Dissenting Body and Its Creative Recontextualisation in Lithuanian Visual Arts

Bibliographic Data

ID21243749
AuthorsBasia Nikiforova (0000-0003-2774-4707, Lithuanian Culture Research Institute, Department of Contemporary Philosophy, Saltoniškių str. 58, LT-08105 Vilnius, Lithuania), Kęstutis Šapoka (0000-0001-6729-4865, Lithuanian Culture Research Institute, Department of Contemporary Philosophy, Saltoniškių str. 58, LT-08105 Vilnius, Lithuania)
Year2019
Volume12
Issue2
Pages361-375
Publication date2019-12-31
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueCreativity Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2345-0487 • E-ISSN: 2345-0479
PublisherVilnius Gediminas Technical University (PUBLISHER • LT)
DOI10.3846/cs.2019.11178
OpenAlexW2998633444
LanguageEN
References cited20

The body is an important starting point concept throughout deconstruction, reconstruction and recontextualization of the body’s concept. This change of focus in research that stems from the results to the process of contextualization means that the researcher should engage with texts or images, as they are reflected in the process of cultural development and exchange, through which decontextualization is exhibited. This article deals with the concept of new materialism and endeavors to explain, how discourses come to matter. It examines the issue of how new materialism tackles visual art in innovative ways – through the intersections of artistic practice, art-as-research, and philosophical analysis. Such definitions as Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s “a bodily being”, Julia Kristeva’s “the abjection of the self”, Arjun Appadurai’s “the aesthetics of decontextualization” and “singularized object”, Igor Kopytoff’s “the cultural biography of things”, and Nicholas Thomas’ “entangled objects”, constitute the methodological frameworks of our research. We will analyze such approaches as Hans Belting’s concept of body as a “living medium”, Giorgio Agamben’s view on body as an object of commodification and Jacques Derrida’s “trust in painting”. An attempt to understand body reconceptualization and deconstruction through the categories of new materialism is the most important aim of this article. Karen Barad’s concept of intra-action (that implies a clear-cut subject-object distinction) is crucial to our research, which underlines that bodies have no inherent boundaries and properties and that the analyzed representations are “material-discursive phenomena”. The artworks under consideration will be confronted with a diagnosis that, according to Barad, all bodies come to matter thanks the intra-activity and its performativity. The case studies of Svajonė Stanikienė and Paulius Stanikas, Evaldas Jansas and Eglė Rakauskaitė works show how the image of the body is developed through the processes of their deconstruction and decontextualization

Aesthetics · Commodification · Epistemology · Linguistics · Materialism · Semiotics · Sociology · Art, Politics, and Modernism · Philosophy · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism

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