Minor Arts Research Articles

Not by Words Alone: Early Holocaust Graphic Narratives as a “Minor Art”

Abstract Immediately after the Holocaust, scores of Jewish survivors created graphic narratives, in word and image, about their individual and collective wartime experiences under Nazi oppression. This essay will make a case for these early postwar works as a “minor art.” “Minor” captures the material characteristics of this low-capital, low-circulation printed matter: slight in weight, small in size, modest in price, and ephemeral in quality. It also describes their “poor” images that pull, in form and structure, from popular culture (comics, cartoons, illustrated books) on the margins of modernist concerns (composite image-texts relying on narrative storytelling). Borrowing from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of “minor literature” as a deterritorialized, political, collective utterance, I argue that disciplinary notions of “art” and “testimony” have prevented us from seeing this “minor art” and recognizing how its vernacular, amateur art practices allowed survivors to reconstruct the past, remember communities and identities erased, and reclaim their own narratives of persecution. Created by a minority (a decimated Jewish community) working on the peripheries of the art world, they tell a Jewish story using Jewish frames of reference to create a community outside of majoritarian culture. What is at stake in them is not only a poetics of recollection but a politics of representation: of seeing with Jews as a critical act by dominated persons against the dominant, antifascist master narrative of WWII and the primary media of its dissemination, photography and film. Ultimately, this “minor art” can have major implications for both how we understand the crucial first decade of survivor initiatives and how we write our histories of Jewish art.

Pre-Islamic religious motifs (550 BC to 651 AD) on Iranian minor art with focus on rug motifs

This article reviewed the influence of pre-Islamic religions such as Mithraism and Zoroastrianism on decorative elements of ancient Persian rugs. The article then evaluated the effect of the Islamic religion on Persian rugs. This was examined through extant evidence from pre–Islamic empire artefacts and publications in Persian carpet history, iconography and religious studies. Using spiritual motifs on some ancient rugs results from the important position of rugs in ancient Iranians’ lives. Believing the existence of religious motifs on Persian carpets is because the first carpet in history (Pazyryk) was attributed to the ancient Achaemenians, decorated with symbolic motifs from Mithraism and Zoroastrianism. Pazyryk shows how rug-weaving evolved during the Achaemenids, and it represented spiritual foundations through visual concepts. This article reviewed the symbolic Persian rug motifs from ancient religions through Pazyryk, with support from museum collections. With the emergence of religions, these effects are seen in all aspects of life, including the production of rug design.Contribution: The main contribution of this research was that it investigated the effects of religion on Persian art focusing on the Persian rug. The findings showed that religion had directly influenced the decorative motifs of the Persian rug among high-class families that might have cascaded into visual elements found on commoners’ rugs.

Pre-Islamic religious motifs (550 BC to 651 AD) on Iranian minor art with focus on rug motifs

Pre-Islamic religious motifs (550 BC to 651 AD) on Iranian minor art with focus on rug motifs

Art as immanent liberation : a Deleuzean study of the role of art in Iris Murdoch's The Unicorn

Art has a critical place in Iris Murdoch's The Unicorn (1963) where it is closely intertwined with freedom. However, to date this aspect of the novel has been largely overlooked. The present study adopts a Deleuzean approach to examine the liberating role of art in this novel as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's concept of "minor art" can shed new light on the novel's thematic structure. The present study shows the effects of (minor) literature and music on the protagonist, namely Hannah Crean-Smith. This study, then, offers a Deleuzean reading of the intertextual relations in The Unicorn to explore the potential of the other texts addressed in the novel and to investigate their impact on actualizing Hannah's will to power. The results show that the virtual powers of the novel Hannah reads, together with her interest in music, de-subjectify and liberate her from the bounds of familialism and organism.

Broken discus lamps from Roman Dacia

The present study analyses 46 mould-made Roman lamps, focusing on the deliberate partial or total removal of their discs, in order to facilitate the insertion of solid fuel (tallow) rather than olive oil. The latter had the disadvantages of being more expensive, more difficult to produce and distribute within the Empire, without being more calorically efficient than the solid alternative. Based on the information revealed by the contexts of discovery, respectively by the typological framing of the artifacts, an attempt has been made to establish a chronological frame during which these lamps were used. Following the analysis of the archaeological material concerned, a typology capturing four ways of cutting the disc of a lamp was created. The present study contributes to the valorisation of the lamps in a different manner, the local specialised literature often limiting itself to their property of providing alternative dating or modest forays into the minor arts.

