High Art Research Articles

Ladislav Trakal’s Art and Crafts Workshop of Decorative Painting in Kharkiv (1899–1921)

The article attempts to outline the activities of Kharkiv art and crafts workshop of decorative painting, headed by a Czech creator Ladislav Trakal in 1899. The introduction of some new archival documents into scientific circulation showed that there was a close connection between the pedagogical system of Rayevska‑Ivanova’s school, founded in 1869, and Trakal’s decorative‑handicraft workshop. The 4‑year industrial art school in Prague, which Trakal graduated from in 1896, did not have the status of a higher art institution at that period of time. When Trakal arrived in Kharkiv and headed the decorative‑handicraft workshop, which was housed in an edifice that Colonel Borodaevsky devised to Kharkiv Society for the Dissemination of Literacy, Trakal got on a well‑worked ground, which was prepared by Rayevska‑Ivanova. In 1869 this outstanding person, the first woman‑artist with a European level education and a diploma from St. Petersburg Academy of Arts in Russian Empire, founded an industrial art school in Kharkiv. Later, in 1896 she was forced to leave teaching at her school due to a complete loss of vision. However, the need for specialists of this profile did not disappear. Kharkiv was experiencing a real construction boom, and decorators, one of whom Trakal was, were in great demand. Although Trakal’s workshop did not become as multidisciplinary as Raevska‑Ivanova’s school, it used a lot of the pedagogical system developed by the founder of industrial art education in Kharkiv, to its advantage. Trakal’s workshop gave its students an initial industrial art education, prepared them for the activity in decorative painting. Unlike Rayevska-Ivanova who taught free of charge in her private school for more than 27 years, trying to lay solid foundation of industrial art education in Kharkiv, Trakal turned out to be a rather enterprising person. He successfully completed highly paid orders for the decoration of buildings in Kharkiv and also opened his own private studio. Having a good command of Russian, Trakal easily entered Kharkiv’s artistic life. He actively participated in exhibitions, where he showed his paintings, made in the Art Nouveau Style with an enhanced symbolist sound. However, the question remains about how bright and original this artist was in comparison with artists from other Ukrainian cities (M. Zhuk, Yu. Mykhailiv, M. Sapozhnikov). Similarly, the contribution of other art institutions to the development of some of Trakal’s students who eventually became famous masters, also requires further studying.

Social and Emotional Learning: Beyond Components and Outcomes

Social emotional learning (SEL) is the current zeitgeist in education. This collaborative self-study includes a teacher educator and her former student, a high school English Language Arts teacher. Both educators, who center relationships and social justice in their teaching, reflect on what they learned and identify and analyze three tensions experienced by the K-12 teacher: concerns about coming across as too political, responding to parent and caregiver reservations about teaching SEL, and grappling with teachers’ emotions in the classroom. Main takeaways are discussed, including the value of partnership between teacher educators and their former students in the development of teaching craft.

Sounds from Nowhere

When Pandit Ravi Shankar began performing for Western audiences in the 1960s, his collaborative instinct for the meeting of Hindustani music and jazz was challenged by what he described as "shrieking, shouting, smoking, masturbating, and copulating" audiences of "strange young weirdos," according to Mick Brown writing for <i>The Telegraph</i>. We can only imagine the debates of high and low art which were fought between Shankar and George Harrison, Bud Shank, or even Tony Scott, who were few of his many collaborators from the West. Caught between its original referent and its appeal to learned style, jazz (with its roots in African-American history) is placed at the center of debates about authenticity, gatekeeping, and located-ness. Once something like "world music," composed through collaboration, fusion, and re-sampling, enters a space not used to any of the styles mixed into this world of music, it creates unique soundscapes. Ethnomusicologist Martin Stokes, writing "On Musical Cosmopolitanism," looks at the course of sounds through the world to think of music "as a process in the making of 'worlds,' rather than a passive reaction to global 'systems'" (6). The world created is never an unproblematically imported ambience. A jazz club anywhere in the world does not always correspond to Dixieland, or Chicago, or New York, nor does it reveal the influence of Black labor-songs, vaudeville, or ragtime. This is where an album like Indian composer duo Shankar-Jaikishan’s <i>Raga-Jazz Style</i> (1968) becomes interesting, compressing 11 ragas from Hindustani music into curt pieces corresponding to different, morphed forms of jazz. By looking at the history of the circulation of interfused styles of jazz in America, Goa, Bombay, and mainstream Hindi cinema, this paper examines the material conditions of creativity, and attempts to inscribe this global creative collaboration of forms into a connected history of jazz and Hindustani music.

