Capacity Of Art Research Articles

“Born with God in the House”: Feminist Vision and Religious Revision in the Works of Zora Neale Hurston

“Born with God in the House”: Feminist Vision and Religious Revision in the Works of Zora Neale Hurston Jenny Hyest At the start of her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, Zora Neale Hurston insists that any reader who wishes to understand the trajectory of her life must first understand her origins. “Time and place have had their say,” she observes, “[s]o you will have to know something about the time and place where I came from, in order that you may interpret the incidents and directions of my life” (1). Later, in the chapter titled “Religion,” Hurston examines her history in the Baptist Church and, quite strikingly, frames her account as a birth narrative: “You wouldn’t think that a person who was born with God in the house would ever have any questions to ask on the subject. . . . I tumbled right into the Missionary Baptist Church when I was born” (215). By portraying the church as her birthplace, Hurston emphasizes the profundity of its influence on her. Readers cannot hope to “interpret the incidents and directions” of her life, she suggests, without understanding her relationship to the church (1). Yet, in the same text, Hurston also declares: “It seems to me that organized creeds are collections of words around a wish. I feel no need for such” (226). Elsewhere she goes even further. In a 1937 letter to Henry Allen Moe of the Guggenheim Foundation, written to report on her Haitian Vodou fieldwork, Hurston assured him, “No I have not been converted locally,” before pointedly adding, “tho I am not a christian either” (391). An effort to map Hurston’s stance on religion seems to produce a tale of two Zoras. Having abandoned the faith of her youth while in college, Hurston remained steadfast in her refusal to align herself with any organized religion throughout the rest of her life. She was, as this essay will demonstrate, a rigorous and consistent critic of “organized creeds,” and she reserved her most [End Page 25] incisive reproaches for Christianity. At the same time, even a cursory survey of her career suggests that a fascination with Judeo-Christian history, beliefs, and practices determined the direction of her intellectual and creative life. In her anthropological work on Vodou in New Orleans and the Caribbean, she frequently adopted a comparativist approach, putting African diasporic religious practices into dialogue with Christian ones. As a scholar of folklore, she recorded African American folk adaptations of Christian origin myths. And her fiction writing was consistent with this larger ethos of her career. The titles alone hint at the persistence of her devotion—Jonah’s Gourd Vine; Their Eyes Were Watching God; Moses, Man of the Mountain; Seraph on the Suwanee—and her interest in Christian history intensified during the final years of her career, which were dedicated to researching and writing Herod the Great, an unpublished manuscript from the 1950s that she described as her “great obsession” (Hurston to Burroughs Mitchell 702). Hurston was not a Christian, but the themes of her writing and research suggest that she retained a decidedly Christian sensibility. Following Hurston’s lead, this essay examines what it meant for her to be “born” in the Macedonia Missionary Baptist Church, where her father, John Hurston, was the preacher, and to be raised “with God in the house.” In so doing, I reveal not two contradictory Zoras but rather one woman responding to the contradictory implications of her religious inheritance. Although Hurston insisted that her childhood exposure to patriarchal religious dogma had threatened the development of her artistic capacities, she also came to recognize that the aesthetics of the black Baptist Church had indelibly shaped her mode of artistic expression. Hurston’s response to this conundrum, I maintain, was twofold. Throughout her writings, and especially in Dust Tracks and her letters, she named the injuries she suffered within patriarchal Christianity and exposed the ways organized religion, more generally, functioned as a tool of domination. Yet rather than repudiate her religious inheritance in its entirety and, in the process, tear at the fabric of her own aesthetic subjectivity, Hurston reinvented that inheritance. Their Eyes Were Watching God, I argue, is an expression of...

Conceptualising the Coming World, Rearming Collective Thought

In his analysis of Kant's “Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment?”, Michel Foucault defined modern criticism as a way of detecting a difference in history within one's own time, of being mindful of the plasticity of one's present. Two books expound on the capacity of intellectuals and artists to survey current events and “see what's coming”, identifying what the times are pregnant with and what already pervades them. From the future of industrial societies within the newest forms of c...

