Cultural Complexities
Jagiellonian University
Visuality and Textuality: Chinese Text-art under Western Eye
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Lulu Ao
Towards the end of the 20th century, and in the early decades of the 21st century, the study of visual art is no longer confined to the field of image study, and the subject matter of text in works of visual art has attracted the attention of artists and theorists alike. Contemporary scholars and artists have explored the communicative potential of text-art since the late 1960s, such as the works by Joseph Kosuth (1945-) and the pioneer art group Art&Language, regarding it as a new type of contemporary art. Compared with western text-art research, very little study has been devoted to the picto-ideographic textual language of Chinese text-art, which was developed out of Western conception of contemporary text-art but is also distinguished from it. Major Chinese avant-garde artists, including Gu Wenda(1955-), Liu Yonggang(1964-), and Xu Bing(1955-), embraced this new concept from the Western sphere of contemporary art and brought it to contemporary Chinese art since the 1980s. This paper explores the unique characteristics of contemporary Chinese text-art by analysing its writing system and linguistic features from a Western point of view. It compares the use of text-art in Western and Chinese cultures, examining the similarities and differences between the two and evaluating the specific characteristics of Chinese text-art. Ultimately, it demonstrates that Chinese picto-ideographic text raises fundamentally different questions about the use of text in art.
Nowhere to Go-- Is American Pop Culture Committing Anomic Suicide?: A Durkheimian Analysis of American Pop Culture Today View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Karen Wood
Durkheim, the “Father of Sociology,” wrote several works that examine the tension between individual freedom and social regulation. In his seminal work, Suicide: A Study in Sociology, he developed a typology of suicide that explores the role that social forces play for individuals who commit suicide. The experience of “anomie” is one type of suicide whereby the individual experiences excessive freedom devoid of the necessary social regulation that not only governs our everyday lives, but actually serves to affirm our very identity by situating us within the social context. While Durkheim writes specifically about actual suicide, his work could be applied more broadly to social phenomena themselves, and pop culture is an excellent phenomenon for such analysis because it is both pervasive and relentless in its desire to tear down conventions. This paper examines the sociological functions of popular culture. While many of these functions serve society in the same way that art and myth serve our collective good, this paper argues that pop culture’s marriage to both technology and to consumer culture often catapult it into a frenzied state of absurdity and vulgarity. Far from examining, critiquing, or transgressing social norms for the sake of public debate or to keep authority in check, pop artists are themselves the culture makers, and, given that society is no longer pushing back, it is no wonder that the “boundary pushers” of today have nowhere to go. Their boundless freedom leads them to anomie and ultimately, their art to anomic suicide.
Art and Security: Speculative Bureaucracies
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Asko Kauppinen, Petra Ragnerstam
The study traces the imaginary of art and security in the works John Ruskin, Franz Kafka, and Kim Stanley Robinson. These writers share a concern with the relationship between art and security, which is intertwined with speculations about the role of bureaucracy. Ruskin, initially an art critic, became increasingly interested in cultural policy as his career progressed. His ideas on art and cultural policy were surprisingly attuned to the role of earth resources and their extraction and political uses. In particular, we examine Ruskin's public lectures on cultural policy, where he considers the entanglements of art and security through a reflection on the geological, material, political, and artistic aspects of iron. Kafka's reflections on art and security, on the other hand, revolve around modern urban problems of bureaucratic imagination and security, particularly in his short story "The Burrow." We read this story as a literary endeavor to re-imagine the role of security and the environment in bureaucratic city planning. In Stanley Robinson's works, we find speculative global environmental disaster bureaucracies that offer a way to understand the post-nation/urban politics of art, security, and the environment. The Science in the Capital trilogy, in particular, presents a refreshingly positive take on passionate bureaucracy, attempting to disentangle it from the nation-state focus, Kafkaesque individual crushing nightmares, and critiques of neoliberalism. However, it also brings us back to Weberian notions of rational bureaucracy, which now extend not only to individuals and populations but also to the earth system.
Navigating Queerness in Cultural Institutions: Documenting Freelance Performance-makers Experiences of the Workplace
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sarah Mullan
The Big Freelancer Survey seeks to capture the current experiences of the UK’s freelance theatre workforce, in addition to their working conditions. In 2022, the survey found that 53% of all respondents reported that they had witnessed one or more forms of harassment and/or discrimination in the past twelve months.’ Unfair treatment, sexism, bullying, and racism are explicitly identified in the final survey report as specific forms of harassment or discrimination encountered by participants. Despite increasing attention to the challenges of working as a theatre freelancer, and continued awareness of inequalities within the sector, the specific experiences of LGBT+/Queer individuals in this field remain conspicuously absent from academic research and industry reports. In this paper I argue that the arts industry, and theatre sector specifically, has a responsibility to understand the experiences of marginalized individuals working the arts and ensure there are supported in safe working environments. I will reflect on the development of my pilot research project Queer Institutions, which seeks to capture the experiences of queer freelance performance makers through an anonymous survey, one-to-one interviews, and the collation of existing policies and practices from theatrical institutions. The paper outlines project design and the challenges encountered in collecting data on personal experiences in the workplace. I also utilise the results of early data collection to document contemporary experiences of LGBT+/Queer individuals in the theatre industry and assert some of the ways in which the arts can be more inclusive and supportive of these theatre makers.
