scholarly journals CONTEMPORARY ART IN THE CONTEXT OF TEACHING PRACTICES: PROBLEMS AND PROSPECTS

2019 ◽  
pp. 27-30
Author(s):  
N.V. Shmeleva ◽  
A.K. Saimiddinov

The article considers the status of contemporary art in the system of university education, addresses the need for determine the boundaries of art in the framework of pedagogical practice, offers methods of analysis of contemporary art, because such university courses as "World Art Studies" (WAS) and "History of Art" have a number of specific features. Firstly, a work of art is often presented as a cultural text with significant axiological meaning and considered as a history of the development of art, but not as art itself. Secondly, the logic of teaching requires the definition of clearer tools for the selection of studied works of art. Also, the teaching methods such disciplines as "WAS" or "History of Art" are closely intertwined with methods of analyzing the existing empirical base in the field of contemporary (or near modern) art. Teaching of artistic culture of the twentieth century, as a rule, rests in an insufficient understanding of the specifics of creative practices of the Modern and Postmodern eras (if you use some kind of common periodicals), therefore, often, extrapolating an established didactic platform relating exclusively to classical art is clearly not enough.

Chapter One deals with several central issues with regard to understanding the role of religious motifs in contemporary art. Besides being a repetition of imagery from the past, religious motifs embedded in contemporary artworks become a means to problematise not only the way different periods in the history of art are delimited, but larger and seemingly more rigid distinctions as those between art and non-art images. Early religious images differ significantly from art images. The two types are regulated according to different sets of rules related to the conditions of their production, display, appreciation and the way images are invested with the status of being true or authentic instances of art or sacred images. Chapter One provides a discussion of the important motif of the image not made by an artist’s hand, or acheiropoietos, and its survival and transformation, including its traces in contemporary image-making practices. All images are the result of human making; they are fictions. The way the conditions of these fictions are negotiated, or the way the role of the maker is brought to visibility, or concealed, is a defining feature of the specific regime of representation. While the cult image concealed its maker in order to maintain its public significance, and the later art image celebrated the artist as a re-inventor of the old image, contemporary artists cite religious images in order to reflect on the very procedures that produce the public significance and status of images.


2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Parola

This essay derives from the primary need to make order between direct and indirect sources available for the reconstruction of the history of video art in Italy in the seventies. In fact, during the researches for the Ph.D. thesis it became clear that in most cases it is difficult to define, in terms of facts, which of the different historiographies should be taken into consideration to deepen the study of video art in Italy. Beyond legitimate differences of perspectives and methods, historiographical narratives all share similar issues and narrative structure. The first intention of the essay is, therefore, to compare the different historiographic narratives on Italian video art of the seventies, verifying their genealogy, the sources used and the accuracy of the narrated facts. For the selection of the corpus, it was decided to analyze in particular monographic volumes dealing with the history of the origins of video art in Italy. The aim was, in fact, to get a wide range of types of "narrations", as in the case of contemporary art and architecture magazines, which are examined in the second part of the essay. After the selection, for an analytical and comparative study of the various historiography, the essay focuses only on the Terza Biennale Internazionale della Giovane Pittura. Gennaio ’70. Comportamenti, oggetti e mediazioni (Third International Biennial of Young Painting. January '70. Behaviors, Objects and Mediations, 1970, Bologna), the exhibition which - after Lucio Fontana's pioneering experiments - is said to be the first sign of the arrival of videotape in Italy (called at the time videorecording), curated by Renato Barilli, Tommaso Trini, Andrea Emiliani and Maurizio Calvesi. The narration given so far of this exhibition appeared more mythological than historical and could be compared structurally to that of the many numerous beginnings that historiographyies on international video art identify as ‘first’ and ‘generative’. In the first part of the essay the 'facts' related to Gennaio ’70, as narrated by historiography on video art, are compared. In the second part the survey is carried out through some of the direct sources identified during the research, with the aim of answering to questions raised by the comparison between historiographies. Concluding, it is important to underline that the tapes containing the videos transmitted have not been found and seem to have disappeared since the ending of the exhibition. Nevertheless, the deepening of the works and documentation transmitted during the exhibition is possible thanks to other types of sources which give us many valuable information regarding video techniques and practices at the beginning of 1970 in Italy.


