Aesthetic Discourse Research Articles

From ‘Primitive’ Artisans to ‘Modern’ Craftsmen: Colonialism, Culture, and Art Education in the Late Nineteenth-Century Punjab

By closely reading the debates on the art school curriculum within the Indian civil and educational bureaucracy in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, this article analyses the fundamental shift in the theoretical and methodological basis of art education in colonial art schools, which were founded for the revival of Oriental arts and craftsmanship through western ideas of visual literacy. A detailed analysis of the founding decades of the Mayo Schools of Art demonstrates the intersection of aesthetic discourses in art education with the Orientalist views of Indian society as a traditional, tribal caste-based society. The colonial sociology of occupational castes became the conduit to recruit and train artisan castes in the Mayo School of Art. While this colonial policy of caste-based education in Punjab favoured artisan castes in their occupational careers, it restricted the enterprising students of artisan families who wished to pursue their careers independently of their hereditary associations.

Modernism after Wagner

The project of art historian Juliet Koss's recently published monograph Modernism after Wagner is a double genealogy of sorts. To a lesser extent, Koss is interested in revisiting and reexamining the history of the term Gesamtkunstwerk, most famously (or infamously) associated with the theoretical and artistic work of Richard Wagner. It is this association that, in Koss's estimation, contributed to the devaluation of the Gesamtkunstwerk in twentieth-century aesthetic discourse. She claims that, due to the growing association of Wagner's oeuvre and thought with fascism, the term became adopted as shorthand in modernist discourse for an artwork that demands a passive and emotionally overwhelmed audience response. Far more, however, Modernism after Wagner proposes a reconsideration of the range of ideas that underlie Wagner's formulation of the “total work of art,” ideas that, over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, become increasingly dissociated from the composer and the label Gesamtkunstwerk. Koss identifies what she takes to be the two most significant of these ideas: the unification of different art forms in a total artwork (one that still retains each art form's distinctness) and a model of spectatorship that requires empathetic and active engagement. Her thesis is that these ideas remained central not only to late nineteenth-century aesthetic discourse and artistic production but also to modernist debates and artwork in the first decades of the twentieth century.1 She is, in essence, constructing an alternative history of the Gesamtkunstwerk, one that looks beyond terminology in order to unearth conceptual affinities and that seeks to move the Gesamtkunstwerk from a peripheral and disreputable position to a central (if often obscured) place in German modernist artistic production and discourse.

The Hermeneutics of Transmission: Deciphering Discourses on Poetry and the Arts in Early Modern Europe (1500-1800)

This article discusses how the constitution, circulation and institutionalization of discourses on poetry and the arts in early modern Europe could best be accounted for from a historical point of view. Pointing to various inconsistencies in the way historians of ideas have traditionally explained the rise of aesthetic discourses, the article examines the usefulness of the tools crafted by historians of the book for the development of such a project. Through an example, the drawbacks of interpretations based solely on serial bibliographies are also addressed, as the author argues for the importance of case studies, grounded in social, cultural and political history, through which various types of aesthetic practices may be made to appear. She also suggests that, to bypass the theoretical and practical deadlocks of traditional Begriffsgeschichte as far as the study of aesthetic practices is concerned, intellectual traditions and the actions that make them possible — that is “actions of transmission” — are to be promoted to the status of primary hermeneutic tools.

The Ethics of Ndau Performance: Questioning Ethnomusicology's Aesthetics

The examination of two contexts of Ndau performance from southeastern Zimbabwe—ceremonial drumming for spirit possession and secular muchongoyo dance/drumming—is an excellent starting point for reopening discussion about the analytical value of aesthetics in ethnomusicology. Members of these communities evaluate performances according to specific ethical values and social expectations. The parameters, values, and expectations that shape Ndau responses to sacred and secular performances can be compared to the legacy of aesthetic discourses in ethnomusicology that emerge from Immanuel Kant. Ultimately, aesthetics seems a counterproductive tool for understanding how communities such as this evaluate local performance practices. Within Ndau communities, the good is coterminous with the beautiful.

At the Vanishing Point: Theater and Asian/American Critique

This essay elaborates a notion of a "subjectless" Asian/American critique, following the work of Kandice Chuh and others but in relation to the specific aesthetic devices available through the theater. This Asian/American critique builds on a Deleuzian relationality specifically developed through a formalist interpretation of playwright Naomi Iizuka's 36 Views and At the Vanishing Point . By placing Asian American studies, theater, and the Deleuzian notion of the fold into a critical constellation, the project rethinks the value of these terms and their utility in unpacking aesthetic discourses and geopolitics.

