Changing Imaginaries of Progress and Growth in Avant-Garde and Intermedia Art Practices
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3986/pkn.v46.i3.02Keywords:
art and society, avant-garde, intermedia art, ecocriticism, ideology of growth, post-capitalismAbstract
This article connects the artistic avant-garde from the beginning of the twentieth century on the one hand and today’s intermedia and socially engaged artistic practice on the other. The central thesis is that the presented examples of works of art manifest concepts and models for thinking and living beyond the imperative of growth and continuous progress. Such artistic strategies are presented through five topical sets including laziness and disappearance, cosmopolitanism and universal language, alternative representations of space/ time, transhumanism, posthumanism, and systemic worldview. Just as avant-gardes used to criticize industrial or modern society, so today intermedia art contributes to the restructuring of the imaginary of growth, capitalist production and consumption. The article thus advances the conceptual understanding of post-growth and degrowth in the field of art and humanities, showing how precisely art may enable a positive understanding of powerlessness and release or the opposite of growth which is usually understood as exclusively negative—as lack and loss.
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