Folk Music, Class, and Nation

The identitarian nature of French folk music (both in itself and within art music) is introduced as presenting a challenge to long-standing official French policies of national unity—whether expressed as traditional unity in uniformity or via a newer Third-Republic formulation of unity in diversity. This challenge explains why official French art-musical culture never joined in with the celebratory ethnic-national folk-music practices of other European nations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Instead, French folk music’s relation to the state is characterized by wide-ranging attempts to control and neutralize difference, resulting in invented traditions presented to schoolchildren as their unified patrimoine and composed into an emerging strand of neoclassical dance-form composition that brought together the modal and the folk-like. At the same time, folk music was usefully harnessed as an internal exotic within world’s fairs and as an element of modern tourism, while within opera, the particularism of regionalist composers was censored (sometimes self-censored), and often replaced by vague indicators of childlike Frenchness.

Konstantin Somov’s Early Works and Impressionism: A New View on the Issue

The article reveals literary (Emile Zola’s novel “L’Œuvre”, Richard Muther’s work “History of Painting in the 19th Century”), literary and artistic (magazines “Mercure de France”, “L’Ermitage”, “La Revue Blanche”, “La Plume”) and artistic (exhibits of the French art exhibition of 1896) sources of Konstantin Somov’s acquaintance with the art of French impressionism at the beginning of his independent activity (before leaving for Paris in the late 1890s). There are also identified sources of phenomena in his work that are similar to impressionism only externally. These issues become the subject of special consideration for the first time. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the fact that it first reveals that the artist did not address to impressionism in the period before his departure to France, as it has been long believed. To study the tasks set, the article involves sources of personal origin (letters and diaries of K.A. Somov and his friend A.N. Benois), as well as A.N. Benois’s articles of the 1890s, published on the pages of the magazine “World of Art”. The author comes to the conclusion that K.A. Somov did not turn to the artistic method of the impressionists in his work at that time, since the information he had been able to get from the identified sources was of a verbal and theoretical nature. Black-and-white reproductions of impressionist paintings in literary and art magazines and in Muther’s “History of Painting in the 19th Century” had not provided sufficient information for the artist. The phenomena similar to impressionism in Somov’s works are based on the study of nature, the heritage of the old European artists, the art of the Barbizonians, J.-F. Millet, W. Turner.

Imágenes para imaginar: La importancia de atender a los archivos

En este artículo examinamos la importancia de estudiar las imágenes fotográficas del horror, en especial aquellas producidas por sus víctimas, frente a una tradición historiográfica que, en nombre del inimaginable, del irrepresentable de la tragedia –discurso a menudo centrado en el horror del Holocausto nazi– rechaza el estudio de sus restos visuales. Y lo hacemos a través de las reflexiones de Georges Didi-Huberman en Imágenes pese a todo, donde parte del estudio de cuatro fotografías tomadas desde el interior de Auschwitz por un detenido judío, que servirán de ejemplo central para comprender la urgencia de atender a las huellas que nos han quedado del acontecimiento. Será necesario, para ello, repensar la manera en que nos enfrentarnos a este tipo de archivos, realizar una revisión epistemológica de la disciplina histórica. El potencial cognitivo de las imágenes, y su importancia para la praxis ética y política, no serán comprendidos mientras uno no sepa adentrarse en el necesario trabajo de la imaginación. El saber, ante la imagen, ante esa realidad que urge ser comprendida, necesita de un papel activo del observador, de una mirada que sepa reconocer el dolor que hay detrás, la posibilidad de un tiempo no cerrado, capaz de afectar al presente. This paper studies the importance of facing the archives of tragedy, especially those produced by its victims, against a historiographical tradition that, in the name of the unimaginable, of the unrepresentable of the tragedy –often focused on the horror of the Nazi Holocaust–, rejects the study of visual vestiges. We approach it through the reflections of the French art historian Georges Didi-Huberman in his work Images in Spite of All, where he analyses four photographs taken in 1944 in Auschwitz by a Jewish prisoner. It will be necessary to rethink the way to confront these documents. Their cognitive potential, and their importance for ethical and political praxis, will not be understood if we don’t go into the necessary work of imagination. The knowledge, before the image, before that reality that urgently needs to be understood, needs an active role of the observer, a gaze that recognizes the pain behind it, the possibility of an unfinished time.

A Host of Possibilities

In 2012, Okwui Enwezor was appointed artistic director of the third iteration of La Triennale, which he titled Intense Proximité (IP). While Enwezor had the credentials to legitimize the French art scene, he was also keenly aware of his own revolving roles as guest and host. This article considers his exhibition-making practice within the context of hospitality. Conventionally, hospitality entails warmly welcoming guests to make themselves at home. This interaction between guest and host involves not only implicit codes of etiquette and manners but also an economy of exchange that revolves around constant transaction and negotiation. In general, a curator’s duties are similar to those of a host in setting up the conditions to welcome a diverse array of artists, ideas, and viewers into a designated space. Keeping in mind how curating, in the words of Erica Lehrer and Cynthia Milton, is also “a kind of intimate, intersubjective, interrelational obligation,” Enwezor never presumed his role as positionality to be sovereign. The first half of the article introduces the concept of hospitality and sets up Enwezor’s curatorial premise of IP. The second half mobilizes his curatorial practice as a means to open up ways to reconceive hospitality as a site of interruption, absolution, and abolition, and it reaffirms scholarship that conceives Enwezor’s exhibition making as a decolonial practice.