Artistic Motifs Research Articles

Drawing, Memory and Imagination in the Wolfenbüttel Musterbuch

Abstract The Wolfenbüttel Musterbuch (Cod. Guelf. 61.2 Aug. 8°, fols. 75-94, Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel, Germany) is considered a crucial example of a medieval modelbook. The collection of drawings contained within its pages has long been identified as key evidence for the transmission of artistic motifs between Byzantium and western Europe in the thirteenth century. Offering an in-depth analysis of the drawings and the quire that contains them, the present article suggests that the drawings were made with the purpose of working through visual representations that the draftsman found intriguing and that he sketched in order to train his own hand, memory and imagination. This hypothesis challenges some of the assumptions behind the category of medieval modelbooks as a means of faithfully reproducing images so that they can be further copied in another context. If the main goal of the drawings in Wolfenbüttel was that of enriching the draftsman’s visual memory and exploring imaginative possibilities, their value as reproductions might have been marginal, but their role as means of cross-cultural encounter was decisive.

Intoning the Male and Female Voices in a Novel by Eva Figes

AMY CHRISTINE PARKER University of Manitoba The book Light, with Monet at Giverny: A Novel is a story that imaginatively describes a day in the life of the Monet family. It is written by one of the feminist writers of the first wave which ended in the seventies, ‘‘Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Eva Figes, Germaine Greer, Shulamith Firestone, and Kate Millett’’, as described by Susan Watkins in Twentieth Century Women Novelists: Feminist Theory into Practice. Watkins’ book describes these women as being opposed to contemporary interpretations of Freudian theory, and in particular to certain aspects of his description of the Oedipus complex which they see as patriarchal and arising from capitalist values and the hypothesis that hysteria is self-motived rather than a problem of sexuality. Yet what Sally Robinson recognizes in Engendering the Subject: Gender and Self-representation in Contemporary Women’s Fiction as the refreshing plurality of the voices of these feminist authors is characteristic as well of those who remain faithful to religion or Christianity, which are traditionally feminine voices. This paper searches for the developing voice of women in this work of fiction by Eva Figes and recognizes as well the presence of the continuing male voices. A positive aspect of Figes’ novels is the fact that she often finds a way for a character to thrive despite harsh conditions. Throughout the novel, exterior sounds such as a clock counting the hours, a nearby passing train, singing birds and galloping horses create some sonorous effects. As the land lies amongst hills and a river, echoes can also be heard. These sounds punctuate the dialogues and silences within which much of the meaning of the story is contained. In this novel about an artistic family, the auditory effects are enhanced by visual motifs of light and color. In another of her novels, The Knot, there is a similar recurrence of ‘[n]ot

"Girls are dancin": shōjo culture and feminism in contemporary Japanese art

This thesis identifies a growing trend in the use of the shojo girl motif in contemporary Japanese art and positions it as an emerging new feminist expression inspired by locally determined gender-transgression. Japan’s current output of artists, exhibitions and art publications show that the Japanese girl—the shojo— is a ubiquitous presence. Shojo is an increasingly common point of figurative reference for contemporary Japanese artists, a complex cultural construct, and a wide-spread motif in present-day Japanese culture. The shojo is conveying a strong female youth culture that fosters anti-hegemonic gender subjectivities amid a context of social and moral panic. This thesis departs from Japanese feminine stereotypes to pay particular interest to an emerging wave of figurative contemporary art practices in which the figure of the shojo is utilised for a new generation of feminist critique. Aoshima Chiho, Kunikata Mahomi, Miyashita Maki, Takano Aya, Sawada Tomoko and Yanagi Miwa are contemporary artists whose works feature representations of Japanese girls to negate stereotypes and alternately foreground the female subjectivities found in shojo culture. Through this gesture, the artists propose ways in which the shojo has, and can, transgress the boundaries of gender hegemony within contemporary Japanese society. The theoretical framework for this thesis explores an overlap in the transgressive modes of local Japanese with global culture where it concerns new feminist expression in contemporary art. This expanding theoretical framework for contemporary feminist art finds its context in art practice in the 2007 Global feminisms exhibition which included Japanese art. Contemporary art is defined in this thesis as a cultural and conceptual break with Modernism’s Western centric values. While feminist art and its scholarship has been in many respects at the fore of this break from Modernist values, it was not until the past two decades that feminist art found synergy with other identity politics. As a result, newer feminist art has produced new ways of understanding gender politics. In Japan, the figure of the shojo is a vehicle for these new ideas. In working at the intersection of the three themes of shojo, contemporary Japanese art and contemporary feminism, this thesis will argue the importance of this figure to feminist expression in contemporary Japanese art, and global feminism more generally.

