Bandness

Cutting Edge of the Contemporary: KNUST, Accra, and the Ghanaian Contemporary Art Movement

Globalization is a factor that contributes to the unification and integration of national cultures of different countries of the world. This phenomenon, of course, has a significant impact on the development of modern painting. The article is devoted to the analysis of the work of contemporary artists in order to identify the features of the process of their transformation in the context of the development of global art. The boundaries of the concepts of "world art" and "global art" are defined. The characteristic features of the modern global art environment are revealed, as well as the forms of their perception and interpretation in the works of such artists as Chris Metze, Douglas A. Kinsey, Claire Fahy, Katarzyna Zvolinska, Nazafarin Lotfi and Daniel Hutchinson. The novelty of the research lies in the fact that the article examines the works of individual and most famous contemporary artists in the context of such a phenomenon as "global art". Here a watershed is drawn between the concepts of "global art" and "world art", their boundaries and the most important features are determined. Thus, it contributes to the formation of ideas about the global trends of artistic and creative activity on the example of specific paintings. Relevance and short-termness are designated as the main features of global art, which strongly affect the artistic form, figurative language and ideological content of works in the art of modern painting.

The work concerns the (short) period lived by Ivo Andric in Krakow in 1914, after his stayin Wien and before coming back to Sarajevo. During a few months in Krakow, Andric writes threeinteresting essays about Krakow, its art and its artists. Andric faces art from the past (Wawel, the RoyalCastle) and contemporary art (works by the youngest Polish artists). His judgments are always accurate,in particular about contemporary Polish art, even considering the judgments by the latest art historians.Andric will always consider his interlude in Krakow as a fairy tale. For people involved in his works, onthe other hand it represents the foundation of his growing-up intellectual think.

Ecological safety is one of the most urgent problems of humanity. After analyzing previous research, whose authors have investigated environmental problems and their influence on one and their art, we can conclude that finding such influence patterns in works of art of the ХХІth century is a topic not studied enough. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to investigate the influence of ecological problems on works of art and their characteristics, as well as finding results, that could be useful for art critics, designers, and artists. During the research, we have analyzed the works of modern designers and artists that touch on the topic of environmental problems. As a result, we have found 3 global problems that artists tend to choose for their creations: 1) global warming; 2) pollution; 3) species extinction; 4) deforestation. It was also found, that the main means of art that authors are using for talking about these problems are: 1) sculpture; 2) painting, 3) photography; 4) installations Purpose. The purpose of the article is to analyze contemporary social art projects devoted to environmental problems in the world, to elucidate the most important environmental problems reflected in the work of artists, to identify the main types of art to which their works belong, to identify the main ways of the artistic expressiveness of the composition in their works. Methodology. In this article, we have used such methods as analysis, observation, comparison, and research. Results. in the course of the scientific work we have described the depiction of the most actual ecological problems in sculptors' works and have found the main means of art that have been used in them. Scientific novelty. This research is the first one to systematize and arrange the information regarding the main ecological problems and the main means of art being used by artists to talk about them. Practical value. This work widens the scientific apparatus of art historians and researchers of works of contemporary art

The purpose of the research to reveal the features of the interpretation of the artistic image in the works of contemporary art in the context of culturological hermeneutics. The methodology of this work is based on interdisciplinary approach – «culturological hermeneutics» enriched by the achievements of such joint methodologies as analytical psychology, structuralism, culture morphology, etc. Scientific novelty of this work lies in the analysis of the artistic image in works of contemporary art in the context of culturological hermeneutics. Conclusions. Based on the analysis of works of contemporary art, it is revealed that the interpretation of the artistic image remains open and inexhaustible, according to the principles of hermeneutics. Each interpreter will have his own approach to translating the content of the new text, which in turn will be another interpretation of the original text in art criticism. It is substantiated that the author's experience has primary importance for revealing the artistic image and content of the work. Disclosure of the artistic image is associated with the perception and therefore includes the principles of the receptive aesthetics.

