Context Of Contemporary Art Research Articles

Il disegno dei sogni

This article explores the multifaceted concept of dreams within the context of contemporary art. It examines how the term "dream" is interpreted and represented by different artists and their works, specifically in the exhibition "Dream: Art Meets Dreams" curated by Danilo Eccher. The exhibition is described as an allegorical journey into the deepest parts of the human soul, touching on desires, expectations, and fears. It showcases how dreams serve as a channel to access the unconscious and spiritual dimensions, influenced by Freudian thought. The article also delves into historical perspectives on dreams, from Plato to modern neuropsychology, and how these perspectives shape our understanding of dreams as both a personal and universal phenomenon. Through the analysis of various artworks and artistic approaches, the article highlights the ongoing dialogue between dream imagery and its aesthetic and symbolic significance in both historical and contemporary contexts.

Deep Else: A Critical Framework for AI Art

From a small community of pioneering artists who experimented with artificial intelligence (AI) in the 1970s, AI art has expanded, gained visibility, and attained socio-cultural relevance since the second half of the 2010s. Its topics, methodologies, presentational formats, and implications are closely related to a range of disciplines engaged in the research and application of AI. In this paper, I present a comprehensive framework for the critical exploration of AI art. It comprises the context of AI art, its prominent poetic features, major issues, and possible directions. I address the poetic, expressive, and ethical layers of AI art practices within the context of contemporary art, AI research, and related disciplines. I focus on the works that exemplify poetic complexity and manifest the epistemic or political ambiguities indicative of a broader milieu of contemporary culture, AI science/technology, economy, and society. By comparing, acknowledging, and contextualizing both their accomplishments and shortcomings, I outline the prospective strategies to advance the field. The aim of this framework is to expand the existing critical discourse of AI art with new perspectives which can be used to examine the creative attributes of emerging practices and to assess their cultural significance and socio-political impact. It contributes to rethinking and redefining the art/science/technology critique in the age when the arts, together with science and technology, are becoming increasingly responsible for changing ecologies, shaping cultural values, and political normalization.

Abstracts from the Spectra 2018 Symposium Part 3: Nano-Optics

Abstracts from the Spectra 2018 Symposium Part 3: <i>Nano-Optics</i>

Representation of the Sociocultural Institute of the Army and the Serviceman in Contemporary Russian and American Cinema: an Experience of Comparative Analysis

The article discusses the issue of cultural aspects of national security in its relation to the context of contemporary art. The author examines Russian and American military cinematography of the 2010s. It is revealed that typical features of the representation of images of the army, the soldiers and the war in general in two different national cinematographic schools. The connection between the features of war cinema and the specifics of historical fate and the circumstances of current foreign policy is marked out. In conclusion, the author identifies some of the risks and threats to national cultural security associated with the broadcast into the Russian cultural space of the point of view expressed in American war cinema.

Neglect and the Kaleidoscopic Mind: Psychology and Mental Health in Contemporary Art

This paper seeks to explore the broad question of whether and how art can be applied to medical therapeutic practices. As part of this research, the paper outlines an ongoing project, exemplifying this combined approach, which seeks to improve function in stroke patients. We reviewed previous collaborations between art and psychology dating back to the 1960s, employing methods ranging from simple, analog, haptic interfaces to the contemporary potential of machine learning to improve brain function. We then outline an ongoing project employing machine learning and multisensory stimulation to improve function in stroke patients, which are being run in collaboration with Klinik Lippoldsberg, Germany. We discuss the possibility that these same approaches may also be applied to healthy people as an open-ended inquiry into consciousness and mental optimization. It is hoped that these approaches will be beneficial to the medical community, but also equally broaden the reach and context of contemporary art, which is so often marginalized within institutions that are not readily accessible to or in communication with other disciplines.

