Analysis Of Artworks Research Articles

Radiation damages during synchrotron X-ray micro-analyses of Prussian blue and zinc white historic paintings: detection, mitigation and integration

High-flux synchrotron techniques allow microspectroscopic analyses of artworks that were not feasible even a few years ago, allowing for a more detailed characterization of their constituent materials and a better understanding of their chemistry. However, interaction between high-flux photons and matter at the sub-microscale can generate damages which are not visually detectable. We show here different methodologies allowing to evidence the damages induced by microscopic X-ray absorption near-edge structure spectroscopy analysis ( $$\mu$$ XANES) at the Fe and Zn K-edges of a painting dating from the turn of the twentieth century containing Prussian blue and zinc white. No significant degradation of the pigments was noticed, in agreement with the excellent condition of the painting. However, synchrotron radiation damages occurred at several levels, from chemical changes of the binder, modification of crystal defects in zinc oxide, to Prussian blue photoreduction. They could be identified by using both the $$\mu$$ XANES signal during analysis and with photoluminescence imaging in the deep ultraviolet and visible ranges after analysis. We show that recording accurately damaged areas is a key step to prevent misinterpretation of results during future re-examination of the sample. We conclude by proposing good practices that could help in integrating radiation damage avoidance into the analytical pathway.

Welcome Home?

This article examines the case of Jewish women immigrants from Ethiopia and their sense of belonging to the state of Israel and Israeli society. By focusing the discussion on the concept of home within the ideologies of nationhood and citizenship, it analyses artistic products of women that express their active participation in the production of meaning of the notion ‘to belong to a homeland’. Arguing that the artists present a multi-faceted attitude towards the nation-state, the article shows the complex positions they occupy as transnational subjects that hold hybrid identities and affiliations which open up new possibilities for civic action and subversive practices. The methodology of the present study, which integrates an analysis of artworks with a sociopolitical discussion, draws on cultural studies, migration studies and qualitative feminist methodology. It addresses three major identity categories in the discussion – those of gender, race and religion.

The Concept of the Oceanic Feeling in Artistic Creativity and in the Analysis of Visual Artworks

Abstract For several decades now, psychoanalytically oriented writers on art have used the concept of the oceanic feeling to designate feelings of oneness, limitlessness, and mania in artistic creativity and aesthetic experiencing. In this article, I examine critically the most influential account of the oceanic feeling in aesthetics, provided by art pedagogue and art critic Anton Ehrenzweig. Following his points of emphasis, I elaborate on the structural, perceptual, and affective aspects of oceanic states of mind. To illuminate further some of the central premises and problems of Ehrenzweig’s account, I assess two separate analyses of visual artworks that have incorporated his ideas. To conclude, I present my own view of the use of oceanic terminology in regard to artistic creativity, analysis of visual artworks, and aesthetic encounters.

Holding Your Scream in Your Hand. 3D Printing as Inter-Dimensional Experience in Contemporary Artworks by Alicia Framis, Martin Erik Andersen and Hito Steyerl

Abstract During the last couple of years, 3D printing has been widely discussed as a technology with the potential to revolutionize production methods as we used to know them. However, hitherto not much has been written about the aesthetic| aspects of this new possibility of transferring bits to atoms. What kinds of (3D) images are awaiting us? This article focuses on how three contemporary artists are including 3D prints and the process of 3D printing in their work. The article offers a short introduction to the characteristics of 3D printing followed by indebt analysis of art works by Spanish installation artist Alicia Framis. Danish sculptor and professor at The Royal Danish Art Academy Martin Erik Andersen and German filmmaker and writer Hito Steyerl. The article points out how these, very different, works of art use 3D printing to offer the viewer a sense of inter-dimensionality. The central experience here lies somewhere between 2D and 3D.

