This daring, intensely personal book challenges both conventional
and feminist ideas about beauty by asking us to take pleasure in
beauty without shame, and to see and feel the erotic in everyday
...life. Bringing together her varied experiences as a poet, art
historian, bodybuilder, and noted performance artist, Joanna Frueh
shows us how to move beyond society's equation of youth with beauty
toward an aesthetic for the fully erotic human being. A lush
combination of autobiography, theory, photography, and poetry, this
book continues to develop the ideas about the erotic, beauty, older
women, sex, and pleasure that Frueh first addressed in Erotic
Faculties. Monster/Beauty examines these issues using a
provocative, often explicit, set of examples. Frueh admiringly
looks at the bodies and mindsets of midlife female bodybuilders,
rethinks the vampire, and revises our ideas about traditional
models of beauty, such as Aphrodite. Above all, she boldly brings
her personal experience into the text, weaving her reflections on
female sensuality with contemporary theory. These linked essays are
as much a performance as they are a discussion, breaking down the
barriers between the personal and the academic, and the erotic and
the intellectual. Frueh writes passionately and beautifully, and
the result is a much-needed exploration of beauty myths and taboos.
EDITORIAL Riesco, Benjamín Ballester
Boletín del Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino,
01/2023, Volume:
28, Issue:
1
Journal Article
After a long wait of more than three years as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, the change of the Chief Curator of the Chilean Museum of Pre-Columbian Art and the renewal of the Editorial Team of ...its Bulletin, the special issue on Art and Shamanism. An ambitious project that initially contemplated 19 manuscripts and that, little by little, matured until it took its final form, made up of 12 articles that are the result of research on the relationship between shamanism and artistic manifestations throughout the American continent and the Iberian Peninsula. As a whole, the published writings express in an extraordinary way the state of the art, the current debates and the new investigations on an anthropological problem as old as it is current, since shamanism is still present, in one way or another,neo or following the ancestral traditions.
This issue of the Bulletin of the Chilean Museum of Pre-Columbian Art includes twelve works on art and shamanism, making use of a variety of tools, methodologies, and concepts. Next, the global use ...of the word shaman, shamanic practice and its applications to archaeology are considered, and an attempt is made to clarify the relationship between art and shamanism. Then, each of the articles collected in this volume of the Bulletin is briefly commented on. Happily, after overcoming various challenges, including the pandemic and a change in the Editorial Team, this volume coincides with the Shamanism exhibition, Visions out of time, held at the Chilean Museum of Pre-Columbian Art. The actions that fall within the shamanic sphere are diverse and variable. Each culture applies a name in the language that corresponds to it. Thus we find behique , mara'akame , machi, and many others. The term shaman offers us the opportunity to use a single word to refer to the ritual activities that lead to the ecstatic state; a category that encompasses the diversity of practitioners who share a series of characteristics, some of which will be listed below. Shamanism occurs in small-scale societies, with low hierarchical manifestations. Consequently, and from a certain point of view, it would not be correct to call complex societies with clear evidence of hierarchies such as those of Chavín, Moche, Wari or Tiwanaku shamanic. However, it might be advantageous to identify shamanic elements in the art of these cultures, in efforts to clarify certain aspects of the iconography that might otherwise remain obscure.
Art-Historical Art Today Sikander, Shahzia; Tai, Xiangzhou; Zhang, Hongtu
Ars Orientalis,
2019, Volume:
49, Issue:
20220203
Journal Article, Web Resource
Peer reviewed
Open access
The articles within this volume highlight diachronous dialogues between artists and artwork created generations earlier. This layered, multivalent practice of invocations and quotations continues in ...works by contemporary artists like Shahzia Sikander, Tai Xiangzhou, and Zhang Hongtu. These artists are not attempting to place themselves within a teleological progression, or to suggest direct relationships between themselves and historic traditions. Rather, the past provides them with a repertoire of forms, techniques, themes, and ideas for expressing present issues. Their art encourages us to deal with uncomfortable stereotypes as well as reified perceptions of cultures and previous eras. It serves as a mirror of today’s world, clothed in the garb of the past.
