Art

Temple, Huygens and ‘sharawadgi’: tempering the passions to achieve tranquillity

Sir William Temple (1628–1699), the eminent English ambassador to the Dutch Republic and a widely read essayist,1 famously used the term ‘sharawadgi’ (beauty without an apparent order)2 to describe the layout of Chinese gardens in his essay ‘Upon the Gardens of Epicurus’:Among us, the Beau...
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Sir William Temple (1628–1699), the eminent English ambassador to the Dutch Republic and a widely read essayist,1 famously used the term ‘sharawadgi’ (beauty without an apparent order)2 to describe the layout of Chinese gardens in his essay ‘Upon the Gardens of Epicurus’:Among us, the Beauty of Building and Planting is placed chiefly, in some certain Proportions, Symmetries, or Uniformities; our Walks and our Trees ranged so, as to answer one another, and at exact Distances. The Chineses scorn this way of Planting, and say a Boy that can tell an hundred, may plant Walks of Trees in strait Lines, and over against one another, and to what Length and Extent He pleases. But their greatest reach of Imagination, is employed in contriving Figures, where the Beauty shall be great, and strike the eye, but without any order or disposition of parts, that shall be commonly or easily observ’d. And though we have hardly any Notion of this sort of Beauty, yet they have a particular Word to express it; and where they find it hit their Eye at first sight, they say the Sharawadgi is fine or is admirable, or any such expression of Esteem.3
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Concrete Violence – Wolf Vostell’s Disasters of War

Wolf Vostell is best known for the intermedial interactive events he staged on the streets of West Germany throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Berlin/100 Ereignisse (Berlin/100 events, 1965) exemplifies his work from the period, whichhe preferred to call ‘events’, ‘happenings’, ‘actions’, an...
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Wolf Vostell is best known for the intermedial interactive events he staged on the streets of West Germany throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Berlin/100 Ereignisse (Berlin/100 events, 1965) exemplifies his work from the period, whichhe preferred to call ‘events’, ‘happenings’, ‘actions’, and ‘demonstrations’, thus blurring the boundary between art and life while affiliating artistic practice with political activism.1 Berlin/100 Ereignisse involved driving around the Western sector of the city in a car and making one hundred stops: to bury a clock in the rubble of Go¨rlitzer train station, meet a naked woman wearing a gas mask, confront a sign prohibiting loitering with ‘der realita¨t einer straße’ (the reality of a street) by wielding posters with current headlines as lowercase slogans – ‘weinender U.S.-soldat im vietnamkrieg!’ (crying US soldier in the Vietnam War), ‘straßenkampf in rhodesien!’ (rioting in Rhodesia), ‘rocker mit motorra¨-dern!’ (bikers with motorcycles) – pour out a bag of sugar near the Berlin Wall, and perform an array of other more ordinary activities like eating and waiting, all for a ‘Zufallspublikum’ (chance public).2 These ‘events’ indicate the ambivalent politics and site-specificity of Vostell’s work, which often explored the topography of post-war Germany
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Man in the Middle: Ingres’s Portrait of Louis-Franc¸ois Bertin at the Salon of 1833 and the Problem of the Juste Milieu

In a corner of room 60 on the second floor of the Louvre’s Sully Wing, Ingres’s Portrait of Louis-Franc¸ois Bertin hangs adjacent to his study for Angelica saved by Ruggiero (1819) (Fig. 1).1 In the absence of Ruggiero, Angelica seems to look over her right shoulder, not at the hippogriff-ridin...
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In a corner of room 60 on the second floor of the Louvre’s Sully Wing, Ingres’s Portrait of Louis-Franc¸ois Bertin hangs adjacent to his study for Angelica saved by Ruggiero (1819) (Fig. 1).1 In the absence of Ruggiero, Angelica seems to look over her right shoulder, not at the hippogriff-riding knight who despatches a sea monster prior to rescuing her, but at a plump male figure resolutely oblivious to his neighbour and her peril. The juxtaposition of Bertin’s self-confident gaze and relaxed body with Angelica’s vulnerable nakedness could be read as an exercise in iconographical incongruity, if not a moment of curatorial mischief (Fig. 2). But whatever the explanation for the painting’s current display, it is hard not to regard this as a dramatic fall from grace for a work that had occupied the ‘place of honour’ when first shown at the 1833 Salon, and attracted voluminous coverage in the press. Bertin’s relegation to the upper reaches of the Sully Wing is consistent with the assumption that its standing as a work of art has been compromised by the received idea that it is, above all else, a social document: an archetypal image of the newly dominant bourgeoisie of early nineteenth-century France.2
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Virtual connectedness in times of crisis: Chinese online art exhibitions during the COVID-19 pandemic

