“Studies in Visual Arts and Communication –
an international journal”
Volume 8 – Nr 1, 2021
Table of Contents
June 2021; 8(1)
1. Eva C. Mesas Escobar, María Dolores López Martínez, Eva Santos Sánchez-Guzmán
El cadáver exquisito en las experiencias de creación compartida
Studies in Visual Arts and Communication – an international journal / June 2021 8(1)
RESUMEN
Con el presente texto nos adentramos en las aportaciones que el surrealismo, a través de su experimento creativo llamado Cadáver exquisito, ofrece para generar metodologías de trabajo en la creación compartida. Desde este experimento y sus variantes, revisamos un conjunto de experiencias artísticas colectivas que hemos desarrollado en los últimos años, relacionado con contextos artísticos, sociales y comunitarios.
La idea que hace fluir este tipo de creaciones es el nacimiento de un cuerpo común, entendido como colectividad, que crece desde la suma de aportaciones individuales. El cadáver exquisito es un juego de gran interés para la activación de la creación colectiva, que se da en el espacio-ambiente y que concluye en una obra ante la cual la sorpresa del encuentro con lo inesperado hace emerger los vínculos vividos en el proceso. Según esto, lo interesante de estas experiencias no son sólo los resultados, sino el mismo proceso de creación y aquello que se activaba a nivel relacional y colectivo.
Las experiencias mostradas invitan a vagar invirtiendo el orden lógico de la actividad creadora, en el sentido de entregarse a los procesos de forma despreocupada, a habitar nuevos escenarios, a deambular por ellos y permitir que surjan nuevas imágenes del mundo.
Palabras clave: Surrealismo, cadáver exquisito, juego, creatividad compartida, expresión artística, diversidad.
2. Ali Shobeiri
Thinking from Materials in Andy Goldsworthy’s Environmental Artworks
Studies in Visual Arts and Communication – an international journal / June 2021 8(1)
ABSTRACT
By adopting posthuman ecology as its methodological framework, the author of this paper examines how British environmental artist Andy Goldsworthy’s conceptualization of nature can radically undermine the nature/culture dichotomy. To do this, the author will survey the first and the second waves of environmental art movement, also known as Representational and Performative Environmental Art, in order to situate Goldsworthy’s small-scale works within the latter. Then, by embracing Tim Ingold’s idea of “thinking through making” within materialist ecology, the author puts forward that Goldsworthy’s environmental art can resist the old-age hylomorphic model by using intuitiveness and improvisation as its strategy. In doing so, Goldsworthy eschews from turning nature into a representation that is to be manipulated by human subjectivity from afar, precisely by thinking from natural materials rather than about them, thus inviting us to conceive all human and nonhuman organisms as an intricate conglomerate of “leaky things” in an endless flux of ecological becoming.
Keywords: Ingold, materiality, environmental art, nonhuman, Goldsworthy, hylomorphism.
3. Katarina Andjelkovic
Moving Desire through a Machinic Assemblage. Rethinking Transmediality with Man Ray
Studies in Visual Arts and Communication – an international journal / June 2021 8(1)
ABSTRACT
Art in the period immediately after World War I witnessed a general interest in becoming more machine-like, and artists like Man Ray (1890-1976) challenged the functions of the basic optical machines used by artists. Instead of using the camera as a machine for making documents, Ray used it as an instrument for exploring ‘desire’. Drawing on Lacan’s theory of desire, I propose that, with Ray, desire entered the process and became the purpose of flows, multiplicities, production, and repeated reproduction. This claim is supported by Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus, when they assert that “desire is not primarily connected to a specific object, but is always the desire of an arrangement (assemblage)” (Deleuze and Guattari 1983). In such constellation, ‘desire’ becomes part of diverse processes that mark the “transition” of the object to the image and vice versa, as typified in Man Ray’s art. Likewise, machine is a tool at the service of Ray’s mind, be it automatism characteristic of the surrealism or subverting typical means of reproducibility. The hypothesis is that, when observed from the perspective of Deleuze and Guattari’s machinic approach, the foundations of Man Ray’s painting can be contextualized as machinic, in a close connection with the concept ‘desiring-machines’. The aim of this paper is to renew a concern with the medium by looking at the transmedia nature of Man Ray’s painting as being machinic. The transmedia nature of Ray’s painting will be examined in the case of his painting DANGER/DANCER. L’impossibilité (1917-1920), by looking at how ‘desiring-machine’ undermines ordinary machine functions.
Keywords: desire, machine, transmediality, Man Ray, Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari.
4. Hamida Sivac
Subversive syntax. A comparative investigation into artistic methods aimed at subverting linguistic communication in Feminist Art of the mid-1970s
Studies in Visual Arts and Communication – an international journal / June 2021 8(1)
ABSTRACT
During the 1970s, several attacks have been launched onto articulate language by feminist thinkers, writers, film-makers, and, not least, visual artists. However, the artistic strategies of the latter have been remotely investigated in the past and today still remain hardly known. The paper centers this very research gap by crystalizing some of the methods artists have deployed in dealing with the realization that there is no language outside of patriarchal ideologies. For the purpose of typologically mapping this diverse field of feminist action, the article will discuss three particular positions: Austrian artist VALIE EXPORT, Italian artist Ketty La Rocca, and, as a major voice of contemporary feminist theory, French psychoanalyst and cultural theorist Luce Irigaray. Through this case study triad, spread across different geographies and languages, the subject of the feminist critique of language in the visual arts of the 1970s will be approached by means of a comparative methodology. In order to uncover the common practices as well as the diverging ideologies nurturing those practices, the article will elaborate on how syntactical irregularities have become instruments for the artistic organization of visual as well as textual material. The use of literary figures as a way of disclosing oppressed content was proposed by Irigaray, while simultaneously already being used miles away by the two artists as strategies for the subversion of linguistic properties that were considered ‘patriarchal,’ such as objectivity and rationality. At the same time, the material body is staged as something that is always inevitably ‘coded’ by the phallocentric “Symbolic.”
