This article aims to articulate Su Shi's painting theory and its aesthetic implications. While some scholars have interpreted his painting practice primarily in terms of the manifestation of the artist's inner personality through external objects, I argue that Su Shi's own accounts of painting reveal a different emphasis. When we attend closely to these accounts, we find a sustained effort to observe and penetrate external objects beyond their visible appearance so as to apprehend and capture their invisible vitality and underlying principles. To provide a coherent account of this practice, I develop a tripartite framework of eye, mind, and hand, showing how these function as its essential components. Finally, I demonstrate how thisunderstanding of painting resonates with Su Shi's broader philosophical outlook.
This article examines short plays produced by Climate Change Theater Action (CCTA), using a lens from Mark Fisher who is living with us still (eerily haunting us, perhaps) through his two books Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (2009) and The Weird and the Eerie (2016). We first draw on Capitalist Realism to examine our current capitalist predicament and its numbing of sensation that makes it difficult to envision alternatives. We connect this with Fisher’s conceptualization of the eerie as an encounter with obscured agents or agency which is how capitalism operates but, as a theatrical technique, might offer a chink in capitalism’s armor through which eerie art can make a Real impact on capitalist reality. We then examine three short CCTA plays written over the past decade and consider the part that eeriness plays in their anti-capitalism. From this analysis, we broaden out to consider whether, in our current capital-induced anesthesia in which it is almost impossible to imagine how things would work outside of capitalism, eeriness might be one of theater’s most crucial contributions, offering not only a glimpse of capitalism’s obfuscation of causality, but also some concrete prototyping of alternatives.
This article explores Tuomas A. Laitinen’s mixed-media installations that focus on the agency of the octopus and the precarious conditions of the more-than-human watery community. In the installations, Laitinen employs various materials, including glass, water, copper sulfate, and multiple media, such as video, light, and sound, to address complex and entangled ecological issues. To analyze these artworks in their complexity, I suggest a conceptual and methodological practice of tentaculating. This thinking/sensing practice elaborates on Donna Haraway’s idea of tentacular thinking and Laitinen’s tentacular works with a tentacular being, namely, an octopus. The practice of tentaculating enables a nuanced critique of the anthropocentric approaches in both artmaking and broader life, tending to separate the human from the more-than-human. In this article, I rethink the notion of the autonomy of art in conjunction with tentaculating to tackle anthropocentric mastery and show how Laitinen’s works emerge and operate in an unfixed, semi-autonomous, but also always connected manner to offer novel engagements with more-than-human ecology.
This article examines the cultural and political significance of the New Cross Fire of 1981 in Deptford (London) and its aftermath, focusing on its representation in two key documentaries produced by two film collectives: Blood Ah Go Run (1982) by Menelik Shabazz and Imruh Bakari and Jus Soli (2015) by Somebody Nobody. Drawing on postcolonial theory, memory studies, and Black British cultural studies, I explore how these films act as sites of remembrance and resistance. The analysis demonstrates that through distinct aesthetic and narrative strategies, both works challenge the historical erasure of this Black British memory, which subsequently sparked episodes of struggle and resilience rooted in questions of (non)belonging and identity dislocation. This article also considers the transgenerational impact of the fire, linking it to broader experiences of displacement, structural racism and community mobilisation, culminating in the 1981 riots. In doing so, it positions these documentaries as interventions in the cultural memory of Britain's Black diaspora, framing the fire as a pivotal event that catalysed a new cultural and political direction for Black British communities."Blood Ah Go Run & mldr;.Unless justice come" (Blood Ah Go Run 1982).
