Creation Of Artworks Research Articles

Visual time: the image in history

To render time sensible: transmissibilityReview of:Keith Moxey, Visual Time: The Image in History, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2013, 207 pp., 8 col. plates, 21 b. & w. illus., $89.85 hdbk, $24.95 pbk, Hardback ISBN 978-0-8223-5354-6, Paperback ISBN 978-0-8223-5369-0.Jae EmerlingKeith Moxey's Visual Time: The Image in History imagines itself as an art historical methodology when in fact it only rhetorically questions the discipline's 'epistemology certainty' about images and temporality. Moxey never enacts a methodology capable of confronting the complicated issues of temporality, images, and art historiography. Instead, he traipses through seven chapters on these issues that read more like transcriptions of conference talks than the in-depth work one expects in a book project. While Moxey offers convincing explanations of art historical shortcomings regarding an artwork's essential anachronism-for example, the simple fact that a work from 1907 is encountered anew, time and again, in each present, by new sets of viewers-he fails to arrive at either a method or a theoretical framework to address what he terms the 'anachronic power' of an artwork. Nonetheless, this text astutely surveys much recent work on images and historiography. It does so by addressing pre-existing methodological issues such as linear chronology, ekphrasis, contemporaneity, and aesthetic experience.The problem is that Moxey only flirts with theory in a text purportedly about images and time. This is baffling. How could a book purporting to rethink art history by focusing on the complex temporality enfolded within an aesthetic encounter refrain from fully engaging with Jacques Derrida's late work on photography and temporality, or Gilles Deleuze's quite famous theory of the time-image? I mention these figures not to assert that their work offers the only answers to the issues Moxey foregrounds. Quite the contrary. I mention these figures because Moxey chose to address this topic in a manner that reads like a kind of aristocratic overview, a survey of thought that never quite gets its hands dirty. Rhetorical questions and faint suggestions of a method abound in this text. But in the end, there is nothing like the critical and creative work found in Georges Didi-Huberman's Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art (1990, 2005) or T. J. Demos' Return to the Postcolony: Spectres of Colonialism in Contemporary Art (2013).1 As Moxey writes of his own approach: 'Instead of offering even tentative answers to these issues confronting the history of art today, these essays ally themselves with persistent questions' (8).I would argue that we are well aware of the questions facing the history of art. The problem is that we persist in the same historiographic mode despite theoretical challenges and the creation of new artworks. What remains to be done is to create an art historical mode capable of encountering an artwork as a material-force, as a mode of transmissibility wherein art historians could grasp that an event is dated (it takes on a consistency in a specific past) even as it continues to produce effects into the future, effects that alter and change the past. This would be to creatively involve ourselves with an ontology of the work of art as a temporal passage. It would be an art history truly capable of thinking thresholds and passages, becoming and history-a diagrammatic art history wherein art history becomes a theory-practice of multiplicities, a practice more aligned with Spinozist joy than historicist melancholy.2Moxey articulates the motivating problematic he desired to confront in his book here: 'The aesthetic power of works of art, the fascination of images and their capacity to shape our response in the present, argues against treating them as if they were simply documents of particular historical horizons' (137). Of course, Moxey is correct to identify this fundamental art historical paradox as a problematic. …

A Study on Arts and Crafts ideas with Works of William Morris

These days there is a flow of support for returning to design and handcraft, and the arts and crafts ideas of William Morris have an influence until the present over periods. The semanticity and methodology of guild production method supported by William Morris is studied. The foundation that human is in beautiful harmony with nature is on free labor and artistic life. In the organic relationship, the decline of art is understood as general crisis of culture, and human living condition should be changed in order to rouse the human sense of beauty and comprehension of art. Once human labor becomes artistic, the consumption living and local living become artistic as well. And then consumers desire more artistic works, structures, or urban spaces, and the demands for those move artificers to go toward producing more artistic works and structures. That is, the course of succession of art and culture through living is the driving force of social progress. Even if the period when Morris lived and the present are very different, this paper will shows that a large amount of art and culture will be greatly developed in twenty-first century which is 'the period led by cultural consumers', and the people directly creating art works will be also increased at the same time, as Alvin Toffler suggested. Furthermore, we can aware through this paper that such the people will rule the world. Finally it reached the period that we must face to 'making artistic life' as Morris expected a century ago. According to the result of this paper, we realized the study about Morris will contribute greatly to improve the quality of human life.

