The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis - Softcover

Demos, T. J.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822353407 ISBN 13: 9780822353409

Publisher: Duke University Press Books, 2013

Synopsis

In The Migrant Image T. J. Demos examines the ways contemporary artists have reinvented documentary practices in their representations of mobile lives: refugees, migrants, the stateless, and the politically dispossessed. He presents a sophisticated analysis of how artists from the United States, Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East depict the often ignored effects of globalization and the ways their works connect viewers to the lived experiences of political and economic crisis. Demos investigates the cinematic approaches Steve McQueen, the Otolith Group, and Hito Steyerl employ to blur the real and imaginary in their films confronting geopolitical conflicts between North and South. He analyzes how Emily Jacir and Ahlam Shibli use blurs, lacuna, and blind spots in their photographs, performances, and conceptual strategies to directly address the dire circumstances of dislocated Palestinian people. He discusses the disparate interventions of Walid Raad in Lebanon, Ursula Biemann in North Africa, and Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri in the United States, and traces how their works offer images of conflict as much as a conflict of images. Throughout Demos shows the ways these artists creatively propose new possibilities for a politics of equality, social justice, and historical consciousness from within the aesthetic domain.

About this title

About the Author:

T. J. Demos is Reader in Art History at University College London. He is the author of Dara Birnbaum—Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman and The Exiles of Marcel Duchamp.

Review:

“If you ask me, what is the best book on art of the 2010 decade, or even the twenty-first century so far, I don’t hesitate for a second to mention a book that I spent a week of alleged holidays to reread, in detail, as intellectual comfort food in my pessimism over the low quality of art writing, whether it be art history or catalogue essays. No other book offers such a perfect balance of theorizing, close reading of art works, activism and philosophy. . . . The book is so rich, one could teach an entire semester seminar on just its basis. Watching the videos, websites, photographs he analyzes and reading his commentaries is the best education in the arts—and in politics—one can dream of. . . . This book is a true masterpiece of scholarship as I like it—of what I call ‘cultural analysis’ with an activist edge. This is simply the best book on the aesthetics-politics bind I have read—ever. My admiration is immense; but so is my joy in reading finally something that makes scholarship exciting again.” -- Mieke Bal

About this edition

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0822353407
• ISBN 13: 9780822353409
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 368