The Isle of Sculptures of Pontevedra (1999-2019): a model to recover nature as a social and cultural space in the city

La Isla de Esculturas fue concebida como una construcción cultural de la naturaleza y revertida a paisaje estético, teniendo en cuenta la singularidad etnográfica, histórica y antropológica del lugar donde se enclava: la Xunqueira del Lérez de Pontevedra. Constituye igualmente un homenaje al granito, material identitario de la escultura de todas las épocas y una referencia de la cultura y el arte que sus autores entroncan con la conciencia mítica y el simbolismo del The Waste Land (La tierra baldía) de T. S. Eliot. Como La tierra baldía, que reunifica pasado y presente, entre metáforas y símbolos, los escultores que intervienen en el espacio contorneado por el río Lérez acogen, en un todo, una pluralidad de alusiones culturales, lenguajes y conceptos, referencias clásicas y experiencias más contemporáneas. Fueron invitados a intervenir doce artistas: Giovanni Anselmo, Fernando Casás, José Pedro Croft, Dan Graham, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Jenny Holzer, Francisco Leiro, Richard Long, Robert Morris, Anne & Patrick Poirier, Ulrich Rückriem y Enrique Velasco.

Judson Memorial Church and the intersections between happening and dancing

The article examines a short excerpt from the New York scene, namely the period around 1959–1963 in the context of the environment, happening, dance pieces and draws attention to the leading influences of Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, and Merce Cunningham. We are focusing on the gravitating artists’ circles around the Judson Memorial Church and some of their distinct practices and centers. Among the many, we consider the Reuben Gallery, Judson Gallery, Judson Dance Theater, and artists such as Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Morris, Simon Forti, Carolee Schneemann, Robert Rauschenberg. The text does not aim to provide a complete overview of Judson Dance Theater or the artists` practices, but rather to consider some of their common influences in their period of formation. We will bring the environment and the happening under their contradictions and variability and will consider the first generation of dance reformers at Judson Dance Theater as an influential force for involving visual artists in intermediate zones.

Robert Morris between art criticism and object making, 1961-66

Robert Morris’s art criticism and object making through the 1960s exemplifies a period concern: the constitution of the self-possessing subject. This article analyses the contours of artistic presence in his practice against the 1960s’ repudiation of expression. As such, it seeks to intervene into historiographical readings of minimalist art that foreground the paradoxical re-emergence of expression through the ‘anti-humanist turn’. In addition, it contributes an original reading of Morris’s lecture-performance, 21.3 (1964). The article features four case studies: the 1990s’ renewal of art historical interest in the 1960s; Morris’s ‘Notes on Sculpture’ essay series and his presentation of the Gestalt; 21.3 and the status of formalist method; and a review of modernist criticism by Mary Kelly conducted in the early 1980s, and, by way of conclusion, a return to the exhibited object. By analysing the work of art through its layered reception, this article approaches art criticism and object making as homologous sites of inquiry. It is finally claimed that Morris’s insistence on ‘control’ may be read as articulating a professional anxiety concerning the need to strategically stage-manage one’s person in the arena of a shifting art world, in which artistic form was no longer a sufficient condition for winning prestige.

Art as Information Ecology

In Art as Information Ecology, Jason A. Hoelscher offers not only an information theory of art but an aesthetic theory of information. Applying close readings of the information theories of Claude Shannon and Gilbert Simondon to 1960s American art, Hoelscher proposes that art is information in its aesthetic or indeterminate mode—information oriented less toward answers and resolvability than toward questions, irresolvability, and sustained difference. These irresolvable differences, Hoelscher demonstrates, fuel the richness of aesthetic experience by which viewers glean new information and insight from each encounter with an artwork. In this way, art constitutes information that remains in formation---a difference that makes a difference that keeps on differencing. Considering the works of Frank Stella, Robert Morris, Adrian Piper, the Drop City commune, Eva Hesse, and others, Hoelscher finds that art exists within an information ecology of complex feedback between artwork and artworld that is driven by the unfolding of difference. By charting how information in its aesthetic mode can exist beyond today's strictly quantifiable and monetizable forms, Hoelscher reconceives our understanding of how artworks work and how information operates.

A History of the (Attempted) Institutionalization of Parapsychology

In addition to an introduction, the present book contains 14 chapters. Most of them represent elaborated text versions of contributions that were presented by the authors at a (nearly) eponymous conference held in Freiburg, Germany, on the 17.10.2014. As the book title announces, the chapter authors trace the development of parapsychological research in different countries. Usually they focusing on the more or usually less successful attempts to academicize and institutionalize parapsychology as a legitimate scientific discipline, but sometimes they cover also related aspects. The chapters include historical parapsychological treatises for Germany (Ulrich Linse, Anna Lux, Uwe Schellinger, Martin Schneider, Bernd Wedemeyer-Kolwe) including the GDR (Andreas Anton, Ina Schmied-Knittel, Michael Schetsche), France (Renaud Evrard), Great Britain (Elizabeth Valentine), Hungary (Júlia Gyimesi), the Netherlands (Ingrid Kloosterman), Russia in the Soviet and post-Soviet area (Birgit Menzel), and the USA (Eberhard Bauer, Anna Lux). The four chapters covering France, Great Britain, Hungary, and the Netherlands are written in English, the others in German. In the following, will briefly touch upon topics I found most interesting. Anna Lux from the university in Freiburg, Germany, identified several characteristic aspects of academic parapsychological work in Germany and compared them with those in the USA, which took place at about the same time and were more strongly focused on the experimental paradigm. She shows how different social circumstances and also private predilections of the main actors involved resulted in different developments. This also applies to the fate of parapsychology in the other countries mentioned, which is surprisingly multifaceted: While in the Netherlands the situation with official professorships at the University of Utrecht can be compared most closely to that of Germany where Hans Bender (1907-1991) held a professorship at the university of Freiburg, the academization of parapsychology in Hungary was hindered by an influential spiritualist and religious social current. In France, however, comparable efforts were mainly impeded by continued opposition of established scientists. After all, the private research institute “Institute Métapsychique International” (IMI) was founded in France in 1919, which has survived to this day despite adverse circumstances. Great Britain has always played a special role in Western parapsychology, mainly due to the foundation of the “Society for Psychical Research” as early as 1882, which is still considered an international figurehead for a constructive and critical examination of parapsychological topics. However, in Great Britain existed several other societies and “institutes”, which were often small and short-lived. It was not until 1985 that parapsychological research was able to gain a foothold at a British university for the first time through an endowed professorship in Edinburgh, held by Robert Morris (1942–2004) until 2004. From here, numerous graduates were able to carry the work on parapsychological research questions further to other universities.