Aesthetic Utopia Research Articles

Aesthetic Utopia, Revolution in Daily Life and Identity Construction of Peasant Paintings

Aesthetic Utopia, Revolution in Daily Life and Identity Construction of Peasant Paintings

Joseph Roth’s anti-American utopia

The article is devoted to the novel Job [Hiob] (1930), written by the Austrian Joseph Roth about the life of a Russian Jew named Mendel Singer. Upon his emigration to America, he is subjected to trials not unlike the long-suffering biblical character — a cruel test of faith followed by last-minute miraculous salvation. Roth’s narrative strategy rests on the substitution of the empirical picture of the world with the spiritual reality of a religious mind. By contrasting the poetics of realism with the truth of the eternal myth, Roth insists on an artist’s right to depict reality from the metaphysical perspective of the absolute future. This material provides the background for the article’s discussion of the conflict between social adaptiveness and culture, which not only are mutually conditioned but also tend to develop in stark contradiction with each other. Roth’s protagonist, who embodies the Jewish idea of becoming a society’s opponent, remains on the culture’s side. He survives America’s excruciating test, and it is only through the mythological model of Job at the core of the novel that the story has a happy ending — a triumph of a religious and aesthetic utopia.

Szybkie samorództwo blagi. Schulz, Deleuze i kwestia interpretacji

The essay is a polemic against Idit Alphandary’s article, “Aesthetic Falsehood and Moral Emotions in Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass and The Hourglass Sanatorium.” The author notes that the strong interpretive theses of Alphandary’s article often turn out to be false, as they are based on Celina Wieniewska’s translation errors, as well as research presuppositions aimed at linking Schulz to Deleuze and Guattari’s category of “becoming-other.” Proving that the scholar took shortcuts in her interpretation, the author proposes a counter-interpretation according to which Schulz is no postmodernist, but a modern aesthetic conservative: in his vision, the world can only be saved by beauty. When beauty is removed from this world, life ceases to make sense, in view of which the only subject worth the effort is the subject of aesthetic contemplation. There is no deterritorialization in Schulz’s topology, instead there is an extremely strong aspiration for reterritorialization: for closure, for self-sufficiency, for autonomy, for slamming down the walls of the aesthetic fortress, for establishing a subjective center of the world that transforms reality into a delightful spectacle. Why does Alphandary misrepresent Schulz? Because she needs him as an ally in the common cause of aesthetic renewal of a world subjected to modern processes of secularization. She is not alone in this claim, for Schulz intensely attracts minds eager to view reality through the colorful panes of art. What the author fails to understand, however, is that this essentialist aesthetic utopia not only has nothing to do with the Deleuzian critique of the subject as a punctuated center of representation, but is its radical negation. Nor does she understand that modern aesthetic metaphysics (or metaphysical aestheticism) does not open the temporal horizon at all, but rather closes it (thus eliminating the transition to ethics), as evidenced by the image of the aesthetic fortress as a metaphysical asylum hinted at by Schulz in “The Republic of Dreams".

Su Shi’s “Transforming into Bamboos” and John Keats’ “Negative Capability”: A Comparative Study

The seemingly identical artistic terms put forward respectively by the Chinese poet Su Shi and English poet John Keats, “Transforming into Bamboos” and “Negative Capability” contain significant differences due to their distinct cultural context and the poets’ personal experience. Firstly, their subjective mentalities are different. Rather than the total repression of human faculties and the Taoist world-weary attitude, Su Shi advocates an initiative subject, a fully charged mind with a deep humanistic concern; while for Keats, a state of passiveness and receptiveness overwhelms the exercise of intelligence and reason. Secondly, their ways of approaching “Truth” are different. Su Shi values both talent and hard practice, together with a dialectical attitude towards language and media while Keats emphasizes a dispossessed ego, an imaginative soul，a chameleon quality, and a full trust on language and symbols. Thirdly, the claimed “Truth” they are pursuing are different. For Su Shi, the goal of “Transforming into Bamboos” is to catch Li(理) , a Confucian variant or derivation of Tao while what Keats looks for through “Negative Capability” is an aesthetic utopia where he finds justice for his art and himself under an age of industrialization.