Environmental performance of Cantabrian (Northern Spain) pelagic fisheries: Assessment of purse seine and minor art fleets under a life cycle approach

The perpetuation of fishing activity from an environmentally, socially and economically sustainable approach is essential to guarantee not only the future of coastal populations, but also the supply of high-value seafood for society and the safeguarding of cultural heritage.This article aims to assess the environmental performance associated with fishing fleet operations in Cantabria (northern Spain) under a life cycle thinking from a holistic approach. Thus, the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology was applied under a ‘cradle-to-port’ approach, setting the functional unit as 1 kg of fresh fish landed. Inventory data on the main inputs and outputs were collected from a sample of 57 vessels covering for the first time the main techniques, purse seine and minor art fisheries.The results identified that the vessel use stage was the responsible of most of the impacts. In line with the literature, diesel consumption stood as the chief hotspot in six of the seven impact categories analysed. Purse seiners got a value of 0.25 kg of fuel per kg of fish landed, while the performance of the minor art fleet showed significantly lower consumption (0.07). Regarding impacts on climate change, this study found a quantity of 1.00 and 0.34 kg CO2 eq. per FU, for purse seine and minor arts, respectively. These figures were consistent with the expected results for pelagic fisheries. For the remaining indicators, purse seiners generally performed worse.The LCA methodology provided outcomes that allow the proposal of potential improvements and measures to foster the transition towards a more sustainable smart-fishing sector. Further research efforts should focus on the development and implementation of renewable energy and low-carbon vessel propulsion technologies.

Features of the Hellenistic culture of ancient Sudan

The article examines the main features and specificity of the formation of the Hellenistic culture in ancient Sudan. To assess the nature of the Hellenistic influence on the culture of Meroe, the author analyzes the characteristic features of the region's architecture, reliefs of temple complexes, painting and decoration of walls, items of minor art, jewelry, which had been obtained during archaeological excavations. The author explores the ways of penetration of Greek culture directly and through Egypt, as a result of which the Hellenistic culture of Meroe becomes the result of the syncretisation of Hellenistic Egypt and local forms. The borrowing had a specific nature, most of the Hellenistic elements were re-interpreted, transplanted into the Meroe and adapted to the local culture. The processes of transformation of images created through the syncretization of Egyptian Hellenistic images with local culture gave rise to a special form of Sudanese Hellenism, in which the Meroitic reading is traced in the concept, form and style. Such processes of combining local features with images that came from Egypt were typical for the entire history of contacts between these two Nile civilizations, the nature of the interaction as a whole was subjected to uniform laws, giving rise to a unique form of Hellenism in Meroe.

The role of Russо-Byzantine antiquities collectors in the formation of museum collections at the turn of the 19th–20th centuries

In the context of Russо-Byzantine minor arts, hoards of the Kievan Rus’ era represent a unique group of material culture artifacts, which are being thoroughly examined by academic science — archaeology and art history. The history of museum affairs have accumulated a number of studies on individual private collections, where the hoards were presented to some extent. However, there is a demand for a comprehensive coverage of the entire complex of hoards as the result of a “collecting fever” in the Russian Empire at the turn of the 19th–20th centuries. The culture of this period, addressed to the styles of past eras, made objets d’art of Byzantium, Ancient Russia and neighboring cultures to be desirable items of collecting, which contributed to the activation of the antiquities market. When the antiquities used to be implemented into the private collectors’ milieu, certain tendencies of their existence in this milieu inevitably arose. This article makes an attempt to highlight beneficial and negative aspects of such tendencies, especially for humanitarian science and museum work. Among the personalities, such as A. S. and P. S.Uvarovs, D.Ya. Samokvasov, B.I. and V.N.Khanenko, V. V.Tarnovsky, A.A.Bobrinsky, A. V.Zvenigorodsky, M P.Botkin, P.Morgan — two groups are distinguished according to their motivations and approaches: professional archaeologists and connoisseurs of antiquities. Characteristics of structure and acquisitions of their collections in the context of archaeological excavations are given; their further history of existence and the role in the museumification of decorative and applied arts monuments are revealed. A number of problematic aspects of the collectors and antique dealers’ activity is named, such as the growth of the forgery market, the fragmentation of monuments, which used to the single complexes, as well as the issue of national values restitution.

