Visual Music and Kinetic Ornaments

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-146
Author(s):  
Katherine Rochester
Keyword(s):  
Avant Garde ◽  
Artistic Production ◽  
Visual Music ◽  
The Absolute ◽  
Interwar Europe ◽  
Lotte Reiniger ◽  
Haptic Cinema

This essay traces the theorization of interwar animation through period analogies with painting and dance, paying special attention to the valorization of concepts such as dematerialization and embodiment, which metaphors of visual music and physical kinesthesis were used to promote. Beginning in 1919, and exemplified by her feature-length film Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed (1926), Lotte Reiniger directed numerous silhouette films animated in an ornate style that embraced decorative materiality. This aesthetic set her in uneasy relation to the avant-garde, whose strenuous attempts to distance abstraction from ornament took the form of absolute film, and were screened together at the Absolute film Matinee of 1925. However, their claims for aesthetic integrity were staked on territory these artists largely had in common. By adopting a feminist approach that examines networks of collaboration, publication, and artistic production in Weimar Berlin, this essay reveals Reiniger as an early proponent of haptic cinema in interwar Europe and one of animation's earliest and most perceptive theorists.

Multisensory Modalities and Modernist Translation

CounterText ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 283-306
Author(s):  
Tamara Brzostowska-Tereszkiewicz
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Reader Response ◽  
Sensory Integration ◽  
Cultural Anthropology ◽  
Sensory Perception ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Artistic Production ◽  
High Modernism ◽  
The Arts

Multisensory and cross-modal perception have been recognised as crucial for shaping modernist epistemology, aesthetics, and art. Illustrative examples of how it might be possible to test equivalences (or mutual translatability) between different sensual modalities can be found in theoretical pronouncements on the arts and in artistic production of both the avant-garde and high modernism. While encouraging multisensory, cross-modal, and multimodal artistic experiments, twentieth-century artists set forth a new language of sensory integration. This article addresses the problem of the literary representation of multisensory and cross-modal experience as a particular challenge for translation, which is not only a linguistic and cross-cultural operation but also cross-sensual, involving the gap between different culture-specific perceptual realities. The problem of sensory perception remains a vast underexplored terrain of modernist translation history and theory, and yet it is one with potentially far-reaching ramifications for both a cultural anthropology of translation and modernism's sensory anthropology. The framework of this study is informed by Douglas Robinson's somatics of translation and Clive Scott's perceptive phenomenology of translation, which help to put forth the notion of sensory equivalence as a pragmatic correspondence between the source and target texts, appealing to a range of somato-sensory (audial, visual, haptic, gestural, articulatory kinaesthetic, proprioceptive) modalities of reader response.

"Us" vs. "Them". Communist Dialectical Images from Interwar Europe and Soviet Russia

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adri Kácsor
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Political Propaganda ◽  
Political Transformations ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Soviet Russia ◽  
Interwar Europe

Brawny male workers vs. bulging bourgeois men. Working-class mothers burdened by the hardship of poverty and childcare vs. elegant upper-class women enjoying a lifestyle of privilege. Such juxtaposed images of workers and the rich were prevalent in the visual culture of communism throughout the twentieth century, appearing on posters, illustrations, and other genres of political propaganda across countries and continents. Although these didactic propaganda images have rarely been considered in histories of modernism and the avant-garde, this article argues that they were among the key visual inventions of twentieth-century communist visual culture given their highly innovative aesthetics and juxtaposed structure that provided them a potential to become dialectical. Drawing on examples from interwar Europe and Soviet Russia, this article examines how didactic juxtapositions could become dialectical images, triggering political transformations while also making revolutionary class consciousness visible for the viewer.

scholarly journals Pandemic Avant-Garde Urban Coexistence in Mário de Andrade’s Pauliceia Desvairada (1922) after the Spanish Flu

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susanne Klengel
Keyword(s):  
Blind Spot ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Artistic Production ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The World ◽  
Famous Book ◽  
Spanish Flu ◽  
First World

The radical aesthetic of the historical avant-garde movements has often been explained as a reaction to the catastrophic experience of the First World War and a denouncement of the bourgeoisie’s responsibility for its horrors. This article explores a blind spot in these familiar interpretations of the international avant-garde. Not only the violence of the World War but also the experience of a worldwide deadly pandemic, the Spanish flu, have moulded the literary and artistic production of the 1920s. In this paper, I explore this hypothesis through the example of Mário de Andrade’s famous book of poetry Pauliceia desvairada (1922), which I reinterpret in the light of historical studies on the Spanish flu in São Paulo. An in-depth examination of all parts of this important early opus of the Brazilian Modernism shows that Mário de Andrade’s poetic images of urban coexistence simultaneously aim at a radical renewal of language and at a melancholic coming to terms with a traumatic pandemic past.

