Art Archives Research Articles

Production of popular science films in Leningrad: late 1940s – 1960s

This article is dedicated to the history of the Soviet popular science cinematography on the example of the Leningrad film studio “Lentekhfilm” / “Lennauchfilm"” during the late 1940s – 1960s.The goal of this work consists in tracing the development and production stages of popular science films at the Leningrad film studio “Lennauchfilm”.  The author sets the following tasks: follow the work of the film studio “Lennauchfilm” based on the archival materials, as well as determine the main plotlines of popular science films of the period under review. The article employs archival documents stored in the fund No. 243 of the St. Petersburg Central State Archive of Literature and Art. Namely, based on the materials of the annual financial and production reports of the film studio, using the quantitative methods, the author carries out the sampling of films that were classified as popular science. The author also applies the problem-chronological method for studying the stages of operation of the film studio. The novelty of this research consists in determination of production volumes of popular science films at a particular film studio, as well as their main themes. As a result, the author highlights six main plotlines: natural sciences, geography of the country, industry and agriculture, education of children and adolescents, history of culture and art, historical-revolutionary. The conclusion is made that the Soviet popular science cinematography was aimed not only at popularization of scientific knowledge (as follows from the definition of the term “popular science film” given in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia), but also performed the important political and civic functions on youth education, distribution of technical knowledge, as well as illustration of the achievements of the Soviet Union in economic and social policy.

Historical and Archival Aspects of Expertise and Attribution of N. K. Roerich’s Works

Based on the materials of expert and attribution studies carried out by the author over the years, this article examines the historical and archival documents, evidence and facts used in the course of the examination and attribution of works of easel, theatrical and decorative art of Nicholas Roerich (1874–1947). Also, the author examines the role which documents from the funds of the departments of manuscripts of the State Russian Museum, the State Tretyakov Gallery, the Russian State Archives of Literature and Art, the Central State Archive of Film and Photographic Documents of St Petersburg, and other institutions play in the examination process, which is important for clarifying and studying the artistic heritage of the master. The purpose of the article is to consider individual examples of the examination and attribution of N. K. Roerich’s works with the help of various kinds of historical, cultural, and everyday documents, facts, and evidence reflected in unpublished art history texts, epistolary and memoir sources, in inscriptions on the reverse of paintings and on the margins of typographic prints of exhibition catalogues and works of art by Roerich, i.e. everything that contains important information for an expert included in the concept of “historical and archival aspects”. The article provides examples of art history, culturological and technical and technological methods used in the examination and attribution of works of art, and their result, which is reflected in the “expert conclusions”, attributions, verified and refined description of works and the history of their existence, which is important for understanding the artist’s work, further analysis of his work and, as a result, the emergence of new scholarly and educational publications.

Art Archives Digitalization in the role of Preservation and Dissemination of Knowledge in Art Higher Education Institutions in Indonesia

In 2017, through the Research and Community Service Program, the Bandung Institute of Technology funded a proposal for a data and analysis center for Indonesian visual art studies. The proposal came from the Aesthetics and the Art Sciences, part of the research group of the Faculty of Art and Design at Bandung Institute of Technology. The project subsequently developed into a digital repository containing data related to the works, studies and profiles of artists from Bandung School (now the Visual Art Study Program) from the 1940s to the 1990s. Even though new initiatives proceed at a slow pace, CIVAS (Center for Indonesian Visual Art Studies) operates two of its functions, to preserve knowledge and to disseminate knowledge as a center for archive and art studies. It also serves to build organizational memory as an institution. This research is a qualitative study using an analytical approach and applying it to a case study descriptively. To conduct an analysis, this study uses several theoretical approaches including digitization as an attempt to preserve and disseminate knowledge. This study seeks to identify the opportunities and problems faced by practitioners in digital art archiving activities especially in higher education organizations. This paper concludes that the main purpose of digitizing art archives is to produce an effective method for the disseminationof knowledge.
 Keywords: Digital, archiving, preservation

The Photograph as Archive, Reimagining the Archive, the Living Archive of Aboriginal Art

In 2008, an Indigenous Australian artist based in Melbourne – Maree Clarke (Mutti Mutti/ Wemba Wemba/Boonwurrung) – created a kangaroo-teeth necklace, revivifying an art and cultural practice for the first time in over a century. She was inspired to do so after viewing an 1880 photograph of an ancestor – Yarruun Parpur Tarneen – wearing such adornment, and by visiting with extant examples of such adornment in museums around the world. This photo-essay seeks to both represent Clarke’s collaborative work, and invite others in to learn, share, and co-create. We argue that photographs are archives themselves: sites and sources of creative co-production. Photographs are inextricable from their people and their relations (with Ancestors, Country, kin, and community). The holistic integration of Indigenous knowledge transmission, contemporary art-making, archival photographs, and extant artifacts offers a radical re-imagination of what archives are and can do.

