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.

Maximus

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Byers
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Political Action ◽  
American Art ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Self ◽  
Postwar Period ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Art Practices ◽  
The One

This concluding chapter charts the continuing significance of the early postwar moment in Olson’s later work, particularly The Maximus Poems. The philosophical and political concerns of the American avant-garde between 1946 and 1951 play out across The Maximus Poems just as they inform later American art practices. The search of the early postwar American independent left for a source of political action rooted in the embodied individual is seen, on the one hand, to have been personified in the figure of Maximus. At the same time, Maximus’s radical ‘practice of the self’ charts a sophisticated alternative to the Enlightenment humanist subject widely critiqued in the United States in the immediate postwar period.

Stieglitz, Alfred (1864–1946)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Herbert R. Hartel Jr.
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
American Art ◽  
The United States ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Alfred Stieglitz ◽  
City College ◽  
Technical Manual ◽  
The Usa ◽  
German Jewish

Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) was an American art collector, dealer and photographer who was one of the earliest supporters of modernist art in the United States. Stieglitz was born in 1865 in Hoboken, New Jersey, to an affluent German-Jewish family. He studied at City College in New York for two years and then at the Technische Hochschule in Berlin for three years, before returning to New York. Although trained in engineering, Stieglitz became interested in photography while in Germany. He promoted photography as a legitimate form of art and expression, which was a radical idea at the time. This led him to establish, in 1902, the Photo-Secession, a group of photographers who believed that photography needed to be considered a fine art and not a technical, manual craft. In 1903 Steiglitz started Camera Work, his own publication on modern art, which he published until 1917. Camera Work published photographs, reproductions of modernist artworks, and essays, treatises, statements and criticism about modernist art and theory. In 1904, Stieglitz opened his first gallery, the ‘‘Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession’’ (later known as ‘‘291’’ for its address on Fifth Avenue), where he introduced the European avant-garde to the USA. He donated works for the Armory Show in New York in 1913 and also purchased works from the exhibition.

Epilogue

2019 ◽  
pp. 195-200
Author(s):  
Jennifer Iverson
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Electronic Music ◽  
Rock Music ◽  
The United States ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Art Making ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Cognitive Research ◽  
Cultural Sphere ◽  
German City

Midcentury electronic studios drove the development of high art music, but also fed back into the cultural sphere in many ways, proving consequential in scientific, architectural, and popular music domains. The phonetics–music collaborations, for instance, were carried even further in continuing phonetic, linguistic, and cognitive research in Cologne and beyond. The integrated serial designs of the WDR composers, and especially their optimistic utopian dreams, inspired architectural plans for a rebuilt German city that would coalesce around art-making spaces. In popular music spheres such as film sound and rock music, the avant-garde music of the WDR composers, as well as new electronic synthesizers, had significant impacts. These rich cross-pollinations are due in large part to the heterogeneous, laboratory-like structure of the WDR studio, a structure that was replicated in the electronic studios that sprung up in the United States, Asia, and Latin America. In summary, the WDR studio had far-reaching consequences that were both structural and aesthetic. Cultural wounds were exposed and salved as electronic music began to make progress in reclaiming wartime spaces, ideas, and technologies. The impacts of midcentury electronic music continue to reverberate today.

¿Dónde están los Judíos en la “Vida Americana?”: Art, Politics, and Identity on Exhibit

Images ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 144-156
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Shandler
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Art History ◽  
American Art ◽  
The United States ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Art Making ◽  
Profound Impact ◽  
American Artists ◽  
Politics Of Race

Abstract Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, 1925–1945, an exhibition that opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art in February, 2020, proposed to remake art history by demonstrating the profound impact Mexican painters had on their counterparts in the United States, inspiring American artists “to use their art to protest economic, social, and racial injustices.” An unexamined part of this chapter of art history concerns the role of radical Jews, who constitute almost one half of the American artists whose work appears in the exhibition. Rooted in a distinct experience, as either immigrants or their American-born children, these Jewish artists had been making politically charged artworks well before the Mexican muralists’ arrival in the United States. Considering the role of left-wing Jews in this period of art-making would complicate the curatorial thesis of Vida Americana. Moreover, the exhibition’s lack of attention to Jews in creating and promoting this body of work raises questions about how the present cultural politics of race may have informed the analysis of this chapter of art history.

scholarly journals Shaping the Avant-Garde

2019 ◽  
pp. 273-292
Author(s):  
Pablo Müller
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
American Art ◽  
The United States ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Sergei Eisenstein ◽  
Dziga Vertov ◽  
Specific Manner ◽  
Art Journal ◽  
Art Production

