scholarly journals Self-representation in the works of Busisiwe Nzama: An analysis of the Frida 'little travellers' and more

Image & Text ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Khaya Mchunu

The focus of this article is on 'little travellers', a form of figure making associated with Woza Moya, an arts and craft project based in Hillcrest, KwaZulu-Natal. This article tracks and analyses the creation of two variations of the Frida 'little traveller' created by a Woza Moya bead artist, Busisiwe Nzama, in partnership with the Director of the project, Paula Thomson. My data-gathering process was conducted over an eleven-month period of observations interspersed with conversations, photographing and interviews with the objective of deepening an understanding of the co-design and co-creation process between a stakeholder from the arts and craft non-governmental sector and societal practice partners. The study conducted found that an analysis of this process of partnership allows a deepened understanding of the historical realities of an individual expressed through beadworks. Some 'little travellers' by Nzama take their inspiration from the work of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. As with Kahlo, much of Nzama's work is concerned with self-representation. While Nzama and Kahlo treat the subject of self-representation differently, both artists indicate ways in which the self becomes infused in a work of art. This aspect of the 'little travellers' conceptualisation enables me to explore the similarities between Nzama and Kahlo's bodies of work.

2018 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 560-585
Author(s):  
Sinja Graf

This essay theorizes how the enforcement of universal norms contributes to the solidification of sovereign rule. It does so by analyzing John Locke’s argument for the founding of the commonwealth as it emerges from his notion of universal crime in the Second Treatise of Government. Previous studies of punishment in the state of nature have not accounted for Locke’s notion of universal crime which pivots on the role of mankind as the subject of natural law. I argue that the dilemmas specific to enforcing the natural law against “trespasses against the whole species” drive the founding of sovereign government. Reconstructing Locke’s argument on private property in light of universal criminality, the essay shows how the introduction of money in the state of nature destabilizes the normative relationship between the self and humanity. Accordingly, the failures of enforcing the natural law require the partitioning of mankind into separate peoples under distinct sovereign governments. This analysis theorizes the creation of sovereign rule as part of the political productivity of Locke’s notion of universal crime and reflects on an explicitly political, rather than normative, theory of “humanity.”


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 1009
Author(s):  
Kerine Claudya Wijaya ◽  
Ariesa Pandanwangi ◽  
Belinda Sukapura Dewi

<p>Every artist has the goal of creating works of art that cannot be separated from the spiritual feelings experienced daily. The creative process of creating this work of art is initiated from the mirror which will be explored in the work of art. The method used is descriptive qualitative study and experimental method. The problem in this creation process is how the phenomenon that occurs when humans feel unhappy in their inner life so that they feel depressed, even judged between individuals, both physically and non-physically. The result of this creation process is a puzzle arrangement which is a metaphor for the results of reflection as well as the spiritual relationship of the soul with the body that has been experienced in living and contemplating life. The message conveyed through this work is that humans must understand each other.</p><p>Setiap seniman memiliki tujuan menciptakan karya seni yang tidak lepas dari perasaan spiritual yang dialami sehari-hari. Proses kreatif penciptaan karya seni ini digagas dari cermin yang akan dieksplorasikan pada karya seni. Metode yang dipergunakan adalah studi metode deskriptif kualitatif dan metode eksperimental. Permasalahan dalam proses penciptaan ini bagaimana fenomena yang terjadi ketika manusia merasakan perasaan tidak bahagia dalam kehidupan batinnya sehingga merasa tertekan, bahkan dinilai antar individu, baik secara fisik maupun non fisik. Hasil dari proses penciptaan ini adalah susunan puzzle yang merupakan metafora dari dari hasil refleksi sebagaimana hubungan spiritual jiwa dengan tubuh yang telah berpengalaman dalam penjalanan hidup dan perenungan hidup. Pesan yang disampaikan melalui karya ini adalah manusia harus saling memahami antara satu dengan lainnya</p>


2021 ◽  
Vol 64 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-171
Author(s):  
Srdjan Sarovic

This essay represents an inquiry concerning the method in the arts; as such, it is intended for the affirmation of its significance. Firstly, the concept of artistic method will be explained in view of its relations with poetic impulse and the technical aspect of art creation, and then associated to Longinus?s understanding of the sublime. In between these two opposites, artistic method is seen as dependent from poetical impulse, while governing technical side of the creation process. Since it defines the manner of their selection and use, artistic method gives meaning to the medium and technical practices constituting the making of the artwork. On the other side, artistic method springs from the poetic impulse and has to be in accordance with it. Such proposed meaning of the concept of artistic method will be, in the second part of this essay, illustrated with examples of my own artistic practice, being its place of origin.


