New Encounters: Arts, Cultures, Concepts – serie

Post-Traumatic Art in the City comprises an original analysis of the nexus of war, art and urban society in two specific contexts: late 20th-century Beirut and Sarajevo. With an emphasis on conceptions of the 'post-traumatic', De le Court explores how cities and art are mutually formative in war and post-war contexts, providing unique insight into the politically and psychologically driven art scenes from within the works of art themselves. Grounded in close analyses and new research, the book makes an important contribution to the fields of art history and trauma studies.

Concentrationary Memories has, as its premise, the idea at the heart of Alain Resnais's film Night and Fog (1955) that the concentrationary plague unleashed on the world by the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s is not simply confined to one place and one time but is now a permanent presence shadowing modern life. It further suggests that memory (and, indeed, art in general) must be invoked to show this haunting of the present by this menacing past so that we can read for the signs of terror and counter its deformation of the human. Through working with political and cultural theory on readings of film, art, photographic and literary practices, Concentrationary Memories analyses different cultural responses to concentrationary terror in different sites in the post-war period, ranging from Auschwitz to Argentina. These readings show how those involved in the cultural production of memories of the horror of totalitarianism sought to find forms, languages and image systems which could make sense of and resist the post-war condition in which, as Hannah Arendt famously stated 'everything is possible' and 'human beings as human beings become superfluous.' Authors include Nicholas Chare, Isabelle de le Court, Thomas Elsaesser, Benjamin Hannavy Cousen, Matthew John, Claire Launchbury, Sylvie Lindeperg, Laura Malosetti Costa, Griselda Pollock, Max Silverman, Glenn Sujo, Annette Wieviorka and John Wolfe Ackerman.

In 1945, French political prisoners returning from the concentration camps of Germany coined the phrase 'the concentrationary universe' to describe the camps as a terrible political experiment in the destruction of the human. This book shows how the unacknowledged legacy of a totalitarian mentality has seeped into the deepest recesses of everyday popular culture. It asks if the concentrationary now infests our cultural imaginary, normalizing what was once considered horrific and exceptional by transforming into entertainment violations of human life. Drawing on the political philosophy of Hannah Arendt and the analyses of violence by Agamben, Virilio, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, it also offers close readings of films by Cavani and Haneke that identify and critically expose such an imaginary and, hence, contest its lingering force.

How can photographers, curators, and editors convey narratives of peace and not just stories of war? Providing interdisciplinary and international perspectives on timely debates, Picturing Peace explores humanitarianism and visual culture, community collaboration, collective memory, and imagined futures for creating and sustaining of civil societies. How things look and are perceived are not superficial issues; when it comes to war and conflict, photography is vitally relevant not only to documenting violence, but also to rebuilding peaceful societies.The volume examines the intersecting issues of visual culture and peacebuilding, including: the genealogies of photography and conflict, decolonisation and the gaze, the significance of archival material, as well as recent peacebuilding initiatives. Exploring multiple forms of peace photography, the volume offers a range of voices from preeminent international scholars, as well as interviews with practicing photographers who have experience of working with post-conflict communities. As such, the book provides a timely investigation into the politics of representation, questioning how photographers might help foster social relationships, transform conflicts, and reconcile communities in the image-oriented cultures.

How can photographers, curators, and editors convey narratives of peace and not just stories of war? Providing interdisciplinary and international perspectives on timely debates, Picturing Peace explores humanitarianism and visual culture, community collaboration, collective memory, and imagined futures for creating and sustaining of civil societies. How things look and are perceived are not superficial issues; when it comes to war and conflict, photography is vitally relevant not only to documenting violence, but also to rebuilding peaceful societies.The volume examines the intersecting issues of visual culture and peacebuilding, including: the genealogies of photography and conflict, decolonisation and the gaze, the significance of archival material, as well as recent peacebuilding initiatives. Exploring multiple forms of peace photography, the volume offers a range of voices from preeminent international scholars, as well as interviews with practicing photographers who have experience of working with post-conflict communities. As such, the book provides a timely investigation into the politics of representation, questioning how photographers might help foster social relationships, transform conflicts, and reconcile communities in the image-oriented cultures.

