Border crossings: the cultural brokerage and artistic practice of David Ruben Piqtoukun

Cinema plays a major role in contemporary art, yet the deeper influence of its diverse historical forms on artistic practice has received little attention. Working from a media and cultural studies perspective, Screen Presence explores the intersections of film, popular media, and art since the 1950s through the examples of four pivotal figures – Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Mona Hatoum and Douglas Gordon. While their film-related works may appear primarily as challenges to conventional cinema, these artists draw on overlooked forms of popular film culture that have been commonplace, and even dominant, in specific social contexts. Through analysis of a range of examples and source materials, Stephen Monteiro demonstrates the dependence of contemporary artists on cinema’s shifting applications and interpretations, offering a fresh understanding of the enduring impact of everyday media on how we make and view art.

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Screening Statues

10.3366/edinburgh/9781474410892.001.0001 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Steven Jacobs ◽

Susan Felleman ◽

Vito Adriaensens ◽

Lisa Colpaert

Keyword(s):

Contemporary Art ◽

Three Dimensional ◽

Interdisciplinary Approach ◽

Film History ◽

Two Dimensional ◽

Artistic Practice ◽

Experimental Art ◽

Broad Scope ◽

Art Practices ◽

Extensive Reference

Sculpture is an artistic practice that involves material, three-dimensional, and generally static objects, whereas cinema produces immaterial, two-dimensional, kinetic images. These differences are the basis for a range of magical, mystical and phenomenological interactions between the two media. Sculptures are literally brought to life on the silver screen, while living people are turned into, or trapped inside, statuary. Sculpture motivates cinematic movement and film makes manifest the durational properties of sculptural space. This book will examine key sculptural motifs and cinematic sculpture in film history through seven chapters and an extensive reference gallery, dealing with the transformation skills of "cinemagician" Georges Méliès, the experimental art documentaries of Carl Theodor Dreyer and Henri Alekan, the statuary metaphors of modernist cinema, the mythological living statues of the peplum genre, and contemporary art practices in which film—as material and apparatus—is used as sculptural medium. The book’s broad scope and interdisciplinary approach is sure to interest scholars, amateurs and students alike.

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‘A disoriented vision of … fact’: Brian Friel, Francis Bacon, and Faith Healer

Irish University Review ◽

10.3366/iur.2020.0473 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 50 (2) ◽

pp. 319-336

Author(s):

Zosia Kuczyńska

Keyword(s):

Creative Process ◽

Francis Bacon ◽

Major Influence ◽

Artistic Practice ◽

Archival Research ◽

Faith Healer ◽

Brian Friel ◽

History Of ◽

Composition Process

The Brian Friel Papers at the NLI reveal a long and relatively unexplored history of major and minor influences on Friel's plays. As the archive attests, these influences manifest themselves in ways that range from the superficial to the deeply structural. In this article, I draw on original archival research into the composition process of Friel's genre-defining play Faith Healer (1979) to bring to light a model of influence that operates at the level of artistic practice. Specifically, I examine the extent to which Friel's officially unacknowledged encounter with a book of interviews with painter Francis Bacon influenced the play in terms of character, language, and form. I suggest that Bacon's creative process – incorporating his ideas on the role of the artist, the workings of chance, and the extent to which art does violence to fact – may have had a major influence on both the play's development and on Friel's development as an artist.

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“I’m just aware they’re labels”

Fieldwork in Religion ◽

10.1558/firn.v7i2.179 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 7 (2) ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Sharon Smith

Keyword(s):

Ethnic Origin ◽

Political Organization ◽

Faith Communities ◽

Border Crossings ◽

Sexual Identities ◽

Theoretical Approaches ◽

Class Status ◽

Sexual Identification ◽

Minority Ethnic ◽

Divine Order

This article discusses fieldwork in two research projects on Buddhists in London. It explores issues involved in researching lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, questioning and/or intersex (LGBTQI) Buddhists. It also considers issues around heterosexual identities in Buddhist communi-ties. In researching dynamics of gender and sexual identification of participants it was observed that at times participant narratives treated these identities for these axes of difference as provisional and contingent rather than essential, fixed and a basis for socio-political organization. This contrasts with much of the work on religion and sexuality in mainstream theistic traditions, where their LGBTQI members often argue a “reverse discourse” asserting their place in a “Divine Order” in which their sexual/gender identity is a key part of “who they are.” It is argued that theoretical approaches based on queer theorizing could be particularly applicable to research on Western Buddhist perspectives on gender and sexual identities. This is attributed to the anti-essentialist approach Buddhism takes to questions of subjectivity and identification and its non-hegemonic status in the West. Such queer theorizing would, however, need to acknowledge the constraints to “border crossings” between identity positions arising from oppressive forces from gender minoritization, class status, minority ethnic origin, and so on. It is also suggested that research on the heterosexual majority can elucidate ways in which faith communities are gendered, racialized and stratified by class.

