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Lost Horizon – (Dis)location And Identity In Contemporary Tibetan Art (Sarah Magnatta)
In 2011, artist Tenzing Rigdol surreptitiously moved over 20,000 kilograms of dirt from Tibet into the exile community of Dharamsala, India for an installation titled Our Land, Our People. Thousands of Tibetans in the area came to view and touch the land, some with memories of a Tibetan landscape…
Art And Madness (Iwo Zmyślony)
The following is the first of a two-part series. How can we enter someone else’s head? How can we get inside? How can we break through our own, invariably too constricting horizon to reach out to another human being? How can we look at reality from the perspective of…
Querying And Queering The Virgin – Sacred Iconography And Profane Iconoclasm In The Art Of Frida Kahlo (Tina Kinsella)
A contemporary icon of those on the periphery and for those who are dispossessed, Frida Kahlo’s paintings draw on her mestizaje inheritance and personal experience of marginality ― political, cultural, sexual, gendered ― to produce an iconoclastic iconography that contests the supposedly centred subject of modernity. As with many female…
But Is It Art? – Searching For Simple, Practical, And Illuminating Answers, Part 2 (Jakob Zaaiman)
The following is a second installment of a two-part series. The first part can be found here. The question then arises, how does the “theatrical pretense” – and its invitation to a theatrical narrative – relate to inanimate crafted objects such as paintings, or sculptures? The answer is that, in the…
But Is It Art? – Searching For Simple, Practical, And Illuminating Answers (Jakob Zaaiman)
The following is the first installment of a two-part series. “Art” desperately needs a handy, practical definition, not of the scholarly conceptual variety, but rather of the plain and simple sort that you can usefully take with you into a gallery, and apply directly to what you see. You want…
Treating Your In-Home Automated Concierge Like A Real Person (Brittany Scantland-Lall)
For Christmas, my parents gave us an Amazon Echo. If you’ve seen the commercials (or have one in your home), you know this is the Amazon in-home concierge with “Alexa” who responds directly to your commands. “Alexa, add yogurt to my grocery list.” “Alexa, play Piano Guys Christmas music.” “Alexa,…
Neoliberal Dreams And The Plight Of The Humanities, Part 2 (Carl Raschke)
The following is the second of a two-part series. The first installment can be found here. A longer version is published in .PDF version in an upcoming issue of the Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory. Seaborg was correct in one key respect. The humanities historically had never really belonged…
Neoliberal Dreams And The Plight Of The Humanities (Carl Raschke)
The following is the first of a two-part series. A longer version is published in .PDF version in an upcoming issue of the Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory. Neoliberalism, The “Knowledge Society”, and the Birth of Biopolitics The results of the Presidential election of 2016 struck the academic thought-world…
Celebrities Becoming New Focus Of Religious Worship For “Non-Believing Believers” (Madison Tarleton)
Each day millions of Instagram savants wake up and take their morning coffee with the Kardashians, spend their lunch break painstakingly assessing the Angelina Jolie divorce, and settle in for a pleasant dinner at home with Beyoncé and her family. All of this is to say, once we make the decision…
Baz’s Bronx – Get Down Or Let Down? (Lachlan MacDowall)
On August 12 Netflix screened the latest project by Australian film director Baz Luhrmann. The Get Down is a twelve-part television series set in the Bronx in the 1970s that chronicles the birth of disco, punk and particularly hip-hop, through the lives of four teenagers. In one sense, the broad story of hip-hop…