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A Comparative Study of Media in Contemporary Visual Art
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A Comparative Study of Media in Contemporary Visual Art

A special issue of Arts (ISSN 2076-0752).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (11 May 2023) | Viewed by 9044

Special Issue Editor

Dr. Helen Westgeest

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Centre for the Arts in Society, University Leiden, Leiden, The Netherlands
Interests: the role of the medium in meaning production in visual arts; contemporary art; theory of photography; theory of video art; interactions in art between East and West

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

If mass media tend to conceal the active role of a medium as mediator in order to take the truthfulness of a message for granted, many contemporary artworks precisely seek to undo such concealment. In this respect, artists have adopted the confrontation of different media in a single artwork as a productive strategy. While “monomedia” used to be associated with Greenbergian Modernism, with its focus on essentialism and purity, contemporary artworks that confront various media in meaningful ways serve as highly interesting explorations for comparative studies of visual media. This Special Issue aims to investigate intermediality not only as a formal confrontation of media, but also as a political notion. Juxtaposed media can act as metaphors for “agonistic political models” (Mouffe, 2013) to counteract neo-liberal objectives linked to consensus, which commonly exclude minorities voices. Intermediality may also draw attention to intercultural issues in the sense of the cooperation and cohabitation of various (ethnic) groups, migration, or multiple ethnicities represented in one person.

Proceeding from an introductory essay by the guest editor, this Special Issue includes articles with a variety of complementary perspectives on the subject of this collection. For instance, in ‘The Laocoon Moment’, Jens Schröter discusses relations between media in several historical socio-political contexts, which still form a point of reference for today’s views. Ágnes Pethő examines “affective intermediality” (in Tacita Dean’s Antigone) as a case study of sensuous excess and complex affective performativity of intermedial artworks. And truths and fictions of photography integrated in video art (by Eve Sussman and Simon Lee) are discussed by Lisa Saltzman. Ksenia Fedorova addresses intermediality as a political interface in interactive new media art. Intermediality may, however, also be applicable to academic research (holding radical political potential), as Lindiwe Dovey argues in her essay. This call for papers invites scholars to propose additional challenging perspectives.

Dr. Helen Westgeest
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Arts is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Published Papers (5 papers)

