Actual Works Of Art Research Articles

‘Hear our Voices’: Female popular musicians in post-independence Zimbabwe

Whenever Zimbabwean music is debated in the country or outside, the reflections tend to centre on established male singers such as Thomas Mapfumo, Oliver Mtukudzi, Simon Chimbetu and others. Female singers are on the margin of theoretical works despite the fact that Susan Mapfumo, Dorothy Masuku and Stella Chiweshe have been singing from the 1950s, through the 1970s and certainly up to the present day (in the case of Stella Chiwese). In Zimbabwe today, the performances and creativity of new female singers such as Mbuya Madhuve, Chiwoniso Maraire and Fungisai Zvakavapano2 steal the musical charts. And yet very little research has been done on their work in order to explore the phenomenon of a female singing culture and to explain how they contribute and give shape to the contours of Zimbabwe's national culture. The main aim of this article is to consider the musical contributions of Mbuya Madhuve and Chiwoniso Maraire to the debates on democracy in Zimbabwe. These singers have been neglected even in those studies that have analysed the songs of women such as Stella Chiweshe, Dorothy Masuku and Susan Mapfumo (Kwaramba 1997, Vambe 2004, Makwenda 2005). In analysing the lyrics of Mbuya, Madhuve and Chiwoniso we do not try to link the lives of the singers to their creativity.3 We argue, instead, that what female singers intend their songs to mean, and how these very songs are received by the listening audience, constitute the arena of national culture formation. 2Fungisai Zvakavapano is a well-known gospel singer. An analysis of gospel music in Zimbabwe is the subject of an article to be published in 2007. 3See Viet-Wild, F. 1993. Teachers, preachers and non-believers: A social history of Zimbabwean literature. Harare: Baobab Books. This book uses authors’ biographical details to read meaning into their works of art. The approach is dated and undermines a concerted effort to understand the actual works of art.

The Effectiveness and Use of Digital Portfolios for the Assessment of Art Performances in Selected Secondary Schools

This is a report of an experimental study that focused on adjudicating the art portfolios of secondary art students assessed in both actual and digital forms in order to determine whether art teachers evaluate actual works of art in students' portfolios differently than digital copies of them. The study participants included 178 students of 29 secondary teachers from four school districts in Florida and Indiana. This report includes description of the rationale for the study, goals and objectives of the study, analysis of the data, and discussion of findings of the study. The results suggest that electronic portfolios can be used to reliably estimate student art performances and that scores produced from art teachers' evaluations of digital copies of actual works of art are consistent with scores produced from evaluations of these same works in the actual form.

UNUSUAL SUBSTITUTE MATERIALS IN PAINTINGS, BASED ON THE EXAMPLE OF SOCIALIST REALISM IN EASTERN EUROPE

This paper deals with the widespread use of unusual substitute materials in paintings. In particular, it discusses historical and technological issues related to Socialist Realist painting and the uniquely rich and powerful techniques employed by artists in eastern Europe in the 1950s. During that period, practically any kind of ordinary material might be used to make a work of art. Without understanding the particular working methods involved, appropriate conservation is very difficult. These unconventional materials and techniques are discussed on the basis of literature research, interviews with artists and their families, and the examination and conservation of actual artworks.

Literature as Historical Archive

While it is always desirable to develop new archives, it is especially important for late eighteenth century France. A number of cultural historians have suggested that our sense of historical reality would be augmented if it were infused by the information provided by art and literature. The last half of the eighteenth century gives reason to believe that literature offers a particularly useful opening onto the reality of people's lives. Because the methods of literary patronage had changed, for the first time the financing of publication required a mass market. Fortunately, literacy was increasing significantly, thus producing sufficient numbers of paying customers to support a burgeoning publishing industry. People read for entertainment and, it seems, for information. Writers increasingly claimed their works were realistic. Numerous scholars have used these works for illustration of conclusions reached about the period; a few have turned to them as the source of indications of that reality. While literature in one way or another reflects the period of its creation, better methodology needs to be developed for using literature as an opening onto the age. Single works do not in isolation provide trustworthy insights into the thought, feelings, customs, and details of everyday life. Still, reliability increases as the novels and plays included in the archive become more numerous and common elements emerge. Multiplicity of example and congruence of significance are essential for using literature and the arts as reliable historical archives. If a large percentage of the actual works of art not only turn around but focus, for example, on the reasons for emigration, or the anguish of divorce, or incest, or suicide, it seems obvious that literature is responding to contemporary conditions and attitudes. Of course, any conclusions are particularly useful when they are buttressed by other, traditional resources.

