Culture Without Mirrors: Restructuring Creative Cognitive Power by Amanda Beech

Amanda Beech is an artist and writer based in Los Angeles. Her work explores a new realist approach to the image, contingency, and the political through force. Recent solo shows include All Obstructing Walls Have Been Broken Down, Catalyst Arts, Belfast (2014); and Final Machine, Lanchester Gallery Projects, UK (2013). She has recently presented work in Agitationism, Irish Biennial; L’Avenir, Montreal Biennale (2014); and Speculative Aesthetics, Tate Britain (2015). Beech’s writing includes essays for Speculative Aesthetics, (Urbanomic 2014); Realism, Materialism, Art (Sternberg Press 2015), and catalogue contributions for the Irish and Montreal biennales. Her books include Final Machine (2013) and Sanity Assassin (2010), published by Urbanomic. Beech is dean of critical studies at CalArts, California.



Cultural forms are perceived to explicitly understand, through means of reflecting the human condition, the forces that dominate the relations and values of society. This mode of explanatory aesthetics aims to transform culture into an illuminating mirror of a human identity that is captured within and alienated by systems of its own making. In light of the destitution of cultural horizons, we must question the ways in which culture has embedded its comprehension of critique as an incorrect and unworkable form of transcendentalism that had led itself to believe that it is operating under the rubric of a coherent materialism. This rejection of culture as a rational and representational operation demands work, for it is here that we must question the aspirations and methods for another comprehension of reason – that is, a culture without mirrors.