The Dialectics of Design and Destruction: The Degenerate Art Exhibition (1937) and the Exhibition internationale du Surréalisme (1938)

October ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 150 ◽  
pp. 49-62
Author(s):  
Benjamin H. D. Buchloh
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Exhibition Design ◽  
Historical Study ◽  
Recent Book ◽  
Art Exhibition ◽  
Marcel Duchamp ◽  
History Of ◽  
Degenerate Art ◽  
Point Of Departure

As a genre of cultural production, where iconic (painterly or photographic), sculptural, and architectural conventions intersect to represent the uniquely specific and current conditions of experience in public social space, exhibition design by artists has only recently emerged as a category of art-historical study. While earlier discussions of El Lissitzky's design of the Pressa exhibition in Cologne in 1928, an exhibition that likely had the widest-ranging impact and is the central example of such an emerging genre in the twentieth century, might have served as a point of departure,1 Romy Golan's important, relatively recent book Muralnomad2—primarily concerned with the history of mural painting and its various transitions into exhibition design—has to be considered for the time being the most cohesive account of the development of these heretofore overlooked practices. Yet, paradoxically, two of the most notorious cases of the historical development of exhibition design after Lissitzky are absent from her study: the infamous Degenerate Art exhibition that opened in Munich on July 19, 1937 (two days after the opening of Nazi Fascism's first major propaganda building, Paul Ludwig Troost's Haus der Deutschen Kunst, and its presentation of German Fascist art in the Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung),3 and the Exposition internationale du Surréalisme in Paris, which was installed by André Breton and Marcel Duchamp six months later and 427 miles to the west, on January 17, 1938, at Georges Wildenstein's Beaux Arts Galleries in Paris.4

Afterword: An exhibition about hospitality. A more sensitive perception of vulnerability

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 379-385
Author(s):  
Fabienne Brugère
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
The Political ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Art Exhibition ◽  
Aesthetics And Politics ◽  
Art Forms ◽  
History Of ◽  
Political Right ◽  
Ethics And Politics

This afterword reflects on the tension between art, politics and philosophy at the thematic core of this Special Issue, ‘Migrants and Refugees Between Aesthetics and Politics’. Brugère calls attention to a recent art exhibition – one that came out of her book with Guillaume Le Blanc, The End of Hospitality – at the Museum of the History of Immigration, in Paris, as a way to frame a conflict between two ideas of hospitality, or the broad ethical gesture to welcome others and the political right that more and more governments are unable to uphold as borders tighten around the globe. The afterword elaborates on the aims of the exhibition, namely, to show ‘a correspondence between art and philosophy on the question of hospitality’. Rather than a mere representation of discourse around migration, the artwork displays a praxis of the imagination, one in which cultural production by and about refugees brings spectators to recognize a shared sense of vulnerability and to question received ideas on migration. In this manner, contemporary art forms become an essential link in the ongoing struggle between ethics and politics.

The History of Muslims and Christians in Papua: Tracing Cultural and Religious Heritage

2015 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-106
Author(s):  
Cahyo Pamungkas
Keyword(s):  
Social Space ◽  
Social World ◽  
Sociology Department ◽  
Historical Study ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Agents ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The University ◽  
The Relationship

This is article derived from a thesis study in the Sociology Department of the University of Indonesia in 2008 exploring socio-economic, socio-political and socio-cultural contexts playing their roles in the formation of the political and religious fields along with their respective ‘habitus’ of the social agents in the Papua land. This paper discusses the history of the term “papua” itself based on a historical study conducted by Solewijn Gelpke (1993). Based on historical approach, the relationship between Muslims and Christians in Papua can be traced as a religious and cultural heritage. Also, by using a sociological conception elaborated by Bourdieu (1992: 9), we may view the Papua land as a social space encompassing all conceptions of the social world. Bourdieu’s social space conception considers the social reality as a topology (Harker, 1990).

scholarly journals Atmospheric rooms as experience in the space-time in an evolutionary museum- Alexander Dorner's exhibition design

2020 ◽  
pp. 48-49
Author(s):  
Marcelo Rafael de Carvalho ◽  
Mirtes Marins de Oliveira
Keyword(s):  
Rhode Island ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Exhibition Design ◽  
The United States ◽  
Theoretical Research ◽  
Art Gallery ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
History Of ◽  
Museum School ◽  
Changes Over Time

