Cover feature: Deborah Frizzell on Richard Mosse’s Enclave: Dream of the Celt
Announcing the arrival of:
Cultural Politics 2015 Volume 11, Number 2
Featuring Richard Mosse (cover art):
Richard Mosse’s Enclave: Dream of the Celt
Deborah Frizzell
Abstract
The Irish artist Richard Mosse’s The Enclave (2013), a six-screen video, photography, and sound installation made over several years in and around Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo, was featured in the Pavilion of Ireland at the Fifty-fifth Venice Biennale and at Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. Shot with infrared Kodak Aerochrome film, Mosse’s Enclave became a locus for debates about contemporary aesthetic strategies, especially within photography, and the ethics of deploying the shock of the sublime to elicit both empathy and questioning, exposing the viewer/participant to the tensions of attraction and aversion that oscillate within the sublime. I argue that Mosse’s visual/aural strategies, by running counter to those programmed within the image supply chain dominated by mass-produced culture, set in motion jarring ambiguities that an uneasy audience must struggle with or at least decode. Mosse engages the critical points at which given sign systems break down, become porous or malleable, and where glitches and short circuits upset our blasé habits and routines of consumption. His installations pose questions about how we read meaning in the texts and images that structure our experience and our understanding of cultural representation. Thus Mosse’s work highlights the limitations of photojournalism and photography by mixing the contingent and abstract, the symbolic and political, evoking the precariousness of life as experienced in the continuing cycles of war, armed conflicts, and systematic tactics of violence that mark our era.
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Table of Contents
Volume 11, Number 2, July 2015Special Section on THE SQUARED HORIZON: FRAMES and TRAJECTORIES of PAUL VIRILIO
Felicity J. Colman: Dromospheric Generation: The Things That We Have Learned Are No Longer Enough
Neil Turnbull: Light and Illumination: Paul Virilio’s Neoplatonism and the Theological Critique of Modernity
Book Reviews
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For past artists visit: http://culturalpolitics.org
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Cultural Politics (ISSN: 1743-2197) is an international, refereed journal that explores the global character and effects of contemporary culture and politics. It analyzes how cultural identities, agencies and actors, political issues and conflicts, and global media are linked, characterized, examined and resolved. In doing so, the journal explores precisely what is cultural about politics and what is political about culture. It investigates the marginalized and outer regions of this complex and interdisciplinary subject area.
Edited by:
John Armitage, Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, UK
Ryan Bishop, Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, UK
Douglas Kellner, University of California, Los Angeles, USA
Mark Featherstone, Book Reviews Editor
Joy Garnett, Arts Editor
Each issue includes essays and projects by visual artists solicited and edited by New York artist Joy Garnett. Contributing artists include Stephen Andrews, Kathe Burkhart, Paul Chan, Christos Dikeakos, Gair Dunlop, Yevgeniy Fiks, Zoe Leonard, David Humphrey, Dominic McGill, Julia Meltzer & David Thorne, Arnold Mesches, Carrie Moyer, Richard Mosse, Steve Mumford, Sarah Peters, Mira Schor, Susanne Slavick, Nancy Spero, and others.
Forthcoming issues will feature the art of Brandon Balengée, Susan Hamburger, Joy Gerrard...
Cultural Politics is published by Duke University Press.
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