RCAAP Repository

After initially framing the contemporary crisis of art criticism in neo-Adornian terms, the article offers a review of the historical and philosophical foundations of art criticism coming mainly from the perspective of Jena Romanticism. Based on the latter, it traces a sound distinction between art criticism and other kinds of discourse about art. Finally, it makes critical comments on art journalism and contemporary discourses that favor public mediation in lieu of reflection, but that have nevertheless occupied the social space of art criticism.

Melodrama’s adaptability is a direct cause of the way in which it can also be transmedial, transgenre and transnational, finding new ways of expression outside of the classic confinements of Hollywood’s excesses. Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Manbiki kazok, also known as Shoplifters, is an example of a film that belongs to the melodrama category, but that explores the pathos and feeling that are characteristic of the genre in a way that not only is it not divorced of the political but contains within itself a fierce rebuke of the pressures of a capitalist society that underlines its emotional burden.

Shoplifters is a 2018 feature film directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda. It is about a family with no blood ties living in a low-class neighbourhood in Tokyo who find a girl locked at a balcony in the cold day after day. Understanding that she is being mistreated by her parents, the Shibata family decide to take Yuri in. The audiovisual essay The Invisible Family analyses Shoplifters according to three key concepts of melodrama: house, family and society. Each one of them, introduced by a quotation, is composed of three diptychs with scenes from the film. The small and cluttered houses in Shoplifters constrict the characters and render their inner selves visible. As the Shibata fall apart throughout the film, their care and respect for each other grow deeper. Shoplifting and using others are unacceptable in society. However, these are carried out by the Shibata, because their income is not enough to provide for the family. It is, thus, urgent to improve work regulations, to provide more and better employment opportunities and to support families. All in all, the conflict emerges within the family, gathered in a house which suffocates them and pressured by a society which not only imposes rigid norms of respectability but also makes the weakest invisible.

Ana Vaz, born in Brasília, Brazil, in 1986, is one of the most notorious Brazilian experimental filmmakers working today. Her films were shown at festivals and institutions such as: Berlinale Forum Expanded, New York Film Festival, TIFF Wavelengths, Cinéma du Réel, Flaherty Seminar, Tate Modern, Palais de Tokyo, Jeu de Paume,  etc. Her body of work narrates stories hidden in lost memories of colonial landscapes. By exploring multi-temporalities, her films reflect the borderland experience – be it the borders between Brazil and Europe; art gallery and movie theater; poetry and cinema, or between humans and non-humans. In addition, her movies are the result of meaningful dialogue with the greatest thinkers of our time, such as: Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, Jacques Derrida, Viveiros de Castro, David Kopenawa, João Guimarães Rosa, and Clarice Lispector. Departing from a pedagogy of "walk and listen”, we invite readers to explore  Ana Vaz's counter-cinema.

Five years ago, in a volume charting a ‘formerness’ for the Global West, I proposed a shift from institutional critique to infrastructural critique. This was described as a shift from a critique of the enabling container for a certain discourse or performativity of citizenship (institution) to an embodied critique that necessarily owed more to praxis. Thus the direction was towards a critique based on contingent ruptures, with the interpretation and activation of these ruptures the source of political meaning. The immanence of such an approach registers in the sense that it works with desires that are latent in the infrastructure, thus broadly conceived.  It is the notion of infrastructure as a mode of thinking that favours the concrete over the abstract - concrete that is immanent to real abstraction – that I would like to develop in this article, concentrating on the epistemic and political relations between infrastructure and critique.  

The article examines various forms of immanent critique. Following forms of critique in Kant and Hegel, it highlights how contemporary approaches to immanent critique within the tradition of critical theory fail. Idealistic residuals regularly prevent critical thinking from holding on to immanence. Historico-philosophical, but also anthropological assumptions are particularly relevant here. Finally, an alternative to the existing forms of critique is outlined, which strengthens pluralistic concepts, and detaches the idea of immanence from an in itself homogeneous internal perspective of critique.

In the moment of the first lockdown, in double confinement - of the social and the self - a pursuit took place. With Malabou’s words and a camera, searching for the Lazaretto was a process to derive and rediscover a place and a moment. A form, as film, as essay.  In the open air.

This article comprises excerpts of the book:  Moten, F. (2019). All that Beauty. Letter Machine Editions.

The texts presented in this special issue of the JSTA have two ambitions. On the one hand, they try to retake the problem of art criticism in a digital age that significantly transformed the means of exhibition and experimentation of works of art. Together they are an introduction to the task of criticism today, taking into account its genealogy in German theoretical romanticism and its new repertoires in post-colonial theory and infra-structural critique. On the other hand, they aim in recovering the discussion of criticism and the need for its inclusion in contemporary art discussions. 

