Between and within choreographies: An early choreographic object by William Forsythe

In 1990, William Forsythe created The Books of Groningen – Book N(7), an installation commissioned by the Dutch city of Groningen and architect Daniel Libeskind. This early choreographic object is composed of a water canal, a series of willow trees pulled by wires in order to grow in arched shape and a bush hedge. At a time of marked interest in expanded choreography as it develops in conjunction with choreography’s links to visual art, as well as in choreographic history, this article considers Book N(7) in relation with diverse historical conceptions of choreography – as dance-making, as an organisation of moving bodies, as notation and pre/scription. This analysis shows that the installation negates certain aspects of choreographic history while exemplifying and perpetuating others, therefore situating itself between different historical construals of choreography. At the same time, it points to the ways in which Book N(7) defies the possibility both of complete ruptures and of smooth continuities with the choreographic past, engaging in a negotiation which reworks this past in the present. Framing this analysis of The Books of Groningen – Book N(7) by references to certain of Forsythe’s ulterior works, this article presents the installation as a part of the artist’s longlasting, shifting engagements with the notion and history of choreography.

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Conditions of Visibility

10.1093/oso/9780198845560.001.0001 ◽

2019 ◽

Keyword(s):

Art History ◽

Visual Art ◽

Fundamental Question ◽

Ancient World ◽

Work Of Art ◽

History Of Art ◽

Shared Objects ◽

History Of ◽

Modern Prejudice ◽

Historical Past

We often assume that works of visual art are meant to be seen. Yet that assumption may be a modern prejudice. The ancient world - from China to Greece, Rome to Mexico - provides many examples of statues, paintings, and other images that were not intended to be visible. Instead of being displayed, they were hidden, buried, or otherwise obscured. In this third volume in the Visual Conversations in Art & Archaeology series, leading scholars working at the intersection of archaeology and the history of art address the fundamental question of art's visibility. What conditions must be met, what has to be in place, for a work of art to be seen at all? The answer is both historical and methodological; it concerns ancient societies and modern disciplines, and encompasses material circumstances, perceptual capacities, technologies of visualization, protocols of classification, and a great deal more. The emerging field of archaeological art history is uniquely suited to address such questions. Intrinsically comparative, this approach cuts across traditional ethnic, religious, and chronological categories to confront the academic present with the historical past. The goal is to produce a new art history that is at once cosmopolitan in method and global in scope, and in doing so establish new ways of seeing - new conditions of visibility - for shared objects of study.

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Reception History and the Interpretation of Revelation

The Oxford Handbook of the Book of Revelation ◽

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190655433.013.22 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 375-393

Author(s):

Ian Boxall

Keyword(s):

Visual Art ◽

Textual Criticism ◽

Reception History ◽

Biblical Text ◽

Music Drama ◽

History Of Interpretation ◽

History Of ◽

Biblical Texts

The chapter describes the discipline of reception history as the study of the ongoing use, interpretation, and impact of a biblical text. If the history of interpretation has often focused on the ways biblical texts are understood in commentaries and theological writings, reception history also considers how a book was received in spirituality and worship, in music, drama, literature, visual art, and textual criticism. Criteria for selecting and organizing materials useful for reception history are discussed, and there is a review of recent attempts to provide broad overviews of Revelation’s reception history, along with specific examples of the value of the discipline for interpreting Revelation.

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The Dispositif of Holography

Arts ◽

10.3390/arts8010028 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 8 (1) ◽

pp. 28 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Jacques Desbiens

Keyword(s):

Visual Art ◽

Spatial Representation ◽

Computer Generated Holography ◽

French Word ◽

History Of ◽

Artistic Research

The French word dispositif, applied to visual art, encompasses several components of an artwork, such as the apparatus itself as well as its display conditions and the viewers themselves. In this article, I examine the concept of dispositif in the context of holography and, in particular, synthetic holography (computer-generated holography). This analysis concentrates on the holographic space and its effects on time and colors. A few comparisons with the history of spatial representation allow us to state that the holographic dispositif breaks with the perspective tradition and opens a new field of artistic research and experimentation.

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“He” Had Me at Blue: Color Theory and Visual Art

Leonardo ◽

10.1162/leon_a_00677 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 47 (5) ◽

pp. 460-465

Author(s):

Barbara L. Miller

Keyword(s):

Visual Art ◽

Turning Points ◽

Combustible Mixture ◽

Color Theory ◽

Blue Color ◽

History Of ◽

Bodily Activity

Schopenhauer and Goethe argued that colors are dangerous: When philosophers speak of colors, they often begin to rant and rave. This essay addresses the confusing and treacherous history of color theory and perception. An overview of philosophers and scientists associated with developing theories leads into a discussion of contemporary perspectives: Taussig’s notion of a “combustible mixture” and “total bodily activity” and Massumi’s idea of an “ingressive activity” are used as turning points in a discussion of Roger Hiorns’s Seizure—an excruciatingly intoxicating installation.