Introduction: Musical Research at IRCAM

Introduction: Musical Research at IRCAM

PERMAINAN VISUAL, SIMBOL, DAN PENGHARAPAN DALAM KARTU UNDANGAN PERNIKAHAN DI YOGYAKARTA

This study was designed in order to explain the socio- cultural relationship between the wedding invitation card created by graphic designers in Yogyakarta; to reveal the contained symbolic meanings; and to examine the considerations of which the designers decided to use certain visual composition in creating their artworks and why they did it. Hermeneutic theoretical framework was applied to accomplish the research objectives. The first step done was construing the wedding invitation cards and describing the artists' life and cultural background. The invitations then were studied by exploring its' 'socio historical elements', analyzing it visually and ended by interpreting it. This study found out that wedding invitation cards created by graphic designers in Yogyakarta were works of art that could be distinguished from the common ones which were made in a mass production. Wedding invitation card was an effect of 'inviting culture' transformation in Javanese society, from inviting verbally to inviting by written invitation. However, it did not mean that the verbal invitation tradition was vanishing. The socio- cultural relationship existed in wedding card was due to the changing in the customs and manners of inviting people. In the cards made by graphic designer artists, the socio- cultural relationship is not reflected in its visual aspects. When it does, it would be managed and adapted in such a way to meet the artists' aesthetic base that they mastered from their academic experience, i.e. Western aesthetic. The creation of visual artworks was determined by the creative process undertaken by the designers. Yet, each piece of work of visual art basically was conformed the creator's style as a mean to represent the couple and to represent his own authenticity as a graphic designer. The meaning of representation was not representing the reality but more on representing an ideal or expectation.Keywords : Visual artist - Wedding invitation cards - Simbolic meaning

Reflections on the Confluence Project : Assimilation, Sustainability, and the Perils of a Shared Heritage

Reflections on the Confluence ProjectAssimilation, Sustainability, and the Perils of a Shared Heritage Jon Daehnke (bio) The recent bicentennial of Lewis and Clark’s “Corps of Discovery” created increased interest in commemorations of this event along the entire course of the expedition’s travels. In advance of the bicentennial, a number of states established Lewis and Clark commemorative commissions, museums at both national and local levels planned exhibits on the Corps of Discovery, and leaders of local communities along the trail deliberated on the best ways to use the bicentennial to attract tourist dollars to their communities. A group of Lewis and Clark reenactors—including some descendants of William Clark—even set out to retrace the entire course of the journey during the bicentennial years.1 The desire to commemorate the bicentennial was certainly felt along the Columbia River, along which the Corps of Discovery traveled in 1805 and 1806. A centerpiece of Columbia River commemorations of Lewis and Clark—and the one that might have the most long-lasting presence—is the Confluence Project, a series of seven permanent and public art installations located at specific spots on the banks of the river. The Confluence Project art installations were principally designed by artist Maya Lin and further developed and constructed with the assistance of a number of architects and partners.2 The Confluence Project was initiated in 2000 as a collaborative effort between various civic groups from Oregon and Washington, a number of Pacific Northwest Native American tribes, artists, and landscape designers. The stated [End Page 503] goal of the Confluence Project is to “reclaim, transform, and reimagine,” through the creation of public artworks, seven places along a roughly three-hundred-mile stretch from the mouth of the Columbia River to near the border of Washington and Idaho.3 All seven of the chosen sites were stopping points for the Corps of Discovery. Ultimately, the Confluence Project was “designed to rethink what a commemoration of the Lewis and Clark Northwest Expedition could be,” especially by providing greater space for Native American voices and framing the history of the Corps of Discovery as part of a larger shared heritage.4 Explicit in the Confluence Project, and promoted as part of a shared heritage, is a message of environmentalism and sustainability. The seven sites that were chosen for the Confluence Project were chosen in part because they were points of intersection between environment, culture, and history, places of “encounter between the natural world and the built environment, the past and the present, for people of all backgrounds.”5 The art installations located at each site were designed by Maya Lin to interpret the area’s ecology and history and to integrate environmental concerns and history with an awareness of and sensitivity to the tremendous changes the journey of Lewis and Clark effected on Native Americans and their homelands. The Confluence Project has a strong, positive emphasis on a future where we begin to preserve and sustain our natural and cultural resources.6 Messages of shared heritage, especially when placed in the context of long-term environmental sustainability, seem reasonable and, in fact, even relatively mainstream. My argument in this article, however, is that these messages, while on the surface seemingly agreeable, are not entirely benign. I suggest that the messages of shared heritage and sustainability found in the Confluence Project, rather than transforming and reimagining the story of Lewis and Clark, serve to further assimilate the Native American story as one more component of the American master narrative, create a false equation of Indigenous and settler experiences on the landscape, distance and erase the tragedies of colonialism, and perpetuate stereotypes of pristine nonanthropogenic landscapes. In effect, the Confluence Project hides what is a very real and specific history of colonial violence and dispossession and turns it instead into an ahistorical story of shared environmental concerns. [End Page 504] My arguments in this article are drawn from multiple visits to two of the Confluence Project artworks; the Vancouver Land Bridge in Vancouver, Washington, which connects the Columbia River with historic Fort Vancouver, and the bird blind at the Sandy River Delta east of Portland, Oregon, where the Sandy River flows into...

