Contemporary Art Practice Research Articles

Monumental failures: the contested bodies and sites of public art under lockdown

This article reads the events of June 2020 surrounding Bristol’s Colston statue and Maggi Hambling’s monument to Mary Wollstonecraft as examples of the tensions emerging around the idea of the monument under lockdown. If lockdown is understood as the suspension of personal and social freedoms, then it is not simply individual movement which is at stake, but the shared space of representation too. To use Judith Butler’s formulation, such space - which is already contested, commercialized, mediated - is precisely where the ‘concrete and sedimented artifices’ of the historically legitimized monument come into performative tension with those ‘empowered actors’ who seek to wrest political legitimacy and visibility. With regard to the Colston monument, its defacing, toppling, attempted destruction and subsequent symbolic repurposing by various audiences including protesters, other artists and the museum reflect the issues that surround contemporary public art discourse and practice under lockdown. Critical analysis of these issues is enabled by theoretical precursors such as Rosalind Krauss’s ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’ (1979). The crises around the status of public art are not only a result of singular events or changes in taste. Rather, there are broader historical causes for the failure or exhaustion of monumentality as form itself.

More Than Meets the Eye: Art Engages the Social Brain.

Here we present the viewpoint that art essentially engages the social brain, by demonstrating how art processing maps onto the social brain connectome—the most comprehensive diagram of the neural dynamics that regulate human social cognition to date. We start with a brief history of the rise of neuroaesthetics as the scientific study of art perception and appreciation, in relation to developments in contemporary art practice and theory during the same period. Building further on a growing awareness of the importance of social context in art production and appreciation, we then set out how art engages the social brain and outline candidate components of the “artistic brain connectome.” We explain how our functional model for art as a social brain phenomenon may operate when engaging with artworks. We call for closer collaborations between the burgeoning field of neuroaesthetics and arts professionals, cultural institutions and diverse audiences in order to fully delineate and contextualize this model. Complementary to the unquestionable value of art for art’s sake, we argue that its neural grounding in the social brain raises important practical implications for mental health, and the care of people living with dementia and other neurological conditions.

The impacts of processes of digitalization on the reception of contemporary art in Turkey during Covid-19

ABSTRACT During the Covid-19 pandemic, internet-based technologies have become a lifeline for artists, art professionals, and audiences. The widespread usage of digital formats and techniques in the production and presentation of artworks has made contemporary art practices more accessible and thus open to being experienced. On that point, we ask: How has contemporary art, which rapidly shifted to digital platforms soon after the outbreak of the pandemic, been received in light of these transformations? By means of an online survey (N = 627), we examined the art-viewing habits of contemporary art audiences in Turkey, exploring how they have changed in the course of the pandemic and how that shift has been reflected in their experiences. Our findings reveal that while audiences have been willing to engage with online art content, the virtual realm cannot and will not be able to replace the physical experience of going to art venues in person.

CONFLUENCE OF ART AND TECHNOLOGY WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO CONTEMPORARY ART PRACTICE IN INDIA

For centuries, across the worlds, artists have struggled to invent new techniques to perfect their articulation, which in turn has changed art and its relation to the viewer. In the course of art history technology has served as a useful aid to develop innovative methods for making art. For long the utilitarian notion of technology did not clash with the metaphysical or intuitive notions of art. But in modern times the reproduction technology has raised questions concerning authenticity and originality of an artwork. In the present transitory times, the digital technology is continuously redefining art and the manner in which the art/audience response circuit has undergone a paradigm shift. The present paper attempts to delineate a capsule account of the confluence between art and technology in general and discuss how Indian contemporary artists engage the art/technology interface in their art practice.

The The Bride Machine: Duchamp’s Theory of Art Revisited

It is a commonplace in certain areas of art theory and contemporary art practices to consider Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades as ordinary objects, which have an artistic value that depends more on a theoretical or institutional framework than on an aesthetic experience. The aim of this paper is, on the one hand, to show the historical emergence of these artifacts on the light of the impact of the industrial production in avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century. Discussing Walter Benjamin’ s and Jean Brun’s, it argues that Duchamp’s practice has an explanatory principle, both in the mechanical reproduction of the work of art and in the aestheticization of the machine. On the other hand, it brings forward some observations regarding Duchamp’s insight on the “total lack of good or bad taste” and the perceptual dimension of a sculptural object as the Large Glass, coming back to Arthur Danto’s interpretation of ready-mades and to the notion of “implementation” introduced by Nelson Goodman to define “the process of bringing about the aesthetic functioning that provides the basis for the notion of a work of art”.

