Post-Mexican Fugue1(Farewell to ¡Que Viva Mexico!)

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tarek Elhaik
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Media Arts ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Moving Images

This chapter focuses on the watershed curatorial project Mexperimental: 60 Years of Avant-Garde Media Arts from Mexico. Curated in 1998 by Jesse Lerner and Rita Gonzalez as a visual and conceptual probe into the post-Mexican condition, Mexperimental has had an enduring impact on the ethics of curation and pedagogy of moving images. One of the incurable-images of Mexican modernity and visual culture is the maguey plant, which has left an enduring impression on the anthropological, political, optical, and curatorial unconscious of post-revolutionary Mexico. The chapter examines three contemporary experimental documentaries that propose an alternative montage to nationalist and vanguardista uses of the maguey: Rubén Gámez's Magueyes (1962), Olivier Debroise's Un Banquete En Tetlapayac (2000), and Jesse Lerner's Magnavoz (2006).

Introduction

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tarek Elhaik
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
The United States ◽  
Lessons Learned ◽  
Media Arts ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Experimental Media ◽  
Mexican Film ◽  
Image Building ◽  
Writing Culture

This book examines post-Mexican film and media arts and proposes a conception of curation as both repair and counter-actualization. It does so by introducing the concept of the incurable-image. Building on a participant-observation of curatorial platforms and experimental media arts in Mexico City, the book animates a trans-media assemblage that grew out of a convergence of three interconnected themes: the role played by the discipline of anthropology in shaping the contours of Mexican modernity and its avant-garde media arts and visual culture; the lessons learned from the tradition of experimental ethnography and the important ‘Writing Culture’ debates in academic anthropology in the United States during the 1980s; and the so-called ‘anthropological turn’ in visual studies and contemporary art since the 1990s. The book turns its attention away from cross-cultural geographies towards a geophilosophy of departures and arrivals modulated by Mexico City's chaotic intellectual life.

Banner

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Magda Szcześniak ◽  
Łukasz Zaremba
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Visual Representations ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Polish Culture

A chapter from the book Kultura wizualna w Polsce. Spojrzenia [Visual Culture in Poland. Looks], ed. Iwona Kurz, Paulina Kwiatkowska, Magda Szcześniak, Łukasz Zaremba (Fundacja Bęc Zmiana, Instytut Kultury Polskiej UW: Warsaw, 2017). The essay is devoted to protest imagery in Polish culture - from avant-garde painting to contemporary, vernacular visual representations used during protests.

Exploring Visual Methods in Teaching Tourism

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 203-214
Author(s):  
Ana Isabel Rodrigues
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Visual Stimuli ◽  
Visual Methods ◽  
Self Reflection ◽  
Moving Images ◽  
Educational Environments ◽  
Ways Of Thinking ◽  
And Behavior ◽  
Photography Method

Humankind is becoming increasingly image based. Visual culture is everywhere: it surrounds us all with still and moving images. Based on this pictorial change, working with the visual in education has the potential for engaging students in a process of self-reflection in an effort to change ways of thinking and behavior, aiming to consolidate concepts taught in classes. Nevertheless, there are key elements to consider as a set of methodologies and practices. The aim of this study is to explore multiple ways of working with the visual, within educational environments, specifically in classes taught in the second and third year of a degree in Tourism. Two examples of visual methodologies were considered for this study. An image-based exercise through the use of tourism cartoons as visual stimuli to evoke opinions and incite thoughts was fully implemented. Analysis was undertaken and the results are presented. A reflexive photography method is also proposed as another example for a visual-based exercise. The results from the cartoons exercise demonstrate that knowledge is continuously derived from the experience of the learner. The student's impressions and full comprehension of the concepts taught in a particular subject were achieved with this exercise.

