Terry Smith. Art to Come: Histories of Contemporary Art. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2019. 456 pp.

2022 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 418-419
Author(s):  
Martha Buskirk
1995 ◽  
Vol 69 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 103-109
Author(s):  
A. James Arnold

[First paragraph]The Repeating Mand: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective. ANTONIO BENITEZ-ROJO. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1992. xi + 303 pp. (Cloth US$ 49.95, Paper US$ 15.95)Myth and History in Caribbean Fiction: Alejo Carpentier, Wilson Harris, and Edouard Glissant. BARBARA J. WEBB. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992. x + 185 pp. (Cloth US$ 25.00)Caribbean literature has been overtaken of late by the quarrels that have pitted postmodernists against modernists in Europe and North America for the past twenty years. The modernists, faced with the fragmentation of the region that hard-nosed pragmatists and empiricists could only see as hostile to the emergence of any common culture, had sought in myth and its literary derivatives the collective impulse to transcend the divisions wrought by colonial history. Fifteen years ago I wrote a book that combined in its lead title the terms Modernism and Negritude in an effort to account for the efforts by mid-century Caribbean writers to come to grips with this problem. A decade later I demonstrated that one of the principal Caribbean modernists, Aimé Césaire, late in his career adopted stylistic characteristics that we associate with the postmodern (Arnold 1990). The example of Césaire should not be taken to suggest that we are dealing with some sort of natural evolution of modernism toward the postmodern. In fact the two terms represent competing paradigms that organize concepts and data so differently as to offer quite divergent maps of the literary Caribbean.


2012 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 224-239 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Zepke

Felix Guattari was a modernist. He not only liked a lot of modernist artists, but his ‘aesthetic paradigm’ found its generative diagram in modern art. The most important aspect of this diagram was its insistence on the production of the new, the way it produced a utopian projection of a ‘people to come’, and so a politics whose only horizon was the future. Also important for Guattari's diagram of the ‘modern’ were the forces of abstraction, autonomy and immanent critique. Together these elements construct an artwork that is radically singular and separate, composed of a-signifying, a-temporal and invisible forces, sensations that go beyond our human conditions of possibility. In this Guattari's modernism must be understood as being quite different from his co-option by contemporary art theorists influenced by post-Operaist thought. Post-Operaism understands politics as ‘being-against’, a dialectical form of negation that finds its political condition of possibility in what already exists. Because such thought sees modern art as being entirely subsumed by the institutions and markets that contain it, art itself must be negated in order for aesthetic powers to become political. This has lead post-Operaist thought to align itself strongly with the avant-garde positions of institutional-critique and art-into-life, or ‘non-art’. Guattari's modernism takes him in a very different direction, affirming modern art despite its institutional enframing, because art is forever in the process of escaping itself. This makes modern art the model in Guattari's thought for politics itself.


Author(s):  
Anne Ring Petersen

The Conclusion briefly sums up the findings of the preceding chapters and points towards the future relevance of studies in contemporary art and migration. In continuation of the last chapter, it emphasises art’s ability to address difficult political and humanitarian issues related to the current refugee situation in Europe and the Middle East, which will undoubtedly continue to preoccupy the minds of people in these regions and elsewhere for many years to come.


2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 189-200
Author(s):  
Rabia Demir

Events such as illness, death, violence, and war deeply affect the life of the individual or the social structure and cause radical changes and traumas. In the historical process of art, it is seen that artists are not indifferent to traumas, on the contrary, traumas constitute the center of their work. This article examines how the letter is handled as a means of communication between the artist and the audience in contemporary artworks that want to face personal or social traumas. In this context, examples of contemporary art that want to be aware of the traumas experienced, to tell them, to come to terms with the past and to achieve improvement in the name of the future, and using the letter as a means of expression, are included. In these works, where the letter is used as a means of expression and communication, the writer, reader or listener changes; the letter is written/read/listened to by the artist or the audience. Thus, the audience plays an important role as well as the letter in the emergence and completion of the work. This, in turn, turns the works into an interactive space, allowing to face the past and to realize the trauma experienced.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document