Jae Emerling
University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Art and Art History, Faculty Member
- Visual Cultures, Methodologies for Artistic Research, Artistic Research, Art and Art History, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Critical Theory, and 13 moreModernism, Contemporary Art, Walter Benjamin, Giorgio Agamben, Photography, Photography Theory, History of photography, Historiography (in Art History), Architectural Theory, Cy Twombly, Gilles Deleuze, Continental Philosophy: Alain Badiou, and Art Theoryedit
- Jae Emerling is Professor of Art History in the College of Arts + Architecture at the University of North Carolina, C... moreJae Emerling is Professor of Art History in the College of Arts + Architecture at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. He is the author of Theory for Art History (Second Edition, 2019) and Photography: History of Theory (2012). He is the Reviews Editor for the Journal of Visual Culture. In 2011 he was visiting professor of contemporary art in the Faculty of Arts at the VU Amsterdam. He received his Ph.D. in art history from the University of California, Los Angeles. His latest book creates the aesthetic-historiographic concept of transmissibility. Transmissibility: Writing Aesthetic History (2023) performs a transdisciplinary philosophy of aesthetic history via the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Cy Twombly, Marina Abramović, Paul Celan, Cecil Taylor, Italo Calvino, Candida Höfer, and others by focusing on the artistic and historiographic labor that differentiates artworks from other modes of creation: that is, how and why the vitality and epistemic significance of an artwork is anachronistic and futural.edit
Full opening chapter of Emerling, Transmissibility: Writing Aesthetic History (2024)
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Art History, Gilles Deleuze, Walter Benjamin, Henri Bergson, and 15 moreFranz Kafka, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Derrida, History of Art, Simone Weil, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Italo Calvino, Georges Perec, Paul Celan, Primo Levi, Adrienne Rich, Wallace Stevens, and Amiri Baraka
The full introduction to Emerling, Transmissibility: Writing Aestheic History (Routledge, 2024)
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Introduction to the second edition of Theory for Art History (2019)
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Journal of Visual Culture, 2021 http://www.journalofvisualculture.org The JVC Palestine Portfolio is an incredibly powerful, heartfelt, heart-wrenching, life-affirming and hopeful polyphony of reminiscences, art works, graphic designs,... more
Journal of Visual Culture, 2021
http://www.journalofvisualculture.org
The JVC Palestine Portfolio is an incredibly powerful, heartfelt, heart-wrenching, life-affirming and hopeful polyphony of reminiscences, art works, graphic designs, scholarly texts, critical writings, briefings, visual activism, petitions, and mobilisations. Thanks to Sage, it is free to access, and is available to download (and circulate widely, if you’re so inclined) on the Sage site (https://journals.sagepub.com/home/vcu) and here.
The JVC Palestine Portfolio with contributions by: Larissa Sansour, Rashid Khalidi, Mazen Kerbaj, The Mosaic Rooms, Strike MoMA, Ariella Azoulay, Danah Abdulla, Rounwah Adly Riyadh Bseiso, Hanan Toukan, Zeina Maasri, Adrian Lahoud and Jasbir K. Puar, Yoav Galai, Distributed Cognition Cooperative (Anna Engelhardt and Sasha Shestakova), Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi, Firas Shehadeh, Sami Khatib, Léopold Lambert/The Funambulist, Tina Sherwell, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Rochelle Davis and Dan Walsh, Lina Hakim, Ariel Caine, Nida Sinnokrot/Sakiya, Yara Sharif, Visualizing Palestine, Nada Dalloul, Simone Browne, Rehab Nazzal, Lila Sharif, Oraib Toukan and Mohmoud M Alshaer, Mark Muhannad Ayyash, Omar Kholeif, Oreet Ashery, The Palestinian Museum, Kareem Estefan and Nour Bishouty, Ghaith Hilal Nassar, Adam Broomberg, Kamal Aljafari, Nicholas Mirzoeff, Palestinian Feminist Collective, W.J.T. Mitchell, Dar El-Nimer for Arts and Culture, Jill H. Casid, Macarena Gómez-Barris, Stephen Sheehi, Susan Greene, Sunaina Maira, and Shourideh C. Molavi and Eyal Weizman.
