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In 1969, Lynda Benglis withdrew her large latex floor painting, Contraband, from the exhibition Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials. Looking beyond the logistical problems that caused Benglis to pull the work, I suggest that it challenged the conceptual and formal parameters of the exhibition from its inception. Taking hints from feminism, modernist painting, camp aesthetics, psychedelic imagery, pop, and minimalism, Benglis's latex pours unify an array of movements, styles, and political positions that have often been treated as antithetical. Although the refusal of traditional binaries was typical of the neo-avant-garde, Benglis's work was "contraband" because it challenged the inflexible dictum that feminist art and modernist painting are mortal enemies. With Contraband, she drew on abstract expressionist techniques for communicating feeling by exploiting the dialectic of spontaneity and order in Pollock's drip paintings. Simultaneously, she drew attention to gender through sexed-up colors and materials. Rather than suggesting that gender difference is repressed by abstract expressionist painting's false universalizing, Benglis shows that modernist techniques for communicating feeling are crucial for the feminist project of understanding the public significance of seemingly private experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the spring and summer of 1906, while visiting the rural village of Gósol in the Spanish Pyrenees, Picasso executed his first woodcut, made two sculptures out of boxwood, and began to focus on the topoi of wood and the forest as avatars of primal matter and of that which lies beyond civilization. In a subsequent series of paintings, he used wooden supports for images that depict male and female heads that look as if they had been chiseled out of wood. Others represent nude figures in forest settings, with explicitly sexual gestures and poses connoting a range of attitudes. These little studied works provide an optic into Picasso's early exploration of the emergence of sexual identity as an inner psychic state, but one whose signs can be read through the body. Later, responding to the proliferation of cheap, industrially produced materials, including trompe l'oeil woodgrain wallpaper, Picasso began to treat woodgrain as a mere surrogate, one that marks its distance from actual wood through a variety of painterly and mechanical effects. No longer associated with "primitive" authenticity and the primordial forces of the forest, woodgrain now appears as a false sign open to conceptual play and metamorphosis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines a little-known but important installation entitled Insure the Life of an Ant, conceived by artist Mike Malloy and displayed at the O.K. Harris Gallery in New York in April of 1972. This provocative and idiosyncratic piece confronted gallery-goers, who became viewer–participants, with the option of killing or saving a live ant displayed like a sculpture on a pedestal, either by pushing a button or not. The artist made the piece, which can function almost like a psychology experiment, to engender a "moral dilemma". I explore the particular role of affect in a participatory art installation, distinct from response to inanimate art. I investigate the roles of emotion and reason in dealing with the work; whether ratiocination can be considered an "anti-affect"; and how the tension between competing thoughts and feelings helped create a psychological drama. The essay looks at how an art space can operate as a zone of moral exceptionalism to encourage questionable actions. It also locates the piece in relation to the emergence of a more behaviorist art in the early 1970s, as discussed by critic Gregory Battcock, and the larger notion of postmodernism. Other contexts investigated include art and animal rights and issues of sentience and speciesism; social and military violence, including capital punishment and the Vietnam War; the 1961 Milgram experiment; Hannah Arendt's concept of the "banality of evil" as a Nazi war criminal defense; and other works of art involving maltreatment or violence toward both human and non-human animals, including those by Marina Abramović, Marco Evaristti, and Edward and Nancy Reddin Kienholz. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whenever twentieth-century modern art or new contemporary artworks are included amongst displays of ancient Egypt, press statements often assert that such juxtapositions are 'surprising', 'innovative', and 'fresh', celebrating the external perspective they bring to such collections. But contemporary art's relationship with museums and other disciplines needs to be understood in a longer-term perspective. Pairings of twentieth- and twenty-first-century artistic works with objects of antiquity is an activity that has been undertaken for more than a century in what has been a relatively long period of mutually reinforcing influences between modern/contemporary art, museum display, the art market, and Egyptian heritage. Together, they have decontextualised ancient Egyptian culture and shaped the language and perspectives of scholars, curators, and artists. In this paper, rather than considering how artists have been inspired by ancient Egypt, I will give a few examples of how more recent art practices from the late nineteenth century onwards have impacted the language and discourse of Egyptology and its museum representation. Then, using more recent artist engagements with the British Museum, I argue for greater interdisciplinary dialogues between artists and Egyptologists, as both take more critical stances towards research that recontextualises the power and agency of collections, representation, and knowledge production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Picasso twice quoted the name of Dufayel, once in relation with the name of the Louvre and once for the same period of his career, between 1910 and 1914. This essay explores the universe created by the businessman Georges Dufayel in order to understand the role it played in Picasso's