Significant Forerunner Research Articles

Hybridity and the Unifying Space of Painting: Larry Abramson in Conversation with Theolonius Marx

Abstract While the drive toward homogeneous and pure visual languages was at the foundation of early twentieth-century utopian modernist art systems, the Dadaist and Surrealist reaction to this utopianism took the form of extreme and often violent hybridity. Marcel Duchamp's 1913 “readymade” of a bicycle wheel placed atop a kitchen stool is a paradigmatic manifestation of the linguistic hybridity characteristic of post-utopian twentieth-century art. In the 1920s Francis Picabia made paintings constructed of separate and discrete layers of images, which, when viewed together, produced an unsettling visual “monster.” Picabia's practice of superimposition was a significant forerunner of prevailing contemporary practices in postmodern painting. In his essay “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” philosopher Fredric Jameson (1991) identifies pastiche as one of the main characteristics of cultural production in the age of postmodernism. Pastiche is defined as a work of art consisting of motifs borrowed from one or more sources, an incongruous hodgepodge of materials, forms, and images. In this age of pastiche, what are the options open to artists—to endlessly quote, imitate, or parody existing images and styles, or to construct a new and significant system of meaning? To discuss the centrality of the principle of hybridity in postmodern art—and in my own artistic practice of the past fifty years—I summoned Theolonius Marx, a fiction of my imagination who helped me handle the dilemmas of conceptual art in the 1970s. In this “conversation,” Theolonius and I ponder how hybridity has placed a challenge to utopian modernist concepts, and what the conditions are for it to thrive today as a relevant and sustainable medium.

Constructing a Versatile Virtuoso Persona

German pianist Anna Caroline de Belleville was one of the foremost virtuoso pianists in the 1820s and 1830s, deemed the “Chamber Virtuoso of Her Royal Highness” by Princess Louise of Prussia and “Queen of the Piano” by Paganini. Although a few modern biographical accounts provide an overview of her life and career, there has been no critical examination of her virtuosity within the context of early nineteenth-century performance culture. Drawing on periodicals, magazines, correspondence, memoirs, and contemporary writings, this article reconstructs Belleville’s early career and illustrates her significance by examining her strategic programming, pianism, and reception. I argue that Belleville’s reorientation of her public concert repertory in the mid-1830s, particularly her incorporation of works considered “classical” or “serious,” enabled her to mediate the conflicting musical tastes of her critics and audiences, and to reinvent herself as a pianist renowned not for a bravura style but for a versatile, eclectic virtuosity centering on the faithful interpretation of “serious” works. This course of action marked Belleville as a significant forerunner to the interpreter-performer pianists who came to dominate the virtuoso scene from the mid-nineteenth century onward.

The Big Short's Incoherence, Documentary Aesthetics, and Use of Direct Address

<i>The Big Short</i>'s Incoherence, Documentary Aesthetics, and Use of Direct Address

El reencuentro del arte de la memoria de Giordano Bruno en el Ciclo Cremaster de Matthew Barney

El presente trabajo de investigación representa un intento crítico para abordar el concepto de continuidad en el pensamiento artístico basado en el estudio de caso de una obra artística única en su tipo, el Ciclo Cremaster de Matthew Barney. Es una producción artística notoria, que ha suscitado mucho debate y dividido las opiniones de los críticos y del público, sin llegar, sin embargo a concluir de manera definitiva el proceso artístico del autor. La hipótesis que manejamos es la de contemplar al Ciclo Cremaster como una especie de manifiesto contemporáneo de los sistemas desarrollados por el filósofo y libre pensador Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), cuyos tratados sobre el cosmos, la memoria, la imaginación, la magia y la imagen se condensan en una “maquina mágica de la memoria” que podría ser una significante precursora del trabajo de Barney.

Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre and Dystopia, Science Fiction, Post-apocalypse: Classics—New Tendencies—Model Interpretations

Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre and Dystopia, Science Fiction, Post-apocalypse: Classics—New Tendencies—Model Interpretations

4. Passion in the Work of Johann Sebastian Bach

Abstract Passions are exceptionally important in the works of Johann Sebastian Bach. His passion compositions are based particularly on Luther’s reformation, chiefly on developmental tendency which is based on the works of Johann Walter, Hans Leo Hassler and Michael Praetorius. The most significant forerunner of J. S. Bach was Heinrich Schütz. J. S. Bach’s textual aspect is aimed at the model of passion oratorio the main representative of which was a librettist Heinrich Brockes who worked in Hamburg. The interesting fact is that before the arrival of J. S. Bach, in 1723, there was no long tradition of passions in Leipzig. They were performed there in 1721 for the first time. J. S. Bach is demonstrably the author of the two passions: St Matthew Passion BWV 244 and St John Passion BWV 245. The authorship of Johann Sebastian Bach in St. Lukas Passion BWV 246 is strongly called into question and from St Mark Passion BWV 24 only the text was preserved.

Book Review: Public Relations and the History of Ideas, by Simon Moore

Public Relations and the History of Ideas. Simon Moore. London, UK: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2014. 146 pp. $155 hbk.Something exciting is happening, finally, in the academic study of public relations (PR)-PR history is getting treated with much more breadth and depth than simply rehashing the usual (Ivy Lee did this, Bernays did that) accomplishment skimming and how-to-do-it advice of agency and corporate communications superstars.Today, more and more research is emerging that explores PR in a broader historical context than ever before. Articles and books, including a new series published by Routledge, examine far off, even ancient, manifestations of communication strategies and tactics-used for good or ill-that today would be recognized as PR, even though those manifestations occurred as part of broader movements hundreds or thousands of years ago.A strong new addition to this trend is Simon Moore's book that is part of the Routledge series dubbed New Directions in Public Relations and Communication Research. Moore chairs the Information Design and Corporate Communication Department at Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts. His book examines ideas of eminent thinkers-ranging from Confucius to Carl Jung-in the context of the mass communication of those ideas, many of which have resulted in economic, political, or spiritual movements still influential, in varying degrees, today.In each chapter, Moore provides an overview of a key by 1 of 10 influential thinkers. The overview is followed by a discussion about how PR fits into the mix, or, more broadly, how managed communication syncs up with the thinker's thinking.For example, in Chapter 5, Moore reviews Martin Luther's Ninety-five Theses, and then, later, interprets Luther's work in a PR context:With this work, driven into a door, a storm broke which has still not subsided, and has been fed by the communication it released. It is the most significant forerunner of singleissue, campaign-based communication: direct, morally certain, and using passion to energize or distort reason.Hence, Luther's work is examined through the contemporary lens of issues management.Yet Moore does not limit his examples to widely familiar Western thinkers such as Luther. One of the more fascinating chapters deals with a work written around 950 CE, On the Perfect State, by Abu Nasr al-Farabi, who, according to Moore, lived most of his adult life in Baghdad. For Al-Farabi, communication in a perfect political state is based more on an innate, natural order of human and possibly divine elements, and it pretty much can only exist as top-down, one-way communication. Moore explains that for this Middle Eastern philosopher, a key feature of a perfect state is that messages emanate directly from the ruler, while his subjects wait to receive them: passive, uncritical, and ready to learn. …

The Magical Cosmology of Rosaleen Norton

This article explores the magical cosmology of the controversial Australian witch and trance artist Rosaleen Norton (1917-1979). Within the social context of post-World War Two Australia, Norton was unquestionably an unconventional figure at a time when the local population was approximately 80 per cent Christian. Norton claimed to be an initiated follower of the Great God Pan and also revered Hecate, Lilith and Lucifer. Norton claimed to encounter these mythic beings as experientially real on the ‘inner planes’ which she accessed while in a state of self-induced trance. Many of her most significant artworks were based on these magical encounters. Influenced by a range of visionary traditions, including Kundalini Yoga, Kabbalah, medieval Goetia and the Thelemic magick of Aleister Crowley, Norton embraced a magical perspective that would today be associated with the so-called ‘Left-Hand Path’, although this term was not one she used to describe her work or philosophy. Norton’s artistic career began in the 1940s, with publication of some of her earliest occult drawings, and reached a significant milestone in 1952 when the controversial volume The Art of Rosaleen Norton – co-authored with her lover, the poet Gavin Greenlees – was released in Sydney, immediately attracting a charge of obscenity. Norton rapidly acquired a media-led reputation as the wicked ‘Witch of Kings Cross’, was vilified by journalists during the 1950s and 1960s, and was branded by many as demonic. But Norton’s magical approach was not entirely ‘dark’. Her perception that the Great God Pan provided a source of universal vitality led her to revere Nature as innately sacred, and in many ways she can be regarded as a significant forerunner of those Wiccans and Goddess worshippers from a later generation who would similarly embrace the concept of sacred ecology and seek to ‘re-sacralize’ the Earth.