1970 ◽  
Vol 36 ◽  
pp. 261-279 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. V. S. Megaw

Nearly seventy years ago Wilhelm Worringer first wrote that ‘ultimately all our definitions of art are definitions of classical art’ (Worringer, 1953, 132). Today, the study of Western European art history, old or modern, the products of peasant craft-centres or urban ‘schools’, has in the course of time developed its own methodology and, almost, mystique. In contrast, the study of many branches of prehistoric art in Europe and elsewhere is all too often seen as a mere extension of the skilled but subjective approaches of classical archaeology without considering the suitability of the latter's application. The use of the classical art-historian's intuitive methods built up not just from visual exprience but a detailed background of literary, historical and philosophical studies must in fact be almost entirely denied the student of prehistoric or primitive art. It is perhaps only natural that principles of classical art history should be applied to later European prehistory, though it is often difficult to arrive at a precise definition of these principles. It was Johann Joachim Winckelmann who made the first systematic application of categories of style to the history of art (Gombrich, 1968, 319). Sir John Beazley, the greatest of all modern classical art historians followed in this tradition basing attributions ‘on the grounds of tell-tale traits of individual mannerisms’ (Carpenter, 1963, 115 ff.) a scheme first applied to painting less than a century ago by the Italian physician Giovanni Morelli (Gombrich, 1968, 309 ff.) and followed at the turn of the nineteenth century in the study of Italian painting (Lermolieff, 1892–3). With Beazley it is, however, difficult to follow step by step his methods of work.


2007 ◽  
Vol 35 (103) ◽  
pp. 108-137
Author(s):  
Carsten Sestoft

Romanens status i det 17. århundredes Frankrig The hesitations of a genre: The status of the novel in seventeenth-century FranceIn answering the question: What was the novel in seventeenth-century France? – this article provides insight into some important points of the early history of the genre. The contradiction between its non-existence in official (Aristotelian) poetics and its existence as a popular commodity on the book market was, in the course of the seventeenth century, reconciled in the emergent category of belles lettres as a plurality of genres mainly defined by their public of honnêtes gens, while attempts at legitimizing the novel as belonging to such Aristotelian genres as epic or history generally failed; and at the end of the century a number of convergences – between epic and novel, between the designations roman and nouvelle, and between the ‘high’ and ‘low’ forms of the novel – seem to point to the fact that the social existence of the genre had been strengthened, even if it was the English novel of the eighteenth century that could be said to reap the profits of this stronger position. Using historical semantics and cultural sociology to study the status of the novel in seventeenth-century France thus leads to a clearer understanding of the specificity of the novel as a literary and cultural genre.


2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 81-88
Author(s):  
José Antonio Colón Fraile

ABSTRACTWe studied how the urinating action and the use of the own urine have been used as an element of artistic expression in different art throughout history disciplines. This tour was organized by subject indexes, from the simplest to the most complex images semiotically. Contemporary art deserved special attention by incorporating the use of the body and its fluids as examples of human fears and obsessions, characterized the appearance of urine by its radicalism and gender affiliation.RESUMENSe estudia cómo se ha representado la acción de orinar y el uso de la propia orina como elemento de expresión artística en las distintas disciplinas a lo largo de la historia del arte. Se estructura este recorrido por índices temáticos, desde las imágenes más simples hasta las semióticamente más complejas, comenzando por la representación de niños que orinan, utilizados en todas las épocas como imagen de lo anecdótico y motivo decorativo para fuentes y jardines. Se continúa por otras imágenes que, aun siendo protagonizadas también por niños, poseen niveles de lectura culturalmente más elevados. Se divide este estudio en dos grandes épocas antagónicas: el mito de la Edad de Oro, estado natural y privilegiado para el ser humano, y el posterior mito de la caída en el que la sexualidad connota el acto de orinar ofreciéndonos nuevas lecturas desde el erotismo, la pornografía y su uso político-propagandístico. 


Author(s):  
Elena Y. Baboshko ◽  
◽  
Dmitriy V. Galkin ◽  

The authors refer the issue of definition of contemporaneity as cultural and historical totality basing on the research results of a well-known theorist Boris Groys. Analyzing the progress of his ideas, the authors conclude, that the philosopher’s considerable contribution to the science is composed of the next phase of the development of the thesis about the art language as the base of contemporaneity construction and of the “natural selection” of contemporary art structures. The latter is not simply reduced to the postmodern “polylogue” variant, but implies a kind of contemporaneity patterns niche and “stabilization”. The patterns naturally tend to become complementary due to simple juxtaposition/ overlay in general time context. According to the authors, this circumstance does not prevent them from being turned by different political forces into locally dominating contemporaneity patterns (as in the case of Gesamkunstwerk Stalin). Contemporary art provides simple experience, that helps to retain the illusion of single and seemingly total contemporaneity. B. Groys leads us to the thought that art provides conditions for generating a significant reflective distance in relation to different social and historical situations. The distance gives an artist the opportunity to consider the reality comprehensively, given the autonomy, through the art language. However, we believe, that the most important philosopher’s achievement is not only drawing parallels between cultural and social and historical processes, based on the concept of art strategies influencing the social dynamics. He also managed to approach one of the most significant issues in culture theory and history – the opportunity to define contemporaneity as cultural and historical totality. According to his modernity theory, the origin of contemporaneity is hidden in the avant-garde art manifestation. He interprets the utopic by its nature modernist discourse, applied in art practice, through Nietzscheian will to power as redefining the new age philosophy. This article aims to analyze the progress of the issue of contemporaneity in the works of B. Groys and to explicate the complexity of considering contemporaneity as cultural and historical totality. The authors believe that the thorough study of the phenomenon of total artwork (Gesamtkunstwerk) as a soviet Stalin project and critics’ opinion analysis helps to create arguments limiting the opportunity of considering contemporaneity as totality.