Restating Classicist Monumentalism in Soviet Architecture, 1930s–early 1950s

2019 ◽  
pp. 64-88
Author(s):  
William C. Brumfield
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Socialist Realism ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Bolshevik Revolution ◽  
Stalin Era ◽  
Imperial Russia ◽  
Architectural Styles ◽  
The Soviet Union

This article examines the development of retrospective styles in Soviet architecture during the Stalin era, from the 1930s to the early 1950s. This highly visible manifestation of communist visual culture is usually interpreted as a reaction to the austere modernism of 1920s Soviet avant-garde architecture represented by the constructivist movement. The project locates the origins of Stalin-era proclamatory, retrospective style in prerevolutionary neoclassical revival architecture. Although functioning in a capitalist market, that neoclassical reaction was supported by prominent critics who were suspicious of Russia’s nascent bourgeoisie and felt that neoclassical or neo-Renaissance architecture could echo the glory of imperial Russia. These critics left Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution, but prominent architects of the neoclassicist revival remained in the Soviet Union. Together with the Academy of Architecture (founded 1933), these architects played a critical role in reviving classicist monumentalism—designated “socialist realism”—as the proclamatory style for the centralized, neoimperial statist system of the Stalin era. Despite different ideological contexts (prerevolutionary and Stalinist), retrospective styles were promulgated as models for significant architectural projects. The article concludes with comments on the post-Stalinist—and post-Soviet—alternation of modernist and retrospective architectural styles.

"Us" vs. "Them". Communist Dialectical Images from Interwar Europe and Soviet Russia

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adri Kácsor
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Political Propaganda ◽  
Political Transformations ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Soviet Russia ◽  
Interwar Europe

Brawny male workers vs. bulging bourgeois men. Working-class mothers burdened by the hardship of poverty and childcare vs. elegant upper-class women enjoying a lifestyle of privilege. Such juxtaposed images of workers and the rich were prevalent in the visual culture of communism throughout the twentieth century, appearing on posters, illustrations, and other genres of political propaganda across countries and continents. Although these didactic propaganda images have rarely been considered in histories of modernism and the avant-garde, this article argues that they were among the key visual inventions of twentieth-century communist visual culture given their highly innovative aesthetics and juxtaposed structure that provided them a potential to become dialectical. Drawing on examples from interwar Europe and Soviet Russia, this article examines how didactic juxtapositions could become dialectical images, triggering political transformations while also making revolutionary class consciousness visible for the viewer.

scholarly journals Interweaving Realities: Spoken Language and Moving Images in the Sonne halt!, Experimental Film by Ferry Radax

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luka Bešlagić
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Context ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Spoken Language ◽  
Experimental Film ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Moving Image ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Moving Images ◽  
Narrative Cinema ◽  
Movie Script

This paper analyses the experimental film Sonne halt! by Ferry Radax, an Austrian filmmaker renowned for his unconventional approach to cinematic practice. Filmed and edited between the end of the 1950s and early 1960s, the film at first may appear to be a belated homage to the previous European experiments in avant-garde cinema, already carried out a few decades earlier. However, since there have been no great ‘historical avant-garde’ movements in Vienna in the period between the two world wars – according to the novel argument made by Klaus Kastberger – it was already the middle of the 20th century when the ‘original’ avant-garde strategies were finally acknowledged in Austria, and simultaneously appropriated by the ‘neo-avant-garde’. In this peculiar historico-cultural context Sonne halt!, in its fragmentary non-narrative structure which resembles Dadaist or Surrealist playfulness and openness, innovatively and radically interweaved two disparate film registers: moving image and spoken language. Various sentences arbitrarily enounced throughout the film – which have their origin in Konrad Bayer’s unfinished experimental, pseudo-autobiographical, montage novel der sechste sinn – do not constitute dialogues or narration of a traditional movie script but rather a random collection of fictional and philosophical statements. At certain moments there is a lack of rapport between moving image and speech – an experimental attempt by Ferry Radax to challenge one of the most common principles of sound and narrative cinema. By deconstructing Sonne halt! to its linguistic and cinematic aspects, this article particularly focuses on the role of verbal commentaries within the film. Article received: December 28, 2017; Article accepted: January 10, 2018; Published online: April 15, 2018; Original scholarly paper How to cite this article: Bešlagić, Luka. "Interweaving Realities: Spoken Language and Moving Images in the Sonne halt!, Experimental Film by Ferry Radax." AM Journal of Art and Media Studies 15 (2018): . doi: 10.25038/am.v0i15.228

scholarly journals The Nanking Atrocity: Still and Moving Images 1937–1944

2014 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-67
Author(s):  
Gary Evans
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Visual Media ◽  
World War ◽  
Moving Images ◽  
Mass Public ◽  
Racial Context ◽  
Film Clips

