Le Musée d’Art E Pluribus Unum: An Urban Arts Movement in Haiti

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Smith
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Capital ◽  
Installation Art ◽  
Conceptual Art ◽  
Access Networks ◽  
Art World ◽  
Art Making ◽  
Found Objects ◽  
Monetary Value ◽  
Art Collectives ◽  
Urban Arts

The Atis Rezistans (Resistance Artists) are a collective of sculptors based in downtown Port-au-Prince who have founded their own museum. The artists are best known for using found objects and wood to make politically charged works that draw on the imagery of Vodou. Since launching this artistic movement over a decade ago, co-founder André Eugène has referred to his home and atelier as Le Musée d’Art E Pluribus Unum. While art collectives are common in Haitian art, by designating themselves a “museum” the Atis Rezistans have incorporated aspects of conceptual art and installation art into their art movement. They describe the founding of this museum as a strategic appropriation of an institution that has historically belonged to the bourgeoisie. Conversations with Eugène, and other artists in the collective, reveal that they have carefully considered the power of museums: museums imbue certain objects with cultural capital and monetary value; present certain world views through the display of objects; and may offer visitors encounters with human remains. Becoming a museum has allowed Eugène and the other artists to access networks of art world mobility in ways that their artworks alone would not have. This essay offers context for understanding the Atis Rezistans as part of a tradition of art making among Haiti’s majority. It argues that due to their location, their class, and their overt use of Vodou imagery, scholars have overlooked conceptual elements of their movement, specifically how they play with the idea of the museum.

Politics in the Art of War: The American War Cemeteries

2018 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 223-254
Author(s):  
Kate Clarke Lemay
Keyword(s):  
Soft Power ◽  
American Art ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Strategy ◽  
Art World ◽  
Art Making ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Art Of War ◽  
International Diplomacy ◽  
Internal Struggle

The overseas American war cemeteries, in their aim to achieve “soft power” or cultural diplomacy during the mid-century, created high-value commissions in the American art world. The sought-after commissions resulted in an internal struggle between artists practicing traditional figural Classicism and the avant-garde who had adopted expressionism and abstraction. Additionally, a surging political stream of anti-Communism made artists vulnerable, because modern art seemed to underscore Communism’s abandonment of religion. By adopting demagoguery as political strategy, McCarthyists escalated the perception of Communism as present in the United States by targeting American culture, including artists of the American war cemeteries. Describing the struggles surrounding the creation of the cemeteries, this essay takes into account the artists’ biographies, statements, and actions, arguing that their art-making was not only critical in creating international diplomacy, but also in sustaining American freedom, particularly within an era of American political suspicion.

scholarly journals SPACE AS A CONTEXT IN DANIEL BUREN’S ART

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 301-322
Author(s):  
Tuğba RENKÇİ TAŞTAN
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Conceptual Art ◽  
World Order ◽  
Art World ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Innovation Development ◽  
Traditional Art ◽  
The Social ◽  
Art Scene ◽  
The 1960S

20th century; it is a period in which two world wars took place and a new world order in human history occurred in many areas of innovation, development and transformation. After the war, the meaning, content and boundaries of art and the artist have been discussed, expanded and gained a new dimension and acceleration with the deep changes in the social, economic, political and cultural fields with the crisis brought on by the war. This complex period also manifested itself in the traditional art scene in France. The French artist Daniel Buren (b. 1938) has witnessed this process; by adopting the innovations in art with his productions, he has demonstrated his space-oriented conceptual works dating back to the present day in a period in which daily life accelerates with the mechanization of art practice and conceptual art movements are in succession. In this article, in order to comprehend the point of the artist and his productions from the beginning until today; the cultural environment in France after the World War II, the developments in the art world, the changes in the social field and the artistic dimensions of these changes are mentioned. The development and practices of the French artist Daniel Buren's artistic practice, policy, artistic attitude and style for the place, architecture, workshop and museum in the period from the second half of the 1960s to the present day are examined with examples with certain sources. In this context, the views and concepts that the artist advocates with his original productions are included. Finally, in the research, the evaluations were made in line with the sources and information obtained about the art adventure and development of the artist, and the innovations, contributions and different perspectives he offered about the art are discussed.

