scholarly journals To Open the Mouth, to Show the Tongue: Anthropophagic Gestures in Brazilian Art

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 143-151
Author(s):  
Eduardo Jorge de Oliveira ◽  
◽  
André Masseno ◽  

This essay seeks to articulate a detailed reading through two anatomical selections – the mouth and tongue—in Brazilian art from the end of the 1960s. The reading is part of a shift in the matrix of Oswald de Andrade’s “Anthropophagic Manifesto,” originally published in the Revista de Antropofagia in 1928, whose interpretations spread in Brazil during the second half of the 20th century. This study mobilises elements of the manifesto and its resonance in the works of artists such as Anna Maria Maiolino, Lygia Pape, Paulo Bruscky, and Lenora de Barros.

Author(s):  
Richard B. Mott ◽  
John J. Friel ◽  
Charles G. Waldman

X-rays are emitted from a relatively large volume in bulk samples, limiting the smallest features which are visible in X-ray maps. Beam spreading also hampers attempts to make geometric measurements of features based on their boundaries in X-ray maps. This has prompted recent interest in using low voltages, and consequently mapping L or M lines, in order to minimize the blurring of the maps.An alternative strategy draws on the extensive work in image restoration (deblurring) developed in space science and astronomy since the 1960s. A recent example is the restoration of images from the Hubble Space Telescope prior to its new optics. Extensive literature exists on the theory of image restoration. The simplest case and its correspondence with X-ray mapping parameters is shown in Figures 1 and 2.Using pixels much smaller than the X-ray volume, a small object of differing composition from the matrix generates a broad, low response. This shape corresponds to the point spread function (PSF). The observed X-ray map can be modeled as an “ideal” map, with an X-ray volume of zero, convolved with the PSF. Figure 2a shows the 1-dimensional case of a line profile across a thin layer. Figure 2b shows an idealized noise-free profile which is then convolved with the PSF to give the blurred profile of Figure 2c.


Author(s):  
Huda Fakhreddine

Modern Arabic poetic forms developed in conversation with the rich Arabic poetic tradition, on one hand, and the Western literary traditions, primarily English and French, on the other. In light of the drastic social and political changes that swept the Arab world in the first half of the 20th century, Western influences often appear in the scholarship on the period to be more prevalent and operative in the rise of the modernist movement. Nevertheless, one of the fundamental forces that drove the movement from its early phases is its urgent preoccupation with the Arabic poetic heritage and its investment in forging a new relationship with the literary past. The history of poetic forms in the first half of the 20th century reveals much about the dynamics between margin and center, old and new, commitment and escapism, autochthonous and outside imperatives. Arabic poetry in the 20th century reflects the political and social upheavals in Arab life. The poetic forms which emerged between the late 1940s and early 1960s presented themselves as aesthetically and ideologically revolutionary. The modernist poets were committed to a project of change in the poem and beyond. Developments from the qas̩īdah of the late 19th century to the prose poem of the 1960s and the notion of writing (kitābah) after that suggest an increased loosening or abandoning of formal restrictions. However, the contending poetic proposals, from the most formal to the most experimental, all continue to coexist in the Arabic poetic landscape in the 21st century. The tensions and negotiations between them are what often lead to the most creative poetic breakthroughs.


