This handsomely produced volume contains 22 contributions from international scholars, which were originally presented at the 2000 Conference of the International Society for Phenomenology, Fine Arts, & Aesthetics. The papers center around the theme of gardens and include a wide range of topics of interest to phenomenologists but also, perhaps, to gardeners with a philosophical bent. A sampling of topics: Leonardo's Annunciation Hortus Conclusus and its reflexive intent; hatha yoga--a phenomenological experience of nature; the Chinese attempt to miniaturize the world (...) in gardens; conflating and compressing time in commodified space and architecture; constructing the deconstructive landscape (the ruin aesthetic); and a phenomenological-anthropological aproach to Zen gardens. The volume is lightly indexed by name (mostly philosophers). Annotation (c)2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com). (shrink)

Since the 1960s, many artists have incorporated ecological concerns into their work, an endeavor that has required new strategies in art-making. To explore recent American manifestations of these interests, the David and Alfred Smart Museum commissioned new projects from artists Mark Dion, Peter Fend, and Dan Peterman, each focusing on interrelationships between particular organisms—human beings-and a specific group of sites—a museum building, a river landscape, and a university campus. The results, exhibited at the Smart Museum during the summer of 2000, (...) evoke the varied scales, from the microscopic to the global, at which human actions affect the environment. This catalog documents each of the artists' projects through an array of images and words: Smart Museum Associate Curator Stephanie Smith provides an introduction and brief overviews of the three projects, each of the artists contribute statements, and photographers Susan Anderson and Tom van Eynde document—in over 100 images—the processes and projects that comprise the exhibition. (shrink)

Looking at representations of the Irish landscape in contemporary literature and the arts,this volume discusses the economic, political and environmental issues associated with it, questioning the myths behind Ireland's landscape, from the first Greek descriptions to present day post Celtic-Tiger architecture.

Numinous Fields has its roots in a phenomenological understanding of perception. It seeks to understand what, beyond the mere sensory data they provide, landscape, nature, and art, both separately and jointly, may mean when we experience them. It focuses on actual or potential experiences of the numinous, or sacred, that such encounters may give rise to. This volume is multi-disciplinary in scope. It examines perceptions of place, space, nature, and art as well as perceptions of place, space, and nature in (...) art. It includes chapters written by art curators, and historians and scholars in the fields of landscape, architecture, cultural geography, religious studies, philosophy, and art. Its chapters examine ideas, objects, and practices from the ancient time of Aboriginal Australians' Dreaming through to the present. The volume is also multi-cultural in scope and includes chapters focussed on manifestations of the sacred in indigenous culture, in cultures influenced by each of the world's major religions, and in the secular, contemporary world. Contributors: Samer Akkach, James Bennett, Veronica della Dora, Alasdair Forbes, Virginia Hooker, Philip Jones, Russell Kelty, Muchammadun,Tracey Lock, Ellen Philpott-Teo, John Powell, Rebekah Pryor, Wendy Shaw. (shrink)

What I should like to explore here is the experience of landscape both through the arts and as an art, an art of environmental appreciation. A clearer understanding of landscape, environment, and art, as well as what it is to "know" in the context of environmental experience, suggests how the arts can contribute to an intimate, engaged experience of landscape, and how this process itself can be construed as an art in which the perceiver is a quasi-artist. I should like (...) to do this through a re-weaving of words and ideas to propose a new fabric for understanding the relation of art, landscape, and perceiver. The threads I want to combine are four: art, environment, landscape, and knowing in the sense of appreciation. I hope to show how the loose-knit texture they form can be spread over a particular landscape in such a way that the landscape will fill the fabric and the fabric integrate the landscape. I realize that I may have over-worked my metaphor, so I shall leave it now, but I hope that it can serve as a guiding image for the relation and application of the ideas I shall be working with. (shrink)