The Problem of Synthesis of Arts in the Context of the Development of Modern Ukrainian Painting on the Levkas.

Levkas painting is one of the most interesting contemporary art practices in Ukraine in the 21st century. It has great potential for creating of qualitatively and aesthetically new works and meanings. Today, we can observe the spread of levkas not only in the field of modern religious painting, but also among artists of other directions not only in Ukraine but also abroad. Levkas, as a structural component of the easel painting in the context of “synthesis of arts” acquires new qualities and meanings. The article considers the main interpretations of the concept of “synthesis of arts”, analyzes the main ways of combining arts by the criterion of integrating forces, identifies the main complicating factors, among which the main are: erroneous kinship and substantive diversity of terminology, insufficient research of the problems of synthesis in the context of painting on levkas. Also, the present study revealed the main characteristics of modern painting on levkas formation process, namely: partial loss of the sacred component and the formation of new stylistic, genre and technical-technological “canons”, the emergence of numerous replications based on the wide range of analog materials in the art market, finding new means of exposition and representation. In the course of the work the newest technical and stylistic means of artistic expression were established, which became the main tool in the process of modernization of levkas technique by synthesis, namely: the latest combinations of materials, options for expanding of levkas functions. Prospects for further research may include the following issues: consideration of the reasons for modernization of traditional painting on levkas, comparative analysis of the latest levkas mixtures, typology of existing works on levkas according to certain criteria and analysis of regional and chronological differences in modern levkas painting.

Beyond the Principle of Unity

In this article, a reflection on unity and dispersion focuses on the moment when the projection of human condition onto the tissue of the world became visible in the most quantifiable and dangerous ways for the planet, tearing apart the vision of unity of human endeavors. These ways are discussed in sections: 2. “Destruction” and 3. “The Anthropocene – a scene of human presence”. In section 4. “What Art has to do with it”, links between some contemporary art practices and the broad context described before are searched and analyzed, using, among others, Bourriaud’s concept of “the exform”. Questions that arise are: How much of this dispersion is still due to the World Wars? How much is due to the ecological crisis? Is there unity in artistic ecological strive to confront the challenge?

Сетевая культура и два вектора развития визуальных искусств

In the article, from the standpoint of the theory of network culture and the concept of «symbolic capital» by P. Bourdieu, the processes taking place in visual art practice under the influence of the development of the Internet are considered. Contemporary art practices and digital art explore the same symbolic capital from different conceptual positions. For contemporary artistic practice, the critical theory and idea of D. Kossuth about the search for the boundaries of art as such, the study of the socio-cultural reality of the here-and-now, and the formulation of the principles of identity remain the main ones. In digital practices, the focus is on the search for an individual style through the study of the structural features of the artistic language itself, autonomy from verbal commentary. The presence of these vectors is also associated with the redistribution of power capital under the influence of the development of network culture and the Internet, when the museum and gallery sphere is not able to control all the processes taking place in art practice. Not one of the participants in artistic communication possesses the integrity of power. Networks today have become a platform with their own power and authority. At the same time, rules from offline flow into the virtual environment and new restrictions are created, related both to the ontological features of digital logic and to the work of online communities.

Language Generation: Word in contemporary Russian Art

The focus of the article is the investigation of the verbal-visual representations in the relevant practices of contemporary Russian artists of Generation Y (Millennials), i.e. artists born from 1981 to 1996. The paper examines various types of connections between word and image in Russian art, forms of existence and cultural meanings of the verbal components in contemporary Russian art. The author comes to the conclusion that verbal-visual art is an established trend on the Russian art scene. Interesting processes of rethinking the traditional principles of conceptualism are evident in the artworks of contemporary artists. The sign-symbolist imagery is obvious in the visible graphics of figured poems by contemporary Russian artists: artistic representation coexists with logocentrism, the desire for self-identification is combined with the idea of being rooted in the foundations of traditional Russian culture. The principle of eclecticism, characteristic to the era of metamodernism, allows contemporary painters to create the endless semiosis of simulacra that do not give direct clues to the viewer for interpretation. Contemporary artists, being the conductors of the mass culture, strive to get away from the rules of academic school and define the boundaries of the past and the future, the random and the natural. The article pays special attention to the study of visual rhetoric. Using examples, the author shows that the language in contemporary Russian art has not a narrative meaning, but a multi-level semantic impulse closely related to the visual component.

