A Call to Otherness: Inscribing Digital Vernaculars into the Art Institution

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 94-115
Author(s):  
Gabriel Menotti
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Art History ◽  
Media Culture ◽  
Digital Arts ◽  
Western Art ◽  
The World ◽  
Aesthetic Forms

In the mid-2010s, a number of renowned museums and galleries across the world held retrospective exhibitions positioning digital arts within western art history. While inscribing some techno-aesthetic forms and behaviours into the contemporary arts institution, these exhibitions nevertheless cemented the exclusion of others. By examining the role and shortcomings of curatorial practices in this process, this article seeks to frame curating as an art of inclusion able to carve institutional and epistemic space for otherness. In doing so, I argue for the relevance of devices for noticing, defined as a range of tactics that enable the apprehension of digital vernaculars – everyday, ‘lower’ expressions of digital media culture – within institutional sites and discourses. Through these tactics, curators may provoke under-represented cultural actors, forms and behaviours into recognition, reverse the violence of institutional occlusion, and fertilize art histories.

Depicting gestures

Gesture ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jürgen Streeck
Keyword(s):  
Visual Arts ◽  
Art History ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Abstract Expressionism ◽  
Body Motion ◽  
Pictorial Representation ◽  
Western Art ◽  
The World ◽  
Embodied Communication ◽  
Late Renaissance

In “Depicting by gestures” (Gesture, 8 (3)), I have explored the methods by which hand gestures depict the world. Here I explore how gestures themselves are depicted. Many paintings and sculptures show human bodies in motion or showcase traces of body movements, including gestures of the hand. The issue is how the artists succeeded in depicting or insinuating movement in media that are inherently still, and how such arrested gestures function in pictures of social life so that these are perceived as “legible interactions” (Gombrich). By scrutinizing the changing logic of representation of embodied communication in the visual arts, gesture researchers can gain insights into the relationships between movement, form, meaning, and context, and recontextualize their own analytic methodologies within the broader discourse in the humanities on human behavior and its interpretation (Streeck, 2003).
 In the following, I examine a number of characteristic attempts, made during different periods of Western art-history, to solve this problem: in Egyptian, Greek, and Hellenistic art; in some medieval illuminations; in the early and late Renaissance; and in the 20th century styles of “écriture automatique” and Abstract Expressionism. Each of the strategies involved is predicated on three types of analysis: of ways in which body motion communicates meaning, of visual perception, and of the nature of pictorial representation.

3. A global art history?

2020 ◽  
pp. 48-62
Author(s):  
Dana Arnold
Keyword(s):  
South America ◽  
Art History ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Western Art ◽  
The World ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Yuan Dynasty ◽  
North And South America ◽  
Global Art ◽  
North And South

Are the practices of Western art history appropriate for the study of art from cultures outside its geographical boundaries and conventional timeframe? The bias in this interpretation of the subject opens up the questions of the importance of the canon in art history and how we view non-figurative, primitive, and naive art. ‘A global art history?’ considers a range of different examples of artistic practice from around the world, including the sculpture of the Dogon people of Mali and the calligraphy of Wu Zhen, who was active during the Yuan Dynasty (1271–1368). It also discusses what is meant by the ‘primitive’ arts of Oceania, Africa, and North and South America.

Coda: The Rosetta Stone

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Schotter
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Media ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Digital Code ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Rosetta Stone ◽  
The World ◽  
Western Imagination ◽  
Origin Point

Hieroglyphs have persisted for so long in the Western imagination because of the malleability of their metaphorical meanings. Emblems of readability and unreadability, universality and difference, writing and film, writing and digital media, hieroglyphs serve to encompass many of the central tensions in understandings of race, nation, language and media in the twentieth century. For Pound and Lindsay, they served as inspirations for a more direct and universal form of writing; for Woolf, as a way of treating the new medium of film and our perceptions of the world as a kind of language. For Conrad and Welles, they embodied the hybridity of writing or the images of film; for al-Hakim and Mahfouz, the persistence of links between ancient Pharaonic civilisation and a newly independent Egypt. For Joyce, hieroglyphs symbolised the origin point for the world’s cultures and nations; for Pynchon, the connection between digital code and the novel. In their modernist interpretations and applications, hieroglyphs bring together writing and new media technologies, language and the material world, and all the nations and languages of the globe....

Pigs and Humans

2007 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
Domestic Pigs ◽  
Food Taboo ◽  
The World

Pigs are one of the most iconic but also paradoxical animals ever to have developed a relationship with humans. This relationship has been a long and varied one: from noble wild beast of the forest to mass produced farmyard animal; from a symbol of status and plenty to a widespread religious food taboo; from revered religious totem to a parodied symbol of filth and debauchery. Pigs and Humans brings together some of the key scholars whose research is highlighting the role wild and domestic pigs have played in human societies around the world over the last 10,000 years. The 22 contributors cover a broad and diverse range of temporal, geographical, and topical themes, grounded within the disciplines of archaeology, zoology, anthropology, and biology, as well as art history and history. They explore such areas as evolution and taxonomy, domestication and husbandry, ethnography, and ritual and art, and present some of the latest theories and methodological techniques. The volume as a whole is generously illustrated and will enhance our understanding of many of the issues regarding our complex and ever changing relationship with the pig.

