From the Ethics of Intervention to Creative Worldmaking: Truth and Activism in Renzo Martens’s Episode III and White Cube
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3986/9789610505945_07Keywords:
documentary film, contemporary art, ethics of documentary film, truth, postcolonial studiesAbstract
The paper analyzes the ethics of intervention in the controversial film Episode III: Enjoy Poverty (2008) by the Belgian artist Renzo Martens. The analysis stems from Linda Williams’s text on the film The Good Woman of Bangkok (1991) by Dennis O’Rourke, in which she bases the ethics of O’Rourke’s intervention on his fragility and personal involvement, which allows for a more complex insight into truth. My text demonstrates that the concept of truth is also indispensable for understanding Episode III. It shows that truth is edited in order for the intervention to work and that the artist’s truth guides his ethical decisions in the film. In conclusion, it observes recent proposals for an ethics of engaged art as proposed by T. J. Demos. By looking at the art-activist practice of Renzo Martens, the paper considers the challenges and opportunities of the praxis of solving social problems through art today.
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Avtorji jamčijo, da je delo njihova avtorska stvaritev, da v njem niso kršene avtorske pravice tretjih oseb ali kake druge pravice. V primeru zahtevkov tretjih oseb se avtorji zavezujejo, da bodo varovali interese založnika ter da bodo povrnili morebitno škodo.
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