Immersive proximities / Critical distances: Revitalizing the Gesamtkunstwerk and Brecht's Dialectical Theatre in the metaverse
From its outset, the ‘total work of art’ has been marked by unreconciled dialectical tensions. Between its sharp-tongued condemnations of technology and simultaneous reliance on it, its yearning for decentralised mass transcendence and its slippage into totalitarianism, the multifarious incarnations of the Gesamtkunstwerk have not served as actualized visions so much as a recurring dream. That is not to say, however, that these contradictory impulses signal a hopelessly vague lineage, destined for “the trash heap of history” as Lebbeus Wood has proclaimed. Even while its specific taxonomy remains ambiguous, the Gesamtkunstwerk- precisely its dialectical struggles- have proven fruitful as a means to understand critical pedagogies in the new millennium, taking on forms far beyond the term’s geographical and disciplinary locus. When taken to be a loose assembly of aesthetic elements rather than a monolithic, centralised endeavor, the potency of the Gesamtkunstwerk as an aesthetic ideal among interdisciplinary art forms since the nineteenth century becomes undeniable.
The ‘Cool’ in Cool Britannia: Yinka Shonibare’s double appropriations of the ‘Ethnic’
Against a lurid pink wall hangs some fifty small canvases coated with dollops of impasto in variegated patterns that play off African fabric designs. At first glance, the exuberant clash of its gaudy patterning and colour- barely offset by the panels’ minimalist arrangement- signals a mimicry of the ‘ethnic’ fabrics one might see donned by black Britons in a show of their solidarity with African culture. But just how authentically ‘ethnic’ are these exoticised emblems of the Other?
What's new about new materialisms? Collectivizing the terrain of decolonial struggle in contemporary art
In the wake of onrushing ecological crises, riddled with an urgency seemingly irreconcilable with our temporalities, how might we cultivate curatorial and artistic practices that resist the coloniality of the Anthropocene’s self-mythologisation? With every fiber of our being intertwined in webs of processes that require repatterning, this time of precarity urges us to undertake the daunting task of a collective recuperation at the intersection of myriad disciplines, one that resists capitulating to humanist paradigms.
Opulence, you own everything! : Appropriation, excess and fantasy as critique in queer performance
Lustrous pearls adorning the décolletage, fur stole flung effortlessly over the shoulder, puppy in hand- itself bejeweled- a model struts her stuff down a runway. Against all odds, this scene finds its origins far from a Paris Fashion Week catwalk. Rather, we find the fashion capital in flames in Jennie Livingston’s 1991 documentary, Paris is Burning, as this lavishly dressed figure is revealed to be a drag queen executing her closest mimicry of that haute couture model in a Harlem ballroom.