scholarly journals Living Simulacrum

2022 ◽  
pp. 219-229
Author(s):  
Joanna Kiliszek
Keyword(s):  
Focal Point ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Point Of Reference ◽  
Contemporary Artists

The Neoplastic Room at the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź was originally designed in 1948 by the avant-garde artist Władysław Strzemiński. Destroyed in 1950 and reconstructed in 1960, it became the focal point of the museum, with the ‘International Collection of Modern Art’ by the a.r. group being exhibited there. At the same time, it became a point of reference for contemporary artists and a strategy for building a permanent collection for the museum, as well as a reflection on how the past can give a vision of the future. This essay focuses on the gesture of ‘re-curating’ the Neoplastic Room in relation to the performative practice of the artists involved (e.g., Daniel Buren, Elżbieta Jabłońska).

scholarly journals Other Stories: Experimental Forms of Contemporary Historying at the Crossroads Between Facts and Fictions

2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-15
Author(s):  
Małgorzata Sugiera
Keyword(s):  
New Wave ◽  
Main Argument ◽  
Historical Discourse ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Past ◽  
Academic History ◽  
The Future ◽  
Rhetorical Dimension ◽  
Hayden White ◽  
Experimental History

Summary The process of questioning the authority of academic history—in the form in which it emerged at the turn of the 19th century—began in the 1970s, when Hayden White pointed out the rhetorical dimension of historical discourse. His British colleague Alun Munslow went a step further and argued that the ontological statuses of the past and history are so different that historical discourse cannot by any means be treated as representation of the past. As we have no access to that which happened, both historians and artists can only present the past in accordance with their views and opinions, the available rhetorical conventions, and means of expression. The article revisits two examples of experimental history which Munslow mentioned in his The Future of History (2010): Robert A. Rosenstone’s Mirror in the Shrine (1988) and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s In 1926 (1997). It allows reassessing their literary strategies in the context of a new wave of works written by historians and novelists who go beyond the fictional/factual dichotomy. The article focuses on Polish counterfactual writers of the last two decades, such as Wojciech Orliński, Jacek Dukaj, and Aleksander Głowacki. Their novels corroborate the main argument of the article about a turn which has been taking place in recent experimental historying: the loss of previous interest in formal innovations influenced by modernist avant-garde fiction. Instead, it concentrates on demonstrating the contingency of history to strategically extend the unknowability of the future or the past(s) and, as a result, change historying into speculative thinking.

Arensberg, Walter (1878–1954)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Archino
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Focal Point ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Marcel Duchamp ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Early American ◽  
Large Glass ◽  
New York Dada ◽  
Constantin Brancusi

Walter Arensberg (April 4, 1878 to January 29, 1954) and his wife, Louise Stevens Arensberg (1879–1953), were influential patrons of the avant-garde, building a collection that included modernist art, early American Shaker furniture, and non-Western objects, primarily of African and pre-Columbian origin. They collected modern art by American and European artists, with a special concentration in work by Marcel Duchamp (who also served as their art advisor) and Constantin Brancusi. Their New York apartment, at 33 West 67th Street, hosted a frequent salon of artists, writers, and intellectuals from 1915–1921. These gatherings were a focal point for the activities and antics of New York Dada. Among Arensberg’s many friendships with artists and writers, his long association with Marcel Duchamp was perhaps most influential. When Duchamp arrived in New York in 1915, Walter Pach met him at the pier and brought him directly to the Arensberg’s apartment, where Duchamp lived during the summer of 1915. Later, Arensberg paid the rent for Duchamp’s studio, located in the same building. The Arensberg Collection would amass nearly forty works by Duchamp, including The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (1921). When Arensberg was unable to purchase the artist’s infamous Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 (1912), he commissioned a duplicate and eventually acquired the original as well.

