Aesthetic Violence in the 20th C. and Beyond

How does art respond to the tremendous pace of the world's violence? More
than merely sublimating or ameliorating trauma, art documents the physical
and psychological damage wreaked by social, political, cultural or personal
violence. Damaged life yields a damaged art, the distortions of which are
crucial in capturing the specific ramifications of violence. Art in the
face of war must suffer this distortion; consider the writings of Levi,
Antelme, Celan, Beckett, and O'Brien, among many others. The documentary of
aesthetic violence runs through work as various as art on feminism, racism,
and ranges from group to personal violence.

Yet there also has been a subgroup of artists that integrate aspects of
violence into their own oeuvre, sometimes to unearth or expose its taboo and
other times to dissipate it or to direct it to various ends. In this trend
consider Pound, Bataille, Artaud, Jünger, Celine, Gide, Genet through to
Viennese Actionism, performance artist Bob Flanagan, writer Kathy Acker,
punk and heavy metal music, and violent cinema. Critics have generally
placed the former group of writers as ethical exemplars while the latter are
known for crossing or destroying ethical boundaries. But what is the
assumed status of the ethical exemplar, and does it leave the condition of
aesthetic violence still uncritically suspended despite its evocation?

Other Voices (www.othervoices.org), an online journal of cultural criticism,
seeks essays that address the invocation of aesthetic violence of the past
century. Some overall questions we wish to address include: How does
aesthetic violence relate to ethics? How is aesthetic violence experienced?
At what point does violence inhibit any aesthetic experience? How might
aesthetic violence relate to a confrontation with political violence? How
does aesthetic violence operate as a critique of violence?

We are also interested specifically in contributions that articulate a sense
of the effect of violent assault upon the art object or viewer/reader. Too
often critical discourses on violence adopt a moralizing tone, dismissing
violence without close examination of its specific physical, psychological
and aesthetic effects. More detailed inquiry may allow us to ask, for
instance, on what possible grounds could one establish a phenomenology of
aesthetic violence? What would be its terms and conditions, its ethical
position? To what degree is violence inherent in our categories of
knowledge, aesthetic techniques or modes of representation?

Some general topics might include:

- war aesthetics

- art and racist violence

- art and feminism

- art and rituals involving violence

- art and violence of political resistance

- music and violence

- the beautiful and the ugly

- ethics of violent art from the position of the artist or the viewer

- violence and technique: as a way of directing, focusing, or de-focusing
attention on specific forms or instances of historic or personal violence

- violence and pleasure in art

- philosophies of modernity and violence (Nietzsche, Sorel, Benjamin,
Adorno, Lenin, Marxism, Mao, Colonialism, Fanon, Situationism, Black
liberation movements, third world/global struggles)

We invite papers from all theoretical perspective and disciplines,
including, but not limited to: theoretical and philosophical essays,
comparative case studies, historical and cultural interpretations, and
psychological and psychoanalytical investigations.

We are interested in articles (4000-9000 words), intellectual commentaries
(3000-5000 words), review essays (2000-4000 words) and scholarly book
reviews (1500-2500 words). Non-traditional submissions, such as lecture
transcriptions, hypermedia projects, translations, art work, interviews and
other materials, will also be considered.

Please send completed submissions by email attachment to
submissions_at_othervoices.org no later than June 15, 2007.

Please direct general inquires to both:

Vance Bell, editor-in-chief (vbell_at_othervoices.org)
Joshua Schuster, editor (jnschust_at_english.upenn.edu).

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Received on Sun Feb 04 2007 - 13:54:34 EST