Abstract:Although Victor D’Amico’s pedagogy and legacy are well known within the field of art education, discussions of his work often disregard the context in which he worked for over thirty years—The Museum of Modern Art. This essay examines D’Amico’s key projects, considering how they were supported by and in collaboration with his museum colleagues. The result was a unique legacy steeped in a pedagogy of modern art and museum education. As a conclusion, this essay looks (...) at the training of art educators and museum educators as requiring different kinds of foundational work and an acknowledgment of the importance of the museum as a context for art education. (shrink)

This clearly designed and illustrated book is dedicated to a complete overview of Richard Meier's Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, completed in 1995. Located in the area of the Casa de la Caritat, a former monastic enclave, this extraordinary building maintains a unique dialogue between the city's old urban fabric and the contemporary art housed within the museum. Barcelona's first institution devoted entirely to twentieth-century art, this museum synthesizes the striking contemporaneity of its bold architecture and the (...) rich medieval history of its context. Meier's masterful use of materials -- pristine white aluminum panels, glass, stucco, and granite -- and characteristic modern style emphasize a play of solid and void, light and shadow, through the museum's fluid, geometric forms. An external ramp leads from the sweeping plaza to a triple-height atrium space. An internal, glass-enclosed ramp unfolds vertically along the front facade of the building, offering breathtaking vistas of a sixteenth-century church and the romantic city beyond and leading to three floors of open exhibition areas. This unique publication documents the dramatic design with preliminary sketches, models, drawings, and lavish color photographs. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Symposium: The Future of the Art Museum: Curatorial and Educational Perspectives:IntroductionDaniel A. SiedellIntroductionThere are few futures pondered more often than the art museum's. The new millennium has spawned a veritable cottage industry of such prognostication. Most of it has occurred from the perspectives of building expansion, audience growth, and collection development. These are not, by any means, unimportant considerations. However, such sustained attention to them by directors, (...) marketers, board members, collectors, and the mass media tend to obscure the fact that these areas of concern are not ends in themselves. A new museum wing, higher attendance, and more gifts of art to the collection mean little unless they serve to facilitate specific curatorial and educational ends, which themselves are in the service of expanding and deepening their capacity to enhance the experience of art. The future of the art museum rests on the ability of curators and educators to develop new and more robust curatorial and educational work that is responsive to both the larger culture and to the vocational standards of their respective professions. Curators and educators need, then, to be more self-critical of their practices.This symposium brings together a few of these professionals to reflect on the future of the art museum from the perspective of those involved in the day-to-day production, presentation, and interpretation of works of art. It is occasioned by the publication of David Carrier's book, Museum Skepticism: A History of the Display of Art in Public Galleries, recently published by Duke University Press, and more specifically, Carrier's conclusion, which offers its own reflection on the future of the art museum. A frequent contributor to the Journal of Aesthetic Education, Carrier is a philosopher and art critic whose interests range widely from the art criticism of John Ruskin and Adrian Stokes to the writing of art history and the paintings of Sean Scully.1 Carrier's book, written while a scholar in residence at the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, explores the history and philosophy of art museums from the point of view of the narratives on which they rely as well as produce. And it is narratives that art educators and curators produce, affirm, and expand when they curate exhibitions and do educational programming.Because they are "public" institutions (even when they are private organizations) and serve many competing audience constituencies, art museums [End Page 1] often suffer from an acute identity crisis, even while they build large expansions, engage in aggressive campaigns to court collectors, placate increasingly more powerful governing boards, and expand their programming to the point that it ceases to be education. The business of the art museum often masks these deep crises, which eventually become a neurosis that plagues curatorial and educational practice. A symptom of this illness can be seen in the misplaced tension between curators and educators as a battle between the "scholars" and the "popularizers," the "elites" and the "community."In 1946 Alfred H. Barr Jr. of the Museum of Modern Art presented a paper called "Research and Publication in Art Museums."2 In it Barr not only recognizes the importance of museum scholarship; he argues that such scholarship, unlike that of the academic art historian, must engage and interact with "the man off the street." Indeed, Barr passionately believed that museum scholarship not only could but should engage a broader and more diverse public all the while remaining committed to scholarly ideals. Barr acknowledges the tensions between museums as "popular community centers" and museums as places of "research and publication." But, he continues, "Both can be done provided we have enough faith to believe in the values of both and enough skill to persuade others to agree with us."3 Barr's expansive definition of scholarship is instructive and a challenge. "By publication I mean not only the scholarly treatise but also the popular article or book, the classroom or public lecture, the gallery talk, publicity releases."4 For Barr, scholarship is not merely a curator's or educator's opportunity to address her professional colleagues and strengthen guild rank; it is a value that is infused throughout all work... (shrink)

The aesthetic is present everywhere—in the street, in department stores, movie houses, mountainsides, as in the art gallery, the cathedral, the sacred grove. By universalizing the concept of the aesthetic, modern art has destroyed the barrier that once marked off Beauty and the Sublime as separate realms of being. In the eyes of modern art and modernist aesthetics, anything can legitimately appeal to taste. President Eisenhower, complaining about modern art, said that he had been brought up to (...) believe that art was intended to carry one away from the dangers and unpleasantness of everyday life but that the new paintings reminded him of traffic accidents. A recent statement by Francis Bacon, the celebrated British painter, also mentions traffic accidents. Bacon agrees with Ike that this type of event is not excluded by modern art. But Bacon finds traffic accidents to be a source of beauty. "If you see somebody lying on the pavement with the blood streaming from him," he explains in the catalogue of his exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in spring 1975, "that is in itself—the color of the blood against the pavement—very invigorating . . . exhilarating. . . . In all the motor accidents I've seen, people strewn across the road, the first thing you think of is the strange beauty." Harold Rosenberg is a professor, poet and art critic for the New Yorker. Among his influential works are The Tradition of the New, The Anxious Object, Artworks and Packages, Act and Actor, The De-Definition of Art, Discovering the Present, and Art on the Edge. (shrink)

El siguiente artículo plantea una reflexión sobre la historiografía del arte centroamericano y latinoamericano, para establecer algunas tendencias en cómo se han estudiado y qué aportes han realizado estos campos de conocimiento al entendimiento de las artes visuales regionales y la historia cultural centroamericana. Adicionalmente, en contraste con este estado de la cuestión, se plantean las contribuciones que realiza la tesis doctoral “Hacer exportable a Centroamérica: activación de circuitos artísticos internacionales y su impacto en la consolidación de los museos de (...) arte moderno y sus colecciones en Guatemala y Costa Rica, 1950-1996”, al conocimiento de esta historiografía. Se analizan dos aportes puntuales que realiza la tesis: por un lado, la investigación evidencia contundentemente que determinados/as artistas centroamericanos/as participaron con vigor de las redes artísticas internacionales en la segunda mitad del siglo XX; esto se logra reconstruir mediante un mapeo de los eventos en los que participaron. Seguidamente, se abarca otro aporte, en el que la investigación problematiza lo que se ha dicho sobre las características del arte moderno centroamericano mediante un análisis de las colecciones de tres museos regionales. (shrink)

The idea of modern art presupposes the rise of historicism and the sense of progress since the Enlightenment. Once art, however, conceives itself as progressive and hence modern, it is confronted by the paradoxes of progress: progress renders the modern obsolete at the same time as it seeks to give itself meaning by positing a goal, a destination that would be the end purpose and hence the end of progress. As a consequence, modern art is impelled (...) to constantly transcend its own achievements and limits in a utopian quest for the artwork of the future, the ultimate work of art. But what happens to art when the grand art-historical narrative of modernism collapses? I argue that the ‘modern’ mutates into the ‘contemporary’ and that art now defines itself not in relation to the future but to the present. Contemporary art understands itself as operating in the present, that is, as an art for the present. It finds its destination now in the latest institutionalization of the paradoxes of progress: the museum of contemporary art. (shrink)

Accompanying an exhibition organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, this book is the most comprehensive catalogue on the work of this internationally recognized architectural firm.