Martha Ann Honeywell: Art, Performance, and Disability in the Early Republic

Martha Ann Honeywell (1786-1856) was a visual artist and performer who traveled across North America and Europe to exhibit her embroidery, waxwork, miniature writing, and paper cutting as well as her atypically-figured body, which lacked arms and hands and had just one foot with three toes. Drawing on over two hundred newspaper advertisements that she published, over one hundred samples of her visual artwork, nearly thirty visitor responses, and one surviving letter, this essay examines Honeywell’s story and the strategies that she used to appeal to consumers and cultivate her business. It argues that she capitalized on new cultural and commercial opportunities in the early republic as well as long-held conceptions of disability in productive ways. Honeywell was a relentless traveler, seeking new markets internationally and in the American West. She also catered to her patrons’ desires for miniatures and silhouettes, which held popular appeal, and utilized advancements in print culture to generate publicity. At the same time, Honeywell’s techniques for attracting clientele were informed by ideas about disability, and congenital physical anomalies in particular, with deep roots in western culture. To accommodate her spectators’ curiosities about her body, she juxtaposed her artistic capacities and physical incapacities in ways that elicited shock and amazement. In addition, to ease visitors’ fears about disability and anxieties about viewing her impairments, she presented familiar and socially acceptable traits that aligned with their expectations of the body, gender, and class. In the end, Honeywell’s mastery of these dual strategies of the spectacular and the conventional—along with the possibilities that the early national marketplace presented—produced what may seem like an unexpected outcome. Rather than condemning, fearing, or deriding her uniqueness, customers proclaimed her to be uniquely American, an exemplary woman and citizen.

Tidelines: Creative Vision, Ecology and the Tropics

On a sunny, calm day in the tropics, waves wash ashore plastic bottles, discarded thongs and sparkling red shards from broken car taillights, littering the tideline. The appeal of the tropics, imagined as a pristine verdant paradise replete with exotic plants and enigmatic animals, belies the impact of human activity on the region. Works of art, however, can reveal this ecological change, offering new ways of comprehending our place in the tropics. The capacity of artists to address these changes in a way that generates reflective understanding is examined in this paper. Both the author’s works of art and those of other artists in the tropical region are analyzed in terms of their aesthetic properties. These findings may assist artists who endeavor to present new ways of imaging change in the ecology of the tropics.

Hands-On Heritage! Establishing Soft Authority over Heritage through Architectural Experiment: A Case Study from Jordan

This study identifies ‘heritage as practice’ as an alternative to ‘authorized’ heritage engagement. Heritage, in this sense, is perceived as a source of inspiration and creativity rather than just an asset to be preserved. ‘Heritage as practice’ is informed by the conventional identification and evaluation of heritage, coupled with the architectural and artistic instincts, capacities, creativity, and commitment found in the field of architecture, to interpret heritage. We label the work produced out of this practice as ‘creative material’ that is subjected to further re-creation when it is used as a platform for community engagement. We examine the mechanisms of these engagements through an academic experiment in which architecture students were asked to analyze the representations of the local heritage site of Umm el-Jimal, Jordan. We argue that shifting from ‘authorized’ engagement to informed ‘instinctual’ one gives the students a soft authority over heritage. However, it is the capacity to creatively engage with and about heritage, and use this to continuously and creatively interpret heritage, that makes this authority valid and just.

Strategic Gaps: Poetry and the Sixth Sense from Chateaubriand to Mallarmé

This article examines a view of poetry that developed in France during the course of the nineteenth century: namely, of poetry as a mode of perception and knowledge that creates and maps a ‘strategic gap’ between the sensual and the conceptual. Following brief discussion of the explicit analogy between poetry and the sixth sense as it appears in twentieth-century poetry (Bonnefoy, Guillevic), the article traces a history of this ‘strategic gap’ through a series of writers: Chateaubriand, Ballanche, Staël, Lamartine, Baudelaire, Hugo, and Mallarmé. The term ‘sixth sense’ — proposed by the abbé Du Bos in 1719 as a synonym for aesthetic response and briefly adopted by Chateaubriand to designate the capacity of art to offer intimations of the divine — was appropriated by Mesmerism in the late eighteenth century and remained associated with the paranormal and the occult. Nineteenth-century poets were therefore obliged to coin alternatives — enthusiasm, prayer, conjecture, mystery — in order to articulate an increasingly secular apprehension of the ‘divine’, of that which lies just outside our sensual or conceptual grasp. Implicit in these coinages is nevertheless the conviction that poetry allows us to perceive and express what Chateaubriand calls the ‘je ne sais quoi’ and Mallarmé quite simply ‘autre chose’.

