Artistic Portrayal Research Articles

Telling My Story

The authors document the integration of methods from the arts and humanities into a social research and development project, the objectives of which are to create and test promising interventions helpful in assisting older homeless African American women get and stay out of homelessness in the city of Detroit, Michigan, USA. The exhibit incorporates multiple forms of narrative, includes performative features, promotes public awareness of homelessness in the city of Detroit, and engages homeless and formerly homeless women in social action. The authors examine the prototype design and the involvement of participants in creating artistic portrayals of their homeless experience.

A Brief History of Urology at Baylor University Medical Center

A Brief History of Urology at Baylor University Medical Center

The voice of art and the art of medicine. The 2002 presidential address.

Vincent van Gogh's life, letters, and art are the framework for this existential speech about the nature of alienation, as well as its threat to humanity and to the artful practice of medicine. The honest, human voice expressed in van Gogh's art stands in opposition to alienation, which occurs when we divide the world into two parts: the "perfect" world of science versus the "flawed" world of human experience. Bridging this divide allows for an "authentic" life, one which honestly defines itself and faces difficult human truths. The most difficult truth relates to our own mortality, but it must be faced if we are to understand the value of existence. Film clips from Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters illustrate how an artist's portrayal of these issues can be both profound and humorous, and how art brings us closer to our own humanity and to the essence of medicine. Neurosurgeons are warned about the lure of science and technology as a substitute for purpose and meaning, both as physicians and as human beings. The role of the American Association of Neurological Surgeons is explored and found to offer neurosurgeons a bridge away from alienation and toward a neurosurgical community. Neurosurgeons are urged to find meaning through service to their profession and to find the voice and art of medicine. [Note: Actual film clips were used when this address was delivered. Unofficial transcripts of the clips have been included in this article so that the integrity of the speech would not be compromised.]

Cultural Loss and the American Dream: The Immigrant Experience in Barry Levinson'sAvalon

Barry Levinson's Avalon is an exploration in the most American of experiences-the process of immigration experienced by millions of new citizens (Nugent). As we follow the acculturation of Sam Krichinsky and his extended family, we observe the joy, the sense of wonder, and the feeling of limitless possibilities that were part of the immigrant experience in America during the first quarter of the 20th Century. But we also witness the social forces that erode, step-by-step, across generations, the rich cultural heritage the Krichinskys brought to their new homeland. The strong family ties, the traditions, the rituals, and the cultural norms are slowly replaced by the promises of a new, fast-paced, modernizing America. The loss, necessary and yet irreparable, teaches us much about the paradoxes of the immigrant experience (Bodnar; Gordon). This paper explores Levinson's artistic portrayal of those paradoxes. Hollywood and the media have always portrayed the immigrant experience in a very positive light. The arrival of immigrants seems deeply woven into our contemporary sense of national identity. It confirms America's status as the land of opportunity, as the newcomers help create the contours of our own modernity. The many migrant strands come together to see America through two world wars and an industrial economic boom unlike any in previous history. The hardships of the experience, of course, cannot compare to the good fortune of freedom and social mobility associated with America's bounty. The whole journey has an ineffable quality-the horrible conditions of the old country are left behind, for the sake of the opportunities of the new homeland. Along the way, in a more or less unquestioning fashion, the immigrant is supposed to embrace the American culture and become a full-fledged participant in the nation-building process that defined the 20th-century United States. To some extent this portrayal of immigration is critical to our sense of patriotism. It upholds the notion of America's manifest destiny, of its uniqueness among nations. From colonial times Americans are not united by a common birthplace, but by the embracing of certain ideals and aspirations. That so many would yearn to join in this project is a clear indication of the staying power of those promises. Underneath the symbolism, the message is clear: coming to America is the means to personal redemption. Even grittier films-Moscow on the Hudson, Mi Familia, or The Godfather-that show glimpses of immigration's underside, end up reaffirming its blessings as well. It is in America that immigrants are finally allowed to flourish and succeed. It may take a period of re-adjustment, and there may be a certain amount of cultural adaptation to deal with, but the result is an affirmation of the American dream. People prosper, get settled, and enjoy the fruits of their labor. They see their children growing up in a prosperous land, where they can look forward to an unfettered future. Needless to say, immigrant films deal in hope. They trade on the promise that motivates so many to leave their homelands. Furthermore, Hollywood is not alone in preserving the iconic image of the immigrant. The media contributes to its perpetuation as well. Legal immigrant stories tend to highlight their success; or, if faced with tragedy-someone gets killed or mugged-they highlight the enormous sadness for someone who came from so far to have his/her dreams cut short by misfortune. Every Fourth of July the news media profiles a group of immigrants at their citizenship ceremony in a courthouse, the governor's palace, or the steps of Congress. The commentary usually runs along the lines of how fortunate the new citizens are to have found a haven, and how proud they are to become Americans. Flags are waved, photo-ops are created for the local newspapers, and the symbolism goes on. What is missed in these public images is the complexity of the immigrant experience. There is a bitter sweetness that comes from giving up one's identity, from letting go of old ways to embrace the American way. …

No Nudes, Please!

