scholarly journals The Visual Economy of “Precious Books”

2020 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-114
Author(s):  
Zeina Maasri
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Book Publishing ◽  
The Political ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Capitalist Economy ◽  
Art Object ◽  
The Aesthetic

Abstract Shedding light on the postcolonial Arabic book, this article expands the literary and art historical fields of inquiry by bringing into play the translocal design and visual economy of modern art books. It is focused on the short-lived Silsilat al-Nafa'is (Precious Books series, 1967–70), published in Beirut by Dar an-Nahar and edited by modernist poet Yusuf al-Khal (1917–87). The series engaged prominent Arab artists and foregrounded the aesthetic dimension of the printed Arabic book as a “precious” art object. Situated historically at the threshold of contemporary globalization, this publishing endeavor formed a node connecting transnational modernist art and literary circuits with book publishing and was thus paradigmatic of new forms of visuality of the Arabic book. This materiality was enabled by a network of changes in the visual arts, printing technologies, and the political economy of transnational Arabic publishing in late 1960s Beirut. Relations between these three fields are analyzed through a multifaceted lens, focusing on the book as at once a product of intellectual and artistic practice, a commodity in a capitalist economy of publishing, and a translocal artifact of visual and print culture.

Space Making as Artistic Practice: The Relationship between Grassroots Art Organizations and the Political Economy of Urban Development

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 1142-1161 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shira Zilberstein
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Urban Development ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cultural Representations ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Social And Cultural Capital ◽  
Art Organizations ◽  
Do It Yourself ◽  
The Relationship

Standard narratives on the relationship between art and urban development detail art networks as connected to sources of dominant economic, social, and cultural capital and complicit in gentrification trends. This research challenges the conventional model by investigating the relationship between grassroots art spaces, tied to marginal and local groups, and the political economy of development in the Chicago neighborhood of Pilsen. Using mixed methods, I investigate Do–It–Yourself and Latinx artists to understand the construction and goals of grassroots art organizations. Through their engagements with cultural representations, space and time, grassroots artists represent and amplify the interests of marginal actors. By allying with residents, community organizations and other art spaces, grassroots artists form a social movement to redefine the goals and usages of urban space. My findings indicate that heterogeneous art networks exist and grassroots art networks can influence urban space in opposition to top–down development.

Materialities of Abstraction

2021 ◽  
Vol 67 (2) ◽  
pp. 191-214
Author(s):  
Brandon Truett
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Abstract Art ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Material World ◽  
Bloomsbury Group ◽  
Art Object ◽  
Visual Artist ◽  
The Aesthetic

This article recovers the 1918 chapbook that the understudied Vorticist poet and visual artist Jessie Dismorr composed for the American sculptor John Storrs and his wife Marguerite. It examines the ways the chapbook reorients the aesthetic criteria by which we recognize abstraction in the early twentieth century. Studying how Dismorr’s divergent and feminist approach to Vorticist practice exploits “the materialities of abstraction,” or the traces of the material world that evince the outside of the abstract art object, it suggests that these material traces lead us to reimagine the boundary between inside and outside, and thus the way an art object indexes and interacts with the material world. Proposing that the recovery of an object as seemingly inconsequential as an individual chapbook in fact raises questions about how we construct the literary- and art-historical field of modernism, the article situates Dismorr’s work in relation to other feminist understandings in British modernism of the socialized space of artistic practice across media exemplified by Virginia Woolf ’s account of sociability within the Bloomsbury Group, and argues for the importance of such unique objects as chapbooks to the study of material culture within literary history and within art history as well.

Misplaced Polarities: A Comment on “State, Capital and World Economy” by Paul Kellogg

1991 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-133
Author(s):  
Elisabeth Gidengil
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Capital Investment ◽  
World Economy ◽  
The Political ◽  
Dependency Theory ◽  
State Capitalism ◽  
Current Strategy ◽  
Capitalist Economy ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
State Capital

AbstractPaul Kellogg has called on Canadian political economists to break decisively with dependency theory, arguing that Nikolai Bukharin's insights can provide the key to retheorizing Canada as an unqualifiedly advanced capitalist economy. This comment first questions Kellogg's assumption that left-nationalist dependency theorists were ascribing nationalist motivations to capital investment and then goes on to illustrate that the case for Carroll's internationalist thesis is not as strong as Kellogg supposes. Questions are raised about the appropriateness of Bukharin's emphasis on state capitalism and the nationalization of capitalist interests in the light of Canada's current strategy of market-led continentalism. Finally, the argument is made that capitalist laws of motion can provide only a starting point for understanding the political economy of Canada.

scholarly journals Religious Motifs in Polish Contemporary Art Using the Crucifixion: An Outline of the Problem

2020 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 149-166
Author(s):  
Beata Bigaj-Zwonek
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Social Problems ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Artistic Expression ◽  
The Political ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
The World ◽  
Post War