The final issue of 2021 is especially devoted to Art Criticism: a thematic dossier, guest-edited by Nuno Crespo, Luiz Camillo Osorio, and Sabeth Buchmann, with the title “Is There A Place (Still) For Criticism?”.

The oeuvre Critical Zones. The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth addresses the climate crisis mainly through the few-kilometers thick layer of critical zones that surrounds planet Earth, within the scope of New Climate Regimes. It proposes the redefinition of concepts such as Gaia, and suggests new ones, namely Terrestrial. The book is the product of a collective endeavor from scientists, artists, philosophers, historians, and activists, arguing that areas, disciplines and all living beings are connected. While associated with the ongoing scientific project Critical Zone Observatories, it was developed and launched during the exhibition Critical Zones - Observatories for Earthly Politics, in May 2020 at ZKM Karlsruhe, and edited by its two main curators, Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel. This review will introduce an impressively complete work, whose reading is as stimulating as necessary, and which contributes remarkably to what will be the most important debate of our century.

This essay aims at an analysis and deconstruction of Movement, Framework, Cut (2019) an audiovisual essay by Nuno Dias, that edits shots from Corrente (2008), Cinema (2014) and O Guardador (2015), three short films directed by Rodrigo Areias. Dias looks for intersections in these works. What draws them together? What is the role of landscape in these films? What is more important in cinema: what one sees or what is hidden? The aesthetics of image and sound as ways to cut across the incommensurable. Characters-being emerge in shots as metaphors of memory. The character-being in Corrente floats the waters of the river. In O Guardador, the character-being floats, with a lantern, the museum rooms, between objects of the past. In Cinema, the character-being carries over his shoulders the weight of memory in abandoned old cans that hide fantasies in a “cinematic bunker”. It is inaccessible to the common mortal, but that he is allowed to spy.

Madalena Miranda's journey to the lazaretto in Lisbon is a metaphor for a journey into the interior of everyone who has experienced the covid-19 pandemic. Just as the last pandemic marked our lives forever, other pandemics can be found during other times and in other societies. In this short text, we cross the video with other stories created by the connection between moving images and the direct sensations they create. We explore Rousseau's ethics, the savage in Robinson Crusoe and Senator La Ciura, and Boccaccio's concept of community. All the stories take us back to a moral and ethical problem that is linked to the concept of “appearance”.

The first issue of 2022 opens to the potentially of this journal to become interdisciplinary and to research within the cross fields of art and technology (although we always know that there is no art research without the technological means to produce it). Nevertheless, we want to highlight how this issue comes from the openness of the field, including, in the Articles sections, three texts that try to understand different domains of this relation, namely: virtual reality, glitch art, and artificial intelligence.

El atentado del 11 de septiembre, tornó a Osama bin Laden el hombre más buscado del mundo, y tras su muerte en mayo de 2011, Norteamérica fue tomada por una gran euforia. En esta investigación, trabajamos con la hipótesis que la muerte del terrorista, puede haber favorecido la reelección de Barack Obama. Para probar nuestras teorías, utilizamos el Google Trends, trazando una frecuencia relativa a la distribución de interés por el evento y comparando el promedio obtenido con los valores relativos a los votos regionales en Mitt Romney y Barack Obama en las elecciones de 2012. Los resultados muestran que nuestra hipótesis puede ser corroborada, ya que al estudiar el padrón de distribución de interés por la muerte de Osama bin Laden, identificamos una correlación positiva para los votos en Barack Obama (r= 0.347, p=0.013) y una correlación negativa para los votos en Mitt Romney (r=0.324, p=0.021)

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A gestão da informação clínica em contexto hospitalar coloca questões de organização da informação, bem como questões de ordem médica, ética, jurídica, tecnológica e económica, implicando os profissionais envolvidos na forma como os registos clínicos são produzidos, armazenados e tornados acessíveis. Apesar do Processo Clínico Eletrónico (PCE) ser uma realidade mais ou menos presente em todas as instituições de Saúde, a persistência da produção e uso dos registos clínicos em papel mantém-se como solução paralela ou alternativa ao PCE. Esta situação resulta em défices e em duplicação de informação, que colocam sérios desafios à prática diária, com prejuízo para a prestação de cuidados ao utente. O presente trabalho apresenta um estudo de reutilização da informação clínica realizado no Centro Hospitalar de São João (CHSJ) no sentido de apoiar a tomada de decisão relativa à gestão de informação do Arquivo Clínico, fundamentando uma estratégia de integração no PCE de registos clínicos em papel dos atuais doentes do CHSJ, com base nas necessidades de acesso à informação. Reflete-se sobre o processo de investigação levado a cabo e os resultados obtidos, à luz do método de investigação quadripolar.

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