Moving Peoples and Motion Pictures: Migration in Film and Other Media

Nearly from the start, cinema has registered, dramatized, and produced images of migration and its attendant anxieties. Indeed, movies have been fuelled by the movements of peoples thanks to the striking stories and images these always engender. After glancing at two distinct efforts in the 1960s in which cinema aimed to capture a mass phenomenon for a mass audience (one from Classic Hollywood, the other from the periphery of India), I will interrogate 21st-century strategies to come to terms with what the art form’s limitations may be. Can cinema get its arms around something so complex, multidimensional, and contested as migration? Jia Zhangke’s success in bringing internal Chinese migration to light may not be easily replicated by filmmakers in other nations faced with migration issues that cluster at their borders. Perhaps other art forms are naturally more capable in this regard. To isolate what cinema has done best, however, I will draw attention to films set on the edges of Europe.

Cambodia's orphan dance shows: From cultural salvation to child exploitation?

In Cambodia, orphan dance shows were once popular as a way to preserve endangered art forms and to cultivate children's dignity and well-being. But they came to be seen as exploitative instead, and today are nearly nonexistent. This article examines the confluence of changes that caused this reversal of opinion. The reversal is due to both covert factors such as changes in constructions of childhood, and overt factors such as changes in audience composition. The rise and fall of Cambodian orphan dance shows took place largely within foreign communities, with little local input.

The Art of Digital Curation

Artists have long engaged with digital and networked technologies in critical and creative ways to explore both new art forms and novel ways of disseminating artworks. Net-based artworks are often created with the intent to circulate outside traditional institutional spaces, and many are shared via artist-run platforms that involve curatorial practices distinct from those of museums or commercial galleries. This article focuses on a particular artist-run platform called Paper-Thin, characterizing the activities involved in managing the platform as digital curation in a polysemous sense – as both the curation of digital artworks and the stewardship of digital information in a complex technological ecosystem. While scholars and cultural heritage professionals have developed innovative preservation strategies for digital and new media artworks housed in institutional collections, the ongoing care of artworks shared through networked alternative spaces is largely carried out co-operatively by the artists and curators of these platforms. Drawing on Howard Becker’s sociological theory of art worlds as networks of co-operative actors, this article describes the patterns of co-operative work involved in creating, exhibiting, and then caring for Net-based art. The article outlines the importance, for cultural heritage professionals, of understanding the digital-curation practices of artists, as these artist-run networked platforms demonstrate emergent approaches to the stewardship of digital culture that move beyond a custodial paradigm.

Contemporary Art in Applied Dimensions: A Reflective Review of Art as Therapeutic Process

A common perception about contemporary art is the perception that it excludes a majority of people as being its legitimate viewers or judges, by virtue of the fact that it contains exclusive or encrypted messages. A small, privileged group of experts grant value, acceptance and endow public popularity of such works for the market and media. In this research we seek to provide an insight into a cluster of contemporary abstract art forms and show how such art forms anticipate closer and more common sensory and hermeneutic experience. Art like that of Hamish Fulton is built on experiences that enables us to connect with them, thereby redefining the concepts and ideas of these arts through an alternative phenomenological experience of their methods and processes of making art. Fulton’s art is based on a visual translation of his experiences of healing walks through mountainous terrain. We may build a personal, general methodology of interpretation by building personal synergistic links with the methods of creation – that could in turn generate therapeutic effects both in the viewer or in the interpreter of such art, through self-reflection and re-construction of the concepts proposed in the framing. Likewise, we will reflect briefly on art therapeutic projects that we studied for patients with ADHD. We analyze the expressions and suggest a method of therapeutic art creation based on similar processes as in Fulton.

The Terms of the Text

Chapter 9 examines how unconventional written work is currently pushing the limits of our understanding of genre. Women from elsewhere are drawing from personal experience in order to disturb tired distinctions between “text” and “life” in imaginative fashions that reconfigure the reading experience. Their creative work is contributing to liberating these authors from overworked modes of expression and worn expectations, and allows them to break free from rigid definitions. It is significant that a number of worldwide women writers are now opting to compose works in a variety of creative forms ranging from the bande dessinée to the journal to the photo essay to récits of all sorts, expanding our conceptions of generic classification by playing with everything from titles to formats within the written work. This inventiveness includes a great deal of attention to visual arts and music, occasionally through the integration of works of art and musical notations in the text itself, and other times through allusions to artistic and musical pieces, or even through the construction of passages that liken literature to these other art forms. Authors are more and more impressively contributing to their own publishing profiles by writing “autobiographically” in variations that elude any clear categorization, but that reveal intimate details in texts that embody movement, progression, and development in exciting new terms.

