The Transition to Art: Poster Exhibitions at the Outset of the Poster’s Institutionalisation

Ikonotheka ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 239-251
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Matul

What happened when the poster, originally an advertising medium, became an object of appreciation in the museums of Communist Poland? What criteria did it have to comply with in order to be accepted into a temple of art, a museum? The article analyses poster exhibitions organised at the Zachęta Central Bureau of Art Exhibitions in the 1950s. During this period, the interest of museum curators, critics and art historians in this medium must be envisioned as always being underpinned by political and propagandist interests; the transition of the poster to the status of a work of art is analysed here in this double, i.e. cultural and political, perspective.

Author(s):  
Gregory P. A. Levine

What makes art “Zen” and Zen art “Art”? From where and when does it arise: Southern Song dynasty China (1127-1279), Muromachi period Japan (1333-1573), London in the 1920s, Manhattan or Japan in the 1950s and 1960s? How do we describe Zen art—including heirloom works such as Muqi Fachang’s Six Persimmons or the contemporary artist Murakami Takashi’s Daruma works—and why do we build description around particular religious terms, such as mushin, and seemingly timeless aesthetic qualities such as simplicity, spontaneity, abbreviation, monochromatic, abstraction, nothingness, and so forth? How do terms and sensibilities come to be normalized, and what sorts of Zen art might they exclude or repress, and why? What should we make of Hisamatsu Shin’ichi’s “Seven Characteristics of Zen art”? Why are the arts of Japan so often described as inherently or entirely informed by Zen? Beginning with writings from Zen campaigners and art historians in the 1920s, this chapter follows the lexical journey of Zen and Zen art, aesthetics to the present and suggests the discursive and ideological energies that propelled them toward the status of global “givens.”


2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 76-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giulia Cavaliere

The benefits of full ectogenesis, that is, the gestation of human fetuses outside the maternal womb, for women ground many contemporary authors’ arguments on the ethical desirability of this practice. In this paper, I present and assess two sets of arguments advanced in favour of ectogenesis: arguments stressing ectogenesis’ equality-promoting potential and arguments stressing its freedom-promoting potential. I argue that although successfully grounding a positive case for ectogenesis, these arguments have limitations in terms of their reach and scope. Concerning their limited reach, I contend that ectogenesis will likely benefit a small subset of women and, arguably, not the group who most need to achieve equality and freedom. Concerning their limited scope, I contend that these defences do not pay sufficient attention to the context in which ectogenesis would be developed and that, as a result, they risk leaving the status quo unchanged. After providing examples of these limitations, I move to my proposal concerning the role of ectogenesis in promoting women’s equality and freedom. This proposal builds on Silvia Federici’s, Mariarosa Dalla Costa’s and Selma James’ readings of the international feminist campaign ‘Wages for Housework’. It maintains that the political perspective and provocation that ectogenesis can advance should be considered and defended.


2004 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 579-609 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Petersen

Argument“How should a modern artist react to the atomic age?” Time magazine posed this question in 1952 to open a review of an exhibition of paintings inspired by the “explosion of the atomic bomb” and by the “discovery of nuclear energy.” The energetic paintings of the Italian Spatial Movement were, according to Time, “almost as explosive as the bomb itself.” “Explosiveness” was a defining feature of much 1950s art, whose main impulse, gestural abstraction, has previously been understood as the urgent expression of the artist's subjectivity. This paper argues that explosiveness in art can also be seen as an “expression” of the realities of the nuclear era. Postwar artists were ambivalent about the explosive forces, both liberating and devastating, that lay within the atom. Toward the end of the 1950s, no longer content merely to represent atomic disintegration, some artists went so far as to propose the outright self-destruction of the work of art as the only fitting means of expression in the atomic age.One must – and this is not an exaggeration – keep in mind that we are living in the atomic age, where everything material and physical could disappear from one day to another, to be replaced by nothing but the ultimate abstraction imaginable.– Yves Klein 1958 (Klein 1973, 10)


Art Scents ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 158-177
Author(s):  
Larry Shiner

Chapter 9 begins with the idea of the total work of art (Gesamtkunstwerk) and considers examples of odors in theater from the Renaissance to the present, arguing that the inclusion of odors in some types of theater production is appropriate. In the case of film, the chapter discusses the difficulties faced by the first serious attempts in the 1950s and the handful of recent efforts, arguing that the combination of images with sound is able to suggests odors, whereas actual odors are likely to create more puzzles than they are worth, except in the case of highly experimental “art house” films. In the case of music, the chapter focuses on Green Aria: A Scent Opera, presented at the Guggenheim in 2009, a work that combined narrative, odors, and an electronic music score and marked a decisive step toward the successful integration of actual smells with music and narrative.


