scholarly journals Review of Barbara Baert (ed.), Fluid Flesh: The Body, Religion and the Visual Arts, Leuven: Leuven University Press 2009, xvi + 125 pages, ISBN 9058677168

2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 176-180
Author(s):  
Susan P. Casteras
Keyword(s):  
Visual Arts ◽  
The Body

Diaghilev and British Writing

2009 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-92
Author(s):  
Susan Jones
Keyword(s):  
Visual Arts ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Responses ◽  
Literary Aesthetics ◽  
Ballets Russes ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Subject ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Opening Up

This article explores the diversity of British literary responses to Diaghilev's project, emphasising the way in which the subject matter and methodologies of Diaghilev's modernism were sometimes unexpectedly echoed in expressions of contemporary British writing. These discussions emerge both in writing about Diaghilev's work, and, more discretely, when references to the Russian Ballet find their way into the creative writing of the period, serving to anchor the texts in a particular cultural milieu or to suggest contemporary aesthetic problems in the domain of literary aesthetics developing in the period. Figures from disparate fields, including literature, music and the visual arts, brought to their criticism of the Ballets Russes their individual perspectives on its aesthetics, helping to consolidate the sense of its importance in contributing to the inter-disciplinary flavour of modernism across the arts. In the field of literature, not only did British writers evaluate the Ballets Russes in terms of their own poetics, their relationship to experimentation in the novel and in drama, they developed an increasing sense of the company's place in dance history, its choreographic innovations offering material for wider discussions, opening up the potential for literary modernism's interest in impersonality and in the ‘unsayable’, discussions of the body, primitivism and gender.

Natural Entropy and Piers Plowman

2020 ◽  
pp. 265-297
Author(s):  
Nicolette Zeeman
Keyword(s):  
Visual Arts ◽  
Piers Plowman ◽  
The Body ◽  
Natural Reaction ◽  
Physical Suffering ◽  
Beneficial Impact ◽  
Medical Theory

This chapter considers medieval theories that sin produces bodily sickness and suffering, and that this might, paradoxically, undermine sin itself. These theories result from the psychosomaticism of medical-stoic thought; they assume that sickness is the body’s natural reaction to being ‘abused’ by vice. These theories were developed in later medical theory, according to which the vices have their destructive impact on the body via the ‘non-naturals’ (contingent phenomena that affect health), especially the passions. Influenced by these ideas, medieval pastoral thought frequently describes sinners as suffering physiologically and the visual arts contain many striking illustrations. If the overt purpose of such texts and images is to warn people off sin, their effect is also to show sin somehow naturally consuming or destroying itself; it will be clear that such theories are at odds with intentionalist ethics. Langland explores these ideas and paradoxes in Piers Plowman, where the personified sins, and Haukyn, are undoubtedly sad vices; related ideas also underlie the poem’s apocalyptic ending, which is characterized by the coincidence of endemic sin and physical suffering. But at this point it is not clear that the suffering has any beneficial impact. However, the chapter also observes that the poem’s ending reflects a kind of entropy that may derive from experiencing, but also writing and reading about, the reiterations of sin: it suggests that the natural entropy of sin may after all still play some part here.

‘More sensual Delights’

2021 ◽  
pp. 115-141
Author(s):  
James A. Winn
Keyword(s):  
Visual Arts ◽  
Political Ideology ◽  
Scientific Discourse ◽  
The Body ◽  
Sexual Pleasure ◽  
Aesthetic Theory ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
Definitive Evidence ◽  
The Mind ◽  
English Opera

