Documenta 11 Platform 5

At the start of the twenty-first century, the contemporary implies a clear desire to affirm a type of art that is expanding across the globe, challenging old geographical borders, and reclaiming narratives of place and displacement; in other words, new cultural practices that transfigure the relationship between the global and the local, and articulate the discourse of difference. Being in the place of here and now, working with others in simultaneous and specific practice, and contemplating the production of work in the experience of connection means raising the value of the performative aspect of practice and displacing the reflective role of cultural production. In the new cartography of this multifarious global art, the author, who combines theoretical and curatorial discourse with creative practice, defines how global concepts circulate from the critical analysis of transnational contemporary art to the global.

This thesis argues that the contemporary artist's objective is the production of new social space and the institution of new cultural knowledge. It does this by drawing an unexpected parallel between the social and political expectations facing the contemporary artist and the deepest philosophic conception of the artist's function. It traces art's historical trajectory from 20th century modernism, post-modernism to post-colonialism, from a broad range of critical, theoretical and curatorial perspectives.

With increased mobility and transnational interaction worldwide, internationalism in contemporary visual art is no longer exclusively a western issue. Contemporary visual art includes works by expatriate artists who have settled in the west, as well as artists outside the west reflecting on everyday events in a globalized world. Peripheral Insider examines the conditions of expatriate artists from various angles: the historical and colonial roots of the issue, positions among theorists dealing with expatriate artists in the west, the role of established art institutions, and examples of recent developments in the field. Peripheral Insider argues that expatriate art or internationalism in visual art is a phenomenon with a specific history, closely related to colonial and post-colonial experiences. The contributors elucidate the book's main theme on various theoretical levels and set forth their analyses of a number of issues relevant to new interpretations of "the post-colonial agenda."

The poor economic performance of some African countries since independence has been a major concern to both African leaders and policy makers. This volume, which draws together contributions from academics based in Africa and its diaspora, situates the continent within its historic and socio-political background: from the 1960s, the decade of independence, through to its development outlook as the new millennium unfolds. It examines a broad range of contemporary issues -- from development and culture to linguistics and is unique in identifying and examining issues that are common both to Africa and the diaspora.

Shooting the Family, a collection of essays on the contemporary media landscape, explores ever-changing representations of family life on a global scale. The contributors argue that new recording technologies allows families an unusual kind of freedom—until now unknown—to define and respond to their own lives and memories. Recently released videos made by young émigrés as they discover new homelands and resolve conflicts with their parents, for example, reverberate alongside the dark portrayals of family life in the formal filmmaking of Ang Lee. This book will be a boon to scholars of film theory and media studies, as well as to anyone interested in the construction of the family in a postmodern world.

Contemporary art exhibitions appeal to cognition as well as the senses, modeling a new and expansive understanding of global aesthetics. In this original work of aesthetic theory, James Voorhies argues that we live in the shadow of old ways of thinking about art that emphasize the immediate visual experience of an autonomous art object. But theory must change as artistic and curatorial production has changed. It should encompass the full range of activities through which we encounter art and exhibitions, in which reading and thinking are central to the aesthetic experience. Voorhies advances the theoretical framework of a “postsensual aesthetics,” which does not mean we are beyond a sensual engagement with objects, but rather embraces the cognitive connections with ideas that unite art and knowledge production. Cognitive engagements with art often begin with publications conceived as integral to exhibitions, conveying the knowledge and research artists and curators produce, and continuing in time and space beyond traditional curatorial frames. The idea, and not just visual immediacy, is now art’s defining moment. Voorhies reframes aesthetic criteria to account for the liminal, cognitive spaces inside and outside of the exhibition. Surveying a wide range of artists, curators, exhibitions, and related publications, he repositions the aesthetic theory of Theodor Adorno, and draws inspiration from Rosalind Krauss and Fredric Jameson, to describe a contemporary “logic of the curatorial.” He demonstrates how, even as we increasingly expect to learn from contemporary art, we must avoid an instrumentalist and reductive view of art as a mere source of information. As Voorhies shows through an analysis of two major global exhibitions, dOCUMENTA (13) (artistic director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev) and Documenta11 (artistic director Okwui Enwezor), and of Ute Meta Bauer’s curatorial work at the Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, it is imperative for artistic research to retain its unique role in the production of knowledge.

The 1990s witnessed a return to aesthetics, but one that stressed the independent claims of beauty in reaction to its perceived suppression by ethical and political imperatives. Beauty, however, is just one aspect of the aesthetic. In recent years, increasing attention has been paid to the ways in which aesthetics and ethics are intertwined. In The Life and Death of Images some of the world's leading cultural thinkers engage in dialogue with one another concerning this [beta]new[gamma] aesthetics. In provocative and accessible fashion, they demonstrate its relevance to a range of disciplines including analytic and continental philosophy, art history, theory and practice, cultural history and visual culture, rhetoric and comparative literature.