scholarly journals The Senses Pointing Toward a New Transformation

ARTMargins ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 129-135
Author(s):  
Hélio Oiticica
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Behavioral Patterns ◽  
Art Making ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
British Art ◽  
Art Magazine ◽  
The Senses

Hélio Oiticica's “The Senses Pointing Towards a New Transformation” was written between June 18 and June 25, 1969, in London and submitted to the British art magazine Studio International, but never appeared in print. The essay negotiates art after objecthood and contextualises Oiticica's project to effect a definitive radicalization of anti-art, one that the artist held to be necessary in light of the impasse reached by the longstanding conflict between formalist art and its various neo-avant-garde negations (both within the Brazilian and the international neo-avant-gardes). For Oiticica, after both Neoconcretism and Minimalism, it was now the process of art making itself that had to be rethought. Oiticica did so by developing what he called “crebehavior,” a practice that revealed the routinized character of everyday life and proposed an immanent transformation of the same via a change in everyday behavioral patterns. Such a transformation opened up the possibility of bringing about “creleisure,” a condition that Oiticica understood to involve both the realization and the dissolution of art.

scholarly journals Introduction to Hélio Oiticica's “The Senses Pointing Toward a New Transformation” (1969)

ARTMargins ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-128
Author(s):  
Jo Melvin ◽  
Luke Skrebowski
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Behavioral Patterns ◽  
Art Making ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
British Art ◽  
Art Magazine ◽  
The Senses

Hélio Oiticica's “The Senses Pointing Towards a New Transformation” was written between June 18 and June 25, 1969, in London and submitted to the British art magazine Studio International, but never appeared in print. The essay negotiates art after objecthood and contextualises Oiticica's project to effect a definitive radicalization of anti-art, one that the artist held to be necessary in light of the impasse reached by the longstanding conflict between formalist art and its various neo-avant-garde negations (both within the Brazilian and the international neo-avant-gardes). For Oiticica, after both Neoconcretism and Minimalism, it was now the process of art making itself that had to be rethought. Oiticica did so by developing what he called “crebehavior,” a practice that revealed the routinized character of everyday life and proposed an immanent transformation of the same via a change in everyday behavioral patterns. Such a transformation opened up the possibility of bringing about “creleisure,” a condition that Oiticica understood to involve both the realization and the dissolution of art.

Politics in the Art of War: The American War Cemeteries

2018 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 223-254
Author(s):  
Kate Clarke Lemay
Keyword(s):  
Soft Power ◽  
American Art ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Strategy ◽  
Art World ◽  
Art Making ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Art Of War ◽  
International Diplomacy ◽  
Internal Struggle

The overseas American war cemeteries, in their aim to achieve “soft power” or cultural diplomacy during the mid-century, created high-value commissions in the American art world. The sought-after commissions resulted in an internal struggle between artists practicing traditional figural Classicism and the avant-garde who had adopted expressionism and abstraction. Additionally, a surging political stream of anti-Communism made artists vulnerable, because modern art seemed to underscore Communism’s abandonment of religion. By adopting demagoguery as political strategy, McCarthyists escalated the perception of Communism as present in the United States by targeting American culture, including artists of the American war cemeteries. Describing the struggles surrounding the creation of the cemeteries, this essay takes into account the artists’ biographies, statements, and actions, arguing that their art-making was not only critical in creating international diplomacy, but also in sustaining American freedom, particularly within an era of American political suspicion.

scholarly journals B.S. Johnson’s Liberatic Cityscape in Albert Angelo

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 99-110
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Biela
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
Visual Sensitivity ◽  
Material Object ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Crucial Aspect ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Way

For Bryan Stanley Johnson, a British post-war avant-garde author, space was a crucial aspect of a literary work. Inspired by architects and film makers, he was convinced that “form follows function” (“Introduction” to Aren’t You Rather Young to Be Writing Your Memoirs) and exercised the book as a material object, thus anticipating liberature – a literary genre defined in 1999 by Zenon Fajfer and Katarzyna Bazarnik, which encompasses works whose authors purposefully fuse the content with the form. The goal of this paper is to analyse the cityscape theme in Johnson’s second novel, Albert Angelo (1964), in which London is presented as space that accompanies the character in his everyday life and becomes a witness of the formation of his identity. The protagonist is an architect by profession, so special attention is paid to his visual sensitivity and the way the cityscape is reflected in his memories. Furthermore, Johnson’s formal exploitation of the book as an object and its correspondence to the content is analysed with reference to the metaphor of “[t]he book as an architectural structure” discussed by Bazarnik in Liberature. A Book-bound Genre.

