The artwork as an ecological object

2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Goodfellow
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Processes ◽  
Ecological Systems ◽  
Material Object ◽  
Original Material ◽  
Ecological Awareness ◽  
Robert Smithson ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Underlying Processes ◽  
Vast Network

Contemporary art is not a simple system based on the creation and dissemination of aesthetic and conceptual objects, but a complex set of institutional and social processes with different motivations, audiences and environments. Likewise, the contemporary artwork cannot be represented as a singular object, but a complex set of material, technological, social and psychic relations. This complexity can be traced to the 1960s when three cultural developments: the expansion of the artwork, the increase in ecological awareness and the proliferation of systems thinking, and systems technology converged, shifting our focus from the material world to the underlying processes, relationships and data. This understanding leads to a focused description of the complex artwork Spiral Jetty by Robert Smithson and how this work can be understood in systems, specifically ecological-systems terms. Such complex work extends beyond the confinement of the original material object to include a vast network of physical and social relations, and this expanded work is more accurately described as simultaneously system and object, or ecological object.

Public Architecture in Ancient Mesoamerica

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Takeshi Inomata
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Social Processes ◽  
Political Organization ◽  
Public Buildings ◽  
Underlying Assumption ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Diverse Groups ◽  
Public Architecture

The study of temple-pyramids and other public buildings has long been an important focus in Mesoamerican archaeology. Scholars generally use the term public architecture to refer to structures for use, visitations, and gatherings beyond individual households, but the term public needs to be examined more critically. Public buildings are tied to the formation and transformation of the public sphere, a social field shaped in specific historical contexts that enables and restrains the political action of people. Traditional studies commonly viewed public buildings as reflections of society, political organization, or worldviews. Investigations before the 1960s often focused on the descriptions of public buildings or used them to define cultural areas and traditions. The rise of processual archaeology in the 1960s and 1970s encouraged researchers to examine social processes through the analysis of buildings. Some scholars assumed that the size of public buildings and the labor investments in their constructions reflected the levels of political centralization. At the same time, the symbolic aspect of buildings continued to be an important theme in Mesoamerican archaeology. The underlying assumption was that public buildings, through their shapes and orientations, or associated images and texts, represented worldviews or cosmologies. While these approaches continue to be common, various Mesoamerican archaeologists have begun to examine the recursive processes in which buildings shaped, and were shaped by, society. In this framework, some scholars focus on people’s actions and perceptions, whereas others view buildings as active agents in social processes. Sensory perceptions, particularly visibility, are examined as critical media, through which the recursive relations between buildings and people unfolded. Construction events are also viewed as critical processes, in which collective identities and social relations are created, negotiated, and transformed. The meanings of buildings still represent an important focus, but instead of searching for fixed, homogeneous meanings, the new theoretical perspectives have urged scholars to analyze how diverse groups negotiated multiple meanings. In the early 21st century, public buildings at archaeological sites continue to be a subject of negotiation among diverse groups, including the governments, descendant communities, archaeologists, developers, and the general public.

Nasser's Gamble

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Ferris
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Arab World ◽  
Decisive Role ◽  
Original Material ◽  
Egyptian Revolution ◽  
Arab Nationalism ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Arab Spring

This book draws on declassified documents from six countries and original material in Arabic, German, Hebrew, and Russian to present a new understanding of Egypt's disastrous five-year intervention in Yemen, which Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser later referred to as “my Vietnam.” The book argues that Nasser's attempt to export the Egyptian revolution to Yemen played a decisive role in destabilizing Egypt's relations with the Cold War powers, tarnishing its image in the Arab world, ruining its economy, and driving its rulers to instigate the fatal series of missteps that led to war with Israel in 1967. Viewing the Six Day War as an unintended consequence of the Saudi–Egyptian struggle over Yemen, the book demonstrates that the most important Cold War conflict in the Middle East was not the clash between Israel and its neighbors. It was the inter-Arab struggle between monarchies and republics over power and legitimacy. Egypt's defeat in the “Arab Cold War” set the stage for the rise of Saudi Arabia and political Islam. Bold and provocative, this book brings to life a critical phase in the modern history of the Middle East. Its compelling analysis of Egypt's fall from power in the 1960s offers new insights into the decline of Arab nationalism, exposing the deep historical roots of the Arab Spring of 2011.

Mobile Perception and the Automotive Prosthetic

Transfers ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charissa N. Terranova
Keyword(s):  
Urban Sprawl ◽  
Human Body ◽  
Conceptual Art ◽  
Robert Smithson ◽  
Martha Rosler ◽  
The World ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
And Linguistics

This essay focuses on a body of photoconceptual works from the 1960s and 1970s in which the automobile functions as a prosthetic-like aperture through which to view the world in motion. I argue that the logic of the “automotive prosthetic“ in works by Paul McCarthy, Dennis Hopper, Ed Ruscha, Jeff Wall, John Baldessari, Richard Prince, Martha Rosler, Robert Smithson, Ed Kienholz, Julian Opie, and Cory Arcangel reveals a techno-genetic understanding of conceptual art, functioning in addition and alternatively to semiotics and various philosophies of language usually associated with conceptual art. These artworks show how the automobile, movement on roads and highways, and the automotive landscape of urban sprawl have transformed the human sensorium. I surmise that the car has become a prosthetic of the human body and is a technological force in the maieusis of the posthuman subject. I offer a reading of specific works of photoconceptual art based on experience, perception, and a posthumanist subjectivity in contrast to solely understanding them according to semiotics and linguistics.

