Reception Of Art Research Articles

Representation and identity: Reflections on presenting contemporary art in an American museum

This text is a curatorial reflection upon the process of organizing the exhibition Theater of Operations: The Gulf Wars 1991–2011, which took place at MoMA PS1 in 2019. The text questions the possibilities and limits of decolonial curating in an American museum and analyses the reception of Iraqi contemporary art in a Western context.

Memory and Memorialising in Graphic Life Narratives- The London Jungle Book (2004) and Drawing from the City (2012)

The paper focusses on graphic narratives -The London Jungle Book (2004)by Bhajju Shyam and Drawing from the City(2012) by Teju Behan, produced by Tara Books, an artists’ collective and publisher of graphic literature, based in Chennai, India, which lie at the threshold between adult picturebooks and artists’ books. These worksemphasise the embodied landscape and the performative art traditions of the Pardhan-Gond and Jogi art traditions respectively. The transformation of the personal through the collective art practice and memorialisation of the collective practice through the personal experience enables the artists to articulate a different kind of cultural politics, that questions the conventional frameworks of reception of non-elite vernacular and popular art forms in the contemporary art world. The paper employs the concept of “autographics” as proposed by Gillian Whitlock and Anna Poletti, which suggests a form of engagement with the modes and materiality of representation, the techniques of production, the colours, styles and textures in the art form as necessary means of signification of the self in graphic life writings. The paper attempts to show how these graphic works resist reading and translation into a single medium and instead divert our attention towards the sensorial experience of engaging with graphic life narratives.

Visions, writings and walls: perceptual learning and the artwork of Kemang Wa Lehulere

It is not easy to define where, for Kemang Wa Lehulere, the making of art begins and ends. Wa Lehulere’s artworks suggest an attitude toward looking focused on less developed aspects in contemporary art criticism and art history. The artworks perform this task by insisting on the attention and involvement of the viewer in ways that make artistic production and viewer reception a potently intertwined and productive place of attention. This article argues that Wa Lehulere’s creative practice reflects contested and changing ideas of visual cultural knowledge in South Africa. My personal encounters with Wa Lehulere’s artwork over the years, through direct engagements at exhibitions, in talking about reference images, sketches, and unfinished object assemblages in the artist’s studio, and in moments of reflection on the artist’s own way of describing their practice, have informed my ideas about creative practices loosely described as ‘conceptual art’ in the space of South Africa. The contestations and changes that I see through these visual gestures are seen to organically expand into the vicissitudes of cultural, social, and political dynamics. Wa Lehulere’s artwork as an analytic device changes the viewer’s long-term perception (of learning) and, in this context, delivers a form of perceptual learning oriented toward decolonial education. It permits a choreography of and for future narratives. As such, Wa Lehulere’s performances, drawings, photographs, and texts function as forms of sense-making for other sights. Such visual and theoretical activities of critical conceptual art are produced by and effectively inform changing definitions of art, care ethics, and freedom in periods of transformation wherein such cultural phenomena become crucial to liberatory practices.

О НЕСКОЛЬКИХ «ЭРМИТАЖНЫХ» ЭКФРАСИСАХ ВИКТОРА КРИВУЛИНА

In the practice of the Soviet literary underground, it was important to restore connections with tradition, hidden or edited according to the ideological models. Dialogue with tradition was recognized as a condition for achieving creative independence and cultural identity. Naturally, many texts created outside official Soviet literature have a wide layer of intertextual and intermedial references, often pointing to cultural layers and semantic areas that are not related to each other. A typical example of such an allusional multilayeredness and polyreferentiality is poetic ekphrasis. One of the most important literary figures of the Soviet samizdat was the poet Viktor Krivulin. In his samizdat books, many texts have obvious markers of ekphrastic descriptions referring to fine art, music, and cinema; a typical feature of his poetry is ‘complex ekphrasis’, which combines references to different works. This article deals with several of his poems related to the collection of paintings at the Hermitage, in particular the texts devoted to the paintings by Bartolomeo Murillo and Tiziano Vecellio. Krivulin’s reception of fine art was found to be influenced by his reading experience: the interpretation of the paintings is correlated with other examples of cultural reception of the same artist. Thus, ekphrasis is not only a description of a particular work but also the experience of reflection on the history of perception of an artist in culture, as well as the experience of self-relation with other ekphrases. The form of ekphrastic text thus appears for the poet as a means of historical and culturological reflection.