The article analyzes the ideological foundations of the emergence and evolution of landscape in Chinese painting as an independent genre from the III to the XVIII century, before the rapid integration of Western European artistic traditions. Landscape painting is considered as an expression of the state of mind of Chinese artists, the prevailing philosophical ideas, in particular Taoism, the embodiment of literary images associated with the natural origin. Despite the attention of the scientific community to the development of images of (...) nature in the art of ancient and modern China, there are few studies devoted to the causes and justification of certain processes that influenced the formation of the genre. The purpose of the study is to analyze the reasons for the appearance of images and motifs in the landscapes of Chinese artists in connection with the philosophical ideas of that time, cultural connotations in poetry and the principles of landscape art. The tasks include determining the most typical range of scenes and images in landscapes created from the III to XVIII centuries. The material is the work of Chinese artists who lived since the reign of the Wei Dynasty, during the heyday of landscapes in the era of the Tang Dynasty and up to the XVIII century. Of interest is the study of the mechanism of influence on the formation of figurative systems in Chinese landscape painting that developed in parallel poetry and landscape art. (shrink)

Abstract:Environmental ethics and policy have been largely developed around the concept of nature as a dynamic collection of living beings in direct interaction with humans. However, when we consider the Moon, Mars, and other worlds we encounter profoundly static and lifeless nature with essentially no history of human interaction. On what basis do we make decisions on the preservation or utilization of such lifeless landscapes? Here I suggest that static lifeless landscapes on other worlds have some parallels on (...) Earth in the upper elevations of the Antarctic Dry Valleys and the central depression of the Atacama Desert in Chile and Peru. In the soil of both locations life is absent or cannot grow and the timescales of landscape evolution vastly exceed human timescales. For all intents and purposes, these are static and lifeless landscapes. Today, human activities in Antarctica are carefully regulated with a view toward preservation while in the Atacama Desert resource mining has extensively altered the landscape. Thus, these two sites provide alternate possible futures for the Moon and Mars. Preservation of static lifeless landscapes could be based on two attributes. First, they provide a way to further define and understand the Earth and the limits of life—which is the current scientific motivation for biological and geological research activities there. Second, both on Earth and particularly on other worlds, lifeless landscapes may express states that are new to human experience akin to new forms of art or new branches of science. We don't understand these environments, their nature, or their relationship to us. In the case of Mars there may come to be a tension between preserving a lifeless landscape and introducing or enhancing life on that planet. (shrink)

Introduction Introduction / Jan de Vries 1 Art in History / Gary Schwartz 7 History in Art / J. W. Smit 17 Pt. I Art and Reality Market Scenes As Viewed by an Art Historian / Linda Stone-Ferrier 29 Market Scenes As Viewed by a Plant Biologist / Willem A. Brandenburg 59 Marine Paintings and the History of Shipbuilding / Richard W. Unger 75 Skies and Reality in Dutch Landscape / John Walsh 95 Some Notes on Interpretation / E. de (...) Jongh 119 Are These Girls Really So Neat? On Kitchen Scenes and Method / Jochen Becker 139 Didactic and Disguised Meanings? Several Seventeenth-Century Texts on Painting and the Iconological Approach to Northern Dutch Paintings of This Period / Eric J. Sluijter 175 The Changing Face of Realism / Lyckle de Vries 209 Pt. II Art, Economy, and Society Art History / Jan de Vries 249 The Volume and Value of Paintings in Holland at the Time of the Dutch Republic / Ad van der Woude 285 Works of Art in Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam: An Analysis of Subjects and Attributions / John Michael Montias 331 Conclusion Science, Commerce, and Art: Neglected Topics at the Junction of History and Art History / David Freedberg 377 Biographical Notes on the Authors 429 Index. (shrink)

“Else-where” is a synoptic survey of the representational values given to art, architecture, and cultural production from 2002 through 2011. Written primarily as a critique of what is suppressed in architecture and what is disclosed in art, the essays are informed by the passage out of post-structuralism and its disciplinary analogues toward the real Real . While architecture nominally addresses an environmental ethos, it also famously negotiates its own representational values by way of its putative autonomy ; its main repression (...) in this regard is “landscape,” figure of the Other and figure of the Real. Engaging forms of spectrality, and not necessarily speculative intelligence per se, architecture is also “conscious” of its own complicity in capitalist orders, a complicity that in part underwrites its avant-garde forms of agitation since the onset of modern architecture. As a result, and over the course of the twentieth century, architectural vanguards have successively been depleted such that they return only as reified half-measures in the late-modern production of difference. As such, the essay “Actually Existing Ground” examines the failed promise of Landscape Urbanism. Since the 1960s, as with the allied arts, architecture has evacuated many of the utopian gestures given to modernism and embraced a form of ultra-contingency in a direct alliance with the post-modern and post-Marxist concession to markets and to cultural production as principal means of establishing formal hegemony. This recourse or surrender to the economic-determinist ethos of post-modernity, regardless of attempts to problematize it and/or critique it through types of what Manfredo Tafuri has called “operative criticism” , has, arguably, all but failed, and with the suggestive return circa 2011 of new forms of resistance an exit from the accommodating spirit of the times is indicative of the expectation of strenuous, yet highly formal and non-discursive operations within artistic and architectural production. The essays collected in “Else-where” cross various disciplines, inclusive of landscape architecture, architecture, and visual art, to develop a nuanced critique of an emergent formal regard in the arts that is also an invocation of the highest coordinates given to the arts – formal ontology as speculative intelligence itself – or the return of the universal as utopian thought “here-and-now.”. (shrink)

