Artistic Voice Research Articles

Voices of Mono-ha Artists: Contemporary Art in Japan, Circa 1970

Voices of Mono-ha Artists: Contemporary Art in Japan, Circa 1970

The Storied South: Voices of Writers and Artists

The Storied South features the voices--by turn searching and honest, coy and scathing--of twenty-six of the most luminous artists and thinkers in the American cultural firmament, from Eudora Welty, Pete Seeger, and Alice Walker to William Eggleston, Bobby Rush, and C. Vann Woodward. Masterfully drawn from one-on-one interviews conducted by renowned folklorist William Ferris over the past forty years, the book reveals how storytelling is viscerally tied to southern identity and how the work of these southern or southern-inspired creators has shaped the way Americans think and talk about the South. The Storied South offers a unique, intimate opportunity to sit at the table with these men and women and learn how they worked and how they perceived their art. The volume also features 45 of Ferris's striking photographic portraits of the speakers and a CD and a DVD of original audio and films of the interviews. |The Storied South features the voices--by turn searching and honest, coy and scathing--of twenty-six of the most luminous artists and thinkers in the American cultural firmament, from Eudora Welty, Pete Seeger, and Alice Walker to William Eggleston, Bobby Rush, and C. Vann Woodward. Masterfully drawn from one-on-one interviews conducted by renowned folklorist William Ferris over the past forty years, the book reveals how storytelling is viscerally tied to southern identity and how the work of these southern or southern-inspired creators has shaped the way Americans think and talk about the South.

American Splendor and the universal grotesque

Abstract Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor is infused with trans-generic texts that evoke the spirit of the Rabelaisian carnival, which foregrounds bodily anxiety and sensory engagement. For example, Pekar relates at length his issues with health, food, sex and other so-called ‘base’ preoccupations. There are repeated scenes of physical bodily anxiety, such as Pekar’s struggle with throat ailments and later a cancer, which he presents in such graphic detail that it can be considered integral to his artistic voice. Through this sharing of a visceral, sensory experience, Pekar creates a deeply affecting work to which audiences can relate on a transcendent physical level. The film adaptation of American Splendor (Berman and Pulcini, 2003), with its multimodal and multi-genre form of storytelling, enhances this aspect of his work, retaining much of the physical discomfort and grotesque tendencies but blending music, stage, drawing and documentary film to truly represent the expansive parameters of the original. Most importantly, the film retains Pekar’s ability, through sensory engagement and the grotesque, to reach an audience at their most basic level. This article discusses how the film adaptation of American Splendor, emphasizing the grotesque physical attributes of its characters as well as a multi-modal form of storytelling, demonstrates Pekar’s ability to create a universally understandable mythic universe within a superficially quite personal and specific narrative structure. This, in part, explains why Pekar’s work continues to have a powerful emotional resonance.

Revisiting the notion of political black cinema: A comparative analysis of Melvin Van Peebles and Ousmane Sembene

Abstract This article revisits Ousmane Sembene’s La Noire de ... (1966) and Melvin Van Peebles’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baaadasssss Song (1971) to put pressure on Sembene’s legacy as an advocate of African women’s rights and Van Peeble’s reputation as a provocative voice in the American Black Arts Movement. Focusing on each films’ defiant yet silent protagonists, this article questions feminism’s concern for women to speak out against patriarchy that would silence them. It asks whose liberation the films provide for, and interrogates cinema that speaks for the voiceless. This article posits that artistic voice, even when mobilized for political resistance, always presents a risk and threat of displacing violence. Speaking out against oppression, whether white supremacist, neo-imperialist or patriarchal oppression, requires the speaker to wield a certain authority that invests in other means of oppression. This article addresses the politically committed artist’s responsibility to navigate the tenuous relationship between politics and art.

G.O. Vinokurʼs “New Class Approach”. A Possible Model for A.P. Platonovʼs Poetic Language?

The peculiar language use in Andrei Platonovʼs “mature” oeuvre substantially differs from the language used in the authorʼs earlier works and from other linguistic innovations in early 20th-century Russian (experimental) literature. It is unclear why Platonov decided to adopt this peculiar writing style or what made him choose this innovative way of writing to achieve his poetic goals and to express his views and thoughts. The article aims to explore whether Grigorii Vinokurʼs programmatic texts on “language building” that appeared in LEF in 1923 (‘The Futurists – Constructors of Language’ and ‘On Revolutionary Phraseology’) may have inspired Platonov when searching for his own artistic voice.