Body of Art and Love

Body of Art and Love

Towards an Olfactory Art History

ABSTRACTIn seeking to expend the sensorium of art history, it is interesting to note that an engagement with the sense of smell was prevalent in a number of artists' writings prior to the actual creation of olfactory artworks. Despite its presumed marginality, scent was a preoccupation for a number of artists, and was integrated into the major trajectories of modern art, even ones dominated by painting and sculpture. This article examines the writings and works of one prominent artist from the modern era, Paul Gauguin, to explore the precedents for contemporary olfactory aesthetics.

Reflections on the Impact of “The Digital Revolution” on Art and Religion

Reflections on the Impact of “The Digital Revolution” on Art and Religion Rafael Chodos The steady and rapid progress of digital technologies over the last thirty years has led to major changes in the cultural ecosystem in which we live. Particularly since the development of the Internet in the early 1990s, the digital world has become a larger and larger part of our lives. It has caused major disruptions in many industries, such as photography, publishing, the creation and distribution of books, artworks, music, and movies. It has facilitated the outsourcing of even highly skilled labor so that the significance of national boundaries has been diminished, and the future need for human labor has been called into question. It is these disruptions, and others like them, which make us speak of the digital “revolution”—for a revolution is a form of evolution and growth that begins with some kind of destruction. Digital technologies grew rapidly also during the first half of the twentieth century and were widely deployed in manufacturing. But we do not speak of that period of their development as any kind of revolution, for instead of displacing existing commercial structures, their role was to reinforce those structures and make them more efficient. It was not until the 1980s that digital technologies started to displace and destroy existing commercial structures—and then the “digital revolution” started. The impact of the digital revolution on commerce has been widely recognized and discussed. This is not surprising, given that the development of digital technologies in the twentieth century was driven principally by commercial interests and for commercial purposes. But it turns out that the digital revolution is having unexpected impacts also in the spheres of art and religion. Here, I want to reflect on just four of them. Replacing the notion of authority with the notion of popularity The recent popular uprisings in the Middle East have reminded us that political authority may be overthrown by coordinated popular action. But the creation of new authority structures is much harder than the overthrow of the old ones. And when the existing political power structures are not well coordinated with the underlying religious and social authority structures or when those structures themselves are unclear, revolution may lead only to chaos. Throughout history up until quite recently, and in most parts of the world, religion has been linked to, and depended on and reinforced, the prevalent political and social authority structures. From the temple states of the ancient Middle East, through the House of David and all the nationalistic excesses that entailed, to the Roman Empire and its “spinoff,” the Catholic Church, religion has always been affiliated with authority. This is not to ignore the countervailing spiritual traditions that are as old as the temple states. We can read the Books of Genesis and Exodus as an account of the transformation of the Israelite religion from the personal, naturalistic mysticism of the patriarchs into the political religion that Moses founded—a religion whose objective was the founding of a new temple state, perhaps on the model of the Egypt from which there was so great an Exodus!—“spirituality” might be defined as “religion” minus (dogma + sacred text + institutional hierarchy), and there has always been a spiritual alternative to institutionalized religion. Spirituality has raised its voice to higher or lower decibel levels through the ages. Art, too, has historically been a “sidekick” to the church, the state, and the aristocracy. Standards of competency and excellence have been established by the king, the church, and their hangers‐on; and it was only briefly, in the early twentieth century, that some artists rejected their role as flatterers to the aristocracy and the church. Those artists (van Gogh, Kandinsky, Klee, Picasso) can be thought of as having ushered in the Modern Art Revolution. But even their rebellious ideas were quickly co‐opted by the aristocrats who became their collectors and their patrons. During the last seventy‐five years, art has functioned largely as a socio‐economic marker: people go to museums and galleries for the same reasons they attend classical music concerts, to show that they are educated and affluent, and affiliated with the prevalent social and political...

