Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2017 Heft: 216 Seiten: 225-248.

The most notable development in public sculpture of the last thirty years has been the disappearance of the sculpture itself. Ever since Jean Tinguely’s Homage to New York destroyed itself at the Museum of Modern Art in 1960, sculptors have tried to find new ways to make the sculptural object invisible, immaterial, or remote. Where the sculpture did have some material presence, it often took unexpected forms. As Rosalind Krauss says, “Rather surprising things have come to be (...) called sculpture: narrow corridors with TV monitors at the ends; large photographs documenting country hikes; mirrors placed at strange angles in ordinary rooms; temporary lines cut into the floor of the desert.”However various these experiments may seem, they began with a single motive: to escape the constraints of the pedestal, the gallery, and finally of art itself. To prevent this new work from becoming just another commodity in the market, artists either produced works so intangible or remote they could not be bought and sold, or disseminated their ideas in so many reproducible forms they could not be monopolized. The political nature of these motives also meant that much of this “sculpture” could be considered “public.” Changing the nature of the art meant changing the role of the audience as well, questioning the purely contemplative role the observer plays in the conventional setting of the museum or gallery. According to Henry Sayre, “As the avant-garde work of art denies its own autonomy, it implicates the audience in its workings.”3 As the aesthetic focus shifts from the object to the experience it provokes, the relationship of the two goes beyond mere implication: the public becomes the sculpture. Artists, like Richard Serra, whose goal is to illuminate the material nature of space and the often tenuous materiality of the observer’s own body, have made “the viewer, in effect, the subject of the work,” to quote Douglas Crimp. Michael North is associate professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of The Final Sculpture: Public Monuments and Modern Poets and is currently completing a study of the politics of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound. (shrink)

This article explores the transformative power of art circulation by analysing surprising narratives of abducted fountains across the early modern Mediterranean area under the political influence of the Spanish Empire. The object of this study will be the stories of Italian fountains stolen by Spanish viceroys or rescued during naval skirmishes between the Holy League and the Ottoman Empire. These narratives reveal a widespread desire for fountains throughout the Mediterranean, which generated a sequence of geographical relocations and cultural translations. My (...) aim is to conceptualise the desire for Italian fountains as an engine for continental circulation, taking into consideration several cases of stolen, abducted, or captive works of sculpture whose stories navigate the dubious boundaries of historical truth and resemble more popular episodes of thefts of relics or the kidnapping and trafficking of enslaved people. Sometimes demonstrable facts, sometimes charming legends linked to the suggestive power of water, these episodes disclose the life of monumental art in motion and subvert the widespread reading of fountains as site-specific objects. (shrink)

