Sculptural rhymes of Art Nouveau: on the visual poetics of symbolism

This article is first within the Russian and Western art history to examine the concept of visual poetics as a separate subject of research. Based on the analysis of iconographic and theoretical searches of the masters of symbolism, which found reflection within the boundaries of expressive means of visual art, the author comes concludes on the poetic principles of symbolist artists as the fundamental sources of the formation of the style of Art Nouveau – a new sculptural language of the XIX – early XX centuries. Detail characteristic of the philosophical-aesthetic content that underlies optical forms of the visual symbolist image, in its scientific origins leans on the capabilities of the art comparative-formal analysis, as well as iconological method adapted to the period under review. The innovative conceptual approach towards studying the art of symbolism lies in the fact that poetry as the concept is depicted beyond the literary sphere, as a specific type of artistic worldview that influenced the development of the visual language of art in the era of Art Nouveau. At the same time, visual poetics is compared to the complex system of internal images, which shape in with the works of the master throughout the entire path of his self-expression, and are directly related to profoundness of the poetic principle of the soul, lyrical and metaphorical intuition of the artist. This approach allows us broadening the representation on the aesthetic benchmarks of the symbolist artists, as well as designating the new methodological coordinates in the field of studying the art of symbolism in both national and international contexts.

Totalna porażka. O dwóch projektach fotograficznych [Epic Fail: About Two Photographic Projects]

Epic Fail: About Two Photographic ProjectsThe paper discusses images of failure in Polish photography created in 1970–2000, drawing on three particular projects: Archeology of Photography by Jerzy Lewczyński and the exhibitions The New Documentalists (2006) and Postdocument: Missing Documents: Documents of the Polish Transformation After 1989 (2012). As such, it concentrates on documentary, or post-documentary, photography which suffers no illusions as to the mimetic power of the medium, but persists in hoping that photos can have social impact.As the analyzed projects aim to create a critical picture of reality, they focus on spaces and people subject to exclusion and on the experience of failure (e.g., Unfinished Houses by Konrad Pustoła and Wojciech Wilczyk’s There’s No Such Thing as an Innocent Eye), as well as on the erosion of interpersonal relations (e.g., Aneta Grzeszykowska’s Album). Disappointments stemming from both the socialist reality and Polish capitalism mix with the desire to find and preserve what is intimate and authentic. The discussed artists devote the majority of their attention to the problem of photography as a medium and its ability to generate social change. However, they remain fully aware of the fact that the very nature of the photographic image, with its media entanglements, makes it difficult to create an unadulterated reflection of reality; it also makes it difficult to accept anything that does not fit the visual poetics of success, anything old, damaged, démodé, or kitschy. Accordingly, the artists raise important questions about the rules for creating images in the photographic universe and about the possibility of transcending them to create a new type of document, one that would elude the rules of “dominant images” (a term first coined by Rafał Drozdowski), and to enable such a use of photography as was postulated by John Berger: rooted in personal experience and memory. Totalna porażka. O dwóch projektach fotograficznychArtykuł ukazuje obrazy porażki w fotografii polskiej powstałej w okresie 1970–2000. Odwołuje się do trzech projektów: Archeologii fotografii Jerzego Lewczyńskiego oraz wystaw Nowi dokumentaliści (2006) i Postdokument. Świat nie przedstawiony. Dokumenty polskiej transformacji po 1989 roku (2012). Skupia się więc na fotografii nurtu dokumentalnego czy postdokumentalnego – nieżywiącej złudzeń co do mimetycznej mocy medium, ale nieporzucającej nadziei na społeczne oddziaływanie zdjęć.Przywoływane projekty stawiają sobie za cel stworzenie krytycznego obrazu rzeczywistości, a więc koncentrują się na przestrzeniach i ludziach podlegających wykluczeniu, przegranych (np. Niedokończone domy Konrada Pustoły, Niewinne oko nie istnieje Wojciecha Wilczyka), a także na erozji stosunków międzyludzkich (np. Album Anety Grzeszykowskiej). Rozczarowania związane zarówno z rzeczywistością socjalistyczną, jak i polskim kapitalizmem, mieszają się z pragnieniem odnalezienia i ocalenia tego, co żywe, bliskie, autentyczne.Artyści najwięcej uwagi poświęcają problemowi fotografii jako medium i jej zdolności generowania społecznej zmiany. Zdają sobie sprawę, że specyfika obrazu fotograficznego z jego medialnymi uwikłaniami utrudnia przekazanie niezafałszowanego obrazu rzeczywistości oraz akceptację tego, co nie mieści się w obrębie wizualnej poetyki sukcesu, tego, co stare, zniszczone, niemodne, kiczowate. Zadają w ten sposób pytanie o reguły tworzenia obrazów w fotograficznym uniwersum i o możliwość ich przekroczenia – stworzenia nowego dokumentu. Miałby on wymykać się regułom „obrazów dominujących” (określenie Rafała Drozdowskiego), umożliwić takie użycie fotografii, jakie postulował John Berger: zakorzenione w osobistym doświadczeniu i pamięci.