This essay revisits Meyer Schapiro’s critique of Heidegger’s interpretation of Van Gogh’s painting of a pair of shoes in order to raise the question of the dispute between art history and philosophy as a contest increasingly ceded to the claim of the expert and the hegemony of the museum as culture and as cult or coded signifier. Following a discussion of museum culture, I offer a hermeneutic and phenomenological reading of Heidegger’s ‘Origin of the Work of Art’ and (...) conclude by taking Heidegger’s discussion of the strife between earth and world to the site of the ancient temple of Apollo Epicurius at Bassae as an example of the insistent foreclosure of the ancient work of art and the conflicts of the pervasive efforts of modern conservation. (shrink)

This collection of essays constitutes the first history of modern Japanese aesthetics in any language. It introduces readers through lucid and readable translations to works on the philosophy of art written by major Japanese thinkers from the late nineteenth century to the present. Selected from a variety of sources (monographs, journals, catalogues), the essays cover topics related to the study of beauty in art and nature. The translations are organized into four parts. The first, "The Introduction of Aesthetics," traces (...) the formation of notions of "beauty," "culture," and "art" in Japan. It includes discussion of the creation of the museum in Japan and the frenetic efforts of Nishi Amane, Okakura Tenshin, Ernest Fenollosa, and Mori Ogai to introduce German, British, and French aesthetic thought to the Japanese. This is followed by three sections that examine the transformation of the aesthetic field into an academic discipline that flourished at three major Japanese universities. "Aesthetics at Waseda University" begins with an essay on the spiritualism and idealism of Onishi Hajime and continues with essays on the impact of German Lebensphilosophie ("philosophy of life") on Shimamura Hogetsu and Takayama Chogyu, and work by the major Waseda aesthetician of the twentieth century, Aizu Yaichi. Thinkers of the Tokyo School adopted a "scientific" method in the study of art theory. Part 3, "Aesthetics at the University of Tokyo," focuses on the ideas of Otsuka Yasuji (holder of the world’s first Chair of Aesthetics), Onishi Yoshinori, Watsuji Tetsuro, Abe Jiro, Takeuchi Toshio, and Imamichi Tomonobu. The section concludes with a look at the contemporary philosopher Sakabe Megumi. The last section, "Aesthetics at the University of Kyoto," includes essays on Nakagawa Shigeki and Fukada Yasukazu, pioneers in the field of aesthetics, and on the philosophy of art of the "Kyoto School," which was deeply inspired by the thought of Nishida Kitaro. Finally the work of Kuki Shuzo, an influential teacher of Western philosophy at the University of Kyoto, is examined. A History of Modern Japanese Aesthetics is a companion volume to Modern Japanese Aesthetics: A Reader (UH Press, 1999). (shrink)

Bhabha, Georges Didi-Huberman, David Morgan and Lee Siegel, as well as a series of focused contributions by Yve-Alain Bois, Wendy Doniger, Kenneth Frampton, Martin E. Marty, John Hallmark Neff, Annemarie Schimmel, and Helen Tworkov consider how rapture resonate's both in a cultural context and within the experience of a single human being.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Pragmatist Aesthetics and New Visions of the Contemporary Art Museum:The Tate Modern and the Baltic Centre for Contemporary ArtAngela Marsh (bio)John Dewey mandated the repositioning of our experience of art within the realm of the everyday, and recognized the importance of art objects principally with regard to how they operate within an experience as "carriers of meaning."1 In this quote from Art as Experience, Dewey illustrates the (...) segue between art and the perceiver, and his belief that within the profound art experience, lived dichotomies are healed:In art as an experience, actuality and possibility or ideality, the new and the old, objective material and personal response, the individual and the universal, surface and depth, sense and meaning, are integrated in an experience in which they are all transfigured from the significance that belongs to them when isolated in reflection.2Although the ephemeral nature of Dewey's definition of art-as-experience — hinged upon immediacy and the subjective heuristics of the perceiver — may seem difficult to capture and apply, the practicality of the concept, Richard Shusterman argues, lies in its "transformative potential," as a way to reconceive the place of art and its function in our world:Defining art as experience, I argue, also has value in widening the realmof art by challenging the rigid definition between art and action that is supported by definitions that define art as mimesis, poiesis, or the narrow practice as defined by the institutional art world. In other words, I argue that Dewey's definition of art as experience has a very fruitful transformational potential.3By defining art as experience, Dewey also sought to dissolve the binary structures of aesthetic rifts: art and life, high art and low art, body and mind, subject and object, self and world, emphasizing the holistic action in our engagement with art.4 But according to Dewey, the divisor of art from life and thus to blame for the aesthetic barrenness of our lived reality is the museum institution, as Shusterman describes: [End Page 91]The compartmentalization and spiritualization of art as an elevated "separate realm" set "upon a far-off pedestal," divorced from the materials and aims of other human effort, has removed art from the lives of most of us, and thus impoverished the aesthetic quality of our lives.(PA, 19)However, we must keep in mind that Art as Experience was published in 1934. Today, new approaches towards encounter and engagement within public museums are taking form and gaining momentum, with unprecedented directorial visions and mandates designed to nurture and make accessible art-based experiences among diverse audiences — where art and life can meet via multiple approaches. Theoretical synchronicities between pragmatist approaches to aesthetics and fruitful museum experiences can be suggested upon consideration of various innovative programs and approaches initiated at the Tate Modern in London and the Baltic Center for Contemporary Art in Gateshead. The overwhelming success of both venues could signify a reengagement of the general public with contemporary art, fed by "democratic," participatory approaches to exhibiting and programming art that make the museum more accessible to the various mixed publics it serves. In light of these new museological developments, Dewey's polemic oppositions between his conceptualizations of the museum experience and "art-as-experience" should be reexamined and possibly redefined.Dewey was entirely opposed to the concept of "art for art's sake." By exonerating art of any functional value — deeming it "fine" — art was elevated to a position separate from life, and thus rendered impotent to effect a lived aesthetic experience (which is how, Dewey would argue, the arts function most powerfully — as the purveyors of heightened experience). As Shusterman describes:The underlying motive for such attempts to purify art from any functionality was not to denigrate it as worthlessly useless, but to place its worth apart from and above the realm of instrumental value...and this freedom from use would be its defining and ennobling feature.(PA, 9)Dewey (and Shusterman) thus maintained that the very power construct that put the "fine" in art did so by removing the aspect of function from it. As previously stated, Dewey blamed museum institutions for removing art from its... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Pragmatist Aesthetics and New Visions of the Contemporary Art Museum:The Tate Modern and the Baltic Centre for Contemporary ArtAngela Marsh (bio)John Dewey mandated the repositioning of our experience of art within the realm of the everyday, and recognized the importance of art objects principally with regard to how they operate within an experience as "carriers of meaning."1 In this quote from Art as Experience, Dewey illustrates the (...) segue between art and the perceiver, and his belief that within the profound art experience, lived dichotomies are healed:In art as an experience, actuality and possibility or ideality, the new and the old, objective material and personal response, the individual and the universal, surface and depth, sense and meaning, are integrated in an experience in which they are all transfigured from the significance that belongs to them when isolated in reflection.2Although the ephemeral nature of Dewey's definition of art-as-experience — hinged upon immediacy and the subjective heuristics of the perceiver — may seem difficult to capture and apply, the practicality of the concept, Richard Shusterman argues, lies in its "transformative potential," as a way to reconceive the place of art and its function in our world:Defining art as experience, I argue, also has value in widening the realmof art by challenging the rigid definition between art and action that is supported by definitions that define art as mimesis, poiesis, or the narrow practice as defined by the institutional art world. In other words, I argue that Dewey's definition of art as experience has a very fruitful transformational potential.3By defining art as experience, Dewey also sought to dissolve the binary structures of aesthetic rifts: art and life, high art and low art, body and mind, subject and object, self and world, emphasizing the holistic action in our engagement with art.4 But according to Dewey, the divisor of art from life and thus to blame for the aesthetic barrenness of our lived reality is the museum institution, as Shusterman describes: [End Page 91]The compartmentalization and spiritualization of art as an elevated "separate realm" set "upon a far-off pedestal," divorced from the materials and aims of other human effort, has removed art from the lives of most of us, and thus impoverished the aesthetic quality of our lives.(PA, 19)However, we must keep in mind that Art as Experience was published in 1934. Today, new approaches towards encounter and engagement within public museums are taking form and gaining momentum, with unprecedented directorial visions and mandates designed to nurture and make accessible art-based experiences among diverse audiences — where art and life can meet via multiple approaches. Theoretical synchronicities between pragmatist approaches to aesthetics and fruitful museum experiences can be suggested upon consideration of various innovative programs and approaches initiated at the Tate Modern in London and the Baltic Center for Contemporary Art in Gateshead. The overwhelming success of both venues could signify a reengagement of the general public with contemporary art, fed by "democratic," participatory approaches to exhibiting and programming art that make the museum more accessible to the various mixed publics it serves. In light of these new museological developments, Dewey's polemic oppositions between his conceptualizations of the museum experience and "art-as-experience" should be reexamined and possibly redefined.Dewey was entirely opposed to the concept of "art for art's sake." By exonerating art of any functional value — deeming it "fine" — art was elevated to a position separate from life, and thus rendered impotent to effect a lived aesthetic experience (which is how, Dewey would argue, the arts function most powerfully — as the purveyors of heightened experience). As Shusterman describes:The underlying motive for such attempts to purify art from any functionality was not to denigrate it as worthlessly useless, but to place its worth apart from and above the realm of instrumental value...and this freedom from use would be its defining and ennobling feature.(PA, 9)Dewey (and Shusterman) thus maintained that the very power construct that put the "fine" in art did so by removing the aspect of function from it. As previously stated, Dewey blamed museum institutions for removing art from its... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 20 (2000) 59-69 [Access article in PDF] Buddhist Views on Ritual Pactice Protestant Character of Modern Buddhist Movements Yukio MatsudoUniversity of HeidelbergWhat is the relationship between ritual and ethical activities in Nichiren Buddhism, as practiced in the Soka Gakkai (SG)? SG is a lay Buddhist organization which is, as such, involved extensively in secular affairs, specifically in the field of educational, cultural, social, and peace-promoting programs. (...) The question is, therefore, not at all whether there is a connection of religious practice and ethical activities. Rather it begs an explanation regarding its ideological background. In this respect a further reflection on a metareflection level would be useful to clarify the "modern" character of SG, which may be discussed in relation to Christian Protestantism since it has been regarded as a spiritual background for the formation of modern ethos such as individualism, egalitarianism, and social engagement. Thus, I will depict the fundamental feature of Nichiren Buddhism as "reformative Buddhism," which makes the practice of Buddhism congruent with "modern" understanding of religious roles in daily life as well as social engagement. On the other hand, I will also discuss some problems being inherent to the Western acculturation of the reformed and "engaged Buddhism." 1 The Ethical Activities of the SG in the World Ethical and Social Aspects of the Movement It is generally well known that the lay Buddhist organization, SG, as a whole has initiated wide and multifaceted activities even in an international level in order to transform its religious ideals into social reality, specifically in the field of educational, cultural, social, and peace-promoting programs. For this purpose it established educational institutes ranging from kindergartens to universities as well as research [End Page 59] institutes such as the Institute of Oriental Philosophy (founded 1961), the Boston Research Center for the 21st Century (founded 1993), the Toda Institute for Global Peace and Policy Research (founded 1996), and other centers for ecological researches. For promoting mutual respect and understanding through cultural expressions and exchanges several institutes have been established, like the Min-On Concert Association (founded 1963), the Tokyo Fuji Art Museum (founded 1991), and La Maison Littéraire de Victor Hugo in Bièvre, France (founded 1992). On a global level, its political involvement is, for a large part, situated as a NGO in the frame of the UNO and the UNESCO. With the help of the UNO, SG has organized all over the world expositions translating its concerns for peace, e.g., "Nuclear War: Threat to our World" and "War and Peace." With the Simon Wiesenthal Center it organized an exhibition "The Courage to Remember: Anne Frank and the Holocaust Exhibition." The issue of human rights is another of its major concerns. Commemorating the forty-fifth anniversary of the United Nations' adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, SG held an exhibition entitled "Toward the Century of Humanity: An Overview of Human Rights in Today's World" at the UN office in Geneva. Also, money received from fund-raising activities has been donated to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and related agencies to provide medical supplies and food, and to support educational programs in the areas concerned. To expose the horrors of war, SG has also published life histories written by members about their sufferings in war: "Women against War," "Cries for Peace," and "Peace is our Duty." Segmental Differentiation of Organizational Structure To meet the requirements of functional differentiation of today's modern societal life SG is organized in a segmental and hierarchical structure. The basic structure is the regional units, organized in a hierarchical model, and all members are integrated "in each group" in their residence area. At the same time each member belongs to a specific "division" which is organized according to gender, age, and occupation. There are the four divisions of men, women, young men, and young women. Additionally there are divisions for school boys and girls, university students, as well as divisions according to occupation such as artists, lawyers, medical doctors, academics, and so on. These divisional differentiations reflect the need... (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)

