Gordon Pask: Cybernetic Polymath

Leonardo ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 162-168 ◽  
Author(s):  
María Fernández
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Digital Culture ◽  
Science And Art ◽  
Art Practices ◽  
History Of Art ◽  
History Of

Despite his influence in art, architecture and theater, British cybernetician Gordon Pask is rarely acknowledged in histories of digital culture and virtually unknown in the history of art. Pask is better known as a theoretician than as an artist or designer, although his machines, artwork and theories were closely related. This article investigates the relevance of specific aspects of Pask's theories to his best-known artwork, The Colloquy of Mobiles, to illustrate his characteristic unification of science and art, and theory and material experimentation. Select works of contemporary art are discussed to indicate Pask's significance to contemporary art practices.

scholarly journals Del descanso forzado a la cama interconectada como espacio de creación. Escenarios posibles desde las prácticas artísticas contemporáneas = From Forced Rest to the Interconnected Bed as a Space for Creation. Possible Stages in Contemporary Art Practices

2020 ◽  
pp. 557
Author(s):  
José Luis Panea
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Art Practices ◽  
History Of Art ◽  
History Of ◽  
Body Metaphor ◽  
The Subject

El reposo al que la enfermedad conduce para mitigar el dolor encuentra –cultural e históricamente– como escenario paradigmático el lecho, la cama. Este mueble, en tanto metáfora corporal, suele ser testigo de acontecimientos como el nacimiento, la enfermedad, la sexualidad y el erotismo o la muerte. En el arte, ha devenido tropo frecuente al exponer dichas cuestiones, conduciendo a una re-experimentación creativa del espacio doméstico. Analizaremos una genealogía de artistas que aportan otra mirada a este enser por el que el cuerpo pasa, y que, debido a la experiencia de la enfermedad y el trauma, se resignifica, llevando al autor a replantar su propio habitar e incluso su práctica artística. Partiremos de la Estética y la Historia del Arte para localizar las principales exposiciones sobre el tema y pondremos en relación a los artistas que han tratado la cama como repositorio de dicho padecer.AbstractThe repose to which the disease leads to mitigate the pain, finds –culturally and historically– as a paradigmatic scenario the bed. This piece of furniture, as a body metaphor, is usually witness of events such as birth, disease, sexuality and eroticism or death. In art, the bed has become a frequent trope especially to expose the illness as a moment of forced rest in which it is possible to creatively re-experience the domestic. We propose a genealogy of artists who bring another look to this belonging that, due to the experience of pain, trauma or disease, is re-signified, leading the author to reconsider his own habitat. We will start from Aesthetics and History of Art to analyse the main exhibitions on the subject and we will put in relation the artists who have treated the bed as a repository of said suffering.

scholarly journals Iconografía y uso de la orina en la Historia del Arte / Iconography and Use of Urine in the History of Art

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 81-88
Author(s):  
José Antonio Colón Fraile
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
The Body ◽  
Artistic Expression ◽  
History Of Art ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Complex Images

ABSTRACTWe studied how the urinating action and the use of the own urine have been used as an element of artistic expression in different art throughout history disciplines. This tour was organized by subject indexes, from the simplest to the most complex images semiotically. Contemporary art deserved special attention by incorporating the use of the body and its fluids as examples of human fears and obsessions, characterized the appearance of urine by its radicalism and gender affiliation.RESUMENSe estudia cómo se ha representado la acción de orinar y el uso de la propia orina como elemento de expresión artística en las distintas disciplinas a lo largo de la historia del arte. Se estructura este recorrido por índices temáticos, desde las imágenes más simples hasta las semióticamente más complejas, comenzando por la representación de niños que orinan, utilizados en todas las épocas como imagen de lo anecdótico y motivo decorativo para fuentes y jardines. Se continúa por otras imágenes que, aun siendo protagonizadas también por niños, poseen niveles de lectura culturalmente más elevados. Se divide este estudio en dos grandes épocas antagónicas: el mito de la Edad de Oro, estado natural y privilegiado para el ser humano, y el posterior mito de la caída en el que la sexualidad connota el acto de orinar ofreciéndonos nuevas lecturas desde el erotismo, la pornografía y su uso político-propagandístico. 