The structure of Solovyov's three lifetime poetry books: toward a problem statement

This essay examines for the first time the three editions, from 1891, 1895, and 1900, of Solovyov’s collected poetry from the point of view of their internal organization and relationship. The task posed is the identification and description of the most important components of the poetry book, which are present in all three editions and contribute to an understanding of the author's conception as it was realized in the books under consideration. To fulfill this task the comparative and descriptive methods of analysis are used. The evolution of the author’s artistic consciousness is described on the basis of the collected editions of Solovyov's poetry, his epistolary heritage, and the research of contemporary scholars. The different levels of the author's dialogue with the reader, with critics, as well as with poets and writers are highlighted. The author outlines the ways of researching the examined theme. In particular, the chronological order of the development of Solovyov's lyrical books, as well as the definite recurrence of the separate lyrical components in each of the three books, is shown. We see that the content of the author's three prefaces determines their function in the structure of the poetry books. The special role of critical works, included by the author in the third edition, in shaping the structure of the book of poems, as well as their relation with the foreword, is emphasized. The author concludes with genre renewal of art forms to solve new aesthetic tasks. Solovyov's aspiration to realize the life-creative conception within the framework of work on three lifetime editions is affirmed. In conclusion, the author substantiates the idea that the presented editions in their unity are a transitional genre form, which corresponds to the poet’s individual artistic searching and which establishes the literary trends of the turn of XIX–XX centuries.

Sustainability of Artists in Precarious Times; How Arts Producers and Individual Artists Have Adapted during a Pandemic

Making a living as an artist, whatever the discipline, is challenging. In addition to skills and talents, artists need resilience, adaptability, creativity, and the ability to withstand endless setbacks and rejections. Most critically, they need an on-going, stable income. Several studies have demonstrated that the income of most artists is usually very low. To survive, artists often find other sources of income aside from their creative work. Ideally, they also need a place to work, the capacity to do their work and a sense of validation from others of their work. When your livelihood disappears over night because of a pandemic, how do you then sustain that creative work? Using multiple sources of data and a qualitative methodology, including case studies and interviews, this paper addresses the ways that artists and producers from different art forms have addressed these challenges in Australia. It is concluded that while the impact of the pandemic on artists’ lives has been considerable, some artists have been able to survive, adapt, and move forward.

Ola Skanks: Delayed Recognition of a Dance Artist Ahead of Her Time

This essay chronicles my research relationship with choreographer, teacher, educator, and activist Ola Skanks. Canadian-born and of West Indian (St. Lucia and Barbados) descent, Skanks was a groundbreaking dance and fashion design artist who combined modern, Western art forms with traditional dances of the Africa diaspora. I share excerpts from my work to date, including my archival exhibition, It’s About Time: Dancing Black in Canada 1900–1970, to provide context for the circumstances that Black people danced in, socially and/or as performers. This is followed by a selection of photos from Skanks’s archival collection that illustrate the scope of her creative and community contributions. In conclusion, I offer a transcription of a speech I gave when Skanks was inducted into the Dance Collection Danse’s 2018 Encore! Dance Hall of Fame, alongside some of Canada’s most well-known dance artists and community builders. I detail some of the highlights of my meetings with her and also the profundity of the delayed recognition of a woman so far ahead of her time.

Butoh: Granting Art Status to an Indefinable Form

<p>Butoh is a kind of art, but exactly what kind of art is not so easy to see. While traditionally considered a type of dance, there are a number of butoh works that are not readily identifiable as dance works, if in fact they count as dance at all. Through the use of Noël Carroll’s narrative theory of art, I will show how butoh comes to be thought of as art even if it fails to match up exactly with any one pre-existing art form. I will show how the context in which butoh came into being is sufficient for granting butoh art status due to its relation to existing art forms. I compare butoh to its two most similar analogues, dance and performance art, and examine how it resembles and differs from each of them. I also show how the reason categorising butoh as only one kind of art form is problematic due to its being part of a non- Western aesthetic tradition that does not break the world up into such easily separable pieces.</p>

Butoh: Granting Art Status to an Indefinable Form

<p>Butoh is a kind of art, but exactly what kind of art is not so easy to see. While traditionally considered a type of dance, there are a number of butoh works that are not readily identifiable as dance works, if in fact they count as dance at all. Through the use of Noël Carroll’s narrative theory of art, I will show how butoh comes to be thought of as art even if it fails to match up exactly with any one pre-existing art form. I will show how the context in which butoh came into being is sufficient for granting butoh art status due to its relation to existing art forms. I compare butoh to its two most similar analogues, dance and performance art, and examine how it resembles and differs from each of them. I also show how the reason categorising butoh as only one kind of art form is problematic due to its being part of a non- Western aesthetic tradition that does not break the world up into such easily separable pieces.</p>