scholarly journals Intimité de Jean-Victor Pellerin, ou à la recherche du « théâtre du silence »

2017 ◽  
pp. 114-122
Author(s):  
Tomasz Kaczmarek
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Main Element ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Inner Life ◽  
Sexual Motives ◽  
Avant Garde

Jean-Victor Pellerin was a representative author of the „school of silence” or, as some called it, „art of unexpressed”, in which emotions are implied in gestures, fragments of speach, and silence. In his first drama Intimacy (1922) the French playwrighter presents a bourgeois marriage living a monotonous life. The characters discuss trivial things of everyday life, they talk to each other, but there is no communication between them, because each of them is closed in their own world. Nobody is listening one another and words are spoken only in order to fill their existential emptiness. The writer is focused on the dialogue between the characters in the context of what they hide and what they do not want to tell themselves. People who appear to them are not flesh and blood human beings but they are the reflection of their own disturbed personality only. In this manner the writer focuses on the inner life of his solitary, their nostalgia for youth or even their hidden sexual motives. This is why the silence grows into the main element of the drama. Intimacy is one of the finest examples of „intimist aesthectic” developed by the avant-garde theater creator Gaston Baty who rejected the predominance of the word for discovering the mysterious world of the spiritual man.

Looping Sensations

Ricanness ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 135-168
Author(s):  
Sandra Ruiz
Keyword(s):  
Real Time ◽  
The Political ◽  
Video Screen ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Self Injury ◽  
The Senses ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
Narrow Space

This chapter shares the archive of the late queer Rican avant-garde multimedia artist Ryan Rivera by examining his experimental videos. Less than a minute each, these abstract videos draw the spectator’s attention to the psychical states of self-injury and suffering. Through close-ups, looping, a manipulation of real time, and overexposure, Rivera pushes the spectator to endure a series of grotesque actions; he repeatedly bangs his head, places his fist down his throat, holds his breath, retches, and punches and slaps his face. The author explicates the political and aesthetic consequences of waiting in the seat of sensation with and for a bodiless Rican subject who compels us to wait in dissonance through the exploitation of the senses. As a way to engender a type of queer calling, the author urges the reader to sit with the artist as he beats his head against the never-quite-postcolonial, creating new forms of Brown and Rican intimacy. The author reformulates the Cartesian split by showcasing the narrow space of a video screen in which the artist bangs his queer postcolonial head against the fast-paced heteronormative world.

Our Lady of Art

2020 ◽  
pp. 121-142
Author(s):  
Thomas J. Ferraro
Keyword(s):  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Sexual Intimacy ◽  
Male Gaze ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
Expressive Culture ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Senses ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Washington Square

Chapter 5 examines Willa Cather’s neglected story, “Coming, Aphrodite” in light of her fascination with the bodily presentation that Camille Paglia would later call “sexual personae”—for which Cather develops her own Marian interpretive sensibility, half Roman Catholic and half Pagan, as a deliberate counterforce to the Puritan heritage deflating U.S. artistic and expressive culture. In her twenties, Cather was a prodigious journalist fascinated by the radiant figurae of statuary, painting, drama, poetry, and fiction both home and abroad—which she interrogated in explicitly religious terms, with a particular affinity for both Marian-Catholic dissent from the Puritan denial of the senses and its alternative of graced intercession. Cather learns to invite readers to the redemptive power of forbidden love: sex for its own sake, adultery whether intermittent or sustained or only imagined, same-sex beatings of the heart and meetings of the mind. Then, in “Coming, Aphrodite!,” in a way more literal that her readers could possibly have expected, Cather stages the male gaze of an avant-garde, sexually disciplined and romantically impervious, young painter in Washington Square, Don Hedger, who finds himself in thrall—through a closet peephole!—to the artful exhibitionism in body and song of an equally ambitious, alternatively brilliant ingénue, Eden Bower. Their pas de deux produces a profound, profoundly mutual, yet never-to-be domesticated, sexual intimacy, non-reproductive but dually procreative—all of it conducted under signs of Roman Latinate and Indo-Latino Catholicism, including a story within the story entitled “The Forty Lovers of the Princess.”