continent. 1.4 (2011): 242—252. Introduction The following two works were produced by visual artist Jonas Staal and writer Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei during a visit as artists in residence at The Bag Factory, Johannesburg, South Africa during the summer of 2010. Both works were produced in situ and comprised in both cases a public intervention conceived by Staal and a textual work conceived by Van Gerven Oei. It was their aim, in both cases, to produce complementary works that could (...) be read “through each other,” in which the movement of artistic construction would be imitated by textual deconstruction and vice versa. Both works deal with the way in which capital, apartheid, and monumentality are interwoven in South-African society. The Missing Link addresses a monument for democracy, erected on the premises of a private corporation running both an amusement park and the Apartheid Museum franchise. The textual intervention accompanying this public intervention investigates the limits of the inclusiveness of the anti-discrimination section in the South-African constitution, itself a monumental work of democracy. The Monument for the Distribution of Wealth deals with the history and eventual dissolution of a monumental square, commemorating the Soweto Uprising, in one of the poorest townships of Johannesburg. The history accompanying this public dismemberment of memory is equally fragmented, which is expressed by the many voices recounting uncertain and perhaps even irrelevant “facts” about the genius loci, the way in which the memorial space has actually entered into the memory of the inhabitants surrounding it. Next to their individual practices, Staal and Van Gerven Oei have worked together on a number of projects ever since 2007, including several art residencies. Their work involves an investigation of the different interfaces between art, politics, and public space in media ranging from theater and public interventions, to video installations and (co-authored) textual works. The Missing Link Missing Link (1) Missing Link (2) Missing Link (3) Intervention on the monument entitled The Seven Pillars of the Constitution , part of the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, South Africa. The Seven Pillars represent the constitutional values propagated in South Africa since the abolition of the apartheid regime. The monument and museum were built by the Gold Reef Resorts corporation, which is also responsible for the theme park and casino next to it. By placing the word “capitalism” on the wall surrounding the museum, the capitalist system and the constant social divisions that it implies are interpreted as sophistic continuations of apartheid politics. Through the capitalist system, apartheid is still operational within South African society. Whereas during the apartheid regime, the separation clearly ran along race divisions, in the current, “democratic” system, the same actual separation is sustained without it being an explicit element of the foundations of the country, i.e. the constitution. This intervention foregrounds the constant role of capitalism is both periods. At the same time the intervention acknowledges that contemporary Western artisthood is a mirror of the privileges that are offered by the capitalist system, and the type of artist that it produces. The intervention initiates a critical discourse concerning the capitalist system situated within the disaster of capitalism itself, in other words: through the desire to break with the presumption that art would be able to operate outside the capitalist system and to confirm that art—and the artist himself—is in fact modeled on this system. The public intervention by Staal was supplemented by a textual intervention by Van Gerven Oei: a proposition to alter the seventeenth amendment of the South African constitution. Even though the anti-discrimination legislation in South-Africa is one of the most stringent and inclusive in the world, one factor—wealth—remains outside its scope, thus continuing the schisms along racial lines produced during the apartheid regime: §9.3. The state may not unfairly discriminate directly or indirectly against anyone on one or more grounds, including race, gender, sex, pregnancy, marital status, ethnic or social origin, colour, sexual orientation, age, disability, religion, conscience, belief, culture, language, birth, and wealth. Monument for the Distribution of Wealth Intervention concerning the June 16 Memorial Acre in Central Western Jabavu, one of the poorest townships of Johannesburg. The monument comprises a park on which different are placed recalling an important protest the black population against the former apartheid regime. In 1976, from a school adjacent to the park, they started a massive protest against the introduction of Afrikaans in the school curriculum. The police reacted violently, and shot several hundreds of students. The construction of the June 16 Memorial Acre was started in 2005, and from the start was the paragon of corruption. Coordinated by local politicians, some family members of the protest leader from 1976 gained control of the realization of the monument, outside the regulation through external institutions. The available budget of 41 million rand (at that time well over 5 million euro) was largely embezzled. In the meantime, the monument has become fully dilapidated and defaced. The park has become overgrown with weeds and covered in a layer of dirt, and the local population is slowly plundering the square to use the material for the construction and decoration of their own houses. The Monument for the Distribution of Wealth develops the dynamics already existent around the June 16 Memorial Acre. Without obtaining official permission in advance, several local inhabitants were hired to break down the monument, sort the materials, and offer it to the neighborhood. Thus, the redistribution of wealth after the fall of the apartheid regime is finally taking place, albeit from the mere remains of the capital that was once invested in the community. The words “monument” and “for free” are spray-painted on the stacks of material, both in English and Zulu, as these are locally the most common languages. Van Gerven Oei supplemented Staal’s public intervention with an account of the history of the monument based on a series of interviews. The account clarifies how the different interests within the protest 1976 are reflected in the exceeding decay of the park, and how in the end those interests were represented by the June 16 Memorial Acre. Monument for the Distribution of Wealth 1: Removing stones Monument for the Distribution of Wealth 3: Pulling down statues Monument for the Distribution of Wealth 4: Offering the material Monument for the Distribution of Wealth 5: Offering the material Monument for the Distribution of Wealth 6 The next day A Fragmentary History of the Monument for the Distribution of Wealth, Formerly Known as the June 16 Memorial Acre in Central Western Jabavu, Soweto Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei The following text, based on interviews and online research aims to provide parts of a history of the park in front of Morris Isaacson High School in Central Western Jabavu, Soweto. The idea for the transformation of the park into a memorial site has its source in the events of June 16, 1976: the start of the the student uprising in Soweto. The development of the park was started in the early 1980s, and the actual transformation into a memorial site, the June 16 Memorial Acre, was initiated in 2005. Over the last few years, several monumental additions have been made to the park: A marble monument with three pillars was revealed on June 16, 2006. A sculpture of a book and several billboards on June 16, 2008. A sculpture of student leader Tsietsi Mashinini on June 16, 2010. The park was transformed into the Monument for the Distribution of Wealth on August 3, 2010. According to the entry “Youth Struggle” on the website South African History Online, the Bantu Education Act was introduced in 1953 . In 1954 , Dr Verwoerd, Minister of Native Affairs, stated: “What is the use of teaching the Bantu child mathematics when it cannot use it in practice? That is quite absurd.” According to the entry “Soweto uprising” on Wikipedia, the Afrikaans Medium Decree was issued in 1974 , forcing all black schools to use Afrikaans and English in a 50-50 mix as languages of instruction. The Regional Director of Bantu Education (Northern Transvaal Region), J.G. Erasmus, told Circuit Inspectors and Principals of Schools that from January 1, 1975 , Afrikaans had to be used for mathematics, arithmetic, and social studies from standard five (7th grade). English would be the medium for general science and practical subjects. Indigenous languages would be used for religion instruction, music, and physical culture. According the entry “Soweto uprising” on Wikipedia, on April 30, 1976 , students from the Orlando West Junior School in Soweto went on strike, refusing to go to school. Their example was followed by other schools in Soweto. A student from Morris Isaacson High School, Toboho “Tsietsi” Mashinini, proposed a meeting on June 13, 1976 to discuss further action. According to Weizmann Hamilton’s article “The Soweto Uprising 1976,” which appeared in the September 1986 edition of Inqaba Ya Basebenzi (Fortress of the Revolution), on June 13, 1976 , the South African Students’ Movement called a meeting at the Donaldson Community Center in Orlando. 300-400 Students representing 55 schools decided to hold a mass demonstration on June 16. According to Brian Mokhele, member of the Joint Community Safety Forum, Dr Edelstein was the first victim of the Soweto uprising and killed the day before the march on June 15, 1976 . Edelstein was an administrator at the pass office in Jabavu and gave golf courses to the local community. Edelstein was put in a garbage bin and pierced by pickaxes. The garbage bin was left at the very spot of the murder for many years. A few years ago, a child was beheaded at the same spot, and the basketball court next to it has been abandoned since. According to Marcus Neustetter, founder of the Trinity Session, this story is untrue. According the entry “Soweto uprising” on Wikipedia, on June 16 , Tsietsi Mashinini led students from Morris Isaacson High School to join up with others who walked from Naledi High School. A crowd of between 3,000 and 10,000 eventually ended up near Orlando High School. According to Raymond Marlowe, a local photographer, Tsietsi Mashinini was heading the march. According to the entry “Hector Pieterson” on Wikipedia, Dr Edelstein died on June 16, 1976 , stoned to death by mob and left with a sign around his neck proclaiming “Beware Afrikaaners.” The first child to die that day was called Hastings Ndlovu. According to Pat Motsiri, Orlando West is claiming struggle heritage through the Hector Pieterson Museum, while Hector Pieterson was from Jabavu. According to Pat Motsiri, his generation effectively struggled between 1980 and 1991, forcing the release of Nelson Mandela and negotiations with the apartheid regime while the 1976-generation was safely in exile. Nevertheless, this has not been recognized in any monument. After the abolition of apartheid, the generation from 1976 returned from exile, occupied important government and ANC positions, creating an abundance of 1976 memorials and refusing to acknowledge that this was only possible because of the younger generation’s struggle. He calls this a generational conflict. According to Archibald Dlamini, the park officer responsible for the Memorial Acre, he started working for the municipality in 1978. In 1981/82 , Isaac Makhele from Pimville, who used to work in the cemetery business, was the first developer of the park. It used to be just a normal park until City Parks decided to develop the Memorial Acre in 2006. In 2007 the work was stopped by the community. According to Brian Mokhele, he left the country in 1989 after he participated in the riots of 1986. But when he returned in 1999 he found that nothing had changed. He says that they were promised to be protected by the Constitution, but that reality is different. The police uses fear to suppress them so that they don’t come out to talk openly. He has been arrested twice, both times harassed and tortured by the police, but in the end always released without indictment. He says that this is their way to threaten communities to back off from politics. According to Moses, who is sitting outside rolling a joint, Brian knows everything. He tells Brian to tell me everything he knows. According to Brian Mokhele, Tsietsi Mashinini was possibly murdered in 1990 during his exile in New York. Two weeks before he was supposed to return to South Africa, his papers in order, he was found dead under mysterious circumstances. His coffin was sealed when he was buried. According to Pat Motsiri, he came up with the idea for the Memorial