Rereading Moscow Conceptualism

Slavic Review ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 75 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-51
Author(s):  
Mary A. Nicholas

The most important Russian artistic movement of the end of the twentieth century, Moscow conceptualism has been described as sectarian, esoteric, and self-absorbed, with an affinity for substituting longwinded commentaries for visual images. Such definitions, while compelling for some participants in the movement, fail to describe adequately the work of a number of unofficial Moscow artists from the late Soviet period, particularly the so-called second generation of conceptualists. This is partly the result of a critical tendency to misconstrue the role words actually play in the work of second-generation artists and to conflate their use of painted text with that of other Moscow conceptualists. Closer attention to the kinds of texts these artists include in their pictorial creation and their intent in doing so suggests that they represent a significant but understudied development in this still misunderstood group.

Lituanistica ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 63 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonas Mardosa

The article deals with Evangelical Lutheran baptism in the Tauragė District in the second half of the twentieth century. The author gives an overview of a historical perspective of the Evangelical Lutherans in the district of Tauragė and introduces the features of the liturgical development of the Christian and Evangelical Lutheran sacrament of baptism and the basis of folk baptism. Ethnographic field research material and ethnological investigation are the primary material sources of this study. With the help of research material, the structure of the traditional Evangelical Lutheran Baptism in the Tauragė district is shown, with emphasis on the preparatory actions of baptism granting the Sacrament of the Baptism, and baptismal feasts. The author maintains that the essence of baptism of the Lithuanian Evangelical Lutherans is a common human ground, and because of that ground common features with the customs of the Catholic baptism are found. The customs of the ceremonies of Lutheran and Catholic baptism share many common points in the perspective of folk devotion.In the Tauragė district, traditional Evangelical Lutheran baptismal rituals of the first half of the twentieth century have the following specific features: a twoday baptismal feast, decoration of baptismal clothes in myrtles, a baby carrier participating without the presence of the godparents in the granting of the Sacrament of Baptism and specific customs of the welcoming of the baptized infant. Changes in baptism took place in the second half of the twentieth century. The atheist ideology of the Soviet period and changes in people’s lifestyle influenced the disappearance of some specific aspects of baptism, while others remained as a fact of ethno-cultural memory. The significance of entertainment in the ceremony has increased, the age of baptized infants has extended, the ritual position of the baby carrier and the tradition of decorating the baptism covering with myrtles have disappeared, and the parents of the infant, like guests, became only participants in the baptism ceremony in the church. After Lithuania regained its independence, the traditional structure of the baptism has remained, but the aspect of folk piety in baptism has shrunk due to the absence of magic practices.


2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 108-119
Author(s):  
Stepanova Lena B. ◽  

Disease theme of indigenous population of the Northern national outskirts of Russia, as well as the study of special knowledge in the field of traditional medicine and healing practices, for a long time belonged to the taboo part of knowledge. However, at the beginning of the twentieth century, there was a turning point in the visual culture of region, when the picture of diseases was expressed through the camera and became public. There are works of photographers documenting the course of the most dangerous diseases, such as leprosy and external manifestations of mental disorders. The aim of this study is to study external factors that influenced the genesis of the “medical” series of visual images of the population of Northeast Asia. The research methodology is based on a cultural and historical analysis of the events that preceded its appearance and subsequent application in medical practice in order to document the course of diseases in the Soviet period. This article presents the results of a brief review of the prehistory of the “medical” direction in ethnographic photography of the Yakut region. The circle of photographers of the Yakut region is defined, where stories illustrating the diseases that the local population suffered from are reflected. At the beginning of the twentieth century, footage of medical practices and shamanistic rituals for healing were presented in the photo projects by I. V. Popov and A. P. Kurochkin. In the 1920s-1930s. the genre of “medical photography” is represented by the works of the doctor-epidemiologist T. A. Kolpakova, military surgeon E. A. Dubrovin, unknown with the initial “D”, who worked in the medical detachment of the Commission for the Study the Productive Forces of the Yakut Republic (CYR) The Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union and the People’s Committee the Health of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. The experience of studying this topic serves as a clear illustration of the specifics of the region and in some way confirms the conclusions made by the participants of numerous expeditions that studied the foreign population of the Yakut region and predicted the inevitable extinction in the future. Keywords: medical anthropology, anthropology of disease, visual research, indigenous people, visual text, visual sources


Author(s):  
Chris Coffman

“Seeing Stein’s Masculinity” analyses the shifting significance of visual images of and written texts about Stein. Driven by recent reinterpretations of Jacques Lacan’s theory of the gaze, this chapter reads his theories against the grain to counter arguments about the visual that reproduce binary thinking about gender. Queering his account of the gaze makes it possible to register the expanded array of masculinities mobilized in photographs of Stein by George Platt Lynes, Henri Manuel, and Man Ray as well as in their recent reception during the 2011 Seeing Gertrude Stein exhibit in San Francisco. Moreover, Stein’s own comments in The Autobiography about being photographed by Man Ray queer the heteronormative gaze that drives James Agee’s review of that book in the September 11, 1933 issue of Time whose cover featured Lynes’s image of Stein in profile. Tracking changes that have taken place between the early twentieth century and the present in attitudes toward her queer sexuality and masculinity, this chapter argues that traces of abjection remain in contemporary reactions to Stein despite greater acceptance of her gender, sexuality, and innovative writing.


