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Added by: Hans Maes, Contributed by: Christy Mag UidhirSummary: Defines a portrait as a representation of a living being as a unique individual possessing (1) a recognizable physical body along with (2) an inner life. A third condition is that the subject consciously presents a self to be conveyed in the resulting artwork. Pictures of animals can meet the first two criteria, but not the third.
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Added by: Hans Maes, Contributed by: Christy Mag UidhirAbstract:
Sumary: Begins with a discussion of objectification, first at the cultural and social level, as investigated by Catharine MacKinnon, then at the personal level, as investigated by Martha Nussbaum. Freeland also considers what 'subjectification' might amount to and how portraits can either be objectifying or subjectifying.Comment: Useful in discussing portraiture and depiction, as well as the links between aesthetics and ethics, and objectification in general.Artworks to use with this text:
Lucian Freud, Naked portrait (1972-3)
he people in Freud's 'naked portraits' are not shown as active or autonomous, but rather as inert material things. Their boundaries are violated, says Freeland.
Mary Cassatt, Children Playing on a Beach (1886)
Portraying children as autonomous, distinct individuals with inner lives. Useful in discussing portraiture and depiction, as well as the links between aesthetics and ethics, and objectification in general.
Artworks to use with this text:
Lucian Freud, Naked portrait (1972-3)
he people in Freud's 'naked portraits' are not shown as active or autonomous, but rather as inert material things. Their boundaries are violated, says Freeland.
Mary Cassatt, Children Playing on a Beach (1886)
Portraying children as autonomous, distinct individuals with inner lives.
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Added by: Chris Blake-Turner, Contributed by: Christy Mag UidhirAbstract: Two assumptions are common in discussions of the paradox of tragedy: (1) that tragic pleasure requires that the work be fictional or, if non-fiction, then non-transparently represented; and (2) that tragic pleasure may be provoked by a wide variety of art forms. In opposition to (1) I argue that certain documentaries could produce tragic pleasure. This is not to say that any sad or painful documentary could do so. In considering which documentaries might be plausible candidates, I further argue, against (2), that the scope of tragic pleasure is limited to works that possess certain thematic and narrative features.Comment: This is a clearly written paper that can be used in teaching a wide array of topics in aesthetics, especially the literatures on emotional engagement with art, and documentary film. Friend does not presuppose much background knowledge on these issues. As such, this paper would make for an excellent addition to an introduction to aesthetics module, perhaps being used as a main reading for units on emotion and art. A more focused upper-division module on a subject such as philosophy of film could also benefit from this paper's inclusion.
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Added by: Ten-Herng LaiAbstract:
This paper argues that public statues of persons typically express a positive evaluative attitude towards the subject. It also argues that states have duties to repudiate their own historical wrongdoing, and to condemn other people’s serious wrongdoing. Both duties are incompatible with retaining public statues of people who perpetrated serious rights violations. Hence, a person’s being a serious rights violator is a sufficient condition for a state’s having a duty to remove a public statue of that person. I argue that this applies no less in the case of the ‘morally ambiguous’ wrongdoer, who both accomplishes significant goods and perpetrates serious rights violations. The duty to remove a statue is a defeasible duty: like most duties, it can be defeated by lesser-evil considerations. If removing a statue would, for example, spark a violent riot that would risk unjust harm to lots of people, the duty to remove could be outweighed by the duty not to foreseeably cause unjust harm. This would provide a lesser-evil justification for keeping the statue. But it matters that the duty to remove is outweighed, rather than negated, by these consequences. Unlike when a duty is negated, one still owes something in cases of outweighing. And it especially matters that it is outweighed by the predicted consequences of wrongful behaviour by others.Comment (from this Blueprint): This paper highlights several important things. First, statues are blunt tools and express pro-attitudes to the persons they represent as a whole. Second, it sets out a clear standard for removal, and defends the conclusion that we should remove many or even most existing statues. Third, to the question “what if removal incites violence?” this paper provides a good answer. Fourth, a legitimate question is what we should do about statues of wrongdoers of the distant past? The discussion on this here is insightful.
