Cultural Reflections of Medusa

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

The aim of the project Meta-Image , funded by German Research Foundation (DFG), is to provide a network-based research environment for art history and other sciences concerning visual culture. It consists of the two components prometheus and HyperImage . Meta-Image combines the distributed digital image archive prometheus , which consists of a very large pool of images, with HyperImage ( http://www.hyperimage.eu ), a tool for image annotation. prometheus provides over 700,000 images in nearly 60 connected image databases; Hyperimage facilitates collaborative work directly on the image. The numerous users, the secure legal context for use and the existing technologies for collaborative research make prometheus a perfect subject for HyperImage . This image annotation tool serves as an instrument to support research in art history. It allows the identification of motifs, the creation of linked image networks as well as the addition of metadata. This synthesis creates the ability to reorganise, juxtapose and annotate images in a way that can lead to new conclusions concerning image-based research. Art history and other cultural studies can finally realise the potential of the network based and collaborative analysis of images.

Contributors

This book re-examines feminist theory through the lens of South Asian aesthetic conventions drawn from iconography, philosophy, Indo-Islamic mystic folk traditions and poetics. It discusses alternate fluid representations of gender and intersectional identities and interrelationships in some dominant as well as non-elite Indic aesthetic traditions. The book explores pre-Vedic sculptural and Indus terracotta iconographies, the classical aesthetic philosophy of rasa, mystic folk poetry of Bhakti and Sufi movements, and ghazal and Urdu poetics to understand the political dimension of feminist theory in India as well as its implications for trans-continental feminist aesthetics across South Asia and the West. By interlinking prehistoric, classical, medieval, premodern and contemporary aesthetic and literary traditions of South Asia through a gendered perspective, the book bridges a major gap in feminist theory. An interdisciplinary work, this book will be useful for scholars and researchers of feminist theory, women’s studies, gender studies, art and aesthetics, philosophy, literature, cultural studies, queer studies, sexuality studies, political studies, sociology and South Asian studies.

Often featuring lighthouses, bridges, or quaint country homes, Thomas Kinkade’s soft-focus landscapes have permeated American visual culture during the past twenty years, appearing on everything from Bibles to bedsheets to credit cards. Kinkade sells his work through his shopping-mall galleries, QVC, the Internet, and Christian stores. He is quite possibly the most collected artist in the United States. While many art-world and academic critics have dismissed him as a passing fad or marketing phenomenon, the contributors to this collection do not. Instead, they explore his work and its impact on contemporary art as part of the broader history of American visual culture. They consider Kinkade’s imagery and career in relation to nineteenth-century Currier and Ives prints and Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ , the collectibles market and the fine-art market, the Thomas Kinkade Museum and Cultural Center, and “The Village at Hiddenbrooke,” a California housing development inspired by Kinkade’s paintings. The conceptual artist Jeffrey Vallance, the curator of the first major museum exhibition of Kinkade’s art and collectibles, recounts his experiences organizing that show. All of the contributors draw on art history, visual culture, and cultural studies as they seek to understand Kinkade’s significance for both art and audiences. Along the way, they delve into questions about beauty, class, kitsch, religion, and taste in contemporary art. Contributors . Julia Alderson, Alexis L. Boylan , Anna Brzyski, Seth Feman, Monica Kjellman-Chapin, Micki McElya, Karal Ann Marling, David Morgan, Christopher Pearson, Andrea Wolk Rager, Jeffrey Vallance

The creative component of the design process is fundamental, as it is associated with the search for innovative solutions. In the creative process, the designer’s imagination plays a leading role – it serves as the foundation for shaping and transforming the vision of the functional and aesthetic image of the future object. This study was aimed to identify and systematise the main strategic directions and techniques that stimulate the creative process in generating innovative solutions within modern design practice. The research methodology included the analysis of information sources on design methods; tools for form development in architectural, industrial, and environmental design; structural and systematic analysis; and synthesis of research results. It has been demonstrated that human imagination operates on the basis of previously formed visual images through perception. The strategic approach to reativity development is shaped by visual-operational experience. It has been established that the main method of generating new ideas is creative experimentation. To stimulate the creative process during the ideation stage, it is advisable to apply techniques such as decomposition, alteration of visual modelling tools, combinatorics, the use of simple and flexible tools, references and analogies, brainstorming, and design heuristics. The practical significance of these findings lies in their application to design practice, the education and training of specialists in artistic and creative fields, and further research in art history, cultural studies, architecture, and design.