[Original] Editor's comment: Recently some popular magazines have published quite a few artistic portrayals of nudes, some by famous foreign artists, others by Chinese art workers. The magazines Creative Works and Flower City have also published illustrations of nude sculptures of Zhang Zhixin. This has generated much comment. In the West, the artistic portrayal of nudes has a long history and is very common. It is intimately related to the historical development of the Western people, to their customs and habits. In our country, the broad popular masses rarely come into contact with this form of art and are easily repulsed by it. This is understandable. To learn from the great foreign works of art, our artists must discuss works of nudes. But as far as their own creative work is concerned they should strive in a direction that is appreciated and enjoyed by the people of our country. In popular magazines, it is inadvisable to publish illustrations depicting nudes, including famous foreign works of art. We hope that the departments concerned will pay attention to this.

Clichés of Ethnicity Subverted: Robert LePage's La Trilogie des Dragons

La Trilogie des dragons, conceived and produced under the direction of Robert Lepage, has received national and international acclaim. This analysis of the six-hour version of the production examines how Lepage departs from traditional explorations of cultural communities. In a strikingly flexible playing space the production elicits an intertextual discourse among the disparate texts connoting ethnic experience. Superimposed on a simple narrative exploring the lives of two Québécois women is a metatext which questions the validity of narrow, highly individualized, artistic portrayals of multiculturalism. The mise en scène embodies archaeological inquiry into the physical artifacts of a population; the predominantly non-verbal text encourages a reconsideration of the primacy of written documents as a way of creating meaning; the use of three languages within the course of the production challenges the emphasis placed on linguistic compatibility between stage and audience; and the theatricality highlights, simultaneously, cultural stereotypes and their appropriation into a new context.

The Drama of the Passions: Tate and Purcell's Characterization of Dido

ABOUT 1689-1690, Josias Priest, the dancing master at a girls' school in Chelsea, asked Henry Purcell to write a chamber opera for the school to perform. The opera that Purcell wrote with Nahum Tate, Dido and Aeneas, is still effective and moves us today. Many critics have remarked on the opera's surprising unity and attribute it to Purcell's genial musical setting of Tate's pedestrian verse.' But it is the libretto describing Dido' passions that actually provides the unity. Baroque aesthetics are essential to Tate and Purcell's achievement, particularly ideas about the artistic portrayal of passions. Strictly speaking, the unity of Dido and Aeneas is not a unity of action but a unity of form. It derives from Tate and Purcell's combined intentions to depict the movement of passions that leads up to Dido's lament, the opera's climactic moment. To shape the drama and portray Dido's passions, the authors use conventions of seventeenth-century faculty-psychology -theories about the human soul and its passions. The relationship of the parts of the soul and the role of the passions, as described in seventeenth-century theoretical works, provides the basis for

The Female Nude in Public Art: Constructing Women's Sexual Identity in the Visual Arts

In the winter and spring of 1922, a battle raged in the New York popular press centering around a sculpture and an artist almost forgotten today-the Triumph of Civic Virtue by Frederick William MacMonnies. Civic Virtue was a huge sculptural ensemble, due to be put in place that summer at one of Manhattan's more prominent sites, the plaza in front of City Hall. Yet when art historians today recall the sculpture and the controversy that it provoked, both are seen as of marginal import: the sculpture as an example of a sadly outmoded style, and the debate as one more instance of an artist vilified by a prudish, philistine public.1 But however trivial MacMonnies' Civic Virtue now seems from an aesthetic viewpoint, the controversy that it generated is of real potential interest for women's studies scholars. To my knowledge this debate is one of the first times when a group of women created a genuinely feminist protest around the image of womanhood that public art so importantly produces. In doing so, they began to ask crucial questions about the use visual culture makes of women's bodies-questions that are still the focus of public debate today. The furor sparked by Civic Virtue was not the first press debate MacMonnies' sculptures had engendered. At several moments in his career, press and public asked angry questions about the artist's portrayal of women. In fact, seen as a whole, MacMonnies' art and the discourse that encircled it provide interesting historical evidence of shifting attitudes about the way in which visual culture can and should embody women's sexual identity. This article, by examining several of MacMonnies' sculptures and the contemporary critical response to them, seeks to identify some of the means by which the visual arts constructed women's identity during the period 1890-1925. Many of the rationales by which mainstream society in the modern era explain culture's use and abuse of women's bodies were proposed and honed during those decades, and art critical debates around MacMonnies' work were an important part of the process.