Acre in 2003 . He submitted the documents for the proposal to the council, which sidelined him as soon as the budget came out in 2005 . According to Brian Mokhele, there was on estimation R 41,000,000 spent to redesign the park and turn it into the Memorial Acre. The millions were divided by Amos Masondo, the mayor of Soweto, the local councilor Bongani D. Zondi, and the director of the city of Johannesburg, Pat Lephunya. They were dividing the money between several contractors: Tsietsi Mashinini’s brothers were involved in the development of the park, they got the tender to do the green areas, the landscaping. Construction was done by other companies, some did the paving, the toilets, etc. EMBA, a private company appointed by the municipality was in control of the money flow, but the money was quickly gone. According to Raymond Marlowe, the contractor bought a BMW with the money. According to Archibald Dlamini, the Mashinini brothers got the tender, so the space would look more like the other places around in Soweto. It was agreed that after they were done, they would return the property to the municipality. They did whatever they could do. According to Mafaisa, a member of the Jabavu business community, he was one of the contractors for the landscaping and the pavement under Mpho Mashinini, one of the brothers. He says that I should contact Mavi for information on Mpho. According to Poi Stuurman, a local youth worker, Mafaisa is one of the guys who ran away with the money. According to Mavi, Mpho Mashinini was never a contractor. The contracts were organized by Sbu Butelezi, the former head of the Gauteng Department for Public Works. The June 16 Foundation and the Mashinini brothers will be the beneficiaries of the park when it is finished. According to Brian Mokhele, City Parks did not accept the Memorial Acre because it was not finished. The rest of the year, the unfinished park is not maintained, as should have happened. This was done deliberately so that in the end they can just clean the whole thing up and have a reason to redo the whole park. According to Brian Mokhele, the Mashinini brothers now work for the government. People that manipulate for money purposes always come from the government’s side. Because the park was left unfinished, the people from the neighborhood are taking away the stones to decorate their own homes with. According to Archibald Dlamini, because City Parks doesn’t accept responsibility of the park, he officially has nothing the guard, except for his cottage, which is municipal property. The thieves come at night and destroy the park, but he cannot do anything because he is sleeping. According to the website of the Thanda Foundation on June 16, 2006 a bronze statue of Hector Pieterson, the first child to die in the 1976 protests, made by Kobus Hattingh and Jacob Maponyane was unveiled in the Maponya Mall in Soweto. The statue is sculpted after the famous image shot by Sam Nzima of Mbuyisa Makhubo carrying the dead body of the boy. The sculpture was sponsored by the Thanda Foundation, founded by the Swedish entrepreneur Dan Olofsson and South-African entrepreneur Matthews Phosa. According to the official website of the City of Johannesburg, the Memorial Acre and Artwork were unveiled in 2006. According to a blog post on sowetouprisings.com, the Memorial Acre was still under development on July 24, 2006. According to Archibald Dlamini, City Parks only cleans up the park once a year just before the June 16 celebrations. Everybody is waiting for the Mashinini brothers to finish their job. The last time he talked with them was in 2007 . According to a sign on the school grounds of the Morris Isaacson High School, the June 16 Trail will be finished in 2008 . According to a blog post on sowetouprisings.com, the Memorial Acre contains another monument erected in Tsietsi’s honor. The monument was created as part of the Sunday Times Heritage Public Art program. Its physical form resembles a giant book which symbolizes the crisis in education experienced in 1976. On the face of the book is the map of the route taken by the students from Morris Isaacson High School in Central Western Jabavu to Phefeni Junior Secondary in Orlando West (currently the site of the Hector Pieterson Museum), while the back cover of the ‘book’ is inscribed with a tribute to Tsietsi Mashinini. The monument was revealed on June 16, 2008 . According to Marcus Neustetter, the billboards on the Memorial Acre were part of a school project realized in 2008. Following several workshops, the students from different high schools along the June 16 Trail were invited to work with artists on the billboards, while the neighborhood community was invited to watch the process during the festivities on June 15 and 16, 2008 . The billboards were supposed to be removed because of construction works on the Memorial Acre, which never ended up happening. According to Brian Mokhele, the former toilet facilities were converted into a house for the park officer. This park officer has been working for city parks for more than 12-15 years, but does nothing here, because the park, including the new toilet buildings, is not finished. The government is now moving around looking for people to take this job because they stopped it. They confronted everybody who was going in and chased them away. According to John, in 2009 , some girls, around 16 or 17 years old, were raped by four men who had been drinking in a local shebeen. When the bar quit they said that they would go home by car, but instead raped the girls on the Memorial Acre nearby. This happened in the unfinished toilets, because the doors couldn’t be closed. According to Brian Mokhele, there used to be some fences around the park because of the construction work that was eventually stopped, but these were also stolen. According to Archibald Dlamini, people from the neighborhood started about two and a half years ago, and the last piece was stolen near the end of 2009 . Sometimes he would catch someone with a roll of fence, and then use it for his own cottage. According to the official website of the City of Johannesburg, a statue of Tsietsi Mashinini by Johannes Pokhela was revealed on June 16, 2010 , “Youth Day.” According to Shirley Makutoane, deputy principal of Isaac Morrison High School, the statue of Tsietsi Mashinini, funded by the June 16 Foundation, has temporarily been placed within the school perimeter. The statue will be moved to the Memorial Acre when it will be finished, in 2011 . According to Brian Mokhele, beside the June 16 Foundation, there is also a June 16 Memorial Acre Foundation. Both foundations are quarreling about the money involved in the Memorial Acre project. Nobody knows who’s involved in them. According to Marcus Neustetter, the June 16 Foundation consists of people that were part of 1976 protest movement, local government officials, representatives of the Hector Pieterson Museum, and the council. According to students from the Isaac Morrison High School, the statue of Tsietsi Mashinini is on the school ground because on the Memorial Acre it would be vandalized by youths from White City, an adjacent neighborhood. Accorcing to Brian Mokhele, the statue of Tsietsi should eventually be mounted on the Memorial Acre. It is wrong that the statue is in the school at the moment, because it is not a public school. He wants the statues to depict the massiveness of the force that was coming into Soweto after the protests. According to Brian Mokhele, City Parks, City of Jo’burg, City Lights, and SAPS are making some sort of plan to take the plan back. They want to remove the trees from the Memorial Acre, and redesign the Memorial Acre into a relaxing park, without political content. They want to depoliticize the square. In doing so,they will have their own employment and not use local workforces. According to Brian Mokhele, the community wants to remove the monuments, amphitheater, and sculptures from the Memorial Acre because they do not resemble anything. The sculptures should be depicting the truth of what happened, because the Memorial Acre is a political heritage site. He wants to involve the people that actually participated in the struggle to make the monument so that everyone can enjoy it and get a better understanding of the struggle heritage. Therefore, he proposes collective ideology in which everyone has a say. This would prevent future vandalization of the monument. According to Pat Motsiri, the sculptures must depict the event around June 16, 1976. Like the story of Dr Edelstein, who was pierced by pickaxes, forced into a garbage bin and burned alive. According to Jonas Staal, the Memorial Acre should be destroyed, its elements stacked on pallets, thus forming the Monument for the Distribution of Wealth . According to Mafaisa, his men can do the work quickly. He has about twenty men working under him. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 38.2 (2004) 105-115 [Access article in PDF] Intimacy and Monumentality in Chandigarh, North India: Le Corbusier's Capitol Complex and Nek Chand Saini's Rock Garden Sharon Irish School of Architecture University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Chandigarh's Le Corbusier: The Struggle for Modernity in Postcolonial India, by Vikramaditya Prakash. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002, 179pp., $35.00 cloth. The seventh century poet and philosopher Dharmakirti wrote of (...) the path we each must make: No one behind, no one ahead, The path the ancients cleared has closed. And the other path, everyone's path, easy and wide, goes nowhere. I am alone and find my way.1The image in Figure 1 shows the bottom of a concrete ramp that angles back upon itself as it connects two levels of the government complex in Chandigarh and ends in a grassy hillside that has several dirt paths cutting across it. The concrete ramp begins just to the left of Le Corbusier's Assembly Hall (Figure 2). What I hope is evident from just two images is the contrast between the curving, unplanned path that pedestrians have made as they leave the bottom of the ramp, and the axial, monumental path implicit in the organization of the large concrete plaza in front of the Assembly Hall. One is informal and intimate because of the many footprints that have worn away the grass; the other is formal and monumental in its carefully controlled framing of a sculptural presence. They are two very different paths, offering different rewards as we wander upon them.As Vikramaditya Prakash's book, Chandigarh's Le Corbusier, emphasizes, the Capitol Complex derived from Le Corbusier's personal mythology, transmogrified somewhat by the site, the politics, and the climate. Le Corbusier "considered it the true mission of modern architecture to reestablish the aesthetic and poetic forms necessary for the liberation and deliverance of...modern man."2 Le Corbusier's monumentalism, then, was imposed on Chandigarh's landscape and the inhabitants with the assumption that he knew best what architecture was appropriate for "liberation." While there are many aspects of his designs to appreciate and admire, his buildings only indirectly address the visitor, preferring uncanny to intimate relationships.3 [End Page 105] Click for larger viewFigure 1 The bottom of the ramp leading into a path toward the Trench of Consideration, Capitol Complex, Chandigarh. Photo by the author. Click for larger viewFigure 2 Façade of the Assembly Building, Le Corbusier, 1953-61, Chandigarh. Photo by the author. [End Page 106]For six months in 1999, I lived in Chandigarh within a few blocks of Le Corbusier's government complex and another compelling place, the nearby and unrelated Rock Garden. While the paths at the Government Complex are, for the most part, empty, those in the Rock Garden are not and provide chances for intimate interactions that are only hinted at underneath Le Corbusier's concrete ramp. Poignant informality in Le Corbusier's government sector exists in areas that were never completed according to plan.4 Its predominant monumentality provides a useful contrast to the intimate spaces of the Rock Garden.In the 1950s, two men, Le Corbusier and Nek Chand Saini, began two very different projects within a kilometer of each other in Chandigarh. Le Corbusier's Capitol Complex started in the very highest government circles with Prime Minister Jawaharwal Nehru: the plan was to build a new state capital for a newly divided Punjab in a newly independent India. In architectural history, Chandigarh is well known and well studied due to its planning and design. Nek Chand's Rock Garden (under construction since 1958, and open to the public since 1976) began as an illegal private project by one man to give form to his imagination. This essay is my impressionistic response to these two projects.Monumental buildings often function powerfully as icons or as proud isolated structures. Visited on ceremonial occasions, they can provide visually compelling backdrops to large-scale... (shrink)