•There is a new database capturing information about 140,000+ paintings shown at the Paris salon.•Surprisingly, this database shows that portraits were a very commonly displayed genre—although they ...have long been ignored by scholars.•Most portraits displayed were of women.•Many portraits displayed had anonymous or pseudo-anonymous titles; this was previously unknown.
This essay describes a novel dataset that facilitates the quantitative analysis of eighteenth and nineteenth-century French painting. Based on titles listed in the Paris Salon livrets, the dataset assigns detailed keywords indicating the content for each of the more than 148,000 paintings shown at the Salon—the principal French art exhibition of the era—from the seventeenth to nineteenth century. To demonstrate the interest and utility of this dataset, we present a case study about a genre that has traditionally been neglected by both art historians and cultural economists: portraiture. Our analysis shows portraiture was ubiquitous, usually representing 27% of all paintings exhibited in a year—more than any other genre. We also trace the changing demographics of sitters. There were, for example, dramatic increases over time in how many images of women were displayed. We also chart the rise of quasi-anonymous portraiture, where names of sitters do not appear in paintings’ titles but audiences from certain social classes could identify subjects. We ultimately demonstrate how quantitative methods can be fruitfully applied to this art historical dataset, which is now available freely online, and is just one of many similar datasets that can be digitized and studied.
Editorial Schwerda, Mira Xenia
Art in translation,
09/2022, Volume:
14, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
The artist Mona Hatoum aims to “expand the idea of a shaky ground to include the entire world.”1 The articles in this varia issue of Art in Translation discuss the topics of translation and ...transformation, and they underline that the global history of art and visual culture is complex, unexpected, and ever-changing—in some ways resembling Hatoum’s “shaky ground.” This issue’s articles foreground unpublished, original research on intercultural translation. While focusing on specific case studies or people, the articles address broader questions that have been at the heart of art history over recent decades: The authors lead us away from the deceptive paradigm of linear rise and decline and from the question of original and copy, which preoccupied art history for so long. They examine specific routes taken by objects and moments of cultural contact rather than searching for illusive origins, explore the development of specific phenomena, ideas, and symbols, and investigate the cultural, political, and personal context of art, artists, and art historians. Geographically this issue’s essay topics range from East Asia, to Southeast and South Asia, the Middle East and West Africa, with some references to European and North American art histories and art historiographies, thereby illuminating specific chapters in a global, interconnected history of art.
In our modern secular society, theology is capturing progressively less attention and is being granted minimal importance within the wider community. Unjustly so, as this collection of essays ...demonstrates. On the occasion of the centenary of Radboud University (1923-2023), researchers and professors from the Faculty of Theology present a series of easily comprehensible theological insights concerning both human frailties and the greatness of humanity. Using the deadly sins and a few virtues as a guiding framework, these essays explore lighthearted the boundaries, horizons, and ambiguities of human existence.This volume combines perspectives from Biblical studies, church history, systematic theology, and practical theology to address individual challenges and societal discussions. The seven deadly sins provide food for thought on what can go wrong in individual lives and in society. The classic list of pride (superbia), greed (avaritia), envy (invidia), lust (luxuria), gluttony (gula), wrath (ira), and sluggishness (acedia) still affect us. Virtues, on the other hand, are often less actively pursued, yet they inspire us to critically observe our surroundings: love (caritas), justice (iustitia), and fairness (aequitas).These insights often draw from the rich history of Nijmegen's Faculty of Theology. Not to imply that its approach is a unique breeding ground for vices, but rather to acknowledge the joyous occasion that spurred this collection. The compilation wraps up with art-historical reflections on the images that eloquently enhance the contributions.
