Infrastructure Aesthetics

An upsurge in artworks negotiating the conditions of their own production, distribution, and reception has called attention to the infrastructural relations that shape the art world but have long been understudied. In response, this book introduces the concept of infrastructure aesthetics into the study of culture. The concept is drawn from infrastructure studies, media theory, and aesthetic theory. This volume develops it further, addressing: the analytical challenge of working with works that blur the boundaries between art and infrastructure, both historically and in the present, the aesthetic problem of assessing artistic forms that operate on an infrastructural level, and the politics of artistic agency on a social level, beyond the work's content or message. As the relation between artworks and their institutional and social settings becomes infrastructural in nature, we need to move beyond the reductive division of the study of artworks into production, articulation, and reception. This book provides its readers with an innovative conceptual toolbox designed for precisely this task, as well as a forceful set of exemplary case studies applying the concepts in theory and practice. Contents Introduction: Surfacing Infrastructures in the Arts Part One Art: Inversion, Invention, Intervention Investigation, Inversion, Intervention: “Women Artists – Past and Present” by Hellen Lassen, Hanne Lise Thomsen and Else Kallesøe Solo, Transparent, Responsible? Artist Collectives’ Inversion of Eurocentric Infrastructures at Documenta Fifteen Practicing a Black Women’s International. Infrastructures of a Black, Left, Feminist Sensibility The Monument as Relation Model: Examining the Material and Cultural Infrastructure of Sculptural Monuments Collaborating with Film and TV-Producer Jef Cornelis: Notes on Infrastructural Forms of the Image and Image Practices A Video Store After the End of the World: Material Speculation & Media Infrastructures Beyond the Cloud Part Two Aesthetics: Organization, Mediation, Relation A Crisis of Autonomy. Critique of Art and Sexuality in 1974 Critical Zone(s) Observatories: Modelling Infrastructures of Climate Science in the Art Museum The Intratemporal Work of Art Art as Reflective Infrastructure Aesthetic Appearance: An Infrastructural Perspective Part Three Politics: Institution, Reproduction, Support Poetry as Infrastructural Switch: Yahya Hassan and the Politics of the Danish Literary Circuit Gendered Infrastructures of the Danish Music Industry: From Disorientation to Feminist Collective Capacity Brown Island Floating in a White Sea: On Affective Infrastructures Institutional and Infrastructural Frictions: The Case of Group-Think – An Art, Sport, and Protest Project with Youth TOVES: THE SALE. Towards an Infrastructural Model for Hosting at the Art Museum Infrastructural Orientations in the Exhibition Contributors Index