Why Coins Turned Round the World Over? A Critical Analysis of the Origins and Transmission of Ancient Metallic Money

The inspiration behind the pre-modern bronze round coinage standardised across China by the First Emperor of Qin in the 3rd century BC have remained fairly obscure and are still a contentious issue. We demonstrate in this article that the various theories arguing for an exclusively endogenous impetus behind the spread and development of Chinese round coinage vouched for by many scholars in either East Asia or the West all carry inherent contradictions. In contrast, circumstantial and archaeological evidence in support of partly exogenous origins are mounting. Evidence from the Middle East points to the early invention and wide circulation of round coinage in Lydia, Greece and the Achaemenid Empire. The expansion of the Persians into India in the 6th century BC and the later incursions by Alexander and the Greco-Bactrians in the fourth and third centuries BC all facilitated and may have decisively contributed to India’s adoption of round coinage. Similarly, the flow of ideas, artistic motifs and metallurgic knowhow from West Asia to China via Central Asia had occurred much earlier than the 3rd century BC. Active adoption of foreign (Central Eurasian steppe) customs in the fourth century BC is recorded in Chinese pre-imperial records and confirmed by recent archaeological findings across Eurasia. Ongoing archaeological work in China’s western provinces could further highlight this ancient phase of globalization that, quite literally, still shapes our most fundamental grasp of money.

The pipette, the tiered cosmos, and the materialization of transcendence in the rock art of the North American Southwest

The pipette is a rare rock art motif found across the North American Southwest but seldom depicted in other media. We address landscape and archaeological contexts, associated imagery, material correlates, and ethnography to provide an interpretative hypothesis that accounts for the motif’s widespread, cross-cultural use. We argue that pipettes represent a tiered cosmos and axis mundi, at times with portrayals of emergence and transcendence. The pipette’s compartmentalization signifies the conceptual metaphor ‘the cosmos is comprised of containers’, a concept embedded in Uto-Aztecan languages with Mesoamerican antecedents. The motif’s distribution across the North American Southwest demonstrates that it was a key religious symbol that accompanied the adoption of Mesoamerican-like religious beliefs and practices beginning in the eighth century or before. Prehistoric iconography – whether we understand it or not – references thought and ideas that were important enough to memorialize. Despite difficulties inherent to interpretation, archaeology would be remiss not to take advantage of the enduring iconological record. We demonstrate that careful, concentrated, and multidimensional approaches to understanding prehistoric symbolism can provide valuable and credible insight into cultures that otherwise could not speak for themselves.

Pushing at Boundaries: The Path of a Brazilian Instrumentalist

Over the course of his career as instrumentalist, composer, and arranger, Paulo Moura participated in, contributed to, and initiated some of the most influential movements of Brazilian popular music. His ability to perform at the highest level of proficiency in a wide range of styles and genres demonstrated the flexibility and scope of a professional urban musician; his commitment to creativity, transformation, and improvisation revealed the mind of an innovator, visionary, and master.
 
 In this eulogy, pianist Cliff Korman, one of Moura’s duo partners, considers elements of Moura’s artistic and aesthetic motivation, his commitment to improvisation as an underlying premise of popular music, and the path he forged to eventual mastery. In a look at their last presentation, accompanied by reference to supplementary video clips, Korman offers a descriptive analysis of their approach to preparation and performance and contemplates Moura’s evolving definition of improvisation.

Dramatic Peculiarities of Ecological film

The notion "Ecological Film" is being quite frequently used by film scholars today, especially when it comes to documentary films or тction films using animals as actors. In both cases the film's creators turn to the theme of Nature, which makes it possible to treat this category of screen production as a separate art form. The article covers the artistic motivations making the world's best documental filmmakers (Verner Herzog, Godfrey Reggio, etc.) turn to this theme, and the dramatic methods characteristic of ecological film.