Ruins, Ruination, and Counter-Memory in Kurdish Women’s Art

This article focuses on the contemporary visual art practices by Kurdish female artists as strategies of counter-memory. The Kurdish community in Turkey has been facing ongoing violence, with its (cultural) heritage, memory, and archives constantly under threat. In this article, I use the archaeological metaphors of “ruins” and “ruination” by Ann Laura Stoler to examine the destruction, and discuss a selection of contemporary artworks by Kurdish women artists who represent such forces of destruction symbolically to build a counter-archive. Consulting research from other disciplines to explain the colonial dynamics in the region, I trace the decolonial feminist discourse within the Kurdish women’s movement. Finally, I explain how the female body and the city are recurrent themes in these artworks to challenge the colonialist, heteronormative, and nationalistic paradigms. Such artistic expressions of ruination, I argue, animate politics, disturb common sense, and mobilize counter-memory, one that is decolonial and feminist.

Contemporary art, affective turn and emotions

Due to the so-called Affective Turn, which is according to a number of scholars shaping present cross-disciplinary studies of various phenomena, art included, emotions are coming into focus of many different theoretical orientations. Among the authors concerned with issues of emotions, Sara Ahmed?s discourse on affective economies, and her understanding of emotions as practices that produce surfaces and borders that allow the collective and the individual to appear as objects proves to be particularly useful in the analysis of immaterial artworks. In regard to the leading poetic principles of contemporary art practices, starting from Bourriaud?s Relational aesthetics and the insights offered by Sara Ahmed, we will look more closely into emotions as key notions for understanding the aesthetics experience of art today.

Artistic expression: freedom or curse?

The purpose of this contribution is to evaluate the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in freedom of artistic expression cases dealing with visual and performance arts. The reasons for this particular evaluation are salient to the fact that the ECtHR has consistently provided a lesser level of protection to artistic expression than to political expression. The aim of this article is to challenge the approach of the Court to the freedom of artistic expression in relation to visual and performance arts. The critical evaluation is based on two different but complementary grounds: contemporary theory of art critique of the ECtHR’s understanding of art and critique based on the ECtHR’s own political freedom of expression cases. The argument of the authors is that the ECtHR approach to visual and performance arts as an exercise in ethics and aesthetics is contradicted by contemporary art theory and practice which invariably assumes the societal role of art, its potential subversive and transformative function within a society at large, and, ultimately, its lato sensu political value. In addition, visual and performance arts are powerful yet fragile instruments for delivering the debate to society at large. Viewed from this perspective, artistic expression has the same beneficial effect on a democratic society as political expression stricto sensu. Therefore, the rationales underpinning protection of political expression are essentially the same as those of artistic expression, therefore the ECtHR should extend the same level of legal protection to arts and artists to keep valuable social dialogue alive.

The practice of multispecies relations in urban space and its potentialities for new legal imaginaries

This article explores what it means to enact multispecies relations in urban space. This exploration is rooted in contemporary art practices that create living frameworks through which encounters with non-human animal cultures, histories, rituals and justice are manifested. Such works play with the legalities and categorizations of ‘animal’ and ‘nature’ by exposing the nested reasonings and protocols that continue to propagate hierarchical species logics. Consequentially such work, alongside scholarship on earth-bound legalities, looks to how law can foster more just multispecies orderings, which aspire to create more equitable conditions for all. To scaffold such transitions the article makes the case for how a constant, public, educational and social rehearsal that unknots histories of liberal individualism is required in order to shift the ontological position of the human species. This rehearsal is set against the backdrop of climate emergencies and the call for a more expansive notion of the urban commons. The closing reflections point to how the Earth’s inviolability must necessarily be placed at the centre of an approach to urban making that is complemented by an intersectional set of innovative cosmologies, actions, manners and ways.

Inheritance, disobedience and speculation in pedagogic practice

ABSTRACT This article considers relations between inheritance, disobedience and speculation in art practice and art education in schools and other sites of teaching and learning. In recent decades educational practices such locations have been subject to doctrinal cultures of audit, standardisation and competences, invoking what Michael Hampe terms the homogenization of the interpretation of experience. In contrast the article advocates the idea of speculative pedagogies that remain open to the unknown potentialities of students’ and teachers’ learning encounters and invent a future when such a future, demands thought. Speculative practice and the idea of disobedience are elaborated through contemporary art practices, then applied to pedagogical contexts and processes of learning. Focusing upon the relevance of how a learning encounter matters for a student and the obligations required of a teacher, the article then considers an ethics and politics of pedagogical work through the idea of idiotic events and Isabelle Stengers’ notion of the cosmopolitical proposal.

