subcultural groups. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on the cinematic representation of Christian values such as faith and love in Robert Bresson's films, Journal d'un curé de campagne (1951) [Diary of a Country Priest] and Les Anges du péché (1943) [Angels of Sin], as connected with the pathos of film characters by a kind of productive montage (Sergei Eisenstein), but also by sublime narratives, i.e., “invisible” movements (Gilles Deleuze). To understand those values and their correlative (im)perceptible movements, the chapter analyzes and discusses film sequences (...) and considers Christian conceptual frames of reference—namely the stating and breaking of religious moral laws (e.g., sins), the possibility of redemption (e.g., confession, penitence, contrition and sorrow), and the ideas of salvation of a person's spiritual dimension as the state of being saved from evil and as an effect of Jesus Christ's death on the cross. Journal d'un curé de campagne and Les Anges du péché represent and describe these complex rational and emotional entanglements between people and their bodies and souls, throughout the course of their ordinary lives. That is to say, Bresson's “religious approach” deals with the role of religion in people's choices and behaviors, aiming to mirror and fight for good against evil—and God's transcendental love. (shrink)

In Essays on Beauty & the Arts (2023) (‘Essays’), Dominic McIver Lopes has unearthed something of a champion for his ongoing mission to rejuvenate analytic aesthetics. ‘The history of analytic aesthetics’, Lopes declares, ‘is dominated by writing on Kant and, to a lesser extent, David Hume. … We badly need to excavate alternatives to the tradition of Hume and Kant’ (p. xvi). As tall of an order this already is, the height of Lopes’s hopes for Bolzano appears to reach further (...) still—‘Perhaps Bolzano can do for aesthetics what Mill and Kant do for ethics’ (p. xxv). While the jury is still out on whether Bolzano can fill those shoes, what is clear is that Lopes succeeds at making a tantalizing case on Bolzano’s behalf. (shrink)

Conceptos generales en las historias del arte colombiano: historia, arte y nación, 1959-1985 pretende no solo hacer una búsqueda de los textos iniciales de la historia del arte en el país, específicamente de aquellos que iniciaron el proceso de consolidación del campo autónomo del arte en Colombia, sino también un análisis de los mismos desde los usos conceptuales de las ideas de historia, arte y nación. La selección de los textos responde al criterio específico de hablar de una historia general (...) del arte nacional, es decir, con delimitación temporal amplia que se vincule a las ideas de la larga y media duración de Fernand Braudel, y sin tener en cuenta la nacionalidad del autor, pues esto dejaría por fuera los casos de Juan de Garganta, Francisco Gil Tovar y Marta Traba. Asimismo, en términos temporales se ha seleccionado un margen de 26 años, comprendido entre 1959 y 1985, lapso en el cual fueron publicados los textos mencionados, así como el Manual de Historia de Colombia, la Enciclopedia de Salvat y los textos de Barney Cabrera, Álvaro Medina y Eduardo Serrano. (shrink)

In this paper I examine the thesis regarding the end of the history of art, through which Hans Belting frames the museum as a correlate of history, understood as framing art and the role of the museum within the development of a closed and outdated philosophy of history: the phi-losophy of Hegel. On the contrary, I believe that first He-gel and later Arthur Danto not only explain the changing roles of art and the museum but also argue for the need (...) for reflection on art in modern culture. Our reconstruc-tion of this debate through the work of these authors allow us to represent, for contemporary thought, a pro-ductive analysis of the history of art and its connection with philosophy, and offers us theoretical perspectives that remain relevant for our understanding of theory, the history of art, and various institutional spheres. (shrink)

El libro Las indisciplinas de la Historia del arte propone reflexionar sobre los distintos enfoques y maneras en que el objeto de la Historia del arte se ha transformado, como muestran las necesidades de reescribir la historia a partir de nuevas perspectivas críticas, los modos en los que esa misma disciplina se ha reconstituido, y las nuevas formas de escritura sobre el pasado del arte con las que la historia del arte mantiene una relación llena de tensiones. La pregunta que (...) orienta este libro es saber si la inevitable adhesión de otras áreas del conocimiento a su régimen ha disuelto sus fundamentos y su propia identidad. Con el título Las indisciplinas de la Historia del arte queremos, por tanto, explorar la diversidad e independencia de perspectivas que integran, dentro de un rico campo de tensiones (no libre de complejas críticas), la historia del arte de hoy. (shrink)

