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Abstract:
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Abstract: This article, a revised and extended version of a presentation to the “6th International
Conference of the Arts in Society,” Berlin, May 2011, elaborates the dialectical relationship between
visual art forms and the social structures in which they are produced, by extending Robert Witkin’s
taxonomy first presented in his 1995 book “Art and Social Structure.” Witkin tracked the history of
visual art from pre-modern times, for which he invented the label “invocational art,” to the advent of
Modernism, described in terms of “evocational” and “provocational art.” The article then extrapolates
from Witkin’s model to include post-Modernism, for which the author ’s term “revocational art” has
been coined, and goes on to discuss Nicolas Bourriaud’s concept of “Altermodernism,” his term for
describing the relationship between contemporary art practices and the social conditions of today,
for which the author suggests an alternative-”convocational art”-a synonym for Bourriaud’s term
“relational art.” The paper then introduces a systemic-functional semiotic model for the analysis of
relational art, and concludes with a demonstration of the model as applied to the work of Anton Vidokle. |