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Kristine Stiles has played a vital role in establishing trauma studies within the humanities. A formidable force in the art world, Stiles examines the significance of traumatic experiences both in the individual lives and works of artists and in contemporary international cultures since World War II. In Concerning Consequences, she considers some of the most notorious art of the second half of the twentieth century by artists who use their bodies to address destruction and violence. The essays in this book focus primarily on performance art and photography. From war and environmental pollution to racism and sexual assault, Stiles analyzes the consequences of trauma as seen in the works of artists like Marina Abramovic, Pope.L, and Chris Burden. Assembling rich intellectual explorations on everything from Paleolithic paintings to the Bible's patriarchal legacies to documentary images of nuclear explosions, Concerning Consequences explores how art can provide a distinctive means of understanding trauma and promote individual and collective healing.

Esta obra analiza los productos culturales contemporáneos del choque entre la globalización y la violencia a través de la literatura, del cine, de la arquitectura y de la escultura. Específicamente estudia las subjetividades que derivan de este contexto: los cuerpos residuales, es decir, remanentes de la generalizada violencia social, política, y económica inherentes a las sociedades consumo. El análisis está centrado específicamente en los textos La virgen de los sicarios de Fernando Vallejo, Rosario Tijeras de Jorge Franco y en sus adaptaciones cinematográficas. También examina las novelas Satanás y Scorpio City de Mario Mendoza, Perder es cuestión de método y Vida feliz de un joven llamado Esteban de Santiago Gamboa, El olvido que seremos de Héctor Abad Faciolince y Todo pasa pronto de Juan David Correa. A través del trabajo plástico de Doris Salcedo el texto examina como los cuerpos residuales están presentes como ausencia en la escultura contemporánea y esto, en última instancia, señala su condición marginal. Además, explora transformaciones urbanas recientes en Bogotá, particularmente en estructuras arquitectónicas como el Palacio de Justicia y el Parque Tercer Milenio. En este corpus diverso se analiza el contexto político e histórico en el cual los cuerpos residuales devienen parte del proceso de reciclaje de desechos. Este trabajo propone una lectura de la producción cultural reciente totalmente novedosa tanto en su forma como en el contenido, en tanto que rompe con las visiones tradicionales y propone una nueva comprensión no solo de la violencia sino de las prácticas culturales contemporáneas colombianas.

This book is the first and most extensive academic monograph to be published on the work of the Mexican neo-conceptual artist Teresa Margolles. A range of art works produced by Margolles throughout the length of her career, which began in the 1990s (as part of the SEMEFO collective) and continues to the present day, are explored from such theoretical perspectives as the philosophy of death; the difficult spectatorship of death and the corpse; approaches to the representation of death and dead bodies in art from inside and outside Mexico; and the response of art to traumatic events in Mexico during and since the 1990s. The extensive scope of the study is a significant contribution to scholarly material on the artist, attending to difficult questions around art and ethics; its analysis of Margolles's work is situated within the contexts of the long tradition of the display of real bodies and body parts in Mexican visual culture, against the backdrop of the effects of NAFTA and the War on Drugs.

Visualizing Violence in Francophone Cultures brings together two complex and powerful loci of meaning: violence and the visual. As such, it offers a comprehensive overview from which one can gain a better understanding of the complexity of the visual rhetoric of violence. The visual representations of violence explored in this volume include both fictional works, including, for example, narrative films, graphic novels, and theatre, and non-fictional genres, such as news media and cultural artifacts. This volume's strength is also grounded in its interdisciplinary approach; by bringing together scholars from a variety of academic fields to examine a broad range of visual artifacts, such as photography, graphic novel, films, paintings, objects, the book offers a substantive corpus focusing on the rhetoric of violence. The essays collected in this volume explore the ways in which visual expressions of violence have infiltrated diverse narrative forms, and, as such, how they both construct and challenge general understandings of contemporary violence. They all chart, with cultural and historical specificity, the way in which images of violence shape the visual imaginary of ethical worlds.

Los estudios comparativos de Federico García Lorca y Salvador Dalí han tendido a concentrarse en aspectos biográficos. Este libro supera tal enfoque analizando la representación del narcisismo, el genio y la violencia en los poemas, las pinturas, las conferencias y las autobiografías de Lorca y Dalí. Tales temas se examinan principalmente desde las ópticas del psicoanálisis, la psicología analítica, el surrealismo, la psiquiatría, la filosofía y la antropología. El interés de este libro también radica en aquello que revela con respecto a la percepción de la creatividad según la intelectualidad modernista y en el análisis de la poesía de Dalí, que aún constituye una tarea novedosa en el campo de los estudios culturales. En resumen, la autora explora el tema de la formación del sujeto artístico en la época vanguardista. ¿Puede el narcisismo de Dalí y Lorca desvelar una tendencia sexual concreta? ¿De dónde viene el concepto del genio de Dalí y cómo se compara al duende lorquiano? ¿Qué oculta la violencia poética de ambos artistas en relación a la naturaleza híbrida de la modernidad?