In 2008, renowned Australian composer Peter Sculthorpe remarked that almost everything he has written since the early 1960s has been influenced by Indigenous music “because that was a music … shaped by the landscape over 50,000 years.” 3 His preference for accumulating “an effect of relentless prolongation” through the use of long drones has seen his music fail, until recently, to appeal to an Australian ear attuned to Bach and Mozart. 4 His aim, however, has not been to satisfy the (...) European-trained ear, but to “mirror the Australian outback”; to capture a sense of time and space that many Australians have repeatedly failed to access. 5 Sculthorpe‟s efforts to form connections with the landscape are by no means singular; representations of the bush have dominated the arts from early settlement, albeit in a largely negative fashion. The contradiction between an accepted Australian vision of the landscape as empty, unwelcoming bush or desert, and the social reality of a nation living mainly in coastal communities has not gone unnoticed. 6 Nevertheless, contemplating this “accepted vision” alongside the lukewarm reception of Sculthorpe‟s work gives rise to the following question: what conclusions, if any, may be drawn from insistently negative representations of the landscape? In consideration of this question, I propose an analysis of two texts in which the representations of landscape have been overlooked in favour of feminist or classical readings: Barbara Baynton‟s Bush Studies and Joan Lindsay‟s Picnic at Hanging Rock. If “landscape is personal and tribal history made visible,” what is one to make of Bush Studies? 7 The parallels between Baynton‟s narratives of isolation and her own experiences cannot fully account for her portrayals of the bush as “a lonely, hostile place, antagonistic to its inhabitants,” where time recedes into the vast distances of the plains, and the past and future are uncertain. 8 Baynton‟s settlers, cut adrift from cultural and religious traditions, fail to form communities and conform to the notion that “where si gnificant tradition counts for little, places may be virtually without time,” leading to “no awareness of history.” 9 In short, Baynton‟s settlers are plagued with a sense of timelessness that appears to originate from perception, rather than the environment. (shrink)

indians are the "singing remnants" or "graffiti," in the words of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson ("i am graffiti"). The forms this graffiti takes, our inscriptions on the landscape, are as numerous as our Nations, abundant as our ancestors who loved, lived, and passed down knowledge of our lands and histories. "You are the result of the love of thousands," writes Linda Hogan, who beseeches us to listen to the environment surrounding us (159). Deborah Miranda (Coastal Esselen and Chumash) reminds us that (...) we are also the result of violent histories, in her tribal memoir Bad Indians, a book that relishes the tales of her ancestors who resist and act out to survive. This harm, genocide, and settler mapping of worlds also... Read More. (shrink)

Understanding the neural underpinnings of emotion enables a re-imagining of traditional aesthetics in which landscape art is conceived as "dance for the dancer." Eschewing the "ocularcentric" for the _kinesthetic_ yields a fresh theory of artistic expression in landscape applicable to all fine art.

In Landscape, Natural Beauty, and the Arts, a distinguished group of scholars probes the complex structure of aesthetic responses to nature. Each of the chapters refines and expands the terms of discussion, and together they enrich the debate with insights from art history, literary criticism, geography and philosophy. To explore the interrelation between our conceptions of nature, beauty and art, the contributors consider the social construction of nature, the determination of our appreciation by artistic media, and the duality of nature's (...) determining in gardening. Showing that natural beauty is impregnated with concepts derived from the arts and from particular accounts of nature, the volume occasions questions of the distinction and relation between art and nature generally, and culminates in a set of philosophical studies of the role of scientific understanding, engagement, and emotion in the aesthetic appreciation of nature. (shrink)

