Concerning the research “Material history of the built environment and the conservation project” (2008–2020), methodology and results

2021 ◽  
pp. 780-786
Author(s):  
F. Graf ◽  
G. Marino
Author(s):  
Usha Iyer

Dancing Women: Choreographing Corporeal Histories of Hindi Cinema, an ambitious study of two of South Asia’s most popular cultural forms—cinema and dance—historicizes and theorizes the material and cultural production of film dance, a staple attraction of popular Hindi cinema. It explores how the dynamic figurations of the body wrought by cinematic dance forms from the 1930s to the 1990s produce unique constructions of gender, stardom, and spectacle. By charting discursive shifts through figurations of dancer-actresses, their publicly performed movements, private training, and the cinematic and extra-diegetic narratives woven around their dancing bodies, the book considers the “women’s question” via new mobilities corpo-realized by dancing women. Some of the central figures animating this corporeal history are Azurie, Sadhona Bose, Vyjayanthimala, Helen, Waheeda Rehman, Madhuri Dixit, and Saroj Khan, whose performance histories fold and intersect with those of other dancing women, including devadasis and tawaifs, Eurasian actresses, oriental dancers, vamps, choreographers, and backup dancers. Through a material history of the labor of producing on-screen dance, theoretical frameworks that emphasize collaboration, such as the “choreomusicking body” and “dance musicalization,” aesthetic approaches to embodiment drawing on treatises like the Natya Sastra and the Abhinaya Darpana, and formal analyses of cine-choreographic “techno-spectacles,” Dancing Women offers a variegated, textured history of cinema, dance, and music. Tracing the gestural genealogies of film dance produces a very different narrative of Bombay cinema, and indeed of South Asian cultural modernities, by way of a corporeal history co-choreographed by a network of remarkable dancing women.


Author(s):  
Chris Keith

This book offers a new material history of the Jesus tradition. It shows that the introduction of manuscripts to the transmission of the Jesus tradition played an underappreciated but crucial role in the reception history of the tradition that eventuated. It focuses particularly on the competitive textualization of the Jesus tradition, whereby Gospel authors drew attention to the written nature of their tradition, sometimes in attempts to assert superiority to predecessors, and the public reading of the Jesus tradition. Both these processes reveal efforts on the part of early followers of Jesus to place the gospel-as-manuscript on display, whether in the literary tradition or in the assembly. Building upon interdisciplinary work on ancient book cultures, this book traces an early history of the gospel as artifact from the textualization of Mark in the first century until the eventual usage of liturgical reading as a marker of authoritative status in the second and third centuries and beyond. Overall, it reveals a vibrant period of the development of the Jesus tradition, wherein the material status of the tradition frequently played as important a role as the ideas about Jesus that it contained.


MRS Bulletin ◽  
1992 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Becker ◽  
Noreen Tuross

Friable natural products are often used in articles of personal adornment, and the perishable nature of these materials presents a unique challenge to museums. At the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, a collection of gowns worn by the First Ladies of the United States is a popular display of historical and sentimental import. Opened to the public on February 1, 1914, fifteen gowns were displayed as part of a “Period Costumes“ exhibit in the U.S. National Museum (now known as the Arts and Industries Building). Within just a few years, the exhibit was recognized as “one of the most interesting and popular in the Museum.” A First Ladies' Hall was created in the mid-1950s to exhibit the gown collection in period room settings. This design theme continued when the Hall moved to the Museum of American History and Technology (now the National Museum of American History) in 1964. The First Ladies' Hall was closed for renovation in 1987, allowing the curatorial staff to reassess the collection's use and conservators to perform long overdue examinations and treatments. Reinstallation of the exhibit is scheduled for spring 1992.The First Ladies' conservation project includes a history of each gown's use and exhibition as related to its physical condition and also includes stabilization treatments to meet the demands of future display. The current conservation project provided an unusual opportunity for extensive research into fabric deterioration of a popular and important collection. The goals of the research are twofold: first, to determine each object's state of preservation by studying the effectivenss of several analytical approaches with minimal destructive sampling and, second, to begin investigating the mechanisms involved in the degradation of silk, the material predominant in this collection.