La représentation d’Ulysse et de Polyphème dans la mosaïque romaine. Analyses et comparaisons

In Homer’s Odyssey, whilst Ulysses is staying at the court of the Pheacians, he narrates his past adventures, in particular his encounter with the Cyclops, Polyphemus. The obvious physical imbalance between the two protagonists provides moral justification for recourse to guile, to metis, rather than engaging in a regular combat. In this paper, we have chosen to further exploit mosaics representing Ulysses inebriating Polyphemus for the sole purpose of revisiting the documentation by focusing on comparable works - sculptures, paintings and minor arts - in order to put forward a few hypotheses. We will take a look in turn at the role played by the sculptures of the Hellenistic period, the influence of Aristotle’s unity of action and unity of time, ending with the different depictions of Polyphemus’ organs of sight – at times « monocular » or « triocular » – in attempt to elicit their iconographical meaning.

Wet Nurse in art in Graeco-Roman Egypt

The wet nurse is a woman employed to breast-feed another woman's baby other than her own, for certain salary. This profession was very important to most of the ancient families in Egypt, especially in Pharaonic and Graeco-Roman Egypt. Most of the information about wet nurses is sourced from the reliefs shown on the walls of the temples and tombs, minor art exhibited in the galleries of the different museums, and from the contracts mentioned in the ancient papyrus especially the Oxyrhynchuspapyri. Wet nurse in Pharaonic Egypt has very essential role, either in divinity or in social society. She is very important for the king to insure his royal rights. Private wet nurses are also used among the upper classes; they are also depicted on the walls of tombs, showing signs of love to their owners. Many details were given about wet nurses and wet nursing as an important profession in Egypt during the Greek and Roman times. This section of the study depends on contracts preserved in the ancient papyrus that provides us with a lot of information about this profession, also the physician Soranus was one of the most interested Greek doctor, who gives many details about wet nurses. The paper is supported by a catalogue of the representation of wet nurses in Greek and Roman Egyptian art. It deals with Divine Wet nurse in Greek and Roman Egypt, especially Hathor and Isis. The representations of divine wet nurses in temples' relief as Dendra, Edfu, Philae and Armant. And in minor art.

WESTERWALD STONEWARE AT KELMSCOTT MANOR: MORRIS, POTTERY AND THE POLITICS OF PRODUCTION

Kelmscott Manor, the country home of William Morris, houses a remarkable collection of ceramics bearing a singular relationship to one of the most influential figures in Victorian cultural history. This study of Kelmscott’s collection of German stoneware reveals new interpretations of its production history and fascinating insights into its significance for the cultural context of Morris’s work. Based on a complete catalogue, the paper examines the ensemble of approximately thirty pieces of eighteenth- to nineteenth-century Westerwald stoneware, orgrès de Flandres, as it was known to Morris and his contemporaries. The Kelmscott group is the largest collection of this material known from an English historic house and has a composite and well-documented provenance. Supplementary material provided as an online appendix contains a fully illustrated, descriptive catalogue.Westerwald pottery of the seventeenth century and earlier has been extensively studied, but its ceramics of the late eighteenth to nineteenth centuries have received little attention. Most accounts stress the simplification of vessel forms and ‘degeneration’ of decorative designs during this period, leading towards mass-productionc1900. This paper re-assesses later Westerwald output, drawing attention to a vernacular pottery tradition of significant interest in its own right. This paper suggests that it was this continuing tradition of vernacular production and its naturalistic, decorative schemes that attracted the interest of Morris throughout his adult life, from the Red House experiment to the heyday of Morris & Co. Examining his writing on creativity, the minor arts and labour, the paper interpretsgrès de Flandresas an expression of Morris’s idealisation of the relationship between labour and craft production.