WTF? Feminist pedagogy and 3D printing in a preservice virtual field experience

Systemic gender inequality and sexual discrimination continues across a wide spectrum of social, political, and economic fields. Using three key feminist curriculum and pedagogy principles (decentering norms, centering difference, distributing leadership) we employ feminist pedagogy by facilitating curriculum development and implementation that is empowering for not only junior high school students but also preservice teachers, and the collaboration between a junior high school teacher and university preservice educators. We introduce artists that use 3D printing in ways that embody feminist principles and social justice activism to inspire preservice teachers to develop feminist curricula and pedagogy that includes 3D printing. By introducing the artists, we highlight why and how feminist content is part of feminist pedagogy, and how feminist pedagogy works to challenge feminist concerns. Given that most preservice teachers did not experience feminist art pedagogy in preK-16, we designed opportunities to experience feminist art pedagogy in teaching junior high school art classes. As teachers (and students) create feminist curriculum to use and share with others, they gain political power as engineers of progressive educational change towards ending sexism. WTF? (Where's the feminism?) is about our (re)searching feminist pedagogy in a junior high school context through a collaborative form of distributed leadership.

“It’s classy because you can’t see things”: data from a project co-creating sexy images of young women

ABSTRACT Public and academic debates about sexualisation suggest that selfies taken by women of their own bodies, for display on Instagram, are sexualising and harming them. This paper reports on a “compare and contrast” project where a professional photographer (myself) took photographs of women who are sexy self-representers on Instagram. It is an examination of the aesthetics and practices of amateur and professional photography in this context, and draws attention to the role of class in making aesthetic judgements about women’s sexy selfies. I argue that these respective photographic regimes produce and affirm their own sets of values which reveal the hierarchical and prejudiced nature of visual (and wider) culture as it relates to representations of women’s bodies. I report on the verbal and visual languages used by participants and myself to make visible differing classed standards, through the concepts of what is “tasteful” and what is “vulgar”. Dominant discourses about sexualised self-representations of women that focus on risks to the selfie-taker mask prejudices regarding class. The privileging of professional or “high art” aesthetics over amateur, “everyday aesthetics” perpetuates a policing and marginalising of women’s bodies and sexualities and helps maintain long-standing ideals of female respectability and sexual decorum.

The Promotion of Regional Cultural Resources and the Integration of Visual Art Education—Take Haihunhou Culture as an Example

In the development of the big data era, major changes are taking place in many fields in the world, and the field of visual art education is no exception. Breaking through the old style of aesthetic education, transforming from art education to visual art education, and achieving interdisciplinary teaching is a major challenge and opportunity for art educators. This article takes Jiangxi’s regional culture—Haihunhou culture as the research base, integrates museum research, network interactive experience, local teaching materials and other methods to conduct junior high school art teaching, making full use of the rich cultural and social resources at present, There is a new breakthrough in art classroom education, which more representatively reflects the inheritance, innovation and comprehensiveness of the integration of regional cultural resources and visual art education.

The Exploration of Arnheim‘s Theory of Visual Perception in the Field of Art Appreciation and Review in Junior High School

Rudolf Arnheim (German Rudolf Arnheim, 1904-2007) is a famous Gestalt psychologist and aesthetician in the history of western aesthetics. His research on the theory of visual perception plays an important role in exploring human thinking activities. Arnheim’s theory of visual perception and related research in the field of art education can provide professional and detailed theoretical support for the teaching of art curriculum appreciation and review in middle school. Through the analysis and exploration of Arnheim’s visual perception theory, this paper attempts to apply his visual perception theory to the learning field of junior high school art curriculum appreciation review. Teachers can make use of Arnheim’s relevant research results to make students understand and master art language more easily, and make full use of art language knowledge for art appreciation.

