scholarly journals Holy Crisis. On the Problem that Espouses Modern Art to Modern Spirituality

Perichoresis ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 47-61
Author(s):  
Marc De Kesel
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Religion And Spirituality ◽  
Complex Relation ◽  
The One

AbstractVisual art owes its modernity from the crisis it fell into in the midst of the nineteenth century. Courbet’s call for realism questioned the foundation of the art of his time. The incapacity of the series of ‘-isms’ that followed to answer Courbet’s call, pointed to a crisis not only in art, but in the then emerging non-artistic visual culture in general. In fact, Courbet’s call questioned the image paradigm that was in force since the Renaissance: the one of ‘representation’. The crisis of art laid bare the crisis of the representation paradigm. Modern art’s complex relation to religion and spirituality must be understood in the context of this paradigm crisis. Although generally anti-religious, modern art often keeps on being fascinated by religion, spirituality, and mysticism. The ‘religious’, the ‘holy’, the ‘sanctity’ modern art is inclined to, is linked to the crisis it originates from. Does this reference to the religious and the spiritual, then, constitute the answer to that crisis? I defend the thesis that it rather affirms this very crisis. If there is something ‘holy’ in art, it is not the answer to which it makes people long, but it is art’s inherent crisis itself. If art has a ‘holy’ mission, it is to keep that crisis on the agenda of modernity.

The National Gallery of Zimbabwe

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amanda H. Hellman
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Art Museum ◽  
National Gallery ◽  
Art Gallery ◽  
Art And Design ◽  
Southern Rhodesia ◽  
One Year ◽  
Contemporary Artists

The National Gallery of Zimbabwe is an art museum in Harare dedicated to collecting, preserving, and promoting Zimbabwean visual culture. Though the collection focuses on contemporary artists from Zimbabwe, its holdings are diverse, containing traditional and contemporary African along with European Old Master paintings—a reflection of the acquisition interests of the first director. Sir James Gordon McDonald (1867–1942), a friend and biographer of Cecil Rhodes, gifted £30,000 to found an art gallery in 1943. Ten years later in 1953 a board was established to raise funds, build the museum, and select a director. In 1956, Scotsman Frank McEwen (1907–1994) was appointed to the post of director. The Rhodes National Gallery was opened on 16 July 1957 in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia (renamed Harare, Zimbabwe in 1980). The institution changed its name to the National Gallery of Rhodesia in 1972, one year prior to McEwen’s resignation. One of McEwan’s projects was the Rhodes National Gallery Workshop School. Artists who participated in this early workshop, such as Thomas Mukarobgwa and John and Bernard Takawira, helped define Zimbabwean modern art. After Zimbabwe gained independence in 1980 the National Gallery developed the BAT Workshop, which became the National Gallery School of Visual Art and Design in 2012.

James Thomas Marshall's correspondence (1887–1895) with Scotland's Alexander Somerville: practical, personal and controversial matters in conchology

2009 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. G. MOORE
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Taxonomic Revision ◽  
Marine Science ◽  
The One ◽  
Clyde Sea ◽  
Sea Area ◽  
Molluscan Species

Attention is drawn to the one side remaining of a nineteenth-century correspondence addressed to Alexander Somerville that is housed in the archives of the Scottish Association for Marine Science at Oban, concerning conchological matters. Previously unstudied letters from James Thomas Marshall shed new light on the practicalities of offshore dredging by nineteenth-century naturalists in the Clyde Sea Area; on personalities within conchology; on the controversies that raged among the conchological community about the production of an agreed list of British molluscan species and on the tensions between conchology and malacology. In particular, the criticism of Canon A. E. Norman's ideas regarding taxonomic revision of J. G. Jeffreys's British conchology, as expressed by Marshall, are highlighted.

Mutable Views

2019 ◽  
pp. 52-70
Author(s):  
Johanne Sloan
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Landscape Art ◽  
Experimental Films ◽  
Contemporary Artists

This chapter addresses the contemporary renewal of landscape art in Canada, arising at the intersection of visual art and cinema. Artworks, installations, and experimental films are discussed according to four categories: figure/ground, spatial illusions, the historicity of landscape, and digital scenery. Landscape—as a distinct art historical genre, conventional cinematic background, and ideological ground—has historically played a key role in Canadian visual culture. The contemporary artists and filmmakers in question have remade landscape in pictorial terms by remixing legacies from the visual arts and cinema and also in political terms, by calling attention to the damaged natural world of the Anthropocene, confronting Indigenous claims to the land, and foregrounding struggles over nationhood, identity, and collective memory.