Presenting the Unpresentable: Jean-François Lyotard’s Kantian Art-Sublime

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Rachel Zuckert
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
The Absolute

Abstract This article reconstructs Jean-François Lyotard’s theory of the sublime in contemporary art, focusing on his claim that such art ‘presents’ the unpresentable, and tracing its origins in Kant’s account of the sublime. I propose that Lyotard identifies a difficulty concerning Kant’s account: to understand why the disparate elements in the experience of the sublime (idea of reason, sensible representation) should be synthesized to form that experience. Lyotard recasts this difficulty as a pragmatic problem for artistic practice – how to ‘testify’ to the absolute in a non-absolute, sensibly perceivable object (the artwork) – that can be understood to drive avant-garde artistic experimentation.

Faktura

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Isabel Wünsche
Keyword(s):  
Dimensional Space ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
Pictorial Space ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Artistic Production ◽  
Important Quality ◽  
Visual Demonstration ◽  
Viktor Shklovsky

Faktura, literally "texture," is related to the Russian avant-garde’s preoccupation with the fundamental principles of the creative process. The term, applied to a work of art, addresses the way in which materials are used, the processes, the surrounding environment, and the artistic devices; it characterizes the textural structure of a work of art and the manner by which it was constructed. As a creative principle, it rejects a pictorial space based on perspective and the illusion of three-dimensional space projected onto a flat canvas. The Russian formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky considered faktura to be the single most important quality of an object of art as a constructed object: it was the evidence of its having been made. He applied the term to poetic writing as well as the visual arts; in both cases faktura offered a visual demonstration of the properties inherent in a material or construction: "The whole effort of a poet and a painter is aimed first and foremost at creating a continuous and thoroughly palpable object, an object with a faktura." The term faktura remained a fluid concept during the 1910s, its essential qualities being further defined and developed by members of the avant-garde from 1913 well into the mid-1920s. While faktura, as initially used by members of the early Russian avant-garde, was characterized by the use of natural materials and a holistic–metaphysical approach to art, it was later adapted by the Constructivists to conform to a strictly materialist ideology and utilitarian orientation in artistic production.

Diagonalsymphonien [Diagonal Symphony] (1924)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard J. Leskosky
Keyword(s):  
Musical Instruments ◽  
Short Film ◽  
Film Exhibition ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Public ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Visual Music ◽  
Universal Language ◽  
Sequential Images ◽  
Abstract Shapes

Diagonalsymphonien [Diagonal Symphony], a black-and-white, abstract, animated short film made in Germany by Swedish painter Viking Eggeling, assisted by Bauhaus student Erna Niemeyer, is a seminal work of avant-garde cinema. It arose from Eggeling’s experiments trying to create a universal language of abstract symbols in which he created sequential images on long painted scrolls. Though silent, the film explores the concept of visual music—the artificial creation of visual rhythms analogous to music. Eggeling made his images with paper and tin foil cut-outs affixed to black sheets of paper filmed one frame at a time. The abstract shapes, constantly growing and disappearing along diagonal axes, often suggest musical instruments such as panpipes, grand pianos, zithers, and drums. Eggeling premiered his film to friends in 1924. Its first public screening was in Berlin at the 3 May 1925 First International Avant-Garde Film Exhibition, titled Der absolute Film, along with Rene Clair’s Entr’acte (1924), Fernand Leger’s Ballet mecanique (1924), and examples of Walther Ruttmann’s Lichtspiele Opus works (1921–25) and Hans Richter’s Rhythmus films (1921–25). Eggeling’s film received critical praise for its exploration of time and the non-literary potential of film. He, however, was too ill to attend the public screening and died sixteen days later. Diagonal Symphony is his only surviving film.

