Recent Art Research Articles

Amatsuchi Kosaku: Reconsidering Postwar Japanese Art History from a Perspective of Ecology

This paper discusses Amatsuchi Kosaku, an artist collective that formed in the late 1980s and continued its unique activities until the early 2000s. Because Amatsuchi Kosaku was based in Shizuoka, it was excluded from the normative narrative of Japanese art history, which has been constructed around artists and artist collectives working in metropolises like Tokyo and Kyoto. This paper examines the “metropolitan-centrism” in the Japanese art history, and reconsiders the artistic practice of Amatsuchi Kosaku, from the perspective of “ecology,” a concept that has been the focus of much attention in recent contemporary art discourse.

Dialogues between Past and Present? Modern Art, Contemporary Art Practice, and Ancient Egypt in the Museum

Whenever twentieth-century modern art or new contemporary artworks are included amongst displays of ancient Egypt, press statements often assert that such juxtapositions are ‘surprising’, ‘innovative’, and ‘fresh’, celebrating the external perspective they bring to such collections. But contemporary art’s relationship with museums and other disciplines needs to be understood in a longer-term perspective. Pairings of twentieth- and twenty-first-century artistic works with objects of antiquity is an activity that has been undertaken for more than a century in what has been a relatively long period of mutually reinforcing influences between modern/contemporary art, museum display, the art market, and Egyptian heritage. Together, they have decontextualised ancient Egyptian culture and shaped the language and perspectives of scholars, curators, and artists. In this paper, rather than considering how artists have been inspired by ancient Egypt, I will give a few examples of how more recent art practices from the late nineteenth century onwards have impacted the language and discourse of Egyptology and its museum representation. Then, using more recent artist engagements with the British Museum, I argue for greater interdisciplinary dialogues between artists and Egyptologists, as both take more critical stances towards research that recontextualises the power and agency of collections, representation, and knowledge production.

We create the Universe: artists and scientists take on the Big Bang

Between October 2021 and January 2022 an ambitious combined art and science exhibition presented a unique object-rich cosmological story at the University Library of Leuven, Belgium, as part of the Kunst Leuven KNAL! City Festival 2021 (English: BANG! Big Bang City Festival). To the Edge of Time was a transdisciplinary[1] introduction for general audiences to one of the most famous and complex developments in science, the Big Bang theory. The exhibition presented artworks and science objects as equal partners that through curatorial placement and interpretation could fluidly convey key theoretical moments, materials, philosophical perspectives and ideas. The scientific story focused on how the groundbreaking work of the Belgian priest-astronomer Georges Lemaître bridged the insights of two of the twentieth century’s other leading European scientists, German physicist Albert Einstein and the British cosmologist Stephen Hawking. Objects from their lives and archives revealed their specific ideas and processes of thinking and discovery. Artworks from leading international artists brought new material, critical and conceptual dimensions and multisensory encounters. The exhibition was the result of a curatorial collaboration between the author, British contemporary art and transdisciplinary curator Hannah Redler-Hawes, and Belgian cosmologist and former collaborator of Stephen Hawking, Professor Thomas Hertog, of KU Leuven. As guest curators, they worked with Annelies Vogels, Exhibition Coordinator of the university and Wouter Daenen of KU Leuven Libraries, and others to form a closely collaborating curatorial team. To the Edge of Time was not only the first exhibition worldwide to explore Lemaître’s work through a transdisciplinary narrative, but also to place Stephen Hawking’s work in a broader historical context. In the trans- and interdisciplinary exhibition field, where new commissions and collaborations between living artists and scientists have been increasing, it was somewhat unusual for a cosmology exhibition in its reliance on material culture, concentration on historical art and science objects and its combining of these with presentations of recent contemporary art and advanced theoretical physics concepts. These combinations helped to convey parallel movements of thought where neither the art nor the science were presented as derivative to each other, a key curatorial ambition. This practice-based paper, offering Redler-Hawes’s personal reflections, discusses how the narrative evolved to define a shared language between the contributors. It considers, through a narrated walk-through of key object-artwork ‘constellations’, how the presentation generated new insights into different methods of enquiry, knowledge acquisition and making sense of our place in the cosmos, by bringing major themes in twentieth century science into dialogue with international artists working independently and in collaboration with science during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.[2] Note: Where images belong to the Science Museum Group this Journal shares them under a fully open access CC-BY licence (see our Open Access statement here https://journal.sciencemuseum.ac.uk/about-the-journal/). Where the image or work belong to a third party, this is indicated in the credit in the caption and full rights belong to the indicated party.

