ȘTEFAN GAIE
ȘTEFAN GAIE
Institution: niversity of Oradea, Romania, Department of Arts:
Email: stgaie@yahoo.com
Rising in an extremely troubled context in the first decades of the 20th century, the so-called radical avant-garde (especially Futurism, Dadaism, Suprematism and Constructivism) obsessively pleaded for a “new beginning”, a real “restart” of art. Its disco...
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Rising in an extremely troubled context in the first decades of the 20th century, the so-called radical avant-garde (especially Futurism, Dadaism, Suprematism and Constructivism) obsessively pleaded for a “new beginning”, a real “restart” of art. Its discourse, both theoretical, of the avant-garde manifestos, and visual, aimed at giving alternatives for what were meant to become the new benchmarks of art history.We know today that the face of art definitely changed as a result of avant-garde assaults. Even if the effects of this radicality faded in the past century, they are still evident. This study is intended to understand this radicality within the context of its occurrence, to find some of its constants, and to follow its effects upon contemporary art, in order to attempt to understand to what extent we can speak about a success or a failure of the avant-garde.
Keywords: art history, modern art, avant-garde, beginning, contemporary art
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1 year ago
Paul Haynes
Paul Haynes
Institution: School of Business and Management, Royal Holloway,
Email: Paul.haynes@rhul.ac.uk
Cultural appropriation, as both concept and practice, is a hugely controversial issue. It is of particular importance to the arts because creativity is often found at the intersection of cultural boundaries. Much of the popular discourse on cultural appropriation focusses on the commercial use of in...
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Cultural appropriation, as both concept and practice, is a hugely controversial issue. It is of particular importance to the arts because creativity is often found at the intersection of cultural boundaries. Much of the popular discourse on cultural appropriation focusses on the commercial use of indigenous or marginalized cultures by mainstream or dominant cultures. There is, however, growing awareness that cultural appropriation is a complicated issue encompassing cultural exchange in all its forms. Creativity emerging from cultural interdependence is far from a reciprocal exchange. This insight indicates that ethical and political implications are at stake. Consequently, the arts are being examined with greater attention in order to assess these implications. This article will focus on appropriation in literature, and examine the way appropriative strategies are being used to resist dominant cultural standards. These strategies and their implications will be analyzed through the lens of Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of minor literature.
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1 year ago
Why has the Jewish-Romanian identity of the Dadaists Tristan Tzara, Marcel Janco, and Arthur Segal been overlooked or critically unexamined in art historical discourse? Until recently, this significant and complicated identity warranted a brief mention
in biographical and Dada studies, such as in ...
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Why has the Jewish-Romanian identity of the Dadaists Tristan Tzara, Marcel Janco, and Arthur Segal been overlooked or critically unexamined in art historical discourse? Until recently, this significant and complicated identity warranted a brief mention
in biographical and Dada studies, such as in those of Robert Motherwell (1951), George Hugnet (1971) Harry Seiwert (1996)
and François Buot (2002), which gave prominence to the three Dadaists’ ties to Switzerland, France, Germany. Romania, their
country of birth, was mentioned briefly to indicate the international character of the Dada movement in Zurich, for besides the
Romanians, the Dada group comprised of artists from Germany, Russia, Sweden, and France, among them, the main contributors
Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings, Richard Huelsenbeck, Hans Richter, Hans Arp, and Sophie Taeuber-Arp. Their country of origin was
also used in the description of Zurich and its international, intellectual scene during the war. Their Jewish upbringing and religious and cultural affiliation are even less acknowledged.
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1 year ago
It does not happen very often that one short paper opens an entire new subfield of a philosophical discipline. But this is exactly what Peter Kivy’s 1990 paper “The Profundity of Music” achieved. In a couple of years after Kivy’s paper appeared, all philosophers of music, who previously, lik...
