Third Text
Issues
Volume 36, 2022
Issue 5
Number 178, September 2022
Art and Rebellion: The Struggle for Freedom and Autonomy at the Ljubljana 2020/2021 Protests 409–428
Petja Grafenauer & Daša Tepina
The aim of this article is to document, contextualise and theorise the rebellious actions carried out by artists in Slovenia in 2020–2021, and to present these actions as a continuation of the avant-garde movements of the twentieth century. We focus on the diverse actions and protests carried out by a strong alliance of artists, anti-capitalists, anti-fascists, ecological movements, and other civil structures that continue to challenge the oppressive autocratic powers. When art becomes confrontational, it fights for its autonomy and its production can achieve an aesthetic revolutionary potential. So when it demands the impossible, it fights for its space and position and becomes life itself, it becomes avant-garde. We could therefore say that the politics of aesthetics has a way of producing its own politics, proposing to re-arrange politics, re-configure art as a political issue or assert itself as true politics.
Mapping the Agency of Trash: A New Materialist Re-Reading of Contemporary Indian Art 429–454
Tanvi Jain & Shatarupa Thakurta Roy
In view of the growing concerns and innate creative potential of waste, this article reconsiders the ontological status of discarded materials and materiality as active components/agents in the conception, making and interpretation of art through a new-materialist framework. By denying a pure representational analysis, the study instead brings forth art’s complex, dynamic material-semiotic character. It offers a re-reading of the artworks of twenty-first century Indian artists by exploring multiple facets of how trash operates conceptually and physically. A nuanced understanding of the co-constitutive, relational role of myriad human and non-human actors is instantiated through case studies. By discussing the reappropriation of trash under three overlapping categories, where the artists apply trash as metaphor and symbol, relics and substance/physical matter (for its physical properties like texture, colour, etc), the study acknowledges the material-discursive character of art. Thus, the study offers an extended interpretation of materials and objects in art where meaning and material are mutually constructive.
Fugitive Aesthetics: Echoes, Ghost Stories and Refugee Cinema 455–476
Bruce Bennett & Katarzyna Marciniak
This article discusses four recently released refugee films: ‘Dolce Fine Giornata’, ‘Atlantics’, ‘Island of the Hungry Ghosts’ and ‘Life Overtakes Me’. It draws on a range of theoretical frames, including the work of Avery Gordon and Jacques Derrida on spectrality, in order to outline the original concept of ‘fugitive aesthetics’, the narrative and stylistic system that, we argue, underpins a wide spectrum of refugee films. While the majority of films about refugeeism typically place refugees centre-stage, our article focuses on the phenomenology of the effacement of this figure. In analysing these films in which refugees are at the margins of the narrative, we examine the ways that unresolved histories of migration, colonisation and enclosure irrupt traumatically into the present. Thus, this article draws out complexities of this field of highly politicised representation that are all too often overlooked in debates around the mediation and documentation of refugee experience.
Debating Neoconcretism: The Problem of Modernism as Identity 477–496
Renato Rodrigues da Silva
Neoconcretism was an international pioneer of ‘interdisciplinarity’, since its crossings of mediums and disciplines created original versions of participatory art, performance, installation art, process art, institutional critique, body art and environmental art. However, we must question whether this statement is valid throughout its history. Thus, this article investigates the ‘First Neoconcrete Exhibition’ – through the detailed analysis of the works presented in the exhibition, the positions taken in the catalogue and in the Neoconcrete Manifesto, and the debates in the national press – revealing the preponderant defence of art’s autonomy, which formalises an early modernist identity for the movement that contrasts with its legacy to contemporary Brazilian art. Eventually, the transition from this ideological position to the contemporary practice of interdisciplinarity was made possible by Ferreira Gullar’s art criticism, which was based on Ernst Cassirer’s notion of ‘symbol’, whose intrinsic relativism liberated him to positively receive new proposals.
Images That Sweat: On the Spectacular Realism of Lino Brocka’s ‘Macho Dancer’ 497–512
Manuel Ramos
This article revisits the cinema of the late Filipino filmmaker Lino Brocka in order to erode the distinction between realism and spectacle at play, still today, in many discussions about the political capacities of the moving image. The work of Brocka is understood here as both realist and escapist, in agreement with the work of other key non-Western filmmakers that work with anticolonial and Hollywoodian codes. The author focuses the analysis on the expressive amalgamation employed by Brocka in ‘Macho Dancer’ (1988) and argues that this film develops a poetics of sweat and liquidity opening up the spectatorial experience to unexpected intensities; intensities that invite us to think and feel more and to think and feel differently.
Borderscaping Hong Kong: Lo Ting and its Creative Agency 513–531
Selina Ho Chui-fun
Lo Ting, a mythical half-human and half-fish figure, has been appropriated by local cultural workers since 1997. Based on the 1998 exhibition ‘Hong Kong Reincarnated: New Lo Ting Archaeological Find’ and the film ‘Three Husbands’ (Fruit Chan, 2018), this article examines the creative agencies of Lo Ting from the perspective of ‘borderscaping’. The study affirms borderscaping as active signifying, discursive and affective practices that involve dynamic processes of adaptation, contestation or resistance in the subject-making of Hong Kong people. Set in two different contexts, post-1997 and post-2014, both productions have arguably sought a new form of becoming or belonging, and envisaged the Hong Kong/China border as something that can (or cannot) be crossed, interpreted and reinvented rather than passively inhabited. By offering new (geo)political-cultural imaginations, they have sought a new spatiality of politics, shifting from the rigid territorial spatialities of the nation-state to representing, negotiating and contesting the ‘where’ of the border.
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