Visioning Israel-Palestine strives to cultivate recognition of the part that cultural products have played in the duplication of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. While this conflict is one of the longest-lasting struggles over land and human rights in recent history, politicians and the media have largely reduced it to a series of debates over historical facts and expressions of violence. Its persistence, however, has also led to the manufacture of cultural products that challenge understandings of the conflict as a fight between two distinct peoples unified against each other. The wide range of international contributors to the volume analyse the content of such products alongside the work that they do within Israel-Palestine and in the Jewish and Palestinian diasporas. Considering Israeli and Palestinian films, art installations, street exhibitions, photographs and oral histories, Visioning Israel-Palestine expands the conflict’s historical imagination and nurtures suitable cultural conditions to revitalize the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

The influential cultural critic Elisabeth Bronfen sets out in this book a conversation between literature, cinema, and visual culture. The crossmappings in and between these essays address the cultural survival of image formulas involving portraiture and the uncanny relation between the body and its representability, the gendering of war, death and the fragility of life, as well as sovereignty and political power.Each chapter tracks transformations that occur as aesthetic figurations travel not only from one historical moment to the next, but also from one medium to another. Following Bronfen on these journeys into the cultural imaginary, the reader encounters prominent artists such as Edgar Degas, Francesca Woodman, Paul McCarthy, Eva Hesse, Louise Bourgeois, Richard Wagner, Pablo Picasso and William Shakespeare, alongside Classical Hollywood's film noir and melodrama, and the TV series The Wire and House of Cards.

This ground-breaking and extraordinary examination of the work of Abstract Expressionist painter Helen Frankenthaler overturns assumptions about the artist, whose work has been burdened by its label as ‘the bridge between Pollock and what was possible’. Trained as a painter, Alison Rowley brings a keen eye to Frankenthaler’s paintings, returning to the fore the artist’s debt not only to Jackson Pollock but also to Cezanne, and speculating for the first time as to her artistic responses to wider political events, in particular the Rosenberg trial.Making a fascinating case, too, for the connections between the ‘breakthrough’ work Mountains and Sea and Lily Briscoe’s painting in Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse, this beautifully written book provides crucial insights into Frankenthaler’s practice.With her bold and radical painting now appearing in major international exhibitions, this paperback re-issue of Rowley’s original 2007 study comes at a significant moment of reappraisal, and confirms Frankenthaler’s status as one of the most important artists of her generation.

Selected and introduced by Juli Carson, this book presents a collection of essential essays, interviews, and never-before published archival materials that trace the development of the teaching of major artist and thinker Mary Kelly, from 1980-2017.As an artist and a theorist, Kelly is known for her foundational contributions to Feminism and Conceptual Art; she is also revered for her innovative pedagogy, which has influenced countless artists, writers and teachers within the international art community. Her description of a feminist practice of concentric pedagogy, centred on the artwork rather the mastery of the teacher, radically changed teaching practice in art studios.Detailing Kelly’s innovative pedagogical program, the essays are split into three sections: The Method, which focuses on Kelly’s renowned method of “ethical observation” within studio critique; The Project, which explores her notion of what constitutes an artistic project; and Project and Method in the Field which presents, for the first time, a transcription of On the Passage of a Few People though a Rather Brief Period of Time, a performative colloquy commissioned by the Tate Modern and moderated by Kelly in 2015; following this transcription is a portfolio of practicing artists previously enrolled in Kelly’s Interdisciplinary Studio Area at UCLA.Mary Kelly’s Concentric Pedagogy highlights how contemporary studio teaching practice has been largely informed by Kelly’s bold and innovative approach to art pedagogy, evidencing how the intersection of teaching, artistic practice, and radical political engagement can transform our approach to all three. It is essential reading for students and teachers of art and design studio practice, art history and theory, contemporary, and feminist art.