Shakespeare’s "Othello" beyond the boundaries of the page: An analysis of two filmic productions

http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/2175-7917.2015v20n2p11O objetivo deste artigo é observar e analisar duas produções fílmicas da obra Otelo, de William Shakespeare. A primeira, intitulada Othello, foi dirigida, produzida e estrelada por Orson Welles em 1952, e a segunda, também intitulada Othello, foi dirigida por Oliver Parker, em 1995. O interesse principal do estudo dessas produções é observar - à luz dos princípios de adaptação teatral de Jay Halio (2000), Patrice Pavis (1992), e Allan Dessen (2002) - como cada diretor construiu em suas produções fílmicas o momento da sedução que acontece na Cena III, Ato III, do texto shakespeariano. A análise aponta que duas concepções diferentes, separadas no tempo e no espaço, são capazes de fazer com que a atemporalidade de Shakespeare transcenda e mostra aos espectadores modernos que a capacidade artística humana é capaz de atravessar fronteiras inimagináveis de criatividade e transformar uma grande obra literária em um exímio espetáculo (fílmico ou teatral).

Reviews: Music and the Politics of Negation

Music and the Politics of Negation , by James R. Currie. Musical Meaning & Interpretation. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2012. xxi, 222 pp. In James Currie's book, a distantly Adornian conception of negation organizes a series of close readings of compositions by Mozart and Haydn, plus a concluding excursus on the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra. It amounts to a defense—timely, some would say—of values that have been under the cosh lately: aesthetic autonomy and the human autonomy that it ostensibly models; the utopian potential and politically resistant capacity of art; and the continuing importance of canonical (that is: late eighteenth-century Viennese) music. Consequently, the book is also a sustained critique of the liberal intellectual vernacular of much present-day musicological discourse: happy-clappy pluralism, which arguably echoes the foodcourt multiculturalism of free-market ideologies; knee-jerk historicism, which tends to imagine that its methods axiomatically puncture the lofty aspirations of the aesthetic by exposing art's origins; the idea that disenchantment and demystification, in a sort of permanent intellectual upheaval, should be the main elements of a musicologist's job description; the broadly postmodern suspicion of any perspective that can be described as “totalizing”—and indeed any artistic practice that professes to transcend the quotidian, or the material given-ness of the world as it is. Though I have a great many doubts about the particulars of this book's arguments and argumentation, these broad preoccupations are, it seems to me, important—even pressing. This study will not be everyone's cup of tea. This is partly because of its tone, which is by turns playful and portentous, knottily abstract, sweepingly big-picture, and self-consciously eclectic in its range of collateral reference. Certainly, this book at times wears its learning rather heavily, ostentatiously parading its intellectual gurus in a way that can be distracting to read. Early on, one characteristic paragraph (pp. 3–4) develops a boldly adumbrated claim about the history of mirror metaphors via Romantic theories of the uncanny, a frothy description of the climactic bathroom …

Art as behaviour--an ethological approach to visual and verbal art, music and architecture.

In recent years, the fine arts, architecture, music and literature have increasingly been examined from the vantage point of human ethology and evolutionary psychology. In 2011 the authors formed the research group 'Ethology of the Arts' concentrating on the evolution and biology of perception and behaviour. These novel approaches aim at a better understanding of the various facets represented by the arts by taking into focus possible phylogenetic adaptations, which have shaped the artistic capacities of our ancestors. Rather than culture specificity, which is stressed e.g. by cultural anthropology and numerous other disciplines, universal human tendencies to perceive, feel, think and behave are postulated. Artistic expressive behaviour is understood as an integral part of the human condition, whether expressed in ritual, visual, verbal or musical art. The Ethology of the Arts-group's research focuses on visual and verbal art, music and built environment/architecture and is designed to contribute to the incipient interdisciplinarity in the field of evolutionary art research.

