‘Loaded’: indie guitar rock, canonism, white masculinities

Popular Music ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
MATTHEW BANNISTER
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Context ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
High Culture ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Alternative Rock ◽  
Symbolic Identification ◽  
History Of ◽  
Important Means ◽  
White Masculinities

Indie alternative rock in the 1980s is often presented as authentically autonomous, produced in local scenes, uncaptured by ideology, free of commercial pressures, but also of high culture elitism. In claiming that the music is avant-garde, postmodern and subversive, such accounts simplify indie's historical, social and cultural context. Indie did not simply arise organically out of developing postpunk music networks, but was shaped by media, and was not just collective, but also stratified, hierarchical and traditional. Canon (articulated through practices of archivalism and connoisseurship) is a key means of stratification within indie scenes, produced by and serving particular social and cultural needs for dominant social groups (journalists, scenemakers, tastemakers, etc.). These groups and individuals were mainly masculine, and thus gender in indie scenes is an important means for deconstructing the discourse of indie independence. I suggest re-envisioning indie as a history of record collectors, emphasising the importance of rock ‘tradition’, of male rock ‘intellectuals’, second-hand record shops, and of an alternative canon as a form of pedagogy. I also consider such activities as models of rational organisation and points of symbolic identification.

scholarly journals How Style Became Famous and Irrelevant at the Same Time

2015 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 215-230
Author(s):  
Nataša Lah
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Context ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Theoretical Issue ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Late 18Th Century ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
19Th Century Art

The article is concerned with the theoretical issue of the status of style in visual arts, aiming to demonstrate that – within art history – stylistics acquired its disciplinary autonomy in the late 18th century when, J. J. Winckelmann was the first to detach stylistics from rhetoric, thus expanding the field of stylistic competence to the history of art. It was also the time when, under the influence of early Romanticism, the entirely opposite tendencies originated, those of the emphasized individuation of art. Therefore, parallel to the birth of theoretical notion of “the styles of the eras”, romanticists not only paved the way for Modernism, but also thwarted the application of a newly risen stylistic methodology concerned with the cultural codification of style. The disagreement between the “classicists”, and “romanticists”, eventually culminated in the schism of the Paris Salon and the emergence of a wide range of new trends, heterogeneous conceptions and avant-garde movement, all in a very short space of time. The concept of “the style of epoch” has been staggered by the challenges of the 20th century. The function of culture within the stylistic characteristics of the 19th century art production was appropriated by artists, whose artwork acquired total objectual autonomy. The cultural and stylistic codification of of historical periods conceived in the 18th century could no longer be applied to the heterogeneous art produced during the Modernist era. By affirming the obviousness of the visual, Modernism eluded all the semantic, functional, utilitarian, narrative and symbolic burdens of earlier periods. This article endeavours to show how, subsequent to the epoch of Modernism, style can be discussed exclusively at a level of the apparent expressed features of an artwork. Codification which follows the principle of temporal “anchoring” in the cultural context of the Modernits era of Modernism remains both risky and ineffective stylistic strategy.  

The Dangers of Poetry

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin M. Jones
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
Cultural Landscape ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
High Culture ◽  
Political Consequences ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Acts ◽  
History Of

Poetry has long dominated the cultural landscape of modern Iraq, simultaneously representing the literary pinnacle of high culture and giving voice to the popular discourses of mass culture. As the favored genre of culture expression for religious clerics, nationalist politicians, leftist dissidents, and avant-garde intellectuals, poetry critically shaped the social, political, and cultural debates that consumed the Iraqi public sphere in the twentieth century. The popularity of poetry in modern Iraq, however, made it a dangerous practice that carried serious political consequences and grave risks to dissident poets. The Dangers of Poetry is the first book to narrate the social history of poetry in the modern Middle East. Moving beyond the analysis of poems as literary and intellectual texts, Kevin Jones shows how poems functioned as social acts that critically shaped the cultural politics of revolutionary Iraq. He narrates the history of three generations of Iraqi poets who navigated the fraught relationship between culture and politics in pursuit of their own ambitions and agendas. Through this historical analysis of thousands of poems published in newspapers, recited in popular demonstrations, and disseminated in secret whispers, this book reveals the overlooked contribution of these poets to the spirit of rebellion in modern Iraq.

