Roger Bartra: Intrusion and Melancholia

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tarek Elhaik
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Public Intellectual ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
National Tradition ◽  
Media Objects ◽  
Art Film ◽  
Diagnostic Work

This chapter explores the post-nationalist and post-cosmopolitan diagnostic work of Roger Bartra, leading public intellectual figure in contemporary Mexico, in relation to what he calls the ‘melancholic post-Mexican condition’. ‘Bartra’ stands here both for the conceptual persona of the Anthropologist and for a sign of a slow and patient disarticulation of the historically constituted racialized citizen-subjects and media-objects staged by post-revolutionary cosmopolitan modernism and avant-garde art/film practices. Bartra has evaluated the dominant forms of affectivity transmitted by the nationalist and national tradition of Mexican anthropology: a composite of pride, abjection, enthusiasm, and melancholia. The chapter considers the mutual intrusions between Bartra and the author as well as Bartra's intellectual vocation and anthropological motion in and out of Mexico, along with the implications this has with regard to the assemblage at work in the anthropological turn in contemporary art.

scholarly journals On Lars von Trier, Enfant Terrible of Danish Art Film

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mette Hjort
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Lars Von Trier ◽  
Crucial Feature ◽  
Art Film

THE PROBLEM WITH PROVOCATION: ON LARS VON TRIER, ENFANT TERRIBLE OF DANISH ART FILM Anyone interested in contemporary art is likely to have spent a good deal of time pondering the nature and role of artistic provocation. Provocation as a crucial feature of artistic practice was largely unknown before 1800 (Walker 1999: 1). The idea of 'shocking the recipient' was, however, 'a dominant principle of artistic intent' for members of the various avant-garde movements that emerged in the early decades of the 20th century (Peter Bürger, cited in Walker: 2), and at this point the provocateur is a well-known and even expected figure in the landscape of art. It is not difficult to think of examples of artworks that are self-evidently about creating a sense of outrage. Let me mention just a few well-known works that prompted a public outcry: Rick Gibson's Human Earrings (1985), which consists of a...

Contemporary Art and the Problem of Music: Towards a Musical Contemporary Art

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
G. DOUGLAS BARRETT
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Contemporary Music ◽  
Conceptual Art ◽  
Social Process ◽  
Theoretical Concept ◽  
Sound Art ◽  
Art Theory ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Absolute Music ◽  
Art Form

Abstract This article elaborates the art-theoretical concept of ‘the contemporary’ along with formal differences between contemporary music and contemporary art. Contemporary art emerges from the radical transformations of the historical avant-garde and neo-avant-garde that have led to post-conceptual art – a generic art beyond specific mediums that prioritizes discursive meaning and social process – while contemporary music struggles with its status as a non-conceptual art form that inherits its concept from aesthetic modernism and absolute music. The article also considers the category of sound art and discusses some of the ways it, too, is at odds with contemporary art's generic and post-conceptual condition. I argue that, despite their respective claims to contemporaneity, neither sound art nor contemporary music is contemporary in the historical sense of the term articulated in art theory. As an alternative to these categories, I propose ‘musical contemporary art’ to describe practices that depart in consequential ways from new/contemporary music and sound art.

Pop as Translation Strategy: Makishi Tsutomu's Political Pop in Okinawa

ARTMargins ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 42-71
Author(s):  
Hiroko Ikegami
Keyword(s):  
Vietnam War ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Economic Benefits ◽  
Pop Art ◽  
Cocktail Party ◽  
Lingua Franca ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Japanese Imperialism ◽  
Translation Strategy ◽  
The Vietnam War

This essay makes the first sustained study of the Okinawan artist Makishi Tsutomu (1941–2015) who used American Pop Art vocabularies to describe the complex realities of US-occupied Okinawa. Focusing on his 1972 installation Commemorating the Reversion to the Great Empire of Japan, the essay examines the critical ambivalence of Makishi's Political Pop as a translation strategy. Despite his critique of both American and Japanese imperialism, Makishi was aware that Okinawa was inseparably entangled in it, especially in the context of the Vietnam War, which brought violence, but also economic benefits, to Okinawa. Despite his use of the American Pop idiom as a new lingua franca for contemporary art, Makishi's work did not reach either mainland or international audiences as the artist exhibited almost exclusively in Okinawa. By comparing Makishi's artistic strategies with those of a representative Okinawan novelist, Ōshiro Tatsuhiro, especially as articulated in his 1967 novella The Cocktail Party, the essay situates the significance of Makishi's project within the emerging discourse on the global neo-avant-garde.