Preface:
The JVC Palestine Portfolio
Journal of Visual Culture’s Editorial Collective has a longstanding commitment to tracking and analyzing critically the continued unfolding of racialist, colonialist, and jingoistic discourses. The journal often provides a critical space wherein these discourses can be researched and debated so as to redress the social, political, and ethical injustices that continue to plague the world we share. Everything we do in this journal exists under the sign of Stuart Hall’s vital challenge: ‘We must mobilise everything [we] can find in terms of intellectual [and other] resources in order to understand what keeps making the lives we live and the societies we live in profoundly and deeply antihumane in their capacity to live with difference’.
As a Collective, then, we stand in solidarity with Palestinians against Israeli settler colonialism and the Apartheid that results from it.
Compelled to respond to the urgency of the moment instigated by the Israeli regime’s actions in Gaza in May and June 2021, which we also acknowledge as a part of the ongoing Nakbah and an extension of official policies of displacement and erasure since 1948, we sent out an email with the subject line: ‘Journal of Visual Culture for Palestine: a call to [name of recipient]’, asking for a favour, for cooperation, for a contribution. The email in full is as follows:
Download to read on...
http://www.journalofvisualculture.org
The JVC Palestine Portfolio is an incredibly powerful, heartfelt, heart-wrenching, life-affirming and hopeful polyphony of reminiscences, art works, graphic designs, scholarly texts, critical writings, briefings, visual activism, petitions, and mobilisations. Thanks to Sage, it is free to access, and is available to download (and circulate widely, if you’re so inclined) on the Sage site (https://journals.sagepub.com/home/vcu) and here.
The JVC Palestine Portfolio with contributions by: Larissa Sansour, Rashid Khalidi, Mazen Kerbaj, The Mosaic Rooms, Strike MoMA, Ariella Azoulay, Danah Abdulla, Rounwah Adly Riyadh Bseiso, Hanan Toukan, Zeina Maasri, Adrian Lahoud and Jasbir K. Puar, Yoav Galai, Distributed Cognition Cooperative (Anna Engelhardt and Sasha Shestakova), Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi, Firas Shehadeh, Sami Khatib, Léopold Lambert/The Funambulist, Tina Sherwell, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Rochelle Davis and Dan Walsh, Lina Hakim, Ariel Caine, Nida Sinnokrot/Sakiya, Yara Sharif, Visualizing Palestine, Nada Dalloul, Simone Browne, Rehab Nazzal, Lila Sharif, Oraib Toukan and Mohmoud M Alshaer, Mark Muhannad Ayyash, Omar Kholeif, Oreet Ashery, The Palestinian Museum, Kareem Estefan and Nour Bishouty, Ghaith Hilal Nassar, Adam Broomberg, Kamal Aljafari, Nicholas Mirzoeff, Palestinian Feminist Collective, W.J.T. Mitchell, Dar El-Nimer for Arts and Culture, Jill H. Casid, Macarena Gómez-Barris, Stephen Sheehi, Susan Greene, Sunaina Maira, and Shourideh C. Molavi and Eyal Weizman.
Preface:
The JVC Palestine Portfolio
Journal of Visual Culture’s Editorial Collective has a longstanding commitment to tracking and analyzing critically the continued unfolding of racialist, colonialist, and jingoistic discourses. The journal often provides a critical space wherein these discourses can be researched and debated so as to redress the social, political, and ethical injustices that continue to plague the world we share. Everything we do in this journal exists under the sign of Stuart Hall’s vital challenge: ‘We must mobilise everything [we] can find in terms of intellectual [and other] resources in order to understand what keeps making the lives we live and the societies we live in profoundly and deeply antihumane in their capacity to live with difference’.
As a Collective, then, we stand in solidarity with Palestinians against Israeli settler colonialism and the Apartheid that results from it.
Compelled to respond to the urgency of the moment instigated by the Israeli regime’s actions in Gaza in May and June 2021, which we also acknowledge as a part of the ongoing Nakbah and an extension of official policies of displacement and erasure since 1948, we sent out an email with the subject line: ‘Journal of Visual Culture for Palestine: a call to [name of recipient]’, asking for a favour, for cooperation, for a contribution. The email in full is as follows:
Download to read on...
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“Located outside the often spectral interiors of historicity, Emerling’s Theory for Art History demands our attention with an exquisite rendering of art and image making. His is as much a spatial reckoning with the labor, manifestation,... more
“Located outside the often spectral interiors of historicity, Emerling’s Theory for Art History demands our attention with an exquisite rendering of art and image making. His is as much a spatial reckoning with the labor, manifestation, and reception of art history as it is a deliberation on how we construct the temporal. With each chapter, we are fortunate to lose ourselves among these pages as they extend meaning, promise epistemic entanglements, and signify our own disciplinary un-becoming.” Sean Anderson, The Museum of Modern art, New York, USA
Theory for Art History provides a concise and clear introduction to key contemporary theorists, including their lives, major works, and transformative ideas.
