scholarly journals Nowe widzenie – astrologiczny i astronomiczny wymiar wizji fotograficznej

2018 ◽  
pp. 33-64
Author(s):  
Dorota Łuczak

The paper focuses on the New Vision – one of the most important developments in the history of the twentieth-century photography, whose ambition was to modernize human perception, hence also society. A project with such an objective, characteristic of the avant-garde, required not only the use of photography as a tool of “ocularcentrism,” to use a term coined by Martin Jay, but also some more solid epistemological and ontological foundation. The author analyzes the project of the New Vision, introducing two interpretive contexts, i.e. astrology and astronomy, which are understood as specific paradigms of cognition and knowledge. First, both concepts are located in a more general discourse of the philosophy of history (Nietzsche, Benjamin), and second, they are related to the practice and theory of the New Vision and the idea of developing a new vision of reality, shown at the famous “Film und Foto” exhibition (Stuttgart, 1929). The basis of the present interpretation is methodological reflection on the ideologization of photography in the so-called revisionist studies which favor the critique of the apparatus of power. Instead, the author proposes a concept of photographic vision connecting the picture and the spectator or, in other words, calling for taking into consideration the process of reception. This proposal, close to Hans Belting’s anthropology of the image, renounces the idea of the passive spectator, subject to the picture, in favor of the analysis of its perception. In the context of the New Vision, the picture-spectator relationship has been approached in terms of astrology and astronomy.

Tempo ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 71 (281) ◽  
pp. 71-79
Author(s):  
Stefan Pohlit

AbstractDuring the 1980s, Julien Jalâl Ed-Dine Weiss, founder of the Al-Kindi ensemble of Aleppo, invented a qānūn in just intonation with which he attempted to solve a major discrepancy between the theory and practice of maqām-scales. Weiss objected to the introduction of Western standards, observing that they distort the significance of interval ratios and prevent a comparative understanding of the modal system as a transnational phenomenon. In the twentieth century, the implementation of equal-semitone temperament emerged simultaneously with a notable invasion of sociological criteria into musical inquiry. The polarity observed between westernisation and tradition can be seen most visibly in the present search for identity amongst Middle- and Near-Eastern musicians, but this schismogenic process can also be observed in the history of the Western avant-garde, where microtonal explorations have been halted in favour of extra-musical conceptuality. While cross-cultural musicians are faced with a new climate of distrust, it seems most likely that the principles that draw us apart may originate in the very patterns of thought in which our notion of culture operates. Weiss's tuning system may serve as a helpful tool to foster a new and universal epistemology of tone, bridging and transcending the apparent contradictions between the two spheres.


2015 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 845-859
Author(s):  
EVAN CALDER WILLIAMS

This essay develops a history of salvage both as particular activity and as concept, arguing that it has quietly become one of the fundamental structures of thought that shape how we envision future possibility. However, the contemporary sense of the word, which designates the recuperation or search for value in what has already been destroyed, is a recent one and represents a significant transformation from the notion of salvage in early modern European maritime and insurance law. In that earlier iteration, salvage denoted payment received for helping to avert a disaster, such as keeping the ship and its goods from sinking in the first place. Passing through the dislocation of this concept into private salvage firms, firefighting companies, military usage, avant-garde art, and onto the human body itself in the guise of “personal risk,” the essay argues that the twentieth century becomes indelibly marked by a sense of the disaster that has already occurred. The second half of the essay passes into speculative culture, including fiction, video games, and film, to suggest that the most critical approaches to salvage have often come under the sign of science fiction but that the last decade in particular has shown how recent quotidian patterns of gentrification and defused antagonism have articulated stranger shifts in the figure of salvage than any speculative imaginary can currently manage.


Author(s):  
Laura Harris

In Experiments in Exile, I explore and compare projects undertaken by two twentieth-century American intellectuals while they lived in voluntary exiles in the United States: the Trinidadian writer and revolutionary C. L. R. James and the Brazilian visual artist and counterculturalist Hélio Oiticica. James and Oiticica never met. They lived and worked in the United States at different moments. My focus is on James’s stay during the 1940s and on Oiticica’s stay during the 1970s. Given the significant differences between them—not just at the level of nationality but at the level of race (James was black, Oiticica was white), class (James was situated within a precarious middle class, Oiticica was firmly established within an upper middle class), sexuality (James was straight, Oiticica was gay), and disciplinary locations (James is generally situated in the history of radical social theory and practice, and Oiticica is generally situated in the history of avant-garde aesthetic theory and practice)—this is surely an unlikely combination. This study is itself an experiment, one that goes beyond the usual parameters of comparativist or transnational research, to identify, in the surprising resonances between the projects pursued by these two very disparate figures, a common project I believe they, together, bring into relief....


