The Art and Philosophy of Balance at Constantin Brâncusi

1998 ◽  
pp. 127-132
Author(s):  
Stefan Munteanu
Keyword(s):  
Metaphorical Thinking ◽  
History Of Art ◽  
History Of ◽  
Symbolic Thinking ◽  
Constantin Brancusi ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Outstanding Representative ◽  
The Way

Our paper intends to be an attempt of making evident the joining of the art and the philosophy of Constantin Brâncusi, the most outstanding representative of sculpture in our century. The way of approaching this topic was suggested to us by the great artist and thinker himself, who urges us that we should not make difficult what he expressed in a simple way. Of course, his multipurpose creation makes our job quite difficult, but we think the effort is worth doing, because in spite of all the limited commentaries, we succeeded in fiding out the coherence and the universality of his thinking as well as his capacity of placing himself above the cleatism—heraclitionism dispute which is considered as being fundamental for the whole history of art. That is because there exists, and we can speak about a unity of his works in all, based on the solidarity of the forms of his sculpture. As a result, mixing up the formal entities with the deviations from the principles of identity and noncontradiction in the discursive logic, we discover another type of logic in his creation. It is the logic of the metaphorical thinking, of the symbolic thinking based on the principle that anything can be something else in the same moment. This is why the aesthetic commentary, concerned with the modality of the suggestive expression, requires a complementarity of a hermeneutics of the symbol, capable of revealing the intention of the work in its complexity. Therefore, our attempt of considering the symbol of the ovoid as the keystone of Brâncusi’s philosophical conception, appears to be verisimilar. That is because, from the archetypal perspective, according to the arhaic Romanian philosophy, the egg is just the in-between shape (between en the spherical and hourglass, between geometric and biotic, between eleatic and heraclitian); it is the element by which the formal-aesthetic analysis can be unified; it is the synthesis of the opposites and the joy of the equilibrium.

scholarly journals Remix in the age of ubiquitous remix

2021 ◽  
pp. 135485652199445
Author(s):  
Abby S. Waysdorf
Keyword(s):  
Point Of View ◽  
Archival Material ◽  
History Of ◽  
Accepted Part ◽  
The Media ◽  
Contemporary Media ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Way

What is remix today? No longer a controversy, no longer a buzzword, remix is both everywhere and nowhere in contemporary media. This article examines this situation, looking at what remix now means when it is, for the most part, just an accepted part of the media landscape. I argue that remix should be looked at from an ethnographic point of view, focused on how and why remixes are used. To that end, this article identifies three ways of conceptualizing remix, based on intention rather than content: the aesthetic, communicative, and conceptual forms. It explores the history of (talking about) remix, looking at the tension between seeing remix as a form of art and remix as a mode of ‘talking back’ to the media, and how those tensions can be resolved in looking at the different ways remix originated. Finally, it addresses what ubiquitous remix might mean for the way we think about archival material, and the challenges this brings for archives themselves. In this way, this article updates the study of remix for a time when remix is everywhere.

Veronicas and Artists

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Religious Images ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of Art ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Way ◽  
Contemporary Artists

Chapter One deals with several central issues with regard to understanding the role of religious motifs in contemporary art. Besides being a repetition of imagery from the past, religious motifs embedded in contemporary artworks become a means to problematise not only the way different periods in the history of art are delimited, but larger and seemingly more rigid distinctions as those between art and non-art images. Early religious images differ significantly from art images. The two types are regulated according to different sets of rules related to the conditions of their production, display, appreciation and the way images are invested with the status of being true or authentic instances of art or sacred images. Chapter One provides a discussion of the important motif of the image not made by an artist’s hand, or acheiropoietos, and its survival and transformation, including its traces in contemporary image-making practices. All images are the result of human making; they are fictions. The way the conditions of these fictions are negotiated, or the way the role of the maker is brought to visibility, or concealed, is a defining feature of the specific regime of representation. While the cult image concealed its maker in order to maintain its public significance, and the later art image celebrated the artist as a re-inventor of the old image, contemporary artists cite religious images in order to reflect on the very procedures that produce the public significance and status of images.

