Expressive Things: Art Theories of Henri Focillon and Meyer Schapiro Reconsidered

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kerstin Thomas
Keyword(s):  
Material Properties ◽  
Art History ◽  
Human Action ◽  
Art Theory ◽  
Speculative Realism ◽  
Artistic Activity ◽  
Reception Aesthetics ◽  
The Way

The chapter discusses the art theories of Henri Focillon and Meyer Schapiro in order to explore the potential of an art history based on speculative realism. The focus lies on three basic positions in their writings, considered to be productive for the perspective of a speculative art history, as they transcend idealistic and language centered concepts of art history. First, both Focillon and Schapiro consider the artwork as an object with a reality of its own, causing things to happen. Second, both of them hold a relational and processual conception of the artwork: it is considered as a place of negotiation between human action, material and ideas. Thirdly, their materialistic and relational conception of the artwork is associated with a dynamic notion of form. These principals can be related to the speculative realist’s materialist and dynamic conception of the object. Focillon’s and Schapiro’s models may help to pave the way for an art theory that combines production and reception aesthetics, in understanding art as a never accomplished process of negotiation between the poles of artistic activity, material properties, society and the viewer.

Minds, Machines, and Giving a Damn

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Chodat
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Science ◽  
West Coast ◽  
Human Action ◽  
Walker Percy ◽  
Christian Life ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Partial Success ◽  
The Way

The 1960s saw the triumph of cognitive science over behaviorism. This chapter examines three literary–philosophical objections to this shift: “West Coast” phenomenology, Richard Powers’s Galatea 2.2, and the writings of Walker Percy, the first of the postwar sages featured in this book. For “West Coast” philosophers, cognitive science ignores the way human action is structured by what we “give a damn” about—a sense of significance that orients our actions. Powers’s novel goes a step further: no more than machines do we know what to give a damn about. Percy’s essays and fiction challenge both these positions, asking us to see analogies between the significance we find in language and the significance we find in living a Christian life. Establishing such an analogy is the goal of Percy’s 1971 Love in the Ruins, which seeks to embody—with only partial success—what terms such as “faith” and “community” might mean.

Humans and the Environment

2013 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Spatial Scales ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
Human Action ◽  
Cultural Practice ◽  
Environmental Archaeology ◽  
Archaeological Data ◽  
Temporal And Spatial ◽  
Global And Local ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Way

The environment has always been a central concept for archaeologists and, although it has been conceived in many ways, its role in archaeological explanation has fluctuated from a mere backdrop to human action, to a primary factor in the understanding of society and social change. Archaeology also has a unique position as its base of interest places it temporally between geological and ethnographic timescales, spatially between global and local dimensions, and epistemologically between empirical studies of environmental change and more heuristic studies of cultural practice. Drawing on data from across the globe at a variety of temporal and spatial scales, this volume resituates the way in which archaeologists use and apply the concept of the environment. Each chapter critically explores the potential for archaeological data and practice to contribute to modern environmental issues, including problems of climate change and environmental degradation. Overall the volume covers four basic themes: archaeological approaches to the way in which both scientists and locals conceive of the relationship between humans and their environment, applied environmental archaeology, the archaeology of disaster, and new interdisciplinary directions.The volume will be of interest to students and established archaeologists, as well as practitioners from a range of applied disciplines.

scholarly journals Aesthetics and Creativity. Identity Configurations

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Livia Durac ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Human Action ◽  
Two Dimensions ◽  
The Other ◽  
Mutual Understanding ◽  
State Of Mind ◽  
Human Attitude ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Nature And Society ◽  
The Way

Reflecting on human attitude towards reality, together with deciphering the emotional code that accompanies it, has configured - in time – the aesthetic universe, open to human reflection, creation, and evaluation. Aesthetics appears through the way in which consciousness reacts and capitalises upon things in nature and society, or which belong to human subjectivity, including on artistic work, which have an effect on sensitiveness due to their harmony, balance and grandeur. As a fundamental attribute of the human being, creativity is the engine of cultural evolution, meaning the degree of novelty that man brings in his ideas, actions, and creations. Aesthetical values, together with the other types of values, contribute to what society represents and to what it can become, hence motivating human action and creation. Their role is to create a state of mind that encourages the cohesion, cooperation, and mutual understanding of the society. Integrating a chronological succession of the evolution of the concepts that objectify its structure, its aesthetics and creativity, this article stresses the synergetic nature of the two dimensions of human personality, paving the way to beauty, as a form of enchantment of the human spirit.

scholarly journals Mapping the Canadian landscape : the performing arts and experiential perspectives

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine Alison Johns
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Specific Time ◽  
Performing Artists ◽  
Place And Space ◽  
Specific Time Period ◽  
Time Period ◽  
Performing Art ◽  
The Way

Focusing on a specific time period in Canadian performing art history--from the 1970s through to the late 1990s--this thesis "maps out" three artists' experiences in the landscape and the way these experiences are represented to an audience through performance. Using specific examples from the repertoire of Davida Monk, Paul Thompson, and R. Murray Schafer, I make a case for considering these performing artists as landscape researchers. I suggest that their performances explicitly and implicitly explore foundational questions about the meanings, uses, and affective power of landscape in ways that are analogous to the writings of cultural geographers during the same period. Like Yi-Fu Tuan, John Jakle, Denis Cosgrove and Jay Appleton, these performing artists examine the experience of humans in the landscape and focus on issues of place and space, homeland, and the meaning of landscape. Monk, Thompson and Schafer extend the perspectives of the geographers and bridge important gaps in their ways of knowing landscape.

