Mimetic Art Research Articles

Dancing robots: Social interactions are performed, not depicted.

Clark and Fischer's depiction hypothesis is based on examples of western mimetic art. Yet social robots do not depict social interactions, but instead perform them. Similarly, dance and performance art do not rely on depiction. Kinematics and expressivity are better predictors of dance aesthetics and of effective social interactions. In this way, social robots are more like dancers than actors.

Lil Wayne, Imitatio, and the Poetics of Cannibalism

Lil Wayne, Imitatio, and the Poetics of Cannibalism Andrew M. McClellan (bio) Abstract This paper explores rapper Lil Wayne's use of the language of food and consumption through the lens of critical theorizing about poetic imitatio ("imitation") from antiquity through the staggered Renaissances across Europe. I suggest that Lil Wayne's use of consumptive imagery points to a poetics of artistic engagement—what I term a "poetics of cannibalism"—that has lurked in the background of theorizing about imitatio for millennia. Scholars have recognized a range of deep-seated traditions going back to antiquity analogizing literature to physical bodies, literary reception to "consumption," and the notion that competitive poetics is inherently violent. But rarely are these traditions merged in discussions of imitatio. This study sheds light both on the tradition of theorizing about imitatio and on Lil Wayne's place in it. More broadly, the paper interrogates the role food plays in mimetic arts and in discussions of poetics and reception. Introduction: Imitatio One of the most provocative and self-critical expressions of the anxiety of artistic influence occurs in the animated sitcom South Park. The episode "Simpsons Already Did It"1 charts two parallel plots, each of which confronts frictions engendered by working within a generic tradition dominated by the presence of an identifiable urtext (The Simpsons) that seemingly curtails "innovation."2 In one, the child Butters, rejected by his friends Kyle, Stan, and Cartman, assumes the alter ego "Professor Chaos" and sets about plotting the destruction of the world in retaliation. His schemes, however, synopsize Simpsons episodes, as his toady "General Disarray" notifies him with each successive suggestion. Butters's inability to conjure anything "novel" precipitates his spiraling dejection and neurasthenic breakdown, which causes him to see the world of South Park warped into Simpsons-style animation. The second plotline is itself an insidious reworking of a Simpsons short "The Genesis Tub," wherein, like Lisa Simpson, Cartman manages to create a miniature world in a petri dish whose society worships him as a god.3 The two plots converge when Butters notices that the parallel events involving his erstwhile friends mirror the plot of "The Genesis Tub." The conversation doubles as a metatheatrical psychologizing of the show creators' anxieties about writing an animated series in the wake of The Simpsons: BUTTERS: They did that on The Simpsons! Ha! "Treehouse of Horror"! Episode 4F02! "The Genesis Tub." Lisa loses a tooth, and the bacteria on it starts to grow, and makes a little society, and they build a statue of her thinking she's God! Ha! Hahaha! CARTMAN: So? KYLE: Yeah. So? CARTMAN: Dude, The Simpsons have done everything already. Who cares? STAN: Yeah, and they've been on the air for like, thirteen years. Of course they've done everything. [End Page 109] MR. GARRISON: Every idea's been done, Butters, even before The Simpsons. CHEF: Yeah. In fact, that episode was a rip-off of a Twilight Zone episode. BUTTERS: Really? So I shouldn't care if I come up with an idea, and The Simpsons already did it? It … uh … doesn't … matter.4 The boys' schoolteacher Mr. Garrison's claim that "Every idea's been done" is a literary conceit of immense antiquity.5 The Old Testament Ecclesiastes, for example, postulates something similar in "there is nothing new under the sun."6 So too the fifth-century BCE Greek lyric poet Bacchylides—"it's not easy to find the gates of verse unspoken"—and the Roman playwright Terence in Eunuchus—"indeed, there's nothing said today which has not been said before." Cicero, Rome's greatest orator, joked that it's impossible to say anything, no matter how ridiculous, that hasn't already been peddled by some philosopher.7 And there's a wonderful irony that one of the oldest poetic texts that comes down to us—the Words of Khakheperraseneb, a self-reflective colloquy between an Egyptian priest-poet and his listless heart (c. 1,800 BCE)—bemoans the state of literary expression as one of constant recapitulation of earlier poetic material, that literary invention is suffocated by the weight of tradition: If only I had unknown utterancesand extraordinary verses,in...

