The Posthuman in the Anthropocene: A Look through the Aesthetic Field

2016 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 150-165 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacob Wamberg ◽  
Mads Rosendahl Thomsen
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Complexity Theory ◽  
Human Body ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
The Body ◽  
Environmental Modification ◽  
Potential Shift ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Aesthetic Field ◽  
The Aesthetic

The posthuman summons up a complex of both tangible challenges for humanity and a potential shift to a larger, more comprehensive historical perspective on humankind. In this article we will first examine the posthuman in relation to the macro-historical framework of the Anthropocene. Adopting key notions from complexity theory, we argue that the earlier counter-figures of environmental catastrophe (Anthropocene entropy) and corporeal enhancement (transhuman negentropy) should be juxtaposed and blended. Furthermore, we argue for the relevance of a comprehensive aesthetical perspective in a discussion of posthuman challenges. Whereas popular visual culture and many novels illustrate posthuman dilemmas (e.g. the superhero’s oscillation between superhuman and human) in a respect for humanist naturalist norms, avant-garde art performs a posthuman alienation of the earlier negentropic centres of art, a problematization of the human body and mind, that is structurally equivalent to the environmental modification of negentropic rise taking place in the Anthropocene. In a spatial sprawl from immaterial information to material immersion, the autonomous human body and mind, the double apex of organic negentropy, are thus undermined through a dialectics of entropy and order, from abstraction’s indeterminacy to Surrealism’s fragmentation of the body and its interlacing with inorganic things.

Cut and paste

2018 ◽  
pp. 25-65
Author(s):  
Anna Dahlgren
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Close Study ◽  
History Of ◽  
Illustrated Press

Chapter 1 considers the mechanisms of breaks and continuities in the history of photocollage with regard to gender, genre and locations of display. Collage is commonly celebrated as a twentieth-century art form invented by Dada artists in the 1910s. Yet there was already a vibrant culture of making photocollages in Victorian Britain. From an art historical perspective this can be interpreted as an expression of typical modernist amnesia. The default stance of the early twentieth century’s avant-garde was to be radically, ground-breakingly new and different from any historical precursors. However, there is, when turning to the illustrated press, also a trajectory of continuity and withholding of traditions in the history of photocollage. This chapter has two parts. The first includes a critical investigation of the writings on the history of photocollage between the 1970s and 2010s, focusing on the arguments and rationales of forgetting and retrieving those nineteenth-century forerunners. It includes examples of amnesia and recognition and revaluation. The second is a close study of a number of images that appear in Victorian albums produced between 1870 and 1900 and their contemporary counterparts in the visual culture of illustrated journals and books.

‘From the Monkey Mountains’: The Body, the Grotesque and Carnival in the Music of Pavel Haas

2016 ◽  
Vol 141 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-112
Author(s):  
Martin Čurda
Keyword(s):  
String Quartet ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
The Body ◽  
Leos Janacek ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Compositional Technique ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Previous Scholarship ◽  
Interpretative Framework ◽  
The Grotesque

ABSTRACTIt has been claimed that Pavel Haas's string quartet ‘From the Monkey Mountains’ (1925) demonstrates the composer's alignment with the ‘Western’ musical avant-garde of the 1920s. However, Haas's avant-garde affiliations remain largely unexplained, as does the influence of Leoš Janáček, with whom Haas studied. Combining the methods of music analysis, semiotics and discourse analysis, I explain how Haas reconciled Janáčekian compositional technique with the ideas underpinning the contemporary Czechoslovak avant-garde movement known as Poetism. Focusing particularly on notions of the body, the grotesque and carnival, I propose an interpretative framework for and a reading of Haas's quartet ‘From the Monkey Mountains’. In doing so, I also illuminate the aesthetic and cultural context of Haas's music from the 1920s, which has received little attention in previous scholarship.

Art, Science, and the Body in Early Romanticism

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephanie O'Rourke
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Human Body ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
The Body ◽  
New Model ◽  
Archival Material ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of

Can we really trust the things our bodies tell us about the world? This work reveals how deeply intertwined cultural practices of art and science questioned the authority of the human body in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Focusing on Henry Fuseli, Anne-Louis Girodet and Philippe de Loutherbourg, it argues that romantic artworks participated in a widespread crisis concerning the body as a source of reliable scientific knowledge. Rarely discussed sources and new archival material illuminate how artists drew upon contemporary sciences and inverted them, undermining their founding empiricist principles. The result is an alternative history of romantic visual culture that is deeply embroiled in controversies around electricity, mesmerism, physiognomy and other popular sciences. This volume reorients conventional accounts of romanticism and some of its most important artworks, while also putting forward a new model for the kinds of questions that we can ask about them.

A Major Contribution to Feminist Film History

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cécile Chich
Keyword(s):  
Film History ◽  
The Body ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Feminist Film ◽  
Women's Cinema ◽  
Women's Film ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
A Site ◽  
Formal Innovation

This chapter examines the centrality of the work of artistic duo Maria Klonaris and Katerina Thomadaki to the project of writing a feminist women's film history by focusing on the aesthetic and conceptual choices they made and on their thought-provoking contributions to feminist film practice. In particular, it considers Klonaris and Thomadaki's Cinéma corporel (Cinema of the Body). The chapter suggests that the female avant-garde film has, paradoxically, been marginalized by feminist film theory's focus on mainstream cinema as a site of patriarchal representation and spectatorship. It shows that Klonaris and Thomadaki's Cinéma corporel represents, for women's cinema, a strategy of dissidence. In form, content, concept, and approach, it calls for a revisitation of “film” outside the canon established in traditional film history. The chapter underscores the need to “heighten the visibility of women's contributions to traditions of formal innovation and explore how formal innovation enables women to enlarge discourses about women's subjectivity” and art.

The Aesthetics of Action and Movement

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily S. Cross ◽  
Andrea Orlandi
Keyword(s):  
Human Body ◽  
Research Field ◽  
The Body ◽  
Aesthetic Perception ◽  
Moving Body ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Methodological Considerations ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Motor Knowledge ◽  
Different Levels

The embodied simulation account proposed a pivotal role for the body of an observer in the aesthetic perception of artworks. Beginning with this consideration, this chapter briefly outlines evidence from experimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience that supports this proposed relationship between the human body and motor knowledge and aesthetic appraisal of action. The chapter focuses on the cognitive processes involved in perceiving a moving body and aesthetic estimation. It also discusses the impact of visuomotor expertise in shaping different levels of action representation and relative hedonistic judgment. While this research field remains somewhat in its naissance, alternative accounts have also been proposed to account for the link between embodiment, expertise, and movement aesthetics, which are also considered here. The chapter concludes with some theoretical and methodological considerations, questions, and perspectives that warrant further attention in future studies to expand existing knowledge on the empirical aesthetics of the human body in action.

Correction of Posture Deviations in the Sagittal Plane Using the Pilates Method

2019 ◽  
pp. 3-13
Author(s):  
Alexandru Cîtea ◽  
George-Sebastian Iacob
Keyword(s):  
Low Back Pain ◽  
Back Pain ◽  
Postural Control ◽  
Human Body ◽  
Sagittal Plane ◽  
The Body ◽  
Lower Limbs ◽  
Low Back ◽  
Pilates Method ◽  
The Relationship

Posture is commonly perceived as the relationship between the segments of the human body upright. Certain parts of the body such as the cephalic extremity, neck, torso, upper and lower limbs are involved in the final posture of the body. Musculoskeletal instabilities and reduced postural control lead to the installation of nonstructural posture deviations in all 3 anatomical planes. When we talk about the sagittal plane, it was concluded that there are 4 main types of posture deviation: hyperlordotic posture, kyphotic posture, rectitude and "sway-back" posture.Pilates method has become in the last decade a much more popular formof exercise used in rehabilitation. The Pilates method is frequently prescribed to people with low back pain due to their orientation on the stabilizing muscles of the pelvis. Pilates exercise is thus theorized to help reactivate the muscles and, by doingso, increases lumbar support, reduces pain, and improves body alignment.

Banner

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Magda Szcześniak ◽  
Łukasz Zaremba
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Visual Representations ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Polish Culture

A chapter from the book Kultura wizualna w Polsce. Spojrzenia [Visual Culture in Poland. Looks], ed. Iwona Kurz, Paulina Kwiatkowska, Magda Szcześniak, Łukasz Zaremba (Fundacja Bęc Zmiana, Instytut Kultury Polskiej UW: Warsaw, 2017). The essay is devoted to protest imagery in Polish culture - from avant-garde painting to contemporary, vernacular visual representations used during protests.

Representation of a Human Body: A Comparison Study between Balinese and Javanese Traditional House

Humaniora ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 83-90
Author(s):  
Anak Agung Ayu Wulandari ◽  
Ade Ariyani Sari Fajarwati
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Study ◽  
Human Body ◽  
Qualitative Method ◽  
Descriptive Analysis ◽  
The Body ◽  
Comparison Study ◽  
Architectural Drawing ◽  
Study Approach ◽  
The Comparative Study ◽  
Head Area

The research would look further at the representation of the human body in both Balinese and Javanese traditional houses and compared the function and meaning of each part. To achieve the research aim, which was to evaluate and compare the representation of the human body in Javanese and Balinese traditional houses, a qualitative method through literature and descriptive analysis study was conducted. A comparative study approach would be used with an in-depth comparative study. It would revealed not only the similarities but also the differences between both subjects. The research shows that both traditional houses represent the human body in their way. From the architectural drawing top to bottom, both houses show the same structure that is identical to the human body; head at the top, followed by the body, and feet at the bottom. However, the comparative study shows that each area represents a different meaning. The circulation of the house is also different, while the Balinese house is started with feet and continued to body and head area. Simultaneously, the Javanese house is started with the head, then continued to body, and feet area.

Restating Classicist Monumentalism in Soviet Architecture, 1930s–early 1950s

2019 ◽  
pp. 64-88
Author(s):  
William C. Brumfield
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Socialist Realism ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Bolshevik Revolution ◽  
Stalin Era ◽  
Imperial Russia ◽  
Architectural Styles ◽  
The Soviet Union

This article examines the development of retrospective styles in Soviet architecture during the Stalin era, from the 1930s to the early 1950s. This highly visible manifestation of communist visual culture is usually interpreted as a reaction to the austere modernism of 1920s Soviet avant-garde architecture represented by the constructivist movement. The project locates the origins of Stalin-era proclamatory, retrospective style in prerevolutionary neoclassical revival architecture. Although functioning in a capitalist market, that neoclassical reaction was supported by prominent critics who were suspicious of Russia’s nascent bourgeoisie and felt that neoclassical or neo-Renaissance architecture could echo the glory of imperial Russia. These critics left Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution, but prominent architects of the neoclassicist revival remained in the Soviet Union. Together with the Academy of Architecture (founded 1933), these architects played a critical role in reviving classicist monumentalism—designated “socialist realism”—as the proclamatory style for the centralized, neoimperial statist system of the Stalin era. Despite different ideological contexts (prerevolutionary and Stalinist), retrospective styles were promulgated as models for significant architectural projects. The article concludes with comments on the post-Stalinist—and post-Soviet—alternation of modernist and retrospective architectural styles.

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