Arthur Danto Goes to the Movies

2021 ◽  
pp. 361-376
Author(s):  
Noël Carroll
Keyword(s):  
Necessary Conditions ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Moving Images ◽  
End Of Art ◽  
Arthur Danto

This chapter reviews the ways in which Danto’s “method of indiscernibles” enables him to construct an analysis of films as moving images in terms of necessary conditions. The chapter challenges Danto’s account, but also suggests how Danto’s “end of art” thesis might explain certain developments in avant-garde cinema.

scholarly journals Interweaving Realities: Spoken Language and Moving Images in the Sonne halt!, Experimental Film by Ferry Radax

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luka Bešlagić
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Context ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Spoken Language ◽  
Experimental Film ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Moving Image ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Moving Images ◽  
Narrative Cinema ◽  
Movie Script

This paper analyses the experimental film Sonne halt! by Ferry Radax, an Austrian filmmaker renowned for his unconventional approach to cinematic practice. Filmed and edited between the end of the 1950s and early 1960s, the film at first may appear to be a belated homage to the previous European experiments in avant-garde cinema, already carried out a few decades earlier. However, since there have been no great ‘historical avant-garde’ movements in Vienna in the period between the two world wars – according to the novel argument made by Klaus Kastberger – it was already the middle of the 20th century when the ‘original’ avant-garde strategies were finally acknowledged in Austria, and simultaneously appropriated by the ‘neo-avant-garde’. In this peculiar historico-cultural context Sonne halt!, in its fragmentary non-narrative structure which resembles Dadaist or Surrealist playfulness and openness, innovatively and radically interweaved two disparate film registers: moving image and spoken language. Various sentences arbitrarily enounced throughout the film – which have their origin in Konrad Bayer’s unfinished experimental, pseudo-autobiographical, montage novel der sechste sinn – do not constitute dialogues or narration of a traditional movie script but rather a random collection of fictional and philosophical statements. At certain moments there is a lack of rapport between moving image and speech – an experimental attempt by Ferry Radax to challenge one of the most common principles of sound and narrative cinema. By deconstructing Sonne halt! to its linguistic and cinematic aspects, this article particularly focuses on the role of verbal commentaries within the film. Article received: December 28, 2017; Article accepted: January 10, 2018; Published online: April 15, 2018; Original scholarly paper How to cite this article: Bešlagić, Luka. "Interweaving Realities: Spoken Language and Moving Images in the Sonne halt!, Experimental Film by Ferry Radax." AM Journal of Art and Media Studies 15 (2018): . doi: 10.25038/am.v0i15.228

scholarly journals Forming the Legal Avant-Garde: A Theory of Art/Law

2019 ◽  
pp. 174387211987183
Author(s):  
Lucy Finchett-Maddock
Keyword(s):  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Legal Studies ◽  
Political Aesthetics ◽  
Legal Thinking ◽  
End Of Art ◽  
Legal Aesthetics

This piece seeks to account for an increased interest in the intersection of art and law within legal thinking, activism and artistic practice, arguing there to exist the phenomena and movement of ‘art/law’. Art/law is the coming together of theory and practice in legal and political aesthetics, understood as a practice, (im)materially performed. It is seen as a natural consequence of thinking law and resistance in terms of space and time, accounting for a turn towards the visual, the practical and the role of affect, within ways of knowing. Art/law is a symptom of the end of art and end of law, synchronically rendered. Divisions between legal and aesthetic form have been well rehearsed within legal aesthetics scholarship, from law and literature, to critical legal studies’ work with images, text and performativity, and now law’s Anthropocene. Art/law as a practice, however, is argued as an emergent onto-epistemic-ethics of necessity, a movement of seeing, being and knowing in response to the advancement of spectacle. It is the simultaneous reunion of law, art and resistance as one, breaking down the institutional artifice of art worlds and law worlds, offering a form of ‘resistant (in)formalism’, that accounts for matter and change and asserts convergence as a medium. It is an inclusion of the uncertain and the disordered, that is an opening for the audience. This resistant (in)formalism describes the role of form, audience and practice within property, legal and aesthetic establishment, offering a countering of separatism at the end of art and the end of law, through a praxeology of art/law in seeing, thinking and action.

scholarly journals Mediateka Babel. YouTube jako temat, rama formalna i platforma sztuki