Landscape, Natural Beauty and the Arts offers probing studies of the complex structure of aesthetic responses to nature. Each chapter refines and expands the terms of discussion, and together they enrich the debate with insights from art history, literary criticism, geography and philosophy. To explore the interrelation between our conceptions of nature, beauty and art, the contributors consider the social construction of nature, the determination of our appreciation by artistic media, and the duality of nature's determining in gardening. Showing that (...) natural beauty is impregnated with concepts derived from the arts and from particular accounts of nature, the volume occasions questions of the distinction and relation between art and nature generally, and culminates in a set of philosophical studies of the role of scientific understanding, engagement and emotion in the aesthetic appreciation of nature. (shrink)

This article deals with the Chinese ink painting tradition, as a paradigm in which art and life are coupled and intertwined. In fact, in Chinese classical aesthetics, art and life do not produce a dramatic tension, but are inscribed in a common process of naturalness or spontaneity. The painter has to learn how the breath, or vital energy, that flows in every single image-phenomenon, can be enlivened by the brush strokes. Moreover, the paper builds a dialogue between the European and (...) the Chinese main patterns. Showing alternately the continuity or the discontinuity between art and life, both traditions of thought display the possibility to learn a sort of “art of living”, through – and not despite – the dynamic de-coincidence that appears in the folds of human experience. (shrink)

We explore themes in Nobel Prize–winning economist James M. Buchanan’s work and apply his Ethics and Economic Progress to problems facing individuals and firms. We focus on Buchanan’s analysis of the individual work ethic, his exhortations to “pay the preacher” of the “institutions of moral-ethical communication,” and his notion of law as “public capital.” We highlight several ways people with other-regarding preferences can contribute to social flourishing and some of the ways those who have “affected to trade for the public (...) good” might want to redirect their efforts. We show how Buchanan’s work has considerable implications for business ethics. Just as his economic analysis of politics changed how we understand government, we think his economic analysis of ethics can (and should) change how we understand business. (shrink)

Abstract:Ninety years ago, John Dewey’s discussion of “the religious”—as distinct from traditional “religion”—opened new ways of thinking about the connection between spirituality and everyday forms of human action. But in what ways does our contemporary religious landscape invite us to reimagine and reconstruct Deweyan approaches to religion? This essay addresses this question by focusing on how the community of El Paso, Texas came together to respond to one of the worst racially motivated mass shootings in recent history. This community’s use (...) of spirituality, art, and institutional religion all corroborate key Deweyan insights and invite us to stretch them further. (shrink)

The algorithmic turn in photography raises the question of whether an algorithmically generated image is even a photograph at all. This paradox is abundant on India's urban streets, where the pedestrian or road user is met with giant photo saturated flex hoardings printed with political and community messages and photo-shopped portraits of gods, chief ministers and party workers. In this article, attention to photo-based political posters alongside art practices sharing common elements of digital capture and postproduction contextualizes a reading of (...) technologically produced visual landscapes in the South Indian city of Bangalore. Informed by Vilèm Flusser, the techno-materiality of hoardings are interpreted as visual practices whose reliance on Microsoft and Adobe softwares reveal more than the semiotic information that is ostensibly transmitted; in so doing the extent to which photography is a useful entry point for assessing the visuality in which we're currently living and how this gets locally inflected in the case of India is explored. (shrink)

The current intense concern with landscape in the arts and social theory is seen as a response to the shaking of the Modern world-view, which has attended the growing awareness of the ecology crisis. The dilemmas associated with developing a new conception of the relationship between humans and the natural world is explored through a critical engagement with the work of Heidegger and Habermas.The article develops a symbolic conception of landscape as a place where the human world and the earth (...) meet and a new sense of the human condition set within ecological constraints can be articulated and reflected upon. (shrink)

Introduction : reinterpreting landscapes in an evolving world -- The pastoral tradition as inherited motives -- From classical pastorals to pastoral landscapes : rebirth of the landscape idea through analytical narration -- Instances of pastoral motivation in contemporary landscape analytical practice -- Articulating analytical narratives of contemporary pastoral landscapes -- The landscape analyst's pastoral action.

Entranced Earth looks at audiovisual, literary, performative, and testimonial sources to examine the impact of neocolonial extractivist industries on the natural environment in the Western Hemisphere.

