Art Scene Research Articles

L’art, l’artiste et la presse:les armes de la propagande et de l’idéologie communiste en Roumanie. L’exposition Flacăra, 1948

After the proclamation of the Romanian People’s Republic in December 1947, a new direction in art developed. The Flacăra exhibition marks the beginning of Soviet-style socialist realism, which gradually takes hold of the Romanian art scene. The press played an essential role in the establishment of realism and exercised a particular form of control. The Communist Party realised that art and the press could be a powerful tool to convey the Marxist-Leninist ideology. The article analyses the press discourse on the works presented in Flacăra.

SOCIO–POLITICAL ACTIVISM IN CURATORIAL PRACTICE. THE CASE STUDY OF FESTIVAL “SURVIVAL KIT”

This article is focusing on the potential strategies that characterize the practice of socio-politically activism in curatorial practice and its potentiality to transform the visual art institutions. Socio-political activism in curatorial practice addresses the specific socio-political issues in various exhibition formats and includes in its methodology strategic decisions that have lasting impact both on the functioning of the institutions themselves and socio- political change in general. This article also examines what strategies Latvian contemporary art curators use to encourage the presence of socio-politically active discourse in the Latvian visual arts scene. The article concludes that strategically inclusive activities in the context of Latvian art institutions are mostly not part of the exhibition policy. The case study under consideration is Latvian contemporary art festival “Survival kit” that is one of the rare art events in Latvia that have engaged with the possibility of real socio-political change and have found it continually necessary to work in ways that question the social and political life of Latvia.

The Dissident Power of Queer Art and Curating in Central Eastern Europe

The text aims to explore the political, cultural and artistic implications of LGBTQ+ art and curatorial practices in Central Eastern Europe in the 21st century. Currently, queer exhibitions, are on the rise in post-communist Europe, especially those held in contemporary art centres and museums. They cast light on new queer art and activism and the volatile sexual politics in the region because of the significant increase in the number of artists working with LGBTQ themes and the topical political background of this movement and its impact on cultural debates. Curators are developing innovative perspectives on sexual, social and artistic dimensions of queer exhibitions in this geographic context still seriously affected by homophobic state policy. The objective is to feature three art shows of major queer artists which have been organised in Hungary, Poland and Estonia in the last decade. The exhibitions are: The Survivor’s Shade: The Life and Work of El Kazovsky at the Museum of Fine Art- Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest in 2015/16; Daniel Rycharski: Fears at the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw in 2019 and Jaanus Samma. Not Suitable for Work. A Chairman’s Tale, Museum of Occupations and Freedom, Tallinn in 2016. The three artists and their exhibitions have been selected because they were organised by major cultural institutions in the capitals, they have achieved a significant social impact and huge audience and the artists have played an important role in the contemporary art scene in each country. Their work is a current manifestation of the queer artistic and intellectual culture that has been developing slowly in the region since the 1980s and has come to play an increasingly important role in recent years. The exhibitions and art of the three artists are a starting point for a broader outline of the themes and important figures in recent queer art in Central Eastern Europe (CEE). Moreover, in each case, they appear in a complex and difficult political context related to the struggle for LGBTQ+ rights. Hence, I would like to propose a thesis about the dissident power and status of queer art and curating in CEE.

Abstraction in artistic scenes executed on Mesopotamian pottery during prehistoric times