Digital Embodiments of Artists’ Archives

This article is an inquiry into the presentation and organization of digitized materials and analogous records from artists’ archives on the web. Traditionally, artists’ archives have been described hierarchically with finding aids—text-based documents detailing contents of collections, boxes, and analog folders. The ubiquity of the web and prevalence of digitization has disrupted hierarchical arrangement associated with archival description and shifted researchers’ expectations of access to records. This shift has affected modes of presentation and dissemination of such information resources. The author examines timely examples of digitized artists’ archives and similar resources, including the Asia Art Archive, the Russian Art Archive Network, the Artist Archives Initiative, and the Archives of American Art. [This article is a revision of the paper that won the 2020 Gerd Muehsam Award. The award recognizes excellence in a paper written by a graduate student on a topic relevant to art librarianship or visual resources curatorship.]

Cabinets of Costume: Renegotiating Participation Through Practice, Object-Based Study and ‘Ghosts’ of an Assemblage of Dress

The exhibition Cabinets of Costume was undertaken as part of an international conference, Culture, Costume, and Dress at Birmingham City University (BCU) in May 2017. Its aim was to highlight two study collections held at BCU — the first, the Historical Dress Archive, which includes the Kate Elizabeth Bunce objects, and the second, the Art and Design Archives. Referencing the previous practice of object-based study to inform current practice at the Municipal School of Art, Birmingham, this paper will explore the cultural and creative capital of this assemblage of everyday historic dress uncovered in 2012 at BCU. Focusing on the Historical Dress Archive the initiative was developed to enable undergraduates across the faculty of Art, Design and Media at BCU to study extant historical dress, creating five representations or ‘ghosts’ of the objects of study. The initiative and exhibition offered an opportunity for a student-academic partnership to share the practices of object-based study as a creative catalyst, to inform costume practices as a live project.

The Study on the possibilities of the developmental environment for educational contents in performing arts archives

The Study on the possibilities of the developmental environment for educational contents in performing arts archives

Risk Management for Art Collections and Archives

ABSTRACT This paper provides an overview of issues around the authenticity of artworks and objects and their related archives, in the context of an organization’s art collection. Due to the high prices and cultural importance of significant objects and documents, it is important to manage risk. The digital age has led to a public keen on gaining virtual access to information, thus while a corporate collection indicates corporate social responsibility, it involves cultural memory and demonstrates public spending which calls for accountability, compliance with regulations and responsible management of the collection. What are the risks and how should these be managed?

«The exponent of the moral principles of his era, his people»: to the 115th anniversary of the People's artist of the USSR Yuri Vladimirovich Tolubeyev

The paper is devoted to the Soviet actor of theater and cinema Yuri Vladimirovich Tolubeyev (1906–1979). His life and career are traced, the most famous works are mentioned. The materials of the Russian state archive of literature and art (Moscow) and the Central state archive of literature and art (St. Petersburg) are introduced into scientific circulation for the first time, the most interesting of which are letters addressed to the actor from grateful spectators with reviews of his work.

Digital Literacy and Liberative Community Engagement

AbstractHow can institutions really open up and promote their archival collections through creative interventions? This question was posed when devising the In Our Minds project, a collaborative project between The National Archives U.K. and University for the Creative Arts (UCA) Archive, U.K. This article reflects on digital literacy as a means to create content and use digital platforms to engage, promote and disseminate information as part of the project's aims and outcomes. It also assesses how creative interventions can open up and increase awareness to certain collections through the defined theme of mental health, by individual creative practitioners, and developing exhibition strategies for a touring exhibition with physical and digital artworks.

