Avant-Garde Lot’s Wife: Natalia Goncharova’s Salt Pillars and the Rebirth of Hospitality

Sodomscapes ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lowell Gallagher
Keyword(s):  
Avant Garde ◽  
Innovative Treatment ◽  
Aesthetic Practice ◽  
New Beginnings ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Forward Looking

Chapter four shows how the innovative treatment of the flight from Sodom by the avant-garde Russian painter Natal’ia Goncharova (1881-1962) presents a figural merger of messianic expectation and cosmopolitan hope in the artist’s experimental hybridizing of secular and sacral components to aesthetic practice. The strangely oneiric and mortified landscape conveyed by Goncharova’s proto-cubist vocabulary in Salt Pillars (ca. 1909) assembles a prescient image of Hannah Arendt’s notion of natality, which Arendt draws from Augustine’s definition of the human as inherently endowed with the capacity for gratitude and the ability to begin again in the midst of uncertainty. Put simply, the painting gives figural expression to the fundamental ambiguity of Arendt’s notion of natality, its backward- and forward-looking turn toward givenness and new beginnings. Through this gesture, Salt Pillars presents a patient attentiveness to the complicity of worlding and unworlding gestures in the rhythm of being with others.

scholarly journals The notion and meaning of interdisciplinarity in the studies of art and media

2012 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 196-211
Author(s):  
Nikola Dedić
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Art History ◽  
Media Theory ◽  
Cultural Meaning ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Linguistic Turn ◽  
Elite Culture ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approaches ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Definition Of

This text attempts to mark the difference between traditional, modern, monodisciplinary and contemporary interdisciplinary approaches within the analysis of reception of media and artistic contents. Monodisciplinary approaches are connected with the classical basis of humanistic and social sciences which are related to the definition of culture based on opposition between mass and elite culture (art). Avant-garde and linguistic turn within social sciences in the 60s realized re-evaluation of the notion of culture-culture is not seen anymore as a sum of elite products of human spirit but rather as a production of cultural meaning, i.e. as a discourse. This turn enabled interdisciplinary turn within the sciences as aesthetics and art history and also enabled the emergence of contemporary interdisciplinary media theory.

scholarly journals Dadaism (Re)activated. Artzins and Dada

2017 ◽  
Vol 44 (6) ◽  
Author(s):  
Magdalena Lachman
Keyword(s):  
Artistic Expression ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Literary Journals ◽  
Definition Of

The article analyses in what way artzins (independent art and literary journals published in Poland in the 1980s and 1990s) drew inspiration from the Dada tradition, and how they made its philosophy live again. Artzins are seen here both as a medium of literature and art and as specific forms of artistic expression (press art). The article attempts to show why artzins and their authors were interested in reviving the avant-garde and Dada ideas. It also investigates how Dadaism functions today in the form of contemporary works and styles which are influenced by this avant-garde movement. What is more, the article tries to answer the question about the nature and definition of Dadaism shaped and reflected by today's artistic projects.

THE ISSUE OF CONTEMPORANEITY AS CULTURAL AND HISTORICAL TOTALITY IN THE WORKS OF BORIS GROYS

2021 ◽  
pp. 5-18
Author(s):  
Elena Y. Baboshko ◽  
◽  
Dmitriy V. Galkin ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Social Dynamics ◽  
Will To Power ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Historical Processes ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Forces ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Modernist Discourse ◽  
Selection Of

The authors refer the issue of definition of contemporaneity as cultural and historical totality basing on the research results of a well-known theorist Boris Groys. Analyzing the progress of his ideas, the authors conclude, that the philosopher’s considerable contribution to the science is composed of the next phase of the development of the thesis about the art language as the base of contemporaneity construction and of the “natural selection” of contemporary art structures. The latter is not simply reduced to the postmodern “polylogue” variant, but implies a kind of contemporaneity patterns niche and “stabilization”. The patterns naturally tend to become complementary due to simple juxtaposition/ overlay in general time context. According to the authors, this circumstance does not prevent them from being turned by different political forces into locally dominating contemporaneity patterns (as in the case of Gesamkunstwerk Stalin). Contemporary art provides simple experience, that helps to retain the illusion of single and seemingly total contemporaneity. B. Groys leads us to the thought that art provides conditions for generating a significant reflective distance in relation to different social and historical situations. The distance gives an artist the opportunity to consider the reality comprehensively, given the autonomy, through the art language. However, we believe, that the most important philosopher’s achievement is not only drawing parallels between cultural and social and historical processes, based on the concept of art strategies influencing the social dynamics. He also managed to approach one of the most significant issues in culture theory and history – the opportunity to define contemporaneity as cultural and historical totality. According to his modernity theory, the origin of contemporaneity is hidden in the avant-garde art manifestation. He interprets the utopic by its nature modernist discourse, applied in art practice, through Nietzscheian will to power as redefining the new age philosophy. This article aims to analyze the progress of the issue of contemporaneity in the works of B. Groys and to explicate the complexity of considering contemporaneity as cultural and historical totality. The authors believe that the thorough study of the phenomenon of total artwork (Gesamtkunstwerk) as a soviet Stalin project and critics’ opinion analysis helps to create arguments limiting the opportunity of considering contemporaneity as totality.