En su libro Precariedad, estética y política, Vilar se pregunta por un problema que no es nuevo para el pensamiento crítico del siglo XX: la precariedad. Y llama la atención sobre la importancia de este concepto en el presente en que vivimos, como si fuera un fantasma que sobrevuela el mundo y la historia. Parece ser que la precariedad se presenta con el perfil de lo actual, como si fuera el rostro de las condiciones contemporáneas de existencia. De ahí que (...) esta sociedad que han llamado del riesgo, de la seguridad, o de control, introduzca esta categoría a partir de la sospecha de la libertad en la vida privada y pública. De ese modo, partimos de la afirmación de que nos encontramos en un contexto asociado tanto a la precariedad como a la contingencia, es decir, espacios de constante escepticismo e incertidumbre, en donde las experiencias y manifestaciones sensibles emergen como posibilidades y espacios de reflexión crítica. (shrink)

Los intentos por situar e identificar históricamente la producción artística y su relación con la realidad fueron generalmente determinados por el concepto de mímesis o imitación, en tanto condición esencial de la actividad artística. Esta tesis puede apreciarse en la disciplina de la historia del arte cuando era estructurada como la historia de las diversas situaciones imitativas del arte, en la que predominó esta función como modo de afrontar la representación de lo real, al apelar a la acción de copiar (...) y reproducir un referente del mundo de la experiencia. Pero cuando se vinculó el término a la actividad del arte la mímesis adquirió un carácter relacional. Fue en este sentido que los filósofos antiguos delimitaron este concepto: es la actividad de copiar la apariencia de las cosas. La antigua teoría consideró que se correspondía con el acto de reproducir solo las cosas existentes y el arte; en este caso, debía imitar lo que el hombre veía con conocimiento. Resulta interesante que no se podía imitar en un nivel idéntico y, al contrario, el arte debía construir el parecido de las cosas. (shrink)

Este texto parte de un diálogo entre el último libro de Simón Puerta Domínguez, Pensamiento crítico y modernidad en América Latina. Un estudio en torno al proyecto filosófico de Bolívar Echeverría (2021), y el libro de Didi-Huberman, Desear desobedecer. Lo que nos levanta, 1 (2020).2 A partir de la confrontación de estas dos posturas, cercanas en muchos puntos a pesar de los horizontes teóricos tan diversos, deseo sacar provecho de la lectura de Puerta sobre Echeverría, para acercarla en este texto (...) a un amplio espectro de la imagen y su función en los imaginarios y en los diversos procesos de representación cultural (Didi-Huberman, 2013; Mauss, 2009; Taussig, 1993; Turner, 1982). Por ello, aquí me aproximo a la ciudad barroca y la imagen de la Virgen de Guadalupe, emergidas en el virreinato novohispano (xvii-xviii), como gestos visuales de desobediencia y aparición política para extrapolar las estrategias de estos eventos históricos a prácticas y procesos del contexto contemporáneo, también marcado por las fracturas violentas de la cultura, específicamente en relación con la obra de los artistas colombianos José Alejandro Restrepo y Óscar Muñoz, para reivindicar así la actualidad y la pertinencia de estas estrategias del proceso histórico de la región. (shrink)

Con la frecuencia con que en la actualidad se dice que arte es o puede ser cualquier cosa, también puede decirse hoy que el arte debe ser político. Esa es al menos la impresión que da el auge reciente de las diversas prácticas en el arte: estéticas expandidas, de lo cotidiano, relacionales o imbricadas, los situacionismos, los colonialismos, entre otras. Todas ellas se presentan como teorías programáticas en favor del primado del mensaje político y social sobre el arte, y del (...) cubrimiento total de la experiencia por parte de la reflexión sobre los problemas acuciantes de la sociedad en conflicto, como si la experiencia ofrecida por la obra de arte se hubiera convertido en una directriz que reorienta la atención hacia nuevos objetos, actividades y situaciones: desde principios de la década de los noventa se amplió la red discursiva del arte, en la cual sobresalen los agentes y sujetos políticos de acción, el carácter cultural y político de la acción artística, ahora signada por la diferencia, los conflictos sociales y políticos, y el mapeo de una cultura precarizada. Y con ello, parece ser agenda del arte contemporáneo buscar, en el público y en las instancias institucionales, el carácter problemático para el ámbito de los espacios sociales en relación con acontecimientos en los que la sociedad tiene una responsabilidad que escapa a la posibilidad de individuación. (shrink)

The authors explore the works of a group of Colombian artists of the twentieth century who resort to the references of the Latin American pre-Hispanic world as a plastic strategy of a modern art with strong roots in their own culture. Thus, the Bachué group and the cases of Pedro Nel Gómez and Rómulo Rozo are analyzed as alternatives to the official and prevailing art, with an avant-garde tendency, from a nationalist and indigenist point of view.

