Arts doi: 10.3390/arts13020057
Authors: Louis D. Nebelsick
In 1882, the lavishly decorated golden regalia of a steppe nomad warrior prince, which was crafted in the late sixth century BCE in a “bilingual” Scythian–Milesian workshop on the Black Sea coast, was found on the edge of a Lusatian swamp 120 km southeast of Berlin. Its discovery and the ongoing findings of steppe nomad armaments—arrows, battle axes, and swords—in central Europe have led to a lively debate about the nature of Scythian–Indigenous interaction in the Early Iron Age, ranging from benign visions of long-term acculturation to violent scenarios of short-term raiding. In this article, I argue that an analysis of the iconography of the Witaszkowo hoard and new information from excavations at its find spot make it likely that it was sent as a diplomatic gift by Scythian elites to an indigenous leader and deposited by the local community as a votive hoard. An affirmation of the compact chronological range of Scythian artefacts found in the west, growing evidence for the destruction of indigenous strongholds by horse-borne archers, and concurrent evidence for the drastic depopulation of vast landscapes in the second half of the sixth century BCE allow us to envisage the gifting of this hoard as an episode of a fierce and destructive altercation. It is posited that this onslaught was a facet of the western thrust of the Lydian and Persian Empires, and that its extirpative impact was the result of systematic, commercially driven slaving triggered by the concurrent monetisation of the economies of the Black Sea coast. The effects of these raids on Eastern Central Europe’s later prehistoric communities are made manifest by analogies to the disastrous ramifications of the transatlantic slave trade on societies of 16th-to-18th-century West Africa.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts13020056
Authors: Tiffany Johnson Bidler
By way of an analysis of Simone Leigh’s You Don’t Know Where Her Mouth Has Been (2017), this essay argues that by hybridizing the cowrie and watermelon, Leigh creates her own natural history of these biological forms that disorders the rigid taxonomic classification on which systems of discrimination rely. The resulting hybrid cowrie not only defies classification, it also forms a folded architecture that facilitates a Deleuzian reading. The hybrid cowries, by way of their capacious construction and narrow slits, evoke an interiority that enables metamorphosis. By way of the analysis of the works of Cupboard (2014) and Cowrie (Pannier) (2015), the essay further investigates architectural forms. It considers the intricate interactions between the hybrid architecture of natural forms, such as cowries and watermelons, and human-fabricated forms, such as teleuks and crinolines.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts13020055
Authors: Preethi Ramaprasad
What are the implications of a bejeweled dancer in fine silk on the proscenium stage performing a piece that undeniably centers caste? As the Bharatanatyam field reflects on the art form’s appropriation from the hereditary dance community, analyzing choreography reveals different bodily representations of caste. Many Bharatanatyam dancers globally perform excerpts of the Nandanar Charitram, by Tamil composer Gopalakrishna Bharathi. The plot traces Nandanar, a Dalit saint who is not allowed in many temples and ends with his immolation, allowing his “purified” self to unite with the Hindu god Shiva. I study performances of the Nandanar Charitram comparing two Bharatanatyam showings and the 1942 film “Nandanar”. To recognize how caste is both articulated and understood, I analyze choreography, interviews conducted with dancers, and forums where audience members share their responses to the works. I use Judith Butler and Dwight Conquergood’s theorization of performativity, acknowledging that while Bharatanatyam choreography is often “iterative”, it has the potential to “disrupt” dominant norms on caste and politics. Nandanar remains the most prominent Dalit figure seen in the Bharatanatyam repertoire. By studying representations of his story, I highlight the relevance of bodily caste politics in the South Asian diaspora today.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts13020054
Authors: Estefanía Vélez
Gender impersonators and trans gender-nonconforming people have long been a source of fascination within the visual arts. Nevertheless, illustrators and photographers alike have perpetually instrumentalized the image of the queer subject as a visual shorthand for criminality, freakishness, and deception. Beginning with the broadside illustrations of José Guadalupe Posada, this article examines how visual representations of Latinx queerness and gender nonconformity shifted across the Americas and throughout the late nineteenth century into the late twentieth century. Ultimately, I contend that Reynaldo Rivera’s photography of late-twentieth-century ballroom culture provides a substantial departure from these speculatory conventions by visually legitimizing the lived authenticity of the queer Latinx people who populate his work.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts13020053
Authors: Yulia A. Griber Tatyana Samoilova Abdulrahman S. Al-Rasheed Victoria Bogushevskaya Elisa Cordero-Jahr Alexey Delov Yacine Gouaich James Manteith Philip Mefoh Jimena Vanina Odetti Gloria Politi Tatyana Sivova
In physical environments and cultural landscapes, we most often deal not with separate colors, but with color combinations. When choosing a color, we usually try to “fit” it into a preexisting color context, making the new color combination harmonious. Yet are the “laws” of color harmony fundamental to our shared cognitive architecture, or are they cultural products that vary from country to country? To answer these questions we conducted an experiment with 599 participants aged 18 to 76 from eight different countries, including Algeria (MA = 26.2 years; SD = 8.8; 49 men, 26 women), Belarus (MA = 19.8 years; SD = 9.1; 19 men, 63 women), Italy (MA = 29.0 years; SD = 12.8; 23 men, 67 women), Mexico (MA = 20.0 years; SD = 7.0; 34 men, 23 women), Nigeria (MA = 34.7 years; SD = 10.5; 29 men, 32 women), Russia (MA = 24.6 years; SD = 6.3; 17 men, 72 women), Saudi Arabia (MA = 24.5 years; SD = 8.6; 28 men, 38 women), and Chile (MA = 34.3 years; SD = 15.1; 35 men, 43 women). To create experimental stimuli, we used 10 color combinations composed by the Russian avant-garde artist Mikhail Matyushin and his disciples for the Reference Book of Color (1932) based on shades that were typical in architectural design—yellow ochre, light umber, light ochre, and burnt umber. We removed the “intermediary” linking color from each of the selected color triads and asked participants to adjust the color of this band according to their liking. Mapping 2995 color choices into CIELAB and CIELCh color space to identify their chromatic characteristics (hue, lightness, and chroma), we demonstrate graphically that color triads in different cultures have a different “geometry” in CIELAB color space and on the color circle. We conclude that the revealed patterns of these relationships reflect cross-cultural “shifts” in human perception of color harmony. The analysis presented in this paper will facilitate opportunities for architects, designers, and other color professionals to create culturally specific harmonic color combinations in urban environments.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts13020052
Authors: Laura J. Allen
In the mid-twentieth century, growing North American textile and ready-to-wear industries vigorously appropriated Native American aesthetics to cultivate a commercial and design identity apart from Europe. Most studies of the circulation of Indigenous idioms in these industries focus on Southwestern or South Pacific regionalisms, and scholarship on studio and commercial fabric and fashion design from the Northwest Coast in the twentieth century is limited. This paper contributes by raising Indigenous and non-Indigenous use of Northwest Coast design forms during the politically turbulent 1940s–1960s and analyzing the impact of this aesthetic vocabulary within broader North American textiles and fashion. Throughout, I engage with the approaches of critical fashion theory and multiple modernisms, considering the frictions of property and power relations within settler-colonial states, then and now. Drawing from study of objects, periodicals, and archival materials as well as first-person perspectives, I contextualize these representations within entangled art, museum, and design worlds in the Northwest Coast, New York City, and the Southwest. My examination illustrates that Northwest Coast artists and art ideas asserted a peripheral but locatable role in mid-century textiles and fashion, facilitating the development of today’s robust Indigenous fashion network on the Northwest Coast and its cultural politics.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts13020051
Authors: Elzbieta Perzycka-Borowska Marta Gliniecka Dorota Hrycak-Krzyżanowska Agnieszka Szajner
This manuscript investigates the cultural and educational dimensions of murals and graffiti in the ruins of the Aliko Hotel on Naxos Island. Moving beyond their aesthetic value, these artworks are examined as conduits for complex sociocultural and educational discourses. Employing semiotic analysis, particularly informed by Roland Barthes’ conceptual framework, the study offers a multi-layered interpretation of the significance of street art. A systematic approach guided the empirical data collection, entailing the careful selection and categorisation of 76 photographs, eventually honed down to 21 key images for detailed analysis. This set, comprising 6 murals and 15 graffiti pieces, was subjected to meticulous examination to discern both dominant themes and motifs (‘studium’) and the elements evoking personal connections (‘punktum’), thereby facilitating emotional and intellectual engagement. The methodology of the study is tailored to uncover the collective narratives encapsulated within these visual forms, as well as the individual responses they provoke. It probes how personal interpretations are influenced by the viewers’ beliefs and backgrounds, thereby expanding the semiotic analysis to encompass both shared and individual meanings. This balanced analytical approach deepens the understanding of visual expressions as dynamic interactions between the artwork and its audience. It underscores the transformative role of street art in urban environments and its contribution to public art discourse. The impending demolition of the Hotel Aliko ruins underscores the ephemeral nature of street art. The murals and graffiti, as transient custodians of cultural and social narratives, accentuate the fragile nature of this cultural heritage. This critical moment underscores the importance of documenting and preserving such art forms and the stories they encapsulate, highlighting their significant role in shaping community identity and cultural education.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts13020050
Authors: Lisa E. Bloom
This article delves into the underexplored intersection of Jewish identities and feminist art. It critically examines artworks by Judit Hersko and Susan Hiller, aligning with evolving identity constructs in contemporary aesthetics. Concepts like “postmemory” link second-generation Jewish artists to past experiences and unveil the erasure of Jewish women’s memory of Jewish genocide. Analyzing Hersko and Hiller’s diverse works, from landscape photography and sculpture to performance art, it underscores their shared pursuit: illuminating lingering “ghosts” of the Holocaust in modern landscapes. Susan Hiller’s The J Street Project represents an ongoing exploration of loss and trauma beyond the Holocaust in Germany, using archives as a dynamic, evolving phenomenon. Judit Hersko’s art calls for bearing witness to a potential climate catastrophe in Antarctica. The article culminates in the exploration of “The Memorial” (2017), an art project by the activist collective Center for Political Beauty that focuses on the resurgence of overt anti-Semitism in Germany. In essence, Hiller and Hersko confront erasures in history and nature, emphasizing justice and repair. Their art, intertwined with a project addressing contemporary anti-Semitism, serves as a testament to the enduring power of feminist art, reflecting, mourning, and transforming a world marked by historical traumas and war.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts13020049
Authors: Richard Shiff
Within the fields of aesthetics and psychology, there is a long tradition of arguing that affect precedes cognition. A verbalized thought following upon a feeling and associated with it does not translate the feeling precisely or adequately. In fact, as C. S. Peirce would argue, the thought itself projects its own affect, which is independent of its logic. The essence of affect or feeling will always elude linguistic capture. This essay argues that experiences of belief and doubt are affective sensations, and both can be graphed on a scale of sensuous intuition or cognitive guessing (which, again, projects affect). The failure of language to grasp what we refer to as instances of emotion, feeling, sensation, affect, belief, doubt, and the like is more of an intractable problem for philosophical aesthetics than it is for the aesthetics of the art experience. Examples of the art of Cy Twombly, Barnett Newman, Donald Judd, Bridget Riley, and Katharina Grosse are invoked to argue through the gap between thought and feeling.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts13020048
Authors: Denis Topal
The “ceremonial” forms of swords and daggers—that is, bladed weapons decorated with precious metals—occupy a special place in the culture of the early nomads. For the Scythian period, we know at least 76 ceremonial objects from 61 sites, corresponding to 3.5% of the total sample. More than half of the finds come from the northern Black Sea region (mainly Ukraine). Ceremonial forms are represented in all morphological categories (from daggers to extra-long swords), but their distribution is slightly different. Most akinakai belong to the average and long swords. Most Scythian akinakai in Eurasia belong to the dagger and short sword groups. Although most Scythian swords and daggers fall into the Middle Scythian period, most ceremonial forms belong to the last phase of Classical Scythian culture. This period is a veritable “golden autumn” of Scythia with its huge royal burial mounds and abundance of gold, perfectly illustrating our argument that conspicuous consumption coincides with periods of political and social instability. After the peak of the proliferation of ceremonial akinakai in the third quarter of the 4th century BC, we observe a generation later the complete disappearance of Classical Scythian culture, along with its characteristic weapons, horse harnesses, and animal style.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts13020047
Authors: Jessica Peña Torres