The concept of contemporary art does not emphasize the boundary between art and non-art. It will constantly include non-art objects into the category of art. Contemporary art has thoughts and souls. It focuses on human psychology, society, history and other broad fields. Contemporary artists are often people who are rich in philosophical thinking. They should learn to observe the world in depth and express their thoughts on the world with their works. Since the 20th century, with the awakening of People’s self-consciousness and political consciousness, artists’ exploration and application of body symbols constantly express their reflection and introspection on society, there is also a change in the way of understanding and constructing one’s own identity. The identity issues such as feminism and ethnic minorities have triggered a series of social movements. This article will take the body expression in modern and contemporary art as the incision, and will carry on the research from the following two aspects: 1) taking the body’s plasticity, empathy and sociality as the representatives, the paper analyzes the language characteristics behind the body’s expression; 2) This paper discusses the body as a critical weapon from the perspective of its discourse power, attitude, power and as a tool of identity construction. And through a number of body-related works of art research, analysis of its expression in the context of modern and contemporary art direction. Is a work of art an “organism”? In order to answer this question, we must first clarify the concept of “organism”, which usually refers to living individuals. The Modern Chinese Dictionary simplifies it to “human beings and animals”. The more popular definition in psychology is “the organic matter with the ability to adapt to changes in the environment”. An interpretation closer to the artistic dimension comes from Aristotle, who believed that “poetry is an organism”. Later, Coleridge, an English poet, developed his idea, believing that “the life of a poem originates from the seed of the poet’s inspiration, which unconsciously absorbs the components of external substances acting on the human brain, thereby forming an organic entity that unites content and form, thought and emotion, concept and imagery” (Whistler, 2013). From Coleridge’s point of view, it is obvious that the work of art is an “organism”, which is born from the artist’s inspiration. It is in turn influenced by different kinds of artistic priors and the real world, and is then shaped in the entity. Contemporary art, which we are discussing today, is more “organic” in its “body language”.

This study investigates the widely accepted notion that spending more time looking at works of art results in better art appreciations. To this end, we examined the verbal responses of 34 non-expert viewers to works of public contemporary art. We structured and conducted the study in such a way as to compare, for each informant, examples of free, self-guided viewing experiences against instances of semi-structured viewing experiences with researcher imposed minimum durations. In this way, we hoped to determine the impact of longer viewing periods on the informants’ art appreciation performance by examining changes in cognitive dispositions and in production of interpretive hypotheses about the works of art. According to these two indicators, extended viewing periods were found to have a significant and positive effect on the art appreciation performances of the majority of the non-expert participants in this study. These findings support the notion that there is a relationship between viewing duration and better art appreciations.

