Contemporary Visual Art Research Articles

Brill's Companions to the Christian Tradition 55

Brill's Companions to the Christian Tradition 55

Speculative Animation: Digital Projections of Urban Past and Future

This article explores the growing presence of digital animation within the work of contemporary visual artists, architects and designers concerned with urban geography. While contemporary theorists...

Colecionadores, coleções particulares e o mercado brasileiro de arte contemporânea

The collector, within the context of the contemporary visual arts, is a powerful and, for many, mysterious figure. Beyond the stereotype of the eccentric rich (or, more recently, in Brazil, the corrupt recipient of money bribes or money launderer buying art), collectors are different amongst themselves, both in their financial capacity to buy works as well as their relationship with art itself, in addition to their different motivations for acquiring and collecting works of art. This article is an introductory reflection on collecting and collections stemming from an ethnographic research on the Brazilian contemporary art market performed discontinuously between the years of 2012 and 2016. KEYWORDS Art collector, art collection, work of art, artist, art market.

The Impact of Public Funding on Contemporary Visual Arts

AbstractPublic policy for supporting the visual arts has historically followed different traditions in France and the United Kingdom. In an environment of fiscal austerity that impacts upon public funding as well as private patronage, and given the tensions between artistic freedom on the one hand, and market constraints on the other, this article examines how these two traditions of financing artists has influenced the direction of the work itself. A brief historical presentation of the two forms of public support and their evolution in recent decades provides a framework for understanding government attitudes and policies on both sides of the Channel. A closer examination of selected artists, chosen here for their representativeness and their international renown, is used to illustrate the changing nature of public support for visual art creation.

Picking Up Speed: Re-Thinking Visual Art Education as Assemblages

In contemporary visual arts education, neoliberal managerialism has meant that education has become end-product driven. This article builds on a mindset of how to perform an affirmative critique by analyzing relationality as entanglements of subjects and objects, or educational assemblages, in the visual arts classroom. Drawing on visual ethnography in an upper secondary school in Sweden, we analyze speeds and intensities as bodily experienced affect. The speed and intensity increased in the classroom when the teacher introduced materials connected to a film project. The complex encounters and entanglements between human and nonhuman bodies accelerated the intensity in the educational assemblages. As a result, we suggest a methodology of visual invention that can resist the logics of the neoliberal discourse and unleash the potentials for creativity by working with learning encounters as well as becoming open and sensitive toward unexpected events.

Physics of Laser in Contemporary Visual Arts: the research protocol

Physics of Laser in Contemporary Visual Arts: the research protocol

After Indenture

This essay introduces the special section “Art After Indenture,” in which five scholars characterize and respond to eight contemporary visual artists who are descendants of indentured workers. The author also raises questions about the commemoration of indentureship and calls for greater contention with its traumatic legacy.

The end of the Global South and the cultures of the South

As the Global South is increasingly interpenetrated by neoliberal and authoritarian regimes, the idea of the South as a site of emancipatory resistance and exotic cultural difference has ended. This article offers an alternative route into the cultures of the South. It focuses on the shifting forms of the South in contemporary visual art and outlines the possibilities of the non-coercive forms of cultural exchange and the cartographies of a cosmopolitanism from below. This perspective on the South is most evident in in the stories of embodied solidarity that stand in contrast to the top-down visions of socio-economic development and cultural homogenization.

Knowledge of Art in Malaysian Contemporary Visual Art

Malaysia has a scarcity in the presentation of art knowledge through visual art. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the importance of art knowledge in the field of visual art. In fact, Malaysian contemporary visual artists appear to have insufficient values of intellectualism and lack shared vision. The intention of this study was to reveal the factors in Malaysian visual arts that led to the crisis in art knowledge development. This project uses a qualitative triangulation method in order to reveal similarities from face-to-face interviews and document studies. The analysis was supported by evidence obtained from observation of several art discourses. The findings of this study revealed the importance of world knowledge and perception of art based on critical thinking. In addition, the results of this study also present the awareness of the valuable contributions of art knowledge in visual art. This paper revealed the factors that lead to the unconvincing development of art knowledge, specifically in Malaysia. The importance of art knowledge can be investigated further in order to validate visual art as an intellectual product that communicates knowledge.