This article describes the development and public performances of La Liga de la Decencia, a new play presented as part of the 2023 New Works Festival at the University of Texas at Austin. Inspired by the cabaret scene and teatro de revista of the 1940s in Mexico City, La Liga de la Decencia combines live performance and video art to explore how hegemonic gender and social norms shaped by the emergent nationalism of postrevolutionary Mexico continue to oppress femme and queer bodies today across the US–Mexico border. Through satire, parody, and dance, La Liga de la Decencia problematizes the social, class, and gender norms as established by the cultural elite and the state. Following research-based theatre as an inquiry process, this article describes how writing and directing this play allowed for a deeper understanding of the dynamics of a historical period. By mixing facts, fiction, and critical commentary, La Liga de la Decencia investigates history through embodiment.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts13020046
Authors: Barbara Armbruster Caspar Meyer
This article explores the extraordinarily rich gold finds from the Early Scythian princely tomb Arzhan 2 in the Republic of Tuva, southern Siberia (late 7th to early 6th centuries BCE), through the methodological framework of the chaîne opératoire (operational sequence), in order to reconstruct the objects’ processes of manufacture. Through an interdisciplinary study of the finds at the State Hermitage in Saint Petersburg, the principal author analyzed tool marks and surface morphologies, which allow for the comprehensive identification and documentation of the numerous techniques employed in the creation of the often very elaborate jewelry, decorated weapons, and other personal ornaments. The production of both individual pieces and extensive series of thousands of identical trimmings attests to the existence of complex craft processes and workshop organizations. The technological aspects of the gold finds impress through their diversity and outstanding quality, both artistically and in terms of their craftsmanship. As this article will demonstrate, the objects present the earliest evidence for a highly specialized goldsmith artform in southern Siberia.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts13020045
Authors: Emilio Méndez-Martínez Esther Uria-Iriarte Montserrat González Parera
This article aims to propose a critical reflection on what it means to be a professional of drama-based practices. To do so, we promote a process of cooperative creation and research based on our own doubts, contradictions, and concerns about the different roles we play in our practice. The results of this process are presented in artistic form, using dramatic language and metaphor as doors to new spaces for reflection.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts13020044
Authors: Lauren Beck
The representation of Spain, and Spanishness in general, at sites of collective identity in the United States and Canada requires scholarly attention. Many monuments, which range from statues and museums to capitol buildings and national parks, continue to commemorate colonial times despite broader public awareness of the association between colonization and racialized violence, as well as the explicit movement toward decolonization. This commemorative material also demonstrates how non-Spanish settlers have appropriated historical moorings of Spain and its colonial past to reinforce and whitewash their identities in places such as New Mexico and Texas, and even in Newfoundland and Labrador. How monuments are funded and gain public support is another vector that points to the ways that identity—particularly, white identity—informs monumental architecture in ways that exclude people of colour, as well as women, who, when featured in monuments, are usually dehumanized as concepts rather than being the actors of settler-colonialism. This article explores these challenging topics with the aim of articulating a roadmap for future scholarship on this subject.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts13020043
Authors: Małgorzata Stępnik
This article discusses the œuvre of Artemisia Gentileschi, a prominent Baroque painter who was rediscovered by art historian Roberto Longhi in the 1910s. Today, her art is interpreted through various lenses, including art theory, women’s studies, and psychoanalysis. Gentileschi’s paintings are often “read” in close reference to her painful biography, with a focus on the “chiaroscuro” of trauma and its overcoming. Significantly, such biography-oriented approaches seem to be predominant in scholarship on art created by women. The argument presented is that Gentileschi’s works require a thorough re-reading free of “compulsive biographism”, as postulated by Salomon. The focus should shift from an empathic Einfühlung (or empathic projection) towards an objective analysis based purely on art-historical or sociological criteria. This article also explores the presence of the socially mediated and mediatised figure of the artist in fine literature (novels by Banti, Lapierre and Vreeland), cinematic biographies (Artemisia, directed by Merlet, documentaries (Artemisia Gentileschi: Warrior Painter, directed by River), anime (a series titled Arte, directed by Takayuki Hamana), and graphic novels (Ferlut and Baudouin; Siciliano). In this artistic constellation Artemisia is labelled as an art/feminist “icon”, a female genius, and as in numerous scholarly texts dedicated to her, “a victim”. I propose that the discussed literary and visual texts related to Gentileschi be interpreted as symptomatic (in line with Panofsky’s concept of ‘iconology’) of the contemporary mentality, which is filtered through feminist and subaltern thought.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts13020042
Authors: Elena Sidorova
In 1990, three years after Andy Warhol’s death and one year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) organized the first one-man show of this pop artist in Eastern Europe. The Prints of Andy Warhol, although never shown at the MoMA in New York, traveled to the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain in Jouy-en-Josas, France, the Národní Galerie in Prague, Czechoslovakia, the Staatliche Kunstsammlung in Dresden, the GDR, the Mücsarnok in Budapest, Hungary, and the Muzeum Narodowe in Warsaw, Poland. The current paper analyzes the cultural–political context of The Prints of Andy Warhol. It first discusses the place of both American pop art and Eastern Europe in MoMA’s International Program (IP) and then explores the organizational challenges, art historical contents, and public reception of the exhibition. The paper concludes by examining the broader impact of The Prints of Andy Warhol on both the growing awareness of American pop art in Eastern Europe and MoMA’s cultural diplomacy in this region after the fall of the Iron Curtain.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts13020041
Authors: Rebecca Bedell
This essay surveys the shifting emotional regimes in Western art from the eighteenth century into the twenty-first, concentrating on the place accorded social affections. In particular, it calls attention to a significant change underway in recent decades as the suppression of the full range of emotions instigated by modernism has been challenged and the tender emotions re-embraced. Important contemporary artists, such as Hank Willis Thomas and Emily Hass, are invoking and exploring themes of love, care, empathy, and concern and, in many cases, making creative use of them to advance social, political, and environmental justice.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts13010040
Authors: Marco Martiniello Elsa Mescoli
Published in 2019, the Special Issue entitled “Arts and Refugees: Multidisciplinary Perspectives” gathered together a set of articles exploring the role of art created and performed by refugees settled in urban European contexts [...]
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts13010039
Authors: Kate van Orden Lisa Pon
The inspiration for this Special Issue on Im/Materiality in Renaissance Arts arose from two convictions: (1) that sensual experiences and the physicality of creation must be a part of our accounts of the past, and (2) that crosstalk among scholars of music, literature, art, and architecture can reveal both the historiographical gaps endemic to specific disciplines and the critical tools each specialty brings to the project of incorporating living, breathing artists, builders, poets, singers, players, worshippers, scientists, and others into histories of the Renaissance arts [...]
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts13010038
Authors: Svitlana Kot Alina Mozolevska Olha Polishchuk Yuliya Stodolinska
Twenty-first century digital technologies and popular visual art have transformed the ways military conflicts are experienced, narrated, and shared. It demonstrates that digital platforms have become arenas for constructing visual narratives that influence public perception and engagement with the conflict. Through a multimodal and visual analysis of over 950 digital artworks shared on Instagram during the first three months of the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine, this study investigates how these artworks form specific visual narratives which contribute to portraying the new wartime reality while also constructing images of the self and the other through heroization, victimization, dehumanization, and other strategies. All these visual narratives jointly represent the complexity of the war reality and form an epistemic understanding of the conflict. This study highlights the important function that popular visual art on digital platforms such as Instagram plays in shaping perceptions of the Russo-Ukrainian War, particularly in expressing emotions, conveying traumas, and influencing public opinions.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts13010037
Authors: Dani Snyder-Young Michael Arnold Mages Rahul Bhargava Jonathan Carr Laura Perovich Victor Talmadge Oliver Wason Moira Zellner Angelique C-Dina Ren Birnholz Halle Brockett Ezekiel D’Ascoli Donovan Holt Sydney Love George Belliveau
Data now plays a central role in civic life and community practices. This has created a pressing need for new forms of translation and sense-making that can engage diverse publics. Research-based Theatre (RbT) has proven to be an effective approach to delivering qualitative data to community stakeholders. We extend this tradition by proposing “community-engaged data theatre”. This approach translates quantitative data into theatrical language to engage communities in deliberative conversations on relevant issues. Community-engaged data theatre requires bridging multiple disciplines and involves creating new definitions and shared vocabularies in discourses that formerly have had little overlap in meaning. In this article, we share key insights from our initial experiments in which we adapted quantitative and qualitative data to devise a pilot piece in collaboration with a local community partner. In this essay, we communicate our collaborative process in polyvocal, artistic form. We edit and adapt materials from our conversations and creative practices into scenes illustrating how we taught and learned from each other about data science, participatory modeling, material deliberation and Composition to pilot our lab’s first community-engaged data theatre prototype.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts13010036
Authors: Karen S. Rubinson Katheryn M. Linduff
The Pazyryk Culture, situated in the Altai Mountains of Russia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, and China, flourished for a relatively short period: 5th–3rd centuries BCE. A series of burial grounds from the later phase, 4th–mid-3rd centuries BCE, to be studied here reveal the remains of three groups of individuals of high, mid, and lower status. Within the limiting topographical and environmental confines of the local region, in contrast to the vast grasslands of the steppe and the deserts and oases of Central Asia, it is possible via the analysis of material culture and with reference to ethnographic studies to see nuances of interaction among these three groups and the regions immediately adjacent during this short period. Aided by modern scientific techniques, including DNA and isotopic analysis, together with analysis of excavated and often frozen remains, it is also possible to map out a heterarchical set of relationships within the hierarchical framework. The model developed in this unique landscape might be tested elsewhere in Eurasia as it extends the application of the notion of nonuniform socio-political organization among pastoralists noted for Bronze Age societies in the Eurasian steppe to the late Iron Age.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts13010035
Authors: Iryna Shramko
Among the antiquities of the archaic period of Forest-Steppe Scythia, a group of elite burials of women, possibly endowed with priestly functions during their lifetime, stands out. Until recently, only two unrobbed burial complexes were known to contain the main burials of women of high social rank, in whose graves golden costume elements were found—primarily expressive details of headdresses. The barrows (kurgans) were discovered at the end of the 19th century when amateur excavations were actively carried out on the right bank of the Dnipro. As a result of research conducted by the author at the Skorobir necropolis (in the area of the Bilsk fortified settlement, on the left bank of the Dnipro), two similar graves were recently discovered, which provided new material that significantly expanded the known geographical distribution of this phenomenon. The materials are closely analogous to the previously discovered elite female burials of the Middle Dnipro (barrow 100 near the village of Syniavka, barrow 35 near the village of Bobrytsa) and allow us to highlight a number of stable elements of the funeral costume of noble women and the sets of objects that complemented them. In this article, we consider the social and cultural significance of female attire in elite burials and delimit the chronological framework of this previously understudied phenomenon within the first half of the 6th century BCE. The new finds offer unprecedented insight into the form and meaning of one type of female headdress which researchers have tried to reconstruct for over a century.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts13010034
Authors: Srđan Teparić
In this article, I discuss the methodological and contextual aspects of writing music criticism, drawing cues from applied musicology and autoethnography. The challenge for any music critic is the question of the relationship between objective and subjective approaches. I analyze the relationship between analytical listening and aesthetic experience, using the examples of two music reviews of Ivo Pogorelić’s piano recitals that I wrote. The interpretations of this pianist are suitable for the analysis precisely because he is commonly seen as an unconventional, even controversial pianist, and his interpretations of romantic music are often regarded as examples of anti-academicism and even deconstruction of pianistic canons accumulated during the 20th century. Against that term, I will talk about liberation, which is perhaps a more suitable label for Pogorelić’s modernist approach to performance.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts13010033
Authors: Marianna Charitonidou
In the original publication (Charitonidou 2021), there was a mistake in the title [...]