Postmodern strategies of the artistic reception of chaos in the novel «Lovers of justice» by Y. Andrukhovych

Postmodern strategies of the artistic reception of chaos in the novel «Lovers of justice» by Y. Andrukhovych

Kafka After Kafka: Dialogical Engagement with His Works from the Holocaust to Postmodernism ed. by Iris Bruce and Mark H. Gelber

Reviewed by: Kafka After Kafka: Dialogical Engagement with His Works from the Holocaust to Postmodernism ed. by Iris Bruce and Mark H. Gelber Abigail Gillman Iris Bruce and Mark H. Gelber, eds., Kafka After Kafka: Dialogical Engagement with His Works fr om the Holocaust to Postmodernism. Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture. Rochester: Camden House, 2019. 231 pp. Kafka After Kafka contains eleven remarkably productive and thoughtful essays by a mix of well-known and younger Kafka scholars. The introduction opens by cataloguing the global artistic reception of Kafka, from the Japanese Kōbō Abe, to South Africa's Achmat Dangor, to dramatic works by Alan Bennett (Kafka's Dick) and Sally Clark (The Trial of Judith K.). The editors claim that much recent art inspired by Kafka is about "violence and humiliation" at the expense of the "modest, elegant, playful, ironic Kafka of real life" (3). Not so in these pages, where the "dialogical engagement" promised in the title prevails. The chapters open up fruitful new connections and perspectives, which yield original interpretations of works we thought we already knew. The volume began as a conference at Ben-Gurion University, and the section devoted to "Kafka in the Israeli Cultural Space"—an exciting new avenue of Kafka research—is a highlight. Like all the excellent volumes in this Camden House series, the book is carefully researched and well ommitted, with detailed footnotes and an index. A strength of the collection is the authors' recounting of postwar cultural and intellectual history. Caroline Jessen's essay on Werner Kraft's 1968 Franz Kafka: Durchdringung und Geheimnis recounts the career of this German Jewish man of letters. Like Scholem and Benjamin (whom he knew), Kraft viewed Kafka as a writer of parables, and so he sought to "wrest Kafka away from literature." Jessen calls the book "an itinerary of reading" (19) that takes the form of "interweaving of literary text and commentary" (20)—a style evocative of rabbinical writing but also of great works of retrieval motivated by loss, such as Benjamin's Passagenwerk. Amir Engel analyzes Hannah Arendt's lesser-known Kafka essay ("Franz Kafka: A Revaluation," in Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954)—one of the first she published in German after World War II. Arendt finds in Kafka a source of optimism: Even as The Trial and The Castle depict totalitarian societies, worlds of "made-up necessity," the two protagonists are "truth-tellers," who resist simply by asserting their humanity. [End Page 133] Two chapters make critical contributions to Kafka's contemporary reception in Israel. As an Israeli Arab writer, journalist, and television writer who writes in Hebrew (now living in the United States), Sayed Kashua is the quintessential insider/outsider. As Iris Bruce demonstrates, Kashua incorporates many of Kafka's themes, both in the novel Second Person Singular (the basis of the film A Borrowed Identity) and in "Herzl Disappears at Midnight," which features an Arab-Israeli, Gregor Samsa. Bruce proposes, "Kashua's postmodern metamorphoses are fluid, predictable, humorous, and ultimately have a didactic function" (126). Mark H. Gelber offers a new perspective on the trial to determine the fate of newly discovered Max Brod's Nachlass. Moving beyond the question of whether the Israeli Supreme Court's decision to award the collection to the Israeli National Library is just, Gelber wonders whether there is also "poetic justice" in retaining Kafka's manuscripts in the Jewish State rather than in Marbach. The question becomes an occasion to reassess Kafka's Zionism or, more exactly, the numerous aspects of Zionism with which Kafka did connect. Two chapters break new ground by opening up Kafka's influence on lyric poetry. Poet Tali Latowicki examines the Kafkan sensibilities of two challenging Hebrew poets, the modernist Ya'akov Steinberg and the postmodern Hezy Leskly, neither of whom is well known in translation. In this series of powerful close readings, Latowicki finds that the three writers "share the same suspicion toward 'natural' symbolic expression. They also share the same wish [ … ] to create an antilanguage, a language that is united with the concrete. As part of this utopian project, the writer himself must undergo a metamorphosis of some sort. He has to die in...