Author(s):  
Nadezhda Andreevna Petruseva

The article focuses on the problem of transformation of a musical language, the correlation between an esthetic guideline, an invention, a composition technique and a language. The author describes the two strategies of life and work of Pierre Boulez which allowed him to gain significant cultural authority, and enumerates the persons who had influenced Boulez’s esthetics. In a broad esthetic and philosophical context, the author shows the turn from the technique to the language in esthetical and theoretical texts of Pierre Boulez; describes the three concepts of the language, the period of synthesis following the period of rejection, and Boulez’s concerns about the problems of music perception. In the context of Boulez’s thesis about the unity of an invention, a technique and a language, the author considers the piece for viola “Trema” (1981) by Heinz Holliger, Boulez’s adherent. The author uses a comprehensive approach as a combination of elements of comparative analysis, musical phenomenology (focusing of mind on music structures), and hermeneutics (the process of understanding, interpreting). The research material is of a methodical importance for modern educational courses of theory and history of music. The author arrives at the conclusion that Boulez, as well as Kant, directs the concept of art towards Aristotle's category of “poiesis” as “craft and creation”; focuses on the overcoming of the esthetics of rejection (preceding the classic-romantic tradition) in Boulez’s turn to the period of “synthesis” which includes not only the turn from a technique to a language, but also electroacoustic “sound manufacturing”.  The following aspects of Hollinger’s “Trema” are considered for the first time: the idea, the principles of new solo music, the new technique. The author arrives at the conclusion about “Trema” belonging to the “multilayered music epoch” and that radical rethinking of a musical language sharpens communication.   