This text takes as an excuse the homonymous exhibition at the Museo de Antioquia, to address the history and political gestures in contemporary art. By addressing some curatorial approaches of the exhibition, it explores the cultural functions of the museum as a place of localization of descriptive and communicative processes about culture, and how the exhibition reveals the negative effects of these functions on cultural processes. The text highlights the presence of the artist Jorge Marín, who in his works questions (...) the influence of the notion of progress in the territory. He recovers what has been discarded by history to stage what has been rejected and repudiated. Marín's works are presented as a survival strategy that illuminates other ways of thinking about the territory of culture and questions the concept of history as a fixed representation. In this way, it highlights the importance of addressing history and political gestures in the production of contemporary art, and how the exhibition "El Jardín de los senderos que se bifurcan" and the work of Jorge Marín are examples of how art can question and subvert the hegemonic narratives of history and culture. (shrink)

The authors reflect on the conceptual slippage of the Baroque from the philosophy and history of Latin American art. They appreciate the use and appropriation of its formal and aesthetic strategies in some artists of contemporary art, from which we can think about the current historical processes of the region. -/- Keywords: Latin American Baroque, Contemporary art, appropriation, theatricalization, philosophy and art history.

The paper proposes a parallel reading of Albrecht Dürer’s engraving ›Melencolia I‹ (1514) and Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s notion of real abstraction. It argues for a constitutive link between the abstractions operative in ›Melencolia I‹, in commodity exchange, and in certain formations of psychological suffering, most notably described in the psychoanalytic conception of melancholia theorized by Sigmund Freud and the subsequent Lacanian tradition. With and against the iconographic analysis put forward by Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl in ›Saturn and Melancholy‹ (...) (1964), this paper understands the engraving’s polyhedron as a pivot point in Dürer’s artwork and in art history in general – namely, as a stumbling block that indicates the negativity of abstraction through its very positive existence. Abstraction, understood in this specific sense, and contrary to classical ontology and epistemology can in fact constitute a world of real material social relations instantiated through acts (and failures) of exchange. (shrink)

This issue of Technoetic Arts: A Journal of Speculative Research (TA) encompasses eight articles by artists and scholars from around the globe who engage with methodologies of art practice within research that reflects on technological and ecological change, contributing to the discourse on the inclusion of subjective experience in research. The articles by authors Dulmini Perera, Kate Doyle, Nora S. Vaage, Merete Lie, Nikita Peresin Meden, Kristina Pranjić, Peter Purg, Nicolaas H. Jacobs, Marth Munro, Chris Broodryk, Semi Ryu, Rahul Mahata, (...) Doreswamy, Sana Altaf and Aqib Javid Parry form a collection that crosses disciplines and genres to engage in fundamental critique of existing modes of enquiry and conclusion. The texts situate art and design methodologies in particular cultural contexts and in relation to frameworks defined by research methodologies of the sciences and humanities to gain agency for critique and to counter a sense of inevitability that has come to mark the most recent crises. (shrink)

Through the prism of archipelicity, the artistic production of the Afro-American Diaspora reveals its diffractive potential: at once close to and far from its original origins, it unfolds in the in-between of a double consciousness. In his seminal essay, Paul Gilroy calls for the overcoming of binary oppositions in order to better apprehend the complexity of Afro-diasporic intellectual culture, which he sees as specifically transnational (Gilroy, 1993). As inclusive as this theoretical framework may seem, it is challenged by the inherent (...) transcoloniality of the artistic dynamics animating the region of the Black Island Americas. To this day, avatars of the colonial model persist in the Lesser and Greater Antilles and in the majority of the coastal nations of the Caribbean basin. To a certain extent, these schemes continue to influence the aesthetic-political choices of the region’s visual artists and performers, while providing them with symbolic codes that can be interpreted as signs of belonging to the Afro-Trans American diaspora. It is therefore a challenge to claim any form of diasporic citizenship in such a shifting and uncertain configuration. What is thought to be relevant from an individual or community perspective may prove to be institutionally subversive. In the syncretic tradition of Cuba and Brazil, the same code can be given different semiotic meanings depending on the political and pragmatic context. This article therefore takes an ethno-critical look at the contribution of such practices to the broader framework of archipelagic networks and map zones of Afro-diasporic connectivity in a trans-American context. (shrink)