The Garden in the Machine: Two American Avant-Garde Films and the Nineteenth-Century Visual Arts

Prospects ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 239-262
Author(s):  
Scott MacDonald
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Past ◽  
Academic Fields ◽  
The Future ◽  
Historical Periods ◽  
Logical Extension ◽  
As If

One of the primary reasons I became interested in film studies was the seeming open-endedness of the field. Cinema was new, I reasoned, and would continue to be new, unlike other academic fields, and particularly those devoted to historical periods: as a scholar and a teacher, I would face the future, endlessly enthralled and energized by the transformation of the potential into the actual. That my development as a film scholar/teacher increasingly involved me in avant-garde film seemed quite natural — a logical extension of the attraction of film studies in general: Avant-garde film was the newest of the new, the sharpest edge of the present as it sliced into the promise of the future. Scholars in some fields may empathize with the attitude I describe, but scholars in all fields will smile at its self-defeating implications: of course, I can see now how typically American my assumptions were — as if one could maintain the excitement of youth merely by refusing to acknowledge the past! Obviously, film studies, like any other discipline, is only a field once its history takes, or is given, a recognizable shape.

The Third Manifesto: ‘We Shall Come to See’

1988 ◽  
Vol 4 (14) ◽  
pp. 120-121
Author(s):  
John Andreasen
Keyword(s):  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Art Forms ◽  
Science And Politics ◽  
The University ◽  
Changing Society

In June 1985, a fortnight's discussions on ‘The Theatre in the Future’ were held as part of the Fools' Festival in Copenhagen. The seminars discussed the position of theatre and its possibilities in a rapidly changing society, often from deeply opposed positions – socially engaged versus wildly avant-garde, verbal versus imagistic, anthropological versus robotic, and so on. Participants were an exciting mix of professional performers of many kinds, plus theatre critics and ‘ordinary’ engaged people, who for two weeks exchanged experiences and visions of theatre in conjunction with other art forms, and with science and politics. The manifesto below was the contribution to these seminars of John Andreasen, a veteran of ‘sixties happenings, who has subsequently concentrated on street and environmental theatre, and for the past twelve years has taught and directed in the Drama Department of the University of Aarhus.

scholarly journals Thinking beyond, living beyond: Futurism.

wisdom ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 176-187
Author(s):  
Lucio GIULIODORI ◽  
Valentina ULIUMDZHIEVA ◽  
Elena NOTINA ◽  
Irina BYKOVA
Keyword(s):  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
To Come ◽  
The One

Living in the future, constantly thinking over it, incessantly inventing it, anticipating it, more than a Weltanschauung, a state of consciousness. It’s not about predicting rather living the prediction, experimenting with it, chasing the words to describe it, imagining the machines to produce it. The futurists’ undertaking was fueled by an overwhelming desire to overcome their present time through art and influence, by dint of its momentum, the society, culture and life that thrived around it, shifting their current world and the one to come by virtue of an overflowing power of insights as well as an innovative and creative strength. This is what Futurism was, its constant, compelling self-supersession was its ontological matrix as this movement was projected and installed in a dimension of time that had severed both the past and the present. This study aims to frame this avant-garde on the basis of this chief cornerstone.

scholarly journals Rok 1989 – wokół pojęcia modernizmu

2019 ◽  
pp. 415-428
Author(s):  
Wojciech Włodarczyk
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
The Political ◽  
Past Century ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Past ◽  
Clement Greenberg ◽  
Polish Language ◽  
Polish Art

The author argues that the significance of the year 1989 for Polish art was not determined by political changes, but by the rise of postmodernism. Until that moment, the term “modernism” usually referred in academic art history to Polish art at the turn of the 20th century. The concept of postmodernism brought to the Polish language a new meaning of modernism as simply modern art, and more precisely, as modern art defined by Clement Greenberg. That change made it necessary to draw a new map of concepts referring to modern Polish art, most often defined before by the concept of the avant-garde. In Mieczysław Porębski’s essay “Two Programs” [Dwa programy] (1949), and then, since the late 1960s, in Andrzej Turowski’s publications, the concept of the avant-garde was acknowledged as basic for understanding twentieth-century Polish art. The significance of the concept of the avant-garde in reference to the art of the past century in Poland changed after the publication of Piotr Piotrowski’s book of 1999, Meanings of Modernism [Znaczenia modernizmu]. Piotrowski challenged in it the key role of that concept – e.g., Władysław Strzemiński and Henryk Stażewski, usually called avant-gardists before, were considered by him modernists – in favor of a new term, “critical art,” referring to the developments in the 1990. In fact, critical art continued the political heritage of the avant-garde as the radical art of resistance. The author believes that such a set of terms and their meanings imposes on the concept of the avant-garde some limits, as well as suggests that scholars and critics use them rather inconsistently. He argues that concepts should not be treated as just label terms, but they must refer to deeper significance of tendencies in art. He mentions Elżbieta Grabska’s term “realism,” also present in the tradition of studies on modern Polish art, and concludes with a postulate of urgent revision of the relevant vocabulary of Polish art history.

