Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carrie Rohman
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
John Cage ◽  
Art Making ◽  
Art Practices ◽  
Merce Cunningham ◽  
Isadora Duncan ◽  
The Aesthetic

Rather than looking primarily “beyond” ourselves to understand animals and aesthetics, I suggest we must also look “within” to identify a deep coincidence of the human and animal elaboration of life forces in bioaesthetic practices. A “bio-impulse” at the root of the aesthetic itself connects human artistic propensities to animality through strategies of excess, display, and intensification. Re-envisioning the aesthetic domain itself as trans-species in scope is ethically charged because our species must acknowledge the shared status of art-making, one of our most hallowed and formerly “exceptional” activities. In examining the work, theories, and art practices of Isadora Duncan, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Rachel Rosenthal, Merce Cunningham, and John Cage, I articulate ways to recognize and assess the entanglement of human and nonhuman aesthetic forces.

scholarly journals Análise musical de Six Melodies (1950), de John Cage: contexto e procedimentos composicionais

Opus ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 32
Author(s):  
Ana Leticia Crozetta Zomer ◽  
Guilherme Antonio Sauerbronn De Barros
Keyword(s):  
John Cage ◽  
Merce Cunningham

Neste trabalho apresentamos uma análise da obra Six Melodies, do compositor norte-americano John Cage (1912-1992). Criada em 1950, a obra pertence ao seu segundo período composicional, denominado Período Romântico (1938-1950) por Solomon (1998, 2002). A análise musical se deu a partir da investigação dos processos composicionais (micro-macrocosmic form e gamut technique), abordando aspectos formais e estruturais da obra. Dessa forma, procuramos revelar detalhes a respeito da estética de Cage durante seus primeiros anos como compositor e da influência que seu companheiro, Merce Cunningham, exerceu sobre as obras deste período. O estudo das técnicas composicionais desenvolvidas durante o Período Romântico reflete a mudança no pensamento estético-filosófico do compositor.

Materialities of Abstraction

2021 ◽  
Vol 67 (2) ◽  
pp. 191-214
Author(s):  
Brandon Truett
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Abstract Art ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Material World ◽  
Bloomsbury Group ◽  
Art Object ◽  
Visual Artist ◽  
The Aesthetic

This article recovers the 1918 chapbook that the understudied Vorticist poet and visual artist Jessie Dismorr composed for the American sculptor John Storrs and his wife Marguerite. It examines the ways the chapbook reorients the aesthetic criteria by which we recognize abstraction in the early twentieth century. Studying how Dismorr’s divergent and feminist approach to Vorticist practice exploits “the materialities of abstraction,” or the traces of the material world that evince the outside of the abstract art object, it suggests that these material traces lead us to reimagine the boundary between inside and outside, and thus the way an art object indexes and interacts with the material world. Proposing that the recovery of an object as seemingly inconsequential as an individual chapbook in fact raises questions about how we construct the literary- and art-historical field of modernism, the article situates Dismorr’s work in relation to other feminist understandings in British modernism of the socialized space of artistic practice across media exemplified by Virginia Woolf ’s account of sociability within the Bloomsbury Group, and argues for the importance of such unique objects as chapbooks to the study of material culture within literary history and within art history as well.

No More Silent Victims: Agency, Authority and Artistry in the Black Woman’s Story in Revenge (1992)

2019 ◽  
pp. 123-144
Author(s):  
Celeste-Marie Bernier ◽  
Alan Rice ◽  
Lubaina Himid ◽  
Hannah Durkin
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Art Making ◽  
Black Artists ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Aesthetic

“I was trying to write myself, paint myself, and my compatriots, my fellow black artists, if you like, into the history of British painting’, Lubaina Himid writes of the aesthetic, political, ideological and cultural philosophies undergirding her series, Revenge (1992), which is the subject of this chapter. Warring against the iconographic and invisibilising stranglehold exerted by white western male artists in particular, she says, ‘I’m trying to make a comment about how European artists ... have hijacked some of our African and Caribbean imagery, our bodies and all the rest of it’. Staging her own acts and arts of revenge against white western strategies of appropriating and objectifying Blackwomen’s bodies and art-making traditions, she exults in her successes by declaring that ‘I’ve hijacked some stuff back’. ‘The old solutions did not seem to allow for creative imaginings nor did they enable the black woman’s story to take its place amongst the other voices’, she concedes. Himid diagnoses a situation in which ‘old solutions’ or dominant representational modes are responsible for denying as well as distorting ‘the black woman’s story’. Working to do justice not to one but to many Blackwomen’s stories, she cuts to the heart of the matter: ‘Her story is complex and constantly interwoven through the whole, yet is often told simply and by others as that of a silent victim’.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Samantha Matthews
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Women Poets ◽  
Poetic Language ◽  
Social Spaces ◽  
Gender Hierarchy ◽  
Cultural Interest ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Key Terms