Reviewed by: The Arcades: Contemporary Art and Walter Benjamin by Jewish Museum Laura Morowitz The Arcades: Contemporary Art and Walter Benjamin. The Jewish Museum, New York. March 17–August 6, 2017. For Walter Benjamin, art was a revolutionary tool. He wrote about the poetry of Baudelaire, the photographs of Atget, the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. In surrealism, the contemporary art of his day, he recognized both the spell of the dream and the potential for revolutionary transformation. In turn, artists have been deeply inspired, sometimes directly, sometimes via cultural transmission, by the mesmerizing reflections of Benjamin. A show of contemporary art informed by Benjamin’s writings could illuminate both the works themselves and the continuing relevance of Benjamin’s ideas. The show, The Arcades: Contemporary Art and Walter Benjamin, does not. On display at the Jewish Museum in the spring of 2017 and featuring the work of thirty-seven artists, the exhibition focused on Benjamin’s magnum opus, The Arcades Project (Das Passagen-Werk.) It is less a book then a sprawling, frustrating, heartbreaking, poetic, brilliant, and often abstruse series of quotations, observations, and reflections. It remained unfinished, its structure emulating the fragmentation of twentieth-century capitalism and the unfinished business of social revolution. Whether Benjamin ever intended to finish it will remain unknown, since he took his own life by swallowing morphine in despair at not being allowed to cross the Spanish border while fleeing the Nazis.1 The Arcades Project was Benjamin’s attempt to understand and articulate both the promise and failure of modernity. It does so through illuminating the disparate elements of nineteenth-century Paris, then the most technically advanced city of its time. The work is less a history than an archaeology of its subject. For Benjamin, the meaning of the city could best be understood through the debris and effluvia it had left behind, tiny glimmers of which were still visible beneath the surface. Modernity’s promise and failure were embodied in every element of Paris: its arcades, bridges, advertisements, poetry, social order, leisure habits, and material culture. The glass and iron arcades were indoor streets designed for window-shopping, strolling, and the pleasures of the flâneur. Like the objects of an archive, these things from the past [End Page 875] could now only be glimpsed in tantalizing fragments. Benjamin structured these topics in a loose array of quotations, revelations, and images, which he called convolutes. Within them he charted a revolutionary city’s thrall to the narcotic of capitalism. The curator of the exhibition, Jens Hoffman, deserves much credit for tackling such a fascinating and complex topic. It is hardly easy to fit The Arcades Project into any framework at all. The show is well conceived and the organization well planned. The problem with the show lies in its excision of Benjamin’s writing and in the selection of the works themselves, which fail to capture Benjamin’s spirit. The exhibit is divided cleanly into two parts. It opens, in a cleverly designed space meant to evoke the iron-framed arches of the Arcades, with an homage to Benjamin. After a cursory description of The Arcades Project, which focuses largely on the categories of the convolutes and on Benjamin’s role as historian of Paris, the visitor is invited to look at facsimiles of important documents of his life: his childhood studies in Hebrew, his entry card to the Bibliothèque Nationale, his final letter to Theodor Adorno (addressed to “mein lieber Teddie”). The visitor then enters a section devoted to contemporary art. Each of the works is displayed with two accompanying text boards, one a brief description or commentary on the convolute to which the work relates, the other a set of appropriated quotations chosen and put together by the poet Kenneth Goldsmith. The aim is to parallel the collage-like structure (or anti-structure) of Benjamin’s work, but chosen from a host of twentieth-century figures. Some of them, such as the “poem” for “Convolute X Marx” consists of quotations from Marshall Berman’s All that is Solid Melts into Air and works as a perfect compliment. 2 So, too, the reflections on boredom...

The purpose of the article is to study the artistic traditions and conceptual innovations in the works of Ukrainian artists of the XX-XXI centuries. In contemporary Ukrainian art, figurative language is produced simultaneously with the renewal of public consciousness and in certain aspects directly contributes to its formation. Figurative imagery using Ukrainian artists of this cultural period is not only the result solely of sensory experience, they also absorb the institutionalization of social experience that allows them to reflect different levels of reality. The methodology is the cultural-semiotic analysis of the forms of manifestation of visualization of modern art culture. The application of a systematic approach allowed us to study semiotic systems that contribute to the comprehensive disclosure of the problem of the semantics of modern forms of visualization. The integrative approach has enabled research in new forms of visualization of modern artistic language, which combines informational and aesthetic functions. Due to the revealed changes, traditional images are visualized with the help of a new artistic language, which does not correspond to the traditional meanings of the artistic image. The scientific novelty of the work lies in understanding the metaphysics of postmodern figurative art in contemporary Ukrainian art. A characteristic feature of the development of modern culture is the rapid social transformation, covering all areas of human activity. For the structure of art, the nature of which is due to constant change and renewal, the problem of the relationship between tradition and innovation is important. Thus, contemporary artists in their figurative, non-figurative and conceptual practices use the memory of artistic culture and artistic traditions as a mediator between the past and the present. Ukrainian art practitioners build a multiple and diverse artistic and image system based on the mechanism of interaction of traditions and innovations, involvement in the creative process of specific stylistic combinations of past and present, and reflection on cultural realities. Conclusions. Ukrainian culture is being revived in the following main directions: the process of self-consciousness and the formation of national historical memory has intensified, and the vector of development of social consciousness has been determined. Also, due to the weakening of totalitarian control, upgraded ideological and spiritual social norms. In the context of freer cultural development, artists use simple and clear images in various unusual contexts, often visualizing the determinants of the renewal of the collective consciousness. At the same time, the entry of domestic art into the world art arena meant the urgent need for rapid change in all spheres of art. This speed led to a number of complex problematic issues related to the difficult interaction of traditions and innovations, as well as folk and classical in contemporary art, determined the formation of a new series of images.

