The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics

Introduction

Maja Bak Herrie, Tobias Dias — Thu, 19 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0100

Skeptimentality: The Square and the Aesthetics of Complicity

Devika Sharma — Thu, 19 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0100

In this article, I offer the notion of “skeptimentality” as a framework for thinking about the strikingly transmuted character of the noble moral sentiments (sympathy, empathy, benevolence, compassion, care, and pity) in the privilege-sensitive public culture of contemporary Scandinavia. Skeptimentality is my term for the sense that there is something morally embarrassing about the moral sentiments. I bring into play insights from feminist studies of sentimental sympathy as mediating factor in gender, race, and class-relations in order to highlight the extent to which skeptimentality differs from sentimentality and the aesthetic of sympathy we associate with it. The latter part of the essay develops further the notion of skeptimentality through an analysis of Swedish director Ruben Östlund’s award-winning feature film The Square (2017). As an aesthetic mode, skeptimentality has its own tropes, which often take an explicitly critical position on sentimental ones; it is, I submit, an aesthetic not of sympathy, but of complicity.

Aesthetics and Politics of Waste: Rejects in Consumer Society's Distribution of the Sensible

Lorenzo Gineprini — Thu, 19 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0100

Most critical studies of consumerism denounce the deceptive images produced by commodities, but what happens when consumer goods are rejected as waste? Instead of considering garbage disposal as a merely technical and hygienic issue, this article investigates the “aesthetics of disappearance” of waste. The structural reasons for the invisibilization of waste and the political effects of its manifestation will be analyzed through Jacques Rancière’s notion of “distribution of the sensible.” The central thesis is that material consumer culture, based on a continuous process of devaluing and replacing items, needs organizing the perceptual field to make waste disappear and thus create the illusion that, once discarded, an object vanishes. Therefore, making waste visible is interpreted as a rapture of the normative configuration of the sensible, disturbing habitual modes of experiencing and signifying reality. This hypothesis is investigated through a paradigmatic artistic work: Matta-Clark’s Garbage Wall (1970). The American artist exposes waste in the public space to challenge the established distribution of spaces and functions in the urban context, displaying waste’s stubborn resistance to the imperative to disappear.

The View from Above and its Counter-Appropriation

Hauke Ohls — Thu, 19 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0100

The term “view from above” does not merely describe an aerial perspective using digital technologies. According to Macarena Gómez-Barris, it is an extractive and neoliberal tool for transforming territories into areas to be exploited. In contrast, she introduces “submerged perspectives,” which can always be found in these territories and are characterized by relations on the ground. An argument based on opposites should always make one suspicious, especially when considering contemporary artistic practices. This article demonstrates that contemporary works of art can unleash the critical potential of the view from above. Two works, one by Carolina Caycedo and the other by Forensic Architecture, are analyzed to demonstrate a substantial expansion of the view from above. Contemporary art has the capability to counter-appropriate a supposedly hegemonic instrument and, thus, offers the possibility of rejecting constructed and abstract dichotomies.

Performing Profiling: Algorithmic Enunciation, Transgender Perspectives, and Ada Ada Ada's in transitu

Søren Bro Pold — Thu, 19 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0100

What kind of reading and viewing space is created within contemporary platforms? While existing research has explored the impact of surveillance, this article moves on to theoretically discuss the intersection of technosocial reading. It examines how algorithmic interpellation and profiling function as enunciative strategies, and how this is explored from a transgender perspective. The article raises theoretical questions about the flattening of enunciation and its implications for a critical reading and observation space. To further explore these concepts, it analyses Ada Ada Ada’s year-long in transitu Instagram performance. Through this analysis, the challenges posed by fixed, binary gender categorisations prevalent on platforms like Instagram are unpacked. Ada Ada Ada’s performance serves as an imminent criticism of the enunciative, representational and gender policies of platforms, demonstrating their arbitrary and absurd nature. Ultimately, in transitu invites platform users to reconsider their roles as technosocial readers and observers.

Butoh and Embodied Transformation

Max Liljefors — Thu, 19 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0100

The Japanese avant-garde dance form butoh, founded by Hijikata Tatsumi in the late 1950s, is known for its marked physicality. The choreographic methodology of butoh, however, is not focused primarily on instructing the dancers how to move their bodies. Instead, the dancers work with verbal and mental imagery to transform into butoh-tai, the “butoh body,” a special form of embodiment from which the dance is thought to unfold as its external manifestation. I propose that this is an aesthetic process that can be explained by a combination of theories from empirical and philosophical aesthetics, about empathy, embodied simulation, and the body schema. These theories, which hypothesize an inner, neural body at work in the aesthetic experience, shed light both on the crucial role of imagination in butoh, and on a potential for transformation inherent in the aesthetic experience per se.

Machines of Articulation: Reading Politics through Aesthetic Operations

Daniela Agostinho, Anders Engberg-Pedersen, Jussi Parikka — Thu, 19 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0100

This article is articulated in three voices of scholars who have worked on questions of war, visual culture, and contemporary political aesthetics that also relates to art and film practices. Media theorist Jussi Parikka, literary scholar Anders Engberg-Pedersen, and visual culture researcher Daniela Agostinho address the relations between images, aesthetics and operations through the lens of two books published concomitantly, Parikka’s Operational Images: From the Visual to the Invisual and Engberg-Pedersen’s Martial Aesthetics: How War Became an Art Form. Both books expand the scope of what Czechoslovakian-born filmmaker Harun Farocki termed “operational images” in his experimental documentaries and theoretical writings from the early 2000s. Through his analyses of the politics of imagery in the military-industrial context, Farocki notably defined “operational images” as images that do not depict or represent but rather perform tasks such as tracking, surveilling, detecting, and targeting. For both Parikka and Engberg-Pedersen, Farocki’s central concept of operational images forms a point of departure for writing media archaeologies of the present. In a three-voiced dialogue, the authors unfold operations as a “machine of articulation,” a conceptual and analytical device that reveals surprising linkages and frictions across different themes, techniques, scales, and historical periods.

Emmanuel Levinas's Aesthetic Consciousness

Jussi Pentikäinen — Thu, 19 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0100

Emmanuel Levinas is widely known for his polemical stance towards art. Especially in his earlier writings in the 1940s, he famously calls into question its ethical potential. In this article, I analyse some of Levinas’s early writings in order to answer the following questions: How does Levinas understand the nature of art, and how does this understanding allow him to criticise it, often in harsh terms? I turn to Hans-Georg Gadamer’s concept of aesthetic consciousness, which I argue shares similarities with Levinas’s stance on art. I argue that re evaluating Levinas’s stance allows one to tackle topical issues of aesthetics from the viewpoint of his ethical philosophy. Through showing how Levinas’s aesthetic consciousness hinges on a problematic relationship between conceptual truth and art, and through emphasising the role of criticism, I suggest that Levinas’s thought can be utilised in approaching contemporary questions of the autonomy of art and aesthetics.

Diaphenomenology: A Media Theory of Appearing

Aurora Hoel — Thu, 19 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0100

Cybernetics Everywhere

Maxime Boidy — Thu, 19 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0100

Note on Contributors

Maja Bak Herrie, Tobias ¨Dias — Thu, 19 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0100