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New Articulations of Identity in Contemporary Aesthetics
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New Articulations of Identity in Contemporary Aesthetics

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

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 September 2023) | Viewed by 27315

Special Issue Editors

Prof. Dr. Derek Conrad Murray

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
History of Art and Visual Culture, Porter Faculty Services, University of California at Santa Cruz, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA 95064, USA
Interests: history; theory; criticism of contemporary art and visual culture
Stacy Schwartz
*
E-Mail Website
Co-Guest Editor
History of Art and Visual Culture, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA 95064, USA
Interests: contemporary identity; cultural trauma and representation; visual culture theory; Jewish visuality
* Doctoral Candidate

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Over the last several decades, vibrant conversations have unfolded around existing constructions of identities—often seen as fixed, narrow categories—and a movement toward fluid and intersectional conceptions of the self and community, these discourses having greatly impacted both the theory and practice leading to a radical shift in contemporary aesthetics. Critical debates that destabilize fixed notions of identity have engendered new perspectives, particularly in work critiquing issues of essentialism, heterosexism, monolithic affiliation, and other culturally imposed limitations. This Special Issue seeks to magnify the questions of belongingness raised in contemporary art and generate a multicultural and interdisciplinary discussion that centers around visual practice as a crucial site of social and institutional commentary.

Approaches to this topic might take several forms, with specific interest in pieces grappling with the legacy of cultural trauma, “representational troubling” and the complex convergences of contemporary identities (queerness, gender, ethnicity, etc.) in new domains and across disciplines, fields, and visual media. We welcome observations regarding the possibilities, complications, and applications of identity across the spectrum of visual culture forms, as well as interpretations of artistic practice informed by critical frameworks such as post-blackness, post-Jewishness, liquid blackness, and Afro and Judeo-pessimism; contributions considering the complexities of identity and visuality from intersectional, comparative, and/or anti-essentialist perspectives are also welcomed. Additionally, contributors could consider the imaging of marginalized identities in relation to systems such as academia, the art market, and popular culture. Artists, curators, and other practitioners are invited to submit pieces for consideration, such as reflections on the impact of major exhibitions or series.

Prof. Dr. Derek Conrad Murray
Stacy Schwartz
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) will be waived for publication in this Special Issue. 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.

Keywords

  • identity
  • representation
  • hybridity
  • cultural trauma
  • aesthetics
  • contemporary art

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Published Papers (11 papers)

