Contributors

Museum of Contemporary Art by Artists

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

Book Review| July 01 2013 Being Affected Writings on Contemporary Art and Artists, vols. 1–6, by Lyotard, Jean-François, Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2009–13, $388.00/€297.00 (hardcover), ISBN 978905867881x Keith Crome Keith Crome Keith Crome is a senior lecturer in philosophy at Manchester Metropolitan University. He is the author of Lyotard and Greek Thought: Sophistry (2004) and coeditor of The Lyotard Reader and Guide (2006). Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Cultural Politics (2013) 9 (2): 227–232. https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-2146185 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Keith Crome; Being Affected. Cultural Politics 1 July 2013; 9 (2): 227–232. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-2146185 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsCultural Politics Search Advanced Search In 2009 Leuven University Press published Jean-François Lyotard's study of the artist Christiaan Karel Appel, Karel Appel: Un geste de couleur/Karel Appel: A Gesture of Colour. It was the first volume of what was initially planned to be a five-volume bilingual collection of Lyotard's Writings on Contemporary Art and Artists. The collection has now grown to six volumes, including a two-part fourth volume bringing together Lyotard's shorter, miscellaneous writings on aesthetics and the theory of art and on contemporary artists (Textes dispersés I: Esthétique et théorie de l'art/Miscellaneous Texts I: Aesthetics and Theory of Art and Textes dispersés II: Artistes contemporains/Miscellaneous Texts II: Contemporary Artists). In addition to the volumes mentioned above, a further three have been published: Sam Francis, Leçon de ténèbres: “Like the Paintings of a Blind Man”/Sam Francis, Lesson of Darkness: “Like the Paintings of a Blind... © 2013 Duke University Press2013 You do not currently have access to this content.

This panel discussion examines the role of museums in bringing the work of African artists to the consciousness of the contemporary world. The topics covered include the participants’ first meaningful encounters with contemporary African art, the role of the curator of contemporary African art in the museum, and the age-old question about presenting contemporary African art in art and/or ethnology museums. The panelists also examine questions relating to accessioning and (re) presentation of African artists in the permanent collection, and they cover the place of contemporary African art relative to the “traditional” and Western contemporary.

Contributors

Is a Factory a Museum?* Thomas Elsaesser I read Hito Steyerl's essay "Is a Museum a Factory?" with great interest.1 Not only because she quotes me and announces in the most affable—if nonetheless unmistakable—way her doubts about my remarks, but because she touches on subjects I have been thinking about for some time and that are relevant for a broader audience. The basic argument of "Is a Museum a Factory?" could be summed up as follows: Now, because more and more factories are being converted into museums, it is about time to ask what these two seemingly diametrically opposed institutions have in common that makes it so easy to transition from one to the other. And if that is the case, what consequences does this transition have for (a) the concept of production in art and society, (b) the experience of space and time, (c) the relationship of the masses and the individual, and, finally—here I add my own point—(d) the formatting or programming of the human senses and body? All of this is focused on the question of the fate of the socially committed film and political cinema that once was shown in factories as well and now leads a hybrid and conflicted existence as installation art in museums, exhibitions, and galleries. The areas of tension cannot be discussed in detail here, so let me just try and extend Hito Steyerl's essay to include a further thesis: At one time people did [End Page 42] physical labor in factories and sought to relax with viewing pleasures and feasts for the eyes. Today, "to look is to labor"—whether at a monitor in the office, on a screen or at home, in the cinema, or at the museum. We experience leisure, if at all, playing sports, working in the garden, at the fitness studio, or in other activities and performances even more obsessively oriented around the body; that is, at leisure we are still subjects of the "societies of control" described by Gilles Deleuze and the body-oriented self-maximization that became famous in Michel Foucault's writing as the "care of the self" and "biopolitics." The premises of such an argument are, on the one hand, closely linked and focused—political cinema, installation art—and, on the other hand, very far apart: they refer to our postindustrial societies of crisis and their atomized, fragmented subjectivities, experienced and affirmed only as participants in "multitudes." Hito Steyerl puts her finger on a number of sore points and striking paradoxes. The fact is that several of the most-visited museums are either former factories or power stations, such as Tate Modern in London, or they look like factories, as in the case of the Centre Pompidou in Paris. To put it more generally: in recent decades, more and more factories, warehouses, turbine halls, gasometers, harbors, and large market halls have been converted into museums, exhibition spaces, or artists' studios. If Tate Modern can be said to be the most famous case in Europe, there are countless other examples: the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, near Newcastle (a former grain mill), the Santralistanbul Museum of Contemporary Art in Istanbul (a former power station on the Bosporus), the theater and photography museums on Helsinki's harbor (in a former ship cable factory), or the Centre for Art and Media Technology (ZKM) in Karlsruhe (a former weapons and ammunitions factory). In her essay, Hito Steyerl alludes to Rem Koolhaas's newly designed Contemporary Art Museum in Riga, a coal-fired power plant that was already decommissioned during the Soviet area. On the website of Rem Kohlhaas's firm Office for Metropolitan Architecture, this tendency to transform factories into museums is addressed directly: "It is an open secret that the presentation of art is not the only function of the contemporary Museum. The very success of the institution—a pivotal centre of contemporary society—has accrued additional interests and powers that require their own infrastructure, in addition, but independent from the viewing of art." The infrastructure demanded here includes not only the museum shop, a large cinema, performance spaces, and surrounding greenery but also "educational, media-related and production...

