Baptism of Blood: Bodies Performing for the Law

This article undertakes an analysis of Ron Athey’s and Hermann Nitsch’s performance art and blood rituals to show how their radical artistic spectacles are necessary acts of defiance in contemporary art and society. They open up the possibilities for subjects to redefine their relationship to the big Other. The author argues that the use of blood is at the centre of both of these artists’ performances and has the potency to unsettle and attack the patriarchal system of social authorities. At the same time, the popularization of such artistic and bloody practices has led to the appropriation of blood in mainstream popular culture. By referring to popular artist Lady Gaga and her use of blood in recent performances, the article demonstrates that blood is divested of its symbolisms and becomes a mere commodified product. The comparison between performance artists and popular artists like Lady Gaga reveals how blood is used in different ways to facilitate each artist’s project. While Athey’s performances stress blood as the site of the reality of the body in pain, and Nitsch’s as a celebration of both Eros and Thanatos, Lady Gaga’s performances by using fake blood separate blood from the body and meaning.     

‘Farewell Red Balloon’ – visual analysis of illustrations inspired by a children’s book

Lee Hall’s recent play The Pitmen Painters, based on William Feaver’s account of ‘unprofessional painting’ by miners in a Northumbrian coal mining village, raises issues surrounding the representation of the North in visual culture. This paper considers the now increased visibility of the Ashington Group and their adoption as nostalgic symbols of self-improvement and the intellectual life of the working classes. The reproductions of the Group’s paintings in Hall’s play prompt consideration of current debates around access to education, the use of art as social improvement, the loss of traditional Leftist values in the British Labour Party, the transformation of sites of heavy industry to cultural/heritage sites and the perceived poverty of ambition in communities such as Ashington today. The focus on the Group here also reignites problematic questions for art history itself: the art historian’s urge to critically frame groups of artists and the continued equation of non-professional art with ‘authenticity’ in art history and criticism, as well as the ethical issues involved in ‘speaking on behalf of others’ (Craig Owens).     

The Dark Side of Art’s Social Turn: Towards a Discourse on the Impact of Art’s Use of Social Forms Upon the Social

The recent “social turn” in art, in which art favours using forms from social life above its own, has been extensively discussed. Relational Aesthetics by Nicolas Bourriaud, Conversation Pieces and The One and the Many by Grant Kester, essays by Claire Bishop who supplies the term “the Social Turn,” and her recent publication Artificial Hells, are now as important to the field as the art they scrutinise. Ironically, however, when this discussion regards the implications of the “turn”, it habitually addresses the effects of this development from – and for – art’s point of view, overlooking the way in which artists’ inroads into social life may be differently regarded in the social realm. As much as this represents a failure to illuminate a particular area for knowledge, it also signifies a failure to take art’s revalorised commitment to the social to its ethical conclusion: such, from two perspectives, is the “dark side” of art’s social turn. This article seeks to mitigate these oversights. In particular, it looks at art in which an artist undertakes another person’s professional work. Considering the effects of this on those whose practices are appropriated, I propose a consultative approach, involving ethnographic and empathetic modes of address. Consequently, this article does not present an answer to the question it poses, “how do professionals in the social realm see art’s appropriations of their practices?” but rather, a framework for approaching that.     

Market logics: how locality and mobility make artistic livelihoods in Dakar

This essay addresses two questions linking artists and market spaces in Dakar. First, what do access, proximity, and the representation of locality have to do with the art market? And, secondly, how do markets, networks, and mobility produce and structure artists as a professional category in Dakar? The analysis and theorisation proposed here aligns Dakar’s art market with the city’s other markets as a transactive and productive space. In doing so, this essay also contends with dismissive assessments about the art market in Dakar as inadequate or fledgling. The practices of two artists, Fally Sene Sow and Douts Ndoye, orient discussion of the relationship between artists and markets by focusing specifically on how artists gain mobility and access to multiple networks and opportunities by way of market logics.     

