Past Imperfect, Or the Pleasures and Perils of the Reenactment

2017 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
PAUL DURICA
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Public History ◽  
Site Specific ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Multiple Voices ◽  
Historical Reenactments ◽  
As If

From 2010 to 2015, Pocket Guide to Hell, a series of public history projects in Chicago, produced site-specific, participatory historical reenactments with the intention of treating the past as if it were a public space – an inhabitable site where multiple voices can be heard, meanings contested, and alliances forged. This paper narrates the process behind the production of the final Pocket Guide to Hell project, which marked the centennial of the Arts Club of Chicago, in order to reflect upon the origins of creative acts, the challenges of cocreation, and the possibilities and limitations of the reenactment form.

Past Imperfect, Or the Pleasures and Perils of the Reenactment

2018 ◽  
Vol 52 (04) ◽  
pp. 929-942
Author(s):  
PAUL DURICA
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Public History ◽  
Site Specific ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Multiple Voices ◽  
Historical Reenactments ◽  
As If

From 2010 to 2015, Pocket Guide to Hell, a series of public history projects in Chicago, produced site-specific, participatory historical reenactments with the intention of treating the past as if it were a public space – an inhabitable site where multiple voices can be heard, meanings contested, and alliances forged. This paper narrates the process behind the production of the final Pocket Guide to Hell project, which marked the centennial of the Arts Club of Chicago, in order to reflect upon the origins of creative acts, the challenges of cocreation, and the possibilities and limitations of the reenactment form.

scholarly journals Presentism, Public History and Contemporary Russian Art

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Galina Yankovskaya
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Public History ◽  
Expert Knowledge ◽  
Participatory Culture ◽  
Important Place ◽  
Russian Art ◽  
The Past ◽  
Art Practices ◽  
History Of

The article examines typical features of images and themes of the past as they appear in contemporary Russian art, within the context of the presentist regime of historicism and as a part of public history. This research focuses on the works by Mikhail Pavlyukevich and Olga Subbotina, as well as Chaim Sokol, all of them the artists for whom image of the present is determined by the experience of the past as an incomplete process. The analysis focuses on the factors that ground this important place that the past occupies within the space of contemporary art practices. The article explores intersections between history in public space and contemporary art. The author argues that the development of public history rooted in participatory culture, as well as de-monopolisation of expert knowledge and non-academic languages constituting the discourse on the past, shares similarities with many characteristics of contemporary art practices. In these practices the public actively participates in the artistic processes, an artist loses their status as a demiurge, while site-specific character of artistic projects necessarily rests upon the exlporation of the history of place and the immersion in memory. A palimpsest, in which inseparable interpenetrating layers of the past appear through one another, becomes a metaphor both of public history and of one of the trends in contemporary art. Keywords: presentism, public history, contemporary art, Mikhail Pavlyukevich, Olga Subbotina, Chaim Sokol

scholarly journals Acceptance: on 1956: Desire and the Unknowable

2005 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sue Hajdú
Keyword(s):  
Historical Event ◽  
Historical Evidence ◽  
Site Specific ◽  
The Czech Republic ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
The Arts ◽  
First Response ◽  
A Site ◽  
Selection Of

1956: desire and the unknowable is my first response to my father's photographs of the Hungarian Uprising of October 1956. The paper emerges from my position as a member of the Hungarian diaspora, whereby my very existence and identity as a member of a diaspora owes itself to a historical event that I am unable to lay claim to. The work traces tensions created by multiple desires - in diasporic longing, in positivist history-making, and in the demands put on the photograph as unmediated historical evidence. This paper is an adaptation from a chapter in my Masters dissertation - Little Histories. It opens with an outline of the context of production of the original images, as well my responses to these images. It then goes on to discuss issues that have had a significant impact on the creation of the work, whether arising from the original images or from critical theory. The overriding notion is that vernacular photographs can be used to contest and replace images and ideologies that have come to dominate our memories of the past, and that the past becomes meaningful through such acts of engagement. 1956: desire and the unknowable was first exhibited in a solo exhibition, Little Histories, at the Sydney College of the Arts in 2001. Later that year it was presented, together with 30 of my father’s original photographs, in a father-daughter collaborative exhibition at 62 Robertson, Brisbane. Between Ranke and the sublime: two approaches to Budapest 1956 presented opposing modernist and post-modern views about the ability of the photograph to provide knowledge of the past. The work was most recently shown again at a residency in CESTA, in the Czech Republic, as part of a site-specific installation. In the country where my father once walked I presented a selection of my father’s work at the Szabo Ervin Library, Budapest, in 2001.