Calligraphy, poetry and paradoxical power in Wenda Gu's Neon Calligraphy Series

This article addresses how older people understand and engage with contemporary art in the gallery context – whether there is something unique to the art, the format of the visits, the pedagogical approaches used by gallery educators, the social contact, or a combination of all these factors. It also addresses the psychosocial barriers to engagement. It draws from ‘Contemporary visual art and identity construction – wellbeing amongst older people’, a two‐year research project funded by the cross‐research council New Dynamic of Ageing Programme. Over 21 months, 43 participants aged 60–92 made three visits to contemporary art galleries in north‐east England. The potential for art galleries to develop lifelong learning opportunities for post‐retirement people has implications for the cultural, health and voluntary sector.

BOOK REVIEWS many excluded. Selftends to favor projects with iconic intentions and ambitious, transformational urbanistic aspirations. The museums considered are the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (Fort Worth, Texas; Tadao Ando & Associates); the Contemporary Art Center (Cincinnati, Ohio; Zaha Hadid, Architects); the Kunsthaus Graz (Graz, Austria; Spacelab Cook/ Fournier); the Nasher Sculpture Center (Dallas, Texas; Renzo Piano Building Workshop); the Museum of Modern Art expansion (New York, New York; Yoshio Taniguchi and Associates); the Walker Art Center expansion (Minneapolis, Minnesota; Herzog & de Muron); the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia expansion (Madrid, Spain; Ateliers Jean Nouvel); the de Young Museum (San Francisco, California; Herzog & de Muron); the Toledo Museum ofArt Glass Pavilion (Toledo, Ohio; Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa/SANAA); the Denver Art Museum (Denver, Colorado; Studio Daniel Liebeskind); the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (Boston, Massachusetts; Diller, Scofidio +Renfro); the NelsonAtkins Museum of Art Bloch Building (Kansas City, Missouri; Steven Holl Architects); the Akron Art Museum (Akron, Ohio; Coop Himmelb(l)au); the New Museum (New York, New York; Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa/SANAA); the Acropolis Museum (Athens, Greece; Bernard Tschumi Architects); the Museum Brandhorst (Munich, Germany; Sauerbruch Hutton); and the Museo Nazionale delle Arri dell XXI Secolo (Rome, Italy; Zaha Hadid Architects). This list of case studies includes virtually all the major players in contemporary art museum design, though Renzo Piano, the leading art museum architect of the period, is represented only by the Nasher Sculpture Center which, though incorporating his trademark glass roof and natural lighting, is not the most representative of his work because of the institution's sole focus on sculpture. Important projects conspicuous in their absence are the DIA: Beacon Riggio Galleries (Beacon, New York; the ARRIS 70 § Volume 25 § 2014 installation artist Robert Irwin, in association with OpenOffice); the Musee de Quai Branly (Paris, France; Jean Nouvel); and the Smithsonian American Art Museum/National Portrait Gallery expansion (Washington, DC; Foster+ Partners). This said, these exclusions are largely explained by Self's interest in what he terms "the Bilbao effect" or "the Sydney effect": the quest of clients and architects to use these buildings to create destinations that will also become transformative symbols of their cities. Further, the other pole of contemporary art museum design (that of the understated, spiritual envelope for collections) has been virtually monopolized over the past thirty years by the practice of the Renzo Piano Building Workshop. Self's critiques are always judicious, taking into account the realities of process and clients' desires rather than long discussions of aesthetic preferences, though he clearly articulates the relative success and failure of the buildings analyzed. The journalistic origins of the case studies are apparent, however, in their uniform length; some of the more complex projects, such as the MoMA or Reina Sofia expansions, would have benefited from longer exposition and exploration than some ofthe simpler projects. Perhaps a little more time could also have been spent on the museological implications of radical architecture (Self acknowledges that many of the projects present challenges to curators; should they? The preference of many ofthe great collections for "white cube" galleries and warehouse-type exhibition spaces endures for a reason), but The Architecture ofArt Museums presents a terrific summation of the building type over the first decade ofthe twenty-first century and is the definitive reference work on the subject. It belongs on the shelf of any architect engaged in museum design. ERICMICHAEL WOLF The Menil Collection Houston, Texas A Field Guide to American Houses Th Definitiv Guid to Identif ing and Und r tand.ng Am nca Dome tic Architec ure Virginia Savage McAlester Virginia Savage McAlester. A Field Guide to American Houses: The Definitive Guide to Identifying and UnderstandingAmerica's Domestic Architecture. New York: Alfred A Knopf, 2013, 848 pp., black-and-white illustrations, hardcover, ISBN 978-1-4000-4359-0. This book is the long-awaited second edition of the nationally recognized standard for identifying American domestic architectural styles. The first edition, published in 1984 and in print since its release, is in the library of every preservation architect, State Historic Preservation Office, historic preservation specialist, and educator and serves the professional and advocate with an illustrated and comprehensive architectural vocabulary and a national...