La stèle funéraire à palmette de Mnasithéios (musée de Thèbes n° inv. 28200), découverte en 1992 dans la nécropole de l'antique Akraiphia, en Béotie, constitue un chef-d'œuvre de l'art grec archaïque, des années 520-510 av. J.-C. La stèle, intacte, est la seule à ce jour qui ait conservé sa représentation en relief, le distique élégiaque et la signature du sculpteur : ΦΙΛΟΥΡΓΟΣ ΕΠΟΙΕΣΕΝ. Deux études ont déjà été consacrées à ce monument, la première analysant l'épigramme, les éléments figuratifs et décoratifs, (...) ainsi que les paramètres sociaux et culturels qui en découlent ; la seconde essayant d'attribuer l'œuvre à un atelier athénien précis, l'atelier d'Endoios et de Philergos-Philoourgos. L'étude finale que nous publions ici présente, pour la première fois, les photographies du relief dans son intégralité et, en guise de commentaire de ces illustrations, l'analyse stylistique du modelé. (shrink)

De la ville antique d'Éleftherna, siège episcopal de Crète à l'époque paléochrétienne, proviennent trois chapiteaux qui présentent un intérêt particulier. Travaillés dans le calcaire local ils relèvent — pour deux d'entre eux du moins — du type des « chapiteaux mixtes » puisqu'ils associent deux types différents de chapiteaux à deux zones. Les chapiteaux d'Éleftherna, datés de la première moitié du VIe s., suivent fidèlement les modèles constantinopolitains, mais ils s'inscrivent sans aucun doute dans la production d'un atelier local dont (...) nous trouvons des œuvres dans plusieurs monuments de la région de Mylopotamos. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Journal of Ancient History Jahrgang: 4 Heft: 2 Seiten: 191-239.

Anthropologists have defined iconatrophy as a process by which oral traditions originate as explanations for objects that, through the passage of time, have ceased to make sense to their viewers. One form of iconatrophy involves the misinterpretation of statues' identities, iconography, or locations. Stories that ultimately derive from such misunderstandings of statues are Monument-Novellen, a term coined by Herodotean studies. Applying the concept of iconatrophy to Greek sculpture of the Archaic and Classical periods yields three possible examples in which (...) statues standing in Greek sanctuaries may have inspired stories cited by authors of the Roman imperial period as explanations for the statues' identities, attributes, poses, or locations. The statues in question are the portrait of the athletic victor Milo of Croton at Olympia, a bronze lioness on the Athenian Acropolis identified as a memorial to the Athenian prostitute Leaina , and the Athena Hygieia near the Propylaia of Mnesikles. Inscriptions on the bases of Archaic and Classical statues in Greek sanctuaries typically named the dedicator, the recipient deity, and the sculptor, but did not include the subject represented or the historical occasion behind the dedication. These “gaps” left by votive inscriptions would only have encouraged the formation of iconatrophic oral traditions such as the examples examined in this article. (shrink)

This paper examines the relationships between monumental commemoration and memory, placing Rachel Whiteread's Memorial to the Austrian Jewish Victims of the Shoah (2000) as the physical manifestation of Derrida's archive as a place where memory, power, writing and representation intersect. I consider the context and characteristics of Whiteread's memorial alongside the concept of the crypt, formulated by Derrida in his ‘Fors’ to Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok's The Wolf Man's Magic Word (1976). I propose that the archive, formed as (...) it as around the crypt, is a place where death and desire co-habit, and that the Holocaust, the subject of Whiteread's sculpture, is itself an archive that has been constructed around what Maria Torok terms the ‘exquisite corpse’. This exquisite corpse of the Holocaust encrypts, even in its own commemoration, the erotics and desires of the ‘Nazi father’ or ‘Hitler in uns’, what Derrida terms ‘the tombstone of the illicit’. This paper poses the question that we are, even as we remember the Jewish dead, simultaneously re-encrypting the forgetful, murderous Nazi father, and advocates that we maintain a watchfulness on the threshold of the archive, the monument, the text, in order to resist total resolution, complete meaning, the forgetful re-inscription of acts of atrocity. (shrink)

Das Buch ist in drei Teile zu je zwei Kapiteln gegliedert: 1. Spätantike ägyptische Grabskulptur; 2. Monumente dieser Welt; 3. Vorstellungen von der nächsten Welt. Die Kapitel selbst sind durchgezählt.

This essay interprets the controversy over Richard Serra's monumental sculpture, Tilted Arc , which was designed for a public plaza in downtown Manhattan in 1979 and then torn down five years later after intense public outcry. Levine reads this controversy as characteristic of contemporary debates over the arts, which continue the tradition of the nineteenth century avant-garde, pitting art against a wider public, and insisting that art must deliberately resist mainstream tastes and values in favor of marginality and (...) innovation. This definition of art has posed a lasting dilemma for democratic societies: how, after all, should a democracy deal with art that represents an intentional rejection of the majority? The problem becomes even more intractable when it comes to avant-garde art commissioned for public spaces, where the art object can challenge public tastes and movements in a way that is inescapable for those who must live and work in the space. Disturbed by the imposition of a massive and incomprehensible art object in a public plaza, Serra's opponents argued that Tilted Arc frustrated a whole range of socially beneficial activities, labor and leisure alike. And they claimed that Serra's supporters were dangerously anti-democratic. But despite the avant-garde's challenge to majority tastes, this essay makes the case that it remains a democratic value to continue to sponsor avant-garde art in public spaces. (shrink)

La Ruta de la Amistad surgió con motivo de la XIX Olimpiada en México. Siendo el corredor escultórico más largo del mundo, donde a lo largo de diescisiete kilómetros se ubicaron 19 esculturas monumentales de arte abstracto, marcó el punto de partida de un nuevo arte público, alejado de nacionalismos. Para que esta ruta se hiciera realidad implicó un arduo trabajo, desde su gestión hasta su construcción, que generalmente no es mencionado cuando se habla de ella. A más de cincuenta (...) años de su creación, sigue siendo muestra de lo mejor del arte mundial de la década de los sesenta. (shrink)