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10 pages, 741 KiB  
Article
The Laocoon Moment
by Jens Schröter
Arts 2023, 12(4), 175; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts12040175 - 12 Aug 2023
Viewed by 1348
Abstract
Lessing’s Laokoon from 1766 is still an important text in the discussion on the borders between different arts and their media. Especially in the 20th century, texts were written that referred back to Lessing’s seminal text. One of the most important ones, which [...] Read more.
Lessing’s Laokoon from 1766 is still an important text in the discussion on the borders between different arts and their media. Especially in the 20th century, texts were written that referred back to Lessing’s seminal text. One of the most important ones, which will receive a detailed discussion, is Clement Greenberg’s “Towards a Newer Laocoon”. The discussion will on the one hand start from the observation that drawing borders between different arts and their media has always had political implications. On the other hand, this discussion will be related to the transformation to digital media in the late 20th century. By reading Greenberg and discussing some examples from art, especially from the recent field of AI-generated imagery, the concept of “digital modernism” and its political implications will be introduced. The two main findings are as follows: Firstly, it might be problematic to construct a progression from medium-centered to multimedial art since both tendencies coexist in contemporary art. Secondly, the current situation once again points to the politics of drawing borders between different arts (and their respective media). Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue A Comparative Study of Media in Contemporary Visual Art)
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7 pages, 237 KiB  
Article
Intermedialities as Sociopolitical Assemblages in Contemporary Art
by Helen Westgeest
Arts 2023, 12(4), 170; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts12040170 - 3 Aug 2023
Viewed by 1426
Abstract
This article is an introductory essay to the Special Issue “A Comparative Study of Media in Contemporary Visual Art”. It starts with a short overview of the terminological discussion about intermediality as a concept and its relationship with medialities with other prefixes—such as [...] Read more.
This article is an introductory essay to the Special Issue “A Comparative Study of Media in Contemporary Visual Art”. It starts with a short overview of the terminological discussion about intermediality as a concept and its relationship with medialities with other prefixes—such as mixed, intra-, multi-, and transmedialities. So far, intermediality has been discussed less by art historians than by literary scholars. This introductory essay argues that critical analysis of intermediality in contemporary artworks may offer additional insights for investigation of the issues addressed in these artworks. The case studies in this Special Issue underscore this view. As a kind of kick-off, the second part of this essay includes a short case study that focuses on two artworks by the Lebanese artist Rabih Mroué in order to provide insight into how intermedial relations can act as metaphors for the sociopolitical relations addressed in his artworks. Applying philosopher Manuel DeLanda’s “assemblage theory”, philosopher Edward S. Casey’s concept of “absorptive mapping”, and anthropologist Tim Ingold’s view of living beings as consisting of a bundle of lines facilitates the highlighting of the sociopolitical aspects of intermediality in Mroué’s artworks. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue A Comparative Study of Media in Contemporary Visual Art)
12 pages, 252 KiB  
Article
Intermediality in Academia: Creative Research through Film
by Lindiwe Dovey
Arts 2023, 12(4), 169; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts12040169 - 1 Aug 2023
Viewed by 1747
Abstract
This article provides an overview of the recent flourishing of research and pedagogy in higher education that seeks a greater rapprochement between criticism and creativity, bringing together diverse media, disciplines, and modes of knowledge production and expression. It focuses on transformations in film [...] Read more.
This article provides an overview of the recent flourishing of research and pedagogy in higher education that seeks a greater rapprochement between criticism and creativity, bringing together diverse media, disciplines, and modes of knowledge production and expression. It focuses on transformations in film and screen studies and on the ethical and aesthetic possibilities of conducting creative, intermedial research through filmmaking, drawing on the author’s recent, first-hand experiences of conducting such research through her making of two films about the African women filmmakers Judy Kibinge (from Kenya) and Bongiwe Selane (from South Africa). The author gives specific examples from her filmmaking process to show how she has attempted to unsettle the generic space between documentary filmmaking, curatorial practice, and video-essay making to engage in a collaborative research practice with Kibinge, Selane, and their communities, as well as her research teams. Grounding itself in a decolonial feminist framework, this article draws on the perspectives of a wide range of thinkers and filmmaker scholars to explore ways in which the colonial, patriarchal values that have haunted many academic institutions can be reformed to allow for the envisioning of new futures that will lead to a more self-reflexive, socially just higher education environment. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue A Comparative Study of Media in Contemporary Visual Art)
25 pages, 19532 KiB  
Article
Tacita Dean’s Affective Intermediality: Precarious Visions in-between the Visual Arts, Cinema, and the Gallery Film
by Ágnes Pethő
Arts 2023, 12(4), 168; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts12040168 - 31 Jul 2023
Viewed by 2517
Abstract
Tacita Dean’s art relies on the perception of liminalities, of moving in-between, of one medium unfolding into another through dispersed, “molecular” sensations, either subverting or augmenting impressions of art forms perceived on the level of larger, structural wholes. Arguing against the wide-angle perspective [...] Read more.
Tacita Dean’s art relies on the perception of liminalities, of moving in-between, of one medium unfolding into another through dispersed, “molecular” sensations, either subverting or augmenting impressions of art forms perceived on the level of larger, structural wholes. Arguing against the wide-angle perspective employed by media studies approaches and for a close-up analysis of an “affective intermediality” in Tacita Dean’s art, the author looks at the landmark exhibitions at the National Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery, and the Royal Academy in London organised in 2018. The article singles out some of the individual works in the context of the exhibition as a work of art, and focuses on questions like the cross-media phenomenon of the “cinematic”, the affective performativity of the various dispositifs employed in her installations of celluloid films, the affordances of Dean’s signature aperture-gate masking technique, as well as the relation between narrative cinema experienced in a theatrical space and film as the medium of a visual artist. The essay concludes with a brief analysis of her gallery film, Antigone (2018), unravelling an allegorical journey through cosmic time and atmospheric landscapes, viewed as an ode to the “blind vision” of photochemical film and as a synthesis of key features of her intermediality conceived as a strategy for the re-sensitization of mediums by approaching one art from the point of view of another. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue A Comparative Study of Media in Contemporary Visual Art)
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10 pages, 283 KiB  
Article
Back to the (Winter) Garden: On Still Video, Motion Pictures and the Time of Early Photography
by Lisa Saltzman
Arts 2023, 12(4), 163; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts12040163 - 21 Jul 2023
Viewed by 1352
Abstract
This essay, which reframes elements of my 2015 book, Daguerreotypes: Fugitive Subjects, Contemporary Objects, returns to the lacuna at the heart of Roland Barthes’s reflections on photo-graphy: the so-called “Winter Garden” photograph of his mother as a little girl. An image that [...] Read more.
This essay, which reframes elements of my 2015 book, Daguerreotypes: Fugitive Subjects, Contemporary Objects, returns to the lacuna at the heart of Roland Barthes’s reflections on photo-graphy: the so-called “Winter Garden” photograph of his mother as a little girl. An image that is lovingly conjured but forever withheld, this photograph is the fulcrum of a theory of photography that emerged from the conjunction of mourning and desire. For Barthes, and all those working in his wake, the absent photograph is something of photography’s primal scene. With attention to the work of Eve Sussman and Simon Lee, their 2011 three-channel HD video Wintergarden and her 2018 NFT 89 Seconds Atomized in particular, this essay takes readers “back to the garden” to think about the time of early photography. To do so, this essay considers a range of contemporary videos that mine and mime the conventions of photography to produce static, durational encounters with stillness in a medium that is anything but, ultimately, revealing the truths and fictions of photography’s founding moment and fundamental logic. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue A Comparative Study of Media in Contemporary Visual Art)
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