Cross- and self-fertilization of plants – Darwin's experiments and what we know now

The scientific work recorded by Darwin in his book on the cross- and self-fertilization of plants is an exemplar of interesting choices, careful technique, decades of work and methodical analyses that provided a plethora of robust results. The conclusions Darwin drew from his studies are, for the most part, valid and still relevant today. They focus primarily on providing data to support Darwin's hypothesis about the nature and importance of the benefits derived from cross-fertilization, although he conceded that a few plants seem to be invariably self-fertilized. The work is also a significant forerunner for the concepts of hybrid vigour and inbreeding depression. A wealth of information relating to flowers, flowering time, pollen efficacy, the results of cross- and self-pollination, the behaviour and impact of insects, seed and seed germination and plant breeding systems is scattered throughout the book. Darwin also related this book to several others he wrote in which some of these topics are included.

La vida inquieta de Manuel Reina

The critics usually consider Manuel Reina (1856-1905) a transitional author between nineteenth-century poetry and Spanish modernism. A thorough analysis of his most important work La vida inquieta (1894), published two years before Rubén Dario’s Prosas profanas , reveals, however, an innovation in aesthetics that makes him a significant forerunner. Reina contributes to turn-of-the-century Spanish poetry a renovation of the sensibility in terms of “art for art's sake,” the quest for ideal beauty, and an image of the poet as the hero for such an ideal. But the newly proclaimed faith in beauty also conveys consciousness of an emerging crisis arising from the very heart of modernity that Reina expressed through the emblematic title of his book: vida inquieta or spiritual uneasiness, doubts, spleen and complex states of mind.

Sensitive cooperation: a basis for assisted feeding

To describe sensitive cooperation as a basis for assisted feeding through the experiences of people with high cervical spinal cord injury (hcSCI). People who contract a complete hcSCI will require lifelong assistance from others with all activities of daily living. Initially, they prefer getting help from people they already know and are reluctant to cooperate with personal assistants. Assisted feeding is a situation where the nature of the cooperation between the two parties involved is crucial. Qualitative. Sixteen people with hcSCI were interviewed twice within a period of eighteen months. The second interview was combined with an observation. Transcriptions of interviews and notes from the observations were analysed according to Reflective Lifeworld Research as described by Dahlberg and colleagues. Sensitive cooperation implies genuine acquaintance and sincere concern for the person receiving help. It takes time to develop and it is not possible for the person who needs help to ask for sensitive cooperation. When a meal has to be based on cooperation with another human being it is no longer adjusted by the inner eating pace and rhythm of the person needing assisted feeding, but has the temporality of the helper as a necessary condition. A particular meal draws on the experiences from all previous meals and is a significant forerunner of future meals. Sensitive cooperation implies genuine acquaintance and sincere concern for the person receiving help. It takes time to develop and it is not possible for the person who needs help to ask for sensitive cooperation. When a meal has to be based on cooperation with another human being it is no longer adjusted by the inner eating pace and rhythm of the person needing assisted feeding, but has the temporality of the helper as a necessary condition. A particular meal draws on the experiences from all previous meals and is a significant forerunner of future meals. Nurses and other health care professionals working within settings where people with hcSCI are admitted right after the injury have a responsibility to be meticulous when cooperating with the patients during assisted feeding. They create the basis for later cooperation with the personal assistants. Professionals working in institutions must assume that people with hcSCI are vulnerable and that assisted feeding should be carefully scheduled and conducted without interruption. Without this foundation, sensitive cooperation might never happen.