Since the stone age humankind has created masterworks which possess a mysterious quality of solidity and grandeur or monumentality. A Paleolithic Venus and a still life by Cezanne both share this monumentality. Michelangelo likened monumentality to sculptural relief, Braque called monumentality 'space', and Hans Hoffman, himself one of the masters, called monumentality 'pictorial depth.' The masters agreed on the import of monumentality, but none of them left a clear explanation of it. In 1943 Earl Loran published his classic book on (...) Cezanne's pictorial structure but, as I demonstrate, his explanation was misleading. This book provide a clear explanation, as did an earlier book by Robert Casper. This book also traces some history of monumentality with reproductions. It also explains how some painters achieved monumentality and how a student can attempt it. Pictorial space is created in the tension between pairs of opposing planes. Opposing planes pull against each other, each containing the other, paradoxically, within the flat surface of the canvas. Sculpture also can be 'plastic': opposing masses pull against each other, each containing the other and creating tension in the space which lies between them. Painting has other aspects like subject matter, expression, style and technique but pictorial space does not depend on these. Monumentality moves us profoundly and apparently has done so since the Paleolith. Using patients' vignettes, I show that there are profound parallels between the structure of a monumental work of art and the structure of an evolving personality. In Winnicott's words, such a personality has 'depth ... an interior space to put beliefs in ... an inside ... a space where things can be held ... the capacity to accept paradox [to contain opposites] ... room and strength ... and originality and the acceptance of tradition as the basis for invention'. A monumental painting also meets this description. I argue that monumental art provides a visual portrait of an evolving personality just as myth, as Freud and Jung both showed, provides a narrative portrait of an evolving personality. An evolving personality is perhaps humankind's most important creation; an underlying purpose of both myth and art is to help us achieve it. I demonstrate in this book that monumental art represented the evolving personality since at least 35,000 BC. Thus to understand monumentality is to better understand the personality and its history. (shrink)

Notes on Medieval Landscape. Sculptural Cycles of Months in Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century Tuscany - Starting from the cycle of Months depicted on twelfth- and thirteenth-century Tuscan monuments, this paper seeks to discern whether and, if so, how medieval representations inform later generations about actual rural terrain and agrarian practices during the Middle Ages. Combining visual and written medieval sources (notably, the writings of Hugh of St Victor, ca 1096-1141) with studies of historical agricultural production reveals how iconographic choices were informed (...) by both theological conceptualizations and first-hand experience of the physical environment. (shrink)

In Cameroon, a monumental "statue of liberty" is made from scrap metal. In Congo, a thriving popular music incorporates piercing screams and carnal dances. When these and other instantiations of the aesthetics of Africa and its diasporas are taken into account, how are ideas of beauty reconfigured? Scholars and artists take up that question in this invigorating, lavishly illustrated collection, which includes more than one hundred color images. Exploring sculpture, music, fiction, food, photography, fashion, and urban design, the (...) contributors engage with and depart from canonical aesthetic theories as they demonstrate that beauty cannot be understood apart from ugliness. Highlighting how ideas of beauty are manifest and how they mutate, travel, and combine across time and distance, continental and diasporic writers examine the work of a Senegalese sculptor inspired by Leni Riefenstahl's photographs of Nuba warriors; a rich Afro-Brazilian aesthetic incorporating aspects of African, Jamaican, and American cultures; and African Americans' Africanization of the Santería movement in the United States. They consider the fraught, intricate spaces of the urban landscape in postcolonial South Africa; the intense pleasures of eating on Réunion; and the shockingly graphic images on painted plywood boards advertising "morality" plays along the streets of Ghana. And they analyze the increasingly ritualized wedding feasts in Cameroon as well as the limits of an explicitly "African" aesthetics. Two short stories by the Mozambican writer Mia Couto gesture toward what beauty might be in the context of political failure and postcolonial disillusionment. Together the essays suggest that beauty is in some sense future-oriented and that taking beauty in Africa and its diasporas seriously is a way of rekindling hope. Contributors. Rita Barnard, Kamari Maxine Clarke, Mia Couto, Mark Gevisser, Simon Gikandi, Michelle Gilbert, Isabel Hofmeyr, William Kentridge, Dominique Malaquais, Achille Mbembe, Cheryl-Ann Michael, Celestin Monga, Sarah Nuttall, Patricia Pinho, Rodney Place, Els van der Plas, Pippa Stein, Françoise Vergès. (shrink)

In Cameroon, a monumental “statue of liberty” is made from scrap metal. In Congo, a thriving popular music incorporates piercing screams and carnal dances. When these and other instantiations of the aesthetics of Africa and its diasporas are taken into account, how are ideas of beauty reconfigured? Scholars and artists take up that question in this invigorating, lavishly illustrated collection, which includes more than one hundred color images. Exploring sculpture, music, fiction, food, photography, fashion, and urban design, the (...) contributors engage with and depart from canonical aesthetic theories as they demonstrate that beauty cannot be understood apart from ugliness. Highlighting how ideas of beauty are manifest and how they mutate, travel, and combine across time and distance, continental and diasporic writers examine the work of a Senegalese sculptor inspired by Leni Riefenstahl’s photographs of Nuba warriors; a rich Afro-Brazilian aesthetic incorporating aspects of African, Jamaican, and American cultures; and African Americans’ Africanization of the Santería movement in the United States. They consider the fraught, intricate spaces of the urban landscape in postcolonial South Africa; the intense pleasures of eating on Réunion; and the shockingly graphic images on painted plywood boards advertising “morality” plays along the streets of Ghana. And they analyze the increasingly ritualized wedding feasts in Cameroon as well as the limits of an explicitly “African” aesthetics. Two short stories by the Mozambican writer Mia Couto gesture toward what beauty might be in the context of political failure and postcolonial disillusionment. Together the essays suggest that beauty is in some sense future-oriented and that taking beauty in Africa and its diasporas seriously is a way of rekindling hope. Contributors. Rita Barnard, Kamari Maxine Clarke, Mia Couto, Mark Gevisser, Simon Gikandi, Michelle Gilbert, Isabel Hofmeyr, William Kentridge, Dominique Malaquais, Achille Mbembe, Cheryl-Ann Michael, Celestin Monga, Sarah Nuttall, Patricia Pinho, Rodney Place, Els van der Plas, Pippa Stein, Françoise Vergès. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ovid, Art, and Eros PAUL BAROLSKY OVIDIO, AMORI, miti e altre storie or Ovid: Loves, Myths, and Other Stories is the copiously illustrated catalogue to the monumental exhibition mounted in 2008–2009 at the Scuderie del Quirinale, in Rome, in celebration of the great Roman poet and his world. This handsome tome is many books in one: a beautiful album of color plates illustrating a wide range of fascinating (...) objects, an overview of Ovid’s life, works and influences—a book for amateurs and specialists alike, a book to delight and instruct. The book includes paintings and sculpture but also pottery, coins, and jewelry. There is something for everybody here. Ovidio is divided into relatively brief sections written by numerous scholars who treat such topics as Ovid and myth, Ovid the love poet, Ovid in exile, Ovid and Augustan Rome, Ovid and the figurative arts, and Ovid in the seventeenth century. The book’s attention to illustrated editions of Metamorphoses, and especially the Ovide moralisé, is notable and refreshing. I think it fair to say that the exhibition and its catalogue are, not surprisingly, dominated by Metamorphoses and the ways in which artists illustrated its stories over the centuries. The myths of Venus and Adonis, Narcissus and Echo, Icarus and Daedalus, and Jupiter and Europa are among the numerous Ovidian stories that get extensive treatment here. We need to recall that no ancient author in the Hellenic tradition is so copiously illustrated as is Ovid—a fact that is Ovidio, amori, miti e altre storie, ed Francesca Ghedini et al. Rome 2018, 310 pages; isbn 9788856906486; €33.15. arion 27.2 fall 2019 easily taken for granted. A consummate story teller, Ovid inspired the pictorial tales of Poussin, Rubens, Rembrandt, and Velázquez, among other masters. Often in this book, works of mythological art are seen in the context of Ovid, even when there is no specific association between image and text. Such is the case when, for example, we encounter the well-known Praxitelean Aphrodite pudica in the Uffizi which inspired Botticelli’s similar Aphrodite now in the Musei Reali of Turin. There is nothing that links the statue and the painting to Ovid other than the fact that their makers, like the poet, write about the goddess of love. Ever so many mythological works suggest the arousal of desire. The Praxitelean Aphrodite modestly covers her body with both of her hands. Understandably, since according to an ancient tale, a young man was so aroused by the statue that he left a stain upon her. In short, we are in the realm of erotic art. The Hellenistic statue of Leda and the Swan in the archeology museum of Venice is an excellent example of erotic art featured in this book, even though Leda is mentioned only in passing in Metamorphoses. She seems to swoon in rapture as the bird (Jupiter in avian guise) slithers between her legs, beak seeking lips. Scarcely resisting, Leda reaches ambiguously downward as if in search of something, and we can well imagine what that might be. That her lower hand is invisible contributes to its suggestiveness. Leda’s upper hand is pressed against the swan’s sinuous neck, by no means a gesture of resist170 ovid, art, and eros Figure 1: Leda and the Swan. Venice, Museo Archeologico Nazionale, 2018. Eric Vandeville / akg-images. ance, I believe, even though in the myth she is taken by force. What we see is what the Ovid catalogue calls a “voluptuous amplexus.” The story of Leda and the Swan is forever told by painters in various erotic ways. When, later in the Renaissance, Correggio pictures the momentous event he shows the swan mounting Leda who, in this case, receives the bird in a seated position. As the bird engages the nymph, feathers pressed against her inner thigh, the swan, as in the ancient statue, seeks out her mouth with his beak—a juxtaposition as phallic as it is oral. The Leonardesque smile of Leda betokens not fear or violence but pleasure—a decidedly carnal pleasure. In a different context, Vasari wrote that Correggio painted not colors but flesh. When Leonardo himself pictured Leda, he delicately rendered the... (shrink)