scholarly journals 2007 Presidential Address of the CHA

2008 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Conrad
Keyword(s):  
Public History ◽  
Presidential Address ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Public Knowledge ◽  
Foreseeable Future ◽  
The Past ◽  
Academic History ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Impact

Abstract In keeping with the Congress theme of “Bridging Communities: Making Public Knowledge, Making Knowledge Public,” this paper reflects on issues relating to public history and the impact of the Internet — that most public of media — on the ways in which academic historians create and disseminate knowledge. It explores the rise of public history as a profession and field of study over the past three decades, the efforts of the Canadian Historical Association (CHA) since its founding in 1922 to reach a broader public, and the impact of the Internet on the work of professional historians. By raising questions about the role of academic historians in general and of the CHA in particular in bridging what on the surface seems to be the divergent interests of academic and public history, it contributes to a larger discussion that will almost certainly preoccupy CHA presidents for the foreseeable future: where academic history and the arts disciplines generally fit into the postmodern university and into the rapidly expanding world of knowledge fuelled by the Internet and its related technologies.

The Many Pasts of Detective Fiction

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-172
Author(s):  
Thomas Leitch
Keyword(s):  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Public History ◽  
Detective Novel ◽  
Sherlock Holmes ◽  
Detective Story ◽  
The Past ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Detective Novels ◽  
The Many

Building on Tzvetan Todorov's observation that the detective novel ‘contains not one but two stories: the story of the crime and the story of the investigation’, this essay argues that detective novels display a remarkably wide range of attitudes toward the several pasts they represent: the pasts of the crime, the community, the criminal, the detective, and public history. It traces a series of defining shifts in these attitudes through the evolution of five distinct subgenres of detective fiction: exploits of a Great Detective like Sherlock Holmes, Golden Age whodunits that pose as intellectual puzzles to be solved, hardboiled stories that invoke a distant past that the present both breaks with and echoes, police procedurals that unfold in an indefinitely extended present, and historical mysteries that nostalgically fetishize the past. It concludes with a brief consideration of genre readers’ own ambivalent phenomenological investment in the past, present, and future each detective story projects.

The Poetry and Music of Science

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom McLeish
Keyword(s):  
School Leaver ◽  
Creative People ◽  
Creative Processes ◽  
Arts And Sciences ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Two Cultures ◽  
Personal Accounts ◽  
Poetry And Music

‘I could not see any place in science for my creativity or imagination’, was the explanation, of a bright school leaver to the author, of why she had abandoned all study of science. Yet as any scientist knows, the imagination is essential to the immense task of re-creating a shared model of nature from the scale of the cosmos, through biological complexity, to the smallest subatomic structures. Encounters like that one inspired this book, which takes a journey through the creative process in the arts as well as sciences. Visiting great creative people of the past, it also draws on personal accounts of scientists, artists, mathematicians, writers, and musicians today to explore the commonalities and differences in creation. Tom McLeish finds that the ‘Two Cultures’ division between the arts and the sciences is not after all, the best classification of creative processes, for all creation calls on the power of the imagination within the constraints of form. Instead, the three modes of visual, textual, and abstract imagination have woven the stories of the arts and sciences together, but using different tools. As well as panoramic assessments of creativity, calling on ideas from the ancient world, medieval thought, and twentieth-century philosophy and theology, The Poetry and Music of Science illustrates its emerging story by specific close-up explorations of musical (Schumann), literary (James, Woolf, Goethe) mathematical (Wiles), and scientific (Humboldt, Einstein) creation. The book concludes by asking how creativity contributes to what it means to be human.

scholarly journals Recomposing the City: A Survey of Recent Sound Art in Belfast

2013 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
pp. 47-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gascia Ouzounian
Keyword(s):  
Public Spaces ◽  
Sound Art ◽  
Site Specific ◽  
Sonic Art ◽  
The Past ◽  
Post Conflict ◽  
The City ◽  
Radical Transformation

This article introduces examples of recent sound art in Belfast, a city that has undergone radical transformation over the past decade and is home to a burgeoning community of sound artists. The text investigates the ways in which sonic art can redraw boundaries in a city historically marked by myriad political, socioeconomic, religious and sectarian divisions. The article focuses on sound works that reimagine a “post-conflict” Belfast. These include site-specific sound installations in urban and public spaces, soundwalks, sculptures, locative and online works, and experimental sonic performances that draw upon traditional Irish song and music.