Artistic reception of analogy in “Molinnya” (“Prayer”) by Danyl Zatochnyk

Artistic reception of analogy in “Molinnya” (“Prayer”) by Danyl Zatochnyk

Arte interativa: quem é o autor e onde está o espectador?

This article examines how the emergence of interactive art brought about the necessity of re-positioning the traditional role of the spectator and led to the re-formulation of the notion of authorship. The non-linear structure of interactive artworks empowers the spectator with the (apparent) control of its narrative and creates a relational space filled with an input-output dynamic. It is suggested that this elevates the spectator to the realm of co-authorship of the work of art that he/she is interacting with, because the specificity of each interaction generates symbolic meanings that the original author cannot anticipate.It is also argued that the input required from the spectator to interact with the artwork could be compared to a theatrical performance. Thus, an analogy between the spectator-in-action of an interactive artwork and the figure of an actor is established. This brings us to the question concluding the article: as the reception of interactive art implies an action from its spectator, the compatibility between action and contemplation is questioned.Finally, the article concludes that the corpus of an interactive artwork has to include the spectator that acts and creates the input needed for the interaction to be established. Therefore, only from the point of view of an external observer one can gain access to its global dimension, that is, as meta-spectators.

The New Aesthetic of the Late Nineteen Twenties Reconsidering the Periodization of the Interwar Avant-Gardes

AbstractThe avant-gardes of the nineteen twenties are discussed in the art historical literature as the art products of a rarely upbeat decade, which featured great utopian aspirations and progressive art between the wake of World War I and the Nazi takeover in Germany, as well as the consolidation of Stalinism in the Soviet Union. This essay depicts the decade as being far from a homogenous period, demonstrating that the early internationalism and sense of unlimited possibilities gave way, in or around 1923, to less idealistic, more pragmatic views and practices in even the avant-garde. If examined in this framework, the reception of avant-garde artists and works in the late 1920s that had been enthusiastically embraced in the first years of the decade, was understandably cooler. Professional eminence was overwriting great ideas. The lack of the earlier fervor had disappeared, not because the art was worse, but on account of the new Zeitgeist that brought about the new moral idea of utilitarianism, requiring that the artists be, first of all, of use to the community. Several artists and art writers suddenly turned against those ideas and art that they had only a short time earlier held in the highest esteem.