Kam, Jožek, putuješ (Where are you going, Jožek) Modest Contribution to the Study of Old Kajkavian Secular Lyric

The paper brings forth several observations about two secular Kajkavian songbooks written by the same hand. They are Pjesmarica Nikole Šafrana (Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts Archives, sg. I a 98) and Canticum cytharaedorum cytarizantium cum cytaris suis (National and University Library in Zagreb, sg. R 3631). Even though the songbooks are quite extensive, so far they have not been thoroughly analysed nor written about as a whole; rather, scholarly attention was directed to individual songs, mostly those that were repeated in several manuscripts. Some songs were written about in the attempt to ascertain or confirm their author, some because they revolve around a historical event (e.g. the Zrinski-Frankopan Conspiracy), while some served as a template for stylistic analysis. Unlike such approach, in which the songbooks are always understood as a mere, almost accidental collection of randomly gathered compositions, this paper emphasizes that songbooks should be studied as unique, ordered wholes. Their compiler was obviously guided by the desire to offer a rounded collection. The hypothesis that the compiler was a person who continuously and seriously engaged in Kajkavian lyric before the National Revival can be further testified to by several manuscripts from the State Archives written by the same hand.

Art Catalogs Unbound

AbstractExhibition catalogs have a long history within arts organizations, libraries, and archives. Scholars often rely on them for research, but they can also be used for teaching critical informa...

Evaluation the Software Tools Quality to Thesaurus in the Implementation of a Controlled Media Art Vocabulary

In this project, he develops the evaluation of seven thesaurus software tools, in the implementation of a controlled vocabulary, for the CAAC (Collections and Archives of Contemporary Art of the Faculty of Fine Arts of Cuenca, UCLM) in collaboration with UC3M; framed in the "Media Art vocabulary" project. For the conservation of artistic products as digital objects of the museum of Cuenca, Spain. The Construction and application of the thesaurus, Web implementation, publication of its terms as Linked Data, using TemaTres Software. A customized method is used combining quality, usability and semantic web techniques. A method was designed to evaluate the characteristics of each of the tools. Such as the availability of download, easy of access, use, learning, deployment on the server, sharing, and exchange of data, and free use. This study is a part project to Vocabularies for a Media Art Archives and Collections Network. This project establishes the scientific and methodological convergence of two research teams, one from Humanities, Art and Fine Arts, the other from Documentation, with a support of Computer Science and Audiovisual Communication. The importance of project progress lies in metadata labeling, identification by descriptors of the specific thesaurus, guarantee of semantic reuse of content, interoperability for a network of Media Art archives and collections, its digital continuity and dissemination in virtual spaces Wide projection. Winning the TemaTres tool, the thesaurus was implemented in the period from April to July 2019.

Букет фиалок и немного нервно: штрихи к нобелевским дням 1933 г.

In 1933, Ivan Bunin was the first Russian author to be awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. This article bears on the materials held in Moscow archives that contribute to the Bunin “Nobeliade” that researchers have reconstructed relying on foreign collections. The ego-documents of direct participants and first-hand witnesses of the events that took place between November 9 (the announcement of the Swedish Academy) and December 3 (Bunin’s departure from Paris to Stockholm) add touching details to this historical moment and also demonstrate different attempts to manipulate the laureate. Dozens of telegrams and some letters to the laureate are stored in the Russian archive of art and literature. They overlap with the letters of the abovementioned Bunin’s correspondents to other persons held in the House of Russia Abroad. They latter archive also includes a handwritten note of Bunin. This is the first publication of the mentioned archive materials.

Digital Art Archives in Asia for the Public Domain: A Conversation with Bo Zheng and Lu Pan

Below is a written account of a conversation between Bo Zheng and Lu Pan about digital archives in Asian contemporary art and visual culture, which took place via Zoom on March 30, 2020, and was moderated by Sjoukje van der Meulen, co-editor in chief of Stedelijk Studies. While the challenges and promises of increasing connectivity, inclusivity, and easy and unrestricted access in regard to digital archives and collections are ordinarily presented in the context of large and often state-sponsored digitization projects, the focus in this conversation is on nonprofit, experimental archival practices of artists and artists’ collectives who operate outside the domain of large official institutions, such as art museums and state archives.

