Re/entangling Irish and Nigerian diasporas: Colonial amnesias, decolonial aesthetics and archive-assemblage praxis

2018 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 173-198 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alice Feldman
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Theoretical Work ◽  
Art Making ◽  
Research Traditions ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Assemblage Art ◽  
Decolonial Aesthetics ◽  
Interactive Account

This article discusses the practice of ‘genealogical re/entanglement’ developed in the context of a project about the ways colonial amnesias obscure the connections between the histories of Anglo-European colonialities and the crises of contemporary migrations. This methodology appropriates archival and assemblage art making practices to make visible and ‘familialise’ the prior encounters of Irish and Nigerian diasporans that remain unknown in Ireland, towards reshaping the grounds of present and future relations. The centrality of embodied knowledges in decolonial scholarship creates an imperative of not only grounding theoretical work in the materialities of lived experiences but also confronting the colonial inheritances that underpin the methods employed to engage them. As such, in the contexts of this project, the development of the methodology became a project in itself. In this article, I reflect on the decolonial interrogations and method(il)logical transfigurations of the Western art and research traditions that intersected with and co-constructed the substantive analysis of Irish and Nigerian diasporic entanglements. An interactive account of how the method operates provides an opportunity to explore the ways the interconnectedness of the aesthesic, epistemological and pedagogical projects underpinning decolonial work combine to constitute a dynamic praxis.

Performance Art in China

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adele Tan
Keyword(s):  
Performance Art ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Economic Reforms ◽  
Art Museum ◽  
Body Art ◽  
Art Making ◽  
Robert Rauschenberg ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Authoritarian State ◽  
Cultural Constraints

Performance art events began in China in the 1980s following Deng Xioping’s post-Mao economic reforms in 1979, which exposed Chinese socialist society to foreign investments and influences. In 1985, at a time when China’s mainstream art was mostly defined by official Academic Realism or Socialist Realism, incipient strands of avant-gardist experimentation were surfacing through informal art groups. Robert Rauschenberg, for instance, held a solo exhibition at the National Art Museum of China, Beijing. The exhibition displayed innovative readymade assemblages, installations and collaborations, introducing Chinese audiences and artists to major trends in contemporary Western art, including the breaking of aesthetic and conceptual boundaries, thus motivating artists away from deeply embedded modes of thinking and art-making. Rauschenberg’s exhibition confirmed a rising awareness in China that art could embrace participatory agency, and break down rules of perception and action, while expanding the possibilities of the duration, place, and materials of art. China’s performance art questioned thresholds of visuality and aesthetics, and was widely translated into Chinese asxingwei yishu [behaviour art], while also referred to as xingdong yishu [action art], shenti yishu [body art], and most recently xianchang yishu [live art]. The implication of human behavior and conduct in the translated term reflected performance art’s function in addressing lived experiences under socio-cultural constraints in an authoritarian state, as well as social change and upheaval during China’s transition into a socialist state with capitalist characteristics.

scholarly journals “Wir Arme Leut”: Undignified Death and Madness in Berg’s Wozzeck

2013 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Meaghan Parker
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Social Stigma ◽  
Western Society ◽  
Class Structure ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Tragic Hero ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
Death Experience ◽  
History Of

Images in Western art of the tragic hero meeting his end typically conjure Romantic topics of honour, stoicism, and transcendence, yet it is questionable whether these projections of artistic death translate to the lived experiences of the dying. The titular protagonist of Alban Berg’s 1922 opera, Wozzeck, experiences death in a way that starkly contrasts Romantic ideals. Wozzeck does not die the honourable, ‘masculine’ death that might be expected from a tragic hero; rather, he capitulates to madness, misery, and poverty. Spurned by those who socially outrank him, Wozzeck is condemned to a shameful death, his fate sealed by his destitution and the sanctimonious prejudice against his ‘immoral’ life. These considerations provide a fascinating starting point for an examination of Berg’s poignant representation of Wozzeck’s death — a death that reflects early twentieth century attitudes that shaped and stigmatized the death experience. In this article I will frame my discussion of Wozzeck by considering the history of death in Western society, particularly the stigmas surrounding the gender and class of the dying individual. This history will inform my analysis of the symbolism in Berg’s music. Detailed analysis of Wozzeck sheds a critical light on the social stigma and class structure mapped onto the suffering, madness, and death of Wozzeck and his lover Marie.