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts13010032
Authors: Noah Randolph
At the entrance to City Park in New Orleans, Louisiana, a monument to Confederate general P.G.T. Beauregard rose twenty-seven feet over the citizens of New Orleans until 2017, when the sculpture was removed from its pedestal. Following the removal, Mayor Mitch Landrieu asked: “why there are no slave ship monuments, no prominent markers on public land to remember the lynchings or the slave blocks; nothing to remember this long chapter of our lives; the pain, the sacrifice, the shame… all of it happening on the soil of New Orleans.” This landscape of empty pedestals was confronted by Paula Wilson that fall. Rather than erect a material monument that would directly replace the fallen General Beauregard, Wilson turned to her own body. Before the sun rose early one morning, she climbed atop the empty pedestal and began dancing in a performance titled “Living Monument.” This paper analyzes Wilson’s performance and its documentation as radical acts of refusing the logics of monumentality. In examining this work, I consider how performance as a mode of memorialization completely destabilizes the monumental presentation of a static history, thus offering a new grammar by which to think through modes of revolution and redress in the symbolic landscape.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts13010031
Authors: Valeriy Zolotukhin
The assumption of similarity between artistic speech melody and music was deeply rooted in Russian Symbolism and based on the culturally established analogy between poetry/lyrical prosody and music. This connection was the basis for a wide range of performative practices focused on performed word such as the experiments of director Vsevolod Meyerhold and composer Mikhail Gnesin in Petrograd theater studios in 1900–1910s, and the collective declamation of Vasilii Serezhnikov and Vsevolod Vsevolodskii-Gerngross. However, after the October revolution, this analogy not only inspired new artistic paths, but also new approaches in humanities. This article explores the correlation between a practice-based strategy and advanced theory that characterized the structure and curricula of the Petrograd Institute of the Living Word (Institut zhivogo slova; 1918–1924). Its specific institutional features affected the development of disciplines in the fields of linguistics, poetics, and literary studies. The earlier period of its work (1918–1921) was defined by the search for common ground, which could unite representatives of different disciplines. The study of the melody of speech, which this article is focused on, became one of the key joint research projects of the Institute’s team. It is the perspective of the Institute of the Living Word’s research projects and performance-related art practices that is used for analysis of the Russian Formalist approaches in the 1910s–20s, specifically articles and books of philologist Boris Eikhenbaum on the melody and composition of verse intonation.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts13010030
Authors: Noam M. Elcott
Pablo Picasso’s Landscape with Billboards (1912) evinces a deep and complex relationship with emergent trademark and related intellectual property law in France. Among the three trademarked logos featured prominently in the work is that for Bouillon Kub. Critics, caricaturists, and the Cubists themselves toyed with the visual and textual rhymes between Cubism and Bouillon Kub. But only Picasso in his Landscape with Billboards engaged deeply with the nascent trademark and design protection laws exploited more forcefully by Bouillon Kub than nearly any other brand. This essay is a small part of a larger chapter on Picasso, Cubism, and the semiotics of trademark, which, in turn, is a part of the book project Art™: A History of Modern Art, Authenticity, and Trademarks.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts13010029
Authors: Marijana Tkalec Martina Glogar Željko Penava Petra Forte Tavčer Danjela Kuščer Izabela Stojanoska
Textile materials are an essential part of contemporary architecture, the environment, and urban spaces due to their unique appearance and qualities, as it is now possible to achieve both a structural function and an aesthetic quality with textiles. As colour is one of the most important characteristics of textile material, it is also important to understand the relationships between colour and textile material with different surface qualities. In order to explain the complexity of different textile materials and the appearance of colours, which consequently affects the colour properties, this paper analyses this phenomenon. The presented research analyses the dependence of the reproduction quality and colour appearance on fabrics of different construction and structural characteristics, i.e., the texture of the textile material, printed using digital inkjet technology. The aim of this work is to investigate the influence of various structural features of textiles on the colour appearance of digitally printed textile substrates, to monitor the quality of colour reproduction, and to analyse the behaviour of a reactive dye droplet on textile substrates. Printing of a particular shape was performed using a Dimatix Materials Printer DMP-2831 piezoelectric inkjet device (provided by the J. Stefan Institute, Ljubjana, Slovenia; manufactured by Fujifilm Dimatix Inc., 2230 Martin Avenue, Santa Clara, CA, USA). The behaviour of the ink delivered by the needle of the tensiometer DSA20E, Kruess GmbH (provided by the J. Stefan Institute, Ljubjana, Slovenia; manufactured by Kruess Scientific Instruments (Shanghai) Co., Ltd. Futong Dong Dajie 10 Baoneng Center, Tower B, Room 605 Chaoyang District, Beijing 100102, China), on the surface of the fabric was analysed. The samples were digitally printed on a Mimaki digital printer Tx2-1600 (provided by University of Ljubljana Faculty of Natural Science and Engineering, Slovenia EU; manufactured by Mimaki, 2182-3 Shigeno-Otsu, Tomi-city, Nagano, Japan), with reactive dyes, which were first pretreated in a bath with a specific solution. The statistical method of image analysis and microscopic imaging were used to obtain the characteristics of the porosity, texture, and roughness parameters. All results are presented from colouristic analysis based on the objectification of colour and colour differences. The objective values of the parameters of lightness (L*), chroma (C*), and hue (h°) show the significant influence of the structure and properties of the substrate on colour reproduction, and significant changes were obtained, which were confirmed by the evaluation of the colour differences. The results confirm the influence of the substrate structure on colour properties. Furthermore, it is essential to consider this complexity in the context of environmental colour design when utilising (coloured) textile installations/materials in architecture and urban spaces, i.e., in the environment.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts13010028
Authors: Jingqiu Guan
This article explores the first-time choreographic collaboration between Eiko Otake, a renowned Japanese dance artist, and Wen Hui, a celebrated Chinese choreographer and filmmaker, which took place in mainland China in January of 2020. The outbreak of the coronavirus in Wuhan compelled Otake to return to the US prematurely, and the subsequent global pandemic led the two artists to continue working together through the computer screen. Constructed from daily footage of Wen and Otake moving together, conversing about their personal histories and choreographic works, and visiting the Nanjing Massacre Memorial, the resulting documentary film No Rule Is Our Rule (2023, 74 min) offers a poignant portrayal of their creative process, which places utmost importance on honesty and openness. Through an in-depth analysis of their artistic exploration presented through the film, the article examines how their collaborative endeavor which prioritizes corporeal interaction and unfiltered dialogues can be conceived as a form of mediated social choreography. I argue that their embodied methodology, grounded in the interweaving of personal and social memories, points to the potential for collective healing from the tension and trauma in Sino-Japanese history and promotes collective imagining through intercultural dialogues.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts13010027
Authors: Mew Lingjun Jiang
In a faraway apple orchard in Sannohe, a small town in Japan’s Aomori Prefecture, a zushi miniature wooden shrine at the Nose Kannon Hall caught the media’s attention with its unique adornment—the karuta playing cards with European-inspired abstract designs in bold red and black colors that were used during the early modern period for pastime and gambling. Because of this decoration, the Nose Kannon Hall is known by locals as the Karuta Hall, and the zushi that enshrines the Buddhist deity Bodhisattva Shō-Kanzeon is also believed to be the home of bakuchi no kamisama “the kami deity of gambling”. Little is known about the nature of devotion to this bakuchi no kamisama or how the playing cards that were used for frivolous games came to be sacralized as items worthy to be used as decoration of a Buddhist shrine. This article considers the slippage between prayer and play in the regional Buddhist devotion by focusing on the Nose Kannon Hall, which presided at a key intersection along the northern trade route where the local community and outside visitors, such as pilgrims and traders, converged, especially during the Edo period (1603–1868). Marshaling historical records, televised interviews, and images provided by the town officials and guardian family of Nose Kannon Hall, I argue that the use of karuta playing cards on the miniature shrine at Nose Kannon Hall epitomizes a kind of localized early modern Shinto–Buddhist syncretism at the margins of the urban culture that is simultaneously devotional and tongue-in-cheek sacrilegious in a quintessentially Edo-esque way.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts13010026
Authors: Sandrine Welte
Whereas Picasso’s work in ceramics, wood and bronze is rather well known, the body of his sculptures in glass remains an object of little research. In fact, as a thorough analysis reveals, they rarely find mention in publications or catalogues on Picasso and seldom are included in exhibitions or retrospectives on the great Spanish artist. This may on the one hand be attributed to a still prevailing perception of glass as a medium for industrial, functional or everyday purposes—hence discounting the material in terms of artistic output—while on the other to controversies of authorship, related to the question of ideation versus creation. Unlike ceramics or bronze, the realisation of blown glass sculpture hinges on the involvement of the maestro vetraio as the mediator between thought and form—thus resulting in a distancing between artwork and artist conditioned by the nature of the medium. Against this background, the paper aims at a better understanding of Picasso’s vision of sculpture through an examination of his creations in the vitreous medium. On these grounds, a closer look at Picasso’s works in glass is meant to highlight his unique ‘hand’ in terms of idiom, line and form.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts13010025
Authors: Angela Vanhaelen
Focusing on a single artwork, Frans Post’s painting called The Oxen Cart of 1638, this article explores what Édouard Glissant calls the emotional apartheid of the plantation system. It argues that the affective evasion of Post’s painting fosters anti-Black racism by denying the full humanity of captive peoples. The painting is read together with Caspar Barlaeus’s contemporary apologia for the leadership of Maurits of Nassau, who was the governor-general of Dutch Brazil and Post’s patron. Focusing on classical and Neostoic understandings of governance and enslavement, the article turns to Paul Alpers’s analysis of the pastoral mode as an art of evasion that justifies the exploitation of rural labourers. It concludes by taking up Saidiya Hartman’s concept of critical fabulation to consider the oppositional views and counter-narratives expressed in the music-making traditions of enslaved people.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts13010024
Authors: Ben Spatz
This essay offers a critical introduction to the circulation of racial materialities, and especially whiteness, in North American and European academic contexts. It proposes that we can escape from the dominant epistemology of identity as a fixed attribute of individuals without losing the urgent and much-needed analytics of identity as social and material force. In the gap between “identity politics” and a richer critical politics of identity lies the difference between a discursive public sphere of agonistic conflict and one of potentially transformative relationality. Drawing on critical race theory and especially black radical thought, my analysis rejects the reduction of identity to discrete census categories and attempts to situate contemporary scholarly practices in the context of a planetary decolonial movement. If “identity” today is all too frequently dismissed by a methodological whiteness that strictly separates it from materiality, politics, and knowledge, then a dramaturgical or choreographic analytics of race might better address how racial materialities operate both above and below the level of individual bodies, subjects, and citizens. Synthesizing practical insights from artistic research and performing arts with critical theories of race and identity, this essay refers to some of the author’s recent personal experiences at academic events in order to describe and analyze whiteness as a form of social choreography.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts13010023
Authors: Samuel D. Albert
This article examines the series of art exhibitions organized by the Hungarian government in the 1920s. After examining the bureaucratic framework of the exhibition, the article then discusses the materials displayed at five different exhibitions, organized between 1920 and 1927. While much of the material displayed remained the same, the rhetoric, particularly the catalog essays that accompanied the exhibition provided insight into the organizers’ goals and the governmental ideology underlying that rhetoric.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts13010022
Authors: Ace Lehner
Transness throws into question how many so-called Western cultures—i.e., those ideologically descended from the colonial project—have sutured “reality” to the “privileging of sight”. At the crux of trans-visual culture is a need to be understood outside current modes of visual apprehension. As a methodology rooted in trans-embodied experiences, trans provides a mode for decolonizing the privileging of sight and moving toward a new understanding of bodies, identity, representation, and visual culture. It is imperative to explore such methods in today’s political climate, and it is advantageous to apply them to trans-visual culture, as exponential innovations can be discerned. In this article, I will deploy a trans visual studies methodology to the work of contemporary trans masculine artist and photographer Wynne Neilly to explore how his work engages a praxis of transing identity. I will discuss how his work shifts the understanding of identity and representation to one decoupled from optical ontology and how he works to unseat White masculinity as the center of Western art and visual culture.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts13010021
Authors: Sarah Louise Cowan