Keywords: 1970s, Feminism, Visual Art, Language.
5. Jonathan Joy
From Attendance to Performance: The Spectatorial Experience and the Emergence of Live Cinema
Studies in Visual Arts and Communication – an international journal / June 2021 8(1)
ABSTRACT
Cinema is a medium of possibilities. The trajectory of cinema is not beholden to a single future. Its intent is to sketch out a framework of transformation in an ever-changing cinematic landscape. A landscape which recognizes its genealogy from analog film to digital cinema, from attending spectatorial witness to performative intervention upon the object of vision, environment and ourselves. Contemporary cinema has not forgotten its roots; strongly grounded in the past, but receptive to innovation, modification and transition. This is clearly seen in the current cinematic landscape which emphasizes the spectatorial experience — participating in its unfolding, part of its presence, but more than anything the ontology of cognitive recognition, affects, and bodily perceptions. Cinema, a time-based, temporally specific occasion, has long established an encounter which addresses spectatorial experience, but now may no longer require the form of time, space and agency to produce a narrative. I will consider the combination of sounds and moving-images that give credibility to ‘here’ and ‘now,’ and their relation to spectator. The intersection of the cinematic dispositif and the elusive spectator has been at the center of a rich debate since the late twentieth century. The cinematic spectator has gone through transformations and modifications, even shifting focus from ocular to haptic. The reference models comprise the work and theories of Jean-Louis Baudry, Laura Mulvey, Christian Metz, Vivian Sobchack, Gene Youngblood, and Laura U. Marks. Their contributions, moving from an ocular-centric epistemology of the late-twentieth century to an embodied, tactile, proprioceptive experience in the twenty-first century, have brought forth an ontology which provides deep consideration to the cinematic spectator within a live performance space.
The following theoretical investigation focuses on the expansion of contemporary cinema and what constitutes a spectatorial experience in the twenty-first century. I argue for a theoretical framework of metamorphosis in a form of contemporary cinema, namely Live Cinema, which engenders affective movements in the spectatorial experience. The performer and spectator in a live cinema performative setting are met with communicative exchanges entrenched in participation, improvisation, human agency, and communal relationships. Both parties enter an affectively composed journey built on proprioception, accidental performative occurrences, visceral desires, and ephemeral behavior. These developments in a live cinema framework are witness to a shift towards immediacy, spontaneity, immersion, and engagement found in an intuitive encounter with live performance components, mediatization and instrumentation; a practice which becomes visible in a real-time fractal performance space.
Keywords: affect, bodily presence, engagement, live cinema, mediatization, mobility, spectator, spectatorial experience, temporality.
6. Lorenzo Rossi
Michael Haneke and the Trauma of Europe
Studies in Visual Arts and Communication – an international journal / June 2021 8(1)
ABSTRACT
Michael Haneke is one of the contemporary filmmakers who has reflected the most on past and present history of Europe. The Austrian director has addressed in his cinema crucial historical events of the European history of the XX century, with a narrative approach that privileged the account of trauma. From the cultural origins of Nazism (The White Ribbon, 2009) to the effects of colonial politics (Caché, 2005) to recent conversations regarding immigration (Happy End, 2017), Haneke has always constructed a gaze on History that was external, marginal and focused on the subtle threshold that divides private and public: through the emergence of an analysis of the great issues of historical contemporaneity with an endemic and subtle storytelling of familiar relations. This paper aims to focus on the modernity and uniqueness of Haneke cinema in relation to the most recent European events, with an emphasis on the modalities of narration and analysis through which the Austrian filmmaker dealt with the collective traumas and most cogent social upheavals. Such a position is reflected in his approach to images with a discontinuity that is both aesthetic (the VHS of Caché, the smartphone videos of Happy End) and narrative (a form of storytelling that remains suspended), but also in his parallel between the neutrality of familiar relations and the evental (événementielle) nature of historical events. On the one hand it is not the authenticity of the blood ties that guarantees the harmony of the family, on the other for a people or a nation to be part of something (namely, to be part of Europe) does not prevent the occurrence of major catastrophes.
Keywords: Haneke, trauma, cinema, visual studies, history, Europe, événementielle, image.
7. Luca Cardone
The performative role of the body in gamified vision and VR
Studies in Visual Arts and Communication – an international journal / June 2021 8(1)
ABSTRACT
Starting from Flusser’s intuitions on the role of buttons and how they have modified our images, the article aims to investigate the relationship between the new technologies of the audiovisual world and the body. Using the phenomenon of gamification as a solution to understanding the complex landscape of hybrid media, the categories of interaction and immersion will be examined. The objective of the research is the analysis of the performative interactions of the body immersed in the virtual reality of videogames and software cinema. The phenomenological crisis of the body inaugurated by virtual technologies produces the need to rethink its performative possibilities in an amplified way within the virtual immersion. The scattered body in the image -and not vanished-, within the analyzed virtual contexts, appears as an element of the narrative itself. The consequences of this performance increase are examined here, such as the the author’s disappearance in a strong sense and the weakening of the state of aesthetic contemplation, both results of the gamification of technical images. The article takes advantage of the valuable interview with virtual designer Enea Le Fons for his unique and extended experience in a VR session.
Keywords: VR, gamification, body, performance, buttons.