Author(s):  
Ori Soltes

Religious and cultural syncretism, particularly in visual art in the Jewish and Christian traditions since the 19th century, has expressed itself in diverse ways and reflects a broad and layered series of contexts. These are at once chronological—arising out of developments that may be charted over several centuries before arriving into the 19th and 20th centuries—and political, spiritual, and cultural, as well as often extending beyond the Jewish–Christian matrix. The specific directions taken by syncretism in art is also varied: it may be limited to the interweave of two religious traditions—most often Jewish and Christian—in which most often it is the minority artist seeking ways to create along lines consistent with what is created by the majority. It may also interweave three or more traditions. It may be a matter of religion alone, or it may be a matter of other issues, such as culture or gender, which may or may not be obviously intertwined with religion. The term “syncretism” has, in certain specifically anthropological and theological circles, acquired a negative connotation. This has grown out of the increasing consciousness, since the 1960s, of the political implications of that term in the course of Western history, in which hegemonic European Christianity has addressed non-Christian religious perspectives. This process intensified in the Colonial era when the West expanded its dominance over much of the globe. An obvious and particularly negative instance of this is the history of the Inquisition as it first affected Jews in late-15th-century Spain and later encompassed indigenous peoples in the Americas, Asia, and Africa. While this issue is noted—after all, art has always been interwoven with politics—it is not the focus of this article. Instead “syncretism” will not be treated as a concept that needs to be distinguished from “hybridization” or “hybridity,” although different modes of syncretism will be distinguished. Syncretistic preludes to visual artists in the 19th and 20th centuries, suggesting some of the breadth of possibility, include Pico della Mirandola, Kabir, and Baruch/Benedict Spinoza. Specific religious developments and crises in Europe from the 16th century to the 18th century brought on the emancipation of the Jews in some places on the one hand, and a contradictory continuation of anti-Jewish prejudice on the other, the latter shifting from a religious to a racial basis. This, together with evident paradoxes regarding secular and spiritual perspectives in the work of key figures in the visual arts, led to a particularly rich array of efforts from Jewish artists who revision Jesus as a subject, applying a new, Jewishly humanistic perspective to transform this most traditional of Christian subjects. Such a direction continued to spread more broadly across the 20th century. The Holocaust not only raised new visual questions and possibilities for Jewish artists, but also did so from the opposite direction for the occasional Christian—particularly German—artist. Cultural syncretism sometimes interweaves religious syncretism—which can connect and has connected Christianity or Judaism to Eastern religions—and a profusion of women artists in the last quarter of the century has added gender issues to the matrix. The discussion culminates with Siona Benjamin: a Jewish female artist who grew up in Hindu and Muslim India, attended Catholic and Zoroastrian schools, and has lived in America for many decades—all these aspects of her life resonate in her often very syncretistic paintings.


Author(s):  
Taras Bocharov ◽  
Petr Kozorezenko

The article examines the origin and development of Russian graphic landscape art, performed in the technique of engraving on linoleum. It covers the period from the early 20th century, the moment the first masters of this direction of graphic art appeared in Russia, until the late 1960s when linocut, the landscape, in particular, reached its prime and acquired its completely individual, unlike any other graphic technique, characteristic. The authors analyze the linocut landscapes of notable artists of the period described starting with the founder, N.Sheverdyaev, and the leading propagandist of linocut in Russia, I.Pavlov. The article describes the distinctive features of engraving and making prints by famous artists of the 20th century, graphic artists, and not only. This is M.Dobuzhinsky, B.Kustodiev, V.Falileev, K.Kostenko, N.Piskarev, later I.Sokolov, P.Staronosov, and many other not so famous artists. The Soviet period is represented by A.Kravchenko, M.Matorin, I.Sokolov, S.Yudovin, and, of course, A.Zyryanov, one of the well-known printers of the 1960s. The linocut technique is well established in almost all types of landscape. These were industrial, agitational works, glorifying the work of Soviet people, colorful sheets, and lyrical, delicate, and poetic works. The architectural and rural landscape occupied an important place in the work of the letterpress masters: in the urban landscape, of course, the images of the two capitals prevailed, which is not surprising since most of the artists studied and worked in Moscow and Leningrad. The authors of the article drew attention to the creative work of N.Lapshin, F.Smirnov, N.Novoselskaya, A.Smirnov, and others. In the article, the authors try to show how versatile and complex the linocut technique, especially colored, is. The authors want to show that the art of engraving on linoleum helped to view the landscape genre in graphics differently and, possibly, influenced the development of the landscape in other types of prints and painting. The authors are trying to prove that linoleum engraving rightfully takes an equal position with woodcut and etching. The works of masters working in this technique are exhibited in all museums in the country.


2018 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-22
Author(s):  
Michaela Mojžišová

Abstract The study deals with the increase in the introduction of modern opera production at the Slovak National Theatre in the 1960s. The author interprets it not only as an attempt of dramaturgy to enliven the traditional repertoire, but in particular as an ambition to apply more modern theatrical poetics in the production opera practice. Since there was no practice of updating classic opera production in Slovakia in the sense of “Regietheater” at that time, this production of the 20th century was considered to be the most realistic way of reviving opera. At the same time, the study highlights the social motivation of this intention: an effort to address a new, progressively oriented audience that would create appeal for a conventionally oriented audience that primarily focuses on the musical-vocal component of opera productions.


