JAWS: Journal of Arts Writing by Students - Volume 5, Issue 1, 2019

Our guest editorial takes the form of an interview between the JAWS editorial team and Dr Rachel Hann.

Most recently art philosophy has shifted away from postmodernist ideas. But where does the practice of photo-collage fit in? Photo-collage addresses a range of theories; it involves a particular method of cutting and pasting; it brings up metaphysical notions of ‘decoding’ artworks; and it addresses a variety of themes. This article places these ideas into the twenty-first-century cultural rhetoric, which has broadened to involve wider themes from ecological philosophy. The article suggests that in asking how photo-collage fits into the cultural scene, it is pertinent to ask how the arts fit into the bigger picture of the world.

This article examines and discusses the conditions that have led to parafictions becoming an important mode of practice in contemporary art. This article demonstrates how the socio-political situation during 1998–2018 has combined with the development of technological infrastructure to its current planetary-scale and affected relationships with truth. This has led to the growth of artists creating parafictions, which exploit this so-called era of post-truth and fake news. To demonstrate one model of parafictive practice, this article uses the case study of the artists UBERMORGEN.COM, who implement radical media strategies and methods of ‘hallucinated consensual hallucination’.

The Pearl Button (2015) is a documentary directed by Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzmán. Throughout the film, the director takes us on a journey along Chilean waters, where the brutality of the countries’ past comes to life with the cyclical movements of this natural resource. In the light of phenomenology, this article analyses the devices that Guzmán uses to bring the elements of the past into the present, providing his audience with a space of remembrance.

The use of the ornamental or decorative in art and design has been associated with backwardness, especially in the context of turn of the century aesthetics debates. This article examines two accusations levelled at the ornamental – that its practitioners are ‘stragglers’ and that it is a haunting ‘spectre’. These words are taken as a starting point from which ornamentation’s particular relationship with a non-linear experience of time can be explored. This disruptive characteristic of the ornamental aesthetic is then examined in the context of the 2014 Jeremy Deller-curated exhibition Love is Enough, which displayed works of Andy Warhol alongside works of William Morris.

The concept of simulacra, with a propensity to diverge into in-betweenness, is a complex notion at the best of times. A dualistic structure of communication made up of signifier and signified that always produces a floating signifier, links simulacra with experience as an active agent of change. A story of divergence in an artwork can simultaneously affect the communication of it, even given no apparent narrative. This article then identifies three ways the simulacrum effects the communication of a work of art in artist-curator practice through the Deleuzian concept of simulacra, as a living recurrence of difference.

The aim of this article is to place Debord’s ‘spectacle’ in direct comparison with social media. The concept of the spectacle as presented and outlined by Debord in The Society of the Spectacle argues ‘All that once was directly lived has become mere representation’. Drawing from Debord, this article examines whether social media is a manifestation of the spectacle in contemporary society.

This article will propose how the physical material of the silkworm might unsettle and entice us to consider an alternative means of relating to others. Examining work by the artists Kumi Oda and Candice Lin, this article will search for forms of relationships not based on the appropriation and exploitation of animal difference for the distinction and profit of the human species. Musing over both Haraway’s and Derridean theories, the article will unravel the strangeness of silkworms, mingling more intimately with their physicality in efforts to stitch together a new ontology that accommodates the multiplicity of differences present and in emergence, within both the species of our own, and those of others.