The Paradox of Neo-liberalism

In the spring and summer of 1938 two quite different seminars took place in Paris. One was the very well-known Collège de Sociologie, which included the participation of Caillois and Bataille – see ‘Sacred Sociology of the Contemporary World’, 2 April 1938, and the session ‘Festival’, 2 May 1939, in which Caillois indicates the importance of sacred games (in Hollier 1988: 157–159, 279–303). The other was the Walter Lippman Colloque, 26–30 August 1938 (in Rougier 1939). The former was the significant forerunner of French sociology and philosophy – from Derrida to Baudrillard – decisively influenced by Marcel Mauss.

The Legacy of Kafka in Contemporary Austrian Literature

Filipp, Frank, ed. The Legacy of in Contemporary Literature. Riverside: Ariadne, 1997. $29.50 hardcover. Evaluating the legacy ofa great and extraordinarily influential writer is never an easy task. Such examinations tend to gravitate between the Scylla of positivistic influence study, where subsequent writers openly affirm and admit the impact a prominent literary precursor has had on their work, and the Charybdis of often broad, and hence vague, identification of intellectual or thematic constellations, which attempts to align the work of a later writer with the models of a significant forerunner. Of the nine essays collected in the present volume, only two successfully sail through these treacherous waters. The general problem is compounded in this instance by the sheer stature of as one of the most prominent, most influential of all modern German fiction writers: is there any author who does not share in some way, if only indirectly, in Kafka's legacy? Moreover, what defines Kafka's significance is the way in which his writing has tended to gather together, in concentrated form, many of the issues and dilemmas that have become the hallmarks of European modernism. Here one could go through a litany of terms and phrases, such as Freudian psychoanalysis, alienation, linguistic skepticism, existential angst, bureaucratization of civil life, etc. When contemporary writers articulate such omnipresent themes, are they always doing so in Kafka's name, as it were, or as his heir? Put differently: What criteria can be used to distinguish between the participation in a more generally shared cultural-intellectual problematic and the specific influence of a particular artist, especially one whose reach is as broad as Kafka's? If, as Frank Pilipp maintains in his preface, Austrian literature displays a more concentrated indebtedness to than do other national literatures (2), is it himself or the wider intellectual-historical tradition that explains this affinity? The major failing of the present volume is that it does not address this extremely complex problematic. Over half of the essays in this volume (five of nine) treat two authors who freely admitted Kafka's influence on their writing: Elias Canetti and Peter Handke. Kristie A. Foell points out differences between Kafka's fictional world and that portrayed in Canetti's Die Blendung in order to arrive at the uninspired conclusion that it was Kafka's person and his life, not his manner of writing, that fueled Canetti's imagination. Readers familiar with Canetti's reflections on Kafka's correspondence with Felice Bauer will not be surprised by this assertion. Richard H. Lawson seeks to explore parallels between Kafka's and Canetti's aphoristic writings. However, as becomes clear over the course of his deliberations, what he understands under the term aphorism is simply autobiographical self-expression. This explains why his examples of aphoristic utterances by are drawn solely from his diaries. Lawson completely ignores that both and Canetti were composers of aphoristic texts that reflect a specific literary genre, defined by its employment of rhetorical, structural, and figurative devises. Thus the special sympathetic relationship (34) he identifies between and Canetti is once again grounded in personal-biographical rather than in formal literary issues. Fully three essays address the impact of Kafka's work on Peter Handke. The outstanding contribution in this group, and one of the two outstanding pieces in this collection, is Thomas F Barry's Kafka and Handke: Poetics from Gregor to the Gregors. Barry is not satisfied with cataloging superficial connections between Kafka's and Handke's works; indeed, he expresses some skepticism about the significance of ties such as Handke's proclivity for giving his characters names that invoke those of Kafka's protagonists. Instead, he digs to the psychological level, citing their negative sense of their own body ego as Kafka's and Handke's most profound commonality. …

