Body as a New Social Medium in Lithuanian Per-formative Arts: How Discourse Comes to Matter

Basia Nikiforowa, Kestutis Sapoka

Abstract


This article deals with the concept of new materialism and examines the issue of how new materialism tackles visual art in innovative ways – though the intersections of artistic practice, art-as-research, and philosophical analysis. Selected artworks by S & P Stanikas and Evaldas Jansas are analyzed in this paper as body reconceptualization in Lithuanian art, employing the approach of new materialism. We will explore the geopolitical and ideological background, in which Lithuanian and Polish visual artists grapple with cultural binaries from the 1960s to the 1990s: male-female gendered bodies, traditional or contemporary art, and the artist as free individual or the one tied to ideology. Employing Rossi Braidotti’s term “affirmative”, this article poses a question whether it is possible to argue on the analyzed cases that “affirmative politics combines critique with creativity in the pursuit of alternative visions and projects”.


Keywords


abjection; commodities; body reconceptualization; emotional terror; matter; new materialism; post-humanism; sexuality; violence

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References


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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17951/kw.2017.22.5
Date of publication: 2018-01-07 00:00:00
Date of submission: 2017-06-17 02:00:42


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