Success, Fame and Independent Art in Contemporary Art

Günümüz sanat ortamında başarı miti ünlü olmak mefhumu ile sarmallanmış bir konumdadır. Söz konusu bu sarmallanma neoliberal kapitalizmin doğasının yansımasıdır. Neoliberal kapitalizm, girişimci özgür bireyler olarak sanatçılar için giderek tüketimden bağımsızlaşan ve daha fazla üretme gerçekliğini dayatan piyasa koşulları altında, özellikle de rekabetçi ortamın da katkılarıyla başarı kavramının içeriğini, gen yapısını değiştirmiştir. Özellikle günümüz teknoloji ve sosyal medya ortamı düşünüldüğünde Andy Warhol’un 1960’larda sarf ettiği “Bir gün herkes 15 dakikalığına ünlü olacak” sözü karşılığını bulur niteliktedir. Paylaşım ağının genişlemesi, aynı anda yüzbinlerce insanın bir arada olabilme ihtimali/gerçekliği üretimin fazlalılığı karşısında nitelik kavramını bir anda niceliğe çevirmiştir. Bu bağlamda, Theodor W. Adorno ve Max Horkheimer’ın Batı Kültürü ve Aydınlanma eleştirileri olarak kaleme aldıkları Kültür Endüstirisi ve Guy Debord’un Gösteri Toplumu gibi kavramsallaştırmaları günümüz kültürel koşullarının öncü okumaları olarak karşımıza çıkmaktadırlar. Diğer taraftan günümüz sanat piyasası koşullarını belirleyen bu problematiklerin karşısında yer almak ve piyasanın dışında kalarak eleştirel bir tutumla ayrı bir stratejik konum ve yer edinmek ilk bakışta olası görünmekle beraber çelişik bir konumu da beraberinde getirmektedir. Bu çalışmada söz konusu bu yaklaşımlar ışığında başarı ve ona sarmallanmış ün mefhumlarına değinilecek, bu koşulları oluşturan etmenler günümüz sanatı bağlamında tartışılacak, bağımsız sanat/sanatçının neliği irdelenecektir.

Contemporary Colors in Artworks

The purpose of this study is to discuss on contemporary colours in artwork. Contemporary colours have developed a bridge between theory and practice, particularly in the production of works of art. While other studies have been conducted on colours solely, this one focuses on the relationship between artwork and contemporary colours. This teaches the reader that contemporary colours are an integral component of the world of painting and design art. The study of contemporary colours employs artwork to address the subject about the significance of modern colours. As a result, the significance of modern colours has become significant that it has evolved into a movement within the context of contemporary art. This writing is an attempt to convey information about colours using a common language

Translation, transformation and refiguration: The significance of Jingdezhen and the materiality of porcelain in the work of two contemporary Chinese artists1

Abstract In December 2016 a group of researchers led by Professor Jiang Jiehong travelled to Jingdezhen as fieldwork for the Everyday Legend research project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust. Representing the White Rabbit Collection of Contemporary Chinese Art, Australia, I was invited to participate. This article developed from reflections on the fieldwork component of the research project, as well as the formal and informal discussions that took place, at the time and subsequently, in Shanghai, Birmingham, Groningen and London. In 2018, as a further development of this process of reflection, I conducted semi-structured interviews with two artists of different generations: the article examines how Liu Jianhua and Geng Xue approach the use of porcelain as a contemporary art material. Each has spent extensive periods of time in Jingdezhen and each is immersed in this particularly Chinese tradition. At the same time, each is identified (and identifies themselves) as practising in a global contemporary art context and participates in exhibitions and exchanges internationally. Considered in the context of current and historical discourses around global contemporaneity and its manifestations in twenty-first-century China, their work illuminates the key question that the Everyday Legend project was designed to examine: how can contemporary art and traditional Chinese craft practices intersect, informing and enriching each other? As representatives, respectively, of the generation who emerged into the first years of the post-Cultural Revolution Reform and Opening period, and of a younger generation educated partly outside China, they reveal how Chinese artists strategically negotiate local and global in positioning their work as contemporary reinventions of traditional forms and materiality.

Art, Creativity, and the Potential of Artificial Intelligence

Our essay discusses an AI process developed for making art (AICAN), and the issues AI creativity raises for understanding art and artists in the 21st century. Backed by our training in computer science (Elgammal) and art history (Mazzone), we argue for the consideration of AICAN’s works as art, relate AICAN works to the contemporary art context, and urge a reconsideration of how we might define human and machine creativity. Our work in developing AI processes for art making, style analysis, and detecting large-scale style patterns in art history has led us to carefully consider the history and dynamics of human art-making and to examine how those patterns can be modeled and taught to the machine. We advocate for a connection between machine creativity and art broadly defined as parallel to but not in conflict with human artists and their emotional and social intentions of art making. Rather, we urge a partnership between human and machine creativity when called for, seeing in this collaboration a means to maximize both partners’ creative strengths.