Evaluating Artistic Voice of Singing Objectivly Using BPNN

In this paper, an objective way to evaluate artistic voice of singing is discussed. The model transforms artistic voice evaluation indicators into qualified data as BP network input and takes fuzzy synthetic evaluation results as output. The authors take F1(the first Formant), F3(the third Formant), vocal range, perturbation of F1, perturbation of F3 and average energy as the evaluating parameters and assess the quality of singing voices with BPNN(back propagation neural network). The results are then compared with the subjective evaluation of experienced professionals. Experiments show that BP neural network is effective to evaluate the singing voices, thus to be helpful to scientific guidance of selecting and training the talent of artistic voice.

Jazzing the Classics: Race, Modernism, and the Career of Arranger Chappie Willet

AbstractThe American popular music tradition of “jazzing the classics” has long stood at the intersection of discourses on high and low culture, commercialism, and jazz authenticity. Dance band arrangers during the 1930s and 1940s frequently evoked, parodied, or straddled these cultural debates through their manipulations of European classical repertoire. This article examines Swing Era arranging strategies in the context of prevailing racial essentialisms, conceptions of modernism, and notions of technical virtuosity. The legacy of African American freelance arranger Chappie Willet, and his arrangement of Beethoven's Piano Sonata, op. 13 (“Pathétique”) for the black dance band of Jimmie Lunceford, suggests that an account of the biography and artistic voice of the arranger is critical to understanding the motivations behind these hybrid musical works.

Mashups − A Protected Form of Appropriation Art or a Blatant Copyright Infringement?

Mashups − A Protected Form of Appropriation Art or a Blatant Copyright Infringement?

Introduction- Going Beyond, Going Against: New Studies on Jewish Latin Americans

Going beyond, going against—this research dossier on Jewish Latin Ameri-cans aims to fill lacunae and map new areas in Jewish Latin American historio- graphy, bibliography and cultural studies. It covers a broad range, illustrating the vitality and innovativeness of contemporary scholarship. Going beyond—our aim is to insert less heard voices into the conversation on Jewish Latin Americans, voices of women, Sephardim, and philosophers, voices of crypto-Jews and artists. We want to go beyond the more commonly heard sounds coming from established communal, institutional sources to pre- sent a fuller range of Jewish Latin American experiences. We emphasize these experiences as Latin American, an integral part of the area’s history and culture. Publishing this collection of texts in a journal of Latin American studies like EIAL therefore seems appropriate.

Getting Kinky Inside and Outside: A Conversation with Trey Anthony

This article explores how one comes to discover and develop their artistic voice. By using an interview format, Spy Dénommé-Welch engages in a conversation with Trey Anthony who discusses a range of topics, including representation and identity in Canadian theatre. While reflecting on her own artistic trajectory, Anthony shares some insights into the impacts that art and storytelling have had on her artistic development.

Who Is Ana Mendieta?

