Arts and Sciences Harvey, Eleanor Jones
The Magazine antiques (1971),
03/2020, Letnik:
187, Številka:
2
Magazine Article
A new exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution examines the influence of naturalist Alexander von Humboldt on the American arts. In focus here: the landscapes of Frederic Church. Harvey focuses on ...the, landscape art by Frederic Church, according to the book Cosmos by naturalist Alexander von Humboldt. Humboldt envisioned Church as a scientist and a poet, capable of distilling the essence of nature while retaining the specific character of the local landscape. Church's acute powers of observation were a perfect match for Humboldt's exultation in the details in nature. And it rang true for Church that the artist should be well read in natural philosophy and observant of nature and its processes, so that he could invest his artworks with scientific truth as well as aesthetic merit. By doing so, Church pushed landscape painting to greater prominence as the genre most capable or conveying Americas cultural ambitions.
...the book reconceptualises colonialism not as the secular domination of bodies and territory, but rather as a particular form of class domination. According to Candiani, rural people understood the ...use value of water in drastically different terms from urban elites, such that the progressive desiccation of the Mexico City hinterland was in essence an instantiation of colonialism. ...it recruited native people to labour in the destruction of the hydrological regime on which their agricultural livelihoods depended, forcing them to adopt new subsistence strategies.
THE PRINCE AND THE PAINTER Koster, John
Wild west (Leesburg, Va.),
02/2020, Letnik:
32, Številka:
5
Magazine Article
Faced with snags and sandbars, the crew had to repeatedly unload and load the boat, and in the process they :ossed some of Prince Max's botanical specimens overboard, till he raised strenuous ...objections. (During the return journey flooding damaged several crates of specimens, while a steamboat transporting other crates caught fire, destroying another precious cache.) Finally, officials at Leavenworth threatened to confiscate the brandy the trio had brought to preserve animal specimens, as the introduction of "ardent spirits" into Indian country was prohibited. ...it was Indian children helped save Prince Max, and Prince Max, through Bodmer's paintings, helped save the Indians- at least in memory-by capt aring their culture before trade goods changed their mode of dress and alcohol and disease devastated their populations.
This study considers William Wordsworth as a utopian writer who critiques late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century institutional representations of the land by configuring alternative ...landscapes. Working with Louis Marin's notion that utopian texts comment upon and reconstruct contemporary society by displacing and projecting its structures into a fictional discourse, the study traces Wordsworth's various dystopian and utopian texts from 1793 until 1815. Addressing long-standing critical readings which lament either Wordsworth's displacements of the imagination for the actual and the natural or his displacement of "actual human issues" through poetic idealizations, a utopian reading shows that displacement itself can be a means of active engagement. The process of such an engagement emerges from Thomas More's Utopia which critiques and seeks to reform Britain's sixteenth-century institutional landscape by reconfiguring it as a "no-place" (or ou-topos) that also is a "good-place" (or eu-topos). Wordsworth configures alternative spaces in which the imagination, nature or a more particular manifestation of them (such as a revised idea of pastoral idyll) is seen to have the potential of prevailing over an institutional landscape. This study shows that the landscapes in Wordsworth's poetry and prose respond to and challenge a broad variety of representations of Britain, Europe and the Americas that appeared in state-sponsored and privately financed geographical texts, ranging from domestic descriptions of picturesque topography to accounts of foreign exploration and colonization, from Britain's first national Ordnance Survey to county atlases sold by subscription to large landholders. By considering Wordsworth's writing in relation to such contexts, this study also participates in the recent re-complication of spatio-geographical theory that has been occurring especially in the fields of sociology and geography. Wordsworth's texts show that he, like many others of his time and like many late twentieth-century theorists, understands the sense of space to be both a product and a producer of social experience. His texts suggest that the first step toward reforming social experience is through the utopian imagination of alternative spaces.
After attaining its independence from Spain in 1821, Mexico was confronted with the task of defining for itself a new political, social and cultural identity. Mexico's history in the 19th century can ...best be described as a period of constant political and social upheaval: the birth of a new nation was neither easy nor peaceful. Mexico's search for its own form of literary expression followed a similar road. For a long time, Mexico's literature continued to be heavily dependent on foreign models. Ignacio M. Altamirano (1834-93) was the first to recognize the need to move away from foreign influences, and also the first to formulate and implement a program for the creation of an autonomous literature. An integral part of his philosophy was the notion that any aspiring new writer should acquire a broad knowledge of Western literature, but at the same time be wary of the dangers of imitation. Altamirano's critical writings and in particular his works of narrative fiction are evidence of the profound commitment with which he worked towards the establishment of a "national literature". Not enough attention has been paid so far to the fact that all but two of Altamirano's works of narrative fiction contain specific references, quotations, and in some cases allusions to German novelists, poets, and dramatists belonging to the period of ca. 1780-1850. The significance of these references shall be explored in the present thesis, together with a possible solution to the mystery surrounding the origin of Altamirano's tale "Las tres flores".
The book highlights how listening practices (or "audile techniques," in Jonathan Sterne's coinage) were involved in constructing conceptions of nature and culture, personhood, and forms of belonging ...in colonial New Granada and in Colombia's early postcolonial period. The voice (and the ear) thus conceived become critical, in the author's view, to the historical articulation of the colony and the postcolony, and in determining the juridical status of different peoples. While the prose is not always easy to penetrate, by publishing in English, the author at least potentially makes this fascinating material accessible to a broader readership interested in historiographical treatment of the relationship between the aural and the oral, the ear and the voice, listening and vocalizing.
Acosta also challenged some of the obstacles to science that derived not from Christianity but from its pagan classical heritage: ...Acosta refuted Aristotle's claim that the Southern Hemisphere ...would be largely uninhabitable because it was a "burning Zone" with firsthand evidence from South America. If the impact of the New World was of such importance for the growth of science, it is odd, too, that the Mediterranean-bound Italy looms so large while the adventurous Iberian nations contributed little to the physical sciences (though recent historiography is more and more emphasizing their contributions to natural history).
The volume presents the neoclassical style as a multivalent and cultural, not just visual, phenomenon that reflected both imperial authority and independence-related ideals. The essays include Susan ...Deans-Smith's examination of the 1796-1803 Tolsá's equestrian portrait of Charles IV in Mexico City, Isaac Sánchez's study of the promotion of classical urban space in late colonial Peru, Paul Niell's research on the 1828 reconfiguration of the Havana Plaza de Armas with the addition of the building known as El Templete as a paradigm of buen gusto, and Carla Boccetti's study of classical architecture and sculpture in early twentieth-century Cartagena de Indias. In order to discern stylistic changes Maya Stanfield-Mazzi considers the modifications to two existing structures inside Cuzco's Cathedral, the main altarpiece and the altarpiece of Christ of the Earthquakes, which she reads as expressions of art, politics, and religion related to "Cuzco's struggles in the independence era" (250), revealing local translations of neoclassicism based on Andean factors.
