Fine Arts

[This text was written in conjunction with the online exhibition "Lo Ch'ing: Painting the Postmodern Landscape", http://the-poets-brush.artinterp.org/omeka/] The Anthropocene is a term given to the chronological period of the Earth's existence in which human practices and actions substantially impact on the planet's ecosystems. In recent decades, artists around the world have attempted to draw attention to the interconnections between humans and the networks of living and nonliving entities in which they are entangled, sometimes building upon and sometimes challenging traditional modes of imaging 'the landscape.' This collection of images places Lo Ch'ing within this artistic field, investigating how his work draws attention to the situation of humans, animals, and plants—and their interdependence—in the context of global modernity.

This article examines the uses of organic matter in the art of Xu Bing and Gu Wenda. It attempts to outline the common concerns that both link these uses to culturally specific identities (Chinese or otherwise) and go beyond them to construct an image of the nonhuman world as a phenomenon that participates in and is effected by the context of globalization. The analysis presented draws upon recent posthumanist theoretical work in animal studies and object-oriented ontology, specifically Cary Wolfe’s writings on animals and biopolitical frameworks and Timothy Morton’s theories of ecology and hyperobjects. Considering works like Xu Bing’s A Case Study of Transference and Gu Wenda’s united nations series from the viewpoint of posthumanist philosophies offers a more nuanced critical picture of how both artists have attempted to engage the boundaries of culture and human biological identity in the era of economic and environmental globality.

This article examines the Tirana Independence Monument, first inaugurated in November of 2012 on the hundredth anniversary of Albanian independence from the Ottoman Empire. The monument, designed by Visar Obrija and Kai Roman Kiklas, swiftly fell into disrepair until it was recently renovated in November of 2015. The article analyzes the monument's function in terms of its doubled existence as a sign of perpetual natality (the possibility of the rebirth of national consciousness) and as a ruin with a spectral pseudo-presence (as an object that continually reminds us of the disjunctures that divorce the present from its historicity). It considers the way the monument's inauguration relates to the politics of monumentality in contemporary Albania, and argues that the monument's gradual ruination between 2012 and 2015 can be read as a particular manifestation of the history of the image in late capitalist society. [1]

In the spring of 2016, a group of students, activists, and artists began to discuss the formation of a collective to oppose the hegemonic structures of capitalism and neoliberal politics and economics in contemporary Albania. From these discussions, a group of street artists—individually anonymous but known collectively as Çeta—emerged. The group is made up of members of various ages and backgrounds: designers, political scientists, architects, artists, and physicists. Different members carry out the design and execution of individual works at different times, according to the needs of the group and their commitments to other forms of political action in a given period. Çeta’s wheat pastes and stencils evidence the presence of a true dissident artistic movement in the capital of Tirana, a movement that refuses to cooperate with the dominant political parties in the country and, at the same time, rejects the ideological neutrality that frequently characterizes the Albanian contemporary art scene. Çeta’s works draw attention to the political systems that exploit the poor, the working classes, and minority communities, as well as the forms of rhetoric that obscure the plight of these groups in the name of socioeconomic progress and European integration. Çeta’s actions and interventions push back against the growing spectacle of prosperity in Albania, against official narratives proclaiming that the Albanian people are satisfied with their lives, their surroundings, and their government. Recently, the current mayor of Tirana began a campaign aimed at “beautifying” the city by a variety of means, including commissioning works of street art. In reaction to this spectacle, Çeta has sought to turn the walls of Tirana back against the political elites that continue to privatize the city and exploit its citizens.

In 1969, Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha wrote an open letter addressed to Kristaq Rama, Shaban Hadëri, and Muntaz Dhrami – the most prominent sculptors in socialist Albania – that contained a series of conceptual and aesthetic considerations bearing upon the creation of the massive Vlora Independence Monument then being realised by the sculptors. The three sculptors likewise responded with an open letter, and this exchange subsequently became one of the key documents of socialist Albanian cultural history. This article considers the way these letters functioned to shape the narrative of art’s relationship to political power and the narration of history in Albania. It explores the kinds of agency attributed to the dictator, to state sculptors, and to the monumental work of art, and considers how the discourse surrounding the exchange served to conceptualise the process of creating public sculpture under socialism as a reflection of the inherently collaborative nature of socialist contemporaneity.

On 22 November 2014 a multi-level underground bunker on the outskirts of Tirana, the Albanian capital city, was opened to the public for the first time. The bunker had originally been constructed in the 1970s, during the country’s socialist period, as part of the widespread transformation of public space and landscape that took place during the 1960s and 1970s, and was intended to house the heads of state in the event of a nuclear attack on the nation. The bunker’s aggressively publicized reopening as Bunk’Art – a combination museum and art installation space – is one of the most fraught and complex attempts on the part of the Albanian government to come to terms with the nation’s recent history, according to the museum’s website. The space, paradoxically devoted both to the period of fascist occupation in Albania and to the subsequent period of isolationist socialist dictatorship, intertwines a plethora of documents, photographs, and museum installations of questionable historical veracity. Bunk’Art represents a unique confluence of aesthetic discourses, strategies of memory-production, and policies related to architectural heritage and tourism, and the museum offers a particularly poignant example of post-socialist political manoeuvring vis-à-vis the socialist past.

This article considers the potential intersections of object-oriented ontology and science fiction studies by focusing on a particular type of science-fictional artifact, the category of 'Big Dumb Objects.' Big Dumb Objects is a terminology used-often quite playfully-to describe things or structures that are simultaneously massive in size and enigmatic in purpose: they stretch the imagination through both the technical aspects of their construction and the obscurity of their purpose. First used to designate the subjects of several science fiction novels written in the 1970s, Big Dumb Objects (often called BDOs) have been understood in terms of science fiction's enduring interest in the technological sublime and the transcendental. While object-oriented ontology has often turned to science fiction and weird fiction for inspiration in rethinking the possibilities inherent in things and their relations, it has not considered the implications of BDOs for a theory of the object more broadly. The goal of this article is to consider how extreme size and representations of scale in science fiction can help expand an understanding of the object along lines that are similar to those pursued by object-oriented ontology, especially Timothy Morton's notion of hyperobjects.