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It does not happen very often that one short paper opens an entire new subfield of a philosophical discipline. But this is exactly what Peter Kivy’s 1990 paper “The Profundity of Music” achieved. In a couple of years after Kivy’s paper appeared, all philosophers of music, who previously, like Charles Swann in Marcel Proust’s novel (Proust (1913) 1992), would have found it difficult to utter the word
‘profound’ unironically, all began took this concept very seriously. The problem Kivy (1990) draws our attention to is this: we do call some musical works profound. However, Kivy argues, given that a work is profound only if it is about something profound and given
that music (or “music alone”) is not about anything, this leads to something of a paradox: how can music be profound if it is not about something profound?My aim in this article is to give a Kivy-esque answer to this question, which might be more consistent with Kivy’s work in the philosophy of music in general than Kivy’s own take on the profundity of music. The upshot is that what makes a work profound is not that it is about something profound, but that it actively challenges any straightforward interpretative activity (while at the same time nudges you to keep on trying to interpret it). I argue that this line of argument is very much in tune with Kivy’s general theoretical commitment that “music alone isn’t about anything” (1990, 204)
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1 year ago
Anna Orrghen
Anna Orrghen
Institution: Department of History
Email: info@res00.com
On December 20, 1999, the Swedish national monument, celebrating the turn of the millennium, was inaugurated by His Majesty King Carl XVI Gustaf (Fig. 1).1 The monument was a collaboration between artists, architects, and engineers, and it was erected on behalf of the Millennium Committee set up by ...
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On December 20, 1999, the Swedish national monument, celebrating the turn of the millennium, was inaugurated by His Majesty King Carl XVI Gustaf (Fig. 1).1 The monument was a collaboration between artists, architects, and engineers, and it was erected on behalf of the Millennium Committee set up by the Swedish government. The commission to realize the monument was given
to Chalmers University of Technology along with a request to create something “permanent with an everlasting value.”
2 The committee paid particular attention to the university’s outstanding research in digital technology and, over the course of one year, artists, scientists, architects, and engineers collaborated in constructing the monument. The vice-chancellor of Chalmers implied that the working process represented an ideal example of how to conduct research in
the future. He particularly emphasized the project’s interdisciplinary art, science, and technology collaborations, conducted in close cooperation with both the City of Gothenburg and industry.3
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1 year ago
Jussi A. Saarinen
Jussi A. Saarinen
Institution: unstated
Email: info@res00.com
Art museums are built to elicit a wide variety of feelings, emotions, and moods from their visitors. While these effects are primarily achieved through the artworks on display, museums commonly deploy numerous other affect-inducing resources as well, including
architectural solutions, audio guides...
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Art museums are built to elicit a wide variety of feelings, emotions, and moods from their visitors. While these effects are primarily achieved through the artworks on display, museums commonly deploy numerous other affect-inducing resources as well, including
architectural solutions, audio guides, lighting fixtures, and informational texts. Art museums can thus be regarded as spaces that are designed to influence affective experiencing through multiple structures and mechanisms. At face value, this may seem like a somewhat self-evident and trivial statement to make. However, in this article, I argue that niche construction theory enables us to make several illuminating observations about the ways in which art museums are engineered to influence our feelings. To expound on this claim, I single out for discussion the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, which for its entire lifespan (1939–52)—and prior to its evolution into the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum—was expressly organized to kindle in its visitors a special, spiritual form of aesthetic experience: a liberating feeling of cosmic rhythm and order, no less. The argument will proceed as follows: In Part 1, I introduce the basics of niche construction theory and specify the sense in which I apply it to museums and aesthetic
affective experiencing. In Part 2, I outline the origins and ethos of the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, after which I pin down the type of affective experience it fostered by drawing from visitors’ self-reported reactions to the artworks on display. Then, in Part 3,
I use niche construction theory to explain how the Museum consciously fashioned itself, by means of various mutually supportive resources and technologies, into a fertile setting for the specified feelings. Finally, in Part 4, I extend beyond the discussed case to assess the implications of niche construction theory for a broader understanding of how art museums make us feel. In other words, by tracing the early steps of the Museum of Non-Objective Painting towards the present-day Guggenheim, I call attention to the general variation in affective niches as regards their structure, technologies, and affective aims. Overall, the article elucidates the functioning of art museums as affective niches and furthers the conceptual development of niche construction theory in aesthetics.
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1 year ago
Maarten Steenhagen Shibukawa
Maarten Steenhagen Shibukawa
Institution: Uppsala Universitet:
Email: info@res00.com
Many people assume that fictional entities are encapsulated in the world of fiction. I show that this cannot be right. Some works of fiction tell us about pieces of poetry, music, or theatre written by fictional characters. Such creations are fictional creations, as I call them. Their authors do not...
