The Mother of Pop? Dorothy Morland and the Independent Group

2013 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 262-278
Author(s):  
Anne Massey
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Royal College ◽  
Multidisciplinary Approach ◽  
Architectural History ◽  
Independent Group ◽  
Architectural Practice ◽  
Interdisciplinary Practice ◽  
Cultural Boundaries ◽  
Inclusive Approach ◽  
Art And Architecture

The historiography of the Independent Group, dominated at present by art and architectural history, positions it within the trajectory of modernism. This Themed Issue demonstrates that there are other readings of the Group, which foreground both its multidisciplinary approach and contestation of cultural boundaries. The author is concerned here with the ways in which the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) and its Director, Dorothy Morland (1906–1999), acted as a catalyst for the Group. As an arts administrator rather than a practitioner, Morland’s contribution is often overlooked in the histories of art and architecture. Using the disciplinary approach of visual culture, a more inclusive view is opened up. Claims for prescience are in themselves, problematic, but by positioning Morland as the ‘Mother of Pop’, the commonly accepted view of the Independent Group as the ‘Fathers of Pop’ is contested. Morland trained as a singer at the Royal College of Music, and this background gave her a non-specialist and inclusive approach towards the visual. She managed to facilitate certain kinds of interdisciplinary debate and made it possible for certain kinds of art, design and architectural practice to flourish within the context of the ICA. She also facilitated the exhibition and dissemination of this interdisciplinary practice, acting as a bridge between the ICA management and the Independent Group, as well as being key to the preservation of the ICA’s history and archives.

scholarly journals ‘By faith alone’ (undivided loyalty) in light of change agency theory: Jesus, Paul and the Jesus-group in Colossae

2017 ◽  
Vol 73 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Andries G. Van Aarde
Keyword(s):  
Agency Theory ◽  
Change Agent ◽  
Change Agency ◽  
Semantic Domain ◽  
Mediterranean Culture ◽  
Cultural Boundaries ◽  
Inclusive Approach ◽  
God's Work

This article aims to apply the model of change agent to the interpretation of Colossians. Presuming a continuity between Jesus and Paul, the article introduces the concept of ‘by faith alone’ from the Pauline letters. By this expression is meant an undivided fidelity to an inclusive approach to understanding God’s work, with concrete historical roots in Jesus’ crossing of gender, ethnic and cultural boundaries. Living in this manner requires reformation, transformation and change. The study spells out in fuller detail what is understood ‘by faith alone’ by discussing the meaning of ‘faith’ within its semantic domain embedded in the codes of 1st-century Mediterranean culture. Living in faith is both a change of one’s inner convictions and about a life in faith.

scholarly journals High Teas, High Collars and High Rise Buildings in a ‘High-Context’ Culture: The Semiotics of Japan’s Project of Modernity

2017 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 11
Author(s):  
Nicolas Adam Cambridge
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Paradigm Shift ◽  
Analytical Approach ◽  
Japanese Society ◽  
Roland Barthes ◽  
Semiotic Analysis ◽  
Architectural Practice ◽  
High Rise ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Contemporary Context

<p>This article addresses a paradigm shift in Japanese society during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – focusing on the encounters with Western culinary, sartorial and architectural practice experienced by a ‘high-context’ culture (Hall, 1976). The main discussion documents the differentiated reception of these changes – valorised by reformers for whom engaging with the outside world was key to their project of modernity, but treated with suspicion by members of the proletariat who feared for the purity of traditional Japanese values. The manner in which the resulting tensions were mediated through the print media and imagery of domestic visual culture is interrogated using a prism of semiotic analysis and the findings located within a contemporary context to suggest that Roland Barthes’ analytical approach to the country as an ‘empire of signs’ (Barthes, 1982) retains its original traction.</p>

Networked Objects

2013 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 570-573
Author(s):  
Mary Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Geographic Locations ◽  
Cultural Contact ◽  
Cultural Boundaries ◽  
Art Works ◽  
Objects Tracking ◽  
Nuanced Understanding