Soviet Constructivism is a central reference for the American art journal October (founded in 1976 and still in print today). This article discusses the ways in which October refers to that historical art movement, while overlooking some of its key political aspirations. Especially during the journal’s founding years, the discursive association with Soviet Constructivism served to bestow criticality, urgency, and sociopolitical relevance on the American art journal. Furthermore, with the reference to Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov, in particular, the October protagonists have positioned themselves in a specific manner within mid-1970s art critical discourse in the United States. In addition to framing and positioning, the article examines how Soviet Constructivism (alongside Dadaism and Surrealism) becomes for October a key reference for rooting and evaluating the expanded, cross-genre art production post-1945 historically.

scholarly journals My Fate is in Your Hand

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 48-59
Author(s):  
Alex Cateforis
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
American Art ◽  
The United States ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
Art World ◽  
Pacific War ◽  
The People ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
American Artist ◽  
Artistic Achievement

Yasuo Kuniyoshi (1889-1953) was a Japanese-American émigré artist active and successful in the United States from the mid-1920s until his death. However, despite his artistic achievement and integration into American culture, Kuniyoshi’s life and fate turned tragic as the Pacific War erupted, which intensified extreme racism toward the people of Japanese heritage and increased nationalism in the United States. Kuniyoshi’s 1950 painting My Fate is in Your Hand reveals the artist’s dual and conflicted identity, his social and political fate in the U.S. after Pearl Harbor, and suggests that a year before his death, the artist no longer controlled his fate. A majority of white Americans and the conservative American art world rejected him as an Asian “other.” Kuniyoshi grew weary, stressed, and anxious, an artist caught between success and rejection and his split Japanese and American identity. In this essay, I argue that each major portion of the work’s title— “My,” “Fate,” and “Your Hand”— reveals the symbolic meaning of the painting and suggests the artist’s inner state in 1950. I also analyze four of Kuniyoshi’s earlier works to provide insight into the meaning of My Fate is in Your Hand and to tell the story of the Japanese-American artist.  

scholarly journals Reflections on the global art market: implications for the Sociology of Culture

2009 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 331-362 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diana Crane
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Art Market ◽  
The United States ◽  
Art World ◽  
Sociology Of Culture ◽  
High Culture ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Global Art

The article examines the recent changes in art world from the characteristics of the global art market and its implications for sociological theories of art. Therefore, it focuses on the correlation established between the decline of the avant-garde art and how there are tenuous boundaries between high culture and popular culture. In this sense, it discusses and analyzes the influence increasingly exerted by actors located in countries such as the United States, England, Germany, France and, more recently, China. It concludes with how much the global art market may be illustrative of cases in which the globalization of markets expands the cultural and economic inequality by favoring the privilege of small social groups in the contemporary world.

The Challenges of Displaying “Asian American”: Curatorial Perspectives and Critical Approaches

2007 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 12-32
Author(s):  
ShiPu Wang
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Financial Support ◽  
American Art ◽  
The United States ◽  
Community Leaders ◽  
Art Exhibitions ◽  
The Past ◽  
Critical Approaches ◽  
Racial Demographics

This essay delineates the issues concerning AAPI art exhibitions from a curator’s perspective, particularly in response to the changing racial demographics and economics of the past decades. A discussion of practical, curatorial problems offers the reader an overview of the obstacles and reasons behind the lack of exhibitions of AAPI works in the United States. It is the author’s hope that by understanding the challenges particular to AAPI exhibitions, community leaders, and patrons will direct future financial support to appropriate museum operations, which in turn will encourage more exhibitions and research of the important artistic contribution of AAPI artists to American art.

Where Great Powers Meet

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Shambaugh
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Soft Power ◽  
The United States ◽  
Great Power ◽  
Stable Region ◽  
Power Transition ◽  
Global Power ◽  
Sphere Of Influence ◽  
The Cold War

After the end of the Cold War, it seemed as if Southeast Asia would remain a geopolitically stable region within the American imperious for the foreseeable future. In the last two decades, however, the re-emergence of China as a major great power has called into question the geopolitical future of the region and raised the specter of renewed great power competition. As this book shows, the United States and China are engaged in a broad-gauged and global competition for power. While this competition ranges across the entire world, it is centered in Asia, and here this text focuses on the ten countries that comprise Southeast Asia. The United States and China constantly vie for position and influence in this enormously significant region, and the outcome of this contest will do much to determine whether Asia leaves the American orbit after seven decades and falls into a new Chinese sphere of influence. Just as important, to the extent that there is a global “power transition” occurring from the United States to China, the fate of Southeast Asia will be a good indicator. Presently, both powers bring important assets to bear. The United States continues to possess a depth and breadth of security ties, soft power, and direct investment across the region that empirically outweigh China’s. For its part, China has more diplomatic influence, much greater trade, and geographic proximity. In assessing the likelihood of a regional power transition, the book looks at how ASEAN (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations) and the countries within it maneuver between the United States and China and the degree to which they align with one or the other power.

Cinema Expanded

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Walley
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Film History ◽  
Video Art ◽  
Experimental Film ◽  
Art World ◽  
Film Culture ◽  
Moving Image ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Expanded Cinema ◽  
History Of

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.

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