The Vanishing Vanishing-Point: Violence prevention through civil imagination Journal Article uri icon

Overview

abstract

  • In their video The Vanishing Vanishing-Point (2015), contemporary artists Effi & Amir depict the death of a mundane yet exceptional olive tree. Utilizing Google Street View and Google Earth, the video highlights temporal ruptures in the tree’s photographic documentation in order to expose a field of socio-political violence surrounding the tree’s demise. In this essay, I demonstrate how the artwork adopts a lens of ‘forensic aesthetics’ both to interrogate this complex field of culpability and to advocate an approach of violence prevention through civil imagination. The Vanishing Vanishing-Point emphasizes the need for a plural, ‘civil gaze’ (Azoulay, 2012) in order to understand the composite, multiple ‘events of photography�� surrounding the tree’s untimely death and to prevent such future acts of aggression.

publication date

  • December 1, 2017

has restriction

  • closed

Date in CU Experts

  • January 22, 2018 3:55 AM

Full Author List

  • Cohen B

author count

  • 1

Other Profiles

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)

  • 0047-2441

Electronic International Standard Serial Number (EISSN)

  • 1740-2379

Additional Document Info

start page

  • 342

end page

  • 358

volume

  • 47

issue

  • 4