Pictorial Art, Viewed from the Standpoint of Mental Organization As Revealed by the Excitatory Abreaction Techniques of Psychiatry

1953 ◽  
Vol 99 (414) ◽  
pp. 136-143 ◽  
Author(s):  
N. C. Colquhoun ◽  
Harold Palmer

The pictorial work of art bears witness, above all else, to the process of creation. Whatever it is that differentiates a work of art from mere skilled productivity—(and aesthetic theories rage about this issue)—it would appear that only in the case of the former is the spectator made conscious of that heightened scale of perception, at once purposive, integrated, and whole, which is the distinguishing feature of creative activity. And if we admit the principle of creativity in artistic expression, then we must seek in paintings something more than a reproduction of external appearance. The visible world indeed is the raw material of art, but it is moulded and fashioned by the artist according to his own purposes and, it is now suggested, by certain qualities of reminiscence. As a consequence of the relation which exists between his own emotional life and these qualities he creates in pictures a world of reality which has for him a compelling intensity—an irradiance in which he finds meaning and justification for his work. It is the embodiment of some new state of comprehension, bringing order, coherence and purpose to what otherwise would be formless and lacking in meaning. This world re-born, founded in experience, is invested with conviction and validity. The making of such an extra-sensory world is at the heart of creativity, for only so can the artist create the conditions for a communicable experience. A purely private world is mysterious and incommunicable, and does not provide the conditions in which schools of art can develop.

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-98
Author(s):  
Stephen Adam Schwartz

In his text on the ‘Exposition Universelle 1855’, Baudelaire upholds what he calls ‘cosmopolitisme’ as the antidote to the constraining influence of universalizing principles of taste that are meant to define beauty for all times and places. Baudelaire’s view is that such aesthetic systems close off the possibility of beauty, which, he maintains must contain an element of novelty. Accordingly, the proper attitude for the viewer (or reader or spectator) to take before a work of art is one that remains always open to novelty and to the ‘universal vitality’ out of which it springs. This attitude is the cosmopolitan one. Yet Baudelaire characterizes this attitude in ways that seem fundamentally incompatible if not diametrically opposed. On the one hand, cosmopolitanism as described in this text seems to involve the slow, lived apprenticeship in the values, ways of life, and criteria of judgement of those in other places, the better to be able to appreciate the beauty of the objects produced in them. On the other, he speaks of the appropriate attitude toward an aesthetic object — indeed toward any object that presents itself to our senses — as one resulting solely from the spectator’s exertions on his or her own mind and will, exertions by which the spectator refrains from imposing criteria of judgement upon the putative aesthetic object in order, instead, to derive one’s criteria from it. While the text on the ‘Exposition’ provides the reader with no way of resolving this contradiction, Baudelaire’s remarks on fashion in ‘Le Peintre de la vie moderne’ (1863) provide a dialectical resolution.


Author(s):  
Giulia Crespi

The duo “Art and Space” looks very easy to understand: art interacts with spaces, uses spaces or simply fills spaces. However, starting from this simple consideration, what this chapter would like to propose is a reflection about a kind of art that creates spaces and places instead, expanding the discussion about the interdisciplinary approach of artists to creation. Considering the works of some artist that have made the intervention on spaces one of their prerogatives, the research would like to focus on the new connections that arise between the artist and the public through these creations. The imagery of Yayoi Kusama, Tomas Saraceno, Anish Kapoor, Cristina Iglesias, Carsten Nicolai, Rudolf Stingel, among others, allows a different perception and fruition, most of time asking to the spectator itself to be an active part in the work of art.


2013 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 308-321 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Kemp

This article argues that Sophie Calle's desire to become her own work of art exists in tension with the fear of becoming a mere product for consumption. Recognising this fear of commodification allows us to view Calle's work from a couple of new angles. Firstly, it tells a compelling story about contemporary emotional life, in particular, the emotional demands made of women. Drawing on sociological perspectives, this article will explore Calle's work in relation to a commercial culture that turns the traditionally ‘feminine’ emotional domain into a lucrative resource. Secondly, it allows us to see Calle's art-making as a form of defence against this injunction to ‘sell oneself’. In a consumer culture in which one's sense of a private self is pushed further and further into a corner, art appears as a refuge in which one's creative singularity may be preserved.