2016 ◽  
pp. 79-108 ◽  
Author(s):  
Konrad Matyjaszek

The rules of the reservation. On the book Jewish Poland Revisited by Erica Lehrer The paper offers a review of Erica Lehrer’s Jewish Poland Revisited, a publication presenting outcomes of an anthropological research on Jewish-Polish memory projects in Cracow's former Jewish district of Kazimierz. In a discussion of the book's theses, the author critically analyses Lehrer's postulate of 'ethnography of possibility' and the resultant strategy of approval for contemporary Kazimierz as a 'space of encounter' alongside with its rules of participation, imposed by the Polish proprietors of the district on its visitors.The article focuses on two such rules that condition a visitor’s possibility of participation in shrinking public spaces of Kazimierz. First of these laws is discussed as an imperative of abandoning the immediacy of district's physical space and its histories signified by the surviving built environment. Instead, Lehrer introduces a conceptual division of "social" and "physical" spaces, which leads to silencing of otherwise immediately present evidence of the violent past. The second rule is analyzed as a requirement of accepting the contemporary Polish owners’ role of 'brokers" and "purveyors" of Jewish heritage, consequential with an approval of a doubtful legal and moral title to the appropriated spaces.Through focusing on these rules of participation that determine and perpetuate the conditionality of Jewish presence in the space of Kazimierz, the author argues for a necessity of questioning and re-defining the traditional divisions of disciplines that establish conceptual separations of "social" and "built" spaces, as well as for a necessity of a critical outlook on contemporary Central European understandings of "heritage". Such an inquiry is discussed as conditional for overcoming the largely avoided yet still present "heritages" in the history of Polish-Jewish relations: the traditions of violence and exclusion, either social and spatial. Regulamin rezerwatu. O książce Jewish Poland Revisited Eriki LehrerArtykuł stanowi recenzję książki Jewish Poland Revisited Eriki Lehrer, prezentującej wyniki antropologicznych badań na temat żydowsko-polskich projektów pamięci realizowanych w byłej dzielnicy żydowskiej na krakowskim Kazimierzu. Omawiając tezy pracy, autor poddaje krytycznej analizie proponowany przez Lehrer projekt etnografii możliwości i wynikającą z niego strategię akceptacji współczesnego Kazimierza jako przestrzeni spotkania, za którą idzie akceptacja zasad uczestnictwa narzuconych gościom przez polskich zarządców Kazimierza.W artykule rozpatrywane są dwie takie zasady, warunkujące możliwość uczestnictwa gościa w kurczącej się przestrzeni publicznej Kazimierza. Pierwszą z nich autor opisuje jako nakaz porzucenia bezpośrednio dostępnej, fizycznej przestrzeni dzielnicy i niesionych przez nią historii, których znakiem jest ocalała zabudowa. W to miejsce Lehrer wprowadza podział na przestrzeń społeczną i fizyczną, skutkiem czego stłumione zostają ślady brutalnej przeszłości, w przeciwnym razie bezpośrednio obecne. Drugą zasadę autor odtwarza jako wymóg akceptacji roli współczesnych polskich właścicieli jako brokerów i pośredników żydowskiego dziedzictwa, co w konsekwencji pociąga za sobą akceptację ich wątpliwych prawnie i moralnie roszczeń do zawłaszczonej przestrzeni.Skupienie uwagi na regulaminie uczestnictwa, który ustanawia i utrzymuje warunkowy charakter żydowskiej obecności w przestrzeni Kazimierza, prowadzi autora do wniosku o konieczności rewaluacji i redefinicji tradycyjnego rozdziału dyscyplin, który tworzy konceptualny podział na społeczne przestrzenie i architektoniczne obiekty, oraz do krytycznego namysłu nad obowiązującym obecnie w Europie Środkowo-Wschodniej rozumieniem pojęcia „dziedzictwo”. Tego rodzaju poszukiwanie uznaje autor za warunek przezwyciężenia ignorowanego zwykle, choć mimo wszystko obecnego w polsko-żydowskich stosunkach „dziedzictwa”: tradycji przemocy i wykluczenia, tak społecznego, jak i przestrzennego. 


2018 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 559-561
Author(s):  
Todd Reisz

Depending upon how you approach the matter, it is either humdrum or complicated to ask an architect how he would improve the Gulf region's built environment. Humdrum, because that is what architects do every day: say how they can improve what was done poorly before them. Complicated, because there's a frustrating modern history of experts coming to the Gulf to do just that. In the Arab Gulf countries, architecture is most often assumed to result from imported expertise, certified and purchased abroad. The foundation of that assumption rests in the late colonial British management of Gulf cities. Colonial officers, most often referred to as political agents or political residents, harnessed the built environment to visually convey the bureaucratic order that the British government was instituting where it had suppressed it in the decades before. Modern architecture served as a sleight of optics to foster economic improvement and political stability. It was less style, more content. Literally, the contents of the building: medical machines, cadastral maps, canned foods, air conditioning. In this way, the architect was perceived as a herald and packager of promised technological improvements from afar. And, in many ways, he or she still is perceived as such. And that's a problem worth touching upon.


BUILDER ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 284 (3) ◽  
pp. 15-19
Author(s):  
Wojciech Januszewski

he s ubject o f t his w ork i s a n i ndepth analysis of the structure of the built environment as a system of organised relations. Three elementary aspects expressed in binary oppositions were distinguished: interior – exterior (formal aspect), individual – collective (social aspect), variable – permanent (dynamic aspect). These aspects reflect the diverse psychophysical needs and existential states of a human being. The reorganisation of a habitat is a change in the internal relationships of these categories in a specific region and spatial scale. A healthy environment can be defined as one that balances polar categories at each level of the analysis. Reforms and re-evaluations in the built environment can be interpreted as attempts to restore balance, as illustrated with examples from the history of architecture and urban planning. The results of the work contribute to the general theory of the built environment, essential for the proper design process in a wide spectrum of spatial scale.


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