Pub Date : 2020-08-01DOI: 10.1177/1470412920944482
H. Holmes
Jesse Darling, a contemporary Berlin-based artist, produces sculptures, paintings, and drawings that animate material to depict a lived experience of queerness and disability. This article highlights a recent exhibition of Darling’s as an entry point to their wide-ranging practice. Refracted through the lens of Sara Ahmed’s concept of feminist ‘willfulness’, Darling’s objects depict the body as unruly, unpredictable, and given to change, making them exciting candidates for both disability and trans studies. At a moment in contemporary art and cultural production more broadly when gender-nonconformity is signaled through an attempt to erase bodily markers of specificity, Darling insists on such specificity as the inescapability of the human experience.
{"title":"On Jesse Darling","authors":"H. Holmes","doi":"10.1177/1470412920944482","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412920944482","url":null,"abstract":"Jesse Darling, a contemporary Berlin-based artist, produces sculptures, paintings, and drawings that animate material to depict a lived experience of queerness and disability. This article highlights a recent exhibition of Darling’s as an entry point to their wide-ranging practice. Refracted through the lens of Sara Ahmed’s concept of feminist ‘willfulness’, Darling’s objects depict the body as unruly, unpredictable, and given to change, making them exciting candidates for both disability and trans studies. At a moment in contemporary art and cultural production more broadly when gender-nonconformity is signaled through an attempt to erase bodily markers of specificity, Darling insists on such specificity as the inescapability of the human experience.","PeriodicalId":45373,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Visual Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2020-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1470412920944482","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44683012","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-08-01DOI: 10.1177/1470412920944490
S. Stryker
This short, first-person essay describes and briefly evaluates the life and work of the Russian–Hungarian trans-identified artist El Kazovsky (1948–2008). It principally focuses the author’s viewing of ‘The Survivor’s Shadow: The Life and Work of El Kazovsky’ – a massive, 19-room retrospective exhibition at the Hungarian National Gallery in 2015–2016. The author explores the paradox of El Kazovsky’s visibility as a nationally celebrated artist in a moment of extreme state-sanctioned queer-phobia, and the illegibility of his transness. It ends by suggesting that the practice of ‘surviving in shadow’ is increasingly necessary given the continued worldwide drift toward reactionary ethno-nationalist politics that are hostile to trans lives.
{"title":"Surviving in the shadow of the un/seen: on the paradoxical in/visibility of El Kazovsky","authors":"S. Stryker","doi":"10.1177/1470412920944490","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412920944490","url":null,"abstract":"This short, first-person essay describes and briefly evaluates the life and work of the Russian–Hungarian trans-identified artist El Kazovsky (1948–2008). It principally focuses the author’s viewing of ‘The Survivor’s Shadow: The Life and Work of El Kazovsky’ – a massive, 19-room retrospective exhibition at the Hungarian National Gallery in 2015–2016. The author explores the paradox of El Kazovsky’s visibility as a nationally celebrated artist in a moment of extreme state-sanctioned queer-phobia, and the illegibility of his transness. It ends by suggesting that the practice of ‘surviving in shadow’ is increasingly necessary given the continued worldwide drift toward reactionary ethno-nationalist politics that are hostile to trans lives.","PeriodicalId":45373,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Visual Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2020-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1470412920944490","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49120476","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-08-01DOI: 10.1177/1470412920944500
Stamatina Gregory
Medicalized and often surveilled shifts of the cancerous and/or trans body intersect in generative ways: metaphorical and material, symbolic and systemic. This piece discusses Patrick Staff’s (2017) video Weed Killer through an analysis of its source text, Catherine Lord’s essay ‘The Summer of Her Baldness’ (2003) along with prior queer and feminist explorations of cancer, disease, and pain, to build a transfeminist analysis of how the experience of cancer treatment reveals the constructedness of femininity as well as the ablism underlying binary gender systems. Staff’s work creates alignments and ruptures between sets of a potentially intersecting politics, which bear the weight of naturalized gender, pharmacological mediation, ‘passing’, and debility.
