About the Author

Oliver Klaassen

E-Mail: o.klaassen@uni-oldenburg.de   ORCID logo

Website: https://uol.de/kunst/lehrende/mitarbeiterinnen-und-lehrkraefte/klaassen-oliver-1

Oliver Klaassen is a research associate at the Institute for Art and Visual Culture at Carl Ossietzky University of Oldenburg and a PhD candidate at the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC) of Justus Liebig University of Giessen. In addition, they serve as a board member of the German Gender Studies Association and as an editorial team member at On_Culture: The Open Journal for the Study of Culture, as well as a speaker of the research working group Queering: Visuelle Kulturen & Intermedialität. Klaassen’s current research interests include queer(ing) art studies, methods of art studies, history and theory of photography, as well as aesthetic ambiguity of (and in) contemporary art.

Contributions by Author: Oliver Klaassen

12/15/2021 _Perspective

(Re-)Negotiating Ambiguity’s (Added) Value(lessness)

1_Capacity and Openness are not the Same as Ambiguity. Refuse Ambiguity. [1]  (David J. Getsy) Abstract art is often considered ‘ambiguous’ due to its openness and capaciousness. Even though this sometimes sounds like a compliment, it is not. More often, it is used to avoid confronting the particularities and complexities proposed by an abstract form and others’ investments in it. The same intransigent form can and does mean differently for different viewers. To call this situation ‘ambiguous’ is to fall back into hopeless subjectivism and avoidance. Instead, let’s call this situation ‘competing’ to show how much it is in the viewer’s incomplete attempt to classify that differences emerge and that supposedly stable taxonomies unravel amidst contestations and divergences of reception. Nominations of ambiguity are nothing more than declarations of resignation. We call something ambiguous when we give up on it and when we avoid committing to learning about all that does not fit into our categories. Objects, people, texts, events, and acts are not themselves ambiguous. They are particular, inassimilable, unorthodox, unprecedented, or recalcitrant. To invoke ‘ambiguity’ is to flee from the confrontation with something that does not easily fall into one’s patterns of knowing. This act of exhausted reading disrespects the particularity of that which is before us and instead writes it off as being at fault — as being unknowable, indiscernible, and incompletely categorizable. ‘Ambiguity’ is safe to invoke, because it places blame for our own limitations elsewhere. It is a method of deflection and scapegoating. It enables us to throw up our hands and beat a hasty retreat from confronting how limited our categories and systems are. After all, what do we really mean when we say something or someone is ambiguous? We mean that we cannot read, cannot identify, and cannot classify. Instead, I want to uphold the particularity and inscrutability that the backhanded slur ‘ambiguous’ attempts to manage. I want to see that particularity as a challenge to systems of knowing. ‘Ambiguous’ as an invocation or description merely signals the limitations of the one who would deploy that term. This does not mean I want everything clear and in its place. Quite the opposite: I want to embrace the radical particularity that always exceeds and undermines taxonomies. This is a queer stance, for it denies the applicability or the neutrality of those taxonomies as adequate representations of the world’s complexity. Rather, they are artificial impositions…

07/31/2019 _Perspective

A Radical-Ambiguous (Re-)Vision of America’s West

David Benjamin Sherry’s Eco-Queer Critique of America’s Changing National Parks in his Photo Series Climate Vortex Sutra (2014)

How can climate change be understood and imagined in contemporary art photography from a queer point of view? [1] In the following, I want to answer this question by delving into the artistic practice of the American photographer David Benjamin Sherry. Through my eco-queer reading [2] of his series Climate Vortex Sutra (2014), I want to find out to what extent it deals not only with questions of climate change but also with the heteronormative history of American landscape photography. […]