Maintenance work: Interrogating the sociology of art

The following article explores the different ways art sociologists investigate art that is based in the participatory arts. The aim is to shift the empirical focus to the art practice, which speaks for itself, and to place the work of the artist and all who cooperate or collaborate in the making of the artwork at the center of sociological analysis. By allowing the artist to speak fully about their work, art sociologists can uncover new social and cultural phenomena and better understand the different motivations underlying art-making. The following literature highlights the recent tendencies in the sociology of art, explores the “social turn” in art and presents different sociologists who focus on the art practice and the art’s voice. For further development of the field, I suggest the sociology of art needs to catch-up with the recent tendencies in art by placing the empirical focus on participatory art practices that will not only give us a better understanding about the intricate actions taking place in the art making, but it will also illuminate new layers of social life that are hidden. To conclude, I suggest that sociologists engage with participatory-based artists to enhance sociology through a public sociology of art.     

Constructing citizenship at the margins: the case of young graffiti writers in Melbourne

Young people engaging in graffiti are often portrayed as the anti-thesis of the ‘good citizen’. As politicians and the media fight the ‘war on graffiti’, these young people are tagged as criminals and misfits, overlooking the ways this arts practice reclaims their ability to tell stories and unhinge traditional ways of practicing citizenship. Using ideas from Michelle Fine et al.’s social psychology of spatiality as a conceptual lens, this paper explores the tensions, contradictions and binaries these young people find themselves caught between, particularly; art or vandalism, professional or amateur, artist or criminal, and legitimate or illegitimate citizens as young people and transgressors of ‘normal behaviour’ in public spaces. Using multiple methods, including ‘hanging out’ and participatory visual methods, this study explores how young graffiti artists’ experiences in and out of a legal ‘street art’ programme, speak back to ‘normative’ conceptualisations of citizenship. Their experiences of differential belonging and contested citizenship, which are played out in public spaces (and beyond), highlight the importance of alterative arts programmes and the creation of sanctioned spaces in negotiating young people’s ‘right to the city’.     

The Standpoint of Art/Criticism: Cindy Sherman as Feminist Artist?*

Feminist Standpoint Theory identifies knowledge as a social product developed from a specific social position. We apply this theory to explore the dominant standpoint informing the social organization of Western art via an institution we call art/criticism. We find that the assumptions, values, and analytic strategies informing mainstream art and art criticism express the standpoint of privileged men. As a test of our argument, we consider the case of an artist who is often hailed as a feminist artist and yet is one of the most successful woman artists today: Cindy Sherman. We find that while Sherman is working with some fertile possibilities for feminist analysis, her work ends up re‐directing this potential into a disempowering play with images. We conclude that rather than countering our argument, the celebration of Sherman’s work as feminist reveals the workings, as well as the limits, of the privileged male standpoint in art.     

Investigating the organizational everyday: a critical feminist approach

ABSTRACT

This article considers the possibilities and limits of applying institutional ethnography, a feminist theoretical and methodological approach that contributes to collective projects of investigating and transforming social life. Elaborating on the approach, the article reports on an ethnographic exploration of visual artists’ experiences and struggles in Canada's art world – a project that started from the standpoint of practising visual artists, examined their work and relations, and explicated practices and logics of art and valued work conditioning their lives. Speaking back to formal or text-based investigations of particular institutions, the article grapples with how to engage in research that more fully reveals the ‘social,’ attending to everyday life, to the ‘life work’ that people do, and to social forms that are threaded through intersecting, localized intimate and institutional spheres.     

Decolonial Hip Hop: Indigenous Hip Hop and the disruption of settler colonialism

ABSTRACT

Contemporary Detroit has gone through many changes – or so it appears. From streets lined with vehicles made by Chrysler, Ford, and General Motors and driven by the nearly 2 million people who called the city home in 1950 to certain parts of the city looking like ghost towns; from a population that dwindled to 670,000 to the revival of downtown. Yet, what has been remarkably consistent is the invisibility of the Motor City’s Indigenous population. Indeed, Indigenous erasure, combined with rhetoric and policies that continue to marginalize and subjugate African Americans in Detroit, create a place rooted in multiple colonialisms. This essay examines how Detroit’s Indigenous Hip Hop artists resist settler colonialism through art, creativity, and culture as well as the practices of Detroit 2.0, a rhetoric and policy used by Detroit elites to reimagine it as a place of opportunity. By making visible the connections between blackness and indigeneity, as well as by linking the struggle of colonized peoples in Detroit to those in Palestine, Indigenous artists are not only asserting their humanity and challenging the longstanding idea of their erasure, but also constructing pathways for artists and activists to disrupt the effects of multiple colonialisms that continue to marginalize people of colour in urban areas. Detroit’s Indigenous Hip Hop artists make socially conscious music and also participate as activists in the city of Detroit. They serve as a window onto contemporary Indigenous identity, represent an exemplar of the urban Indigenous experience, and combine activism with art in a variety of ways.     