This thesis examines the hogbacks and hammerhead crosses of Viking Age Strathclyde and Northumbria. Both are Insular forms of carved stone sculpture often found in Christian contexts. This thesis aims to highlight the significance of these carved stones within a contemporary landscape dominated by a complex historical and archaeological narrative, with the overall aim of ascribing them functions, beyond those of funerary. The approach this thesis takes is theoretical in its construct, both methodologically and analytically, and is grounded in (...) the phenomenological principles of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. It is hoped that this thesis will break down the perceived barrier imposed on research by the modern Scotland-England border, thus potentially alleviate the implied disconnect between Viking Age Strathclyde and Northumbria. While acknowledging the current art-historical work, this thesis archaeologically reappraises hogbacks and provides an original and detailed archaeological treatise of hammerhead crosses. Additionally, this thesis espouses a conceptual framework for approaching, analysing and interpreting carved stones, which considers the idea of what makes space become a place. This framework involves the adoption of a reflexive phenomenological approach to the recording of carved stone monuments in the landscape, and, in approaching material, the adoption and adaption of the concepts of hybrid practice, supervenience, Deleuzian difference, common difference, the third space, and art and agency. In integrating these approaches and concepts, the idea of place-making emerges, discerned via non-dialectical interrelationships between people, material, and space. It is conceptualised here in abstract form as the person/object/place framework. In applying this framework to postulate the functions of hogbacks and hammerhead crosses in the landscape, the following, non-mutually exclusive, themes are considered: commemorative space, economic space, biblical space, mythological space, political space, and sacred space. Considering these themes in the application of the conceptual framework to approaching notable carved stones gives rise to the concept of functional landscapes. These abstract landscapes emerge and are understood through a network of functional places, developing out of particular carved stone monuments inhabiting specific spaces. Ascribing functions to Viking Age carved stones allows for interpretation beyond the traditional and uncritical narrative that hogbacks and hammerhead crosses are simply Viking ‘calling cards’ or gravestones. Furthermore, in considering the Christian context and syncretic nature of many hogbacks, this thesis challenges the common idea that their origins and models often lie solely in Scandinavian paganism and culture. (shrink)

This article aims to analyze the tiger-hunting scene on Yeh Pulu relief, located in Bedulu Village, Gianyar, Bali. This relief is estimated to have been created by Balinese artists of the end of the era of Ancient Bali Kingdom in about the 14th century AD. There are only few in-depth studies conducted on this monumental relief in the context of iconology by visual art researchers. Therefore, the author has conducted intensive field research and studies since a year ago based (...) on Panofsky's iconology theory. Tiger-hunting is part of a series of scenes on the relief which in general tends to tell about everyday routines. The tiger-hunting scene carries an unusual theme amidst a wide range of Balinese cultural artifacts which tend to revolve around mythology and epics such as Mahabrata and Ramayana. Based on the theory of iconology which consists of a sequence of analyses starting from the pre-iconographic analysis, the relief characters were found in the form of rough sculptures on the surface of a rocky soil wall located near the Petanu watershed in Gianyar. The iconography aspects revealed that the characters on the relief figuration tend to be naturalistic; and iconologically, they tend to relate to the meaning of narratives on the romanticism of everyday heroism. Heroism nurtures the Balinese people's proletariat side in facing challenges in their life and the political power in the era of the Ancient Bali Kingdom. (shrink)

On one of the reliefs in the famous Passage of the Theoria Apollo is depicted holding aloft a cithara, all of whose parts, detached from the wall, are today broken (left upright strut above the crosspiece and the whole right-hand section of the instrument). If a reconstruction drawing of how the complete cithara originally looked is made on the basis of the surviving elements, it can be seen that it is more squat and less high than similar instruments generally are, (...) a large number of which are depicted on red-figure vases, with the dates usually proposed by sculpture experts to place the Theoria relief in a chronological context. The cithara that we see is closer in its proportions to the slightly earlier ones which appear on black-fîgure pottery at around 490 B. C. The form and type of the Theoria cithara thus argue in favour of a high date for the whole monument. (shrink)

This book, a companion volume to Professor Pollitt's The Art of Rome: Sources and Documents, presents a comprehensive collection in translation of ancient literary evidence relating to Greek sculpture, painting, architecture, and the decorative arts. Its purpose is to make this important evidence available to students who are not specialists in the Classical languages or Classical archaeology. The author's translations of a wide selection of Greek and Latin texts are accompanied by an introduction, explanatory commentary, and a full bibliography. (...) An earlier version of this book was published twenty-five years ago by Prentice-Hall. In this new publication Professor Pollitt has added a considerable number of new passages, revised some of his earlier translations and presented the texts in a different order which allows the reader to follow more easily the development of sculpture and painting as perceived by the ancient writers. The new and substantial bibliography, organised by topics as they appear in the book, emphasises works that deal directly with the literary sources or that supplement our knowledge of the personalities and monuments described in the sources. This collection will be welcomed by students and teachers of Greek art who have long been in need of an authoritative and reliable sourcebook for their subject. (shrink)