This article introduces the concept of postfeminism and highlights its value for research in language and gender studies. After discussing theoretical, historical and backlash perspectives, we advance an understanding of postfeminism as a sensibility - a patterned-yet-contradictory phenomenon intimately connected to neoliberalism. We consider elements widely theorised as constituting the postfeminist sensibility, alongside concerns shared by those who take postfeminism as their object of critical inquiry, in addition to an analytic category for cultural critique. The article then illustrates how the postfeminist sensibility may operate empirically, in the context of the doing and undoing of gender equality policies in workplaces. The article responds to calls for the field of language and gender to reinvigorate its political impetus, and to engage with feminist scholarship on postfeminism, particularly as recently developed in media and cultural studies.

New Feminist Approaches to Social Science Methodologies: An Introduction

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

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes1. The Febuary 2011 annual meeting of the College Art Association (CAA) in New York had an entire session organized by Patricia Mainardi dedicated to “The Crisis in Art History.” The papers were later published in a special issue of Visual Resources (27, no. 4, 2011). Yet the present crisis in the discipline can be considered just the latest of many that it has faced at least since the 1970s, when a whole new range of theoretical references, such as postcolonial theories, psychoanalysis, gender studies, and semiotics, pressured art historians to reflect about their specific approaches to art. Hans Belting's Das Ende der Kunstgeschichte? came out in 1983, centering its fire on the power structures of the field in Germany, and in 1982 the Art Journal also produced an issue on “The Crisis in the Discipline,” edited by Henri Zerner, with articles by such leading art historians as Rosalind Krauss, David Summers, and Donald Preziosi, among others. At that time, the main topic of discussion was the incorporation of new objects of study in the art historical field, such as advertisement, photography, and other aspects of visual culture, bringing art history closer to so-called visual studies. Concerns about developing a global art history, something that still resonates today, appeared at the turn of the century with important publications such as Hans Belting's Bild-Anthropologie (2001) and David Summers's Real Spaces (2003). Both books demonstrate a special interest in anthropology, which persists today with the incorporation of anthropological theories such as those of Alfred Gell and Bruno Latour, for example, into the field. Belting, Das Ende der Kunstgeschichte? (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1983), trans. as The End of the History of Art? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Zerner, ed., “The Crisis in the Discipline,” special issue, Art Journal 42, no. 4 (Winter 1982); Belting, Bild-Anthropologie (Munich: W. Fink, 2001); and Summers, Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism (London: Phaidon Press, 2003).2. This was the 33rd Congress of the Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art, Germanische Nationalmuseum Nuremberg, July 15–20, 2012. Its theme, “The Challenge of the Object,” appears somewhat conservative when considered from the perspective of contemporary art. Since at least the 1960s Conceptual art has done away with the idea of a necessary connection between art and the material world, which had important political consequences as well.3. The same logic that we see here organizes much of the “globalized” art world. In a review of the exhibition Africa Remix: L’art contemporain d’un continent, presented at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, in 2005, Roberto Conduru notes that African artists still need to pass through the established institutions of art in the United States or in Europe to enter the circuits of the international