An Intellectual and a Peasant in Gleb Uspensky’s Cycle “Peasant and Peasant Labor”: Dynamics of Interaction in Context of Idea of “Merging with People”

The cycle of essays by G. I. Uspensky “The Peasant and the Peasant Labor” in the aspect of the actual for Russian literature of the second half of the XIX — early XX centuries problems of relations between the people and the intellectuals are analyzed in the article. The crisis in the study of the “peasant” cycles of Uspensky, caused by the predominance of ideological interpretation, is stated. It is argued that Uspensky finds the key to understanding the peasantry not in the socio-economic conditions of his life, but in the field of aesthetics. The point of convergence, in which the peasant and the intellectual appear as equal subjects of communication, is, according to Uspensky, the aesthetic attitude to work. An implicit correspondence is established between peasant labor and the creative effort of the artist. Therefore, the intellectual turns out to be a necessary mediator in the process of the peasantry acquiring its own “voice”. It is proved that the aesthetic utopia in the cycle “Peasant and Peasant Labor” was crushed by the ethical maximalism of the writer. The peasant economy is represented by the Uspensky reasonably organized order, the anthroposphere, in which the working peasant was likened to the monarch and the Creator. In turn, the intellectual was declared an impostor, marked by the “antichrist” seal. In Uspensky’s creative consciousness, the aesthetic and ethical found themselves in a tragic and hopeless contradiction, and the prospect of “merging with the people” was illusory.

Vivir la transparencia

At the beginning of the 20th century, the idea of the glass house fascinated many artists and writers of the European avant-garde. Against the background of urban densification, the ideal of a house with transparent walls questioned the value of intimacy and the attachement to the feeling of homeliness. The dream of an open space where the borders between the inside and the outside, locality and universality, the private and the public sphere would vanish, pervades the writings of Paul Scheerbart, André Breton and Walter Benjamin. First an aesthetic utopia, then a political utopia, the dream of the glass house eventually transformed into the nightmare of totalitarian surveillance. This article highlights the fantasies that crystallised around this unsettling utopia and explains the reasons for its decline.

The Contemporary Disintegration of Aesthetic Utopia and Its Paradoxical Form

The Contemporary Disintegration of Aesthetic Utopia and Its Paradoxical Form

Notas para una genealogía de códigos de vestir y tecnologías estetizantes en la escuela colombiana

This article shows an analysis of the schoolchild’s construction from a series of aestheticizing technologies that constitute a child’s body in which the aesthetic utopia of modern school is inscribed. The paper, derived from an archaeological–genealogical research about school uniform and dress codes in the Colombian school during the late twentieth century and the early twenty– first century revolves around the following questions: What enabled the emergence of some discourses about school bodies, appropriate appearance and attire in the Colombian school? How did the school subject became a properly uniformed, seemly, neat, respectful and beauty person?

The Politics of Aesthetics and the Hatred of Democracy according to Jacques Rancière

Among readers of Jacques Rancière there is a discussion about the possibility of aesthetics substituting for real political action. This is because while the French author elaborates on the conception of the emancipated spectator, he states that the political task of art cannot be the removal of the spectator from her “passive” condition into the dimension of political action, but only the suspension of the relationship between “active” and “passive”. However, in Aisthesis, published in 2011, Rancière warns the reader that it is not a case of abandoning the aesthetic utopia, even if any teleological view is withdrawn. In this article, I intend to discuss these paradoxes by confronting the considerations of Le Spectateur émancipé and La Haine de la démocratie, trying to show that if politics itself presupposes action, the politics of aesthetics must be understood as a non-identification process that takes subjects out of the places that were “addressed” to them beforehand. In La Haine de la démocratie one of the symptoms of the crisis of representative democracy is presented by the fact that it produces oligarchies and, on the other hand, new social dynamics appear as the conquest of a new citizenship that confronts these political oligarchies. Noting that demonstrations today, whether in Turkey, Spain, or New York, are similar to artistic happenings, Rancière can say that where there is aesthetics there is democracy. Understanding this last statement is the aim of the present article.

