The symptomatology of a surpassing disaster: Narrativization and temporality in the work of Walid Raad

Maska ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 35 (200) ◽  
pp. 84-101
Author(s):  
Kaja Kraner

Since the 1990s, the common thread to artistic practices based on the collection, archiving and presentation of historical documents can be derived from what is happening with the space, time and the regimes of visibility and knowledge as part of digital reproductivity. Nevertheless, roughly two separate key approaches can be identified: construction approaches that are often designed as an intervention in the dominant historiographical practice, on the one hand, and approaches focusing on the study of infrastructural, epistemological and other conditions for the possibility of archiving and historicization in general, on the other. The latter approaches frequently question the standard treatment of documents that is most often based on the ability to trace their origin as well as on their presumptive expressive and narrative potentials. The article therefore analyses the approach to studying history adopted by Lebanese-American artist Walid Raad, drawing from the performance-lecture Les Louvres and/or Kicking the Dead, which is part of a broader project about “a history of art in the Arab world”. In the process of defining the specifics of Raad’s approach based on the concepts of “spaces of interrupted histories” and “self-historicization”, the article draws a comparison between artistic uses of documents in the context of former socialist countries and the Middle East or, more specifically, the Lebanese socio-political context. Instead of unifying both “spaces of interrupted histories” by focusing on narrativization and temporality in Raad’s work, I concentrate mostly on the differences.

1924 ◽  
Vol 14 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 142-157
Author(s):  
Jocelyn Toynbee

The history of art in the Roman period is the history of the interplay of two opposite tendencies. On the one hand there is the Roman taste for realism and accurate representation, combining with the Italian love of naturalism; on the other, the fostering of the Greek tradition of idealism in art both by the Greek artists who worked at Rome and by the Greek enthusiasts among their Roman employers. After the culmination of Roman historical art under the Flavians and Trajan, the second century, as is well known, was marked by a great reaction in favour of things Hellenic, and it is with one small part of the Greek revival under Hadrian and the Antonines, when Greek art blossomed afresh for the last time during the history of the ancient world, that I propose to deal in this paper.


ARTMargins ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 55-76
Author(s):  
Nikolas Drosos

Focusing on a series of exhibitions of modern art from the 1950s to the early 1970s, this article traces the frictions between two related, yet separate endeavors during the first postwar decades: on the one hand, the historicizing of modernism as a specifically European story; and on the other, the constitution of an all-encompassing concept of “World Art” that would integrate all periods and cultures into a single narrative. The strategies devised by exhibition organizers, analyzed here, sought to maintain the distance between World Art and modernism, and thus deferred the possibility of a more geographically expansive view of twentieth-century art. Realist art from the Soviet bloc and elsewhere occupied an uneasy position in such articulations between World Art and modernism, and its inclusion in exhibitions of modern art often led to the destabilizing of their narratives. Such approaches are contrasted here with the prominent place given to both realism and non-Euro-American art from the twentieth century in the Soviet Universal History of Art, published from 1956 to 1965. Against the context of current efforts at a “global” perspective on modern art, this article foregrounds the instances when the inner contradictions of late modernism's universalist claims were first exposed.


1991 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 53-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dina Rizk Khoury

The literature on merchants and trade in the early modern Middle East is still rudimentary. Although the period witnessed basic changes in trade patterns of the region, there have been very few regional studies addressing the nature of trade and the various groups engaged in it, either from an internal or local perspective or from an international one (Masters, 1988; Raymond, 1984; Abdel-Nour, 1982). For much of the Arab world there is a gap in the literature between Goitein's and Ashtor's works on the Middle Ages on the one hand, and the eighteenth century on the other when northern European companies acquired a strong foothold in the area (Goitein, 1966, 1967; Ashtor, 1978). For Iraq there exist almost no general works on the early Ottoman period and the Iraqi archives remain inaccessible. Thus, any conclusions on trade and merchants in Iraq during this period are by necessity tentative and general. There are a number of issues that can be raised with respect to early modern Iraq, however, which are relevant to the history of early modern trade in general.


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Silvia Bordini

The involvement of art in tv devices is examined from a double point of view: on the one hand, the use of tv as a divulgation tool that compares the history of art, entertainment and spectacularization; and on the other, the interpretation of tv as a tool for artistic experimentation. The hypothesis of a cultural use of the potential of audiovisual communication is elaborated in particular by numerous art historians, with different initiatives that reflect the variants of the very notion of art history and art criticism. The hypothesis of TV as a possible tool for making art according to unprecedented linguistic modulations starts from Lucio Fontana in the context of spatialist theories and then develops autonomously in the specific of new technological languages: the programs, the devices and the physicality of the television itself were in fact the first "material" that the artists used to elaborate what went down in history as "videoart". In the paths outlined in this short essay, television has taken on the significance of a strongly symbolic medium, in the alternation of different and often contrasting messages and models, linked to a variety of cultural and ideological positions.