Winner of the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.Ian Buruma is fascinated, he writes, “by what makes the human species behave atrociously.” In Theater of Cruelty the acclaimed author of The Wages of Guilt and Year Zero: A History of 1945 once again turns to World War II to explore that question—to the Nazi occupation of Paris, the Allied bombing of German cities, the international controversies over Anne Frank's diaries, Japan's militarist intellectuals and its kamikaze pilots. One way that people respond to power and cruelty, Buruma argues, is through art, and the art that most interests him reveals the dark impulses beneath the veneer of civilized behavior. This is what draws him to German and Japanese artists such as Max Beckmann, George Grosz, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Mishima Yukio, and Yokoo Tadanori, as well as to filmmakers such as Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Kurosawa Kiyoshi, and Hans-Jürgen Syberberg. All were affected by fascism and its terrible consequences; all “looked into the abyss and made art of what they saw.”Whether he is writing in this wide-ranging collection about war, artists, or film—or about David Bowie's music, R. Crumb's drawings, the Palestinians of the West Bank, or Asian theme parks—Ian Buruma brings sympathetic historical insight and shrewd aesthetic judgment to understanding the diverse ways that people deal with violence and cruelty in life and in art.Theater of Cruelty includes eight pages of color and black & white images.

This volume explores the relationship among beauty, violence, and representation in a broad range of artistic and cultural texts, including literature, visual art, theatre, film, and music. Charting diversifying interests in the subject of violence and beauty, dealing with the multiple inflections of these questions and representing a spectrum of voices, the volume takes its place in a growing body of recent critical work that takes violence and representation as its object. This collection offers a unique opportunity, however, to address a significant gap in the critical field, for it seeks to interrogate specifically the nexus or interface between beauty and violence. While other texts on violence make use of regimes of representation as their subject matter and consider the effects of aestheticization, beauty as a critical category is conspicuously absent. Furthermore, the book aims to'rehabilitate'beauty, implicitly conceptualized as politically or ethically regressive by postmodern anti-aesthetics cultural positions, and further facilitate its come-back into critical discourse.

Looking at works by Carrie Mae Weems, Toni Morrison, Emily Dickinson, Flannery O'Connor, Dorothy Allison, Carson McCullers, and Zora Neale Hurston, Claire Raymond uncovers a pattern of femininity constructed around representations of sadistic violence in American women's literature and photography from the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Dickinson's poetry is read through its relationship to the Southern Agrarian critics who championed her work. While the representations of violence found in Carrie Mae Weems's installation From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried, Morrison's Beloved, Dickinson's poetry, O'Connor's'A View of the Woods'and'A Good Man Is Hard to Find,'Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina, McCullers'Ballad of the Sad Café, and Hurston's Mules and Men are diverse in terms of artistic presentation, all allude to or are set in the antebellum and Jim Crow South. In addition, all involve feminine characters whose subjectivity is shaped by the practice of seeing acts of violence inflicted where there can be no effective resistance. While not proposing an equivalence between representing violence in visual images and written text, Raymond does suggest that visual images of violence can be interpreted in context with written evocations of violent imagery. Invoking sadism in its ethical sense of violence enacted on a victim for whom self-defense and recourse of any kind are impossible, Raymond's study is ultimately an exploration of the idea that a femininity constructed by the positioning of feminine characters as witnesses to sadistic acts is a phenomenon distinctly of the American South that is linked to the culture's history of racism.

Nicolas Winding Refn has emerged as a uniquely talented international filmmaker with an eye for visceral, iconic images. A 21st century mythmaker from his cult Pusher trilogy to the award-winning Drive and Only God Forgives, Refn infuses a sophisticated avant-garde sensibility with the grit of exploitation cinema. This book relates Refn's films to the ideas of Nietzsche, Canetti, Blanchot and others, and to aesthetic theory in general. It also asks why the West has become a largely artificial society, unable to generate new communal mythologies. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.

Gender, Agency and Violence: European Perspectives from Early Modern Times to the Present Day centres on literary, cinematic and artistic male and female perpetrators of violence and their discourses.This volume takes an interdisciplinary and cross-European approach – covering French, German, English and Italian case-studies from the sixteenth to the twentieth century and allowing for the exploration of recurrent themes. The contributions also facilitate an insight into how the arts and media respond to historical turning points which, time and again, challenge the link between gender, agency and violence for individuals and society alike.