Socrates’ humour and Plato’s games in the commentaries of late Neoplatonists

The irony of Socrates is one of the essential elements of Plato’s dialogues. However, what appears ironic or playful to modern readers, was not apprehended in the same way by Neoplatonic commentators. For Proclus, one of problematic Plato’s passages concerns the “laborious game,” which refers to the refined eight hypotheses of the Parmenides. Proclus turns to various places of Plato’s dialogues where different games are mentioned. Some of them are mimetic arts, which are partly restricted in Plato’s Republic. Other games are distinguished as pertaining to “old men” and to children: the former is appropriate to philosophers, while the latter is not. Even the “laborious” mode of Parmenides’ playing is given an ontological interpretation. Damascius was aware of the “Parmenides’ game” problem, but he primarily used ready Proclean interpretation. Unsurprisingly, Damascius approaches the conclusion that Parmenides was not playing at all — despite the apparent wording of Plato and minute investigations of Proclus. The extant writings of Simplicius contain no dedicated Platonic commentaries. However, the commentary on Epictetus’ Enchiridion contains a verbose argument on human laughter and its role in a philosopher’s ethos. In general, Simplicius continues Damascius’ trend of rigorous seriousness. Olympiodorus the Younger follows his predecessors in a mere serious reading of Plato, but he acknowledges numerous instances of Socrates’ irony and joking. However, Olympiodorus dissociates Plato from Socrates’ irony and emphasises its purely didactic extent. Generally, we can conclude that the later a Neoplatonic commentator is, the less perceptive to Plato’s humour he appears.

Affect, Belief, and the Arts.

The cultural project is a therapeutic melding of emotion, symbols, and knowledge. In this paper, I describe how spiritual emotions engendered through encounters in imaginative culture enable fixation of metaphysical beliefs. Evolved affective systems are domesticated through the social practices of imaginative culture so as to adapt people to live in culturally defined cooperative groups. Conditioning, as well as tertiary-level cognitive capacities such as symbols and language are enlisted to bond groups through the imaginative formats of myth and participatory ritual. These cultural materializations can be shared by communities both synchronically and diachronically in works of art. Art is thus a form of self-knowledge that equips us with a motivated understanding of ourselves in the world. In the sacred state produced through the arts and in religious acts, the sense of meaning becomes noetically distinct because affect infuses the experience of immanence, and one's memory of it, with salience. The quality imbued thereby makes humans attentive to subtle signs and broad “truths.” Saturated by emotions and the experience of alterity in the immanent encounter of imaginative culture, information made salient in the sacred experience can become the basis for belief fixation. Using examples drawn from mimetic arts and arts of immanence, I put forward a theory about how sensible affective knowledge is mediated through affective systems, direct perception, and the imagination.

Aesthetics Naturalised: Schlick on the Evolution of Beauty and Art

Abstract In his earliest philosophical work, Moritz Schlick developed a proposal for rendering aesthetics into a field of empirical science. His 1908 book Lebensweisheit developed an evolutionary account of the emergence of both scientific knowledge and aesthetic feelings from play. This constitutes the framework of Schlick’s evolutionary psychological methodology for examining the origins of the aesthetic feeling of the beautiful he proposed in 1909. He defends his methodology by objecting to both experimental psychological and Darwinian reductionist accounts of aesthetics. Having countered these approaches, Schlick applies Külpe’s psychological distinction between stimulus-feelings and idea-feelings to collapse the traditional philosophical opposition between the agreeable and the beautiful. Both types of feeling, Schlick argues, result from humans’ adaptation to their environment. Because of this adaptation, feelings that were once only stimuli for action can come to be enjoyed for their own sake. This thesis underlies Schlick’s 1908 argument that art, qua mimesis, is necessarily inferior to aesthetic feelings directed towards the environment. Part of Schlick’s justification for this view is that humans are, through a long evolutionary process, better adapted to their environment than to artworks. Schlick nevertheless concedes that mimetic art can involve ways of abstracting from the objects it copies to produce idealised regularities that are not found in the original. Schlick thus concludes that art teaches its audience how to perceive the world in this abstract and idealised manner. This type of environmental aesthetics constitutes a means for reaching Schlick’s utopian ecological vision of a future in which culture will become harmonised with nature.

