Defying the News: New Aesthetics of “Truth” in Popular Culture

Lithgow, Michael

doi:10.22230/cjc.2012v37n2a2515

Cited by 7 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 55 publications

(37 reference statements)

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“…Aesthetics is a notoriously difficult term to pin down and is used to refer to a wide range of experiences. We have elsewhere described and defended the relevance of aesthetic experience to discursive legitimacies (Lithgow 2012(Lithgow , 2013(Lithgow , 2017. In a nutshell, aesthetic experience presents opportunities to escape, destabilize and challenge conditions of possibility for hegemonic forms of discursive certainty.…”

Section: Assemblage Theory Of Embedded Artist-inresidenciesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The discursive legitimacies of knowledge-that is, in its conventional forms produced through logic and reason, backed by empirical evidence-are also influenced by aesthetic conditions-experiences of meaningfulness (for example: the regulation of ambiguity, senses of belonging and identity, anticipation related to form and other characteristics of communication linked to sociocultural context, performativity, narrative techniques, etc.) that fall outside of rational empirical boundaries, but which nevertheless play a role in shaping discourse legitimacy (Lithgow 2012(Lithgow , 2013(Lithgow , 2016(Lithgow , 2017. The presence of aesthetic priorities in the day-to-day routines of the embedded artist similarly creates possibilities for, as Jacques Rancière (2004) says, redistributions of the sensible, allowing for free play or shifts between a given reality and another while leaving room for ambiguity and uncertainty.…”

Section: Assemblage Theory Of Embedded Artist-inresidenciesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Sympathy for the abject: (re)assessing assemblages of waste with an embedded artist-in-residence

Lithgow

Wall

2019

Journal of Aesthetics & Culture

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The assemblages of (post)industrial neoliberal society include the production of vast quantities of post-consumer materials categorized as waste, which for many appears to vanish from everyday spaces. But rather than make it disappear in any final sense, recycling and disposal processes simply move it in new forms into new places within the global flows of waste. In urban contexts, the abject category of waste must be expelled from the sanitary spaces and subjectivities of daily routines, yet its corresponding absence in everyday perception obviates the urgency of action. One approach to unbundling the abject residue of contemporary society without instigating castastrophic rupture of social orders is through the aestheticization of the expelled. Artists working in the realm of abjection can serve as agents disrupting and redefining boundaries and social imaginaries of the status quo. In this paper we examine an artist-in-residence at the Edmonton (Canada) Waste Management Centre, arguing that the Deleuzian assemblages erasing the material consequences of garbage can be short-circuited in a municipal setting by redistributions of aesthetic experience. In this case, the artist residency embedded in human and mechanical assemblages of waste disposal allowed the artist to transform materials into an aesthetic spectacle recategorizing the abject as sympathetic and a vital component of social and spatial discourse.

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Section: Assemblage Theory Of Embedded Artist-inresidenciesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Assemblage Theory Of Embedded Artist-inresidenciesmentioning

confidence: 99%