market and art world. “With one sole exception—Wim Botha … all of the remaining 87 artists already represented their country and/or the Continent in the Biennials that proliferate throughout the world, and also presented their work in prestigious institutions within the system of international art.” Conduru, “O mundo é uma tribo,” Concinnitas (UERJ, Rio de Janeiro), no. 8 (July 2005): 198–202.4. Although this in fact is a very significant way to approach Brazilian visual culture, it should not be exclusive. Important work has been done in the last few years on the process of the transfer and circulation of material culture within the Portuguese Empire and in Brazil. See Jens M. Baumgarten, “Transformation asiatischer Artefakte in brasilianischen Kontexten,” in Topologien des Reisens, ed. Alexandra Karentzos, Alma-Elisa Kittner, and Julia Reuter (Trier: Universität Trier, 2009), vol. 1, 178–94.5. A good example can be found in Rodrigo Naves's interpretation of Jean-Baptiste Debret's Brazilian period: “Definitely, the existence of slavery hindered once and for all any effort to transplant the classical form as truth into Brazil.” Naves, A forma difícil: Ensaios sobre arte brasileira (São Paulo: Ática,1996), 71.6. Moema is the tragic character of Frei Santa Rita Durão's epic poem Caramuru. She was the sister of Caramuru's wife, Paraguaçu, and drowned while swimming after the ship that carried Caramuru back to Europe.7. Regarding the position that Baroque occupies in Brazilian art history, it is interesting that in the first Pan-American Congress of Architects, organized in Uruguay in 1920, Alexandre de Albuquerque proposed the Baroque manner of Minas Gerais as the source for a Brazilian national style, since, according to him, Brazil did not possess a strong indigenous culture, as did other countries in South America.8. Sergio Miceli, Nacional estrangeiro (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2003).9. The study of art history is relatively recent in Brazil, and by examining other contributions to the history of culture in the country, one can find elements that could help to impel art history in new directions. The writer Mario de Andrade, one of the main protagonists of Brazilian modernism, for instance, developed a genuine interest in African and Native culture and in 1936 wrote a project for the creation of an Institute for National Patrimony in which he included material and immaterial culture of the different populations in Brazil. In the same period, the sociologist Gilberto Freyre, who had studied with Franz Boas, wrote his classic book Casa-grande e senzala, in which he examines the diversity of contributions to Brazilian culture. In the 1940s and 1950s, Lina Bo Bardi organized exhibitions in Bahia and at the São Paulo Art Museum (MASP) based on her research on popular art in Brazil. See, among others, Antonio Gilberto Nogueira, Por um inventário dos sentidos: Mário de Andrade e a concepçã de patrimônio e inventário (São Paulo: Hucitec/Fapesp., 2005); Marina Grinover and Silvana Rubino, eds., Lina por escrito: Textos escolhidos de Lina Bo Bardi (São Paulo: Cosac e Naify, 2009); and Gilberto Freyre, Casa-grande e senzala (São Paulo: Global, 2003).10. “From this we conclude that … art, in its simple forms, is not necessarily expressive of purposive action, but rather based upon our reactions to forms that develop through mastery of technique.” Franz Boas, Primitive Art (New York: Dover, 1955), 62. I also think that Boas's question about what could be considered an aesthetic object in these cultures is a very important one because it definitely secures these objects as of interest for the field of art history, at the same time that it forces us to listen to the point of view of their creators.11. On Assuriní visual culture, see Regina Polo Müller, Os Assuriní do Xingu: História e arte (Campinas: Unicamp, 1993). When dealing with contemporary indigenous culture we must also acknowledge the impact of the market on how aesthetic value is assigned. This, of course, implies recognizing that indigenous culture is in fact alive and interacting