Activists working in post-traumatic societies have tended to resist psychoanalytical terms because they fear that pathologizing individual suffering displaces the collective and political causes of traumatic violence. In a contrary direction, some thinkers about discourse and power have latterly embraced what Judith Butler insists is'the psychic life of power'. An openly psychoanalytical modelling of trauma for approaching major historical events such as the Holocaust adds yet a third position. Drawing on all three strands, this book poses the question of visual politics to psychoanalysis. It also explores the relevance of the many psychoanalyses to the study of art and other images in post-traumatic conditions. Visual Politics of Psychoanalysis builds on maverick art historian Aby Warburg's project of combining social, cultural, anthropological and psychological analyses of the image in order to track the undercurrents of cultural violence in the representational repertoire of Western modernity.In this innovative collection, a distinguished group of international authors dare to think psychoanalytically about the legacies of political violence and suffering in relation to post-traumatic cultures worldwide. Drawing on post-colonial and feminist theory, they analyse the image and the aesthetic in conditions of historical trauma from enslavement and colonisation to the Irish Famine, from Denmark's national trauma about migrants and cartoons to collective shock after 9/11, from individual traumas of loss registered in allegory to newsreels and documentaries on suicide bombing in Israel/Palestine, from Kristeva's novels to Kathryn Bigelow's cinema.

This book introduces a new research agenda for visual peace research, providing a political analysis of the relationship between visual representations and the politics of violence nationally and internationally. Using a range of genres, from photography to painting, it elaborates on how people can become agents of their own image.

Images of suffering male bodies permeate Western culture, from Francis Bacon's paintings and Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs to the battered heroes of action movies. Drawing on perspectives from a range of disciplines—including religious studies, gender and queer studies, psychoanalysis, art history, and film theory—Ecce Homo explores the complex, ambiguous meanings of the enduring figure of the male-body-in-pain. Acknowledging that representations of men confronting violence and pain can reinforce ideas of manly tenacity, Kent L. Brintnall also argues that they reveal the vulnerability of men's bodies and open them up to eroticization. Locating the roots of our cultural fascination with male pain in the crucifixion, he analyzes the way narratives of Christ's death and resurrection both support and subvert cultural fantasies of masculine power and privilege. Through stimulating readings of works by Georges Bataille, Kaja Silverman, and more, Brintnall delineates the redemptive power of representations of male suffering and violence.

Este libro se estructura a partir de tres campos de investigación distintos pero contiguos: la historia del arte, la estética y la semiótica. Bajo la óptica de la presentación de la exposición La violencia en Colombia, se explora la relación de Botero con la tradición europea y latinoamericana, las condiciones contextuales en la obra del maestro, su representación de la violencia, la relación problemática entre arte y violencia, y otros aspectos desde la perspectiva semiótica de su obra.

Warfare, ritual human sacrifice, and the rubber ballgame have been the traditional categories through which scholars have examined organized violence in the artistic and material records of ancient Mesoamerica and Central America. This volume expands those traditional categories to include such concerns as gladiatorial-like boxing combats, investiture rites, trophy-head taking and display, dark shamanism, and the subjective pain inherent in acts of violence. Each author examines organized violence as a set of practices grounded in cultural understandings, even when the violence threatens the limits of those understandings. The authors scrutinize the representation of, and relationships between, different types of organized violence, as well as the implications of those activities, which can include the unexpected, such as violence as a means of determining and curing illness, and the use of violence in negotiation strategies.

Les succès controversés des Bienveillantes de Jonathan Littell ou de Inglorious Basterds de Quentin Tarantino attestent que le besoin de mémoire est toujours aussi vivace mais interrogent les modes de revenance des horreurs du XXème siècle par les arts. Cet ouvrage explore aussi bien les possibilités qu'offre l'écrit qui fixe la mémoire que l'image qui donne à voir ce que le texte ne dit pas.

Nur wenige Bilder beschäftigen und polarisieren die gesellschaftliche Diskussion unserer Zeit so sehr wie Darstellungen von Gewalt. Mediale Gewalt wird dabei meist als unmittelbarer Ausdruck von Einstellungen zur Gewalt begriffen, als Instrument zur Verarbeitung von Gewalterfahrungen und als Stimulans zur Entfaltung von Aggression. Diese Zusammenhänge untersucht Susanne Muth an einem Schlüsselbefund: den zahllosen Gewaltdarstellungen auf der Luxuskeramik des archaischen und klassischen Athen. Dort wurde zum ersten Mal in der Geschichte der Kunst eine differenzierte Ikonographie der Gewalt entworfen, deren Spuren bis in unsere Zeit reichen. Um diese Ikonographie analysieren und interpretieren zu können, entwickelt Susanne Muth neue Ansätze einer historische Interpretation von medialer Gewalt. In faszinierender Nahsichtigkeit erschließt sie die neue Ikonographie der Gewalt (Krieg, Mythos, etc.) und führt auf dieser Grundlage in die komplexen Strukturen der Gewaltdarstellungen der Athener ein. Das Ergebnis ist ein neues und überraschendes Bild vom Umgang der Athener mit ihren Erfahrungen und Darstellungen von Gewalt – ein Bild, das unserem heutigen Umgang mit (medialer) Gewalt sehr fremd ist.