Modernist propositions long have been understood as atemporal—somehow outside of time—or insistently hailing the future. This temporal framework suppresses the contributions of those excluded from modernist canons, particularly Black women. In this article, visual and material analysis of sculptural works produced in the 1970s and 1980s by U.S. Black women artists Beverly Buchanan, Senga Nengudi, and Betye Saar reveal how Black feminists have engaged with modernist protocols in order to redress cultural erasures of Black women. These practices exemplify Black feminist modernisms, or creative practices that unsettle the racist and sexist logics of dominant cultural institutions. Each of these artists utilizes haptic surfaces as a method for defying institutional modernism’s obfuscation of the past. The analysis focuses on Buchanan’s defiance of memorial erasures, Nengudi’s reenactment of labor, including in its historical forms, and Saar’s adaptation of generational memory-making processes. Ultimately, these artists’ rejection of a “timeless” modernism demands that viewers understand the present moment in relationship to a still-evolving past. In this way, Buchanan, Nengudi, and Saar position the present as an accumulation, rather than transcendence, of historical occurrences.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts13010020
Authors: Marie N. Pareja
The wall paintings from the site of Akrotiri, Thera, are often considered to be instrumental to understanding elements of life in the Bronze Age. This is partially due to their high degree of preservation. The large-scale detail present in the scenes allows for a more detailed and nuanced understanding of the imagery that survives in glyptic art that, considered together with the surviving wall paintings, helps to better inform one’s understanding of Aegean life. Many of the iconographic elements and themes, however, remain at least partially enigmatic. This is particularly the case for Xeste 3, a cultic building at Akortiri, where the wall paintings contribute to a larger, programmatic cultic narrative. The current investigation seeks to better understand the monkeys scene from Room 2 of the first floor by deconstructing and examining each visual element via comparative analyses. They are first contextualized within the Aegean, then considered in light of Mesopotamian comparanda. This method allows for possible parallels between the monkeys from Xeste 3 and at least three priestly classes known from contemporary Mesopotamian tradition: the gala, assinnu, and kurgarrû. Each of these priestly classes belonged to the adaptable and widespread cult of Inanna, one of the most powerful and popular deities in Mesopotamia.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts13010019
Authors: Giedrė Jankevičiūtė
The Republic of Lithuania was one of several young nation-states that re-established or proclaimed their statehood in the aftermath of the First World War, following the dissolution of empires in Europe. The quest for cultural identity and attempts at its representation within the country, in the region, and on the international stage was the crucial element in the nation-building process, where cultural diplomacy played a pivotal role. For Lithuania, as for most European countries of that era, exhibitions, especially art exhibitions or art sections in the case of world shows (for instance, the Expo 1937 in Paris or the New York World’s Fair in 1939), served as a prominent means of expressing its identity. An overview of the Lithuanian state art exhibition strategy, the dynamics of its organizational process, the exhibition content, and their geographical reach are discussed in the article. To comprehensively grasp Lithuania’s cultural strategy and to reconstruct the network of its artistic connections, foreign art exhibitions organized at the state level and the acquisition of artifacts from these exhibitions for Lithuania’s national art collection, the M. K. Čiurlionis Art Gallery, are briefly reviewed as well.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts13010018
Authors: Benjamin Ruilin Fong
This article proposes a new paradigm, Sino-American film, that is centered on Chinese language in American films. Sino-American films comprise two generations. The First Generation includes Pushing Hands (1993), Take Out (2004), and Saving Face (2004) and is characterized by independent production, limited distribution, and creation during a period when Asian Americans were rarely represented on film. The Second Generation includes The Farewell (2019), Tigertail (2019), Shang-Chi and the Legend of Ten Rings (2021), and Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) and is characterized by a Hollywood production model, widespread distribution across streaming services, and creation during a period of growing Asian American cultural representation. Sino-American films negotiate both Chinese-language film and Hollywood by focusing on overlooked characters— Chinese-language-speaking Americans. This article contributes to conversations in Chinese film studies and Asian American studies by bringing Asian American film into exchanges with three Chinese film studies paradigms: transnational cinema, Chinese-language film, and Sinophone film. This cross pollination uncovers new areas for further study. Sino-American film demonstrates the importance of Sino-American language, ethnicity, and culture within the subsuming category of Asian American film. Furthermore, pairing Sino-American films with Chinese film studies uncovers a new category of Chinese-language film outside assumed contexts and paradigms.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts13010017
Authors: Jean Baird
Magic, as an emanation of past presence in a picture, emerges as a theme in postmodern theories of photography. It is linked to various forms of actual and symbolic absence; an absence which creates a space that keeps us looking, ostensibly for something that is lost. Photography may not always have been digital, but it has always been magical. Photography Without Pictures explores the critical dialogue and disciplinary uncertainty around the terminology of an expanded photographic that derived from debates surrounding the proliferation of digital media and the previous, ontological question of the nature of photography as a technology and a pictorial medium. It is prompted by Andrew Dewdney’s conviction that in order to deal with the contemporary condition of the networked screen image, we need to “Forget Photography” (2021). Dewdney considers the paradox that while photography is now ubiquitous, it is also peculiarly and magically undead, a simulation at the behest of mutable electronic data. The article examines three instances of critical response to contemporary photography, including the interpretation and response to several photographic artworks and one simulated photograph, to distinguish characteristics of pictoriality, authorship and temporality in photographic pictures. In asking what it means to be a real photographer, we discover that the singular observer/artist has become a crowd in respect of the image sharing culture of post-internet art. Throughout his polemical argument to Forget Photography, Dewdney prefers to use the term image and imagery to refer to both the photographic and the networked image. The terms picture and image tend to be interchangeable in language and inhabit each other in practice, yet there are historical differences and continuities that make the distinction remarkable in considering questions of ontology and media continuity. Pictorial, temporal and illusory ‘magic’ are the themes through which these photographic uncertainties unfold.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts13010016
Authors: Syra Kalbermatten
This article explores the innovative collaboration between the Rubey platform and the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp. Through the tokenization of the artwork Carnaval de Binche by James Ensor, this platform made it possible for interested investors to purchase blockchain-registered Art Security Tokens within this artwork and become co-owners of it—at least from an economic perspective. Although fractional ownership platforms for art have been established before, this is the first time an art investment opportunity like this has materialized itself in an explicit partnership with a museum. The tokenized artwork will be held on public display within the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp, for a period of ten years—a significant departure from the usual practice of storing such pieces in a storage vault—before it will be sold again. This article contextualizes this practice within both the ‘assetization’ of art that has increased in recent decades and the financial challenges facing Belgian—more broadly speaking, European—public museums. Based on a limited number of interviews with the stakeholders and desk research, this article subsequently explores the more practical benefits and concerns of a collaboration like this and presents an analysis of this practice drawing upon publications within the field of economic sociology. Since we find ourselves only at the beginning of this partnership, some questions will be raised for further research.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts13010015
Authors: Filip Petkovski
During the existence of Yugoslavia (1945–1991), the leading political ideology of “brotherhood and unity” had to be manifested in all forms of cultural life. Promoting the physically capable body as part of a larger cultural movement, Yugoslavia witnessed the transformation of physical daily regimens into mass bodily spectacles performed at stadiums, called sletovi, demonstrating the power of mass-choreographed discipline. Similarly, Yugoslav choreographers were encouraged to develop a distinct performance aesthetic based on stylization as a rhetoric for modernization, using folk dance as a medium to showcase and promote the collective body of the people through choreographed folklore spectacles. Focusing on these two case studies that exemplify how mass choreography was used as a strategy to choreograph the Yugoslav society, this paper analyzes how political ideologies and their constructions through physicality supported the Yugoslav state project, thereby pointing to the present-day remnants of these aesthetics in the post-Yugoslav republics, evident in mass protests. By utilizing archival and choreographic analysis, I demonstrate how movement and dance impacted the public understanding of unity and helped the creation of a Yugoslav socialist society, drawing from Andrew Hewitt’s thesis on “social choreography”.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts13010014
Authors: Katarina Lopatkina
This article is a reconstruction of travel experiences of Swedish artist Albin Amelin in Moscow in 1937–1938, based on archival materials. It focuses on the exchange between the Soviet Union and Western artists in the interwar period and shows international Soviet art contacts as part of the state’s diplomatic work. This case study enables a detailed observation of the elements of the Soviet hospitality industry, and a description of various practical aspects of the artist’s stay in Moscow.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts13010013
Authors: Eugene J. Johnson
This essay discusses the affect of a group of well-known buildings and one project from antiquity to the recent past: Pantheon, Rome; Hagia Sophia, Istanbul; Leon Battista Alberti’s Sant’Andrea, Mantua; Etienne-Louis Boullée’s Project for a Newton Cenotaph; Louis I. Kahn’s Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla and Frank O. Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao. Despite the disparities in time, at least two of the works considered have characteristics in common, while others have more.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts13010012
Authors: Dinghui Zhou
Noir can be seen as a formula with a set of distinguishable thematic, narrative, and aesthetic elements matured in postwar Hollywood and later recycled, refined, or resisted by filmmakers worldwide. In the past decade, a handful of noirish crime films produced in People’s Republic of China particularly reworked this formula to articulate local concerns, one example being Black Coal, Thin Ice. By attempting a comparative analysis of this movie’s characterization with the noir formula’s conventional portrayal, this essay argues that Black Coal, Thin Ice revises the noir formula by drawing more attention to the noir killer’s plight as a demoralized state worker and deconstructing the formulaic presence of the femme fatale as a deadly and powerful seductress. Moving beyond the Black Coal, Thin Ice case, the essay also posits that the recent Chinese noirish crime films’ fusing of stylized chiaroscuro with color lighting to register various existential and psychological concerns enriches the chiaroscuro aesthetic of the noir formula.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts13010011
Authors: Katarzyna Cytlak
Tadeusz Kantor was a Polish artist and theater director who directly influenced the conceptual understanding of theater, especially in Argentina following two visits to Buenos Aires with his troupe Cricot 2 in the 1980s. He exerted a particularly strong influence on the Periférico de Objetos [The Periphery of Objects], a troupe founded in Buenos Aires in 1989 by Daniel Veronese, Ana Alvarado and Emilio García Wehbi, labelled by critics as “the Argentine theatre of the image”. Despite radically different socio-cultural contexts, elements arising from Kantor’s theater practices (especially his idea of the “poor object” and his concept of “reality of the lowest rank”) acquired distinctly different meanings in Latin America from those coined by Kantor. A nuanced examination of the Periférico de Objetos indicates that Kantor’s concepts, which in their original context resisted politicization, played an important role in the creation of a socially and politically engaged theatre. His concepts, adapted to local realities by the Periférico de Objetos, were reflected in debates surrounding the recent Argentinian past, most notably, the post-dictatorship period.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts13010010
Authors: Miya Shaffer
Multiracialism, or the concept of “mixed-race”, remains a key racial discourse within twenty-first-century North American societies. Scholarly and mainstream studies of multiracial people often highlight the function of speech in theorizing mixed-race experiences, where interviews or other first-person narratives resist racialized stereotypes and express complex multiracial identities. Yet these studies often overlook the body as a comparable analytical site, ignoring how the body’s mobilization—in dance, choreography, and everyday actions—might further nuance mixed-race subjecthood. My article emphasizes experimental dance and choreography as alternative methods for imagining multiracial subjects, where these body-based approaches reject both stereotypical depictions of multiracial people in mainstream media and “transparent” representations in interviews. Drawing on the concept of “opacity,” which describes unknowable, illegible difference, I propose that experimental dance enables the expression of “opaque” multiracial subjectivities. This article then offers a choreographic analysis of Glenn Potter-Takata’s Yonsei f*ck f*ck, an experimental dance that produces opacities for its performers, who are of mixed Japanese heritage. Through movement scores, stand-up comedy, and a re-created “late-night” talk show, the dance invites audiences to move beyond the desire to recognize, categorize, and “know” the mixed-race Asian American performer.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts13010009