REPRESENTATION OF FEMININITY IN MODERN UKRAINIAN NOVELS

The paper deals with the main tendencies of the artistic reception of women images in modern Ukrainian novels. The principles of modeling femininity in literature have been considered from the positions of the gender studies, postcolonial and psychoanalytic theory. It is proved that the peculiarities of this modeling are determined by stylistic and genre tendencies of the Ukrainian literature. The interpretation of feminine images typical for the national literary tradition (mother, family-keeper, demonic woman) has been demonstrated in numerous examples. These images correlate with the fundamental artistic principles of the turning points in history (actualization of the archetypes, attention to the irrational manifestations of human psychics). They display the ‘masculine’ literary tradition (representation of a woman as an external object), but at the same time demonstrate a new accent in the understanding of the gender roles (woman as a mentor of a man). The alternative types of the feminine identity represented by feminist and culturological women’s writing have been explored as well. Special attention has been paid to procreation as the main woman’s ability, which forms different models of feminine mentality – from the essentialist mother-type to the image of a child-free woman. The modeling of a feminine artistic worldview becomes an actual strategy in overcoming the postcolonial trauma. It is explained by the peculiarities of the postcolonial literatures, which fulfill their historical reflections in the local family stories. In this context, feminine conscience gets the status of a memory-keeper and shows the ability to trace the development of national history in its everyday dimensions. Based on the large-scale generalization of the last decades’ artistic practice, the researcher determines the main worldview intentions of modern novels, in particular the tendency to achieve gender parity, the full-fledged dialogue of men and women as the equal subjects of culture creation.

А.С. Пушкин в персидской поэзии

The authors of the article, in the theoretical framework of comparative literature, using the examples of the artistic reception of A.S. Pushkin’s works in Iranian poetry, show the ideological and artistic foundations of the interpenetration of the literature of Russia and Iran. The search context concretizes and develops a picture of the functioning of A.S. Pushkin’s artistic world in a foreign culture.

Pour une esthétique des ambiances

Why an aesthetics of ambiances? The answer to this question if far from being solely theoretical. It is associated with my personal career in research and academic teaching since the 1980s.On the one hand, observing everyday ethos, through walks, landscape sensitivity, sound practices, the reception of architecture and street arts have revealed the ambiance as an essential way to question the substance of what is unseen, the nature of the background to the lived environment.On the other hand, throughout my classes and aesthetics seminars in urban planning and architecture, “art’s place” in professions dominated by function forced me to rethink aesthetics as freed from its artistic imperative and digging into its more universal sensitive and atmospheric foundations.This paper reviews an aesthetics of ambiances that is currently being built, working on four levels. At the aesthetic level: what is the imperceptible? What role do non-visible forms play? At the epistemic level: how do we integrate the relevant knowledge that is still too exclusive? At the rhetorical level: how do the components of an ambiance organise themselves, and how can we name the configurations? At the level of aesthetic competence: who makes an ambiance? How are creation and reception divided?

Applying the Avant-Garde: Display Experience in the Exhibition of Modern Art (1948)

The Exhibition of Modern Art (Wystawa Sztuki Nowoczesnej) organized in 1948 in the Palace of Art (Pałac Sztuki) in Cracow was one of the most prominent art events in Poland during the last century. It is considered one of the unprecedented moments in shaping the modernity. The exhibition was thought to be designed as a whole venture, integrating the modern art demonstration with the will to make it accessible to all the social groups. The desire of the authors was to endear the authorities, since the Stalinist repressions were approaching, and present the modern art as accessible to the society and needed in the “new socialist order”. Simultaneously, the primal context for the exhibition, underlined by its authors as well as the critics in subsequent years, were the surrealist exhibitions in Paris. This new avant-garde mode of displaying, so attractive for the Polish artists, put in the foreground not the traditional reception of art, implied by the traditional museology, but mostly focused on the spectator’s experience and used all possible kinds of tools to enhance it. These two approaches were usually presented as antagonistic and impossible to reconcile. The article attempts to analyze the tools which the display’s authors used to merge the avant-garde display with didacticism. While looking at the Recovered Territories Exhibition which took place a couple of months earlier, one might notice that the Exhibition of Modern Art was not the first display that accommodated the avant-garde solutions to the didactic and propagandistic venture.