III The Central Middle Ages (900–1200)

III The Central Middle Ages (900–1200)

Linking computer science, art, and practice through digital sound

This paper reports on an NSF-grant supported summer workshop that brought music and computer science students together for eight weeks to explore creative projects in digital sound production. The dynamics of the students' collaborations were observed as they crafted experimental projects weaving together music, theatre production, sampled digital audio, and MIDI. Moving among various levels of abstraction, the students found practical and artistic motivations to learn the science of digital sound. The projects they produced suggest ways to revitalize computer science courses by linking science, art, and practice through digital sound, a subject naturally interesting to students.

Gounod’s Faust: Opera of Redemption

Because Charles Gounod's reputation waned drastically in the second half of the nineteenth century, he has been thought by some—if he was thought of at all—to be a composer of mediocrity and qualified competence. He once wrote that Palestrina's music is superb because of the absence of visible means, but Gounod's own compositions have been condemned for abounding in those means: effects that are obvious, external, and unconvincing, along with an impact without subtlety because his supreme artistic motivation was the concept bien ordonne. Such judgment largely stemmed from two causes. First, Gounod has been repeatedly associated with a cote- rie of late nineteenth-century composers—Felicien David, Charles Ambrose Thomas, Ernest Reyer, Edward Lalo, Leo Delibes—who themselves epitomized this less than positive evaluation. Second, since Gounod popularly was—and is—known almost exclusively as the composer of Faust, an opera that saw its two-thousandth Paris production just seventy-five years after its premier performance, he suffered from a familiarity that tended to breed contempt. One historian, however, who has made a conscientious effort to adjudge the essential qualities of Gounod clearly, fairly, and in proper proportion with a perceptive ear and eye on the music it-

Thomas Eakins: art, medicine, and sexuality in nineteenth-century Philadelphia

The life and work of Thomas Eakins (1844--1916), America's most celebrated portrait painter, have long generated heated controversy. In this fresh and deeply researched interpretation of the artist, Amy Werbel sets Eakins in the context of Philadelphia's scientific, medical, and artistic communities of the 19th century, and considers his provocative behavior in the light of other well-publicized scandals of his era. This illuminating perspective provides a rich, alternative account of Eakins and casts entirely new light on his renowned paintings. Eakins' modern critics have described his artistic motivations and beliefs as prurient and even pathological. Werbel challenges these interpretations and suggests instead that Eakins is best understood as an artist and teacher devoted to an exacting and profound study of the human body, to equality for women and men, and to middle-class meritocratic and Quaker philosophies.

Machinic Desires: Hans Bellmer’s Dolls and the Technological Uncanny in <i>Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence</i>