scholarly journals How Style Became Famous and Irrelevant at the Same Time

2015 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 215-230
Author(s):  
Nataša Lah
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Context ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Theoretical Issue ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Late 18Th Century ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
19Th Century Art

The article is concerned with the theoretical issue of the status of style in visual arts, aiming to demonstrate that – within art history – stylistics acquired its disciplinary autonomy in the late 18th century when, J. J. Winckelmann was the first to detach stylistics from rhetoric, thus expanding the field of stylistic competence to the history of art. It was also the time when, under the influence of early Romanticism, the entirely opposite tendencies originated, those of the emphasized individuation of art. Therefore, parallel to the birth of theoretical notion of “the styles of the eras”, romanticists not only paved the way for Modernism, but also thwarted the application of a newly risen stylistic methodology concerned with the cultural codification of style. The disagreement between the “classicists”, and “romanticists”, eventually culminated in the schism of the Paris Salon and the emergence of a wide range of new trends, heterogeneous conceptions and avant-garde movement, all in a very short space of time. The concept of “the style of epoch” has been staggered by the challenges of the 20th century. The function of culture within the stylistic characteristics of the 19th century art production was appropriated by artists, whose artwork acquired total objectual autonomy. The cultural and stylistic codification of of historical periods conceived in the 18th century could no longer be applied to the heterogeneous art produced during the Modernist era. By affirming the obviousness of the visual, Modernism eluded all the semantic, functional, utilitarian, narrative and symbolic burdens of earlier periods. This article endeavours to show how, subsequent to the epoch of Modernism, style can be discussed exclusively at a level of the apparent expressed features of an artwork. Codification which follows the principle of temporal “anchoring” in the cultural context of the Modernits era of Modernism remains both risky and ineffective stylistic strategy.  

scholarly journals Reflections on the global art market: implications for the Sociology of Culture

2009 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 331-362 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diana Crane
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Art Market ◽  
The United States ◽  
Art World ◽  
Sociology Of Culture ◽  
High Culture ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Global Art

The article examines the recent changes in art world from the characteristics of the global art market and its implications for sociological theories of art. Therefore, it focuses on the correlation established between the decline of the avant-garde art and how there are tenuous boundaries between high culture and popular culture. In this sense, it discusses and analyzes the influence increasingly exerted by actors located in countries such as the United States, England, Germany, France and, more recently, China. It concludes with how much the global art market may be illustrative of cases in which the globalization of markets expands the cultural and economic inequality by favoring the privilege of small social groups in the contemporary world.

Misreading Egypt

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Schotter
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Experimental Film ◽  
Tower Of Babel ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Sergei Eisenstein ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Modern Technologies

The first chapter of Hieroglyphic Modernisms exposes the complex history of Western misconceptions of Egyptian writing from antiquity to the present. Hieroglyphs bridge the gap between modern technologies and the ancient past, looking forward to the rise of new media and backward to the dispersal of languages in the mythical moment of the Tower of Babel. The contradictory ways in which hieroglyphs were interpreted in the West come to shape the differing ways that modernist writers and filmmakers understood the relationship between writing, film, and other new media. On the one hand, poets like Ezra Pound and film theorists like Vachel Lindsay and Sergei Eisenstein use the visual languages of China and of Egypt as a more primal or direct alternative to written words. But Freud, Proust, and the later Eisenstein conversely emphasize the phonetic qualities of Egyptian writing, its similarity to alphabetical scripts. The chapter concludes by arguing that even avant-garde invocations of hieroglyphics depend on narrative form through an examination of Hollis Frampton’s experimental film Zorns Lemma.

