Poster, The - Volume 3, Issue 1-2, 2015

Western art museums are increasingly assuming a political role on the international stage. An example of this is the controversy that arose between western art museums and the Chinese government over the arrest and detention of Ai Weiwei in 2011. This article interprets these controversies as reflective of an ongoing political discourse. This article seeks to inform this discourse from the perspective of the field of international relations, using contributions from political science to interpret situations over Chinese dissident art between western art institutions and the Chinese state, and generate descriptive and prescriptive suggestions for the future.

Death imagery online is a conflicted area of examination. At times it can assume a virality that will change public opinion creating iconic moments where death functions as a transformative device. The Internet with its ineradicable features to preserve content makes death a performance that can be consumed stripped of time and space. Death imagery becomes immortalized on the Internet defying the physical mortality of the body as a site of decay and decomposition. This article examines the death of Neda Agha-Soltan in Iran, exploring the entwined notions of witnessing and how the death event courted virality, immortalizing Neda as a global icon. The Internet became a site of double articulation where the act of dying was both contemporaneous and historical – captured, disseminated and consumed non-stop on the Internet. This temporal dislocation of the Internet means death as a media event can be both banalized as part of popular culture and equally consigned to the iconic; igniting affective communities that can domesticate death for collective grieving, communion and agency.

This article argues that our understanding of visual liberty is framed within a functionalist circumscription. It thereby sets out to map an enfranchising dynamic for the act of viewing that is initiated within the domain of art but imbricates beyond it, illuminating and undermining the functionalism of the image within the culture industry: a functionalism that facilitates the sedimentation of ideologies and renders them matters of first rather than second nature, thereby militating against social change. Its approach, shaped through Antonio Gramsci’s work on the agency of the organic intellectual, establishes the historical background of art and the viewer through a detailed inventory that focuses on how tutoring the act of viewing has serviced elite hegemonies, beginning with early mediaeval church art and artefacts and progressing through to mediations of art history, art criticism and art theory. It proposes that the peculiar strengths of art can be put to the service of social change by illuminating how the visual rhetoric of the image industry constrains and controls our subjectivities. Through a Benjaminite partnership, the artist and viewer, working as organic intellectuals, can reconfigure their historic functioning into a creative coalition that activates the agency of the latter to inhabit a new space for thought and action. This understands art as a modus operandi, working shoulder to shoulder with other disciplines that are engaged in an emancipatory project: one way amongst many of doing, rather than a discrete discipline with outreach workers in selected theoretical fields.

Propaganda and Slogans: The Political Post er in Soviet Ukraine 1919–1921 (exhibition catalougue, The Ukrainian Museum, New Yo rk, 20 October 2013–2 February 2014, Intro. by guest curator, Myroslav Shkandrij, University of Manitoba) (2013) New York: The Ukrainian Museum, 68 pp., ISBN: 9780966062151, p/bk, $20 US