2014 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
KATIA ARFARA

Originating from the avant-garde's attempt to supplant the structural limitations of perspective which ‘bound the spectator to a single point of view’, installation art emerged during the 1960s and the 1970s as a critique of the pure, self-referential work of art. Belgian artist Kris Verdonck integrates that modernist debate into his hybrid practice of performative installation. Trained in visual arts, architecture and theatre, Verdonck uses sophisticated technological devices in order to blur binary distinctions such as time- and space-art, inanimate and animate figures, and immateriality and materiality. This study focuses on End (Brussels 2008), which shows the possible final stages of a human society in ten scenes. I analyse End as an echo of the Futurists’ performance tactics, which prefigured a broadening of the formal aesthetic boundaries of performance art under the major influence of Henri Bergson's theory of time.


2018 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 70-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalie Edwards

The mobility of people and objects is a central motif in the work of contemporary artist Sophie Calle. In this article, I compare two of Calle’s exhibitions that take a particularly unusual approach to mobility. In Fantômes and Prenez soin de vous, the objects are an email and works of art and their mobility arises from their displacement. In both exhibitions, Calle obliges the spectator to look at other people looking at the artefacts, which I refer to as the ‘double look’. In this article, I analyse how this technique serves to question the notion of a unitary, individual artist behind each work of art, how it questions the parameters of spectatorship, and how it challenges understandings of intimacy in contemporary culture.


2018 ◽  
pp. 260-269
Author(s):  
Elena Stepanowna Perelomowa

The article discusses the organization of linguistic postmodern literary text. Analyzes the poetic works of Ukrainian postmodern art discourse for selection by the authors of language means of expression to achieve communicative goals. Word in a work of art does not only nominative function, it is used in a subjectify lingual space and determine speechthinking freedom of speaker. The author draws attention to the fact that the poetic function of language, along with the reference, ambiguity and gives it an opportunity for the ambiguity of the utterance. In connection with this understanding of the meaning of art depends on the different attitudes to the very subject of the statement saying, an the method of reading the text. Related words in the concept of becoming unfit for the image “literal” pattern of life. Therefore, a clear sign of postmodernism become Ukrainian verbal games, heteroglossy languages, discourse, linguistic hybrids, marginal dictionaries. He rejects the discourse of a totalitarian society, the official lexicon of Soviet-style language as inadequate to express the individual senses and feelings, instead of resorting to repetition of words, obscene language, citations, etc. The essence of the product is replaced by rhythmic melodic phrase, a phrase open to freely attach to it any associative chain. In the process of generation of artistic expression is present in the selection principle nonselection linguistic means of expression. The dialogue is born and polylogue game between the text of culture, the reader, the author.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (2021-2) ◽  
pp. 68-83
Author(s):  
Peter de Cupere

The sense of smell is a powerful sense that offers many possibilities. To speak of olfactory art, there must be the intention to use odour or olfaction as both context and concept of the work of art. For this, we speak about the terms Olfactory Context and Olfactory Concept. The Olfactory Context can be divided into the Intrinsic and Intentional Odour Values. The intrinsic odour value brings with it their significance, while the intentional odour value gives an extra meaning to a smell. In addition, the Olfactory Perception is part of the Olfactory Concept of the artwork. To perceive this, the smell must be transferred to the spectator. The way in which an odour is transferred in a work largely determines how the smell is interpreted in relation to the work. The odour transfer and odour situation determine how an odour gets to the viewer. We call these methods of odour transfer Olfactory Transfers and divide them into five categories: Flowers, Smell Devices, Scent Spaces, Time and Translations. In most cases, Olfactory Transfers are used in crossovers. Together with the various possibilities of using the Olfactory Context, they also demonstrate the Complexity of Olfactory Art. The 1st Olfactory Art Manifest explains the differences in olfactory art, while the 2nd Olfactory Art Manifest demonstrates the Complexity of Olfactory Art.


1994 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 148-155
Author(s):  
Eli Rozik

In the last century it has become commonplace that faithfulness to the playwright, and the play, is not necessarily a commendable quality. The play is currently viewed as raw material for a production, a pre-text for a more complex and final text, which reflects the universe of the director rather than that of the playwright. The performance is a work of art in which dialogue is only one component among others, although usually of crucial importance. Similarly, the playwright is viewed as merely the designer of the verbal aspects of the final text, among other designers. The director, in contrast, is viewed as the actual sender of the message and accountable to audience and critics for the results of his decisions: whether he or she has impoverished or enriched the play, whether or not he or she succeeded in conveying some new insight. Without elaborating on a justification of this view, there is no doubt that the production of Ionesco's The Chairs, directed by Rina Yerushalmi at the Cameri Theatre, Tel Aviv, 1990, is a clear instance of such an approach.Perhaps the most striking decision of Yerushalmi was to get rid of any deviation from consistent characterization, although prescribed by the playwright in the stage directions of the play. Following Martin Esslin, with regard to plays within the style of the so-called ‘Theatre of the Absurd’, such deviations are among the features which are held responsible for the sense of absurdity and/or grotesque that such texts produce in the audience.