Telematic art across the North–South divide

Telematic artworks are often included in the theoretical framework of relational aesthetics for the ways in which they engender active dialogue and exchange. This study is situated within a critique of the claim that relational art is widely accessible in terms of its formal structure and is thus ‘more or less democratic’ (McIntyre 2007: 35). This argument fails to recognise the political aspect of communication. Particularly because telematic artworks are able to cross geo-political divides, they are imagined within a utopian construction of globalisation. However, all globalisation is mediated and thus loaded with pre-existing power relations that are often merely reproduced and reinforced in telematic artworks. This is explored through a critical analysis of a telematic artwork entitled Urbanet: Jhb–Linz by South African artist collaborative Hobbs/Neustetter as well as its location within the exhibition ‘80+1: A Journey Around the World’, which took place in Austria in 2009. While the exhibition tends to reinforce a privileged gaze of the Global South for audiences, Urbanet: Jhb–Linz destabilises the act of looking and being looked at through a series of aesthetic and structural choices. This provides a particular challenge to the form of power that pervades North–South communication.

Dalinianas e outras metamorfoses imagéticas

<p>A partir das propostas do seminário de Pós-Graduação ministrado na Universidade Paulista (UNIP) <em>Imagens e Travessias: suportes, experimentações, transmutações e transmediações.</em> (2014), a autora reflete sobre alguns processos de metamorfose imagética. Algumas obras do pintor catalão Salvador Dali servem como inspiração para apontar desafiadores processos de transformação da imagem, num amplo leque que vai desde metamorfoses intra-textuais até passagens de suportes como foto para pintura, instalação e até mesmo a serialização em objetos de grife. Se estabelecem também paralelos entre tais procedimentos na arte e na comunicação, sempre com base na semiótica visual, o suporte metalingüístico do artigo. </p>

Three paintings by Zdzisław Beksiński: making art possible “After Auschwitz”

The article is dedicated to the art work of one of the most significant Polish surrealist artists, Zdzislaw Beksinski. The article reveals the main periods of the artist’s biography, lists the people of art who influenced the establishment of the author’s individual style and the art works Z. Beksinski preferred. Special attention is paid to the dichotomy of form and content as well as Z. Beksinski’s original opinion of it: the artist believed that the major significance was borne by the form, not the content: what he created was the form, while content is something contributed by the spectators. The article continues with the review of three works by Z. Beksinski, leading to the following conclusion: in the situation when god has been crucified but not resurrected, when the human loses his last hope for salvation, when his forces are a null in the face of an unknown but horrifying enemy; in the situation of the End of the World, the total night when the monsters (such as the monstrous words) come alive, the only thing left for a human is to remember of this situation at every moment of time, to understand the nature of words and the threat they present, to understand the mechanism of protection from them; to take care of the closest people, to protect them, thereby allowing neither themselves nor himself to turn into stone of the horrors the reality brings. The final analysis of art works by Z. Beksinski is performed through the prism of “after Auschwitz” art concept.

A multilevel model with autoregressive components for the analysis of tribal art prices

In this paper, we introduce a multilevel model specification with time-series components for the analysis of prices of artworks sold at auctions. Since auction data do not constitute a panel or a time series but are composed of repeated cross-sections, they require a specification with items at the first level nested in time-points. Our approach combines the flexibility of mixed effect models together with the predicting performance of time series as it allows to model the time dynamics directly. Model estimation is obtained by means of maximum likelihood through the expectation–maximization algorithm. The model is motivated by the analysis of the first database ethnic artworks sold in the most important auctions worldwide. The results show that the proposed specification improves considerably over classical proposals both in terms of fit and prediction.

Positioning of the reception theory

The aim of this paper is theoretical positioning and defining of a reception theory, namely the theory that led to one of the most influential epistemological shifts in the theoretical discourse of the 20th century, from the analysis of art work and the author to the analysis of recipients (readers, viewers, listener), which thus becomes the main category of meaning in a contemporary theoretical discourse.