The Legacy of Kafka in Contemporary Austrian Literature

Filipp, Frank, ed. The Legacy of Kafka in Contemporary Austrian Literature. Riverside: Ariadne, 1997. $29.50 hardcover. Evaluating the legacy ofa great and extraordinarily influential writer is never an easy task. Such examinations tend to gravitate between the Scylla of positivistic influence study, where subsequent writers openly affirm and admit the impact a prominent literary precursor has had on their work, and the Charybdis of often broad, and hence vague, identification of intellectual or thematic constellations, which attempts to align the work of a later writer with the models of a significant forerunner. Of the nine essays collected in the present volume, only two successfully sail through these treacherous waters. The general problem is compounded in this instance by the sheer stature of Kafka as one of the most prominent, most influential of all modern German fiction writers: is there any author who does not share in some way, if only indirectly, in Kafka's legacy? Moreover, what defines Kafka's significance is the way in which his writing has tended to gather together, in concentrated form, many of the issues and dilemmas that have become the hallmarks of European modernism. Here one could go through a litany of terms and phrases, such as Freudian psychoanalysis, alienation, linguistic skepticism, existential angst, bureaucratization of civil life, etc. When contemporary writers articulate such omnipresent themes, are they always doing so in Kafka's name, as it were, or as his heir? Put differently: What criteria can be used to distinguish between the participation in a more generally shared cultural-intellectual problematic and the specific influence of a particular artist, especially one whose reach is as broad as Kafka's? If, as Frank Pilipp maintains in his preface, "Austrian literature displays a more concentrated indebtedness to Kafka" than do other national literatures (2), is it Kafka himself or the wider Austrian intellectual-historical tradition that explains this affinity? The major failing of the present volume is that it does not address this extremely complex problematic. Over half of the essays in this volume (five of nine) treat two Austrian authors who freely admitted Kafka's influence on their writing: Elias Canetti and Peter Handke. Kristie A. Foell points out differences between Kafka's fictional world and that portrayed in Canetti's Die Blendung in order to arrive at the uninspired conclusion that it was Kafka's person and his life, not his manner of writing, that fueled Canetti's imagination. Readers familiar with Canetti's reflections on Kafka's correspondence with Felice Bauer will not be surprised by this assertion. Richard H. Lawson seeks to explore parallels between Kafka's and Canetti's aphoristic writings. However, as becomes clear over the course of his deliberations, what he understands under the term "aphorism" is simply autobiographical self-expression. This explains why his examples of aphoristic utterances by Kafka are drawn solely from his diaries. Lawson completely ignores that both Kafka and Canetti were composers of aphoristic texts that reflect a specific literary genre, defined by its employment of rhetorical, structural, and figurative devises. Thus the "special sympathetic relationship" (34) he identifies between Kafka and Canetti is once again grounded in personal-biographical rather than in formal literary issues. Fully three essays address the impact of Kafka's work on Peter Handke. The outstanding contribution in this group, and one of the two outstanding pieces in this collection, is Thomas F Barry's "Kafka and Handke: Poetics from Gregor to the Gregors." Barry is not satisfied with cataloging superficial connections between Kafka's and Handke's works; indeed, he expresses some skepticism about the significance of ties such as Handke's proclivity for giving his characters names that invoke those of Kafka's protagonists. Instead, he digs to the psychological level, citing their negative sense of their own "body ego" as Kafka's and Handke's most profound commonality. …

A quantitative study of erythrasma lesions.

Summary.— Factors involved in the formation of erythrasma lesions are discussed. In the axillae and groins, the presence of scaling was a significant forerunner of the appearance of a fluorescent lesion. The total bacterial count, the counts of both fluorescent and non-fluorescent diphtherolds, were highest in areas showing both fluorescence and scaling, but the number of micrococci did not differ significantly between affected and non-affected sites.

The Origins of Hydrostatics

Although numerous problems on floating bodies had been set before his time, it was Archimedes (287–212 B.C.) who had no significant forerunner in the presentation of hydrostatics as a unified corpus of scientific knowledge. He presented a number of carefully reasoned arguments that in general resolved into the use of the principle which came to bear his name. Before Archimedes there had been some sound (and of course some quite unsound) mechanics, but little of a stature that remained acceptable by later, standards.