Recent work by Brian Glavey in The Wallflower Avant-Garde (2018) has shown how ekphrasis—so often conceived narrowly as the literary description of visual art or as an exercise in mimetic representation—also testifies more broadly to the variety of relations that people can adopt toward art. Ekphrasis considers how art works upon beholders both in the initial moment of apprehension and long after. Indeed, because so many canonical instances of ekphrasis highlight the capacity of art to endure across the ravages of time, ekphrasis can be said to explore the agency of the artwork in relation to its futurity.

This renovated conception of ekphrasis grounds this panel’s examination of ekphrasis and related instances of art-within-art in contemporary literature and film. These embedded artworks foreground the problem of the artwork’s temporality at a time when environmental devastation, crisis capitalism, and entrenched structures of oppression seem to undermine the notion that any human work can intentionally shape the future, or even endure. As Wendy Brown argues in Undoing the Demos (2015), “this loss of conviction about the human capacity to craft and steer its existence or even to secure its future is the most profound and devastating sense in which modernity is ‘over.’” The salience of ekphrasis can arguably be construed as a response, in miniature, to this loss of conviction. One function of embedded artworks, as this panel will identify and explore, is to stage what the work of art is now by considering the artwork’s capacities to condition forms of futurity. Panelists will also explain how embedded artworks are staging grounds for issues that animate critical conversations about intermedial aesthetics, postcritical reading, the re-emergence of the art novel, and the autonomy and historicity of contemporary art. Short, 16-minute papers will allow for substantive discussion.

First, in “Crisis Temporality and the Contemporary Art Novel,” Cara Lewis shows how twenty-first-century authors are reckoning not only with the challenges of writing after individual catastrophes but also with the distinct and peculiar temporality of writing after catastrophe after catastrophe. Disaster is now so normative, in fact, that Ali Smith has written Autumn (2016), Winter (2017), Spring (2019), Summer (2020), and Companion Piece (2022) at breakneck speed in order to respond quickly to events like Brexit, the European migrant crisis, and COVID-19. Yet even as these are works of the moment, with Smith herself unsure about “whether in 19 years’ time they’ll be stale and mean nothing to us,” Smith consistently embeds art—paintings, drawings, films, sculptures, collages—that has endured, sometimes for centuries. Focusing on how these artworks offer coping strategies to survive the present and secure the future, this paper introduces the problem of creating within the temporality of crisis that subsequent papers will explore.

Next, Michaela Bronstein turns to the crisis of police violence and the Movement for Black Lives in “‘I’d rather live’: The Costs of Consequential Art.” Saidiya Hartman describes the central romance in the film Queen and Slim (2019) as Black “love ... without legacy”: the characters are murdered. Yet in a different sense the film is about their legacy—about the protests they inspire and about their transformation into a circulating photographic image. This paper tracks three strands within the film: the experiences of the protagonists, whose act of desperation (shooting a cop) has been misperceived as a deliberate statement; a photograph taken of them by a child; and protests that spring up around them. Even as the photograph kills both the subjects of the image and the photographer, it also mobilizes a mass movement. Art has the power to produce new Black life—but at the cost of the lives that created it.

Finally, in “The Global Artwork after Globalization,” Madigan Haley begins with the recognition that, for well over a decade, some scholars and activists have been heralding and seeking to hasten a new historical condition “after globalization.” But if neoliberalism has been a hegemonic model of globality, it is far from the original or exclusive one. This paper examines recent fictions that look beyond the dominance of capitalist globalization specifically by imagining the form and function of emergent global artworks. Both Richard Powers’s Overstory (2018) and Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future (2020) conclude by describing embedded artworks that condition a utopian futurity that seemingly cannot be described within the novel’s diegesis. In these novels, the work of art is made to index the work of making a world after globalization and amid environmental catastrophe, and ekphrasis becomes an archaeology of the future.