Creativity in the Margins: Identity and Locality in Ireland's Fashion Journey

Ireland has undergone significant economic changes in the last 170 years: from the destitution of the Great Famine of the 1840s to the affluence of the Celtic Tiger years at the end of the twentieth century. This article examines the relationship of Irish people with fashion, whether as producers of crafted textiles for export to larger centers of culture in the nineteenth century, or as consumers who integrated elements of fashion with folk dress traditions. The effect of Ireland's heritage of folk material culture on the discourse of dress in the cultural nationalism of the early twentieth century is explained. The early flowering of fashion design in Dublin and the international success of designers such as Sybil Connolly and Irene Gilbert is discussed through the use of classic histories of Irish fashion: the subsequent performance of the industry in the freer trade environment of the 1970s and 1980s is assessed. Irish fashion today is building an international profile, while the industry copes with the challenges of multinational retailing and globalization of production. The article concludes by looking at localized fashion discourses, where groups use ritualized display to build a local engagement with the international aesthetic discourse of fashion.

Beyond Inchoate Debris

This paper looks at the ways in which the matter of dust has been dealt with recently in British, US and European cultures, particularly in contemporary art. In their rehabilitation of the minimal, refuse and dust – by which I mainly intend here ordinary dust, in its multi-material mutable obsolescence – a number of aesthetic practices and theoretical discourses of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including commodity studies, museum studies, anthropology, and epistemology, think about and make (things) matter, or matter otherwise. The article will draw attention to the cultural questions posed by dust: in its marking the unstable border between visibility and invisibility, between the past as cherished material memory and/or redundant useless excess, it functions as a powerful testimony to the ‘life of things’ and humans alike, as well as to the power of impurity.

Vom Reden über Stimmungen

Due to the increasing influence of German cultural studies, the issue of Stimmungen has been reconsidered within the field of literary studies. The historical background of Stimmungen becoming part of the aesthetic discourse is being considered, and a new effort is being made to explore the phenomena connected with the concept of Stimmungen, to reflect the resulting methodological problems, and to analyse the possibilities and limitations of the concept. This paper reflects on historical origins and presents an overview of the current state of research in literary studies. Focussing on basic aspects of media theory, it reflects the relationship between literature and knowledge in the context of an aesthetic concept of Stimmungen.

Silence, the Utmost in Ambiguity

In his article Silence, the Utmost in Mario Perniola presents a historical perspective on the meanings and development of the term ambiguity from ancient Greek to the modern age. Perniola's perspective is not a review of different approaches and schools of thought; instead, he presents an alternative philosophical and aesthetic discourse he counter-poses to modern and contemporary cultural positions which he considers useful in order to explain the state of today's art and intellectual discourse. Perniola does so by stressing the significance of silence as the aesthetic attitude that combines contemplation and action. Drawing on the work of Pascal and Gracian and on works by the masters of modern rationalization — Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein — Perniola proposes an intellectual disposition that rejects immediate gratifications and the cacophony of today's deluge of information and thus he reclaims attention, selection, and discretion as functions relevant to aesthetic and ethical values. Mario Perniola, Silence, the Utmost in page 2 of 9 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 12.4 (2010): Thematic Issue Ambiguity in Culture and Literature. Ed. Paolo Bartoloni and Anthony Stephens

El Templete and Cuban Neoclassicism: A Multivalent Signifier as Site of Memory

In this article I explore the production and reception of El Templete, anineteenth-century memorial erected to commemorate the founding ofHavana. This symbolically rich monument participates in the aesthetictraditions of architecture, sculpture and painting, and is a paradigmaticexample of the multivalence of public, monumental art in the latecolonial classicism of Latin America and the Caribbean. Rather thanrepresenting strictly an aesthetic discourse of Spanish colonial power,El Templete underwent a process of local assimilation, whereby classicalforms and academic aesthetics were adapted to the self-representation ofaheterogeneouscolonialcity.Keywords: art, Bourbon Spain, colonialism, Cuba, neoclassicism, visualculture.

Adoptee Aesthetics: A Gendered Discourse

The present article seeks to explore how aesthetic discourses by adoptee artists from South Korea can be said to place the adoptee figure at the intersection between race and gender. By looking at how the adopted self uses art as a site in which to negotiate the question of identity formation, I hope to make apparent the constructive relation between adoptee aesthetic discourse, gender, and race. The analysis thus intends to challenge our notions of identity, gender, and self, precisely by looking at how discourse is performed in order to transform and, eventually, engender our selves.