Author(s):  
Terry Smith

As an art-critical or historical category––one that might designate a style of art, a tendency among others, or a period in the history of art––“contemporary art” is relatively recent. In art world discourse throughout the world, it appears in bursts of special usage in the 1920s and 1930s, and again during the 1960s, but it remains subsidiary to terms––such as “modern art,” “modernism,” and, after 1970, “postmodernism”––that highlight art’s close but contested relationships to social and cultural modernity. “Contemporary art” achieves a strong sense, and habitual capitalization, only in the 1980s. Subsequently, usage grew rapidly, to become ubiquitous by 2000. Contemporary art is now the undisputed name for today’s art in professional contexts and enjoys widespread resonance in public media and popular speech. Yet, its valiance for any of the usual art-critical and historical purposes remains contested and uncertain. To fill in this empty signifier by establishing the content of this category is the concern of a growing number of early-21st-century publications. This article will survey these developments in historical sequence. Although it will be shown that use of the term “contemporary art” as a referent has a two-hundred-year record, as an art-historical field, contemporary art is so recent, and in such volatile formation, that general surveys of the type now common for earlier periods in the history of art are just beginning to appear. To date, only one art-historiographical essay has been attempted. Listed within Contemporary Art Becomes a Field, this essay (“The State of Art History: Contemporary Art” (Art Bulletin 92.4 [2010]: 366–383; Smith 2010, cited under Historiography) is by the present author and forms the conceptual basis of this article. Contemporary art’s deep immersion in the art market and auction system is profiled in the separate Oxford Bibliographies article Art Markets and Auction. This article does not include any of the many thousands of books, catalogues, and essays that are monographic studies of individual contemporary artists, because it would be invidious to select a small number. For similar reasons, entries on journals, websites, and blogs are omitted. A select listing of them may be found in Terry Smith, Contemporary Art: World Currents (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2011; Smith 2011 cited under Surveys). Books on art movements are not to be found because contemporary art, unlike modern art, has no movements in the same art-historical sense. It consists of currents, tendencies, relationships, concerns, and interests and is the product of a complex condition in which different senses of history are coming into play. With regret, this article confines itself to publications in English, the international language of the contemporary art world. This fact obscures the importance and valiance of certain local-language publications, even though many key texts were issued simultaneously both in the local language and English, and many others have subsequently been translated. In acknowledgment of this lacuna, a subsection on Primary Documents has been included.


Itinerario ◽  
1994 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 97-115
Author(s):  
H.L. Wesseling

Is history science or art? This is a problem which has been on people's minds for more than a century and certainly it is an interesting question. But within the framework of this contribution it is not really important, for, whether one practises art history or history of science, one faces the same problem. On the one hand such a history is first and foremost a history of the work and achievements of individuals. A history of science which does not deal with the work of Copernicus, Newton and Einstein is as useless as a history of art in which Rembrandt, Rubens and Michelangelo do not figure. Art and history are and will remain foremost the work of individuals of genius. On the other hand it is also true that a history of art or science which confines itself exclusively to a series of sketches of individuals and their work is not satisfactory either. Artists and scientists do not work within a vacuum. As one discerns tendencies and trends in art, likewise within the field of science one finds schools and paradigms. In order to understand works of art and science we have to look closely at influences and examples, at the time-spirit, the spiritual climate, et cetera.


Leonardo ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 162-168 ◽  
Author(s):  
María Fernández

Despite his influence in art, architecture and theater, British cybernetician Gordon Pask is rarely acknowledged in histories of digital culture and virtually unknown in the history of art. Pask is better known as a theoretician than as an artist or designer, although his machines, artwork and theories were closely related. This article investigates the relevance of specific aspects of Pask's theories to his best-known artwork, The Colloquy of Mobiles, to illustrate his characteristic unification of science and art, and theory and material experimentation. Select works of contemporary art are discussed to indicate Pask's significance to contemporary art practices.


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