Debord, Guy (1931–1994)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ryan Robert Mitchell
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
City Planning ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Art Practice ◽  
Situationist International ◽  
Art And Politics ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Political Theorist ◽  
Advanced Capitalism ◽  
The City

Guy Ernest Debord (1931–1994) was a French radical political theorist, writer, activist and filmmaker. After his early involvement with French avant-garde art movements in the 1950s, Debord founded a revolutionary organization, the Situationist International (SI), in 1957. Inspired by earlier avant-garde movements like Dada and surrealism, Debord sought to create an explicitly political and critical art practice that could be employed to transform everyday life. The SI attracted sound poets, architects, writers, activists, graphic artists and painters. The movement sought to merge everyday life, art and politics through such practices as radical city planning, the beautification of the city through graffiti, and rambling psycho-geographic drifts through urban spaces, seeking to uncover the desire and beauty that had been hidden by advanced capitalism.

Religion

2020 ◽  
pp. 98-141
Author(s):  
Angela Dalle Vacche
Keyword(s):  
Irrational Belief ◽  
Social Anthropology ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Spiritual Dimension ◽  
Belief In God ◽  
Literary Adaptations ◽  
Fair Game ◽  
Hidden God ◽  
The Senses

Bazin argues that miracles are inexplicable events that test science. Wary of the supernatural and transcendence, he does not approve of Pius XII’s standards of sainthood. All religions are fair game for social anthropology, even if they address mankind’s spiritual dimension. Irrational belief in God is necessary to maintain hope in eternal justice, since human laws are imperfect. Cinema’s illusionism turns irrational belief into a spiritual sensibility even for those who do not believe in any religion. Opposed to the dogmatic tendencies of any religion, Bazin argues that, in comparison to Jean Delannoy’s literary adaptations, Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest (1951) stands out as an avant-garde film that is a masterpiece. This film explores Blaise Pascal’s notion of the Hidden God, by remapping the senses in such a way as to mark a new stage in the evolution of cinematic language. It is an example of pure cinema, comparable to Vittorio De Sica’s very different Bicycle Thieves (1948).

Lyrical Socialist Realism

October ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 147 ◽  
pp. 56-77 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christina Kiaer
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Socialist Realism ◽  
Large Piece ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Critical Response ◽  
Geometric Patterns ◽  
Soviet Art ◽  
Socialist Realist ◽  
Cross Country ◽  
Revolutionary History

The thirty-three-year-old artist Aleksandr Deineka was given a large piece of wall space at the exhibition 15 Years of Artists of the RSFSR at the Russian Museum in Leningrad in 1932. At the center of the wall hung his most acclaimed painting, The Defense of Petrograd of 1928, a civil-war-themed canvas showing marching Bolshevik citizens, defending against the incursions of the White armies on their city, arrayed in flattened, geometric patterns across an undifferentiated white ground. The massive 15 Years exhibition attempted to sum up the achievements of Russian Soviet art since the revolution as well as point toward the future, and Deineka, in spite of his past association with “leftist” (read: avant-garde) artistic groups such as OST (the Society of Easel Painters) and October, was among those younger artists who were anointed by exhibition organizers as leading the way forward toward Socialist Realist art—a concept that was being formulated through both the planning of and critical response to this very display of so many divergent Soviet artists. Known for his magazine illustrations and posters, Deineka had also established himself at a young age as a major practitioner of monumental painting in a severe graphic style that addressed socialist themes, such as revolutionary history (e.g., Petrograd), and, as his other works displayed at the Leningrad exhibition demonstrate, proletarian sport (Women's Cross-Country Race and Skiers, both 1931) the ills of capitalism (Unemployed in Berlin, 1932), and the construction of the new Soviet everyday life (Who Will Beat Whom?, 1932).

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