Three and one chair: an analytic investigation into the Holo-Art

ABSTRACTAmong all of the new media arts, holography has not yet been thoroughly understood due to its complicated visual and technical structure, which may cause misconceptions about its real content or perhaps an underestimation of its artistic value. This research, therefore, raises an attempt to reinterpret the visual representation theory of the holographic object by using Joseph Kosuth’s conceptual assumption in his conceptual artworks as a model to conceptually decode the holographic scene. While Kosuth’s conceptual art is represented by three separate conceptual definitions of an object (real, visual and verbal), this research investigates the holographic form as a physical alternative that combines the same three definitions of an object into a unified physical form. Hence, this research assumes that the holographic model is a form of post-conceptual art. By emphasizing the crucial role of scientific research in the recent revolutionary artistic and cultural trends in our contemporary societies, this project attempts to reveal the extent to which the scientific properties of the unconventional mediums can truly contribute to reshaping our conceptual visual perception. Additionally, the experiment series of the project scientifically sheds light on the conceptual vision and also reinforces the conceptual dimensions of the visual holographic scene in contemporary visual art.

VISUAL ART FROM THE PERSPECTIVES OF ISLAMIC SHARIAH: A NEED ASSESSMENT ANALYSES

Based on the previous studies on issues concerning visual artwork, many suggested an improvement has to be made on the Guidelines about Visual Art from the Islamic Perspectives (1987). Referring to the guideline, the process of producing visual artwork deals with the visual subject and the style of presenting the visual form. As a reference in producing Shariah compliant visual artwork, the guideline should be improved based on the evolving of the contemporary art. This paper aims to explore the needs of study on visual art from the perspectives of Islamic Shariah base on the contemporary development in the art scene. Given this gap, this study attempts to discuss the literature review for compiling the preliminary view point on the guideline status quo. The result shows that there are deficiencies in the guideline in terms of visual subject, visual form and visual content discussion. It is hoped that this study will pave the way to new frontier in the Contemporary Visual Art based on Islamic Shariah which has a huge contribution to the sustainability of national art. Result of this study can become a literature for those researchers who are intent to discover on this topic. Recommendation was given for further investigation into a refinement the guideline base on the contemporary art development through the qualitative research. A Correction to this article was published on 07 May 2021. http://ijasos.ocerintjournals.org/en/pub/issue/61260/930804

Normativity and Beauty in Contemporary Arts

Our intuitions related to art are generally associated to ideas such as creativity, freedom of expression, experimentation. The fact that so many artists (especially writers, but also musicians, painters, performance artists) are or have been people with training in legal disciplines should be taken into account when considering the apparently extrinsic relationship between art and law. The question we have to answer is the following. When we make a judgment of taste looking, say, at the Mona Lisa, what does that mean exactly? What do we mean when we say that “the Mona Lisa is beautiful and an absolute masterpiece of Western art”? This statement contains a judgment of taste (Mona Lisa is beautiful) and an artistic judgment (it is a masterpiece of Western art). In what follows I will show that: i) the two judgments are different, ii) both judgments have normative nature, but the normativity of the judgment of taste refers to different elements from the artistic judgment and, finally, iii) contemporary visual arts require the formulation of an artistic judgment rather than a judgment of taste.

Harmony Korine’s <em>Trash Humpers</em>: From Alternative to Hipster

Harmony Korine’s <em>Trash Humpers</em>: From Alternative to Hipster

The Green Man: the desire for deeper connections with nature

In an epoch of compromised ecologies and parallel changes in human perceptions of nature, this paper charts the development of the Green Man or Foliate Face in art and architecture. The Green Man first appeared in France in the 1st century and flourished in British architecture in the 11–15th centuries. This pagan character was a Wildman, worshipped as both an apotropaic and benevolent spirit, associated with fertility. This paper provokes an inquiry into whether the leafy extrusions from Green Man’s mouth are a form of nonhuman desiring language, a means of communicating with the plant world, or merely a site of vegetal genesis and agency. In contemporary visual art, the concept of the Green Man or the hybrid plant–animal has emerged anew, no doubt in response to climate change fears and diminishing ecodiversities. Edourdo Kac’s 'Enigma', for instance, is a genetically modified petunia flower, created from Kac’s DNA, combining human and plant genes in the one plant. This paper draws on the plant philosophy of Michael Marder and traces the Green Man plant–human hybrid into the present, as a means of documenting the way nature thinks through humans.