"This Immense Expense of Art": George Eliot and John Ruskin on Consumption and the Limits of Sympathy

This essay attempts to better our understanding of George Eliot's conservatism by examining a body of ideas about consumption and moral obligation that she and John Ruskin share. I use a discussion of consumer ethics to explore the moral logic of their conservatism by examining the role of the aesthetic within it. Economic consumption and the aesthetic are subjects inextricably connected, not just because the discourses of political economy and aesthetics have a shared origin in eighteenth-century moral philosophy, but also because the discourse of aesthetics has long served to legitimize select modes and acts of consumption. By marking out a limit where one may reasonably cease to sympathize and instead devote energy (and money) to personal gratification, the treatment of consumption in George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871) offers an important articulation of moral thought. Eliot suggests that aesthetic pleasure can make consumption morally defensible, but she also anticipates Pierre Bourdieu's critique of the aesthetic: her novel represents both the display of cultural capital and the exercise of the aesthetic disposition as ways of maintaining social and economic hierarchies. She thus at once critiques and participates in the system within which the aesthetic functions to preserve social and political stasis. Using John Ruskin's economic writings to expose Middlemarch as a novel of consumer ethics, this essay examines Eliot's representation of personal economic consumption as an emergent mode of social and political agency that might operate productively within that stasis.

Markets, identities and the discourses of antique dealing

This paper examines the ways in which market exchanges in the world of antique dealing offer dealers resources for the creation and expression of identity. As such, the paper takes a specific view of identity as discursively produced through interaction. Analysis of interviews with 16 UK antique dealers found that they typically drew on discourses of taste and aesthetics, and of morality and care, to manage their identities. In doing so they mobilized differing (and most often oppositional) constructions of customers, other dealers, antique markets and antique objects. The paper therefore has two key aims: to explore the antiques world as a marketplace institution within which particular sets of discourses circulate, and to examine the intersection of these discourses in dealers’ constructions of self, others and ‘world’. In closing, the paper argues for a fuller application and conceptualization of ‘discourse’ within marketing and consumer research. The author suggests that the hitherto underused concept of ‘marketplace institutions’ might help to understand how discourses and identities are thoroughly embedded in the marketplace.

The coding of aesthetic and thematic discourse in a cinematic mnemonic: The case of Ama Lur (1968)

The deployment of film for purposes of propaganda is well documented, but the makers of the Basque documentary Ama Lur ( Motherland) (1968) committed themselves to far greater experimentation with film language and aesthetics when they attempted to construct Ama Lur as a collage of Basque identity that would impact upon its audience as a mnemonic, a device to aid memory that relies on visual, kinesthetic or auditory associations between more easily remembered constructs. This article contextualizes the making of Ama Lur (the first full-length feature made in the Basque Country since the Spanish Civil War) in the turbulent and increasingly violent decade of the 1960s as it was lived in the Basque Country during the dictatorship of General Franco. Against a backdrop of the emergence of ETA, the makers of Ama Lur sought to both document and make newly relevant a notion of extant and vibrant Basque nationhood. With reference to the theories of time put forward by Henri Bergson, this analysis of Ama Lur seeks to explain its functioning in the service of an oppressed but nevertheless evolving Basque culture and identity.

Rethinking Aesthetic Education

Scholars have continuously debated about the importance of aesthetics in art education and of aesthetic education and have posed numerous questions about the possibility of practicing aesthetics in the educational field. Aesthetic education was first introduced in the structured curriculum of Discipline-based Art Education (DBAE). Since DBAE, the significance of aesthetic education has become manifested, and the meaning of aesthetic education has become recognized. However, aesthetic education in DBAE was not fully developed. The primary reasons for this lack of development include an absence of available curriculum for aesthetic education, problems with aesthetic education related to its birth under the influence of modernism, and the complex and ambiguous meanings that the term aesthetics has. Because of these reasons, it is still difficult to define aesthetic education, which has led to the continued confusion about what aesthetic education is and how to teach aesthetics to children. In addition, some scholars insist that the discourse of aesthetics in art education is useless. Therefore, this study suggests that these difficulties and problems come from a narrow understanding and interpretation of the meaning of aesthetic education. Thus, this study attempts to overcome these problems by redefining the meaning of aesthetics by reexamining the term aesthetics from its origin in order to break through the modernist dichotomy between body and mind, emotion and reason, sense and thought, as well as art and life. Based on this investigation, this study emphasizes the importance of aesthetic education and the possibility to practice it in art education.

Future Directions for Environmental Aesthetics

After half a century, environmental aesthetics successfully expanded the scope of modern art-centred Western aesthetic discourse. I argue that further expansion is in order. First, we should explore the aesthetics of the constituents of the environment, namely artefacts, human activities and social relationships, which determine the quality of life and the state of the world. Second, we need to cultivate aesthetic literacy as well as a normative discourse to steer our aesthetic practice toward a better world-making. Finally, environmental aesthetics needs to be globalised to include rich aesthetic traditions of nature and environment from diverse cultures.