Islamic Calligraphy in the Special Collections of the Romanian Academy Library in Cluj-Napoca / La calligraphie islamique dans les collections speciales de la Bibliotheque de l’Academie Roumaine de Cluj-Napoca

Minor art in the West, calligraphy was revered in the Islamic world, developing in amazingly diverse and original ways and revealing the aspiration to devise a radically non-mimetic visual construction to exalt and spread the Divine Word in a culture that frowns on making an image of the divine and its creation. Paper and the emergence of bureaucratic elite prompted the development of sophisticated calligraphic styles with six standardized cursive scripts, the nature of the text or the prospective readers determining the type of writing employed for literary, religious, or administrative works. The Islamic manuscripts and books in the Romanian Academy Library of Cluj-Napoca, the legacy of the celebrated scholar Timotei Cipariu, illustrate a wide repertoire of styles, once again demonstrating the inherent potential of Islamic calligraphy for developing a variety of versatile ornamental forms, while remaining true to its key role to communicate facts and express thoughts and feelings.

A ARTE DE OBSERVAR SEM SER OBSERVADO

As tensões e contradições entre a realidade e a ficção são aspectos explorados por Orwell (1984) e Weir (The Truman Show) para revelar progressivamente a verdadeira natureza de suas obras: em 1984, uma distopia fictícia que estiliza a automatização e a manipulação pela arte-propaganda na vida real; em Truman, uma alegoria da vida contemporânea, a própria sociedade do espetáculo, forjada nos estúdios de fabricação de memórias. Ao contrário da ficção, infelizmente, as estruturas de poder no mundo real pouco se revelam, já que a sua condição de permanência é o ocultamento. A arte como recurso utilitário do Estado tem papel fundamental na automatização da linguagem: esse é o seu fim. Os regimes totalitários ganharam público porque souberam manipular os arquétipos pelos meios de comunicação, pois a ditadura só é mantida pela adequação entre ideologia e realidade. Os recursos de controle dos sistemas de produção e de reprodução de mídias são mecanismos da arte-propaganda que censuram a linguagem artística em direção à automatização da visão de mundo. A poética, num contexto de otimização de recursos, é desnecessária; a produção artística, por sua vez, é reduzida a termos permitidos e não permitidos. Sofisticando-se os métodos, institui-se o juízo de gosto sobre o que é considerado como arte maior e arte menor, ou como bom e ruim. Nesse sentido, o ensaio sugere um diálogo entre as distopias ficcionais, lidas como alegorias da vida contemporâneo, e a automatização da visão de mundo.

Il cubicolo della Madonna con due Magi nelle catacombe romane dei SS. Marcellino e Pietro dopo il restauro. Declinazioni iconografiche della scena di Epifania

The Cubiculum of the Madonna with two Magi in the Roman Catacombs of the SS. Marcellino and Pietro after restoration. Iconographic declinations of the Epiphany scene The author has directed the restoration of cubicle 69, called of the Madonna with two Magi in the Roman catacombs of the SS. Marcellinus and Peter. In the intervention, which took place between 2014 and 2015, laser beam has been used for cleaning in a technological successful way, which now has a wide range of case studies in the conservation of catacomb paintings. The restoration was the occasion for a deepening of the iconographic peculiarity of the cubicle, from which is given the name. The study showed how, in the cemetery ad duas lauros, the scenes of Epiphany, even apart from doubtful cases, always present two Magi on the sides – or beside – of the Virgin and Child, instead of the canons three. It is good to reiterate that the number of the Magi is not mentioned in the Gospel text, but only appears in the subsequent apocryphal production, in relation to the three gifts brought by the dignitaries. The numerical variation, attested also in one case in the catacombs of Domitilla and in some products of the so-called minor arts in the version of four Magi, seems in the whole of the Labicana to be a precise local choice, not so much due to mere compositional reasons or to uncertain experimentation iconographic, but perhaps to a careful reading on the one hand to the Gospel text, on the other anticipating the concept of royalty that the epiphanic situation, especially in the symmetrical scheme in work in cubicle 69, allowed to express.