El saber del actor español en el siglo XVIII. La expresión de las pasiones en los tratados de declamación

Uno de los objetivos del teatro durante la Ilustración fue mejorar la declamación actoral. Su ejercicio, considerado como un arte liberal, se codificó en reglas objetivas difundidas en distintos tratados. Muchos de ellos, escritos por actores, revelan una dependencia de saberes ya consolidados o de otras artes miméticas, como la retórica clásica y la pintura. Los textos incorporaban el estudio de las pasiones, para responder al nuevo drama burgués. El proceso por el que el actor alcanzaba la expresividad emocional está presente en la paradoja diderotiana, y en otros textos publicados y traducidos en el XVIII: "Le comédien", de Rémond de Saint-Albine; "L'art du théâtre", de F. Riccoboni; "An Essay on the Art of Acting", de A. Hill; "Desengaño de los engaños", de Rezano Imperial; "Ideen zu Einer Mimik", de J. J. Engel, etc. Estos ejemplos, como estudiamos en este artículo, confirman las relaciones entre las distintas escenas europeas, en las que predomina el referente francés.

The Spectacle of Helen in Euripides’Helenand Marlowe’sDoctor Faustus

AbstractThis essay traces a line of thought through post-Homeric receptions of Helen, taking as its primary case studies Euripides’ Helen and Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. Both plays feature Helen as a figure for articulating the phenomenological challenges that audiences face when viewing mimetic art on the stage. This essay argues that these profoundly metatheatrical plays use scenes of characters’ seeing the distinctive beauty of Helen to compare the power of theatrical spectacle to witnessing the supernatural.

Aristotle’s Mimesis or Creative Imitation

The present paper explores in totality the Mimetic or Creative imitative power in creative writers and visual painters. Giving a befitting reply to his master, Plato condemned poets and painters on the grounds that they lack originality. They are mere imitators and their creation is thrice removed from truth and reality. Aristotle in his magnum opus, Poetics, starts with this mimesis thing and goes at length telling that Mimesis or Imitation is central to existence. We human beings are better developed than brute beasts primarily because we have the highest imitating power. Plato and Aristotle both take into consideration the poets. Plato criticizing him and Aristotle accolade him on grounds on mimetic arts. As it delves deeper into the idea it explores that besides imitation, it is instinctual in nature and the other instinct is for rhythm and harmony. Persons endowed with these two natural gifts ultimately give rise to poetry. Poetry after its birth diverged into two directions the graver spirits imitated the lives of nobler men and trivial ones the actions of meaner men. Thus was born tragedy and comedy.

«No sin ser deformada puede la realidad exhibir sus enigmas»: Poetics and Writing in the Lyrical Work of J.M. Caballero Bonald

Through the analysis of a few theoretical and literary texts by J.M. Caballero Bonald, this article highlights the centrality of artistic ‘deformation’ in the author’s poetical conception and, at the same time, his rejection of any kind of mimetic art. This ‘deformation’ – which, upon re-working reality, allows the artist to reveal reality’s hidden face – in Caballero Bonald’s view is the true purpose of literature. Closely linked to it are painting (especially Picasso’s Cubism), the surrealist imagination and baroque aesthetics, all fundamental to his literary opus, which is analysed in this essay without losing sight of concepts such as Labyrinth, Otherness, and Hermeticism, also of great importance in casting light upon Caballero Bonald’s works.

