Minor Arts Research Articles

Decorative Arts: Laying the Groundwork

Any discussion of arts requires some initial clari fication of fundamental issues. Right away, there are the obvious difficulties of definition, which continue to challenge us in interesting, and sometimes frustrating, debate. We will touch briefly on the history of the study of on how the special qualities and characteristics of the arts rely on specific and separate tools which we librarians need to know about and collect. First, we cannot even begin to discuss the arts without noting two major problems. The first is the definition issue, already mentioned. The very title of the ARLIS/NA conference session noted above?What Art and Architecture is Not: Decorative Arts?is an indicator that the terminology is ambiguous and confusing. Second, the arts (whatever they are) have not occupied equal stature with the arts in the way that they are perceived and studied (note the past tense, as the situation seems to be changing). No one suffers too much over what is meant by the but the arts are challenging to define and explain. And yet, all of us KNOW. Everyone KNOWS on a gut level what is meant by though we might come up with varying ways of describing them, like made for use, minor arts, functional art, functional decora tion, surface design, applied art, and so on, realizing, of course, that none of these phrases really does the job. More about nomenclature later. As far as status is concerned, we all sense the hierarchical place the arts occupy, vis-?-vis the arts. Just the terms fine versus decorative express an explicit hierarchical relationship. This distinction was unknown in antiquity, and is primarily a Western phenomenon. The word art is from the Latin ars, meaning skill, craft, knowledge. The ancient Greeks did not include the visual arts among the disciplines championed by their muses. Nor were the visual arts considered among the liberal arts of the early medieval scholarly world, which included grammar, rhetoric, logic, geometry, arithmetic, music, and astronomy. These liberal arts were distinguished from the so-called mechan ical, or manual of weaving, pottery-making, wood carving, navigation, armoring, and finally, painting, sculpture, and architecture. And these mechanical arts were not as exalted as the others. Somewhere along the way, however, this grouping of liberal and mechanical arts got reshuffled. Italian Renaissance scholars reassigned painting, sculpture, and architecture to the more exalted category that included poetry and music and sepa rated them from the other mechanical arts of weaving, pottery, etc., thus sowing the seeds for the classification we know today. How this dovetailed with the development of the concept of beauty for its own sake is beyond the scope of this discus sion. Suffice it to say, the concept of beauty for its own sake did not exist in ancient and medieval times. The visual arts?all of

Model Boats in the Context of Maritime History and Archaeology

Funereal, votive or shipbuilders’ model boats and ships have been quite well documented in the past, but little research has been undertaken into other wooden models from north-west Europe. There have been over 160 found during archaeological excavations, dating from the 9th to the 19th centuries. A study of these ‘toys’ is not just a study of objects among the minor arts, but reflects a far more important aspect—a source for interpreting remains of full-size vessels, the hypothetical reconstruction of hull-forms and exploration of new ways of defining unknown vessel-types. © 2007 The Author

For a minor art: resonances between art, clinical practice and madness nowadays

SUMMARY We discuss the changes that were brought about in B razil in the 20th century related to the acceptance of works of art produced in clinics or, in any way, other than those conventionally accepted by the artistic community. The enlargement of this field, now including dissenting works of art, seems to indicate a change in contemp orary sensibility therefore shifting the relationships between art, clinical practice and ma dness itself.

The Minor Arts of Daily Life: Popular Culture in Taiwan. Edited by DAVID K. JORDAN, ANDREW D. MORRIS, and MARC L. MOSKOWITZ. [Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2004. vii+278 pp. ISBN 0-8248-2800-3.