In 1967 Garfinkel and Bittner were investigating good organizational reasons for bad clinic records, demonstrating how the reading of such records as sociological data should be reported to the understanding of their production’s practical contingencies and to the situated circumstances of their use. This seminal paper opened new avenues of research related to the study of records in various professional contexts and of their transformation, to the development of praxiological approaches to practical and professional texts, or to the study of (...) historical documents and archives. To contribute to this ethnomethodological strand of research, I propose a case-study of artworks’ records management at the museum, investigated as a perspicuous site to reflect upon how artworks are experienced, apprehended and defined in the institutional ordinary business. Drawing on observations and materials collected at the French National Museum of Modern Art, I study records’ careers and describe their material and organizational properties, by giving a close look at some elements. More particularly, I focus on one distinctive property of some records: their thickness, investigated as a scheme of interpretation of the situated features of documentation work. By reading artworks’ records as local collective practices of assemblage, disruption and reconfiguration of pieces of documentation, I demonstrate that what is documented in this process is not only the artwork: it is also the collective work of working with artworks, dealt with as ongoing achievements of institutional practices. (shrink)

The history of Iraq in the twentieth century, and perhaps the Middle East more broadly, is punctuated by an intellectual shift that has, for the most part, escaped the attention of scholars. It might be characterized as a shift from a problem of representation introduced by the rise of left-wing politics, to a problem of experience created by its failure. This shift registers in the work of writers and artists, where the depiction of the social world gave way to an (...) exploration of states of being. The paradigm for that turn inward in modern art was set by the artist Kadhim Haidar, in a series of paintings exhibited at the National Museum of Modern Art in Baghdad, in 1965, under the title The Epic of the Martyr [Malḥamat al-shahīd]. The paintings reconstructed imagery from the mourning processions that annually commemorate the martyrdom of the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson, al-Husayn. This paper argues that the ritual imagery contains a grammar of experience, forged in the early history of Islam, that linked justice to a state of being, and that the transposition of the imagery into painting activated that grammar in the artwork. (shrink)

For Malraux, modernity in art is not only about modern art; it is also about the birth of what he aptly terms “the first universal world of art.” This event was a consequence of the process of metamorphosis which is central to Malraux’s account of the relationship between art and time. The article explains this event, noting also that modern aesthetics has not provided an explanation. (This is the English version of the final which will be in French.).

The subject of the study is the works of contemporary St. Petersburg artists of different generations and creative trends, as well as the forms and features of their communication with each other and with the general as well as professional public. The trends of artistic communication in the city are determined by the activities of such institutions as art and non-art museums, art galleries and exhibition centers, which are a classic form of presentation of contemporary art; alternative venues such as (...) creative spaces and art clusters. The field of attention also includes the attraction of St. Petersburg authors to the organization of small artistic associations, mainly art groups, for example, "Unconquered", "North-7", "Parasites", etc. In addition to works of art, theoretical works and reflections by researchers of contemporary art in St. Petersburg and the spaces of its public presentation are involved. The methodological basis is the analysis of the works of St. Petersburg masters of the beginning of the XXI century in the context of the development of urban institutions of artistic communication. The research is based on theoretical works devoted to the problem of artistic communication and trends in the current art process. Comparative-interpretative and typological methods are used to compare the works of artists and forms of artistic communication. The problem of artistic communication in the field of fine art in St. Petersburg is becoming the subject of a separate study. This area of city life is currently developing quite dynamically, as new art associations, curatorial practices and alternative classical platforms for the presentation of the work of authors belonging to different generations and art movements are emerging. Traditional museums and galleries, as well as creative spaces, art clusters and other often non-core institutions, such as libraries and cafes, are involved in this process. Against this background, the features of St. Petersburg artistic communication crystallize, which is characterized by a desire to organize communities, to fuse realistic traditions and current trends, to escapism and symbolism, as well as an interest in oriental themes and stylistics. (shrink)

There can be little doubt, from the enduring contemporary popularity of art galleries and museums, that such visual arts as painting and sculpture are sources of perceptual and emotional satisfaction and pleasure to a large viewing public. Still, given the contemporary unfamiliarity of much of the subject matter of past art and the absence of any clearly comprehensible subject matter in much modern (abstract and other) art, it may be less clear what younger or older viewers might come to (...) learn from their viewing of much or any educational value. This paper first offers an overview of the complex history of development of visual art from past to present in light of the shifting standards of artistic and aesthetic evaluation that have variously guided such development. However, it is argued that, while any educated appreciation of visual art cannot be had without some understanding of such history, it also requires a clear grasp of conceptual relations between the artistic and the aesthetic and of the significant interplay of diverse criteria of evaluation in any and all serious artworks past or present. Given this, visual arts may provide a unique route to educational understanding of the broadest liberal character. (shrink)

This article aims to defend the value of art museum audio guides. Modern guides have many functions, but I will focus on two that pertain directly to art appreciation. First, audio guides offer tours that direct visitors' attention to museum highlights. Second, they have individual stops that offer commentary and criticism about individual works of art. I will concede that the tours do not serve the interests of all visitors. However, I will defend the merits of the (...) individual stops. In particular, I will argue that they provide information about the associated works that it would be difficult for us to learn just by looking at them for ourselves. In so doing, the guides put us in a better position to appreciate the works. Crucially, this benefit obtains even if art appreciation turns out to be subjective, must be undertaken autonomously, or has to be grounded in empirical observation. (shrink)

The paintings of the three brothers -- Marcial Camilo, Juan Camilo, and Felix Camilo Ayala -- stand among the high points of modern Mexican folk art, and represent the most ambitious creations to have come from the province of Guerrero . The joyous traditions of Guerrero rival the better-known outputs of Oaxaca or Michoacan in quality but they have not received comparable attention from collectors or museums.