«No sin ser deformada puede la realidad exhibir sus enigmas»: Poetics and Writing in the Lyrical Work of J.M. Caballero Bonald

Through the analysis of a few theoretical and literary texts by J.M. Caballero Bonald, this article highlights the centrality of artistic ‘deformation’ in the author’s poetical conception and, at the same time, his rejection of any kind of mimetic art. This ‘deformation’ – which, upon re-working reality, allows the artist to reveal reality’s hidden face – in Caballero Bonald’s view is the true purpose of literature. Closely linked to it are painting (especially Picasso’s Cubism), the surrealist imagination and baroque aesthetics, all fundamental to his literary opus, which is analysed in this essay without losing sight of concepts such as Labyrinth, Otherness, and Hermeticism, also of great importance in casting light upon Caballero Bonald’s works.

“These Aren’t the Right Pictures”. Framing Strategies in Rutu Modan’s “Ha-nekes”

The tension between referentiality and fictionality, or fictionalization, has historically been at the center of a debate concerning the function and, more importantly maybe, the reception, of three tools: the paratext, the photographical medium, and the literary genre of the graphic novel. In different contexts and from different points of view, these three elements have aroused reactions and questions about the definition of the boundaries between reality and fiction on one side, and renewed the longstanding debate over the ability of mimetic arts of being a truthful way of knowledge, on the other. By using the idea of framing as a way to define the borders between, at the same time, text and context, reality and fiction, what is seen and what is shown, the paper aims at analyzing the strategies employed in Rutu Modan’s graphic novel Ha - nekes (2013) in addressing these polarities. Some of the implications in the use of the notion of framing will be especially developed in relation to what Jan Baetens and Hugo Frey defined as “the ability of the graphic novel to work on the borderlines of first-person narrative, history-from-below, and oral history as well as to introduce fiction with historical meaning (and vice versa)” and Marianne Hirsch’s definition and use of “postmemory.”

Pintura e escultura como modelos para o coro no Livro II das Leis de Platão

Este artigo constitui-se de um comentário acerca do papel das artes na educação da segunda melhor cidade possível de Platão imaginada no último diálogo que escreveu, As Leis. A educação será realizada através do coro que, segundo nossa interpretação, seguirá os desenhos apresentados pelas pinturas e esculturas. Estas, como defenderemos, imitam diretamente a Ideia do Belo e talvez correspondam à imagem dos homens ideais da cidade da República. A educação vai do corpo, que dança e canta a partir de padrões expostos pelas obras plásticas, à alma. A arte mimética se faz essencial, portanto, na educação e, como explicitaremos, também na percepção do belo através de uma representação reta dos seres.

Introduction: Shakespeare's Mediterranean

Introduction: Shakespeare's Mediterranean

Philosophical Quest and Growing up Motif in Ambiguous Adventure by Chiekh Hamidou Kane and Dead Men’s Path by Chinua Achebe

In literary tradition, some of the innovative and formative trends that characterise production and consumption of mimetic art in most third World countries of Africa focuses extensively on formation of the personal agents- specifically, the protagonist.This phenomenon has characterised most of the 21st Century texts and classed them under the literary sub-genre known as Bildungsroman. Bildungsroman is viewed primarily as a nineteenth-century literary phenomenon and the term is used so loosely and broadly that any novel – and even an epic poem like Iliad and Odyssey by Homer – that include elements of coming-of-age narrative might be labelled as a “Bildungsroman”.It is true that the type of novel commonly referred to as the “Bildungsroman” flourished in British literature in Victorian age, and was extremely popular among the realist writers. This accounts for early British publication of Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot and others who employed the pattern, for their novels of character formation into the fictional model of the Bildungsroman literature; a genre that consists of the literary treatment of the process of development and formation of a character in relation to society. As it were, the variety of Philosophical Bildungsroman is an advance variant of Bildung that offers the necessary extension and complexity to the phenomenological literary concern of Martin Heidegger, who posits the philosophical experience of the individual as the “Dasine”. Dasien is Heidegger’s philosophical concept which means “being there”. As a concept in existential philosophy, Heidegger employs it to explain the very concept of personhood. The philosophical quest in this case is attained through the process of “unconcealment” meaning “the disclosure of truth”. Meanwhile, in rethinking Ambiguous Adventure and Dead Men’s Path as typical Bildung texts, the real unconcealment will be extricated from the “thingly character or the constitutive elements” (Poetry Language Thought, 54)of the protagonists, so as to determine, and have a clear vision and beauty of a (realist) representation of these agent (s) maturing in relation to the modern demands of society woven in universalistic model of growth and development via social background. Thus, ‘‘beauty becomes one way in which truth occurs as unconcealdness’’ (The Origin of the Work of Art, 55). This is because in philosophical Bildung, the attainment of successful maturation remains the object of our inquiry and concern, and this is framed within a large-scale diachronic model of human existence; who engages in the act of “thinking a thought, this kind of thinking concerns the relation of being to man” (Letter to Humanism, 1) and remains the prototype of a true Bildung character and texts understudy, namely: Ambiguous Adventure and The Dead Men’s Path. Therefore, this paper opens up a new pattern of thought by investigating philosophical quest and growing up motif in this two novels using Heidegger’s notion of dasien and unconcealment.