Review: <i>How Photography Became Contemporary Art: Inside an Artistic Revolution from Pop to the Digital Age</i>, by Andy Grundberg

This paper aims to propose both a theoretical discussion on the dynamics of the enjoyment of art museums in accordance with a psychological approach, and a brief illustration of the empirical research conducted. The theoretical discussion takes into account in particular the studies of the Gestalt psychology in the field of visual perception, and the contributions of psychology that deals with aesthetic experience. The empirical studies highlight the impact of several factors related to the enjoyment of the museum’s collections, in particular, the typology of art museums visited (ancient art/modern and contemporary art) and some personality traits (openness to experience, sensation seeking). Results show that ancient art museums visitors have an approach to the visit mainly aimed to the cultural enrichment, while visitors to the modern and contemporary art museums are mostly inclined to conduct an affective experience, which includes emotions articulated along the positive-negative dimension as interest, amazement, excitement and anxiety. Moreover, modern and contemporary art museum visitors have higher values in the personality trait sensation seeking, compared to ancient art museum visitors. Applied implications of the results are also analyzed.

In challenging times where funding is uncertain and scarce, innovative strategies must be developed to train the future workforce of health and service providers to serve the growing and diverse aging population. The Center for Successful Aging (CSA) at California State University Long Beach brings together faculty, students, and community partners to develop creative solutions for diverse aging populations, serving as a leader in community engagement, workforce development, and applied research to address disparities and promote quality of life in aging. The CSA Internship Program has taken a community-based approach to providing both research and service-oriented learning opportunities for students at the CSULB College of Health and Human Services. Service-oriented internships have included support for a service provider collaborative and student-run dementia respite program. Research-oriented internships have included a masking adherence study, an adult day-care feasibility study, and a study on the experience of older adults dining out with hearing loss. To date, thirty-seven students have completed a minimum of 120 hours each for a total of 4,400 hours. By leveraging our community partnerships, CSA has provided research and service-oriented opportunities for students to build their knowledge and skills on aging and improve attitudes towards working with older adults. In this presentation, we will describe in more detail the strategies for developing unique learning experiences, student learning outcomes, and their impact on students. Through these strategies, CSA aims to empower students to become the next generation of leaders in health and human services for an aging society.

An intensive training course has been developed and implemented at the California State University Long Beach based on 8 years of experience in the multiphase flow area with the specific focus on droplet–solid interactions. Due to the rapid development of droplet-based equipment and industrial techniques, numerous industries are concerned with understanding the behavior of droplet dynamics and the characteristics that govern them. The presence and ensuing characteristics of the droplet regimes (spreading, receding, rebounding, and splashing) are heavily dependent on droplet and surface conditions. The effect of surface temperature, surface wettability, impact velocity, droplet shape and volume on droplet impact dynamics, and heat transfer are discussed in this training paper. Droplet impacts on moving solid surfaces and the effects of normal and tangential velocities on droplet dynamics are other topics that are discussed here. Despite the vast amount of studies into the dynamics of droplet impact, there is still much more to be investigated as research has expanded into a myriad of different conditions. However, the current paper is intended as a practical training document and a source of basic information, therefore, the scope is kept sufficiently broad to be of interest to readers from different engineering disciplines.

This paper presents the results from an ongoing NSF TUES project that develops a unique and innovative virtual approach, named as Green-BIM teaching method, to deliver sustainability practices using Building Information Modeling (BIM) technology for undergraduate students and implement it as a hands-on laboratoryand project-based course in the construction education curriculum. This NSF TUES project aims to inspire undergraduate students with green building practices associated with BIM for the sustainable development of a built environment. The Green-BIM teaching method is designed and used to teach a construction management course offered at California State University Long Beach. The approach starts with the BIM-based teaching method developed in the previous study and incorporates the knowledge of sustainability in a built environment. The effectiveness of the Green-BIM teaching method was evaluated by using an assessment rubric. The evaluation results indicated that the method overall helped students to effectively learn materials. It was found that the GreenBIM teaching method provides dynamic representations of knowledge and increases classroom interaction and students’ personalized learning experience.

In 1989, Donald Reish hosted the 3rd International Polychaete Conference (IPC3) in Long Beach, on the campus of California State University Long Beach. In 2015 he asked one of us (Bruno Pernet) if it might be possible to bring IPC13 back to Long Beach, thirty years later. Bruno assembled a planning committee consisting of himself and Christine Whitcraft (CSU Long Beach), Kirk Fitzhugh and Leslie Harris (Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County), and Larry Lovell (Dancing Coyote Environmental). The committee’s proposal was accepted at the International Polychaetology Association (IPA) general meeting in Wales in 2016, and the planning committee morphed into an organizational committee!