"You are here, a map declares, but of course you are not, any more than you truly occupy the vantage point into which a landscape painting puts you. How maps and paintings figure and reconfigure space--as well as our place in it--is the subject of Edward S. Casey's study, an exploration of how we portray the world and its many places. Casey's discussion ranges widely from Northern Sung landscape painting to nineteenth-century American and British landscape painting and photography, from prehistoric (...) petroglyphs and medieval portolan charts to seventeenth-century Dutch cartography and land survey maps of the American frontier. From these culturally and historically diverse forays a theory of representation emerges. Casey proposes that the representation of place in visual works be judged in terms not of resemblance, but of reconnecting with an earth and world that are not the mere content of mind or language--a reconnection that calls for the embodiment and implacement of the human subject." -- Book jacket. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Grand Manner Aesthetics in LandscapeFrom Canvas to CelluloidEmily E. Auger (bio)Popular films about the environment and related human and material resource issues, particularly colonialism, tend to enhance the appeal of their subject matter by aesthetically transforming it according to audience preferences and tastes. Such mediating strategies are perhaps too familiar to contemporary artists of all types who would prefer to work beyond the limits of what their readers or (...) viewers are prepared to tolerate as entertainment, but the particular emphases and accommodations made by film artists to convey messages about the environment are little changed from those strategies used by painters over the past three centuries to a similar end. The methods by which environmental issues are aestheticized in late-twentieth-century film is directly and historically related to those established for grand manner painters by Nicholas Poussin (1594-1665) and taught at the French academy from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. That these fundamentals were part of the training of artists who would be willing and able to enhance the glory of Louis XIV's absolutist monarchy seems not to have undermined the popular enthusiasm their association with the "classical" past generated outside of France. Thus, the grand manner ideal was repeated, elaborated, and adapted by subsequent British and American artists, teachers, and aestheticians, both amateur and professional, including Joshua Reynolds (1723-92), president of the British academy; theoretician Edmund Burke (1729-97); and such American painters as Benjamin West (1738-1820), Thomas Cole (1801-48), Frederic Church (1826-1900), and Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902).Examples of filmic adaptations of grand manner aesthetics considered here include English director John Boorman's The Emerald Forest (1985) and Anglo-French director Roland Joffé's The Mission (1986), both British productions; Kevin Costner's Dances with Wolves (1990) and John McTiernan's [End Page 96] Medicine Man (1992), both American productions with American directors; and Australian director Bruce Beresford's Black Robe (1991), a Canadian/Australian production based on Irish-born, Canadian novelist Brian Moore's best-selling novel of the same title (1985). While it might be argued that these films merely show the adaptation of academy-based grand manner ideals and principles to new imperialist interests, this article demonstrates how they educate and draw public sympathy to global environmental concerns, albeit with reference to a recognizably Western aesthetic tradition. Thus, the interest of this study to educators and students of the visual arts is twofold: first, it demonstrates the continued adaptation and application of aesthetic principles originally developed in the seventeenth century to a technology-based medium; and second, it shows how those aesthetic principles are currently applied in film to direct and modulate public opinion on matters well beyond the domain of pure or theoretical aesthetics.The grand manner aesthetic, first defined with reference to seventeenth-century painting and still apparent in twentieth-century film, is largely attributable to Poussin since he was an artist who wrote—and wrote well—about his understanding of artistic quality and priorities. He was deeply committed to classicism; he thought the elements of a painting should be idealized rather than realistic and particularized, that those elements should be clearly delineated in a linear manner, that exotic subjects and excessive color should be avoided as both appeal too much to the senses and not enough to the mind, and that figures should always predominate over landscape. Poussin's ideals became the model for students training at the French Academy, an institution officially formed in 1648 under the direct control of the government. Aspiring academicians were exhorted to produce images that were usually composites of the better, and sometimes imagined, aspects of the appearance, character, and deeds of the fictional and historical people, events, and locations that were their subjects. They were never allowed to forgot the hierarchy of value that placed genre painting forever below history painting, yet it cannot have escaped their notice that a certain number of well-executed examples of the lowly still life, domestic interior, and picturesque landscape on the exhibition walls made the "grandness" of more ambitious works more apparent by contrast.The French Academy soon became the envy of foreign upper-level bureaucrats cognizant... (shrink)