The Iconoclasts of Queer Aztlán

2019 ◽  
pp. 31-54
Author(s):  
Robb Hernández
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Ethnic Enclaves ◽  
Institutional Discourse ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Queer Of Color ◽  
Classic Essay ◽  
Definition Of

This chapter draws on Cherríe Moraga’s classic essay “Queer Aztlán: The Re-Formation of Chicano Tribe” to distinguish how iconoclasm, the literal breaking of images, has been deployed as a unifying language for queer Chicanx avant-garde formed in the ethnic enclaves of Los Angeles. In institutional discourse, the East LA art collective known as Asco (Spanish for “nausea”) has tended to overshadow queer of color amorphous collectives, artistic circles,and collaborations. With attention to groups like Escandalosa Circle, Butch Gardens School of Art, Pursuits of the Penis, and Le Club for Boys, this chapter elucidates how a bold language faced indifference and sometimes violence in traditional museum settings. With a particular eye on the disciplining of Robert “Cyclona” Legorreta’s unruly archival body, another method and definition of Chicano queer avant-gardisms is demanded and found in the archival body/archival space methodology undergirding the case study chapters.

A Plan with the Force of a Battleship

2019 ◽  
pp. 208-217
Author(s):  
Alexander Kluge
Keyword(s):  
Karl Marx ◽  
Retrospective Evaluation ◽  
Objective Reality ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Ancient Site ◽  
Definition Of

This chapter explores Alexander Kluge's retrospective evaluation of Soviet avant-garde cinema practices. Kluge recounts Sergei Eisenstein's plan in 1927 to film Capital, “based on the scenario by Karl Marx.” During the following two years, Eisenstein pursues his plan, which no one is willing to finance. Kluge sees Eisenstein's grand plan to film Capital as a kind of imaginary quarry. One can find fragments there, but one may also discover that there is nothing to be found. Dealing in a respectful way with the plans of a great master like Eisenstein is similar to excavating an ancient site; one discovers more about oneself than actual shards and treasures. Kluge suggests that “today we experience the proliferation of existent conditions. Objective reality has outstripped us, but we also have reason to fear the mass of subjectivity that eludes our consciousness.” In 2008, it is dangerous to confront this reality with the method and the expectations of Marx: one becomes discouraged. Kluge then provides a definition of images.

Loy’s Dialogue with Lacerba and Italian Feminism

2019 ◽  
pp. 17-66
Author(s):  
Laura Scuriatti
Keyword(s):  
Gender Identity ◽  
Sexual Morality ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Fundamental Categories

This chapter contextualizes Loy's readings of Futurist ideas and aesthetics within the specificity of the Florentine avant-garde; it analyzes Loy’s responses to the writings and ideas on sexuality, sexual morality, feminism, motherhood, genius, autobiographism and avant-garde art, published in the magazines Lacerba (1913–1915) and La Voce (1908–1916), which have so far been neglected by scholarship. The chapter shows that the reception of Otto Weininger's and Karl Kraus’s works in Lacerba at the hand of Giovanni Papini infiltrated Loy's early texts, together with the debates on similar questions in the expatriate community. It analyzes the echoes between Loy's poems and the writings of Ada Negri, Sibilla Aleramo and Enif Robert. The author here argues that Loy’s aesthetics began to crystallize as a form of critique of the fundamental categories pertaining to the definition of art, artwork and author, as well as of gender identity, on the basis of the Florentine sources and debates that she incorporated into her writing. The chapter thus contributes to a necessary decentering and regionalizing of modernism, complicating the picture of modernist internationalism.

Towards a Historical Definition of the Haskalah

2001 ◽  
pp. 184-220
Author(s):  
Shmuel Feiner
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Revolutionary Movement ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Jewish Society ◽  
Alive Today ◽  
History Of ◽  
Definition Of

This chapter studies the long historiographic tradition in search of a definition of the Haskalah. It suggests reducing the historical parameters of the Jewish Enlightenment so that it can be recognized as a trend in which modernizing intellectuals aspired to transform Jewish society. Despite the obvious diversity and dispersion of the Haskalah, and the difficulty in defining it precisely, the chapter enumerates a number of essential criteria, elaborating on the self-consciousness of the maskilim and paying special attention to their militant rhetoric and awareness of belonging to an avant-garde, redemptive, and revolutionary movement. It also sketches a portrait of the typical maskil, surveys the history of the movement and its various centres, and elucidates the dualistic nature of its ideology, explaining its links to the processes of Jewish modernization and secularization. Ultimately, the Haskalah was the intellectual option for modernization that triggered the Jewish Kulturkampf which, still alive today — especially in Israel — separates modernists and anti-modernists, Orthodox and secular Jews.

Choreographies of the Living

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carrie Rohman
Keyword(s):  
Visual Art ◽  
Contemporary Literature ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Felix Guattari ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Human Endeavor ◽  
Theatrical Performance ◽  
Aesthetic Practice ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The Aesthetic

Animals seem to be everywhere in contemporary literature, visual art, and performance. But though writers, artists, and performers are now engaging more and more with ideas about animals, and even with actual living animals, their aesthetic practice continues to be interpreted within a primarily human frame of reference—with art itself being understood as an exclusively human endeavor. The critical wager in this book is that the aesthetic impulse itself is profoundly trans-species. Rohman suggests that if we understand artistic and performative impulses themselves as part of our evolutionary inheritance—as that which we borrow, in some sense, from animals and the natural world—the ways we experience, theorize, and value literary, visual, and performance art fundamentally shift. Although other arguments suggest that certain modes of aesthetic expression are closely linked to animality, Rohman argues that the aesthetic is animal, showing how animality and actual animals are at the center of the aesthetic practices of crucial modernist, contemporary, and avant-garde artists. Exploring the implications of the shift from an anthropocentric to a bioaesthetic conception of art, this book turns toward animals as artistic progenitors in a range of case studies that spans print texts, visual art, dance, music, and theatrical performance. Drawing on the ideas of theorists such as Elizabeth Grosz, Jane Bennett, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, Una Chaudhuri, Timothy Morton, and Cary Wolfe, Rohman articulates a deep coincidence of the human and animal elaboration of life forces in aesthetic practices.

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