Comprehension of the ideological content of P. A. Oyunsky's poem “The Red Shaman” through the lens of modernity

Over the past decades, public consciousness has undergone reconsideration of the spiritual values. This heightened the interest towards the works of the classics of world literature, including Yakut. Among the compositions of Yakut literature, the dramatic poem by P. A. Oyunsky &amp;ldquo;The Red Shaman&amp;rdquo; is of definite interest. This work, as an example of high art, continues to heat the imagination and gives food for thoughts. Since its first publication, &amp;ldquo;The Red Shaman&amp;rdquo; arouses interest of multiple literary scholars and linguists. There is an urgent need for revising its ideological content through the prism of universal outlook upon the world as demanded by time. An attempt is made to reveal the true content of P. A. Oyunsky&amp;rsquo;s dramatic poem The Red Shaman&amp;rdquo; from the perspective of new generation of the audience, by detection of literary techniques applied by the author, examination of conflict situations, interaction between the images that requires axiomatic method, as well as usage of the method of abstraction within the framework of anthropomorphic principle of research that suggests reference to the primary source for ethical-philosophical interpretation based on the new approach. The attention of both, audience and researchers is currently focused on comprehension of the authentic content of P. Oyunsky's compositions outside the influence of traditional interpretations. For the contemporary audience &amp;ldquo;The Red Shaman&amp;rdquo; disclosures the new sides of its ideological-literary content. This work contains the author's profound reasoning on the trends of development of modern society, which requires a different approach towards the artistic heritage of the prominent poet.

JOZEF ARTUR DÖ QOBİNO İRSİNDƏ ŞƏRQ MÖVZUSU

The French diplomat, sociologist, and writer Joseph Arthur de Gobineau always addressed the subject of the East in his works. Both in art and in publicist work Gobineau appeals to the description of the way of life and thinking, the criteria of life of the people of the East. His works are distinguished by high art and imagery. His works on the East are relevant and interesting in modern times through the prism of East-West relations. Key words: Arthur de Gobineau, diplomat, France, Europe, East

Copland’s Styles

This article examines the relationship between Aaron Copland’s activities as composer and as pedagogue in order to illuminate the fraught midcentury relationship between musical modernism and middlebrow culture. I situate his unpublished lecture notes and music appreciation books within the middlebrow context and trace their connections with the works he composed during this period. At the center of my investigation is the contentious midcentury category of “style,” which implicated both Copland’s music and his pedagogy in ways that illuminate middlebrow cultural appreciation at large. Challenging long-standing modernist depictions of the middlebrow as the straightforward commercialization of high culture, I excavate characteristic middlebrow commitments to compromise, novelty, and breadth that proved even more unsettling to midcentury hierarchies than mass culture’s supposedly shameless pandering. By emphasizing Copland’s commitment to a canon of modern “styles,” in composition as in music appreciation, I draw out underlying tensions between his “middlebrow” approach to modern music and a “higher,” purer form imagined by Arnold Schoenberg and Theodor W. Adorno. At the same time, I show how these distinctions often threatened to collapse. On a broader methodological level, I chart a middle course between “social” conceptions of the middlebrow—as a means of marketing, distributing, and teaching high art to a mass audience—and “aesthetic” discussions of it as a compositional style. By examining the reciprocity between Copland’s pedagogy and music, I ultimately suggest that the problem which middlebrow culture posed to high modernism lay not just in its ability to mediate between high and low, modernism and mass culture, but also in the challenges it posed to fantasies of aesthetic immediacy and autonomy.

일본전근대] 주제 제한성 탈피를 위한 방법론의 전환: 일본 전근대사 연구의 동향과 과제

This article observes research trends of Japanese premodern history studies published in the Korean academic world during the two years of 2018 and 2019 and based on this, it predicted future research direction. The following research trend characteristics were found. First, there was a noticeable increase in the number of studies that dealt with the same subject material using innovative approaches and unique and creative research methodologies. Second, intensified Korean-style research was shown. Third, research bases were expanded with the publications of annotations and source books and attempts were being made for the popularization of Japanese history through the publications of high quality liberal arts books, academic journals, and translations. Fourth, research was conducted actively on excavated text data such as wooden tablets and memorial inscriptions and most were products of Japanese researchers. In general, judgments can be made that conversions have been attempted to break away from subject limitations. Meanwhile, it seems that the absence of controversy within the academic world and a lack of relations among researchers of the same field are tasks that must be resolved in the future.