The late Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, curator of Indian art at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, uniquely combined art historian, philosopher, orientalist, linguist, and expositor in his person. His knowledge of the arts and handcrafts of the Orient was unexcelled and his numerous monographs on Oriental art either established or revolutionized entire fields. He was also a great Orientalist, with an almost unmatched understanding of traditional culture. He covered the philosophic and religious experience of the entire premodern world, east (...) and west, and for him primitive, medieval European, and classical Indian experiences of truth and art were only different dialects in a common language. Finally, Coomaraswamy was a provocative writer, whose erudition was expressed in a delightful, aphoristic style. The nine essays in this book are among his most stimulating. They discuss such matters as the true function of aesthetics in art, the importance of symbolism, and the importance of intellectual and philosophical background to the artists; they demonstrate that abstract art and primitive art, despite superficial resemblances, are completely divergent; and they deal with the common philosophy which pervades all great art, the nature of medieval art, folklore, and modern art, the beauty inherent in mathematics, and the union of traditional symbolism and individual portraiture in premodern cultures. (shrink)

The essays collected in this special issue of Critical Inquiry are devoted to reflection on the shifts in photographically based art practice, exhibition, and reception in recent years and to the changes brought about by these shifts in our understanding of photographic art. Although initiated in the 1960s, photography as a mainstream artistic practice has accelerated over the last two decades. No longer confined to specialist galleries, books, journals, and other distribution networks, contemporary art photographers are now regularly the subject (...) of major retrospectives in mainstream fine-art museums on the same terms as any other artist. One could cite, for example, Thomas Struth at the Metropolitan Museum in New York , Thomas Demand at the Museum of Modern Art , or Jeff Wall at Tate Modern and MoMA . Indeed, Wall's most recent museum show, at the time of writing, The Crooked Path at Bozar, Brussels , situated his photography in relation to the work of a range of contemporary photographers, painters, sculptors, performance artists, and filmmakers with whose work Wall considers his own to be in dialogue, irrespective of differences of media. All this goes to show that photographic art is no longer regarded as a subgenre apart. The situation in the United Kingdom is perhaps emblematic of both photography's increasing prominence and its increased centrality in the contemporary art world over recent years. Tate hosted its first ever photography survey, Cruel and Tender, as recently as 2003, and since then photography surveys have become a regular biannual staple of its exhibition programming, culminating in the appointment of Tate's first dedicated curator of photography in 2010. A major shift in the perception of photography as art is clearly well under way. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Taking Up Space:Museum Exploration in the Twenty-First CenturyTiffany Sutton (bio)Museums have become a crucible for questions of the role that traditional art and art history should play in contemporary art. Friedrich Nietzsche argued in the nineteenth century that museums can be no more than mausoleums for effete (fine) art.1 Over the course of the twentieth century, however, curators dispelled such blanket pessimism by showing that what keeps historical (...) art museums, both comprehensive and modern, "alive" and relevant in the modern art world are the things that curators do with the artworks in their collections.2 In certain cases, I will argue in this article, the focus on artworks and the relationship between them can be rewardingly shifted onto the spatial aspect of the museum. I will try to show what such a shift of focus entails, show that it involves a gestalt shift (in Wittgenstein's terms, the "dawning of an aspect"), and illustrate the limits within which this can arise.3 The foremost of these limiting factors is museum architecture, and I will discuss this to the extent that it determines the limits of what curators can do. How architects do things with museums, however, lies outside the scope of this article.An Art Historical Heuristic Gets a Curatorial MakeoverNineteenth-century art museums typically were vast, labyrinthine, and built to assume the shape of a comprehensive art historical narrative, so they were easy targets for ideologues drawn to vibrant modern artworks and the controversy surrounding them. At the turn of the twentieth century new commercial galleries developed a distinctively modern mode of display in which individual artworks were showcased with plenty of space around them.4 Had existing museums changed their ways to accommodate these developments, the momentum of a new aesthetic of flatness, surface, [End Page 87] and yet purer forms of conceptualism would have been lost. It was not a time for absorption and deflation: new museums, no less monumental and historical but smaller and with fewer volumes, were commissioned to give modern art the appearance of a fresh start.5 The weightless upward mobility of Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan, modeled in 1945 and opened to the public in 1959, consummated this trend of the first half of the twentieth century and gave it its purest form. What the building spurt revealed was that as art changes, it demands to be reflected in its surroundings, not merely accommodated. That the response was to build new museums rather than new wings suggests the inner workings of the principle—call it "curatorial heuristic one"—that, whereas art history is fluid and simply flows forward with new developments, museums are not of this nature; they can become effete.The curatorial revision of this heuristic was a century in coming. As often happens when emerging movements are yet underdetermined, modernism suppressed in its beginnings the background factor that would seem to entail the end of modern art when finally brought into focus: the very context of display that had once set it apart. Duchamp's Readymades (1913) gave the initial nod (or wink) to the gallery context; it was, however, ignored, as a suppressed punch line, until art history was ready to concede the importance of the context of display—not in the gallery, but in the museum—to a site-specific artwork by Richard Serra: his Splashing and Prop (1968). With the museum's framing context and, concomitantly, the importance of the curator's work conceded, the barrier that had kept lesser masterpieces in the basement (or out of the museum) were removed. Unearthed, these began to circulate, and attention centered on the relation in which they stood to better-known artworks, either as suppressed alternates or as descendants of an artistic lineage. So postmodern sprawl began, with the display of multiple alternative art histories drawing, as modernism had, on available display conventions for periodizing according to internal principles (period, school, genre, style) such that detection of them devolved upon the viewer.When public uses for the new public museums began to diversify (from an historical/educational focus to aesthetic/educational and cultural/political ones), principles for ordering artworks were... (shrink)

Over a decade ago, Arthur Danto announced that art ended in the sixties. Ever since this declaration, he has been at the forefront of a radical critique of the nature of art in our time. After the End of Art presents Danto's first full-scale reformulation of his original insight, showing how, with the eclipse of abstract expressionism, art has deviated irrevocably from the narrative course that Vasari helped define for it in the Renaissance. Moreover, he leads the way to a (...) new type of criticism that can help us understand art in a posthistorical age where, for example, an artist can produce a work in the style of Rembrandt to create a visual pun, and where traditional theories cannot explain the difference between Andy Warhol's Brillo Box and the product found in the grocery store. Here we are engaged in a series of insightful and entertaining conversations on the most relevant aesthetic and philosophical issues of art, conducted by an especially acute observer of the art scene today.Originally delivered as the prestigious Mellon Lectures on the Fine Arts, these writings cover art history, pop art, "people's art," the future role of museums, and the critical contributions of Clement Greenberg--who helped make sense of modernism for viewers over two generations ago through an aesthetics-based criticism. Tracing art history from a mimetic tradition through the modern era of manifestos, Danto shows that it wasn't until the invention of Pop art that the historical understanding of the means and ends of art was nullified. Even modernist art, which tried to break with the past by questioning the ways of producing art, hinged on a narrative.Traditional notions of aesthetics can no longer apply to contemporary art, argues Danto. Instead he focuses on a philosophy of art criticism that can deal with perhaps the most perplexing feature of contemporary art: that everything is possible. (shrink)