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Added by: Rossen VentzislavovSummary: Fusco's text chronicles the preparation, performance, and public reception of an artwork - "Two Undiscovered Amerindians" - she created in collaboration with Guillermo Gómez-Peña in 1992. The performance was intended as a critique of the contemporary artworld, whose shallow redemptive multiculturalism often sidelined important issues of racial difference and racialized aesthetic perception. It consisted of the two artists spending three days in a golden cage presented, in the manner of live ethnographic spectacles of the not so distant colonial past, as members of an exotic and newly discovered island nation in the Gulf of Mexico. Fusco contends that otherness is always performative and, as such, has held the entire history of performance art - from the Dadaists to the present day - captive. The resulting frequent gestures of appropriation, condescension and erasure discredit the social and intercultural consciousness most performance artists see themselves as representing. Ironically, the strange journey the "Two Undiscovered Amerindians" project has travelled has plentifully confirmed the iniquities the two artists set out to expose.Comment: While not a philosophical text per se, this article is very helpful in discussions of the political dimension of the contemporary artworld, and the race dynamics within it.
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Added by: Hans MaesSummary: Provides a close reading of formal portraits of people with disabilities. Focuses on the fundamental elements of traditional portraiture: frame, pose, costume, likeness. Central argument: a conservative representational genre can act in the service of a progressive politics. Through framing, pose, costume, and likeness portraits accord dignity, authority, and symbolic capital to disabled subjects.Comment: Useful in discussing portraiture and depiction, as well as empowerment and art's role in power relations in general.
Artworks to use with this text:
Doug Auld, Shayla (2005) Portrait of a black woman with significant burn scars
Compared and contrasted with Gilbert Stuart's portrait of George Washington (1810).
Sasha Newley, Christopher Reeve (2004)
Juxtaposed with earlier iconic portraits of the 'man of steel'.
Marc Quinn, Alison Lapper Pregnant (2006)
Powerfully asserting that a woman with significant disabilities who is evidently sexual, about to become a mother, is worthy of being seen on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square. Useful in discussing portraiture and depiction, as well as empowerment and art's role in power relations in general.
Artworks to use with this text:
Doug Auld, Shayla (2005) Portrait of a black woman with significant burn scars
Compared and contrasted with Gilbert Stuart's portrait of George Washington (1810).
Sasha Newley, Christopher Reeve (2004)
Juxtaposed with earlier iconic portraits of the 'man of steel'.
Marc Quinn, Alison Lapper Pregnant (2006)
Powerfully asserting that a woman with significant disabilities who is evidently sexual, about to become a mother, is worthy of being seen on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square.
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Added by: Zoé Grange-MarczakAbstract:
Published in French in 1990, this book is among the later conceptualizations of postcolonial and racial relations. Glissant is a novelist, and his attention to politics operates through an interest in linguistics: studying creole languages, he exposes how colonized people transformed the tool of the master, leading to the creation of a new, creolized culture and expression. He reads the long-term effects of the slave trade, where people were forcibly taken from their cultural and linguistic milieu an put in another one, characterized by an extremely violent relation of subjection. In this context, he elaborates the notion of antillanité, as a French West Indies description of the unpredictable linking and blending of cultures and languages, extending and specifying the idea of négritude found in Césaire and Senghor in the 1930s. This complex analysis leads to two seemingly contradictory concepts: first, his idea of opacity argues in favor of untranslatability and of irreducible yet non-hierarchical differences. Second, his poetics of relation leads to an understanding of identity as an extension of the connection to the other. From there, he sketches a new definition of culture, taking into account power dynamics, which is also a departure from the idea of authenticity or autochtony. Against a binary reading of colonialist relations of power, Glissant explores the formation of identities through the process of creolization, where a new language is invented as a mean of resistance, thus undermining any possibility for a pure, uniform identity.
Comment: Glissant's usage of poetic language, as well as the specific French colonial and postcolonial context might add difficulties to a book which which must be understood in its specificity—and, maybe, untranslatability. However, this particularity leads to Glissant's general philosophy of culture, allowing for a particularly original and thought-provoking viewpoint on social relations.
