Maximus

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Byers
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Political Action ◽  
American Art ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Self ◽  
Postwar Period ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Art Practices ◽  
The One

This concluding chapter charts the continuing significance of the early postwar moment in Olson’s later work, particularly The Maximus Poems. The philosophical and political concerns of the American avant-garde between 1946 and 1951 play out across The Maximus Poems just as they inform later American art practices. The search of the early postwar American independent left for a source of political action rooted in the embodied individual is seen, on the one hand, to have been personified in the figure of Maximus. At the same time, Maximus’s radical ‘practice of the self’ charts a sophisticated alternative to the Enlightenment humanist subject widely critiqued in the United States in the immediate postwar period.

scholarly journals American Art Criticism between the Cultural and the Ideological (I)

2014 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-107
Author(s):  
Gabriel C. Gherasim
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Art Criticism ◽  
Fine Arts ◽  
American Art ◽  
The United States ◽  
Fourth Moment ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Postmodern Art ◽  
The One ◽  
Time Frames

Abstract Starting from the presupposition that art and art criticism in the United States of America are closely linked and that the very meanings and receptions of art works have been reflected by various writings in the field of art criticism, this first part of a comprehensive study on the topic attempts, on the one hand, to divide the historical evolution of American fine arts and art criticism into several distinct periods, and on the other, to evaluate the major directions of art criticism by considering its historical periods as being markedly ideological or cultural, as the case may be. Thus, considering the approximately 150 years of historical accomplishments of art criticism in the United States, I will argue that the starting point of American art criticism is visibly cultural, while the next two periods are characterised by ideological art criticism, noting that the ideological orientation differs in the two time frames. The fourth moment in the evolution of art criticism marks the revival of the cultural, so that, within the fifth, the postmodern art criticism could no longer grasp a clear distinction between the cultural and the ideological. The present article will focus on the first two important orientations in art criticism in the United States, 1865-1900 and 1908-1940, respectively; a future study will consider the remaining three periods, following this historicist approach of art criticism in the United States.

The New Failure of Nerve

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Byers
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
John Cage ◽  
Jackson Pollock ◽  
Max Horkheimer ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Theodor Adorno ◽  
Mark Rothko

The first chapter asks how the postwar American avant-garde emerged, and under what conditions. It considers a constellation of works from 1945 to 1947 which figured the need to ‘begin again’ both aesthetically and philosophically. The first section suggests that the roots of this movement can be found in critiques of the Enlightenment tradition which emerged in the United States from 1943 and informed a new independent left politics focused on the radical individual. The following sections reveal how these critiques (which included the work of émigrés such as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer) initiated an American neo-primitivism exemplified by Olson’s early oeuvre as well as those of Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, and John Cage.

scholarly journals Shaping the Avant-Garde

2019 ◽  
pp. 273-292
Author(s):  
Pablo Müller
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
American Art ◽  
The United States ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Sergei Eisenstein ◽  
Dziga Vertov ◽  
Specific Manner ◽  
Art Journal ◽  
Art Production

Soviet Constructivism is a central reference for the American art journal October (founded in 1976 and still in print today). This article discusses the ways in which October refers to that historical art movement, while overlooking some of its key political aspirations. Especially during the journal’s founding years, the discursive association with Soviet Constructivism served to bestow criticality, urgency, and sociopolitical relevance on the American art journal. Furthermore, with the reference to Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov, in particular, the October protagonists have positioned themselves in a specific manner within mid-1970s art critical discourse in the United States. In addition to framing and positioning, the article examines how Soviet Constructivism (alongside Dadaism and Surrealism) becomes for October a key reference for rooting and evaluating the expanded, cross-genre art production post-1945 historically.

Reinhold Niebuhr and Protestant Liberalism

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
David A. Hollinger
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Other ◽  
Reinhold Niebuhr ◽  
Common Cause ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Protestant Christianity ◽  
The One ◽  
Protestant Liberalism

This epilogue offers a historical perspective on the career of Reinhold Niebuhr, the most acclaimed intellectual within a distinctive American Protestant generation: the generation that brought the tradition of Protestant liberalism to its greatest moments of public authority, and then presided over that tradition's decline in relation to secular dispositions on the one hand and evangelical sensibilities on the other. Niebuhr's career displays the fissures and fusions that constitute much of Protestant liberalism's struggle to define its own relation to the United States and its various component parts. At issue, often, has been to what extent the faithful should make common cause with, or against, people who do not profess Christianity at all, or who profess the wrong kind. Those fissures and fusions have been propelled by many immediate historical conditions, but also by a variety of often conflicting senses of how Protestant Christianity can best accommodate the Enlightenment.

Looking for Something to Signify

Screen Bodies ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 22-37
Author(s):  
David Yagüe González
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Norms ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
The One

The behaviors and actions that an individual carries out in their daily life and how they are translated by their society overdetermine the gender one might have—or not—according to social norms. However, do the postulates enounced by feminist and queer Western thinkers still maintain their validity when the context changes? Can the performances of gender carry out their validity when the landscape is other than the one in Europe or the United States? And how can the context of drag complicate these matters? These are the questions that this article will try to answer by analyzing the 2015 movie Viva by Irish director Paddy Breathnach.