For more than fifteen years, Melissa Ann Pinney has been making photographs of girls and women, from infancy to old age, to portray how feminine identity is constructed, taught, and communicated. Her work depicts not only the rites of American womanhood—a prom, a wedding, a baby shower, a tea party—but the informal passages of girlhood: combing a doll's hair, doing laundry with a mother, smoking a cigarette at a state fair. With each view, we gain a greater understanding of the (...) connections between mother and daughter, and by extension the larger world of family, friends, and society. Pinney's approach to interpreting girlhood became more complicated and complex when her daughter, Emma, was born eight years ago. Emma's childhood evoked in Pinney her own girlhood and gave her work new meaning and purpose. Ultimately, Regarding Emma shares with all of us the incremental and the ritualistic changes that take place in a woman's life over time. Her photographs are artistic and social documents that reveal the subtle and bold aspects of feminine identity—documents whose reach will extend well beyond the walls of America's leading galleries and museums into the hearts and homes of everyday Americans. "Melissa Ann Pinney is making powerful art. In matters of light, color, and composition she is flawless. But these are not simply constructions of elements. These photographs bear witness to the speed at which the little girl becomes the old woman, to the fleeting, breathless beauty of childhood, to life itself, which leaves us stunned in its wake."—Ann Patchett, from the Foreword "Melissa Ann Pinney provides a compelling portrait of American girls as they make their way from infancy to adulthood. Using her daughter's childhood as a point of departure, she traces the complex terrain of adolescence and budding femininity. The results are photographs marked by empathy and grace."—Sylvia Wolf, Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City "These photographs by Melissa Ann Pinney impart a sense of the special and sacred everyday rituals we take for granted. She appreciates at once the transient nature of what she finds and its gravity. Her pictures describe so well the wonder, and beauty, and centrality of the things we know best and the people we see often."—Sandra S. Phillips, Curator of Photography, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art "Melissa Ann Pinney's record of life with her daughter, Emma, adds a new and touching chapter to our knowledge of the lives of women and girls."—Adam Gopnik, author of Paris to the Moon and a staff writer for The New Yorker "Melissa Pinney's passionate, painstaking investigation of the stages of women's lives is impressive for its rigor and courage. Her themes aren't imposed on the pictures or on the women, men, and children who people them; instead, they arise from her attentive study of particularities— of the ways human lives are etched on the surfaces of faces and the positions of bodies in real spaces and places, mundane but radiant. When she turns from the lives of others to her own life, the shift is seamless but the volume swells, the emotions grow more pointed and the paradoxes more painful, joyous, and direct. This is remarkable work by an artist at the height of her powers."—Peter Bacon Hales, author of William Henry Jackson and the Transformation of the American Landscape. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 39.2 (2005) 97-103 [Access article in PDF] MoMA as Educator: The Legacy of Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Ralph A. Smith Professor Emeritus University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art by Sybil Gordon Kantor. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2002, xxv, 472 pp., $39.95. ISBN 0-262-11258-2 Sybil Kantor's history of the intellectual (...) origins of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an engaging account of Alfred Barr, Jr.'s, pivotal role in acquainting an American audience with the modernist movement in art that had developed in Europe and the Soviet Union in the first part of the twentieth century. Scrupulously documented, Kantor's narrative relies heavily on interviews with Barr's contemporaries, his publications, and his extensive correspondence. She also limns portraits of major figures who either influenced his ideas or were instrumental in establishing MoMA. Although the book is very informative about modern art, according to its author it is not intended to be strictly a history of that art. Rather, it is devoted to Barr's early development, his personal characteristics, his attitude toward the cultural and political climate of the times, his definitions of modernism and formalism, and finally, his legacy.Kantor traces Barr's career through the decade of the 1920s, which culminated in his being named the first director of MoMA in 1929; the expansive years of the 1930s and 1940s when, as Kantor puts it, Barr and the museum were at full throttle; and the later years when Barr was relieved of his director's responsibilities to allow him to spend more time on writing and the mounting of exhibitions. He retired from the museum in 1967, began to show signs of ill health in the mid-1970s, and died at the age of 79 in 1981. The Early Years Barr began his studies in the history of art at Princeton where he took courses with Frank Jewett Mather, who taught about modern art, and with Charles Rufus Morey, a distinguished medievalist whose teaching ranged beyond the architecture and sculpture of the Middle Ages to the other arts of that era. Morey's example of comprehensiveness would later stimulate Barr to think along similar lines about modern art and the organization of MoMA. At Harvard's graduate school Barr learned the skills of connoisseurship and museum management from Paul Sachs whose students went on to become directors of major museums across America. Sachs also encouraged Barr's interest in modern art and provided him with numerous letters of [End Page 97] introduction to scholars and museum directors — and occasionally withfunds for his travels.1 Lincoln Kirstein was a close friend, art critic, and earlyally, while Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Walter Gropius, and Philip Johnson significantly affected Barr's understanding of architecture. A large cast of artists, patrons, collectors, writers, trustees, and editors of "little magazines"(so-called because of their relatively small numbers of readers) also enter the scene and play various roles. A few words are in order about Barr himself who, Kantor says, exhibited more rebelliousness, a larger vision, and greater discipline than most of those around him. Barr the Man Kantor portrays a mind and sensibility possessed of exceptional discernment for the new, the difficult, and the worthwhile in the art of the early twentieth century. Barr's feeling for order, organization, and clarity of relations; his commitment to perfection, freedom, and truth; and his faith in the capacity of modern art to overcome prejudices and improve the taste of Americans are not merely reflections of the disciplinary habits inculcated by Barr's Presbyterian upbringing. They also reveal the classical tastes acquired through his art-historical studies and echo the temper of the age.The time — the 1920s through the 1940s — valued both the rationalism of science with its methods of problem solving and the insights of psychoanalysis with its probing of the irrational. Belief in the inevitable progress promised by advances in technology was, however... (shrink)

The lead essay by Arthur Danto "addresses the possibility that art as it has been enshrined in the museums, galleries, and other canonizing institutions of modern culture has reached an end, that it has nothing more to do or say." The other essays in the book are reactions to the lead essay.

Until fairly recently, most of the attention of art historians and others in these debates has been paid to differences among the partisans of various disciplinary methodologies, or to the differential benefits of one or another school of thought or theoretical perspective in other areas of the humanities and social sciences as these might arguably apply to questions of art historical practice.1 Yet there has also come about among art historians a renewed interest in the historical origins of the academic (...) discipline itself, and in the relationships of its institutionalization in various countries to the professionalizing of other historical and critical disciplines in the latter part of the nineteenth century. These interests have led increasingly to wider discussion by art historians of the particular nature of disciplinary knowledge, the circumstances and protocols of academic practice, and the relations between the various branches of modern discourse on the visual arts: academic art history, art criticism, aesthetic philosophy, the art market, exhibitions, and musicology.2 What follows does not aim to summarize or characterize these developments but is more simply an attempt to delineate some of the principal characteristics of the discipline as an evidentiary institution in the light of the material conditions of academic practice that arose in the latter half of the nineteenth century in relation to the history of mueological display. In brief, this essay is concerned with the circumstances of art history’s foundations as a systematic and “scientific” practice, and its focus is limited to a single, albeit paradigmatic, American example. 1. An extended discussion of these issues may be found in Donald Preziosi, Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science , pp. 80-121. See also The New Art History, ed. A. L. Rees and Frances Borzello .2. One important sign off these discussions has been a series of “Views and Overviews” of the discipline appearing in The Art Bulletin in recent years, of which the most recent has been perhaps the most extensive and comprehensive: Mieke Bal and Norman Byrson, ”Semiotics and Art History,” The Art Bulletin 73 : 174-208. Donald Preziosi is professor of art history at the University of California, Los Angeles, and, beginning in 1992, at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He is the author of Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science and is currently completing a book on the history of museums entitled Framing Modernity. (shrink)

Currently, art takes on the characteristics of a secular religion: it offers identity, dogmas, canons, experiences of transcendence and provides a certain worldly salvation without demanding any commitment to a creed or a doctrine. I will illustrate this through the example of the performance Marina Abramovic carried out at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in The Artist is Present (2010). I will connect this to the distinction that Agamben has set between the concepts of secularization and desecration: (...) while secularization displaces the forces from one place to another, leaving them intact, desecration involves neutralizing the desecrated, eliminating its aura and putting it back to use. Even though it is commonly believed that contemporary art desecrates realities, I will try to show that actually it secularizes them. Art brings with it the strength and meaning of the religious and keeps the integrity of the auratic space within the artistic realm. This is one of the reasons why transgression in art is such an important topic for theorists: it is a constant effort to redefine the limits between what is considered sacred (and art has a decisive power on that) and what is profane (not sacred anymore or not yet). (shrink)