Encountering alterity: linguistic opacity in modern and contemporary art

This study considers artworks from across the modern and contemporary period (with a focus on the 1940s onwards) where writing is presented as incomprehensible to the viewer. This can occur, for instance, where issues related to cross-cultural interaction are being addressed, or more generally where the issue of encounter with an otherness of some kind has become the content of the work. While the earlier part of the analysis will focus primarily on artists of European or North American origin, artists of non-Western birth will predominate in the discussion of more recent art. Amongst the artists discussed are Paul Klee, Jackson Pollock, Mark Tobey, Lee Krasner, Zhao Wuji, Cy Twombly, Rasheed Araeen, Xu Bing, Oscar Ho Hing-Kay, and Warren Leung Chi Wo. Egyptian hieroglyphics, the Chinese written language, and Arabic calligraphy are linguistic codes to which the article will also refer.

‘Grammars of displacement’: Kojo Laing’s lines of flight

ABSTRACT Departing from the relationship between the texts of the Ghanaian poet and novelist Kojo Laing and a recent international art exhibition, this article traces the relationship between style and the multivalent activity of flight across Laing’s work. Drawing upon an intercontinental range of philosophers – from Deleuze and Guattari to contemporary Akan thinkers – it analyses the intersections between gender, geography, and language in Laing’s texts, and demonstrates their value within the context of discussion of contemporary literature’s investment in possible futures. Laing’s transnational aesthetic foregrounds lines of flight across and between different linguistic and cultural communities, and traces relentlessly emerging or possible constellations of relation. Situating Laing in the context of his interdisciplinary reception, this article seeks to explore the aesthetic and ethical ramifications of the unusual networks of affiliation and response of one of West Africa’s most important, yet critically undervalued, contemporary writers.

Mentoring as affective practice

ABSTRACT This paper discusses the potential contributions that an arts mentoring program can make to the support of artists and creative practitioners contending with the challenges of the post-pandemic creative sector. In so doing, it also considers possible criticisms of the efficacy of arts mentoring, given the uncertainty and precariousness that characterise careers in the cultural sector. To explore these ideas, the paper presents an analysis of interview data from research on a recent arts mentoring program in Australia. Utilising the concept of ‘affective practice’ from critical discursive psychology, the paper argues that the benefits of mentoring go beyond practical contributions like skills guidance or ‘gate opening’ by mentors. Additionally, a mentoring program can function as a site in which the ‘feeling experiences’ that derive from the cultural and personal associations of a creative or artistic practice can be reinforced, through the program itself and through the relationship between mentor and mentee, potentially strengthening artistic and creative activities and their practitioners, and thereby perpetuating the survival and growth of contemporary art worlds.

FROM COLONIAL MODERNITY TO POSTSOCIALISM: CHENG XINHAO’S ENCOUNTERS ON THE KUNMING–HAIPHONG RAILWAY

In the modern history of Yunnan, a landlocked province in the southwest of China, the Kunming — Haiphong Railway profoundly shaped its geographic, political, and socioeconomic landscapes. Yunnan based artist Cheng Xinhao’s recent art and research projects To the Ocean investigates modernity and (post)coloniality of Yunnan through intellectual reflections on the history of the Kunming — Haiphong Railway, bodily experience with the current railroad, and spiritual conversations with himself about childhood memories and geographical imaginations. By analyzing Cheng’s visual works and writings in the project To the Ocean, this essay focuses on Cheng’s three encounters on the Kunming — Haiphong Railway — the Wujiazhai Railway Bridge, Bisezhai Station, and China-Vietnam Railway Bridge — to elaborate the iterative power of colonial modernity, socialist revolution, and postsocialism in shaping the landscapes of the Tonkin — Yunnan cross-border area.

Vibrant Africa

This feature covers the recent Art After Dark: Museum Nights event hosted on February 8th at the Harn Museum. Titled "Vibrant Africa," the event encouraged families to commemorate Black History Month through an evening of art, music, food, and celebration.

