scholarly journals Elucidating the Visual Language of the Venus Table in the Dresden Codex: A Visual Semiotics Approach

2020 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
pp. 95-126
Author(s):  
Margarita Juárez Nájera ◽  
Mariana Castellanos
Keyword(s):  
Visual Language ◽  
Visual Response ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
Visual Semiotics ◽  
Saint Martin ◽  
Art Historians ◽  
Dresden Codex

The visual language of the paintings has undergone a theoretical and pragmatic process, which is different than that of textual linguistics. In this paper we propose a method of analysis based on semiotics to elucidate and compare the visual response of six paintings of the pre-Columbian Maya Dresden Codex. The Venus table was chosen because it presents a calendrical-astronomical message through a visual language that makes its interpretation complex. We consider that the visual semiotics of the Quebec School represented by Saint-Martin and Shannon´s entropic comparison of the Venus table paintings may be applied to both classical and contemporary pictorial works to support the work of art historians.

Semiotics of Visual Language by Fernande Saint-Martin

1991 ◽  
Vol 1070 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-92
Author(s):  
William C. Stokoe
Keyword(s):  
Visual Language ◽  
Saint Martin

scholarly journals Fake or Fortune? Alexander Dorner and the Weimar Reproductions Debate

Venezia Arti ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Camilla Balbi
Keyword(s):  
Art Museums ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
Art Historians

Between 1929 and 1930 the Der Kreis journal hosted a debate among art historians and museum directors on how art copies were changing the museum landscape. The so-called Hamburger Faksimile-Streit constitutes a crucial moment in the Weimarian theoretical debate on the categories of copy and original, culminating a few years later in Benjamin’s well-known essay on the work of art. After examining the theses of the main participants in the debate, this article focus on the position of curator and museum director Alexander Dorner – the only one advocating for the non-superiority of originals over copies in art museums – and on his relationship with Walter Benjamin’s later theories.

Illies, F. (2019). Just now the sky was blue. Texts on art. Translated by V. Serov. Moscow: Ad Marginem Press, Muzey sovremennogo iskusstva ‘Garazh.’ (In Russ.)

2021 ◽  
pp. 286-289
Author(s):  
N. I. Kovalyov
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
Common Motif ◽  
Art Historians ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Literature ◽  
Historical Periods

The reviewer claims that Florian Illies’ essays demonstrate a perfect balance between pure scholarship and journalism. Despite representing a miscellany of genres (book and exhibition reviews, articles summarising the author’s view of various painters and art historians), the collection proves harmonious due to a common motif of the essays. The book does not draw a strict line between history of literature and art history. Similarly, Illies does not separate art history from the context of the life around art, i. e. the authors’ correspondence, their relationships with their family and friends, fellow artists and patrons. His unconventional view of art history enables Illies to identify interesting overarching subjects which include the problem of the patron’s influence on a work of art and the category of taste. The essayist is particularly interested in ‘second-rank’ authors, who, he suggests, emerge as first-rank in various historical periods.

The Transition to Art: Poster Exhibitions at the Outset of the Poster’s Institutionalisation

Ikonotheka ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 239-251
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Matul
Keyword(s):  
Central Bureau ◽  
Art Exhibitions ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
Political Perspective ◽  
Art Historians ◽  
The Status ◽  
The 1950S

What happened when the poster, originally an advertising medium, became an object of appreciation in the museums of Communist Poland? What criteria did it have to comply with in order to be accepted into a temple of art, a museum? The article analyses poster exhibitions organised at the Zachęta Central Bureau of Art Exhibitions in the 1950s. During this period, the interest of museum curators, critics and art historians in this medium must be envisioned as always being underpinned by political and propagandist interests; the transition of the poster to the status of a work of art is analysed here in this double, i.e. cultural and political, perspective.

scholarly journals Types of Catharsis in the Perception of Paintings

2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 125-132
Author(s):  
M.V. Yermolayeva ◽  
D.V. Lubovsky
Keyword(s):  
Meaning Making ◽  
Main Character ◽  
Personal Reflection ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
Art Historians ◽  
The Moment

The article analyzes the functions and structure of psychological catharsis as a cultural means of meaning-making. Basing on eudemonistic understanding of catharsis, the authors show its meaning-making action. In the structure of catharsis, there are phases of excitement (pathos), concentration (‘merging’ with the main character), and transcendence (‘reaching beyond one’s limitations’) which, through personal reflection, concludes with the individual’s ‘return to oneself’, transformed through the encounter with the work of art. The authors consider catharsis as an event that encourages action and creates the space of opportunities for it; basing on the research of art historians, the authors describe two kinds of catharsis (in the perception of Caravaggio’s and Rembrandt’s works). The authors identify psychotechnical means of interrupting catharsis at the moment of emotional extremum (in the works of Caravaggio) and the conditions for completing the reflective catharsis with the ‘return to one’s transformed self’ (using the paintings of Rembrandt as an example). The paper concludes with an outline of further prospects of exploring catharsis as a cultural means of meaning-making.