On the “Odoresque” and “Aero-Perfumes”: Smell Related Neologisms in Avant-garde and Contemporary Art and Scholarship

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (2021-2) ◽  
pp. 120-133
Author(s):  
Caro Verbeek
Keyword(s):  
Embodied Cognition ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Doctoral Dissertation ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Literary Sources ◽  
The Hague

For her doctoral dissertation “In Search of Lost Scents,” art and scent historian Caro Verbeek (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Kunstmuseum, The Hague) collected olfactory neologisms or newly invented smell related words from (art) historical sources ranging from 1855 to 1975, which she categorised according to the themes poetry, mind, concepts, material and synaesthesia. Three never-before-published artistic illustrations by the author help establish a more embodied cognition of the meaning of some of these concepts, as including “smell images” is impossible. In addition, she has created a “synaesthetic odour wheel” based on literary sources (2021).

THE ISSUE OF CONTEMPORANEITY AS CULTURAL AND HISTORICAL TOTALITY IN THE WORKS OF BORIS GROYS

2021 ◽  
pp. 5-18
Author(s):  
Elena Y. Baboshko ◽  
◽  
Dmitriy V. Galkin ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Social Dynamics ◽  
Will To Power ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Historical Processes ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Forces ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Modernist Discourse ◽  
Selection Of

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.

Presenting the Unpresentable: Jean-François Lyotard’s Kantian Art-Sublime

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Rachel Zuckert
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
The Absolute

Abstract This article reconstructs Jean-François Lyotard’s theory of the sublime in contemporary art, focusing on his claim that such art ‘presents’ the unpresentable, and tracing its origins in Kant’s account of the sublime. I propose that Lyotard identifies a difficulty concerning Kant’s account: to understand why the disparate elements in the experience of the sublime (idea of reason, sensible representation) should be synthesized to form that experience. Lyotard recasts this difficulty as a pragmatic problem for artistic practice – how to ‘testify’ to the absolute in a non-absolute, sensibly perceivable object (the artwork) – that can be understood to drive avant-garde artistic experimentation.

Heide Circle

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Haese
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Early Phase ◽  
Institutional Support ◽  
Second Phase ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Art Collectors ◽  
Art And Literature ◽  
Post War ◽  
New Generation

The group of avant-garde Australian artists and their supporters, now identified as the Heide Circle, evolved over three decades, from the pioneering modernism of the early 1930s through the post-war era of the mid-1960s. These Melbourne-based artists constituted the essential core of radical Australian modernism; the early phase including, most notably, Sidney Nolan, Albert Tucker, Arthur Boyd, John Perceval, and the Russian-born émigré Danila Vassilieff. The work of these pioneering artists demonstrated a highly original antipodean response to European expressionist, cubist, and surrealist movements, together with a new fascination with untutored and naïve art. The group shared personal and institutional support from the art collectors and patrons John and Sunday Reed, whose semi-rural home called ‘‘Heide‘‘ on the outskirts of Melbourne became the focus of the movement. In 1938, the Reeds spearheaded the establishment of the Contemporary Art Society (CAS) in order to promote the modernist movement in Australian art. Along with the young poet Max Harris, the Reeds also began publishing the key cultural journal Angry Penguins, which was dedicated to championing radical art and literature. These initiatives eventually collapsed in 1947. However, the revival of the CAS in 1953 initiated a second phase of the Heide circle, together with a new generation of artists.

scholarly journals “Utopias Are for Those Who Cannot Build”: The Structural Philosophy of the Swedish National Board of Building

Arts ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 73
Author(s):  
Claes Caldenby
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Office Buildings ◽  
Building Stock ◽  
National Board ◽  
Pragmatic Theory ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Post War ◽  
Large Building ◽  
International Phenomenon

Structuralism in architecture was a widespread international phenomenon in the post-war decades. It was an avant-garde architecture, in many cases even utopian. In contrast to this, the structural philosophy of the Swedish National Board of Building was outspokenly pragmatic. This article, based on documents and interviews with the architects involved, gives the background of the National Board’s interest in “the chronological dimension of architecture”. The National Board was the largest client in Sweden for design and building and experienced managers of a large building stock. In the mid-1960s, they developed, in cooperation with consultants, a “building box” for office buildings. They gladly showed a lack of interest or downright scepticism towards international structuralism: “Utopias are for those who cannot build”. Two of the main involved practices were A4 and ELLT, later merged into Coordinator architects, and from early on focused on an architecture of change. Two of their iconic projects from the late 1960s are the large office block Garnisonen and IBM Nordic Education Center. They are examples of a “consequence architecture”, very clearly “ideas based”. For a period around 1970 the pragmatic theory led to radical projects. “Dogmatic theorising was part of the game” as it was said about contemporary art.

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