Sacred motifs have a long tradition in art and ample figurative representation. They have been present in the visual arts for numerous reasons, from the need to identify faith to artistic expression based on commonly-known truths and stories saturated with meaning. In the art of the twentieth century, Christian motifs were often an excuse to speak about the world, its threats and fears, and the human condition. Polish artists frequently availed themselves of religious symbols and systems in the post-war era, and during the political transforma­tion of the 1980s, they became a way to articulate uncertainty, expectation, and hope for change. Today, the religious trope is a pretext for artistic commentary on religion, social problems, and internal issues of the creators themselves. The article explores the causes and the nature of artistic practice rooted in Christian iconography in Polish contemporary art, with a particular emphasis on the motif of the crucifixion.

scholarly journals The Oneida Community and the utility of liberal capitalism

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Coffee
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Social Environment ◽  
The Political ◽  
Economic Prosperity ◽  
Capitalist Economy ◽  
Communal Life ◽  
Oneida Community ◽  
The Social ◽  
Liberal Capitalism ◽  
Market Capitalism

Historians studying the utopian Oneida Community have often located its demise in rising internal dissent and failing consensus among its members, with special emphasis on the personal jealousies and generational tensions that its practice of group marriage may have produced. Those studies step past the essential place of work and industry in communal life and especially the community’s theology, which equated economic prosperity with Christian virtue. This essay reframes our understanding of the political economy of the Oneida Community, with specific attention to their last decade, and the social tensions stoked by their reliance upon market capitalism and waged labour. While acknowledging the internal dissent that accompanied the structural demise of the commune, the present study asks how such discord arose from business-centred theology within the social environment of competition and a prolonged economic depression. The Community’s dependence upon the surrounding capitalist economy challenged their self-described ‘Bible communism’ and precipitated its demise.

scholarly journals The Aesthetic Post-Communist Subject and the Differend of Rosia Montana

2012 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 125-141 ◽  
Author(s):  
Irina Velicu
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Social Movements ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Central And Eastern Europe ◽  
Discursive Practice ◽  
Alternative Possibilities ◽  
Capitalist Economy ◽  
Post Communism ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Rosia Montana

By challenging the state and corporate prerogatives to distinguish between “good” and “bad” development, social movements by and in support of inhabitants of Rosia Montana (Transylvania) are subverting prevailing perceptions about Central and Eastern Europe (CEE)’s liberal path of development illustrating its injustice in several ways that will be detailed in this article under the heading “inhibitions of political economy” or Balkanism. The significance of the “Save Rosia Montana” movement for post-communism is that it invites post-communist subjects to reflect and revise their perception about issues such as communism, capitalism and development and to raise questions of global significance about the fragile edifice of justice within the neo-liberal capitalist economy. However, resistance to injustice (and implicitly affirmations of other senses of justice) is an ambiguous discursive practice through which Rosieni make sense as well as partake their sense of Rosia Montana. The movement brings about a public dispute which may be compared with a differend: (in Lyotard’s words), a conflict that cannot be confined to the rules of “cognitive phrases,” of truth and falsehood. This article argues that while post-communist events of “subjectification” are unstable and thus, are to be viewed aesthetically, this same ambiguous multiplication of political subjectivity may facilitate the creation of social spaces for imagining alternative possibilities of development.

scholarly journals The Future of Winckelmann’s Classical Form

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Prettejohn
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Walter Pater ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Classical Form ◽  
Profound Influence ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Historical Importance

Winckelmann’s thought and writing are routinely acknowledged to have had a profound influence on the artistic practices of the half-century after his death, known under the label ‘Neoclassicism’. Standard accounts of modernism in the arts, however, assume that this influence came to an abrupt end around 1815. According to such accounts, the anti-classical reaction that followed the Battle of Waterloo and the demise of Neoclassicism was itself a motive force in the generation of modern art and modernism. This paper argues, on the contrary, that Winckelmann’s ideas not only remained relevant, but gained in power through the generations after the fall of Napoleon. Mediated by critics and artists among whom Walter Pater and Frederic Leighton serve as the principal examples, Winckelmann’s thought made a decisive contribution to twentieth-century modernism. In particular, the articulation in both criticism and artistic practice of ideas about classical form, indebted to Winckelmann, had a subtler and more complex impact on the modernist doctrine of ‘formalism’ than literary or art historians have acknowledged. A renewed attention to classical form will help future scholars to write a more nuanced account of modernism in the visual arts. More importantly, it will call attention to artistic projects that have been excluded from histories of modern art due to reductive assumptions that classicism and modernism are inherently contradictory. The paper concentrates on Frederic Leighton as a case study of an artist whose historical importance and aesthetic merit have been occluded by reductive thinking of this kind.

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