When Chinese museums had to close their doors due to the outbreak of COVID-19, several online art exhibitions were created that were able to still create a sense of connectedness among their audience members during the pandemic. This article details three online exhibitions – by Chronus Art Center...
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When Chinese museums had to close their doors due to the outbreak of COVID-19, several online art exhibitions were created that were able to still create a sense of connectedness among their audience members during the pandemic. This article details three online exhibitions – by Chronus Art Center, by M WOODS, and by independent curator Yu Minhong – and explores how they communicate ‘being-in-common’ (a concept by Jean-Luc Nancy) in the online realm; it also proposes alternative forms of cosmopolitanism that do not rely on physical mobility. The exhibitions are analyzed using visual and discourse analysis and supported by semi-structured in-depth interviews with the curators. This study shows that a cosmopolitan art world does not need to rely on physical travel if connectedness is understood as being-incommon rather than meeting-in-person, digital technology is mobilized effectively, and cosmopolitanism is grounded in a relocalization. In an era when the global art world is looking for ways to reinvent itself and the mobility system on which it operates, the article contends that it would do well to look to and learn from the example of Chinese online exhibitions.
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IMAGES FOR INSTRUCTION: A MULTILINGUAL ILLUSTRATED DICTIONARY IN FIFTEENTH-CENTURY SULTANATE INDIA

When I began studying the Miftāḥ al-Fużalāʾ (Key of the Learned), Robert Skelton, the doyen of the art of the book in India, challenged me to imagine the many other manuscripts that would have been available to the artists who made this book. Attributed to the central Indian sultanate of Malwa...
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When I began studying the Miftāḥ al-Fużalāʾ (Key of the Learned), Robert Skelton, the doyen of the art of the book in India, challenged me to imagine the many other manuscripts that would have been available to the artists who made this book. Attributed to the central Indian sultanate of Malwa, the Miftāḥ is the only known illustrated Persian dictionary (farhang) in the Islamicate manuscript tradition. For its fifteenth-century makers, the Miftāḥ was a wholly new text, written in 1468–69 by Muhammad ibn Muhammad Da⁠ʾud Shadiyabadi. The Miftāḥ required its artists to search for and codify visual representations of particular words from canonized manuscript genres such as the Islamicate cosmography (ʿajāʾib al-makhlūqāt) or works of belles-lettres (adab). This process of selectively adapting from an array of genres in order to create a new one, namely the illustrated farhang, would have allowed artists to experiment with the Islamicate manuscript tradition in India. By illustrating definitions, the Miftāḥ also became a manual on literary and visual languages for students in the fifteenth century. This article demonstrates that the book was conceived as a didactic work intended to educate members of sultanate society.
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CAMERA, CANVAS, AND QIBLA: LATE OTTOMAN MOBILITIES AND THE FATIH MOSQUE PAINTING

