Revolutionary Art Research Articles

Baudelaire: Liberte, Libertinage and Modernity

LE MODERN STYLE IN FRENCH LITERATURE ranges from Baudelaire's reading of Poe to the Modernism of Beckett, and the transition between these two phenomena might be located in Walter Benjamin's critique of literary Benjamin's work constitutes a double articulation that allows him to move between criticism (political ideology, the Russian Revolution, Marx, Brecht, Lukacs, revolutionary art) and a critique of Proust and Valery, who deliberately distanced their works and aesthetics from political concerns. The intersection between Benjamin's two fields of focus can be located in his framework of modernity. This conceptual frame arises at the crossroads of history, sociology, economics, urban architecture and politics. Their paths, passageways, and arcades map what he calls capitalism, filtered into the idiom of poetry. Benjamin's reading of modernity can best be seen in his analysis of the poetic oeuvre of Baudelaire.

Moral creativity as artistic transformation

ABSTRACT: Moral creativity in the arts is defined as the conscious transformation of moral values into artistic products. Artistic revolutions, occasioned when conventional art is inadequate to satisfy human needs, are associated with moral creativity. This exploratory study examined the following: the meaning of moral creativity in the arts; the conditions that lead artists to be morally creative; the developmental process of becoming morally creative (illustrated by references to Ernest Hemingway's development); and objectivity and subjectivity in moral creativity. Issues connected with cultivating moral creativity in the arts are discussed in the final section.

In Anxious Celebration: Lewis Hine's Men at Work

In a letter to the radical periodical, the New Masses, in October of 1930, one reader requested more satire from the artists who published in its pages, art with “greater revolutionary purpose.” The drawings of an artist like Louis Lozowick, Vern Jessup complained, were suspiciously ambiguous: “In the New Masses they're proletarian art. What do you call them when they appear in the bourgeois business magazines, as they do?” Louis Lozowick, a Russian-American avant-garde painter and a contributing editor of the New Masses, rose immediately to the challenge. In a letter of response in the December, 1930 issue, entitled, “What Should Revolutionary Artists Do Now?” he noted that leftist artists and writers go to capitalist publications and galleries with the same regularity (and uncertainty) as workers go to shops and factories — and for the same reasons. One might ask a revolutionary artist to refuse all collaboration with capitalist institutions and starve to death with his revolutionary conscience immaculate. Or one might ask him to contribute to the revolutionary movement with whatever means at his command while conceding the inevitability (as we do in the case of the factory worker) of his working in capitalist institutions.

The heritage of Giotto's geometry: art and science on the eve of the scientific revolution

This ambitious book explores the relationship between the Western revolution that began with Galileo in the early seventeenth century and the Renaissance artistic revolution inaugurated by Giotto three hundred years earlier. The fruit of many years of thought and research, it demonstrates the crucial role that Italian Renaissance painting, sculpture, and architecture played in what we call science. Samuel Y. Edgerton, Jr., shows that rather than being symptomatic in nature, the arts served as a catalyst for the transformation in perception which occurred in the West in the fourteenth century. According to Edgerton, the new way in which reality was represented, through the use of the unique Renaissance tools of perspective and chiaroscuro, set the stage for modern scientific practice.

Harry Broudy and Discipline-Based Art Education (DBAE)

In a 1992 article describing discipline-based art education' to a crafts audience Albert Anderson said, Over the past several years a major philosophical shift in the art education field has initiated what appears to be the early stages of a revolution in the way art is taught in the public schools.2 The impact of discipline-based art education on the field of art education is usually marked by its adoption by the Getty Center for Education in the Arts in 1983. The history of the growing influence of DBAE is often seen as closely allied to the series of Getty projects that followed.3 The first of these projects were in large part grounded in the work of Harry Broudy, though he might find it amusing to be considered the author of an incipient revolution in art(s) education. I will suggest that he deserves either much of the credit or much of the blame, depending upon how one views discipline-based art education and its effects on the teaching of art. This change in paradigm or philosophy for teaching art, like other innovations, did not just suddenly appear. A long series of related events either prepared the way for or contributed to discipline-based art education (DBAE).4 As I survey the development of DBAE and the Broudy role in its formulation and introduction, I find it difficult to construct an accurate picture of how his many writings and activities interconnect in their influence and impact on DBAE. In some instances, changes connected to his work were in the field of general education; in other cases, changes were directly in art or arts education; and in still others, in writings and events paralleling the development of DBAE. I will, of course, be selective as I trace the history of DBAE. The role that Harry Broudy, a preeminent philosopher of education, played in various education and art education histories can be found described in the other essays in this issue. These essays provide a context for this particular history, but what one realizes in reading them is how wide-