Kuerin matkassa

This article discusses a socially-engaged environmental art titled Kuer’s Journey and a related video work. The art work was created in the summer of 2018in collaboration with the Art Äkäslompolo art event. According to local wishes, the event critically considered the plan for the Hannukainen iron ore minetargeted next to the Äkäslompolo village near the Pallas-Yllästunturi National Park. Kuer’s Journey was carried out using an art-based action research approach to create a dialogic space and situation that serves as a tool for decolonisation and cultural revitalisation, while increasing community resilienceand adaptation, in inevitable environmental and cultural change in the Arctic. At the core of the article is the concept of Arctic art, which is used to reflecton the encounter between Western contemporary art practices and northern ecocultures and ways of knowing.

Indian Art Education and Contemporary Art Practices

Arts education is a distinct academic discipline in India, with governmental and private institutions offering specialised training in the arts.Religious paradigms such as the Hindu Ashram and Muslim madrasas, Buddhist monastery etc., were used to build ancient Indian educational systemsuntil the British instituted schools following their system of preparatory schools under the Cambridge system to promote service to the British Empire. As a result, Indian perceptions of literacy and education, as well as the culture of learning, have shiftedincluding, in the context of the arts, the concepts of differences between art and craft, the social relationship between master craftsperson and artisan, public art and individual art, religious art and secular art, and so on. Art in India, as in the rest of the world, has undergone numerous changes that have resulted in what we see today, a unique amalgamation of sensibilities from the west as well as from across Asia. In the twenty-first century, a new era in India begun.The country's cultural diversity adds to the multi-dimensional approach, which is a direct approach and a direct contribution of various religious beliefs, languages, and the still prevalent rural culture congregating with the rapidly growing urban culture.The country's diversity, like its art, is an experience in and of itself that is difficult to comprehend.This is the core and crux of the new modern India and its emerging art. The paper will discuss about the contemporary art practices in India with reference to its practising artists.

Exhibition Review: Every Day. Art. Solidarity. Resistance

Exhibition Review: <i>Every Day. Art. Solidarity. Resistance</i>

Nigerian women artists’ visibility in twenty-first century contemporary art practices: A triumph against exclusions from art groups and collectives in Nigeria

Nigerian artists began forming art groups and schools from the 1950s and 1960s. These art groups advanced the reclaiming of Nigeria‟s artistic cultural heritages. However, even in the post-colonial and post-Civil War 1970s and 1980s many art groups and art institutions had few or no female members that participated in their activities. This essay reviews notable art groups in Nigeria from the earliest to the more recent. It also identifies the prominent women artists that had contributed to modern Nigerian art history. The essay also looks at the changes in the 1990s‟ and identifies contemporary art and its liberal and individualistic approaches as what caused decline in art groups in the twenty-first century. It will identify the women making impact in Nigeria‟s art scenario in the twenty-first century. The essay argues therefore that the liberalizing nature of twenty-first century contemporary art practices in Nigeria may have endeared more visibility to Nigerian women artists.

The Aesthetic of Acclimatization

Singapore’s global aspirations have, since the turn of the 21st century, led to the consolidation of a range of new institutions—arts research centers, degree granting programs in universities, museums, festivals— with affiliated experts, to prepare the ground for an emergent arts scene that is aligned with the norms of contemporary western art practice. As neoliberal instrumentation competes with the communitarian logic of the traditional arts, dance forms such as Indian classical, Javanese court and Malay folk dances, which once sought to link the ancient past and perpetuity for ethnic communities of spectatorship, are constricted within narrowly defined categories of the regional performing arts market. To avoid becoming mere touristic spectacles, a new generation of traditionally trained artists reinvent their respective forms to accommodate the near future of contemporary culture in Singapore. Such adaptations unsettle the once cohesive universe of traditional dance, resulting in unfinished and unsettling works that betray, to quote Nicholas Bourriard, “countless forms of melancholy”, This paper looks at two recent works of contemporary dance staged in Singapore—January Low’s Reclaim (2019), Raka Maitra’s Pallavi Series (2015-2018). I consider dance emerging from this latter discourse as articulating an aesthetic of acclimatization, sustained by political, communal and institutional attachments that emerge in a climate of overwhelming crises and adjustment. As the traditional dance world in Singapore enters a state of slow death, I identify projects that embark on experiments of partial recuperation, which “stay with the trouble,” as Donna Harraway suggests, making-with and getting-on with what remains of traditional dance and its embodied practices. I suggest that these projects extend the life of traditional dance as a minor, mutated species in an early evolutionary stage that nevertheless transforms the ecology they acclimate to. In remaining selectively porous to neoliberal and biopolitical operations, and receptive to novel artistic regimes, can the aesthetic of acclimatization allow traditional dance to escape its totalization within neoliberal calculations?