Conclusion: What is Speculative Empiricism?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Didier Debaise
Keyword(s):  
Social Groups ◽  
Speculative Philosophy ◽  
System P ◽  
History Of ◽  
Selection Of

Process and Reality ends with a warning: ‘[t]he chief danger to philosophy is narrowness in the selection of evidence’ (PR, 337). Although this danger of narrowness might emerge from the ‘idiosyncrasies and timidities of particular authors, of particular social groups, of particular schools of thought, of particular epochs in the history of civilization’ (PR, 337), we should not be mistaken: it occurs within philosophy, in its activity, its method. And the fact that this issue arises at the end of Process and Reality reveals the ambition that has accompanied its composition: Whitehead has resisted this danger through the form and ambition of his speculative construction. The temptation of a narrowness in selection attempts to expel speculative philosophy at the same time as it haunts each part of its system.

Sea Urchins and Circuses: The Modernist Natural Histories of Jean Painlevé and Alexander Calder

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-211
Author(s):  
Patricia E. Chu
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Sea Urchins ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Machine Age ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The One ◽  
Natural Historian

The Paris avant-garde milieu from which both Cirque Calder/Calder's Circus and Painlevé’s early films emerged was a cultural intersection of art and the twentieth-century life sciences. In turning to the style of current scientific journals, the Paris surrealists can be understood as engaging the (life) sciences not simply as a provider of normative categories of materiality to be dismissed, but as a companion in apprehending the “reality” of a world beneath the surface just as real as the one visible to the naked eye. I will focus in this essay on two modernist practices in new media in the context of the history of the life sciences: Jean Painlevé’s (1902–1989) science films and Alexander Calder's (1898–1976) work in three-dimensional moving art and performance—the Circus. In analyzing Painlevé’s work, I discuss it as exemplary of a moment when life sciences and avant-garde technical methods and philosophies created each other rather than being classified as separate categories of epistemological work. In moving from Painlevé’s films to Alexander Calder's Circus, Painlevé’s cinematography remains at the forefront; I use his film of one of Calder's performances of the Circus, a collaboration the men had taken two decades to complete. Painlevé’s depiction allows us to see the elements of Calder's work that mark it as akin to Painlevé’s own interest in a modern experimental organicism as central to the so-called machine-age. Calder's work can be understood as similarly developing an avant-garde practice along the line between the bestiary of the natural historian and the bestiary of the modern life scientist.

National Institute of Art and Design named after Kamoliddin Behzod

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 104-108
Author(s):  
Dilzoda Alimkulova
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Art And Design ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
History Of ◽  
20Th Century Art

The art of Uzbekistan of the first decade of 20th century (1920-30s) is worthily recognized as the brightest period in history of Uzbek national art. We may observe big interest among the artwork which was created during the years of Independence of Uzbekistan towards the art of 20th century and mainly it may be seen in form, style, idea and semantics. Despite the significant gap between the 20th century art tendencies and Independence period, there is very big influence of avant-garde style in works of such artists as Javlon Umarbekov, Akmal Ikramjanov, Alisher Mirzaev, Tokhir Karimov, Daima Rakhmanbekova and others.

Cinema Expanded

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Walley
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Film History ◽  
Video Art ◽  
Experimental Film ◽  
Art World ◽  
Film Culture ◽  
Moving Image ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Expanded Cinema ◽  
History Of

Cinema Expanded: Avant-Garde Film in the Age of Intermedia is a comprehensive historical survey of expanded cinema from the mid-1960s to the present. It offers an historical and theoretical revision of the concept of expanded cinema, placing it in the context of avant-garde/experimental film history rather than the history of new media, intermedia, or multimedia. The book argues that while expanded cinema has taken an incredible variety of forms (including moving image installation, multi-screen films, live cinematic performance, light shows, shadow plays, computer-generated images, video art, sculptural objects, and texts), it is nonetheless best understood as an ongoing meditation by filmmakers on the nature of cinema, specifically, and on its relationship to the other arts. Cinema Expanded also extends its historical and theoretical scope to avant-garde film culture more generally, placing expanded cinema in that context while also considering what it has to tell us about the moving image in the art world and new media environment.

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