Third Text
Issues
Volume 35, 2021
Issue 3
Number 170, May 2021
Trashing Scale: Distributed Agency, the Afterlife of Commodities and Animism in Contemporary Art 317-340
Alberto López Cuenca
This article provides a conceptual and historical approach to frame the recurrent use of animism in contemporary art and theory. It calls attention to the ‘anthropological turn’ that took place in the 1980–1990s that characterised objects and artworks as agents, and revise the notion of the ‘socialist object’ to define the kind of agency commodities have achieved in late capitalism. It argues that the current interest in new forms of agency can be related to an animistic object resulting from the overlapping of flexible commodities and diffuse things: garbage. Pollution and waste are generating unpredictable kinds of agency that are engulfing humans in unprecedented assemblages. The article specifically focuses on how two artistic projects – Adriana Salazar’s ‘The Animistic Museum of Texcoco Lake’ (2018) and TRES art collective’s ‘Ubiquitous Trash’ (2016) – engage with different notions of animism and trash in their devising of experimental post-humanist scales.
The Aestheticisation of Late Capitalist Fascism: Notes for a Communist Art Theory 341–354
Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen
Picking up Walter Benjamin’s analysis of German Fascism as an aestheticisation of politics, this article develops the concept of late capitalist fascism for which aesthetics plays an important role. Today fascism is not primarily a political force but a cultural phenomenon that circulates as language, emblems and objects. Because of its history fascism does not dare name itself as such, but fascism is fast becoming part of everyday life in a number of countries, including Hungary, Italy and the United States – but also France and Denmark, where the threat of fascism is used as a pretext for imposing fascist measures, especially in relation to immigration and asylum policies.
The Aesthetic Surveillance of Performance Art by the Romanian Securitate in the 1970s and 1980s 355–372
Caterina Preda
This article discusses the specific case of the surveillance by the Securitate, the Romanian secret police, of artists who engaged in performance art (body art, action art, live art) during the last two decades of Romanian communism. Building on Cristina Vătulescu’s concept of ‘police aesthetics’ and Mogoș and Berkers’s ‘mechanisms of control’, this article analyses the aesthetic surveillance by the Securitate and the different strategies to prevent problematic art that it employed towards performance artists, ranging from control, discouragement, and the support given to complying artists. Through a close reading of the files by the Securitate of three artists – Alexandru Antik, Imre Baász and Wanda Mihuleac – I show performance art was considered as having an ‘interpretative’ or ‘hostile content’, depending on the status inside the regime of the artist who practised it.
Women’s Action Cinema in Pakistan: Fighting Bodies and Arts of Difference 373–387
Esha Niyogi De
This article examines the ambivalent aesthetics of Urdu action heroine films directed and produced by the female star, Shamim Ara, and promoted in their day (the 1980s) as a cinema for women. Released under the Islamist military regime of Zia-ul-Haq, these films draw on action genres from elsewhere, thanks to rampant video trade/piracy. Historians dismiss such films as exploitative and escapist. A close look at the arts of depicting fights and choreographing female movement on screen reveals, instead, a tendency to arrest the exploitative sexualisation typical to action heroine cinema worldwide. I argue that these female-focused arts were pleasurable to a non-liberal Pakistani women’s culture riddled at this time with violent censorship. The female and male bodies on the Ara action screen interact in paradoxical ways with both the masculinist Pakistani state and with global genres that fetishise the aggressive female body and sexual violence.
Gender and Performativity in Xing Danwen’s East Village 389–410
Yu-Chieh Li
This article contextualises Xing Danwen’s role in creating the posed photography of Ma Liuming from 1993 to 1995, the canon of East Village performance art in China, and how this experience prompted her to reflect on gender issues in later works. I compare similar shots of performance work by Rong Rong and Xing Danwen and discuss the role of a gendered power structure in the making of a performance art canon. These images have been received as documentations, yet it was through dialogue with the camera and two genders that Ma and Xing developed their unique paths to performance art and conceptual photography in the 1990s.
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