«Get in Your Theatres; the Street is Not Yours»: The Struggle for the Character of Public Space in Tunisia

2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 54-69
Author(s):  
Heather Harrington
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Freedom Of Expression ◽  
Social Scientist ◽  
Phenomenological Approach ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Site Specific ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
And Gender

Abstract How people move and appear in public spaces is a reflection of the cultural, religious and socio-political forces in a society. This article, built on an earlier work titled ’Site-Specific Dance: Women in the Middle East’ (2016), addresses the ways in which dance in a public space can support the principles of freedom of expression and gender equality in Tunisia. I explore the character of public space before, during, and after the Arab Spring uprisings. Adopting an ethnographic and phenomenological approach, I focus on the efforts of two Tunisian dancers – Bahri Ben Yahmed (a dancer, choreographer and filmmaker based in Tunis, who has trained in ballet, modern dance and hip hop) and Ahmed Guerfel (a dancer based in Gabès, who has trained in hip hop) – to examine movement in a public space to address political issues facing the society. An analysis of data obtained from Yahmed and Guerfel, including structured interviews, videos, photos, articles and e-mail correspondence, supports the argument that dance performed in public spaces is more effective in shaping the politics of the society than dance performed on the proscenium stage. Definitions and properties of everyday choreography, site and the proscenium stage are analysed, along with examples of site-specific political protest choreography in Egypt, Turkey and Tunisia. I engage with the theories of social scientist Erving Goffman, which propose that a public space can serve as a stage, where people both embody politics and can embody a protest against those politics.

CAN JULIEN D’HUY’S COSMOGONIES SAVE US FROM YUVAL NOAH HARARI?

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 5-34
Author(s):  
Prof. Ph.D. Jacques COULARDEAU ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Short Circuit ◽  
Deep Roots ◽  
Intelligent Machines ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Tv Shows ◽  
Present World ◽  
As If

Over the last two decades, we seem to have been confronted with a tremendous number of books, films, TV shows, or series that deal with the past and the present, not to mention the future, as if it were all out of time, timeless, even when it is history. We have to consider our present world as the continuation and the result of the long evolution our species has gone through since we emerged from our ancestors 300,000 years ago. Julien d’Huy is a mythologist who tries to capture the phylogeny of myths, and popular or folkloric stories that have deep roots in our past and have been produced, changed and refined over many millennia. Can he answer the question about how we have become what we are by studying the products of our past and present imagination? But confronted to the prediction of Y.N. Harari that our species will simply disappear as soon as the intelligent machines we are inventing and producing take over our bodies, brains, and minds in just a few decades, Julien d’Huy sure sounds like the antidote because at every turn in our long history we have been able, collectively, to seize the day, and evolve into a new stage in our life, both biological and mental, not to mention spirituality. Let’s enter Julien d’Huy’s book and find out the power and the energy that will enable us to short-circuit and avoid Yuval’s nightmare.

PERFORMING CRISIS IN GREEK THEATRE: SCENOGRAPHIC STRATEGIES AS DRAMATURGIES OF CRISIS

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (46) ◽  
pp. 45-70
Author(s):  
María Konomi ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Site Specific ◽  
Specific Performance

This essay will investigate a series of performances in Greece that showcase the theme of crisis discussed through the particular frame of their expanded scenographic strategies as dramaturgies of crisis. This expanded scenography is not restricted to politics and aesthetics of scenographic representation extending well beyond traditional staging paradigms to aspects that reinstate the emergence of social realities and a fundamentally social conception of space. Indicatively, this includes strategies like introducing various charged elements from lived experi-ence and contemporary visual culture, as well as conflictual aesthetics of the crisis and visual and spatial dramaturgies of the precarious. Sce-nographic dramaturgies of crisis seem to thrive on new spatial perfor-mance forms that directly interact with social realities and real spaces (like site-specific performance), while they mobilize a renewed address to found, shared public space putting to use strategies of participation. In this context of the crisis, the widespread multimedia idioms and the proliferation of video and cinematic idioms are also notable. Perfor-mances that thematize aspects of the crisis, such as Revolt Athens (2016), and the twin site-specific performances built with a core topographical address, Tea Time Europe (2014-15) and Eat Time Europe (2016) will be an-alyzed as key case studies to exemplify and further contextualize their scenographic approaches as content and context-oriented formulations, as visual and spatial dramaturgies that provide us with an entryway into performing crisis.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document