There is a palpable difference between Addison’s stimulating and thoughtful remarks on literature or the visual arts and his scattered, unconvincing, and dismissive comments on music. His unease about music, the chapter argues, stemmed from ignorance, disappointment, and a tendency to link musical pleasure with secret or illicit sexual pleasure. By basing his aesthetic theory on sight, Addison was able to make contact with scientific discourse, indirectly express his political ideology, and avoid extensive discussions of music, the art about which he knew least. His attempt at an English opera (Rosamond, 1707) failed, and the libretto does not suggest that Addison gave much thought to what it might be like to set or sing his words. As a young man, he wrote two St Cecilia odes, closely following the conventions established in Dryden’s ode for 1687. Printed in the Annual miscellany for 1694 is his translation of an episode from Ovid that purports to explain ‘the secret Cause’ that makes the River Salmacis weaken those who bathe in it. Something about the power of music, its emotional and sensual influence on the body and the mind, was evidently connected in his mind with secret pleasures that he did not wish to acknowledge or reveal. Same-sex love was probably among such pleasures. While there is no definitive evidence that Addison had strong homosexual feelings, or that he acted upon them, there is reason to believe that he associated such feelings with music, an association which shaped his consciousness and therefore his aesthetics.

Körperlichkeit in der Philosophie der Spätantike. Corporeità nella filosofia tardoantica

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Body ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Philosophical Importance

In this volume, the idea of the body and corporeality in the philosophy of late antiquity is examined. It deals with questions of ontology, mathematics, physics, astronomy, biology, anthropology, politics, theology and aesthetics. The importance of the topic results both from its historical relevance (for the visual arts, literature, the specialist sciences, religion and general cultural history) as well as its philosophical importance. From a philosophical point of view the late antique reflection on corporeality contains an impressive array of meanings discussed in this volume. With contributions by Riccardo Chiaradonna, Giovanni Colpani, Diego de Brasi, Sabine Föllinger, Christoph Helmig, Christoph Horn, Alberto Jori, Alessandro Linguiti, Claudia Lo Casto, Christoph Markschies, Dmitri Nikulin, Federico Petrucci, Flavia Salvatori, Ambra Serangeli, Daniela Taormina, Chiara Tommasi, Denis Walter

scholarly journals DISSENTING BODY AND ITS CREATIVE RECONTEXTUALISATION IN LITHUANIAN VISUAL ARTS

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 361-375
Author(s):  
Basia Nikiforova ◽  
Kęstutis Šapoka
Keyword(s):  
Visual Arts ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
Cultural Development ◽  
The Body ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Clear Cut ◽  
Cultural Biography ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Art As Research

The body is an important starting point concept throughout deconstruction, reconstruction and recontextualization of the body’s concept. This change of focus in research that stems from the results to the process of contextualization means that the researcher should engage with texts or images, as they are reflected in the process of cultural development and exchange, through which decontextualization is exhibited. This article deals with the concept of new materialism and endeavors to explain, how discourses come to matter. It examines the issue of how new materialism tackles visual art in innovative ways – through the intersections of artistic practice, art-as-research, and philosophical analysis. Such definitions as Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s “a bodily being”, Julia Kristeva’s “the abjection of the self”, Arjun Appadurai’s “the aesthetics of decontextualization” and “singularized object”, Igor Kopytoff’s “the cultural biography of things”, and Nicholas Thomas’ “entangled objects”, constitute the methodological frameworks of our research. We will analyze such approaches as Hans Belting’s concept of body as a “living medium”, Giorgio Agamben’s view on body as an object of commodification and Jacques Derrida’s “trust in painting”. An attempt to understand body reconceptualization and deconstruction through the categories of new materialism is the most important aim of this article. Karen Barad’s concept of intra-action (that implies a clear-cut subject-object distinction) is crucial to our research, which underlines that bodies have no inherent boundaries and properties and that the analyzed representations are “material-discursive phenomena”. The artworks under consideration will be confronted with a diagnosis that, according to Barad, all bodies come to matter thanks the intra-activity and its performativity. The case studies of Svajonė Stanikienė and Paulius Stanikas, Evaldas Jansas and Eglė Rakauskaitė works show how the image of the body is developed through the processes of their deconstruction and decontextualization.

Are there things only artists can do?

