scholarly journals Food for Thought: Of Tables, Art and Women in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse

2017 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 147-168
Author(s):  
Estella Antoaneta Ciobanu
Keyword(s):  
Art Criticism ◽  
Critical Appraisal ◽  
Still Life ◽  
The West ◽  
Traditional Philosophy ◽  
To The Lighthouse ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
Fruit Composition ◽  
Female Nude ◽  
Feminist Theories

Abstract This article examines art as it is depicted ekphrastically or merely suggested in two scenes from Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse, to critique its androcentric assumptions by appeal to art criticism, feminist theories of the gaze, and critique of the en-gendering of discursive practices in the West. The first scene concerns Mrs Ramsay’s artinformed appreciation of her daughter’s dish of fruit for the dinner party. I interpret the fruit composition as akin to Dutch still life paintings; nevertheless, the scene’s aestheticisation of everyday life also betrays visual affinities with the female nude genre. Mrs Ramsay’s critical appraisal of ways of looking at the fruit - her own as an art connoisseur’s, and Augustus Carmichael’s as a voracious plunderer’s - receives a philosophical slant in the other scene I examine, Lily Briscoe’s nonfigurative painting of Mrs Ramsay. The portrait remediates artistically the reductive thrust of traditional philosophy as espoused by Mr Ramsay and, like the nature of reality in philosophical discourse, yields to a “scientific” explication to the uninformed viewer. Notwithstanding its feminist reversal of philosophy’s classic hierarchy (male knower over against female object), coterminous with Lily’s early playful grip on philosophy, the scene ultimately fails to offer a viable non-androcentric outlook on life.

scholarly journals Art Criticism and the State of Feminist Art Criticism

Arts ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 28
Author(s):  
Katy Deepwell
Keyword(s):  
Women Artists ◽  
Art Criticism ◽  
The State ◽  
Art World ◽  
Feminist Art ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
The Third ◽  
Fourth Part ◽  
State Of Art ◽  
First Offers

This essay is in four parts. The first offers a critique of James Elkins and Michael Newman’s book The State of Art Criticism (Routledge, 2008) for what it tells us about art criticism in academia and journalism and feminism; the second considers how a gendered analysis measures the “state” of art and art criticism as a feminist intervention; and the third, how neo-liberal mis-readings of Linda Nochlin and Laura Mulvey in the art world represent feminism in ideas about “greatness” and the “gaze”, whilst avoiding feminist arguments about women artists or their work, particularly on “motherhood”. In the fourth part, against the limits of the first three, the state of feminist art criticism across the last fifty years is reconsidered by highlighting the plurality of feminisms in transnational, transgenerational and progressive alliances.

scholarly journals The Return to Kalokagathia: Curating as Leverage in the Ongoing Dialogues between Aesthetics and Ethics

Philosophies ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 29
Author(s):  
Suzana Milevska
Keyword(s):  
Art Criticism ◽  
Art World ◽  
Art Theory ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
The West ◽  
Ethical Concerns ◽  
Catalyst Potential ◽  
Ethical Responsibilities

This essay argues that curating brought back a kind of leverage that redressed the otherwise imbalanced relationship between aesthetics and ethics. Curating lends out to art its innocent and aspirational belief in such a balance because the ethical concerns in art theory and art criticism have long been toned down while form was prioritized over content. Ever since the curatorial profession created its own niche in the art world—started, for example, in the West, in the late 1960s with curators such as Siegelaub, Szeemann, or Lippard—curating began to mediate this relationship, thus helping to activate the catalyst potential of art without having to compromise its formal aspects. More specifically, this essay explores the ways in which theories and practices of curating brought back to mind the ancient Greek notion of kalokagathia, the intertwinement of aesthetics and ethics and, with it, other ethical responsibilities, principles, and values that art forgot to address while giving privilege to its formal aspects.

Conclusion: ‘On the very brink of utterance’: Aldous Huxley, Mark Gertler and Transfigured Things

2020 ◽  
pp. 203-213
Author(s):  
Claudia Tobin
Keyword(s):  
Art Criticism ◽  
Aldous Huxley ◽  
Still Life ◽  
The Doors

Conclusion: ‘On the very brink of utterance’: Aldous Huxley, Mark Gertler, and Transfigured Things Modernism and Still Life concludes by examining the writings of Aldous Huxley in his analysis of still life painters from Mark Gertler to Cézanne. Reading Huxley’s early art criticism in the light of his later meditation on visionary experience, The Doors of Perception (1954), returns this inquiry to a series of concerns about the ethics of the contemplative versus the active, the animate and the inanimate, which were first raised in the Introduction in Lawrence’s writing on Cézanne.

Mortal Form

Dynamic Form ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 53-92
Author(s):  
Cara L. Lewis
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Still Life ◽  
Spatial Form ◽  
Human Emotion ◽  
To The Lighthouse ◽  
Everyday Objects ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Modernist Novel

This chapter analyzes Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse (1927). It diverges from the critical commonplace that aligns the form of To the Lighthouse with Lily Briscoe's painting and claims instead that the novel unfolds the iconographic implications of a still-life composition. The carefully arranged dish of fruit and a seashell on the Ramsays' table signals the novel's interest in minor, everyday objects and also establishes a vanitas motif—a reminder of mortality and the impermanence of human life. Woolf's still life metamorphoses into various vanitas forms throughout the novel, precipitating later turns of the plot and linking up with the novel's elegiac project. All these vanitas motifs are thus mortal forms that help to determine the shape and flow of the narrative, which is itself a mortal form—hopelessly entangled with human emotion, fated to reckon with mortality, and challenged to mourn the dead. In this way Woolf, like James, requires one to modify the notion that the modernist novel is best approached as a spatial form.