Authors: Rui Zhang Fanke Peng
In 2022, the National Museum of Australia launched an immersive virtual exhibition of Australian Aboriginal art: Connection: Songlines from Australia’s First Peoples, which was created and produced by Grande Experiences, the same team that produced the multisensory experience Van Gogh Alive. The exhibition employs large-scale projections and cutting-edge light and sound technology to offer a mesmerizing glimpse into the intricate network of Australian Aboriginal art, which is an ancient pathway of knowledge that traverses the continent. Serving as the gateway to the Songlines universe, the exhibition invites visitors to delve into the profound spiritual connections with the earth, water, and sky, immersing them in a compellingly rich and thoroughly captivating narrative with a vivid symphony of sound, light, and color. This article examines Connection as a digital storytelling platform by exploring the Grande Experiences company’s approach to the digital replication of Australian Aboriginal art, with a focus on the connection between humans and nature in immersive exhibition spaces.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts13010008
Authors: Tomasz Szerszeń
Ukrainian art, from the economic and political transformation of the 1990s through the events of 2014 (Crimea’s annexation and war in Donbas) to the Russian Federation’s full-scale invasion in 2022, has been haunted in various ways by the question of trauma and loss. At the same time, however, the problem of trauma is not just a problem of war or conflict but is somehow inscribed in post-Soviet space. Photography has a special role to play here, as a medium constantly oscillating between visible and invisible and between presence and absence. Since traumatic images transform and question the medium, a discussion about trauma becomes a discussion about the image itself. This article analyses selected projects by Ukrainian artists in various disciplines made in three chronological moments: the first half of the 1990s, after 2014, and now, in response to the ongoing war. Each project touches in different ways on the issue of trauma and the traumatic view while also touching the broader level of relationships between affects, vision, and history.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts13010007
Authors: Piotr Bolesław Majewski
The Khrushchev Thaw allowed Poland a slightly larger margin of freedom in its cultural exchange with Western Europe than it had since the end of the Second World War. In this newly relaxed political climate, two models of Polish cultural diplomacy emerged in the West. The first constituted the official foreign policy of Poland’s communist authorities, while the other remained unofficial, relying on a network of contacts with Poland’s government-in-exile. An examination of contemporary Polish art exhibited in Paris during the 1950s and 1960s reveals this dichotomy. The first type of cultural patronage was coordinated in Paris by communist representatives of the Polish Embassy. The second emerged in Paris within Polish political émigré circles. Its key proponents were the Literary Institute (Instytut Literacki), including the intellectual and artistic milieu of the monthly journal Kultura (“Polish-based Culture”) and the Lambert Gallery (Galeria Lambert). State foreign policy, funded by the state budget and anchored in agreements between Poland and France on cultural cooperation determined the former, while the latter constituted an oppositional stance against the Eastern Bloc, deriving its strength from the resolve of Polish political émigré circles, their extensive network of sympathetic foreign contacts, and an understanding of the mechanics of the art market. The communist model sought to build a friendly image of Polish culture despite the apparent ideological rift between Eastern and Western Europe. The émigré approach stemmed from a refusal to accept the political division of Europe and involved searching the world of art for evidence of forces in Poland that opposed the political status quo. Finally, the patronage model adopted by communist authorities followed the state-imposed policy of favoring figurative art over Polish abstract art, whereas the model championed by émigré circles pursued the opposite strategy. It showcased unrestrained, spontaneous, and mostly abstract art. It evidenced an affinity for international trends in the art of the time, including abstract expressionism and, in particular, Parisian Art Informel. How can these two strands of cultural diplomacy co-exist? Which resonated more with international audiences?
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts13010006
Authors: Levon Hakobian
The term ‘musicalization’ comes from Aldous Huxley’s novel Point Counter Point where it denotes the use of music-derived models in fiction. The oeuvre of Russian writer Daniil Kharms (1905–1942) provides telling examples of such an approach to constructing both prose and poetry, as in his works, the conventional features of art prose and art poetry are, as a rule, considerably reduced. Kharms’s pieces, typically, consist of discrete ‘incidents’, which can be compared to musical motifs or themes; their organization into finished works is often based upon principles that have their recognizable counterparts in art music of different epochs. Some of Kharms’s texts quoted and commented on in the article show affinities with compositional ideas by major twentieth-century composers such as Alban Berg, Witold Lutosławski, Morton Feldman, Gérard Grisey, and Sofia Gubaydulina.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts13010005
Authors: Joseph Mohan
Abstract Expressionism is often regarded as the first purely American art movement and the first to gain mass cultural recognition. Prior to the 1940s, the consideration and appreciation of abstract art belonged to a certain intellectual elite, but the intimidating complexity of Abstract Expressionism, the daring allure of its artists, and the particularities of mid-century American culture converged to transform the avant-garde into consumer spectacle. This shift represented, and was symptomatic of, a larger societal rearrangement: information and commodity superseded industrialized labor as the core of American culture. Jackson Pollock, America’s first avant-garde superstar, stood at the center of this shift, at once representing both active creative labor and the commodification of the idea of that labor. Hans Namuth’s photographs and films of Pollock placed him and his art firmly in the realm of consumable popular spectacle, underlying further connections to Hollywood film and prominent print media. This article examines how Pollock became a paradigmatic figure in the avant-garde’s proliferation into mass culture and asserts that mass culture did not simply subsume the avant-garde. Rather, the two realms engaged in a mutual construction that pushed the avant-garde across numerous social boundaries. The artistic, critical, and popular receptions that grew out of this convergence erased distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts13010004
Authors: Catherine Cabeen
This article responds to the questions: how does trauma that is long-held in the body affect social choreography? And how can awareness of this intersection guide us towards individual and collective healing practices? Embodied trauma responses, commonly referred to as fight, flight, freeze, and dissociation, initially function as potentially lifesaving responses to external threats but all too often become engrained in how people move through the world and relate to one another. When these patterns of engagement become habituated, they affect the improvisational scores inherent to social choreography. Exploring trauma responses through the lens of social choreography invites increased awareness of how these patterns of behavior affect our relationships and communities. Through this awareness, the possibility of agency is increased. This essay continues the work of somatic and cultural scholars Resmaa Menakem, Staci K. Haines, and Zhiwa Woodbury, among others, whose research points to multiple continuums between how trauma is individually embodied and cultural dynamics we are experiencing globally. Drawing on the somatic work of Peter Levine and Bessel Van der Kolk, whose theories have revolutionized trauma healing, this essay offers accessible pathways to trauma sensitivity that readers can experiment with to consciously refine their own roles in social choreographies ranging from interpersonal to cultural interactions.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts13010003
Authors: Maximilian Leopold Langefeld
Best known for his lush landscapes and geometrical abstracts, Shanghai-born artist Yu Youhan 余友涵 (b. 1943) has frequently been in the limelight of curatorial and scholarly activities. Yet his vibrant pop works, which capture decisive moments in modern Chinese history, have insufficiently been considered mere juxtapositions of imagery derived from socialist China, political figures of the time, and commerce. This article offers new insights into the mechanics of signification in the artist’s Political Pop works by examining the ways in which different kinds of imagery are appropriated, manipulated and recontextualised. Three in-depth semiotic analyses counter the assumption that Yu’s copy-and-paste practice might indicate a lack of originality or even the decay of Political Pop, which had come to a halt in his practice by the early 2000s. Rather, the various acts of appropriation prove to be astute artistic strategies that reinforce the artist’s originality and criticality. By emptying and recoding individual signifiers, Yu’s work blurs the line between fact and fiction and challenges stable narratives usually expressed in official history paintings. In other words, the artist gives birth to a contemporary form of history painting, or rather an anti-history painting, in the style of Political Pop that refashions the cultural memory of China’s past.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts13010002
Authors: Erika Piazzoli Modesto Corderi Novoa Zoe Hogan
In this paper, we discuss a collaborative research project called Lacunae: Embodying the Untranslatable. The issue of untranslatability has been a much-discussed topic in translation studies, with recent debate linking it to performability. Although untranslatability has received some attention lately, the debate has been largely theoretical, confined to a textual conception of translation. In the study discussed in this article, we explored an applied approach to (un)translatability, working with/through the body in space, positing the body as the vehicle for deciphering the untranslatable. We draw on an embodied way of knowing as a phenomenological framework to construct knowledge as lived experience. The study aimed to investigate the lexical, intercultural, and aesthetic potential of performing untranslatability by exploring a series of untranslatable words through research-based theatre. The data generation process involved a retreat where nine researchers/artists/practitioners addressed the research question through practices like process drama, Butoh, physical theatre, improvisation, and visual arts on mixed media. In this paper, first, we introduce the theoretical framework and context of the study. Next, we illustrate the methodology, data analysis, and findings, with reference to one untranslatable word from the Chinese language, yuánfèn 缘分, loosely translated as ‘serendipity in relationships and life events’. We contemplate the practice in this workshop through a philosophical, pedagogical, and research-based lens. Finally, we contemplate future iterations of this project, reflecting on how performing yuánfèn could inform theatre-based research on migration and identity in education.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts13010001
Authors: Emma Louise Leahy
Russian interference and invasion in Ukraine have transformed that nation’s historical practice of mural painting. A traditional art form with deep religious and political resonance in Ukraine, murals have become an instrument for patriotic mass mobilisation against the Russian military threat. From the mid-2000s, spraypaint graffiti underwent a gradual process of professionalisation and reconciliation with mainstream culture as Ukrainian municipalities pursued urban beautification initiatives and city-branding strategies to mitigate the socioeconomic challenges of postsocialism. It was this legacy of apolitical, privately funded street art that provided the foundations for patriotic muralism following the Maidan “Revolution of Dignity” and the Russian annexation of Crimea. Amidst the post-Maidan search for a postcolonial understanding of Ukrainian culture disentangled from Soviet and Russian influences, professionally produced murals in central urban districts proposed new visions of national identity. The war’s intensification since 2022 has resulted in a decentralisation of mural production. No longer reliant on international festivals in urban centres, conflict murals are now made by Ukrainian artists in large cities and small towns across the country. The newest murals represent a blending of the physical and digital—with a subject matter often inspired by viral conflict memes; artworks are, in turn, shared with worldwide audiences via social media.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts12060253
Authors: Lauren R. Cannady
Just as plants confiscated from one part of the world and introduced to another may become naturalized over time, so too may the stories humankind tells about the natural world. Both can have consequences for local and global biocultures. The North American black locust tree (Robinia pseudoacacia L.) offers a case study through which to consider the transmission of early modern environmental and cultural histories. The persistence of a singular specimen planted in Paris in the early seventeenth century stands in contrast to the mutability of histories over time and the divergent modality of narratives about the natural world in different cultures. The many material lives of the plant species—from its propagation and first publication by Europeans to accounts by European colonizers in North America to the tree’s historic and continued use in Indigenous craft practices—can be read through intertwined histories of botany, bioprospecting, settler colonialism, and the Atlantic slave trade. Expanding the profundity of the black locust’s history by connecting its prehistories to written narratives reveals the tree to be an entangled organic object whose histories are integral to its materiality.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts12060252
Authors: Lilian Kong
Chinese state-endorsed films have transformed in the past decade. These films make up the “new mainstream”, a genre defined by its ability to match strides with Hollywood commercial cinema. But, what exactly comprises Hollywood’s impact on official Chinese media? How does it manifest onscreen? Exploring the relationship between state-endorsed blockbusters and Hollywood, this article analyzes a pioneer of the “new mainstream”, Wolf Warrior II (2017). This film stands out as the inaugural collaboration between Chinese media conglomerates and Marvel Cinematic Universe directors. From this collaboration emerges the film’s protagonist, Leng Feng, an ex-soldier who saves civilians from rebel forces in Africa. As Leng enacts justice at home and abroad, however, affective portrayals of his feats foreground ambiguity over coherence and unresolvable impulses over a singular agendum. These melodramatic sites of contradiction, I argue, culminate in the film’s own “global superhero vernacular”. Such a vernacular aligns with transnationally circulating serial franchise logics, pushing the film’s connection with Marvel beyond local–global and state–market binaries. Ultimately, my analysis complicates the smooth thread that links together the superhuman individual, nationalist sovereign power, and international order, thereby re-evaluating state-endorsed cinema’s role within Chinese media cultures and social fields.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts12060251