2018 ◽  
pp. 25-65
Author(s):  
Anna Dahlgren

Chapter 1 considers the mechanisms of breaks and continuities in the history of photocollage with regard to gender, genre and locations of display. Collage is commonly celebrated as a twentieth-century art form invented by Dada artists in the 1910s. Yet there was already a vibrant culture of making photocollages in Victorian Britain. From an art historical perspective this can be interpreted as an expression of typical modernist amnesia. The default stance of the early twentieth century’s avant-garde was to be radically, ground-breakingly new and different from any historical precursors. However, there is, when turning to the illustrated press, also a trajectory of continuity and withholding of traditions in the history of photocollage. This chapter has two parts. The first includes a critical investigation of the writings on the history of photocollage between the 1970s and 2010s, focusing on the arguments and rationales of forgetting and retrieving those nineteenth-century forerunners. It includes examples of amnesia and recognition and revaluation. The second is a close study of a number of images that appear in Victorian albums produced between 1870 and 1900 and their contemporary counterparts in the visual culture of illustrated journals and books.


Author(s):  
Jonathan Goldman

French composer Pierre Boulez was one of the most influential composers of the second half of the twentieth century. His personal development mirrored the history of Western concert music. An essential figure in the history of artistic modernism, he was perceived as a leader of the musical avant-garde since 1945. In addition, through his international career as a conductor, he sought to change the listening habits of the concert-going public by initiating them, through concerts and recordings, into the classics of modernism from the first half of the twentieth century (Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Webern, Bartók, Berg, etc.). From serialism, open forms, the interface between instrument and machine, the concern with perceptibility, Boulez’s catalog forms a rich and varied corpus. Although Boulez dispensed with total serialism after a brief but decisive period, his concern with the formal unity of a work of art remained a central concern throughout his career.


Author(s):  
James Dodd

This chapter sketches the trajectory of Jan Patočka’s philosophical development against the background of the conflicts and crises that marked the history of the twentieth century, and which profoundly affected the Czech philosopher. The relevant period spans from the 1930s, when Patočka studied under Edmund Husserl in Freiburg, to the philosopher’s activities as a dissident in 1970s Czechoslovakia. Particular attention is paid to Patočka’s deep reading of the history of philosophy; the complexities of his appropriation of the phenomenological philosophies of Husserl and Heidegger; and the philosophy of history developed late in his career. The chapter ends with a consideration of Patočka’s influence on contemporary phenomenological philosophy, suggesting that his most promising contribution lies in his challenging engagement with the problem of Europe, above all his call for a post-European philosophical perspective.


2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 391-409
Author(s):  
JAKE JOHNSON

AbstractFor over ten years, Los Angeles arts patron Betty Freeman (1921–2009) welcomed composers, performers, scholars, patrons, and invited guests into her home for a series of monthly musicales that were known as ‘Salotto’. In this article, I analyse Freeman's musicales within a sociological framework of gender and what Randall Collins calls ‘interaction rituals’. I contextualize these events, which took place in a space in her Beverly Hills home known as the Music Room, within a broader history of salon culture in Los Angeles in the twentieth century – a history that shaped the city's relationship with the artistic avant-garde and made Los Angeles an important amplifier for many of the most important voices in contemporary Western art music of the last sixty years.


2005 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 391-402
Author(s):  
NORBERT BANDIER

The time has come for researchers into innovative movements in art and literature in the first half of the twentieth century to break free from traditional investigative frameworks. The works reviewed here belong to different disciplines – art history, literary history, literary criticism, history – but all show a shift of perspectives in the history of culture. They point to a reassessment of the theoretical models we use to understand modern art and literature. Those models are – in this case as they relate to the avant-garde – nuanced, refined, developed and sometimes even invalidated. Though some of these works are not wholly devoted to the European avant-gardes, they do deal with the international circulation of modern art in, to or from Europe, studied here in its lesser-known aspects. Moreover, they all to some extent examine the artist’s responsibility to the community, or the state’s responsibility to art. This theme of responsibility runs through all these works, either in its ethical dimension or as an aspect of the social function of art, especially when art has to confront an entertainment culture or is roped in as part of cultural policy.


Globus ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2(59)) ◽  
pp. 15-18
Author(s):  
Yuri Serov

The article is devoted to the history of the creation and music score of the ballet Twelve based on the poem by A. Blok by the outstanding Russian composer of the second half of the twentieth century Boris Ivanovich Tishchenko. The ballet was staged by the famous Soviet choreographer Leonid Jacobson back in 1964 and became, in fact, the first avant-garde ballet in the Soviet Union. Critics noted Tishchenko’s bright modern symphonic music and Jacobson’s free plastics, which “became a breath of clean air in the rarefied atmosphere of classical epigonism”.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document