The Artivist
Art as Philosophy and Social Critique: The Erotic Self-Portraits of Joan Semmel
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Carol Gould
This paper shows how Joan Semmel’s work destabilizes the spectator’s expectations of the female nude and pose a challenge to the artworld and the broader culture. John Berger famously claims that men act and women appear, a situation reinforced by Western visual culture, particularly Western painting. Women, on his analysis, thus exist in what W.E.B. DuBois would call "double-consciousness." Almost fifty years after Berger’s work, women are still seen as bodies lacking agency--years during which men, too, have become anxious about their desirability and women have ascended economically and socially. What about older women? They do not appear, because they are invisible (unless they live in the stratosphere of power and prestige). Phenomenologically, one who has defined herself through the male gaze would no longer feel an object of desire. Thus, to occupy an aging body would be traumatic. As with any trauma, one must repress or displace it. Remarkably, however, some contemporary women artists have directly confronted aging through nude self-portraiture. For example, photographer Sarah Bloom photographs herself nude in abandoned buildings. Her photographs reflect her grief over the loss of her once-nubile identity. In contrast, some women painters, such as the noteworthy Alice Neel and Joan Semmel, have unapologetically given us self-portraits that depict their aging and aged bodies. Semmel’s work is especially commanding because by eroticizing her own aging body, she subverts some lingering social and artistic values. The fineness and originality of Semmel's oeuvre show that Berger is right about the rhetorical power of visual representation.
Artisting Society of JR: An Approach to His Influence on Contemporary Society
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Luis Alcalá Galiano
It goes without saying that, within the most recent decades, what has been called contemporary art remains to be unsorted. But what happens if the focus lies on so-called urban art? Sometimes the classification becomes even more blurred. This paper aims to bring to light the (artistic or not so artistic) production of JR (Paris, 1983) and pursue the discussion itself about whether the social label applied to any artistic production precedes the very essence of art. Neither it would be fair nor possible to talk about JR and his art without bringing up both the "artivist" and "artivism" concepts with all their possible implications in one sense as well as in the other. Are we dealing with a societal interference in art? Or, on the contrary, has art decided to radically intervene in society?
From Blues to Holy Hip Hop: Using the Marginalized Perspective to Promote Diversity and Inclusion
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Aminata Cairo
Diversity and Inclusion are common themes these days from the workfloor to our academic institutions. There is a common awareness now about unequal relationships and unequal chances that people are trying to address through all kinds of initiatives. These initiatives are well thought out and well researched. Yet they are ineffective and/or failing. Cairo will present a theoretical approach towards inclusion work based in the Blues Aesthetics and Holy Hip Hop that is being developed, but is already showing a more realistic and effective approach. This theoretical approach comes forth out of Indigenous Knowledge, an approach to knowledge that honors local, cultural perspectives and the appreciation of (spiritual) relations at the core of its foundation, among other factors. This theoretical approach also validates the need for the arts as an essential tool for bringing about transformation and cultural change.
The Art of Making Public: The Politics of Participation in Participatory Art Practices
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Siebren Nachtergaele
In recent years, many art practices develop at the intersection between the ‘social turn’ (Bishop, 2012) and the ‘spatial turn’ in the arts (Lehnert, 2011; Papastergiadis, 2010), with participation as a central constitutive element. Participatory art is quite often seen as a radical democratic practice (Kester, 2011), or as an answer to social alienation (Gruber, 2013) and polarization in the society, with a clear social goal (Bishop, 2012). But are these practices really democratic and pluralistic, or rather an instrument as part of a policy agenda, towards privatized public space, gentrification and consensual politics (Courage, 2017:24)? Discussions about inclusion and exclusion (Bell, 2017), cultural democratization versus democratization of culture, and between the individual and the collective are central in these practices (Deceur et al., 2016). In our presentation, we will explore how we can describe the social impact of participatory art practices in Flanders (Belgium). This should be understood as describing the individual and collective meaning-making processes of the practice instead of measuring assessments in terms of social effectivity. On the one hand, we focus on the socio-cultural processes, developed by artists together with participants, and on the other hand, we map the impact on the community and the broader society. In this research project, a multiple case study is set up, by using ethnographic research methods. In this presentation, we will present the provisional findings of the first part of the research, namely the results of the literature study and the first depth-interviews with key informants in the field.