The Human Quest for Discovering Mathematical Beauty in the Arts

In words of twentieth-century British mathematician G. H. Hardy, the human function is to 'discover or observe' mathematics. For centuries, starting from ancient Greeks, mankind has hunted for beauty and order in arts and in nature. This quest for mathematical beauty has led to discovery of recurrent mathematical structures, such as golden ratio, Fibonacci, and Lucas numbers, whose ubiquitous presences have been tantalizing minds of artists and scientists alike. The captivation for this quest comes with high stakes. In fact, art is definitive expression of human creativity, and its mathematical understanding would deliver us keys for decoding human culture and its evolution. However, it was not until fairly recently that scope and scale of human quest for mathematical beauty was radically expanded by simultaneous confluence of three separate innovations. The mass digitization of large art archives, surge in computational power, and development of robust statistical methods to capture hidden patterns in vast amounts of data have made it possible to reveal the—otherwise unnoticeable to human eye—mathematics concealed in large artistic corpora. Starting from its inception, marked by foundational work by Birkhoff, progress in broad field of computational aesthetics has reached a scale that would have been unimaginable just a decade ago. The recent expansion is not limited to visual arts but includes music, stories, language phonology, humor in jokes, and even equations.

Art Museum Image Gallery

Art Museum Image Gallery provides access through a subscription to museum collections of over 156,000 high-quality images sourced from the Art Archive of Picture Desk, Inc. and includes paintings, prints, ceramics, sculpture, and other art. The images span from 3000 B.C. to the present, with an emphasis on cultural and area studies. The price varies and is based on subscribers’ overlap with packages and other factors unique to institution needs, but primarily is on bracket determined by number of users. The interface could use improvement in its limiters. But individual item displays surpass similar products by providing comprehensive data including copyright privileges, the artist, original source, subjects with live links, description, and accession numbers. A link also provides a higher quality version of each image with downloadable capability. Art Museum Image Gallery is best suited for educational use and is ideal for academics, schools, the public, and the government.

A City on the Move

Research Article| December 01 2019 A City on the Move: Contemporary Photography in Bandung, West Java Brian Arnold Brian Arnold Brian Arnold is a photographer and writer based in Ithaca, New York. He currently works with the American Institute for Indonesian Studies developing arts programming between the United States and Indonesia. His photographs and books are held in a number of public collections, including the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Indonesian Visual Arts Archive, the George Eastman Museum, and the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Afterimage (2019) 46 (4): 19–37. https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2019.464003 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Brian Arnold; A City on the Move: Contemporary Photography in Bandung, West Java. Afterimage 1 December 2019; 46 (4): 19–37. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2019.464003 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAfterimage Search Organized by Hou Hanru and Hans Ulrich Obrist and featured in locations across Europe between 1997 and 1999, the groundbreaking exhibition Cities on the Move highlighted an evolving understanding of modernism based on the post–World War II cities of East and Southeast Asia. Curating a visual experience that mimicked the controlled chaos of late-twentieth-century Asian cities, the show brought together more than 150 artists and architects in an attempt to identify hybrids and commonalities in a pan-Asian cultural development that arose in the wake of colonialism and the Cold War, and has continued into the age of “hypercities”1 like Bangkok, Hong Kong, Kaula Lampur, and Tokyo. In discussing the development of Cities on the Move, Obrist stated: Ironically, this exhibition only travelled through Europe, securing the established divide between Asia and the Euro/America-centric visions of internationalism. Nonetheless, the exhibition opened new opportunities for discussion and innovation across borders,... You do not currently have access to this content.

Website Development of Indonesian Art Higher Education Institutions Historical Archives

Art Higher Education Institution in Indonesia has been established since 1947, and ever since has developed in different parts of Indonesia. Indonesia as a country with rich culture and arts, has its own history and characteristics regarding its visual arts development. Prominent names in The History of Art Higher Education Institutions in Indonesia includes names, such as Simon Admiraal, Ries Mulder and RJ Katamsi. They had historical account of establishing Universitaire Leergang voor Tekenleraren (FSRD ITB) and ASRI located in Bandung and Yogyakarta respectively. The goal of this research and development is aimed towards information propagation regarding these historical data and information of art higher education institutions in Indonesia. The project was initiated by Creative Arts Department of Telkom University, which also acts as an art higher education institution. The website development methodology went through several phases, which includes data collections of art higher education institutions in Indonesia, qualitative research that includes interviews and observations of key persons, as well as using Website Generation Model methodology in its development. The preliminary results of this research project informs that the website has perform well in key objectives regarding needs, systems and learning process. In the future it is needed to also research similar projects in Indonesia such as online art database like IVAA (Indonesian Visual Art Archive) which originated in Yogyakarta. The preliminary conclusions of currently ongoing research are that it is necessary to build such online database to hold historical data about the subject, and that the visual aspects of the website have the most consideration for the success of this project. The impact of this research for current development is that the research give way to utilizing qualitative research as well as Website Generation Model in developing better and more attracting websites.