The Tanglewood Trilogy (2002) Book One: Relative Realities, Book Two: Opposite Approach, Book Three: Partial Truth. Conservation of the Circle explains General Relativity, Complementary Opposition, and 50-50 Reality (50-50 as the constant and the norm). This gives humans the basis for everything in mathematics, science, art, and athletics (symbolic systems universally). A unit circle shows the relative relationship between words because it's the circular-linear relationship that controls everything. A circumference and a diameter is, informationally, a zero and a one, producing (...) all symbolic systems (language and mathematics) which humans use to experience (define) (describe) 'reality.' The ideas in these books are now published and visually explained in Truth 2011 and Intelligent Design 2025 to provide the most integrated and succinct visual view of The Circular Theory to date. (At no charge, presently, on PhilPapers for download) ($200 ebook $250 Soft and HardCover on Amazon). (shrink)

For Malraux, modernity in art is not only about modern art; it is also about the birth of what he aptly terms “the first universal world of art.” This event was a consequence of the process of metamorphosis which is central to Malraux’s account of the relationship between art and time. The article explains this event, noting also that modern aesthetics has not provided an explanation. (This is the English version of the final which will be in French.).

John Carvalho’s Thinking with Images, an Enactivist Aesthetics argues that puzzling artworks can draw us into a special activity – thinking when we don’t know what to think – which is valuable because it takes us beyond our skills and understanding. Enactivism is the theory of mind that best explains such thinking. The book illustrates this proposal with four chapters that detail Carvalho’s highly personal or individual encounters with enigmatic works of art. I raise two concerns. First, the four illustrative (...) chapters say that they are enactivist, but they do not show this. The illustrative chapters detail considerations about the works that are not distinguished by a particular theory of mind and might fit with any number of approaches to works of art. The suggestion that the thinking presented in each chapter is skillful is not explained. Second, the book does not just focus on thinking when we don’t know what to think, it also claims that such thinking frees us from mere looking. But enactivism does not require us to deny that our engagement with particular works in their ‘concrete singularity,’ to use Carvalho’s term, is perceptual. If perception is richly integrated or even continuous with what we understand skillfully or cognitively – and enacted in one’s circumstances – this does not erase differences between perception and thought or between their functions. When we ‘think with’ an individual so that we are engaged with it in its concrete singularity, perception is involved either in the present or the past. There is no need to shunt perception or looking aside as life activities that are just rule-bound, just part of knowing what to think rather than part of our response when we don’t know what to think. (shrink)

This article interrogates how both visual culture and queer futurity can be made visible in and through the Philippine archive as a case in point. It begins by problematizing a paradoxical specter of futurity that seems to haunt more the Global North. But despite such haunting, the Philippines in the Global South continues to have thin to nil (i.e., nearly absent) envisioning toward a queer futurity, for most Filipino LGBTQIA + scholars seem to still be engaged in recovering “lost histories” (...) from the archives and “thick descriptions” of the present, while focusing more on the textual than the visual. The article then proceeds to discuss mobilizing ekphrasis and representation as main conceptual tools in bridging the temporally opposite projects of queer archiving and queer futurity. It analyzes through ekphrastic re-reading the various LGBTQIA + representations from the Philippine archive – that is, a “palimpsestic site” of colonial confrontations, national (re)construction, and potentially global queer critique. These re-readings along the archival grain juxtapose the archival representations as historically authentic vis-à-vis their more present-day representations as visual proxies. Yet more crucially, the potency of these ekphrastic re-readings – in lieu of visually actual – lies in their capacity to reverberate queer possibilities, re-awakening them from their sleep within the archives, and thus re-mobilizing them toward becoming a useful part of academics, activists, and artists’ “shared arsenal” in re-envisioning and, hopefully in time, reifying such past possibilities into future queer actualities anew. (shrink)