Architecture and Deconstruction Case of Peter Eisenman and Bernard Tschumi -/- Introduction Towards deconstruction in architecture Intensive relations between philosophical deconstruction and architecture, which were present in the late 1980s and early 1990s, belong to the past and therefore may be described from a greater than before distance. Within these relations three basic variations can be distinguished: the first one, in which philosophy of deconstruction deals with architectural terms but does not interfere with real architecture, the second one, in which (...) a collaboration between Jacques Derrida and a group of architects interested in his concepts is commenced, and the third one, in which completed or only designed objects or new concepts of deconstruction created by architects gain their supremacy over philosophy. The following book analyses these three possible ways, first of all with the reference to Peter Eisenman and Bernard Tschumi. -/- Peter Eisenman -/- Misreading… and Other Errors -/- The issue of relations between Peter Eisenman’s work and philosophy of deconstruction may be referred to his activity more than ten years preceding his direct collaboration with Jacques Derrida (in 1985) and organisation of the exhibition Deconstructivist Architecture at Museum of Modern Art in New York (in 1988). As soon as at the stage of designing the first houses (House I-III, 1967-1970), which almost entirely inscribed in formalistic aesthetics of Modernism, the architect analysed the problem of architecture dependence on its assumptions. All his later designs may be treated as consequence of this initial interest in relations between practice and theory, and at the same time as an introduction to manipulations later on led at the level of metaphysics of architecture. Beginning with the issue of presence, considered in comments to House VI (1972), the number of ideas having their analogies in philosophy of deconstruction increased. The text entitled The End of the Classical: The End of the Beginning, The End of the End (1984), in which Eisenman criticised questions of representation in architecture, its delusive strive for truth and comparably unattainable attempts at ultimate definition of elementary rules, should be acclaimed the breaking point. This attitude was extended by numerous strategies disturbing architecture rules defined at metaphysical level in an essay Moving Arrows, Eros, and Other Errors: an Architecture of Absence (1986). The issue of Eisenman’s passage from formalism to deconstruction has already been much discussed in the literature (Rosalind Krauss, Thomas Patin among others), still it should be mentioned that the threads similar to Derrida’s concept included in Eisenman’s writing reveal untranslatability of architecture and philosophy. -/- Choral Works or Separate tricks -/- In 1985-1986 a series of seven disputes between Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman took place. The pretext for them were designs concerning Parc de la Villette in Paris. The situation of many months of collaboration between a notable philosopher of the second half of the 20th c. and an architect that already had a huge theoretical oeuvre, ended up with a publication of a large volume entitled Chora L Works and it became at the same time a vast study area for historians of contemporary architecture and philosophers. Derrida’s contribution to concept works were his considerations over the idea of chôra, the properties related to this concept were about to be reflected in shapes of the park. Therefore, Chora L Works became an example of the abilities of contemporary art, both in its capability of translation from philosophical ideas to artistic forms and its resistance to tradition of representing in architecture some phenomena and values originating outside this discipline. In the final period of their collaboration both interlocutors started to polemicise with each other more decidedly, what became a separate part of their thought exchange. The exchange of letters between Derrida and Eisenman at the turn of 1989 ended up the period of their direct contacts, nevertheless, at this time precisely a large group of experts in issues of deconstruction joined the discussion and extended the revealed in the former dispute problems into more than ten years of further considerations and publications. Except for a long text by Jeffrey Kipnis, who had participated in the meetings of the philosopher and the architect, there appeared also comments of researchers of artistic theories (K. Michael Hays, Thomas Patin), philosophers (Andrew Benjamin), and even experts in Greek literature (Maria Theodorou or Ann Bergren). Following these debates a contemporary reflection on architecture has saturated with indeed numerous concepts originating in philosophy of deconstruction. -/- Architecture which imitates mute philosophy -/- The series of Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman meetings, which took place in the period of 1985-1987, induced many authors to make comments. Some of them (Jeffrey Kipnis, Ann Bergren, Maria Theodorou) developed the subject of chôra which was introduced to the discussion by Derrida. The problem that was about to be solved was the question of tying up the concept of chôra with architecture, including Eisenman’s architecture and the series of meetings within frames of Chora L Works project. Kipnis on this occasion paid attention to chôra and its character of anachronia which infects any being created within chôra. In other words any event has its counterpart (analogon) in another, earlier event. He demonstrated the similarity of structure of many events and statements from the times of Derrida and Eisenman’s meetings to the almost identical behaviour of figures in Plato’s dialogue Timaeus. The loss of beginning present in this phenomenon was appropriate to both features of chôra and the effects of typical analyses of philosophy of deconstruction. Bergren’s analyses focused on accentuating gender of chôra, which, according to this author, had been neglected hitherto in discussions. She collated chôra descriptions with characteristics of women in myths, early Greek epic and philosophy and she arrived at a conclusion that chôra has features of a single woman and a married one at the same time. And yet Theodorou’s studies showed that in the Homeric epics chôra is not treated as an idea but is related with single things and events. The other part of the comments (represented by Andrew Benjamin and K. Michael Hays’ utterances) concerns Eisenman’s attitude to tradition which was treated as a variety of iteration understood philosophically. Benjamin commenced his considerations at the point of closeness between a definition of tradition and a concept of chôra understood as perpetuation (placement). A problematic issue was for him Eisenman’s complex relation to tradition based on its contest and affirmation at the same time. Overcoming the simple subordination to tradition – according to Benjamin – was based on awareness of the role of repetition in culture not known before. Hays made an attempt to explain the pleasure and torment of repetition with the support of Sigmund Freud and Roland Barthes’ concepts. According to Hays repetitions are attempts of a single being to a certain primal state perceived as free of any tension. In a similar way Rosalind Krauss explained a motif of a grate present in Modernistic art and also exceptionally frequent in Eisenman’s work. -/- Annex Architecture is still writing Balzac novels. Peter Eisenman and literature -/- Architecture’s approach to writing, script or literature, present within Peter Eisenman’s work, is an exceptional phenomenon, furthermore a complex one. The article considers four possible relations. The first one relates to Eisenman’s characteristics as a person extremely gifted with the ability to wordplay, which very ‘play’ reveals skills to create architectural images. In the second approach the attention has been paid to Eisenman’s interests – in the first period of his oeuvre – in linguistic works by Noam Chomsky and his transformational-generative grammar. The third kind of relations applied to overcoming the need for autonomy of architecture (and of modernist aesthetics at the same time) and renew interests in questions of meaning in architecture. The fourth sort of relations occurred when Eisenman started to create reflections of historic or literary narrations in architecture – ‘stone stories’ and architectural fictions of their kind. -/- Bernard Tschumi -/- From perversion to deconstruction In Bernard Tschumi’s writings from the 1970s and 1980s we can find a transposition of important threads of post-structuralist ideas deriving from Georges Bataille, Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida’s works. The analysis of the architect’s writings also shows roots in Phillippe Sollers, Michel Foucault and Denis Hollier’s works. The analysis of borrowed elements from the beginnings of Tschumi’s theoretical activity may be helpful in explaining the contents of his later writings motre inspired by philosophy of deconstruction. The set of his earliest views was inspired by Marxism, Neo Marxism and French Structuralism, mainly by the writings of Henri Levebre and Guy Debord. From the thought of Levebre Tschumi took interest for city as not only a question of urbanistics but also a political issue. From Debord’s concepts he borrowed a conviction about the role of situational violation for changes in the society structure. Some of these beliefs were preserved in his own concepts of architecture as an event. From this period derived also his will to change conservative elements of social structure not by means of political revolution but of theoretical and creative activity. Tschumi acknowledged that the effective way of the proceedings towards achieving his aims would be accepting the role of both a critical intellectualist and architecture expert who would not hide away his left-wing orientation. The speculations defined by the architect as ‘revolting analyses’ were about to characterise contradictions which tear the society apart, penetrate architecture and constitute the basis of culture. Spreading away of the conscience of false assumptions hidden away in various disciplines could have weakened cohesion of a conservative society and influence the will to change among the elites. This way the beginnings of political revolution were rooted in philosophy of architecture. In 1977 Tschumi published his text entitled The Pleasure of Architecture inspired by Roland Barthes’s The Pleasure of the Text, it also included some concepts derived from Georges Bataille and Jacques Derrida. First of all the author used Barthes’s concept which made an assumption that literary activity is pervaded by the spirit of resistance towards social rules, and Tschudi transferred this remark onto architecture. From the ideas of Bataille, acquainted via Holier’s work, he derived his belief that two concepts of space, a conceptual one (defined as Pyramid) and a sensual one (defined as Labirynth), not losing their distinct features, they join in the concept of experienced space which exceeds contradictions. The exceeding itself was defined as the basic rule of architecture and it was referred to situations in which architecture not only negates social needs, but also disavows its own tradition. Crossing the borders applies not only to political issues or permanent rules of the very discipline but also interfering with other fields (especially literature and film). The fact that architecture is associated with organising events turned Tschumi’s attention to questions of violence that result from upsetting architectural order of a given building by its users and the one hand, and on the other from forcing the users to specific acts imposed by this very order. The analysis of the concepts used by Tschumi in his early writings indicates that they are close to definitions that would occur in his reflection in the following years influenced by philosophy of deconstruction. -/- Approaching deconstruction Tschumi in his theories developed in the 1980s presumed that the current social world had undergone a deep process of decay, and the reaction against which ought to be based on ordering-up actions, and also preserving the main outline of disintegration of the whole and its elements in the state of conflict. The statements concerning the nature of the contemporary to Tschumi social relations were