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The perplexed outcry of “I don’t get it” is often used to describe not just contemporary and new media art, but today’s world writ large. Afterimage's new special issue, "Aesthetics of Perplexity," is interested in examining perplexity as an aesthetic category, in which the experience of confusion or bewilderment can be harnessed as an artistic tactic. We asked the issue's guest editors to tell us more.

Why perplexity?

Katherine Guinness: My interest in perplexity began thanks to Nina, who was interested in how perplexity, as an aesthetic judgment, was something filled with a range of potentialities that couldn’t be grasped through typical understandings of art and its relation to the political. Our discussions linked with concepts and themes that I’ve been working on—first, a reconsideration of art and the absurd, which I’ve developed in a co-edited (with Charlotte Kent) collection, Contemporary Absurdities, Existential Crises, and Visual Art (2024), and second, something I term the “Corpocene,” which I discuss in my co-authored (with Grant Bollmer) book The Influencer Factory: A Marxist Theory of Corporate Personhood on YouTube (2024), which refers to a condition in which rights and abilities are transferred to corporate entities and denied to human citizens, who are then impelled to act and legally understand themselves as if they are also corporate entities. Both concepts, to me, speak to a broader confusion about the world and one’s place within it, a presumed antagonism between individuals and a world that is increasingly subsumed by capital, an antagonism that results in (probably correct) feelings of confusion and disempowerment. I’ve been thinking about ways to act that harness this confusion—this “perplexity” in the face of absurdity and the incomprehensible scale of technological and financial capital, “perplexity” in the face of resurgent fascisms—rather than resign oneself to fatalism. Of course, this incomprehension isn’t new. Many of the arguments that I’m making resonate with, say, those of Fredric Jameson in his Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism from 1989. But I think many of these phenomena, as linked with financialization and the increasing scale of global capital as they are, seem to be accelerating or deepening in numerous ways.

Nina Peterson: I became interested in perplexity as an artistic strategy after seeing Yoko Ono’s Film No. 4 (1966), which the artist used as a conceptual petition for peace during the late 1960s. The film involves a series of close-up shots of naked butts, and the idea of butts acting as collective protest registered as absurd to me. It perplexed me! Katherine’s co-edited text Contemporary Absurdities, Existential Crises, and Visual Art helped me to conceptualize how perplexity is a feeling that results from the apprehension of the absurd, and I wondered about the possibilities for this absurdist tactic—a bunch of unidentifiable posteriors—to serve as protest. Broadly speaking, protest actions prioritize clarity. Pamphlets disseminate information and posters use pithy phrases to challenge specific policies. This makes sense; it is necessary to clearly articulate logistics and the problem that needs addressing for the sake of organizing and coalition building. But conventional forms of protest can be exclusionary. People who work jobs without paid time off, caregivers, those living with a disability such as a chronic illness or physical impairment might not be able to participate in marches, sit-ins, or other forms of civil disobedience. And power can also instrumentalize and impose legibility, turning it against demonstrators during arrests and prosecutions. So, I was curious about the effects and purpose of a perplexingly absurdist artistic petition involving butts—something that seems opaque or incongruous with the aims and conventions of protest—in the context of mid-twentieth century anti-war activism. Collaborating on this special issue with Katherine meant that I could contemplate questions about perplexity in dialogue with her and the issue’s contributors.

What does perplexity say about the ability of art to intervene in various ways?

Katherine Guinness: Too much of art that is overtly “political” today, tends to presume a kind of didacticism—what Grant Kester, in this journal, once criticized as an “orthopedic aesthetic.”¹ There are numerous reasons to reject this kind of politics. I tend to think about it in terms of Jacques Ranciere’s understanding of “politics” and “aesthetics,” where the politics of art agonistically rewrites the boundaries of what is considered art or not, what can be sensed and what can be said within the sphere of “art.” That’s not entirely what’s at stake with perplexity, however. As I see it, perplexity is a confrontation in which an inability to interpret or make sense is a confrontation—an agonistic act—that also refuses the clarity or transparency long guiding the presumptions of Enlightenment reason and the rationality of the bourgeoise public sphere. Art’s ability to intervene is inevitably oblique and opaque. One can’t know in advance what the “point” of one’s intervention is, or will be, and one can’t presume moral (or political) superiority over the audience because of one’s intervention. Instead, perplexity is something that embraces contingency and the potentials of unknowing, of irrationality, and how a refusal to synthesize artist, work, and audience is itself a politics that keeps open the space of potentiality that essentially comprises “the political.”

Nina Peterson: Right now, confusion seems to be on the side of reactionary politics. Hegemons trump up confusion and manufacture chaos to entrench division and spread fears about others—those already excluded from dominant structures of social and political belonging. But to categorize confusion’s political use only as something weaponized against the vulnerable is to discount the ways in which not knowing can be generative in social terms. Art’s cultivation of perplexity—a sense of uncertainty or undecidedness—is something that resists the epistemic rigidity of the very systems that constructed and enforced the category of Other. Contributions to our issue show how art might intervene in discourses that seek to fix relations of power, to render hierarchical social structures unchangeable. For example, Erica Levin’s article about Ana Vaz’s films examines the potential of filmic perplexity to resist colonial modes of knowing people and places. So I agree with Katherine that perplexity is in many ways about relational and epistemological potential: it refuses closure or supposed permanence.

NOTE

1. Grant H. Kester, “Rhetorical Questions: The Alternative Arts Sector and the Imaginary Public,” in Art, Activism, and Oppositionality: Essays from Afterimage, ed. Grant H. Kester (Duke University Press, 1998), 123.

We invite you to read the special issue, "Aesthetics of Perplexity" for free online for a limited time.

POD copies of the special issue (issue 52.1} can be purchased on the journal’s site. For ongoing access to Afterimage, please ask your librarian to subscribe and/or purchase an individual subscription.