scholarly journals Disclosing a Transfer: Art and Religion in the Notebooks of Dominique de Menil

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 188-222
Author(s):  
Samuel O’Connor Perks ◽  
Rajesh Heynickx ◽  
Stéphane Symons

Abstract The art collector and educator, Dominique de Menil (1908–1997) has mostly been remembered as a pragmatic orchestrator of high-profile commissions in the art world. However, little attention has been paid to her role as a thinker. This article seeks to address that lacuna in the literature by attending to an overlooked source in the Menil archives, de Menil’s notebooks, which were written between 1974 and 1994. By analysing de Menil’s use of metaphor in the notebooks, we place them within the trajectory of de Menil’s intellectual development stemming back to her 1936 article: ‘Pour l’unité du monde chrétien’. The first part situates the metaphors which de Menil employed in the notebooks from the 1970s in the intellectual context of her inception of these figures of speech in Montmartre, Paris in 1936. The second part unpacks a central metaphor which grounds de Menil’s conception of tradition. The third part compares de Menil’s art historiography vis-à-vis other models which sought to reinvigorate the avant-garde art scene via pre-modern sources. The Coda critically assesses de Menil’s art historiography against other prevalent views on the relation between pre-modern and modern works of art.

Author(s):  
Alisa Alexander

Art brut is a term and phenomenon created by the French artist and writer Jean Dubuffet (1901–1985). It refers to works of art created by artists who seemed to stand outside of culture—or more specifically the mid-20th century European art world and its institutions. Dubuffet sought a kind of art more radical than the avant-garde, which he thought had become increasingly homogenous and empty of invention. Modern artists no longer provided a sufficient critique of culture, so his search for a new and revolutionary art led him to fringes of society. "Art brut" translates to "raw art," as Dubuffet viewed this kind of art to be "uncooked" by culture. He looked for works which owed "nothing to the imitation of art that one can see in museums, salons, and galleries; works which the artist has entirely derived (invention and manner of expression) from his own sources, from his own impulses and humours, without regard for the rules, without regard for current convention" (Prospectus et tousécritssuivants, 1967). Art brut artists were often eccentric personalities, psychiatric patients, non-professional artists, and prisoners. Most importantly, these artists created works that aimed to express the maker’s pure, unmediated vision, without any knowledge of or regard for previous traditions. Therefore, art brut creations are not unified in terms of formal qualities or medium, but rather by the status of the creator.


Author(s):  
Daniel Martin Feige

Der Beitrag widmet sich der Frage historischer Folgeverhältnisse in der Kunst. Gegenüber dem Gedanken, dass es ein ursprüngliches Werk in der Reihe von Werken gibt, das späteren Werken seinen Sinn gibt, schlägt der Text vor, das Verhältnis umgekehrt zu denken: Im Lichte späterer Werke wird der Sinn früherer Werke neu ausgehandelt. Dazu geht der Text in drei Schritten vor. Im ersten Teil formuliert er unter der Überschrift ›Form‹ in kritischer Abgrenzung zu Danto und Eco mit Adorno den Gedanken, dass Kunstwerke eigensinnig konstituierte Gegenstände sind. Die im Gedanken der Neuverhandlung früherer Werke im Lichte späterer Werke vorausgesetzte Unbestimmtheit des Sinns von Kunstwerken wird im zweiten Teil unter dem Schlagwort ›Zeitlichkeit‹ anhand des Paradigmas der Improvisation erörtert. Der dritte und letzte Teil wendet diese improvisatorische Logik unter dem Label ›Neuaushandlung‹ dann dezidiert auf das Verhältnis von Vorbild und Nachbild an. The article proposes a new understanding of historical succession in the realm of art. In contrast to the idea that there is an original work in the series of works that gives meaning to the works that come later, the text proposes to think it exactly the other way round: in the light of later works, the meanings of earlier works are renegotiated. The text proceeds in three steps to develop this idea. Under the heading ›Form‹ it develops in the first part a critical reading of Danto’s and Eco’s notion of the constitution of the artworks and argues with Adorno that each powerful work develops its own language. In the second part, the vagueness of the meaning of works of art presupposed in the idea of renegotiating earlier works in the light of later works is discussed under the term ›Temporality‹ in terms of the logic of improvisation. The third and final part uses this improvisational logic under the label ›Renegotiation‹ to understand the relationship between model and afterimage in the realm of art.


Author(s):  
Jonathan Walley

Cinema Expanded: Avant-Garde Film in the Age of Intermedia is a comprehensive historical survey of expanded cinema from the mid-1960s to the present. It offers an historical and theoretical revision of the concept of expanded cinema, placing it in the context of avant-garde/experimental film history rather than the history of new media, intermedia, or multimedia. The book argues that while expanded cinema has taken an incredible variety of forms (including moving image installation, multi-screen films, live cinematic performance, light shows, shadow plays, computer-generated images, video art, sculptural objects, and texts), it is nonetheless best understood as an ongoing meditation by filmmakers on the nature of cinema, specifically, and on its relationship to the other arts. Cinema Expanded also extends its historical and theoretical scope to avant-garde film culture more generally, placing expanded cinema in that context while also considering what it has to tell us about the moving image in the art world and new media environment.


Arts ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 28
Author(s):  
Katy Deepwell

This essay is in four parts. The first offers a critique of James Elkins and Michael Newman’s book The State of Art Criticism (Routledge, 2008) for what it tells us about art criticism in academia and journalism and feminism; the second considers how a gendered analysis measures the “state” of art and art criticism as a feminist intervention; and the third, how neo-liberal mis-readings of Linda Nochlin and Laura Mulvey in the art world represent feminism in ideas about “greatness” and the “gaze”, whilst avoiding feminist arguments about women artists or their work, particularly on “motherhood”. In the fourth part, against the limits of the first three, the state of feminist art criticism across the last fifty years is reconsidered by highlighting the plurality of feminisms in transnational, transgenerational and progressive alliances.