Black Men and Black Masculinity

2021 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 437-457
Author(s):  
Alford A. Young
Keyword(s):  
Black Men ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Black Males ◽  
Black Masculinity ◽  
First Century ◽  
Criminal Justice Systems ◽  
Male Experience ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
New Research ◽  
Sociological Studies

In recent decades, sociological studies of black males and of black masculinity in America unfolded with great rapidity. In the 1960s, sociological studies of black males gained currency. Much of their focus has been on the problematic state of black males in education, employment, family life, peer and social relations, and within criminal justice systems. That tradition moved from employing a social problems lens for researching black men to documenting how their efforts in these and other spheres of life reflect creativity and efficacy as much as malaise and despair. Emerging several decades later in sociology, black masculinity studies began with an emphasis on how black males contended with hegemonic masculinity. This tradition moved to explore how sexual, socioeconomic, and other variations in the black male experience elucidated vulnerability as a common feature of that experience, as well as to more extensive visions of black masculinity. New research questions stand before both traditions that constitute the twenty-first-century agenda.

Studying the Particular, Illuminating the General: Community Studies and Community in Wales

2005 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
pp. 672-690 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nickie Charles ◽  
Charlotte Aull Davies
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Family Life ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Social Processes ◽  
Paid Work ◽  
Community Studies ◽  
The Family ◽  
Community People ◽  
Work Affect ◽  
General Community

This article is inspired by Frankenberg's (1990) claim that the best way to understand general social processes is through the study of their manifestation in the details of social life. We look at how studies of community that have been carried out in Wales, particularly Village on the Border and The Family and Social Change ( Rosser and Harris, 1965 ), have accomplished this link between the particular and the general. We then consider the findings of our own research, which is a restudy of Rosser and Harris, showing how they provide a counterbalance to grand theoretical claims about the transformations that are affecting community and family life. We find that although factors such as increasing geographical mobility and women's greater participation in paid work affect people's experiences of community, people continue to place a high value on what they call communities. Such communities are spoken about and defined in different ways but all are based on local social networks of kin, neighbours and friends and/or locally-based associations. They are also gendered, with women playing a key role at both informal and formal levels of community. We suggest that the apparent resilience of local social relations evident in our research may help to explain the continued cultural and political resonance of community in Wales.

Gender insurgency and neoliberal reform: the academy twice transformed?

2010 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 73-91
Author(s):  
Richard Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Considerable Change ◽  
The Public ◽  
Neoliberal Reform ◽  
Social Theories ◽  
Internal Relations ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Neoliberal Restructuring

English higher education, like other parts of the public sector and higher education in other countries, is currently undergoing considerable change as it is being restructured as if it were a market in which universities, departments and academics compete against one another. This restructuring is producing new processes of subjectivity that discipline those who work and study in higher education institutions. Feminist poststructuralists have suggested that this restructuring is enabled partly through new forms of accountability that seemingly offer the 'carrot' of self-realisation alongside the 'stick' of greater management surveillance of the burgeoning number of tasks that academics, amongst others, must perform. This paper, located in the context of these changes, builds on Judith Butler's insight that processes of subjection to the dominant order through which the self is produced entail both mastery and subjection. That is, submission requires mastery of the underlying assumptions of the dominant order, In this paper I adopt an auto/biographical method and a critique of abstract social theories to explore how the neoliberal restructuring of universities interacts with the gender order. Many universities are being remoulded as businesses for other businesses, with profound effects on internal relations, the subjectivities of academics and students, and practices of education and scholarship. Yet I doubt if we can understand this, nor resist the deep corruption, through grasping neoliberalism's dynamics alone. A longer memory and a more concrete analysis are needed. Today's intense individualisation impacts on pre-existing social relations, which inflect it unpredictably. From my own experience, I evoke the baseline of an older academy, gender-segregated, explicitly patriarchal and privileged in class and ethnic terms. I stress the feminist and democratic gains of the 1960s and 1970s. I sketch the (neoliberal) strategies that undermine or redirect them. I write this, hoping that the next episode can be written differently.