Real spaces: world art history and the rise of Western modernism

David Summers sets forth that current formalist, contextual and post-structural approaches fail to provide an adequate account of all art, particularly art produced outside the Western tradition. He argues that there are profound problems right at the heart of Western thinking about art, and his new framework is an attempt to resolve these problems. At the core of the argument is a proposal to replace the notion of the 'visual arts' with that of the 'spatial arts', comprising two fundamental categories: 'real space' and 'virtual space'. Real space is the space we share with other people and things: the fundamental arts of real space are sculpture (the art of personal space) and architecture (the art of social space). Virtual space - which always entails a format in real space (thus making real space the primary category) - is space represented in two dimensions, as in paintings, drawings and prints. Adopting a wide definition of art that in principle embraces anything that is made, and underpinning his arguments with detailed examination of artefacts and architecture from all over the world, Summers develops his thesis in a series of chapters that broadly trace the progress of human skill in many different traditions: from the simple facture of the first tools to the sophisticated universal three-dimensional grid of modern technology, which he describes as 'metaoptical' space. In a sequence of far-reaching and revealing discussions of facture, places, centres, three-dimensional and planar images, virtuality and perspective, and the centreless metaoptical world of Western modernism, Summers creates a conceptual framework that always relates art to human use, and enables us to treat all traditions on an equal footing within universal categories. At the same time, this infrastructure can help to understand the dynamics of opposition and conflict both within and between cultures. Formalism and other theories of art are not rejected. Rather, in this wider context they can be identified and evaluated within the Western tradition whence they originated, without some naive universal validity being ascribed to them. Within this broad plan there is incredible wealth of detail and energy of description. The author's constant engagement with actual works of art is always lively and convincing; his analysis of the concrete metaphors that lie behind our critical vocabulary is revealing and thought-provoking; and his clear-headed and courageous engagement with important issues is most impressive. Some of the author's language and terminology may, for the novice, prove an alluring challenge at first. However, Summers writes with exceptional clarity: new terms are carefully defined and explained in such a way, that the reader will not only understand them but also appreciate why such terminology is essential to a work of such profound philosophy. What is striking is that the author is always using language in order to think about the real world, and not in order to retreat into a closed world of academic scholasticism. He insists that all art is made to fit human uses, and can never be separated from the primary spatial conditions of those uses. With its universal scope and its sympathetic understanding of the innumerable forms that art can adopt, this is a book that will stimulate people to think in entirely new and fruitful ways about the human purposes of art, and also to think more deeply and critically about the intricate relations between art, political order and technology.

Picasso: the sculptures

Twentieth-century art can be understood fully only from a perspective that ignores boundaries between countries and continents. Werner Spies has always had on open eye and mind for developments on both sides of the Atlantic, and his critical appraisals of trends in both Europe and the USA continue to be a stimulating feature of writing on art at an international level. He has followed events in the international art world for over 40 years, as a close friend of artists, as a teacher, as a critic, and as a curator of major international exhibitions. Spies's collected writings first appeared in German in 2008. That enormously successful edition is already out of print, but it is now being made available to an international audience in English for the first time. The 10 volumes, beautifully printed with over 1,400 full-colour illustrations, and presented in a slipcase designed by Andreas Gursky, is destined to be a collector's item The significance of these writings lies in the author's varied approach to his subjects and especially to his intense engagement with actual works of art, derived from his long friendship with many artists and countless visits to their studios. In their wealth of detail, and in their refl ection of personal encounters and impressions, Spies's writings constitute an important resource on the art of the twentieth century.