2016 ◽  
Vol 43 (6) ◽  
pp. 571-598 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathy Kiloh

Jürgen Habermas’ characterization of Adorno’s project as an aestheticization of philosophy continues to influence our reading of his work. In contradiction to Lambert Zuidervaart, who suggests that in order to be understood as politically relevant, Adorno’s philosophy must be supplemented with empirical research, I argue in this article that Adorno’s work contains many of the resources we would need to theorize an ethical politics. First, it both identifies the moral debt carried by the subject and addresses the need for social transformation in order to change this situation. Second, it proposes an ethical comportment of self-relinquishment as a first step towards this reorganization of the social. The self-relinquishment of philosophy to its object is modeled upon aesthetic experience, which, according to Adorno, we must regard as a remorseful atonement for the subject’s domination of the object in its attempt to ‘wrest itself free’ ( Aesthetic Theory, 1997c: 112) of undifferentiated being. By incorporating into philosophical thought the mimetic bodily impulses tamed by aesthetic form, we may engender within ourselves a solidarity with objectivity. Rather than the self-possessing and conservative subject that constitutes its world mentally, Adorno theorizes a subject for whom thinking is a temporalization or a becoming. Thinking produces otherness within the subject itself. In this thinking-as-becoming, we see the beginnings of a highly individuated political subjectivity capable of acting in solidarity with the other. This brings us to the third element within Adorno’s philosophy that can serve us in formulating an ethical politics: the non-violent organizational principle of the modern work of art. In mobilizing the logic of the modern work of art, the autonomous individual is empowered to forge a politics that preserves contradiction in the facilitation of a non-violent relation with others.


Panggung ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Esthi Nimita ◽  
Mustika Yundari

ABSTRACTThis article discusses the concept of creating a work of art within a traditional framework. Therefore we need to understand how a work of art was created in the context of tradition, and the difference with the creation of art in the modern world. This article also a discourse on what is actually called a traditional art, and the distiction between traditional art and modern art. In this case, the example is a tradisional dance of Java. The choice is in the hand of the artist, or an art connoisseur nevertheless, through a deeper understanding of the traditional arts and how it was created, so a person may have perspective about life, and the conjunction with God.Keywords:Art, Traditional Art, Modern Art, Creation Process, Flow, TaksuABSTRAKArtikel ini membahas konsep penciptaan suatu karya seni, dalam lingkup seni tradisional. Persoalan yang diangkat mengenai perlunya kita memahami bagaimana sebuah karya seni itu diciptakan dalam konteks tradisi, dan apa bedanya dengan penciptaan karya seni pada konteks modern, dengan pembahasan apa itu seni tradisional dan apa itu seni modern.Dalam hal ini, kebetulan yang dicontohkan adalah seni tari tari tradisi Jawa. Pilihan memang ada ditangan seniman atau penikmat seni,namun dengan memahami secara lebihdalam apa itu seni tradisional dan bagaimana karya seni tradisional itu diciptakan, maka seseorang dapat memiliki perspektif yang lebih baik mengenai hidup, kehidupan, dan hubungannya dengan Sang Pencipta.Kata Kunci:Seni, Seni Tradisional, Seni Modern, Proses Penciptaan, Flow, Taksu. 


2021 ◽  
Vol XII (35) ◽  
pp. 87-116
Author(s):  
Milena Vladic Jovanov

In the double poetic of W. B. Yeats, a certain relation between poems is initiated; and this relation is not only interpreted by means of various approaches to the theories of intertextuality but rather the theory of deconstruction as well. Yeats makes it so his poems lean on one another, creating in his poetic practice a self-referentiality, owing to the fact that he uses his own poetry as a basis for further verse-creation. Reality is, in fact, art, which is why in the space between poems a narrative pointed toward diverse themes is formed. One of these themes is art and the poet’s experience of creating a work of art which the poet showcases in his own writings through indications such as repeated verses or themes that guide the reader into a multifaceted nexus of meaning and space between poems in which they create and write a new work of art in the form of an interpretation. Writing about their own experience of the poem, the poet writes about the poem itself, making the experience of writing and the poem the themes of the poem. However, by writing about their own experience of how they write, the poet achieves a complex modernist meta-quality. They do not directly talk about the poem and the laws it rests upon nor do they critique previous rules and derive ideologies behind them nor do they personally set foot in the work of art as is in postmodernism, but rather they do so by means of complex poetic images. These images enable the intricate meta-quality that refers us to the space between poems and makes another important characteristic through which Yeats gets close to modernist poetic possible – communication. The poems communicate with one another and in that exchange the question and theme of communication, which is of great importance to modernist poetic both in poetry and narrative, is raised. If it could be said that money is the main topic of realism, then time would be the main topic of the stream-of-consciousness novel, as well as, in a sense, the modernist novel in general. What distinguishes modernist poetic, besides the theme of communication as a form of discourse – a transfer of knowledge – is the creation of both the identity of the work of art itself and the very social function of the poet – a topos theme of world literature – made possible through the self-same communication. Moreover, communication does not only involve the exchange between two or more poems, in which by way of repetition is the différance of the same, in the space between two or more poems shown, but also the change and transposition of meaning from one place to another. In this way, modernist poets directly deal with the issues of the creation of art itself and the fundamental, often indistinguishable question of what artistic is and when the border between the artistic and inartistic is crossed in a work of art. Through the use of paratextual material – the title, subtitle and the comments – the reader is included in the creation of the work of art as an important link. They as the semiotic reader, in Eco’s terms, through their own literary knowledge create a work of art in which they communicate with the author, while simultaneously correcting that selfsame communication by means of their inner semantic reader whom they never forget, since the writer beguiles their readers through intertextual irony and, especially, meta-quality. The doubleness of reading marks the duality of the creation of a work that has double relations: to itself and to the reality that it – through other works – either expresses or denies but always regards again and again with its writing and its relation to it.