Machinic Desires: Hans Bellmer’s Dolls and the Technological Uncanny in Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence Steven T. Brown (bio) There are no human beings in Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence. The characters are all human-shaped dolls. —Oshii Mamoru One of the most distinctive aspects of Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, Oshii Mamoru’s 2004 sequel to the highly acclaimed feature-length animation Ghost in the Shell (1995), is the film’s obsession with the uncanniness of ningyō (literally, “human-shaped figures”) in the form of dolls, puppets, automata, androids, and cyborgs. In interviews, Oshii has acknowledged the importance of the concept of the uncanny (unheimlich in German; bukimina in Japanese) and its relation to ningyō for an understanding of Ghost in the Shell 2.1 This concern is one that the sequel shares with the first movie, but Ghost in the Shell 2 goes well beyond the earlier film in the scope of its engagement. Of particular interest is Ghost in the Shell 2’s repeated references to the erotic grotesque dolls constructed and photographed by German Surrealist Hans Bellmer (1902–1975). In this essay, I explore Ghost in the Shell 2’s intermedial play with various ningyō and how such engagements enter into the film’s complex evocations of the uncanny at the limits of the human. [End Page 222] Any study of the uncanny must acknowledge at the outset how much it owes to the pioneering efforts of not only Sigmund Freud but also Ernst Jentsch,2 the earliest writers to analyze the variety of complex phenomena associated with the uncanny and attempt to account for it in psychological and/or psychoanalytic terms. In addition, an enormous amount of critical attention has been given to Freud’s essay on “The ‘Uncanny’” (1919) by contemporary philosophers, literary theorists, and cultural critics such as Jacques Derrida, Hélène Cixous, Sander Gilman, Neil Hertz, Samuel Weber, and Nicholas Royle.3 In most cases, such post-Freudian readers of the uncanny have focused their analysis on deconstructing Freud’s reading of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “The Sandman” (1816).4 In what follows, I am more concerned with discussing the uncanny as a literary and artistic motif with philosophical implications than I am in the explanatory power of Freudian discourse to account for the psychosexual etiology of the uncanny. In other words, I am less interested in rereading Freud’s (mis)reading of “The Sandman,” or in critiquing psychoanalytic metanarratives such as the “castration complex” or “death drive,” than I am in unpacking the function of the trope of the uncanny in Ghost in the Shell 2. Indeed, I argue that engagements with the uncanny appearing in Ghost in the Shell 2 should be regarded not so much as Freudian gestures on the part of Oshii as they are byproducts of Oshii’s remediation5 of the dolls of Hans Bellmer, which were explicitly designed to evoke the uncanny on many levels: more specifically, in terms of the repetition of déjà vu, the blurring of boundaries between life and death, animate and inanimate, and the doppelgänger. What binds together all of these instances of the uncanny is that in each case, the uncanny evokes a sense of unfamiliarity at the heart of the familiar, a feeling of unhomeliness in the home, an estrangement of the everyday. The defamiliarizations produced by the uncanny in Ghost in the Shell 2 work to destabilize our assumptions about what it means to be human in a posthuman world and how we might relate to all the ningyō with whom we increasingly share the world. “Once Their Strings Are Cut, They Easily Crumble” In his essay “From Wooden Cyborgs to Celluloid Souls: Mechanical Bodies in Anime and Japanese Puppet Theater,” Christopher Bolton points out the strong analogy in the first Ghost in the Shell movie between cyborgs and traditional Japanese puppet performance (ningyō jōruri) with respect to “the [End Page 223] divide between body and voice” that is “foregrounded by the ventriloquistic medium of animation.”6 There is no question that puppet-like characters and the division of body and voice are also important to the world of...

Lure of the Fallen Seraphim: Sovereignty and Sacrifice in James Joyce and Georges Bataille

For Georges Bataille, sovereignty and sacrifice are inextricable. The passage to sovereignty requires overcoming the fear of death and a transgressive accession to the un-knowledge (non-savoir) of being.1 Joyce's Finnegans Wake allegorizes a simi lar transgression, with the reviving Finnegan rising from his bier and demanding whiskey for himself, in the impossible ontological maneuver of drinking to his own demise. For Bataille, in one of his only references to Joyce, the ritualized revelry of the wake is paradig matic both of that gaiety-in-armihilation that distinguishes the sover eign and of the need to confront death while remaining conscious: In order for man to be revealed to himself he must die, but he must do it while living (12:336). I contend that the blithe demise of Finnegan is but the final, though greatest, term in an ethos of sovereignty and sacrifice that spans Joyce's entire oeuvre, from the first pages of Dubliners to the final lines of Finnegans Wake, whose consonance with Bataille's mythology of loss furnishes an interpretative tool for understanding the Irishman's artistic trajectory. Although Bataille claimed that Joyce had no influ ence on his work (8:615), the contiguity of their artistic motifs and thematic concerns is sufficient to justify a comparative investigation into their respective texts. Beyond the passing references to the Wake, Bataille's formalized ethos of sovereignty is too close to that of Joyce to ignore. Indeed, it is easy to speculate on the early historical and biographical parallels that might be behind this. As young men, for example, both considered the priesthood. Joyce questioned and final ly abandoned his faith at the same age that Bataille converted. Both men carried with them a profound and unorthodox religious sensibil ity and a debt to Thomas Aquinas, which found repeated expression through their work. It is highly unlikely that the two writers ever met, but both were in Paris during the 1930s?the son of the blind madman with an abortive career in medicine, on the one hand, and the older, near-blind ex-medical student with the schizophrenic texts and a mad daughter on the other2?forging their own artistic praxis along