The question naturally arises: Is public art inherently violent, or is it a provocation to violence? Is violence built into the monument in its very conception? Or is violence simply an accident that befalls some monuments, a matter of the fortunes of history? The historical record suggests that if violence is simply an accident that happens to public art, it is one that is always waiting to happen. The principal media and materials of public art are stone and metal (...) class='Hi'>sculpture not so much by choice as by necessity. “A public sculpture,” says Lawrence Alloway, “should be invulnerable or inaccessible. It should have the material strength to resist attack or be easily cleanable, but it also needs a formal structure that is not wrecked by alterations.”12 The violence that surrounds public art is more, however, than simply the ever-present possibility of an accident—the natural disaster or random act of vandalism. Much of the world’s public art—memorials, monuments, triumphal arches, obelisks, columns, and statues—has a rather direct reference to violence in the form of war or conquest. From Ozymandias to Caesar to Napoleon to Hitler, public art has served as a kind of monumentalizing of violence, and never more powerfully than when it presents the conqueror as a man of peace, imposing a Napoleonic code or a pax Romana on the world. Public sculpture that is too frank or explicit about this monumentalizing of violence, whether the Assyrian palace reliefs of the ninth century b.c., or Morris’s bomb sculpture proposal of 1981, is likely to offend the sensibilities of a public committed to the repression of its own complicity in violence.13 The very notion of public art as we receive it is inseparable from what Jürgen Habermas has called “the liberal model of the public sphere,” a dimension distinct from the economic, the private, and the political. This ideal realm provides the space in which disinterested citizens may contemplate a transparent emblem of their own inclusiveness and solidarity, and deliberate on the general good, free of coercion, violence, or private interests.14 12. Lawrence Alloway, “The Public Sculpture Problem,” Studio International 184 : 124.13. See Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, “The Forms of Violence,” October, no. 8 : 17-29, for an important critique of the “narrativization” of violence in Western art and an examination of the alternative suggested by the Assyrian palace reliefs.14. Habermas first introduced this concept in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence . First published in 1962, it has since become the focus of an extensive literature. See also Habermas’s short encyclopedia article, “The Public Sphere,” trans. Sara Lennox and Frank Lennox, New German Critique 1 : 49-55, and the introduction to it by Peter Hohendahl in the same issue, pp. 45-48. I owe much to the guidance of Miriam Hansen and Lauren Berlant on this complex and crucial topic. W. J. T. Mitchell, editor of Critical Inquiry, is Gaylord Donnelly Distinguished Service Professor of English and art at the University of Chicago. His recent book is Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. (shrink)

This French translation of the original English play, The Endless Column by Mircea Eliade, summarizes the philosophy of artist and philosopher, Constantin Brancusi. Probes the meaning of Brancusi's work and his silence after his well-known India visit. According to the play, the fact that Brancusi did not accomplish his Meditation Monument was due to the difficulty in putting the light of human contemplation into sculpture.

This overview of the "sister arts" of the nineteenth century by younger scholars in art history, literature, and American studies presents a startling array of perspectives on the fundamental role played by images in culture and society. Drawing on the latest thinking about vision and visuality as well as on recent developments in literary theory and cultural studies, the contributors situate paintings, sculpture, monument art, and literary images within a variety of cultural contexts. The volume offers fresh and sometimes (...) extended discussions of single works as well as reevaluations of artistic and literary conventions and analyses of the economic, social, and technological forces that gave them shape and were influenced by them in turn. A wide range of figures are significantly reassessed, including the painters Charles Willson Peale, Washington Allston, Thomas Cole, George Caleb Bingham, Fitz Hugh Lane, and Mary Cassatt, and such writers as James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, and William Dean Howells. One overarching theme to emerge is the development of an American national subjectivity as it interacted with the transformation of a culture dominated by religious values to one increasingly influenced by commercial imperatives. The essays probe the ways in which artists and writers responded to the changing conditions of the cultural milieu as it was mediated by such factors as class and gender, modes of perception and representation, and conflicting ideals and realities. (shrink)

Un raccord réalisé dernièrement entre un poitrail d'animal ailé découvert à Thasos en 1987 et une tête archaïque de la Glyptothèque Ny Carlsberg de Copenhague, connue sous le nom de «tête Wix», généralement considérée comme appartenant à un couros créé au milieu du vr siècle, permet de reconstituer une sphinge dont la tête est très légèrement tournée vers sa gauche. Cette belle sculpture thasienne, qu'on peut maintenant dater plus précisément de 570-560 av. J.-C, confirme l'influence du style paro-chiote sur (...) Thasos, colonie de Paros. De plus, le type même du monument auquel elle appartenait semble avoir son origine dans les Cyclades : à Naxos et à Paros. Conformément à leur nature de démon chthonien les sphinges dressées dans les sanctuaires au sommet d'une colonne ionique gardaient la tombe d'un héros. C'est du moins ce qui semble avoir été le cas dans les sanctuaires d'Apollon de Délos et de Delphes, à l'Acropole d'Athènes, au sanctuaire d'Archiloque à Paros. (shrink)

Paul Crowther, in his book, The Kantian Sublime (1989), works to reconstruct Kant's aesthetics in order to make its continued relevance to contemporary aesthetic concerns more visible. The present article remains within the area of Crowther's "cognitive" sublime, to show that there is much space for expanding upon Kantian varieties of the sublime, particularly in art.

En el siglo XXI, y en especial durante la pandemia del Covid-19, eclosionó en Europa y América una oleada de ataques contra esculturas cuyo pasado revelaba colonialismo, racismo o explotación esclavista. Los ataques evidenciaban la persistencia de un patrimonio monumental que representaba símbolos de opresión y que cuestionaba la representación de los derechos humanos. Este estudio indaga sobre varios antecedentes históricos y casos actuales para analizar la naturaleza y motivos subyacentes a ese tipo de ataques vandálicos simbólicos.

L’article expose les premiers résultats du programme scientifique « SIG du centre monumental de Thasos. Topographie et architecture » qui, depuis 2015, vise à reprendre les études sur l’agora de Thasos par le biais d’une approche conjointe des inscriptions, de la sculpture et de l’architecture. L’un des objectifs était dans un premier temps la réalisation d’un plan géoréférencé de l’agora et de ses abords, qui puisse également servir d’appui à la construction d’un Système d’Information Géographique (SIG). L’article expose (...) le cadre méthodologique de leur mise en place ainsi que les diverses applications que vise le WebSIG de Thasos. Cette première étape étant désormais achevée, ces outils de recherche ont permis la reconfiguration d’un nouveau programme de recherche intitulé « Archépolis : Archéologie et histoire de l’espace public à Thasos ». (shrink)

This paper presents the sanctuary of Zeus Ammon at Kallithea, Chalcidice, where three related deities were worshipped. The cult of Dionysos and probably that of the Nymphs began in the late 8th century BC or earlier in a cave in the southern part of the sanctuary. The cult of Zeus Ammon was introduced in the first half of the 4th century BC, and in the second half of the century a Doric peristyle temple and an open-air corridor running parallel to (...) the temple and flanked by two rows of monumental bases that supported sculpture were built. The cult of Asclepios was introduced in the same period. In the 2nd century AD the sanctuary reached its apogee: the area was reorganized, the old buildings were altered and new edifices were built. Cet article présente le sanctuaire de Zeus Ammon à Kallithea en Chalcidique, où trois divinités liées entre elles étaient honorées. Le culte de Dionysos et, probablement, celui des Nymphes a commencé à la fin du viiie siècle av. J.-C., ou plus tôt, dans une grotte située dans la partie sud du sanctuaire. Le culte de Zeus Ammon a été introduit dans le premier quart du ive siècle av. J.-C. et, dans la deuxième moitié du siècle, on a construit le temple dorique péristyle et un portique ouvert parallèle au temple et flanqué de deux rangées de bases monumentales qui soutenaient des sculptures. Le culte d’Asclépios a été introduit à la même période. Au iie siècle de notre ère, le sanctuaire atteint son apogée : l’espace est réorganisé, les anciens bâtiments sont transformés et de nouveaux édifices sont construits. (shrink)

