This book is about artists and activists who have embraced mimicry as a subversive tactic. Bringing together the contributions of seventeen writers, it addresses the ways in which artists have responded to power and ideology by imitating its outward forms. These contributors address in particular the current age of fantasy and political deception, and they consider the work of artists who have reacted by using dissimulation and make-believe themselves. Chapters include discussions of mimicry in reference to a number developments and debates: the post-truth era, the neoliberal consensus, the politics of race and gender, online subcultures, and the rise of the new right.An electronic version of the introductory chapter is available under a creative commons licence.
Gediminas Gasparavicius is Associate Professor at The University of AkronMaia Toteva is Associate Professor of Global Art and Visual Culture at Texas Tech UniversityTom Williams is Assistant Professor of Art History at Belmont University
What is subversive mimicry? A guide to art in the post-truth era – Gediminas Gasparavicius, Maia Toteva, and Tom WilliamsPart I: The state and its specters1 Subversive economics and the art of refusal in Akasegawa Genpei’s Greater Japan Zero-Yen Note (1967) – Isabel Elson-Enriquez2 The slapstick state: politics as play in a Modified India – Sayandeb Chowdhury3 Probing the control zone: The NSK State in Time and the Irish Question – Conor McGrady4 Mimicry and its subversive negative potentials – Marina GržinicPart II: The danger and promise of mimesis 5 A specter is haunting Spectre: Laibach, the right, and the specter of ultra-identification – Alexei Monroe6 Irony and subversive mimicry in art and internet meme culture – Vera Mevorah7 Walking with images: of spider crabs, bot aesthetic, and Hasan Elahi’s Tracking Transience – Sebastian Althoff8 Mimesis and mimicry: contemporary art, commodification, and (post)critique – Steyn Bergs9 Who’s afraid of post-internet mimicry? – Kostis StafylakisPart III: The politics of dissimulation10 Not turning on, but putting on: lying as an aesthetico-political strategy – Craig J. Peariso11 Parafiction and truthiness: Stephen Colbert and Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow – Sarah Archino12 Sexy Semites, half-disguised soldiers, and fake passport stamps: levels of spectatorship in Palestinian and Israeli parafiction art – Keren Goldberg13 Human capital: culture jamming and racial capitalism at the millennium – Carrie Lambert-BeattyPart IV: Subversive mimicry in decolonial contexts14 Overidentification, decolonization, and genderqueer artivism in contemporary South Africa – Matthias Pauwels15 Samuel Fosso’s masquerade: history, colonial trauma, and healing in Emperor of Africa – Juan Carlos Guerrero-Hernández16 The agency of irony and mimicry in the subversion of colonial legacies: contemporary ethnographic portraits by Pushpamala N. and Yuki Kihara – Anisha Verghese17 “Ways to murder with a flag”: paradoxical discourse and subversive affirmation in the art of Odesa Conceptualists – Svitlana Biedarieva