Considering Connections
Jagiellonian University
Featured Cultural Paradox and Beyond Meaningful: A Case Study on “Book from the Sky” View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jun Zhang
This paper focuses on the Chinese artist Xu Bing’s artwork, “Book from the Sky”, which is related to the problem of confrontation with authority and the cultural significance of writing in Mao’s era, especially during the Cultural Revolution. This artwork is a changeable installation and a display of woodcut printmaking books with 4,000 pseudo-Chinese characters. Look further, however, a meticulously crafted challenge to the history, culture and unrest of the period from which the artist gathered his inspiration, is revealed; and to fully relate to the challenge the artwork poses, the viewers of the work are required to contest with the following three elements of its presentation. Firstly, the painstaking attention to detail is demonstrated in the process of creating and displaying the artwork. The main approach is the combination between the “real” book formation and the “fake” written language. Secondly, Xu’s thoughts and methods of making pseudo characters and binding books create nonsensical language, which challenges the prescribed cultural power and reflects the sacred religious/cultural significance of Chinese characters. Last but not least, the inspirations behind Xu Bing’s printmaking practice with Chinese characters, reflect his attitude toward counter-authority and working with objective nature, and art for the people. To conclude, a natural affinity for traditional Chinese culture is expressed in this work, while a rebellious, mocking stance is taken to deconstruct and restructure Chinese characters in an attempt to break free from the myth of character creation – the official power recognition and the framework of traditional cultural bondage.
Musicking and Mountain Ecologies: What Performance Tells Us About Ecology
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Timothy Cooley
Sustainable and resilient cultural processes, like sustainable ecosystems, require change. All life needs to adapt—even innovate—to survive. This paper shows some of the ways that musical practices have adapted over the past 150 years in the Polish Tatra Mountain region (alpine region of the Carpathian Mountains) in response to dramatic sociopolitical changes and a rapidly developing tourism industry. The musical practices both materially and sonically continue to change, yet the core performative values remain remarkably resilient and identifiably “traditional,” thus modeling a social system that values Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) as a flexible way of being. This study explores ways that TEK is remembered and still practiced in some performative traditions of the Tatra Mountains, thus allowing many regional Górale (mountaineers) to continue living thoroughly within the beautiful but unforgiving high Tatras and fully in the modern world. However, recent ethnographic research suggests that many related practices are losing material ties to local ecosystems as unique regional production technologies succumb to less-expensive global imports. This may be severing many of the ties to the ecology and the landscape—both of which have historically defined the region. I also ask how scholars of performance traditions might collaborative with environmental scientists to develop adaptive human-cultural practices and policies that are equitable and sustainable for all biological beings in the Carpathian and other delicate mountain ecosystems.
Elevating the Experience of Illness into an Aesthetic Experience: A Participatory Photography Project with Cancer Survivors in Singapore View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Marina Zuccarelli
In the three last decades participatory and community art, meaning the collective involvement of individuals in the art making process, has proliferated. This has coincided with an increased engagement in the social aspect of healthcare and awareness of the importance of support beyond the physical. This paper operates at the intersection of both and explores development and outcome of a series of participatory photography projects involving cancer survivors in Singapore. It focusses on processes, dynamics and on participants perspectives and motivations. Numerous studies on art and health demonstrate that art interventions provide patients emotional support and a space to express their struggle, often invisible to family and society. I have developed these fundamental findings further by focusing on the use of photography as a participatory practice to encourage communication and enrichment. Scholars such as Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, Margaret Iversen and Vilém Flusser, offer a conceptual framework considering photography as a medium intrinsically connected to the concepts of loss, vulnerability, trauma and unconscious. Building up in these considerations I relate the medium to the illness. I explore further the potential of photography to facilitate acknowledgement and expression of personal concerns through a specific image making process based on metaphorical representation of the illness and their concerns. This method aims to facilitate the personal narrative and generate empathy and understanding of the complexity of the illness experiences. Furthermore, I consider the role of the artist within a community care institution context and the factors to consider working with a vulnerable community.
Is There a Future for Motherhood? View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Doreen Saar
The arts move society to identify the social movements of the present as well as to help mold the future. While books like Jessica Valenti’s Why Have Kids? interrogate the myth of motherhood, critical theorists such as The Theorist’s Mother Andrew Marder in The Theorist’s Mother suggests mothers “constitute the defining limit of philosophy and critical theory.” Other theorists like Sophie Lewis in Full Surrogacy Now argues that the creation of children could be reconstituted through surrogacy. While these philosophers and critics argue the limits of motherhood, novelist and transwoman Torrey Peters places these philosophical positions into what she deems a “domestic novel” where “artistic form and politics could meet up. This paper refracts the ways in which Peters’ novel Detransition, Baby explores ultimate questions about the nature not only of the identity but of the social category of motherhood.