Veronicas and Artists

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Religious Images ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of Art ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Way ◽  
Contemporary Artists

Chapter One deals with several central issues with regard to understanding the role of religious motifs in contemporary art. Besides being a repetition of imagery from the past, religious motifs embedded in contemporary artworks become a means to problematise not only the way different periods in the history of art are delimited, but larger and seemingly more rigid distinctions as those between art and non-art images. Early religious images differ significantly from art images. The two types are regulated according to different sets of rules related to the conditions of their production, display, appreciation and the way images are invested with the status of being true or authentic instances of art or sacred images. Chapter One provides a discussion of the important motif of the image not made by an artist’s hand, or acheiropoietos, and its survival and transformation, including its traces in contemporary image-making practices. All images are the result of human making; they are fictions. The way the conditions of these fictions are negotiated, or the way the role of the maker is brought to visibility, or concealed, is a defining feature of the specific regime of representation. While the cult image concealed its maker in order to maintain its public significance, and the later art image celebrated the artist as a re-inventor of the old image, contemporary artists cite religious images in order to reflect on the very procedures that produce the public significance and status of images.

Contemporary Art

Art History ◽  
2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Terry Smith
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Art World ◽  
Local Language ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
Public Media ◽  
History Of Art ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Many

As an art-critical or historical category––one that might designate a style of art, a tendency among others, or a period in the history of art––“contemporary art” is relatively recent. In art world discourse throughout the world, it appears in bursts of special usage in the 1920s and 1930s, and again during the 1960s, but it remains subsidiary to terms––such as “modern art,” “modernism,” and, after 1970, “postmodernism”––that highlight art’s close but contested relationships to social and cultural modernity. “Contemporary art” achieves a strong sense, and habitual capitalization, only in the 1980s. Subsequently, usage grew rapidly, to become ubiquitous by 2000. Contemporary art is now the undisputed name for today’s art in professional contexts and enjoys widespread resonance in public media and popular speech. Yet, its valiance for any of the usual art-critical and historical purposes remains contested and uncertain. To fill in this empty signifier by establishing the content of this category is the concern of a growing number of early-21st-century publications. This article will survey these developments in historical sequence. Although it will be shown that use of the term “contemporary art” as a referent has a two-hundred-year record, as an art-historical field, contemporary art is so recent, and in such volatile formation, that general surveys of the type now common for earlier periods in the history of art are just beginning to appear. To date, only one art-historiographical essay has been attempted. Listed within Contemporary Art Becomes a Field, this essay (“The State of Art History: Contemporary Art” (Art Bulletin 92.4 [2010]: 366–383; Smith 2010, cited under Historiography) is by the present author and forms the conceptual basis of this article. Contemporary art’s deep immersion in the art market and auction system is profiled in the separate Oxford Bibliographies article Art Markets and Auction. This article does not include any of the many thousands of books, catalogues, and essays that are monographic studies of individual contemporary artists, because it would be invidious to select a small number. For similar reasons, entries on journals, websites, and blogs are omitted. A select listing of them may be found in Terry Smith, Contemporary Art: World Currents (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2011; Smith 2011 cited under Surveys). Books on art movements are not to be found because contemporary art, unlike modern art, has no movements in the same art-historical sense. It consists of currents, tendencies, relationships, concerns, and interests and is the product of a complex condition in which different senses of history are coming into play. With regret, this article confines itself to publications in English, the international language of the contemporary art world. This fact obscures the importance and valiance of certain local-language publications, even though many key texts were issued simultaneously both in the local language and English, and many others have subsequently been translated. In acknowledgment of this lacuna, a subsection on Primary Documents has been included.