2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 171-189
Author(s):  
Ewa Wójtowicz
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Global Network ◽  
Digital Culture ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Moving Images ◽  
Meta Level ◽  
Formal Framework ◽  
Dziga Vertov ◽  
The One

The text focuses on the specific features of the so-called 'cinematic turn' within the scope of visual culture emergent within the YouTube platform, particularly during its first, formative years. This turn takes place on the meta-level of the existing circulation of content enabled by YouTube, often being an autothematic reflection on this tool of cultural production. The vernacular aesthetics, a specific formal framework and a particular modus operandi of YouTube became the subject of artistic statements, sometimes in a form of subversive remix. Therefore I think of YouTube as a realm of art because of its meta-media practice that made the cinematic turn visible. It does not rely on straightforwardly understood production of (moving) images, but  postproduction, as understood by Nicolas Bourriaud. Moreover, the cinematic turn taking place within YouTube is different from the one practised by the avant-garde of 20th century, due its being not “seeing” or “writing” (as Dziga Vertov understood montage) but rather “overwriting”, to use language more adequate to the described sphere of digital culture. Artists use YouTube as an open library, working with its resources, applying techniques such as postproduction, remix, re-contextualisation and appropriation. Therefore it becomes a multimedia library, a “Mediateca Babel” of a kind, to recall J. L. Borges' idea. The examples mentioned in the text are of a postproductional nature, such as to-camera-performance and subversive “overwriting” of contents enabled with the circulationism typical for social media. Equally important are the strategies of recognising the cultural framework of YouTube, in the context of 20th-century media art history, as well as the platform’s interface. Also, there is the issue of relations between vernacular creativity and the art system because of “capturing” the amateur-generated content and transferring it to mainstream artworld. These examples let me argue that the cinematic turn is a form of postproduction, which enables the hidden mechanisms behind the circulation of moving images in the overloaded global network. The cinematic turn in the context of YouTube does not mean that cinema and its language are at home within this platform. Also, the meta-artistic way of “making” platform art does not turn YouTube into “art platform” (as understood by Olga Goriunova). Nevertheless, platform art may happen in this context as a result of working with the cinematic turn in its vernacular aspect, which makes it possible to reveal its key features and move them to the meta-level.

Advertising and Avant-Gardes: A History of Concepts, 1930–1940

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yvonne Zimmermann
Keyword(s):  
Human Mind ◽  
Persuasive Communication ◽  
Cinema Studies ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Moving Images ◽  
Transnational Network ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Concepts ◽  
Educational Films

The chapter takes advertising as an umbrella term for persuasive communication. Looking at screen advertising as a specific type of communication – one that is made to persuade – the documentary, educational films, and avant-garde works of the 1930s and early 1940s come into view together under the label of advertising. Focussing on the work of John Grierson, Paul Rotha, and Hans Richter, the chapter shows how debates among intellectuals, pedagogues, and artists on both sides of the Atlantic revolved around concepts of propaganda and education to promote democracy. The chapter contributes to the field of useful cinema studies by mapping the transnational network of people, ideas, and materials involved in using moving images as tools for shaping the human mind.

Arthur Danto, the End of Art, and the Philosophical View of History

2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 235-256
Author(s):  
Chiel van den Akker
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of History ◽  
Common View ◽  
Philosophical View ◽  
End Of Art ◽  
Arthur Danto

Abstract This essay takes Arthur Danto’s end-of-art thesis as a case in point of a substantive philosophy of history. Such philosophy explains the direction that art has taken and why that direction could not have been different. Danto never scrutinized the philosophy of history that his end-of-art thesis presumes. I aim to do that by drawing a distinction between what I refer to as the common view of history and the philosophical view of history, and by arguing that we need the latter if we want to properly assess the plausibility of the end-of-art thesis.

scholarly journals “Hay Muchísimo Poder en la Oscuridad” : Black Cuir Cinema Clubs in Contemporary Havana

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (15) ◽  
pp. 40-62
Author(s):  
Maile Speakman
Keyword(s):  
Digital Information ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Nationalist Discourse ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Moving Images ◽  
Racial Democracy ◽  
Experimental Media ◽  
Cultural Spaces ◽  
Media Markets ◽  
Black Queer