scholarly journals Affective Iconoclasm: Codes of Labour as a Human Characteristic

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 541-548
Author(s):  
Melissa Gronlund
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Art Making ◽  
Economic Productivity ◽  
Western Art ◽  
History Of ◽  
Image Production ◽  
Racial Hierarchies ◽  
Human Characteristic

Abstract This text argues that a number of recent works of contemporary art have developed an anthropomorphised code to signal “humanness.” Primary within this code is representations of labour, which the artworks connect to mimetic or realist stylisation as well as to the history of image production and often specifically Western art-making. It elaborates this thesis with regards to recent videos by Pierre Huyghe and Sidsel Meineche Hansen, and at a critique of social media labour in a lecture-performance by Jesse Darling, which all draw a link between human and non-human subjectivities and economic productivity. In focusing on different examples of nonhuman likenesses, the text also uses primatology to suggest that the colonial relationship between labour and species and racial hierarchies continues to colour representations of labour today.

Varma, Raja Ravi (1848–1906)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Xaviers
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Color Theory ◽  
Art Making ◽  
Oil Painting ◽  
Ancient India ◽  
Western Art ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
The Way ◽  
Indian Art

Raja Ravi Varma transformed the way Indian gods and goddesses were pictured, and he did so with oil painting—a new import in 19th-century India. By the last quarter of the 19th century, when Western art had long rejected Salon art and a modernist explosion in painterly surface was imminent, the auto-didact Raja Ravi Varma started to paint in an academic realistic style. His interaction with Western oil painting can be regarded as the advent of modernism in Indian art. It may sound paradoxical to consider the adoption of Western academic realism as modernist but in this instance, Varma’s modernism was a break from various folk or classical Indian painterly traditions. The role of the aristocratic gentleman artist, which Ravi Varma performed, differed from traditional artisans in that it entailed a scientific temperament in art-making, with awareness of anatomy, geometry (perspective), and color theory. Many scholars have claimed that Raja Ravi Varma forged a "visual unity" in India through his calendar art—chromolithographs created with imported German technology—which circulated throughout India. His work visually unified the Hindu pantheon, which had until then been as iconographically diverse as the number of dynasties that had ruled across ancient India.

scholarly journals “A murky business”: A phenomenological ontology of risk in child protection social work

2018 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 284-300 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joe Smeeton
Keyword(s):  
Social Work ◽  
Child Protection ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Theoretical Work ◽  
Theoretical Examination ◽  
The World ◽  
Natural Home ◽  
Phenomenological Perspective ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The Impact

This paper is based upon ongoing theoretical work by the author. A growing number of academics are starting to problematise social work within a risk paradigm by highlighting the impact this has on how service user's experiences are atomised into units of risk, rather than having their needs understood as members of families and communities. This paper seeks to develop this discussion by offering a theoretical examination of risk from a phenomenological perspective by unpacking some of the underlying constructions of risk. Using Heidegger’s work this paper attempts to first of all undertake an ontology of risk and then to examine its usefulness in the UK child protection context. The author argues that working within a risk paradigm obscures rather than clarifies understanding. The approach is rooted in an argument that “phenomenology” is the natural home of social work which is interested in the lived experiences of people within their environments or “being-in-the-world”.

A Conversation with Hsieh Tehching, from The Black Cover Book

ARTMargins ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 108-118
Author(s):  
Jon Solomon
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
Early Career ◽  
Chinese Diaspora ◽  
Art Making ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Individual Perceptions ◽  
Career Motivations ◽  
Social Motivations ◽  
Xu Bing

This is a translation of a 1993 conversation involving three artists from the Chinese diaspora Hsieh Teh-Ching, Ai Weiwei and Xu Bing. Through candid dialog they tease out the motivations behind their conceptually driven artistic practices, their individual perceptions of social systems and politics, a “Western” art system from which they are marginalized, the concept “Modern art,” the Duchampian imagination, contingency, and postmodernism, etc. Their dialogue helps to situate the frame of mind of émigré artists working and living in New York in the early 1990s, with particular attention to the spiritual and social motivations behind art-making, while elaborating the moral and ethical dimensions behind their work. While the three men do not always agree, a clear sense of the early-career motivations behind each of these artists' work can be garnered from their discussion.

