Visual culture

Author(s):  
India Lewis

Abstract This chapter addresses books published in the field of visual culture in 2020, and is divided into three sections: 1. Curatorial Practice; 2. Thinking About Space; and 3. The New Craft. The books under review cover a range of subjects within their specialities but reflect general trends in contemporary writing and study in the field of visual culture. The first section looks at publications that examine curatorial practice (In the Meantime: Speculations on Art, Curation, and Exhibitions, by Jens Hoffman; Museums Inside Out: Artist Collaborations and New Exhibition Ecologies by Mark W. Rectanus); the second section examines books that describe theories of space (Architecture and Ekphrasis: Space, Time and the Embodied Description of the Past by Dana Arnold; Construction Site for Possible Worlds, edited by Amanda Beech and Robin Mackay); and the third and final section examines publications about craft and its ethics (The New Politics of the Handmade: Craft, Art and Design, edited by Anthea Black and Nicole Burisch).

Author(s):  
India Lewis

Abstract This chapter addresses books published in the field of visual culture in 2019 and is divided into three sections: 1. Race and Art; 2. Art and the Body; 3. Art in Eastern Europe The books under review cover a broad range of subjects within their specialities, but reflect general trends in contemporary writing and study in the field of visual culture. The first section looks at two publications that deal with the black experience in art: Darby English’s To Describe a Life: Notes from the Intersection of Art and Race Terror and The Place Is Here, edited by Nick Aikens and Elizabeth Robles. The second section examines books that see art through bodies: Bauhaus Bodies: Gender, Sexuality, and Body Culture in Modernism’s Legendary Art School, edited by Elizabeth Otto and Patrick Rössler; Sculpture, Sexuality and History: Encounters in Literature, Culture and the Arts from the Eighteenth Century to the Present, edited by Jana Funke and Jess Grove; and Queer Difficulty in Art and Poetry: Rethinking the Sexed Body in Verse and Visual Culture, edited by Jongwoo Jeremy Kim and Christopher Reed. The third and final section looks at publications about art and eastern Europe: Marta Filipová’s Modernity, History, and Politics in Czech Art and Klara Kemp-Welch’s Networking the Bloc: Experimental Art in Eastern Europe, 1965–1981.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Abbiss

This article offers a ‘post-heritage’ reading of both iterations of Upstairs Downstairs: the LondonWeekend Television (LWT) series (1971–5) and its shortlived BBC revival (2010–12). Identifying elements of subversion and subjectivity allows scholarship on the LWT series to be reassessed, recognising occasions where it challenges rather than supports the social structures of the depicted Edwardian past. The BBC series also incorporates the post-heritage element of self-consciousness, acknowledging the parallel between its narrative and the production’s attempts to recreate the success of its 1970s predecessor. The article’s first section assesses the critical history of the LWT series, identifying areas that are open to further study or revised readings. The second section analyses the serialised war narrative of the fourth series of LWT’s Upstairs, Downstairs (1974), revealing its exploration of female identity across multiple episodes and challenging the notion that the series became more male and upstairs dominated as it progressed. The third section considers the BBC series’ revised concept, identifying the shifts in its main characters’ positions in society that allow the series’ narrative to question the past it evokes. This will be briefly contrasted with the heritage stability of Downton Abbey (ITV, 2010–15). The final section considers the household of 165 Eaton Place’s function as a studio space, which the BBC series self-consciously adopts in order to evoke the aesthetics of prior period dramas. The article concludes by suggesting that the barriers to recreating the past established in the BBC series’ narrative also contributed to its failure to match the success of its earlier iteration.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Abbiss

This article offers a ‘post-heritage’ reading of both iterations of Upstairs Downstairs: the LondonWeekend Television (LWT) series (1971–5) and its shortlived BBC revival (2010–12). Identifying elements of subversion and subjectivity allows scholarship on the LWT series to be reassessed, recognising occasions where it challenges rather than supports the social structures of the depicted Edwardian past. The BBC series also incorporates the post-heritage element of self-consciousness, acknowledging the parallel between its narrative and the production’s attempts to recreate the success of its 1970s predecessor. The article’s first section assesses the critical history of the LWT series, identifying areas that are open to further study or revised readings. The second section analyses the serialised war narrative of the fourth series of LWT’s Upstairs, Downstairs (1974), revealing its exploration of female identity across multiple episodes and challenging the notion that the series became more male and upstairs dominated as it progressed. The third section considers the BBC series’ revised concept, identifying the shifts in its main characters’ positions in society that allow the series’ narrative to question the past it evokes. This will be briefly contrasted with the heritage stability of Downton Abbey (ITV, 2010–15). The final section considers the household of 165 Eaton Place’s function as a studio space, which the BBC series self-consciously adopts in order to evoke the aesthetics of prior period dramas. The article concludes by suggesting that the barriers to recreating the past established in the BBC series’ narrative also contributed to its failure to match the success of its earlier iteration.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
David Monciardini ◽  
Jukka Tapio Mähönen ◽  
Georgina Tsagas

AbstractThe article introduces the thematic issue of Accounting, Economics, and Law: A Convivium dedicated to the regulation of non-financial reporting. It provides the reader with an overview of the varying approaches and frameworks that have emerged over time in relation to the reporting of non-financial information. In particular, the article focuses on the European Non-Financial Reporting Directive. We maintain that to date this latter initiative has failed to deliver on its intended objectives. In the context of the ongoing revision process of this initiative, the present paper outlines five key areas to be improved drawing on the lessons learnt from the past as well as from key points raised by the papers in the present thematic issue. What emerges from this collective effort is a renewed agenda that highlights some of the structural failures of the current reporting regime and a blueprint for future reforms. The final section summarises the various contributions of articles included in this thematic issue.


