Theoretical Problems of Soviet Underground Culture

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Lipovetsky ◽  
Tomáš Glanc ◽  
Maria Engström ◽  
Ilja Kukuj ◽  
Klavdia Smola
Keyword(s):  
Communicative Practices ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Central Focus ◽  
Cultural Phenomenon ◽  
Relational Art ◽  
Theoretical Hypothesis ◽  
Historical Specificity ◽  
The Aesthetic

This article presents a spectrum of theoretical problems associated with the Soviet artistic underground as a historical and cultural phenomenon. The central focus is on constellating issues of terminology and definition around the borders of underground culture in the USSR, within scholarship about it. As a theoretical hypothesis of the handbook, the chapter introduces the concept of the lifeworld, which the volume editors and contributors interpret as a synthetic multimedia nexus of a given nonconformist circle’s activities, both artistic and cultural. The underground lifeworld manifests the aesthetic discourse idiosyncratic for each artistic circle and serves as the source of semi-spontaneous “relational art” that absorbs and generates artworks, along with performative and communicative practices. Through the concept of the aestheticized lifeworld, the authors of this article define the historical specificity of the Soviet artistic underground in relation to the Russian historical avant-garde and Western neo-avant-garde.

Experience the Experimental

Contracultura ◽  
2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Dunn
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Active Participation ◽  
The Other ◽  
Experimental Writing ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Cultural Phenomenon ◽  
Mass Audience ◽  
Other Hand

Chapter 2 explores the connections between the artistic avantgarde and the counterculture. A small, but influential group of artists sometimes identified as “marginal” or “underground” coalesced in the aftermath of Tropicália. Cultura marginal may be located at the intersection of two cultural phenomenon: On one hand it had deep affinities with the emergent counterculture. On the other hand, cultura marginal was indebted to the mid-century constructivist avant-garde, especially neo-concretism. The author discusses the work of experimental artist, Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark, who developed a series of environmental and performative works that demanded the active participation of spectators to create meaning. The author explores Oiticica’s dialogue with experimental writer and songwriter, Waly Salomão, whose work circulated within the rarified field of experimental writing, while also finding a mass audience through popular music, notably in the performances of Gal Costa. The author devotes a section to the journalist and artist Torquato Neto, who promoted cultura marginal and also performed in “Nosferato no Brasil,” a celebrated example of Super 8 film. Finally, the author analyzes the publication Navilouca, a graphic and textual project that brought together key figures of cultura marginal and the avantgarde.

Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 522-538
Author(s):  
Jonathan Walley
Keyword(s):  
Avant Garde ◽  
Medium Specificity ◽  
Expanded Cinema ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Experimental Films

The conclusion argues that while expanded cinema might seem radically opposed to conventional, popular, and mainstream cinema, it nonetheless attempts to articulate and specify the aesthetic qualities that define all cinema. This parallels a trait of conventionally made avant-garde/experimental films; the assertion of cinema’s nature and essences, which constitute all forms of cinema regardless of how different one kind of film appears from another. The conclusion also draws upon the notions of the “essentially cinematic” explored across the book to counter theoretical arguments against such specificity positions (e.g. medium specificity) that have been advanced by critics and scholars in the worlds of cinema and art. The conclusion argues that these anti-specificity positions are overly simplistic, and that expanded cinema represents a more nuanced and sophisticated notion of what a medium specific theory—or work of cinema—can be.

Secessionist Movement

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Fine Art ◽  
Art Nouveau ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Secessionist Movement ◽  
Applied Arts ◽  
Modern Movement

The Secessionist Movement is the name applied to a range of artistic splinter groups that began to emerge in the 1890s. Objecting to what they saw as the inherent conservatism of established academies, these groups ‘seceded’ or broke away from their parent institutions and launched their own, avant-garde approach. The first secessionist group appeared in Munich in 1892 under the leadership of Franz von Stuck and Wilhelm Trübner. Among the most influential secessionist groups was that founded in Vienna by a coalition of artists, architects and designers who resigned from the Association of Austrian Artists in 1897. United by the urge to elevate the applied arts to the status of fine art, members of the Vienna Secession produced exquisite work across a spectrum of creative disciplines. The aesthetic initially resembled the curvilinear Art Nouveau style, but it increasingly moved towards abstraction and geometric simplicity. The founding of the Vienna Secession thus marked the beginning of a new artistic era in Austria and heralded the birth of the Modern Movement.