Written to reveal the vital connections between art history, aesthetics, and contemporary philosophy, this expanded second edition presents new ways for rethinking the methodologies and theories of art and art history. The book comprises a complete revision of each theorist; updated and trustworthy bibliographies on each; an informative introduction about the reception of critical theory within art history; and a beautifully written, original essay on the state of art history and theory that serves as an afterword.
From Marx to Deleuze, from Arendt to Rancière, Theory for Art History is designed for use by undergraduate students in courses on the theory and methodology of art history, graduate students seeking an introduction to critical theory that will prepare them to engage the primary sources, and advanced scholars in art history and visual culture studies who are themselves interested in how these perspectives inflect art historical practice.
Theory for Art History provides a concise and clear introduction to key contemporary theorists, including their lives, major works, and transformative ideas.
Written to reveal the vital connections between art history, aesthetics, and contemporary philosophy, this expanded second edition presents new ways for rethinking the methodologies and theories of art and art history. The book comprises a complete revision of each theorist; updated and trustworthy bibliographies on each; an informative introduction about the reception of critical theory within art history; and a beautifully written, original essay on the state of art history and theory that serves as an afterword.
From Marx to Deleuze, from Arendt to Rancière, Theory for Art History is designed for use by undergraduate students in courses on the theory and methodology of art history, graduate students seeking an introduction to critical theory that will prepare them to engage the primary sources, and advanced scholars in art history and visual culture studies who are themselves interested in how these perspectives inflect art historical practice.
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Afterword to Emerling, Theory for Art History Second Edition
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"Emerling has done the near impossible: he has written an introduction to the history and theory of photography that also adds significantly to the ways in which we come to see, know, and understand the world. Here, by focusing on the... more
"Emerling has done the near impossible: he has written an introduction to the history and theory of photography that also adds significantly to the ways in which we come to see, know, and understand the world. Here, by focusing on the 'and' between history and theory, photography itself becomes ingeniously a way to generate new worlds politically and aesthetically. Emerling writes that 'to study the history and theory of photography is to write and create alongside and in the middle of images.' He couldn't be more right."
--Marquard Smith, Founding Editor, Journal of Visual Culture
--Marquard Smith, Founding Editor, Journal of Visual Culture
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Review of the first three volumes of Undoing the Image by Éric Alliez and Jean-Claude Bonne. Body Without Organs, Body Without Image: Ernesto Neto's Anti-Leviathan, Becoming-Matisse: Between Painting and Architecture, and Duchamp Looked... more
Review of the first three volumes of Undoing the Image by Éric Alliez and Jean-Claude Bonne. Body Without Organs, Body Without Image: Ernesto Neto's Anti-Leviathan, Becoming-Matisse: Between Painting and Architecture, and Duchamp Looked At (From the Other Side) / Duchamp With (and Against) Lacan, vols. 1–3 of Undoing the Image. Trans. Robin Mackay and Maya B. Kronic. Falmouth: Urbanomic Media Ltd., 2017–2022. 112 pp., 128 pp., and 576 pp.
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Aesthetics, Art History, Art Theory, Georges Didi-Huberman, and 11 moreContinental Philosophy, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Lacan, Modernist Architecture (Architectural Modernism), Postmodernism, Modernism (Art History), Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Marcel Duchamp, Contemporary Continental Philosophy, Henri Matisse, and Art and Art History
Memorial essay for Jean-Luc Godard.
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This conversation contains 'moments' from a dialogue between the esteemed scholar Homi K Bhabha and Journal of Visual Culture editor Jae Emerling that took place at Harvard University on 7 March 2022. As part of the 20th anniversary... more
This conversation contains 'moments' from a dialogue between the esteemed scholar Homi K Bhabha and Journal of Visual Culture editor Jae Emerling that took place at Harvard University on 7 March 2022. As part of the 20th anniversary celebrations of the journal's founding, it was essential to include voices whose work, presence within the world, and poetic insights traverse the entirety of visual culture studies. Bhabha is certainly such a voice for our Editorial Collective, past and present. The goal of this open dialogue, if there is a single one, was to have a real conversation about Bhabha's vital current projects, which address the socioeconomic , political, and cultural dangers facing all of us. But it is also a hopeful discussion about the 'survival' of the theoretical humanities in the 21st century. We hope that it reads as dialogic-radiating lines passing through the singular points that shape the history of our present, while always remaining open and attentive to the unforeseen actualizations of the past-future events that compose each of us individually and collectively.