Selected and introduced by Juli Carson, this book presents a collection of essential essays, interviews, and never-before published archival materials that trace the development of the teaching of major artist and thinker Mary Kelly, from 1980-2017.As an artist and a theorist, Kelly is known for her foundational contributions to Feminism and Conceptual Art; she is also revered for her innovative pedagogy, which has influenced countless artists, writers and teachers within the international art community. Her description of a feminist practice of concentric pedagogy, centred on the artwork rather the mastery of the teacher, radically changed teaching practice in art studios.Detailing Kelly’s innovative pedagogical program, the essays are split into three sections: The Method, which focuses on Kelly’s renowned method of “ethical observation” within studio critique; The Project, which explores her notion of what constitutes an artistic project; and Project and Method in the Field which presents, for the first time, a transcription of On the Passage of a Few People though a Rather Brief Period of Time, a performative colloquy commissioned by the Tate Modern and moderated by Kelly in 2015; following this transcription is a portfolio of practicing artists previously enrolled in Kelly’s Interdisciplinary Studio Area at UCLA.Mary Kelly’s Concentric Pedagogy highlights how contemporary studio teaching practice has been largely informed by Kelly’s bold and innovative approach to art pedagogy, evidencing how the intersection of teaching, artistic practice, and radical political engagement can transform our approach to all three. It is essential reading for students and teachers of art and design studio practice, art history and theory, contemporary, and feminist art.

This book considers the sculpture of Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) in light of psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott’s (1896-1971) radical ideas regarding transitional objects, potential space, and play, offering a model for exploring the complex and psychologically evocative work Bourgeois produced from 1947 to 2000. Critical concepts from British object relational theories – destruction, reparation, integration, relationality and play – drawn from the writings of Winnicott, Melanie Klein, Marion Milner, and Christopher Bollas, among others, bear upon the decades-long study of psychoanalysis Bourgeois brought to her sculptural production that was symbolic, metaphorical, and most importantly, useful.The book demonstrates how Bourgeois’s transformative sculptural objects and environments are invested in object relations, both psychical and tangible, and explores Bourgeois’s contention that the observer physically engage with the intricate sculptural objects and architectural spaces she produced. Each chapter focuses on a key body of work – Femme Maison, Personages, Lairs, Janus, and Cells – examining how these imaginative and playful objects are staged as embodied encounters in space and time to invoke the mutuality, reciprocity, and ambivalence of our object relationships.Weaving a tapestry of aesthetic, cultural, and psychological encounters, Transformative Objects and the Aesthetics of Play addresses critical relationships among Bourgeois’s work and that of other artists from Pieter Brueghel to Eva Hesse. It brings together practical, archival, and theoretical material, offering close examinations of historically situated objects and analyses of their complex affects and spatiality. Gathering critical perspectives from psychoanalysis, cultural analysis, feminist, queer, literary and affect studies, the book extends its specific art historical scope to investigate the crucial roles that art and cultural experience assume in everyday life.

This book considers the sculpture of Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) in light of psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott’s (1896-1971) radical ideas regarding transitional objects, potential space, and play, offering a model for exploring the complex and psychologically evocative work Bourgeois produced from 1947 to 2000. Critical concepts from British object relational theories – destruction, reparation, integration, relationality and play – drawn from the writings of Winnicott, Melanie Klein, Marion Milner, and Christopher Bollas, among others, bear upon the decades-long study of psychoanalysis Bourgeois brought to her sculptural production that was symbolic, metaphorical, and most importantly, useful.The book demonstrates how Bourgeois’s transformative sculptural objects and environments are invested in object relations, both psychical and tangible, and explores Bourgeois’s contention that the observer physically engage with the intricate sculptural objects and architectural spaces she produced. Each chapter focuses on a key body of work – Femme Maison, Personages, Lairs, Janus, and Cells – examining how these imaginative and playful objects are staged as embodied encounters in space and time to invoke the mutuality, reciprocity, and ambivalence of our object relationships.Weaving a tapestry of aesthetic, cultural, and psychological encounters, Transformative Objects and the Aesthetics of Play addresses critical relationships among Bourgeois’s work and that of other artists from Pieter Brueghel to Eva Hesse. It brings together practical, archival, and theoretical material, offering close examinations of historically situated objects and analyses of their complex affects and spatiality. Gathering critical perspectives from psychoanalysis, cultural analysis, feminist, queer, literary and affect studies, the book extends its specific art historical scope to investigate the crucial roles that art and cultural experience assume in everyday life.