This manuscript investigates the facts of publication of the images of the Nanking Atrocity (December 1937–January 1938) in <em>LIFE </em>and <em>LOOK</em> magazines, two widely read United States publications, as well as the Nanking atrocity film clips that circulated to millions more in American and Canadian newsreels some years later. The publishers of these images were continuing the art of manipulation of public opinion through multimodal visual media, aiming them especially at the less educated mass public. The text attempts to describe these brutal images in their historical context. Viewing and understanding the underlying racial context and emotive impact of these images may be useful adjuncts to future students of World War II. If it is difficult to assert how much these severe images changed public opinion, one can appreciate how the emerging visual culture was transforming the way that modern societies communicate with and direct their citizens' thoughts.

Cut and paste

2018 ◽  
pp. 25-65
Author(s):  
Anna Dahlgren
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Close Study ◽  
History Of ◽  
Illustrated Press

Chapter 1 considers the mechanisms of breaks and continuities in the history of photocollage with regard to gender, genre and locations of display. Collage is commonly celebrated as a twentieth-century art form invented by Dada artists in the 1910s. Yet there was already a vibrant culture of making photocollages in Victorian Britain. From an art historical perspective this can be interpreted as an expression of typical modernist amnesia. The default stance of the early twentieth century’s avant-garde was to be radically, ground-breakingly new and different from any historical precursors. However, there is, when turning to the illustrated press, also a trajectory of continuity and withholding of traditions in the history of photocollage. This chapter has two parts. The first includes a critical investigation of the writings on the history of photocollage between the 1970s and 2010s, focusing on the arguments and rationales of forgetting and retrieving those nineteenth-century forerunners. It includes examples of amnesia and recognition and revaluation. The second is a close study of a number of images that appear in Victorian albums produced between 1870 and 1900 and their contemporary counterparts in the visual culture of illustrated journals and books.

Media Arts: Visual Culture and Numeracy

2017 ◽  
pp. 285-316
Author(s):  
Kathryn Grushka ◽  
Maura Sellars
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Media Arts

scholarly journals Mediateka Babel. YouTube jako temat, rama formalna i platforma sztuki

2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 171-189
Author(s):  
Ewa Wójtowicz
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Global Network ◽  
Digital Culture ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Moving Images ◽  
Meta Level ◽  
Formal Framework ◽  
Dziga Vertov ◽  
The One

The text focuses on the specific features of the so-called 'cinematic turn' within the scope of visual culture emergent within the YouTube platform, particularly during its first, formative years. This turn takes place on the meta-level of the existing circulation of content enabled by YouTube, often being an autothematic reflection on this tool of cultural production. The vernacular aesthetics, a specific formal framework and a particular modus operandi of YouTube became the subject of artistic statements, sometimes in a form of subversive remix. Therefore I think of YouTube as a realm of art because of its meta-media practice that made the cinematic turn visible. It does not rely on straightforwardly understood production of (moving) images, but  postproduction, as understood by Nicolas Bourriaud. Moreover, the cinematic turn taking place within YouTube is different from the one practised by the avant-garde of 20th century, due its being not “seeing” or “writing” (as Dziga Vertov understood montage) but rather “overwriting”, to use language more adequate to the described sphere of digital culture. Artists use YouTube as an open library, working with its resources, applying techniques such as postproduction, remix, re-contextualisation and appropriation. Therefore it becomes a multimedia library, a “Mediateca Babel” of a kind, to recall J. L. Borges' idea. The examples mentioned in the text are of a postproductional nature, such as to-camera-performance and subversive “overwriting” of contents enabled with the circulationism typical for social media. Equally important are the strategies of recognising the cultural framework of YouTube, in the context of 20th-century media art history, as well as the platform’s interface. Also, there is the issue of relations between vernacular creativity and the art system because of “capturing” the amateur-generated content and transferring it to mainstream artworld. These examples let me argue that the cinematic turn is a form of postproduction, which enables the hidden mechanisms behind the circulation of moving images in the overloaded global network. The cinematic turn in the context of YouTube does not mean that cinema and its language are at home within this platform. Also, the meta-artistic way of “making” platform art does not turn YouTube into “art platform” (as understood by Olga Goriunova). Nevertheless, platform art may happen in this context as a result of working with the cinematic turn in its vernacular aspect, which makes it possible to reveal its key features and move them to the meta-level.

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