Closing the Missing Link in Ethnomathematics Research: The Socio-Affective Dimension of Cultural Artifacts

This paper discusses the tendency to neglect socio-affective dimensions when researching cultural artifacts. It regards such an omission as a missing link in ethnomathematics research activities and that ignoring such aspects of artifacts predisposes one to make the information obtained thereof abstract and meaningless to the learner. It acknowledges the need to incorporate into the classroom both the artistic motif and the messages coded therein. The paper ends by suggesting the seniority reputational research approach as an alternative research method to investigating mathematical concepts in cultural artefacts.

What We Owe the Romantics

Romanticism is recognized as a wellspring of modern-day environmental thought and enthusiasm for nature-preservation, but the character of the affinities between the two is less well understood. Essentially, the Romantics realised that nature only becomes a matter for ethical concern, inspiration and love when the mind and sensibility of the human observer/agent are properly attuned and receptive to its meaning. That attunement involves several factors: a more appropriate scientific paradigm, a subtler appreciation of the impact that the setting of human dwelling, especially landscape, may have on character; the discovery of ‘life’ and spontaneity as a motif in science and art; a deeper and more complex sense of time; and a feel for place drawn from the life-world rather than physics or economics. Romanticism invented a new language and set of descriptions to illuminate all of these things, one we neglect or forget at our peril.

Weisheitsliteratur in Übersetzungen. Vom westen Nach osten — Letztendlich ein Kreis in dem Europäischen Kulturkreis

The present study intends to deal with the Greek translation of two Latin collections of maxims attributed presumably to Maximos Planudes. The first writing is the Roman Greek version of Ovidius’ poems, entitled Ars amatoria, Remedia amoris and Amores , reduced to sayings and rhetorical topoi. The second one is the translated version of Dicta Catonis in hexametric lines. The study follows the subsequent life of the original Latin texts up to the appearance of their translation. Afterwards it attempts to introduce the Greek versions in a nutshell, and on the basis of the analysis, to shed light on the motivation by which the Greek versions had come to being, also on their presumable function and their reception in a later period of time. In the case of the translation concerning the Ovidian text into Greek, it is not only the artistic motivation that is doubtful, but the identity of the author itself. This analysis intends to clarify this aspect as well, and as far as the radically revised text allows, to ...

A sourcebook of Nasca ceramic iconography: reading a culture through its art

For almost eight hundred years (100 BC - AD 650) Nasca artists modeled and painted the plants, animals, birds, and fish of their homeland on Peru's south coast as well as numerous abstract anthropomorphic creatures whose form and meaning are sometimes incomprehensible today. In this first book-length treatment of Nasca ceramic iconography to appear in English, drawing upon an archive of more than eight thousand Nasca vessels from over 150 public and private collections, Donald Proulx systematically describes the major artistic motifs of this stunning polychrome pottery, interprets the major themes displayed on this pottery, and then uses these descriptions and his stimulating interpretations to analyze Nasca society. After beginning with an overview of Nasca culture and an explanation of the style and chronology of Nasca pottery, Proulx moves to the heart of his book: a detailed classification and description of the entire range of supernatural and secular themes in Nasca iconography along with a fresh and distinctive interpretation of these themes. Linking the pots and their iconography to the archaeologically known Nasca society, he ends with a thorough and accessible examination of this ancient culture viewed through the lens of ceramic iconography. Although these static images can never be fully understood, by animating their themes and meanings Proulx reconstructs the lifeways of this complex society.

GAMBAR CADAS Dl KABUPATEN BERAU: INFORMASI AWAL

In addition to some rock arts sites found in Kalimantan Barat, there are some other rock art sites found recently in several caves, Kalimantan Timur such as in Jufri cave, Te 'et cave, Tewet cave, Tengkorak cave, lias Kenceng cave, Ham cave, Tembus cave, Tebok cave, and Tamrin cave. This article describes several varieties of rock art motif found in both regions and also some administrative problems accidentally faced by my team before archaeological survey was carried out in Kutai Timur District. The purpose is to share this experience with other research teams to prevent uncomfortable experience in the future.