2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 40
Author(s):  
Mei-Hsin Chen

Eduardo Chillida’s The Comb of the Wind XV, embedded in natural rocks rising from the Cantabrian Ocean in 1977, expresses the artistic potential of air as a material, a metaphor, and as an art-maker. With this sculpture, Chillida opened up the possibility for air itself to show indefinite imageries. Although much has been written about this sculptural group from different perspectives, no study has been systematically undertaken to analyze it regarding the theme of the matter of air, which should be considered the core of the work of art. As Gaston Bachelard stated: ‘Chillida wished the iron [of The Comb of the Wind XV] to show aerial realities.’ Hence, this article seeks to study to what ‘aerial realities’ Chillida might refer, and the relationship between air and his artwork. First, this paper delves into the meanings and functions that air involves in Chillida’s artwork, as well as into how the sculptor embodied his poetic of air and allowed the spectator to perceive his sculptural installation with five senses. Also, the interaction between Chillida’s work and Luis Peña Ganchegui’s architectural installation La Plaza del Tenis is examined under the scope of Martin Heidegger’s notion of place. All these aspects are discussed to help readers realize why the air in natural motion is the foundation of The Comb of the Wind XV, and map the holistic imagery of air that Chillida intended to express.


2019 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 337-354
Author(s):  
Charles Bobant ◽  

Dans ce travail, nous tentons de démontrer que l’interrogation merleau-pontienne sur l’art s’ordonne selon trois mouvements spéculatifs distincts et successifs. Dans les années quarante, l’élaboration d’une phénoménologie de la perception conduit Merleau-Ponty à aborder l’art à partir de l’oeuvre d’art et du sujet percevant qui la reçoit, c’est-à-dire du spectateur. Au début des années cinquante, cette phénoménologie de l’oeuvre d’art et de la perception esthétique fait place à une philosophie de l’expression. Le point de départ du questionnement artistique change : il est, non plus le sens exprimé, mais l’acte expressif ou créateur. La signification de l’oeuvre d’art se voit dès lors ressaisie à partir du sens d’être de l’artiste : l’oeuvre est une réponse aux manques perceptifs de l’artiste. À la fin des années cinquante, le cheminement merleau-pontien connaît un tournant ontologique. Merleau-Ponty en vient à régresser en-deçà de l’artiste, vers l’Être même, lequel s’impose finalement comme le créateur véritable. La dernière philosophie de l’art merleau-pontienne prend dès lors les allures d’une traditionnelle philosophie de l’inspiration.In this work, we undertake to demonstrate that the merleau-pontian inquiry into art orders itself according to three distinct and successive speculative movements. In the 1940s, the elaboration of a phenomenology of perception led Merleau-Ponty to approach art starting from the work of art and the perceiving subject who receives it, the spectator. From the beginning of the 1950s, this phenomenology of the work of art and aesthetic perception gave way to a philosophy of expression. The point of departure for artistic questioning changes: it is no longer the meaning expressed, but the expressive or creative act. The signification of the work of art sees itself from this moment understood starting from the meaning of being for the artist: the work is a response to perceptive omissions (manques perceptifs) of the artist. At the end of the 1950s, the merleau-pontian progress of thought experiences an ontological turning. Merleau-Ponty wants to regress below the artist, toward Being itself, which imposes itself finally as the true creator. The last merleau-pontian philosophy of art takes from this moment the aspects of a traditional philosophy of inspiration.In questo lavoro cerchiamo di mostrare come l’interrogazione merleau-pontiana attorno all’arte si dispieghi secondo tre movimenti speculativi distinti e successivi. Negli anni Quaranta l’elaborazione di una fenomenologia della percezione porta Merleau-Ponty a esaminare l’arte a partire dall’opera e dal soggetto percipiente che la fruisce, ossia dallo spettatore. All’inizio degli anni Cinquanta, tale fenomenologia dell’opera d’arte e della percezione estetica cede il passo a una filosofia dell’espressione. Il punto di partenza dell’interrogazione artistica cambia: non è più il senso espresso, ma l’atto espressivo o creativo. Il significato dell’opera d’arte è quindi ricompreso a partire dal senso d’essere dell’artista: l’opera è una risposta alle lacune percettive dell’artista. Alla fine degli anni Cinquanta assistiamo a una svolta ontologica nell’itinerario merleau-pontiano. La ricerca di Merleau-Ponty ci conduce al di qua dell’artista, verso l’Essere stesso, che s’impone infine come l’autentico creatore. L’ultima filosofia dell’arte merleau-pontiana assume i contorni di una tradizionale filosofia dell’ispirazione.


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