Private Rights and Public Wrongs: Fair Use as a Remedy for Private Censorship

Copyright law seeks to promote the public welfare by incentivizing the creation and publication of art, literature, and other original works of authorship. The law bestows exclusive economic rights in expression, which allow copyright holders to exploit the commercial value of their creations in the marketplace. This affords a high degree of control over when and how others use copyright-protected works. These rights, however, are not absolute. The 'fair use' doctrine has traditionally permitted unauthorized and uncompensated uses of copyrighted material for socially beneficial purposes.Under current jurisprudence, the fair use analysis is dominated by concerns about market harm. The doctrine favors 'transformative' uses that are unlikely to reduce demand for the original work by substituting for it in the marketplace. This approach makes sense when, as in most infringement cases, a copyright holder sues to protect the commercial value of a work that has been or will soon be published. But when the plaintiff’s motive is to censor his work from the public eye altogether, without regard for its commercial value, copyright enforcement is far less compelling. In these “private censorship” cases, the market-oriented fair use analysis routinely overprotects copyrights and produces outcomes that conflict with copyright law’s constitutionally-mandated purposes.This Article proposes a reinterpretation of the fair use doctrine in the private censorship context. Eschewing the prevailing 'market substitution' framework, this alternative analysis would give greater weight to copyright law’s public-oriented objectives. The proposed analysis would facilitate a more equitable adjudication of private rights and public interests by helping to distinguish legitimate applications of copyright law from illegitimate attempts to suppress information and expression.

Sonic Menageries: Composing the sound of place

This article investigates the essential association between location and sound, mediated and represented by the process of recording and the subsequent creation of an artwork. The basic argument this article would like to develop is that location-specific sound recording, as practised by artists and phonographers, is basically an exercise in disembodiment of sound from environment, whether it is observational or immersive in approach; if the purpose of this mediation by recording is artistically reconstructive, the location-specificity of the recorded sound is displaced by the further mediation of the creative process. By developing the argument from an experimental angle, in relation to an audio art projectLandscape in Metamorphoses, this article will try to examine how the discourse of acoustic ecology becomes reconfigured in the shift from environmental sound content recorded at location to production of soundscape composition as audio artwork. Today, the application of digital media to artistic practice has become integral – in the case of audio art via creation of auditory art works (for both spatial diffusion and live interaction); this can bring about a reconfiguration of environmental aesthetics. The article will find relevance in redesigning the ecological discourse in the digital realm of ‘soundscaping’ through the practice of mediation, as composing of the sound of location, or ‘place’.

Educating for Peace: A Case Study of a Constructivist Approach to Understanding Peace through Artistic Expression

This paper discusses a project called “Making a PEACE of Paper,” which illustrates how children can explore the meaning and idea of peace through art while, at the same time, understanding other cultures in a meaningful and respectful way. It describes how students can use art and technology to overcome spatial boundaries and exchange creative ideas with students in another country. It also considers how to create ‘shared spaces’ that may help students from different backgrounds to better understand each other’s cultures. The visual art and technology projects, methods, and pedagogy discussed in this paper can be replicated by teachers and community peace educators easily and with minimal (if any) costs. Through this project, teachers and community peace educators may explore what ‘a peaceful future’ means to students and how they think this may be attained. This project provides an engaging framework for students to share ideas, discover meaning, and advance their own understanding of peace through collaboration, dialogue, and creation of artworks that represent their ideas. It is flexible and adaptable to various contexts, age groups, and settings. It also provides a model for authentic student voice in learning, extensive higher-level thinking, and a platform for collectively reaching new insights. The goal of this project is to provide a compelling way to allow students to “see” peace in a transformed way that will help lead to a more peaceful society. It is hoped that this project will motivate teachers and community educators to create a new vision of teaching this topic of peace.