with other sectors of society today, resisting the tendency of both anthropologists and art historians to imagine these cultures as if “frozen in the past.”12. Tapirage is the name given to a technique used by some indigenous groups to alter the feather colors of live birds. See Amy Buono, “Crafts of Color: Tupi Tapirage in Early Colonial Brazil,” in The Materiality of Color: The Production, Circulation, and Application of Dyes and Pigments 1400–1800, ed. Andrea Feeser, Maureen Daly Goggin, and Beth Fowkes (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate Press, 2012), 8–40.13. Amy Buono, “Indigeneity as Corporeality: The ‘Tupinambization’ of the Early Modern Atlantic,” in Art and Its Histories in Brazil, by Claudia Mattos and Roberto Conduru, Issues and Debates (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, forthcoming).14. On this issue, see Joanne Rappaport and Tom Cummins, Beyond the Lettered City: Indigenous Literacies in the Americas (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012), 1–26.15. As I have argued above, there cannot be one unitary Brazilian art; given the constant dynamic exchange between local and transferred material and immaterial culture, we must substitute this concept for a more dynamic view of the arts in Brazil.16. Terreiro is the name for buildings and spaces that contain Afro-Brazilian religious activities. Quilombos are historic settlements of fugitive and freed slaves that were created in remote places within the interior of Brazil.17. We must learn to see the circulation of people, ideas, and objects between different localities in Africa and Brazil as a two-way process. As Roberto Conduru notes, although slavery implied the forced migration of a much larger population from Africa to the Americas, there was also some significant immigration in the other direction. This is well documented, for example, in the development of agudá architecture in the region of the Gulf of Guinea (Togo, Benin, and Nigeria). Conduru, “Sobrevivência e invenção—conexões artísticas entre Brasil e África,” in Mattos and Conduru, Art and Its Histories in Brazil.18. The direct relation between art and art history has been pointed out numerous times. Wolfgang Kemp (“Benjamin and Aby Warburg,” Kritische Berichte, no. 3 [1975]: 5–6) has argued that Dadaist collage played an important role in the development of Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas, for instance. See Kurt W. Forster, “Die Hamburg-Amerika-Linie, oder: Warburgs Kunstwissenschaft zwischen den Kontinenten,” in Aby Warburg: Akten des internationalen Symposions, Hamburg, ed. Horst Bredekamp, Michael Diers, and Charlotte Schoell-Glass (Weinheim: Wiley-VCH Verlag), 11–37. Performance art has helped us understand the theatricality of Baroque art, and it also can be very productive in interpreting much of what we call Native art, for instance.19. Thierry Dufrêne, “Pour en finir avec le corset de la chronologie: Vers une histoire de l’art élargie qui rapproche les temps et les oeuvres,” in Théâtre du Monde, exh. cat. (Paris: FAGE, 2013), 30–37. The exhibition at La Maison Rouge, which showed the collection of eccentric Tasmanian collector David Walsh, was curated by Jean-Hubert Martin, who also used Surrealist-inspired anachronistic models to display the objects.20. Belting, Bild-Anthropologie; and Summers, Real Spaces. For a critique of David Summers's book in relation to the question of a new world art history, see James Elkins, “On David Summers's Real Spaces,” in Is Art History Global? (New York: Routledge, 2007), 41–72.Additional informationNotes on contributorsClaudia MattosClaudia Mattos, professor of art history at the University of Campinas, earned a PhD from the Freie Universität, Berlin, in 1996. She publishes on nineteenth- and twentieth-century art and is preparing one book on art and ecology in Brazil and editing another on Brazilian art history for Getty Publications [Instituto de Artes, Departamento de Artes Plásticas, Rua Elis Regina 50, Cidade Universitária Zeferino Vaz, 13083-854, Campinas, SP, Brazil, cvmattos@iar.unicamp.br].

