Empathy

In 2008, filmmaker Harun Farocki expressed his desire to find an estranging empathy and thereby reclaim a term closed off to him in his Brechtian foundation. Today, artists are caught between the popular call for more empathy as the cure to political apathy and the theoretical implications that such an affective encounter with Others contains. In addition to advocating Carolyn Pedwell’s terminology of empathy as either foreignizing or domesticating affective translation, the author analyzes two artistic devices employed by Candice Breitz and Berlinde De Bruyckere to achieve this empathy that Farocki, and other artists, have searched for.

Empathy is an art, the ability to place oneself in the position of others in order to understand their ideas, feel their emotions, and understand their experiences. This fundamental and widespread acceptation of empathy as the fantasy of having direct access to other people’s states of mind persists, not without the risk of potential abuses, including those of outright projection and the illusion of transparency. How can we conceive of empathy beyond the limits of consciousness and subjectivity, at the confluence of our respective existential opacities?
[Translated from the French by Louise Ashcroft]

This article is a brief opinion piece about the dangers, or at least the questions that should be raised, with regard to empathy as an aesthetic viewing response. Griffiths argues that emotion can be manipulated and that empathetic response should be measured against historical facts.

In this article, the author examines Trevor Paglen’s Machine Readable Hito (2017) and its inclusion of output of emotion recognition algorithms. He briefly reviews the history of facial emotion in psychology and its links with emotion-identification algorithms used in a range of digital technologies. He identifies how empathy has its origins in artistic representations of emotion and how this history relates to current psychological research on empathy. This history demonstrates how computational systems, as represented in Paglen’s work, are used to modulate and manage the possibilities for empathetic understanding.

Counterintuitive to the work of many arts institutions and the people who visit them, the pursuit of knowing might not be as important as embracing what is not known. In this article, the author makes a case for the importance of not knowing to the pursuit of what cultural critic Ta-Nehisi Coates calls “muscular empathy” by tracing two frameworks—abstraction and kinesthetic empathy—through an examination of the creation and presentation of Dara Friedman’s video installation Mother Drum (2016). In what conditions can artists and those who experience their work loosen their grip on what they think they know in order for curiosity and plurality to breathe?

Victoria Lomasko has been spearheading Russia’s graphic journalism movement for close to ten years. Her reportages create a portrait of contemporary Russia, casting light on issues that are altogether avoided by Russia’s state-dominated media: chronic economic distress, brutal nationalism and the influence of the Orthodox Church, censorship, and the sclerosing effects of the stranglehold of Putin’s government and of the oligarchs on the political and economic life of the country. Her work creates awareness, showing that at least one person cares enough to listen, to draw, to name, to share, and to continue chronicling her time with enduring empathy.

Julia Martin’s work deals with death, solitude, and suffering. And yet, it is punctuated by jokes and by references to television and cake. Martin uses humour as a device to mollify the viewer, who is ensnared in an empathetic relationship with her difficult subject matter. The author explores Martin’s recent photographic/textual works through the notion of empathy, as seen through Barthes, Levinas, and Freud, and the notion of sincerity and double-framing found in Eshelman’s performatism.

For many, including people who identify on the political left, the idea of opposing prisons seems nonsensical—logic tells us that people go to prison for committing a crime. Yet, we know that there are flaws in our justice system and that systemic bias is a reality when it comes to criminalization of specific communities. Sheena Hoszko and Jamie Ross have recently made artworks that speak to their experiences as anti-prison activists and abolitionists.

Commemorating the untimely passing of Pierre Allard on November 25, 2018, this article offers a global overview of the engaged art practice of ATSA, founded by artist couple Pierre Allard and Annie Roy. Two projects—L’État d’Urgence (1998–2010) and Le Temps d’une Soupe (2016–)—are examined more closely in the context of the thematic feature on empathy. The author highlights the artists’ political and artistic engagement in the public sphere by contextualizing their “actions”—installations and collaborative social interventions—as a response to the often alienating and dehumanizing repercussions of social networks and their everyday usage.
[Translated from the French by Louise Ashcroft]