The Avant-Garde Monument

This article homes in on monuments designed by proponents of the historical or classic avant-gardes. After the First World War, monuments by, among others, Kurt Schwitters and Johannes Baader, Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe, Vladimir Tatlin and El Lissitzky, Man Ray and Salvador Dalí, began to articulate a new function for the genre of the monument: no longer was it to commemorate the past, but to memorialize the present and time to come. This new architecture of memory also led to an expansion of the genre, which in the hands of avant-gardists further came to include temporary pavilions. Paying attention to theoretical writings on the monument, among others, by László Moholy-Nagy, Siegfried Giedion and Robert Smithson, the article concludes by referencing more recent experimentation in monument design by artists such as Flavin, Oldenburg and Hirschhorn, arguing that a comprehensive history of the avant-garde monument is long overdue.

Actors’ Effigies and Photo-Portraits

Disguise and Masquerade in Chapter Five features body forms and constructions during the interwar years in Weimar, Paris, Moscow and Brussels. Instances of the human body as scenographic material increase in number and intensity as modern dance and theatre diminish the differences between and actor and the object. Experimentation at the Bauhaus, particularly by Oskar Schlemmer, is detailed in ‘Ballerina Objects and Mechanical Pierrots’. Further adaptations of figures from the commedia dell’arte push the concept of ‘kinetic painting’ and choreographic text to new levels (as with dancer-artist Akarova). Advances in self-portrait photography as identity study, particularly by women artists like Arndt, Cahun and Krull, engage masking in new interpretations of the être-objet (Dalí). Additional modernist photographs of Dora Maar, Man Ray and others are analysed. Elements of Dada, Expressionism and Futurism appear in this collection of masquerades. Magritte’s provocative images of woman and man with fabric-covered bodies and faces tilts modernist disguising to the heart of Surrealism.

Explosão-fixa da onda-partícula

Investigação que tem como objetivo analisar a fotografia “Explosivo fixa” (Man Ray, 1934) a partir do arcabouço da teoria quântica sustentado pela constatação da “dualidade onda-partícula”. Para isso, em um primeiro momento, abordaremos a edificação do “paradigma quântico” durante as primeiras décadas do século XX. Em um segundo momento, averiguaremos a potencialidade transdisciplinar consolidada por meio do desenvolvimento desse paradigma. E, em um terceiro momento, examinaremos a imagem surrealista criada por Man Ray e buscaremos explorá-la de acordo com o pensamento construído pelo “paradigma quântico” e pela transdisciplinaridade.

Rostificar o acéfalo

O artigo propõe uma análise de imagens artísticas que suscitam as noções de rosto e cabeça como forma de tensionamento da representação humana. A partir de obras produzidas por Tunga, Man Ray e Francis Bacon, buscamos apresentar estratégias poéticas em torno das relações entre corpo e imagem.