Over the last decade an approach to 19th-century visual culture that focuses on cross-cultural contact and exchange has begun to supplement an earlier model of Orientalist critique focused primarily on the iconographic analysis of European Orientalist tropes and stereotypes. In this essay I engage with these discussions by analyzing what I will call networked objects. Tracking the mobility of art works and artifacts across cultural boundaries and their differing signification in varying sites of reception impels a nuanced understanding of how visual culture has been implicated in these networks of power. Influenced by anthropological debates, my approach focuses on the circulation of images and objects across cultures and within the region, exploring their function at divergent sites. Social networks of artists and patrons facilitated the transplantation of ideas and images, but the meanings of networked objects morphed independently of authorship according to their displacement to new geographic locations. Networked objects were also entangled within patterns of misinterpretation, blockage, and rupture as visual forms were created, reshaped, or productively misinterpreted in the environments into which they were transplanted, thus provoking challenges from the peripheries and divergent forms of indigenous agency.

scholarly journals Transcultured Architecture: Mudéjar’s Epic Journey Reinterpreted

2011 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 137-151
Author(s):  
Ila Nicole Sheren
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
New World ◽  
Architectural History ◽  
Visual Language ◽  
Architectural Style ◽  
Medieval Spain ◽  
Fernando Ortiz ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Architecture ◽  
Art And Architecture

The Mudéjar phenomenon is unparalleled in the history of architecture. This style of architecture and ornamentation originated with Arab craftsmen living in reconquered medieval Spain. Embraced by Spanish Christians, Mudéjar traveled over the course of the next four centuries, becoming part of the architectural history of Latin America, especially present-day Mexico and Peru. The style’s transmission across different religions and cultures attests to its ability to unify disparate groups of people under a common visual language. How, then, did mudejar managto gain popularity across reconquered Spain, so much so that it spread to the New World colonies? In this article, I argue that art and architecture move more fluidly than ideologies across boundaries, physical and political. The theory of transculturation makes it possible to understand how an architectural style such as Mudéjar can be generated from a cultural clash and move to an entirely different context. Developed in 1947 by Cuban scholar and theorist Fernando Ortíz, transculturation posited means by which cultures mix to create something entirely new. This process is often violent, the result of intense conflict and persecution, and one culture is almost always defeated in the process. The contributions of both societies, however, coexist in the final product, whether technological, artistic, or even agricultural. I argue that mudejar in Latin America is a product of two separate transculturations: the adoption of Arab design and ornamentation by Spanish Christians, and the subsequent transference of these forms to the New World through the work of indigenous laborers.

Improving Passions

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Burnetts
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Film Criticism ◽  
American Cinema ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Inclusive Approach ◽  
Vexed Question ◽  
The Impact

The book examines how the “sentimental”, a term so often invoked in film criticism, has been mobilized, denigrated, quarantined or ignored over 300 years of aesthetic debate. Responding to the often vexed question of what the sentimental means to various critical and popular constituencies, it argues for its continued conceptual value, less as an evaluative term (with its ongoing connotations of a stoical critical elitism), but as a theoretical tradition and taste category that speaks to the tensions between emotion and cognition in literary and visual culture. Using a meta-critical analysis of a wide range of philosophers and film theorists, and case-studies of Chaplin, Ford, Spielberg and various contemporary independent US filmmakers, the book proposes a more inclusive approach to the analysis of emotion in film studies to that offered by ‘cognitivist’ film scholars. It provides a thorough account of sentimentalism’s links with melodrama, a key ‘mode’ of American cinema, as both its conceptual and narratological cousin. It also speculates on the relevance of sentimentality to feminist and genre-based approaches to film, as well as more recent approaches in film philosophy, like ‘cine-ethics’, phenomenology and the impact of Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy.

