‘The dead are coming’: acts of citizenship at Europe’s borders

This article combines the research agenda of the acts of citizenship literature with reflections on emancipatory theatre. I examine the Centre for Political Beauty’s activity-based artwork ‘The dead are coming’ which problematizes the cruelties of the European border regime in symbolically charged spaces in the German public. Focusing particularly on the roles available to ‘actors’ and ‘spectators’, and the directionality of the message conveyed through the artwork, I examine how the performance subverts the ‘sites’ and ‘scales’ of citizenship. My analysis indicates that the artwork’s subversive potential emerges not only from the political vision conveyed by the artist collective, but also from the way in which others become involved in the performance. Acts of political beauty thus most extensively challenge instituted citizenship’s orientalist anchoring, reverse status-based role allocations and subvert the structural violence of borders when the performance enables the enactment of novel forms of political agency and solidarity.     

Reflexivity,participatory art,and the failures of monist representation

ABSTRACT

This essay engages in a dual-disciplinary theorizing of reflexivity as response to crises of democratic representation. We trace this crises through the parallel lenses of democratic theory and art history. As political theorists explore alternative representations of ‘the people,’ contemporary artists have developed their own responses to the crisis of monist representation. In both state institutions and in participatory art – and in the theorizing of both – we find the rejection of monist representations of ‘the people’ and the embracement of pluralist, partial, and proximate representations. These public reflexive spaces give voice to new, partial publics, and call attention to past and present exclusions.     

Black geographies of struggle and pleasure in Nona Faustine’s White Shoes

In Nona Faustine’s photo series of self-portraits, White Shoes, the artist’s body becomes the agent in exposing the instability of racialized historical geography. Faustine revisits New York City’s landmarks to address what is missing or made invisible: a slave ship, a fugitive woman’s rebirth, or African burial grounds. Making herself visible where she is supposed to remain invisible, she highlights the unacknowledged connection between national wealth, nationalism, geography, and black labor. She discloses the topography of her travels as a changeable terrain, where one slips from the national iconic to ambiguous and finally, to the sacred. I suggest that Faustine doesn’t seek to democratize the extant historical maps, but to shift the terms of reading the city’s geography. She lifts the boundaries between the polarized pathways of knowing – the secularized and the sacred, the living and the dead, the verifiable and the missing. This shift is also made possible by the medium of photography and a feminist turn towards pleasures in one’s body. As Faustine comes to terms with the psychic and cultural inheritance of the diaspora, she moves from the collective body of pain towards black women’s pleasure in their own bodies without purging the history of sexual trauma.     

Dis-Assembly Lines: gestures,situations, and surveillances

In “Americanism and Fordism,” Antonio Gramsci offers a brief meditation on the gestural performances of assembly-line workers who, rather than become subordinate to the disciplinary flow of the machine, cultivate perfectly timed gestures that allow workers to hide in plain sight: or, in other words, to inhabit the scene of management otherwise. Rather than extend Gramsci's investment in virtuosic, masterful performances of gesture, this article considers the potentiality of gesture through Lucille Ball's and Tehching Hsieh's performances of bad timing. As different as these performances are in terms of genre and historical situation, each uses gesture as a technique to performatively divide the labor process, producing fleeting temporalities of waste within rhythms marshaled toward production and accumulation. While it tracks the effects of these itinerant gestures, this article reconsiders the oppositions between productive and reproductive work, rationality and emotionality, and work and home that sustain Gramsci's theory, as well as how the collapse of such oppositions introduces alternative historical and artistic trajectories into theories of precariousness.     

How to live precariously: Lygia Clark's Caminhando and Tropicalism in 1960s Brazil

Economic booms and busts, major social upheavals, brutal military dictatorships: precariousness has been a feature of everyday life in Latin America since its independence. But what does it mean to “propose precariousness as a new idea of existence,” as Brazilian artist Lygia Clark did in 1966? This essay focuses on one specific work by Clark, her 1963 Caminhando, in order to explore the ways in which the very status of performative practices can respond to their social and political conditions and thus offer a model for a subjective experience of precariousness in everyday life. A close study of the process that led Clark to create precarious works will be further supplemented by a contextual analysis of debates about precariousness and adversity within the Tropicalist movement that emerged in late-1960s Brazil, which included artist Hélio Oiticica as well as singers and film-makers.     

Inscrutably,actually: hospitality,parasitism, and the silent work of Yoko Ono and Laurel Nakadate†

With interest in queer socialities, the author considers Jacques Derrida’s provocation in Of Hospitality to “say yes” as hospitable gesture in order to challenge the gendered and racialized demands of this charge. If Orientalist conflations of the East with femininity have in turn sexualized Asian women as simultaneously hypersexual and submissive, then how can we as viewers and readers performatively read Asian femininity in a different, and not anti-relational, orientation to hospitality? Building upon Anna Watkins Fisher’s concept of parasitic performance, this article posits inscrutability as a feminist methodology by considering Yoko Ono’s performances of Cut Piece and Laurel Nakadate’s video Happy Birthday for their interesting solicitations to audience-participants, costars, and viewers.     

“于正剧现象”研究

"于正剧现象"的特征是"叫座不叫好"。这种类型的电视剧违背艺术真实的美学原则,文本中充满大量的虚假情节、虚假人物、虚假环境、虚假道具。既不符合直观真实或超现实真实,又不符合主观真实,更难以达到客观真实的美学高度,是一种典型的高碳艺术。大力开发符合艺术真实,特别是实现客观真实的低碳艺术,这是中国电视剧艺术发展的正确方向。     

强制调解模式研究

通过搭建“强制调解的主导者”和“强制调解的适用阶段”两个维度所形成的框架，可以对强制调解进行类型化分析并提炼出四种模式。一国或地区选择何种强制调解模式，要受到程序正义理念、传统法律程序等因素的综合影响。基于我国实际，未来有必要引入司法性诉前强制调解模式，实现从程序保障提高、调解人适格和制裁措施到位三方面确保诉前强制调解优势的发挥，同时有必要对我国原有的司法性诉中强制调解模式进行改造，实现调解者与审判者身份的分离和调解程序与审判程序时空的分离，并在立法中明确赋予法官动态裁量调解启动的权力以及启动调解时应当考虑的基准。