Из архивных материалов : Сергей Шаршун - русский художник и писатель

Temira Pachmuss, Extracts from the archives. Serge Charchoune, a Russian painter and writer. Serge Charchoune (1888-1976), the first Russian Dadaist poet, was also a modernist painter. In 1921, he authored a long Dadaist work, Foule immobile : poème, and later published several unusual books in Russian, among them Stories unpleasant (1964), Sky à la Bell: a poem 1919-1965 (1965), Lighthouseless: four landscapes (1969), and an artistic portrayal of Charchoune's own alter ego, Mr. Longface: from the epopee "A hero is more fascinating than the novel" (1961). As the unusual titles suggest, the plots are indeed unorthodox. The "freed" contents of the works found curious expressions in Charchoune's equally unusual arrangement of halftone, colors and lines in his painting. An abstract artist, he succeeded in conveying the imperceptible and the inexpressible. His art requires an onlooker's participation, who is expected to complete the painting himself - through his own imagination and understanding of its subtle interplay of colors, lines, and musical notes. As his subject, Charchoune used various symphonies of Bach, Tchaikovsky, and other composers. Charchoune was a frequent visitor at the Merezhkovskys ' Sunday literary salons in Paris, where he came to know Greta Gerell, a Swedish artist and a close friend of Zinaida Hippius. This article is based on their correspondence which reveals Charchoune as a remarkable artist, poet, and man.

Ägypten in Thomas Manns Josephsroman: Zum Problem des `Bildzitats'

Thomas Mann made extensive use of the technique of montage, drawing his material from the most varied areas of life and art. In the many attempts to elucidate examples of montage one important area, namely the plastic arts, has been overlooked. These `visual quotations' (Bildzitate) are, however, particularly characteristic of the spirit and style of Thomas Mann's work. There are three types of Bildzitat: in the first a work of art is absorbed into the language and transformed into a metaphor; in the second type a scene portrayed in art is turned in the novel into an event – the `momentary' art work becomes a chronological sequence; the third type consists of the transference of artistic portrayal to the external appearance of individual characters. The use of such Bildzitate is more than just a vogue of Thomas Mann. It illustrates a specific aspect of his art, his greatness, and his limitations. He is limited by lack of phantasy, by his inability to invent both the plot and the characters of his works. His greatness lies in his genius for observation which enables him to perceive the essential qualities behind the outward appearance and thus to transcend it.

Political Assassinations in India

I. VIOLENCE is endemic in Indian public life. According to Lewis F. Richardson (1960), India stands in the middle range among nations in respect to rates of murder in proportion to population. But violence, including deadly acts, may have increased in India in recent years. Be that as it may, political and social turbulence is an outstanding characteristic of India today (Times, London, 1967; New York Times, 1967). To an extent the violence in India is similar to that occurring currently in the U.S.A.-it is systemic. The violence accompanies the struggle for self-assertion of the poorer classes and castes and provokes a violent response from upper castes and classes. The social structure appears threatened; law and order are invoked against the troublemakers; the police are eager to wield the billy club. The inclination to physical violence is facilitated by the lack of inhibition in Indian culture, except in the case of caste untouchability, against physical contact. The bars against contact are group prohibitions rather than individual ones; on the other hand, tactile deprivation is widespread in the U.S.A. Men in India often hold hands; it has not occurred to them that this indicates a homosexual tendency which is sinful. Violence is an aggravation of physical contact, especially where it becomes pathological because of prolonged tactile deprivation. John Steinbeck gave a moving portrayal of this development in Of Mice and Men (1937). The author notices the ubiquitousness of tactile contact in continental Europe, where also it frequently develops into a quarrel. Thus physical violence, short of serious hurt or death, may not appear as objectionable to Indians (or Europeans) as it does to Puritans. Another preliminary remark concerns the existence in India of what a British psychiatrist termed homicidal rage (Carstairs, 1957). It occurs frequently in northern India where, in the course of a quarrel, one or both participants seemingly lose self-control completely and would stop at nothing in inflicting harm on the antagonist. The onset of the rage is the signal for the bystanders to intervene. The rage socializes the quarrel insofar as the participants, having become helpless and lost control, are dependent upon the bystanders. Although Carstairs noted that businessmen learn to act angrily, in order to pressure repayment of loans from their clients, he underestimates the ritual aspect of the homicidal rage. Violence in India is highly ritualized, though to varying degrees in different areas. The author estimates that it increases as one moves from northwest to southeast. Thus it is least ritualized in the Punjab in the northwest and most in Madras and Kerala, where long drawn-out and seemingly violent quarrels are enacted in well-rehearsed gestures. Kathakali ballet dance, which is indigenous to Kerala, includes gruesome scenes, such as beheading the enemy and drinking his blood. Yet this State is much less violent than other parts of India, where artistic and ritual portrayal of violence is much rarer.

Insight into Artistic Perception and Portrayal

Insight into Artistic Perception and Portrayal