Drawing upon Bernard Stiegler’s and Jacques Rancière’s conceptions of medium as a milieu this article seeks to address the question of the political aspects of the aesthetic in relation to the notion of medium. Based on the analysis of this theoretical question the article interprets and discusses artistic endeavors to re-appropriate and reconfigure conservative symbolic orders and media milieus that have become dissociated in relation to works of art by Alfredo Jaar and Thomas Hirschhorn.

Across philosophical traditions the question of taste has – at least paradigmatically since Kant’s third critique – been one of the most, perhaps the most central question within the discipline of aesthetics. The present issue of NJA explores ways in which this question can be addressed today; politically, analytically, historically, disciplinarily. The articles all stem from the inaugural conference of the research network Aesthetics Unlimited, which was held at Roskilde University, Denmark on 4–5 May 2017. Collaborating with Séminaire d’Esthétique Européen (...) this new international research network for aesthetic studies is funded by the Danish Council for Independent Research and is led by Anne Elisabeth Sejten, Professor of Aesthetics at Roskilde University. (shrink)

The article analyses the constitution of subjectivity in Ruben Östlund’s film Force Majeure. At the centre of attention stands the male protagonist who is uncapable of reconciling his inner nature with the external expectations. If the film may be un- derstood as a critique of existing middle-class conventions, it also reproduces a highly conventional ideal of the self-identical subject. The article argues that this confusion or irony is an expression of a Cartesian subject – still prevalent in the film – (...) in crisis. A neglected aspect of Descartes’ theory is that the autonomy of the subjects presupposes the existence of God. The problem for Östlund’s char- acters is that there is no God. Still, they act as if he, or as if any au- thority might, legitimize their subjectivity. Thus, the whole existence becomes a series of performances. The idea of an inner nature cor- responds with the notion of an outer nature. The latter is certainly very present in Force Majeure, but at the same time this nature is constantly problematized. On an allegorical level, the film may thus be read as a comment on the Anthropocene, a state where we no longer know neither what “nature”, nor “culture” is. (shrink)

Taking its point of departure in an anachronic exhibition, Soulèvements (2016/18), this book is a theoretical exploration of how the notion of contemporaneity understood as the coming together of different times in the same historical present relates to the end of a certain history of art. Critical of hitherto dominant chronological, ahistorical, and/or culturally restricted notions of the contemporary, Lund's overall aim is to make an argument for the contemporary contemporary, as the point of departure for any anachronic relationship with (...) time today, and as the inescapable point of departure for any possible historical imagination. (shrink)

How our experience of presence, time, and history is articulated in contemporary artistic practices. Our present is defined by contemporaneity: the interconnection of heterogeneous times, histories, and temporalities. These many and various times do not merely exist in parallel with one another, simultaneously. Rather, they interconnect and are brought to bear on the same present, forming a sort of planetary present, and—at least in principle—a global sharing of time, although one not shared equally. In The Changing Constitution of the Present: (...) Essays on the Work of Art in Times of Contemporaneity, Jacob Lund explores how the conditions for politically engaged art and aesthetic practice, for questioning the present, have changed in recent decades, while considering how our historical present and its temporal quality differ significantly from previous presents. (shrink)

This article reads Jean-Luc Godard’s film essay Histoire du cinéma as a contemporary artistic endeavour to resist the synchronising, standardising time of global capital, the pervasive uniformity of the global super-present, brought about by today’s televisual and digital communications, which threatens to trivialise the different processes of memory and history, as well as art and culture in general. Taking its point of departure in Bernard Stiegler’s observation that the final stage of capitalism is the control and synchronisation of “available brain (...) time,” the article argues that Godard’s work opposes this control and synchronisation of our minds through an aesthetics of contemporaneity. The argument is based on the development of a theoretical framework that combines recent theories of contemporaneity with reflections on the politics of images. Focusing on the ways in which the Holocaust is remembered in Histoire du cinéma, the article deals with Godard’s image-political creation of temporal contemporaneity through a montage of clips of old films and newsreels, photographs, stills, images of paintings, new footage, advertisements, music, sound and voice recordings, textual citation, narration and commentary. (shrink)