The venetian mirror: Pavel Pavlovich Muratov’s obrazy Italii (1924) and the literature of art

)Criticism has not sufficiently investigated the complex aesthetic program of the threevolumeObrazy Italii (1911–1924) of Pavel Pavlovich Muratov (1881–1950), art historian, critic, bellelettrist, and an exemplary type of the “renaissance man” of Russian modernism.In its combination of art criticism, personal anecdote, biographical sketch, lyrical digression,philosophical speculation, and history, Muratov’s text exemplifies the genre of the literature ofart modeled on John Ruskin’s threevolume Stones of Venice (1851–1853), and informed by hisreadings — and translations into Russian — of, most notably, Walter Pater, Vernon Lee, andBernard Berenson. Composed over a thirteenyear period marked by dramatic ruptures in the historical and cultural continuity of Europe and Russia, as well as dislocations in the author’s life, Muratov’s textmay be read as an evocation of a humanist aesthetic utopia that stands as an alternative to thefractured temporality and fractured identity of his own historical moment. This paper argues thatMuratov finds a relief from his anxiety over the dislocations of the present historical moment bymodeling a practice of reading the past through its artistic and architectural monuments.This practice is allegorized in the 1922 short story “Venetian Mirror” [«Venetsianskoe zerkalo»], which, it is proposed, projects the Italy of the Renaissance as an alternative site for aRussian cultural identity that, in Muratov’s view, has been vitiated and voided by World War I andthe Bolshevik Revolution.Keywords: Pavel Pavlovich Muratov, Obrazy Italii/Images of Italy, “Venetian Mirror,” Venice,Silver Age, Russian aestheticism, the image of Italy in Russian modernism, literature of art, aesthetic essay, aesthetic travelogue, ekphrasis, palimpsest.INTRODUCTION

Modos de hacer / Modos de ver / Modos de pensar (Arte sin supersticiones)

Walter Benjamin’s famous theses about the “reproducibility” of the artwork was the beginning of an era in which Art seems to have conquered a freedom of movement and a fluidity never before known, breaking with its dependence on the ritual of the places sacred and the worship of images. Thereafter, images come to meet us without offering what was once looked for at them, something transcendent. This article reviews the ideas of Benjamin and its reinterpretation by John Berger to expose how Jacques Rancière criticizes them and to show finally how these three philosophers are opening the door to the arrival of an aesthetic utopia. It consists on thinking that Art does not teach us anything, it does not impose any truth. It calls us to venture into the forest of things and signs, it requires us to re-articulate what we see and what we think about what we see, without any image of a purpose or a goal to achieve.

The Distribution of Emotions: Fassbinder and the Politics of Aesthetics

From the very beginning, cinema has been accompanied by an aesthetic utopia: the utopia of an image that in one and the same act permits a world to be understandable in its legality and experienceable as a physical-sensual being-in-the-world. It can be traced from classic film theory—e.g., the writings of Eisenstein and Benjamin—to recent developments in aesthetic thinking, such as the work of Rancière, where it reappears as the “Politics of Aesthetics.” This essay proposes to reexamine Fassbinder's early filmmaking in the light of this “Utopia Film.” It argues that Fassbinder's staging of the group, especially in Beware of a Holy Whore (1971), can be understood as an attempt to show how the intertwining of desire and dominion in personal relationships mirrors social power structures. Beware of a Holy Whore is a thoroughly political film because it transforms an intellectual analysis of these structures into an aesthetic experience for spectators.

EDUCAÇÃO ESTÉTICA: A FORMAÇÃO GLOBAL DOS HOMENS SOB O IMPERATIVO DO PRAZER E DA LIBERDADE

The idea of this article is to present the aesthetic education as a solution for the split of the man in body (sensitivity) and reason, understanding this split as an structural characteristic of the ocidental modern society. Such critical one of the culture appears in Marcuse, in Eros and Civilization, and is through it that we will visit some basic authors to the aesthetic question, such as Kant, with its notion of pleasure, beauty, reflection and dialogue, and Schiller, with its aesthetic utopia, where the playful impulse intends to reconcile sensual and formal impulses (rational). Through this trajectory, we intend to still point, that indirectly, to the recuperation of the education as global formation of the human being.