El aparecer de lo sublime: la recuperación de lo sublime en la naturaleza a través del arte

The Kantian interpretation of the sublime proposes in its assessment a predominant place to the contemplation of nature. Contemporary interpretations, on the other hand, focus their attention upon the capacity of art as a de-structuralizing element, in order to give an account of a historical development of the arts in the way of the sublime. The present paper holds that, since Martin Seel’s Aesthetics of Appearing , it is possible to link both approaches by means of an existential interpretation of the experience of the sublime that stresses the role of time, and thus recovers the experience of the natural sublime in the absence of a super-sensible foundation.

The Poetics of the “Charmed Cup” in Felicia Hemans and Letitia Elizabeth Landon

THE MOTIF OF THE DRINKING CUP, RICH IN HISTORICAL AND LITERARY ASSOCIATIONS, has variously evoked Dionysian inspiration, rituals of libation, Christ's sacrifice, and, by extension, either pleasure or healing. Male Romantics as diverse as Sheridan, Burns, Blake, Coleridge, Byron, Moore, de Quincey, and Keats all utilize the motif. (1) Often, they use it to allude to Bacchic release and artistic creativity: the essence of wit and storytelling is held in the cup, and it inspires creativity and a sexually charged break from mundane life. As these writers imbue the liquid within the with conflicting connotations of life, pleasure, cure, and poison, the becomes for them a complex, metapoetic device for authorship. Women writers of the era, negotiating the conventional ideology of male-identified authorship, adopted and refashioned the motif of the drinking cup. (2) Two such writers, Felicia Hemans (1793-1835) and Letitia Elizabeth Landon (known as L. E. L., 1802-1838), deployed the trope of the cup to explore female authorship and authorial power: the gift of genius, a seductive trap leading to commodification, and authorial control over self and others in seemingly uncontrollable situations. The emerges for them as a metapoetic device through which they analyze the intersections of gender, authorship, and life. While politically less committed to advocating the equality of the sexes than feminist writers such as Wollstonecraft a generation earlier, Elemans and Landon nonetheless expand the sites of women's writing beyond the sober reasoning Wollstonecraft advocates, as they explore ramifications of the authorial position, investing in the intoxication of authorial power. Challenging the typical understanding of Hemans and Landon as unreflective poetesses, this article aims to probe their artistic strategies and their reflections upon those strategies through the trope of the cup. Their use of the same motifs and similar rhetoric suggests significant literary cross-influences and correlations, stemming from their shared position as middle-class women writers navigating social, linguistic, and ideological conditions. They invert and revise the male-oriented rhetoric of the not only to signify their struggles for authorship but also to explore the transformative potential of those struggles. In particular, when they present sorceress figures who administer charmed cups, they enact and comment on the creative and destructive power of female authorship. These rhetorical moves offer metapoetic reflections on their artistic capacity, as well as demonstrate their literary range and professional ambition. 1. The Spell of the Charmed Cup In the Introduction to A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1791), Mary Wollstonecraft attributes women's complicity in men's objectification of them to women's temporary intoxication: ... men endeavour to sink us still lower, merely to render us alluring objects for a moment; and women, by the adoration which men, under the influence of their sense, pay them, do not seek to obtain a durable interest in their hearts, or to become the friends of the fellow creatures who find amusement in their society. (3) A rationalist feminist thinker, Wollstonecraft argues that women inherently have access to the power of reason, a province conventionally assumed to be male. To change their inferior social status and the culture of objectification, she states, women must first awaken from their superficial and transient intoxication. In The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria (posthumously published in 1798), Wollstonecraft presents as the most crucial moment for the protagonist, Maria, the time when she is roused from an intoxicated sensibility to more matured reason via writing. (4) Wollstonecraft constructs writing as a sober and rational act, which facilitates women's awakening from their drunken stupor and allows them to assume a position of equal partnership with men. …

Literature After Ranciére: Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans and Gibson's Neuromancer