Disintegrating Progress: Bolshevism, National Modernism, and the Emergence of Contemporary Art Practices in Armenia

ARTMargins ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-87 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vardan Azatyan
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Socialist Realism ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Complex Process ◽  
Art Practices ◽  
History Of ◽  
Political Project

This article provides a genealogy of the emergence of contemporary art practices in Armenia, arguing that the very history of emersion of these practices can be seen as a complex process of disintegration of the Bolshevik political project, particularly its agenda to base art on a subtle dialectical reconciliation between the nation and the class. After this dialectic was brutally instrumentalized by Stalinist Socialist Realism, it was attacked by the National Modernists during Khrushchev's Thaw. Later, in 1970s, from within the National Modernism itself, the first tendencies of contemporary art practices emerged. They began to challenge the conventional notions of artistic practice along the lines of a conception of art as a performative practice of liberatory subjectivization. This marked the point of the ultimate disintegration of both triumphant and tragic Bolshevik project that became a haunting specter of post-Soviet contexts.

scholarly journals Art of Being an Art Critic. Review of: Busev, M. A. (2020). Iskusstvo postigat’ iskusstvo: sbornik statei k 100-letiiu N. A. Dmitrievoi [Art of Comprehending Art: Collected Articles for N. A. Dmitrieva’s 100th Birthday]. Moscow: BooksMArt. 408 p.: Il.

2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 288-296
Author(s):  
Evgeny P. Alekseev ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Art Criticism ◽  
100Th Birthday ◽  
Methodological Issues ◽  
State Institute ◽  
The Third ◽  
History Of Art ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Russian Federation ◽  
Theoretical Issues

This review examines Art of Comprehending Art, a collection of scholarly articles based on the materials of the conference Historical and Theoretical Issues of Art Studies: For N. A. Dmitrieva’s 100th Birthday (held on April 24–25, 2017 at the State Institute of Art Studies of the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation). The first part of the collection presents colleagues’ memories about N. A. Dmitrieva’s work revealing various facets of her talent. In the second part of the book, scholarly articles by contemporary art historians are devoted to the issues that N. A. Dmitrieva examined, i.e. the history of art criticism and art education in Russia, theoretical and methodological issues (image and word, issues of interpretation, kitsch), the creative work of P. Picasso, M. Vrubel, and A. Chekhov. The third section contains fragments of N. A. Dmitrieva’s diary, as well as two previously unpublished articles.

1, 2, 3, 5: building a collection of artists’ books

2007 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 5-9
Author(s):  
Stephen Bury
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
History Of Art ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Book Format

Because artists’ books can be expensive to buy and to keep, institutions need to have a clearly articulated rationale for collecting them. This could range from documenting the history of art, and contemporary art in particular, to a survey of how artists have used the book format to explore their ideas. This latter approach would support the use of artists’ books in practical workshops leading to the creation of yet further artists’ books.

Religious Themes in Contemporary Art

2016 ◽  
pp. 188-218
Author(s):  
Codrina Laura Ionita
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
The Political ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Bolshevik Revolution ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
History Of Art ◽  
History Of ◽  
Entire History ◽  
The Relationship

The relationship between art and religion, evident throughout the entire history of art, can be deciphered at two levels – that of the essence of art, and that of the actual theme the artist approaches. The mystical view on the essence of art, encountered from Orphic and Pythagorean thinkers to Heidegger and Gadamer, believes that art is a divine gift and the artist – a messenger of heavenly thoughts. But the issue of religious themes' presence in art arises especially since modern times, after the eighteenth century, when religion starts to be constantly and vehemently attacked (from the Enlightenment and the French or the Bolshevik Revolution to the “political correctness” nowadays). Art is no longer just the material transposition of a religious content; instead, religion itself becomes a theme in art, which allows artists to relate to it in different ways – from veneration to disapproval and blasphemy. However, there have always been artists to see art in its genuine meaning, in close connection with the religious sentiment. An case in point is the work of Bill Viola. In Romanian art, a good example is the art group Prolog, but also individual artists like Onisim Colta or Marin Gherasim, who understand art in its true spiritual sense of openness to the absolute.

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