From the early 1990s, the study of Taiwan has flourished into what is almost a field in its own right. Yet, despite this growth, Taiwan Studies remains an unstable and inchoate area of scholarship. Beyond key issues like democratization, national identity and the “miracle economy,” it has no dominant problematics, discursive structures or proscribed methodologies. And, unlike Chinese Studies, it is too small a field to be clearly demarcated into sub-fields.As a result, the study of Taiwan is unusually open to any and all possible topics for study. Indeed, the free play of the range of subjects in Taiwan studies is one aspect of the continuing establishment and consolidation of the meaning of “Taiwan” itself, and of a Taiwanese identity, over the last ten to 20 years.The Minor Arts of Daily Life: Popular culture in Taiwan is in the first instance an excellent contribution to this developing field, but it is also indicative of the challenges to producing legitimate academic knowledge of Taiwan.The book begins with a review of Taiwanese history, which, even now, is a necessary opening step to establish the discursive boundaries of a scholarly project on Taiwan. The introductory chapter presents what has become a received history of Taiwan, organizing it by ruling regimes over the last four centuries. This history was established most clearly in English by the work of Thomas Gold in the mid-1980s and here it is filled out with much detail and nuance.The body of the book is divided into four sections organized into generalizing categories: religion, the public sphere, economic life and popular entertainment. The methodologies include social history in Morris's chapter on baseball, anthropology in Katz's work on chicken-beheading rites, and media studies in Chu's chapter on talk-back television. Simon's work on gay and lesbian identity and Chin-ju Lin's chapter on Filipino domestic workers in Taiwan also add important critical dimensions.

The Minor Arts of Daily Life: Popular Culture in Taiwan (review)

The Minor Arts of Daily Life: Popular Culture in Taiwan (review)

Workshops with style: minor art in the making

Abstract In his book Byzantine Art in the Making; Main Lines of Stylistic Development in Mediterranean Art 3 rd–7 th Century, Ernst Kitzinger describes three types of subjects represented in a group of ivory plaques most likely executed in the same Roman workshop c. 400. He begins with the famous pair of ivory panels inscribed with the names Nicomachi (Paris, Musée Cluny) and Symmachi (London, Victoria and Albert Museum), two of the old Roman senatorial families known for their efforts and actions to preserve and protect pagan rites during the final decades of the fourth century in Rome [fig. 1]. Each of the two panels shows a priestess performing a rite before an altar. Kitzinger's main interest was in the classicistic style of the settings and figures, recruited to emphasize the patrons' purposes. He compares the priestess diptych with the official ivory diptych of Rufius Probianus. There in each part Probianus, vicarius of the city of Rome, is seen seated on a throne flanked by two notaries [fig. 2]. Below, two patricians stand in acclamation pose. The devotional pair of ivories and the official one, says Kitzinger, are closely related. The borders of the first diptych, made of “delicately wrought palmette ornament” are identical with the frames of the second one, including the borders dividing the Probianus panels into upper and lower zones.

Jewellery from Thasian graves

Jewellery found during recent excavations in the necropolis of Thasos fills a gap in our knowledge of minor arts in an important metal producing area of the Greek world. The pieces examined in this article form, in terms of technique, style and iconography, a group, the affinities of which can be traced to the Ionic traditions of the northern Aegean. Their artistic identity fits well with what we know about the character and development of other aspects of Thasian art, characterized by a close adherence to dominant artistic trends coming from both Attica and the East during the late Classical period. The anthropological study of the skeletal remains from the tombs gives further contextual information on the general condition of the people interred, while the objects deposited offer clues to the interpretation of issues concerning the iconography and symbolic use of precious grave goods.