The Andean Visual Poetics of José María Arguedas

<b>José María Arguedas (1911-1969) was one of the most notable Peruvian writers of the 20th century. He was a prose writer, poet, anthropologist and translator who wrote in both Spanish and Quechua, the main Indigenous language spoken in the Andean region where he was born and raised. Throughout his career, he was driven by the desire to defend and diffuse Peruvian Quechua culture and to convince his readers of its extraordinary value for the future of Peru. </b><p>Arguedas’s narrative fiction is considered part of a literary tradition known as indigenismo, which developed in Latin American countries with large Indigenous populations. However, because his work overcomes many of the limitations of this tradition by incorporating elements of Quechua culture into the form of his novels and short stories, it has also been categorised as neoindigenismo. </p><p><br></p> Arguedas’s texts have been a source of inspiration for several Latin American literary and cultural critics. Concerned with the region’s overreliance on Eurocentric theories produced for and from literatures emanating from contexts with distinct socio-cultural and historical particularities, these intellectuals have established critical concepts and frameworks that facilitate the study of literature produced in Latin America. Their concepts, such as narrative transculturation and literary heterogeneity, are particularly useful for examining literatures which, because of a historical event such as the Conquest of America, are embedded in fractured societies in which two or more socio-cultural groups struggle to coexist. These critical frameworks enable the identification and interpretation of the plurality of specificities that underpin narratives such as Arguedas’s, especially those that are associated with Indigenous or popular cultures.<div><br>The concerns regarding the transposition of supposedly universal critical apparatuses to the Latin American milieu that motivated these critics are shared by more recent academics who foreground the bypassing of scholarship produced in peripheral regions in favour of that produced in metropolitan academic centres as an issue that occurs across several academic disciplines. These critics stress that in doing so, scholars risk misinterpreting or overlooking the particularities of Latin American literature, as well as denying Latin American institutions their role as producers of knowledge. Indeed, this has been the case in some studies of Arguedian narrative. The approach adopted in this study is a response to these tendencies. It analyses Arguedas visual poetics first and foremost by critically engaging with Latin American or Latin Americanist literary and cultural criticism.<br> <b><br></b></div><div>Critics have celebrated Arguedas for his unique writing style and particularly for the way he wove Quechua music, song and lyricism into his texts. Focus on his incorporation of Andean orality has meant that scant critical attention has been paid to his representation of the visual. This study seeks to develop upon the Latin American(ist) scholarship that establishes Andean Indigenous and mestizo culture as a subversive element in Arguedas’s texts by examining the way he draws on visual conceptualisations of Peruvian Quechua culture to construct a transcultural visual poetics that contributes to the counter-hegemonic nature of his socio-political literary project. <p><br></p><p>Arguably, common understandings of the visual as a predominantly Western mode of perception and of many Indigenous cultures as ‘oral cultures’ have influenced critics’ tendencies to focus on Arguedas’s use of sound as the primary counter-hegemonic force in his narratives. But Indigenous Andean culture has a complex visual tradition that is a fundamental part of its sensory order and worldview. With the invasion of America, many elements of this visual tradition were overridden as the Spanish, and then criollo, colonial project enforced a new visual order. However, there is a considerable amount of scholarship that documents the numerous aspects of Andean visuality. Drawing upon historical accounts, Andean ethnohistory and anthropology of the senses, this study explores the connections between Arguedas’s treatment of the visual, the Andean visual tradition and the Quechua worldview. By taking this approach to Arguedas’s work, the study aims to demonstrate that the visual is not only a Western mode of perception, that there is no universal concept of the visual sense and that, in his endeavour to faithfully represent Quechua culture and to subvert Western writing styles, Arguedas drew upon Andean visuality just as much as he drew upon its orality. </p></div>