In the article, we investigate non-spectacular, low-key, and small-scale artistic strategies rooted in everyday acts of defiance that are carried out collectively. For that purpose, we examine the political valence of the figure of housewife in postsocialist feminism by attending to the work The Resistance Kitchen (2017) of Polish artist Ma & lstrok;gorzata Markiewicz. Intertwining ideas of Sara Ahmed, Silvia Federici, Ewa Majewska, and Olga Tokarczuk, while building on our prior work on the definition of postsocialist feminism (Kukaine 2023, 2024), we argue for an approach to a political agency that is passive, soft, unspectacular, tender, and weak. We address the kitchen as the unruly space where feminist politics and the domain of art-making intersect, engendering uneventful feminist revolt, obscured political identities, and tender solidarities. Instead of combat, visibility, and heroism, survival, sharing of resources, and mutual care are signature traits of postsocialist feminist art.
Revisiting Gilles Deleuze's work on cinema, this article extracts from the two books a “new analytic of the image” that operates as an “immanent analysis of movement”. It argues that despite four decades of commentary, the cinema books' core proposition—the object of analysis with cinema is movement, and not form or some derivative of it—remains insufficiently grasped. Four theses are developed: first, the need for an immanent analytic that takes movement itself as its object; second, the distinction between relative movement in relation to a closed whole (movement-image) and absolute movement in relation to an open whole (time-image); third, a redefinition of what cinema is, that is, its essence, in terms of the frame, shot, and montage rather than conventional formal categories; and fourth, a plural genealogy of cinema grounded in Bergson's concept of creative evolution, opening the possibility of multiple, emergent “cinemas” beyond human-centered ontology. The article contends that such an approach not only reorients film studies but also has broader implications for cultural analysis and cultural studies, offering an expanded, non-anthropocentric understanding of moving images as generative forces in the world. This has strong implications for all cultural studies and their treatments of objects of analysis.
The article interprets MIchelangelo's Crucifixion of St. Peter (1547-1550)-whose anticlassical style has puzzled critics, both Renaissance and modern-as an allegorical work destined for viewers belonging to the newly-evangelized regions of Africa, America, and Asia, including those that were targeted by Jesuit missions which were still only at the planning stage. The fresco's distinctive pictorial language is posited to reflect Michelangelo's efforts to develop a manner that had the potential to resonate with this new, global audience. A globalizing Catholic Church, Paul III's boundless ambition to convert all nations on the spur of the establishment of the Society of Jesus, and Rome's role as a site of mediation are emphasized as the context in which the commission came about. The aesthetics of the fresco is entangled, in the sense of Shalini Randeria, because it aims to accommodate the visual culture imagined as characterizing the newly-evangelized peoples, distancing itself from the Greco-Roman, classical art tradition. The visual cultures of the newly-evangelized peoples are therefore constitutive of Michelangelo's last maniera, and the source of its modernity.
This article examines sensory accounts of spectators at the International Exhibition of 1862 in order to reconsider how exhibitionary power operated in practice. Building on work on the exhibitionary complex and on Orientalism, it argues that the 1862 Exhibition did not function as a seamless apparatus of imperial pedagogy but as a compromised site where narratives of Western progress and civilisational difference were strained in the encounter between curatorial authority and embodied spectatorship. Through close readings of four testimonies by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Arthur Munby, a Temple Bar satire voiced by a blind narrator, and an orientalist review by an unnamed woman, the article traces how their divergent vantage points produce competing ways of seeing, moving through, and narrating the exhibition. These polyvocal responses show spectators and artefacts slipping beyond the visual and textual scripts supplied by catalogues and the imperial gaze, putting pressure on the Orientalist binaries of East and West and bringing into view zones of cultural hybridity and mutual exchange. By foregrounding these uneven sensory encounters, the article extends accounts of international exhibitions as technologies of governance and colonial knowledge, and reframes the 1862 Exhibition as a historically marginal yet revealing site in which the limits of exhibitionary power became visible.