Between Mimesis and Technē: Cinematic Image as a Site for Critical Thinking

This paper recovers a crucial insight from Aristotle for how to study artworks and then applies that insight to contemporary film theory. In his Poetics , Aristotle introduces the discipline of the critical study of art as the foundation of liberal education. He did so in opposition to Plato, who thought that the mimetic arts could not be taught--only technē could. Aristotle’s crucial claim is that artwork is born out of the creative antagonism between mimetic and technical learning, which only critical thinking is able to reflect on. Cognitivist film scholars (opposing the typical humanities approach that reduces film to its mimetic aspect) argue for a more scientific approach to film, which, however, would reduce film drama entirely to its technical aspect. I argue that the study of cinema is part of liberal education: it yields both algorithmic analytical learning taught formally and heuristic mimetic learning that cannot be formally taught. The artistic image is a site of learning potentially leading even its uneducated (or illiterate) student from mimetic pleasure to dramatic recognition. The cultivation of critical cinematic thinking enables the learner to resist the attempt of control by marketing or propaganda.

Zero Gravity, Anti-Mimesis and the Abolition of the Horizon: On Cosmokinetic Cabinet Noordung’s “Postgravity Art”

This article presents the work of the retro-utopian Slovenian performance and theater collective Cosmokinetic Cabinet Noordung and its effort to abolish mimetic art in zero gravity (“postgravity art”). It describes the origin of a space station rotating around its own axis (designed in 1928 by Hermann Potočnik Noordung in The Problem of Space Travel); questions the relationship between zero gravity and the historical avant-garde (especially Suprematism) as postulated by theater director Dragan Živadinov; and sketches the past, present and future of the collective’s 50-year project Noordung 1995–2045.

KAZIMIR MALEVICH’S SUPREMATISM AND MODERNIST ARTISTIC MYTHOLOGY AS AN ALTERNATIVE TO RELIGION

The present paper discusses the religious and mythological aspects of the Suprematism of Kazimir Malevich (1879–1935). The purpose is to not to provide a broad and detailed overview of Malevich’s artistic practices, but to focus on the tendency to mythologise. The Suprematist art conception of Malevich radically changed the means of expression of visual art at the beginning of the 20 century, conclusively breaking all connections with mimetic art and starting from scratch with the “language” of pure geometric forms. Therefore (and especially from the viewpoint of the current journal’s central issue, dedicated to art and religion), of special interest is the fact that the formal innovations of Suprematism were motivated by impulses related to religious and, more broadly, mythological thinking.

Copia y simulacro en el Sofista de Platón

Dentro del Sofista, Platón establece una distinción clara entre dos tipos de arte mimético: la copia y el simulacro. Tal distinción evita reducir la imagen a la reproducción fiel de un modelo sensible. El presente artículo se propone hacer visible el hecho de que el phantasma (simulacro), y no la copia, constituye el punto de partida de la creación artística.

Configuración del término “distancia mimética” a través de cinco ejemplos: Ovidio, Platón, Hofmannsthal, Cervantes y Büchner

the term “mimetic distance” is carried out as a leitmotiv of artistic communication by five well-known different examples. On the other hand, the maintenance of this concept pleads for advice against the dangerous mimetic art that spreads out many philosophical fields.