SummaryIn this article the implications of Jacques Ranciére's far-reaching notions of “the distribution of the sensible”, “dissensus” and the “three regimes of art” (particularly for literature) are explored. Kazuo Ishiguro's roman noir entitled When We Were Orphans and William Gibson's dark science fiction novel Neuromancer are examined to demonstrate the novelty of Ranciére's thought, in terms of which the cherished categories of literary orthodoxy are surpassed. Specifically, Ranciére challenges the usual distinction between premodern “representational literature” and modern self-referential literature, and introduces a radically historical manner of appropriating the art and literature of an era. His distinction between three regimes of art (the “ethical regime of images”, the “representative regime of the arts” and the “aesthetic regime of art”) are fundamental in understanding the capacity of art and literature to contribute discursively to the “(re)distribution of the sensible”, or the symbolic (re)configuration of social and political space, by disrupting the conventional space of the “sensible” through “dissensus”.

Subterranean subalterns: Territorialisation, deterritorialisation, and the aesthetics of mining

Building on the notions of territorialisation and deterritorialisation, as developed by Deleuze and Guattari [1972. Capitalisme et schizophrénie: L'anti-Œdipe. Paris: Les éditions de minuit; 1980. Mille Plateaux. Capitalisme et Schizophrénie 2. Paris: Les Éditions de minuit], and relating them to work, this paper engages and experiments with the aesthetic study of organisation. In particular, this paper discusses the political aesthetics of deterritorialisation as exemplified in the work of Jean Marc Dalpé. The rhythm of the mines and lines of flight (attempts at deterritorialisation from the subterranean depths) initiate a new mode of visibility – a new way of seeing and speaking of this reality that renders salient and immanent the ambivalence of territorialisation and deterritorialisation. The work of Dalpé presents the deep imprints of the subterranean territory on the body, soul, and experience of Northern Ontarian miners. Dalpé's work evidences the multiplicity of lines of flight that emanate from attempts to negotiate the traumatic and ontological distance created by the multiple haecceities of mining-as-territorialisation. In this paper, through an engagement with the work of Dalpé, we explore an example of the creative capacity of art to reflect the aesthetic realities of a situation that is, in many ways, ugly and oppressive, and shift the emphasis of organisational aesthetics in a more critical direction.

Drawing out a new image of thought: Anne Carson's radical ekphrasis

This paper examines a poem written by Anne Carson in 1999 in response to a drawing by artist Betty Goodwin titled Seated Figure with Red Angle (1988). The critical issue both artist and poet explore is interrogation. For Goodwin, interrogation relates to the history of torture, forced disappearances and other state-perpetuated atrocities. Torture is not an overt theme in Carson's poem but it remains central to the poem's broader exploration of the meanings of interrogation as a mode by which Western culture has sought knowledge, truth, and certainty, which have as their stakes the objectification of others. Arguing that the poem retrieves a connection between the notion of truth (alethêia) and the ancient Greek practice of basanos — or truth by torture — the paper explores the formal strategies the poem uses to challenge the legacy of rationalist epistemology. Like Goodwin, Carson evokes and then refuses the grid-like structures of containment of syntax and sense. She also refuses to subject her words’ visual other to an interrogation by refusing to picture the picture; she will not frame, name, or make the image speak. Referring to the writings of Antonin Artaud, Gilles Deleuze praises the capacity of art to offer “a new image of thought.”1 This paper shows how, in refusing representation as its central operational mode, the poem reaches “to the edge of the thinkable” to demonstrate art's capacity to offer its own uncertain form of thinking that, in its dynamism, provisionality, and conditionality, brings into being “that which does not yet exist.”2 In so doing, Carson's poem draws on and draws out interrelationships that heal the subject–object split Goodwin's art evokes.

Liberal Art: Art and Education for Citizenship in Kant's Critique of Judgment

AbstractWhile most political theorists focus on the role of reflective judgment in Kant's Critique of Judgment, the political dimensions of art itself have been overlooked. Kant's treatment of art suggests a consistent political message: art, as an analogy, can teach basic values for citizenship. I examine his hierarchy of the arts, as well as his treatment of genius and taste, arguing that each is informed by Kant's belief in the heuristic capacity of art.

The awakening of artistic creativity and Parkinson's disease.