Emergent learning and interactive media artworks: Parameters of interaction for novice groups

<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">Emergent learning describes learning that occurs when participants interact and distribute knowledge, where learning is self-directed, and where the learning destination of the participants is largely unpredictable (Williams, Karousou, & Mackness, 2011). These notions of learning arise from the topologies of social networks and can be applied to the learning that occurs in educational institutions. However, the question remains whether institutional frameworks can accommodate the opposing notion of “cooperative systems” (Shirky, 2005), systems that facilitate the creation of user-generated content, particularly as first-year education cohorts are novice groups in the sense of not yet having developed university-level knowledge.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">This paper theorizes an emergent learning assessment item (Flickr photo-narratives) within a first-year media arts undergraduate education course. It challenges the conventional models of student–lecturer interaction by outlining a methodology of teaching for emergence that will facilitate student-directed and open-ended learning. The paper applies a matrix with four parameters (teacher-directed content/student-directed content; non-interactive learning task/interactive learning framework). This matrix is used as a conceptual space within which to investigate how a learning task might be constructed to afford the best opportunities for emergent learning. It explores the strategies that interactive artists utilize for participant engagement (particularly the relationship between the artist and the audience in the creation of interactive artworks) and suggests how these strategies might be applied to emergent generative outcomes with first-year education students.<br /><br />We build upon Williams et al.’s framework of emergent learning, where “content will not be delivered to learners but co-constructed with them” (De Freitas & Conole, as cited in Williams et al., 2011, p. 40), and the notion that in constructing emergent learning environments “considerable effort is required to ensure an effective balance between openness and constraint” (Williams et al., 2011, p. 39). We assert that for a learning event within a Web 2.0 environment to be considered emergent, not only does there need to be an effective balance between teacher-directed content and student-directed content for knowledge to be open, creative, and distributed by learners (Williams et al., 2011), but there also need to be multiple opportunities for interaction and communication between students within the system and that these “drive the emergence of structures that are more complex than the mere parts of that system” (Sommerer & Mignonneau, 2002, p. 161). <br /><br /></p>

Successes and challenges of feminist arts-based participatory methodologies with homeless/street-involved women in Victoria

This feminist arts-based participatory research project with a group of homeless/street-involved women used group interviews and the creation of collective and individual artworks to explore their personal and political realities and share these with a larger audience. The project built trust and a sense of community, encouraged artistic skills development, and allowed to emerge an artistic identity to combat the stigma of the label ‘homeless’. Individual and collective empowerment came from creating artworks collectively but also, the recognition the women received through publicly sharing their artworks. Tensions and challenges emerged around art as education versus therapy, individual and collective works, the role and place of men, and mental health and the police, two things ever present in the lives of these women.

PERKEMBANGAN KONSEP KRIYA

Abstract
 The term kriya, which refers to the art utilizing the materials of crafts Like basket weaving, pottery, etc., can be discussed not only in the context of past art works (referring particularly, in this case, to the classical or traditional works of this art) but also in the context of those that look new and different from the ones from the past. For that reason, this reference to time - past and present - is the point of departure in this article. A reference to time contains a historic aspect. What is meant in this writing is none other than the movement based on the intention of creating art works which are new in character but using as their sources the traditional arts of Indonesia. This is the movement that has eventually given birth to or revived the aforementioned term for the art concerned here, has at the same time distinguished present from past works of this art, and has as simultaneously distinguished those works of art from mere handicrafts.
 