The Dissident Power of Queer Art and Curating in Central Eastern Europe

The text aims to explore the political, cultural and artistic implications of LGBTQ+ art and curatorial practices in Central Eastern Europe in the 21st century. Currently, queer exhibitions, are on the rise in post-communist Europe, especially those held in contemporary art centres and museums. They cast light on new queer art and activism and the volatile sexual politics in the region because of the significant increase in the number of artists working with LGBTQ themes and the topical political background of this movement and its impact on cultural debates. Curators are developing innovative perspectives on sexual, social and artistic dimensions of queer exhibitions in this geographic context still seriously affected by homophobic state policy. The objective is to feature three art shows of major queer artists which have been organised in Hungary, Poland and Estonia in the last decade. The exhibitions are: The Survivor’s Shade: The Life and Work of El Kazovsky at the Museum of Fine Art- Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest in 2015/16; Daniel Rycharski: Fears at the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw in 2019 and Jaanus Samma. Not Suitable for Work. A Chairman’s Tale, Museum of Occupations and Freedom, Tallinn in 2016. The three artists and their exhibitions have been selected because they were organised by major cultural institutions in the capitals, they have achieved a significant social impact and huge audience and the artists have played an important role in the contemporary art scene in each country. Their work is a current manifestation of the queer artistic and intellectual culture that has been developing slowly in the region since the 1980s and has come to play an increasingly important role in recent years. The exhibitions and art of the three artists are a starting point for a broader outline of the themes and important figures in recent queer art in Central Eastern Europe (CEE). Moreover, in each case, they appear in a complex and difficult political context related to the struggle for LGBTQ+ rights. Hence, I would like to propose a thesis about the dissident power and status of queer art and curating in CEE.

Towards a Critical Pedagogy for Inclusion: Disability-led Arts and its Radical Promise in Singapore

ABSTRACT The inclusion of disabled people in Singapore (and globally) is gaining traction given the dominance of transnational instruments like the United Nations Convention on the Rights for Persons with Disabilities. Yet, in the absence of disability rights legislation, inclusion in Singapore has taken on markedly different forms, based on ablenationalist notions of productivity and meritocracy. Situated amidst these global and national frameworks of social inclusion, we consider the recent emergence of disability-led arts in Singapore. These disabled-led initiatives have proliferated in the past five years and have afforded new opportunities to challenge existing meanings of inclusion and to impart new forms of knowledge about the disabled body. In this article, we analyse recent disabled-led art productions put up by Access Path Productions, a disability-led arts creative organisation. In pivoting to the disabled body/mind as a generative form of knowledge and embodiment, these disabled-led performances offer new artistic practices spanning both digital and physical forms. Importantly, these initiatives have engaged with existing art and cultural spaces and institutions in Singapore, transforming existing ways of doing, thinking, and knowing about disability and offering a critical praxis aimed at (re)educating the public on the meanings of disability.

Contemporary Music and the Methods of its Analysis

The article raises the question of what is considered to be contemporary music today. The author notes the variability of the interpretation of this concept, due to the change of the philosophical and aesthetic attitudes in recent art, emphasizing that the concept of “contemporaneity,” which has been developed in European culture, is now unable to reflect adequately the essence of what is happening. The article is devoted to the approaches of analysis of contemporary music that can be found in the Proceedings of the European Music Analysis Conferences (EuroMAC). Three conferences that took place in 2014, 2017 and 2021 were used as sources of information on analysis of contemporary music. A study of this body of texts shows that contemporary music analysis at the present moment has not demonstrated any fundamentally new means of study, but the present-day methods are numerous in their quantity, and the main process of their application is concentrated on the expansion of musical material.

The re-construction of urban space in the place between art and architecture: Selected paradigms of in situ art of the period 1950–2000


 This study investigates in situ art of recent art history and its potential regarding the reconstruction of public space and its meanings. Paradigms of art and architecture conjugation in site specific interventions are examined with a view to answer questions such as the transformative role art can play when it constitutes a plastic phenomenon functioning in a complementary or reactive way as a part of the urban and social space. In situ’s art sculptural objects, due to their transitional form, serve as metaphors for space and time and their condition of constant change in the everyday life of the city. They constitute a physical input in the urban space that seeks to redefine its material boundaries and highlight the interaction between the individual and the city seen as an incomplete entity in a constant re-casting. Through the practice of repetition and movement, sculptural objects are put in dialogue with the objects we come into contact daily, taking part into a new aesthetic reality. It is about a process of re-configurating of the everyday aesthetics of the city, challenging the relationship between art and architecture and thus offering new modes of spatialisation. By examining specific paradigms from the in situ art of the second half of the twentieth century (e.g. Aldo Van Eyck, Daniel Buren, Rachel Whiteread), this paper, seeks to unveil the process of activating the coexistence of the visible and the invisible, the inside and the outside, the private and the collective that this specific artistic process offers in material terms. The main question that this paper seeks to answer is how in situ art- e specially when oscillating between art and architecture- affect the everyday flow of the undifferentiated space and time? How does it shape the coexistence and interaction between city’s objects and subjects? Which alternative – discursive – reality does it offer?