Screening the Art World

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Temenuga Trifonova
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Capital ◽  
Art History ◽  
Art World ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Historical Periods

Unlike most studies of the relationship between cinema and art, which privilege questions of medium or institutional specificity and intermediality, Screening the Art World explores the ways in which artists and the art world more generally have been represented in cinema. Contributors address a rarely explored subject -art in cinema, rather than the art of cinema - by considering films across genres, historical periods and national cinemas in order to reflect on cinema’s fluctuating imaginary of ‘art’ and ‘the art world’. The book examines the intersection of art history with history in cinema, cinema’s simultaneous affirmation and denigration of the idea of art as ‘truth’ and what this means for cinema’s understanding of itself, the dominant, often contradictory ways in which artists have been represented on screen, and cinematic representations of the art world’s tenuous position between commercial good and cultural capital.

The new luxury freeports: Offshore storage, tax avoidance, and ‘invisible’ art

2020 ◽  
pp. 0308518X2097271
Author(s):  
Oddný Helgadóttir
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Capital ◽  
Tax Avoidance ◽  
Spillover Effects ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Art World ◽  
Banking Secrecy ◽  
Wealth Management ◽  
Rapid Spread ◽  
New Form ◽  
And Diffusion

This paper introduces the concept of a Luxury Freeport to describe a novel form of offshore where art and other high-end goods can be stored indefinitely without tax and duty-payments being made. The paper makes three key contributions to our understanding of these new actors in the global political economy. First, it conceptualizes Luxury Freeports as part of what has been called the ‘offshore world’, showing that over the course of the last decade these previously understudied sites have become part of an evolving global ecosystem of tax avoidance. Second, the paper attributes the rise of this new form of offshore to meso-level spillover effects within the offshore world itself: this new model of offshore was born from a combination of the competitive ‘push’ of the rapid spread of Open Customs Warehouses at the turn of the century and the investment ‘pull’ of large pools of money needing new investment outlets in the wake of the recent multilateral effort to clamp down on banking secrecy. Third, it examines how the development and diffusion of the Luxury Freeport model has been shaped and constrained by this clampdown. Navigating the regulatory push against offshore and in an effort to mainstream and legitimize their activities, newer Luxury Freeports have aligned themselves both with the exclusive and high cultural capital environment of the art world and the ecosystem of specialized services offered by the wealth management industry.

Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine Clark
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Next Generation ◽  
Political Consciousness ◽  
Art Making ◽  
Found Objects

Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru (GSRB—New Art Movement) was an art movement that emerged in Indonesia in the mid-1970s. GSRB was established during a period when younger artists had become dissatisfied with the lack of social and political consciousness in art, coupled with the perceived arrogance of power endemic at institutional and state levels in Indonesia. From the mid-1970s the movement instigated new contemporary art discourse and re-defined art making in Indonesia. GSRB continued to gain momentum in the latter half of the 1970s, issuing a publication in 1978, organizing exhibitions in various Indonesian cities from 1975 to 1979 and in the mid-1980s, and involving an increasing number of artists in the movement, among whom Jim Supangkat, FX Harsono, Dede Eri Supria, Nyoman Nuarta, S. Prinka, Wagiono Sunarto, and Bachtiar Zailoel were prominent members. These artists experimented with found objects, installation, and ready-mades, largely addressing conceptual approaches in their making. GSRB articulated a new path for practice; its spirit of experimentation and opposition inspired, influenced, and laid a foundation for the next generation of artists in Indonesia.

Creational Aesthetics and the Challenge of Conceptual Art

2016 ◽  
Vol 20 (5) ◽  
pp. 663-673
Author(s):  
Steven Félix-Jäger
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
Conceptual Art ◽  
Art World ◽  
Theological Aesthetics ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Essential Form ◽  
God's Image

A trend in theological aesthetics is to advocate for a “creational aesthetic” when discussing the ontology and calling of the artist. In its essential form, a creational aesthetic affirms that artists honor the Creator God by creating art. In some way artists are functioning as God’s image when they make art. While this view is popular in the Christian engagement of the arts, it is uncertain if such an observation is the preeminent way of understanding the role of the artist. Can one be considered an artist if s/he is removed from the tactile process of making? In the contemporary art world, the role of the artist in visual art has come into question with a stronger emphasis on conceptuality, over and against construction. In this article I argue for an alternate way of understanding creational aesthetics that makes room for conceptuality in art.