Under Wraps: Byzantine Textiles as Major and Minor Arts

Under Wraps: Byzantine Textiles as Major and Minor Arts

Sor Juana's Villancicos: Context, Gender, and Genre

INTRODUCTION Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, the famous seventeenth-century Mexican nun and writer, successfully constructed and performed her identity as a creole woman in Colonial-era New Spain through her use of the villancico (a type of Spanish lyric, similar to other kinds of European folksongs). This was possible because the generic conventions, social attitudes, and performance context of this form provided Sor Juana with the optimal cover for her somewhat subversive female-centered worldview. In my analysis, I combine considerations of the content of Sor Juana's writings with the cultural and performance context in which they were enacted, a perspective that is relatively lacking in the copious scholarship devoted to the famous nun. Living and writing in a cultural context that viewed as suspect the intellectual contributions of women, Sor Juana sought to present her identity through representations of Mexico and its varied ethnic groups and through the hagiography of the Catholic Church, which provided, perhaps unwittingly, potentially powerful figures with which women could identify. Most collections and analyses of Sor Juana's work focus on her poetry or her essay writings. The most famous of the latter, of course, is her La Respuesta (The Answer 1691, 1994), written in response to a public attack by a Bishop against Sor Juana and her lack of humility in daring to challenge a theological point made by a Jesuit priest, Antonio de Vieyra (or Vieira), concerning the greatest act of Christ. Feminists laud this work as the first manifesto in the Western Hemisphere on the right of women to speak and learn (see, for example, the prologue by the Grupo Feminista de Cultura in Juana Ines de la Cruz 1979). But scholars and writers have largely ignored Sor Juana's many villancicos, and when they have been included in discussions of her life and artistry, they have mostly been discussed from a literary perspective-as written literature. Electa Arenal and Amanda Powell (in Juana Ines de la Cruz 1994) have noted that the consideration of the villancico as arte menor (minor art) gave Sor Juana a certain opening to pontificate on theological matters, but I think this contention can be usefully expanded upon by demonstrating the intimate interrelation among three factors: the villancico texts, the situational context, and the cultural context. I will do this through careful examination of Sor Juana's villancico texts, and especially through a thorough reconstruction from available literature of both the situational (performance) context and of the cultural context (particularly in terms of how the form was regarded in her day). Such an analysis can address the following questions: How did Sor Juana manage to pull off a performance of these pro-woman songs in the context of a seventeenth-century Catholic liturgy? And what can an investigation of this question contribute to our understanding of the interaction between gender and genre? Parts of the following analysis draw on Joan Radner and Susan Lanser's article, Strategies of Coding in Women's Cultures (Radner and Lanser 1993). They identify six types of coding through which oppressed groups like women can covertly convey subversive or dangerous messages: appropriation, juxtaposition, distraction, indirection, trivialization, and (feigned) incompetence. Several of these strategies figure in Sor Juana's use of the villancico form. Additionally, a number of theoretical insights from the field of sociolinguistics (overlapping with anthropology and folklore) can be usefully applied to the case of Sor Juana's use of the villancico form.1 The situational and cultural context of Sor Juana's villancicos, reconstructed from available documents, allows us to develop important insights into her world and the way in which she attempted to navigate it. Decades ago, Bronislaw Malinowski adumbrated (see, for example, Malinowski 1922 and 1935) a dual-contextual view of language and culture, advocating a focus on both the context of culture and the context of situation. …