Sangha as art public? Questions on Buddhist monks engaging with art in Theravada Southeast Asia

This essay explores whether Theravada Buddhist monks – collectively called the sangha – might constitute an ‘art public’ in Southeast Asia. Publics for art have been under-studied in this region, and rarely discussed in more nuanced terms than as being a ‘general public’ or ‘ordinary people.’ The essay argues for the need for an alternate vocabulary and terms of reference for thinking and speaking about the reception of art: one that is theoretically informed by and engaged with the multiplicity of discourses and publics in this part of the world. The essay provides a brief survey of the sangha's role in the development of modern art in Southeast Asia, as a constitutive agent in the articulation of modernity since the mid-nineteenth century, and then concentrates on the engagement of monks with contemporary art, since the 1990s. Key examples discussed include activities organised by Sa Sa Art Projects in Phnom Penh since 2010; the collection and programming of the Buddhist Archive of Photography in Luang Prabang; the practice of artist Orawan Arunrak since 2015; and the historiography of the Chiang Mai Social Installation and related festivals held during the 1990s.

Exhibitions and the Market for Modern British Art: Independent Art of Today at Agnew's Gallery, 1906

A full account of the inception, reception, and cultural economics of Independent Art of To’day, a major show at Agnew’s London gallery in 1906, illuminates a crucial – but often overlooked – moment in the story of modern art in Britain. Its analysis nuances our understanding of artistic practice, the art market, and viewers’ exposure to and understanding of modern art. The exhibition, which featured work by forty living artists united by their resistance to the Royal Academy and their adoption of a ‘modern’ aesthetic, was at the time seen by many critics to present a pivotal moment in the history of British art. This essay examines the exhibition’s criticism and its financial records to shed new light on current debates surrounding the relationship between economic and symbolic value, on the relationship between critics and dealers, and on the development of modern art and the modern art market in Britain.

Educational potentials of embodied art reflection

With reference to a standard work on embodied cognition – The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (1991) by Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson und Eleanor Rosch – in this article I theorize art reception that connects reflexive processes with concrete perceptual experiences as embodied art reflection. Analogously to Varela et al’s citation of meditation practice as a transformation of immediate experience into an open, embodied reflection, one can also understand focussed awareness of experience in reflected, perceptually-oriented reception of art as an open, embodied mode of access. The particular educational potential of art as a medium and object of knowledge and cognition lies moreover above all in its physical power of making-present, which exercises its particular effect in the concrete experience of the artwork. Against the background of a phenomenological perspective on learning, it is especially disruptive moments which are able to form perception and thought anew. For a pedagogical context above all, the schooling of perception and attention practised in art has particular relevance in relation to lived experience, opening new horizons. To show the potential of embodied art reflection through an example from the field of object art, my theoretical discussion opens out into a specific consideration of an artwork.

미국에서의 한국 현대미술 전시와 평가 : 1950년대부터 현재까지

This essay examines the reception of Korean contemporary art in America from the 1950s to the present, researching on the pivotal exhibitions held in the U.S., catalog essays, criticisms, and art historical scholarships which are written and published in English. In art, the meaning of reception indicates not only audiences’ accessibility to introduced artists’ works and exhibitions but also encompasses pertinent writings and publications that engender critiques and discourses regarding the artworks and their shows. It further embraces scholarly discussions, researches, and symposiums tracing art historically. In this vein, the paper explores significant Korean contemporary art exhibitions, artists, artistic tendencies, and movement that brought about an impact on and crucial debates in the terrain of the American contemporary art world: Contemporary Korean Paintings exhibition, Dansaekhwa, Nam June Paik, Minjoong art, Korean American art, Your Bright Future: 12 Contemporary Artists from Korea exhibition, Do Ho Suh, Haegue, Yang, and Bul Lee. Accordingly, it proceeds to recapitulate their characteristics and investigate American receptive modes of those, by dividing them into approximately two decades. Through the exhibition, Minjoong Art: A New Cultural Movement from Korea held in 1988, Minjoong art was recognized and understood as an authentic form of Korean contemporary art in American art world. What this study has also found is that unlike the chronologically ordered Korean scholarships on Korean contemporary art, American scholarships as such are “discursive,” “disconnected,” “imbalanced,” and “ahistorical.” It has observed that the history of the unfolding of Korean contemporary art does not correspond to that of the reception of Korean contemporary art. There is quite a considerable temporal discrepancy between the two. Filling in the gap enables Korean contemporary art to be evaluated and accepted quantitatively and qualitatively. Today, the growth of comprehensive surveys and reliable scholarships that will prove and enhance the value of Korean contemporary art is beyond necessity but rather urgent. There still remains the responsibility that art historians and scholars should generate continuous and extensive scholarships to properly locate Korean contemporary art in the context of global art history.