Visioning Israel-Palestine strives to cultivate recognition of the part that cultural products have played in the duplication of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. While this conflict is one of the longest-lasting struggles over land and human rights in recent history, politicians and the media have largely reduced it to a series of debates over historical facts and expressions of violence. Its persistence, however, has also led to the manufacture of cultural products that challenge understandings of the conflict as a fight between two distinct peoples unified against each other. The wide range of international contributors to the volume analyse the content of such products alongside the work that they do within Israel-Palestine and in the Jewish and Palestinian diasporas. Considering Israeli and Palestinian films, art installations, street exhibitions, photographs and oral histories, Visioning Israel-Palestine expands the conflict’s historical imagination and nurtures suitable cultural conditions to revitalize the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

At the core of this book is a series of conversations with five British artist Black women who exhibited in both Lubaina Himid’s 1985 The Thin Black Line and 2011 Thin Black Line(s) exhibitions: Sutapa Biswas, Sonia Boyce (OBE), Lubaina Himid (MBE, Turner Prize nominee), Claudette Johnson and Ingrid Pollard. The conversations explore their memories of art education and early careers,their experiences in the Black Arts Movement of the 1980s, and their responses to the exhibition Thin Black Line(s) at Tate Britain in 2011, a quarter of a century after the original installation at the ICA in 1985, to reflect upon the issues of race and gender over that period in terms of how Black artist women have collaborated, made art, organized and conversed despite the failure of the British art institutions to sustain, conserve and study their work. Specifically avoiding the classic form of the artist interview, this book draws on a methodology not used in art history before: Constructivist Grounded Theory, which arrives at new theories of how individuals experience the world and act in it through analysing discourse generated in informal but structured conversation that seeks to discover new knowledge, rather than to impose existing theoretical models or concepts on experience as delivered in speech.Voices of Art, Belonging and Resistance is an analysis of the structural racism of British art institutions as experienced by Black subjects, and it also inflects that larger issue specifically with issues of gender and sexuality. Avoiding the now much abused concept of intersectionality, the method allows the intricacies of race, class, gender and sexuality to be in play at all times across the accounts of life experience as artists of the subjects being interviewed and the analysis of the discourse thus generated and art historically and culturally analysed.

In this innovative collection, a distinguished group of international authors dare to think psychoanalytically about the legacies of political violence and suffering in relation to post-traumatic cultures worldwide. They build on maverick art historian Aby Warburg's project of combining social, cultural, anthropological and psychological analyses of the image in order to track the undercurrents of cultural violence in the representational repertoire of Western modernity. Drawing on post-colonial and feminist theory, they analyze the image and the aesthetic in conditions of historical trauma, from enslavement and colonization to the Irish Famine, from Denmark's national trauma about migrants and cartoons to collective shock after 9/11, from individual traumas of loss registered in allegory to newsreels and documentaries on suicide bombing in Israel/Palestine, and from Kristeva's novels to Kathryn Bigelow's cinema.

