Third Text
Issues
Volume 36, 2022
Issue 6
Number 179, November 2022
Piles of Bones: The Performance of Sovereignty through Reindeer Culling in the Subpolar North 535–557
Tessel Janse
Incorporating reindeer remains into haunting art installations, with ‘Pile o’Sápmi’, Máret Ánne Sara manifests how Norwegian forced culls impact Sámi autonomy. Mobilising the notion of animal colonialism, this article places Norwegian reindeer policy in a global history of colonisation through targeting animals upon which Indigenous peoples depend. Turning the gaze toward the North, it reads Sámi art and activism with Indigenous critique to examine how colonisation in Europe itself continues today. Whereas most interpretations stop at affirming Sara’s accusation of colonialism, this article argues that her work expands our understanding of it. ‘Pile o’Sápmi’ unveils the performative aspect of colonial sovereignty, whilst Sara’s insistence on centralising reindeer indicates an opportunity for postcolonial studies to decolonise its own anthropocentrism. Simultaneously, her work escapes the violence it bears witness to. Seen through the lens of Sámi aesthetics or ‘duodji’, ‘Pile o’Sápmi’ tends to localised interspecies ecologies and shows the value of art in doing the work of decoloniality.
Sensing History, Seeking Justice: Affect, Solidarity and Wake Work in Sasha Huber’s ‘Shooting Back’ and ‘Haïti Chérie’ 559–582
Kasia Mika
Sasha Huber’s ‘Shooting Back-Reflections on Haitian Roots’ portraits (2004) and the ‘Haïti chérie’ (‘Haiti, my beloved’, 2010) performance are multi-sensorial works which voice an incessantly reverberating call for justice and solidarity with the absent and silenced victims of past, and ongoing, violences – from Columbus’s 1492 ‘discovery’ and landing on Hispaniola; the Duvaliers’ dictatorship in Haiti; and the 12 of January 2010 earthquake that became a disaster. Taking Huber’s works as the starting point, the article explores the ways in which these wakeful pieces gesture towards an ambivalent repair and perform a form of justice against legal, epistemic and representational regimes of ‘un-visibility’. With each tak-tak-tak of the staple gun, the shining staples, or the contour of a snow angel, these works conjure a space of defiant care and Afro-diasporic solidarity, protest and presence, creating an alternative ‘archive of affect’.
Transwar Art in Japan 583–601
Namiko Kunimoto
This article focuses on the question of periodisations in Japanese art history through a consideration of the long-running careers of four successful but politically and aesthetically diverse artists: Domon Ken (1909–1990), Okamoto Tarō (1911–1996), Yoshihara Jirō and Katsura Yuki (1913–1991). The arc of these artists careers across the prewar, war and postwar periods upsets popular periodisations in Japan’s art history that assert the postwar as a time of rupture and renewal. My focus is meant to challenge this ‘postwar paradigm’ while elucidating these artist’s negotiation of ethics and plurality during drastically different political eras. How does a reading of their work reveal continuities before and after the war, and what are the political stakes of these continuities?
Burning the American Flag Before the World: Ecologies of Abolition and Demilitarisation in Hawaiʻi 603–629
Aaron Katzeman
Concentrating on contemporary art, visual culture and politics in Hawaiʻi, this article articulates a specific kind of abolitionist aesthetics that has ecology at its core and through which traces of a demilitarised futurity are interwoven. The work of anonymous collectives, artists and architects – including Hui Menehune, Tropic Zine, Jane Chang Mi, Drew Kahuʻāina Broderick and Sean Connelly – stretches abolitionism to consider the role US militarism in Hawaiʻi plays in maintaining and enforcing global capitalism, holding captive alternative ways of organising society and the possibility of an environmentally just future. Analysing experimental residencies, video work, socially engaged proposals and other public interventions produced in relation to movements for racial justice, demilitarisation and Hawaiian sovereignty, these projects offer the provocation that the US might have to burn before the world, both spatially – in terms of being visible for all to see – and temporally, a prerequisite to mitigating the worst of climate catastrophe.
Negotiating Offence of Fallist Proportion: Cecil Rhodes and the Removal of University of Cape Town’s Statue 631–650
Daniel Herwitz
The removal of the statue of Cecil Rhodes at the University of Cape Town in 2015, prompted by the student Rhodes Must Fall (RMF) campaign, represents a window into how questions of race, art and inequality intertwined as they played out some twenty-five years into South African democracy. Since RMF then turned to the artwork exhibited at University of Cape Town, finding in it a collectively degraded vision of blackness − even though much of it was created in support of the anti-Apartheid struggle − this interpretive mismatch then became central to the university’s conflict. The sense of offence felt by RMF over these artworks could, in all probability, not have been negotiated at the time, leading to the abstract question of how such offence might ideally be negotiated. About this, I introduce a dialogical notion, one involving reflection on the part of both parties: the offender and the offended.
Against and beyond the Museum 651–662
Alírio Karina
This article considers the role of museums in contemporary and past formations of imperial knowledge and power, and the consequences of this role for the questions of accountability and restitution that have gained new prominence over the past few years. Departing from the view that matters of repatriation and restitution should privilege the terms of collection, this article instead examines the problem of colonial inheritance for museum collections as a whole, and for the museum as an institution. Further, it argues that the museum is an institutional form lacking in contemporary justification. This article proposes that the project for those who seek to ‘decolonise’ the museum must be to end the museum, and to imagine, in its place, new ways of relating to matters of memory and identity.
THIRD TEXT is published in print and online by Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group