Authors: Kendra Grimmett
On behalf of the Catholic Church, the Council of Trent (1545–1563) confirmed the usefulness of religious images and multisensory worship practices for engaging the bodies and the minds of congregants, and for moving pious devotees to empathize with Christ. In the center panel of the Rockox Epitaph (c. 1613–1615), a funerary triptych commissioned by the Antwerp mayor Nicolaas Rockox (1560–1640) and his wife Adriana Perez (1568–1619) to hang over their tomb, Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) paints an awe-inspiring, hopeful image of the Risen Lord that alludes to the promise of humankind’s corporeal resurrection at the Last Judgment. In the wings, Rockox and Perez demonstrate affective worship with prayer aids and welcome onlookers to gaze upon Christ’s renewed body. Rubens’s juxtaposition of the eternal, incorruptible body of Jesus alongside five mortal figures—the two patrons and the three apostles, Peter, Paul, and John—prompted living viewers to meditate on their relationship with God, to compare their bodies with those depicted, and to contemplate their own embodiment and mortality. Ultimately, the idealized body of Christ reminds faithful audiences of both the corporeal renewal and the spiritual salvation made possible through Jesus’s death and resurrection.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts12060250
Authors: Juan Luis Burke
This article analyzes the urban and architectural transformations in the Villa de Guadalupe, the site where the cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe originated, in present-day Mexico City, on behalf of Creole architects, urban planners, and clerics. The article argues that members of Mexico City’s Creole elite played a critical role in fabricating a fervent cult of a dark-skinned Madonna while orchestrating dramatic changes to the site of the apparitions, which transformed it from a humble Indigenous village into the religious and spiritual heart of New Spain. The essay focuses its attention on the town’s urban and architectural changes during the eighteenth century, which is when the village of Guadalupe was transformed into a veritable “villa”, a special designation for an urban establishment in the early modern Hispanic world, which vested it with certain legal autonomy. The story of the urban and architectural transformations and innovations at this site is fascinating, given the ambition on behalf of Mexico City’s Creoles to appropriate it and its success in promoting it as the source of Mexico City’s and New Spain’s claims to exceptionality by divine designation. The Virgin Mary’s appearances to a humble young Indigenous man in an impoverished Native village near Mexico City, which became the spiritual center of New Spain, became a potent narrative wielded by the Creole elite, as they sought to assert their political claims in the face of staunch opposition from Spanish-born administrators and clergy. At the Villa de Guadalupe, as this essay reveals, Creole elites tested their political, urban planning, and architectural skills, asserting their cultural and political relevance in 18th-century Mexico City.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts12060249
Authors: Eugenio Refini
This article explores the use of echoes in early modern theater, particularly in the context of opera. By examining the incorporation of echoes in plays, libretti, and scores, the article argues that the Ovidian trope of Echo occupies a fluid space spanning textuality and performance. The article begins by delving into how the sonic essence of Echo was conveyed in early modern dramatic texts and conceptualized in coeval theoretical writings, forming a continual negotiation between the specific features of the performance and the endeavor to record it on the page. Subsequently, it looks at the appearance of Echo in Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, offering it as a case study for evaluation through the lens of modern performances and the interpretive questions they raise.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts12060248
Authors: Katia Denysova
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]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts12060247
Authors: Elise Archias
Melvin Edwards made his first abstract sculptures at the beginning of the contemporary period in the early 1960s, but the ways he held on formally to a modern notion of “interiority” in his Lynch Fragments series provide us with an underexamined aesthetic position in contemporary art. Edwards offered nuanced relationships between interior and exterior at a moment when concepts of “interiority” and “self” were under the most strain in contemporary art practice. If we consider this turn away from interiority—and toward surface, emptiness, system, and dematerialization—to be, in part, a symptom of the pressure exerted by the commodity form on art viewers’ sensibilities after 1955, then the stakes of Edwards’ choice not only to use found metal objects, but to compose them around an active rather than empty center, feel higher. By comparing the sculpture Mojo for 1404 (1964) with the Bichos (1960–1965) of Lygia Clark, the distinctiveness of Edwards’ project emerges even more strongly. Clark responded to the crisis of interiority with shiny metal sculptures whose interiors were constantly being flipped inside-out. By contrast, Edwards’ art was motivated by the struggle for racial justice, and it persistently spoke its desire for grounded, scarred personhood in an aesthetic language that required viewers to recall their own interiority.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts12060246
Authors: Mari Yoko Hara
Baldassarre Peruzzi’s cosmological vault fresco (1510–11) in the Villa Farnesina in Rome, prominently featuring a scene of Perseus and Medusa, showcases a dynamic operation that was often at work in the early modern period between the beholder and an immobile work of art. These types of representational objects participate in the discourse around materiality, not by employing the signifying powers of their constituent materials, but by encouraging thought about their material presence. I explore the process of haptic engagement that the fresco painting urges in its beholders, raising the possibility that the trope of petrification, made popular by Dante and other Italian writers of amorous poems, unlocks the work’s layered meaning.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts12060245
Authors: Pedro Luengo
The construction of military edifices in Spanish Caribbean was overseen by engineers, as previous studies have largely shown, but forced labor played a key role in the processes, an understudied aspect. Hundreds of enslaved workers in San Juan de Puerto Rico or San Juan de Ulúa (Veracruz, Mexico) and thousands in Havana (Cuba) helped create the built environment of the Spanish empire in the eighteenth century yet both their significant physical presences and housing situations have not been discussed at large. Furthermore, general maintenance of these structures was one of the duties of military engineers serving in Spanish Caribbean and, thus, archival material should be rich in describing this aspect, yet very few plans or reports offer any information concerning enslaved workers’ habitations, apart from Havana’s galeras and some sections of San Juan de Ulúa, both unpublished until now. Recognizing that Spanish authorities paid little attention to the lodgings of their enslaved workers, this paper considers the forms of structures created by enslaved peoples for their lodgings. Through examples discussed in Havana and for San Juan de Ulúa, this study demonstrates that European architectural traditions were eschewed in favor of native and, likely, African customs. These examples offer unique insights into enslaved peoples’ living environments and expand our discussions into how race contributed to the diversity of architectural practices in the early modern Iberian world.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts12060244
Authors: Sagrario Beceiro Begoña Herrero Ana Mejón Rubén Romero Santos
In her triple condition of emigrant, artist and woman, the work of Spanish filmmaker Chus Gutiérrez is a privileged and singular object of study. Through her filmography it is possible to approach the changes that have taken place in the cities on both sides of the Atlantic. Chus Gutiérrez resided in New York during the decade of the 1980s and returned to Madrid to witness the changes that this city was undergoing: from being the epicenter of a dictatorship to a democratic city. Her vision of both places is clearly reflected in two of her films: Sublet (1992) and El Calentito (2005). The protagonists profiled by Chus Gutiérrez in these films are young women who move through complex metropolitan spaces at a critical moment of their lives. Cities become another character, illustrating, pushing, or limiting their course; spaces in which the protagonists accept their differences and begin the search for their individual and collective identity.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts12060243
Authors: Susan Cox Matthew Smithdeal Michael Lee
Research-based Theatre (RbT) offers a powerful stimulus for dialogue about the challenges of graduate supervisory relationships. This paper traces the implementation process for Rock the Boat, an open-access educational resource that includes four professionally acted scenes, a facilitator’s guide, and supplementary reading materials. The resource has been used extensively in online, in-person, and hybrid workshops to identify difficulties in graduate supervision, heighten awareness of power dynamics, and increase reflective practice among participants. Reflecting on lessons learned about the importance of pedagogy and practical logistics, we suggest that implementation aspects of RbT methodology are as vital as the creative and developmental.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts12060242
Authors: Lucy Bell Sdahl Ḵ’awaas
Over 12,000 Haida belongings and 500 Haida ancestral remains were collected and locked away in museums at the height of colonization in the late 1800s to early 1900s. It has been my lifelong quest to undo the colonial harm done to my Ancestors and their belongings. With gudáang ‘láa, (joy) as a foundational philosophy and methodology, I am researching and telling the story of Haida repatriation and reconciliatory work with museums.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts12060241
Authors: Nurcihan Akdağ Şefika Gülin Beyhan
Public buildings, which have an essential place in the urbanization process, reveal their existence in the city through their location. Depending on the selection of the site, how memory is shaped and oriented or whether memory enters an extinction cycle forms the main problem of this study. Public spaces in the city center hold an essential place in urban memory. These spaces hold a place in the urban memory in terms of social and cultural architecture, which are elements that are built in line with the city’s administrative, educational, and military needs. Then, they become a remarkable part of a city’s social life. The main frame of the study is the Governor’s Office of the City of Isparta in the Mediterranean Region of Türkiye. This study aims to discuss the practices in which the social life of the city of Isparta takes place in the memory of the city. Several relevant official and other documents were obtained and examined to reveal the relationship between memory and place. The meaning of the building, news about the building, opinion articles, and texts were analyzed.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts12060240
Authors: Claudia Sofia Quiñones Vilá
The digital revolution has launched myriad new technologies in the field of art and cultural heritage law, including digital art, NFTs (non-fungible tokens), artificial intelligence (AI)-generated art, virtual reality and reality augmentation, online viewing rooms and auctions, holograms, immersive experiences, and more. As a $67.8 billion industry, the art market is a global driver of innovation, international collaboration, and national economies, given its cross-border transactions. However, given the extremely rapid development of these new technologies, regulators have struggled to keep pace and implement legal measures that are fit for purpose in this field. Limited oversight has resulted in several claims that have the potential to change the legal landscape. For instance, claims over the theft/misappropriation of NFTs and the related fraud and money laundering that may ensue, as well as a recent class action copyright infringement suit against the creators of a popular AI algorithm and infringement claims over immersive installation and light technologies, demonstrate how new ways of thinking are required to assess cases involving digital property (distinguished from other types of non-tangible property). Moreover, the US Supreme Court has issued a landmark ruling on fair use within the copyright context, which will be relied upon in the future to determine whether (and to what extent) the appropriation of existing copyrighted material is permitted. This includes both the digital use of physical artworks and the use of born-digital works. Although jurisprudential decisions are made on a case-by-case basis, factual patterns involving online media, digital art, and related technologies could serve as guidance for legislators and other decision-makers when considering what limits should be imposed on Web 3.0. This article will focus on recent US-based claims and regulations and dovetail with existing art market regulations in this jurisdiction (e.g., anti-money-laundering statutes) to determine their impact on new technologies, whether directly or indirectly. Finally, the article highlights ongoing trends and preoccupations to provide an overview of the shifting legal landscape.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts12060239
Authors: Katarzyna Bojarska
In this article, I analyze Julia Pirotte’s photographs of the immediate aftermath of the Kielce pogrom as a resource for conceptualizing the relationship between trauma and photography, gendered ways of seeing, memory and trauma, body and archive, vision and death, death and the archive, images and history, survival, and destruction. These specific atrocity pictures make a difference to contemporary conceptions of trauma photography and the female gaze in relation to racist, political violence. I work with theories that go beyond thinking about trauma and photography based on the Lacanian concept of tuché on the one hand, and Barthes’ punctum on the other. I investigate to what extent Pirotte’s documentation of the Jewish victims and survivors of the pogrom can be read as a belated encounter with the trauma of the Holocaust, and what it reveals about survival at the site of violence. The article is a work of a feminist academic oriented at reclaiming a space within the narrative on visual violence; the reflection on the female traumatic gaze is an element of a broader gesture aimed at reorienting the theory of atrocity pictures and documentations of political violence, as well as photography of trauma.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts12060238