The Challenges of Displaying “Asian American”: Curatorial Perspectives and Critical Approaches

2007 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 12-32
Author(s):  
ShiPu Wang
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Financial Support ◽  
American Art ◽  
The United States ◽  
Community Leaders ◽  
Art Exhibitions ◽  
The Past ◽  
Critical Approaches ◽  
Racial Demographics

This essay delineates the issues concerning AAPI art exhibitions from a curator’s perspective, particularly in response to the changing racial demographics and economics of the past decades. A discussion of practical, curatorial problems offers the reader an overview of the obstacles and reasons behind the lack of exhibitions of AAPI works in the United States. It is the author’s hope that by understanding the challenges particular to AAPI exhibitions, community leaders, and patrons will direct future financial support to appropriate museum operations, which in turn will encourage more exhibitions and research of the important artistic contribution of AAPI artists to American art.

Can India Balance China in Asia?

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Holslag
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Central Asia ◽  
Economic Reforms ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Other ◽  
Military Power ◽  
Regional Power ◽  
Political Fragmentation ◽  
Strong Interest ◽  
The One

The chapter argues that India has a strong interest to balance China and that the two Asian giants will not be able grow together without conflict. However, India will not be able to balance China’s rise. The chapter argues that India remains stuck between nonalignment and nonperformance. On the one hand, it resists the prospect of a new coalition that balances China from the maritime fringes of Eurasia, especially if that coalition is led by the United States. On the other hand, it has failed to strengthen its own capabilities. Its military power lags behind China’s, its efforts to reach out to both East and Central Asia have ended in disappointment, and its economic reforms have gone nowhere. As a result of that economic underachievement, India finds itself also torn between emotional nationalism and paralyzing political fragmentation, which, in turn, will further complicate its role as a regional power.

Aestheticism, Civil Society, and the Origins of Totalitarianism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Mangrum
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Vladimir Nabokov ◽  
The United States ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Lionel Trilling ◽  
Conservative Politics ◽  
New Critics ◽  
Second World

This chapter argues that ongoing concerns about the rise of totalitarianism led writers and intellectuals in the United States to oppose social-democratic institutions after the Second World War. Familiar accounts about opposition to these institutions center on conservative politics. In contrast, this chapter argues that liberal thinkers invoked forms of aestheticism to combat what they perceived as the possible rise of totalitarianism in the United States. In order to document this under-explored trend in American political culture, this chapter establishes connections across writing by Lionel Trilling, Vladimir Nabokov, Hannah Arendt, Friedrich Hayek, the New Critics, and the American reception of Friedrich Nietzsche. These figures in postwar cultural life invoked aestheticism in the arenas of literature, philosophy, political action, and economics as a prophylactic to the perceived intrusions of an activist-managerial state.

Raanan Rein, Fútbol, Jews and the Making of Argentina, trans. Marsha Grenzeback. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014. 166 pp.

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Jewish Identity ◽  
The United States ◽  
Orthodox Jewish ◽  
Literary Representations ◽  
Stanford University ◽  
Common Theme ◽  
American Jews ◽  
The Common ◽  
The One

This chapter reviews the books Fútbol, Jews and the Making of Argentina (2014), by Raanan Rein, translated by Marsha Grenzeback, and Muscling in on New Worlds: Jews, Sport, and the Making of the Americas (2014), edited by Raanan Rein and David M.K. Sheinin. Rein’s book deals with the “making” of Argentina through football (soccer), while Muscling in on New Worlds focuses on the “making” of the Americas (mainly the one America, called the United States) through sports. Muscling in on New Worlds is a collection of essays that seeks to advance the common theme of sport as “an avenue by which Jews threaded the needle of asserting a Jewish identity.” Topics include Jews as boxers, Jews and football, Jews and yoga, Orthodox Jewish athletes, and American Jews and baseball. There are also essays about the cinematic and literary representations of Jews in sports.

Material World: Gender and the Bible in Evangelical Purity Culture

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Moslener
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Young People ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
The United States ◽  
Modern Life ◽  
Material World ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Teenage Girls ◽  
Traditional Gender Roles ◽  
The Bible

For evangelical adolescents living in the United States, the material world of commerce and sexuality is fraught with danger. Contemporary movements urge young people to embrace sexual purity and abstinence before marriage and eschew the secular pressures of modern life. And yet, the sacred text that is used to authorize these teachings betrays evangelicals’ long-standing ability to embrace the material world for spiritual purposes. Bibles marketed to teenage girls, including those produced by and for sexual purity campaigns, make use of prevailing trends in bible marketing. By packaging the message of sexual purity and traditional gender roles into a sleek modern day apparatus, American evangelicals present female sexual restraint as the avant-garde of contemporary, evangelical orthodoxy.

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