«Aquellos furibundos y terribles golpes»: la expresión del combate singular en los textos caballerescos

The literary expression of the battle has barely been studied as an artistic motif, in spite of the importance of the war as a literary topic in the Middle Ages and the Spanish Golden Age. The analysis of the combat as a literary piece of work shows the existence of several topics known and used by any author at that time, so that each battle was different. This article identifies those topics and analyses how they were used, which reveals unknown aspects of the writing process during the Spanish Golden Age.

Embodying Individualism, Re-Imagining Community: Irish Theater in 2005

Embodying Individualism, Re-Imagining Community:Irish Theater in 2005 Claire-Louise Bennett Quite often, after a long altercation, it will become apparent that it's not really the argued-about thing itself that is at issue, but the way it has been perceived. The same could be said of attitudes toward Irish theater. If anything, the year 2005 taught us lessons in seeing, and revealed the blind spot to be a consensus on how we want others to see us—right now, at the present moment, right here. The difficulty for contemporary playwrights seems to lie in establishing an equilibrium between social commentary and analysis and creating credible characters and personal narratives. In Irish theater in 2005, Elizabeth Kuti's The Sugar Wife suffers from too much of the former, while Monged, by Gary Duggan, suffered from an overdose of the latter. Still, encouraging people to turn their heads a little to look in another direction is a remarkable victory. The pain and suffering we witnessed on the Irish stage in 2005 was no longer portrayed as the national condition, but rather as an affliction that, from time to time, inescapably finds us out—simply because we are men and women and tragedy requires no further provision. Speaking of afflictions: I hate to talk about other people's money trouble, but I'm afraid there's just no getting round the terrible year experienced by Ireland's national theater. The Abbey's money troubles remained big news in the Irish dramatic world. It turns out an archaic accounting system had under-reported the company deficit, which was later revealed to ring in at around one million Euro—not a sum likely to be made up by digging down the backs of theater seats. The office abacus was dismantled and Ben Barnes resigned ahead of schedule. His successor, Fiach Mac Conghail, has had some early financial successes: he persuaded the Irish government to waive the theater's four million Euro deficit, and the Abbey has received the largest grant awarded by the Arts Council, a sum of 25.7 million Euro to be issued over three years. In terms of artistic motivation—rather than financial hand-wringing—Mac Conghail's mission is to revive the Abbey's status as a politically relevant national theater, a responsibility that is a part of the theater's legacy. Invoking one of the theater's founders, Mac Conghail described his challenge as "what Yeats called offering a mirror to its citizens." [End Page 137] One company in the business of offering up mirrors in 2005 was Ballymun's Performance Lab@Roundabout Youth Theatre, located in Dublin's poorest district. (The neighborhood's residents might have a few words to say to the Abbey about living on a tight budget.) Unlike the Abbey, though, almost all of the residents of Ballymun's thirty-eight tenement tower blocks have found themselves rehoused, and initiatives to regenerate the area have been, ostensibly, successful. This social atonement was the subject of Dermot Bolger's From These Green Heights, which won numerous accolades at 2003's Irish Theatre Awards. Last year's Tumbledowntown goes one step further in chronicling the regeneration project and its residents; the audience was invited to walk through one of the abandoned flats and encounter childhood memories recorded from the young people who make up the local youth theater. Their stories are often tragic, and at first seem to confirm every stereotype about the urban poor: the unwanted pregnancies, the absent fathers, the alcoholic mothers and so on, and one begins to wonder why the residents should be resistant to an upgrade in their housing situation. Soon, though, we see the absurdity of believing that peoples' fortunes will improve if they are popped into a nice house with pine flooring and uplighting, which makes itself felt as a shallow and middle-class remedy. The people of Ballymun certainly aren't buying it: their vulnerability is exposed as they find themselves disenfranchised from familiar, often inherited, surroundings. As they recount the dreams, nightmares, birthdays, and rows embedded in the walls of the Ballymun flats, one realizes the extent to which a sense of "belonging" both empowers the...