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Added by: Rossen VentzislavovSummary: Goldberg sees the human body in performance art as a transmitter of erotics, gender tensions, cultural norms and political deviations. While two of the notable early works of performance art featured fully clothed male artists using naked female bodies (Yves Klein's Anthropometries of the Blue Period from 1960 and Piero Manzoni's Living Scupture from 1961), the work of female artists like Shigeko Kubota and Yoko Ono addressed the gender imbalance soon after. Goldberg sees the recognition of the body as "prime, raw material" as one of the central accomplishments of performance art. Through numerous examples she demonstrates how this notion enabled a spectrum of physical signification - from regarding the human body as a mere lump of undifferentiated flesh to capitalizing on its biological intricacies. Because of the irreducible intimacy of shared bodily experience, all creative choices along this spectrum - from the disquietingly erotic, to the anachronistically ritualistic, to the viscerally sacrificial - have affected the way we see art and the world around us.Comment: This historical overview of the use of the human body in early performance art can be in any class on body aesthetics or performance art, and can offer an interesting background reading on erotic art.
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Added by: Rossen VentzislavovSummary: Goldberg provides a richly illustrated historical account of the intimate connection between identity and performance art. Starting from the feminist art of the 1960's, the recognition and assertion of identity was a fundamental bid for social visibility. The next frontier was social recognition, which concerned ethnic and sexual minorities as much as it did women. The final frontier - political equality - is one that is still out of reach. Still, according to Goldberg, performance art continues to chart new territories of identification. In fact, while at the outset performance art used early feminist writing as inspiration, Goldberg recognizes a gradual reversal - today's feminists are as likely to chart new philosophical directions as they are to follow the exploratory charge of their performance art counterparts.Comment: This text provides a historical background on the relationship between identity politics and art. It would be useful in classes on performance art, on the social context of art, as well as classes focusing on philosophy or race, gender and sexuality and ways to achieve social visibility.
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Added by: Chris Blake-Turner, Contributed by: Christy Mag UidhirIntroduction: The concept of artistic freedom, like that of academic freedom, is as potent as it is slippery. Its indeterminacy may in fact lend the concept some power, since it can be uncritically applied to many different kinds of situations involving artists and their creations. Philosopher Paul Crowther has observed that the prevailing conception of artistic freedom is essentially negative in character: it is based 'purely on the absence of ideological or conceptual restraint.' There is a widespread art-world intuition that the creative freedom of the artist should be given virtually absolute precedence in decisions about the creation, exhibition, and treatment of artworks. As a recent controversy involving Swiss artist Christoph Buchel and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MoCA) shows, the dominant conception of artistic freedom also entails freedom from financial and logistical constraints such as museum budgets and exhibition deadlines. In this particular case, the artist and his supporters argued that the museum violated his artistic freedom by attempting to display his unfinished and abandoned artwork against his wishes. As with the Tilted Arc controversy in the 1980s, this case raises provocative questions about the nature of artistic freedom as 'artistic' as it comes into conflict with the needs and interests of the institutions that pay for, exhibit, and, in Mass MoCA's case, construct the work.
Artworks to use with this text:
George Stubbs, Whistlejacket (1761-2)
Freeland disputes the image's status as a portrait partly because of how formulaic it appears.
Jill Greenberg, Monkey Portraits (2006)
The artist anthropomorphizes the animals, as is evident in the titles she chose for some of the works ('The Misanthrope', 'Oy Veh'). So, do they qualify as portraits? Freeland lays ground for a definition of portraits, offering a great introduction to the topic of portraiture, and representation in general. The text can inspire interesting discussions on the possible differences in depicting humans, animals and objects.
Artworks to use with this text:
George Stubbs, Whistlejacket (1761-2)
Freeland disputes the image's status as a portrait partly because of how formulaic it appears.
Jill Greenberg, Monkey Portraits (2006)
The artist anthropomorphizes the animals, as is evident in the titles she chose for some of the works ('The Misanthrope', 'Oy Veh'). So, do they qualify as portraits?