Joseph Cornell’s Subversive Materialism

Abstract

Joseph Cornell’s box assemblages have proven difficult for art historians and gallerists to categorize. Being neither painting, sculpture, nor precisely collage, their unique position within the history of twentieth-century American art highlights the disruptive materialist strategies the artist employed in forming his objects in the 1940s. This article discusses three related strategies derived from material culture that the assemblages subvert by deviating from the established pathways of particular object categories: the inauthentic object, the souvenir, and the biographical object. These related strategies helped the artist to negotiate his relationship with the city of New York and its immersive consumer culture, and mediate the anxieties recalled in his diaries regarding eternity and the infinite expanse of space. Finally, the article contends that these deviations represent the source of the works’ spiritual and social resonance.     

Kunst und Preise

How are prices established in the market for contemporary art? Buyers in this market are confronted with fundamental uncertainty since “quality” is only difficult to determine and the development of prices is non-predictable. Since the emergence of a market for contemporary art presupposes at least the possibility for intentional rational decision-making, this uncertainty must be reduced. We argue that the value of a piece of art or an artist is established in an intersubjective process of granting reputation by experts and institutions in the field of art. This is achieved primarily through the institutions of the art market and the training of artists, i.e. through galleries, curators, critics, art dealers, journalists, collectors, and art schools. They participate jointly in the making of artistic reputation of the artist’s work that provides, in turn, the basis for the determination of its economic value. For testing this hypothesis we assembled and analyzed two datasets with data on the biographies of artists and prices for their works.     

Reorientalism and globalisation: transnational artists from India and representations of the ‘other’

In this article, I discuss some artists who have emigrated from India to the United States and the United Kingdom whose more recent work contains ‘Orientalising’ imagery influenced by the conjoined forces of the art market, collectors, biennales, globalisation, the Internet, the rapid development of India’s economy and its impact on the global art scene. It seems that fame and fortune for some Indian artists living in the West entails capitulating to the desire for exotic, ornate, sexual and stereotypical representations associated with Indian culture and religion. In contrast, I consider the direction taken by other artists who remain in their country of origin and portray life lived there without being particularly attentive to being Indian, although they may concentrate on social and political issues.     

Tomorrow,things will be different Qiu Zhijie’s concept of keeping alive life through art

Abstract

The paper examines Qiu Zhijie’s multi-layered project A Suicidology of the Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge (since 2008) and asks what is at stake when art literally and metaphorically is assigned with life-saving functions. Based on the artist’s assumption that today’s social and political reality as well as its subjects are historically constructed the article conceives of the Nanjing Bridge as an embodiment of a historically constituted contemporary Chinese reality. Through close readings of the works as well as analyses of theoretical writings by Qiu Zhijie the article scrutinises the relationship Total Art assumes between the social and the aesthetic realm and examines the premises and strategies the artist adopts in order to produce socially and aesthetically effective art that keeps ‘alive’.     

“See Media”: Coco Fusco’s Direct Address and the Performance of In/Security

Abstract

A Room of One’s Own: Women and Power in the New America (2006–2008) is a multi-media performance art piece by visual artist Coco Fusco. In a lecture style performance staged at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) as part of their 2007 symposium The Feminist Future: Theory and Practice in the Visual Arts, Fusco explores the use of women in US military interrogation efforts during the height of the War on Terror and – problematic and violent as it may be – mounts a parallel attack against the art world itself. Although invited to speak, Fusco speaks (performs) out of turn – and out of sync in order to level a critique at the very establishment in which the symposium was held. In doing so, Fusco directs our attention towards the interwoven workings of power, surveillance, silence, and the making and the performances of particular kinds of citizen/subjects/enemy combatants/art objects/interrogators/artists. This article seeks to address how visual culture and US military security discourses are inextricably linked through interwoven histories and unsettling relationships between race and national security, national security and feminism, as well as race and feminism.     