يتناول هذا البحث موضوعا مهما يدور حول التجريد في الفن الرافديني القديم (أي التبسيط والاختزال) في المشاهد الفنية المنفذة على الفخار خلال عصور قبل التاريخ, فالتجريد أقدم اساليب الفن البشري حيث يربط الفن بالسحر والدين. والإشكال التجريدية من خلال تعريتها من كل ما هو طبيعي تصبح حرة، وتمتلك طاقة داخلية نابعة من مصادر روحية. 
 وكان الفخار أحد تلك الفنون التي جسدت وخلدت عليها جانباً من تفاصيل الحياة في بلاد الرافدين متخذة من الاسلوب التجريدي اساسا لصياغة مشاهدها, ولكثرة الفخاريات المكتشفة في مختلف المواقع العراقية القديمة وفي كل العصور ولدقة التفاصيل الممثلة عليها وتنوع موضوعاتها وتعدد مشاهدها أمكن من خلالها رسم صورة واضحة للحياة الدينية والمدنية لأبناء بلاد الرافدين بكل ما تتضمنه من تفاصيل. يهدف البحث الى تسليط الضوء على أقدم اساليب الفن الانساني المعروف بالأسلوب التجريدي من خلال تتبع نشأته وتطوره عبر العصور.

An Exploration of the Artistic Scene Design of Traditional Music

Traditional music records the development and changes of various local historical periods with the "symbols" of music, which is an important driving force to enhance cultural self-confidence and self-improvement in the new era, and also an important content to continuously satisfy people's spiritual needs. The cultivation of new art scene has become an important engine for the development of traditional music. Taking Poyang Fishing Song as an example, this paper, based on the scene theory and the basic connotation, artistic value and contemporary development characteristics of Poyang Fishing Song, puts forward the construction of a matching art scene design programme with scene design, performance form and choreography effect as the core elements, so as to provide theoretical support and ideas for the realization of the connotative development of Poyang Fishing Song.

Beyond the Paradigm of Post-1989 Feminist Art History: Researching All-women Exhibitions in Czechoslovakia, Poland and Croatia/Yugoslavia (1945–1989)

There have been some attempts in recent years to construct a global history of all women art initiatives, including those undertaken in Eastern Europe. These have succeeded in – slowly – redrawing a map of all-women art activities, and yet have revealed numerous limitations of revisionist attempts. In this text, we demonstrate how art historiography has developed in Eastern Europe after the political transformation in 1989 and how its anti-communist bias has contributed to the erasure of all-women art activities related to the socialist states’ politics from social memory and feminist art history. In the second part of the text, we develop parallel narratives – on Polish, Czech and Croatian/Yugoslav art scenes, respectively – about how this tendency is to be seen in the research on all-women exhibitions. These observations are a starting point for our histories of all-women exhibitions that include the activities of women artists and women’s organisations so far neglected in postsocialist feminist art historiography.

The Shaping of Malaysian Abstract Expressionist Art within the Context of Malaysian Modern Art (1950s-1970s)

Abstract Expressionism is an art form that began in the West and later gained influence in the East. In the years after World War II, Abstract Expressionism became the catalyst in the transition of modern art in Asia. In Malaysia, with the advocacy of Abstract Expressionism and the spirit of Expressionism, abstract art became mainstream in the art scene since the 1950s. Abstract Expressionism from two different worlds—America and/or Europe and Malaysia—is different, especially in terms of the artists’ respective approach and creativity. This article discusses how the evolution of abstraction works through the artworks produced by Syed Ahmad Jamal, Yeoh Jin Leng, Latiff Mohidin, and Chew Teng Beng. This is followed by a discussion on the diversity of abstraction forms in Malaysian Abstract Expressionist art through the study of works by the aforementioned artists

Аршил Горки и художники русской эмиграции в США в 1920-е – 1930-е годы

The relevance of the topic of this article is explained by the under-researched artistic and historical-cultural context; it helps visualize history. The life and work of Arshile Gorky (1901–1944) are considered during the peak of his creativity, after moving to the USA, in the 1920s and 1930s. Notably, Gorky becomes part of the community of Russian artist emigrants. The article analyzes the artist’s personality and his strong connection with Russian culture, as well as the American art scene. It examines the influence on his work of Russian teachers and contemporaries living at that time in the United States, among them Nikolai Fechin, David Burliuk, and Ivan Dombrowski (John Graham). The article also analyzes Arshile Gorky’s role in the formation and development of American abstract expressionism, especially his contribution to the creation of creative methods and artistic approaches that influenced many American artists among his contemporaries and followers. Several methods were used in the research, including cultural-historical and social-historical methods. It is quite evident that Arshile Gorky embodied in his work the spirit of search and experiment: his works were distinguished by boldness, plastic expressiveness, deep emotionality, and technical innovation.