Time-Space Alterations: A New Media Abstraction of Traditional Chinese Painting and Calligraphy Aesthetics

The artist and scholar Keung Hung argues that traditional Chinese manners of approaching art can be abstracted through digital media, forging new interdisciplinary correlations. He posits that digital media can be used to shift the notions of time and space from traditional Chinese aesthetics into the contemporary art context.

The importance of critical judgment in uncertain disciplines: A comparative case study of undergraduate fine art visual practice

Criticality is an important means to negotiate uncertainty, which has become a characteristic of teaching and learning conditions in postmodern times. This paper draws from an empirical comparative case study conducted in the uncertain discipline of fine art visual practice, where critical judgement and meta-cognition are important for professional contemporary art practice. Charting the curricula intended by staff and the culture experienced by students, the paper considers the relation between the espoused theory of criticality in two art schools and their theory-in-use within assessment structures and cultures. Emphasis is placed on the significance of such approaches to criticality for the student experience and their learning engagement. Emerging discourses of ‘subjectivity’ and a lack of development of student meta-cognition indicated that, at an undergraduate level of study, the curricula of these cases are unwittingly underpreparing their graduates for operating with agential criticality as they enter the uncertain context of contemporary art.

Contemporary ceramics art and its transgressive side

This article wants to propose a discussion on the ranking of ceramics as art, a few aspects in regards to Ceramic Art’s inclusion in Contemporary Art context. The author is calling into question the shallow division between Decorative and Major Arts, a century after the distinction disappeared. Respectively, the art object made with ceramic material, in the general context of Contemporary Art and a few ways of manifestations of this art that leads toward permanent transgressive dimensions of artistic ceramic.

Advanced Constructivism and Postgravity Art: Theoretical and Philosophical Implications

This article discusses art’s potential in outer space through a dialogue between European and Russian avant-garde traditions, and the postgravity art project by Dragan Živadinov, Dunja Zupančič and Miha Turšič. They enact a 50-year theater performance, Noordung:: 1995–2045, with the help of high tech, Suprematism and Constructivism. The performance is based on five replays every 10 years with the same actors and on technological substitutes of the deceased. The project has several topical theoretical implications. The author explores its key philosophical aspects and presents new potentialities for a systemic cognitive model for image and space conceptual transformations within the context of contemporary art and aesthetics.

Curatorial ‘Translations’: The Case of Marcel Duchamp’s Green Box

Abstract In curatorial studies, translation is a trope that is beginning to define a mode of praxis, through which the mediating role of the curator has developed into a methodology that entails principles of categorization, montage, displacement and assembly. The artist Marcel Duchamp is famous for the popularization of such techniques in the modern and contemporary art context. Furthermore, the theme of translation informs interpretations of his art in differing and unexpected ways, as well as influencing its reception by English-speaking audiences. This article negotiates the tension between artist and curator and explores the concept of curatorial translation in three exhibitions of Duchamp’s work. The Green Box (1934) – and its contentious presentation as a verbal exposition of the seminal piece, the Large Glass (1915–23) – is the key work through which this concept of translation will be examined.

Informal Youth Cultural Practices: Blurring the Distinction Between High and Low

AbstractThis article argues that art educators need to focus on informal youth cultural practices in order to develop art projects that are meaningful to young people and relevant to their contemporary social media and postmodern artistic context. First, this article reports on doctoral research that examines informal youth cultural practices in cyberspace, or those taken up by young people "behind the scenes" of school art education and institutional curricula. Various methodological approaches, including a multiple case study, were used to understand the lesser-known dimensions of teenagers’ cultural capital. The results underscore the importance of image-processing software in fostering the teenagers’ appropriation skills as well as their technical, artistic, and identity exploration. The results also show that the teenagers’ creative processes and visual productions migrated from their art class to digital social networks. Furthermore, the youth participants, whose informal cultural practices drew from different genres (friendship-driven and interest-driven), expressed a vision of cyberculture focused on the blurring of cultural boundaries. Second, this article examines an art project related to the author’s doctoral research. The project mobilized the viral distribution of gossip on a digital social network and addressed informal youth creative practices through the notion of cultural landmarks. Cultural landmarks refer to key pedagogical resources that connect teenagers with their culture in art education. Cultural landmarks emanating from commercial culture and young people’s informal ways of expressing their inventiveness in digital and analog spaces generated art products and practices that blurred distinctions between high and low culture. Such blurring also happens in the broader context of contemporary art, justifying the need for art educators to consider informal youth cultural practices in their classrooms.