Authors: Armen Kazaryan
For the first time in the literature, this study provides an analysis of the activities of two major architectural–archeological missions that investigated the architectural heritage of the Armenian Highlands: the Russian Ani Archaeological Expedition (1892–1893 and 1904–1917) and the Italian academic programs of the Universities of Rome and Venice and that of Milan Polytechnic (from 1966 to the 1980s). In this article, the results of the conducted research are compared, and their contribution to the development of the history of medieval architecture is evaluated. The differences in the results are related to the chronological distance between the missions, as well as the main focus of each work: the activities of the Russians are primarily archeological, while those of the Italian groups are architectural. The head of the Ani Institute, Nikolay Marr, set himself the task of exhibiting the original artifacts in the museum he had created in the medieval capital of Armenia, Ani, while the Italian professors relied on photography for both permanent and touring exhibitions. The second mission was in unspoken contact with the first, forming a kind of time-stretched dialog. Although, by the 1970s, almost none of the participants in Marr’s expedition remained alive, his scientific works were periodically being published, with some still waiting their turn in the scientific archives.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts12060237
Authors: Xiao Lu
Following the trauma of the Second World War, Hong Kong, under British governance, enjoyed considerable economic and political freedom to establish a local entertainment industry. Musical films became a major genre of Hong Kong’s film releases in the 1950s. Local melodramas, Hollywood musicals, celebrities, and ideals of female beauty were all present in the growth of Hong Kong musical films, which culminated in a glorious display of cinematic art. This article aims to provide insight into the popularity of Chinese-speaking musical films by examining the social, economic, and political complexity of 1950s Hong Kong, including post-war migration and colonial censorship. An in-depth analysis of Li Han-Hsiang’s The Kingdom and the Beauty demonstrates how Hong Kong studios adapted the Hollywood musical to tell Chinese stories and how Hong Kong musical films incorporated Chinese literature and music to represent cultural memory, local identity, and modern aesthetics. This case study sheds light on the localization of a Hollywood genre and the hybridization of Chinese and Western entertainment forms to appeal to a Chinese audience, thereby broadening the definition of cultural hybridity and informing the practice of Hong Kong’s musical filmmaking.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts12060236
Authors: Lasha Chkhartishvili
How is war and its consequences reflected in the theatre? How, in particular, has the Georgian theatre reacted to war, and to what degree does its presence impact Georgian theatre directors and audiences? When and under what circumstances do theatre companies stage plays on the theme of war? Since war never loses its relevance for Georgians, new texts are written continually on this topic and subsequently turned into plays, primarily by young directors. These productions grapple with the experience of war and its impact on the nation and its people, who are radically transformed by their individual histories. In addition, sometimes, they help to reveal hidden passions.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts12060235
Authors: Tomasz Łysak
The concept of the post-apocalypse, a cultural imagination of nuclear energy, the temporality of trauma, and time travel are linked herein in order to arrive at a political reading of the Dark series. This show is a commentary on the phasing out of nuclear power in Germany in response to the nuclear disaster in Fukushima. Two readings of this series are proposed: a meditation on the possible futures of the world (the possibility of reparative action and the post-apocalypse) and a traumatic narrative (the concepts of trauma and loss are crucial to understanding the plot, while both the visuals and the plot borrow from posttraumatic cinema). Nevertheless, the series plays by the rules of popular trauma culture, rules whereby a tragedy suffered by others serves the economic interests of the media.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts12060234
Authors: Amelia G. Jones
The fantasized artist-as-origin began as the quintessential figure manifesting Enlightenment European concepts of individual autonomy and sovereign subjectivity—and thus of identity and meaning as these come to define and situate human expression as well as securing educated, middle-class, European white male hegemony in the Euro-American context. While we think of this conventional figure of the straight white male artist as old-fashioned, as having been relentlessly critiqued since the mid-twentieth century by artists, often from a feminist, queer, anti-racist, or decolonial perspective, this article asserts that the artistic author still drives much of the discourse as well as underlying the money and status attached to visual art today. Citing key works by a range of contemporary artists who have challenged these value systems—Cassils, rafa esparza, James Luna, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, and Susan Silton—this article foregrounds the critique of whiteness and masculinity and the interrogation of capitalism and neoliberalism necessary to interrogating these structures of value attached to artistic authorship.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts12060233
Authors: Maria Alessia Rossi Alice Isabella Sullivan
This article explores how the visual culture of Eastern Europe has been studied and often excluded from the grander narratives of art history and more specialized conversations due to political and cultural limitations, as well as bias in the field. The history and visual culture of Eastern Europe have been shaped by contacts with Byzantium, transforming, in local contexts, aspects of the rich legacy of the empire before and after the fall of Constantinople in 1453. This study expands and theorizes the eclectic visual cultures of Eastern Europe during the late medieval period by focusing on two ecclesiastical buildings of the 14th century built under princely and noble patronage in regions of North Macedonia and Wallachia, respectively: the Church of St George at Staro Nagoričane, near Skopje, modern-day North Macedonia (1315–17) and Cozia Monastery in Călimănești, Wallachia, modern-day Romania (founded 1388). The 14th century was a transformative period for the regions to the north and south of the Danube River, establishing the contacts that were to develop further during the 15th century and especially after 1453.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts12060232
Authors: Agnieszka Rosales Rodríguez
The oeuvre of beloved Polish painter Ferdynand Ruszczyc (1870–1936) reflected the patriotic Neo-Romantic landscape trend of the fin-de-siècle prevalent in Germany and the Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden). It should be considered in the context of Nordic visual culture for two reasons: (1) until the affiliation of Central and Eastern European nations with the Soviet Union in the wake of World War Two, nations bordering the Baltic formed a single, fluid territory of cultural exchange, and (2) Ruszczyc’s oeuvre displays significant commonalities with dominant patriotic and Neo-Romantic trends of progressive artists around the Baltic Sea, where landscape became a vehicle for expressing dreams and emotions, as well as love of homeland. This article situates Ruszczyc’s national and artistic identity at the crossroads of cultures and artistic impulses, regional as well as international. Ruszczyc was born in Bohdanów near Vilnius (now Belarus) to a Polish father and a Danish mother. Like many Polish artists from the Russian partition, he was educated at the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, where he studied with Ivan Shishkin (1832–1898) and Arkhip Kuindzhi (1878–1910). He also travelled to Sweden. Ruszczyc was influenced by the Russian art circle Mir Iskusstva (World of Art, est. 1898) and is often compared with Nordic (e.g., Akseli Gallen-Kallela; Finnish, 1865–1931) and German (e.g., Otto Modersohn; 1865–1943) artists. His visions of nature are sometimes raw monumental images of the northern landscape or fairy-tale fantasies containing symbolic allusiveness and a mythical, poetic element that evoke intimate memories of the land of his childhood. In his paintings, Ruszczyc presented the changeability of seasons, orchards, soil and streams, clouds formations, and tree trunks with palpable emotion. By exposing the material substance of nature, his paintings also reveal its mystical aspect, its ability to transform in accordance with the cyclical, cosmic rhythm of growth, maturation, death, and rebirth.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts12060231
Authors: Stephanie Chadwick
Francis Picabia’s Bobinage (Bobbin, Winding or Coil) is a pencil and ink work produced on gouache-painted paper between 1921–1922. The free-floating forms in this piece appear, at first glance, to be studies in geometric abstraction. Yet, they, and the work’s title, make both semiotic and real-world references. The admixture of perspectives is notable, for it retains traces of the Cubist visual language that motivated Picabia and his peers as well as the imagery of the early twentieth-century technical diagrams that, as has been demonstrated by scholars, inspired his work. Examining Coil and other of Picabia’s artworks in tandem with the scholarship that has investigated these influences, this article explores the artist’s engagement with the very issue of representation. Through this investigation, this paper considers the ways in which Picabia’s work alludes to gender in a manner that privileges masculinity yet calls attention to the destabilizing effects of modernity—and modern representations—on notions about gender and, even, what it means to be human. Contextualized thusly, Coil represents not an abstract divergence but rather a continuation of the artist’s technical, gender, and, one could say, even cyborg investigations, revealing his engagement with new and innovative ways of perceiving, conceiving, and depicting modern experience.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts12060230
Authors: Soraya Murray
Video games are enjoying a flourishing of critical studies; they are finally taken as consequential forms of visual culture worthy of historical, theoretical, and cultural attention. At one time, their scholarship was largely overdetermined by issues of medium and treated largely as an entertainment product. But with the complexifying of the form, combined with a new generation of dynamic scholars and an expanded understanding of how to write about them, games now constitute a robust area of critical engagement with topics in race, sexuality, gender, ethnicity, ability, and other markers of difference. Those interventions have been key in driving the discourse forward, but game studies now faces a new set of strategic challenges. The gains have likely come at great methodological cost. This essay explores the consequences of identity-focused analyses and the roles of intersectional considerations of self and anti-essentialism as crucial tools in combatting enforced notions of belongingness. The author argues that the frontier of methodology in critical game studies may be to think outside of the prescribed ways in which academia encourages monolithic affiliation (or even false segregation) by validating and codifying identity-driven forms of expertise.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts12060229
Authors: Giuliana Borea
In this article, I analyse how the COVID-19 crisis crystalised and fuelled the vigorous role of Amazonian indigenous artists as, what I call, “agents of interface”, enabling connectivity, translation, networking and bridging information, ontologies, claims, and aesthetics. With the pandemic’s spatial restrictions and the reduction of global activity in the arts with a return to focusing on the local, I argue that it is important to look at interfaces as arenas from which to understand further reconfigurations, actions, and values in the arts. Based on the project and exhibition Ite!/Neno!/Here!: Responses to COVID-19 co-curated by the indigenous artist Rember Yahuarcani and me, and on other various initiatives, this paper explores how Amazonian indigenous artists became crucial agents of the interface in four main arenas providing first-hand, real-time information of the impact of COVID-19 at Amazonian urban and rural settings, channelling networks of aid and curation, connecting different agents and worlds, and engaging in curatorial collaborations. I argue that by acting at the interface, artists have reinforced their voices, while pushing for redefinitions of and positions in the art system and suggest that the COVID-19 crisis has introduced a new moment in the configuration of Peru’s art scene.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts12060228
Authors: Ishmael Khaagwáask’ Hope
Elder Nora Marks Dauenhauer, Kheixwnéi, a poet and oral literary scholar and a mentor of the author, told the author “Life is a poem”. This essay will explore the ways in which the oral literary and visual arts of the Northwest Coast interact, how artists across multiple disciplines attain knowledge and develop as artists, and the ways in which the arts sing the poetry of Tlingit life. Examining the relationship between the arts will deepen one’s understanding of each art and illuminate how they inform and enrich one another.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts12060227
Authors: Stella Grace Conard Elena Horton
In Denmark, heightened public interest surrounding migration politics has become embodied in the arts, leading to the development of migration-related arts projects. In this study we explore the experiences of women taking part in an arts-based integration project designed for migrant and Danish women to knit, sew, and crochet in female company, with a view to professionalise their handicrafts. Our findings, which are grounded in ethnographic fieldwork as well as interviews with members of the group, demonstrate how handicraft acts as a prism through which categories such as gender, class, and ethnicity are negotiated within the project. We found that group members’ national and cultural backgrounds shaped their different expectations and experiences in the project. The roles they occupied and their self-perception within the group were also shaped by other factors, such as their family status, their state of employment, and whether handicraft was more of a ‘hobby’ or a source of income. The study makes a case for appreciating the importance of social recognition. Understanding how these women perceived their own and each other’s work becomes a magnifier of the socio-political context in which the integration project is situated. Artistic practice both enabled members to respond to an integration and refugee discourse, while simultaneously positioning them within such frameworks.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts12060226
Authors: Julia Leyda Maria Sulimma
In the original publication [...]