Entangled History between Semi-Peripheries: Magdalena Abakanowicz’s Fibre Art on the Swedish Art Scene circa 1970

This article examines what role Sweden, as a presumed periphery in Northeastern Europe, played at the turn of the 1960s when Magdalena Abakanowicz and her fellow Polish artists working in fibre material broke new ground moving away from traditional tapestry by working with complex three-dimensional forms. Using the method of a history of crossing, histoire croisée, the article shows how exhibitions with Abakanowicz’s fibre art served many interests at the time, the artist’s own creative development and international career, Swedish art institutions eager to display current experiments in soft environments, the burgeoning Swedish cultural policymaking, and larger structures of cultural diplomacy. The article thus proposes to understand the relation between Sweden and Poland as two semi-peripheries, where the dominant narrative of modern art stemming from Western centres influencing the rest was, in many ways, circumvented.

Станция «Дистанция». Диспозитив производства знания в ранних российских художественных исследованиях

The article examines the specifics of Russian artistic research. First, with the help of historical analysis of the phenomenon in the international context, the essential characteristics of artistic research are deduced. They consist in the intertwining of ontology, epistemology and methodology of a work or a process, which is enacted through a problem beyond the issues of art. Art in this situation acts as an “epistemic thing” (Henk Borgdorff), a “theoretical object” (Hubert Damisch), or an enactive environment. This boundary, or the interdependent intertwining of the subject, method, and purpose of the work, manifests itself in different ways in the various apparatuses of knowledge production in art, varying from context to context, despite the globalization of the art scene of the twenty-first century. The Russian art of the late noughties and early tens was just approaching the use of the research paradigm. Its application is conditioned by a range of reasons, including the need to construct a work of art as a complex reflection on a socially acute topic, such as issues of national identity and historical amnesia. The art segment under consideration tried to avoid merging with the common media imagery, moving away from both the dominant rhetoric and its ironic interpretations by artist predecessors and fellow contemporaries, while bypassing straightforward activist strategies. The kind of knowledge such art dealt with was often non-knowledge, the ungraspable, the erased, and the camouflaged. This knowledge found its elusive manifestation in traces of absence, scattered authorship, failures, and other forms of distancing, yet sometimes revealing through such embodiments its own communicative limitations.

Virtual Reality (VR) Innovative Communication Strategies for Chinese Traditional Arts in the Digital Age

Abstract Chinese traditional art has shown an inevitable decline in dissemination in the digital era. This paper utilizes virtual reality technology to enhance the experience of conventional art and LOD technology to manage the specifics of the virtual interactive scene. To display complex virtual terrain accurately, the data is reorganized with the help of a quadtree. The reconstructed art scene creates a virtual hand shape based on the structural characteristics of the human hand and the data glove. The kernel correlation filtering algorithm is utilized to construct the real-time tracking of the virtual hand. The research object in Chinese traditional art is the stele forest in practice. The results of virtual reality experience show the total score of interaction experience 88.159∊(80,100). The VR technology-based calligraphy experience in the stele forest received high user ratings, and the audience recognized the narrative experience. An in-depth study found that the subtitle grouping in the virtual interaction scene significantly affected the immersion of the art experience (P=0.019<0.05, F=4.562). Virtual reality technology provides a communication channel for digitizing traditional Chinese art, and the study contributes to the proposal of communication strategies.