Prema post-digitalnoj estetici

Over the past decades, digital technology and media had firmly integrated into almost all areas of contemporary culture and society. In this context, the Internet, computers or mobile phones are no longer considered products of new media, but instead are taken for granted. With this background in mind, this paper suggests taking a post-digital perspective on today's media society. The concept of post-digital refers to an aesthetics that no longer regards digital technology as a revolutionary phenomenon, but instead as a normal aspect of people's daily life. More precisely, post-digital aesthetics deals with an environment where digital technology became such a commonplace that its existence is frequently no longer acknowledged. Based on the analysis of contemporary artworks and practices inspired by their surroundings, this paper aims to bring those phenomena into consciousness that became unnoticeable in the contemporary digital environment. For this purpose, this investigation goes beyond the formal-aesthetic analysis, but instead focuses on the investigation of the receptive act. Concretely, post-digital aesthetics seeks to describe and analyze the changing modes of perception affected by the increased digitization of one's surroundings. In the context of this analysis, aesthetics is thus understood not as the goal per se, but rather as the means to enhance the understanding of contemporary digital culture.

The Still Life of Objects – Heidegger, Schapiro, and Derrida reconsidered

Kerstin Thomas revaluates the famous dispute between Martin Heidegger, Meyer Schapiro, and Jacques Derrida, concerning a painting of shoes by Vincent Van Gogh. The starting point for this dispute was the description and analysis of things and artworks developed in his essay, “The Origin of the Work of Art”. In discussing Heidegger’s account, the art historian Meyer Schapiro’s main point of critique concerned Heidegger’s claim that the artwork reveals the truth of equipment in depicting shoes of a peasant woman and thereby showing her world. Schapiro sees a striking paradox in Heidegger’s claim for truth, based on a specific object in a specific artwork while at the same time following a rather metaphysical idea of the artwork. Kerstin Thomas proposes an interpretation, which exceeds the common confrontation of philosophy versus art history by focussing on the respective notion of facticity at stake in the theoretical accounts of both thinkers. Schapiro accuses Heidegger of a lack of concreteness, which he sees as the basis for every truth claim on objects. Thomas understands Schapiro’s objections as motivated by this demand for a facticity, which not only includes the work of art, but also investigator in his concrete historical perspective. Truth claims under such conditions of facticity are always relative to historical knowledge, and open to critical intervention and therefore necessarily contingent. Following Thomas, Schapiro’s critique shows that despite his intention of giving the work of art back its autonomy, Heidegger could be accused of achieving quite the opposite: through the abstraction of the concrete, the factual, and the given to the type, he actually sets the self and the realm of knowledge of the creator as absolute and not the object of his knowledge. Instead, she argues for a revaluation of Schapiro’s position with recognition of the arbitrariness of the artwork, by introducing the notion of factuality as formulated by Quentin Meillassoux. Understood as exchange between artist and object in its concrete material quality as well as with the beholder, the truth of painting could only be shown as radically contingent. Thomas argues that the critical intervention of Derrida who discusses both positions anew is exactly motivated by a recognition of the contingent character of object, artwork and interpretation. His deconstructive analysis can be understood as recognition of the dynamic character of things and hence this could be shown with Meillassoux to be exactly its character of facticity – or factuality.

The Image of Indigenous Peoples of Siberia in D.I. Karatanov Creative Work

The subject of this article is the reflection of the Siberian indigenous people, the Kets (or so called “the Ostyaks”) in works by D.I. Karatanov. The aim of the research is achieved by analysis of individual features of these works – portraits, landscapes and many-figured scenes of everyday life. In this research were used such methods as structural and semantic analysis of art works, revelation and analysis of main compositional patterns, consideration of immanation and emanation parts of an artistic image. Following the results of the research, work plays the role of a fore-praying to the nature in the life of Kets fishermen. The result can be used in art sphere of the Krasnoyarsk Territory, history and culture of the Siberian Region and in researches dedicated to national and cultural identity.