La imaginación como función interpretativa: consecuencias para la educación a través del arte

A lo largo de la historia de la filosofía occidental la definición del concepto de “imaginación” ha estado basado en dimensiones como lo corporal, la intuición sensible, la percepción, las imágenes mentales, la memoria, la fantasía, la espontaneidad, la combinación de ideas y la creatividad. Algunos epistemólogos contemporáneos que se remiten a la filosofía analítica de Kant han intentado recuperar la conceptualización de la imaginación en el terreno de lo cognitivo. En el presente trabajo recorremos un camino diferente. Nos remitimos al enfoque psicológico de la “imaginación creadora” desarrollado por el francés Théodule-Armand Ribot a finales del siglo XIX; y por Lev Vygotsky, quien treinta años después dio continuidad a muchas de las ideas de Ribot. Con base en los postulados de ambos psicólogos, proponemos comprender la imaginación como una función psíquica que también subyace a todo proceso de interpretación/compresión. En función de ese objetivo se explora un paralelo conceptual entre la descripción psicológica del mecanismo creativo de la imaginación y la noción semiótica propuesta por Umberto Eco de “invención de funciones sígnicas”, intentando esbozar la complejidad del fenómeno de la recepción del arte. Desde esa perspectiva interdisciplinar se exploran finalmente algunas de las consecuencias de la teoría desarrollada para una educación a través del arte.

On the Reception of the Myth of Prometheus in Austrian Literature of 19th-20th Centuries

This article focuses its attention on the motive of resistance characteristic of Austrian literature of the 19th - 20th centuries, which is considered from the point of view of the historical and literary relationship with the myth of Prometheus. The history of the issue is reviewed. A selective analysis of the versions of the Promethean myth in the Austrian historical and literary context of the 19th-20th centuries, which is part of the pan-European literary and philosophical heritage, is given. The stylistic and genre originality of Austrian interpretations of the myth of Prometheus is proved on the basis of a study of a number of works. The artistic reception of the image of Prometheus in the poem by Z. Lipiner "Liberated Prometheus", little studied in Russian literary criticism is considered in the article. Attention is paid to the version of the Promethean myth in the literature of Austrian Art Nouveau (on the example of F. Kafka's little prose). The issue of conflicting trends in the development of Austrian literature of the 20th century, affecting the interaction of the motive of resistance with the Promethean myth, is investigated by the example of M. Gruber's essay. The correlation of the Austrian versions of the motive of resistance with the myth of Prometheus is proved. The results of the study confirm the significance of the Promethean myth in the Austrian reception of the 19th-20th centuries, which has more pronounced features of drama and theatricality in relation to the European context.

The Artistic Reception of the Bible Legend about Cain and Abel in Modern Ukrainian Literature

The article investigates the reception of the biblical tale of Cain and Abel in the story by A. Zabuzhko Kazka pro kalinovu sopilku (The tale of Cain’s Flute) and the poem by O. Irvanec, Braty (Brothers). The subject of the study were the forms and methods of interpreting traditional motifs and images.
 The biblical legend, its folklore and literary interpretations were selected as the basis for the considerations (J.H. Byron, I. Franko). Following an anti-religious trend in the treatment of traditional images, the authors created a postmodern version of Cain - a murderer and victim at the same time. The material of the Cainic tale also served the writers to address the issue of the relationship between extraordinary personalities and the average ones, and the lesser value of the first in the eyes of God. The result of the study are conclusions about the nature of postmodern reinterpretation of literary tradi­tion in the works of A. Zabuzhko and O. Irvanec.