Third Text
Issues
Volume 28, 2024
Issue 6
Number 191, November 2024
Profit Versus Civilian: Forensic Architecture, Neoliberal Culpability and the Art of Exposé 561–574
Kaitlin M Murphy
The question of how to meaningfully intervene in human rights atrocities and prevent their future occurrence is a pressing global challenge, one made more complicated by the pervasive, yet slippery nature of neoliberalism, which seems almost designed to engineer a sort of hopelessness or uncertainty about where, or how, to meaningfully intervene. This article focuses on ‘Triple Chaser’, the ten and a half minute-long creative investigative video that comprised Forensic Architecture’s contribution to the 2019 Whitney Biennial. Through analysis of how ‘Triple Chaser’ methodically builds a case for individual culpability and institutional accountability for neoliberal mass atrocity, the article explores the role of ‘creative interference’, museal complicity in transnational war profiteering, and the broader politics of neoliberal culpability and accountability.
‘An occasion of power’: Maud Sulter’s ‘Zabat’ as a Herstoriographic Intervention 575–596
Gabriella Moise
Maud Sulter’s ‘Zabat’ (1989), the collaborative photographic muse portraits, generated a discursive space for Black women’s empowerment in the late 1980s that Stuart Hall termed as ‘a moment of explosive creativity’. By employing the means of artistic reappropriation and re-enactment, Sulter could simultaneously challenge and redress the legacy of conventional notions, constructions and practices of colonial, Eurocentric and hegemonic (art) history. She reimagines history’s biases and falsifications to thematise Black women artists’ absence with the help of reconceptualising the figure of the muse as well as through the politically re-evaluative use of what Ariella Azoulay calls the ‘imperial shutter’, that is, photography, a deeply contested device of colonial subjugation. ‘Zabat’’s primary objective of inscribing and enframing Black women’s achievement in (art) history eventually becomes complemented with a story of resistance, an enunciative and empowering counter-history as a result of Sulter’s herstoriographic intervention.
Lygia Clark and Architecture: Constructing a New Geometry of Living 597–618
Vassiliki Tzanakou
Lygia Clark (b 1920), a key figure in the Brazilian neo-concrete art movement, is renowned for her geometric abstract paintings, interactive propositions and, later, her therapeutic psychoanalytic practices that challenged the established notions of the role of art. Despite her influence, Clark’s relationship to architecture is often overlooked by both architects and art historians. This article explores how architectural thinking traversed Clark’s work from the start of her career to the end of her life, enabling her to evolve her art from a means of abstract expression to dynamic corporeal propositions that fostered personal and collective change. Understanding this relationship is crucial for comprehending the full scope of Clark’s artistic legacy and her commitment to humanistic and democratic ideals.
The Local Made Global: Lessons from Contemporary Cuban Artists 619–636
Katherine Mato
Dissident artists in Cuba have historically been subjected to various modes of censorship, leading to innovative forms of circumvention. From a greater focus on more ephemeral modes of artmaking to the establishment of underground networks for the dissemination of protest art, many have been successful in developing careers as activist artists within Cuba and abroad. In dialogue with writings by Claire Bishop, Coco Fusco, Gerardo Mosquera and Chantal Mouffe, this article focuses on the emergence of alternative spaces established by Cuban artists across the island and internationally, with the alternative spaces within Cuba being those that are separate from the official spaces established or espoused by the government. Utilising alternative spaces established by Cuban artists as case studies, the analyses reveal nuanced understandings of sites as spaces of alterity and intervention while also expanding the possibilities of alternative spaces for contexts that extend beyond Cuba. Furthermore, this article introduces the concept of the Cuba Model, which considers the ways in which Cuban artists have adapted the grassroots approach to curatorship seen throughout the island's alternative spaces to larger institutions abroad.
Displacement and Repositioning of the Quotidian: ‘ROCI China’ and the Chinese Avant-garde Revisited 637–653
Sandy JS Zhang
‘ROCI China’, an art exhibition held in Beijing and Tibet in 1985, has been celebrated for its significant impact on contemporary Chinese art. Meanwhile, it has also been criticised for being a sign of American art imperialism and failing to communicate its meanings to Chinese audiences. However, the socio-political forces behind this impact-incomprehensibility duality of ‘ROCI China’ remain little understood. Therefore, this article aims to shed light on the raison d’être of the inherent displacement of Rauschenberg’s representation of the quotidian in 1985 China by scrutinising the exhibition in its original milieu. In addition, by examining Chinese avant-garde artist Wu Shanzhuan’s (b 1960) installation artworks that use everyday materials, this article contends that although the sociopolitical context of 1985 China disabled ‘ROCI China’ from articulating with local audiences, it empowered Wu to employ Rauschenberg’s concept and method of art for acute social expression and criticism from within the Chinese society.
REVIEW ESSAY ‘Komar and Melamid: A Lesson in History’: A Lesson in Dialectics 654–676
Marc James Léger
This article reviews the catalogue produced in conjunction with the 2023 retrospective of the work of the Russian artists Komar and Melamid at the Zimmerli Art Museum in New Jersey. It is credited for providing a thorough appreciation of the work of the artists, which since the 1980s has tended to be limited to their Nostalgic Socialist Realist paintings. The critical strategies developed by Komar and Melamid, which are defined here in relation to a Lacanian ‘Discourse of the Analyst’, not only distinguish their work from their fellow nonconformist compatriots but also allow us to appreciate how their work escapes efforts to frame their practice in ways that would be subservient to NATO designs against Russia since the Maidan Uprising and the invasion of Ukraine. Komar and Melamid’s conceptual eclecticism is related to a ‘dialectic of Enlightenment’ that can be found in the artists’ humorous recuperation of Jewish mysticism.
The Social Form of Contemporary Art’s Autonomy 677–691
Josefine Wikström
The aim of this article is to construct a concept of contemporary art's autonomy specific to the period of the past three to four decades understood as contemporary global capitalism. It does so first by demonstrating how the notion of autonomy, in Western philosophy, is historico-philosophically tied to the notion of form in the individual artwork. Secondly, it makes a close reading of Adorno's understanding of form as sedimented content and makes a critique of it through his reading of Marx and the latter's understanding of value in capitalism as a social form. Adorno's notion of the artwork's autonomy as sedimented content is, in the article, transformed into the artwork's autonomy as social form and put in dialogue with more recent thinking on the current state of contemporary capitalism. The conclusive argument is that contemporary art's autonomy is not threatened but conditioned by contemporary capitalism's stagnant and crisis-ridden state.
Presenting Absence: A Conversation, Berlin, March 2022 692–708
Khaled Barakeh, Brigitte Herremans, Anne-Marie McManus and Guevara Namer
This conversation records encounters held in 2021 and 2022 between Berlin-based artists from Syria – Guevara Namer and Khaled Barakeh – and two scholars, Anne-Marie McManus and Brigitte Herremans. The conversation critically explores a European context that since 2015 has asked Syrian art practitioners to express themselves through war and refugeehood. Reflexively attentive to academia's complicity in these power dynamics, the conversation dwells on artists' frustration with being asked to speak as symbols of Syria, the latest in a line of Orientalised archetypes of Middle Eastern war for media consumption. As the participants dwell on different forms of absence in art, politics, media and society, they point to the fragmented and plural nature of Syrian artistic communities in Europe today. Overall, the conversation calls for the recognition of Syrian practitioners' ‘epistemic agency’ in the creation, circulation and reception of their art.
THIRD TEXT is published in print and online by Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group