Ethics of Contemporary Art: In the Shadow of Transgression

About the Author

Theo Reeves-Evison is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Birmingham School of Art, UK. Prior to taking up a Leverhulme fellowship he worked as a Senior Lecturer in Theoretical and Contextual Studies. He holds a Ph.D. in Cultural Studies from Goldsmiths College and an MA in Critical Theory from the University of Nottingham. He is the editor, together with Jon K. Shaw of Fiction as Method, and has published recent articles in journals such as Parallax, New Formations and Third Text.

Product Description

What happens when the shock of artistic transgression wears off, when scandal dissipates, when outrage becomes a tired routine? In this original new book, Theo Reeves-Evison argues that transgressive art no longer succeeds on its own terms in societies where language, prohibition and morality have become increasingly malleable. This compels us to rethink the relationship between contemporary art and ethics, and focus our attention on the potential of artworks to propose new values rather than simply challenge pre-existing moral codes.

Assembling a novel theoretical framework from the writings of Félix Guattari, Jacques Lacan and others, Ethics of Contemporary Art narrates a journey away from transgression towards a new critical paradigm for the relationship between ethics and aesthetics that places questions of subjectivity centre stage. Along the way artworks by Kader Attia, Artur Zmijewski, Dora Garcia and others serve as springboards launching discussions of the varied pathways along which a renewed ethics of contemporary art might develop.

Review

“A 'slap in the face of public taste,' is how Mayakovsky described art's role in the buildup to the Russian Revolution, explicitly calling upon culture to assist in dismantling bourgeois society. More than a century later artistic acts of offense and transgression have morphed into predictable vanguard precepts; good for advancing one's career within a jaded art world, not so good for advancing positive social change. From performing sexual acts with butchered animals, to re-traumatizing Nazi camp survivors, each generation slaps harder at the establishment's face, only to be invited into its institutional citadel with fanfare. Meanwhile, environmentally damaging deals are signed by major art museums, even as they exhibit politically critical work and program socially interactive projects for the public's alleged edification. How then does one transgress that which thrives on transgression itself? Repurposing concepts such as 'repair' and 'fabulation,' Theo Reeves-Evison's avoids moralizing about these vexed cultural practices, offering instead a philosophical toolkit for finding our way out of transgression's shadows. Ethics of Contemporary Art dares us to imagine a productive engagement with contemporary art's cultural misdeeds while avoiding either falling back into a Victorian idealization of high culture, or celebrating transgression for transgression's sake.” ―Gregory Sholette, author of Delirium and Resistance: Activist Art and the Crisis of Capitalism (2017)

“This reconfiguration of the relationship between ethics and art has been long overdue. In a psychoanalytically inflected investigation guided by Lacan and Guattari, Reeves-Evison impressively moves the parameters of the role of ethics in the process of how art shapes subjectivity.” ―Silke Panse, Reader in Film, Art and Philosophy, University for the Creative Arts, UK

“Ethics of Contemporary Art breaks important new ground by moving the debate on art and ethics away from dominant paradigms of the transgressive artist. It focuses instead on artworks themselves to propose that we think ethics as repair, that is, as a speculative and productive endeavour capable of shaping and recreating the social.” ―João Florêncio, Senior Lecturer in History of Modern and Contemporary Art and Visual Culture, University of Exeter, UK