evolving cubism from that of analytic to synthetic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study delves into the intricate relationship between temporality and spatiality within the realm of in-game photography, aiming to dissect its unique methodology and uncover its vast potential. While in-game photography shares fundamental elements of temporality and spatiality with classical photography, it carves out a distinct niche by virtue of its association with virtual environments. Temporal considerations reveal commonalities between in-game and classical photography, as both capture specific moments in time, akin to the concept of the decisive moment. However, the arresting of temporal progression within the game, accomplished by halting or pausing the gameplay, introduces a novel facet to photography. In-game photography’s capacity to exist within the ‘extended present’ creates a more manageable and distinctive approach to temporal freezing, redefining the notion of the decisive moment, which posed technical, aesthetic, and philosophical challenges in modernist photography. Spatiality, intricately intertwined with temporality, assumes an ergodic structure within in-game photography, offering a multitude of photographic possibilities. Within this framework, photographer can navigate along x, y, and z axes, transforming the camera into a mechanical eye that unveils the invisible and alternative facets of the subject. This newfound freedom introduces an additional layer of engagement between the photographer and the virtual environment, a feature scarcely attainable in classical photography [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The article aims at interpretation of cultural-philosophical tendencies related to the changes in the structures of feeling of the (post)industrial landscape of Ostrava in the period 1989 - 2023. In the theoretical part, the notion of the "structure of feeling" as a basic category of the contextual approach to culture is discussed, thus emphasising the historical and ideological conditionality of literature as a contemporary record of the lived experience of a particular community. It draws on a structural-analytic approach in which the structure of feeling represents a complex arrangement of patterns, principles, and strategies that appear in various modifications as the predominant features of human thought and experience. The contextual analysis reflects on Ostrava's (post) industrial landscape with regard to ongoing deindustrialisation and traces how global socio-economic transformations and changes in the dominant structures of feeling (of postmodernism and metamodernism) manifest themselves at the empirical and symbolic levels. Using selected examples of representatives of the older and younger generations of Ostrava poets who experienced/are experiencing the (post)industrial landscape at one time or another, it describes specific manifestations of postmodern and then metamodern structures of feeling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modernist propositions long have been understood as atemporal—somehow outside of time—or insistently hailing the future. This temporal framework suppresses the contributions of those excluded from modernist canons, particularly Black women. In this article, visual and material analysis of sculptural works produced in the 1970s and 1980s by U.S. Black women artists Beverly Buchanan, Senga Nengudi, and Betye Saar reveal how Black feminists have engaged with modernist protocols in order to redress cultural erasures of Black women. These practices exemplify Black feminist modernisms, or creative practices that unsettle the racist and sexist logics of dominant cultural institutions. Each of these artists utilizes haptic surfaces as a method for defying institutional modernism's obfuscation of the past. The analysis focuses on Buchanan's defiance of memorial erasures, Nengudi's reenactment of labor, including in its historical forms, and Saar's adaptation of generational memory-making processes. Ultimately, these artists' rejection of a "timeless" modernism demands that viewers understand the present moment in relationship to a still-evolving past. In this way, Buchanan, Nengudi, and Saar position the present as an accumulation, rather than transcendence, of historical occurrences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As art history begins to take seriously the imperative to decolonize, one of the most vexing areas of resistance to change is the conventional periodization of art historical epochs. Even while acknowledging that spatial divisions like West and Non-West are deeply problematic, as are geographic divisions per se, we continue to honor the “history” in the discipline’s nomenclature by insisting on temporality as a primary organizing category. The period commonly designated as “modernist” (roughly 1860 to 1960) is particularly difficult to divorce from Western ideals of progress as defined both by technological “advances” and by the heroization of artistic “innovation”. When the modernist moment attempts to open itself up to global narratives, its structuring undercurrent is a particular vision of the art of the West. In this essay, I read the conventional narrative of modernism through a decolonial lens and revisit the reception of Impressionism in the 1910s and 1920s in Mexico to consider how an artistic idiom widely seen as retrograde at that moment became the basis for a radical rethinking around the democratization of art. My analysis exposes how, because of its championing of novelty and its inherent Eurocentrism, the category of modernism obscures and suppresses artists and narratives that fall outside of its limited purview. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores Austrian art historian Alois Riegl's haptic vision within the framework of Anglo-American modernism. Topics discussed include the psychophysiological genealogy of haptics, the notion of haptic in the context of 20th-century Anglo-American art criticism, history and theory, and haptic perception elaborated by Riegl's compatriots and art professors Viktor Lowenfeld and Ludwig Münz.