Who is Ana Mendieta? Redfern, C. & Caron, C. (201 1 ). Who is Ana Mendieta? New York, NY: The Feminist Press. 84 pages. $18.95 hardcover.Who is Ana Mendieta? is clearly a labor of love for creators Christine Redfern and Caro Caron. It is a hybrid graphic text that includes essays, a thought-provoking comic, and an annotated bibliography that looks more like a zine. Caron's drawings are masterful and emotive. The narrative, which combines Mendieta's voice with the voices of other artists, critics, collectors, and historians, feels almost like a poem. At times, the text is disconnected, like pieces of ephemera collected from decades past and patched together to tell a story. The juxtaposed images and texts elegantly recount how early feminist artists struggled mightily under the oppressive shadow of patriarchy to make a space in the art world for women.The book begins with an essential introduction by Lucy R. Lippard. The introduction is especially helpful for readers who may not be familiar with the struggle of women artists in the past 50 years or the life and work of Ana Mendieta. Lippard, a wellrespected critic and scholar, not only writes about Mendieta and the struggle of women artists, but also notes the ways that comics have been catalysts and/or byproducts of political insurrections.Lippard, Redfern, and Caron frame Mendieta's story as part of a larger picture that depicts the ways women have suffered both physical and psychological violence at the hands of men, and our culture as a whole. They argue that such suffering continues to persist to ensure that patriarchy remains the status quo. Using the story of Valerie Solanas, they illustrate how women who have used violence against men are depicted by historians and the media as mentally unstable. Male artists who have been privileged by fame, class, and race are seen as eccentric artistic geniuses. This is the backdrop of the stage on which the story begins.Ana Mendieta, born in 1948, was sent away from her Cuban homeland in 1961 as part of Operation Peter Pan, to escape the turbulence and violence of Castro. The privilege she enjoyed in Cuba was erased as she and her sister became lost children in the Catholic social service system of Iowa. She found a home of sorts in the art department at the University of Iowa where she earned her undergraduate and graduate degrees. Mendieta was deeply influenced by the feminist movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s when the American landscape was full of turbulence and revolution. All of this is illustrated skillfully in the book in a series of drawn montages of various artists, art figures, and Mendieta herself. Redfern and Caron have cleverly contextualized Mendieta's influences and the ways they affected her. They also make visible that which notorious art historians like Horst Waldemar Janson have purposely made invisible - women in the visual arts. The book is filled with mini-tributes to well-known feminist artists such as Carolee Schneemann and Hannah Wilke.The reader can easily see how Mendieta is deeply influenced by the work and rebellion of these women who dared to bare their bodies, create incredibly complex and controversial performance pieces, and raise their fists against the good old boys of the art world.Caron and Redfern use images to effectively tell how Mendieta developed asan artist. Within the story, the reader sees Mendieta, a small figure marked by a masked face, move through time. In one spread she slips into a door left ajar; it looks like a prison door with a meshed window and industrial handle. The reader follows her like Alice down the rabbit hole only to turn the page and witness Mendieta's famous Rape Scene from 1973.Her performance/installation was inspired by the reaction of the press and others to a very violent rape/murder that took place in March 1973. She invited people over to her apartment as though she were hosting an art event or a dinner party. …

From Modern Rock to Postmodern Hard Rock: Cambodian Alternative Music Voices

Cambodian modernity was driven by the political agenda of the Sihanouk government beginning in the 1950s, and Cambodian rock and roll emerged in the 1960s in step with Sihanouk's ambitious national modernization project. Urban rockers were primarily upper-class male youths. In. the postcolonial era rock and roll was appropriated from abroad and given a unique Cambodian sound, while today's emerging hard rock music borrows foreign sociocultural references along with the music. Postmodern Cambodia and its diaspora have seen the evolution of a more diverse music subculture of alternative voices of hard rock bands and hip-hop artists, as well as post-bourgeois and post-male singers and songwriters.

Creating New Realities

Artistic museum intervention has become an established practice since late 1980s and has been used by museums as a curatorial and interpretive tool ever since. Exhibitions such as 'Uncomfortable Truths: The Shadow of Slave Trading on Contemporary Art' held at the V&A in London (February-June 2007), and 'Queering the Museum' at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery (November 2010-February 2011) are recent testimonies of museums’ welcoming approach towards invited artists’ interventions. Author Miwon Kwon has described commissioning institutional interventions negatively as the museum’s self-promotional tool and the resulting status of the artist as commodity. Prior to this, in his 1997 essay ‘The Artist as Ethnographer?’ Hal Foster described the artist’s subjective engagement with institutions and communities as 'ethnographic self-fashioning'. Whilst museums are engaging with its multi-cultural audience through events and activities, the potential of the artistic sub-altern voice in bringing both personal and global associations to the collections offers a non-monologic interpretive approach. This article, however, critically reflects upon the collaboration between ethnographic museums and artists from the diasporas as a method of displaying 'the other' or the work of the celebrity artist. It makes a case for a non-tokenistic and a more democratic process of intervening the museum, one that opens it up as a valuable and accessible site for fresh epistemological engagements by the artist with collections and their meanings.