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Many people assume that fictional entities are encapsulated in the world of fiction. I show that this cannot be right. Some works of fiction tell us about pieces of poetry, music, or theatre written by fictional characters. Such creations are fictional creations, as I call them. Their authors do not exist. But that does not take away that we can perform, recite, or otherwise generate actual instances of such works. This means we can bring such individuals actually into existence, as the works they are. I conclude that the assumption about encapsulation is untenable, unless an exception is made for types.
It is commonly assumed that fictional entities do not exist, at least not actually. “There is no Dracula!” we tell the children before bedtime, “It’s only a story.” That no fictional entity exists is however a substantive philosophical claim, and some philosophers have even gone so far to claim that no fictional entity can exist in the actual world. I will show that both claims are false. To say that fictional entities do not exist, or to claim that they could not exist, is mistaken, I argue, for reasons that have little to do
with the distinction between fiction and reality.
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1 year ago
Richard Maxwell
Richard Maxwell
Institution: unstated
Email: info@res00.com
I take photos on my phone. I use the photos as an atmospheric reference to go back to. Impressed with the empty streets of Hell’s Kitchen, my home for the last twenty years, I started taking photos as I walked my dog. Hell’s Kitchen had recently been overrun by Times Square and luxury apartments...
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I take photos on my phone. I use the photos as an atmospheric reference to go back to. Impressed with the empty streets of Hell’s Kitchen, my home for the last twenty years, I started taking photos as I walked my dog. Hell’s Kitchen had recently been overrun by Times Square and luxury apartments. Here was a chance for me to come to terms with the place through an emptied-out landscape. Despite the upheaval of the last year, somehow these buildings seemed calm and stoic. Do they perceive what’s happening around them? Are they impugned by world events around them.
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1 year ago
Peter Buse
Peter Buse
Institution: University of Liverpool
Email: info@res00.com
This article explores “the play element in photography”, to adapt a key phrase from Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (1938). The context for this exploration is the melancholic paradigm that dominates much of contemporary writing and thinking about vernacular or popular photography, a paradigm tha...
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This article explores “the play element in photography”, to adapt a key phrase from Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (1938). The context for this exploration is the melancholic paradigm that dominates much of contemporary writing and thinking about vernacular or popular photography, a paradigm that emphasises memory, death and mourning, at the expense of other practices and dispositions, not least the ludic. It notes that the existing literature on photography and play concentrates almost entirely on humorous images: optical jokes, trick photography, and a wide variety of distorted pictures. But play is an activity, a practice, as much as it is a product or an outcome. In other words, the ludic in photography is not just a quality of the object photographed, but of a photographic doing. Following this principle, the article shows the ways in which key modes of play such as competition, chance, make-believe and vertigo, are at work in photographic practices old and new, including in the aerostatic photography of Félix Nadar, with which it begins and ends.
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1 year ago
Leif Runefelt
Leif Runefelt
Institution: Södertörn University 141 89 Huddinge Sweden
Email: leif.runefelt@sh.se
In the 1840s, Sweden and Finland were hit by a minor craze for living pictures or tableaux vivants as commercial entertainment. For the price of a ticket, the public could experience the staging, by live actors, of work of arts from antiquity and contemporary sculptors such as Canova and Thorvaldsen...
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In the 1840s, Sweden and Finland were hit by a minor craze for living pictures or tableaux vivants as commercial entertainment. For the price of a ticket, the public could experience the staging, by live actors, of work of arts from antiquity and contemporary sculptors such as Canova and Thorvaldsen. Making strong claims of artistic value, based on the aesthetic theory of Winckelmann and the artistic practice of artists such as Canova, the performances raise interesting questions of how aesthetics worked when set in a commercial framework. The article discusses the problem of beauty faced by entertainers and spectators when art was reenacted for money. The experience of beauty was central to aesthetic theory and to living pictures. However, it remains unclear whether commercial living pictures was about beauty in art or about good-looking women. A possible conclusion is that it was about both, and that the aesthetic theory behind the tableaux was a theory created for a male visual culture, in which the male gaze’s consumption of female bodies was self-evident while dressed in arguments of truth and beauty, confirming a social order in which a certain right look was ascribed to men.
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1 year ago