1988 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 221
Author(s):  
Rosanne Martorella ◽  
Diana Crane
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  

2017 ◽  
Vol 61 (3) ◽  
pp. 343-357 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christos Lynteris

A pressing question during the first half-decade of the third plague pandemic (1894–9) was what was a ‘suitable soil’ for the disease. The question related to plague’s perceived ability to disappear from a given city only to reappear at some future point; a phenomenon that became central to scientific investigations of the disease. However, rather than this simply having a metaphorical meaning, the debate around plague’s ‘suitable soil’ actually concerned the material reality of the soil itself. The prevalence of plague in the working-class neighbourhood of Taipingshan during the first major outbreak of the pandemic, in 1894 in Hong Kong, led to an extensive debate regarding the ability of the soil to harbour and even spread the disease. Involving experiments, which were seen as able to procure evidence for or against the demolition or even torching of the area, scientific and administrative concerns over the soil rendered it an unstable yet highly productive epistemic thing. The spread of plague to India further fuelled concerns over the ability of the soil to act as the medium of the disease’s so-called true recrudescence. Besides high-profile scientific debates, hands-on experiments on purifying the soil of infected houses by means of highly intrusive methods allowed scientists and administrators to act upon and further solidify plague’s supposed invisibility in the urban terrain. Rather than being a short-lived, moribund object of epidemiological concern, this paper will demonstrate that the soil played a crucial role in the development of plague as a scientifically knowable and actionable category for modern medicine.


2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (15) ◽  
pp. 67-107
Author(s):  
Ines R. Artola

The aim of the present article is the analysis of Concerto for harpsichord and five instruments by Manuel de Falla – a piece which was dedicated by the composer to Wanda Landowska, an outstanding Polish harpsichord player. The piece was meant to commemorate the friendship these two artists shared as well as their collaboration. Written in the period of 1923-1926, the Concerto was the first composition in the history of 20th century music where harpsichord was the soloist instrument. The first element of the article is the context in which the piece was written. We shall look into the musical influences that shaped its form. On the one hand, it was the music of the past: from Cancionero Felipe Pedrell through mainly Bach’s polyphony to works by Scarlatti which preceded the Classicism (this influence is particularly noticeable in the third movement of the Concerto). On the other hand, it was music from the time of de Falla: first of all – Neo-Classicism and works by Stravinsky. The author refers to historical sources – critics’ reviews, testimonies of de Falla’s contemporaries and, obviously, his own remarks as to the interpretation of the piece. Next, Inés R. Artola analyses the score in the strict sense of the word “analysis”. In this part of the article, she quotes specific fragments of the composition, which reflect both traditional musical means (counterpoint, canon, Scarlatti-style sonata form, influence of old popular music) and the avant-garde ones (polytonality, orchestration, elements of neo-classical harmony).


2021 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 329-343
Author(s):  
Liudmyla Shapovalova ◽  
Іryna Romaniuk ◽  
Marianna Chernyavska ◽  
Svitlana Shchelkanova

"In the article under consideration are the ways of symphony genre transformation in the early works of Valentin Silvestrov (Ukraine). For the first time, the First, Second, Third, and Fourth symphonies by the genius composers of the 20th century are analyzed as a certain stylistic system. These compositions are endowed with the features of avant-garde poetics, and as a subject of musicological reflection, they are associated with a rethinking of the semantic paradigm of the genre. V. Silvestrov's early symphonies stand out from the classical practice of European symphonies. Scientific awareness of their phenomenal nature necessitated a methodological choice aimed at the most accurate identification of the philosophical concept of the new sound universum of V. Silvestrov's music. Deep correlation of the image of a human being as a factor of the symphony poetics (the influence of philosophical concepts of human ontology in the 20th century with the transformation of the genre canon) is considered. This refers to the nonmusical dimension of the genre semantics. The study of V. Silvestrov's early symphonies reveal a new philosophy of music through gradual movement – modulation: from the neo-baroque First Symphony and ""cosmic pastorals"" Musica Mundana of the Second Symphony through the history anthropologisation in the Third Symphony ""Eschatology"" to the monodrama Musica Humana in the Fourth Symphony. The dichotomy of Musica Mundana – Musica Humana is not accidental: in V. Silvestrov's creative method, remains relevant, which is confirmed by the dramaturgy of his latest work – the Ninth symphony (2019). Keywords: V. Silvestrov's early symphonies, evolution of style, worldview, Musica Mundana, monodrama. "


2021 ◽  
pp. 173-189
Author(s):  
Ewa Kędziora

The Al-Aqsa Intifada was the second Palestinian uprising that took place in 2000–2005. The dramatic record of the Intifada expressing itself in waves of recurring terror attacks and the construction of the separation wall on the border between Israel and Palestine overturned the Israeli-Palestinian relationship and triggered international public opinion. The article aims to determine how those events influenced the art scene. The study performs an overview of activities and artistic phenomena which occurred from 2000 through 2015 and problematized the events of the Second Intifada in various ways. The author focuses on individual works of art by both Israeli and international artists as well as art events and exhibitions of the leading kind. The analysis shows the extensive impacts of the Intifada on the artistic environment of that time and leads the author to the conclusion of the Intifada’s prevailing role in shaping politically engaged Israeli art at the beginning of 21 century. The dramatic events came up in creating a new aesthetic of the conflict, resulted in expanding a cultural boycott of Israel as well as challenged the position of politically engaged artists of Israel.


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