O-230 RCT comparing Recombinant-hcg trigger with Dual-trigger (GnRH-agonist and recombinant-hcg ) in improving clinical outcome in ICSI cycles in women with Diminished Ovarian Reserve

Abstract Study question Does use of Dual-trigger (GnRH-agonist with recombinant-hcg) improve the clinical outcome in women with diminished ovarian reserve as compared to Recombinant-hcg trigger? Summary answer Yes, the use of Dual-trigger (GnRH-agonist with recombinant-hcg) improve the clinical outcome in women with diminished ovarian reserve as compared to Recombinant-hcg trigger. What is known already The population of poor responders has grown exponentially over the years and their management of ovarian stimulation remains one of the most challenging aspects. In GnRH antagonist down-regulated IVF-ICSI cycles, dual triggering for the final oocyte maturation with GnRH-a and a reduced dose of hCG improves the rate of fertilization and clinical pregnancy in women with diminished ovarian reserve. Further more, the benefit of lowered cycle cancellation rate would also enable greater percentage of patients with diminished ovarian reserve to reach the final stage of their ART treatment, thereby enhancing their chances of achieving a successful pregnancy . Study design, size, duration This RCT included GnRH antagonist ICSI cycles from 2018-2019. 82 women with diminished ovarian reserve (AMH ≤ 1.1 ng/ml and AFC ≤5) were included. The primary outcome measured was the oocyte fertilization rate, implantation rate and clinical pregnancy rate per oocyte retrieval cycle. Secondary outcome measured was embryo transfer cancellation rate and abortion rate per oocyte retrieval cycle. Participants/materials, setting, methods 82 women with diminished ovarian reserve undergoing fresh embryo transfer were included and randomly divided in two groups - Group-A (hCG trigger/control group: n = 41); and Group-B (dual trigger/study group: n = 41). Both patient groups underwent controlled ovarian stimulation using antagonist. The final oocyte maturation was triggered either by recombinant hCG (Group-A) or by a combination of recombinant hCG and GnRH-agonist (Dual trigger) (Group-B). Main results and the role of chance The dual-trigger group had significantly higher fertilization rate (62.8 vs. 37.6%), higher clinical pregnancy rate (31.4% vs. 18.1%) as compared to the recombinant-hCG trigger group. In addition, the abortion rate(12.1% vs. 21.3%) and embryo transfer cancellation rate (8.3% vs. 16.1%) were both significantly lower in the dual trigger group. The baseline characteristics for the control and the study group were similar and there was no significant difference in the patient age, serum AMH level, and cause of infertility. The total r-FSH dose, duration of stimulation, endometrial thickness, and serum hormone profile on the day of trigger were also similar between the control and the study group. The main advantage of triggering with GnRH-a is that it induces a mid-cycle FSH surge which resembles the natural ovulatory cycle hormonal changes. Study shows that in GnRH antagonist ART cycles, dual triggering with GnRH-a and hCG could significantly improve the rate of fertilization and clinical pregnancy in diminished ovarian reserve women. Furthermore, the benefit of lowered cycle cancellation rate would also enable greater percentage of patients with diminished ovarian reserve to reach the final stage of their ART treatment thereby enhancing their chance of achieving a successful pregnancy as well as reducing their mental stress. Limitations, reasons for caution The main limitation of our study is the low patient number. Triggering with GnRH-a has become a significant part of contemporary ART practice, especially in high responders, oocytes donors and oncology patients. However, more RCTs are required in order to justify the use of GnRH-agonists in poor responders in ART cycles. Wider implications of the findings Results of our study concurred with other studies of dual triggering, calls for a possible paradigm shift in ovulation-triggering agent for GnRH-antagonist cycles. Diminished ovarian reserve patients are constituting a large part of clinical ART practice and for such patients, obtaining maximum mature oocytes and good embryos is vitally important. Trial registration number not applicable