To write about works that cannot be sensually perceived involves
considerable strain. Absent the object, art historians must stretch
their methods to, or even past, the breaking point. This concise
...volume addresses the problems inherent in studying medieval works
of art, artifacts, and monuments that have disappeared, have been
destroyed, or perhaps never existed in the first place.
The contributors to this volume are confronted with the full
expanse of what they cannot see, handle, or know. Connecting object
histories, the anthropology of images, and historiography, they
seek to understand how people have made sense of the past by
examining objects, images, and architectural and urban spaces.
Intersecting these approaches is a deep current of reflection upon
the theorization of historical analysis and the ways in which the
past is inscribed into layers of evidence that are only ever
revealed in the historian's present tense.
Highly original and theoretically sophisticated, this volume
will stimulate debate among art historians about the critical
practices used to confront the formative presence of destruction,
loss, obscurity, and existential uncertainty within the history of
art and the study of historical material and visual cultures.
In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume are
Michele Bacci, Claudia Brittenham, Sonja Drimmer, Jaś Elsner, Peter
Geimer, Danielle B. Joyner, Kristopher W. Kersey, Lena Liepe,
Meekyung MacMurdie, and Michelle McCoy.
Black Matrilineage, Photography, and Representation: Another Way of Knowing' questions how the Black female body, specifically the Black maternal body, navigates interlocking structures that place a ...false narrative on her body and that of her maternal ancestors. This volume, which includes a curated selection of images, addresses the complicated relationship between Blackness and photography and, in particular, its gendered dimension, its relationship to health, sexuality, and digital culture – primarily in the context of racialized heteronormativity. With over forty contributors, this volume draws on scholarly inquiry ranging from academic essays, interviews, poetry, to documentary practice, and on contemporary art. 'Black Matrilineage, Photography, and Representation: Another Way of Knowing' thus offers a cross-section of analysis on the topic of Black motherhood, mothering, and the participation of photography in the process. This collection challenges racist images and discourses, both historically and in its persistence in contemporary society, while reclaiming the innate brilliance of Black women through personal narratives, political acts, connections to place, moments of pleasure, and communal celebration. It serves as a reflection of the past, a portal to the future, and contributes to recent scholarship on the complexities of Black life and Black joy.
New insights on the reception of Etruscan antiquity in the modernist period.
“L’Étrurie est à la mode”, French archaeologist Salomon Reinach bluntly stated in 1927. Since the beginning of the ...nineteenth century, Etruria had not only been attracting the attention of archaeologists and specialists of all sorts, but it had also been a fascinating and, in some cases, captivating destination for poets, novelists, painters and sculptors from all over Europe. This volume deals with the impact of the constantly expanding knowledge on the Etruscans and their mysterious civilisation on Italian, French, English, and German literature, arts and culture, with particular regard to the modernist period (1890–1950). The volume brings a distinctive point of view to the subject by approaching it from an interdisciplinary and comparative perspective, and by looking at a quite diverse range of topics and artefacts, which includes, but is not limited to, the study of drawings, art works, travel essays, novels, cooking recipes, schoolbooks, photographs, and movies.
By exploring a new paradigm to understand ancient cultures, beyond the traditional ideas and models of “reception of the classics”, and by challenging the alleged fracture between the so-called “two cultures” of humanities and natural sciences, Modern Etruscans will be of interest to scholars from various disciplines. Designed as a learning tool for university courses on the interplay between literature and science in the twentieth century, it is suited as recommended reading for students in the humanities.
Contributors: Francesca Orestano (Università degli Studi di Milano), Chiara Zampieri (KU Leuven), Bart Van den Bossche (KU Leuven), Lisa C. Pieraccini (University of California, Berkeley), Martin Miller (Italienisches Kulturinstitut Stuttgart), Marie-Laurence Haack (Université de Picardie Jules Verne), Gennaro Ambrosino (University of Warwick), Martina Piperno (Durham University), Andrea Avalli (Scuola Superiore di Studi Storici di San Marino).
Ebook available in Open Access.
This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content).