Mythical Islands of Value: Free Ports, Offshore Capitalism, and Art Capital

The Geneva Free Port in Switzerland has paved the way for a new generation of art and luxury free ports. These are critical spatial pivots for the management of art assets, including storage and transactions of artworks, and serve as proxy to examine mechanisms for the capture and generation of value, integral but also outside the global art market. Drawing from the trajectory of the Geneva Free Port and an interdisciplinary body of scholarship on “offshore” and other special zones of production, and value circulation in human geography, anthropology, history, and sociology, this article frames free ports in a longer genealogy of offshore capitalism. First, we claim that the emergence of the Geneva Free Port prefigures and helps illuminate contemporary transformations in offshore capitalism; second, these spaces are more deeply imbricated with public and state authorities than previously suggested. Finally, a holistic understanding of art capital—works of art for investment and asset management—requires an encompassing view of free ports not as accidental and exceptional features in the world of high art but as spaces deeply implicated in the creation and operation of the art market more generally.

ВНЕСОК ПРОФЕСІЙНОЇ (ПРОФЕСІЙНО-ТЕХНІЧНОЇ) ОСВІТИ У ВІДРОДЖЕННЯ ВІТРАЖНОГО МИСТЕЦТВА НА ЛЬВІВЩИНІ

The contribution of vocational education and training to the revival of stained glass art in Western Ukraine and in particular in Lviv region is considered. The popularity of stained glass products in Western Ukraine is due to the development of this art in European countries and the opportunities for local development of the glass industry. The interrelation of the development of stained glass art with socio-economic, cultural and technological changes, which resulted in the division into high art and ordinary craft, is substantiated. High art has always been associated with the work of professional artists. The peculiarities of the functions performed by the participants in the birth process of a stained glass art work are given. It is shown that in modern conditions in the development of stained glass art there is a close cooperation of master performers and professional artists. The result of such cooperation is the improvement of products intended for the general public. The relationship between professional artists and stained glass workers is outlined on the example of the Lviv Higher Vocational Art School, the Department of Art Glass of the Lviv National Academy of Arts and glass industry enterprises. In order to train the specialists-performers in the educational institution of vocational education, a standard of the stained glass profession was developed, the new edition of which expanded and deepened the possibilities of the profession. In order to revive the traditions of stained glass in Western Ukraine, a Center was established on the basis of the institution, which provides educational services for various segments of the population in mastering its art. The problems of the glass industry development in Ukraine are highlighted and the attitude of the Association of its producers to the artistic aspect of production is revealed. The problems of stained glass performers training are identified and ways to solve them are suggested.

Performing Chineseness, Translated Histories: Taiwanese Cartoonist Chen Uen’s Ink-brush Comic Aesthetics and Digital Pedagogy

ABSTRACT This study aims to examine the notion of “multimodal digital pedagogy” through participatory paratexts created among students. Within the field of research on the intersection of arts, media, new technologies, and digital pedagogy, Chen Uen’s work presents an opportunity for educators and students to engage with challenging transnational symbolic dimensions. Taiwan has witnessed an increasing pluralism of aesthetic pedagogy epitomized by Chen’s ink-brush comic exhibition. At the same time, new technologies that enable collaborative work have become a significant means through which students can articulate their cultural imagination after exhibition visits. Using a design ethnography method, this study analyses paratexts shared on an institutional social platform. This study makes three novel contributions. First, this study notes how the debate among educators around high versus popular arts has intensified as curators become increasingly engaged with digital pedagogy. Second, this study discusses how collaborative productions can engage students to re-interpret/create Chen’s work. Sharing these paratexts on social platforms can help students to contextualize their museum going experiences. Third, as a seminal example of such appropriation, Chen’s influence is mapped through intra-Asian appropriation of “Chineseness”. Accordingly, it is argued that Chen Uen’s aesthetic legacy has influenced the cultural literacies of the Taiwanese college students taking part in this educational project.