 Key Word: kriya

Media of Now

That's why film (as cinema) and video (as television) became of interest, because they were the of now; they were what most people were looking at, they weren't looking at art, art was in galleries. --David Hall, 2005 (1) Hall made extensive contributions to contemporary time-based as a founder, practicing artist, and activist for video arts, in his native United Kingdom and internationally. Hall was instrumental in constructing educational, critical, curatorial, and other resources for early video. His video work spans decades with the same complex questions regarding the context of immaterial art and the experiences of the viewer keeping pace with the evolving context of the media of now. Hall began his work primarily in sculpture before emerging as a key figure in the development of video as an artistic medium. He notes the inspiration of work such as Constantin Brancusi's sculpture Endless Column (1920) as influencing his move toward the examination of the experience of time in his sculptural practice, and his working approach shifted to what he terms perceptual, environmental, floor works, (2) focusing on how the viewer perceives and experiences art. Hall was awarded first prize for sculpture at the Biennale de Paris in 1965 and was subsequently included in the foundational show for Minimalist sculpture, Primary Structures, at the Jewish Museum in New York City, as well as in on White at Kunsthalle, Bern, Switzerland (both in 1966). Through the experience of making photography of his sculptures, and noting their tenuous relationship to the physical object, he explored that phenomenon further through his creation of film and video-based artworks. (3) In 1971, while working with the Artists' Placement Group (APG), Hall created what became his most groundbreaking and historically noted works--the series of unannounced Interruptions aired on Scottish and commissioned by the Scottish Arts Council. (4) These original ten artworks were noted as pioneering intrusions through the web of challenges of using broadcast as an arts medium--not for the sake of journalism about the arts or artists, but actually broadcasting an artist's video pieces on mainstream channels. Broadcasting artworks on television poses implicit problems--the expense of broadcast slots being just one issue. As Hall says of his interruptions work, Everybody talks about being in the right place at the right I always quite liked being in the wrong place at the right time. (5) In 1976, a second interruption, This is a Television Receiver, was commissioned for broadcast on BBC 2 during an art-oriented show called Arena. Introduced with the voiceover And now for the very material of Television but otherwise similarly unannounced, BBC newscaster Richard Baker read a monologue deconstructing the magical experience of television by explaining its technical and social function in traditional newsreader monotone. As the piece progresses, Baker's image also is deconstructed into an unrecognizable electronic blur as the signal is distorted. Key to the experience of the interruptions were timing and delicate parallels of comparison and contrast--a balance between suggestion of a connection and enough distinction to provoke reflection about the experience of viewing television. As this quote from Eye magazine says of his earliest interventions. David Hall's [1971 TV Interruptions] set the stage for an era in which artists took up the camera to challenge television's established formulations and its power as a medium of social control his interventions almost established a genre, with subsequent works by [for example] Stan Douglas, Bill Viola and Chris Burden following the form of unannounced disturbances ... (6) A later broadcast-interruption genre work by Hall broadcast on Channel 4 played an important part in referencing video history while commenting on the contemporary trajectory of the use of television in society. …

How Singapore Adolescent Students Cruise the Expanding School Art Milieu

Abstract Stories and visuals of Singapore secondary students reflect the ways they negotiate multiple layers of meanings as they experience artistic learning inside and outside the school setting. The photocollage-cum-photoessay representation of one miniportrait features the unique voice of an adolescent wrestling with learning conventional art skills and his schooling in advanced technology. His voice resonates with others regarding balancing personal aspirations with institutional demands and illustrates the failure of prescribed national art curricular objectives to encompass all aspects of adolescents’ artistic learning. A key finding reveals students integrating popular art outside school with their artistic creation, understanding, and appreciation of fine artworks inside the school curriculum. Their experience demonstrates a blend of reality and hyperreality in the contemporary image-saturated world.

‘Green earths’: vibrational and elemental characterization of glauconites, celadonites and historical pigments

Abstract‘Green earths’ are employed since antiquity as pigments in the creation of artworks. The minerals responsible for the colour belong to four groups: (1) the clayey micas celadonite and glauconite, undoubtedly the most common; (2) smectites; (3) chlorites; (4) serpentines. Whereas there have been several studies on clayey materials, mineralogical analyses in the field of cultural heritage are mainly limited to the identification of the green earth without specific characterization of the mineralogical species. This work shows a preliminary characterization by the multi‐techniques approach of some raw minerals (glauconite, celadonite and ferroceladonite).Vibrational analyses have been correlated with elemental analyses, thanks to the hyphenated instrumentation of scanning electron microscopy with EDS and Raman structural and chemical analyser (SEM‐EDS‐SCA) probes, which permitted collection of EDS and Raman spectra on the same microscopic area. Micro‐Raman and Fourier transform infrared attenuated total reflectance (FTIR‐ATR) spectroscopies were able to distinguish between celadonite and glauconite. The use of different lasers revealed resonance effects in the Raman spectra. In addition to pure minerals, archaeological samples and commercial green earths were also analysed, thereby enabling a more precise classification of the green pigments in heterogeneous samples such as wall paintings. Some commercially available green earths were found to contain organic dyes. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Autonomy to Indeterminacy