Liquid power: reading the infinity pool as a global semioscape

2021 ◽  
pp. 147035722098482
Author(s):  
Crispin Thurlow
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Cultural Politics ◽  
Primary Objective ◽  
Analytic Structure ◽  
Visual Texts ◽  
Visual Material ◽  
The World

The analytic focus of this article is the highly fashionable ‘infinity pool’, treated here as a visual-material realization of the cultural politics of super-elite mobility. The article is organized around a three-step analytic structure. First, I demonstrate how the infinity pool is mediatized as a status marker, and thus circulated and normalized. Second, I pinpoint the semiotic and ideological ways the infinity pool emerges as a mediated practice. Third, I examines how the infinity pool is also remediated on Instagram and thereby broadcast anew. Throughout, I evidence my analysis with visual texts drawn from a range of commercial, situated and digital media sources. My primary objective is to show how the infinity pool, as a mediatized, mediated and remediated practice, feeds the global semioscape, that more informal, often banal plane of cultural circulation where images, ideas and aesthetic ideals seed themselves all over the place. In this way, and however frivolous or innocuous infinity pools may seem, they also spread a particularly privileged way of looking at, and being in, the world.

Brief Analysis for the Aesthetic Form of Chinese Garden Art

2014 ◽  
Vol 584-586 ◽  
pp. 650-653 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bian Ling Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Development History ◽  
Artistic Conception ◽  
High Uniformity ◽  
Aesthetic Form ◽  
The World ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Aesthetic Forms

Chinese garden art has developed gradually along with the neutralization--lasting appeal--artistic conception trend till to the peak, meanwhile, those aesthetic forms can be existed synchronously with historical advancement, logic arrangement in parallel and correspondence as well as abundance and deepening of the interior connotation and exterior extension, which represent the high uniformity of the development history and logics of Chinese garden art. Nowadays, the landscape garden development is required to probe its root, explore its cultural soul, so as to base itself upon the garden industry all over the world. Additionally, the function of traditional aesthetic form will show the powerful functions, declare publicly the deep influence of modernized landscape garden development.

Baroque and the Political Language of Formalism (1845–1945): Burckhardt, Wölfflin, Gurlitt, Brinckmann, Sedlmayr

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Evonne Levy
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Art History ◽  
Architectural History ◽  
The Political ◽  
Nazi Party ◽  
Political Views ◽  
The World ◽  
Art Historians ◽  
Central Argument

<P>This study in intellectual history places the art historical concept of the Baroque amidst world events, political thought, and the political views of art historians themselves. Exploring the political biographies and writings on the Baroque (primarily its architecture) of five prominent Germanophone figures, Levy gives a face to art history, showing its concepts arising in the world. From Jacob Burckhardt’s still debated "Jesuit style" to Hans Sedlmayr’s <I>Reichsstil</I>, the Baroque concepts of these German, Swiss and Austrian art historians, all politically conservative, and two of whom joined the Nazi party, were all took shape in reaction to immediate social and political circumstances. </P> <P>A central argument of the book is that basic terms of architectural history drew from a long established language of political thought. This vocabulary, applied in the formalisms of Wölfflin and Gurlitt, has endured as art history’s unacknowledged political substrate for generations. Classic works, like Wölfflin’s <I>Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe</I> are interpreted anew here, supported by new documents from the papers of each figure.</P>

Epistemic media and critical knowledge about the self: Thinking about algorithms with Habermas

2021 ◽  
pp. 089692052110441
Author(s):  
Eran Fisher
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
The Self ◽  
Theory Of Knowledge ◽  
Digital Platforms ◽  
Self Reflection ◽  
Types Of Knowledge ◽  
Critical Knowledge ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

This article explores the ontology of personal knowledge that algorithms on digital media create by locating it on two axes: historical and theoretical. Digital platforms continue a long history of epistemic media—media forms and practices, which not only communicate knowledge, but also create knowledge. As epistemic media allowed a new way to know the world, they also facilitated a new way of knowing the self. This historical perspective also underscores a key difference of digital platforms from previous epistemic media: their exclusion of self-reflection from the creation of knowledge about the self. To evaluate the ramifications of that omission, I use Habermas’s theory of knowledge, which distinguishes critical knowledge from other types of knowledge, and sees it as corresponding with a human interest in emancipation. Critical knowledge about the self, as exemplified by psychoanalysis, must involve self-reflection. As the self gains critical knowledge, deciphering the conditions under which positivist and hermeneutic knowledges are valid, it is also able to transform them and expand its realm of freedom, or subjectivity. As digital media subverts this process by demoting self-reflection, it also undermines subjectivity.

scholarly journals The grotesque as it appears in Western art history and in Ian Marley’s creative creatures

Literator ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-54
Author(s):  
R. Swanepoel
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
Western History ◽  
Western Art ◽  
History Of Art ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Grotesque

This article presents a theoretical exploration and reading of the notion of the grotesque in Western history of art to serve as background to the reading of the original creatures in the “Tracking creative creatures” project.1 These creatures were drawn by Marley, based on imaginary creatures narrated by his five year-old son, Joshua. The focus in this article is on the occurrence of the grotesque in paintings and drawings. Three techniques associated with the grotesque are identified: the presence of imagined fusion figures or composite creatures, the violation and exaggeration of standing categories or concepts, and the juxtaposition of the ridiculous and the horrible. The use of these techniques is illustrated in selected artworks and Marley’s creatures are then read from the angle of these strategies.

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