“If umbrellas fall in the sky” A qualitative case study on a high school public art project for school space improvement

“If umbrellas fall in the sky” A qualitative case study on a high school public art project for school space improvement

Arte Povera as a Tool in Critical Italian-Language Pedagogy

Visual arts are culturally and historically significant to Italy and a reason why many people study the Italian language. This significance is visible in Italian-language classes, from mentions of high art in beginner-level textbooks to entire courses taught in advanced-level Italian devoted to these arts and their respective movements. The importance of these works to art history and to humanity at large cannot be denied relative to learning about Italian culture in the classroom. However, as presented in this literature review, it may be useful to reevaluate how these more traditional teaching subjects can be considered neutral, with a heavy emphasis on instruction as well as a subconscious perpetuation of racist, sexist, and capitalist ideals. By instead drawing upon the contemporary Italian Arte Povera movement a tool of critical pedagogy from beginner to advanced Italian-language courses, Italian art culture and language can be taught by using a more political, multidimensional approach focused on the learners’ contexts and histories. Thus, students may better understand themselves through Italian language and foster critical thinking, in addition to ultimately acquiring the language.

More than meets the eye(brow): Dermatologic imagery in Frida Kahlo’s self-portraiture

Renowned for her self-portraiture that acts as her visual autobiography, Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) is one of the leading woman painters of all time and an enduring feminist icon. Aside from the personal and societal commentary, both subtle and overt, that is evident within her artwork, the use of medical imagery shifts the viewer’s perspective beyond Kahlo’s self-portraits to offer accurate interpretations of her own singular history. The incorporation of dermatologic iconography within Kahlo’s self-portraiture to record her skin, as well as its unique features, have rebuked conventional standards of beauty and exploded preconceptions of what is permissible in high art.

‘I’m a person who loves beautiful things’: Potassa de Lafayette as model and muse

In January 1977, Potassa de Lafayette visited Andy Warhol’s studio wearing a black velvet and taffeta evening gown. The Dominican model sat for sketches by visiting artist Jamie Wyeth and photographs taken by Warhol that together reveal the sequence in which Potassa raised her skirt and lowered her stockings to expose her penis. This contribution explores Potassa’s strategies of self-presentation amid the politics at play in the studio that day. The author reads Potassa as a self-possessed figure fully in control of her image because hers is an identity not predicated on a gendered or sexed body, but on a visual sensibility – as one who ‘loves beautiful things’. As an aesthete and as one of the first openly transgender models of color, Potassa, the author argues, negotiated difference through beauty and glamor in Warhol’s studio and across New York’s high art and fashion scenes.

Differential participation in community cultural activities amongst those with poor mental health: Analyses of the UK Taking Part Survey.

Rationale. There is a growing literature on the benefits of arts and cultural engagement for mental health. However, whether poor mental health is a barrier to engaging in cultural activities remains unclear. Objective. To identify whether there are differential participation rates in community cultural activities amongst those with differing levels of mental health (specifically, feelings of anxiety and happiness) and identify potential explanatory factors. Method. We analysed data from 7241 participants in the Taking Part survey; a random face-to-face household survey conducted in England (2016–2017). Cultural engagement was measured using a four-factor variable of cultural participation derived from assessing annual attendance at 21 receptive cultural activities. Mental health was measured using two of the Office for National Statistics measures of subjective wellbeing: happiness and anxious feelings. Analyses were adjusted for demographic, socio-economic, geographic and behavioural factors. Results. There was no difference in participation amongst individuals experiencing high levels of anxious feelings, but individuals experiencing low levels of happiness were less likely to engage in ‘popular’ cultural activities (e.g., live music events/cinema), ‘high art’ cultural activities (e.g., opera/ballet), and crafts and literary cultural events (e.g., exhibitions/book fairs). Education and socio-economic status largely explained differences, but for ‘high art’ and ‘popular’ activities, differences persisted independent of all explanatory factors tested. There was no difference in participation in global cultural activities (e.g., festivals). Conclusions. Using behaviour change theory, our findings suggest that lower levels of physical and social opportunity and psychological capability may reduce levels of cultural participation amongst individuals with low levels of happiness, but other physical and perceived barriers still remain to be explored.