Identity, memory and diaspora, voices of Cuban-American artists, writers and philosophers

Identity, memory and diaspora, voices of Cuban-American artists, writers and philosophers

TOWARDS A CULTURE OF LANDCARE: THE ARTS IN COMMUNITY CAPACITY BUILDING FOR NATURAL RESOURCES MANAGEMENT

This paper argues that the new generation of community based natural resources management (CBNRM) should involve the arts, and particularly the community arts, to better enable success in engaging communities in land rehabilitation and ecological sustainability. The paper is based on insights gained from a five-year research project which examined the role of the arts in affecting environmental behaviour. About 200 informant interviews were undertaken, and eight case studies were analysed to provide qualitative and quantitative data. The case studies presented in this paper show that a culture of landcare is gradually evolving and there is a general overlap, and perhaps even convergence, between the community arts and community environmental initiatives such as Landcare. There are now many community arts events that have an environmental focus, and increasingly CBNRM is using the arts to encourage greater community involvement in the issues and to provide an artistic voice of those involved in CBNRM.

A history of American tonalism: 1880-1920

This volume details the development of the Tonalist landscape: the early works of John La Farge at Newport in the 1860s; the influence of Whistler and Inness in the 1880s; the American expatriate art colonies in Europe; and, the development of Tonalism after 1900, which lay the groundwork for modernism in the Stieglitz Circle and subsequently Milton Avery, the Abstract Expressionism of Rothko Gottlieb, and Newman, and post-modern Tonalists like Wolf Kahn.The book challenges standard notions of American art history, tracing the origins of modernism in America back to the late 1870s, with Tonalism as the driving force in the development of a distinctly American vision, reflecting abstract and spiritual impulses that remain a force in American art today. Through its imagery, scholarship and a narrative that incorporates the voices of long-overlooked artists, critics, and writers, A History of American Tonalism: 1880-1920 will serve as an indispensable guide to the cultural history of turn-of-the-century America.

An unobscured glow: Towards a definition of Rural Theatre

The voices of theatre artists working within a rural environment have traditionally been occluded by the cultural commentators and critics who define the ultimate ‘value’ of performance, in terms of its historical contextualization and record. This article, focusing upon the collaborative approaches to dramaturgical and performance practice of British companies making professional theatre for/and with rural communities over the past 30 years, challenges the metro-centric view of theatre history and proposes a definition for a new genre: Rural Theatre.

A Corpus Lives on

VanDerBeek: MIT List Visual Arts Center Cambridge, Massachusetts February 4-April 3, 2011 It is imperative that we (the world's artists) invent a new world language ...--Stan VanDerBeek If we tend to see the present through a rearview mirror, as Marshall McLuhan observed, Stan VanDerBeek: Intercom revealed an artist who drove everywhere in reverse in order to perceive the future. A self-described fruit-picker,' the late VanDerBeek guided film and other time-based media into uncharted territory with an inner compass trained in equal measure to the vicissitudes of technological progress and the ways this progress would impact the human experience. A student at both Cooper Union and Black Mountain College, VanDerBeek began his artistic career as a painter in the 1940s. By the early 1950s had become an influential underground filmmaker, and by the end of that decade was a pioneer of what critic Gene Youngblood dubbed expanded cinema. As a result, through the variegated constellation of artistic thought and production on display in The Intercom, the viewer comes to appreciate just how long and indelible a shadow VanDerBeek cast across our present media-based artistic environment. The Intercom effectively integrated two core valences of the artist's work, one personal and the other global in scope. On one hand, a personal mythology and iconography permeate VanDerBeek's artistic production, foregrounding opinions, humor, dreams, visual incantations, and idiosyncrasies that arise from a culturally and historically conditioned human being. On the other hand, one senses an attempt to facilitate and manifest universal dialogue--by means of what VanDerBeek termed a non-verbal, international picture language--behind everything did. The world hangs by a thread of verbs and nouns, once proclaimed. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Indeed, all of VanDerBeek's work seems intent on freeing humanity from the snares of its own creativity; as critic Sheldon Renan observed, he sees a race between world destruction and world communication, with the lack of the latter accelerating the former.(1) Yet VanDerBeek's work is decidedly Utopian, exposing the social, political, and technological milieu in which lived, and at the same time striving to unify world cultures vis-a-vis a media-based, non-verbal means of communication--a strategy pitched as Culture Intercom. If this sounds old hat, the exhibition actually provided a wake-up call. At first glance, VanDerBeek's works, which often employed inchoate methods, may not seem all that groundbreaking. Yet they allow us to better perceive the lack of critical distance that characterizes today's cultures of connectivity and media convergence. Whether painted by his own hand, collaged and animated from various media sources, or produced in alliance with the logic of a Bell Labs computer program, VanDerBeek's artistic voice reverberated throughout The Intercom. A creative omnivore, VanDerBeek's sources of inspiration were legion and far-flung, ranging from dadaist collage and the staccato rhythms of the Beat Generation to the cinema of Georges Melies and Buster Keaton, the Utopian teachings of R. …

