The Contemporary Art of the Nature Morte in the Age of Artificial Life Forms
The Metafictional Illusion of Life in Installation Art and Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21788142 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Audrey Chan (0000-0002-9417-0718, University of Edinburgh, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2021 |
| Issue | 32 |
| Publication date | 2021-10-06 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | FORUM University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture & the Arts (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1749-9771 • E-ISSN: 1749-9771 |
| Publisher | University of Edinburgh (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.2218/forum.32.6469 |
| OpenAlex | W3207824183 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 5 |
Observing the artistic response to the illusional nature of artificial life forms in the field of installation art, contemporary writers often allude to conceptual artworks through ekphrastic means to “grasp the texture of the contemporary real” (Virilio 4) in a technologically “transformative moment” (Boxall 4). A “reality hunger” for the contemporary brings together a “burgeoning group of interrelated [...] artists in a multitude of forms of media” (Shields 3) to experiment new forms across disciplines through ekphrasis, which “strikes to explode” the “stuffed package” of a culture “containable with its shaped word” (Krieger 233). In her essay “Art Objects” (1995), Jeanette Winterson shows her interest in contemporary conceptual art as she writes that “the true artist is interested in the art object as an art process” and establishing a connection to the future instead of being interested in the final product (12). Her definition of art coincides with that of conceptual art as it seeks to analyse “the ideas underlying the creation and reception of art” (Shanken 433), and thus takes on the framework of the meta-critical process from conceptual art with “the use of scientific concepts and technological media both to question their prescribed applications and to create new aesthetic models” (Shanken 434). Deriving from the artistic landscape of conceptual installation art and its interactions with science, Winterson borrows the subject of the nature morte and the metafictional framework to address the clashes between artificial life forms and the human civilisation by alluding to artworks such as those of Damien Hirst in her novel Frankissstein (2019) when writing about cryonic bodies: “It’s a little like an art installation in here isn’t it? Have you seen Damien Hirst’s pickled shark in a tank?” (106). Based on the interdisciplinary interrelations between installation art and contemporary literature, this paper will read the dialogue between Winterson’s ekphrastic subject of the nature morte in Frankissstein and contemporary installation art, including works of Hirst, Cai Guo-Qiang, and Guillaume Paris, as a response to the rise of artificial life forms with respect to their metafictional and illusional nature as AI will become “fully self-designing” (Winterson 73)
Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Art methodology · Civilization · Contemporary art · Exhibition · Modern art · Performance art · Visual arts · Computer Science · History · Science Education and Perceptions · Space Science and Extraterrestrial Life · Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction
| Highly cited | No |
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