1999 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 272-288 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cecily Hilsdale

AbstractMedieval Spanish art posed a particular problem for art historians due to the difficulty in reconciling strcmg formal differences between perceived Classicism on the one hand and foreign "Mozarabic" elements on the other. The connotations of such formal designations reveal much about larger perceptions of historical development at the beginning of this century. The term "Mozarabic" in early essays by Meyer Schapiro among others attained its definition solely in opposition to other earlier and later styles. It was understood in a pejorative light as the inferior counterpart to other formal idioms such as the Romanesque.


Author(s):  
Ulisse Dogà

The figure of the cultural anthropologist Furio Jesi has experienced a major rediscovery in recent years thanks to the commendable republication of his books and the publication of numerous unpublished works. In this rediscovery, however, a non-secondary aspect of this multifaceted author still remains in shadow, namely his philosophical and hermeneutic interest in the idea of translation. There are many traces of Jesi’s interest in the theory of translation. A volume entitled Translation and Duplicity of Languages was not completed, but there are some chapters from this project (already published in magazines) and materials still awaiting publication. After the study of Walter Benjamin’s Essays on Language, translation represents for Jesi a fundamental ‘linguistic’ junction of the relationship between the sacred and the profane, between myth and mythologem, between the origin and history of language. The aim of this essay will be to reconstruct and clarify Jesi’s idea of ‘translatability’, trying to trace a common thread among the theoretical essays in which Jesi determines translation as a further gnoseological background of his ‘mythological machine’ on the one hand, and the excursus of history of the language and his critical essays on literature on the other.


Author(s):  
Sophie Loidolt

This chapter traces the common thread running through the three main ethical approaches in the history of phenomenology: a personalistic ethics of values and feelings, an existentialist ethics of freedom and authenticity, and an ethics of alterity and responsibility. Although their topics and results may plainly differ, the chapter argues that what makes each of them a specifically phenomenological approach is that the key terms of subjectivity, experience, and intentionality become relevant for ethical argumentation. In this way, phenomenological approaches demonstrate how ethical issues can gain relevance for us in the first place. Furthermore, they elaborate on different forms of “ethical experience”—ranging from emotions (such as love) as a way of experiencing values, and affective experiences (such as anxiety) as a form of existential self-encounter, to experiences that exceed the realm of emotions and embrace the dimensions of speech and interaction (such as the experience of the other).


Archaeologia ◽  
1831 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
pp. 277-298
Author(s):  
Thomas Amyot

In an Enquiry which I addressed to you some years ago, concerning the death of Richard the Second, I took occasion to advert to the rumours prevalent after the date usually assigned to that event, relative to his supposed escape into Scotland, and his death and burial at Stirling. The story on which these rumours were founded, and to which no credit had been given by any English historian of established reputation, has lately been revived, and its truth defended with much plausibility and ingenuity, by Mr. Fraser Tytler, in an elaborate Dissertation subjoined to the third volume of his valuable History of Scotland. The name and authority of the writer would be sufficient to excite attention to his statements, even if they had not already attracted the notice of two of the most distinguished of his countrymen, though with different results as to the impression produced on them. Sir Walter Scott, on the one hand, has fully avowed his belief in the relation, while on the other, Sir James Mackintosh has, with equal decision, expressed his dissent from it. Had it fallen within the plan of the latter eminent person to state the reasons for his adherence to the common narrative more in detail, and with reference to the authorities on which they were grounded, any further attempt on my part to investigate the subject would have been superfluous. But, as the case now stands, I may be permitted to offer a more circumstantial reply to Mr. Tytler's arguments, bearing in mind the courtesy he has uniformly shown in his references to my former observations.


Obiter ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Eltjo Schrage

Within both the civil law and the common law (as well as in mixed legal systems), there are means of acquiring and losing rights, or of freeing ourselves from obligations with the passage of time. The reason for this is at least twofold: on the one hand, for a claimant, a dispossessed owner or a creditor, limitation and prescription provide stimuli for bringing the action; on the other, this sanction upon the negligence of the claimant implies in many cases a windfall for the defendant. If a creditor is negligent in protecting his assets, the law at a certain stage no longer protects him or her. As Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. said aptly some 100 years ago: “Sometimes it is said that, if a man neglects to enforce his rights, he cannot complain if, after a while, the law follows his example”.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara De Poli

The symbolic and historical dimension of the main founding archetypes of Freemasonry – the Orient with a special focus on Egypt – are at the core of this book, which aims to recover the red thread with which masons tie together Masonry and Oriental esotericism. If, on the one hand, the Author points out mystifications and inventions that have characterised part of the Masonic narrative on its origins; on the other hand, she unearths the history of real contaminations and intersections between esotericism of the East and the West, digging up the common matrix that nourished them.


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