Incidence and Correlates of Severe Depression and Stigmatization among HIVPositive Patients Seeking Care at Soroti Regional Referral Hospital

Depressive disorders are notably more prevalent among people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA), occurring at rates three times higher than in the general population. In Uganda, the reported prevalence of depressive disorders among PLWHA ranges between 20% and 40%, with stigma affecting about 34% of this demographic. This study aimed to estimate the prevalence and identify factors associated with major depression and stigma among HIV-positive patients attending the ART clinic at Soroti Regional Referral Hospital (SRRH). Conducted as a descriptive cross-sectional hospital-based study, the research utilized a simple random sampling technique to select 138 participants aged 18 years and older, already diagnosed with HIV and attending the SRRH ART clinic. Critically ill or admitted individuals were excluded from the study. The majority of respondents were female (60.9%), aged between 31 and 45 years (45.7%), and had attained primary school education (54%). The study found a 16.7% prevalence of current major depressive episodes among PLWHA, with 56.5% experiencing recurrent major depressive episodes. Regarding stigma, the prevalence of minimal, mild, and moderate stigma was 65.2%, 29%, and 5.8%, respectively. Factors such as male gender, being divorced or widowed, and being unemployed or engaged in peasant work were statistically associated with any form of major depressive episode. Additionally, recent initiation of ART was linked to stigma among this population. The findings underscored the frequent occurrence of major depression and stigma among PLWHA, which were influenced by factors such as changes in marital status, recent ART initiation, and limited employment opportunities. The study recommended institutionalized and personalized counseling, the formation of social or peer support groups, community education initiatives regarding major depression and stigma among PLWHA, and regular patient follow-ups to mitigate the incidence and prevalence of major depression and stigma in this vulnerable segment of the population. Keywords: prevalence, depression, stigma, HIV

Emerging Artist Resilience Needs: Transitional Education for a Post-COVID Creative Sector

This study investigated the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on recent arts graduates from three universities in the United States. We present evidence of shifting definitions of adaptability, resilience, transformation, excellence, and success in arts training. Based on surveys and interviews, it reinforces findings from the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP). The of experiences of recent arts and arts administration graduates affirms some current pedagogies and suggests others. We synthesize these findings to amplify some models, propose new ones, rebalance traditional outcomes toward a social mission, and consider the need for an expanded notion of excellence in the arts.

Sound-vibration: Relations between bodies, low frequencies, and multisensory experiments

Multimodality research has enabled academics to propose and support new ideas in multiple modes for interpretation, communication, and as an important part of art education. In this piece, multimodal listening is situated as a transcendence of ear-centric approaches and the use of vibration as a poetic practice in contemporary art. As a result, sonic arts and sound experience principles are used to talk about everyday sounds in new and immersive ways, encouraging the audience to disrupt established sensorial boundaries. Subsequently, sound-vibration can be interrelated as a mode of multimodality and as a resource for meaning-making in possible contemporary practices. If perception is considered multifaceted, one could notice the world as an integration of conscious or unaware inputs. In the experience of sound installations, one may explore oscillations as a valuable channel for understanding multimodal approaches since, unlike visual or tactile interactions, the relationship between sound and the body hinges on fully embodied situations. The underlying thought in this piece will emerge from two recent art pieces, that produce atmospheres and blur the concrete division of senses, transversely representing the potential of the low frequencies.

Magic and Metamodernism

Magic and Metamodernism

AI art in architecture

Recent diffusion-based AI art platforms can create impressive images from simple text descriptions. This makes them powerful tools for concept design in any discipline that requires creativity in visual design tasks. This is also true for early stages of architectural design with multiple stages of ideation, sketching and modelling. In this paper, we investigate how applicable diffusion-based models already are to these tasks. We research the applicability of the platforms Midjourney, DALLcdotE 2 and Stable Diffusion to a series of common use cases in architectural design to determine which are already solvable or might soon be. Our novel contributions are: (i) a comparison of the capabilities of public AI art platforms; (ii) a specification of the requirements for AI art platforms in supporting common use cases in civil engineering and architecture; (iii) an analysis of 85 million Midjourney queries with Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods to extract common usage patterns. From this we derived (iv) a workflow for creating images for interior designs and (v) a workflow for creating views for exterior design that combines the strengths of the individual platforms.