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Teaching the History of Kurdistan through Visual Art

10.23918/vesal2021v18 ◽

2021 ◽

Keyword(s):

Visual Art ◽

History Of

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Neither Eyewitnesses, Nor Windows to the Past, but Valuable Testimony in its Own Right: Remarks on Iconography, Source Criticism and Ancient Data-processing

Understanding the History of Ancient Israel ◽

10.5871/bacad/9780197264010.003.0011 ◽

2007 ◽

Author(s):

CHRISTOPH UEHLINGER

Keyword(s):

Data Processing ◽

Conceptual Framework ◽

Visual Art ◽

State Of The Art ◽

Case Examples ◽

The Past ◽

Ancient Israel ◽

History Of ◽

Alternative Approaches ◽

Potential Use

This chapter explores the potential use of visual sources, together with the methods employed for studying them, such as iconography or iconology, for the history of ‘ancient Israel’. It describes the theoretical and conceptual framework, particularly the notion of ‘eyewitnessing’, and considers the method, particularly iconography. The chapter also presents case examples chosen from monuments which are so well known to historians of ancient Israel that they are well suited to illustrate both the pitfalls of more conventional interpretations and the potential of alternative approaches. Before turning to the sources – namely visual evidence that may be related to the history of ancient Israel and Judah – the chapter discusses the state of the art among fellow historians in neighbouring disciplines, including those belonging to the so-called ‘humanities’ (or arts and letters). It also considers visual art and history, the metaphor of legal investigation, the balancing of testimony, and the particular status of an eyewitness.

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Hore, Somnath (1921–2006)

Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism ◽

10.4324/9781135000356-rem1763-1 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Sanjoy Kumar Mallik

Keyword(s):

Visual Art ◽

Academic Training ◽

Colonial History ◽

The Face ◽

History Of ◽

Cultural Domination

Born at the beginning of the 1920s, and acquiring academic training during the mid 1940s, Somnath Hore represents a generation of artists in Bengal, India, who actively redefined the language of visual art from an earlier phase of nationalist self-redefinition, in the face of a long colonial history of British socio-political and cultural domination. In response to the imposition of an alien taste and the hegemonic proclamation of the colonizer’s perspective as superior, Indian responses of the nationalist dimension had harked back to the pre-colonial past in an attempt to invent a contemporary that would visibly retain links to ‘tradition’.

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Acoustic Art Forms in the Age of Recordability

Organised Sound ◽

10.1017/s1355771815000084 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 20 (2) ◽

pp. 200-206

Author(s):

Gerald Fiebig

Keyword(s):

Visual Art ◽

Electroacoustic Music ◽

Sound Art ◽

Sound Recording ◽

Technological Basis ◽

Sonic Art ◽

Art Forms ◽

The Status ◽

History Of ◽

Radio Art

Many theoretical accounts of sound art tend to treat it as a subcategory of either music or visual art. I argue that this dualism prevents many works of sound art from being fully appreciated. My subsequent attempt of finding a basis for a more comprehensive aesthetic of acoustic art forms is helped along by Trevor Wishart’s concept of ‘sonic art’. I follow Wishart’s insight that the status of music was changed by the invention of sound recording and go on to argue that an even more important ontological consequence of recording was the new possibility of storing and manipulating any acoustic event. This media-historic condition, which I refer to as ‘recordability’, spawned three distinct art forms with different degrees of abstraction – electroacoustic music in the tradition of Pierre Schaeffer, gallery-oriented sound art and radiogenic Ars Acustica. Introducing Ars Acustica, or radio art, as a third term provides some perspective on the music/sound art binarism. A brief look at the history of radio art aims at substantiating my claim that all art forms based on recordable sounds can be fruitfully discussed by appreciating their shared technological basis and the multiplicity of their reference systems rather than by subsuming one into another.

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Precarious Resistance: Weaving Opposition in the Poetry of Cecilia Vicuña

PMLA ◽

10.1632/003081205x73434 ◽

2005 ◽

Vol 120 (5) ◽

pp. 1588-1607 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Juliet Lynd

Keyword(s):

Cultural Memory ◽

Visual Art ◽

Aesthetics And Politics ◽

Neoliberal Globalization ◽

Complex Relation ◽

History Of ◽

The Aesthetic

Woven through the threads of the poetry, performance, and visual art of Cecilia Vicuña are the image and metaphor of weaving itself, a visual and cultural reminder of an other—indigenous and feminine—form of forging cultural memory. Ever committed to using the aesthetic both to remember the violent exclusions of history and to explore the perpetuation and transformation of the marginalizing structures of power in the present, Vicuña's multigenre work spans over thirty years of Chile's turbulent history of struggle with dictatorship and toward democracy. This essay analyzes the interlacing of textile and text in quipoem, a collection of the poetry and visual art of this author-artist that re-presents a constantly evolving theorization of the complex relation between aesthetics and politics, writing and difference, and memory and power in the postcolonial, postdictatorship context of the Americas in the age of neoliberal globalization.

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