Women artists on disc

Women on Disc. Thorndike, Maine: Macmillan Reference, 2000. Price: $995 (ISBN 0-7838-0090-8). www.mlr.com. Requirements: IBM PC or compatible (386 or higher recommended); 4 MB RAM for Windows 3.1, 8 MB RAM for Windows 95; CD-ROM Drive and drivers; MSDOS Extensions 2.0 or higher. Optional: printer. This CD-ROM is the electronic version of four standard print reference books published by Macmillan/ G. K. Hall: Chris Petteys's The Dictionary of Women Artists: An International Dictionary of Women Born Before 1900 (G. K. Hall, 1985), Paula Chiarmonte's Women in the United States: A Selective and Resource Guide in the Fine and Decorative Arts, 1750-1986 (G. K. Hall, 1990), Penny McCracken's Women and Designers in Europe Since 1800: An Annotated (G. K. Hall, 1998), and Cassandra Langer's Feminist Art Criticism: An Annotated (Macmillan, 1994). Of these four titles, Petteys and Chiarmonte's books are probably most often found in reference collections. Petteys's biographical dictionary covers over twenty thousand artists, from antiquity to the twentieth century. Her book itself is compiled from such august sources as Benezit, and is an excellent source of obscure artists. A new print edition, the first since its original publication in 1985, is expected in 2001. (Updates and other titles are planned for future releases of the disc.) Chiarmonte's bibliographic references to more than three thousand American women artists is wide-ranging, including artists in the minor arts and in crafts, and indexes nearly four thousand sources. McCracken and Langer's works, on the other hand, are more valuable for scope (McCracken includes even garden designers) and alternative criticism (Langer, lesbian and feminist views) than for biographical detail. The combined number of artists discussed on the disc is about thirty thousand. The scope is impressive, for both U.S. and international artists. Two bibliographies, the Bibliography and the Artists bibliography can be searched by keywords listed in indexes below the search window. In the Basic Bibliography, the indexes are author, title, periodical, Petteys's reference key, medium, annotation keyword, material type, source (one of the four titles making up the disc), or keyword. The annotation keyword index allows the user to limit keyword searches to that portion of the artists records. The keyword index searches the entire record. The indexes in the Artists' bibliography are artist, biography keyword, publications keyword, studies keyword, exhibitions keyword, references keyword, source, and keyword. Again, the user may search by keywords in the whole record or limit the search to a portion of the record. …

Crusader archaeology: the material culture of the Latin East

Lists of Maps and Illustrations Preface and Acknowledgements A Note on the Use of Place Names 1. Background: The Crusaders and Outremer 2. The City and Urban Life 3. The Rural Landscape 4. The Defence of the Latin East 5. Frankish Ecclesiastical Architecture 6. Crafts and Minor Arts 7. The Fine Arts 8. Building Techniques and Materials 9. Burials Postscript Notes Chronology Abbreviations Bibliography Index.

La escultura románica y sus problemas de interpretación: el llamado sepulcro «de Mudarra» procedente del Monasterio de San Pedro de Arlanza

The legendary traditions created in monasteries during the Middle Ages and revitalized in modern times have often led to mistaken interpretations of their oldest remains, both architectural and in the minor arts. One of these remains is the mural monument today in the cloister of the Cathedral of Burgos and originally from the Monastery of San Pedro de Arlanza. Known as the «Tomb of Mudarra» (hero of the County of Castilla), in the traditional historiography it came to be considered a work of the early Romanesque or even a falsification from the seventeenth century. This article attempts to delve into the process by which the mural monument acquired its mythic meaning. A stylistic analysis will resituate the mural monument in the historical context of the late Romanesque in which it was created.

The Charting of the Oceans: Ten Centuries of Maritime Maps

Mastery of the sea has been crucial in the quest for power and riches; the transition from the medieval to the modern world was marked by the emergence of European ships from their home waters out into the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific oceans. In their maps and charts the maritime nations have left a unique visual record of their response to the challenge of the sea. This book traces the history of the charts, not as technical documents, but as eloquent witnesses to the discovery of the world beyond Europe, and to man's evolving knowledge of the oceans. The charts employed a vivid artistic idiom which expressed man's passionate feeling for the sea: the gilded compasses, the nightmarish sea-creatures, the stately ships, the royal crests - all these were fused into a minor art form which flourished for four centuries. This book presents some of the riches of Europe's chart tradition, together with narrative which summarizes the vital role of sea power in history.