Pleasure and Pain in Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Culture by David Evans, Kate Griffiths

MLR, 105.3, 2.010 873 Pleasure and Pain inNineteenth-Century French Literature and Culture. Ed. by David Evans and Kate Griffiths. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. 2008. 286 pp. ?57. ISBN 978-90-420-2502-8. This volume is a selection of papers firstpresented at the conference of the Society of Dix-Neuviemistes on the theme of representing pleasure and pain. The fifteen essays (not all of which will be discussed here) approach this rich topic from a variety of angles; their diversity in thematic unity is one of the pleasures of this book. In their introduction, editors David Evans and Kate Griffiths frame the volume nicely, invoking the theories of Sade and Freud, and highlighting how the inter vening century will blur the boundaries between the destabilized polar opposites of pleasure and pain. In the opening essay Henri Mitterand investigates the literary and philosophical linking of pleasure and pain. Beginning with the Romantic as sociation of Eros and Thanatos, and passing through Spinoza and Kant, he argues thatwhere pain isdestructive, pleasure is the active perfectioning of our being, and finds literary evidence of this in the ironizing of Romantic sufferingby Zola and Flaubert. Michael Tilby masterfully explores allmanner of joyous and melancholic intoxication in Balzac, linking themotif intertextually to a practice of writing (p. 55) thatpenetrates beyond the surface of the real, and generates writerly excess and readerlypuissance. Francesco Manzini reads Balzac in a differentvein: his dis cussion of the expiation of personal and political sin through suffering inVEnvers de Vhistoire contemporaine draws interestingly on Foucault, though it seems most convincing in itsapplication toHuysmans and Eugene Sue. In the volume's second section, public fascination with the criminal Lacenaire and Romantic enrapture with the feminized guillotine serve as examples of the morbid pleasure derived from terror in two highly readable essays by Anne Emmanuelle Demartini and Lo'ic Guyon, respectively. The third section, devoted towomen writers, begins by exploring the relation between women's writing and douleur in the early half of the century. Sara Norris, for example, traces the evo lution ofMalvina Blanchecotte's poetic exploration of suffering and tears as the shared experience' (p. 144) ofwomen across social lines. Turning to the century's end, Rachel Mesch examines an emerging fin-de-siecle inscription of sensual plea sure, which she insightfully terms a feminist counter-sexology' (p. 160), among women novelists such as Anna de Noailles, Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, and Colette. Thefin de siecle remains the focus for the fourth section, opening with Gretchen Schultz's compelling essay on lesbian pleasure and suffering.Where emerging sexology prescribed punishment for acquired homosexuality, but compassion for the pain of hereditary inversion, Schultz argues thatfin-de-siecle literature 'both adopted this distinction and blurred its boundaries' (p. 178). The following two essays examine thefin-de-siecle pathologizing of non-normative sexual practices, though the links to pleasure and pain here are less direct: Alison Moore's broad research examines female sexual frigidity inmedical and pseudo-medical texts, 8/4 Reviews while Elizabeth Stephens maps the pathologizing of sexual excess' onto Foucault's discourse of themonstrous and itsnormalization. Rae Beth Gordon opens the final section with a deft and wide-ranging examina tion of the interplay of pleasure and pain infin-de-siecle aesthetic judgement. She traces the repercussions of widely espoused theories of psychophysics (whereby internal pleasure and pain are scientificallymeasured through bodily responses to works of art), and particularly underscores the deliberate provocation of painful (and also unconscious) sensations by artists such as Gustave Moreau. Carol Rifelj explores the painful quest forbeauty in early-century fashion, a quest whose goal seems contradicted in contemporary novels, where precisely when she is not a "fashion victim", woman's pain may be investedwith erotic power' (p. 249). Claire Moran closes the volume with a return to considerations of religious suffering, this time in French and Belgian painting, showing how the crucifix served as a motif both of the artist's suffering and of his joyous release from the confines of mimetic art. With an emphasis on literature from the early half of the century and theory and art from thefin de siecle, this volume is an engaging contribution to the discourse...