Simultaneous Sports and Other Physico-Follies in Futurist Life and Art

The article offers an overview of Futurism, the revolutionary aesthetic movement that began in 1909 and brought a new vitality to the Italian art scene. One of the least familiar aspects of the movement was the focus that its founder Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and his followers espoused for promoting sport and physical education – both in schools and in workers’ free time. The artistic efforts of the Futurists were quite innovative as they invented new forms of literature, poetry, theatre, music, dance, sculpture, painting, and architecture, as well as supporting the ‘minor arts’. Many of their works employ the simultaneity of art and the celebration of such modern concepts as speed, dynamism, and flight. All these are combined with an amazing burst of creativity and surreal ‘physico-follies’ to create a new futurist vision of humanity. However, for the country as a whole Futurism was considered too elitist and it never really gathered much popular support. Surprisingly, some of its concepts were skilfully absorbed by the fascist movement lead by Benito Mussolini.

La mujer en la primera abstracción geométrica: una "contra-historia" artística en clave de género

Este trabajo es un intento de rescatar las creaciones artísticas femeninas de la primera abstracción geométrica. Recurre, por un lado, a la reescritura del arte moderno de la estética de Jacques Rancière, basada en el valor de la igualdad y en la idea de dar voz a aquellos que no la tuvieron en el relato artístico clásico. Suscribe, por otro lado, el espíritu revisionista de la estética actual, su replanteamiento del valor de la libertad, en cuyo nombre se sigue denegando aún hoy el estatuto artístico a las formas expresivas consideradas no-libres. Se establece así un paralelismo entre la situación de la artista moderna y la de las llamadas artes menores, ambas excluidas del “gran arte” por su falta de libertad y ambas dignificadas, sin embargo, en la obra no-objetiva geométrica de mujeres como Liubov Popova, Sonia Delaunay, Anni Albers y Marlow Moss.

Like This

Jeff Dolven’sSenses of Style describes itself as an experiment and an essaying. Made up of 396 differently sized ‘sections’ within ten larger chapters, it is a book which wrangles far-flung, vast-scale theoretical enquiries – of formalism, grammatology, stylistics, biography, intentionality – into thoughtful, close-read literary focus, by testing the edges of a double question: Why did Frank O’Hara like Thomas Wyatt – and how is Thomas Wyatt like Frank O’Hara? Storying between them a line of liking and likening, carefully strange and marvellous, Dolven hums poetry of the English Tudor court into the listening ear of whistling strollers through the New York School, and all along the way – and over the top, and underneath, and all at once – meddles curiously in hard, simple questions. How to define a minor art? What’s in a name? How much knowledge is there in beauty? Why is a voice commanding? What counts as connection?

Hermès Dionysophore

The ‘Lormier bronze’, named after its earliest known owner, is an exceptional statuette made of copper alloy. It is remarkable, both by its subject and its style, of very fine quality; but also by its state of conservation, namely its gilding, which allows us to contemplate, for once, such a statuette close to its original aspect. The iconography, rather rare in the field of small bronze figurines, clearly derives from the large statuary and illustrates a little-known episode of the Graeco-Roman mythology. Through the diverse possible models and their repercussion in the ‘minor arts’, the article allows to place this work in the Graeco-Roman production by following, in its main lines, the long way going from the original work to the series crafts, sometimes, as here, of high quality.

Exploring Biographies. Ancient Egyptian Funerary Statuettes at the University Museum of Cultural History in Oslo

Small funerary statuettes shaped as mummiform figurines are among the most common ancient Egyptian artefacts to be found in museums of cultural history worldwide. The Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo (MCH) is no exception. The present article explores the biographies of material culture, materiality, objectification and shifts in meaning. It probes the many ways small artefacts, often categorized as ‘minor art objects’ of no importance, provide us with valuable insights into ancient Egyptian beliefs, society and culture. Selecting a few pieces from different periods, it delves into the multi-layered narratives and intersecting storylines where the objects’ biographies are tied to a web of relations across time and space as well as to the history of the ancient Egyptian collection at the MCH. The article discusses questions related to museological and heritage management, and addresses ethical issues concerning the provenance and ownership of archaeological artefacts in museums.

The Coup: Behind the Scenes of the Act with Philippe Petit

This essay discusses the minor art form of high-wire walking in order to show that the agency of the death drive manifests itself by adding rather than removing something from the symbolic order. The essay focuses primarily on the work of Philippe Petit, especially the clandestine walk between the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, on August 6, 1974; Petit’s own writings about his “coup”; and the testimonies of the impact of this act on those who witnessed it that are captured in James Marsh’s film, Man on Wire (2008).