periphery looks at you with hate. This phrase in red neon struck the visitors of Landscapes, an exhibition by Domenico Antonio Mancini in the Lia Rumma Gallery in Naples, in 2019. It was not addressed to the public but to the nineteenth-century pictorial views relocated in the last room of the exhibition, as if repainted by the immaterial vandalism of the colored light. The exhibition’s theme was the visibility of contemporary suburban environments, now accessible through Google street view visualizations. Mancini’s (...) non-representational Landscapes are Google addresses, not aesthetically appreciable but pragmatically challenging: the visitor must type on a touch screen to access to the outskirts of Naples, Palermo, Catania, Rome and Milan. The words at the end of the exhibition almost literally replicated a black graffiti drawn on Palazzo Missori in Milan. Are these relocation and remediation just about artification? What happens when, browsing Google street view, I take a close look at that graffiti recalling the political protests during the streets the 1960s? The deictic transitability in space and time of the hypermediated image can activate a fortuitous narrative and an open interpretation by looking back on the present as if it were past. Even a digital landscape is a moral landscape like that of public art for Danto, with a «internal beauty» whose meaning is not already embodied in architectural and artistic media but accessible and shareable through our portable devices. (shrink)

How to participate proactively in a process of change and transformation, to shape our path within an uncertain future? With this publication, the State Of The Art Network marks a waypost on a journey which started in 2018, when like-minded Nordic and Baltic art organisations and professionals initiated this network as a multidisciplinary collaboration facing the Anthropocene. Over five years, ten organisations and around 80 practitioners from different disciplines, like the arts, natural sciences and humanities came together, online and in (...) person, for workshops, seminars and discussions. The aim was to find ways to create resilience and concrete actions on how to live through the change in culture, economy and the environment and to find concrete, hands-on methods to deal with the Anthropocene and the environmental crisis. As an outcome of this process, this publication takes a closer look at how we as practising artists, researchers and cultural actors can create elements for critical thinking and doing which can assist us in navigating the complexities of the present. -/- Edited for the State Of The Art Network by Erich Berger, Mari Keski-Korsu, Marietta Radomska and Line Thastum. -/- Produced and published by Bioart Society 2023. (shrink)

This article explores the work and thought of French pedagogue Fernand Deligny (1913-1996), focusing on his last project commonly referred to as the Tentative des Cévennes, developed between 1967-1996. From this experience that Deligny forged together with his collaborators, the article exposes the generation of a particular form of knowledge, a philosophy subordinated to a gestural solidarity network formed by human and non-human bodies, environments and situations, minimal gestures, everyday actions, and contingent events, visible only through a series of aesthetic (...) devices that were developed during this period: writings, traces, maps, films, interviews, and wanderings. This gestural philosophy would be linked to a series of actions that would constitute an organic system in its apparent material dispersion. The article is organized through a biographical and historical contextualization, to later deploy the theoretical framework of the research and a conclusion. (shrink)

القراءة أكبر نعمة أنعم الله بها على عباده؛ إذ تمثل أول كلمة نزلت على حبيبنا المصطفى صلى الله عليه وسلم، وهي جملةٌ وجيزةٌ في لفظها، فسيحةٌ في مفهومها، قوله تعالى: ﴿ اقْرَأْ بِاسْمِ رَبِّكَ الَّذِي خَلَقَ ﴾ [العلق:1].بالإضافة إلى أن القراءة قناة مهمة للتواصل بين الأفراد والمجتمعات؛ فهي من العمليات الميتودولوجيا (المنهجية والمهارية)، التي تمكِّن الفرد من الحصول على المعرفة، كما تُسهِم في بناء شخصيته، وتدعيمِ الثقة فيه، وتنميته. كما أن القراءة أداة ووسيلة علاجية فعَّالة، يستخدمها الطبيب والاختصاصي النفسي والاجتماعي (...) فيما يعرف بالبيبليوتيرابيا (العلاج بالقراءة). القراءة عملية نفسية عقلية تتضمن القدرةَ على تحويل الرموز المكتوبة إلى رموز منطوقة، وتُعَد القراءة واحدة من العمليات النفسية الأساسية التي تتطلب عددًا من العمليات العقلية اللازمة لظهورها لدى الأطفال العاديين، كما تُعَد القراءة إحدى المهارات الأساسية المكوِّنة للبُعد المعرفي بالنسبة للفرد، وهدفًا رئيسًا من أهداف المدرسة الابتدائية، وطريقة رئيسة من طرق الوصول إلى المعرفة ولعل هذا ما يؤكده أحد الباحثين بقوله: "القراءة ممارَسة ثقافية واجتماعية، وهي ظاهرةٌ صحية في تاريخ الشعوب والأمم، إنها عادةٌ فردية لا تقبَل الوراثة، فليس حتمًا أن تنجب العائلةُ القارئة بكثرة أطفالاً قارئين بكثرة، والعكس صحيح؛ ذلك أن الدراساتِ والواقع يضعان الباحث أمام مفارقةٍ، هي أن العديدَ من الفقراء ينجبون أولادًا لديهم لذَّة القراءة، ويظلون مشدودين للكتاب والمجلة والجريدة والوسائل السمعية - البصرية، متجاوزين عدم توفر الإمكانيات المادية، وتكون النتيجة هي أنهم يحققون أهدافَهم، ويتسلَّقون السلالمَ الاجتماعية. (shrink)