American Rhapsody

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith Zilczer
Keyword(s):  
Visual Art ◽  
Max Weber ◽  
The United States ◽  
Abstract Art ◽  
Comparative Case Study ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Visual Music ◽  
Georgia O'keeffe ◽  
Contemporary Artist ◽  
Aesthetic Values

The opening decades of the twentieth century saw painters renounce mimetic representation for the formal rigors and spiritual transcendence of visual art divorced from reproduction of the visible world. That they chose to do so in no small measure resulted from a profound shift in aesthetic values: music became the paradigm for visual art. While the concept of visual music gained international currency, this seductive aesthetic model had particular resonance in the United States. Between 1910 and 1930, leaders of the American avant-garde, such as Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Max Weber, experimented with musical ideas to forge a new abstract art. A comparative case study of the music pictures of these painters and the inter-media installations of contemporary artist Jennifer Steinkamp will illuminate the transformation of the modernist ideal of visual music in the postmodern era.

Sculpting Image and Sound

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cornelia Lund
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Digital Technology ◽  
Sound Art ◽  
Artistic Production ◽  
Visual Elements ◽  
Visual Music ◽  
Use Of Technology ◽  
The Status ◽  
Media Formats

Digital technology increasingly has offered new possibilities of combining audio and visual elements, be it in live performances, installations, or videos. The Canadian artist and musician Herman Kolgen plays the different genres like a virtuoso, exploring overarching themes in audiovisual performances as well as audiovisual installations. This chapter offers a case study that takes Kolgen’s work as an example of artistic production that pushes its investigation of audiovisual combinations in different directions by its flexible use of analog and digital media formats. The chapter first discusses the status of Kolgen’s work in terms of categories of audiovisual production such asvisual music, live cinema, andsound art. It then focuses on an analysis of his work under three aspects: exploration of media formats, use of technology, and relation to performance and performativity. At the same time, the chapter situates Kolgen’s work in the wider context of audiovisual art.

scholarly journals Popau, Pop, or an “American Way of Living”? An Introduction to Aracy Amaral's “From the Stamps to the Bubble”

ARTMargins ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 105-119
Author(s):  
Sofia Gotti
Keyword(s):  
Economic Development ◽  
Pop Art ◽  
Military Dictatorship ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Artistic Production ◽  
Cultural Milieu ◽  
Brazilian Art ◽  
Cultural Exchanges ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Military

The introductory text foregrounds the article “From the Stamps to the Bubble” (1968) by Brazilian historian and curator Aracy A. Amaral. It seeks to locate the primary document within a broader historiography of Brazilian art in the second half of the 1960s, and examine the ways in which the military dictatorship, along with certain cultural exchanges facilitated by Brazil's economic development in this period affected artistic production. Placing particular attention on the multiple terminologies that were in use when the article was written, the introduction focuses on the contiguities of Pop Art in the Brazilian cultural milieu. It argues that Pop was present inasmuch as it inspired artists to initiate a process of radical experimentation, which empowered them to depart from an avant-garde tradition founded on geometric abstraction.

Fischinger, Oskar (1900–1967)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard J. Leskosky
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Original Art ◽  
The United States ◽  
Orchestral Music ◽  
John Cage ◽  
Special Effects ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Visual Music ◽  
Abstract Expressionist ◽  
Short Time

Oskar Fischinger (b. 22 June 1900, Gelnhausen, Germany; d. 31 January, 1967, Los Angeles, US) was one of the most influential German abstract experimental animators and creators of visual music. As a youth he studied draughtsmanship and engineering. In 1922, he invented a machine that photographed sequential slices of wax blocks, producing an abstract film in a relatively short time. In Munich, he continued his experiments in creating visual equivalents to orchestral music while making animated cartoons and multi-projector light shows. In Berlin, he did special effects for Fritz Lang’s Frau im Mond [Woman in the Moon] (1929), helped develop the three colour Gasparcolor process, and made stop-motion commercials. In 1936, Fischinger immigrated to the United States. In 1937 he composed the abstract short An Optical Poem to Liszt’s ‘Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2’ for MGM. He worked nine months on the ‘Toccata and Fugue’ segment of Disney’s Fantasia (1940), but none of his original art appears in the film. He continued making abstract expressionist visual music films until 1947, culminating in his masterwork Motion Painting No. 1. Lack of funding subsequently restricted him to painting; around this time he invented a machine to generate artificial sounds. In 1955 he patented the ‘lumigraph’, which enabled its operator to create silent moving colour compositions. Fischinger influenced a host of avant-garde animators, including Norman McLaren, Jordan Belson, and Len Lye, as well as composer John Cage.

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