In order to contribute to the studies of exhibition design, its practice and related fields, the aim of the article is to present and organize in ahistorical perspective some of the contributions and proposals made by Alexander Dorner (1893-1957), art historian, supporter of modern art. Dorner is recognized for his proposals carried out in the design of the exhibition of the rooms of the Landesmuseum in Hannover, Germany, after assuming its direction in the early 1920s. Later, he improved his conceptions when director of the Rhode Island Museum School of Design, in Providence, after immigrating to the United States in 1937. Dorner conceptions were of a living and dynamic museum, not a dead monument in an established way, limited only to a set of exhibition rooms for historical artifacts and artistic treasures closed in shop windows, a kind of deposit of objects. His exhibitions proposals consisted inenvironments for the works, spaces that he called “atmospheric rooms”. In these environments, the aim was to evoke the spirit of each period, in which the user, immersed, would have an opportunity to approach a visual and sensitive logic of the culture in which the works had been created. The idea was not to create a simple imitation of the period, but to allow sensations suggested by colors and shapes, gardens, images of historical exteriors placed over windows, using of devices such as speakers and headphones (for music and poetry of the time), molding a “body imaginary” through experience. In its conception, the museum should demonstrate the history of art and its aesthetic changes over time, as the artistic production of a previous time would allow the exercise of projecting the imagination in the past and updating it with the perspective of the present. This would allow the learning of history, giving more meaning to the present time and boosting and shaping the culture of the future, once the evolutionary connectivity of artistic and cultural production is understood.In order to exhibit the artist production of his time, in partnership with the Russian artist El Lissitzky (1890-1941), he built during 1927 and 1928 what would become known as the first permanent abstract art gallery in a museum, the Abstract Cabinet (Abstraktes Kabinett). With an areasmaller than twenty square meters, it had metal slats on its walls and, as visitors moved, offered a kind of optical illusion. Also sliding panels forcedthe public to manipulate and choose to reveal or hide certain paintings. Historical, theoretical research on exhibition design is the starting point for establishing a historical descriptive method to generate conceptual and morphological analysis parameters to characterizes an exhibition.

Migration and Modernities

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Native Americans ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Historical Study ◽  
Racial Categories ◽  
Geographic Boundaries ◽  
The Us ◽  
Technological Developments ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries

Migration and Modernities recovers a comparative literary history of migration by bringing together scholars from the US and Europe to explore the connections between migrant experiences and the uneven emergence of modernity. The collection initiates transnational, transcultural and interdisciplinary conversations about migration in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, demonstrating how mobility unsettles the geographic boundaries, temporal periodization, and racial categories we often use to organize literary and historical study. Migrants are by definition liminal, and many have existed historically in the spaces between nations, regions or ethnicities. In exploring these spaces, Migration and Modernities also investigates the origins of current debates about belonging, rights, and citizenship. Its chapters traverse the globe, revealing the experiences — real or imagined — of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century migrants, from dispossessed Native Americans to soldiers in South America, Turkish refugees to Scottish settlers. They explore the aesthetic and rhetorical frameworks used to represent migrant experiences during a time when imperial expansion and technological developments made the fortunes of some migrants and made exiles out of others. These frameworks continue to influence the narratives we tell ourselves about migration today and were crucial in producing a distinctively modern subjectivity in which mobility and rootlessness have become normative.

World-Ecological Satire: Peat, Brian O'Nolan, and the Irish Free State's Energy Regime

2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 90-104
Author(s):  
Robert Kiely
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
Ecological Perspective ◽  
Energy Regime ◽  
Energy History ◽  
History Of ◽  
External Site ◽  
Ecological Relations ◽  
Nature And Society ◽  
Human Actors ◽  
The Relationship

A world-ecological perspective of cultural production refuses a dualist conception of nature and society – which imagines nature as an external site of static outputs  – and instead foregrounds the fact that human and extra-human natures are completely intertwined. This essay seeks to reinterpret the satirical writing of a canonical figure within the Irish literary tradition, Brian O'Nolan, in light of the energy history of Ireland, understood as co-produced by both human actors and biophysical nature. How does the energy imaginary of O'Nolan's work refract and mediate the Irish environment and the socio-ecological relations shaping the fuel supply-chains that power the Irish energy regime dominant under the Irish Free State? I discuss the relationship between peat as fuel and Brian O'Nolan's pseudonymous newspaper columns, and indicate how questions about energy regimes and ecology can lead us to read his Irish language novel An Béal Bocht [The Poor Mouth] (1941) in a new light. The moments I select and analyze from O'Nolan's output feature a kind of satire that exposes the folly of separating society from nature, by presenting an exaggerated form of the myth of nature as an infinite resource.