MELINTAS ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-59
Author(s):  
Konrad Kebung

This paper presents Foucault’s philosophical thinking on the constitution of the subject as the peak point of all his works from his early writings through his last writings, lectures, and seminars. All his works therefore can be summarized as a technology or a constitution of the self. To Foucault, this particular “self” should be seen as a result of a work of art that is ordered and engraved creatively and continuously. This “self” is seen as a mode of being which is unique, historical and contextual as well. This process Foucault calls an aesthetic of existence. This paper also shows Foucault’s own perspectives on the various radical and extreme movements that often times bring forth a lot of calamities to human life. Using his aesthetic of existence, he tries to look into such problems critically and presents some possible opportunities to minimize or even to erase all kinds of radicalizations and extremisms. Humankind should be able to care of him/her self and therefore he/she should be able to care for others.


2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alice Barale

To portray melancholy, Albrecht Dürer engraved a bowed figure whose abstracted concentration contrasts with the proliferation of objects around her. In this way, it appears that the mystery she is contemplating is precisely that of her connection with things, which remain extraneous as she turns her gaze elsewhere. In fact, for both Aby Warburg and Walter Benjamin, Dürer's Melencolia I refers to the issue of the image, conceived not as a specific form, work of art or philosophic representation, but as the site of a sense that yields itself only in its material configuration. Thus the space of melancholy is shifted from the subject to that borderland, of continuous intersection between the self and external reality, between the interior and the world, that is the image – conceived as a concrete and reciprocal configuration of both. Meditation on the same restores to melancholy its contradictory character, the unity of destruction and construction attributed to it by Aristotlean tradition, and which modernity, identifying it with an Ego that is depressively worldless, or counter to the world, largely deprives it of.


2016 ◽  
Vol 55 (1-2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Pál S. Varga

Szilárd Borbély described the periodical change in poetry at the turn of the 18th and 19th century as a ”shift in the attitude of literary texts” and as a transformation of ”literary understanding”. The turning away from the late Baroque and Classic poetry – which both followed inherited models of genre – came when the narrator received a unique identity, and the reader began to understand the text as an expression of the Self. This change can be pointed out in Sándor Kisfaludy’s cycle of poems, Kesergő szerelem (1802), which influenced the creation of Csokonai’s own cycle of love poems. The temporalization of the attitude towards the textual genre happened in the poetry of Ferenc Kölcsey. The narrators of Kölcsey’s Vanitatum vanitas and Hymnus create their identity by uniquely reflecting on the genre and dislocating the ready-made meanings. The peak of the transition is the inventive formation of history by means of poetry and language. The epic poetry of Mihály Vörösmarty structures language in a way that makes the mythical recounting of origin possible for the subject attempting to establish an identity in the past. Yet this language brought about the paradox of excluding the subjective from the expression. The concept emphasizing the formation of the attitude that reflects on the genre by language is not only a re-interpretation of 18th-19th century Hungarian poetry, but it is obviously close to the postmodern poetic method which is attributed to Halotti pompa [The Splendours of Death].


2009 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-92
Author(s):  
Susan Jones

This article explores the diversity of British literary responses to Diaghilev's project, emphasising the way in which the subject matter and methodologies of Diaghilev's modernism were sometimes unexpectedly echoed in expressions of contemporary British writing. These discussions emerge both in writing about Diaghilev's work, and, more discretely, when references to the Russian Ballet find their way into the creative writing of the period, serving to anchor the texts in a particular cultural milieu or to suggest contemporary aesthetic problems in the domain of literary aesthetics developing in the period. Figures from disparate fields, including literature, music and the visual arts, brought to their criticism of the Ballets Russes their individual perspectives on its aesthetics, helping to consolidate the sense of its importance in contributing to the inter-disciplinary flavour of modernism across the arts. In the field of literature, not only did British writers evaluate the Ballets Russes in terms of their own poetics, their relationship to experimentation in the novel and in drama, they developed an increasing sense of the company's place in dance history, its choreographic innovations offering material for wider discussions, opening up the potential for literary modernism's interest in impersonality and in the ‘unsayable’, discussions of the body, primitivism and gender.


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