Nikos Papastergiadis: The Cultures Of The South As Cosmos

As the Global South is increasingly interpenetrated by neo-liberal and authoritarian regimes the idea of the South as a site of emancipatory resistance and exotic cultural difference has ended. This article offers an alternative route into the cultures of the South. It focuses on the shifting forms of the South in contemporary visual art and outlines the possibilities of non-coercive forms of cultural exchange and the cartographies of a cosmopolitanism from below. This perspective on the South is most evident in the stories of embodied solidarity that stand in contrast to top down visions of socio-economic development and cultural homogenization.

Liminal Fiction: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Researching, Writing and Disseminating an Archival Novel about the Violent Past

This article explores the concept of liminal fiction, a new literary genre that takes on the challenge of narrating human rights in the sphere of transitional justice. Liminal fiction makes porous the boundaries between literature, law, history, art, and the archive. Using the work of contemporary visual artists who explore the art of forensics, and ground-breaking research methodologies adopted by social and forensic anthropologists, this article analyses the idea of researching and fictionalising a new memory paradigm, one rooted in the visual imagery of disinterred remains. It suggests that establishing a creative synthesis between interdisciplinary research and writing a work of fiction is a means to open up new avenues for narrating the history of the missing. This is partly achieved through a re-configuration of the role of writer and reader as co-curators, charged with the task of shifting through a multi-layered narrative that links the exhumation of mass graves in Spain in the 2000s with experiences in the country's postwar diaspora and the 'Indignados' demonstrations and occupations of 2011. Further, it becomes possible to consider alternative methods of 'publication' and dissemination of a work of liminal fiction — part-archive, part-book, part-installation — in creative collaborations with 'new musuems of space and emotion.'**This refers to a term used by economist and campaigner Susie Symes to evoke the significance of memory sites such as 19 Princelet Street, London, where she is Chair of Trustees.

Traditional Vietnamese Acerbic Sense of Humour: Gestures that Matter in Literature and Contemporary Visual Arts

Traditional Vietnamese Acerbic Sense of Humour: Gestures that Matter in Literature and Contemporary Visual Arts

Trichofilia – fetyszyzacja włosów w sztuce współczesnej w ujęciu estetycznym

I would like to consider the motif of trichophilia in a contemporary art. I think that a hair (taken as the medium or the main/contextual object of representation) not only becomes more influential and meaningful in the artistic universe of various media or symbols, but it also helps to transcend the traditional visual hegemony because of its multidimensional and intersensory status. I am trying to establish a preliminary typology of hair fetishization strategies in contemporary visual arts (painting, collage, assemblage, sculpture, installation, photography, video, media art), showing that a hair can be used as the aesthetic attractor (focus) or distractor (context); the abject; and the symbol. The ambivalence of hair symbolics and materiality is now preoccupying the aesthetics and anthropology of artistic experience which I am trying to show by referring to Bohme’s, Menninghaus’, Kristeva’s and Goodman’s theories as well as to some examples and illustrations taken from contemporary arts and literature.

From dynamic frame to moving image: Remediation and history in Christian Boltanski's works

The aim of the paper is to point to different strategies through which moving images appear in the work of Christian Boltanski. Moving images are discussed in relation to the concept of remediation that becomes crucial not only for understanding the logics of the dominant forms of contemporary art practice, but also of their historic precursors. The first part of the paper gives an introduction into the genesis and meaning of the notion 'moving image' in its historical and contemporary context, as well as an insight into the definition and classification of the concept of ' remediation'. The first part also contains an overview of the long lasting practice of dismantled cinemas, and an overview of the key authors who introduced these terms into theory of art. In its second part, the paper analyses the three selected works of Christian Boltanski exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 2011 and 2015, with the aim to support the thesis that moving images in contemporary visual arts, in the sense of media, are immanent to the fluid relationship that is established among various media.

Towards a unique artistic constitution of light: an aesthetic investigation of laser sciences

This article assumed a communicative model and an informative model as two interpretative approaches to classify laser artworks. Hence, it attempted to determine how some artists struggled to build a unique constitution of laser light usage in their own revolutionary artworks and how they managed to conceptualise the scientific aspects behind the laser light and, therefore, emphasised laser art as an independent artistic trend in sciences of visual arts and as a form of advanced light arts in contemporary visual arts. By classifying the use of laser light in the arts qualitatively and quantitatively, this study tried to elucidate how scientific developments in the physics of laser light have seriously affected the essence of the contemporary aesthetics, in which a non-traditional aspect of the relationship between art, sciences and technology can be embodied. In addition, how can the physics of laser light contribute to a fundamentally change in the concept of light as an artistic material and medium in today's art?