The value transformation аnd semantic space of kitsch in the music practice at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries

Background. The phenomenon of kitsch in the musical practice of the 20th century is characterized by the absence of a strict definition, on the basis of which one or another musical composition could be classified as a kitsch one. The appearance of kitsch in music had several reasons: 1) the composers’ desire to impress the listener, as well as to achieve commercial success (hence the imitation of high art patterns through democratization, aimed at achieving the replication of a musical composition); 2) the perception of kitsch as a “secondary” phenomenon – a copy or a fake; 3) the change of one cultural paradigm for another (“Romanticism – Avant-gardism – Postmodernism”). The negative semantic load of kitsch has developed genetically and is a kind of marking of “a bad taste”. The paradox is that “kitsch” is interpreted by music critics as a secondary phenomenon, which is beyond the boundaries of genuine art. However, in the composer’s work, kitsch can be interpreted in a positive sense, too. The purpose of the article is to identify the space of the actualization of kitsch as a stylistic mechanism of the value semantics of a musical composition and to point out the specificity of kitsch in its categorical correlation with other components of the stylistic system of the composer’s creativity. Objectives. The object of the research is the stylistic systems of composers creativity of the 20th–21st centuries, the structure of which includes the intonation form of kitsch, the ambivalent nature of which is revealed through various composing methods in various semantic keys that are the subject of this study. Methods. The need to substantiate the immanent-musical manifestations of kitsch in the composer’s style system explains the choice of interdisciplinary interaction of general scientific (historical, axiological, cognitive, systemic, and comparative) and special (genre-style, structural-functional, and interpretive) approaches. Results. Kitsch in academic music oeuvre is an intonation form, which is made by a composer from the “intonation dictionary of the epoch” without any individual activity and independence (“ordinary art”, forgery) or by the method of modelling and transforming that reflects the stereotypical human’s ideas of the Beauty in the axiological dynamics of musical arts (“high” art, its transcendental essence). The mechanisms of actualization, assessment and identification of kitsch in music have been revealed. The level of identification by the listener of the composer’s idea with one or another evaluative judgment will depend on the position of not only the author, but also the interpreter. The essence of kitsch is immanently predisposed to the multivariate nature of its manifestation, depending on the peculiarities of the correlation of the composer’s intention and the perception of the recipient. A typology of kitsch and its functions in music have been proposed. Mechanisms of kitsch meaning formation are semantic, axiological, and performing factors. Conclusions. In musical art, the phenomenon of kitsch acquires a perception and semantic transformation, which should be different from other types of art. The versatility of the intonation forms of kitsch depends on the composing, performing, and listening interpretation. In terms of professional perception and evaluation of the composition, kitsch carries a negative semantic load. However, if the perspective and evaluation criteria change, then kitsch can become a “borderline” phenomenon of musical culture. Transformation and “centring”, shift away from the main negative understanding of kitsch is possible only upon its immersing into a new compositional context. At the basis of kitsch stylization is the conceptual reason for referring to kitsch material through modelling (method by I. Stravinsky, D. Shostakovich, A. Schnittke, and R. Schedrin). The interaction of the kitsch material with the author’s stylistic frees kitsch from the negative meaning (metastyle). The transformation of the “kitsch” material becomes possible due to the appeal of the composers to the form of its symbolization (method by A. Schnittke, V. Silvestrov), which generalizes the process of the semantic “decoding” of kitsch in the perception of the recipient. V. Silvestrov reflected the ideas about Beauty within the borders of the modern European musical and aural experience. The uniqueness of the intonation embodiment of kitsch lies in the fact that the composer took into account the axiological aspect of the perception of one or another of its parameters by the recipient to embody his conceptual ideas. Kitsch, being the lexical “component” of the composer’s style, at the level of inter-textual connections becomes a new tool for generating meaning-making in music. In other words, in the music by V. Silvestrov, kitsch is released from the negative semantic load. The ambivalence of the nature of kitsch and the duality of its perception by listeners are the very immanent qualities that the performer can take into account in his/her interpretation of kitsch.