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Comparative Literature, English Literature, Humanities, Visual Culture, and 14 moreMigration, Walter Benjamin, Émmanuel Lévinas, Aesthetics and Ethics, Bob Dylan, Frantz Fanon, Stuart Hall, James Baldwin, Decolonial Thought, Homi K. Bhabha, Decolonization, Visual Culture and Media Studies, Arts and Humanities, and Claudia Rankine
A review-essay on Annamaria Ducci’s intellectual biography Henri Focillon en son temps. La liberté des forms (2021) that extends this work by presenting a call for a ‘return to Focillon’ within art historical thought that begins with his... more
A review-essay on Annamaria Ducci’s intellectual biography Henri Focillon en son temps. La liberté des forms (2021) that extends this work by presenting a call for a ‘return to Focillon’ within art historical thought that begins with his ability to refocus us on the artwork itself and its capabilities to magnetize content both within and without its historical milieu. Focillon’s real interest in the concept of a milieu and in the artwork’s ability to escape this originary context instigates a rethinking of the ontology, historiography, and the temporality of art. He challenges us to think and write through problematics, to experiment with both aesthetic agency and historical reception; to create new linkages between art and life, history and becoming, along the ἀκμή of the vie des formes—thus conceiving an artwork as a past-future event, as a ‘great ensemble’. Focillon posits that if the work of art is an event, then history is a modulated and controlled form of time as such, which itself is an actual-virtual movement or ‘becoming’. Ontologically art ‘goes further than…illustrate history’, he argues, which is why art historians must learn to encounter ‘modalities of life’ in order to write about how it creates ‘worlds’. Our ‘return to Focillon’ takes place within a threshold wherein the event of art is what matters most, that is, the capacities of a given formal property to harness and magnetize forces within and outside of itself in order to render humanist and post-humanist forces perceptible, sensible, and thinkable.
Research Interests: Aesthetics, Gilles Deleuze, Walter Benjamin, Modernism (Art History), Historiography (in Art History), and 9 moreMethodology (Art History), Affect (Philosophy), Affect, Formalism, History and Theory of Art, Theory and History of Art, Henri Focillon, George Kubler, and Aesthetics and Art Historical Methodology
A review of Kamini Vellodi's remarkable Tintoretto’s Difference: Deleuze, Diagrammatics, and Art History (Bloomsbury).
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Contribution to Gil Pasternak's remarkable edited volume The Handbook of Photography Studies (Bloomsbury, 2020). This essay surveys the absorption of theory into the study of photography, mainly introducing formalist, neo-Marxist,... more
Contribution to Gil Pasternak's remarkable edited volume The Handbook of Photography Studies (Bloomsbury, 2020). This essay surveys the absorption of theory into the study of photography, mainly introducing formalist, neo-Marxist, feminist, postcolonial, and affect theories, among others.
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Review essay on the latest English collection of Gilles Deleuze's Letters and Other Texts.
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Emerling, "Say Goodbye, Catallus, to the Shores of Asia Minor": Cy Twombly (1928-2011)
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Essay published in Artistic Research: Charting A Field in Expansion, edited by Paulo de Assis and Lucia D'Errico, London: Rowan & Littlefield, 2019, pp. 12-26. This essay accompanies my earlier piece: "Transmissibility: A Mode of... more
Essay published in Artistic Research: Charting A Field in Expansion, edited by Paulo de Assis and Lucia D'Errico, London: Rowan & Littlefield, 2019, pp. 12-26. This essay accompanies my earlier piece: "Transmissibility: A Mode of Artistic Re-search."
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Published version of a lecture I gave at The Dark Precursor: International Conference on Deleuze and Artistic Research in Ghent, Belgium in 2015. Citation: Emerling, "Transmissibility: A Mode of Artistic Research" in The Dark Precursor:... more
Published version of a lecture I gave at The Dark Precursor: International Conference on Deleuze and Artistic Research in Ghent, Belgium in 2015.
Citation: Emerling, "Transmissibility: A Mode of Artistic Research" in The Dark Precursor: Deleuze and Artistic Research, edited by Paulo de Assis and Paolo Giudici, Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2017, pp. 437-445.