Sound studies without auditory culture: a critique of the ontological turn

‘Sound studies’ and ‘auditory culture’ are terms often used synonymously to designate a broad, heterogeneous, interdisciplinary field of inquiry. Yet a potential disjunction between these terms remains. Some scholars within sound studies, by turning to the ontology of sound and to the material–affective processes that lie ‘beneath representation and signification’, reject auditory cultural studies. In this essay, I consider the ‘ontological turn’ in sound studies in the work of three authors (Steve Goodman, Christoph Cox, and Greg Hainge) and offer a few arguments against it. First, I describe the Deleuzian metaphysical framework shared by all three authors, before addressing their particular arguments. Then, I consider Goodman’s vibrational ontology. While Goodman claims to overcome dualism, I argue that his theory is more rigidly dualist – and poorer at explaining the relation of cognition to affect – than the cultural and representational accounts he rejects. Next, Cox and Hainge’s aesthetic theories are considered. Both are proponents of onto-aesthetics, the belief that works of arts can disclose their ontology. I argue that onto-aesthetics rests on a category mistake, confusing embodiment with exemplification. Because of the confusion, Cox and Hainge slip culturally grounded analogies into their supposedly culture-free analyses of artworks. Finally, I reflect on the notion of an ‘auditory culture’, and suggest the ‘ontological turn’ in sound studies is actually a form of ‘ontography’ – a description of the ontological commitments and beliefs of particular subjects or communities – one that neglects the constitutive role of auditory culture at its peril.

AN IMAGE OF THE INDUSTRIAL URAL IN RUSSIAN ART IN THE XVIII-XIX CENTURY

The analysis of Russian artworks depicting the industrial Ural is presented in the article. Today Russia suffers deindustrialization that spread all over Europe. Deindustrialization is especially hard for countries with Soviet past, which was concentrated on labor and industry. Study of the history of purely industrial regions of Russia helps to find ways of overcoming a trauma of industrial space conversion. It is also essential for contemporary art practitioners creating projects on basis of former and actual industrial spaces to know the history of art representation of the industrial objects. Results. It is shown the genesis and transformation of the industrial Ural’s image during the XVIII-XIX century. Political importance of the Ural began to grow at the same time with the growth of local industry in the early XVIII century. However, only at the end of the XIX century the Ural acquired a complete image in exhibitions of Denisov-Ural’skiy. The image of the industrial Ural undergone particular changes between the XVIII and XIX century.

Characterization of Paintings by Laser Ablation-Inductively Coupled Plasma–Mass Spectrometry

Nondestructive analytical techniques allow replicate analysis of artwork to be performed without damage. However, these techniques can only provide information about the surface layer of an object. When information regarding the composition of the underlying layers is necessary, a sample must be collected from the artwork. In order to minimize the damage produced, micro-sampling techniques such as laser ablation have been proposed. Laser ablation inductively coupled plasma–mass spectrometry (LA ICP–MS) is a suitable approach but its application to artwork has been focused on metallic, ceramic, and glass objects, with few studies for elemental-stratigraphic analysis of paintings. The objective of this study was to construct a laser ablation ICP–MS system for large artwork without size restriction to evaluate its capabilities for paintings. This study describes a specific optical system and an ablation cell designed for this purpose. The analysis of several paintings of known composition shows that sampling damage is hardly observable in colored layers and that it is less than the damage produced when the samples are taken manually by using a scalpel. The system has a depth resolution from 1 to 2 to 5 to 10 µm, depending on the painting technique, and the information obtained permits discovery of the stratigraphical composition. The ability of LA ICP–MS to determine very thin painting layers in a Renaissance easel painting (favored by the low detection limits of ICP–MS) was also assessed by analyzing a portrait of a member of the Medici Family attributed to Jacopo Pontormo. Results were compared with those obtained by scanning electron microscopy.