Children's Literature and the Politics of the Nation-State

Children's Literature and the Politics of the Nation-State J. D. Stahl (bio) Zur Lage der Jugendbuchautoren. Eine Untersuchung über die soziale Situation der Kinder und Jugendschriftsteller in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, by Helmut Müller. Weinheim and Basel: Beltz, 1980. Der Deutsche Jugendliteraturpreis. Eine Wirkungsanalyse, by Klaus Doderer and Cornelia Riedel. Weinheim and Munich: Juventa Verlag, 1988. Die Welt gehört den Kindern. Das moderne China und seine Kinderbücher, by Jean-Pierre Diény. Trans. Helmut Müller. Weinheim and Basel: Beltz, 1973. These three works, with their very different foci, are all concerned with the problematic relationship between children's literature and the state, or, more specifically, with the position of the author of children's literature in society. They examine the political and economic positions that children's book authors occupy in nations as diverse as the Federal Republic of Germany and the People's Republic of China. Müller, Doderer, and Riedel probe these and related issues through the techniques of sociological investigationquestionnaires that quantify and categorize the social position of a more or less representative group of West German children's authors (Müller) or that examine the influence and social context of the Deutsche Jugendliteraturpreis, the only state-granted literary prize in West Germany (Doderer and Riedel). These two works appeared before German Unification, and reflect only the West German situation; Unification will naturally require new studies to meet the dynamics of the new situation. Diény's study examines a group of children's books purchased in China on the eve of the Cultural Revolution and uses this group of works as the basis for his analysis of the relationship between propaganda and art in Chinese society. [End Page 193] As varied as their approaches and materials are, these three books each raise the difficult question of what the role of government should be in the support, development, and control of children's literature. Müller criticizes West German cultural policy for surrendering children's book publishing to market forces that reduce literature to the status of commodity. Doderer and Riedel provide a sophisticated critique of the influence of the national children's literature prize in the context of its historical goal of reaching a broad audience, its actual effects, which tend to be confined to the educated and relatively privileged, and the inescapable pressures of the popular media that are altering if not threatening the whole culture of literacy. Finally, Diény brings into focus the conflict between art and propaganda in a nation-state in which all forms of art have become politicized, but he wavers between endorsements of the goals of the Chinese revolution and critiques of revolutionary art from an aesthetic perspective. These books raise the question of whether children's literature is ultimately a means of social control (even when its goal is liberation) or of subversion. If the state has a responsibility for promoting children's literature, does it have any right to influence the forms that literature takes and the ideas it expresses? The paradoxical nature of art as a social function is brought to light by these very different discussions. Ironically, even the idea of a scholarly (and thus presumably state-funded) investigation into the conditions of life for children's book authors elicited resentment among those approached in the study conducted by Helmut Müller and a team from the Institut für Jugendbuchforschung at the University of Frankfurt. The appearance of a long, detailed, complex questionnaire in the mail of children's writers evoked some cries of protest, some (pointed?) silence, and even a sarcastic commentary on Bavarian radio. In an era of sensitivity to state control through data collection and supervision, such questions seemed to some an invasion of privacy. Yet the study itself suggested that West German children's book authors belong to a group that is not only intent on preserving its sense of privacy and individuality, but also lacking in any collective sense of itself as a group with common problems and interests. This is reflected in the tendency of publishers to shortchange if not exploit writers in their financial arrangements. Though Müller's approach is partly...