About the Contributors

Reviewed by: Negotiated Moments: Improvisation, Sound, and Subjectivity ed. by Gillian Siddall and Ellen Waterman Joel V. Hunt Negotiated Moments: Improvisation, Sound, and Subjectivity. Edited by Gillian Siddall and Ellen Waterman. (Improvisation, Community, and Social Practice.) Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. [ISBN 9780822360827 (cloth), $104.95; ISBN 9780822360964 (paperback), $27.95; ISBN 9780822374497 (e-book), varies.] Illustrations, discography, bibliography, notes on contributors, index. Negotiated Moments: Improvisation, Sound, and Subjectivity contributes to a growing body of multidisciplinary research that resonates within the sphere of critical improvisation studies, a burgeoning field that seeks to "examine improvisation's effects, interrogate its discourses, interpret narratives and histories related to it, discover implications of those narratives and histories, and uncover its ideologies" (The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies, ed. George E. Lewis and Benjamin Piekut, 2 vols. [New York: Oxford University Press, 2016], 1:3). From creative practices in music, art, dance, theater, and literature to everyday human activities, scholars of this field apply research methods from an expanding range of disciplines—musicology, ethnomusicology, [End Page 306] anthropology, psychology, cultural studies, gender studies, literary theory, and more—to engage with diverse improvisational paradigms. By virtue of its longer-standing association with improvisation, however, at present the vast majority of studies in this field center on or emanate from music scholarship and practice. Negotiated Moments is the fourth coauthored and coedited volume in Im prov i sation, Community, and Social Prac tice, a series from the International Institute for Critical Studies in Im prov isation that aims to "advocate musical improvisation as a crucial model for political, cultural, and ethical dialogue and action" (http://www.improvcommunity.ca/publications/books [accessed 6 June 2018]). Within this framework, the editors of Negotiated Moments, Gillian Siddall and Ellen Waterman, sought to "reveal the intricacies of improvisational relationships through agency and interagency, body and bodies, self and selves, sounding and (other means of) sensing" (p. 17). They argue that musical improvisation is "ineluctably embodied," and "its creative and political force is manifested through sounds and gestures that are the traces of experience" (p. 1). The sixteen essays in this collection explore intersections of music, technology, embodiment, and identity. The contributing authors discuss sound-walks and soundscapes, interactive electroacoustic music and audio art installations, multisite networked performances, free jazz, and taiko drumming. Although music is the primary focus, some contributors explore music-adjacent topics such as political street theater, kinesthetic group improvisation, and literary representations of improvisation. Despite an overwhelming North American slant, the contributors represent a diverse range of perspectives, including early-, mid-, and senior-level scholars and scholar-practitioners in music performance, composition, musicology, ethnomusicology, performance studies, gender studies, American studies, and interdisciplinary art. Their collective insights touch on a number of themes that cut to the core of critical improvisation studies. The role of listening in music improvisation emerges as an important theme. Andra McCartney (chap. 2) draws on ideas from acoustic ecology and feminist theory in describing the listening processes that inform her approach to soundwalking (walks with focus on listening to the environment). McCartney argues that participants in a curated soundwalk can play a creative, improvisatory role by remaining open to the variable possibilities of the experience. Soundwalkers have the ability to plot new pathways through a space, redirect listening attention to foreground or background sounds in the moment, and audition different listening perspectives (i.e., they can attune to the musical, historical, political, social, evocative, or sensual aspects of the sonic environment) (p. 44). McCartney also encourages soundwalkers to consider the power of "intimate listening" (from Luce Irigaray's theorizing on love)—"listening to the sound environment as if it were a dear friend or lover"—to elevate aural awareness and emphasize difference (p. 40). For readers familiar with the work of Pauline Oliveros—namely, her concept of deep listening—it will come as no surprise that her contribution also focuses on listening, as well as the embodied and cognitive processes operative in her practice as an improviser (chap. 4). Referencing neurophysiologist Benjamin Libet's work on sensory input and consciousness, Oliveros draws a parallel between the time delay that occurs in her live sampling improvisations (i.e., the initial recording of a...

