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2 The politics of identity and recognition in the ‘global art world’ Identity politics informed by postcolonial critique dominated the discourses on the interrelations of globalisation, migration and contemporary art in the 1990s and the early 2000s. The previous chapter characterised the position from which the struggle for recognition of non-Western artists was launched, designating it the postcolonial position, in contradistinction to the migratory aesthetics position that gathered momentum in the 2000s. This second chapter examines the historical role and
Celebrated as a leader of London’s ‘Underground’ in the 1960–70s, and a leading British poet and performance artist of his time, Jeff Nuttall found fame through his critique of post-nuclear culture, Bomb Culture, which provided an influential rationale for artistic practice through absurdism but lost that recognition a decade or so later. Less well recognised, and with greater influence, is the distinctively visceral sensibility underlying much of his creative work, notably his poetry that draws on Dylan Thomas and the Beat Movement, his graphic drawing and luscious painting styles, and his pioneering performance art. This article argues that it is through these artistic expressions of visceral intelligence that Jeff Nuttall’s art and its long-term influence can now best be understood. It is intended to complement the Jeff Nuttall Papers in the Special Collections of The John Rylands Research Institute and Library, University of Manchester, deposited by the gallerist and poetry publisher Robert Bank (1941–2015), to whose memory this article is dedicated. Further papers have been added by Nuttall’s friends and relatives.
to explain how the work (or the artist) engages with these effects in an aesthetic, visual and conceptual register. The Introduction presented the three interwoven concerns pursued throughout this book: visibility and recognition, identity and belonging, and aesthetics and politics. Chapter 1 outlined how intensified globalisation and mobility have profoundly changed the discourses on art. I argued that the discourse on art and globalisation has primarily revolved around issues concerning globalisation-from-above, whereas the discourse on art and migration has
demands, grotesque images, scatological humour, cutting sarcasm, and rough curses manifest in the distorted figures that move through the piece with their ravenously open mouths and thick, phallic tongues. Without directly corresponding to Artaud’s work, these monsters, dispersed across the collages, seem to act out his anguish, and the vast, blank spaces Spero has placed them within represent the silence that met his demands. Artaud demanded recognition, but he also wanted to make himself present in language.3 His oeuvre testifies to an exhaustive struggle against what
projects aimed at defending or denying the rights of the freedom of movement and negotiating the position, recognition, identity and representation of migrants in society. As W. J. T. Mitchell has noted, on the level of politics, the issue of migration is thus ‘structurally and necessarily bound up with that of images’. Not only do images move from one environment to another, making the ‘migration of images’ fundamental to the ontology of images and visual cultures as such; images also ‘go before’ the immigrant and the first encounter with the receiving country: ‘before
emphasised in order to gain more power and recognition.5 Citing Valeria’s work, I propose to show the cultural roots of a Adamowicz and Storchi, Back to the Furutists.indd 146 01/11/2013 10:58:45 Nocturnal itineraries 147 9.1 Illustration by Rosa Rosà in Bruno Corra’s Sam Dunn è morto: Romanzo sintetico con 6 illustrazioni di Rosa Rosà, Milan: Studio Editoriale Lombardo, 1917: 16. new type of metamorphic self (a type at times female, and at others gender neutral), and its political implications in the context of early twentiethcentury Italian society. Articles and
they celebrate to an aesthetic, devoid of what Stuart Hall called their associated ‘culture of resistance’. 44 In such a context, Vaucher's work was both the very thing these audiences were seeking, while simultaneously being the inverse of everything they represented. The growing recognition of Vaucher's considerable influence on visual culture culminated in her first major (UK) retrospective, Gee Vaucher: Introspective at Firstsite (Colchester), 2016–17. Co-curated by Stevphen Shukaitis
centuries. This chapter is divided into two parts. First, it includes a critical survey of the writings on the history of photocollage between the 1970s and 2010s, focusing on the arguments and rationales for separation and forgetting, or acknowledging and linking, the photocollage practices of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. It thus includes examples of both amnesia and recognition. Second, it considers the agents and platforms for photocollage making in the nineteenth century as well as some particular images, that is, recurrent visual patterns, content and
not have read an art history book titled ‘A History of Women’s Buildings: 1893 Chicago and 1973–1978 Los Angeles,’ but she will be walking through the doors of the Los Angeles Woman’s Building. 25 What we see in these examples is a recognition of the power of the discursive in
Migration, understood as the movement of people and cultures, gives impetus to globalisation and the transculturation processes that the interaction between people and cultures entails. This book addresses migration as a profoundly transforming force that has remodelled artistic and art institutional practices across the world. It explores contemporary art's critical engagement with migration and globalisation as a key source for improving our understanding of how these processes transform identities, cultures, institutions and geopolitics. The book also explores three interwoven issues of enduring interest: identity and belonging, institutional visibility and recognition of migrant artists, and the interrelations between aesthetics and politics, and its representations of forced migration. Transculturality indicates a certain quality (of an idea, an object, a self-perception or way of living) which joins a variety of elements indistinguishable as separate sources. The topic of migration is permeated not only with political but also with ethical urgencies. The most telling sign of how profoundly the mobility turn has affected the visual arts is perhaps the spread of the term global art in the discourses on art, where it is often used as a synonym for internationally circulating contemporary art. The book examines interventions by three artists who take a critical de- and postcolonial approach to the institutional structures and spaces of Western museums. The book also looks at the politics of representation, and particularly the question of how aesthetics, politics and ethics can be triangulated and balanced when artists seek to make visible the conditions of irregular migration.