Outline of a Theory of Visual Tension

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 127-144 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ling Zhu
Keyword(s):  
Visual Perception ◽  
Explanatory Gap ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
Art Historians

Artists and art historians frequently use the word ‘tension’ when describing a work of art. However, no full-fledged explanation has yet been given on what tension, a term borrowed from physics, exactly means in visual and artistic contexts. This paper seeks to fill this explanatory gap and to outline a theory according to which visual tension, in a way totally analogous to elastic tension, emerges as the result of the distortion of basic shapes underlying visual perception. This theory, which draws from Edwin Rausch and Michael Leyton, will be applied to the analysis of biomorphic art, Edvard Munch’s painting Eye in Eye and Giotto’s fresco Joachim’s Dream.

scholarly journals Juri Lotman, Gilles Deleuze and their approaches to cinema: Points of intersection

2020 ◽  
Vol 48 (2-4) ◽  
pp. 392-414
Author(s):  
Mihael Konstantinov
Keyword(s):  
Visual Arts ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
Methodological Approach ◽  
Interdisciplinary Studies ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
Visual Semiotics ◽  
Semiotic Approach ◽  
Methodological Principles ◽  
Philosophical Understanding

Engaging with the methods of studying contemporary digital audiovisual art is a dominant topic in contemporary theories of art. Against this background, the article offers a view onto some aspects of Juri Lotman’s and Gilles Deleuze’s studies on the cinema. As a rule, contemporary studies of digital audiovisual art take place in the context of interdisciplinary studies. One of the methodological principles of such studies consists in adopting a structural and semiotic approach. As of today, this methodological approach to studying audio-visual art is most developed in semiotics of the cinema, which is why in this article visual semiotics in general is viewed through semiotics of the cinema (proceeding from the approach of Juri Lotman). Also, the philosophical understanding of the nature of the cinema offered by Gilles Deleuze has proven fundamental for the study of contemporary audio-visual art. The two authors were contemporaries, but represented different scholarly paradigms: while Juri Lotman was an adherent of structuralism, Gilles Deleuze was a poststructuralist who criticized the structuralist approach. Yet despite this principal difference, both scholars still arrived at similar conclusions as concerns several questions regarding the understanding of the cinema and its very nature. In the present paper I focus on the features of these authors’ approach to spatial and temporal relations in the cinema, audiovisual relations in film as a heterogeneous form of the work of art, virtuality and mythologism in the viewer’s perception of cinema. The differences and similarities in academic approaches to cinema, developed by Lotman and Deleuze, indicate a common direction in the development of the cinema and visual arts theory, which seems relevant for the study of contemporary audio-visual arts.

scholarly journals Polska i niemiecka historia sztuki w polemicznym dyskursie - sympozjum w Rogalinie w roku 1973.

2018 ◽  
pp. 227-250
Author(s):  
Adam Labuda
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
Main Idea ◽  
Historical Background ◽  
Critical Approach ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
German States ◽  
Theoretical Assumptions ◽  
Art Historians ◽  
German Art ◽  
History Of

Polish and German Art History in a Polemic. The Rogalin Symposium of 1973 Summary The paper recapitulates a discussion over the book, Das Kunstwerk zwischen Wissenschaft und Weltanschauung, ed. Martin Warnke, Köln 1970, which was an aftermath of a pungent statement made by critical German art historians at the Congress of German Art Historians held in Köln in 1970. The main idea of the book was showing the “work of art as an object of ideological interests, a victim of ideological interventions” (Warnke) – in this case, those of a nationalist, Nazi, and fascist origin. A critical impulse triggered by the congress and the book was the main reason for organizing a symposium in Rogalin in 1973, during which art historians from Poznań delivered papers-comments on four articles included in the German publication. Taking into consideration the key message of the book, in the first place they focused on the methodological and theoretical assumptions adopted by German scholars. Stressing the discrepancy between the goals and assumptions of the German publication and its Polish reception, the author treats the papers delivered in Rogalin as evidence of a methodological shift in Polish art history of the early 1970s. His main observations are the following: the end of the dominant approach focusing on the artwork itself; a shift toward approaching it in terms of the communicative triad “sender-work-recipient”; acknowledging the inevitable involvement of the art historian (scholar-recipient) in that historically determined framework. It is notable that the Polish scholars virtually ignored the ideological and critical approach to the evolution of art history that was developed in the German book. Moreover, the paper presents the historical background of both the Köln conference and its proceedings as well as the specific determinants of art history in the communist Poland, particularly as regards its contacts with the two German states.

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