Business ethics courses have been launched with professors from business pulling on one oar, and professors of philosophy pulling on the other, but they lack a sense of direction. Let's begin with the basics: What is an ehtical decision? More fundamentally, why the interest in professional ethics in the first place?There are over 300 centers for the study of appIied ethics in this country-why? The events which face our society today are outside the business-oriented collection of shared beIiefs that set (...) our pubIic policy agenda. Cur beIiefs are too narrow, thus we see, understand, and control small slices of life.Business ethics should be the study of the structure and impact on us of what we call "business science," e.g., accounting, marketing, economics, law, etc., and the corresponding study of the process of what Carl Jung called individuation: learning to become one's own uniqueself in the face of these bodies of professional knowledge which have structured our lives and charted the direction for our sensibilities for too long. (shrink)

Business ethics courses have been launched with professors from business pulling on one oar, and professors of philosophy pulling on the other, but they lack a sense of direction. Let's begin with the basics: What is an ehtical decision? More fundamentally, why the interest in professional ethics in the first place?There are over 300 centers for the study of appIied ethics in this country-why? The events which face our society today are outside the business-oriented collection of shared beIiefs that set (...) our pubIic policy agenda. Cur beIiefs are too narrow, thus we see, understand, and control small slices of life.Business ethics should be the study of the structure and impact on us of what we call "business science," e.g., accounting, marketing, economics, law, etc., and the corresponding study of the process of what Carl Jung called individuation: learning to become one's own uniqueself in the face of these bodies of professional knowledge which have structured our lives and charted the direction for our sensibilities for too long. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Art in Social Studies: Exploring the World and Ourselves with RembrandtIftikhar Ahmad (bio)IntroductionRembrandt’s art lends itself as a fertile resource for teaching and learning social studies. His art not only captures the social studies themes relevant to the Dutch Golden Age, but it also offers a description of human relations transcending temporal and spatial frontiers. Rembrandt is an imaginative storyteller with a keen insight for minute details. His narrative (...) of the culture, society, economy, geography, and contemporary events of seventeenth-century Dutch life is as vivid and perceptive as a historian’s eloquent text. How people lived in community, how the city of Amsterdam functioned, how important religion was to people, how diverse and cosmopolitan the culture was, how interdependent the world was in the seventeenth century, and what the social and civic ideals of the Dutch people were during the Golden Age—Rembrandt’s paintings, etchings, and drawings neatly organize these and other social studies themes into visual messages. More importantly, our appreciation and interpretation of Rembrandt’s work helps us learn about not just Dutch society and culture of four hundred years ago but also about ourselves. The passion, emotions, conflicts, and inspirations of his subjects are essentially human and eternal, arousing empathy in every generation and cross-section of society. In this article I look at Rembrandt’s art for the purpose of teaching and learning social studies in our contemporary interdependent world—a world that is chronologically and geographically distant from the Dutch Golden Age but in many respects shares its enduring values, norms, ideals, pursuits, challenges, and possibilities. To do so, I employ a conceptual lens—the curriculum thematic strands of the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS)—to examine Rembrandt’s art in order to explore life and make meaning of the story that is being told about the human condition, and to seek out its relevance to ourselves and [End Page 19] our world in the early twenty-first century. Although Rembrandt’s oeuvre is extensive, including the diverse genres of self-portraits, group portraits, drawings, etchings, landscapes, and religious themes, for our limited purpose I have selected only those works that, in my judgment, correspond with the following seven of the ten thematic curriculum strands of the NCSS:CultureTime, Continuity, and ChangePeople, Places, and EnvironmentIndividual Development and IdentityProduction, Distribution, and ConsumptionGlobal ConnectionsCivic Ideals and PracticesThese thematic curriculum strands are derived from the foundational disciplines of the social sciences and humanities such as anthropology, history, geography, sociology, political science, psychology, economics, philosophy, and law, but they are conceptually interrelated.1 For example, culture is a core concept in anthropology but it is also relevant to Time, Continuity, and Change, which is the main concept in the history discipline. Similarly, culture is relevant to the theme of People, Places, and Environment, which is the central focus of geography. More importantly, since social studies is about human experiences, there is a general consensus among the social studies educators that classroom teachers should draw content knowledge not just from the social sciences as mentioned here but from wide sources “to construct curricular experiences enabling students to actively relate new knowledge to existing understanding.”2 That is to say all fields of knowledge that are related to human civilization and that help in developing students’ skills in reflective thinking, decision making, and problem solving are relevant to social studies education. Those fields also include art. Rembrandt’s art is especially relevant because his themes are universal and the social, political, and economic contexts in which he created his work—globalization, individualism, and free enterprise—are more or less similar to our age.It needs to be mentioned that by looking at Rembrandt’s art from the social studies perspective it is not my intention to strip his work of its aesthetic scope and value. On the contrary, by looking at Rembrandt in the social studies classroom I seek to humanize social studies education itself. That [End Page 20] is to say I wish to step back from the conventional view of social studies to feel free from the bonds of traditionalism and discover, describe, analyze... (shrink)