Power,capital, and artistic freedom: contemporary Chinese art communities and the city

This paper offers a critical review of the proliferation of the contemporary art colony in China since the beginning of the twenty-first century in the context of China's promotion of cultural creative industries as one of the strategies for urban development and economic growth. Through analyzing cases in Beijing, Xi’an, and Sanya, cities ranging from ‘first-tier’ to ‘third-tier’ in their size and status, the paper explores the challenges and opportunities many contemporary Chinese art professionals find themselves face amid the competitive city image building campaign, a top-down movement led by local state and private investors in cities across China. It is evident that contemporary art and alternative art spaces associated with it have been drawn into the process of commodification, inadvertently recruited to play an ancillary role in the reproduction of the hegemonic collusion between political power and capitalism in a rapidly urbanizing China. Nonetheless, I argue that the inclusion of contemporary art communities as a player in the production and reproduction of the urban space has provided critical-minded artists, critics, and curators opportunities to participate in the reconfiguration of the physical and cultural landscape of Chinese cities, albeit not always with positive outcomes. As such, some art professionals are able to appropriate the process of capitalist urbanization to create their own ‘infrastructures of resonance’ [Thompson 2015. Seeing Power: Art and Activism in the Twenty-first Century. Brooklyn: Melville House], which support artistic freedom and facilitate the growth of diverse forms of cultural creation and exchange despite the coming dominance of ‘power plus capital’ [X. Wang 2003. A Manifesto for Cultural Studies. In: C. Wang, ed. One China, many paths. London: Verso, 274–291].     

In Search of Her Own Language Eva Hesse Show San Francisco Museum of Modern ARt

This article discusses the work of Eva Hesse, a young German minimalist artist who died in 1970 at the age of 34. Hesse left behind a complex assembly of art works known for their fragile and disintegrating beauty. Hesse's work resists to be understood in relationship to other works of art; instead her sculptures and paintings are viewed as attempts to find her own language through which she creates a pathway to her inner turmoil. Her work is understood not as a representation of her inner world but as a language through which she gains access to a previously foreclosed, somber world. Struggling at the edge of inside–outside and chaos–order, Hesse succeeds at drawing the spectator into questioning the most fundamental, pregiven realities of life.     

Performing the limits of finance

Recent financial turmoil has put emphasis once again on the very meaning and reach of ‘finance’. In doing so, recent financial crises have also provoked questions about the very ‘ends’ of finance: Where are the borders of finance? Given the expansive reach of financial innovation over the past two decades, are there any serious limits to the kinds of practices that can be converted into financial objects? Does the culture of finance (expansive and all encompassing) encounter meaningful interruptions? This paper explores these questions by reviewing a cluster of public-art responses to the 2008 financial crisis mounted by artists critical of the expansive logic of financial abstraction. This paper pays particular attention to the work of Fergal McCarthy and Fred Forest, two public artists who have confronted finance and its rational culture with practices of gameplay, whimsy, and carnival. In doing so, these artists invoke a strategy designed to lay the all-encompassing claims of financial abstraction alongside its own impossibility; alongside performances which undermine the expansive claims of financial abstraction. These are strategies, I conclude, which can interrupt the technocratic discourses which dominate the contemporary cultures of finance; strategies which, in the words of one artist, evoke ‘plausible states of uncertainty’ about our faith in financial abstraction.     

Social complex contagion in music listenership: A natural experiment with 1.3 million participants

Can live music events generate complex contagion in music streaming? This paper finds evidence in the affirmative—but only for the most popular artists. We generate a novel dataset from a music tracking website to analyse the listenership history of 1.3 million users over a two-month time horizon. We show that attending a music artist’s live concert increases that artist’s listenership among the attendees of the concert by approximately 1 song per day per attendee (p-value < 0.001). Moreover, this effect is contagious and can spread to users who did not attend the event. However, whether or not contagion occurs depends on the type of artist. We only observe contagious increases in listenership for popular artists (∼0.06 more daily plays per friend of an attendee [p < 0.001]), while the effect is absent for emerging stars. The contagion effect size increases monotonically with the number of friends who have attended the live event.