The Andean Visual Poetics of José María Arguedas

<b>José María Arguedas (1911-1969) was one of the most notable Peruvian writers of the 20th century. He was a prose writer, poet, anthropologist and translator who wrote in both Spanish and Quechua, the main Indigenous language spoken in the Andean region where he was born and raised. Throughout his career, he was driven by the desire to defend and diffuse Peruvian Quechua culture and to convince his readers of its extraordinary value for the future of Peru. </b><p>Arguedas’s narrative fiction is considered part of a literary tradition known as indigenismo, which developed in Latin American countries with large Indigenous populations. However, because his work overcomes many of the limitations of this tradition by incorporating elements of Quechua culture into the form of his novels and short stories, it has also been categorised as neoindigenismo. </p><p><br></p> Arguedas’s texts have been a source of inspiration for several Latin American literary and cultural critics. Concerned with the region’s overreliance on Eurocentric theories produced for and from literatures emanating from contexts with distinct socio-cultural and historical particularities, these intellectuals have established critical concepts and frameworks that facilitate the study of literature produced in Latin America. Their concepts, such as narrative transculturation and literary heterogeneity, are particularly useful for examining literatures which, because of a historical event such as the Conquest of America, are embedded in fractured societies in which two or more socio-cultural groups struggle to coexist. These critical frameworks enable the identification and interpretation of the plurality of specificities that underpin narratives such as Arguedas’s, especially those that are associated with Indigenous or popular cultures.<div><br>The concerns regarding the transposition of supposedly universal critical apparatuses to the Latin American milieu that motivated these critics are shared by more recent academics who foreground the bypassing of scholarship produced in peripheral regions in favour of that produced in metropolitan academic centres as an issue that occurs across several academic disciplines. These critics stress that in doing so, scholars risk misinterpreting or overlooking the particularities of Latin American literature, as well as denying Latin American institutions their role as producers of knowledge. Indeed, this has been the case in some studies of Arguedian narrative. The approach adopted in this study is a response to these tendencies. It analyses Arguedas visual poetics first and foremost by critically engaging with Latin American or Latin Americanist literary and cultural criticism.<br> <b><br></b></div><div>Critics have celebrated Arguedas for his unique writing style and particularly for the way he wove Quechua music, song and lyricism into his texts. Focus on his incorporation of Andean orality has meant that scant critical attention has been paid to his representation of the visual. This study seeks to develop upon the Latin American(ist) scholarship that establishes Andean Indigenous and mestizo culture as a subversive element in Arguedas’s texts by examining the way he draws on visual conceptualisations of Peruvian Quechua culture to construct a transcultural visual poetics that contributes to the counter-hegemonic nature of his socio-political literary project. <p><br></p><p>Arguably, common understandings of the visual as a predominantly Western mode of perception and of many Indigenous cultures as ‘oral cultures’ have influenced critics’ tendencies to focus on Arguedas’s use of sound as the primary counter-hegemonic force in his narratives. But Indigenous Andean culture has a complex visual tradition that is a fundamental part of its sensory order and worldview. With the invasion of America, many elements of this visual tradition were overridden as the Spanish, and then criollo, colonial project enforced a new visual order. However, there is a considerable amount of scholarship that documents the numerous aspects of Andean visuality. Drawing upon historical accounts, Andean ethnohistory and anthropology of the senses, this study explores the connections between Arguedas’s treatment of the visual, the Andean visual tradition and the Quechua worldview. By taking this approach to Arguedas’s work, the study aims to demonstrate that the visual is not only a Western mode of perception, that there is no universal concept of the visual sense and that, in his endeavour to faithfully represent Quechua culture and to subvert Western writing styles, Arguedas drew upon Andean visuality just as much as he drew upon its orality. </p></div>

Perspectiva comparada de una poética visual mística. La tradición a través de Paradjanov y Val del Omar.

