SESSION: Always Connect? Relational Paradigms in Art History
Art history draws on a host of relational paradigms, from ecologies and networks to systems and webs, to frame its analyses of artistic production, circulation, and reception. Recent studies illuminate, for instance, how artworks have been embedded in systems of colonial oppression, are implicated in ecologies of environmental exploitation, and move through global logistical networks. Far less attention has been paid to the implications of selecting one relational paradigm over another, even though that choice is decisive. Each paradigm carries its own presumptions and priorities, and so privileges certain positions over others.
This panel, therefore, examines the ways that relations are posed and understood in art history. It asks: How do those paradigms define methods of inquiry? Which histories are invoked, explicitly or implicitly, in the choice of one over another? And under what conditions do attempts to connect encounter frictions and misalignments, possibly even prompting revisions of relational thinking more broadly? To broach these questions, the papers in this session offer methodological reflections, theoretical interventions, and historiographic reappraisals from a range of geographic and conceptual perspectives.
Session Convenor:
Christopher Williams-Wynn, Freie Universität Berlin
Speakers:
Christine Filippone, Millersville University of Pennsylvania
From Open Systems to Cine Accion in Third Cinema: La hora de los hornos
The 1968 Argentine film La hora de los hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces) established the paradigm for revolutionary activist cinema. Screened clandestinely and in union halls in the midst of Argentina’s first dictatorship, the four-hour manifesto film offered an analysis of the oppression of Latin America systematically through the lens of its history, geography, economy, sociology, ideology, culture, religion, and daily life. Directors Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas used mostly found, documentary footage and avant-garde film techniques to open a space for liberation from neocolonialism amidst repressive authoritarian rule. Avant-garde film closely followed avant-garde conceptual art practices in Argentina that utilised systems theory in the creation of radical institutional critique extending beyond the art system to address social, economic, and political contexts. The projection of the film was a direct political intervention intended to generate discussion, persuade, and ultimately convert the spectator into an actor in the political process. The cine-accion or film act, derived from social systems theory, was central to the filmmakers’ watershed manifesto “Toward a Third Cinema” (1969), which sought to construct “a liberated personality with each people as the starting point—the decolonisation of culture.” This paper argues that Solanas and Getino employed open systems in the film’s creation and distribution and in their conception of the cine-accion, the open-ended process whereby the viewer became an active participant in the decolonial process.
Zanna Gilbert, Getty Research Institute
Elena Shtromberg, University of Utah
Transgresoras: Mail Art and Feminist Networks in Latin America
This presentation stems from research for the exhibition Transgresoras: Mail Art and Messages, 1960s-2020s (UCR ARTS, 2025), which focuses on how feminist networks in Latin America and the U.S. challenged existing models of communication and connectivity in mail art and the art world more broadly. The international mail art network has been theorised through various frameworks: as a Deleuzian rhizome, a nodal object-actor network (Latour), a cybernetic feedback system, and within systems art paradigms, as both parasite and saboteur. However, when historicising feminist mail art practices, these methodological models prove less applicable. Feminist mail art networks operated differently than their predominantly male counterparts; they were more contingent and finite in structure. Two projects illustrate distinct approaches to feminist connectivity. Suzanne Lacy and Linda Pruess’s International Dinner Party (1979) presents a network in which the artists and participants pursued maximum connectivity. With more than 2000 participants, the project highlighted the vast reach of feminist organising in a pre-Internet era. Josely Carvalho and Sabra Moore formed their own autonomous network in their collaborative work Connections Project/Conexus, (1986–7), in which pairs of women artists across Brazil and the US connected through the mail. Despite the connectivity of many feminist networks, scant attention has been paid to them in the scholarship on mail art. By recuperating feminist histories, we not only expand our understanding of mail art as a medium but also foreground alternative genealogies of networked practice that remain relevant for contemporary artists working across digital and analogue platforms.
Jakob Schillinger, Universität für Angewandte Kunst Wien
Entangled Becomings or Algorithmic Control? Art’s Ecological Turn and the Analytics of Power
The paper addresses the panel’s questions concerning the stakes of different relational paradigms within the analysis of art with a view to the reception of media theory’s “ecological turn” within art history. Focusing on the work of Pierre Huyghe and its reception, the paper investigates the affordances and limitations of such systems-theoretical frameworks with regard to an analysis of power. Huyghe’s work is often described in terms of autopoietic systems and situated within the context of an increasing imbrication of the environment with computational technology. Where the work’s criticality is not simply asserted, its relation to contemporary forms of power is sometimes flagged as an open question. The proposed paper takes up this question and asks: How can art historical analysis in terms of systems and ecology address the dimension of power? Drawing on Donna Haraway, Viveiros de Castro, and others, Erich Hörl conceptually differentiates two opposing paradigms of ecology: on the one hand a Foucauldian environmentality, which reduc[es] relations to calculable, rationalizable, exploitable ratios, in the form forcefully wielded by the mathematics of power“ (Hörl 2017, 8), and on the other hand a general ecology, which acknowledges the primacy of relations, that is, an understanding of relations that which produces in the first place what it connects. The paper works out this differentiation theoretically and probes its applicability to an analysis of art by example of the work of Pierre Huyghe.
Sarah E. James, Manchester School of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University
Relation as Rupture? Unworlding: A Chronopolitics of Disaster
My paper explores the chronopolitics of disasters—nuclear, military, environmental—as relations of rupture. Connecting our present to Cold War pasts, and vice versa, I position artworks as time machines, pivots or portals which open wormholes, schizophrenically performing both relations and ruptures, connections and erasures. Case studies including The Otolith Group, Susanne Kriemann, Larissa Sansour, Bahar Noorizadeh, Naeem Mohaiemen, Tiong Ang & Co, and Hsu Yi Ting enable me to map and materialize connections, not via relational paradigms—grounded in ecologies, networks or systems—but via modes of unworlding (via Günther Ander’s negative anthropology). Here relations emerge as colonizing, embodying, and devastating, (W.E.B du Bois), rooted in ‘scorched earth’ racial capitalism (Rosa Luxemburg), patriarchal violence, and embodied primitive accumulation (Silvia Federici). But the artworks in question are also, crucially, figured as reclaiming relationality as sites of radical struggle and collective dreaming. I examine an aesthetic spectrum of disaster, including the totalising revisions required after nuclear fallout or genocide (Bertolt Brecht), I explore artworks as contaminating or having afterlives (Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch), of harbouring ghosts (du Bois and Mark Fisher) and Afrofuturist dreams (Octavia Butler). Instead of understanding art’s politics on a micro-level, my paper regrounds art’s histories in the geopolitical disasters of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—genocides, anti-communist killings, nuclear colonialism—alongside the many radical collective struggles for liberation, decolonization, revolution and alternative socialist futures. Here, art’s privileged relational power is revealed to be its ability to unworld us from our capitalist present, estranging us from it, and, critically, making it possible to reimagine.