Looping Sensations

Ricanness ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 135-168
Author(s):  
Sandra Ruiz
Keyword(s):  
Real Time ◽  
The Political ◽  
Video Screen ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Self Injury ◽  
The Senses ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
Narrow Space

This chapter shares the archive of the late queer Rican avant-garde multimedia artist Ryan Rivera by examining his experimental videos. Less than a minute each, these abstract videos draw the spectator’s attention to the psychical states of self-injury and suffering. Through close-ups, looping, a manipulation of real time, and overexposure, Rivera pushes the spectator to endure a series of grotesque actions; he repeatedly bangs his head, places his fist down his throat, holds his breath, retches, and punches and slaps his face. The author explicates the political and aesthetic consequences of waiting in the seat of sensation with and for a bodiless Rican subject who compels us to wait in dissonance through the exploitation of the senses. As a way to engender a type of queer calling, the author urges the reader to sit with the artist as he beats his head against the never-quite-postcolonial, creating new forms of Brown and Rican intimacy. The author reformulates the Cartesian split by showcasing the narrow space of a video screen in which the artist bangs his queer postcolonial head against the fast-paced heteronormative world.

scholarly journals The Fragmentary Narrative in the Nomadic VJ Performance by Peter Greenaway

Panoptikum ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 108-120
Author(s):  
Kamil Lipiński
Keyword(s):  
Real Time ◽  
Methodological Study ◽  
Peter Greenaway ◽  
Key Characteristics ◽  
Non Linear ◽  
Cinematic Experience ◽  
The Senses ◽  
Spatio Temporal ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
Performance Challenges

The article explores fragmentary, transmedia images of the nomadic  Tulse Luper  VJ Performance in terms of activation of the senses. Considering its key characteristics (such as mobility of the spectator, the multiplicity of viewpoints, fragmentary  storytelling), this VJ screen-based performance challenges ordinary assumptions of the cinematic experience. This perspective sheds a new light on the areal connection of the multi-screen environment that exceeds the perception of one linear  story in favour of a kaleidoscopic stream of images and ekphrastic writing. By  analysing spatio-temporal specifics of the No TV Tulse Luper VJ Performance, this  methodological study attempted to demonstrate that the VJ projection could not only be perceived as a reconfiguration of the basic trilogy but also as a unique,  non-linear, touch-based manipulation of storytelling that aims at transforming  a cinematic event into a real-time, expanded audiovisual project.  

Sergei Eisenstein

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Masha Salazkina ◽  
Katarina Mihailovic
Keyword(s):  
Film Studies ◽  
The Political ◽  
Orson Welles ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Sergei Eisenstein ◽  
Standard Curriculum ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
Historical Writings ◽  
The Relationship

Sergei Eisenstein (Sergei Mikhailovich Eizenshtein, b. Riga, Latvia, 1898–d. Moscow, 1948) remains one of the most celebrated filmmakers and theorists in the history of cinema. He achieved this status internationally during his lifetime, and since his death the overall volume of critical and theoretical writing exploring his work, life, and legacy is surpassed only by that on Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles. At least one of his films—Battleship Potemkin (1925)—is inevitably included in every list of “the greatest films ever made,” and both his films and his theoretical writings are a regular part of the standard curriculum of film studies. Eisenstein’s canonical status as a filmmaker from the 1920s through the 1980s can largely be accounted for by the fact that his films have been seen as models for radical political filmmaking, combining antirealist avant-garde cinematic technique with a commitment to the transformation of the political consciousness of the spectator. The availability of archival materials and restorations of unfinished films in the 1980s and 1990s, combined with a renewed interest in historiography within the field of film studies, has led to a reconsideration of Eisenstein’s film legacy. The enduring question that has shaped much of the critical and historical writings on his films has been about the relationship between the ideological mandates of the Soviet state, particularly of the late Stalinist period (1930s–1940s), and the evolution of Eisenstein’s cinematic style.

scholarly journals Konstmässan och barn: Pilvi Takalas The Committee

2014 ◽  
Vol 42 (118) ◽  
pp. 175-192
Author(s):  
Saara Hacklin
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Dimension ◽  
Participatory Art ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Socially Engaged Art ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
The 1960S

Participation has become a popular strategy within contemporary art. Previously, it has been associated with avant garde art, yet nowadays it has become central strategy in the arts, often favored by politicians and other funders. As a result, participatory art finds itself in a strategy becomes unreflected. Phenomenology, and especially Maurice Merleau-Ponty's philosophy, has been mostly associated with the 1960s Minimalism, as it influencedAmerican artists to explore the position of the spectator and the lived experience of the artwork. However, as phenomenology was associated with modernism, it has been often deemed insufficient to address the political dimension of contemporary art from the late 1960s onwards. In order to find a way to connect the apolitical phenomenology of the 1960s minimalism to the political art of today, I discuss a case study of Pilvi Takala's (b. 1980) The Committee (2013). With this piece Takala won the Emdash prize at Frieze art fair in London. The work consisted of a simple gesture: in it she gave, 7.000 pounds, most of the production budget included in the prize to a group of children. The children could freely use the money as long as they made the decision together. The Committee brings together children and money at an art fair, using the strategies of socially engaged art. In the article I examine the piece from a phenomenological vantage point in order to understand the different levels of the work.

