System, totality, representation
- Submitting institution
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Birmingham City University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 32Z_OP_D0042
- Type
- D - Journal article
- DOI
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10.1215/17432197-2651792
- Title of journal
- Cultural Politics
- Article number
- -
- First page
- 226
- Volume
- 10
- Issue
- 2
- ISSN
- 1751-7435
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of publication
- -
- Year of publication
- 2014
- URL
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https://read.dukeupress.edu/cultural-politics/article-abstract/10/2/226/60151/System-Totality-Representation-Utopian-Globalist
- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
-
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
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This substantial essay, in Duke University Press’s well-established journal, constitutes a major theoretical statement of the researcher’s analysis of the conditions of late-modernist art production in western European and US society (c. 1950–70). Based in elaborating and interconnecting a series of core theoretical concepts—including ‘system,’ ‘totality,’ ‘representation’—the essay moves to a detailed empirical examination of works by a group of artists associated with performance and conceptual art developments in the traditional historiography.
The originality of the researcher’s analysis of artifacts created by, for example, Beuys, Smithson, Dibbets and Heubler, lies in understanding them as part of an ‘anti-anti-utopian’ movement in the post-war era dominated by disabling, apocalyptic Cold War legacies. Adapting Fredric Jameson’s analysis of contemporary science fiction writing, the researcher demonstrates, through a set of specific visual analyses, how the possibility of positive systemic social transformation was given form—‘metaphorized’—in works by these artists during the 1960s and 1970s. The essay, highlighting intertwined aesthetic and political radicalisms, explores the complex relations between specific artistic practices and products and nascent spectacular global capitalism. Drawing on elements of the critique of spectacle developed by Guy Debord, the researcher innovatively posits a tradition, or lineage, of ‘utopian globalism’ in the visual arts traceable back to the Russian Revolution and active, in mutating form, across the world from 1917 until the late capitalist 1990s.
The essay provides an historical and theoretical bridge linking ideas, artists and artworks usually kept in the separated silos of ‘modernist’ and ‘contemporary’ art categories—concluding with a discussion of the significance of works by Christo and Yoko Ono in the history of artistic ‘utopian globalism,’ and stressing that the wider worlds of mass media and ‘mediatization’ processes helped provide the platforms upon which these artists built their careers and materialized dreams of world community.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -