‘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.

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.

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.

scholarly journals Normalizing Vision: The Representation and Use of Spectacles and Eyeglasses in Victorian Britain

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gemma Almond
Keyword(s):  
Assistive Technology ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Assistive Technologies ◽  
The Body ◽  
Visual Aids ◽  
Medical Texts ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
First Time ◽  
Material Evidence

Abstract This study explores the representation and use of Victorian visual aids, specifically focusing on how the design of spectacle and eyeglass frames shaped ideas of the ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ body. It contributes to our understanding of assistive technologies in the Victorian period by showcasing the usefulness of material evidence for exploring how an object was produced and perceived. By placing visual aids in their medical and cultural context for the first time, it will show how the study of spectacle and eyeglass frames develops our understanding of Victorian society more broadly. Contemporaries drew upon industrialization, increasing education, and the proliferation of print to explain a rise in refractive vision ‘errors’. Through exploring the design of three spectacle frames from the London Science Museum’s collections, this study will show how the representations and manufacture of visual aids transformed in response to these wider changes. The material evidence, as well as contemporary newspapers, periodicals, and medical texts, reveal that visual aids evolved from an unusual to a more mainstream device. It argues that visual aids are a unique assistive technology, one that is able to inform our understanding of how Victorians measured the body and constructed ideas of ‘normalcy’ and ‘abnormalcy’.

SEEING AND HEARING DISABILITY IN MAURICIO KAGEL'S REPERTOIRE FROM STAATSTHEATER

Tempo ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 75 (296) ◽  
pp. 7-20
Author(s):  
Bethany Younge
Keyword(s):  
Disability Studies ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
The Body ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Hearing Disability ◽  
Physical Action ◽  
The One ◽  
Traditional Roles

AbstractThis article adopts a disability studies perspective to evaluate the ways in which Mauricio Kagel's Repertoire from Staatstheater reimagines human bodies. Objects and bodies interact in myriad ways within the one hundred vignettes of Repertoire: some objects hinder or aid the bodies on stage, while others become incorporated within the body, acting as a single expressive unit. My analysis demonstrates the ways in which both objects and bodies transform their traditional roles as ascribed by society, rejecting procrustean physiques. Using disability studies concepts such as embodiment and experientialism I evaluate sound and physical action as inextricable expressions of imaginative corporealities. Reflecting upon Kagel's identity as an outsider of the European avant-garde, as well as his irreverence for oppressive social institutions, I evince that other forms of hierarchical disruptions are at play, namely that abled bodies do not preside over disabled ones and notions of beauty hold no clout.

Hope and anxiety: The study of female embodied experience with assisted reproductive technology

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 138-170
Author(s):  
Chengpu Yu ◽  
Wanlin Li ◽  
Mingfen Deng
Keyword(s):  
Assisted Reproductive Technology ◽  
Social Factors ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Infertility Treatment ◽  
Reproductive Technology ◽  
The Body ◽  
Local Culture ◽  
Embodied Experience ◽  
Experiences Of Women ◽  
Infertile Patients

Assisted reproductive technology (ART) is hailed as “the holy grail” for infertile patients in the mainstream narrative. The existing studies have clearly demonstrated how external social factors shape how ART is to be used, but they ignore the recipients of the technologies, and especially the experiences of women. Based on an investigation conducted in Z hospital’s reproductive center, this article regards embodiment as the methodological orientation for integrating socio-cultural context with female embodied experience in order to show their bio-social entanglement. As fieldwork evidence indicates, ART in practice is far from simple “hope technology”; instead, it throws women into a paradoxical world in which hope and anxiety coexist. Embodied experience, hope, and anxiety are transmitted through the bodies of women, which reveals the inscription of social-cultural context and technical uncertainty on the female body and, meanwhile, women actively learn strategies by which to cope with the technical uncertainty and moral pressures from local culture (including healing the body, folk religion, etc.), so as to hold onto infertility treatment with hope.

scholarly journals Herbs of Our Own Kingdom: Layers of the ‘Local’ in the Materia Medica of Early Chosn Korea

2008 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 395-422 ◽  
Author(s):  
Soyoung Suh
Keyword(s):  
Chinese Medicine ◽  
Herbal Medicine ◽  
Cultural Identity ◽  
The Body ◽  
Korean Medicine ◽  
Materia Medica ◽  
Fundamental Assumption ◽  
Cultural Conditions ◽  
Korean Identity ◽  
Previous Scholarship

AbstractPrevious scholarship takes increasing Korean interest in ‘local botanicals’ () in its dynamic with Chinese counterparts as a gauge to measure the degree of independence and the extent of indigenisation of Korean medicine during the Chosn Dynasty (1392‐1910). Questioning this fundamental assumption about the development of Korean medicine, my article aims to scrutinise evocation of ‘the local’ in changing medical strategies concerned with Korean identity. While analysing major texts on local botanicals published during the early Chosn Dynasty, I claim that the classificatory arrangement used to map the local on botanicals often overlapped, and was not organised into a clear set of categories. Considering the traffic of herbal medicine across political and geographical boundaries, and the extreme diversity of botanical names, shapes and attributes, texts on local botanicals cannot be said to show clearly what belongs to a local ‘us’ or a foreign ‘them’. Instead, adjusting the names of botanicals, textualising the folk names of certain species, and publishing a series of books focusing on local botanicals reflected the socio-cultural need of scholars during the Chosn Dynasty to imprint motifs of the ‘local’ on Materia Medica simultaneously making a display of a separate Korean cultural identity. It was an accommodation of what was regarded as universal knowledge to a locale where the body of Chinese medicine had to be interpreted and mediated by the socio-cultural conditions of Chosn Korea.

The Cultural Context of Reception:

2012 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 38-55
Author(s):  
Riikka Korppi-Tommola
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Context ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
High Expectations ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Cultural Perspectives ◽  
The Past ◽  
Dance Company ◽  
Merce Cunningham ◽  
Encounter Time

Abstract The reception of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and John Cage’s visit to Helsinki in 1964 revealed local, Finnish aesthetic priorities. In the dance critics’ texts, Cunningham’s style seemed to create confusion, for example, with its mixture of styles visà-vis avant-garde music. Music critics, mainly avant-garde and jazz musicians, had high expectations for this theatrical event. In their reviews, comparisons were made between Cunningham’s style and the productions of Anna Halprin. In this paper, I analyse the cultural perspectives of this encounter and utilize the theoretical framework of Thomas Postlewait’s pattern of cultural contexts. Additionally, I follow David M. Levin’s argumentation about changes in aesthetics. Local and foreign conventions become emphasized in this kind of a transnational, intercultural encounter. Time and place are involved in the interpretations of the past as well as later in the processes of forming periods.

Embodied Aesthetics

2018 ◽  
pp. 890-910
Author(s):  
Barbara Gail Montero
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
The Body ◽  
Traditional View ◽  
Bodily Experience ◽  
Aesthetic Pleasure ◽  
Embodied Aesthetics ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Bodily Movements

Although great art frequently revers the body, bodily experience itself is traditionally excluded from the aesthetic realm. This tradition, however, is in tension with the experience of expert dancers who find intense aesthetic pleasure in the experience of their own bodily movements. How to resolve this tension is the goal of this chapter. More specifically, in contrast to the traditional view that denigrates the bodily even while elevating the body, I aim to make sense of dancers’ embodied aesthetic experience of their own movements, as well as observers’ embodied aesthetic experience of seeing bodies move.

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