Moscow and Petersburg: The City in Russian Culture by Ian K. Lilly (review)

896 Reviews The afterword, 'Inscribing Otherness: Polish-American Writers after the Great Divide', is ambitious in its scope but rather superficial in its conceptualization of the emigre discourse. Gasyna's mechanical transfer of Edward Said's thoughts on Orientalism to the Polish-American scene is not convincing since from 1956 Poles (unlike Oriental intellectuals) spoke for themselves and their own culture through limited publications in English (the most prominent authors being Kridl, Milosz, Krzyzanowski, and Zamoyski). However, the richness of this afterword lies in the information it provides regarding emigre presses, publishers, on-line resources, pub? lications, and academic centres documenting Polish emigre culture and founded on the American continent. Overall, the volume presents a valuable source for students, scholars, and readers interested in (intellectual) emigration. It is a highly recommended addition to the reading lists for courses on Central and Eastern European culture. University of Glasgow Elwira M. Grossman Moscow and Petersburg: The City in Russian Culture. Ed. by Ian K. Lilly. Notting? ham: Astra Press. 2002. x+120 pp. ?16. ISBN 0-946134-67-7. The six essays ofthis volume explore the existing myths and representations ofthe two rival Russian capitals, Moscow and Petersburg. The firsttwo focus on Moscow and the Moscow text. In her essay 'Representing Moscow in 1812: Sentimentalist Echoes in Accounts of the Napoleonic Occupation', Sara Dickinson reconfirms the myth of Moscow as the centre of 'sincere, intimate and familial, patriarchal, comfortable' Russia in the light of Napoleon's attack on Moscow in 1812, drawing on a great variety of letters, poems, and prose of the period. Continuing the theme of Moscow as a warm and convivial place in his 'Female Sexuality in the Pre-Revolutionary "Moscow Text" of Russian Literature', Ian K. Lilly examines Moscow's 'femini? nity' in various literary sources. The metaphors of the fertile 'Mother Moscow' and 'the stay-at-home matron' are extended by the analysis of female characters, ranging from the bereaved bride to the femmefatale. Moscow's femininity comes out in contrast to the cult of the transvestite Ksenia Petrova in the Petersburg text, which is explored by George E. Munro in 'The Petersburg of Catherine II: Official Enlightenment versus Popular Cults'. The myth of the 'enlightened' capital is challenged by the fact that the city also became home to the self-castrators, skoptsy. In 'The Poetics of the Street in Blok and Guro' Milica Banjanin parallels the re? presentation of St Petersburg in Blok's poetry and Guro's poetic prose, observing a movement from the 'hazy symbolist vision of the street to the seemingly disjointed, fragmented world of the 20th century' (p. 66). In the following essay, ' "Looking Back in Extreme Anguish": St Petersburg in the Autobiographic and Collective Memory of the 1920s', Ekaterina Yudina investigates the portrayal of a 'death' of Petersburg in the refusal to admit to the changing reality in the 1920s. This anguished depiction of Petersburg is challenged by Emily Johnson's reading of Nikolay Antsiferov's in? terpretation of Petersburg as a symbol of 'eternal beauty' in the final contribution to the volume, 'Transcendence and the City: Nikolai Antsiferov's Dusha Peterburga as an Aesthetic Utopia'. University of Surrey Natalia Rulyova ...

Some Notes on Conjuring Away Art: Radical Disruptions of Image and Text in Avant-Garde Film