applied by him to the world of architecture, this led him to coming up with designing strategies that took into consideration the destabilised character of conditions in which works of architecture were created. New ways of conduct invented by Tschumi drew their inspiration from literature and research on literature, psychoanalysis, structural linguistics, structuralism and post structuralism, and eventually also deconstruction philosophy. The proposed methods were opposed by their author both to functionalism continuity trends and postmodern architecture. Tschumi’s proposals contradicted any forms of conservatism or traditionalism in political sphere as well as in reference to tendencies in architecture. They were not simple contradictions of social or architectural rules, they intrude them from the inside, weaken or escalate the already existing incongruities, they move the boundaries between the areas. Revolutionary illusions about the possibility of radical changes were replaced with strategies which completed, tainted or test former rules in the series of formal games of permutation and combination. Quite different from avant-garde formalism Tschumi’s games were not about maintaining the autonomy of a given area, but on the contrary – polluting it with other areas’ influences. Tschumi enjoyed demonstrating illusions of architecture concerning simple relations between form and function, or between form and meaning. Making use of Freud, Lacan and Foucault’s research he introduced a category of “madness” into architecture allowing an observation that the recognised norms are nothing but merely ones of many possible principles of behaviour, and their recognised status resulted from unjustified hindering innovativeness which is crucial for architecture. To reborn architecture’s capability of changing Tschumi also made use of Barthes’s discoveries concerning rules of narration and works by writers who applied in their writing knowledge on linguistics. Making a work’s author unclear by various mechanical transformations of its elements was however apparent only, and formal rigours imposed on the process of designing liberated possibilities difficult to obtain in more traditional creative action. Another mode of acting introduced by Tschumi was combining his work of elements deriving from outside architecture; joining space records with notation of motion and events accompanying architectural objects among others. These architectural and extra-architectural elements were not unified, on the contrary their heterogenous and conflictual character was stressed. This is how shock, anxiety and instability, typical for live in great metropolises, infiltrated architecture. Taking some ideas of deconstruction philosophy as a pattern Tschumi also took into critical consideration in his essays traditional in architecture oppositions between form and figuration, or theory and practice. By combining various inspirations he eventually worked out an idea of architectural event, which he understood as a series of actions contesting its own field, redefining its sources, principles and elements. An event, understood in this way, was not so much producing works as rather creating conditions of their production and at the same time designing the society different from a hierarchic one. -/- Park of deconstruction Among numerous philosophical strategies of deconstruction most frequently used was questioning the practice of strong opposition of two reasons. In many cases Bernard Tschumi’s writings just consider functioning of the conflict juxtaposition of the ideas of structure and ornament or theory and practice in history of architecture. Violation of traditional relations between terms of this kind, both old and modern, raised Jacques Derrida’s objections, when he was induced for the first time to co-operate with architects’ milieu. During this long lasting thought exchange the philosopher eventually acknowledged Bernard Tschumi’s arguments for reasoning the encroachment of architecture’s fundamental rules. Deconstruction applied in architecture was not a simple transposition or analogy of practices that had been applied by philosophy of deconstruction. We may even say that considering architectural terms became an important formula of deconstruction. Architecture understood in philosophical way became something beyond the practice and theory of its own discipline, a sort of metaphysics of both philosophy and architecture. The deliberate encroachment of simplicity of dividing architecture into theory and practice, for the first time became a clear aim for Tschumi in his drawings and texts entitled The Manhattan Transcripts. The contents of this series of works was a record of characteristic features of this New York district in such a way that not only objects were the subject of the record but also relations between objects, people and events. The record was about to take into consideration a conflict character of elements of this representation and at the same time to avoid applying to them the rule of mimetism. The record became a form of reflection over the very record by an increased control over the ways of representation. Architecture which was considered in the The Manhattan Transcripts was not directed to fulfill the needs of inhabitation or production, it was rather related with hitherto usually marginalised liminal situations: building ostentatiously big monuments, religious cult, war etc. Architecture operating in these relations focused also the attention on the included in it continuous tendency to overpass its own restrictions, the role of violence as its not recognised factor, or the meaning of excess and shock in its operation. Architecture moving from reason towards madness became even more visible in the design of Parisian Parc de la Villette, whose pavilions were defined as folies (in French it means both small park buildings and follies). The park was supposed to be on the one hand a reflection of traditional society disintegration while on the other it questioned basic rules of producing a work of architecture. The traditional rules of designing, based on ordering up, were replaced with the strategies of dysfunction and dissociation. In Tschumi’s opinion methods of this kind may be equivalent of what Derrida named différance. Instead of aiming at mergence, any diversity, plays or variations were strengthen. Tschumi’s texts, in which he explained his attitude, were completed by Derrida’s extent statement entitled Point de folie – Maintenant l’architecture. Derrida’s article is the most significant of all his statements on architecture as a form of thinking and activity. According to the philosopher, architecture should divide space (in French defined as espacement), what enables both thinking and action – it arranges the space of an event. Tschumi’s buildings, defined as folies, in an essential way destabilise any created order, and at the same time they refresh it. Derrida’s statement suggests that architecture may become both metaphor of an order merging a language or a society but also of inner forces which deconstruct and reconstruct it. Therefore architecture is at the same time a construction, a deconstruction and a reconstruction. Parc de la Villette stands out in this system with its attempt to step beyond the scheme of an easy repetition and its heading for chances of achieving more radical otherness. -/- Conclusion Destruction as construction. Paradoxes of deconstruction in architecture -/- Scepticism about persistence and common importance of fundamental values of human culture evinced in philosophers and writers’ works as early as in Greek antiquity, nevertheless it was not expressed so strongly as in the second half of the 20th century. Especially in Heidegger’s work Being and Time (although originated in 1927, still influential in all later philosophy) the following states were characterised: the state of losing the ground (Abgrund), of being out of sight (Unheimlichkeit) and of being out of dwelling (Un-zuhause-sein) – as the basis of self-confidence of conscious being there (Dasein). The entire criticism of philosophy of home and dwelling draws the inspiration from this early writing of the German philosopher, it combines crisis of basic terms of metaphysics with social conditions which are dictated by living in large metropolis. The crisis of both metaphysical foundation and home appears to be similar to the situation of weakening the relations between a man and his dwelling in extensively expanding cities. Whereas philosophy, as well as many disciplines of social sciences, have diagnosed for a long time the destabilisation of fundamental ideas of Western culture and crucial changes in the ways of dwelling, architecture itself occurred to be “the last fortress of metaphysics” (J. Derrida). Among contemporary architects, Peter Eisenman and Bernard Tschumi were the ones who engaged most decidedly in the issues of critical analysis of architecture foundation and its social role. Both the architects noticed new formulas of contemporary social and individual existence, tremendously different from the entire history, and at the same time they affirmed lack of adequacy of architecture concepts to new situations. Both Eisenman and Tschumi used to describe the existing architecture as a tool for consolidation of highly integrated and hierarchised societies, and also as a discipline extremely uncoincidental with the current character of social life based on ideas of freedom and diversity. The means to transform architecture and make a factor of further social changes out of it, was a concept that accentuated revealing the inner contradictions of this discipline, and considering them in designing strategies. Eisenman’s activity, in regard of what has just been noticed, was focused on questioning the basic rules of traditionally comprehended architecture, especially the rule of purpose. The American architect noticed that the concept of architecture as fulfilment the need of location, hides away the fact that the location has to be constantly reconsidered, and hence it is overtaken by change (dislocation). Therefore new concept of architecture propounded architectural activity to translocate the concept of location – more than before – but also to change its status perpetually. Such comprehended architecture should claim, as its main purpose, the constant revision of this purpose and create itself anew permanently. Even Eisenman’s earliest designs of houses nos. I-IV broke with such values as the sense of safety, closeness and familiarity, and just on the contrary they accentuated senses of strangeness, homelessness and loss of confidence. The contradictions within architecture noticed by Tschumi referred to combination of intellectual and sensual values in architecture, when their non-appropriation was defeated by an additional condition, namely the way of experience based on pleasure of excess, marked by insanity. The features of folly were especially visible in his designs of gardens, where the order of planning was mixed with sensual experience introduced by particular elements (both the ones created by nature, and the buildings defined as folies). Parc de la Villette designed by the French architect in Paris put in question not only the common understanding of purpose in architecture but also the ideas of order and integrity, as its plan was based on the combination of independent layers with records of grids of points, various lines and planes. The architecture that collides inadequate elements with each other was supposed to be a kind of an event with no beginning and no end. The architecture treated as an event became a form of a space weakened articulation that maintains its diversity and lack of accordance of the elements building it up. The analyses of Eisenman and Tschumi’s theoretical writings indicate how much the aims of architecture have actually changed; instead of supporting social persistence, the architecture is rather intensifying contradictions, and instead of providing people with the sense of safety, it sublimes danger. From simple acts of defamiliarisation, increasing the distance to itself and enhancing the role of theory, through discomfort, anxiety, not feeling someone at home, weirdness, excess, shock and violence, architecture reached the edge of stability and uncertainty, only to make an attempt at penetrating what is impossible and unutterable, and recording what cannot become the subject of any records. -/- . (shrink)