scholarly journals SPLIT ENDS? LITERATURE AND POLITICS AT THEFIN DE SIECLE

2007 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 697-709
Author(s):  
Jock Macleod
Keyword(s):  
Victorian Literature ◽  
Cultural Landscape ◽  
Modern Literature ◽  
The Political ◽  
Literature And Politics ◽  
The Real ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Split Ends ◽  
Bourgeois Culture ◽  
Long Course

AS AN UNDERGRADUATE IN THE1970s, my introduction to the 1890s was perfunctory. Squeezed into a couple of weeks in the middle of a year-long course on “Victorian and Modern Literature,” the literature of the decade was reduced to aestheticism and decadence and presented as something of a preliminary to the real business of modernism. Such a focus reflected the scholarship of the time, in which thefin de sièclewas constructed as a moment of transition, one in which the political and socio-ethical dimensions so central to high Victorian literature were evacuated, as arguments for the autonomy of art came to dominate the literary cultural landscape. The organising principle was one of bifurcation: the separating out ofavant gardefrom bourgeois culture, the high from the low and, of particular relevance to this essay, literature from politics.

scholarly journals Introduction to Hélio Oiticica's “The Senses Pointing Toward a New Transformation” (1969)

ARTMargins ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-128
Author(s):  
Jo Melvin ◽  
Luke Skrebowski
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Behavioral Patterns ◽  
Art Making ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
British Art ◽  
Art Magazine ◽  
The Senses

Hélio Oiticica's “The Senses Pointing Towards a New Transformation” was written between June 18 and June 25, 1969, in London and submitted to the British art magazine Studio International, but never appeared in print. The essay negotiates art after objecthood and contextualises Oiticica's project to effect a definitive radicalization of anti-art, one that the artist held to be necessary in light of the impasse reached by the longstanding conflict between formalist art and its various neo-avant-garde negations (both within the Brazilian and the international neo-avant-gardes). For Oiticica, after both Neoconcretism and Minimalism, it was now the process of art making itself that had to be rethought. Oiticica did so by developing what he called “crebehavior,” a practice that revealed the routinized character of everyday life and proposed an immanent transformation of the same via a change in everyday behavioral patterns. Such a transformation opened up the possibility of bringing about “creleisure,” a condition that Oiticica understood to involve both the realization and the dissolution of art.

The avant-garde’s visual arts in the context of Santayana’s idea of vital liberty

Human Affairs ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Krzysztof Skowroński
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
The Other ◽  
Political Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Political Dimension ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The Universe

AbstractIn the present paper, the author looks at the political dimension of some trends in the visual arts within twentieth-century avant-garde groups (cubism, expressionism, fauvism, Dada, abstractionism, surrealism) through George Santayana’s idea of vital liberty. Santayana accused the avant-gardists of social and political escapism, and of becoming unintentionally involved in secondary issues. In his view, the emphasis they placed on the medium (or diverse media) and on treating it as an aim in itself, not, as it should be, as a transmitter through which a stimulating relationship with the environment can be had, was accompanied by a focus on fragments of life and on parts of existence, and, on the other hand, by a de facto rejection of ontology and cosmology as being crucial to understanding life and the place of human beings in the universe. The avant-gardists became involved in political life by responding excessively to the events of the time, instead of to the everlasting problems that are the human lot.

scholarly journals Katherine Mansfield and Periodical Culture

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Mourant
Keyword(s):  
Social Contexts ◽  
Woman Writer ◽  
The Political ◽  
Katherine Mansfield ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Literary Journal ◽  
Depth Study ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
Story Writer ◽  
The Many

Katherine Mansfield’s contemporaries knew her primarily as a contributor to magazines and periodicals. In 1922, for instance, Wyndham Lewis described her as ‘the famous New Zealand Mag.-story writer’. This book provides the first in-depth study of Mansfield’s engagement in periodical culture, examining her contributions to the political weekly The New Age, the avant-garde little magazine Rhythm and the literary journal The Athenaeum. Reading these writings against the editorial strategies and professional cultures of each periodical, Chris Mourant situates Mansfield’s work within networks of production and uncovers the many ways in which she engaged with the writings of others and responded to the political, aesthetic and social contexts of early twentieth-century periodical culture. By examining Mansfield’s ambivalent position as a colonial woman writer working both within and against the London literary establishment, in particular, this book provides a new perspective on Mansfield as a ‘colonial-metropolitan modernist’ and proto-postcolonial writer.

scholarly journals Out of Bounds: Confronting War Crimes and the Breakdown of Justice with Contemporary Art

