Figurative Art Research Articles

A Bigger Splash to the Narrative

The objective of this article is to offer an example of a work of art identified with what Paul Ricœur named polysemy or linguistic density. Some works of art exemplify a metaphoricity in their constitution and the metaphor would be a privileged model for the analysis of figurative art and of allusive figuration. I believe that the painting A Bigger Splash by David Hockney has an image game that is also a language game: the aesthetic figuration as semantic link between the verbal and the non-verbal, between the poetic and the pictorial. I argue that figuration through metaphoricity also exemplifies an ambiguity in Ricœur’s philosophy of language, and the distinction between the field of the pre-narrative and the narrative of the artwork clarify the aesthetic aspect of his theory of metaphor. The advantage of my example is that the immanent analysis of the metaphoric constitution of the work of art is compatible with the isolation of its narrative elements. The metaphoric redescription in painting should not be automatically extended to the narrative refiguration.

Appunti per una sociologia dell'ambiguità: il contributo delle arti visive

In the globalized western thinking, the accelerated techno-scientific-communicational progress generated a widespread critique toward ambiguity, promoting the notion that true knowledge must adhere to scientific paradigms, based on either true or false. As a reaction, this trend is adding to the social reality an increasing need of a tool that allows emancipation from the deterministic cage of scientific rationality. This need can be satisfied by ambiguity, as typical of crea-tive and receptive figurative arts. Their phenomenology, originating from an im-pulse, takes shape in its development, following free not decided ex-ante by a form, but being realized ex-post as acting-form (literally formativity) pathways. Thus created, figurative arts is ‘open’ to the free interpretation of spectator. Thus becoming conform, figurative art extend their cultural influence to the society, pre-ferring freedom around the polar couple of freedom and order.

Cultural Reproduction of Javanese Gamelan Creation

This research aimed to find out the cultural reproduction of Javanese gamelan c reation. Gamelan is an Indonesian orchestra composed mainly of tuned percussion instruments such as bamboo xylophones, wooden or metal chimes, and gongs. This reserach consisting of life attitude, work ethos, and skill of craftspeople in creation of Javanese gamelan . Cultural reproduction practice occurs in family, school/art institute/home industry environment and gamelan industry center community. This study employed naturalistic inquiry, describing the cultural reproduction of Javanese gamelan Creation naturally; the informants of research consisted of E m pu (master craftsman) who produces gamelan, gamelan craftspeople, Javanese gamelan art figure, and Javanese gamelan users. The result of research revealed that life attitudes the E mpu and the gamelan craftspeople had were: awareness of giving service to God, faith in God, being loyal to their job, submitting to the fate with gratitude, never being desperate, and having noble character. The work ethos of E mpu and craftspeople included: hard work, high togetherness, carefulness, tolerance, high sense of belonging to the job, and mutual help. Meanwhile, gamelan creation skill included: membesot , menyingi , menempa , membabar , and melaras . Life attitude, work ethos, and skill of gamelan creation occurred through parents’ socialization from one generation to the next or from E mpu to craftspeople in home industry. In industrial center community, gamelan gave Wirun villagers an identity as tough and reliable Empu and craftspeople. Keywords: Cultural Reproduction, Life Attitude, Work Ethos, Gamelan.

Gravettian Figurative Art in the Western Pyrenees: Stratigraphy, Cultural Context, and Chronology

The timing and nature of the emergence of art in human evolution has been one of the more debated subjects in palaeoanthropology in the last few years, and one of the areas where archaeology has made impressive advances. Here, we discuss the first evidence of figurative art on portable materials in the north of Spain. After analysis of the stratigraphic contexts of all examples potentially of this age, which eliminated those of uncertain provenance, only three examples can be said to be Gravettian with a degree of confidence. We examine their stratigraphic provenance, the integrity of their archaeological contexts, and the absolute dates available for them. We then discuss their thematic and stylistic traits, comparing them to the wider database of material in the adjacent regions of the French Pyrenees and Mediterranean Iberia. We conclude that figurative depictions were scarce in the Gravettian of south-western Europe, in contrast to the relatively abundant examples of cave art assigned to this period in the region. If this is correct, we should nuance our discussions of ‘Palaeolithic art’ by considering that parietal and portable art had their own trajectories and functions, at least in the Early to mid-Upper Palaeolithic.