In my paper, I establish an Ingardenian phenomenological ontology of "virtualized ficta", i.e., fictional entities introduced to virtual gaming. The first Section of my paper provides an ontology of virtualized ficta, focusing primarily on their ‘‘existential moments’’. But in order to have a firm grasp of the ontological aspects grounding the virtual work, it’s important to engage its strata. This is what I attempt to do in Section 1.2. Virtualized ficta’s intentional dependencies are strongly manifest in what I call the (...) ‘‘strata of the virtual work’’. That is, I repurpose Ingarden’s strata of the literary work, the picture, and the film to showcase that virtualized ficta, from the bottom up (i.e., from their pure ontology to aesthetics) are purely intentional entities. In short, I argue for a purely intentional account of virtualized ficta as ficta-made-virtualia, whose ontological status is determined by the creative acts of game developers and gamers. (shrink)

Departing from the intention to explore Frank Gehry’s drawings serving to their own designer to grasp ideas during the process of their genesis, the article examines Frank Gehry’s concern about the revelation of the first gestural drawings and all the sketches and working models concerning the evolution of his projects, and his intention to capture the successive transformation and progressive concretisation of architectural concepts. The article also compares Gehry’s design process with that of Enric Miralles, Alvar Aalto, Bernard Tschumi, and (...) Le Corbusier. It sheds light on Miralles, Aalto, Le Corbusier and Gehry’s interest in a holistic understanding of all the parts of an architectural project, which is expressed through their tendency to draw the different sketches concerning the same project on the same sheet of paper. At the core of Gehry’s design approach is the osmosis of function and morphology. This aspect of his design vision could be compared to Alvar Aalto’s design process. At the core of the article are the distinction between communication drawings and conceptual drawings, and Gehry’s concern about achieving an osmosis between function and morphology. The article also investigates Gehry’s use of uninterrupted self-twisting line in his sketches, exploring his intention to enhance a straightforward relationship between the gesture and the decision-making regarding the form of the building. (shrink)

The article investigates how the use of extended reality technologies and interactive digital interfaces have affected the design of exhibition spaces. Its main objective is to shed light on how these technologies have influenced the ways in which immersive art installations are conceived and experienced. Particular emphasis is placed on the impact of interactive technologies on how visitors experience exhibition spaces. The article examines an ensemble of immersive art cases, paying special attention to the distinction between immersion and interactivity. Two (...) concepts that are pivotal for understanding the transformations concerning the subjectivity of the exhibition visitor those of the “imagineer” and the “ultra-technologist”, which are analysed in the article. The intention is to render explicit how extended reality technologies have contributed to the design of immersive experiences, significantly influencing the interrelations between the technical, aesthetic and institutional aspects concerning exhibition design and the methods of dissemination of art. (shrink)

Illuminated Mirrors and “No Rights” concerns the peregrinations of El Greco, from Crete to Spain, and various influences acquired along the way. The primary argument is that El Greco suffered a double exile: 1/ voluntary exile from Crete; and 2/ involuntary exile from Renaissance art and its humanist biases. As such, much of the art-historical record is a confused and often-doctored record of El Greco’s manufactured persona—i.e., he is not assimilable to the usual categories of art and art history.