Puritanism in modern art has resulted in a quest for meaning and reality at the expense of the spirit of creativity and spontaneity.

ZusammenfassungDieser Beitrag ist Teil des Forums COVID-19: Perspektiven in den Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften. Die Figur des Pestarztes mit der schnabelförmigen Maske ist heute die am häufigsten zitierte Bildmetapher für die Pest. Es verwundert daher nicht, dass die Pestarztmaske in der Sammlung des Deutschen Medizinhistorischen Museums in Ingolstadt zu den am meisten nachgefragten Objekten und Bildmotiven des Hauses gehört. Der Forumsbeitrag spürt der Figur des Pestarztes auf mehreren Ebenen nach: Zunächst wird anhand zeitgenössischer Text- und Bildquellen diskutiert, welche Art von Schutzkleidung (...) zu Seuchenzeiten empfohlen wurde und welche Rolle das schnabelförmige Maskenattribut dabei spielte. Anschließend wird das Ingolstädter Exemplar unter die Lupe genommen, hinsichtlich seines Materials und seiner Machart auf Authentizität und Praktikabilität hin untersucht und mit dem Exemplar des Deutschen Historischen Museums in Berlin verglichen.Das Ergebnis: Die frühesten Belege für die Verwendung dieser speziellen Art von Schutzkleidung stammen aus Italien und Südfrankreich und datieren aus der Mitte des 17. Jahrhunderts. Für Mitteleuropa gibt es keinerlei Nachweise dafür, dass zu Pestzeiten jemals eine solche Schnabelmaske in Gebrauch gewesen wäre. Und die Pestarztmasken in Ingolstadt und Berlin? Bei kritischer Betrachtung finden sich bei beiden Masken Details, die gegen eine Verwendung als Schutzkleidung sprechen. Ob es sich dabei um ältere, historisierende Nachbauten oder bewusste Fälschungen handelt, muss offen bleiben.This paper is part of Forum COVID-19: Perspectives in the Humanities and Social Sciences. The figure of the plague doctor with the beak mask has become the symbol of the plague par excellence. It’s little wonder that the plague mask in the collection of the German Museum of the History of Medicine in Ingolstadt is one of the museum’s most popular objects and motifs. This forum paper investigates the figure of the plague doctor on several levels: first, it analyses contemporary textual and image sources in regard to protective clothing used in times of plague and the respective role of the beak-like part of the mask. Then it takes a close look at the Ingolstadt specimen. By examining the mask’s materiality and fabrication, questions of its authenticity and practicability are raised. Finally, the Ingolstadt mask is compared with the specimen at the German Historical Museum in Berlin.The conclusion: the beak mask is not mentioned before the mid-seventeenth century, and then only in Italy and Southern France. There is no proof at all of its use during plague outbreaks in Middle Europe. And the specimens in Ingolstadt and Berlin? Both masks present details which suggest that they were not used as protective clothing at all. We do not know, however, if they were produced as replicas for historic reasons or as fakes for the modern art market. (shrink)

As a young boy, Jacques Henri Lartigue set about passionately recording his life in photographs, first documenting his domestic circle and later capturing the auto races, air shows, and fashionable watering holes of the Belle époque. His images have so bewitched modern viewers that even scholars have failed to see them clearly. In Jacques Henri Lartigue: The Invention of an Artist, Kevin Moore puts to rest the long-held myth of Lartigue as a naïve boy genius whose creations were based (...) on instinct alone. Moore begins by exploring the milieu in which Lartigue became a photographer, examining his father's crucial role in teaching him the latest techniques as well as the larger context of the turn-of-the-century craze for amateur photography. Two events brought Lartigue before the public eye in America and created the Lartigue myth: In the summer of 1963, the first exhibition of Lartigue's work in the United States was held at the Museum of Modern Art, which hailed him as an important modernist photographer, a forerunner of the art-documentary style of the 1960s. That fall, Life magazine published a feature presenting his work as an optimistic and sentimental prologue to World War I. Both treatments portrayed him as a naïve genius and Lartigue happily participated in shaping this new persona. In Jacques Henri Lartigue: The Invention of an Artist, Moore successfully challenges the Lartigue myth using examples from popular magazines and the cinema. Illustrated with more than fifty of Lartigue's photographs and drawings as well as press imagery from the period, the book offers a radical reassessment of the photographer and his work. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Eternal Present: Slow Knowledge and the Renewal of TimeDouglas E. ChristieA woman is seated in a chair at the center of a large, light-filled atrium. Across from her sits an adolescent girl, Asian or Asian-American, maybe thirteen years old. They are both perfectly still. They look intently at each other. That is all. Minute after minute passes. Neither of them moves. I look more closely. Utter stillness. Not (...) quite repose, for there is a sense of intentionality to their engagement with each other, but deep stillness and calm. I look around the room and see a hundred or so persons also taking in the scene. Everyone is silent, though there are occasional sounds—shoes shuffling on the floor, a cough, a sigh. It takes me a few minutes to understand what is going on, what I am seeing. I feel my own anxiety to place myself somehow in this scene, to find the appropriate categories for grasping what is unfolding before me. I ask a person nearby; he tells me: it’s Marina Abramovic. She is performing “The Artist Is Present,” part of a retrospective of her work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.1 “Oh,” I say, “thanks.” It’s performance art. Got it. But knowing this only helps a little. What are they doing? What is going on here? What is my part, if any, in what is happening? My mind, as usual, is racing ahead trying to figure it out. Which in this moment I cannot do. So, I pause (inwardly), take a step back and try to reorient myself. I take a breath, then another. I look again at the two figures.Their stillness is uncanny. This is part of what is making me anxious, I think. They are absorbed completely in the simple act of gazing at each other. I smile, thinking at first of the “stare-downs” I used to have with my brother when we were kids. Who would flinch (and fall into uncontrollable laughter) first? It was a game of chicken. With the eyes. Usually it was of short duration, and someone had to lose. This is different. The quality of attention, in particular, feels utterly different. These two are not trying to knock each other off their chairs. No one is trying to “win” at anything. They are, it seems, simply giving themselves to the work of beholding and being beheld. Extraordinary. I am not sitting in the chair. But I feel a jolt run through my body as I begin to feel the depth and power of this moment. The sense of nakedness, of naked abandon, of vulnerability. What else? Tenderness. Yes, I sense a certain tenderness passing between these two figures. And not just between them. Also touching those of us gathered in the room watching them. How is that possible? We are all [End Page 13] strangers to one another after all. And yet within this space, for these few moments there is a remarkable and palpable sense of intimacy.I am not sure at how long I stand there. But after a while, I feel the need to move, to get some relief from the intensity of this exchange. I leave the room where the artist and her companion are sitting and walk into a nearby gallery. (Later I learn that anyone visiting the museum can occupy the chair opposite the artist and that over the course of the exhibit many, many people do just that.) I am not ready to look at anything else, not yet. I have to gather myself a little first.Eventually, I do begin to take in some of the other art in the museum. But my mind keeps returning to that room and to those two seated figures. During the next couple of hours, I return to the atrium several more times. Each time I do, I am struck by how still these two figures are, how alive. Also how still and alive I feel entering into that space. Those of us beholding the scene are respectful and quiet but also animated, exchanging brief whispers, glances, smiles. We are captivated, enthralled.Suddenly... (shrink)

The aim of this article is to theorize how materials can play an active, constitutive, and causally effective role in the production and sustenance of cultural forms and meanings. It does so through an empirical exploration of the Museum of Modern Art of New York (MoMA). The article describes the museum as an “objectification machine” that endeavors to transform and to stabilize artworks as meaningful “objects” that can be exhibited, classified, and circulated. The article explains how the (...) extent to which the museum succeeds in this process of stabilization ultimately depends on the material properties of artworks and, more specially, on whether these behave as “docile” or “unruly” objects. Drawing on different empirical examples, the article explores how docile and unruly objects shape organizational dynamics within the museum and, through them, the wider processes of institutional and cultural reproduction. The article uses this empirical example to highlight the importance of developing a new “material sensibility” that restores heuristic dignity to the material within cultural sociology. (shrink)

Diaristic, mixed notes on: John Ruskin's The Poetry of Architecture (1837) and Modern Painters (1885); Caravaggio, Victorian Aesthetes, G.K. Chesterton, and Tacita Dean; Jay Fellows' Ruskin’s Maze: Mastery and Madness in His Art (1981); Slavoj Žižek at Jack Tilton Gallery, New York, New York, USA, April 23, 2009, “Architectural Parallax: Spandrels and Other Phenomena of Class Struggle”; “Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice”, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts, USA, March 15-August 16, 2009; Janet Harbord, Chris Marker: (...) La Jetée (2009); The Politics of the Envelope, Princeton Envelope Group (PEG), ARC504, Princeton School of Architecture, Princeton, New Jersey, USA, Friday, May 8, 2009; Rhode Island School of Design, Degree Project Reviews, Division of Architecture & Design, Providence, Rhode Island, USA, May 16, 2009; etc. (shrink)