Hard Objects in George Oppen's Discrete Series

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 496-517
Author(s):  
Ned Hercock
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Ludwig Wittgenstein ◽  
Discrete Series ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
John Ruskin ◽  
Gerard Manley Hopkins ◽  
Marcel Duchamp ◽  
The World ◽  
Production History ◽  
History Of

This essay examines the objects in George Oppen's Discrete Series (1934). It considers their primary property to be their hardness – many of them have distinctively uniform and impenetrable surfaces. This hardness and uniformity is contrasted with 19th century organicism (Gerard Manley Hopkins and John Ruskin). Taking my cue from Kirsten Blythe Painter I show how in their work with hard objects these poems participate within a wider cultural and philosophical turn towards hardness in the early twentieth century (Marcel Duchamp, Adolf Loos, Ludwig Wittgenstein and others). I describe the thinking these poems do with regard to industrialization and to human experience of a resolutely object world – I argue that the presentation of these objects bears witness to the production history of the type of objects which in this era are becoming preponderant in parts of the world. Finally, I suggest that the objects’ impenetrability offers a kind of anti-aesthetic relief: perception without conception. If ‘philosophy recognizes the Concept in everything’ it is still possible, these poems show, to experience resistance to this imperious process of conceptualization. Within thinking objects (poems) these are objects which do not think.

Apuntes para la historia de una fraseología del español americano

2020 ◽  
Vol 65 (4) ◽  
pp. 367-382
Author(s):  
Juan Pedro Sánchez Méndez
Keyword(s):  
Spanish Language ◽  
Historical Study ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Spanish

"Notes for the History of a Phraseology of American Spanish. This paper presents the characteristics that would define the historical Hispano-American phraseology as opposed to the European Spanish one. Phraseology is one of the areas in which the greatest variation is perceived among the different Hispanic countries. In this paper I will try to point out the main historical foundations that would explain this variation and the characteristics assumed by what we call the indian or colonial phraseology. This would be the origin of what today we can consider a phraseological Americanism, which presents some characteristics that allow establishing its historical study differentiated from the European Spanish and justifies the necessary diastematic vision of the general historical phraseology of the Spanish language. Keywords: history of American Spanish, historical Hispano-American phraseology, phraseological Americanism, Indian or colonial phraseology. "

A Left History of Liquorice: What It Means to Write "Left" History

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Bryan D. Palmer
Keyword(s):  
Historical Study ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Special Edition ◽  
Political Climate ◽  
Historical Approach ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Impact

This article is part of a special Left History series reflecting upon changing currents and boundaries in the practice of left history, and outlining the challenges historians of the left must face in the current tumultuous political climate. This series extends a conversation first convened in a 2006 special edition of Left History (11.1), which asked the question, “what is left history?” In the updated series, contributors were asked a slightly modified question, “what does it mean to write ‘left’ history?” The article charts the impact of major political developments on the field of left history in the last decade, contending that a rising neoliberal and right-wing climate has constructed an environment inhospitable to the discipline’s survival. To remain relevant, Palmer calls for historians of the left to develop a more “open-ended and inclusive” understanding of the left and to push the boundaries of inclusion for a meaningful historical study of the left. To illustrate, Palmer provides a brief materialist history of liquorice to demonstrate the mutability of left history as a historical approach, rather than a set of traditional political concerns.

Light and Sensitivity: Love in the Time of the Daguerreotype

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Czeczot
Keyword(s):  
Male Gaze ◽  
History Of Photography ◽  
Sensitive Material ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
Point Of Departure ◽  
Passive Object

The article deals with the love of Zygmunt Krasiński to Delfina Potocka. The point of departure is the poet's definition of love as looking and reads Krasiński's relationship with his beloved in the context of two phenomena that fascinated him at the time: daguerreotype and magnetism. The invention of the daguerreotype in which the history of photography and spiritism comes together becomes a pretext for the formulation of a new concept of love and the loving subject. In the era of painting the woman was treated as a passive object of the male gaze; photography reverses this scheme of power. Love ceases to be a static relationship of the subject in love and the passive object – the beloved. The philosophy of developing photographs (and invoking phantoms) allows Krasiński - the writing subject to become like a light-sensitive material that reveals the image of the beloved.

ACCOUNTING REPRESENTATION AND THE SLAVE TRADE: THE GUIDE DU COMMERCE OF GAIGNAT DE L'AULNAIS

2006 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cheryl S. McWatters ◽  
Yannick Lemarchand
Keyword(s):  
International Trade ◽  
Real World ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
French Language ◽  
Historical Study ◽  
Economic Context ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Bear Witness ◽  
Language Literature

The Guide du commerce occupies a distinctive place in the French-language literature on accounting. Passed over by most specialists in the history of maritime trade and the slave trade, the manual has never been the subject of a documented historical study. The apparent realism of the examples, the luxury of details and their precision, all bear witness to a deep concern to go beyond a simple apprenticeship in bookkeeping. Promoting itself essentially as “un guide du commerce,” the volume offers strategic examples for small local businesses, as well as for those engaged in international trade. Yet, the realism also demonstrated the expertise of the author in the eyes of potential purchasers. Inspired by the work of Bottin [2001], we investigate the extent to which the manual reflects real-world practices and provides a faithful glimpse into the socio-economic context of the period. Two additional questions are discussed briefly in our conclusion. First, can the work of Gaignat constitute a source document for the history of la traite négrière? The second entails our early deliberations about the place of this volume in the history of the slave trade itself.

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