{"title":"‘I do not want to pass’: embodiment, metaphor, and world-making in Patrick Staff’s Weed Killer","authors":"Stamatina Gregory","doi":"10.1177/1470412920944500","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412920944500","url":null,"abstract":"Medicalized and often surveilled shifts of the cancerous and/or trans body intersect in generative ways: metaphorical and material, symbolic and systemic. This piece discusses Patrick Staff’s (2017) video Weed Killer through an analysis of its source text, Catherine Lord’s essay ‘The Summer of Her Baldness’ (2003) along with prior queer and feminist explorations of cancer, disease, and pain, to build a transfeminist analysis of how the experience of cancer treatment reveals the constructedness of femininity as well as the ablism underlying binary gender systems. Staff’s work creates alignments and ruptures between sets of a potentially intersecting politics, which bear the weight of naturalized gender, pharmacological mediation, ‘passing’, and debility.","PeriodicalId":45373,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Visual Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2020-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1470412920944500","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45181627","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-08-01DOI: 10.1177/1470412920941899
K.J. Rawson, Nicole Tantum
Marie Høeg, who lived from 1866–1949, was a Norwegian photographer and activist for women’s rights. In this photo essay, the authors feature six photographs depicting Marie Høeg in gender transgressive scenes. These photographs are a few of more than 30 that were recovered in the 1980s from a property where Høeg once lived with her female partner, Bolette Berg. Standing out from the traditional landscapes and portraits that were common for the professional studio of Berg & Høeg, these photographs provide a glimpse into Høeg’s playful self-expression at the onset of the 20th century. This photo essay explores not only the documentary value of these images, but also the important considerations of visibility, privacy, and the ethics of circulation that they elicit.
{"title":"Marie Høeg’s worldmaking photography: a photo essay","authors":"K.J. Rawson, Nicole Tantum","doi":"10.1177/1470412920941899","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412920941899","url":null,"abstract":"Marie Høeg, who lived from 1866–1949, was a Norwegian photographer and activist for women’s rights. In this photo essay, the authors feature six photographs depicting Marie Høeg in gender transgressive scenes. These photographs are a few of more than 30 that were recovered in the 1980s from a property where Høeg once lived with her female partner, Bolette Berg. Standing out from the traditional landscapes and portraits that were common for the professional studio of Berg & Høeg, these photographs provide a glimpse into Høeg’s playful self-expression at the onset of the 20th century. This photo essay explores not only the documentary value of these images, but also the important considerations of visibility, privacy, and the ethics of circulation that they elicit.","PeriodicalId":45373,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Visual Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2020-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1470412920941899","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47539931","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-08-01DOI: 10.1177/1470412920936572
Adela Kim
Joan Kee’s latest book Models of Integrity: Art and Law in Post-Sixties America may as well be considered the first foundational text in the field of art and law. Initially, this might appear as an overstatement given the sheer amount of literature on the intersection of the two fields over the past two decades. Indeed, excluding legal case books, one might recall titles ranging from Martha Buskirk’s The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art (2003) to the more recent anthology, Daniel McClean’s Artist, Authorship & Legacy: A Reader (2018). These books dutifully address how the continued reconceptualization of art in the postwar era went hand in hand with changes in the conflicting copyright and authorship laws around the world. Yet, if the existing literature remains stubbornly confined to the work of art, Kee’s book proffers a far more expansive approach by focusing on the contentions between art and law: namely, what unfolds when the two disparate fields are put in discomfortingly close proximity? What unexpected aspects might each field glean from the other?
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Pub Date : 2020-04-01DOI: 10.1177/1470412920906258
Brooke Belisle, Paul Roquet
Many of us are ‘over’ virtual reality (VR), even if it has yet to happen in the way we imagine it. Always about to arrive, VR has exhausted any sane sense of anticipation. To sustain itself, the enthusiasm that it sparks about what could be over the next technological horizon sometimes rebounds, instead, toward the past to rediscover historical precursors. Witness, for example, the unlikely resuscitation of the Viewmaster in 2015, using a smartphone as a very expensive, moving-image stereoscope.1 As popular interest waxes and wanes, VR seems to have always been around and to be always emerging, but never to have completely arrived.