2012 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 1133-1167 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Sanchez-Lorenzo ◽  
J. Calbó ◽  
M. Wild

Abstract. Visual observations of clouds have been performed since the establishment of meteorological observatories during the early instrumental period, and have become more systematic and reliable after the mid-19th century due to the establishment of the first national weather services. During the last decades a large number of studies have documented the trends of the total cloud cover (TCC) and cloudy types; most of these studies are focused on the trends since the second half of the 20th century. Due to the lower reliability of former observations, and the fact that most of this data is not accessible in digital format, there is a lack of studies focusing on the trends of cloudiness since the mid-19th century. In the first part, this work attempts to review the previous studies analyzing TCC changes with information covering at least the first half of the 20th century. Then, the study analyses a database of cloudiness observations in Southern Europe (Spain) since the second third of the 19th century. Specifically, monthly TCC series were reconstructed since 1866 by means of a so-called parameter of cloudiness, calculated from the number of cloudless and overcast days. This estimated TCC series show a high interannual and decadal correlation with the observed TCC series originally measured in oktas. After assessing the temporal homogeneity of the estimated TCC series, the mean annual and seasonal series for the whole of Spain and several subregions were calculated. The mean annual TCC shows a general tendency to increase from the beginning of the series until the 1960s; at this point, the trend becomes negative. The linear trend for the annual mean series, estimated over the 1866–2010 period, is a highly remarkable (and statistically significant) increase of +0.44% per decade, which implies an overall increase of more than +6% during the analyzed period. These results are in line with the major part of the previous trends observed at many areas of the World, especially for the records before the 1950s, when a widespread increase of TCC can been considered as a common feature.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jorgen Segerlund Frederiksen ◽  
Stacey Lee Osbrough

Abstract. Systematic changes, since the beginning of the 20th century, in average and extreme Australian rainfall and temperatures indicate that Southern Australian climate has undergone regime transitions into a drier and warmer state. South-west Western Australia (SWWA) experienced the most dramatic drying trend with average streamflow into Perth dams, in the last decade, just 20 % of that before the 1960s and extreme, decile 10, rainfall reduced to near zero. In south-eastern Australia (SEA) systematic decreases in average and extreme cool season rainfall became evident in the late 1990s with a halving of the area experiencing average decile 10 rainfall in the early 21st century compared with that for the 20th century. The shift in annual surface temperatures over SWWA and SEA, and indeed for Australia as a whole, has occurred primarily over the last 20 years with the percentage area experiencing extreme maximum temperatures in decile 10 increasing to an average of more than 45 % since the start of the 21st century compared with less than 3 % for the 20th century mean. Average maximum temperatures have also increased by circa 1 °C for SWWA and SEA over the last 20 years. The climate changes are associated with atmospheric circulation shifts and are indicative of second order regime transitions, apart from extreme temperatures for which the dramatic increases are suggestive of first order transitions.


2018 ◽  
Vol 43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tomas Frejka ◽  
Frances Goldscheider ◽  
Trude Lappegård

The two parts of the gender revolution have been evolving side by side at least since the 1960s. The first part, women’s entry into the public sphere, proceeded faster than the second part, men’s entry into the private sphere. Consequently, many employed mothers have carried a greater burden of paid and unpaid family support than fathers throughout the second half of the 20th century. This constituted women’s “second shift,” depressing fertility. A central focus of this paper is to establish second shift trends during the second half of the 20th century and their effects on fertility. Our analyses are based on data on cohort fertility, male and female labor force participation, and male and female domestic hours worked from 11 countries in Northern Europe, Western/central Europe, Southern Europe, and North America between 1960/70 and 2000/2014. We find that the gender revolution had not generated a turnaround, i.e. an increase in cohort fertility, by the end of the 20th century. Nevertheless, wherever the gender revolution has made progress in reducing women’s second shift, cohort fertility declined the least; where the second shift is large and/or has not been reduced, cohort fertility has declined the most.