《대한민국미술전람회》의 추상 아카데미즘

This paper aims to analyze the entries and prize-winning art works of the National Exhibition, and determine the contributions and limitations brought on by the 30-year history of the exhibition on the formation of Korea’s modern art, and what role it played in the development of the Koreans’ perception on enjoyment of art and modern art. A closer look into the entries and award-winning works at the exhibition between 1949 and 1981 reveals that there existed a predominant style of painting of realistic figurative art, which was also called academism, yet on the other hand, a number of half-abstraction and abstract works were forming a clear linage of some sort from the early on. Statistics and studies on the materials of work books of the exhibition have pointed to the conclusion that the abstract style of paintings by non-mainstream artists who challenged a conservative National Exhibition was forming a somewhat similar stream within the exhibition. It seems inappropriate to explain the interior border of the National Exhibition with conflicting ideas such as conservative and avantgarde; mainstream and non-mainstream; and figurative and abstract style. The abstractionism that challenged the realistic style of painting in the National Exhibition was accepted in the exhibition to form academism, and the National Exhibition that accepted the challenge of the unconventional had developed to encompass two different streams at the same time.BR The post-war Korean National Exhibition, therefore, was not a failed institution, but rather it embraced both conservative academism and avant-garde modernism at the same time, thereby developing an academism peculiar to the reality in Korea. Furthermore, it accorded with the Korean government’s objective to create a nationwide venue for art participated by all artists, as well as responded in an appropriate manner to the needs of the artists who attempt to acquire authority and honor through the National Exhibition, thus fulfilled its mission.

A business network perspective on unconventional entrepreneurship: A case from the cultural sector

Entrepreneurship is perceived as a key process to be promoted in the current economic and social context. Academic researchers, policy makers and practitioners acknowledge that a “traditional” view on entrepreneurship is no longer sufficient to encompass all possible forms of entrepreneurship. In this line of thought there is a growing interest to gain a deeper understanding of ‘unconventional’ entrepreneurial initiatives. This paper aims to provide a contribution on the development process of unconventional entrepreneurial processes, placing emphasis on their networked nature. The paper adopts the IMP approach as the guiding conceptual framework and examines a single longitudinal case study of RATATA' Festival concerning figurative arts. This research contributes to the emerging literature on unconventional entrepreneurship emphasizing the key role of the interplay between the community of passionate people promoting the initiative and the wider business network progressively enacted along the different editions of the Festival.

On Abjection

Boryana Rossa is an interdisciplinary feminist artist, curator and academic, working across film, photography, painting and performance art. Born in Sofia, Bulgaria in 1972, she later trained and then graduated from the programme of mural painting and public art at the National Academy of Arts, Bulgaria in 1997. Having first trained in the socialist tradition of monumental public art, producing large-scale mural paintings, Boryana describes how the 1990s ushered in the withdrawal of state commissions, leaving a generation of artists to negotiate an unrecognizable public sphere and market economy. In this interview, Boryana shares important insights about her personal trajectory as an artist, which cannot be separated from its political, social and economic context. She incorporates performative elements of pain, blood and humour into her work as a feminist strategy, often calling to account the tendencies of dominant global media and historical narrative in producing mythologies of the male artist, politician or celebrity figure. She inventively engages feminist analyses of sexuality, gender and ‘beauty’, while maintaining the principles of public accessibility and monumentality, which underscored her earlier training.

ХУДОЖЕСТВЕННЫЙ ОБРАЗ В ТВОРЧЕСТВЕ ИЛЬБЕКА ХАЙРУЛИНОВА

Ilbek Khairulinov is a vivid representative of the Altai painting of the second half of the ХХ century. He succeeded as an original and versatile figure in art: as an artist-realist, who exposed many facets of his talent to the viewer and left rich artistic heritage, as an art critic - an explorer of Altai painters’ works, and as a teacher, who captivates young artists opening up new horizons for them. The works of this painter are indicative in terms of studying the creation of an artistic image reflecting the era and contemporaries’ individuality.

From High Hopes of the Celtic Twilight to Last Hurrahs in Inter-war Warsaw: The Plays of Casimir Dunin-Markievicz

Recent reassessments have done much to show that Casimir Markievicz’s cultural activism in Ireland made unique contributions to its renascent cultural nationalism: his portraiture recorded key moments and personages of the age; whereas his role as a dramatist and theatrical impresario in thrall to Shaw, theatrical naturalism and social engagement represented a supplementation of the Celtic Literary Revival. As a further contribution to what is a growing awareness of the importance of Markievicz as a historical, artistic and literary figure, this article will seek to show that, following the breakdown of his marriage and his return to Poland in 1913, Markievicz would also play a meaningful if short-lived role in the emerging modernity of Warsaw’s post-war theatrical world. It will also look to assess why his career foundered, with consequences for his own literary legacy here in Poland.