A High-Performance Dual-Topology CMOS Rectifier With 19.5-dB Power Dynamic Range for RF-Based Hybrid Energy Harvesting

This brief reports a dual-topology CMOS rectifier with an extended power dynamic range (PDR) for radio frequency (RF)-based hybrid energy harvesting (RF-HEH) systems. By leveraging both the cross-coupled differential drive (CCDD) and the Dickson topologies with high forward conduction and low reverse leakage, we obtain an extension of the rectifier’s PDR by adaptively disabling the CCDD counterpart and enabling the Dickson counterpart to dominate the rectifier’s performance during high-power operation. Apart from that, we formulate a rectifier-performance index (RPI), which accounts for the power conversion efficiency (PCE), the PDR, the sensitivity, and the load resistance of the rectifier to provide an adequate performance benchmark with the state-of-the-art rectifiers. Fabricated in a 130-nm CMOS, the proposed dual-topology rectifier measures a wide PDR of 19.5 dB with a peak PCE of 78.4% for a 100-k <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\Omega $</tex-math> </inline-formula> load operating at 900 MHz. Besides, our prototype records the highest RPI of 19.2 compared to the recent arts operating at GSM900.

Food in the Frankish Levant: a Case Study of Cultural Borrowing

Abstract The Crusader movement called for the liberation of the Holy Land and the expulsion of non-Christians. Yet in reality, the Frankish states of Edessa, Antioch, Tripoli and Jerusalem, established as the result of the Crusades, were to become heterogeneous societies, with a plurality of ethnic and religious groups ruled by a Latin Frankish elite. In recent decades, historians, art historians and archaeologists have turned much attention to the study of influences and cultural borrowing in artistic, architectural, religious, military, governmental, administrative and intellectual activities that resulted from almost two centuries of co-existence of the Latins with the local population in the Levant: Eastern Christians, Muslims, and Jews. This article strives to contribute to this ongoing discussion by analyzing some aspects of everyday life in the Frankish Levant, focusing mainly on foodstuffs and food habits. The study of preservation of culinary traditions, consumption of new food products, as well as technological and administrative changes related to food production, are valuable tools in understanding coexistence and cultural borrowing in the Frankish Levant.

Psofotopias

Psofotopias is an essay that observes how different media, cultural artifacts, and narratives depict dreams and the act of dreaming. I connect these popular media examples to critiques of contemporary technology and media theory, to brain science and philosophy of noise, and I conclude with a commentary on one of my recent art installations. This text is inspired by an interview with Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter published under the title “Dreamful Computing”, which takes a quote by the late Bernard Stiegler as its prompt: “In order to do politics today, we must dream”. Their overall interest is that of “designing theories that don’t disavow the uncertainty, noise, and contingency of the situation of media”, an interest that I align with in refusing the often clear-cut separation of dreams and nightmares into either utopias or dystopias. By treating dreams with moral indeterminacy, a space for interpretation, analogy, and (trans)individuation is opened up. This space of ambiguity and uncertainty is what I call a “psofotopia”. Psofotopia is a portmanteau (psofos, noise; topos, place) that allows me to argue that dreams, with their cognitive, interpretive, and affective ambiguity, are “spaces of noise” that offer a model to deal with complexity. The dreaming, and its hallucinatory qualities, produces a para-conceptual and para-real psofotopia, a space that triggers collisions and clashes between the immaterial and the physical. An analogy can be drawn between the para-reality of dreams and that of the virtual space, initially imagined by cyberpunk authors as a consensual hallucination that would free humans from their bodily constraints, and eventually developed into an expensive technological infrastructure that aims to perpetuate interpassivity. I will conclude with a discussion about my new work, NNNV XR, an expanded dream that utilizes VR in combination with a sound installation and custom-made transducing furniture producing haptic signals. The installation connects the virtual and the physical world, allowing the experiencer to dream along my dreams. By navigating the sensorial inputs of NNNV XR, the experiencer inhabits the multimedia psofotopia I propose while being aware of the threads that connect the immaterial and the tangible through the para-real.