Content area
Full Text
Polish Media Art in an Expanded Field. By Aleksandra Kaminska. Chicago: Intellect Books, 2016. xii, 220 pp. Bibliography. Index. Photographs. $36.00, paper.
Aleksandra Kaminska made a very good decision to explore Polish media art in an expanded field. In our post-media age, media art gets dispersed and, as such, is no longer a discrete phenomenon. The media are becoming instruments of heterogeneous artistic expressions and neither make up a separate art discipline nor turn creative practitioners who use them into a distinctive group of media artists. Addressing the practice of artists who work with the media, Kaminska attends both to the themes their works explore and to their local embedment. She insists that art making is a local product—a product “of site-specific ecologies and histories” (15)—and seeks to investigate it as such. Having defined a very narrow time frame of her research, she focuses on the years 2004–2009: on the immediate aftermath of Poland's accession to the EU. She believes that, in such circumstances, art abandoned its autonomy and became steeped in politics, while artists engaged in negotiating the basic social values, such as, above all, identity, social order, and place-specificity. Kaminska underscores the relevance of critical attitudes and experimentation as a method of art making. As she enquires into how artistic histories, pursuits, and conditions get inscribed into media-art practices, she historically reflects on her chosen period, looking back first of all to...