The Cloud‐Astrophysics of Xenophanes and Ionian Material Monism

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander P. D. Mourelatos
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Second Century ◽  
Human Knowledge ◽  
Next Generation ◽  
Critical Thought ◽  
Standard Edition ◽  
The One

This article discusses Xenophanes' “cloud astro-physics”. It analyses and explains all heavenly and meteorological phenomena in terms of clouds. It provides a view of this newer Xenophanes, who is now being recognized as an important philosopher-scientist in his own right and a crucial figure in the development of critical thought about human knowledge and its objects in the next generation of Presocratic thinkers. Xenophanes' account has been preserved in Aëtius, the doxographic compendium (1st or 2nd century ce) reconstructed by Hermann Diels late in the nineteenth century mainly from two sources that show extensive parallelism: pseudo-Plutarch Placita Philosophorum or Epitome of Physical Opinions (second century ce); and Ioannes Stobaeus' Eclogae Physicae or Physical Extracts (fifth century ce). In the Stobaeus version, which is also the one printed in the standard edition of the Pre-socratics.

scholarly journals ‘Epidemics in a Mist’: Medical Climatology and Cholera in Victorian Visual Culture

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 492-511
Author(s):  
Amanda Sciampacone
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Mortality Rates ◽  
Tropical Environment ◽  
Atmospheric Conditions ◽  
Vital Force ◽  
Real Material ◽  
Climate And Health ◽  
Crucial Part ◽  
Epidemic Diseases

Abstract The article explores how Victorian visual culture was a vital force in the construction and dissemination of medical theories on the connection between climate and health. During the nineteenth century, the seemingly inexplicable and deadly nature of many epidemic diseases compelled British medics to investigate all possible reasons for their spread. Focusing on cholera, the article will examine how, in an effort to understand what was seen at the time as a mysterious disease, Victorian medics increasingly concentrated on the climate of India and unusual weather in Britain as propagators of the malady. Supplementing the dominant miasma theory, medics explained how the seemingly airborne sources of cholera resulted from a state of England’s air that resembled the tropical environment of the subcontinent. In an effort to highlight the correlation between cholera and the atmosphere, they produced medical climatology reports containing diagrams that juxtaposed the data on the disease’s mortality rates with measurements of meteorological phenomena. These images, rather than serving simply as illustrations, became a crucial part of medical arguments. As the article will demonstrate, in attempting to visualize the medical climatology of cholera, the diagrams mapped the disease to certain atmospheric conditions, suggesting that cholera could be quantified and controlled. Yet, in doing so, the images also implied that cholera had a real material presence in the air of Britain, powerfully evoking visual tropes of the disease as a substance that had the potential to contaminate the very landscape of the nation.

Sr. José, the Worker mélomane, or Opera and Democracy in Lisbon ca. 1850

2016 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 81-105
Author(s):  
Gabriela Cruz
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Urban Environment ◽  
Bel Canto ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
One Act ◽  
A Performance

Sr. José do capote, a worker and an opera lover, is the monad contemplated in this article. He is a theatrical figure, the protagonist of the one-act burlesque parody Sr. José do capote assistindo a uma representação do torrador (Sr. José of the Cloak attends a performance of The Roaster, 1855), but also an idea that expresses in abbreviated form the urban environment of nineteenth-century Lisbon, the theatrical and operatic sensibility of its citizens, and the politics of their engagement with the stage. This article is a history of Il trovatore and of bel canto claimed for a nascent culture of democracy in nineteenth-century Portugal.

Sufis and the Sufi Lodges in Istanbul in the Late Nineteenth Century: A Socio-Spatial Analysis

2021 ◽  
pp. 009614422110252
Author(s):  
Ahmet Yusuf Yüksek
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Spatial Analysis ◽  
Natural Disasters ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Religion And Spirituality ◽  
Spatial History ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Social Profiles

This study investigates the socio-spatial history of Sufism in Istanbul during 1880s. Drawing on a unique population registry, it reconstructs the locations of Sufi lodges and the social profiles of Sufis to question how visible Sufism was in the Ottoman capital, and what this visibility demonstrates the historical realities of Sufism. It claims that Sufism was an integral part of the Ottoman life since Sufi lodges were space of religion and spirituality, art, housing, and health. Despite their large presence in Istanbul, Sufi lodges were extensively missing in two main areas: the districts of Unkapanı-Bayezid and Galata-Pera. While the lack of lodgess in the latter area can be explained by the Western encroachment in the Ottoman capital, the explanation for the absence of Sufis in Unkapanı-Bayezid is more complex: natural disasters, two opposing views about Sufi sociability, and the locations of the central lodges.

Chatography

2012 ◽  
Vol 71 (3) ◽  
pp. 362-385
Author(s):  
Aron Vinegar
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Modus Operandi ◽  
Great Pleasure ◽  
Complex Relation

The centrality of cats—and the act of drawing cats—to the nineteenth-century architect Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc’s modus operandi as an architectural theorist and restorer is evident from the beginning to the very end of his career. He took great pleasure in interacting with cats, observing their habits, and learning from their supple, graceful movements. In Chatography, Aron Vinegar studies the Château de Pierrefonds, restored in the mid-nineteenth century by Viollet-le-Duc, and argues that the crucial issues at stake in Viollet-le-Duc’s understanding of restoration may be gleaned from his drawings of cats and war machines that demonstrate an interest in movement, unruly forces, and affect, rather than equilibrium and balance. This reading enables us to question the prevalent understanding of Viollet-le-Duc as a structural rationalist, and to appreciate the complex relation between architecture and representation.

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