scholarly journals Entanglement

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 7-13
Author(s):  
Marina Gržinić
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Contemporary History ◽  
European Context ◽  
Social Sciences And Humanities ◽  
History Of Art ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Way

My intention is to expose the way in how gender, class and race and media were and are overdeterminated, but without falling into a simplification that they are simply “contradictory.” I will make recourse to some contemporary performative practices and political spaces in Europe that dismantles the singular established contemporary history of art and performative practices in European context. Author(s): Marina Gržinić Title (English): Entanglement Journal Reference: Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. 10, No. 1-2 (Summer-Winter 2013) Publisher: Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities – Skopje  Page Range: 7-13 Page Count: 7 Citation (English): Marina Gržinić, “Entanglement,” Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. 10, No. 1-2 (Summer-Winter 2013): 7-13.

scholarly journals Connected Material Histories: A response

2016 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
CRAIG CLUNAS
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
First Year ◽  
The West ◽  
Hard Drive ◽  
Social Facts ◽  
History Of Art ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Act Up ◽  
The Way

In giving the very first lecture that first-year History of Art undergraduates at Oxford will hear, I usually employ the practice of giving them a sheet of paper with nothing on it but the outlines of the land masses of the globe, and ask them to draw a line round ‘the West’. The idea was inspired by a reading of Lewis and Wigen's 1997 bookThe Myth of Continents(‘justly celebrated’, as Sanjay Subrahmanyam says), and remains a useful pedagogic act, up to a point, for the reasons so clearly laid out in that book; also, it breaks the ice, it gets a buzz of conversation going in the room, it certainly foregrounds the topic, central now to art historical enquiry, of the way in which ‘representations are social facts’. But the reason I do not ask them to draw a map round ‘the East’ is that I suspect it would be too easy, or at least done too quickly, and indeed the boundaries of both ‘East’ and ‘Orient’, as ‘Europe's Other’, can be shown to have fluctuated much less than have the boundaries of what, for most Oxford students, is still, if somewhat tenuously, ‘us’ or ‘here’. Wherever ‘the East’ is, it all lies (as Subrahmanyam points out in his lecture) in that assuredly -etic part of the world called Asia. I might, in the privacy of my own hard drive, choose to categorize those European images which I need for teaching as ‘Non-Eastern’ (to balance the ‘Non-Western’ rubric on which my specialist options appear in the syllabus). But that is not a category widely used, or at least not in my own discipline of art history.

Rembrandt's Late Self-Portraits: Psychological and Medical Aspects

2002 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-49 ◽  
Author(s):  
Esther-Lee Marcus ◽  
A. Mark Clarfield
Keyword(s):  
Normal Aging ◽  
Artistic Style ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
History Of Art ◽  
History Of ◽  
Dutch Painter ◽  
The Way

The Dutch painter Rembrandt (1606–1669) left behind the largest series of self-portraits in the history of art. These paintings were produced over a period of time from age 22 years until just a few months before Rembrandt's death at age 63. This series gives us a unique opportunity to explore the development, maturity, and aging of the artist. The changes in Rembrandt's face and expression from one self-portrait to the next may be attributable to any combination of the following factors: normal aging changes, modifications and developments of his artistic style, alterations in the way he viewed himself, and changes in the way Rembrandt wanted us to see him. In addition, the modifications may be attributed in part to some illnesses from which the artist may have suffered and/or to a decline in his eyesight that may have influenced both his ability to detect details and his ability to paint.