Capitalism, reproduction and ‘lifelike art’: responding to Alana Jelinek's This Is Not Art

This article responds to the critique of Marxist thought in Alana Jelinek's This Is Not Art. Jelinek's aversion to theorising capitalism as a mode of production leads to limitations in how we push forward the compelling arguments advanced in her book about the supposedly a priori politicised nature of what the author describes as ‘lifelike art’. In particular, I propose that the concepts of hegemony, ideology and fetish are missing in her account in favour of an emphasis on power. These concepts, alongside dialectical thinking, can help us grasp what is specific about the present moment in which we see an increasing tendency within ‘lifelike art’ to embrace not only the state but also the market and capital more generally. Against Jelinek's vitalist emphasis on disciplinarity, however, I suggest that the analysis of artworks in our current moment necessitates a certain level of negative thinking. Not a negativity centred on the kind of dualistic antagonism derided in This Is Not Art, but rather one centred on a recognition that the meaning in emphasising art's self-consciousness, or self-critique, lies in the possibility this offers for reminding us of the current limitations to life.

Artwork imaging from 370 to 1630 nm using a novel multispectral system based on light‐emitting diodes

AbstractThe recent use of multispectral systems as a noncontact method for analysis of artworks has already shown promising results. This study explains the application of a novel portable multispectral system based on light‐emitting diodes (LEDs) for artwork imaging. This method provides spectral information in a spectral range from 370 to 1630 nm with a 25 cm × 25 cm field of view by using two different image sensors in synchrony with 23 bands of irradiation. The spectral information for each point is estimated and validated using the pseudo‐inverse and spline interpolation methods for spectral estimation and three different evaluation metrics. The results of the metrics obtained with both estimation methods show a general good performance of the system over the whole spectral range. The experiments also showed that the selection of the training set for the pseudo‐inverse estimation has a great influence in its performance, and thus, it defines whether or not the pseudo‐inverse outperforms the spline interpolation method. The system is applied in situ to the study of Catalan art masterpieces, and the results demonstrate the potential of a cost‐effective and versatile system using various off‐the‐shelf elements to reconstruct color information and to reveal features not previously identified. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Col Res Appl, 40, 398–407, 2015

Emergent imagination: A developing framework for the analysis of artworks in virtual worlds

This paper proposes a framework for the analysis of artworks created in virtual worlds by extending Lichty's four modalities of art in virtual worlds, identified as transmediated, cybrid, client/browser, and ever gent. A selection of artworks from the Kritical Work in SL exhibitions undertaken in 2008 and 2009 are analysed for the qualities of imaginative experience and the articulation of a new set of movements of the imagination from (and between) physical and virtual world spaces indicates a potency of virtual worlds for the investigation and creation of artistic practice.

Raman Microspectroscopy of Old Paper Samples with Foxing

Diagnostic methods and historical document and artwork (in particular, paper items) analysis using modern physical methods is a topical practical problem. Paper materials exhibit nonuniform degradation with the formation of foxing stains. Correct physicochemical identification of the structure of foxed fragments depends on the efficiency of the experimental technique and offers guidelines for restoration. Raman spectroscopy makes it possible to characterize old paper samples; however, to our knowledge, a comprehensive Raman analysis of foxing has not been done. In this study, we demonstrate that Raman microspectroscopy allows the identification of spectral changes related to paper aging and foxing formation. The degree of degradation of the rag papers studied here is noticeably less than the degree of degradation of the wood-cellulose papers. The spectral differences among 19(th)-, 20(th)-, and 21(st)-century papers are revealed. The presence of lignin and gypsum filler in the 20th-century paper is demonstrated. Raman data indicate that the foxed fragments exhibit a stronger degradation of the paper. The spectral differences between the foxed and unfoxed fragments are discussed. The results can be used in the restoration of paper documents and artworks, in particular for identification of foxed fragments.

Artwork analysis

Artwork analysis