Aesthetics of emptiness and withdrawal: contemporary European art and actually existing democratization

Why, since the late 1980s, have a number of European artists critiqued democracy as the political, critical and aesthetic frame within which to identify their work? How have they done this? And what aesthetic and political discourses have artists proposed in lieu of the democracy they critique? Using these questions as its guide, this article examines the work of Soviet artist Ilya Kabakov, and its influence on artists such as Christoph Büchel and Gianni Motti, to present an alternative to the aesthetics of democratization that have dominated much contemporary art theory in Western Europe, such as the relational aesthetics of Nicolas Bourriaud and the contextual aesthetics of Paul Ardenne. Rather than absorb and reiterate existing discourses of democracy—discourses made especially problematic after 9/11 and during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—this article proposes that post-communist rethinkings of democracy can instead provide different ways for imagining art's political potential, or even the aesthetic potential of politics.

The Exemplary Chaim Rumkowski in Primo Levi’s “La zona grigia”

In his essay A Definition of the Esthetic Experience, Eliseo Vivas offers this description of the signifying effect of art on the perceiving mind: An esthetic experience is an experience of rapt attention which involves the intransitive apprehension of an object's immanent meanings in their full presentational immediacy. (1) Vivas continues, [Intransitive] means to signify that attention is esthetic when it is so controlled by the object that it does not fly away from it to meanings not present immanently in the object; or in other words that attention is so controlled that the object specifies concretely and immediately through its meanings and objective characters. And thus we may contrast esthetic with all other modes of attention by noting that other modes of attention discover in objects not immanent but referential meanings, which is to say, meanings which carry us beyond the object to other objects or meanings not present upon it. (408-9) This experience of concentrated and contained attention is a creative fascination in which meanings, detached from circumambient referential meanings, are reforged. In the novel, self-renewing literary artwork, the endless possible variety of meanings in combination and recombination, in their manifold dense allusivity, all present and absent even in a single reading--these reflexive cross-references--set the esthetic object in unceasing semantic flow. Thus, only homonymy would bind the esthetic and extraesthetic word. Such meanings, which refuse reduction to the univocal, clearly cannot be captured all together at once either in the moment of consumption, or in retrospect. Nevertheless, for Vivas, the experience is one. If each meaning is inscribed in the others that constitute it, what moment could be encapsulated in the definitive paraphrase that might adequately render it to the extraesthetic world? Such a work that could manipulate attention in this way would be sufficient unto itself, autonomous of what lies around it, and, as a consequence, relentlessly ironic. To anticipate my theme: such irony does not lend itself to the establishment of certain moral judgments. The meanings produced in the esthetic experience are, in an ultimate sense, incomprehensible, in part because they can never be present, but also because the reflexive cross-references of terms that cannot be fixed are potentially illimitable. Each manifold meaning infects and modifies the others. Moreover, the self-transforming verbal artifact that does not permit the attention to transgress its borders for the corroboration of its truth by dull, referential meanings, satisfies--and stifles--the will in the play of its forms, hence stifling the activity of judgment. Thus does it preclude complete responsibility, however that may be understood. Esthetic discourse would be profoundly different from, say, the discourse of history, which is ideally capable of falsification by an appeal to extramural fact. Vivas's artwork dwells in secrecy. I would like to employ Vivas's definition of the esthetic as the terminus of a destabilizing epistemological iter in Primo Levi's essay, La zona grigia, the second essay in his last major work, I sommersi e i salvati, which appeared in 1986. Levi begins his essay in the fluent, familiar style of saggistica, proceeds to documentary history in a pivotal moment, and climaxes his essay in the esthetic, much as Vivas defines it, with his description of the impotence that overcomes anyone who would judge a figure as complex as his chosen example, Chaim Rumkowski. Put somewhat differently: the essay begins with pretensions to the propositional only to end in the esthetic and ironic. (2) One consequence of this, I believe, is the deconstruction by the Rumkowski vignette of those parts of the essay that preceded and introduced it, as well as of those that follow it. As we shall see, the figure of Rumkowski is far too vividly singular and fascinating to be contained by any propositional gray zone, whose secondary and derived example it could be claimed to be. …

Absolute Bodies: The Video Puppets of Tony Oursler

Absolute Bodies: The Video Puppets of Tony Oursler

Urban Planning and the Spaces of Democracy: New York of the Great Depression in 42nd Street, Dead End, and The City

Three New York films of the Great Depression and its aftermath, 42nd Street (1932, Lloyd Bacon), Dead End (1937, William Wyler), and The City (1939, Ralph Steiner and Willard Van Dyke), embodied a new political aesthetics in screening urban democratic spaces during moments of social breakdown. This article draws from urban and cinema studies, as well as from social and cultural theory (Lefebvre, Benjamin, Kracauer), to show how these films contributed to a discourse of urban planning and cinematic democratic aesthetics on the possibility of an egalitarian, inclusive, participatory community in diverse city spaces. The article argues that the reshaping of this cultural discourse, through the films’ emphasis on the conflicting material domains of the skyline and the slum, came at the cost of undermining the metropolis and, in The City, of limiting the urban spaces of democracy.