Author(s):  
SIN YI CHEUNG ◽  
ANTHONY HEATH

Britain has long been home to migrants from Ireland (which until 1921 had been part of the United Kingdom). More recently, it has seen major inflows from a number of less-developed countries such as Jamaica, India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Kenya, and Hong Kong that had formerly been part of the British Empire. While there is some reason to believe that the Irish experienced some discrimination in Britain in the first half of the twentieth century or before, evidence implies that the Irish, both first and second generation, now compete on equal terms with the indigenous British. The ethnic penalties experienced by the visible minorities from the less-developed members of the Commonwealth have declined markedly in the second generation, but all the major visible minorities still find it more difficult to obtain jobs commensurate with their qualifications than do the various white groups, even in the second generation. Continuing discrimination against visible minorities is likely to be a major part of the explanation for the difficulty in gaining employment.


Author(s):  
Graham Parkes

Nishitani Keiji is generally regarded as the leading light of the ‘second generation’ Kyoto School of modern Japanese philosophy. Influenced by Zen thinkers from Chinese and Japanese Buddhism as well as by figures from the Western mystical and existential traditions, he is a pre-eminent voice in East–West comparative philosophy and late twentieth-century Buddhist–Christian dialogue. Primarily a philosopher of religion, Nishitani strove throughout his career to formulate existential responses to the problem of nihilism.


2010 ◽  
Vol 38 (5) ◽  
pp. 749-756
Author(s):  
David R. Marples

David Brandenberger argues that contemporary Russian identity was mainly a result of a “historical accident.” He maintains that this national identity was a product of the twentieth century rather than the nineteenth, which is more commonly cited, and that in terms of the state formulating a conception of what it meant to be Russian, the first decade of the Soviet period achieved little. However, by the late 1920s Soviet ideologists began to seek something more appealing than the mundane party slogans and eventually added non-proletarian, historical Russian heroes to the Soviet pantheon, particularly after the purges when the latter group was sorely depleted. This campaign was largely successful in inducing an understanding of national identity from a non-proletarian past as is evident today. He perceives this process as the formation of a Soviet populism, designed to mobilize society “on the mass level” and compares Stalin's USSR with Latin American dictatorships in this regard. Stalin, he argues, “was an authoritarian populist rather than a nationalist.” By 1953, Russians had a much better idea about their identity than in the period before 1937.


1999 ◽  
Vol 44 (S7) ◽  
pp. 149-169 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fatima El Tayeb

The 1999 plan of the Social Democratic government to adjust Germany's 1913 nationality law has generated an intensely emotional debate. In an unprecedented action, the opposition Christian Democrats managed to gather hundreds of thousands of signatures against the adjustment that would have granted citizenship to second generation “immigrants” born in Germany. At the end of the twentieth century, Germans still strongly cling to the principle ofjus sanguinis. The idea that nationality is not connected ot place of birth or culture but rather to a “national essence” tJiat is somehow incorporated in the subject's blood has been strong in Germany since the early nineteenth century and has been especially decisive for the country's twentieth-century history.


2020 ◽  
Vol 44 (165) ◽  
pp. 131-146
Author(s):  
Niall Whelehan

AbstractIn 1927 the Italian anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were executed in Boston following a murder trial that was widely denounced for its anti-labour and anti-immigrant bias. From 1921 the campaign to save the two men powerfully mobilised labour internationalism and triggered waves of protests across the world. This article examines the important contributions made by Irish and Irish-American radicals to the Sacco-Vanzetti campaign. Mary Donovan was a leading member of the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee, and a second-generation Irish union organiser and member of Boston's James Connolly Club. In the 1920s she travelled to Ireland twice and appealed to Irish and Irish American labour to support the campaign. At the same time, Donovan and many of the activists considered here held ambiguous personal and political relationships with Ireland. Transnational Irish radicalism in the early-twentieth century is most commonly considered in nationalist terms. Taking a distinctly non-Irish cause – the Sacco-Vanzetti case of 1920–7 – allows us to look from a different perspective at the global Irish Revolution and reveals how radical labour currents reached into Irish and Irish-American circles during the revolutionary era, though the response to the campaign also indicates a receding internationalism in the immediate aftermath of Irish independence.


2003 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 183-186
Author(s):  
Richard Weston

It has taken a long time to be able to assess Jørn Utzon's importance. Until the end of the twentieth century, the architect described by Sigfried Giedion as the most important of the ‘third generation’ hardly appeared in its literature. By contrast we had no such problem with Le Corbusier: there were the Oeuvres Complètes. It was easy to consult any building, indeed sketch, and along the way to be thoroughly coerced into his theoretical position. His massive and megalomaniac contribution to the last century could be studied first through L'Esprit Nouveau, the avant-garde magazine which promulgated him – ‘17.23, 2me février, 1926, Grande Pensée de L-C …’ and so forth – and later through the archives and sketchbooks. Wright suffered from too many publications. After the Wasmuth Portfolio of 1910 there was no single, accessible reference to his huge output: his theory tended to the verbose, and he was devious in concealing his own sources, most especially his debt to Japan. Mies van der Rohe wrote little and was famously gnomic; his buildings supplied his ‘text’. The so-called second generation, Aalto and Kahn, were well served in terms of publication of their work. The former's theoretical position took much posthumous teasing-out by critics to become widely understood. He could overcome people's ignorance of Finnish – for example, by his 1961 definition ‘acoustic separation is kilograms’ and by his stupefied reaction to the question of what module he used: ‘a millimetre, more or less!’ – but he wrote little.


Author(s):  
G. A. Ivakin

During the Soviet period, the right monarchism was considered by historians of our country as part of general methodological approaches to the study of non-proletarian parties. As ideological and political antagonist of Bolshevism, the Black Hundreds were interpreted as the most reactionary political movement of pre-revolutionary Russia. As a result, the full scientific debate on the right monarchism in the Soviet period did not take place, and Soviet historians failed to form a historical concept of the Black Hundreds as an ideological and political trend in the early twentieth century.


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