"„Sok szíves üdvözlettel régi barátos...” (“With kind regards, your old friend...”). Coriolan Petranu’s Friendly Connections to the Hungarian Historians. Coriolan Petranu is the founder of modern art history education and scientific research in Transylvania. He had received special education in this field of study that is relatively new in the region. He started his studies in 1911 at the University of Budapest, attending courses in law and art history. During the 1912-1913 academic year he joined the class of Professor Adolph Goldschmiedt (1863-1944) at the Friedrich-Wilhelm University in Berlin. The professor was an illustrious personality from the same generation as art historians Emil Mâle, Wilhelm Vögte, Bernard Berenson, Roger Fry, Aby Warburg, and Heinrich Wölfflin, specialists who had provided a decisive impetus to art historical research during the twentieth century. In the end of 1913, Coriolan Petranu favored Vienna, with its prestigious art historical school attached to the university from the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. There he completed and perfected his education under the supervision of Professor Josef Strzygowski (1862-1941). The latter scholar was highly appreciated for his contributions to the field of universal art history by including the cultures of Asia Minor (Syria, Mesopotamia, Armenia, and Persia), revealing the influence that this area had on proto-Christian art, as well as by researching ancient art in Northern Europe. In March 1920 the young art historian successfully defended his doctoral dissertation entitled Inhaltsproblem und Kunstgeschichte (”Content and art history”). He thus earned his doctor in philosophy title that opened him access to higher education teaching and art history research. His debut was positively marked by his activity as museographer at the Fine Art Museum in Budapest (Szepműveszeti Muzeum) in 1917-1918. Coriolan Petranu has researched Romanian vernacular architecture (creating a topography of wooden churches in Transylvania) and his publications were appreciated, published in the era’s specialized periodicals and volumes or presented during international congresses (such as those held in Stockholm in 1933, Warsaw in 1933, Sofia in 1934, Basel in 1936 and Paris in 1937). The Transylvanian art historian under analysis has exchanged numerous letters with specialists in the field. The valuable lot of correspondence, comprising several thousands of letters that he has received from the United States of America, Great Britain, Spain, France, Switzerland, The Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Hungary, Poland, the USSR, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Egypt represents a true history of the stage and development of art history as a field of study during the Interwar Period. The archive of the Art History Seminary of the University in Cluj preserves one section dedicated to Hungarian letters that he has send to Hungarian specialists, art historians, ethnographers, ethnologists or colleagues passionate about fine art (Prof. Gerevich Tibor, Prof. Takács Zoltán, Dr. Viski Károly, Count Dr. Teleki Domokos). His correspondence with Fritz Valjavec, editor of the “Südostdeutsche Forschungen” periodical printed in München, is also significant and revealing. The letters in question reveal C. Petranu’s significant contribution through his reviews of books published by Hungarian art historians and ethnographers. Beyond the theoretical debates during which Prof. Petranu has criticized the theories formulated by Prof. Gerevich’s school that envisaged the globalization of Hungarian art between the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period and that also included in this general category the works of German masters and artists with other ethnic backgrounds, he has also displayed a friendly attitude and appreciation for the activity/works of his Hungarian colleagues (Viski Károly and Takács Zoltán). The previously unpublished Romanian-Hungarian and Hungarian-Romanian set of letters discussed here attest to this. Keywords: Transylvania, correspondence, vernacular architecture, reviews, photographs, Gerevich Tibor, Dr. Viski Károly "

The Shape of Desire

This monograph is devoted to explore the theoretical and practical dimensions of intermediality and transregional communication in art, highlighting their evolution, transformation, and impact on global culture and interaction. The theoretical foundations of intermediality are analyzed, emphasizing the integration of various media forms and their impact on contemporary art and cultural phenomena. The study examines the origins and current state of transregional communication, assessing its importance for the development of global relations, cultural integration, economic and political cooperation. The monograph synthesizes historical perspectives with contemporary trends, including media theory, cultural studies, and art history, to provide a deeper understanding of these concepts. It emphasizes important points, such as the intermediality of visual and literary texts and the transformative impact of interregional exchanges on artistic practices and social structures. This study is an important resource for scholars and practitioners in the fields of media studies, cultural analysis, and art history, as it offers theoretical foundations and practical approaches for future research. Ting Wen, born in September 1982, is an associate professor and currently a full-time teacher at the Art College of Minzu Normal University of Xingyi in Guizhou Province, China. She obtained her PhD from Nanjing University, with research interests in ethnic arts and culture, art criticism, and art theory. In the past five years, she chaired two provincial-level projects, one municipal-level project, and three university-level projects. Besides, she participated in two projects on National Social Science Fund. Her publications included a translated book “Selected Late Writings of Greenberg”, a monograph “Strategies for Cultivating and Enhancing Aesthetic Abilities of College Students”, and more than 30 academic papers, among which 7 papers were included in core journals. The papers of “Riegl and Wolfflin in the Perspective of Formalist Art History” and “Cultural Sociological Analysis of the Modern Art System” were included in Chinese Social Sciences Citation Index (CSSCI, a Chinese database for core journals), and “Analysis of Gaeml Architectural Culture Characteristics Based on Drum Tower” were included in ISTP.