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Saving Abstraction

10.1093/oso/9780190948573.001.0001 ◽

2019 ◽

Author(s):

Ryan Dohoney

Keyword(s):

Altered States ◽

Artistic Practice ◽

Spiritual Orientation ◽

Late Modernity ◽

Religious Feeling ◽

Religious Sensibility ◽

History Of ◽

Spiritual Intervention ◽

Musical Modernism

Saving Abstraction takes up the conflicted history of Morton Feldman’s most important collaboration—his work with Dominique and John de Menil on music for the Rothko Chapel in Houston. These collaborators struggled over fundamental questions about the emotional efficacy of artistic practice and its potential translation into religious feeling. At the center of this study is the question of ecumenism—that is, in what terms can religious encounters be staged for fruitful dialog to take place? And how might abstraction (both visual and musical) be useful to achieving it? This was a dilemma for Feldman, whose music sought to produce sublime “abstract experience,” as well as for the de Menils, who envisioned the Rothko Chapel as a space for spiritual intervention into late modernity. Saving Abstraction develops two central concepts: “abstract ecumenism” and “agonistic universalism.” The former characterizes a broad spiritual orientation within postwar musical modernism and experimentalism that aspired to altered states of ego-loss. This emerged as a renewed religious sensibility in late modernist experimentalism. The latter concept describes the particular religious form that Feldman’s music achieves within Rothko Chapel—an ascetic mode of existence that endures hopefully the aporia of postwar modernization’s destructiveness and modernism’s failure to effectively counter it.

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Germaine de Staël’s and the Early Usage of Improvisation in English

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195370935.013.019 ◽

2014 ◽

Author(s):

Erik Simpson

Keyword(s):

Eighteenth Century ◽

English Language ◽

Napoleonic Wars ◽

The Novel ◽

Artistic Practice ◽

New Information

This chapter describes the emergence of the terminology of improvisation in the English language. Terms relating to improvisation began to appear in the eighteenth century and came to be used frequently in the nineteenth. Germaine de Staël’s 1807 novel Corinne ou L’Italie (published in French and translated into English the same year) was an important part of this emergence of improvisation. By attending to the content and language of Corinne, including the novel’s earliest translations, the chapter argues that the novel helped create a sense of improvisation as an Italianate artistic practice with political overtones specific to the context of the Napoleonic Wars. For the Staëlian improviser, art and history alike progress not toward pre-ordained goals but by taking new information into account and improvising new ends.

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Space Making as Artistic Practice: The Relationship between Grassroots Art Organizations and the Political Economy of Urban Development

City and Community ◽

10.1111/cico.12458 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 18 (4) ◽

pp. 1142-1161 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Shira Zilberstein

Keyword(s):

Political Economy ◽

Urban Development ◽

Urban Space ◽

The Political ◽

Cultural Representations ◽

Artistic Practice ◽

Social And Cultural Capital ◽

Art Organizations ◽

Do It Yourself ◽

The Relationship

Standard narratives on the relationship between art and urban development detail art networks as connected to sources of dominant economic, social, and cultural capital and complicit in gentrification trends. This research challenges the conventional model by investigating the relationship between grassroots art spaces, tied to marginal and local groups, and the political economy of development in the Chicago neighborhood of Pilsen. Using mixed methods, I investigate Do–It–Yourself and Latinx artists to understand the construction and goals of grassroots art organizations. Through their engagements with cultural representations, space and time, grassroots artists represent and amplify the interests of marginal actors. By allying with residents, community organizations and other art spaces, grassroots artists form a social movement to redefine the goals and usages of urban space. My findings indicate that heterogeneous art networks exist and grassroots art networks can influence urban space in opposition to top–down development.

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