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20 pages, 9898 KiB  
Article
Abstract Subjects: Adia Millett, Abstraction, and the Black Aesthetic Tradition
by Derek Conrad Murray
Arts 2024, 13(5), 159; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts13050159 - 17 Oct 2024
Viewed by 797
Abstract
The Oakland, California-based artist Adia Millett is among an ever-growing generation of Black artists who have embraced abstraction in their creative production. Her approach is significant, considering that one of the more pernicious dimensions of art history has been its omission of African-American [...] Read more.
The Oakland, California-based artist Adia Millett is among an ever-growing generation of Black artists who have embraced abstraction in their creative production. Her approach is significant, considering that one of the more pernicious dimensions of art history has been its omission of African-American painters from the history of late-modernist American abstraction. In this 2024 interview, scholar Derek Conrad Murray and Millett exchange ideas about the intersection of Blackness and abstraction. Identity and representation have always been a thorny terrain throughout the history of American art, from the nineteenth century to the present—and Black artists’ commitment to reflecting on racial injustice dubiously rendered their work incommensurate with the aesthetic dictates of post-war abstraction. Since the 1990s, there has been an increase in corrective efforts dedicated to recuperating Black artists who have fallen through the cracks of history. As a result, the twenty-first century has seen an acknowledgment of many artists who were overlooked—and a blossoming of formalist abstraction among recent generations of contemporary Black artists. As articulated in this interview, Adia Millett, like many of her peers, has resisted the falsehood that abstraction is beyond her purview—and has embraced abstraction while refusing to abandon the complexities of Blackness. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue New Articulations of Identity in Contemporary Aesthetics)
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17 pages, 5181 KiB  
Article
Forever Becoming: Teaching “Transgender Studies Meets Art History” and Theorizing Trans Joy
by Alpesh Kantilal Patel
Arts 2024, 13(4), 115; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts13040115 - 1 Jul 2024
Viewed by 1493
Abstract
Academics often comment that their teaching affects their research, but how this manifests is often implicit. In this essay, I explicitly explore the artistic, scholarly, and curatorial research instantiated by an undergraduate class titled “Transgender Studies meets Art History,” which I taught during [...] Read more.
Academics often comment that their teaching affects their research, but how this manifests is often implicit. In this essay, I explicitly explore the artistic, scholarly, and curatorial research instantiated by an undergraduate class titled “Transgender Studies meets Art History,” which I taught during the fall of 2022. Alongside personal anecdotes—both personal and connected to the class—and a critical reflection on my pedagogy, I discuss the artwork and public programming connected to a curatorial project, “Forever Becoming: Decolonization, Materiality, and Trans* Subjectivity, I organized at UrbanGlass, New York City in 2023. The first part of the article I examine how “trans” can be applied to thinking about syllabus construction and re-thinking canon formation for a class focused on transgender studies’ relationship to art history. In the second half, I theorize trans joy as a felt vibration between/across multiplicity and singularity, belonging and unbelonging, and world-making and world-unmaking. Overall, I consider trans as a lived experience and its utility as a conceptual tool. As a coda, I consider the precarity of teaching this course in the current political climate of the United States. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue New Articulations of Identity in Contemporary Aesthetics)
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19 pages, 10177 KiB  
Article
Jewish “Ghosts”: Judit Hersko and Susan Hiller and the Feminist Intersectional Art of Post-Holocaust Memory
by Lisa E. Bloom
Arts 2024, 13(2), 50; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts13020050 - 29 Feb 2024
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 2116 | Correction
Abstract
This article delves into the underexplored intersection of Jewish identities and feminist art. It critically examines artworks by Judit Hersko and Susan Hiller, aligning with evolving identity constructs in contemporary aesthetics. Concepts like “postmemory” link second-generation Jewish artists to past experiences and unveil [...] Read more.
This article delves into the underexplored intersection of Jewish identities and feminist art. It critically examines artworks by Judit Hersko and Susan Hiller, aligning with evolving identity constructs in contemporary aesthetics. Concepts like “postmemory” link second-generation Jewish artists to past experiences and unveil the erasure of Jewish women’s memory of Jewish genocide. Analyzing Hersko and Hiller’s diverse works, from landscape photography and sculpture to performance art, it underscores their shared pursuit: illuminating lingering “ghosts” of the Holocaust in modern landscapes. Susan Hiller’s The J Street Project represents an ongoing exploration of loss and trauma beyond the Holocaust in Germany, using archives as a dynamic, evolving phenomenon. Judit Hersko’s art calls for bearing witness to a potential climate catastrophe in Antarctica. The article culminates in the exploration of “The Memorial” (2017), an art project by the activist collective Center for Political Beauty that focuses on the resurgence of overt anti-Semitism in Germany. In essence, Hiller and Hersko confront erasures in history and nature, emphasizing justice and repair. Their art, intertwined with a project addressing contemporary anti-Semitism, serves as a testament to the enduring power of feminist art, reflecting, mourning, and transforming a world marked by historical traumas and war. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue New Articulations of Identity in Contemporary Aesthetics)
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14 pages, 2941 KiB  
Article
Introduction: The New Face of Trans Visual Culture
by Ace Lehner
Arts 2024, 13(1), 22; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts13010022 - 25 Jan 2024
Viewed by 2353
Abstract
Transness throws into question how many so-called Western cultures—i.e., those ideologically descended from the colonial project—have sutured “reality” to the “privileging of sight”. At the crux of trans-visual culture is a need to be understood outside current modes of visual apprehension. As a [...] Read more.
Transness throws into question how many so-called Western cultures—i.e., those ideologically descended from the colonial project—have sutured “reality” to the “privileging of sight”. At the crux of trans-visual culture is a need to be understood outside current modes of visual apprehension. As a methodology rooted in trans-embodied experiences, trans provides a mode for decolonizing the privileging of sight and moving toward a new understanding of bodies, identity, representation, and visual culture. It is imperative to explore such methods in today’s political climate, and it is advantageous to apply them to trans-visual culture, as exponential innovations can be discerned. In this article, I will deploy a trans visual studies methodology to the work of contemporary trans masculine artist and photographer Wynne Neilly to explore how his work engages a praxis of transing identity. I will discuss how his work shifts the understanding of identity and representation to one decoupled from optical ontology and how he works to unseat White masculinity as the center of Western art and visual culture. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue New Articulations of Identity in Contemporary Aesthetics)
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18 pages, 319 KiB  
Article
Who Is an Artist? Identity, Individualism, and the Neoliberalism of the Art Complex
by Amelia G. Jones
Arts 2023, 12(6), 234; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts12060234 - 6 Nov 2023
Viewed by 3612
Abstract
The fantasized artist-as-origin began as the quintessential figure manifesting Enlightenment European concepts of individual autonomy and sovereign subjectivity—and thus of identity and meaning as these come to define and situate human expression as well as securing educated, middle-class, European white male hegemony in [...] Read more.