Anthropology ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roxanne Varzi ◽  
Andrew McGrath

Stan Brakhage (b. 1933–d. 2003) was a visual artist and filmmaker who embodied many of the theoretical tensions and pragmatic themes in cultural anthropology in the 20th century, despite not being an anthropologist and working almost totally through experiments in 16mm film. In traversing, and being claimed by, both modernist and postmodernist thinkers and artists alike, he was a creator as much influenced by the poetry of American Romanticism as he was the harbinger of a millennial deconstruction. He is generally considered, along with the filmmaker Maya Deren, the quintessential savant of American avant-garde cinema. His phenomenological approach to filmmaking and his attention to poesis in visuality, combined with his persistent dispensation with narrative and plot, drew to light still pressing existential questions about the space between structure and individualism, the unconscious mind, myth, and intersubjective experiences in the shared quotidian of everyday being. While his early works of the mid-1950s showed solidarity with the surrealist and Freudian-inspired themes of compatriots like Maya Deren, in the 1960s Brakhage quickly engaged with what he viewed as the untapped potential of cinematic celluloid as a malleable medium with which to both capture and express the immediacy of sensual experience. At the core of his creative impulse was an exploration of visual perception unfiltered by symbolic textuality. To that end, his 16mm films were mostly soundless, color-saturated, nonlinear impressions of the most consequential of life’s relational phenomena; birth, sex, human development, death, and familial intimacies untethered from linguistic discourses, character drama, and traditional act-based storytelling structures. Brakhage’s process of etching and painting directly onto the emulsified film strips he used for shooting enabled his impressionistic questioning of the boundaries of representation in moving images. Brakhage asserted that, much as with human vision, such manipulations punched holes in the epistemic orthodoxy of experiential narrative and instead stressed the messy and affective ways that our sensory organs force us to negotiate our immanent worlds. His early artistic tenure found him characteristically prolific in modernist aesthetics as he explored concepts ranging from the psychoanalysis of dreaming and the Freudian death-drive in Reflections on Black (1955) to the metaphysical man-myth opus Dog Star Man (1961–1964). Such themes paralleled similar theoretical concerns emergent in anthropology in the mid-20th century as evident in both the structuralism of Levi-Strauss and the persistence of the Freudian unconscious as an explanatory hermeneutic. Today, Stan Brakhage’s influence in anthropology is evident in ethnographic filmmaking that challenges the documentary impulse, ambiguates hegemonic truth claims, and explores the modalities of sensorial representation related to human experience through iterative experimentation.


Author(s):  
Alice Heeren

Rubem Valentim was born in 1922 in Salvador in the state of Bahia. A self-taught artist, Valentim starts his career in the 1940s acting alongside artists like Mario Cravo Júnior and others in effervescent new artistic milieu of the state of Brahia. As art historian Roberto Conduru has noted, Valentim, similarly to other artists working in the 1940s and 1950s in Latin America, responded to Joaquín Torres-García’s Universalimso Constructivo. Nevertheless, Valentim also learned from artists such as Alfredo Volpi and Milton Dacosta carrying their geometric stylistic principles into his own symbolic world heavily influenced by Afro-Brazilian religions. From the 1960s onwards, besides small-scale objects and paintings, Valentim also began working in large-scale murals, installations, and public art pieces, the most famous being his marble mural for the NOVACAP building in Brasília. Valentim found a common thread between the modernist rationality of Constructivism and the geometric lines of Afro-Brazilian visual culture. His work manifested local values and themes, while acting in the process of building a Brazilian national identity, and also figuring into the universal debates central to modernism. Paulo Herkenhoff points to how the double axe of Xangô, a recurrent theme in Valentim’s work with its double edge blade acts as a metaphor for the artist’s endeavor, working between Constructivism and Afro-Brazilian mythology. Valentim has become an exponent of Brazilian art and is especially praised for shedding light into the visual world of Afro-Brazilian religions. He showed at the now iconic 1966 World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal and at the 16ª Bienal Internacional de São Paulo and in 1977. In 1998, the Museu de Arte Moderna da Bahia (MAM-BA) inaugurated a special room in his sculpture garden in the artist’s name.


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