Citation: Emerling, "Transmissibility: A Mode of Artistic Research" in The Dark Precursor: Deleuze and Artistic Research, edited by Paulo de Assis and Paolo Giudici, Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2017, pp. 437-445.
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We invite reviews that are not only focused on the most current books and happenings, but also those that account for slower or more delayed acts of reviewing the various fields we occupy, traverse, and construct with our research. The... more
We invite reviews that are not only focused on the most current books and happenings, but also those that account for slower or more delayed acts of reviewing the various fields we occupy, traverse, and construct with our research. The formula for us is re-view as re-search. As such, any act of review – of looking again, from another angle, without presupposition – cannot help but be theoretical, historical, cultural, ethical, political, and, dare we say it, vital. We desire reviews that challenge, critique, provoke, and inspire rather than descriptive reviews or mere reportage. A re-view is an act of return and repetition as much as it is the assertion of a new point of view or perspective. What we are after is a review as a critical vision, as a threshold between shared worlds, lines of thought, modes of research, artistic practices, and all the other mechanisms through which visual culture(s) takes place.
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A review essay on the latest body of work from the contemporary photographer William Wylie published in the journal History of Photography.
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Essay that was included in the 2016 issue of the Journal of Art Historiography: A Tribute to Donald Preziosi, edited by Philip Armstrong (Ohio State University) and Jae Emerling (University of North Carolina, Charlotte).
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Keith Moxey's Visual Time: The Image in History imagines itself as an art historical methodology when in fact it only rhetorically questions the discipline's 'epistemology certainty' about images and temporality. Moxey never enacts a... more
Keith Moxey's Visual Time: The Image in History imagines itself as an art historical methodology when in fact it only rhetorically questions the discipline's 'epistemology certainty' about images and temporality. Moxey never enacts a methodology capable of confronting the complicated issues of temporality, images, and art historiography. Instead, he traipses through seven chapters on these issues that read more like transcriptions of conference talks than the in-depth work one expects in a book project. While Moxey offers convincing explanations of art historical shortcomings regarding an artwork's essential anachronism-for example, the simple fact that a work from 1907 is encountered anew, time and again, in each present, by new sets of viewers-he fails to arrive at either a method or a theoretical framework to address what he terms the 'anachronic power' of an artwork. Nonetheless, this text astutely surveys much recent work on images and historiography. It does so by addressing pre-existing methodological issues such as linear chronology, ekphrasis, contemporaneity, and aesthetic experience.
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This themed issue of the journal of visual culture entitled Architecture! has two aims. First, to present a collection of articles and shorter provocation/ position pieces about the failure of contemporary architecture to address the full... more
This themed issue of the journal of visual culture entitled Architecture! has
two aims. First, to present a collection of articles and shorter provocation/
position pieces about the failure of contemporary architecture to address the full complex of issues engaged by visual culture studies. Second, these lines of inquiry are meant not merely to critique architecture and its discursive conceits, but rather any critique is only valid to the degree that it identifies what is significant and vital about architecture for visual culture as such. We would like to stress that this is a critical examination of architecture (as bothobject and discourse) in contemporary visual culture: its failures, blindspots,refusals, and symptoms, yes, but also its successes, minor discourses, and alternative models of practice. In short, we are most interested in discovering an ‘outside’, that is, a passage beyond ‘starchitect’ vanity/ideological projects in favor of a critical – vital – interest in architecture as a socio-cultural and historical means of transmitting unforeseen aesthetic possibilities and modes of knowledge. This requires forcing ourselves not only to think ‘architecture from the outside’ (as Elizabeth Grosz, 2001, has said), but from the inside as well because only along this fold does architecture become a plane within which visual cultures are immanently composed. It is along this fold that architecture presents its full powers: to create intervals and delays, to demarcate and cross thresholds between political and temporal blocs, to attract or magnetize disparate communities of people, and to render ontological immanence visible. In short, we want architecture to live up to its claimed singular promise, which Peter Eisenman (2001: xiii) puts this way: ‘only in architecture can the idea of an embodied and temporal virtuality be both thought and experienced.’
