Making worlds, making subjects: contemporary art and the affective dimension of global ethics

In response to Terry Smith’s article, ‘Currents of world-making in contemporary art’ (2011), Meskimmon’s text seeks to extend the arguments that contemporary art is both decidedly ‘worldly’ and ‘with time’, exploring art’s ethical agency in a globalised world. Arguing that Smith’s ‘contemporal dialectic’ locates a materialist politics for contemporary practice, the article suggests ways in which contemporary practice might engender a future beyond teleology, through an active engagement with imagination, affect and the logic of the gift

From the cosmos to the polis: On denizens, art and postmigration worldmaking

The concept of “postmigration”, as a non-binary way of understanding the exchange and movement of people and ideas across imaginative and materially-enforced boundaries, is a compelling way to engage with contemporary politics, art and culture. It also has much to say to a contemporary cosmopolitanism that stresses the significance of embodied, responsible and intersubjective agency as the basis of an ethical worldmaking project. This essay deploys an alternative figuration, the denizen, as a means by which to materialise the imaginative force of art beyond the limits of representation and, in so doing, propose it as an active mode of experimental world- making. Arguing with and through a small number of specific case studies, the text brings the insights of feminist corporeal-materialism together with a postcolonial praxis of reading, writing and making within, and yet against, the grain of the exclusive limits of the “nation” and “her citizens”. The willful act of the denizen in making herself at home everywhere becomes a way of imagining and materialising creative ecologies of belonging that are neither premised upon an essential call to blood nor an authentic claim to soil. Rather, the postmigration worldmaking explored here posits a radically open cosmos that emerges in mutual exchange with a response-able and responsible polis

The precarious ecologies of cosmopolitanism

Meskimmon contends that cosmopolitanism might be described as a precarious ecology, a state of dynamic exchange between selves and others, and a corporeal interplay between subjects, objects and ideas in the world. In this sense, cosmopolitanism is not a finished product, but rather a delicate balance reached during the mutual making of subjects and worlds, when that making welcomes difference and encourages ethical encounters with others. Turning to specific works by the artists Joan Brassil, Catherine Bertola and Johanna Hällsten, Meskimmon suggests that one of the ways that contemporary art can play a role in the creation of the precarious ecologies of cosmopolitanism is through its ability to evoke in viewers a state of wonder. Meskimmon explores wonder as a precarious, and precious, affective state that enmeshes us, imaginatively and sensually, with/in the world, and through each of these very different instances she demonstrates how artwork can participate in the production of a tenuous and attenuated moment of balance, a precarious ecology, that has the potential to align us through our shared wonder at the open generosity of the world

Chronology through cartography: mapping 1970s feminist art globally

Chronology through cartography: mapping 1970s feminist art globall

“And the one doesn’t stir...": on curatorial practice and the making of feminist histories

This essay charts a journey through a series of concentric circles. Like a pebble dropped into a still pool, the exhibition And the One Doesn’t Stir without the Other acted as a point of impact around which resonances between feminist art, activism, history and theory were amplified. It is not surprising that my journey takes the form of undulating waves rather than linear recounting, nor that its aftershocks connect differences rather than destroy them. One of the most significant legacies of feminism to epistemology has been the dismantling of the disembodied logic which underpins monolithic modes of historical narrative. The show’s curatorial sensitivity to the nuances of materiality, time and space enabled visitors to participate with the works in reconceiving the histories of feminist art/theory

As a woman, my country is... : On imag(in)ed communities and the heresy of becoming-denizen

Home/Land: Women, Citizenship, Photographies is an extensive compendium of texts and images, combining scholarly, creative and critical writing on photography with new work in photography. The contributions to the compendium range from academic essays on fine art and documentary photographies to photo-essays, community-based and pedagogical photographic projects, personal testimonies, creative writing, activist interventions and accounts of participatory action research using photography. Home/Land is global in its reach, exploring women’s lives in Britain and other European nations, the United States, Canada, the Middle East, South Africa, Asia and Australia. Bringing together texts and images produced by an international group of feminist scholars, activists, artists and educators, the book demonstrates how women have used photographic practices to find places for themselves as citizens, denizens, exiles or guests, within or beyond the nation as currently conceived, and, in so doing, how they actively produce new and different forms of identity, community and belonging

Jenny Holzer's 'Lustmord' and the project of resonant criticism

Responding to the systematic rape and murder of thousands of women in brutal acts of ‘ethnic cleansing’ during the Bosnian War, Jenny Holzer produced the powerful Lustmord during 1993 and 1994. The project is complex and thought-provoking, not least because its texts, images and objects call to observers’ own bodies, insisting that they participate in the work rather than stand outside it. Lustmord thus redefines the conventional relationship between desire and the gaze, which locates the encounter between subject and object as a unidirectional function of lack. This work creates a different space, one which is troubling and powerful precisely because it sets up reciprocal, intersubjective relationships through spectatorship. Thinking about the implications of this project, its strategies and modes of making ‘history’, will concern me throughout this essay, but a few introductory comments by way of description are necessary first

Response and responsibility: on the cosmo-politics of generosity in contemporary Asian art

Response and responsibility: on the cosmo-politics of generosity in contemporary Asian ar

Making oneself at home: a dialogue on women, culture, belonging and denizenship

The following text is derived from a presentation given as a dialogue to the annual conference of the Association of Art Historians in London 2014, where our presentation was used to open the session. Our decision to perform an interactive, scripted dialogue against a background of images, was an intentional attempt to explore ‘art history’ in ways that do not conform to the accepted academic conference conventions of a formal paper, subsequently revised, extended and embellished with references and footnotes to locate the writing as serious ‘research’ designed for possible publication. Research is generated not only by planned research processes but by informal interactions such as conversation and correspondence. In these processes dialogue is generative: ideas are sketched out, emerge spontaneously in response to questions, or are snatched from insights stimulated by unexpected collisions of spoken or written words.1 Art history offers many examples of fruitful correspondence between thinkers and practitioners. E.H. Gombrich and Quentin Bell explored canons and values in 1979; John Berger corresponded with Leon Kossoff (1996) and with James Elkins (2003-4) about drawing.2 As academics engaged in teaching and research, we talk about our shared interests in feminist histories and theories and our experiences as women now based in Britain, but who lived lives elsewhere - in the United States (Marsha) and southern Africa (Marion). For us the personal has been political; there are commonalities and differences in our experiences of ‘home’ and re-location. In doing light editing (added footnotes) of our performed dialogue for publication, we maintained the dialogic framework to indicate that the two voices speak from their particular perspectives while also finding a shared space

Étude pour le Cirque: becoming powders

Étude pour le Cirque: becoming powder