scholarly journals Pamięć protetyczna i nierealność czasu w serialu Watchmen

2020 ◽  
pp. 278-290
Author(s):  
Krzysztof Loska
Keyword(s):  
Traumatic Experience ◽  
Psychological Issues ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Collective Dimension ◽  
Point Of Reference ◽  
Made In ◽  
The Way

Prosthetic Memory and Unreality of Time in Watchmen Starting from a reflection on the traumatic experience of racism, the author of the article considers the possibility of transmitting the knowledge about the past and retrieving memory, and then points out how the relationships between the past, the present and the future are problematized, if we change the way we think about time, namely when it ceases to be perceived as something real or objective. The point of reference for further considerations is the HBO Watchmen series, made in 2019, which exemplifies the mechanism of prosthetic memory. According to the definition proposed by Alison Landsberg, prosthetic memory includes continuity and rupture. It is connected not only with the individual but the collective dimension as well, as it is related to the sphere of politics. In other words, it is a vehicle thanks to which we can travel to other places and times, and thanks to which the viewer may refer to important social and psychological issues.

scholarly journals The Beginnings of The Modern Art

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 255-261
Author(s):  
Mircea Ştefănescu
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Past Century ◽  
Visual Artists ◽  
Perfect Field ◽  
Marcel Duchamp ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future

Abstract At the beginning of the 20th century visual artists found in the art the perfect field to experiment with different materials, combinations of new shapes and proportions to create new artistic currents. But this new trend has questioned the relation of classical arts with its perennial values which can not be overlooked, however radical the desire of young artists to “break” definitively with the past. Thus, in this new artistic context, many of the old art flagship techniques have been questioned and, as is always the case for predicting the “future of art”, the new artistic tendencies are absolutized and others are considered obsolete and declared “death”. The best known example is that of Marcel Duchamp, who, along with his famous ready-made exhibitions, strongly supported the death of art. Finally, the great creators of the past century felt at one point the need to relate to established art in order to better understand the “place” occupied by the generation of new artistic revolutions.

scholarly journals 1989. On the Concept of Modernism

2019 ◽  
pp. 257-270
Author(s):  
Wojciech Włodarczyk
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
The Political ◽  
Past Century ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Past ◽  
Clement Greenberg ◽  
Polish Language ◽  
Polish Art

The author argues that the significance of the year 1989 for Polish art was not determined by political changes, but by the rise of postmodernism. Until that moment, the term “modernism” usually referred in academic art history to Polish art at the turn of the 20th century. The concept of postmodernism brought to the Polish language a new meaning of modernism as simply modern art, and more precisely, as modern art defined by Clement Greenberg. That change made it necessary to draw a new map of concepts referring to modern Polish art, most often defined before by the concept of the avant-garde. In Mieczysław Porębski’s essay “Two Programs” [Dwa programy] (1949), and then, since the late 1960s, in Andrzej Turowski’s publications, the concept of the avant-garde was acknowledged as basic for understanding twentieth-century Polish art. The significance of the concept of the avant-garde in reference to the art of the past century in Poland changed after the publication of Piotr Piotrowski’s book of 1999, Meanings of Modernism [Znaczenia modernizmu]. Piotrowski challenged in it the key role of that concept – e.g., Władysław Strzemiński and Henryk Stażewski, usually called avant-gardists before, were considered by him modernists – in favor of a new term, “critical art,” referring to the developments in the 1990. In fact, critical art continued the political heritage of the avant-garde as the radical art of resistance. The author believes that such a set of terms and their meanings imposes on the concept of the avant-garde some limits, as well as suggests that scholars and critics use them rather inconsistently. He argues that concepts should not be treated as just label terms, but they must refer to deeper significance of tendencies in art. He mentions Elżbieta Grabska’s term “realism,” also present in the tradition of studies on modern Polish art, and concludes with a postulate of urgent revision of the relevant vocabulary of Polish art history.

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