Examples of conceptual solutions to exhibitions devoted to racial identity in contemporary American art are investigated. The modern multicultural environment of the United States appreciates and explores various manifestations of identity. Trying to overcome stereotypes and myths are tied to her. Therefore, museums and departments in museums representing different cultural regions, and of course, artistic works, are so popular because in them the identity is manifested with the most significant force and with the most vivid colors. For analysis, contemporary African-American and Asian-American art presented in the framework of individual projects devoted to thematic and curatorial design is precisely racial identity in contemporary art: «30 Americans» and «Portraiture Now: Asian American Portraits of Encounter» As part of the analysis, individual artists are mentioned, and their works of art, filled with stereotypical images associated with identity, and their artistic searches for the identity of the personal. An exposition project on the socio-historical direction «Beyond Bollywood: Indian Americans Shape the Nation» is also being studied, designed to demonstrate influences Indian culture to contemporary American culture. The strategy offered by foreign curators cannot be fully incorporated into the realm of Ukrainian art, in the absence of racial issues as such. However, at the same time studying foreign experience can serve as an excellent example for defining national identity and a better understanding of narrow identities, which in the future can transform into exciting and meaningful art projects.

The Aesthetics or Theory of Reception, which analyzes the meanings of literary works and the function of the reader with a reader-response perspective, is an original aesthetic theory that spread from Germany to the world and then to the other branches of art in late 1960s. In the dialogue between the received work of art and the receiver, the style and duration of reception differ fundamentally in each branch of art. As in literary works, the experience of reading and understanding the work in other realms of art depends on the language of the art form. Reception Aesthetics mainly investigates such matters as the conditions under which a work of art is to be comprehended, the styles of comprehension and their results. This study analyzes the changes in the conditions and styles of reception during a dialogue with works of Ceramic Art, and the refreshing influence of reception period on the work with an experimental approach. The reception period is analyzed in the exemplary ceramic works of J. Miro. There are two reasons why the works of Miro were selected for analysis. First, Miro is a versatile artist who has influenced not only contemporary art of painting but also the art of ceramics with his ceramic works. His contribution to ceramic art can be exemplified within his works. Second is the advantage provided by the contribution to the experimental period of analysis through publications about Miro in art literature and the advantage of the evaluating the findings of reception. It is thought that the reception period is a period of art-work analysis that responds to a wider recipient audience about the work of art. It is also considered to involve a period of synthesis revitalizing the work of art with each new receiver. A flexible and explicit approach in the evaluation of work of art will support the formation of aesthetic life and communication among a wider recipient audience.