Some Notes on Conjuring Away Art: Radical Disruptions of Image and Text in Avant-Garde Film Allen S. Weiss AT THE AGE OF FOUR I had my first active, indeed experimental, experience with film. It was the Christmas of 1957 at the country home of friends of die family. After a slide show, I was entrusted with the fascinating task of casting the unsuccessful slides into the fireplace, creating a brief but fascinating pyrotechnical display. Needless to say, I was totally unaware that this act prefigured several classic trajectories of avant-garde cinema. For there exists an avant-garde which would have art self-destruct and fade into oblivion. This is precisely what would constitute a true aesthetic utopia, in both senses of the term: a perfect instantiation of the artwork, and, more literally, a place that does not exist. This essay is a study of several such Utopian gestures, and the works that remain as their trace. It is difficult to say whether Lettrism is merely organized neo-Dada, or the manifestation of an exacerbated solipsism, or yet one more quest for a totalizing Gesamtkunstwerk. Conceived in 1942 by Isidore Isou, Lettrism was given its first polemical and theoretical statement in Isou's 1947 manifesto, Introduction à une nouvelle poésie et une nouvelle musique. Consider Lettrism 's poetic genealogy, proposed by Isou: Baudelaire destroyed the anecdote for the sake of the poem; Verlaine destroyed the poem for the sake of verse; Rimbaud destroyed verse for the sake of the word; Mallarmé arranged and perfected the word; Tzara destroyed the word for nothing; Isou arranged the letter, to create the anecdote. Lettrism proffers two aporias typical of the avant-garde. Artwork versus Gesamtkunstwerk: Lettrist formalism entailed the creation of discrete works in all media, yet, ultimately, Lettrism was as much a way of life as it was an art movement. Formalism versus militancy: the reduction of poetry to its lettric and phonetic basis authorized all permutations and combinations of letters and sounds, yet all the while the use value of this linguistic decomposition was put to militant and socially liberatory ends. Consequently, Lettrism is as much a history of its theoretical texts, slogans , manifestos, and scandals as it is the history of its poetic works, and, as was typical of many avant-garde political aspirations, Lettrism fashioned itself as an art of the masses, at the origins of a revolutionary youth movement , prefiguring the polemic of May '68. 82 Winter 1998 Weiss It is in this context, and through these aporias, that Lettrist cinema, almost totally neglected in the histories of experimental cinema, must be considered. Lettrist cinema was inaugurated in scandal: Isou, announcing the destruction of the cinema, created his first film, Traité de bave et d'éternité (1951). The Lettrists pressured the organizers of the 1951 Cannes Film Festival to give Isou's film a screening; ultimately, only the soundtrack was "screened," shocking many of the critics, yet Isou was awarded the "Prix de Γ AvantGarde ," created on the spot, due to the graces of Cocteau. Isou's film utilized numerous experimental techniques, discussed in his Manifeste du cinéma discrepant (1951) and Esthétique du cinéma (1952): radically disjunctive or "discrepant" editing, which separates image and sound-tracks; "impoverishment " of the cinematic image by means of direct work on the film strip (scratching and writing); creation of a coherent word-track, such that the sound track no longer reinforces the images, but becomes an independent entity. The second Lettrist film, Maurice Lemaître 's Le film est déjà commenc é? (1951) further increased the experimentation, saturating the filmstrip with written signs, utilizing single-frame subliminal editing, flicker effects, and an unsynchronized sound-track which, in its heterogeneous linguistic, poetic and rhetorical play, creates a self-reflexive and theoretical "narrative," implicating the spectator in the filmic work. Such performative extremes result in two contradictory impulses. The creation of a new cinema: this creativity was not only inherent in formal Lettrist filmic innovations, but even more so in the radical rethinking of cinematic production, distribution and presentation, creating new possibilities for the reception of cinema. The destruction of cinema: pushed to the extreme, such "performances" shattered cinema's structural...

Creating Live: The Aesthetic Utopia of Russian Modernism. Edited by Irina Paperno and Joan Delaney Grossman. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994. xii, 288 pp. $39.50

Creating Live: The Aesthetic Utopia of Russian Modernism. Edited by Irina Paperno and Joan Delaney Grossman. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994. xii, 288 pp. $39.50

Creating Life: The Aesthetic Utopia of Russian Modernism

Russian Modernists advanced a view of art as an active creative force destined for the creation not of artistic texts, but of life itself, and a view of life as an object of artistic creation. The contributors show that the Russian notion of 'life-creation' was by no means limited to deliberate aesthetic organisation of behaviour - it was an aesthetic utopia that informed public and private projects of the reorganisation of the world, from human personality, interpersonal relations, and body to society at large.