Activists working in post-traumatic societies have tended to resist psychoanalytical terms because they fear that pathologizing individual suffering displaces the collective and political causes of traumatic violence. In a contrary direction, some thinkers about discourse and power have latterly embraced what Judith Butler insists is 'the psychic life of power'. An openly psychoanalytical modelling of trauma for approaching major historical events such as the Holocaust adds yet a third position. Drawing on all three strands, this book poses the question of visual politics to psychoanalysis. It also explores the relevance of the many psychoanalyses to the study of art and other images in post-traumatic conditions. Visual Politics of Psychoanalysis builds on maverick art historian Aby Warburg's project of combining social, cultural, anthropological and psychological analyses of the image in order to track the undercurrents of cultural violence in the representational repertoire of Western modernity.In this innovative collection, a distinguished group of international authors dare to think psychoanalytically about the legacies of political violence and suffering in relation to post-traumatic cultures worldwide. Drawing on post-colonial and feminist theory, they analyse the image and the aesthetic in conditions of historical trauma from enslavement and colonisation to the Irish Famine, from Denmark's national trauma about migrants and cartoons to collective shock after 9/11, from individual traumas of loss registered in allegory to newsreels and documentaries on suicide bombing in Israel/Palestine, from Kristeva's novels to Kathryn Bigelow's cinema.

Concentrationary Memories has, as its premise , the idea at the heart of Alain Resnais's film Night and Fog (1955) that the concentrationary plague unleashed on the world by the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s is not simply confined to one place and one time but is now a permanent presence shadowing modern life. It further suggests that memory (and, indeed art in general) must be invoked to show this haunting of the present by this menacing past so that we can read for the signs of terror and counter its deformation of the human. Through working with political and cultural theory on readings of film, art, photographic and literary practices, Concentrationary Memories analyses different cultural responses to concentrationary terror in different sites in the post-war period, ranging from Auschwitz to Argentina. These readings show how those involved in the cultural production of memories of the horror of totalitarianism sought to find forms, languages and image systems which could make sense of and resist the post-war condition in which, as Hannah Arendt famously stated 'everything is possible' and 'human beings as human beings become superfluous.' Authors include Nicholas Chare, Isabelle de le Court, Thomas Elsaesser, Benjamin Hannavy Cousen, Matthew John, Claire Launchbury, Sylvie Lindeperg, Laura Malosetti Costa, Griselda Pollock, Max Silverman, Glenn Sujo, Annette Wieviorka and John Wolfe Ackerman.

In 1945, French political prisoners returning from the concentration camps of Germany coined the phrase 'the concentrationary universe' to describe the camps as a terrible political experiment in the destruction of the human. This book shows how the unacknowledged legacy of a totalitarian mentality has seeped into the deepest recesses of everyday popular culture. It asks if the concentrationary now infests our cultural imaginary, normalizing what was once considered horrific and exceptional by transforming into entertainment violations of human life. Drawing on the political philosophy of Hannah Arendt and the analyses of violence by Agamben, Virilio, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, it also offers close readings of films by Cavani and Haneke that identify and critically expose such an imaginary and, hence, contest its lingering force.

The great, influential cultural critic, Elisabeth Bronfen, sets out in this book a conversation between literature, cinema and visual culture. The crossmappings facilitated in and between these essays address the cultural survival of image formulas involving portraiture and the uncanny relation between the body and its visual representability, the gendering of war, death and the fragility of life, as well as sovereignty and political power. Each chapter tracks transformations that occur as aesthetic figurations travel from one historical moment to another, but also from one medium to another. Many prominent artists are discussed during these journeys into the cultural imaginary, include Degas, Francesca Woodman, Cindy Sherman, Paul McCarthy, Eva Hesse, Louise Bourgeois, Wagner, Picasso, and Shakespeare, as well as classic Hollywood's film noir and melodrama and the TV series, The Wire and House of Cards.

The notion of a special intimacy between 'the feminine and the sacred' has received significant attention since the publication of Julia Kristeva and Catherine Clement's famous ecumenical "Conversation" of the same name which focused on the relationship between meaning and the body at whose interface the feminine is positioned. Brought to the wider public as the 'sacred feminine', it has also made its mark on popular culture. Taking up the debate and moving beyond anthropology or theology, writers from varied ethnic, geo-cultural and religious perspectives here join with secular cultural analysts to explore the sacred and the feminine in art, architecture, literature, art history, music, philosophy, theology, critical theory and cultural studies. The book addresses key issues in feminist questions of creativity, the imaginary and the sacred as 'otherness', exploring the ways in which visual practices have explored this rich, contested and highly charged territory.