As with many cultures around the globe, in the nineteenth century the Ottoman empire witnessed a fluidity of media, styles, objects, technologies, and themes in visual culture. Sultans’ portraits migrated across canvases, ivory, manuscripts, photographs, prints, and porcelain; curtain motifs featu...
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As with many cultures around the globe, in the nineteenth century the Ottoman empire witnessed a fluidity of media, styles, objects, technologies, and themes in visual culture. Sultans’ portraits migrated across canvases, ivory, manuscripts, photographs, prints, and porcelain; curtain motifs featured in tents, wall paintings, and architectural decorations; new and “neo” architectural styles spread via world expositions and cityscapes; depictions of buildings and landscapes reconfigured wall paintings, tombstones, ceramics, textiles, and cutout paper (ḳāṭʿı) works.1 The long tradition of depicting the Islamic holy cities also responded to these artistic and cultural changes, and images energetically circulated across different regions in shorter periods of time.2 Even though Mecca and Medina are physical places, their depictions—and by extension, the holy cities themselves—effectively traveled to far-flung audiences.
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Feeling Fit for Function: Haptic Touch and Aesthetic Experience

Traditionally, the sense of touch—alongside the senses of taste and smell—has been excluded from the aesthetic domain. These proximal modalities are thought to deliver only sensory pleasures, not the complex, world-directed perceptual states that characterize aesthetic experience. In this paper,...
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Traditionally, the sense of touch—alongside the senses of taste and smell—has been excluded from the aesthetic domain. These proximal modalities are thought to deliver only sensory pleasures, not the complex, world-directed perceptual states that characterize aesthetic experience. In this paper, I argue that this tradition fails to recognize the perceptual possibilities of haptic touch, which allows us to experience properties of the objects with which we make bodily contact, including their weight, shape, solidity, elasticity, and smoothness. These features, moreover, may be indicative of how well-suited an object is for its function, and in feeling them we can thus feel the positive aesthetic quality of functional beauty.
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Dreaming A Public Poem

The Public Poem is a form I invented in 1967 and have performed in many European cities over the decades. For the last six years in Spain, I had been making “concrete” poems, seeing the sheet of paper as a two-dimensional surface which the typewriter could occupy spatially, then placing Letraset...
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The Public Poem is a form I invented in 1967 and have performed in many European cities over the decades. For the last six years in Spain, I had been making “concrete” poems, seeing the sheet of paper as a two-dimensional surface which the typewriter could occupy spatially, then placing Letraset letters on superimposed plexiglass sheets that provide a third dimension of depth. One day, looking about in the street, I thought, “If I can place letters on these surfaces, then I can ‘write’ on the street, as well.” I quickly discovered the cheap, light, industrial material of polystyrene which could be easily cut into letter shapes—the size of the human beings who occupy the streets—and thus enter into a dialogue with them and the urban space. At first, I placed the letters and words at strategic sites of the city, but soon I found that carrying them with a team was more eloquent, like a hand holding a pen moving across the page. I often used a classic concrete poetry device, the permutation and recombination of letters, in choosing a mother-word or matrix that could be broken up into other words and then form phrases—even entire sentences—as we moved along, like text passing across a giant electronic screen where one or two words may appear at a time, and a sentence is eventually formed.
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John Møller’s ‘Photographic Memory’ – Professional Photography of Greenlandic Inuit and Danish Administrators at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

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Unconditional hospitality: art and commons under planetary migration

In both European and non-European cities, public spaces are formed by racist and segregative politics that influence everyday life. Planetary migration flows and recently implemented border politics tend to leave the most vulnerable in precarious conditions, not only in the case of migrants/refugee...
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In both European and non-European cities, public spaces are formed by racist and segregative politics that influence everyday life. Planetary migration flows and recently implemented border politics tend to leave the most vulnerable in precarious conditions, not only in the case of migrants/refugees but also in the case of citizens. This article focuses on how artistic methodologies in the context of migration/refugeehood can experiment with “alternative modes of existence”. How can newly imagined modes of co-existence contribute to the creation of minor public spaces as well as the transformation of institutions? How can public art construct different and diverse guest-host relationships? How can artistic research and actions reveal precarious labour conditions, stage radical discursive debates, and transform existing institutional practices? This article is based on theoretical discussions of commoning and decolonization practices. It will focus on the art and activist practices, and analyse such, of Al-Madafeh/Living Room (Sandi Hilal, Stockholm) and The Silent University (Ahmet Ogut), and others.
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