Creating Life: The Aesthetic Utopia of Russian Modernism

Creating Life: The Aesthetic Utopia of Russian Modernism

Creating Life: The Aesthetic Utopia of Russian Modernism (review)

Reviewed by: Creating Life: The Aesthetic Utopia of Russian Modernism John Goodliffe Creating Life: The Aesthetic Utopia of Russian Modernism, edited by Irina Paperno and Joan Delaney Grossman; x & 288 pp. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994, $39.95. In describing the history of a country’s literature, one may well be tempted to divide it into separate compartments and so lose sight of the continuity which is, in the final analysis, more worthy of attention. Historians of Russian literature have often succumbed to this temptation and it became almost commonplace to read that in Russia the Realism of the nineteenth century gave way to the Symbolism which began in the twentieth; that Symbolism gave way to Futurism; and that in due course all the earlier “-isms” were swept aside by the Socialist Realism of the Soviet period. For Marxist-oriented Soviet [End Page 371] historians such preoccupation with compartmentalization was obsessive. This makes more than welcome a series of essays which is at pains to emphasize the essential connections and kinship between these various “-isms.” Four of the seven essays are intended to demonstrate how the Symbolists, while ostensibly breaking with the earlier tradition of positivism (the idea that art’s essential purpose is to help build a better world), were, in a number of important respects, continuing and even reinforcing what they claimed to despise. Thus, regarding art and life as indissolubly linked, they attempted to turn life into art and art into life. Their endeavors frequently led them into behavior that now appears “eccentric, at times even ridiculous” (p. 166). Olga Matich describes how Blok, Bely, Dmitry Merezhkovsky, and Zinaida Gippius attempted to model their sexual relationships on the pattern of the “erotic utopia” described by Vladimir Solov’ev in his seminal The Meaning of Love (1892–94). Joan Delaney Grossman discusses Nina Petrovskaia’s relationships with Bely and Valery Briusov. Michael Wachtel shows how Viacheslav Ivanov attempted to overcome his grief at the death of his first wife by using his creative powers to make contact with her “beyond the grave.” Irene Masing-Delic traces the Pygmalion myth through Pushkin, Baratynsky, Turgenev, and Chernyshevsky to the Symbolists who were especially attracted by a myth which showed how an artist could create life and even conquer death. In “Andrei Bely and the Argonauts’ mythmaking,” Alexander Lavrov considers the role of the “Argonaut” circle in establishing a Russian Symbolist culture in the first years of the twentieth century. The Argonauts’ credo was “life-creation” rather than “art-creation,” and they claimed to make no distinction between “talent for living” and “talent for writing.” Lavrov argues that the failure of the relationship between Bely and Nina Petrovskaia marked the disintegration of “Argonautism” and the culture they sought to create. It is left to Irina Gutkin in the concluding essay to guide us through the grotesqueries of Futurism into the apparently diametrically opposed, sanitized world of Socialist Realism, by way of Constructivism, Marxism, and Meyerholdian bio-mechanics, leaving us in little doubt that, appearances to the contrary, each of these movements was concerned with turning art into life and using it to create a better world. So ultimately, as she neatly sums up the thesis of the whole collection, “The aesthetic utopian ideal of art creating life, which took shape at the beginning of the twentieth century, was fused with the utilitarian tradition of the 1860s” (p. 181). I have deliberately reserved for the end comment on Irina Paperno’s introduction and opening article (“The Meaning of Art: Symbolist Theories”) in order to emphasize the manifest contribution she and her co-editor, Joan Delaney Grossman, have made to ensuring the coherence of this admirable collection. Professor Paperno’s clear and concise coverage of her topics makes it evident that she was determined that the book should not turn into the kind of bits-and-pieces patchwork that too many publications of this sort tend to [End Page 372] become without a firm editorial hand at the helm. Her earlier book on Chernyshevsky (Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism, 1988) and Irene Masing-Delic’s Abolishing Death; a Salvation Myth of Russian Twentieth-Century Literature (1992), form the first two parts of...

Creating Life: The Aesthetic Utopia of Russian Modernism

Creating Life: The Aesthetic Utopia of Russian Modernism