The Arts of China to A.D . 900 (review)

Reviews 567 William Watson. The Arts ofChina to a.d. 900. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995. x, 277 pp. 396 illustrations. Hardcover $65.00, isbn 0-300-05989-2. Every scholar at some time and on some level contemplates the ideal introductory book to his or her field or discipline. Few are bold enough to take on the challenge . Beyond the enormous investment of time, the completion of such a project is an inevitable exposé of one's personal vision of the field to one's colleagues. And, indeed, no two serious scholars would or should introduce a field in the same way. For the arts of China, any new book must stand alongside Laurence Sickman and Alexander Soper's The Art and Architecture ofChina (first published in 1956 with several newer editions), Michael Sullivan's The Arts ofChina (first published in 1967 with numerous updated editions), and, to a certain extent, Sherman Lee's A History ofFar Eastern Art (first published in 1964, also widi numerous revised editions). All three of these for decades have been employed as textbooks in the majority of introductory college courses in Chinese art history in the United States, and they have been used fairly successfully, sometimes in combination with the many other more specialized or less widely used books, including some by William Watson. Although a paragraph similar to the one above, with a different name and title, could stand as die preface to a review of an introductory book in any branch of sinology, for Chinese art there exist two unique challenges. First is the audience . The art field is comprised ofcurators as well as academics, and introductory books are most successful if they can serve both audiences. Second is the problem ofhow to assess the constant infusion of data that emerges from China's soil. Several times a year over the past forty-five years, with no sign of decrease in pace or significance, Chinese excavators have been uncovering finds as major as the thousands of figures in pits near the tumulus of Qin Shi Huangdi. From the most general book to the most scholarly paper, a new find can alter one's conclusions within a month after publication. Since introductory books are expected to have long lifetimes and wide circulation, it is an especially serious task to choose the four hundred or so illustrations that will still best represent the field after another ten years ofexcavation. Any fair assessment ofa new introductorybook on Chinese art must take into account these two factors as well as the author's goals for that book and, perhaps,© 1997 by University the reviewer's point ofview. For TheArts ofChina to a.d. 900, the author clearly ofHawai'i Pressstates his major goal in the preface. As for the reviewer, my primary purpose is to assess the merit of this book as a textbook for a survey of Chinese or Asian art history, or perhaps as a text for a more general college course on East Asia. 568 China Review International: Vol. 4, No. 2, Fall 1997 As Professor Watson tells the reader in his preface, there exists a standard history of Chinese art, that is, a history ofwell-known and well-published monuments with a large body of supporting documentary evidence. Many of these monuments, he writes, are found in Sickman and Soper's Art and Architecture of China, the previous book on Chinese art in this Pelican series, now published by Yale University Press. Watson tells the reader that his own book seeks to explain more of the techniques of the Chinese arts than is offered in other books on this subject, and that it will do so through a discussion of objects in major collections. The Arts ofChina to a.d. 900 succeeds in this attempt. The technical manufacture of the various "minor arts" for which China is known—bronze vessels, lacquerware , and all varieties of ceramics—is explained in detail, as are numerous aspects of Chinese painting. Furthermore, the illustrations for his explanations, which appear on almost every page, are excellent, sometimes spectacular. This book is user-friendly and is presented as the kind ofbook tiiat many, including...

Pictures of science

Abstract The apparently minor art of scientific illustration raises questions that bear directly on the 'two cultures' confrontation of art and science. A marked shift in approach is discerned at the beginning of the twentieth century, from the incorporation of illustrations within the text to the use of 'enframed' figures, often with captions, as a separate entity. It is proposed that this change, which appears to have coincided with the introduction of bivariate plots in scientific journals, represents the transition from the essentially narrative structure of natural philosophy to the more adversarial mode of modern science. The link between the restraint required of the graphic artist and minimalist and functionalist aesthetics such as those of the Bauhaus is examined, together with the possibility that such a persimonious method of presentation can carry an implicit message. The different roles of abstraction in science and art are discussed with particular reference to the work of Paul Klee.

Negotiating New (His)stories of Photography

Russian photography today, like all of Russian culture, is in a transitional state. The end of Communism has meant not so much a social revolution as a devolution, a falling away of a regime rather than an aggressive imposition of a new direction. Photography is still viewed as a minor art, both blessed and cursed by the fact that photography as an art form was not supported by the Soviet state. “Official culture” did, however, promote photojournalism, to pictorialize, personalize, and heroize Soviet achievements in life and labor. Now, ex-Soviet photographers are free to develop independently. Many are familiar with Western photography and are influenced by it in varying degrees depending partly on their level of education and access to foreign materials. Many deny such influences out of a desire for personal originality or national authenticity—desires that may or may not conflict with that for international recognition and reward. I have written about this transitional period in an earlier, unpublished...