The coined term gesture-ing in the article's title, "Gesture-ing in Drawing via Theory of Whitehead and Barad," refers to a drawing that is being developed as the article is being written, and provides the motif through which its topic is mapped. In addition, the term relates to the combined role of theory of Whitehead and Barad that is itself gestured; combined in the sense that the drawings are stylistically diagrammatic and include annotation, and are made in cooperation with the article, as it is being written and accommodating the latter's argument. The main drawing, of two featured drawings, Gesture drawing and Index Cards drawing, involves gesture and gesturing of line, while bringing in relevant theory in the form of handwritten index cards and paratext pertaining first to Whitehead and then to Barad. The two drawings are gradually developed, as the article is being written, towards a single combined drawing. Whitehead is relevant to the gesturing of movement from his termed event here to event there within an occasion and the next-new occasion, as and through a passage of nature. Barad's referencing is in terms of intra-activity as and within the middle-ness of such movement. Aspects of Barad's agential realism enable consideration of human-agential and material-agential intra-activity, to suggest how the medium of and as the drawing is sympoietic (Donna Haraway), which is how the author, as the visual work's human agency, prefers to consider the near-autonomy of how simple drawing materials work. The combined ratio of practice-theory-agency-materiality is explored through the narrative, the article itself, which is at-once textual and, albeit through reproduction only, visual-material. The role of digital reproduction is introduced as, itself, an agency as relevant to the process as liquid coffee poured on newsprint, as a key material component of the drawings.
In recent years, critical geography and visual culture studies have increasingly turned to the role of media and how they shape the ways environments are understood and governed. Among these, landscape photography plays a central role in mediating environmental change, making it either visible or obscure, legible or mythologized. This essay critically examines the aesthetic, ideological, and affective work performed by aerial photographs of the Athabasca Oil Sands in Alberta, Canada, particularly those by Edward Burtynsky and Louis Helbig, arguing that these images often participate in a colonial optic rooted in the logic of terra nullius. While their photographs critique the devastation of extractive industry, some also reproduce perceptual habits in which land appears empty, labor invisible, and development inevitable. Situated at the intersection of media aesthetics and decolonial visuality studies, this essay interrogates the frameworks through which land, labor, wilderness, and infrastructural power are made perceptible or erased. In doing so, it contributes to recent debates on petroculture, colonial visuality, and the aesthetics of environmental violence.
This article presents a preposterous history of moral shocks regarding animals in research and testing facilities. Moral shock is a concept developed by James M. Jasper. It reveals how protest images of suffering animals, as a consequence of research and testing procedures, produce visceral effects in humans and can unsettle a subject’s expectations. However, can art that depicts animal suffering and death in animal research and testing facilities engender a moral shock? If so, how can such artworks create a moral shock and what impacts does this have upon the viewer? The works selected for this cultural analysis are by notable artists who have addressed animal suffering and death within these scientific-organizational spaces. The first is a painting by Sue Coe called Baboon heart transplant (1985) and the second is Nicole Cataldo-Davies’ endurance performance about cosmetic testing on animals performed on April 24, 2012. By way of cultural analysis—informed by the thought of Anat Pick, Simone Weil and Elaine Scarry—both Coe and Cataldo-Davies can capture the pain that animals experience in such scientific-organizational space. As such, this encourages the viewer to experience moral shock and subsequent compassion for these vulnerable, neglected and sacred creatures, perhaps even engaging in some forms of political agitation motivated by the experience.
Emojis are small icons used across digital devices and platforms, and this essay explores their aesthetics to argue that they exemplify kitsch in contemporary digital culture. While visually comforting images have appeared in past eras, the digital environment intensifies this tendency through rapid circulation, immediate emotional impact, and widespread commodification, creating a distinct form of contemporary kitsch. In this instant affect culture, hyper-sentimentality operates alongside aesthetic reassurance, driving what might be called a hyper-kitsch digital economy. In line with this aesthetic spirit and built on conventional realism, emojis exhibit six key traits of kitsch: sentimentality, simplification, explicitness, commercialization, mass production, and decorative motifs. The essay examines how their kitschiness can perpetuate potentially problematic tendencies in digital communication, such as exaggerated reactivity and deceptive positivity, and concludes by reflecting on kitsch—and emojis’ kitschiness—as a response to the human desire for emotional safety and certainty.