Проект Всеславянской художественно-промышленной выставки в Петербурге: 1902–1912

The paper examines the All-Slavic Art and Industry Exhibition. Preparations took 10 years: from 1902 to 1912. Using archival materials and early 20th century periodicals, the author analyses the exhibition as part of a global trend toward national and international art exhibitions and as a reflection of the St. Petersburg art scene at the turn of the 20th century, which welcomed contemporary art from various countries: from Germany to Japan. The exhibition was organized by the Petersburg Slavic Benevolent Society, which established a dedicated Exhibition Committee. The committee secured permission from the Tsar and funding from the Minister of Finance to carry out the project. The exhibition aimed to foster new trade contacts and showcase the unity and cohesion of the Slavic peoples in response to the perceived threat of cultural expansion by Hungary and Germany. As attendees showed increasing enthusiasm for the exhibition, the organizers expanded their plans, making them more ambitious and costly. However, the exhibition ultimately did not take place due to foreign policy issues. This study contextualizes the All-Slavic exhibition within the political climate of the time and explores the role of art in international diplomacy. Additionally, the research highlights other All-Slavic art exhibition projects, including those held abroad.

Exploration of New Digital Media Art Forms under the Combination of Virtual and Augmented Reality Technology

Abstract VR and AR not only expand the art field, but also enrich the form and content of digital media art and promote the development of digital media art. This paper proposes a 3D reconstruction of media art scenes based on the improved Neural Radiation Field (NeRF) technology and then completes the style migration, through which a unique scene art effect is formed, with a view to exploring new ways for the development of new digital media art forms. In the virtual orchard construction, the PSNR value of the optimized NeRF method is improved by 0.205, the SSIM value is improved by 0.015, and the LPIPS value is reduced by 0.018 compared with the state-of-the-art method, which can be concluded that the optimized NeRF method has a good image synthesis effect.

Произведения российских уличных художников в собрании Русского музея

The institutionalization of street art goes back more than fifty years and the interest of art institutions in it is only growing. This is due to the expansion of the artistic tools of the representatives of the "street wave" and the significant contribution of the pioneers of street art to the world artistic process. Collecting and representing this trend of contemporary art has become an integral part of covering current artistic trends. The Russian Museum is the first domestic institution to present the work of American graffiti artists in its exhibition in 1995. The Russian street art scene was just emerging during this period, but already at the beginning of the 21st century works by its most prominent representatives are included in the museum’s temporary exhibitions and add to its collection. The State Russian Museum collection contains works by Russian "street wave" artists working in assorted styles and with different mediums. Consideration of works from the collection of the Russian Museum in the context of the continuation of the global process of institutionalization of street art allows us to study in more detail countless examples of museumification and representation of the work of artists with a street-art background.

An Interview with Debra Bricker Balken and Lynn Gumpert, curators of Americans in Paris: Artists Working in Postwar France, 1946-1962 (Grey Art Gallery, 2024)—Part Two

The exhibition Americans in Paris: Artists Working in Postwar France, 1946-1962, running between March and July 2024, examines the art of US expats in Paris following World War II. The following is the second of a two-part interview with the show’s curators, Debra Bricker Balken and Lynn Gumpert. In this second part, the curators discuss the title of their show, which constitutes a reference to Vincente Minnelli’s famous film An American in Paris (1951, starring Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron). Their choice to pluralize “American” reveals much about their conceptual approach. They also discuss the inter-influence but also tensions between French and US artists of the post-war period. They evoke the idea of dialogue between New York and Paris, a notion that has been eclipsed by assumptions about the ascendancy of the New York art scene over the Parisian counterpart in the postwar period (for example, Guilbaut 1983). The curators turn us towards the idea of other forms of globalism, and other forms of modernism, that do not center the New York school. The interview concludes with a brief connection of this exhibit to the “post-global” moment in curatorial world (O’Neill 2019) and the wider society.

The Feminist Agenda and the Brazilian Art System between the 1960s and the 1970s

The reception of second-wave feminist guidelines in the Brazilian artistic system has been a recurring theme of inquiry in feminist historiography because of its peculiarity: a country that propagated its international image as a place of delight and sexual experience, but crystallised in conservative and colonial values, in conjunction with a highly experimental artistic scene, but under the yoke of violence from a civil-military dictatorship. To show what kind of relationship was established between some of the cultural agents of the period and the feminist agenda that arrived in the Brazilian scene, this essay takes some case studies that point out the strategies and negotiations regarding feminism, even though those concerned were not militants.