La dimension artistique du mémorial de Peter Eisenmann a été peu considérée. A la croisée de l'architecture et de la sculpture, il convient d'étudier sa dimension urbaine et de relever son identité comme monument in situ. Les réflexions du philosophe Derrida sur le déconstructivisme architectural, notamment de Libeskind, sont capitales. Comme le dit Habermas, son défenseur majeur, le monument s'adresse aux descendants allemands des bourreaux. Notre essai propose une lecture adornienne du mémorial qui dépend de l'art abstrait et de (...) sa métexis aux ténèbres. Le mutisme du mémorial implique une réflexion sur les questions de l'infigurable et de l'ineffable concernant la Shoah. Si le sens de l'oeuvre semble être absent, cela peut s'expliquer par la déclaration de Ruth Klüger, selon laquelle l'extermination des juifs par les nazis est un non-sens absolu. Le monument invite à ouvrir le champ de la mémoire et contient un avertissement : l'autodestruction de l'espèce humaine. (shrink)

Publication d'une base de statue animalière du IVe siècle portant une dédicace métrique à la triade apollinienne par un Kydoniate qui fut prêtre des Theoi Pantes. Caractère remarquable de la gravure stoichèdon. Identification de l'école de sculpture attique (Crésilas de Kydonia) à laquelle était dû le bronze disparu. Essai de restitution. Étude d'un second texte — inscription honorifique pour un noble kydoniate — gravé à la fin du Ier siècle avant J.-C. sous la base qui fut remployée dans un (...) monument romain inconnu. (shrink)

The Burghers of Calais (1895) by Auguste Rodin was originally commissioned by the city of Calais to celebrate a local hero. It then became part of the national culture of the Third Republic, and it can today be found all over the world. This article tells the story of how this statue came into being and also attempts to address the issue of why it has become so popular and why it seems to speak so directly to universalism. Apart from (...) the fact that The Burghers of Calais is an extremely well executed and very inspired piece of art, this monument, I argue, also has to have another quality in order to become so popular. This quality, I suggest, is related to a new way of understanding and depicting heroism. Rodin centered The Burghers of Calais around a modern version of heroism that can be termed ‘civic heroism’, which draws on the collective and civic courage of the average person ( Zivil-courage), rather than on the physical courage of the single and outstanding individual. Or, to put it differently, Rodin turned the statue into a democratic exemplum. (shrink)

Art can be addressed, not just to individuals, but to groups. Art can even be part of how groups think to themselves – how they keep a grip on their values over time. I focus on monuments as a case study. Monuments, I claim, can function as a commitment to a group value, for the sake of long-term action guidance. Art can function here where charters and mission statements cannot, precisely because of art’s powers to capture subtlety and emotion. In (...) particular, art can serve as the vessel for group emotions, by making emotional content sufficiently public so as to be the object of a group commitment. Art enables groups to guide themselves with values too subtle to be codified. (shrink)

What, if anything, is aesthetically distinctive about sculpture? Some think that sculpture differs from painting in being a specially tactile art. Different things might be meant by this, but it is anyway unhelpful to focus on our means of access to sculpture’s aesthetic properties, rather than those properties themselves. A more promising idea is that, while painting provides its own space, sculpture exists in the space of the gallery. To pursue this thought, I expound and develop (...) the views of Susanne Langer. Sculpture organizes the surrounding space when we see that space as defined by the potential for action of the sculpted object. (shrink)

This reference essay addresses how sculpture may be defined, the nature of sculptural representation and content, the distinctive forms of tactile and bodily experience to which sculpture can give rise, and the ontology of sculpture. It addresses both sculptures whose form is largely fixed and contemporary sculptural practices incorporating found objects and variable presentation.

"The eye that gathers impressions is no longer the eye that sees a depiction on a surface it becomes a hand, the ray of light becomes a finger, and the imagination becomes a form of immediate touching."-Johann Gottfried Herder Long recognized as one of the most important eighteenth-century works on aesthetics and the visual arts, Johann Gottfried Herder's Plastik (Sculpture, 1778) has never before appeared in a complete English translation. In this landmark essay, Herder combines rationalist and empiricist thought (...) with a wide range of sources-from the classics to Norse legend, Shakespeare to the Bible-to illuminate the ways we experience sculpture. Standing on the fault line between classicism and romanticism, Herder draws most of his examples from classical sculpture, while nevertheless insisting on the historicity of art and of the senses themselves. Through a detailed analysis of the differences between painting and sculpture, he develops a powerful critique of the dominance of vision both in the appreciation of art and in our everyday apprehension of the world around us. One of the key articulations of the aesthetics of Sturm und Drang, Sculpture is also important as an anticipation of subsequent developments in art theory. Jason Gaiger's translation of Sculpture includes an extensive introduction to Herder's thought, explanatory notes, and illustrations of all the sculptures discussed in the text. (shrink)

This article addresses debates around the fate of antiquated symbols of colonial domination in postcolonial societies. The handling of apartheid material culture still generates controversy more than 15 years after the country’s first democratic elections. Built in 1949 to commemorate the Great Trek into the interior of the country, the Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria has stood as the embodiment of Afrikaner nationalism and mythology. A number of factors prevented the demolition of the site, including the spirit of national reconciliation. In (...) order to remain relevant and to secure state funding, staff members at the Voortrekker Monument have attempted to map onto the original exclusionary imagery a more inclusive narrative that hinges on the protection of ‘minority rights’ to cultural preservation. This case study sheds light on the way political transitions create openings for the interrogation of colonial monuments – whether they should be destroyed, revised or left untouched – and the development of a postcolonial memorial landscape. (shrink)

This is a short reply to Dan Demetriou's "Ashes of Our Fathers: Racist Monuments and the Tribal Right." Both are included in Oxford University Press's Ethics, Left and Right: The Moral Issues That Divide Us.

In this chapter we focus on the debate over publicly-maintained racist monuments as it manifests in the mid-2010s Anglosphere, primarily in the US (chiefly regarding the over 700 monuments devoted to the Confederacy), but to some degree also in Britain and Commonwealth countries, especially South Africa (chiefly regarding monuments devoted to figures and events associated with colonialism and apartheid). After pointing to some representative examples of racist monuments, we discuss ways a monument can be thought racist, and neutrally categorize removalist (...) and preservationist arguments heard in the monument debate. We suggest that both extremist and moderate removalist goals are likely to be self-defeating, and that when concerns of civic sustainability are put on moral par with those of fairness and justice, something like a Mandela-era preservationist policy is best: one which removes the most offensive of the minor racist monuments, but which focuses on closing the monumentary gap between peoples and reframing existing racist monuments. (shrink)

A century after the World War I, studies on the politics of memory and commemoration have grown into a vast and vital academic field. This book approaches the theme "monument and memory" from architectural, literary, philosophical, and theological perspectives. Drawing on diverse sources - from Augustine to Freud, from early photographs to contemporary urban monuments - the book's contributors probe the intersections between memory and trauma, past and present, monuments and memorial practices, religious and secular, remembrance and forgetfulness. (Series: Nordic (...) Studies in Theology / Nordische Studien zur Theologie - Vol. 1) [Subject: Philosophy, Religious Studies, History]. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

I present and analyze J.G. Herder’s aesthetics of sculpture, as an art form directed toward and appreciated by the sense of touch. I argue that Herder is unsuccessful in his attempt so to define sculpture, but his account is nonetheless fruitful, both in making salient and explaining signal aspects of sculptural appreciation and criticism and, more broadly and quite innovatively, in proposing an aesthetics of touch, even an embodied aesthetics.