This article examines the aesthetic, political, and historical significance of material objects in Satyajit Ray’s Shatranj Ke Khilari (1977), while exploring how the film translates Munshi Premchand’s short story into a cinematic meditation on decadence, dependency, and colonial subjugation. By employing the frameworks of Kracauer, Bazin, and Balázs, the essay situates Ray’s visual strategies within the discourse of material aesthetics, where objects, textures, and spatial arrangements acquire expressive and ideological resonance. The study analyzes carefully curated inanimate objects as mnemonic devices through which Ray reconstructs the historical memory of Awadh’s annexation (1856). Furthermore, through a close reading of the quotidian lives of Awadh’s ruler, King Wajid Ali Shah, and his noblemen, Nawab Mirza Sajjad Ali and Nawab Mir Roshan Ali in the film, the article investigates how Ray’s film becomes a subtle commentary on their colonial defeat and cultural dispossession. Additionally, by evaluating the film’s historical authenticity and character dynamics, the article highlights Ray’s distinctive approach and demonstrates the potential of visual media to enhance our comprehension of historical narratives through the interplay of aesthetics and cultural memory.
Both philosophers and art historians commonly take Brancusi to have been a Platonic sculptor. This is due to the fact that he was sculpting “essences” or “Forms” of things rather than their appearances. My paper argues against the Platonic interpretation of Brancusi. First, I show that this is not a historically accurate way of understanding his sculptural project. Brancusi is not likely to have studied Plato or sculpted in dialogue with his texts. From the historical perspective, rather than connecting Brancusi’s sculpture to Plato, it is more accurate to link it conceptually to Blavatsky’s Theosophy and especially to Isis Unveiled. Second, I argue that Plato’s “Forms”, properly understood, are not the types of things that could be sculpted in the first place. In Plato’s metaphysics, Forms constitute a small subset of “universals”. As non-spatiotemporal, transcendent entities graspable by reason rather than senses, they cannot be rendered in sculpture. Sculpture can endeavor to capture essences (rather than Forms) of things, but there is nothing especially Platonic about such sculptural aims. Thus, Brancusi’s sculptural essences of birds, fish, seals, and turtles are not Platonic in any technical sense of the term. Jointly, these two arguments give us a good reason not to interpret Brancusi’s work in light of Plato’s theory of Forms, but, at best, in light of what he has learned about “essences” from his study of Theosophy.
Cinematic (after)images of dead and extinct animals can be transformative, providing aesthetic encounters with and helping process grief, loss and trauma. Interestingly, compared to narrative cinema, experimental films devote more attention to images of animal death and species disappearance, turning them into a palpable, timeless and meaningful spectacle. Addressing the ways in which experimental film raises questions of animal death and extinction, I discuss how Stan Brakhage’s Sirius Remembered, Deborah Stratman’s Laika and Samy Benammar’s kauaʻi ʻōʻō preserve dead and extinct animals in forms that extend beyond their traditional media representation as commodified, fetishized, victimized or pitiable objects, visceral attractions, dramatic spectacles or evolutionary failures. Building on the theory of afterimages as a visual afterlife, I argue that afterimages of dead animals often relate to the rites of mourning and highlight the affective agency of vanishing animal lives, presenting animal corpses as material, spectral entities with an embodied (non)presence. Meanwhile, afterimages of extinct animals speak of irretrievable loss precisely through avoiding the physical reconstruction of a species, reflecting on the impact of its past existence and human intervention in the natural world. Bringing together film and animal studies with media aesthetics, my study sheds new light on the aesthetics of representing dead and extinct animals in experimental film where animals are given a ghostly, illusive, but distinct presence, becoming central characters and acting agents driving the narrative.