Mikhail Larionov's Still Life with Crayfish

2002 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 10-12
Author(s):  
Sonya Bekkerman
Keyword(s):  
Critical Role ◽  
Formal Languages ◽  
Folk Art ◽  
Still Life ◽  
The West ◽  
Russian Art ◽  
Art Forms ◽  
The Stability ◽  
Line Depth ◽  
Peasant Culture

Mikhail Larionov's Still-Life with Crayfish is a result of the artist sintense engagement with Russian folk art traditions. In attempting to liberate Russian art from the influence of the West, Larionov discovered new formal languages by looking to his heritage and bringing into his paintings images derived from icons, lubki (popular prints) as well as painted shop signs and children sart. Although Larionov did not spearhead the Russian crafts revival, his participation became critical for its dissemination. Still-Life with Crayfish exemplifies Larionov's insistence on russifying Western forms. The lessons of Czanne and the bold experiments of the Fauves figure prominently;however, the artist's conception of line, depth and color is a clear reference to lubki. The strident palette reflects Eastern influences, and the feast itself conveys an essentially Russian character. Larionov spassionate interest in creating new art forms inclined him to draw upon a diversity of sources. His admiration for the stability and timelessness of Russian peasant culture, life and art played a critical role in developing his oeuvre and allowed him to create a distinctive style independent of the West without wholly rejecting it.

The State of Philosophical Studies in India

Philosophy ◽  
1949 ◽  
Vol 24 (91) ◽  
pp. 342-347 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. T. Raju
Keyword(s):  
Indian Philosophy ◽  
The State ◽  
Western Philosophy ◽  
The West ◽  
Philosophical Literature ◽  
Philosophical Concept ◽  
Traditional Philosophy ◽  
Max Müller ◽  
Philosophical Texts ◽  
In The Beginning

Contemporary philosophical activity in India is influenced not only by India's traditional philosophy but also by Western Philosophy. One of the results of the introduction, by Macaulay, of the Western system of education into India is the popularization of the study of Western Philosophy, and Indians took to it quite enthusiastically. Sanscrit philosophical texts were at first regarded as sacred, and Europeans could have no access to them. But in time, the prejudice abated, and Sanscrit texts began to be translated into English. At the beginning, the motives behind Western interest in Indian Philosophy were mainly of two kinds: the rulers wanted to understand the culture and religions of the ruled in order to govern them without hurting their religious sentiments, and thus with the least friction; and secondly. Christian missionaries wanted converts and studied the religions and philosophies of the latter in order to find out defects in them and uphold the superiority of Christianity. But whatever be the motives and however biased the scholarship in the beginning, genuine academical interest in the philosophical literature of India came to be evinced, thanks to the work of men like Max Müller, Deussen, Rhys Davids, etc., and vast stores of Hindu, Buddhist and Jaina philosophical literature were unearthed not only in India but also outside. It should, however, be said that academical philosophers of the West did not take serious interest in Indian Philosophy as such; and not a single Indian philosophical concept has entered till now the discussions of Western technical philosophy, Schopenhauer was an exception: he made serious use of the concept of Maya.

Women and War

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Norton
Keyword(s):  
Sex Workers ◽  
Women Soldiers ◽  
The West ◽  
Women And War ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
Participation Of Women ◽  
Sex And Sexuality ◽  
The Media ◽  
Women In War ◽  
The Military

This chapter examines how the participation of women in war was advanced by both the military and the media as evidence for the equality of women in the West. Attention to the plight of women in the Muslim world turns the gaze of feminists and other potential critics away from the continuing oppression of women in the West. Western women are enlisted, with Western men, in the project of saving brown women from brown men. In participating in this campaign, they learn to look upon Western models of sex and sexuality as liberating, universally valid, and exempt from criticism. The chapter considers the tragedy of the presence of women at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. It argues that women's supposed sexual freedom was deployed by the military as a weapon of war. Women soldiers, supposedly the equals of their male colleagues, were reduced to sex workers.

Contemporary African Art as a Paradox

2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (46) ◽  
pp. 8-26
Author(s):  
Salah M. Hassan
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
African Diaspora ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Art Criticism ◽  
African Art ◽  
The West ◽  
Immigration Legislation ◽  
Art And Culture ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
Contemporary African Art

The field of contemporary African and African diaspora art and culture is currently riddled by two paradoxes. First, in Africa and its diaspora, we are witnessing a burgeoning of creative energy and an increasing visibility of artists in the international arts arena. Yet, this energy and visibility has not been matched by a parallel regime of art criticism that lives up to the levels of their work. Second, we find a rising interest in exhibiting and collecting works by contemporary African and diaspora artists among Western museums as well as private and public collections. This growing interest, however, has been taking place within an extremely xenophobic environment of anti-immigration legislation, the closing of borders to the West, and a callous disregard for African and non-Western people’s lives. Hence, this essay addresses the need for an innovative framework that is capable of critically unpacking these paradoxes and that offers a critical analysis of contemporary African and African diaspora artistic and cultural production. In doing so, the author asserts the importance of movement, mobility, and transiency in addressing issues of contemporary African artistic and cultural production. This article focuses on the use of the term Afropolitan, which has made its way into African artistic and literary criticism as a crossover from the fashion and popular culture arenas. In thinking about the usefulness of “Afropolitanism,” the author revisits the notion of cosmopolitanism in relationship to the entanglement of Africa and the West and its reconfiguration at the intersection of modernity and postcoloniality.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document