scholarly journals Carol Rama and the Pleasure of Image

Author(s):  
Eva-Maria Ivanova

Carol Rama is one of the most provocative artists of the XX and XXI centuries. Although in different periods her work has been associated with some of the significant artistic movements of the XX century, such as surrealism, art brut, arte povera, she does not join any of the leading trends and artistic groups. This makes her work a challenge to the history of contemporary art.

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.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chiara E. Scappini ◽  
David Boffa

The Fonte Gaia from Renaissance to Modern Times examines the history of Siena's famous public fountain, from its fifteenth-century origins to its eventual replacement by a copy in the nineteenth century (and the modern fate of both). The book explores how both the Risorgimento and the Symbolist movements have shaped our perceptions of the Italian Renaissance, as the Quattrocento was filtered through the lens of contemporary art and politics.


2021 ◽  
pp. 31-53
Author(s):  
Piotr Dobrowolski

The article opens with a statement that dramaturgical creativity, long marginalized by literary studies, has returned to the area of its interest together with its researchers’ use of the achievements of performative and cultural turns. Taking these into account allows us to treat drama as a distinctive literary practice in which the reception of a text is exemplary. As the author claims, with the New Humanities, integrating scattered reading perspectives known to the history of literary studies into the horizons of New Positivity, dramatic studies enrich this standpoint and maintain a critical view making creative use of the antagonism of perspectives, confrontation of attitudes, conflict of qualities or different visions and ideas. The potential tensions revealed in the practice of active reading of a literary text in accordance with the dramatic matrix guarantee the positive effects of each act of engaged reading. The dramatization of tradition is a specific field of critical dialogue between the reader and the existing literary tradition. Three dramatic works by Jan Czapliński are indicated as examples of mediators for this dialogue. The work of this playwright presents and suggests a critical reading of the characters and works of Gabriela Zapolska, Henryk Sienkiewicz and Adam Mickiewicz, leading to the emancipation of their works that is situated beyond the framework of the discursively created, existing canon of contemporary Polish literature and culture. A critical view enriches and updates the canon. Dramatization, which allows the revaluation of existing values, appears as the basic category of contemporary art – revealing existing, usually ineffable conflicts and using them to build new, positive values.


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. 


ARTMargins ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 69-86
Author(s):  
Ghalya Saadawi

Chad Elias' 2018 book Posthumous Images: Contemporary Art and Memory Politics in Post-Civil War Lebanon attempts to deal with the question of post-civil war representation, image-making and contemporary art from the perspective of memory studies in Lebanon. Dealing with a particular group of artists working since the 1990's in installation, video, film, and performance, the book attempts to create a relation between their artistic propositions and narratives on the one hand, and the post-war reckoning with the missing and disappeared, the history of former Leftist combatants, neglected space programs, reconstruction and urban space, on the other. The book has a series of shortcomings and structural, theoretical blind spots that this review essay attempts to redress. For instance, Posthumous Images has no framework for the notions of communities of witnessing, collective memory, or post-war amnesia that seems to underpin its claims, as they seem to figure only nominally. In these theoretical omissions, the essay argues, the book adopts and furthers the ideology human rights as this relates to the politics of remembrance, as well as to Lebanon's neoliberal post-war realities. Moreover, it lacks a rigorous art historical frame to study the given artworks formally, or theoretically, leaving the book open to a post-historical method that disavows a critical, social history of art needed for an analysis of post-civil war and post-Cold war art forms in Lebanon and beyond.


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.


1999 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 17-19
Author(s):  
Nicole Picot

The following words preface Francoise Cachin’s introduction to Marie-Thérèse Cavignac’s Les bibliothèques des musées en Aquitaine: Richness and diversity! Reading this volume demonstrates how wide and varied is the subject matter of the museum libraries in the Aquitaine region, whether it be the library in the Bonnat Museum in Bayonne or in the national museum at the Château de Pau, those in museums specialising in the history of Aquitaine, the Pays Basque or the Périgord, or those in museums dealing with prehistory or contemporary art or seaplanes, the customs service or folk art.This description is just as valid for the rest of France. Considerable effort has been put into the modernisation of French museums during the last twenty years or so and their libraries have benefited from this renewal as well. I would like in this paper to describe some of the strengths of libraries and documentation centres in museums of art, and to try and define their role within their institutions and within the network of French art libraries.


Arts ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 19
Author(s):  
Déirdre Kelly

It seems inherent in the nature of contemporary artist’s book production to continue to question the context for the genre in contemporary art practice, notwithstanding the medium’s potential for dissemination via mass production and an unquestionable advantage of portability for distribution. Artists, curators and editors operating in this sector look to create contexts for books in a variety of imaginative ways, through exhibition, commission, installations, performance and, of course as documentation. Broadening the discussion of the idea of the book within contemporary art practice, this paper examines the presence and role of book works within the context of the art biennale, in particular the Venice Art Biennale of which the 58th iteration (2019) is entitled ‘May You Live In Interesting Times’ and curated by Ralph Rugoff, with an overview of the independent International cultural offerings and the function of the ‘Book Pavilion’. Venetian museums and institutions continue to present vibrant diverse works within the arena of large-scale exhibitions, recognising the position that the book occupies in the history of the city. This year, the appearance for the first time, of ‘Book Biennale’, opens up a new and interesting dialogue, taking the measure of how the book is being promoted and its particular function for visual communication within the arts in Venice and beyond.


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.


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