From Modernism to Postmodernism: American Poetry and Theory in Twentieth Century by Jennifer Ashton Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 201 pages The much-vaunted millennium with its Y2K panic button seemed an appropriate time to finally bury eroded and otiose discussion of a modern/postmodern rupture. So prospect of yet another full-length debate on matter seemed, for this reader, to augur if not a critically still-born project, then prospect of a boring read. However, Jennifer Ashton's new study, From Modernism to Postmodernism: American Poetry and Theory in Twentieth Century, proved to be a surprising reward, nothing less than a cornucopia of fresh critical thinking and revisionary relations. It is a demanding--and correspondingly rewarding--book, ambitious in its transdisciplinary articulations, negotiating aspects of cognitive science and logico-mathematical philosophy to accompany and complicate detailed close readings. Ashton is clearly a scholar of first order, a focused and diligent reader, amply equipped to take on obfuscations and obduracy of modernist and contemporary texts and much of their ambient (and frequently ignored) discourse networks. From Modernism to Postmodernism is an excellent book, and even those chapters that fall short of excellence at least vivify by advancing a vibrant polemic. Ashton outlines her ambitious project (and it is ambitious) in book's introduction, Modernism's new She writes: This project ... is an attempt to alter currently received history of twentieth-century American poetry by showing that Stein and (Riding) Jackson have been, and continue to be, misunderstood as postmodernists avant la lettre (2). The book seeks to shatter all conciliation between two purportedly divided period practices and takes direct issue with Marjorie Perloff's arguments in her Twenty-First-Century Modernism, especially Perloff's concept of literalism. Among other things, Ashton disputes Stein's alleged precursory status as regards contemporary penchant for open text. Ashton outlines a clear theoretical trajectory: from work of Stein and (Riding) Jackson, who are committed (according to Ashton) to upholding aesthetic autonomy of artworks and who presuppose as fundamental tenet of their practice centrality of authorial intention in creation of artworks to a postmodernist consecration of indeterminacy, irrelevance of intention, and ineluctable impossibility of aesthetic autonomy (as in work of Ashbery and Language poetry). For Ashton, two poles of this trajectory articulate great modern/postmodern divide. (Interestingly, Perloff's thesis is roughly congruent with Habermas's idea of a century sandwich, with postmodernism pastrami between two thick slices of whole-wheat modernism.) The book widens its parameters to further explore the fact that avant-garde credentials of Perloff's 21st-century modernists derive from New Critical 'mainstream' they claim to repudiate than from marginalized experimentalism they claim to embrace (11). (Lock Bruce Andrews in a room with ghost of John Donne and let's see what happens.) There's a further aspiration: to expose more pervasive project of postmodernism in general: effort to make meaning a matter of someone's intention, and to make interpretation a matter of reaction rather than understanding (13). There is much in this polemical work on which to comment. Given limitations of a short review, let me engage a couple of matters: period terms themselves and Ashton's handling of Language poetry. Like Brian McHale in his fine book The Obligation toward Difficult Whole, Ashton treats term postmodern as prefix to a national literary style or cluster of formal tendencies, largely ignoring wider ramifications of term as a designator of complex and evolving cultural forces--what Lyotard dubbed a condition. …

Marcos Ramirez Erre: Border art ‘from this side’

Place—the location of an artist—is a significant issue in the creation of artistic work. The work of many “border artists” recognized by the mainstream art‐press is made from the perspective of the United States. The work of Marcos Ramirez ERRE is made from the southern—TijuanA&Mdash;side of the U.S.‐Mexico borderline. This article examines his art and the ways that his perspective marks him as different from other artists who have taken the border as their subject.

‘Folklore’, cultural property and modernisation in sub-Saharan Africa

In recent years there have been several attempts, through UNESCO and other international cultural agencies, to preserve African oral ‘folklore’. Many of the supporting arguments for such actions are based on a simplistic binary model of African oral culture, contrasting modern, individually authored, cultural products backed up by copyright laws, with anonymous, static and collective pre-capitalist cultural traditions. This article argues that the binary is itself questionable, since the collective nature of oral culture is more in the reception than the creation of artworks. In addition, a simplistic account of a shift from oral to literary/mediated culture as a shift from traditional to modern, ignores the complexity and dynamism of African cultural responses to globalisation. While not denying the possibility of African artists being exploitated in a modern context of industrial cultural production, the article suggests that African ambiguity to legalistic intellectual property rights may be part of a larger Third World dialectic struggling against globalised culture.