An Iskandarnāma of Nizami Produced for Ibrahim Sultan

2014 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 235-253 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lâle Uluç
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Visual Data ◽  
Military Leader ◽  
Basic Task ◽  
Works Of Art ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
The Way

This paper introduces a copy of the Iskandarnāma of Nizami dated 1435 and dedicated to the Timurid prince Ibrahim Sultan, grandson of the eponymous founder of the Timurid dynasty. It discusses the various features of the manuscript together with comparable examples from the same period, and also focuses on Abu al-Fath Ibrahim Sultan ibn Shah Rukh and his role as both a military leader and a patron of the arts during his tenure as the governor of the provinces of Fars, Kirman, and Luristan (1414–35). Utilizing the visual data together with the historical context of the period, this essay interprets one of the illustrations of the Iskandarnāma, hoping to fulfill what David Summers called “the most basic task of art history,” which he says “is to explain why works of art look the way they look.” The addition of this Iskandarnāma manuscript to the surviving corpus of works that can be connected to Ibrahim Sultan will provide a further insight into the important patronage of this Timurid prince.

The Subjectivity of Nature

2017 ◽  
pp. 22-42
Author(s):  
James Miller
Keyword(s):  
Human Action ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Modern Human ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Objective World ◽  
Subject And Object ◽  
The Way

Daoism proposes a radical reversal of the way that modern human beings think about the natural world. Rather than understanding human beings as “subject” who observe the “objective” world of nature, Daoism proposes that subjectivity is grounded in the Dao or Way, understood as the wellspring of cosmic creativity for a world of constant transformation. As a result the Daoist goal of “obtaining the Dao” offers insights into the ecological quest to transcend the modern, Cartesian bifurcation of subject and object, self and world. From this follows an ideal of human action not as the projection of agency onto an neutral, objective backdrop but as a transaction or mediation between self and world.

Inside the discipline, outside the paradigm: keeping track of the New Art History

1997 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 12-18 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lyn Korenic
Keyword(s):  
Graduate Student ◽  
Art History ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Traditional Art ◽  
New Methodologies ◽  
The Web ◽  
The Way

From the point of view of a student of art history in the 1980s re-entering the discipline as a graduate student, the ‘new’ art history represents a dramatically wider field of enquiry involving new methodologies, although ‘old’ art history is still pursued by some academics. The ‘new’ art history employs an interdisciplinary approach which embraces materials far beyond ‘traditional’ art historical sources, and so information has to be sought outside the art library and via the Internet. Librarians responsible for supporting art history studies need to keep in touch with teachers, with curriculum developments, and with the discipline itself; it may also be helpful to get involved in staff/student use of the Web, and to collaborate with other Humanities librarians. The way in which the ‘new’ art history branches out in all directions parallels the hypertext linkages of the Web and the complexity of our globally-connected world.

Philosophy in a Polycentric World

2019 ◽  
Vol 56 (4) ◽  
pp. 117-138
Author(s):  
Alexander Yu. Antonovski ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Modern Society ◽  
External Factors ◽  
Methodological Question ◽  
Unique Product ◽  
Artistic Activity ◽  
Peter Railton ◽  
The Way

In the first part of the article, the author substantiates the importance of philosophical communication as a kind of dependent variable that does not have an independent meaning without pointing to something else through which the philosophy itself (often negatively and non-reflectively) defines. We are talking about global centers of “systemic” communication (politics, science, religion, etc.), imposing their observations on other communities. It is argued that the priority of philosophical communication is justified by the ability to carry out “universal observations”, which is deprived of all other communication systems.In the second part of the article, the methodological question is first solved about the possibility of explaining a number of phenomena (communications, observations), for which no indication of external factors justifying their existence is required. It is proved that the description and explanation of such phenomena is possible on the way of formulating “significant tautologies” (Peter Railton). Using this method, the author carries out a meaningful deployment of the significant tautology “philosophy is only philosophy” and substantiates that philosophy is communication, capable of defining itself in a universal way: through something else and through itself. The author concludes that philosophy can be considered as a communicative system (i.e.,observer), whose mission is to generate a unique product: a universal self-description of modern society, where philosophy combines three fundamental observational abilities: scientific, protest and artistic activity.

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