The 'theoretical turn' within the arts and humanities in the 1970s and 1980s has, for many, had its day, with work produced under its rubric all too often feeling tired or even downright lazy. In its place - whilst hazarding against an outright rejection of theory - this book, introduced by Mieke Bal, presents work by a new generation of scholars responding directly to Bal's idea of the 'travelling concept'. By taking a concept from one discipline and, with a genuine understanding of its origin, thoughtfully applying this in a new context, exciting new possibilities are opened up for analysis of artworks and other cultural objects. Here, we find these 'travelling concepts' employed in fresh explorations of subjects as diverse as the paintings of Poussin and of Adam Elsheimer; Chantal Akerman's film; the Museum of the French Revolution and the work of German Jewish painter Charlotte Salomon. This is a uniquely illuminating contribution to the edgy territorial conflicts between visual culture, art history and cultural studies.

Here is an important new examination of the work of American German Jewish artist Eva Hesse, one of the most significant figures in twentieth century art. Using exciting new feminist approaches and taking as her starting point two key works, Corby reveals the way in which Hesse has been constructed as a 'woman artist' and explores the overlooked legacy of the Holocaust and refugee life in her art practice. Considering creativity and the feminine, trauma and historiography, and providing a reassessment of Hesse's relationship with her mother and its impact on her work, the book also confirms the importance of drawing practice within Hesse's wider oeuvre.

If virtuality is being celebrated as heralding a radically new era, rich with new possibilities and futures hitherto unimagined through cybernetics, networking and digitalizaton, such claims are also being viewed with deep scepticism and countered by renewed interest in the groundedness and referentiality of the concept of the index. In this transdisciplinary book, major artists, filmmakers, film theorists, philosophers, literary critics, information theorists and cultural analysts examine the twists and turns of the contesting terms of virtuality and indexicality in contemporary cultural theory in relation to history, trauma, sexuality, textuality, anxiety, simulated lives, code, digital cinema, science fiction, and contemporary art. Antony Bryant, Juli Carson, N. Katherine Hayles, Anna Johnson, Mary Kelly, Brian Massumi, Claire Pajaczkowska, Griselda Pollock, Adrian Rifkin, Martha Rosler, Alison Rowley, Trinh T.Minha, Samuel Weber, and Paul Willemen, draw on concrete practices, ranging from film, video and chatrooms to airport spaces, conceptual art and textiles, to offer critically engaged, sometimes sceptical, analyses of contemporary image worlds in the light of a continuing allegiance to grounded histories and critical practice.

The tale of the serial wife-murderer Bluebeard, his defiant, and surviving, final wife, a bloodied key and a secret chamber of horrors, has fascinated writers, composers, artists and film-makers throughout modern times. It is a unique story that dares to disclose and explore masculine violence: the homme fatal. This transdisciplinary book explores the deep appeal of the Bluebeard story for twentieth-century culture. Its major focus is how the modernist imagination used the elements of Bluebearda??s tale to explore masculinitya??s anxieties in the face of the emerging demands of women for redefinition and sexual equality: anxieties also of ethnic and cultural difference, and fundamental disquiet about sexuality, pathology and violence in the masculine. With chapters by Maria Tatar, Elisabeth Bronfen, Mererid Puw Davies, Ian Christie, David Cooper, Michael Hiltbrunner and the editors, the volume undertakes cultural, contextual and musicological analyses of Bartoka??s opera 'Duke Bluebearda??s Castle', tracing Bluebearda??s evolution from Perrault in the seventeenth century to the cinematic hommes fatals of Melies, Fritz Lang and Hitchcock.The result is an intriguing kaleidoscope of sexuality, curiosity, violence and death.