Reading the Painterly Text: Clarence Major's "The Slave Trade: View from the Middle Passage"

Many writers of the black diaspora have embarked upon figurative journeys to the troubled waters of the in their poetry, fiction, and criticism. Their attempts to wrest meaning from this historical site of terror speak to compelling identification of the as the originary moment of the black diasporic migration. In his well-known modernist poem Middle Passage (1945), Robert Hayden presents redemptive critique of the past through melange of imagined voices that ultimately articulates passage through suffering to affirmation. More recently, in her widely acclaimed novel Beloved (1987), Toni Morrison turns to the to chart the possibilities for individual and communal agency in the face of radical dislocation and systematic terror. Charles Johnson's controversial postmodern allegory of African American history, (1990), places its protagonist on mid-Atlantic voyage that radically alters his conception of personal identity, leading him to understand the self as fluid rather than fixed, formed by each person's confrontation with an Other. Finally, in an important recent critical work, Black Atlantic (1993), Paul Gilroy attempts to rethink modernity through the history of the black Atlantic, seeing in its process of cultural mutation and restless (dis)continuity challenge to established categorizations of history and nationalist definitions of culture (2). Contrasting with traditional narratives of the search for origins in some utopian or prelapsarian past, these figurative returns to the troubled history of the are suggestive of black writers' continuing struggle with issues of identity and representation in their art. In Slave Trade: View from the Passage (1994), Clarence Major makes his own distinctive voyage across the Atlantic in poem that is devastating in its attack on the discourse of empire and subtle in its analysis of the difficulties inherent in the project of fashioning an identity through art. In contrast to the speakerly text Henry Louis Gates describes as characteristic of fiction growing out of the African American folk idiom, Major's poetry typically offers instead what might be called painterly text - one that presents readers with complex collage of historical, literary, and philosophical allusions, street talk, cartoons, puns, folk tales, children's songs, advertising slogans, and references to international locales. A talented painter as well as writer, Major has recently described himself as a visual thinker, one who tends to make connections between things more on the basis of visual associations than verbal or logical ones (McCaffery and Kutnik 132). Building its critique through images drawn from specific art works and from repeated themes in Western iconography, Slave Trade draws heavily on Major's technique of associative collage to document European culture's normalization of its own history of conquest through the representation of black people in hierarchical history of progress. By drawing upon actual works of art to illustrate the various ways in which blackness has been framed by the designs of others and by offering its own reconfigurations of specific European landscapes, Major's poem ultimately raises difficult questions about representation, self-expression, and the emancipatory potential of art, while simultaneously delineating the special province of the painterly text. I. Hope, Fallacious Hope / Where is Your Market, Now? - J. M. W. Turner, from poem displayed with his painting The Slave Ship (1840)(1) Charting dizzying route over three continents and several time periods, Slave Trade is composed of four major sections that move from the African past, to Europe, to the Americas, and, finally, to the present-day United States. From this comprehensive vantage point the poem attempts to negotiate the crisscrossing conceptual routes of triangular trade whose operating principles are Christianity, commerce, and colonialism. …