Art and Theory of Post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe: A Critical Anthology by Janevski Ana (review)

SEER, 97, 4, OCTOBER 2019 778 Janevski, Ana and Marcoci, Roxana, with Ksenia Nouril (eds). Art and Theory of Post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe: A Critical Anthology. Primary Documents. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2018. 408 pp. Illustrations. Figures. Notes. Index. $40.00: £31.00 (paperback). The difficulty of defining Central and Eastern European art after the region’s transition from socialism to neoliberal capitalism hangs over the introduction to Art and Theory of Post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe, edited by Ana Janevski and Roxana Marcoci with Ksenia Nouril. Keen to avoid reifying the East/West binary, the editors of this ambitious follow-up to MoMA’s Primary Documents: A Sourcebook for Eastern and Central European Art since the 1950s (New York, 2002) turn to Jelena Vesić, an independent curator and member of the Belgrade-based Prelom collective. Vesić claims that ‘Eastern European art’ can refer to everything from all art made in conditions marked by socialism to only art that engages with the socialist legacy — or even only those practices that were supported by the Soros Centers for Contemporary Art (SCCAs), a network of twenty institutions established around the region to grease the wheels of post-socialist transition in the 1990s (p. 13). Wisely, the volume avoids any clear consensus on the meaning of Central and Eastern Europe and its art as it divides its seventy-five contributions into seven themed chapters rather than organizing them into geographical or chronological schema. Certain themes, particularly the focus on activism and collectivity in the second chapter, reflect the collaborative structure of the book itself, which is a product of multiple research trips and seminars organized by the Central and Eastern Europe group of MoMA’s Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives (C-MAP) project between 2015 and 2017 (these exchanges are listed at the end of the book). Each section comprises a mix of re-publications from English and other languages and newly commissioned texts. Each chapter begins with three new texts: the first is a theoretical introduction by an outside adviser and expert in the field, the second a chapter summary by a C-MAP member and the third an interview with an artist or collective. The first chapter, titled ‘Reckoning with History’, delves into the legacy of the socialist era. In an email conversation with compatriot Jonas Valatkevičius from 2000, Deimantas Narkevičius emerges as the rare Lithuanian artist ready to violate a major taboo on the country’s art scene by engaging with history through the prism of personal experience. Exploring the extra-legal codes that guide interpersonal conduct in post-Soviet society, Narkevičius frames them as a kind of popular truth that protects against both the obligatory rule of law and the trauma of processing past events (pp. 37–38). Socialist baggage remains a topic of interest in the second chapter, ‘Exhibiting the “East” since 1989’. In one highlight, Polish art historian Piotr Piotrowski argues that REVIEWS 779 the unstable nature of borders after the fall of socialism compelled Central European artists to submit their work for Western inspection, and that the thematics of transition and EU integration of the early 1990s and early 2000s, respectively, were informed by geopolitical lines that ‘exist and at the same time do not exist’ (p. 85). As the post-Communist context began to retreat from view, interest shifted from centre/periphery relations to relations between various peripheries (p. 85). Through all this, the concept of Central Europe only maintained coherence from the perspective of actually existing socialism. Once its memory began to wane, the concept was kept alive by nostalgia for the Hapsburg Empire in countries like Hungary and Czechoslovakia (p. 84). Chapter three expands this look at the ideological value of exhibitions to consider the value of archives. Slovenian curator Zdenka Badovinac leads the charge with a look at the strategy of self-historicization adopted by artists at a time when state institutions either ignored or condemned the neo-avant-garde (p. 145). Key projects include Romanian Lia Perjovschi’s Contemporary Art Archive (begun in 1985) and East Art Map (begun in 2001) by the Slovenian retro-avant-garde group IRWIN. The Romanian collective...