Cineclub Cuir and Cine Alternativo are itinerant cinematic events aimed at showing cuir, feminist, avant-garde, Afro-diasporic, and experimental media content in Havana. El paquete semanal is a widespread digital information product that Cubans use to access global media. I argue that Cineclub Cuir and Cine Alternativo’s curatorial frameworks produce exploratory spaces of moving theory that rupture the revolutionary state’s nationalist discourse of colorblindness and racial democracy and the normative and white-washed depictions of queerness that circulate in el paquete. The cinema clubs, which elude state-sponsorship and are free of charge, create collective discursive spaces where participants interrogate the figure of the cuir racializado in sites that are not fully regulated by the state or Cuba’s commodified media markets. The emergence of such spaces in the past three years marks a break with the Cuban state’s post-revolutionary monopoly on cultural spaces but also a resistance to newer, more capitalist forms of media circulation such as el paquete. By projecting moving images of Black queer intimacy in alleyways, rooftops, and a multitude of other public and private spaces throughout Havana, Cineclub Cuir and Cine Alternativo comprise a media infrastructure that is ephemeral, difficult to police, and that contravenes the colonial racial and spatial logics that organize the city.

scholarly journals Materiality and Montage: Film Studies, Digital Humanities and the Visualization of Moving Images

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adelheid Heftberger
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Digital Humanities ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Moving Images ◽  
Dziga Vertov ◽  
Film And Media Studies ◽  
Computer Scientists ◽  
Research Questions ◽  
The One

In this paper, I will highlight some recent initiatives in the study of film within the digital humanities, in which context I will also present some of my own endeavors, specifically visualizations created in collaboration with the pioneering new media theorist Lev Manovich from films made by the Soviet avant-garde director Dziga Vertov (1896-1954). Following this, I will discuss some of the issues related to the use of visualizations as an aid to scholarly research. Finally, I will address a number of possible research questions in film and media studies, answers to which may benefit significantly from the collaboration between film/media scholars and computer scientists on the one hand, and (moving image) archivists on the other.

Post-Mexican Fugue1(Farewell to ¡Que Viva Mexico!)

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tarek Elhaik
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Media Arts ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Moving Images

This chapter focuses on the watershed curatorial project Mexperimental: 60 Years of Avant-Garde Media Arts from Mexico. Curated in 1998 by Jesse Lerner and Rita Gonzalez as a visual and conceptual probe into the post-Mexican condition, Mexperimental has had an enduring impact on the ethics of curation and pedagogy of moving images. One of the incurable-images of Mexican modernity and visual culture is the maguey plant, which has left an enduring impression on the anthropological, political, optical, and curatorial unconscious of post-revolutionary Mexico. The chapter examines three contemporary experimental documentaries that propose an alternative montage to nationalist and vanguardista uses of the maguey: Rubén Gámez's Magueyes (1962), Olivier Debroise's Un Banquete En Tetlapayac (2000), and Jesse Lerner's Magnavoz (2006).

Art Narratives and Globalization

2011 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
pp. 135-144
Author(s):  
Patricia Esquivel
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Art World ◽  
The West ◽  
History Of Art ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
End Of Art ◽  
Arthur Danto

Arthur Danto proklamierte das »Ende der Kunst«, d. h. das Ende der auf ein Narrativ und auf eine unidirektionale Grundlage basierenden Kunstgeschichte. In der zeitgenössischen Kunstwelt und besonders in der Historiographie hingegen findet man durchaus ein Telos. Dieses Telos ist die Globalisierung. Es gibt heute ein sich ausbreitendes unidirektionales Narrativ, dessen Regel als »Netzwerklegitimation« erklärt werden kann. Ein Netzwerk, dessen Ausmaß (mehr Regionen der Welt), Sättigung (mehr Objekte) und Historizität (umfassendere Entwicklungsketten) zunehmen. Das Netzwerk hat auch einen Mittelpunkt, den Westen, wenn auch nicht für immer.<br><br>Arthur Danto proclaimed the »end of art«, that is, the end of the history of art structured on a narrative and unidirectional basis. But in contrast to Danto’s ideas, we detect a telos in the contemporary art world, especially in historiography. This telos is globalisation. At present, we have a clearly expansive unidirectional narrative in which the norm can be summed up as »network legitimation.« A network that is growing in extent (more regions of the world), saturation (more objects) and historicity ( further-ranging chains of development). The network also has a centre, the West, although it may not last forever.

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