While inanimate objects can neither experience nor express emotions, in principle they can be expressive of emotions. In particular, music is a paradigmatic example of something expressive of emotions that surely cannot feel anything at all. The Contour theory accounts for music expressiveness in terms of those resemblances that hold between its external and perceivable properties and the typical contour of human emotional behavior. Provided that some critical aspects are emended – notably, the stress on the perception of similarity instead (...) of the more plausible hypothesis that the listener perceives manifestations that are similar – we are inclined to endorse contour theory. In particular, we share its basic idea that expressive properties are perceived. Although other kinds of processes – high-level conceptual inferences, imagination – sometimes characterize our encounters with music, still perception constitutes the standard process underlying the detection of expressiveness. Moreover, we propose to extend contour theory to visual arts. Taking into consideration, as a case study, depicted landscapes, we observe that they frequently cannot but express emotions such as joy, sadness, liveliness or melancholy. The fact that pictures, unlike music, lack any temporal dimension is a prima facie reason for doubting the extendibility of contour theory’s conceptual arsenal to them. Nevertheless, while being obviously unable to behave somehow, we claim that depicted landscapes can perfectly convey dynamic information. If this is the case, the extension of the notion of contour to visuals art via the stress on the notion of dynamism would represent a second interesting revision of contour theory. (shrink)

The time of the landscape is not the time when people started describing landscapes in poems or representing gardens in works of art: it is the time when the landscape imposed itself as a specific object of thought. This object of thought was constituted through quarrels about how gardens were to be arranged, through accounts of travels to solitary lakes and remote mountains, or through evocations of mythological or rustic paintings. Jacques Rancière retraces these narratives and quarrels, showing how (...) they gave rise to a form of sensibility capable of modifying the existing configuration of modes of perception and objects of thought. The time of the landscape is the time when both the harmony of arranged gardens and the disharmony of wild nature contributed to a revolution in the criteria of the beautiful and the meaning of the word ‘art’. It coincided with the birth of aesthetics, understood as a regime for the perception of and thinking about art, and also with the French Revolution, understood as a revolution in the very idea of what binds a human community. The time of the landscape was the time when the conjunction of these two upheavals brought into focus, however hazily, a common horizon: that of a revolution that no longer concerns only state laws or artistic norms, but the very forms of sensible experience. This brilliant and wide-ranging book will be of interest to students and scholars in philosophy, literature, the visual arts and the humanities generally, and it will appeal to anyone interested in critical theory and philosophy. (shrink)

Surprising artistic interventions in the landscape of the public everyday are psychologically, socially, and politically beneficial to individuals as well as their communities. Such interventions enable their audiences to access moments of surprising inspiration, self-reflection, and revitalization. These spontaneous moments may offer access to the experience of distance from the rational “self,” allowing the irrational and purely emotive that resides within all of us to assert itself. It is this sensual instinct that all we too frequently push aside, particularly in (...) the public realm, for the sake of our responsibilities. Urban communities in particular are persistently accosted by visual and aural advertisements and consumerist lures, that further discourage individuals from accessing their non-rational selves. Yet, I argue that it would improve the health and vibrancy of our communal lives if we encountered among others in public, even for a moment, the strong feelings of sudden elation or confusion that we generally consider to be private. I also argue that an addition could be made to the already diverse oeuvre of artistic approaches that comprise the realm of “sound art” and that it may be termed “musical intervention art” – or, simply put, music played in a circumscribed area in the form of an outdoor installation, that is designed to accost, surprise, overwhelm, and through this, actively engage. This article will describe an imaginary example of musical installation art. (shrink)