Despite the prominent loss of motor skills, artistic capacities remain preserved in Parkinson's disease (PD). Furthermore, artistic creativity may emerge in art-naïve PD patients treated with levodopa and dopamine agonists. The present review discusses reported PD patients who developed enhanced artistic skills under anti-Parkinsonian therapy and the course of this phenomenon in the clinical context. It is unclear whether creative drive is related to dopamine dysregulation, and the mechanisms remain speculative. The delineation of the particular constellation that enables this emergence in PD patients may shed light on the comprehension of the concept of creativity in general.

Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet beyond the Boundaries of Page: An Analysis of Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet and its Balcony Scene

Whenever a literary work of art crosses the boundaries of page and is transformed in a theatrical play or movie; it goes through a long and complex process of adaptation. What the audience sees and hears on stage or in the big screen is a result of a long journey of work and preparation made by directors and producers according to their conception. Walking in this path, the present paper aims at observing Baz Luhrmann’s cinematic version of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, entitled, Romeo + Juliet and released in 1996. The analysis focuses on how Lurhmann constructed the balcony scene, one of the most famous scenes of the Shakespearian playtext. The analysis shows us that Lurhmann’s version is one of the most visually radical screen adaptations of Shakespeare’s text and it is capable of impressing the modern spectators and making them aware of the fact that the human artistic capacity is able to cross unimaginable limits of creativity and transform a literary work of art in a great spectacle. DOI: 10.5901/ajis.2012.v2n4p53

„Studies in Polish Architecture” by Jerzy Faczyński

“The Studies in Polish Architecture” by Jerzy Faczyński is an important document. It is not only an illustration of his (Faczyński’s) artistic capacity, but it is also an illustration of the Polish history and architecture perception in the period after World War II. Faczyński—a Polish soldier during the war, who shared his fate with many others who after the war could not or would not to return to their country and emigrated. The range of the illustrations of Faczyński supplement the text. The author often pictures the world from the point of view of a young, talented adept of the Liverpool University and its Polish Architectural School.

Selling art to the world in Chelsea

This paper explores the dynamic interaction that occurs between large-scale social processes, urban development and the production of artistic expression and meaning through an analysis of art and urban change in the West Chelsea district of New York City. I begin my analysis with a discussion of specific works of art and expand to the local and global context to which these works respond and help to construct. Both urban space and artistic production, consumption and the social meaning attached to art by artists, critics, audiences and other art world actors have felt the impact of the turn to free market policies and ideology that have attended global economic restructuring and the rapid pace of globalisation. At the same time, art's new role as an engine of urban commerce and the accompanying expansion of the art market have helped to shape city districts like West Chelsea and have left their mark on the work that is exhibited and sold there. My analysis integrates a close study of two works of art exhibited in West Chelsea, interviews and other ethnographic data and recent literature on the arts and urban restructuring and the perspective of critical theory. I also provide photographic documentation of social interaction and the built environment of West Chelsea as it evolved in response to the expansion of the art worlds there. A secondary aim of this research is to contribute to a larger discussion about the social role and critical capacities of art in today's social, economic and political climate.

Rebellion, Creativity and Maturity in Arab Women Writings

Side by side with their Arab compatriot male writers and their Western counterparts of both genders, the Arab women writers have found a space for their original literary writings and for the specificity of their complex identity as being Arabs, women and writers. By analyzing The Stone of Laughter by Huda Barakat and The Map of Love by Ahdaf Soueif, we attempt to explore each novel’s specificity and each writer’s literary creativeness, both of which express Arab women writers’ complex identity. If women narratives are partly fictions, they include stories set by the narratives within which their lives are intertwined. Arab women’s voices seem still very much present in post-colonial literature, certainly more audible than ever. They need to claim their right to exist and have to clear a psychic space for themselves. They can afford to be not only parodic but playful and highly sophisticated as well.In this paper, we will compare and contrast the two works; this exercise will not be of an evaluative nature, but it will rather be an exercise of re-arguing that the Arab woman writer is certainly of great artistic and intellectual capacities as much as any writer of the other gender or culture. We choose to compare Barakat’s حجر الضحك (The Stone of Laughter) and Soueif’s The Map of Love in order to explore, to some extent, the divergences at the linguistic, thematic and narrative levels, to unveil the importance of the two trends of Arab woman literature, that is to say Arabic language literary writings and hybrid literary writings.