2021 ◽  
pp. 52
Author(s):  
Catherine Bernard
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
War Crimes ◽  
The Political ◽  
Embodied Experience ◽  
International Conflicts ◽  
Administration Of Justice ◽  
Collective Remembering ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
Marc Quinn ◽  
The Aesthetic

Recent art has turned to judiciary and extra-judiciary practices, specifically in the context of international conflicts, in order to assert art’s political accountability and relevance to our capacity to historicise the present. The war in Iraq inspired works that directly address issues of representation and remediation, such as Marc Quinn’s Mirage (2008), in which the aesthetic experience opens onto an ambiguous experience of the breakdown of justice. Other works have chosen to turn carceral space itself into the site of a collective remembering that harnesses affect to a critical reflection on the administration of justice, on assent and dissent. This article will turn to key works by Marc Quinn and Trevor Paglen that confront extra-judiciary malpractices, but also to recent collective art projects involving an interdisciplinary take on the experience of imprisonment, such as Inside. Artists and Writers in Reading Prison (2016), in which artists of all backgrounds responded to Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis on the very premises of Wilde’s incarceration, as well as the work of 2019 Turner Prize co-recipient: Jordanian sound artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan whose recent works rely on testimonies from Syrian detainees and probe the political pragmatics of aural art. All these works have turned to the document—literary, visual, aural—to reflect on the process of experiential mediation. How does the experience of imprisonment, or extra-judiciary malpractices, come to the spectator? How are they read, heard, interpreted, remediated? The article ponders the remediation and displacement of aesthetic experience itself and the “response-ability”—following Donna Haraway’s coinage—of such a repoliticised embodied experience. It will assess the way by which such interdisciplinary works rethink the poetics of the documentary for an embodied intellection of justice—and injustice—in the present.

scholarly journals Grażyna Bacewicz – The Polish Sappho

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-102
Author(s):  
Małgorzata Gąsiorowska
Keyword(s):  
String Quartet ◽  
Women Composers ◽  
The Political ◽  
String Orchestra ◽  
Limited Extent ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Political Transformations ◽  
New Type ◽  
Nadia Boulanger ◽  
Artistic Career

Abstract The paper is an attempt at a synthetic presentation of the Polish composer Grażyna Bacewicz’s (1909–1969) musical output and artistic career, presented against the background of events in her personal life, and of major events in Polish and European history in the first seven decades of the 20th century. Bacewicz was called ‘the Polish Sappho’ already in the years between World Wars I and II, when there were very few women-composers capable of creating works comparable to the most eminent achievements of male composers. Her path to success in composition and as a concert soloist leads from lessons with her father, the Lithuanian Vincas Bacevičius, to studies at the Łódź and Warsaw Conservatories (violin with Józef Jarzębski, composition with Kazimierz Sikorski), and later with Nadia Boulanger at the École Normale de la Musique, as well as violin lessons with André Tourret. Her oeuvre has for many years been linked with neoclassicism, and folkloric inspirations are evident in many of her works. Her crowning achievement in the neoclassical style is the Concerto for String Orchestra of 1948, while influences from folklore can distinctly be heard in many concert pieces and small forms. The breakthrough came around 1958, under the influence of avant-garde trends present in West European music, which came to be adapted in Poland thanks to the political transformations and the rejection of socialist realism. In such pieces as Music for Strings, Trumpets and Percussion of 1958, Bacewicz transforms her previously fundamental musical components (melody, rhythm, harmony) into a qualitatively new type of sound structures, mainly focused on the coloristic aspects. Grażyna Bacewicz also applied the twelve-note technique, albeit to a limited extent, as in String Quartet No. 6 (1960). Her last work was the unfinished ballet Desire to a libretto by Mieczysław Bibrowski after Pablo Picasso’s play Le désir attrapé par la queue.

A politics of the senses: the political role of theKing’s-Evil in Richard Wiseman’s Severall Chirurgicall Treatises

2018 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 288-294
Author(s):  
Adam S Komorowski ◽  
Sang Ik Song
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Case Series ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Role ◽  
Political Expediency ◽  
Magnum Opus ◽  
The Senses ◽  
Restoration England ◽  
Charles Ii

Written by Richard Wiseman, sergeant-surgeon to King Charles II of England, ‘A Treatise on the King’s-Evil’ within his magnum opus Severall Chirurgicall Treatises (1676), acts as a proto-case series which explores the treatment and cure of 91 patients with the King’s-Evil. Working within the confines of the English monarch’s ability to cure the disease with their miraculous (or thaumaturgic) touch, Wiseman simultaneously elevates and extends the potential to heal to biomedicine. Wiseman’s work on the King’s-Evil provides an interesting window through which the political expediency of the monarch’s thaumaturgic touch may be explored. The dependence of the thaumaturgic touch on liturgy, theatricality and its inherent political economy in Restoration England allowed Wiseman to appropriate the traditionally monarchical role of healer as his own, by drawing attention to a medical ritual of healing that was as reliant, just as the theatrical ritual of monarchical thaumaturgy was, on symbolic binaries of healer–healed, head–body and touch–sight.

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