Author(s):  
Endre Kiss

Gadamer’s hermeneutic philosophy avoids the problem of literary objectiveness altogether. His approach witnesses the general fact that an indifference towards literary objectiveness in particular, leads to a peculiar neglect of par excellence literariness as such. It seems obvious, however, that the constitutive aspects of the crisis of literary objectiveness cannot be shown to contain the underlying intention of bringing about this situation. At this point, one can identify what could probably be the most important element in a definition of literary objectiveness. In contrast to ‘natural’ objectiveness and objectiveness based on various societal conventions, the legitimacy of a literary work is solely guaranteed by its elements being organized in accordance with the rules of literary objectiveness. Thus when the crisis of literary objectiveness intensifies, literariness will also find itself in a crisis. This crisis detaches new, quasi-literary formations from various definitions of literariness. When literary objectiveness ceases, however, to be understood as a system constituted by various objective formations aiming to correspond in one way or another to the ‘world’, scientific analysis of literary objectiveness will be rendered impossible. The crisis of literary objectiveness thus brings about the crisis of the theory of literature and the philosophy of art. Gadamer explicitly argues that the scientific approach proves to be inadequate in the analysis of artistic experience. This attitude results in the categorical rejection of a scientific orientation (and so in a complete indifference towards literary objectiveness), but he seems to overemphasize an otherwise correct thesis on the non-reflexive character of artistic experience. It is the anti-mimetic and Platonic character of Gadamer’s aesthetic hermeneutics that determines the status of literary (artistic) objectiveness in his system of thought. What is of crucial importance, however, is to point out that this aesthetics entails a fundamental reduction of the significance of literary objectiveness. As soon as the essence of aesthetic object-constitution is taken to be re-cognition (plus the emanating aesthetic possibilities), the absolutely natural interest in the original object represented by a work of art.Undoubtedly, Gadamer’s conception answers a number of questions that tend to be ignored by other theories. It is just as obvious, however, that Gadamer completes here the aesthetic devaluation of the objective domain. It is not the characteristics of the ‘original’ that constitute the image, but in effect the image turns the original into an original. Paraphrasing this claim one arrives at a near paradox: not objectiveness makes a work of art possible, but a work of art lends objects their objectiveness.


Oryx ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 127-134 ◽  
Author(s):  
Badamjavin Lhagvasuren ◽  
E. J. Milner-Gulland

This article presents data on the ecology, exploitation and management of the Mongolian gazelle over the last few decades. The species has suffered a massive decline in its range area, coinciding with the construction of the Ulaanbaatar—Beijing railway in the 1950s. It is heavily hunted, both legally and illegally. Threats to the species are outlined and recommendations made about the conservation measures required to secure its future.


1999 ◽  
Vol 18 ◽  
pp. 75-117 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bojan Bujić

Like her crown, which according to the story shines in a constellation, L'Arianna as a work of art shimmers as a distant and mysterious object, and the loss of Monteverdi's score, apart from the famous lament, makes it one of the great ‘if onlys’ of the history of music. Artistic responses to L'Arianna range wide. In Gabrielle d'Annunzio's novel Il fuoco, Stellio Effrena and his group of aesthetes in fin de siècle Venice embrace Monteverdi, and Arianna's lament in particular, as a home-grown antidote to Wagner, elevating ‘Lasciatemi morire’ to the status of an Italian precursor of the ‘Liebestod’. Recently Alexander Goehr gave a new lease of life to Ottavio Rinuccini's libretto in his opera Arianna, first performed in September 1995, and, as if not to desecrate a hallowed object, he included in the opera a recording of the opening of Monteverdi's surviving fragment sung by Kathleen Ferrier.


2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 58
Author(s):  
Aryono Aryono

This article discusses about the efforts of creeds religion flourished to maintain their existence since the 1950s until the late 2010’s in Indonesia. Using historical method, this article found the interesting facts about the struggle of creeds religion in political stage of Indonesia. In 1953, for example, the Ministry of Religion Affairs noted that there were 360 groups protected by the government according on the Constitutional Law 1945 Article 29. After the tragedy of 1965, migration of members to the religions took place. When Soeharto became president, these groups was allowed to flourish. However, they got discrimination and always being watched. The new hope was arose in 2006, when the government issued Law No. 23/2006 about Population Administration, although it still requires to fill the religious column in national identity card (KTP). In the end 2017, the Constitutional Court issued a fatwa related to the status of religious column in KTP of the creeds religion. This condition also encompassed to Aliran Kapribaden’s Romo Semono Sastrodiharjo in Purworejo, Central Java. This discrimination must be terminated, in the name of unity in diversity.


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