The fantasized artist-as-origin began as the quintessential figure manifesting Enlightenment European concepts of individual autonomy and sovereign subjectivity—and thus of identity and meaning as these come to define and situate human expression as well as securing educated, middle-class, European white male hegemony in the Euro-American context. While we think of this conventional figure of the straight white male artist as old-fashioned, as having been relentlessly critiqued since the mid-twentieth century by artists, often from a feminist, queer, anti-racist, or decolonial perspective, this article asserts that the artistic author still drives much of the discourse as well as underlying the money and status attached to visual art today. Citing key works by a range of contemporary artists who have challenged these value systems—Cassils, rafa esparza, James Luna, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, and Susan Silton—this article foregrounds the critique of whiteness and masculinity and the interrogation of capitalism and neoliberalism necessary to interrogating these structures of value attached to artistic authorship. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue New Articulations of Identity in Contemporary Aesthetics)
12 pages, 255 KiB  
Article
The Vicissitudes of Representation: Critical Game Studies, Belonging, and Anti-Essentialism
by Soraya Murray
Arts 2023, 12(6), 230; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts12060230 - 1 Nov 2023
Viewed by 2799
Abstract
Video games are enjoying a flourishing of critical studies; they are finally taken as consequential forms of visual culture worthy of historical, theoretical, and cultural attention. At one time, their scholarship was largely overdetermined by issues of medium and treated largely as an [...] Read more.
Video games are enjoying a flourishing of critical studies; they are finally taken as consequential forms of visual culture worthy of historical, theoretical, and cultural attention. At one time, their scholarship was largely overdetermined by issues of medium and treated largely as an entertainment product. But with the complexifying of the form, combined with a new generation of dynamic scholars and an expanded understanding of how to write about them, games now constitute a robust area of critical engagement with topics in race, sexuality, gender, ethnicity, ability, and other markers of difference. Those interventions have been key in driving the discourse forward, but game studies now faces a new set of strategic challenges. The gains have likely come at great methodological cost. This essay explores the consequences of identity-focused analyses and the roles of intersectional considerations of self and anti-essentialism as crucial tools in combatting enforced notions of belongingness. The author argues that the frontier of methodology in critical game studies may be to think outside of the prescribed ways in which academia encourages monolithic affiliation (or even false segregation) by validating and codifying identity-driven forms of expertise. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue New Articulations of Identity in Contemporary Aesthetics)
23 pages, 5446 KiB  
Article
Converged Aesthetics: Blewishness in the Work of Anthony Mordechai Tzvi Russell
by Brett Ashley Kaplan
Arts 2023, 12(4), 178; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts12040178 - 21 Aug 2023
Viewed by 2250
Abstract
This essay examines the converged aesthetic of Anthony Mordechai Tzvi Russell, focusing on the Kosmopolitan video projects. These videos, and Russell’s work overall, resist the singular terms “Black” and “Jew,” constructing a Blewish converged aesthetic by overlaying images of Josephine Baker or a [...] Read more.
This essay examines the converged aesthetic of Anthony Mordechai Tzvi Russell, focusing on the Kosmopolitan video projects. These videos, and Russell’s work overall, resist the singular terms “Black” and “Jew,” constructing a Blewish converged aesthetic by overlaying images of Josephine Baker or a lonely, lost child walking backward with Russell’s rich and full voice singing Yiddish songs. These remarkable videos, and the projects created by Tsvey Brider (Russell and Dimitri Gaskin), disrupt assumptions about race, gender, sexual orientation, and ethnoreligious affiliation in profound and important ways. I argue that this work performs convergence, thus bucking against the very insistence on antagonism that forms the conditions of possibility for racism. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue New Articulations of Identity in Contemporary Aesthetics)
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9 pages, 1583 KiB  
Article
Identity as Palimpsest
by Gregory Blair
Arts 2023, 12(4), 164; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts12040164 - 25 Jul 2023
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 2590
Abstract
This article focuses on the formation of identity as a stratified discourse between the singular and the collective, and how that exchange is expressed as a visual palimpsest by the artists Annette Cords, G Farrell Kellum, and Njideka Akunyili Crosby. Through their artworks, [...] Read more.
This article focuses on the formation of identity as a stratified discourse between the singular and the collective, and how that exchange is expressed as a visual palimpsest by the artists Annette Cords, G Farrell Kellum, and Njideka Akunyili Crosby. Through their artworks, each artist explores their own identity formation, but also identity formation of those living amid the Postmodern condition of the Western world in the late stages of capitalism. All three artists explore how the collective is manifested in their singular identities by weaving in the personal, intimate, and everyday vernacular into their artworks while also including remnants of wider cultural influences. In the contemporary moment, the dynamic process of identity formation remains betwixt any sort of settled or concretized state. This unresolved status is also reflected in the conceptualization and construction of the artworks by Cords, Kellum, and Akunyili Crosby. The messy interplay between the singular and collective is presented in their artworks as unexpected juxtapositions of diverse information, images, materials, and mark-making. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue New Articulations of Identity in Contemporary Aesthetics)
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11 pages, 243 KiB  
Article
Eva Hesse: Emergent Self-Portrait
by Lauren A. McQuistion
Arts 2023, 12(2), 40; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts12020040 - 22 Feb 2023
Viewed by 2256
Abstract
The artist Eva Hesse (1936–1970) and her work, ranging from traditional painting and drawing to highly inventive bas-relief and sculptural form, are frequently interpreted through the lenses of biography, psychology, and gender, contributing to a prevailing narrative of a troubled and tragic artist [...] Read more.
The artist Eva Hesse (1936–1970) and her work, ranging from traditional painting and drawing to highly inventive bas-relief and sculptural form, are frequently interpreted through the lenses of biography, psychology, and gender, contributing to a prevailing narrative of a troubled and tragic artist figure. This dominant understanding of Hesse’s oeuvre has largely emerged from the interpretation of the artist’s own words, in the form of diary entries and interviews, and the published interpretations of these texts by scholars, peers, and critics, who frequently dwell on the narrative of Hesse’s short and challenging life. However, a closer look at the documentation of the artist’s own process of making, one that combined a near-daily writing practice, close annotations of choices made and executed in her work, and her emphasis on material experimentation, reveals an alternative reading of her writing and work. This paper will first explore the origins of the existing scholarship dedicated to Hesse’s writing that has contributed to the gendered and tragic mythos surrounding the artist and her work. This paper will then provide a re-reading of Hesse’s practice through the example of the work Repetition Nineteen, demonstrating her textual and material process as a deeply entangled set of relations between artist, process, and material contributing to a still-emerging portrait of the artist and her contributions. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue New Articulations of Identity in Contemporary Aesthetics)