two aims. First, to present a collection of articles and shorter provocation/
position pieces about the failure of contemporary architecture to address the full complex of issues engaged by visual culture studies. Second, these lines of inquiry are meant not merely to critique architecture and its discursive conceits, but rather any critique is only valid to the degree that it identifies what is significant and vital about architecture for visual culture as such. We would like to stress that this is a critical examination of architecture (as bothobject and discourse) in contemporary visual culture: its failures, blindspots,refusals, and symptoms, yes, but also its successes, minor discourses, and alternative models of practice. In short, we are most interested in discovering an ‘outside’, that is, a passage beyond ‘starchitect’ vanity/ideological projects in favor of a critical – vital – interest in architecture as a socio-cultural and historical means of transmitting unforeseen aesthetic possibilities and modes of knowledge. This requires forcing ourselves not only to think ‘architecture from the outside’ (as Elizabeth Grosz, 2001, has said), but from the inside as well because only along this fold does architecture become a plane within which visual cultures are immanently composed. It is along this fold that architecture presents its full powers: to create intervals and delays, to demarcate and cross thresholds between political and temporal blocs, to attract or magnetize disparate communities of people, and to render ontological immanence visible. In short, we want architecture to live up to its claimed singular promise, which Peter Eisenman (2001: xiii) puts this way: ‘only in architecture can the idea of an embodied and temporal virtuality be both thought and experienced.’
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We argue that what we need now is for the rest of us—the audience of art, the masses of (non)consumers and owners—to own up to our silence and our clichéd rationales for why art matters. What forces motivate and compel our relation to... more
We argue that what we need now is for the rest of us—the audience of art, the masses of (non)consumers and owners—to own up to our silence and our clichéd rationales for why art matters. What forces motivate and compel our relation to artworks if not capital? We assert that we must recollect why we need art ontologically, ethically, and politically in order to counter this return to objets d'art rather than works of art. And we ask: why are we encouraged to forget that art-works, that it undertakes the aesthetic and epistemic labor defacing and queering anything posited as “natural” or “given”? For us, this is the essential aspect of art’s vitality: creating shared, open, immanent worlds. It is art as an event, not a commodity.
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To rethink art history, yet again, requires a return to Bergson through Deleuze because his work forces us to think how and why an artwork is what it transmits, that is, a ‘nonsignifying passage’, a deframing power that renders an opening... more
To rethink art history, yet again, requires a return to Bergson through Deleuze because his work forces us to think how and why an artwork is what it transmits, that is, a ‘nonsignifying passage’, a deframing power that renders an opening within history. Within this opening, art historians confront a difficult lesson: ‘Life is not your history’ (Deleuze and Parnet [1977]. 2002: 15). Art is and opens us to a ‘vertigo of immanence’, a life that exceeds lived experience without abandoning art as an end-in-itself because ‘thought and art are real, and disturb the reality, morality, and economy of the world’ (Deleuze and Guattari [1991], 1994: 48; Deleuze [1969], 1990: 60).
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My interest here is to address this “architecture of absence” as it functions in the work of Candida Höfer. What is at play in Höfer’s photographs, most of which are of architectural spaces more than structures or facades? How are the... more
My interest here is to address this “architecture of absence” as it functions in the work of Candida Höfer. What is at play in Höfer’s photographs, most of which are of architectural spaces more than structures or facades? How are the images she creates related to architecture? Whether it is her photograph of Mies van der Rohe’s Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin or Schindler’s house in Los Angeles or Bundschaft’s Beineke rare book room at Yale University, Höfer extracts from these iconic buildings “images of spaces” that are neither taken as givens nor necessarily accounted for in advance by the architect. But they are also not pure representations, completely freed from these physical spaces. What is distinct about Höfer’s “architectural photography” is its ability to create a temporal “interplay” of the past within the present, that is, an “architecture of absence” in which “absence” signifies not a lack or privation, but rather an opening, a passage, a threshold. What Höfer’s work reveals is that an image opens a “space of history” that has nothing to do with representation or simple temporal chronology. Instead, her photographs “unravel spatial situations,” thereby exposing a threshold through which temporal forces flow and intersect. An architecture of absence, then, is neither historicist nor eternal. It never faces the lived or the present (“what we are”) nor does it ever give us “what we were” (a simple past tense that is too often taken as a given when it comes to photography); instead, it gives us “what we become, what we are in the process of becoming—that is to say, the Other, our becoming-other.”
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T. J. Demos' books are of exceptional merit and importance. Demos’s critical practice resonates with a line from Jacques Derrida that has always inspired and haunted me: “I believe in the political virtue of the contretemps” (1993;... more
T. J. Demos' books are of exceptional merit and importance. Demos’s critical practice resonates with a line from Jacques Derrida that has always inspired and haunted me: “I believe in the political virtue of the contretemps” (1993; Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf, New York:
Routledge, 1994, 88). In these two works, Demos has offered not merely a body of work, but rather an envoi, a message for anyone interested in the future of art, politics, history, and temporality. For me, they embody an ideal form for art-historical research, i.e., they devise imaginative and critical ways to write alongside artworks such that the artworks' presentation of epistemic, aesthetic, and historiographic complications problematize art-historical practice as such.
