Standing Acts: The Political Aesthetics of Defiant Resistance

Abstract

We most commonly encounter the word defiance when used as an adverb to classify a peculiarly courageous or risky act of resistance. However, the use of the word defiance in this way is a departure from the historical meaning of the word. Moreover, it occludes the possibility that there exists political activity that is manifestly defiant. The article takes issue with this tendency and identifies a mode of resistance that is explicitly defiant. In order to do this, the paper draws from the phenomenological approach underpinning the standing sculptures of the British sculptor Antony Gormley. This informs an exploration of the protest enacted by the standing man of Taksim Square, who participated in a large antigovernment movement in Turkey in 2013. In acts we might distinguish as defiant, the paper demonstrates the materialist vulnerability of the protesting body, the aesthetic ontology at work, the prevalence of the standing metaphor, the role of silence, and the absence of futurity. By unearthing defiant modes of protest, the heterogeneity of resistance is affirmed, and a new domain where art encounters the political is revealed.

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