Widersprüchliche Optionen: Stationen der Künste 1913

2013 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Christoph Asendorf
Keyword(s):  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Rich ◽  
The Aesthetic

AbstractApart from their rather coincidental origin year, 1913, there is no apparent connection between a monument like the “Völkerschlachtdenkmal” in Leipzig (“Monument to the Battle of the Nations”) and the aesthetic manifestations of the avant-garde. These artistic expressions oscillate between opposite poles: weakness and desire for stability, refinement and primitivism, immanence and transcendence. It might be assumed that precisely these contradictory impulses lie at the heart of the rich and widely influential artistic outcome of this pre-war year.

scholarly journals Nordic Modernists in the Circus. On the Aesthetic Reflection of a Transcultural Institution

Humanities ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 111
Author(s):  
Annegret Heitmann
Keyword(s):  
Gender Relations ◽  
Thomas Mann ◽  
Henrik Ibsen ◽  
Modern Life ◽  
Cultural Phenomenon ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Aesthetic Forms

Around 1900 the circus was not only an important and highly popular cultural phenomenon all over Europe, but also an inspiration to writers and artists at the onset of Modernism. As an intrinsically intermedial form with international performers, it can be seen as an expression of certain important characteristics of modern life like innovation, mobility, dynamics, speed and vigor. Its displays of color and excitement, of bodies in motion and often provocative gender relations were experienced by authors as a challenge to create new aesthetic forms. However, the circus does not only figure prominently in well-known works by Kafka and Thomas Mann and paintings by Degas, Macke or Leger, it is also thematized in texts by Scandinavian authors. When writers like Henrik Ibsen, Herman Bang, Ola Hansson and Johannes V. Jensen referred to the circus in their works, they represented it as an experience of modernity and addressed themes like alterity, mobility, voyeurism, new gender relations and ambivalent emotions. As a self-reflexive sign, the circus even served to represent the fragile status of art in modernity and thus made an important contribution to the development of Modernism.

On Jon Snow’s death: Plot twist and global fandom inGame of Thrones

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 384-400 ◽  
Author(s):  
Héctor J Pérez ◽  
Rainer Reisenzein
Keyword(s):  
Participatory Culture ◽  
Negative Events ◽  
Cognitive Mechanisms ◽  
Cognitive Reactions ◽  
Global Event ◽  
Cultural Phenomenon ◽  
The World ◽  
Cognitive Activities ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Individual

The death of Jon Snow at the end of the fifth season of the TV serial Game of Thrones prompted an intense reaction among the fans of the serial on social media. Thousands of viewers all over the world contributed to the discussion of the meaning and implications of this event, turning it into a global event in the participatory culture of contemporary seriality. In this article, we propose an explanation of this remarkable cultural phenomenon. Based on a theory of plot twists as surprise structures, we argue that the reactions of fans can be understood as concrete, contextually adapted realizations of the characteristic cognitive reactions evoked by the emotions of surprise and shock caused by unexpected negative events. Our analysis focuses in particular on the contributions of viewers to the establishment of the beliefs disconfirmed by the plot twist and on the cognitive activities that served to adapt their minds to the new reality revealed by the twist, which also included reflections on the aesthetic aspects of the plot twist and the narrative in which it was embedded. By providing a public platform for these reflections, the fan forums allowed the individual attempts to adapt to the plot twist to become a collective endeavor. The study illustrates how universal cognitive mechanisms interact with culturally produced contents to generate similar reactions to a fictional event across the globe.

Choreographies of the Living

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carrie Rohman
Keyword(s):  
Visual Art ◽  
Contemporary Literature ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Felix Guattari ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Human Endeavor ◽  
Theatrical Performance ◽  
Aesthetic Practice ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The Aesthetic

Animals seem to be everywhere in contemporary literature, visual art, and performance. But though writers, artists, and performers are now engaging more and more with ideas about animals, and even with actual living animals, their aesthetic practice continues to be interpreted within a primarily human frame of reference—with art itself being understood as an exclusively human endeavor. The critical wager in this book is that the aesthetic impulse itself is profoundly trans-species. Rohman suggests that if we understand artistic and performative impulses themselves as part of our evolutionary inheritance—as that which we borrow, in some sense, from animals and the natural world—the ways we experience, theorize, and value literary, visual, and performance art fundamentally shift. Although other arguments suggest that certain modes of aesthetic expression are closely linked to animality, Rohman argues that the aesthetic is animal, showing how animality and actual animals are at the center of the aesthetic practices of crucial modernist, contemporary, and avant-garde artists. Exploring the implications of the shift from an anthropocentric to a bioaesthetic conception of art, this book turns toward animals as artistic progenitors in a range of case studies that spans print texts, visual art, dance, music, and theatrical performance. Drawing on the ideas of theorists such as Elizabeth Grosz, Jane Bennett, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, Una Chaudhuri, Timothy Morton, and Cary Wolfe, Rohman articulates a deep coincidence of the human and animal elaboration of life forces in aesthetic practices.

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