Routledge, 1994, 88). In these two works, Demos has offered not merely a body of work, but rather an envoi, a message for anyone interested in the future of art, politics, history, and temporality. For me, they embody an ideal form for art-historical research, i.e., they devise imaginative and critical ways to write alongside artworks such that the artworks' presentation of epistemic, aesthetic, and historiographic complications problematize art-historical practice as such.
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“On the Image of Bearden,” Romare Bearden: Southern Recollections, essay for the exhibition catalogue to the largest Bearden retrospective to date, celebrating the centennial of his birth, Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte NC, September 2011.
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Exhibition review of Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present, Museum of Modern Art, New York City.
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Is it possible to conceive anew the relation between art history and philosophy, disciplines with indelibly German birthrights, without abandoning the ruins of its aftermath? After philosophy, after art history: this is more than a... more
Is it possible to conceive anew the relation between art history and philosophy, disciplines with indelibly German birthrights, without abandoning the ruins of its aftermath? After philosophy, after art history: this is more than a temporality, it is an orientation, a movement towards and after that which has been forfeited. And yet, only in the aftermath of each, between art history and philosophy, are we granted our inheritance. What has been given is a tradition that, while irreparable, induces a recollection of what remains. What remains, what returns, is neither art history nor philosophy. To read and study this relation between generations and disciplines we must confront two unfinished projects that sought to step beyond the demarcations of philosophy and art history, two projects by forebears who rejected the names ‘philosopher’ and ‘art historian’: Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin. What comes next is unimaginable if we do not return to this pair of German-Jewish émigrés, who succeeded and failed in crossing borders both physical and conceptual. These proper names have long been bound to one another, and each offers art history and philosophy a lesson that has been difficult to receive. The difficulty arises not only from the incompleteness of their respective projects, but also from a certain reluctance to read Benjamin alongside Arendt, Arendt alongside Benjamin.
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Essay on the contemporary photographer William Wylie's work Carrara.
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Deleuze’s and Guattari’s philosophy in the field of artistic research Gilles Deleuze’s intriguing concept of the dark precursor refers to intensive processes of energetic flows passing between fields of different potentials. Fleetingly... more
Deleuze’s and Guattari’s philosophy in the field of artistic research
Gilles Deleuze’s intriguing concept of the dark precursor refers to intensive processes of energetic flows passing between fields of different potentials. Fleetingly used in Difference and Repetition, it remained underexplored in Deleuze’s subsequent work. In this collection of essays numerous contributors offer perspectives on Deleuze’s concept of the dark precursor as it affects artistic research, providing a wide-ranging panorama on the intersection between music, art, philosophy, and scholarship.
The forty-eight chapters in this publication present a kaleidoscopic view of different fields of knowledge and artistic practices, exposing for the first time the diversity and richness of a world situated between artistic research and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Within different understandings of artistic research, the authors—composers, architects, performers, philosophers, sculptors, film-makers, painters, writers, and activists—map practices and invent concepts, contributing to a creative expansion of horizons, materials, and methodologies.
Contributors
VOLUME 1: Paulo de Assis, Arno Böhler, Edward Campbell, Diego Castro-Magas, Pascale Criton, Zornitsa Dimitrova, Lois Fitch, Mike Fletcher, Paolo Galli, Lindsay Gianoukas, Keir GoGwilt, Oleg Lebedev, Jimmie LeBlanc, Nicolas Marty, Frédéric Mathevet, Vincent Meelberg, Catarina Pombo Nabais, Tero Nauha, Gabriel Paiuk, Martin Scherzinger, Einar Torfi Einarsson, Steve Tromans, Toshiya Ueno, Susanne Valerie, Audronė Žukauskaitė
VOLUME 2: Éric Alliez, Manola Antonioli, Jūratė Baranova, Zsuzsa Baross, Anna Barseghian, Ian Buchanan, Elena del Río, Luis de Miranda, Lucia D’Errico, Lilija Duoblienė, Adreis Echzehn, Jae Emerling, Verina Gfader, Ronny Hardliz, Rahma Khazam, Stefan Kristensen, Erin Manning, John Miers, Elfie Miklautz, Marc Ngui, Andreia Oliveira, Federica Pallaver, Andrej Radman, Felix Rebolledo, Anne Sauvagnargues, Janae Sholtz, Mhairi Vari, Mick Wilson, Elisabet Yanagisawa
With support from
The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) / ERC grant agreement n° 313419.