Pleasure: Reflections on Aesthetics and Feminism

For much of this century two questions governed formulation of theory in aesthetics: What is aesthetic experience? and What is a work of art? Theories of perception and appreciation were framed in response, along with correlative concepts of objects of appreciation, notably works of fine art. The more specific questions of field-involving topics such as expression, criticism, interpretation, and ontology-were cast as corollaries to these two basic questions. The overall result was a collection of theories that by 1951 John Passmore found dreary in its attempt to generalize about experience and impose unity upon diverse riches available from actual works of art. I Whatever justice of Passmore's original complaint, as century nears its close, one can hardly object that there is too much uniformity in subjects addressed by aesthetics. Only remnants of interest in aesthetic experience remain, and questions about nature of art have been transformed by an interlude of Wittgensteinian skepticism about definability. While some would laud diversity present in aesthetics today, others might decry its cost. Indeed field presently displays such variety that it is hard to discover any obviously central questions defining it at all. Unified theory has given way to an anarchic if fascinating assembly of concerns perhaps only loosely related. One of most obvious signs of breakdown of confident, systematic theorizing is prevalence of suspicion that quest for a common foundation for taste and critical appreciation that had propelled philosophy of art for centuries is in principle not a fruitful endeavor. This doubt has arisen from multiple sources, though surely one of strongest has been feminist scholarship: its challenge to claims about universal human nature, its support for pluralist interpretations of art, and its own brand of skepticism regarding the canon of great works. For some time my own interests in aesthetics and in feminism appeared to run parallel yet mutually exclusive courses, but it seems to me now that philosophical aesthetics and feminist views of culture have begun to dovetail and to share certain concerns and orientations. Philosophical aesthetics is not by and large taking note of this, however, and in first section of this essay I argue that feminist perspectives provide a vantage from which appearance of breakdown in unified theorizing can be seen to have an underlying order and pattern.2 Thus at first I shall emphasize a potential harmony between feminist critiques and recent directions in aesthetics. Then in second section I shall focus on one of subjects that has all but dropped from view in reshuffling of theoretic concerns: aesthetic appreciation or pleasure. I argue that this concept is urgently in need of reexamination, a need that is especially evident when we consider feminist alternatives to traditional idea of aesthetic pleasure.

Les Commentaires de Lorenzo Ghiberti dans la culture florentine du Quattrocento

The Commentaries of Ghiberti in the Florentine culture of the Quattrocento. Ghiberti’s Commentaries have so far been little considered in the studies of this artist, but they deserve a closer look in the context of Quattrocento writings. The text presents considerable difficulties both in interpretation and in translation. The author of the present article attempts to deal with some of these difficulties, putting forward some hypotheses about the obscure circumstances in which the text was written, and underlining some other outstanding points. Ghiberti draws attention to the importance of the multi-disciplinarity which is necessary for the training of artists, and also stresses the fact that it is the mastery of theoretical texts on art which distinguishes the artist from the mere artisan-practitioner. Dealing with art history from Antiquity, Ghiberti more or less follows the model of Pliny, paying closer attention to the works which have might actually have been able to see. He attempts to built up a real critical discourse around these works. As for other humanists of his time, classical Antiquity remains for Ghiberti a major reference, both in the writings conserved and in the actual works of art. Ghiberti himself possessed a real private collection of such classical works. As for the contemporary works of his period, Ghiberti paints a broad panorama, based on geographical schools and following a chronological scheme inspired by the notions of the progress, the death and the rebirth of art. He also puts forward some personal preferences, based on the subjective value of the works considered. Ghiberti’s Commentaries also throw much light on the artist’s own career, giving details which are useful for the history of art in general. The Commentaries, however do not represent an autobiography but a critical text mainly devoted to works of art in their material reality.

Dynamic Eye Accommodation Evoked by Apparent Distances

A three-dimensional optometer (TDO), which can measure simultaneously three major ocular functions in a working environment, was used to measure the visual responses of human subjects viewing: (1) actual artworks and (2) corrugation presented by moving random dots on a cathode ray tube (CRT). Measurements were performed in natural viewing conditions on two emmetropic females. Both subjects demonstrated distinct accommodative responses for the stimuli presented at a fixed distance. The results indicate that the accommodation generally shifts in accord with changes of perceived distance. The usefulness of the TDO was demonstrated in these experiments.

