The Economy of Appearance
City of the Spectacle and Urban Détournement: The Image as a Contested Site within Capitalist-Urbanism
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Amy Melia
The city is no longer the politico-industrial zone of production. Rather, the post-industrial city is principally, a crucial locus of late capitalist spectacle. It is a spatial extension of the spectacular "image-commodity" – a veritable "empire of signs" (Baudrillard, 1976). In the late capitalist city, corporate imagery and its compelling "sign-values" proliferate every available space and mediate social relations. In the context of this shift in the city model, this paper examines instances of contemporary art, which operate within the city's ubiquitous visual realm, counteracting its "economy of appearances" (Debord, 1967). This paper’s overarching aim is to demonstrate how Situationist concepts of "spectacle" and "détournement" may be repurposed to critically analyse visual contemporary art whose production has been shaped by the conditions of the "urban spectacle" (the spatial manifestation of a capitalist economy in which social relations are no longer primarily mediated by commodities, but by images). This study demonstrates how the image is a contested site within the West’s capitalist-urbanism nexus. The image acquires a dialectical status – it is a locus of capitalist spectacle, but also a conduit for contemporary art’s urban post-Marxist critiques. This paper’s objective is to challenge contemporary art’s presumption that visuality must be rejected in favour of an "aesthetics of action" in order to prevent reiterating capitalism’s "economy of appearances." The research presented argues that, in the Western capitalist city, visual contemporary art does not have to reinstate the spectacle, but can arguably function as an effective method to counteract it.
Over the Image: Own, Steal and Repeat in Contemporary Painting
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Domingos Loureiro, Sofia Torres
Gerhard Richter and Luc Tuymans resort to the appropriation of images from different sources as the basis for their paintings, promoting a discussion of the concept of figuration and representation. However, some artists, such as Sandra Gamarra, Martinho Costa, Richard Prince, focus their practice on processes of appropriation not only of images, but of images of other artists' works. In this situation, it is not a process of reflection on the concept of representation, but on the concept of authorship, where nothing that seems to be in reality. So how do we proceed to understand these new images as an image-another, with its condition of legitimacy and authenticity? This communication intends to analyze how the appropriation processes become images-others when compared with their referents. In this way, the images and their authors, or usurpers, become a new concept, legitimating in action and artistic content, something that, at first, would be derogatory.