C. L. R. James: A Radical West Indian Vision of American Studies

To MILLIONS OF WEST INDIANS, CANADIANS, AND LATIN AMERICANS, is more than the United States: it is North, Central, and South and the Caribbean-the Western Hemisphere. As a hemispheric endeavor Studies takes on a broader, more profound, nuanced, and radical significance than that which confines America to the United States. The history and contemporary reality of the various cultures are so intertwined that it is impossible to understand America in either its limited or its broader sense without reference to the experience of all the hemispheric inhabitants. At the Harvard commencement in 1983, Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes spoke for Latin Americans: We need your memory and your imagination or ours shall never be complete. You need our memory to redeem your past, and our imagination to complete your future.I C. L. R. James (1901-1989) was a West Indian whose works, like those of Fuentes, offer the possibility of enhancing our understanding of America and American Studies. James was an activist, an intellectual, and a revolutionary artist whose many books and essays dealt with radical politics, revolution, race and class, sports, culture, and pan-Africanism. He is the subject of two recent biographies.2 James's importance has been highlighted by a recent surge of interest in his work, reflected in the publication of new editions of many of his books and three volumes of selected writings.3 This essay examines

Writing Architecture: Fantomas, Fragments, Fictions. An Architectural Journey through the 20th Century

In this tantalizing work, Roger Connah explores the peculiar odyssey of twentieth-century architecture through the buildings and writings of Finlands iconoclastic architect, Reima Pietila. Among architects, Pietila is a cult figure, a respected but often misunderstood outsider and arctic shaman, only recently granted the international acclaim and appreciation that are his due. Pietila's complex, geomorphic structures have been compared to the work of Gaudi and Bruce Goff and variously labeled surrealistic, romantic, or expressionistic.Writing Architecture positions Pietila at the heart of contemporary architectural debates - the carnival of conflicting isms, modern post-modern, post-structuralist, deconstructive. From his relative isolation in Helsinki, he is thrust into the community of this century's most revolutionary artists and thinkers, including Wittgenstein, Einstein, Beckett, Borges, Magritte, and McLuhan. Through Pietila Connah reflects on architecture's progress and excess in this century, tracing a path through multiple meanings and intellectual adventures.More metaphysical inquiry than conventional monograph, this extraordinary study draws from various sources to read architecture as Pietila does, as a form of cultural composition in which all theory, literature, music, art, or natural phenomena are potential sources for architectural meaning. Like the existential detective in the pulp crime novels on Fantomas, the elegant French philosopher-thief, Connah offers fragmentary clues, contradictory solutions, and digressive speculations on the particular mystery, misery, and miracle that is modern architecture, but wisely leaves the final verdict up to his discerning readers.Roger Connah's extensive collaboration with Reima Pietila has provided him with a unique opportunity to trace the architect's inimitable approach to architecture and culture. Since 1986 the author has been living in India working as a freelance writer; he is visiting Professor at The National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad and The Jamia Millia Islamia University in New Delhi.

Reviews and Short Notices

Reviews and Short Notices

Jacques-Louis David, Revolutionary Artist: Art, Politics, and the French Revolution.

The lifetime of Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825) coincides with the most tumultuous period in the history of France and much of the Western world. And David's life was closely bound up with the changes that were taking place in French politics, society, and culture. Although most other scholars have focused either on David's artistic activity or on his political career, Warren Roberts examines the connections between these two aspects of his life. Using a historical approach, Roberts provides an interpretation of David's art that illuminates David the man. Roberts presents David's art as a personal record that is an extension of his inner life and a product of historical conditions. David's art, like his character and his actions, cannot be fully understood without understanding the changes that led to and then flowed from the French Revolution. Roberts here considers these changes and their impact on David from the perspectives of the historian and the art historian, and he comes to conclusions that are important for both.

Artistic and scientific revolution

Artistic and scientific revolution

Aesthetic considerations of the electronic museum and attitudes towards art

This theoretical article will briefly outline the idea of the Electronic Museum-the use of computer technology to replace the traditional form of the art museum with its emphasis on the care of precious objects with a museum of electronic images that can be exchanged throughout the world by electronic methods. It will speculate upon the influence of this new technology on the behavior and roles: 1. Artist, 2. Speculator, 3. Art Critic, 4. Art Historian, and 5. Art Museum Director. The development of the modern microcomputer in the past decade has sparked a revolution in art, art education, and human behavior in art. Many writers in aesthetics, art criticism, and art education have not as yet addressed the psychological issues that are related to the development of new technologies in art, including the electronic image. Issues such as How do these technical innovations effect our attitudes towards the art object? and How do they effect our definitions of talent in art?

