Svetlana Racanović, (2024). Art in a Glass Box: Phantasies, Disasters and Shelters in the (Post-)Human Zoo. Život umjetnosti, 115 (2), 144-163.
https://doi.org/10.31664/zu.2024.115.07
Open access
Abstract
Whether experiencing the oppressive “Rules for the Human Zoo” as inspected by Sloterdijk or “long shadows” of Foucauldian disciplinary-biopolitical society or/and being situated within the Deleuzian society of control, we are witnessing how “shelter” (the word ecology comes from the Greek word oikos meaning nest, house, shelter) has become the “box,” the “glass-shouse,” the entrapment where disciplining and controlling forces that constrain us, dis-able us, disjoin us also hypnotize us with the phantasy of life, euthanized life that is shimmering like a spectacle “larger than life”. Here selected artworks (Haake’s, Quinn’s, Hirst’s, Kulik’s, Wertheim, Sea & Sun (Marina) performance), arranged in/with glass boxes or as enclosures, function like a magnifying glass that might, under a certain theoretical or interpretative angle, cleanse or sharpen the view on those “crime scenes” of the Anthropocene. Mancipatory trajectory within the theory of Foucault, Deleuze, Sloterdijk, Guattari and Haraway, traced here in specific artworks, is not about preventing or controlling natural disasters, climate changes or guiding rules of the Anthropogenic Garden. It is about staying with those troubles, living attentively and caringly. Art shows the capability of imagining or rehearsing a new or renewed world in which humans become caring towards and sheltered within themselves and the indiscriminate, knotty environments they inhabit.
KEYWORDS
Art in glass tanks, artificial garden, anthropogenic zoo, biopolitics, phantasmagoria, Michel Foucault (care for the self).
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