Sueños que danzan en el agua. Mestizas y mayas en el teatro de Conchi León

More than a decade ago, Yucatán playwright, director, and actress Conchi León appeared on the Mexican theatre scene, contributing voices originating in ancestral wisdom. From the perspective of contemporary art and aesthetics, as informed by the work of Nelly Richard, Néstor García Canclini, Jacques Rancière, and Walter Mignolo, among others, this article demonstrates the manner in which her plays have transcended traditional Yucatan drama, especially through a commitment to sustainability and social progress. León's artistic voice allows for marginalized voices to find a place on the stage as part of an "urgent theatre" that characterizes her long and varied career in Mérida and beyond. (Article in Spanish)

Listening for Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton’s Voice: The Sound of Race and Gender Transgressions in Rock and Roll

SINGER WILLIE MAE BIG MAMA THORNTON'S story will be familiar many Women & Music readers. Yet I retell it here in a way that emphasizes her voice as an expressive instrument through which she built her career as a musician and that uncovers the critical, personal voice of a black female artist. I am particularly interested in connecting my discussion of her voice, in both senses that I indicate, an exploration of her transgressive sound and image and their impact on rock and roll. Thornton flouted the expectations of dominant black and white middle-class arbiters of propriety. She tapped into a liberated black femininity through which she freed herself from many of the expectations of musical, lyrical, physical, and sartorial practice for black women. I argue that these transgressions, central her artistic voice, were at the heart of her musical identity, her appeal, and her influence. Her identity as a black woman, however, has made it difficult hear and see Thornton in all of her resonant dimensions, especially in standard histories of rock and roll. I begin with a discussion of the ways black feminist and cultural anthropology perspectives have informed my approach Thornton's music and career. Then, following an overview of her career, I listen for Thornton's voice, demonstrating her influence on two rock-and-roll artists and telling the story of a well-recognized but little-known figure who traversed the genres of rhythm and blues, blues, and rock, having an impact on all three. (Black) Feminist Perspectives on Rock-and-Roll History My motivation for exploring Thornton's rock-and-roll legacy stems in part from a frustration with the marginal position black women occupy in mainstream histories of the genre--for example, in The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll and multipart television documentaries produced by Time-Life and PBS during the 1990s. (1) Within these narratives, assumptions about musical genre and social identity come together in ways that are problematic for black women; the narratives position white male artists at the center of the story as the real rock and rollers and overlook black women's impact on rock and roll. In recent years, raceconscious feminist scholars have examined the involvement of women in a range of musical endeavors and explored the ways factors like race, class, and sexuality shape their experiences. (2) This research critiques and rectifies the absence of white women and women of color in narratives of music production. In her pathbreaking study of all-woman swing bands of the 1940S, feminist historian Sherrie Tucker exposes the race and gender assumptions that underpin the dominant narratives of swing history and render the women she writes about invisible; she also demonstrates that writing on swing is informed by discourses of race that differently affect the representation of black and white women musicians. (3) Tucker's sensitivity the politics of representation and her recovery of lost musical voices of women is echoed in the work of feminist scholars concerned with the absence of black women in rock-and-roll history. These scholars have revealed the influential contributions of Thornton, gospel guitarist and vocalist Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and girl groups of the 1960S. (4) This work also examines the race- and gender-rooted biases that have made it difficult recognize the presence of innovative black women in the rock-and-roll context and their involvement in cross-racial exchanges. (5) Such attention black women's cultural production broadens scholarly understanding of music making. Eileen Hayes argues that scholars in musicology and ethnomusicology should draw on black feminist thinking to interrogate black women's practices as music creators, performers, listeners, and consumers and illuminate the heterogeneity of black women's musical experience. (6) Daphne Brooks advises incorporating black feminist perspectives into rock criticism, suggesting that doing so can help break down the oppressive race, gender, and genre paradigms that segregate musical productions according race and gender in spite of frequent boundary crossing. …