Authors are invited to submit their academic papers and essays for the anniversary 100th issue of the Život umjetnosti (Life of Art) magazine.

The submission deadline is March 15, 2017.

The theme of the 100th issue:

Does love make us mobile or numb?

“So, who is
this lover
who speaks and says?”
(paraphrasing Roland Barthes)

Words, according to Hannah Arendt, are not only a medium in which we think, but also a medium which we live. The word love is often spoken, however it seems that the complexity of its meaning is no longer understood in the recent times. Was Zygmunt Bauman right when he argued that we began to forget how to love and what can theory offer to defend the pattern of the (love) behaviour of which the stability is now threatened?
The faces that stare at us or pass us are often furious. They try to convince us that everything we knew was wrong, that a new age has arrived. We are persuaded that they are better, whereas others are worthless and therefore should be fenced off by wall or wire. Everywhere around us hatred is raging, together with angry and zeal shouts against someone, against the right of individuals to decide on their own life. Where has love gone? Is the love discourse extremely lonely in our day, as Barthes claims it to be? Are we becoming weaker if we long for love or express it in public? Is the only actual love today the one towards our own self, planetary declared through an unskilfully edited selfie?
Love, just as much as arts, inspire us to interpret what we perceive, sense and long for, which does not have to be pleasure nor happiness - for love also includes break-ups, divisions and games of power.
By tracing the origins of the syntagm oceanic feeling which appeared in the year 1930 in the very beginning of the study Civilisation and its Discontents, Kaja Silverman reads the Freud’s use of the term love in the context of his open letter to Albert Einstein, written in the wake of World War II. Thereat she concludes that Freud’s invocation of love does not speak of sexuality nor the emotion that wells up inside us when we allow someone else to incarnate our ideal; it was rather his word for the psychic affirmation of our primordial kinship with other creatures and things, an affirmation which opens directly onto the oceanic feeling.
Consonantly, by detecting the neuralgic points and barrenness of humanistic sciences, Rosi Braidotti articulates today the notion of the posthuman, that is to say, of the necessity to shift from the dominant paradigm of humanocentrism the repercussions of which threaten to destruct the entire eco-system.
Worn out from its excessive use, the word love has become something that often provokes revulsion. However, it is worth recalling the words which Gertrude Stein used to comment her famous verse in which the word rose repeats four times in predicate form. We, of course, refer to the undoubtedly love poem Sacred Emily, written back in 1913. The artist, whose “revolution of poetic language” has made a far-reaching impact on the re-conceptualisation of the very notion of art, commented her iterative procedure as follows: “Now listen! I'm no fool. I know that in daily life we don't go around saying ‘is a… is a… is a…’ Yes, I'm no fool; but I think that in that line the rose is red for the first time in English poetry for a hundred years”. Stein, of course, perceived the art language as a “real thing” and not as an imitation of “sounds, colours or emotions”. The language for her was and remained an intellectual recreation. She demanded everyone who considered herself or himself an artist to stay with language as a place that contains within itself the entire history of its intellectual recreation. Therefore, together with her and in the post-truth era, let’s try to explore the performatives of the word love which reach beyond estradisation, spectacularization and, above all, commercialisation. As one popular song goes: “love can’t be sold nor bought…”.

Editors of the thematic issue:
Leonida Kovač, Sandra Križić Roban

For any questions regarding the edition's topic, please contact the editors at zivot-umjetnostiipu.hr

The instructions on how to format the article can be found here: https://www.ipu.hr/content/zivot-umjetnosti/ZU_upute-autorima.pdf

Život umjetnosti is a magazine for contemporary visual arts, dedicated to various aspects of contemporary art practice primarily in Croatia and Europe, with a tradition of continuous publication since 1966. It is published by the Institute for Art History in Zagreb twice a year as a bilingual edition.