The Terracotta Protomai from Gela: A Discussion of Local Style in Archaic Sicily. By Jaimée P. Uhlenbrock.

The Archaic sculpture of western Greeks challenges stylistic categorization. Identification of distinctive local schools in southern Italy and Sicily is hindered by relative paucity and scattered occurrence of monumental sculpture. Moreover, statues and reliefs in baked clay (often quite fragmentary) comprise a sizable portion of corpus of large-scale works. Discussions of Archaic sculpture in West tend consequently to include examples even of small, molded, terracotta figurines-accompanied, of course, by customary caveats about comparing different scales and materials as well as cautionary reminders about problems inherent in assessing value of mass-produced, moldmade objects of minor art for stylistic analysis of monumental sculpture. Uhlenbrock attempts to demonstrate how by focusing on a single class of such moldmade terracottas-female protomes or masks-local sculptural style can indeed be successfully characterized. She bases her study on a corpus of some 1,000 female protomes from Gela and its hinterland in southeastern Sicily. The protomes come from excavations primarily of sanctuaries at Bitalemi, Predio Sola, Feudo Nobile, and on acropolis at Others come from sites further afield, such as Grammichele and Monte Bubbonia. The protomes from Gela lend themselves well to stylistic analysis due to their abundant number, near life-size scale, excellent state of preservation, high quality of workmanship, and their presence in stratigraphic contexts that provide well-defined chronological limits. By tapping this distinctive form of coroplastic sculpture for a discussion of Archaic style, Uhlenbrock's work joins studies by F. Croissant (Les protomes fiminines archaiques, Paris 1983) on protomes of mainland and eastern Greece and by M. Barra Bagnasco (Protomi in terracotta da Locri Epizefiri, Turin 1986) on those of Locri Epizephyrii in southern Italy. In introduction, Uhlenbrock deftly points out strengths, weaknesses, and inconsistencies of previous attempts to define local Siceliot sculptural styles and asserts that trends and traditions can only be illustrated by a plurality of works, sufficiently well preserved that demonstrate consistent and regular traits over a period of time. She holds that protomes from Gela provide just such a body of material; she sets out to show how this rich group of terracottas illustrates existence of a homogeneous local school of coroplastic sculpture, which, in her view, reflects the taste and traditions of monumental aesthetic of artisans at Gela.

Connoisseur of Industry

Journal Article Connoisseur of Industry Get access Roman Baroque Sculpture. The Industry of Art , Jennifer Montagu , Yale University Press 1989 . ISBN 0–300–04392–9 . 278 black and white illustrations, 244 pp. £30.00. ANTHONY HUGHES ANTHONY HUGHES Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Oxford Art Journal, Volume 15, Issue 1, 1992, Pages 89–91, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxartj/15.1.89 Published: 01 March 1992

Benson's minor art

Benson's minor art

:Art and Politics in Late Medieval and Early Renaissance Italy, 1250-1500

A series of papers delivered at a conference with the same name in 1988 at the University of Notre Dame. It considered the relationship between politics and the literary and visual arts. Political scientists and anthropologists focus on the institutions that express power relationships. The aim of the Notre Dame Conference was to consider the relationship between politics and the literary and visual arts. The visual arts considered in this volume range from the traditional fine arts categories of painting, sculpture and architecture to minor art objects such as medals, badges, banners and seals. In general terms, the study of politics denotes the study of power relationships. Within this larger framework political scientists and anthropologists have chosen to focus on the institutions and structures that express these relationships and/or the actions that are undertaken by individuals and groups to define, alter, or reinforce them.