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3 pages, 471 KiB  
Correction
Correction: Bloom (2024). Jewish “Ghosts”: Judit Hersko and Susan Hiller and the Feminist Intersectional Art of Post-Holocaust Memory. Arts 13: 50
by Lisa E. Bloom
Arts 2024, 13(3), 86; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts13030086 - 11 May 2024
Viewed by 785
Abstract
Due to a production error during processing, a number of mistakes appear in the original publication [...] Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue New Articulations of Identity in Contemporary Aesthetics)
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23 pages, 12263 KiB  
Essay
Minding the Body: Space, Memory, and Visual Culture in Constructions of Jewish Identity
by Kerri Steinberg
Arts 2023, 12(3), 110; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts12030110 - 30 May 2023
Viewed by 2449
Abstract
While it is well established that articulations of identity must always be contextualized within time and place, only when we consider how bodies move through, touch, and are touched by physical, cognitive, and even imaginary spaces do we arrive at dynamic and intersectional [...] Read more.
While it is well established that articulations of identity must always be contextualized within time and place, only when we consider how bodies move through, touch, and are touched by physical, cognitive, and even imaginary spaces do we arrive at dynamic and intersectional expressions of identity. Using two divergent visual culture case studies, this essay first applies Setha Low’s theory of embodied spaces to understand the intersection and interconnection between body, space, and culture, and how the concept of belongingness is knotted with material and representational indicators of space at the Yad Vashem Holocaust History Museum in Israel. Marianne Hirsch’s ideas about the Holocaust and affiliative postmemory are also considered to further understand how Jewish bodies inherit their identifies and sense of belonging. To test how embodied spaces and affiliative postmemory or collective memory implicitly operate to help shape and articulate expressions of Jewish identities, the focus then shifts to a consideration of the eight-decade career of New York jazz musician and visual artist, Bill Wurtzel. The clever combination of “schtick and sechel” in Wurtzel’s artistic practice, activated by his movement through the Jewish spaces of his youth such as the Catskills, and through his interaction with Jewish design great, Lou Dorfsman, underscore how Jewish belonging and identity are forged at the intersection of physical and tactile “embodied spaces,” where the internal meets the external and human consciousness and experience converge. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue New Articulations of Identity in Contemporary Aesthetics)
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