Inuit Woman Artists and Western Aesthetics

1997 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 179-186
Author(s):  
Emily Auger ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Values ◽  
Fine Art ◽  
Art World ◽  
Art Making ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Artistic Values ◽  
Aesthetic Values ◽  
Inuit Culture

Inuit artists espouse aesthetic values which are indicative of the degree of their involvement with the western art world and of the non-artistic cultural values which they wish to convey and perpetuate in their own communities. It is in this latter expression that Inuit aesthetics may be studied as a conveyor of Inuit rather than non-Inuit culture. In this paper, the statements made by Inuit woman artists from the Keewatin district are analysed with reference to the values associated with contemporary mainstream fine art and the artists' own assertions regarding the importance of non-artistic values in the art-making process.

scholarly journals Realism Relativized: A Cultural-Historical Approach to What Images Capture

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Prinz
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Diversity ◽  
Art History ◽  
East Asian ◽  
Alternative Theory ◽  
Art Making ◽  
The West ◽  
Cultural Traditions ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Visual Skills ◽  
Ideal Framework

It is sometimes assumed that there can be a unified and universal analysis of pictorial realism, but this seem implausible. Realism has been understood differently at different times in Western art history art, and art-making traditions elsewhere often aspire to forms of realism that contrast with forms operative in the West. Such variations are presented here, with examples from European, African, and East Asian art. Contact between cultural traditions is also considered. Within analytic aesthetics, some definitions of realism are designed to accommodate cultural diversity, but they face challenges. Leading definitions are critically examined. For example, there are theories that focus on entrenchment, visual skills, and informativeness. None of these constructs captures what realist systems share in common, and none provides an ideal framework for explicitly describing how such systems differ. An alternative theory of pictorial realism is presented. On that theory, realist systems each aim to capture aspects of reality, but they focus on different aspects and provide different manners by which those aspects may be captured.

The O–C diagrams of minor planets − a new approach to modelling the rotation

1999 ◽  
Vol 173 ◽  
pp. 185-188
Author(s):  
Gy. Szabó ◽  
K. Sárneczky ◽  
L.L. Kiss
Keyword(s):  
Error Analysis ◽  
Time Dependence ◽  
Theoretical Work ◽  
Minor Planet ◽  
Minor Planets ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Preliminary Results ◽  
Ccd Observations

AbstractA widely used tool in studying quasi-monoperiodic processes is the O–C diagram. This paper deals with the application of this diagram in minor planet studies. The main difference between our approach and the classical O–C diagram is that we transform the epoch (=time) dependence into the geocentric longitude domain. We outline a rotation modelling using this modified O–C and illustrate the abilities with detailed error analysis. The primary assumption, that the monotonity and the shape of this diagram is (almost) independent of the geometry of the asteroids is discussed and tested. The monotonity enables an unambiguous distinction between the prograde and retrograde rotation, thus the four-fold (or in some cases the two-fold) ambiguities can be avoided. This turned out to be the main advantage of the O–C examination. As an extension to the theoretical work, we present some preliminary results on 1727 Mette based on new CCD observations.

Peculiarity Parameters

1976 ◽  
Vol 32 ◽  
pp. 233-254
Author(s):  
H. M. Maitzen
Keyword(s):  
Magnetic Field ◽  
Magnetic Fields ◽  
Theoretical Work ◽  
Observational Evidence ◽  
Rotator Model ◽  
Peculiar Behaviour ◽  
Field Spectrum ◽  
Oblique Rotator ◽  
Ap Stars ◽  
The Way

Ap stars are peculiar in many aspects. During this century astronomers have been trying to collect data about these and have found a confusing variety of peculiar behaviour even from star to star that Struve stated in 1942 that at least we know that these phenomena are not supernatural. A real push to start deeper theoretical work on Ap stars was given by an additional observational evidence, namely the discovery of magnetic fields on these stars by Babcock (1947). This originated the concept that magnetic fields are the cause for spectroscopic and photometric peculiarities. Great leaps for the astronomical mankind were the Oblique Rotator model by Stibbs (1950) and Deutsch (1954), which by the way provided mathematical tools for the later handling pulsar geometries, anti the discovery of phase coincidence of the extrema of magnetic field, spectrum and photometric variations (e.g. Jarzebowski, 1960).

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