{"title":"Guest Editors’ Introduction: Virtual reality: immersion and empathy","authors":"Brooke Belisle, Paul Roquet","doi":"10.1177/1470412920906258","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412920906258","url":null,"abstract":"Many of us are ‘over’ virtual reality (VR), even if it has yet to happen in the way we imagine it. Always about to arrive, VR has exhausted any sane sense of anticipation. To sustain itself, the enthusiasm that it sparks about what could be over the next technological horizon sometimes rebounds, instead, toward the past to rediscover historical precursors. Witness, for example, the unlikely resuscitation of the Viewmaster in 2015, using a smartphone as a very expensive, moving-image stereoscope.1 As popular interest waxes and wanes, VR seems to have always been around and to be always emerging, but never to have completely arrived.","PeriodicalId":45373,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Visual Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2020-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1470412920906258","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42648467","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-04-01DOI: 10.1177/1470412920904642
Sean Anderson
Perhaps it is best to dispense with a few necessary admissions. Selfimplicating, yes; a desire for the reader to temper their expectations, maybe. ‘Why is he writing this?’, you might ask (see one response below) deploying a concatenation of language(s) that are both inside and outside at the same time. Indeed. So much has yet to be written on the enmeshment of interiorities to be formulated within architecture. Yet within this call and response to an elegant densification of meanings in and around a collection of essays, of perambulations among spaces close and proscriptive, virtual and haptic, we find one who started thinking about this volume from the back to the front, a kind of delinquent recto–verso that has since become one intriguing mode by which to regard Brian Massumi’s challenging collection of essays, Architectures of the Unforeseen.
也许最好省去一些必要的录取。自私，是的；也许是希望读者能缓和自己的期望他为什么要写这个，您可能会要求（参见下面的一个响应）同时部署内部和外部语言的串联。的确关于建筑内部的相互关系，还有很多东西要写。然而，在这一呼吁和回应中，我们发现有人开始从后面到前面思考这本书，这是对一本散文集及其周围意义的优雅密集，对封闭和禁止、虚拟和触觉空间之间的探索，从那以后，布莱恩·马苏米（Brian Massumi）富有挑战性的散文集《不可预见的建筑》（Architectures of the Unpreseen）就成了一种有趣的模式。
{"title":"Review: Brian Massumi, Architectures of the Unforeseen: Essays on the Occurrent Arts","authors":"Sean Anderson","doi":"10.1177/1470412920904642","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412920904642","url":null,"abstract":"Perhaps it is best to dispense with a few necessary admissions. Selfimplicating, yes; a desire for the reader to temper their expectations, maybe. ‘Why is he writing this?’, you might ask (see one response below) deploying a concatenation of language(s) that are both inside and outside at the same time. Indeed. So much has yet to be written on the enmeshment of interiorities to be formulated within architecture. Yet within this call and response to an elegant densification of meanings in and around a collection of essays, of perambulations among spaces close and proscriptive, virtual and haptic, we find one who started thinking about this volume from the back to the front, a kind of delinquent recto–verso that has since become one intriguing mode by which to regard Brian Massumi’s challenging collection of essays, Architectures of the Unforeseen.","PeriodicalId":45373,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Visual Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2020-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1470412920904642","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44822281","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-04-01DOI: 10.1177/1470412920909990
Brooke Belisle
Google Earth VR (GEVR), released in 2017, claims to put the whole world within reach using virtual reality (VR). Relying on sensors that track a user’s position and gestures in actual space, GEVR suggests that users can experience its virtual Earth in the same way that they experience the real one: as a world they actively embody rather than a representation they examine from the outside. While GEVR conjures a dematerialized world, it also interrogates how what counts as a material world may always be suspended between embodied, technical, and aesthetic mediations. If ‘the whole world’ – which exceeds individual perception – can only be conceived through aesthetic logics, what do the particular aesthetics of GEVR tell us about the way our world is imaged and imagined today? What are the implications of the way it stages ‘worlding’ as a provisional, dimensional coordination? What does the disorienting experience it offers suggest about contemporary entanglements of perception and representation, body and world, the individual here-and-now and a global everywhere-at-once?