2005 ◽  
Vol 183 ◽  
pp. 523-531 ◽  
Author(s):  
michel hockx ◽  
julia strauss

this collection offers a variety of perspectives on culture in contemporary china. we begin and end with pieces by jing wang and deborah davis on the production and consumption of culture in general, before moving on to three specific areas: visual culture, music and poetry. jing wang's opening piece on “bourgeois bohemians” (bobos) in china revolves around the all-important question of how taste is constructed and a multiplicity of lifestyles imagined. in china as elsewhere in the world, lifestyles are first imagined and transmitted through advertising. wang describes how marketing campaigns propagate idealized lifestyles to different segments of china's self identified urban middle class; notably the bohemian and the xin xin renlei. deborah davis focuses on the consumption end of culture, suggesting that for all the real resentments and worries engendered by growing income inequality and job insecurity, urbanites in shanghai experience consumer culture and the pursuit of individual taste and comfort in the home through shopping to be positive experiences, particularly when juxtaposed against the deprivations of the past. both wang and davis show that the production and consumption of culture are complex phenomena that go beyond mere market manipulation. there is substantial agency involved, from urbanites joyfully participating in redecoration of their flats to the ways in which niche segments of the urban middle class separate into different “tribes.”the braester, denton and finnane essays focus on different aspects of the production and consumption of visual culture: film, museums and fashion. braester suggests that one cannot sharply differentiate commercial film from art film on the basis of content or aesthetics, as directors previously known for making art films move into commercials, and both share similar sensibilities.


APRIA Journal ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 35-50
Author(s):  
Marijke Goeting

During the past decade, computers have broken through the barrier of human time. Today, computers can process data in milli-, micro- and even nanoseconds and can (inter) act autonomously in time frames that exceed our capacity to perceive and respond to. This produces a fundamental problem – a gap between human time and the time of computers – and raises important questions: how do big data and fast computation affect our experience and understanding of time? If a computer is able to deal with the world faster than we can, are we doomed to live forever in the past, however near the present? Or are we dealing with a technological extension of the present, and how might we be able to understand and experience this? By analysing theory and works of art, this text examines how to deal with the shock produced by microtemporal technologies.


Author(s):  
Wu Hung

The eleventh section of Daode jing (Tao Te Ching), the foundational text of Taoism, reads: . . . Thirty spokes share a hub; Because [the wheel] is empty, it can be used in a cart. Knead clay to make a vessel. Because it is empty, it can function as a vessel. Carve out doors and windows to make a room. Because they are empty, they make a room usable. Thus we possess things and benefit from them, But it is their emptiness that makes them useful. . . This section has always been appreciated as a supreme piece of rhetoric on the powers of nothingness, a philosophical concept fiercely articulated in the Daode jing. Whereas that may indeed be the author’s intention, the empirical evidence evoked to demonstrate this concept reveals an alternative way of seeing manufactured objects by focusing on their immaterial aspects. This way of looking at things has important implications for archaeological and art historical scholarship on ancient artifacts and architecture precisely because these two disciplines identify themselves with the study of physical remains of the past so firmly that tangibility has become an undisputed condition of academic research in these fields. Archaeologists routinely classify objects from an excavation into categories based on material and then inventory their sizes, shapes, and decoration. Art historians typically start their interpretation of images, objects, and monuments by identifying their formal attributes. Whereas such trained attention to material and formal evidence will surely persist for good reasons, the Daode jing section cautions us of the danger of ignoring the immaterial aspects of man-made forms, which, though eluding conventional typological classification and visual analysis, are nevertheless indispensible to their existence as objects and buildings. The current chapter incorporates this approach into a study of ancient Chinese art and visual culture by arguing that constructed empty spaces on artifacts and structures—holes, vacuums, doors, and windows—possess vital significance to understanding the minds and hands that created them and thus deserve a serious look into their meaning.


Author(s):  
Jeremy Horder

This chapter explores aspects of the criminal law’s history. The main focus is the influence of religious—and, especially, biblical—thought on the criminal law. This influence does something to explain the law’s harsh attitude to theft and homosexuality, as well as to murder. Examination of efforts to codify the law is also included. This exploration is central to the analysis of how the past has shaped the criminal law’s values. However, the development of the law has not been one of continuous moral improvement. Old injustices have been replaced by new ones. In that regard, threats to civil liberties are also discussed in the final section, focusing on bureaucratic regulation, terrorism, and free speech.


2013 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 10-17
Author(s):  
David Senior

In the past few years, several new publications and exhibitions have presented surveys of the genre of artists’ magazines. This recent research has explored the publication histories of individual titles and articulated the significance of this genre within contemporary art history. Millennium magazines was a 2012 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art that traced the artists’ magazine into the 21st century. The organizers, Rachael Morrison and David Senior of MoMA Library, assembled a selection of 115 international tides published since 2000 for visitors to browse during the run of the exhibition and created a website as a continuing resource for information about the selected tides. The exhibition served as an introduction to the medium for new audiences and a summary of the active community of international artists, designers and publishers that still utilize the format in innovative ways. As these projects experiment with both print and digital media in their production and distribution of content, art libraries are faced with new challenges in digital preservation in order to continue to document experimental publishing practices in contemporary art and design.


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