문래창작촌의 상업화와 예술생태 변화 연구

This paper aims to analyze the impact of the commercialization of the recently emerged Mullae Art Village, an art cluster, on the art ecology, specifically the creative activities of artists. To achieve this goal, Focus Group Interviews (FGI) and in-depth interviews were conducted with a total of 13 artists. Various data related to Mullae Art Village were also analyzed to examine the current state of commercialization and its effects on the art ecology. The analysis revealed that Mullae Art Village has entered a rapid stage of commercialization. Significant changes in the local space are rapidly occurring, and notably, there is a reduction in the available space for artists. The study also confirmed a significant transformation within the local art scene due to the increase in commercial artistic activities. In response to these findings, the research proposes management systems for coping with local commercialization and policy suggestions for preserving artistic activities. Mullae Art Village serves as a space for diverse artistic activities, and the commercialization of the area is closely tied to these artistic endeavors. Therefore, the significance of this study lies in the discussion of strategies for sustainable development through the coexistence of art and commercialization.

Private art museums and their local creative communities: A case study of Mona

This case study is concerned with the arrival and impact of private art museum Mona in Tasmania, examining how the local creative community perceives its impact and how it influences the broader cultural landscape. The museum represents a larger trend where affluent individuals establish prestigious private museums with significant global reach. This study has found Mona to be a highly personal endeavour, providing influential networks in support of the owner's personal and business objectives. It highlights the perception that the museum has had a transformative impact on Tasmania, particularly in adding a sophisticated dimension to the state's cultural visage and a new vibrancy that is thought to resonate strongly with tourists. Previous scholarship has shown that private museums operate in a different context and play by different rules to their public counterparts and this study has shown this to be true in identifying problems with how to govern Mona and the local creative scene trying to negotiate a place within this changing context. Mona has brought credibility to the arts, but set high expectations for the local arts scene, creating entry barriers for young artists and challenging arts institutions with more limited resources.

THE DEPICTION OF ISLAMIC ELEMENTS IN THE ARTWORKS OF YOUNG CONTEMPORARY AWARD

The National Art Gallery (NAG) introduced the Young Contemporary Award (YCA), also known as Bakat Muda Sezaman (BMS), in the early 1970s with the goal of improving the creative thinking of the art scene. The platform has resulted in a significant percentage of notorious local artists producing remarkable artworks. Nevertheless, with the fast advancement of the modern era in Malaysia, the intention of presenting national culture and traditions especially the Islamic values through visual art among the Muslim artists appears to dissipate. The new generation of Muslim artists' preference for western and universal styles led to the abandonment of Islamic symbols. They appeared to ignore their own cultural motifs and ideals without concerning the impact of their decisions on the next generation of Muslim artists. Thus, this paper will discuss the examples of Islamic elements depicted in the Young Contemporary Award artworks based on the principles from the National Culture Congress 1971 using the qualitative method. It is important for these visual arts to be studied for their contribution in Islamic art. These findings can be used as source of reference to improve the content of Malaysian art making.

Thoughts on the Joanine Style in 18th-Century Luso-Brazilian Religious Decorations

The article aims to stimulate reflections on the gilded and polychrome woodwork of the Joanine Style found in 18th-century Luso-Brazilian churches and chapels. It begins with an overview of the cultural and artistic context fostered by the patronage of Dom João V (1689-1750), whose actions brought about changes in the Portuguese art scene, influencing Brazil. Through the analysis of these aspects, the article examines the influence of Portuguese art on Brazilian religious decoration between approximately 1720-1760. It highlights the presumed means used to enrich the formal repertoire of executed works, the formal characterization of remaining pieces, and the involvement of various artists involved in this process. Within this scope, the article also prompts reflections on the wooden ornamentation of the Joanine style in Brazil, a theme that is still insufficiently researched.