Neural Art: Works Based on Concepts of the Nervous System

My work, which I call neural art, is based on a scientific understanding of the nervous system. Neural art combines my interests and professional training in art and physiological psychology. I began developing these ideas about twelve years ago while I was both painting and practicing psychology. I felt that there were new problems to be solved, and I wanted to achieve a personal integration of my activities. In line with most physiological psychologists, I started by assuming that our artistically related experiences, like all experiences, are the result of neural activity but, unlike other experiences, are generated by art objects in the environment [1]. Furthermore, it seemed that this activity of the nervous system is essential to art, or at least is significant. In moving from these assumptions to actual works of art, I considered a number of approaches. The approach I chose to develop actively involves selecting certain features or characteristics of the nervous system as the basis for my art work, in the way many artists select features of their experience or environment as material for their art. For example, a painter of still life first selects the objects to be portrayed-apples, tin cans, dead fish, or silk purses. Most artists then try to convey the objects' underlying essence, using color, form, and space. Instead of selecting objects, I select aspects of the nervous system as the elements of my art. These aspects are tangible elements as well as conceptualizations of the way the nervous system functions. This approach is based in part on ideas developed by C. H. Waddington [2], who pointed out striking similarities in structure and form between twentieth-century painting and the natural sciences. For example, he suggested that the major concern of modern physicists probing the underlying structure of matter is similar to modern abstract artists' 'retreat from likeness', probing the underlying structure of reality. At another level, he showed the parallel between the extradimensionality of relativity theory in physics and of cubism in art. These and other examples of formal features common to art and the natural sciences suggested that I could self-consciously take certain properties in science and use them to develop a specific art form. This is what I have attempted in my work, using the nervous system as the scientific starting point. To identify and develop these features, I began by defining a nervous system conceptually and by stripping away, as much as possible, the specifics of ion flow and detailed molecular structure. Using this approach, a nervous system can be defined in either structural terms (anatomy) or functional terms

College Museum Notes

Somewhat overlooked in the midst of the celebrations and the nationwide publicity occasioned by the formal presentation to the nation of the great gift of works of art by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation last year was the “Study Collection Program” which was an integral and anything but negligible part of this huge art project. The nature of the activities of the Kress Foundation in the arts cannot but be well-known to anyone interested in the fine arts in the United States. Through publications of all varieties, the nature of the stupendous gift of the Foundation to the National Gallery and to the eighteen museums scattered across the nation, from the Eastern Seaboard to Hawaii, has already been given the attention due it. Only mentioned in passing, however, has been the Study Collection Program which one might consider of even greater importance to teaching institutions who concern themselves with the study of the history of art. To be sure, even the great gift to the National Gallery and to the other large museums has, beyond its obvious value, an aspect making it particularly important for advanced study in the field. As a result of the labors of its Research Curators, the late William Suida, and now Mrs. Fern Rusk Shapley, the Foundation has so thoroughly studied and documented the hundreds of paintings and sculptures which were presented to the country in December, that this data alone forms a body of research materials of inestimable value for future scholars in the field. In spite of the vastness of the scope of the whole Kress program, however, one must admit that munificent gifts of works of art have been made to museums in this country before and it is not for this alone that the Kress Foundation Program merits such a unique position in the history of American philanthropy in art. It does so, primarily, for the truly transcontinental scope of its benefaction and even more, for its concern with the future appreciation of all these works of art through providing, as an integral part of its program, colleges and universities with original works of art for use as study material, directing attention thereby to a study of actual works of art.

The life and relining of guns

Temperature-related degradation of pure synthetic as well as partly oxidised natural vivianite has been studied by high-temperature X-ray diffraction (HT-XRD) covering the whole extent of the temperature-related stability of its structure. While temperatures around 70 °C are already damaging to vivianite, exposition to 160 °C results in complete amorphisation of both the vivianite and its oxidation products. As indicated by Mössbauer spectroscopy, temperature-induced oxidation of vivianite starts at 90 °C. To study the occurring structural as well as accompanying colour changes in more detail, model vivianite paint layer samples with different historic binders were prepared and subjected to increased temperatures. Exposition to 80 °C caused pronounced colour changes of all the samples: ground natural blue vivianite became grey – a colour change which has been described in actual works of art. Regarding the binders, the oil seemed to facilitate the transfer of heat to vivianite’s grains. To simulate conditions of conservation treatment under which the painting is exposed to increased temperatures, oil-on-canvas mock-ups with vivianite were prepared and relined in a traditional way using iron. The treatment affected preferentially larger grains of vivianite; the micro-samples documented their change to grey, and their Raman spectra showed the change from vivianite to metavivianite.