The employment of digital technology in recent instances of artwork replication raises important questions about the perceptual and ontological distinction between original and copy, for the latter is purported to be even more authentic than an original that has undergone alterations. Such instances challenge not only Benjamin’s claim about the loss of aura but also Goodman’s distinction between autographic and allographic arts. The article proposes to rethink the original/copy dualism from the perspective of the cult image. In the devotional traditions (...) of Graeco-Roman polytheism as well as Christianity and Buddhism, cult images are approached not as representations, but as animated entities endowed with thaumaturgic powers that can be ritually transferred onto copies. From this perspective, replication is not about reproducing more or less faithfully the original, but engendering a double as effective as the original. Finally, the bearing of this perspective on contemporary works of art is considered. (shrink)

L’article examine les « compositions » de Tchernikhov en liant sa recherche constante de nouvelles formes à la capacité de convertir les « fantaisies » en représentations. Contrairement à Aristote, qui conçoit la mimèsis comme l’équivalent de l’entreprise artistique, Tchernikhov perçoit ses « compositions » comme des actes de dépassement de la mimèsis par la phantasia. Les illustrations visionnaires de ses Fantaisies architecturales expriment son intention de remplacer les mots par des images graphiques. Son approche est fondée sur la croyance (...) que la puissance de l’imagination permet à la langue graphique, qui est par ailleurs internationale, de fonctionner comme un précurseur du progrès. L’objectif de l’article est d’élucider comment Tchernikhov traite la tension entre imagination et réalité et d’examiner dans quelle mesure sa production graphique parvient à surmonter la mimèsis à travers la phantasia. La réponse à ces questions pourrait nous aider à expliquer pourquoi Tchernikhov a souvent été jugé comme inclassable et à évaluer à quel point sa démarche reflète les polarités entre les rationalistes et les constructivistes. L’opposition entre « composition » et « construction » permet de mieux comprendre le positionnement à la fois singulier et fondamental de Tchernikov par rapport au constructivisme. L’article met en évidence le fait que le rôle essentiel de la phantasia pour Tchernikhov découle de la valorisation de la « composition » plutôt que la « construction ». (shrink)

We write this review not having been able to visit the exhibition. At first, we thought that would preclude us from being reviewers, but it turns out that there.

There is broad agreement in aesthetics that some artworks are greater than others despite bearing equivalent (or lesser) aesthetic value. One explanation of this difference in artistic value is that creation of the greater artwork represents a greater achievement. The aim of this article is to refine this explanation and to defend it against recent criticisms. First, I present a prima facie case in favor of the achievement explanation. Second, I draw on the history of photography to motivate three objections (...) to it: namely, that it wrongly excludes (1) lucky, (2) easy, and (3) failed creations from being artistically great. Third, I present my refined version of the achievement explanation and show how it avoids these objections. On my view, an artistic achievement consists in creating a work it would have been especially hard for comparable artists to create. Finally, I raise and address several additional objections. In responding to these objections, I argue, among other things, that my explanation of artistic value enhances our understanding of good-bad art: specifically, it allows us to see how good-bad art is artistically great despite being aesthetically flawed. (shrink)

This chapter presents the formalist account of the moral status of an artwork as an aesthetically significant and autonomous form, with due emphasis on the Anglo-American art-for-art’s-sake aesthetic, as it developed between 1870 and 1960. The author shows that the formalist art-is-above-morals approach is a substantive moral stance in itself. Formalist aesthetics is usually presented in the literature as evincing a purist indifference to ethics, construing moral properties as external to art, in opposition to the internal pure properties of art’s (...) composition. The chapter demonstrates that this is a misrepresentation of the complex formalist prescriptive idea of the relations between art and ethics. Through its autonomy and imperviousness to external co-opting—which is accomplished by due focus on aesthetic form—art on the formalist account is held to be a paradigm of the liberalist principles of individual freedom and self-fulfillment, thus an inherent means to the good. (shrink)

The recent wave of generative AI (GAI) systems like Stable Diffusion that can produce images from human prompts raises controversial issues about creatorship, originality, creativity and copyright. This paper focuses on creatorship: who creates and should be credited with the outputs made with the help of GAI? Existing views on creatorship are mixed: some insist that GAI systems are mere tools, and human prompters are creators proper; others are more open to acknowledging more significant roles for GAI, but most conceive (...) of creatorship in an all-or-nothing fashion. We develop a novel view, called CCC (collective-centered creation), that improves on these existing positions. On CCC, GAI outputs are created by collectives in the first instance. Claims to creatorship come in degrees and depend on the nature and significance of individual contributions made by the various agents and entities involved, including users, GAI systems, developers, producers of training data and others. Importantly, CCC maintains that GAI systems can sometimes be part of a co-creating collective. We detail how CCC can advance existing debates and resolve controversies around creatorship involving GAI. (shrink)