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Pub Date : 2020-04-01DOI: 10.1177/1470412920906259
Lisa Nakamura
Virtual reality (VR)’s newly virtuous identity as the ‘ultimate empathy machine’ arrives during an overtly xenophobic, racist, misogynist, and Islamophobic moment in the US and abroad. Its rise also overlaps with the digital industries’ attempts to defend themselves against increasingly vocal critique. VR’s new identity as an anti-racist and anti-sexist technology that engineers the right kind of feeling has emerged to counter and manage the image of the digital industries as unfeeling and rapacious. In this article, the author engages with VR titles created by white and European producers that represent the lives of black and Middle Eastern women and girls in Lebanon, Nairobi, and Paris. She argues that the invasion of personal and private space that documentary VR titles ‘for good’ create is a spurious or ‘toxic empathy’ that enables white viewers to feel that they have experienced authentic empathy for these others, and this digitally mediated compassion is problematically represented in multiple media texts as itself a form of political activism.
{"title":"Feeling good about feeling bad: virtuous virtual reality and the automation of racial empathy","authors":"Lisa Nakamura","doi":"10.1177/1470412920906259","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412920906259","url":null,"abstract":"Virtual reality (VR)’s newly virtuous identity as the ‘ultimate empathy machine’ arrives during an overtly xenophobic, racist, misogynist, and Islamophobic moment in the US and abroad. Its rise also overlaps with the digital industries’ attempts to defend themselves against increasingly vocal critique. VR’s new identity as an anti-racist and anti-sexist technology that engineers the right kind of feeling has emerged to counter and manage the image of the digital industries as unfeeling and rapacious. In this article, the author engages with VR titles created by white and European producers that represent the lives of black and Middle Eastern women and girls in Lebanon, Nairobi, and Paris. She argues that the invasion of personal and private space that documentary VR titles ‘for good’ create is a spurious or ‘toxic empathy’ that enables white viewers to feel that they have experienced authentic empathy for these others, and this digitally mediated compassion is problematically represented in multiple media texts as itself a form of political activism.","PeriodicalId":45373,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Visual Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2020-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1470412920906259","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46297775","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-04-01DOI: 10.1177/1470412920906261
G. Bollmer, K. Guinness
Jordan Wolfson’s Real Violence (2017) is a brief virtual reality (VR) piece that depicts the artist beating a man to death with a baseball bat. Wolfson uses the haptic possibilities of VR to rapidly induce nausea in the viewer, an act that both relies on empathetic aspects of VR simulation – ‘empathy’ here linked with its history in German aesthetic psychology as Einfühlung – and is a confrontational distancing that questions the politics of ‘empathetic’ immersion. Real Violence demonstrates how contemporary judgments of VR and empathy repeat debates from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, reinventing and emptying particular political/aesthetic strategies that have long characterized a strain of modernist art that uses the formal possibilities (and limits) of media in order to critique the very same possibilities (and limits). This article, through its discussion of Wolfson’s work, seeks to identify and inhabit the complex contradictions present in any discussion of empathy, transgressive confrontation, and the social function of art and VR today. It examines the limitations of immersion and emotional projection, along with the limitations of interpreting this work (and VR in general) as a means for enacting ‘progressive’ social and ideological change through the immersive, empathetic capacities of media. The article concludes by arguing that judgments of Real Violence (and the politics of ‘transgressive’ art more broadly) require assuming the will or intent of an artist who uses confrontation and transgression to ‘correct’ the experience of the viewer, which is something that cannot be assumed for either Wolfson or Real Violence, and rather his work is exemplary of emptying out the possibilities represented by both VR and critical aesthetic intervention.
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