Representations of Melodramatic Performance

Among the reformers advocating a people's theater in the early twentieth century, there were those theorists of culture for the masses, like Romain Rolland and Anatolii Lunacharsky, who realized that to appeal to a broad audience a genuinely popular theatre must not only be uplifting and civic in spirit, but also entertaining. They recognized that such a popular theater already existed in the nineteenth century in the form of melodramatic performance: it had democratized the stage, brought the lower classes into the theatre, reduced the gap between the actor and the auditorium, and enabled the spectator to enter into the action, thereby creating a sense of communion (Bradby and McCormick 15–29). Rather than proposing a return to the sacred rituals of Greece or the religious festivals of the Middle Ages as the basis of a people's theater, they argued that melodramatic performance—purified of its commercialism and crudity—offered the model for a revolutionary new popular art.

Jacques-Louis David, revolutionary artist: art, politics, and the French Revolution

Jacques-Louis David, revolutionary artist: art, politics, and the French Revolution

The Structure of Artistic Revolutions. By Remi Clignet. University of Pennsylvania Press. 312 pp. $30.00

The Structure of Artistic Revolutions. By Remi Clignet. University of Pennsylvania Press. 312 pp. $30.00

The Structure of Artistic Revolutions.

The Structure of Artistic Revolutions.

L.E.A.R.: League of Revolutionary Writers and Artists

L.E.A.R.: League of Revolutionary Writers and Artists

The Making of Ballet Modernism

In 1914, as Europe went to war, Serge Diaghilev launched an artistic revolution that profoundly altered the identity of the Ballets Russes. By and large, historians have dated this artistic shift to Parade. Unveiled in Paris in 1917, three years after Diaghilev's last full-scale season in the French capital, the work served public notice of the switch in his allegiance to the avant-garde. Parade came with impeccable modernist credentials: designs by Pablo Picasso, music by Erik Satie, a libretto by Jean Cocteau, program notes by Guillaume Apollinaire. Only Léonide Massine, the ballet's choreographer, was an unknown quantity, although by the early 1920s, his name, too, would be synonymous with modernism. It is not difficult to understand why historians have identified this work as the cradle of Ballets Russes modernism.

Sociological talk about art and science: Remi Clignet. The structure of artistic revolutions. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985. 344 pp. $30.00 (cloth)

Sociological talk about art and science: Remi Clignet. The structure of artistic revolutions. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985. 344 pp. $30.00 (cloth)

Dead Kachina Man by Teresa VanEtten

238 Western American Literature The Port Townsend locus of the book—it was published there, many of its contributors are associated with that city, and Port Townsend has a sister city in Nicaragua—and the strength of the Sanctuary movement in the North­ west, help to explain the Northwest origins of the book, as does “the humane impulse of passion,” in Daley’s words, which motivates it. Contributors include Central American revolutionary artists and such Northwest notables as Giovanni Costigan, well-known emeritus professor of history at the University of Washington, and Brent Shirley, a Reagan Repub­ lican and mayor of Port Townsend who spent 15 days in Nicaragua. Short of going to see for ourselves, we can grasp something of Central American conditions by reading this book. GLEN A. LOVE University of Oregon Dead Kachina Man. By Teresa VanEtten. (Santa Fe: Sunstone Press, 1986. 131 pages, $10.95 paperback.) The central problem of this story is supposed to be who killed a celebrated carver of kachina dolls. Most readers, however, will be praying—vainly—for the killer to eliminate many more of the stereotypical figures confusing what may loosely be called the plot. Locals and strangers, drug dealers and black­ mailers enter and fade away rather arbitrarily, while our hero, Dominique Rios of the Jerez, New Mexico police force, plods gamely through the deep sand of Ms. VanEtten’sprose trying to solve meaningless mysteries. This is not the very best introduction available to life and death in Pueblo cultures, but at least it is difficult for me to imagine a case of insomnia this book couldn’t cure. KARL KROEBER Columbia University The Zarahemla Vision. By Gary Stewart. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986. 280 pages, $15.95.) If you’re looking for stereotypes vividly displayed in the most unselfcon­ scious of ways, this is the book for you. In this, the second in a series of private eye Gabe Utley murder mysteries, not only does the Mormon church fall prey to stereotyping, but Utah Native Americans emerge as either stupid and ...