Georges Didi-Huberman is a philosopher of images whose work is overdue for attention from English-language readers. Since the publication of his first book in 1982, he has published 46 essays, mostly ...with the prestigious Editions de Minuit, on topics ranging from monographs on individual artists to critical excursions into political philosophy. He is recognised in France and elsewhere in Europe as one of the foremost philosophers of the image writing today. In Georges Didi-Huberman and Film, Alison Smith concentrates on how Didi-Huberman’s work has been informed by cinema, especially in his major (and ongoing) recent work L’Oeil de l’Histoire (The Eye of History). The book traces the development of Didi-Huberman’s visual thought towards a cinematic sensibility already inherent in his early work on images in relationship to each other. After exploring his increasingly political understanding of the vital role of cinematic montage, it traces his growing understanding of cinema as a medium for expressing a dynamic representation of peoples’ memory and experience, and documents his engagement with contemporary filmmakers such as Laura Waddington and Vincent Dieutre.
For the past thirty to forty years, cultural analysis has focused on developing terms to explain the surpassing of modernity. Discussion is stranded in an impasse between those who view the term ...modernity with automatic disdain—as deterministic, Eurocentric or imperialistic—and a booming interest that is renewing the study of modernism. Another dilemma is that the urge to move away from, or beyond, modernity arises because it is viewed as difficult, even unsavoury. Yet, there has always been a view of modernity as somehow difficult to live with, and that has been said by figures we regard today as typical modernists. McNamara argues in this book that it is time to forget the quest to surpass modernity. Instead, we should re-examine a legacy that continues to inform our artistic conceptions, our political debates, our critical justifications, even if that legacy is baffling and contradictory. We may find it difficult to live with, but without recourse to this legacy, our critical-cultural ambitions would remain seriously diminished. How do we explain the culture we live in today? And how do we, as citizens, make sense of it? This book suggests these questions have become increasingly difficult to answer.
The Bloomsbury Handbook of Sound Art explores and delineates what Sound Art is in the 21st century. Sound artworks today embody the contemporary and transcultural trends towards the post-apocalyptic, ...a wide sensorial spectrum of sonic imaginaries as well as the decolonization and deinstitutionalization around the making of sound. Within the areas of musicology, art history, and, later, sound studies, Sound Art has evolved at least since the 1980s into a turbulant field of academic critique and aesthetic analysis. Summoning artists, researchers, curators, and critics, this volume takes note of and reflects the most recent shifts and drifts in Sound Art--rooted in sonic histories and implying future trajectories.
Crossmappings Bronfen, Elisabeth
2018, 2018-05-22
eBook
The great, influential cultural critic, Elisabeth Bronfen, sets out in this book a conversation between literature, cinema and visual culture. The crossmappings facilitated in and between these ...essays address the cultural survival of image formulas involving portraiture and the uncanny relation between the body and its visual representability, the gendering of war, death and the fragility of life, as well as sovereignty and political power. Each chapter tracks transformations that occur as aesthetic figurations travel from one historical moment to another, but also from one medium to another. Many prominent artists are discussed during these journeys into the cultural imaginary, include Degas, Francesca Woodman, Cindy Sherman, Paul McCarthy, Eva Hesse, Louise Bourgeois, Wagner, Picasso, and Shakespeare, as well as classic Hollywood's film noir and melodrama and the TV series, The Wire and House of Cards.
The article is devoted to the definition of the synthesis of arts in Serge Diaghilev's seasons as a dialogue of cultures. In contrast to the interpretation of the dialogue of cultures as a ...sociological phenomenon, which has become a truism, when the dialogue of cultures in the Diaghilev's seasons is seen as a dialogue of French and Russian cultures, it is provided the interpretation of the dialogue of cultures in a work of art. In particular, in Ihor Stravinsky's "Sacred Spring" staged by Waclaw Nizynski, scenography by Nikolay Rerich, there is a dialogue between pagan and Christian cultures as a synthetic choreographic and musical image. Rerich's scenery introduces another cultural allusion - images of the East. The philosophical meaning of interpretation is the ideological definition of synthetic artistic image as a cultural dialogue. Theoretical works and memoirs of I. Stravinsky and S. Lifar testify that there was a certain school of growth in the stage space of the Seasons. Young people quickly became leading dancers, and then created their own choreographic school – "cubist" in Bronislawa and Waclaw Nizynski, "media" – in Lifar. I. Stravinsky became the founder of a new type of synthetic-type scenicism, where the musicality and picturesqueness of plastic exercises turned into large canvases of various genres – folklore, impressionist, expressionist counterpoint. The philosophy of modern art education in the field of music, choreography and vocal creativity encourages the cultural and historical reconstruction of the experience of leading artists who created unsurpassed masterpieces of European culture in the early twentieth century.
Art shows something of reality as a whole, a reality that exists above or below the directly perceptible world. There is a first reality, or empirical reality, which can be mapped and captured ...through sense perception and is characterized by immediacy; and then there is a second or imagined reality that unfolds beyond direct empirical and experiential observation. While the animal intellect is attracted to the surface, to mere appearances, the human intellect is drawn to what lies beyond the surface. The ability to imagine is a condition of human intellect, being characterized, in Schopenhauer’s terms, by a power of “seeing in things not what nature has actually formed but what she endeavored to form, yet did not bring about” (Schopenhauer, 1969, pp. 186-187). For Schopenhauer, this capacity can be fully engaged not by the “ordinary man, that manufactured article of nature” (ibid., p. 187), but by the man of genius. In contrast, John Ruskin holds that the power of art consists precisely in allowing us to regain what can be called the innocence of the eye, in other words, a kind of childlike perception which remains blind to the meaning of perceived things. (Ruskin, 2006, p. 42) This paper seeks a possible answer to the question of how art ties us to reality.
I argue that the experiences of everyday life are replete with aesthetic character, though this fact has been largely neglected within contemporary aesthetics. As against Dewey's account of aesthetic ...experience, I suggest that the fact that many everyday experiences are simple, lacking in unity or closure, and characterized by limited or fragmented awareness does not disqualify them from aesthetic consideration. Aesthetic attention to the domain of everyday experience may provide for lives of greater satisfaction and contribute to our ability to pursue moral aims.
The Present Prospects of Social Art History represents a major reconsideration of how art historians analyze works of art and the role that historical factors, both those at the moment when the work ...was created and when the historian addresses the objects at hand, play in informing their interpretations. Featuring the work of some of the discipline's leading scholars, the volume contains a collection of essays that consider the advantages, limitations, and specific challenges of seeing works of art primarily through a historical perspective. The assembled texts, along with an introduction by the co-editors, demonstrate an array of possible methodological approaches that acknowledge the crucial role of history in the creation, reception, and exhibition of works of art.
Adorno defendió durante toda su vida lo que denominó la crisis de la ópera, que se extendería desde el final de la Primera Guerra Mundial hasta su muerte en 1969. Entre los años veinte y sesenta del ...siglo XX, no hay una sola década en que no dedique varios textos a esta idea, que le sirve para comprender los diversos periodos históricos en los que desarrolló su obra, desde la Gran Depresión hasta la Guerra Fría, pasando por la Segunda Guerra Mundial. Estudiamos la gestación de esta idea de forma cronológica y mostramos que sus textos están marcados por tres presupuestos: el esteticismo musical, la división entre artes liberales y serviles y el mito del nacimiento de la ópera. Esto nos lleva a concluir el carácter mítico de su postura y nos sirve para entender algunas de sus ideas en torno a la dirección de orquesta, la radio, el disco, la televisión y los teatros de ópera.
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