This article delves into the historical development of skywriting as an artistic practice, its intersection with the fields of propaganda and art, and the political dilemmas surrounding its use. I examine skywriting in diverse aesthetic fields such as conceptual art, land art, visual arts, and poetry, highlighting its poetic and political power. I argue that skywriting as an artistic practice serves as a catalyst where the sky becomes more than just a platform for creation or mass communication, as is the case when used for practical purposes such as propaganda or as a tool of war. Due to its temporary and unstable nature, skywriting as a form of art becomes an artificial wonder, expanding the limits of time and space to reflect the world's symbolic, social, and political dimensions.
Chanoyu or Japanese tea ceremony constitutes an occasion, a social situation shaped by time-honored traditions, rituals, and considerations that skillfully straddle the realms of the religious, artistic, and aesthetic. I consider this aged-old tradition as an "aesthetic field" where the host and guests cordially meet and engage in a special kind of tea-drinking. Moreover, mediated by sounds-natural and man-made-and "communicative" silences, an "engaged" rather than a sequestered and dualistic performative presence is engendered. Thus, I make two key claims in this paper: the sounds and silences that constitute the "soundscape" of the tearoom accord phenomenological importance during the tea enactment; and the participants' "engagement" in experiencing the tearoom's soundscape has the potential to heighten the realization of a prime, if not the most cherished, aesthetic sensibility of chanoyu: y & umacr;gen. Theorizing the appreciative experience of chanoyu via the tearoom's soundscape is amply facilitated within Arnold Berleant's democratizing and contemporary frameworks of "social aesthetics" and "aesthetic engagement."
This article examines generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) as a disruptive technology in photographic art. It does so by using diffractive analysis to discuss how photorealistic GenAI imaging may disrupt dominant understandings of photography as an artistic medium and anthropocentric understandings of human versus nonhuman agency in artistic practices. Serving as a prism for discussion is The Electrician (2022), a photorealistic portrait created by Boris Eldagsen using DALLE 2. Like much visual art that builds on the idea of the photographic and highlights nonhuman agency, The Electrician further challenges the boundaries of photography. It does so by imitating a photographic aesthetic without being a photograph, thereby re-actualising questions of what constitutes photography as an artistic medium. The article argues that when photography's boundaries are already porous, and the field of photographic art is characterised by fluidity and experimentation, further challenging these boundaries does not necessarily constitute disruption. Still, photorealistic GenAI imaging may be considered a force of aesthetic disruption, as its current existence in a photo-philosophical limbo makes thinking of and theorising the boundaries of photography and photographic art acutely relevant, no matter their existing porosity. The unprecedented visual resemblance between (some) photographs and (some) photorealistic GenAI images readily calls for problematisation of existing concepts related to photography. The Electrician's forceful highlighting of nonhuman agency, both through its visual expression, its modes of production and the discourse surrounding it, may-in its sociohistorical context-be disruptive. The artwork forces attention towards the entanglement of human and nonhuman agency, making the latter difficult to deny.
This essay analyses power dynamics in our technologically advanced world through the lens of Aesthetic Action, defined by exploring “what the world could be,” and contrasting it with Historical Action, driven by a determinate vision of “what the world should be”. Using Florian Klinger’s framework of Aesthetic Action and this implicit contrast with Historical Action. Through examination of Naoki Urasawa’s anime series Monster and Pluto, the essay argues that seemingly innovative disruptions by tech billionaires typically enact Historical Action. This reinforces existing inequalities and imposes narrow, deterministic visions of a desired future “what the world should be”. In contrast, the essay champions Aesthetic Action, exemplified by characters in Urasawa’s works, as genuine disruption. This approach embraces indeterminacy, fosters ethical responsibility, and opens possibilities for “what the world could be,” which includes a more fair, shared future. Through the portrayal of Kinderheim 511 and the depiction of systemic monstrosity in Monster and Pluto, the essay calls for a critical reimagining of our world beyond the profit-driven imperatives of technological power, advocating for collective Aesthetic Action as resistance and transformative change.