The paper reaches to confirm the existence of ethnographic cultural tradition in the works of the film directors Serguei Paradzhanov and Jose Val del Omar through poetry, cinematographic techniques and traces of theoretical and practical mystique. Subsequently, two major issues are analysed: identifying signs of ethnographic tradition, and confirming clear examples of mystical visual poetics. The analysis of their films unearths topics such as the discussion of unique film genres with features from others, the concept of Pathosformel, or the use of mystical literary structures as a cinematic narrative technique.For its creation and development, the nature of poetic films with a mystical component requires specific and complex techniques to illustrate the depth of the poetic message seen in the technical and aesthetic cinematic treatment on the chosen movies –we will focus to find similarities between the works of the Armenian and the Spanish filmmakers.

Palavras originárias e pensamentos visíveis: ambivalência, imagem, criação

Investigação que tem como objetivo analisar e aprimorar os processos de criação em torno das excitações intelectuais provocadas pela “ambivalência”. Em um primeiro momento, examinaremos o desenvolvimento do conceito de “ambivalência” nos textos psicanalíticos de Sigmund Freud. Para isso, abordaremos seus trabalhos sobre a noção de “inconsciente” e sobre o significado de “palavras originárias”. Em um segundo momento, analisaremos imagens criadas por René Magritte no intuito de explorarmos a “ambivalência” presente em seus “pensamentos visíveis”. E, em um terceiro e último momento, articulando os tópicos anteriores, esboçaremos a possibilidade de delimitarmos uma “poética visual da ambivalência”. AbstractResearch that seeks to analyze and improve the creative processes around the intellectual excitations caused by “ambivalence”. At first, we will examinethe development of the concept of “ambivalence” in Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic texts. For this, we will approach your work on the notion of “unconscious”and on the meaning of “original words”. In a second step, we will analyze images created by René Magritte in order to explore the “ambivalence” present in his “visible thoughts”. And, in a third and last moment, articulating the previous topics, we will outline the possibility of delimiting a “visual poetics of ambivalence”.

Indigenous Surveillance Cinema: Indian Education and the Truant On-Screen

Recent Indigenous boarding school movies have emphasized representations of surveillance together with the “living dead” as a central motif. After a brief review of surveillance in Indian education, this essay examines a cycle of films—The Only Good Indian (2009), Savage (2009), The Dead Can’t Dance (2010), Rhymes for Young Ghouls (2013), and SNIP (2016)—wherein the practices and technologies of surveillance mediate a dynamic interplay between settler educational institutions and the Native runaway or truant. These films converge a popular undead motif with this longstanding genre figure of resistance by Native/First Nations children to settler systems of administration, drawing on its literary formation that extends back to the first Indigenous writing on federal Indian education. Within this larger field of what we may call Indigenous surveillance cinema, discourses of bureaucratic rationality frame the figure of the truant. These films articulate the ways that representational practices ranging from literacy to cinema uphold systems of identification by which administrative surveillance of Indigenous people continues. Cinematic representations of the supervision of Indigenous bodies recall settler-colonialism’s mobilization of an array of early surveillance technologies for the assimilation of Native children. In this context, the watchful eye of the teacher—a proxy for administrative media—suggests a deeper embedding in settler systems of control. A visual poetics of truancy emerges in Indigenous surveillance cinema, as the truant figure operates dialectically with settler surveillance. The truant spatializes settler management and surveillance in her desire to escape cultural conversion at the hands of these proliferating technologies of representation.

Photographic silence: Remediating the graphic to visualize migrant experience in Shaun Tan’s The Arrival

In the absence of a verbal language, The Arrival’s mode of representation is derived from various visual storytelling practices in addition to the comic. This article proposes that Tan remediates the mode of comics storytelling by presenting the narrative as a photo album and drawing the panels as photographs, and in turn the photograph is also remediated in the text as a drawn object. Using transmedial techniques such as focalization, gaze, framing and page layout, in addition to deliberations on style and form, Tan constructs comics storytelling with a photographic vision. This photographic vision is used to represent the experience of migration in the narrative as well as connect past and contemporary histories of migration world over. The photograph emerged as an important medium through which memory came to be visualized in the twentieth century, and is an important historical artefact capable of telling the story of its times. Tan also expects the reader to employ an intermedial and intertextual critical literacy to engage with the narrative. The visual poetics of the text direct the reader’s affective and empathetic engagement with the situation being presented and with the character whose experience they encode. The article focuses on three kinds of photographic representation in the narrative: the iterations of the protagonist’s family photograph, the narrative itself shaped as a photo album and the immigrant’s identification photograph.