A Puzzle for Readers of Arthur Danto’s Aesthetic Theory

The sound art scene is not limited to the northern hemisphere. Rather, it is globally distributed and has for decades also appeared in various manifestations and constellations in the Global South. Globalization, postcolonialism, and decolonization are therefore issues that are just as crucial to the field of sound art as they are for other fields of social and human science. These issues are slowly beginning to enter the academic studies of sound art. However, academic interest in these issues still does not equal what we find empirically in the field. If one surfs the Internet or travels abroad to visit urban areas in the southern hemisphere, one is likely to encounter artists and communities creating works of contemporary sound art. Some of these artists involve themselves in independent long-term collaborations across the hemispheres, while others work within or supported by public institutions, but by far the majority of them are organized in local independent groups or social movements. Curators in the Global North have noted this proliferation and have, in recent years, begun to expand the repertoire of sound art by inviting artists from the Global South to perform and exhibit at cutting-edge festivals and galleries. Many of these transhemispheric collaborations have emerged from particular historical, institutional, and social contexts and take place within a growing critical awareness of postcolonial and decolonial issues. I suggest that these changes require the development of new analytical and theoretical tools within the study of sound art, tools that allow for a rewriting of the history and theory of sound art from a truly global perspective. Such a rewriting of sound art history and sound art practices will have to be acutely aware of issues of globalization, postcolonialism, and decolonialization; it will need to integrate representations on the Internet with those of live concerts, installations, and interviews; it must reach out toward anthropological and ethno-musicological methods; and it should make aesthetic considerations central to its analysis.This chapter, and this section of the book in general, is a modest attempt to begin the work of learning to pay analytical attention to these global shifts and experiments in sound art. The ambition is not to map the entire world of sound arts, nor is it to develop a new fully fledged set of methodological and theoretical tools. The intention is simply to pay attention to these global changes, and through this to start a discussion about the paradigmatic shift that is long overdue in contemporary sound art studies. (Less)

We require an interpretation for principles of Chinese aesthetics that will help us describe how contemporary Chinese artists can express images that are authentically Chinese. In particular, we require an interpretation for Chinese aesthetics that will help us assess whether Jizi’s compositions represent the unification of subject with object and observable nature with dimensions of a larger universe. Where shall we begin? Jizi states that his compositions are influenced in part by the paintings and writings of Jing Hao (c. 855–c. 915) and Shitao (1642–1707). Jing Hao is recognized both as a painter (Fig. 5.1) and as a writer who brought guiding principles of Chinese aesthetics to landscape painting in a way that led to the unsurpassed landscapes of the Northern Song (960–1127) and Southern Song dynasties (1127–1279). So, it is reasonable to inspect the aesthetics of Jing Hao’s Bi fa ji (Notes on Brushwork) for any principles that might be interpreted in a way that strengthens contemporary Chinese aesthetics. The text expresses six principles: vital energy, resonance, thought, scene, brush, and ink. It is the first two principles—vitality or spirit (qi 氣) and rhythm or resonance (yun 韻)—that are of immediate interest for they lead to a discussion of what the painter must do to create a true or authentic (zhen 眞) representation of nature. The aim then is to interpret the principle of the authentic image in traditional Chinese aesthetics so that contemporary Chinese artists have guidance today in making images or installations that are alive and resonant with the vitality of nature. The live hypothesis here is that the description in Bi fa ji of the authentic image of nature may provide a present-day standard for assessing whether a work of contemporary Chinese art is authentically Chinese.

Between imagination, the perception of the world and poetic reason, which comprises both the poiesis and the praxis, the productive act is experienced and the poetic place is revealed, between identity and otherness; subjectivity and objectivity; visible and invisible; formal and informal; and between the world in the strictest sense (what we believe to be real) and the ineffable (mysterious and virtual). In this interwoven and dynamically fertile tension of the endeavor, understood as poetic, where these realities are articulated, the poetic place is generated and form as a process and the non-objective space of the works we present is embodied, between the real, the image and the imaginary: in Las Meninas by Velázquez, in the Carceri d’invenzione by Piranesi, and in many works of modern and contemporary art, such as the drawings by Giacometti, the paintings by Vieira da Silva, and the imaginal paintings by Palazuelo. They are places and landscapes that bring out the value of the relationship between figure and background, and the constant interactivity between all the polarities contained therein. Besides aesthetics, these are poetic places, authentic in-between places that are alive; borderline and imprecise in their limits; between creation, transformation and metamorphosis; in a constant un-veiling or pro-duction of presence, that emerge and are presented here in that tense, dynamic and imprecise relationship of ambiguity and reversibility between figure-background, negative-positive, plane and depth. They are imagined places and landscapes, in which form exists in permanent evolution and difference, appealing to an active receiver who, in his or her relationship with the work, is “moved” and transformed, activating imagination and memory, and releasing the creative impulse.