Theoretical Foundations and Collective Programme of Constructivism in Russian Avant-garde Painting

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Digital Management of Rock Art: the African Archaeology Archive Cologne (AAArC)

Archaeology is a costly and object-affine practice requiring sophisticated technical equipment, and therefore is largely initiated and run from industrialised countries. Accordingly, also data and objects are largely lodged in these countries. In rock art, this leads to the paradoxical situation that many motifs and sites with outstanding prehistoric art are better known and more often shown in northern hemisphere urban centres than in the global south rural areas where the art in fact is found. This paper will focus on the possibilities and benefits of a digital archive in making pictures, data and other archaeological source material accessible anytime from everywhere. An open online archive will in the long run flatten the hierarchical order of access to the results of archaeological research and heritage archiving. Today, this is still concentrated in the western metropoles and rarest in African hinterlands. The open access to thousands of pictures will facilitate dissemination of motifs in particular since the distribution of smartphones and network coverage are ever growing particularly in Africa’s rural areas. The African Archaeology Archive Cologne (AAArC), being licenced under Creative Commons, provides open access to tens of thousands of rock art photos and to the enormous Brandberg-Daureb Data Base that contains 39,000+ rock art figures. Additionally AAArC stores all kinds of digital archaeological products from across Africa (mainly Sudan, Algeria, Chad and Namibia), including audio and film documentary.

Art is long, life is short. Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (1746–1828), the suffering artist

Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes is one of the major figures of European art. From royal portraits to bizarre, grotesque illustrations, his legacy demonstrates a tortured genius, generating some of the most compelling art ever produced. His story is also the story of Spain during one of the most tumultuous passages of its history. In the winter of 1792–93, Goya experienced a mysterious illness resulting in lifelong deafness. After that, his work became more negative, with thick, bold strokes of dark colour. Scholars have suggested various diagnoses on the basis of Master’s symptoms, but the exact nature of the illness has never been identified.

The Origins of Iconic Depictions: A Falsifiable Model Derived from the Visual Science of Palaeolithic Cave Art and World Rock Art

Archaeologists have struggled for more than a century to explain why the first representational art of the Upper Palaeolithic arose and the reason for its precocious naturalism. Thanks to new data from various sites across Europe and further afield, as well as crucial insights from visual science, we may now be on the brink of bringing some clarity to this issue. In this paper, we assert that the main precursors of the first figurative art consisted of hand prints/stencils (among the Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens) and a corpus of geometric marks as well as a hunting lifestyle and highly charged visual system for detecting animals in evocative environments. Unlike many foregoing arguments, the present one is falsifiable in that five critical, but verifiable, points are delineated.

Combined Non-invasive PIXE/PIGE Analyses of Mammoth Ivory from Aurignacian Archaeological Sites.

Among the earliest Homo sapiens societies in Eurasia, the Aurignacian phase of the Early Upper Paleolithic, approximately 40 000-30 000 years ago, mammoth ivory assumed great social and economic significance, and was used to create hundreds of personal ornaments as well as the earliest known works of three-dimensional figurative art in the world. This paper reports on the results of micro-PIXE/PIGE analyses of mammoth-ivory artifacts and debris from five major sites of Aurignacian ivory use. Patterns of variable fluorine content indicate regionally distinctive strategies of ivory procurement that correspond to apparent differences in human-mammoth interactions. Preserved trace elements (Br, Sr, Zn) indicate that differences at the regional level are applicable to sourcing Paleolithic ivory at the regional scale.

Un présent empreint de passé. Brève généalogie de l’hypotypose comme figure de la mémoire

À partir d’une brève généalogie de la figure de l’hypotypose, cet article propose une réflexion théorique sur ses usages contemporains dans sa relation à la mémoire. On considère en effet qu’elle constitue aujourd’hui une figure mémorielle centrale de la littérature, voire de l’art contemporains qui, en évoquant le passé comme s’il était présent (Dumarsais), trouble la réception. En toute fin de compte, elle met en évidence la difficulté à dégager une analogie entre le réel et sa description, qu’elle soit poétique et rhétorique, au point de compromettre avec elle tout un pan de la pensée philosophique.