Virginia Woolf dismissed Byron’s early poetry as ‘album stuff’ and critics have assumed album poetry is inherently unoriginal and imitative. The introduction challenges these received ideas by laying out the aesthetic and cultural interest of this neglected hybrid, protean form designed to be read and circulated in manuscript, and which developed its own poetic language, generic conventions, and common themes. Writers of album poetry range from canonical Romantic poets, women poets, society poets, to amateurs, and albums create social spaces where different views of gender, hierarchy, and poetry clash. ‘Albo-mania’ has been seen as a phenomenon of the 1820s. The introduction traces the fashion’s origins in the 1780s, defines and contextualizes key terms ‘album verse’ and ‘album’, while analysis of Byron’s ‘Written in an Album’ (1812) lays out the characteristics and creative possibilities of album poetry examined in the six case studies which follow.

Black Mountain College

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Saletnik
Keyword(s):  
John Cage ◽  
Black Mountain College ◽  
Curricular Integration ◽  
Ernst Krenek ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Merce Cunningham ◽  
Willem De Kooning ◽  
Clement Greenberg ◽  
Buckminster Fuller ◽  
Black Mountain

Between 1933 and 1957, Black Mountain College served as an unlikely crucible of modernism. Despite its isolated location near Asheville, North Carolina, at various times its permanent and summer faculty included the likes of Anni Albers, Josef Albers, Ilya Bolotowsky, Jean Charlot, Lyonel Feininger, Joseph Fiore, Buckminster Fuller, Walter Gropius, Karen Karnes, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Jacob Lawrence, Robert Motherwell, Beaumont Newhall, Amédée Ozenfant, Xanati Schawinsky, Ben Shahn, and Jack Tworkov. These artists and architects were joined by composers John Cage, Lou Harrison, Ernst Krenek, David Tudor, and Stefan Wolpe; writers and poets Robert Creeley, Charles Olsen, and M.C. Richards; as well as critic Clement Greenberg, musicologist Heinrich Jalowetz, and choreographer Merce Cunningham. There are few evident commonalities among the practices of this mix of European émigrés and Americans, yet the educationally progressive ethos of the College appealed to each of them. Its founding program was predicated upon a belief that the arts were central to higher education and that the practice of democracy would benefit from their curricular integration. Participation was prioritized in all activities, particularly in learning.

Wiesenthal, Grete (1885–1970)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandra Kolb
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Body Image ◽  
Modern Dance ◽  
Ballet Dancer ◽  
Art Nouveau ◽  
Cultural Traditions ◽  
Isadora Duncan ◽  
The Aesthetic

The Austrian dancer and choreographer Grete Wiesenthal was a transitional figure at the crossroads of ballet and modern dance. Initially trained and employed as a ballet dancer at the court opera in Vienna, she soon became disillusioned with the aesthetic traditionalism of ballet and in 1907 embarked on an independent career. Performing with two of her sisters and later as a soloist, she devised a new dance style and technique that emphasized bodily expressivity with motivational impulses provided by music. In the context of Viennese modernism, Wiesenthal’s work offered a novel interpretation of the Viennese waltz as a theatre dance form, oscillating between art nouveau and symbolism. She was groundbreaking in the Austro-German dance scene, exploring female creativity and individualism while contravening balletic principles. Although her career began in Vienna, she toured extensively across much of Europe and overseas, notably in New York, and hence extended her influence internationally. Wiesenthal shared with female contemporaries Anna Pavlova and Isadora Duncan a natural grace, expressive artistry, and flexibility of hands and arms. However, unlike Pavlova, Wiesenthal transgressed the confines and repertory of ballet – for instance, eschewing pointe work. Like Duncan, her body image was liberated, but she was less daring in her choice of costumes – for instance, dancing in sandals rather than barefoot – and drew inspiration from local cultural traditions and not from Greek antiquity.