“The Burial and Unburial of Women”: Thin Black Line(s) and Tracing “Moments and Connections” in Black British Women’s Art Histories

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Celeste-Marie Bernier
Keyword(s):  
Art World ◽  
Art Making ◽  
Black Line ◽  
British Art ◽  
Black British ◽  
Exhibition Space ◽  
Women's Art ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Thin Black Line

As an artist who refuses categorically to shy away from both the “history of slavery” and the “contemporary grievances” arising from a white-dominated British art world, Lubaina Himid created a curatorial tour de force with her Thin Black Line(s) exhibition, on display at Tate Britain in 2011–2012. She adopted an array of signifying practices designed to riff off, reclaim, and revise the ideological biases and racialized blind spots of the Tate as a national institution. Himid’s long history of exhibiting Black British women’s work reflects her determination to fight against their “collective invisibility in the art world” as they “engaged with the social, cultural, political and aesthetic issues of the time” by undertaking a “conceptual reframing of the image of black and Asian women themselves.” Working with the spatial constraints of just one room in which to exhibit a decades-long history of Black British women artists and art making, Himid also had to rely upon numerous strategies to confront the obstacles presented by the Tate’s decision to mount Thin Black Line(s) not as a full-scale exhibition but as an “in-focus display.” This meant that it was not given as extensive a budget or as large an exhibition space as the Tate exhibitions appearing as part of their regular programming, and also not accorded the same levels of marketing, advertising, and scholarly attention. Himid set about solving these problems by engaging in diverse extra-curatorial practices and also by contesting and critiquing these limitations within the space itself. Himid’s self-reflexive strategies became a form of “guerrilla curating” as she engaged in a multitude of methods designed to critique, interrogate, and displace—if not outright reject—the challenges presented by the ideologically confining and tokenizing framing of the Tate as an exhibition space.

Found Objects, Bought Selves

2015 ◽  
pp. 140-161
Author(s):  
Lynne Heller
Keyword(s):  
Virtual Environment ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Second Life ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Art Making ◽  
Found Objects ◽  
Political Tactics ◽  
Material Practice ◽  
Found Object

This chapter traces a process of creating using found object collage, through collecting/consuming practices and finally to the notion of the bought self, avatar representation through consumerist artistic practice in Second Life (SL) the online, user generated, virtual environment. Positioning collage as a reinvigorated current in art, the text couples this mode of making with shopping as found object. Collaboration is inherent in an online virtual world, where programmers, designers and other content providers determine the parameters of what is possible. Found object/shopping is a synergistic fit with the nature of predetermined boundaries coupled with late-stage capitalism. This mode of self-making encourages the idea of buying identification through the construction of an avatar. Through a review of the practices of the Situationists, an aesthetic turn in political tactics is revealed through contemporary art making. The text uses the author's own virtual/material practice as a case study for the theories explored.

Cinema as Idea

2020 ◽  
pp. 439-521
Author(s):  
Jonathan Walley
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Art ◽  
Delayed Response ◽  
Experimental Film ◽  
Art World ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Prior Art ◽  
Expanded Cinema ◽  
History Of ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

Chapter 6 considers works of expanded cinema that could be called “conceptual cinema.” “Conceptual,” here, refers to the belief that cinema among many avant-garde/experimental filmmakers and critics that cinema was ultimately a conceptual phenomenon, even when it took forms that seemed decidedly material. The term, or variants of it, was used in the 1960s and 1970s, often to refer to “imaginary” films, films planned or written but purposely never executed, and unprojected or unprojectable films. There are parallels between such conceptual cinematic works and conceptual art. In both cases, concepts, intentions, imagination, and discourse are taken to be as constitutive as art works as materials and physical processes. The objects of the film medium were, and continue to be, de-centered in favor of these less tangible, conceptual, or discursive dimensions of cinematic practice. While conceptual art will be a point of reference, chapter 6 will also show that a concept-based ontology of cinema emerged organically from within the history of avant-garde/experimental film. That is, it should not be thought of simply as a delayed response by filmmakers to prior art world developments, as if playing catch-up with their fellow artists.

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