Forum+ ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 45-53
Author(s):  
Carolina Bonfim
Keyword(s):  
Visual Arts ◽  
The Body ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Research Project ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Practice Based Research ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract This article seeks to share the methods and strategies of the practice-based research project Ninety movements on TECHNOGYM G6508D. The research dissects the act of running in all its dimensions by fragmenting, archiving, incorporating, and highlighting what is unique and personal in each gesture and each way of moving. Ninety Movements is a continuation of Carolina Bonfim’s recent artistic practice, which explores the relationship between the body and the archive through a visual-arts approach.

“But Such a Mind, Mak’st God Thy Guest”

2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (5) ◽  
pp. 565-589
Author(s):  
Steven Hrdlicka
Keyword(s):  
Visual Arts ◽  
The Body ◽  
Catholic Theology ◽  
Ample Evidence ◽  
Art Works ◽  
Body And Soul ◽  
The Subject

Abstract Ben Jonson’s Eupheme poems and Anthony van Dyck’s portrait of Venetia Digby as Prudence have often been seen as art works fiercely at odds, and that particularly Jonson’s overall brash dismissal of the visual arts is epitomized in his poems in praise of Venetia’s life. Yet ample evidence within Eupheme supports the idea that not only are Jonson’s poems in peculiar ekphrastic conversations with Van Dyck’s painting but that Jonson conceives of the ekphrasis as a device for guiding viewers and readers into rare contemplative poetic spaces. The nature of the interplay between Van Dyck’s painting and Jonson’s poems shares similarities to how Jonson conceived of the courtly masque as a cooperative, unitive experience of visual and verbal elements. In addition, the influence of emblems of Alciato on Jonson’s poetry is instructive in this regard, as these emblems exhibit a cooperative interplay between discrete visual and verbal (body and soul) elements. Issues arising from the artistic cooperative interplay between the body and the soul are linked to the Catholic theology of prudence through the subject of both Jonson and Van Dyck’s works. Specific Catholic contexts hitherto not considered are suggested for both the painting and poems, and especially Jonson’s poem “To My Muse” (the last poem in Eupheme), but these theological contexts are also established in relation to the two titles of Jonson’s poems, which take for their subject Venetia’s body and mind. Furthermore, various loose ends such as the dating of Van Dyck’s painting and the idea that Sir Kenlem had commissioned it to reconstruct Venetia Digby’s reputation are brought up and considered throughout the essay with an eye to these contexts.

Between the Body, the Object and the Image: Dance and the Visual Arts in Puppet Art

Maska ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 31 (179) ◽  
pp. 34-45
Author(s):  
Renaud Herbin
Keyword(s):  
Visual Arts ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Other ◽  
Phantom Limb ◽  
Close Connection ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Relationship

The close connection between creation, theory, and institutions is the starting point for the author’s reflection on the kinds of spaces the latter should prepare. He emphasises that of particular interest are those spaces that are established between different approaches (or rather relationships between the body, the object, and the image). In Reprendre son soufflé by Julika Mayer, the puppet and the actor form a relationship that leaves none of the participants untouched but allows their identities to be changed. Similarly, the puppeteer-dancer in Uta Gebert’s Anubis reveals himself in order to uncover the relationship which links him and the puppet: both exist solely in motion, in the zone of exchange. Bodies and objects, assembled into body-objects, seem to meet by chance in Miet Warlop’s Springville, but in the forefront is the Image, which follows a visual logic in placing the body-objects in different configurations. On the other hand, the space occupied by the body in Yngvild Aspeli’s Signaux is undefined: the actor, his puppet-double, and his phantom limb embody a feeling of strangeness and pain. In the project Anémochore, Christophe Le Blay enables the embodiment of the environment (the wind) in the image of a recorded trace, with which a dancer then engages in dance. Space is therefore something unfinished, something open, undefinable and empty, all of which applies equally to bodies, objects, and images.

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