Symbolic Arts and Rituals in the African Middle Stone-Age

Since the 1950s the huge amount of archaeological research done in Africa has shown that Homo sapiens originally came from Africa rather than Western Eurasia as was previously thought. Nevertheless, some Western scholars retain a Eurocentric bias by suggesting that humans only became fully intelligent after they migrated out of Africa and settled in Europe where, during the ‘Upper Palaeolithic Transition’ around 45,000 years ago, there was an abrupt advance in human neural wiring. Their evidence is the relatively sudden change from Middle Palaeolithic to more advanced Upper Palaeolithic tools and the appearance of the spectacular figurative cave art of Europe. This mental revolution was initially believed to have occurred in ‘Cro-Magnon Man’ who lived in Europe and Western Eurasia 45,000-40,000 years ago and was considered to be the first human to have the cross-domain cognition and enhanced memory necessary for a sophisticated language and symbolic behaviour. In short, although after the 1950s archaeologists generally have acknowledged that prehistoric Africa was the cradle of mankind, some still insist that prehistoric Europe was the cradle of human intelligence. New research on the African Middle Stone Age (MSA), that itself goes back 300,000 years, is challenging this view. This paper provides some examples of symbolic, ritual and artistic behaviour, and indeed advanced tool making that took place during this period and up to around 60,000 years ago, long before the appearance of Cro-Magnon Man.

Visits to figurative art museums may lower blood pressure and stress

Background The research aimed to assess, through physiological measurements such as blood pressure and heart rate, whether exposure to art museums and to different art styles (figurative vs. modern art) was able to enhance visitors’ well-being in terms of relaxing and stress reduction.Method Participants (n = 77) were randomly assigned to one of three conditions, on the basis of the typology of the art style they were exposed to in the museum visit: (1) figurative art, (2) modern art and (3) museum office (as a control condition). Blood pressure and heart rate were measured before and after the visits.Results Diastolic values of the participants were quite stable, as expected in people who do not suffer hypertension; we therefore considered only variations in systolic blood pressure. The majority of the participants exposed to figurative art significantly decreased systolic blood pressure compared to those exposed to modern art and museum office. No differences were found in the heart rate before and after the visit for the three groups.Conclusion Findings suggest that museum visits can have health benefits, and figurative art may decrease systolic blood pressure.

The Liberal Soliloquy: The Elite Expression of Shared Loneliness in Modern European Nationalism and Supranationalism

Abstract Abstract: In this article, I explore the problem of identity at the national and European levels historically and sociologically, exposing the liberal thread that runs through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Looking to key historical and artistic figures, I argue for the continuity between early nationalist and European integrationist impulses, maintaining that-despite their seemingly contradictory essence-the two are bound together by a liberalism (viz. the pursuit of the natural rights of man) they hold in common. I contend that this connection illustrates that the initial efforts to construct the nation in the early nineteenth century and a supranational Europe more than a century later can be understood asidealistic liberal projects that have failed due to the populist turn upon which their success depends, leaving the cultural elites behind both projects in a shared loneliness.

Gazing at Owls? Human-strigiform Interfaces and their Role in the Construction of Gravettian Lifeworlds in East-Central Europe

ABSTRACTThis paper develops a new perspective on human-owl relations in the Pavlovian, a regional group of the early Gravettian of East-Central Europe. It argues that the regular representation of owls in figurative art and ornamentation in this context must be understood as a result of unique conditions of encounter and interaction emerging at the intersection of Southern Moravian early MIS 2-environments, Pavlovian sociocultural practice, and owl presence and behaviour. It is shown that the diverse and tree-rich environments of East-Central Europe, and the Pavlovian Hill region in particular, provided highly favourable living conditions for a rich owl community. In conjunction with Pavlovian settlement behaviour which produced large-scale aggregation sites and seems to have been associated with a more sedentary mode of life, humans were thus particularly exposed to owls that likely dominated the nightly soundscapes of the region. This coincides with the fact that many of the present owl species are resident birds and aligns with compelling evidence for a pronounced ‘sense of place’ in the region's early Gravettian. The paper therefore suggests considering the saliency of negotiating the owl theme in the Pavlovian as an expression of the general eco-cultural entanglement of humans and owls in this setting. I argue that human-owl relations in the Pavlovian might have ultimately been fashioned by a shared sense of place.

Palaeolithic cave art from Crete, Greece

The earliest figural art known from Greece is dated to the Neolithic period (ca. 8,5 to 5thousandyears ago). A recent study of the petroglyphs at Asphendou Cave on the island of Crete, however, suggests that such art has a much longer history in the Aegean basin. First published over forty years ago, the debate concerning the petroglyphs' age has lain dormant for decades. In light of technological advances in digital imaging and recent archaeological and palaeontological discoveries on the island we re-assess the dating of the petroglyphs and prove that some were made in the Late Pleistocene, or Upper Palaeolithic. Comparison of the iconography to fossil data demonstrates that an extinct endemic deer (Candiacervus) is represented at Asphendou Cave. This is the earliest figural art yet discovered in Greece.