Theory of the Image

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Nail
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Art ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Moving Images ◽  
Copernican Revolution ◽  
Systematic Philosophy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Image Production ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Theory Of The Image ◽  
The Way

We live in the age of the mobile image. Our world is now saturated with moving images of all kinds, both analog and digital. This sea change in image production and circulation is nothing less than the Copernican revolution of our time. The centrality of the movement and mobility of the image has never been more dramatic. And just like the Copernican revolution, the aesthetic revolution of the image has consequences not only for the way we think about the contemporary image but also the way we think about all previous images. Theory of the Image offers a new and systematic philosophy of art and aesthetics from the perspective of movement—the first of its kind. Throughout history, the image has been understood in many ways, but rarely has it been understood to be, primarily and above all, in motion. Thus, Theory of the Image offers not only the first aesthetics of motion but also the first history of the mobility of the image in the Western art tradition, from prehistory to the present.

Color, Form, and Motion: Dimensions of a Musical Art of Light

Leonardo ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 33 (5) ◽  
pp. 355-360 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fred Collopy
Keyword(s):  
Art Theory ◽  
Visual Artists ◽  
Previous Time ◽  
Art Form ◽  
History Of Art ◽  
History Of ◽  
Color Form ◽  
Historical Tradition ◽  
Effective Use ◽  
The Way

Lumia are an art form that permits visual artists to play images in the way that musicians play with sounds. Though the idea of creating lumia has a long historical tradition, modern graphicallybased computers make it possible to design instruments for creating lumia that are more flexible and easier to play than at any previous time in the history of art. In designing and playing lumia, three principal dimensions require attention: color, form, and motion. By organizing the design of lumia and instruments for creating them along these dimensions, it is possible to learn a great deal from art theory and history, as guidelines have been devised for the effective use of each of these dimensions.

scholarly journals Når værk bliver til vold

2008 ◽  
Vol 36 (105) ◽  
pp. 102-127
Author(s):  
Lars Albinus
Keyword(s):  
Political Activism ◽  
European History ◽  
Politics And Religion ◽  
History Of Art ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Way

When Work is Violence:Drawing on examples as divergent as current Muslim responses to the Danish cartoons and German terrorism in the 70s, this article aims to show how a closed alliance between art, politics and religion carries the risk of inducing violence which, among other things, annuls the function of art as being inherently ambiguous.It is argued that the function of art in Islam is bound up with the inviolable authority of the prophet and is therefore basically unable to fulfil satiric purposes. Although satire and laughter were also confined to unofficial activities under the Roman Church in medieval times, it is claimed, along the lines of Bakhtin, that a ‘culture of laughter’ actually did survive in the European history of art and paved the way for the appreciation of the potential of satirical critique. Following Benjamin, it is further claimed that the post-auratic function of art joined up with the revolutionary hope for a new aesthetics of life contrary to the fragmentary world of urban capitalism. Finally, as its major case, the article discusses the sliding of aesthetic provocation into political activism in 70s Germany resulting in Urban terrorism. In this case, the function of art once again falls back into a totalitarian critique which merely acknowledges a singular picture of the world. In conclusion, it is pointed out that aesthetic expressions are only imbued with an anti-violent vitality due to a non-condemning, ambiguous openness.

scholarly journals The Semi-Nude and Collapsing Female Figure: Sexuality in the Aesthetic Paintings of Albert Moore and Edward Burne-Jones

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Meaghan Collins
Keyword(s):  
Visual Analysis ◽  
Body Language ◽  
Female Figure ◽  
Female Nude ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
History Of Art ◽  
Female Figures ◽  
History Of ◽  
Pre Raphaelites ◽  
The Aesthetic

The female nude has been researched extensively over the history of Art, and continues to fascinate researchers and art enthusiasts alike. However it is difficult to find information on female figures who are semi-nude: one who is not fully clothed nor entirely nude. The Victorian period in England was a very conservative time, especially for women. Influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites, Aesthetic painters Albert Moore and Edward Burne-Jones depicted women in a peculiarly sexual manner, one that encapsulates the struggle with sexual acceptance of the era. Women are often shown wearing loose, transparent fabric and often asleep or in languid, weary poses. These weary poses are what I refer to as “collapsing women.” In this visual analysis I take a close look at these female figures, and examine them using the terms “semi-nude” and “collapsing female,” in order to determine the meaning behind their dress and body language.

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