‘Centring the Indigenous’

Recent years have seen numerous contemporary Indigenous artists contribute to global art exhibitions. A growing Indigenous-centred literature unpacks the particular critical agenda of this global Indigenous art, while also contextualising it in within the wider field of contemporary art. This article enters into dialogue with this literature through a close reading of a multimedia installation created for the Biennale of Sydney in 2012 by the Indigenous art collective Postcommodity. It introduces the theoretical concept of the ‘trans-Indigenous’ to situate this distinctive collaborative art in the context of global Indigenous cultures. Explaining this concept through a close reading of Postcommodity's work, the article outlines aspects of a shared Indigenous worldview found in the work. It then situates this trans-Indigenous relational art within the critical debates surrounding relational art, describing trans-Indigenous relational art as ‘double-edged’, incorporating both Indigenous commonality and an agonistic friction and unease in relation to the contemporary art context.

The Cry of Beauty: Ethics and Aesthetics in a Contemporary Art Context

This paper examines the idea that beauty, aesthetics, moral principles and ethics in contemporary art are inextricably bound together. It considers the work of two contemporary artists whose practice conflates ideas of beauty and aesthetics with morals and ethics in their considerations of questions of the impact of human agency on the natural world.

Discussing the Relationship between Sound and Image: The Scope of Audio/Visual Strategies in a Contemporary Art Context

Guy Debord challenged our consumption of images as pertaining to the Society of the Spectacle. Hence, in his film Hurlements en faveur de Sade (1952) there are no images, other than a white screen or a black screen, the former as visual backdrop to an audio track expressing Debord’s situationist critique, the silence of the latter to reinforce the perception of (audio-visual) absence thus confronting the audience with its (frustrated) expectations and desires. John Cage’s landmark composition 4’33’’ (1952) also aimed to create awareness, albeit of a very different kind, where the perception of sound in its duration was not determined by the format and expectations of music but by the (timed) awareness of the listener’s acoustic environment. In view of these (now historical) efforts to arrive at a radical perception of sound (and image), and also referring to artists such as Bruce Nauman, Tacita Dean and Anri Sala, this paper will discuss some of the author’s video works and their strategic use of image with/without sound to reflect on Bergsonian duration as experience of multiple time flows within art installations.

A Moment Outside

In the Stedelijk Museum of Modern Art in Amsterdam in 1997, Alexander Brener defaced one of the art world's greatest treasuers. The target was Kazimir Malevich's Supremetism which in great part marked the birth of the Russian Avant-garde. Immediately after being apprehended by security guards, he loudly proclaimed that what he had done was performance art and a dialogue with Malevich about corruption in the commercial art world. Unlike Tony Shafrazi, Brener was not opportunistic about his vandalism and remains an elusive figure in the Russian art scene—managing to pen his manifesto while imprisoned for modifying Malevich's masterpiece valued at $7.5 million. What most critics overlook are the complexities of the context within which Brener and Malevich are embedded. The trajectory of a former Soviet Peoples' art object to proprietary traded commodity leaves much to be explored. This paper identifies and explores three concepts central to developing a nuanced understanding of Brener's work as art: The legal response to art vandalism; a qualitative comparison between Brener and Malevich; And Brener's situation within contemporary art context with an emphasis on post-Soviet culture and the international political economy.

The (Everyday) Image as One of Many: What Happens in the Interstice?

This paper will consider how explorations of time and movement in a contemporary art context have capitalised on the gap as the territory where we can shape our access to images. The author’s engagement with place through everyday images has led to a series of art projects involving photography and video. The discussion will examine how these works capitalise the space in-between images to reflect on time. Reference will be made to David Claerbout’s work, in particular The Algiers’ Sections of a Happy Moment, as it uses multiple photographic takes to endlessly prolong a moment. Mel Bochner regarded Eadweard Muybridge’s photographs as ‘serialization of time through the systematic subtraction of duration from event’. Within these ideas of the image and its relation to the lived moment as posited by Briony Fer, the discussion will allude to Bergsonian duration where ‘actual present’ and ‘virtual past’ coincide, with particular focus on Gilles Deleuze’s ideas of cinematic time. Within the temporal implications of the still image, Roland Barthes’s ‘photographic moment’ will be contrasted with Vilem Flusser’s ideas of the photographic image as a ‘possibility of visualisation’.