The article analyzes selected writings by art critic Rosalind Krauss. It introduces the relationship between Krauss and her mentor Clement Greenberg and addresses Krauss' feminist gesture at the end chapter of her book "The Optical Unconscious." It takes a look at Krauss' views on modernism, her linguistic brutality, anachronistic approach and interpretation of Jackson Pollock's drip paintings into psychoanalysis, semiotics and Gestalt psychology, and views on the roles and positions of women.

The research dealt with the concepts of time and architectural thought and the extent of the influence of Ideas derived from the element of time on the variation and differentiation of architectural movements and schools, by reviewing a group of vocabulary such as nostalgia, present, and looking forward to the future, the null of the present and immortality in architecture and the null or deferred future, and the study of the duration of its reflection on architectural thought to lead to the differentiation of each of the architecture of Mesopotamia, Classical architecture, Modern architecture, Postmodernism, and Autonomous architecture, Deconstruction architecture according to these terms. The problem of the research was the lack of clarity on the influence of the element of time and its role in the differentiation of architectural thought. The main goal of the research is to focus on the role of the element of time in the differentiation and uniqueness of architectural thought. As for the research hypothesis, it focused on emphasizing the role of thought that distinguishes time in the differentiation of architectural thought, which in turn guarantees the uniqueness of societies, and the most important finding of the research is that Classical architecture is distinguished by its interest in the principle of nostalgia, and that there are some trends in Contemporary Iraqi Architecture based on the principle of nostalgia represented by nostalgia for formal elements, and that modern architecture urged in most of its buildings nostalgia for the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BRUNEL UNIVERSITY LONDON'S GEOFF KING has repeatedly demonstrated an affinity for transgressive, rule-breaking cinema, both in his work on comedy and his books on American independent film. With his newest [...]

Copyright of Praktyka Teoretyczna is the property of University of Wroclaw and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Writers on the semiology of Cubism have often cited Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler's 1946–48 descriptions of Cubism as a form of writing. They seem, however, to have overlooked Pablo Picasso's 1945–48 statements about art as a sign language. The first section of this essay argues that Kahnweiler was in fact inspired by Picasso's statements. The second section retraces the origins of semiology in nineteenth-century philology, its revival by Claude Levi-Strauss, his influence on critical theory, the rise of a semiological interpretation of Cubism, and the problems with this interpretation. The third section links Picasso's 1945–48 statements about art as a sign language to his contemporary visual work; specifically, to his illustrations for Pierre Reverdy's book of poems Le Chant des morts. The idea of art as a sign language is traced to Picasso's 1924 drawings of "star charts" or "constellations". However, Picasso's 1945–48 designs using a similar vocabulary are analyzed as signifiers without signifieds—that is, as symbols, rather than signs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Amazonia Investiga is the property of PRIMMATE and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)