Photography

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Gunckel
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Diversity ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
Conceptual Art ◽  
Complex Mechanism ◽  
Formal Potential ◽  
Representative Sampling ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
Art Practices ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Aesthetic

This bibliography reflects the multifaceted relationship between Latina/os and various photographic traditions. As individuals and groups placed in front of the camera lens, Latino/as have often found themselves stigmatized, marginalized, or criminalized. Photographs taken by reformers, the police, and documentarians since the late 19th century, for instance, have often generated harmful or homogenizing visions of the US Latina/o population that frame them as racially different or otherwise problematic. Since the early decades of the 20th century, however, Latino/a photographers have produced bodies of work that challenge these limited visions to craft new images of identity, community, and history. Some of these individuals have harnessed the capacity of photography to fulfill an evidentiary or realist function as either social documentation, a political organizing tool, or a challenge to exclusionary mainstream media coverage. Others have explored the aesthetic and formal potential of photography by engaging in conceptual art practices, crafting speculative reimaginings of history, using it as an extension of performance, integrating it into other media, or mobilizing it as a complex mechanism of community- or self-representation. This bibliography covers the major works of scholarship that have attended to these key photographic tendencies and the places where they overlap, considering works that discuss Latina/os both in front of and behind the lens. Also included here are key exhibition catalogues and photographic essays that provide a representative sampling of visual tendencies or traditions mobilized by practicing Latina/o photographers, with particular attention to regional and ethnic diversity.

A Musical Suite Composed by an Electronic Brain: Reexamining the Illiac Suite and the Legacy of Lejaren A. Hiller Jr.

2018 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
pp. 19-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tiffany Funk
Keyword(s):  
Visual Arts ◽  
Performance Art ◽  
Electronic Music ◽  
Digital Art ◽  
John Cage ◽  
Computational Experimentation ◽  
Art Practices ◽  
Conceptual Performance ◽  
The 1950S

In 1956, Lejaren A. Hiller, Jr., and Leonard Isaacson debuted the Illiac Suite, the first score composed with a computer. Its reception anticipated Hiller’s embattled career as an experimental composer. Though the Suite is an influential work of modern electronic music, Hiller’s accomplishment in computational experimentation is above all an impressive feat of postwar conceptual performance art. A reexamination of theoretical and methodological processes resulting in the Illiac Suite reveals a conceptual and performative emphasis reflecting larger trends in the experimental visual arts of the 1950s and 1960s, illuminating his eventual collaborations with John Cage and establishing his legacy in digital art practices.

Anthropological Fictions: On Character, Culture, and Sexuality in the Work of Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Virginia Woolf

Prospects ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 363-382
Author(s):  
Kimberly Engber
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Columbia University ◽  
Franz Boas ◽  
Subsequent Response ◽  
Vassar College ◽  
Margaret Mead ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Waves ◽  
Ruth Benedict

In January 1932, anthropologist Ruth Benedict writes a letter to her colleague Margaret Mead on fieldwork in New Guinea, bringing Mead up to date on the health of “Papa” Franz Boas. Boas, the academic mentor that Benedict and Mead shared at Columbia University, acts as only the momentary locus for their continuing exchange about life and work and the relationship between the two. After giving “her hospital report,” Benedict turns eagerly to another conversation with Mead, asking, “Did you likeThe Waves? And did you keep thinking how you'd set down everybody you knew in a similar fashion? I did. I suppose I'm disappointed that she didn't include any violent temperaments, and I want my group of persons to be more varied” (Mead,Anthropologist at Work, 318). Focusing on the depiction of characters in Virginia Woolf's 1931 novelThe Waves, Benedict presents modernist fiction as a model for ethnography. However, she completely avoids the literary termcharacterin her discussion of Woolf, a particularly odd omission since Benedict had majored in English at Vassar College and since she and Mead regularly exchanged novels and their own poetry in letters.Ruth Benedict's reading ofThe Waveshas been cited as evidence of her tendency toward a vaguely “poetic” anthropology, an argument that tends to separate the aesthetic from the sociopolitical in both Benedict and Woolf. In this essay, I consider Benedict's reading of Woolf, together with Margaret Mead's subsequent response, as evidence of a shared critical engagement with character, culture, and sexuality in the early 20th century.

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