Jesuit Visual Culture in a Machine Age

2018 ◽  
pp. 448-486
Author(s):  
Mia M. Mochizuki
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Society Of Jesus ◽  
Machine Age ◽  
Global Consciousness ◽  
Art And Technology ◽  
Athanasius Kircher ◽  
Art And Architecture ◽  
The Church ◽  
Cross Fertilization

The term “Jesuit visual culture” has replaced an earlier interest in “Jesuit style” for studies in Jesuit art and architecture. Multimedia strategies transformed the renovation of the Chapel of St. Ignatius in the Church of the Gesù in Rome into a “devotional machine” by drawing upon such diverse sources as Athanasius Kircher, S.J.’s machines, Andrea Pozzo, S.J.’s set designs (apparati), and early modern Jesuit rhetorical exchanges. The result of the cross-fertilization of art and technology was the construction of a prophetic image, where the global consciousness of early modern Jesuit visual culture sustained a transactional aesthetics premised on technological innovation, systemic connectivity, and redemptive materialism. When the Society of Jesus attempted to craft the future, it ensured the rise and, inadvertently, the fall of the all-too-relative image and the order that had become so closely associated with it.

Chinese Architectural History in the Twenty-First Century

2014 ◽  
Vol 73 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-60
Author(s):  
Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Architectural History ◽  
First Century ◽  
Architectural Practice ◽  
Communist State ◽  
Chinese Architecture ◽  
Cultural Transformations ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Impact

The impact of foreign building traditions on Chinese architecture had been limited until the beginning of the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, dramatic changes in construction occurred as the result of the introduction of Western architectural practice and methods of architectural history, as China transformed from an imperial society to a republic to a communist state. In Chinese Architectural History in the Twenty-First Century, Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt examines the state of architectural history in China at the end of the twentieth century and the impact that recent social and cultural transformations are likely to have on the field in the future.

Visual Culture and Catholicism in the Irish Free State, 1922–1949

2006 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-77 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOHN TURPIN
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Free State ◽  
Stained Glass ◽  
Christian Art ◽  
Irish Free State ◽  
Set Up ◽  
The One ◽  
Art And Architecture ◽  
Modern Form

In the newly independent Irish Free State, a triumphalist Catholicism was embodied visually in mass-produced imagery and revivalist architecture. The Academy of Christian Art was set up in 1929 to regenerate Catholic art and architecture, but it failed to address the challenge of Modernism. A debate between eclectic and modern form was most acute in architecture, where the Hiberno-Romanesque and the neo-Classical were favoured by lay and cleric alike. Stained glass was the one form where Modernism was influential. The culmination of populist Catholicism and its visual representation was the Eucharistic Congress of 1932 with its temporary public altars and massive spectacle: a manifestation of Irish national identity.

Art and Architecture in Provincial England

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Tittler
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Architectural Elements ◽  
Architectural Production ◽  
Art And Architecture ◽  
Active Centres ◽  
Design And Production

This chapter considers the contrasting visual and architectural elements which Shakespeare will have experienced both in his native Stratford and in his frequent travels elsewhere throughout the realm. Two important corrections must be made to the canonical and time-honoured assumption that Shakeapeare’s London was the centre for artistic and architectural production, the hub from which ideas about visual culture entered England and then radiated outwards to the rest of the realm. First, our notions of English ‘art’ and ‘architecture’ must be adjusted in this era to accommodate the role of vernacular painting and building carried out throughout the realm by native-English craftsmen working in traditional modes of design and production. And second, we must acknowledge that, far from being the arid cultural wastelands, provincial towns and cities throughout the realm served as active centres of both painting and building.

scholarly journals Jesuit Visual Culture: Communication, Globalization, and Relationships

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-195
Author(s):  
Alison C. Fleming
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Society Of Jesus ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Works Of Art ◽  
Art And Architecture

The visual arts are a powerful tool of communication, a fact recognized and utilized by the Jesuits from the foundation of the order. The Society of Jesus has long used imagery, works of art and architecture, and other aspects of visual and material culture for varied purposes, and the five articles in this issue of the Journal of Jesuit Studies explore how the art they commissioned exemplifies the ideals, goals, desires, and accomplishments of the Society. In particular, these five scholars examine a wide array of images and ideas to consider myriad relationships between the Society and works of art in the early modern period, and the implications of their increasingly global footprint.

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