Revista de História da Arte

Return to Repair

Catherine Dormor — Sun, 31 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The re-turn, like the repair, is a disruptive act. It pauses Azoulay’s forward thrusting, carving out space in the present. In this, the return and the repair become co-agents for temporal relationships between past, present, and future. If we always configure that temporality with a forward motion, then we fail to consider ways in which the future influences that which is ahead of itself and we set it always in the service of its past. Positing an altered temporal framework based upon the repair allows us to consider a future that is a co-producer of knowledge, understanding, and community. Here I want to use the practice of textile repair – the mend – to consider ways in which we might return to future art histories and thus reframe what we can understand by reparation. Rupture and mend are borne out of violence and hold the parts in tension. Colonial notions of reparation are driven by an urge to hide this damage and thus fail to consider mending as productive, plural, vulnerable, and affective ways of being. Here I want to propose the rough repair as an artistic practice, what Jack Halberstam terms ‘murky resistance’ (Halberstam 2020: 2), a space of alternatives, sometimes counterintuitive and refusing. The rough repair gives us scope to think of reparation through material entanglements that are wrought through violent acts and actions. Repair becomes an ethical space in which questions of differential edges, power structures, and the formation of art histories can become a point of re-turn. The wound and reparation are inherently violent and physical actions, and they are destructive. Within an ethics of care, this violence becomes necessary and important for future art histories. In this essay, I want to use this artistic practice to propose ways in which art histories can be regarded and observed, and thus entreat that repairs and reparations should not be rendered invisible.

Minimalist intimacy and feminist materialism in the work of Charlotte Posenenske

Barbara Knežević — Fri, 29 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This paper presents a retrospective post-humanist and fematerial reading of the work of Charlotte Posenenske. This paper re-reads Posenenske’s work in relation to how a decentring of the human subject and artistic author in her Minimalist, fabricated, sculptural practice could be considered to extend an empathy to materials and allow for intimacy with objects; defined here as an amity, a kinship, a close reading, and consideration for objects and materials. The sculptural processes implicated by Posenenske, and her removal of the hand of the artist from her work not just in the production but also the installation and placement of the work, is radical. Posenenske’s work steps beyond the outsourcing of the labour of art to an anonymous factory worker in the case of the found object, or to a fabricator. Instead her work insists on a collaborative process not just in production but in the arrangement, configuration, and distribution of the artworks, that breaks down the hierarchies embedded in the production, reception, and circulation of art. Posenenske’s work is currently enjoying a revival and being correctly acknowledged for its radicality and importance to the history of Late-Modernist sculpture. This paper asks, what might Posenenske’s sculptural practice offer to the discourse of sculpture now in terms of notions of sculptural intimacy, and to a post-humanist, feminist ecological revision of female practitioners of minimalist sculpture?

‘La plus éclatante victoire coûte trop cher’: (des)continuidades de matriz clássica na arte produzida durante o reinado de Luís XIV

Diogo Lemos — Thu, 28 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

As is widely acknowledged, classical and mythological culture played a crucial role in constructing the “heroic” and military image of Louis XIV. Conversely, the second half of the Louis-Quatorzian government witnessed a paradigm shift, identified as the cause of the failure of art produced along these same formularies. Yet classical iconography never truly ceased to be instrumentalised but was rather astutely adapted to a new context of change. Focused on the iconographic and narrative decoding of a set of artistic objects associated with Louis XIV — respectively and recurrently linked with either the “first” or the “second” half of his reign — the main objective of this essay is to understand and contextualise the dynamics of interpretation, (re)adaptation, and continuity/discontinuity within classical artistic culture applied in this context.

Role-taking, role-making: the mask as a tool in David Wojnarowicz’s Arthur Rimbaud in New York

Frederico Rudari — Fri, 29 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Traditionally, theatre actors wore masks to embody individuals with no clear identity. Masks did not feature specific anthropomorphic qualities, leaving audiences free to imagine the malleable and anonymous characters between fiction and actual plausibility. In contrast, in the photographic series Arthur Rimbaud in New York by artist, writer, and activist David Wojnarowicz, the use of a Rimbaud mask seems to have an opposite intention, overlapping meanings and allowing spatiotemporal compression. Portraying the French poet in different contexts and activities, Wojnarowicz is able to interpret the notion of identity and belonging following a narrative that is fictional, biographical and collective, addressing queer histories and temporalities. This paper discusses the multiple possibilities that the mask represents in this work.

Adrian Paci and Immigration to Italy Centro di Permanenza Temporanea

Deborah Ruth Galante — Sun, 31 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This paper examines the issues of borders and migrants by closely analysing the artwork Centro di Permanenza Temporanea (Centre for Temporary Permanence) [2007] by Albanian-born artist Adrian Paci. CPT is a short video filmed in San José, California, not far from the US – Mexico border, which is fraught with issues of migrant influx. The work makes a pointed reference to institutions in Italy whose function is to detain illegal migrants and determine whether they remain in Italian territory or face expulsion. Paci’s video subtly yet powerfully denounces the ongoing treatment of specific groups of migrants at troubled borders and skilfully films near the US – Mexico border in California. This paper aims to explore how CPT illustrates, in parallel scenarios, the ongoing discriminatory process against migrants with ‘undesirable’ provenances.

Contributors

Sun, 31 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000