Unpacking Goethe's collections: the public and the private in natural-historical collecting

2001 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 275-300 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. P. HAMM
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Private Property ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
The Public ◽  
Rock Formations ◽  
Private Collection ◽  
Scientific Collections ◽  
The University ◽  
Vast Network

This paper argues that Goethe's collections, in particular his mineralogical collections, had both public and private purposes. The public purposes were closely tied to the tradition of mineralogizing exemplified by the Freiberg Mining Academy. Abraham Gottlob Werner provided technologies for standardizing mineralogical terminology and identification, and Goethe hoped that these technologies would allow for a vast network of collectors and observers who would collate their observations and develop a model of the Earth's structure. His own cabinet, in particular his collection of rocks (Gebirgsarten), was to be a representative sample of rock formations in particular locations that could reveal features of the Earth's structure and history. Goethe was also responsible for the scientific collections of Jena University. He argued that if such collections were to be useful for teaching and research, a goal he strongly supported, they could no longer be treated as the private property of professors. He recognized that social relations within the University would have to be reordered if museums were to fulfil their epistemic functions. In this respect Goethe was on the side of the modern museum and opposed to the world of the private collection and all its idiosyncrasies. However, his own collections had very private and personal purposes. Using some of the ideas of Walter Benjamin as a foil, this paper tries to uncover some of the private passions that fuelled Goethe's almost insatiable collecting. Though these passions were peculiar to Goethe, I argue that historians of science should attend more to the passions and their place in the sciences.

scholarly journals Basic income: economy and psychology

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 27-35
Author(s):  
Larysa Hevlych ◽  
Ivan Hevlych ◽  
Natalia Dutova
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Practical Implementation ◽  
Basic Income ◽  
Income Dynamics ◽  
Factors Influencing ◽  
Social Idea ◽  
The World ◽  
Modern Vision ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Economy Change

Basic income is a social idea appealing to humanist philosophers and politicians. Numerous experiments on the introduction of the concept of basic income occurred in countries with varying degrees of economic development. Surveys are being conducted around the world on the need to introduce basic income. Dynamics of economic processes and social sentiment in individual countries require generalisation of modern factors influencing the possibility of practical implementation of the concept of basic income. This paper studies the economic and psychological factors for supporting the idea of basic income in terms of its practical implementation, analyses the interpretation of the UBI idea by various researchers and provides a characteristic of the modern vision of basic income. The arguments for and against the practical implementation of this idea with their structuring in the following directions are formed and considered: influence on the economy, change of social relations and possibility of practical realisation. The authors presentgeneralised results of the experiments on the introduction of basic income from the 1960s to the present day in South America, Africa, Europe, Asia, as well as the results of the poll and referendum on the introduction of basic income in Switzerland in 2016.

scholarly journals Museisamlingarnas sociomateriella dynamik

1970 ◽  
pp. 97
Author(s):  
Lotten Gustafsson Reinius ◽  
Eva Silvén ◽  
Fredrik Svanberg
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Processes ◽  
Processes Of Change ◽  
Museum Collections ◽  
The Third ◽  
National Museums ◽  
And Storage ◽  
Dynamic Interplay

“The sociomaterial dynamics of museum collections” is an overarching research idea connecting three separate projects, with the aim of creating new knowledge about the roles of collections and collecting in the shaping of culture and society. The program includes three Swedish national museums that have been decisive in defining Sweden, Swedishness and the surrounding world – the Nordiska Museet (Swedish cultural history) the National Historical Museum (history, archaeology) and the Museum of Ethnography (the third/fourth world). In one study each, two ethnologists and one archaeologist will focus on objects and issues that have in some way been pointed out as problematic but which also seem to have a strong ability to define identity, social relations and create both conflict and reconciliation: collections from indigenous peoples, human remains and repatriation. The program includes three separate and ongoing projects, financed by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond and The Swedish Research Council. The projects are connected by a shared interest in the dynamic interplay between material practices and social processes of change. This will be analyzed with an emphasis on turning points in collecting, classification, display and storage, such as the relocation of objects between and from the museums mentioned. 

Site Reading

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David J. Alworth
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
Joan Didion ◽  
The Road ◽  
Robert Smithson ◽  
Complex Interactions ◽  
Real Material ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Interdisciplinary Study

This book offers a new method of literary and cultural interpretation and a new theory of narrative setting by examining five sites—supermarkets, dumps, roads, ruins, and asylums—that have been crucial to American literature and visual art since the mid-twentieth century. Against the traditional understanding of setting as a static background for narrative action and character development, the book argues that sites figure in novels as social agents. Engaging a wide range of social and cultural theorists, especially Bruno Latour and Erving Goffman, the book examines how the literary figuration of real, material environments reorients our sense of social relations. To read the sites of fiction, the book demonstrates, is to reveal literature as a profound sociological resource, one that simultaneously models and theorizes collective life. Each chapter identifies a particular site as a point of contact for writers and artists—the supermarket for Don DeLillo and Andy Warhol; the dump for William Burroughs and Mierle Laderman Ukeles; the road for Jack Kerouac, Joan Didion, and John Chamberlain; the ruin for Thomas Pynchon and Robert Smithson; and the asylum for Ralph Ellison, Gordon Parks, and Jeff Wall—and shows how this site mediates complex interactions among humans and nonhumans. The result is an interdisciplinary study of American culture that brings together literature, visual art, and social theory to develop a new sociology of literature that emphasizes the sociology in literature.

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