Gilles Deleuze’s intriguing concept of the dark precursor refers to intensive processes of energetic flows passing between fields of different potentials. Fleetingly used in Difference and Repetition, it remained underexplored in Deleuze’s subsequent work. In this collection of essays numerous contributors offer perspectives on Deleuze’s concept of the dark precursor as it affects artistic research, providing a wide-ranging panorama on the intersection between music, art, philosophy, and scholarship.
The forty-eight chapters in this publication present a kaleidoscopic view of different fields of knowledge and artistic practices, exposing for the first time the diversity and richness of a world situated between artistic research and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Within different understandings of artistic research, the authors—composers, architects, performers, philosophers, sculptors, film-makers, painters, writers, and activists—map practices and invent concepts, contributing to a creative expansion of horizons, materials, and methodologies.
Contributors
VOLUME 1: Paulo de Assis, Arno Böhler, Edward Campbell, Diego Castro-Magas, Pascale Criton, Zornitsa Dimitrova, Lois Fitch, Mike Fletcher, Paolo Galli, Lindsay Gianoukas, Keir GoGwilt, Oleg Lebedev, Jimmie LeBlanc, Nicolas Marty, Frédéric Mathevet, Vincent Meelberg, Catarina Pombo Nabais, Tero Nauha, Gabriel Paiuk, Martin Scherzinger, Einar Torfi Einarsson, Steve Tromans, Toshiya Ueno, Susanne Valerie, Audronė Žukauskaitė
VOLUME 2: Éric Alliez, Manola Antonioli, Jūratė Baranova, Zsuzsa Baross, Anna Barseghian, Ian Buchanan, Elena del Río, Luis de Miranda, Lucia D’Errico, Lilija Duoblienė, Adreis Echzehn, Jae Emerling, Verina Gfader, Ronny Hardliz, Rahma Khazam, Stefan Kristensen, Erin Manning, John Miers, Elfie Miklautz, Marc Ngui, Andreia Oliveira, Federica Pallaver, Andrej Radman, Felix Rebolledo, Anne Sauvagnargues, Janae Sholtz, Mhairi Vari, Mick Wilson, Elisabet Yanagisawa
With support from
The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) / ERC grant agreement n° 313419.
Research Interests:
The International Association for Visual Culture and the Journal of Visual Culture invite submissions for the Early Career Researcher Prize. Current doctoral students and recent PhDs (within 5 years of degree) may submit original,... more
The International Association for Visual Culture and the Journal of Visual Culture invite submissions for the Early Career Researcher Prize. Current doctoral students and recent PhDs (within 5 years of degree) may submit original, unpublished essays on any topic related to visual culture. The prize-winning essay/s will be considered for publication in the
journal, pending revisions advised by the committee and the journal’s editorial collective. Final selections will be made by a committee of IAVC and JVC board members, including Sara Blaylock (University of Minnesota Duluth), Jill Casid (University of Wisconsin Madison), Almira Ousmanova (European Humanities University), and Jae Emerling (University of North
Carolina Charlotte).
journal, pending revisions advised by the committee and the journal’s editorial collective. Final selections will be made by a committee of IAVC and JVC board members, including Sara Blaylock (University of Minnesota Duluth), Jill Casid (University of Wisconsin Madison), Almira Ousmanova (European Humanities University), and Jae Emerling (University of North
Carolina Charlotte).
Research Interests:
Interview with the art historian Donald Preziosi. Part of the Tribute to Donald Preziosi in Journal of Art Historiograpy edited by Philip Armstrong (Ohio State University) and Jae Emerling (University of North Carolina, Charlotte).
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
A review-essay on Annamaria Ducci’s intellectual biography Henri Focillon en son temps. La liberté des forms (2021) that extends this work by presenting a call for a ‘return to Focillon’ within art historical thought that begins with his... more
A review-essay on Annamaria Ducci’s intellectual biography Henri Focillon en son temps. La liberté des forms (2021) that extends this work by presenting a call for a ‘return to Focillon’ within art historical thought that begins with his ability to refocus us on the artwork itself and its capabilities to magnetize content both within and without its historical milieu.