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts12060224
Authors: Jenny Lin
This article explores how diasporic Chinese video artists present familial histories and tales of cross-cultural exchange in the context of an exhibition I am curating, Another Beautiful Country: Moving Images by Chinese American Artists, at the University of Southern California (USC) Pacific Asia Museum. I discuss projects by featured artists Richard Fung and Patty Chang. These artists’ experimental documentaries and performative videos foster deep personal discoveries that defy the late-capitalist obsession with the new as defined by youth, novelty, and the next trend, providing revelatory insights through recuperative engagements with what has come before. In analyzing artworks by Fung and Chang, I also reference related texts by/about artists and historical figures including Walter Benjamin, Anna May Wong, and Zhang Ailing, who emigrated from the People’s Republic of China to the United States in the 1950s and whose special collections in the USC Libraries helped inform the exhibition’s programming. I also interweave my own related familial histories and share some (not-so-new) curatorial ideas for immersing audiences in intercultural art and reflection.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts12060225
Authors: Matthew Hayes
As a supplement to sermonizing, the use of images has been crucial to growing the lay Buddhist following in Japan since at least the tenth century. While it may be the case that Buddhist images, much more so than texts, have historically been better able to draw in popular audiences through their accessible means of communication, the emergence of contemporary literate audiences meant new modes of accessibility. This article explores both the textual and illustrative histories of a modern illustrated hagiography on the medieval Shingon Buddhist monk Kakuban 覺鑁 (1095–1143). By tracing earlier vernacular approaches to Kakuban’s narrative that emerged throughout the evolution of this hagiography, it becomes clear that images were merely auxiliary in their appeal to modern Japanese readers and that such an appeal had been a consideration for generations of Buddhist compilers. This example draws attention to the mutually constitutive relationship between otherwise traditionally distinct functions of text and image in Japanese Buddhist hagiography, but also common conceptual divisions between lay and monastic experiences and popular and elite reading practices.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts12060223
Authors: José Ricardo Castellón Osegueda
Historical studies on the subject of Central American design are scarce. This article attempts to fill the gap as well as to overcome the exclusive correlation of design with industrialization. It highlights the relationship in a space and time other than those studied customarily: in the present case, 18th-century Sonsonate, El Salvador. With this purpose, it analyzes crafts, based primarily on an unpublished census of 1787 housed in the Archivo Municipal de Sonsonate. Considering design as a practice inherent to human life, this paper argues that design was present in craft activity through the creation of products, becoming a key factor for survival in a colonial periphery and overcoming guild barriers. Research findings indicate the limitations of conceiving design in industrial societies as a construction of coloniality, positing also the need to advance a concept of design that addresses the cultural and historical realities of peripheral regions like Sonsonate.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts12060222
Authors: J. Cabelle Ahn
On 8 September 2022, the American artist Frank Stella launched a series of twenty-two digital art works minted as Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) in collaboration with Arsnl, the in-house platform by the Artist Rights Society (ARS). Titled Geometries, each “package,” included the NFT that would affirm ownership and the corresponding geometric model designed by Stella in JPG (image), MP4 (video), SLS (3D printing), GLB (virtual reality and model manipulation), and USDZ (augmented reality). This range of digital formats alludes to two of Stella’s innovations in this space: the license to remix and manipulate his models, and the ability to 3D print Geometries at any color, scale, and material. Taking Stella’s foray into the NFT-space as a starting point, my article focuses on an emergent trend by artists engaging with Web3: the effort to bridge the physical and the digital by giving tangible form to NFT artworks and what this suggests for the future of digital materiality. The paper at its core seeks to examine the relationship between the physical referents to NFTs at the very moment when new media returns to historical forms.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts12060221
Authors: Alana J. Coates
This article examines the work of multidisciplinary artist José Villalobos through a queer Latinx lens using the theory of “disidentification” as put forth by José Esteban Muñoz and argues that Villalobos makes space for queer visibility and representation within Tejano norteño culture by subverting culturally specific objects that often perpetuate, sometimes violently, traditional Mexican and Mexican-American gender norms. By critically analyzing two artworks, Soledad (loneliness) (2022), a mixed-media triptych that takes the form of an ex-voto, and a performance, A Las Escondidas (Hide-and-Seek) (2019), this study demonstrates how Villalobos challenges gender-normative thinking in border culture through his artworks by incorporating the body and its adornments. Villalobos utilizes his body in his performances and the implied body in his installations and assemblages to critique and subvert homophobia. By doing so, he grafts queer identity onto norteño iconography to carve out space for representation and inclusion for himself and other members of the queer community.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts12060220
Authors: Robert Bork
No Gothic design drawings on paper or parchment have survived from the 12th century, and only a few have survived from the 13th century. For this reason, most recent scholars tend to concur at least broadly with Robert Branner, who argued in an influential 1963 article that such drawings were first produced only after 1200. This conclusion deserves critical re-examination, however, for two principal reasons. First, the continuity of the Gothic architectural tradition in both time and space strongly suggests that early Gothic builders used similar techniques to those used by their late Gothic successors. From this perspective, the lack of surviving design drawings from before 1200 seems likely to reflect their disappearance over time, rather than their not being used in the crucial period when the conventions of Gothic design and construction were first coming into focus. A second argument for the use of drawings in the 12th century comes from consideration of early Gothic buildings, whose complex and carefully calibrated forms would be literally inconceivable without such graphic aids. Churches such as Saint-Denis Abbey and Notre-Dame in Paris, for example, already display a level of geometrical sophistication and coherence that argues strongly for the use of scaled drawings in their original conception.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts12050219
Authors: Katie Bank
In 1582 George Whetstone described the feeling of entering a barren Great Chamber the morning after a night of sparkling social and musical entertainments. Recounting the previous night’s activities, he reflected on the relationship between musical activity and space, saying ‘the Poets fayned not without reason, that Amphions Harp gaue sence vnto stone Walles’. This article explores the complex relationships between sensing, sociability, activity, and space through an in-depth examination of a late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English interior design trend: personifications of the Five Senses. Using active imagining, it considers how the Five Senses engaged early modern English subjects in a dialectic between sensory/bodily absence and presence as a mode for exploring the precarious pleasure of holding the passions on the edge of balance. Looking at the spatial and musical-ritual framings of the Five Senses decoration at Knole House, Kent, it investigates how feeling, sensing bodies experienced musical–visual sensory interplay in early modern elite households. It seeks to better understand the aesthetic, emotional experiences of those who gave life to the musical, social situations in such spaces.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts12050218
Authors: Francisco Mamani Fuentes
This article examines colonial documents to shed light on the presence of non-white carpenters in the carpentry trade during the first two centuries of Spanish colonial rule in Peru. It first offers a general definition of carpentry work during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and then explores the specific environments in which Indigenous, black, and mixed-race carpenters carried out their activities. Through this analysis, it becomes evident that the agency of non-white individuals and groups in the carpentry trade was shaped by the diverse labor systems that predominated in colonial society.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts12050217
Authors: Madeline Eschenburg
In the 1990s, a notable trend in contemporary Chinese art was the use of human corpses as material for installation art. These works were called derivative and societally harmful by critics and have been dismissed as anomalous in more recent scholarship. This paper will demonstrate that the use of corpses was the continuation of a a decade-long attempt to free art from a perceived unhealthy relationship with society through ridding the human body of ideological meaning. I argue that the use of dead bodies marks a metaphorical end to this preoccupation within the contemporary Chinese art world and paved the way for a fundamental shift in the way artists approached society as a whole.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts12050216
Authors: Kathryn Bunn-Marcuse
Using buttons and beads sewn on wool and calico, Northwest Coast First Nations women fashion the robes and aprons essential to ongoing expressions of inherited prerogatives and rights. Each piece of regalia is carefully crafted to include signifying materials and motifs, telling of the origins or relations of their owners. These creations exist as part of a holistic system that integrates material artworks within ceremony, including song, dance, and oratory, which in turn uphold the laws expressed through potlatching. Shifting scholarly focus from Northwest Coast carving traditions, this paper recenters textile arts within a holistic, culturally focused context while addressing issues of gender, the effects of colonial practices, and the damage wrought by salvage anthropology as it fragmented cultural information across archives. Women’s artistic productions embody long-held technical and aesthetic knowledge connected to oral histories and cultural practices. Restoring Indigenous perspectives connecting tangible and intangible cultural heritage counterbalances the aesthetic emphasis that has dominated Northwest Coast art history.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts12050215
Authors: Matteo Fochessati
This paper offers a survey of the Soviet propaganda works collected by Mitchell (Micky) Wolfson Jr. since there 1980s and now preserved at the Wolfsonian—FIU (Florida International University) in Miami Beach and at the Wolfsoniana—Palazzo Ducale Fondazione per la Cultura in Genoa. The first collection to include the art of the regimes in a larger panorama of cultural production, the Wolfsonian offers, through a critical interpretation of the Soviet propaganda works within linguistic pluralism, a clear and immediate visual narrative of the history of the twentieth century.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts12050214
Authors: Laura Ammann
Antônio Francisco Lisboa (Aleijadinho) is arguably the most famous Brazilian colonial artist, known for his Baroque sculptures and architecture. The reception of his life and work, which often centered on biographical aspects such as his mestiço identity and his disability, conferred him a mythological positioning in Brazilian history. From the first sources from the 19th century to the modernist reappraisal of the Colonial Baroque in the 1920s, Aleijadinho became a foundational figure in the construction of Brazil’s post-colonial nationhood. This article contributes to the understanding of the mythification of Aleijadinho, paying special attention to how his mestiço identity was articulated in the essays of the Brazilian modernist Mário de Andrade.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts12050212
Authors: Christine Bourron
On 11 March 2021, amidst the lingering grip of the COVID-19 pandemic, the art world witnessed an extraordinary event. Christie’s, the renowned auction house, hosted a groundbreaking auction counting just one lot: a Non-Fungible Token (NFT)—a digital asset that had been generating buzz in recent times. The astounding price fetched by the NFT sent shockwaves through the art world. While the 255-year-old auction house was known for selling unique assets, its auctioning of an NFT was surprising as Christie’s online marketplace was not on the blockchain, contrarily to NFT platforms such as Opensea, Nifty Gateway, etc. The resounding success, however, of its historic auction was followed by a surge of NFT off-chain sales at Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and Phillips. While extensive research has been done on the trade of NFTs on the blockchain, little research exists on the trade of NFTs at public auction houses. Based on more than two years’ tracking of NFTs auctioned at major auction houses, our research identifies three phases in the development of the trade and provides valuable insights into the unique factors that contributed to the growth of NFTs at public auctions between the springs of 2021 and 2023.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts12050213
Authors: Aleisha Barton
Beginning in 1966, Victor Moscoso designed many of his psychedelic posters for the stroboscopic light shows of the San Francisco dance halls. Moscoso innovated a new mode of print that depended on its environment—kinetic lithography, a product of creative experimentation. He developed multiple iterations of this medium; however, installing it outside of its original context of the psychedelic dance hall continues to pose a unique challenge for preparators and curators alike. Today, museum display of his works relies upon experimental settings to activate his site-specific design. This article considers how immersive displays and antistatic artworks demand a new kind of relationship between visitor and artwork by decentering the museum’s longstanding emphasis on the optical, a regime that has long served to frame posters and ephemera in contexts of display rather than as active objects. By analyzing two recent exhibitions displaying Moscoso’s kinetic lithographs (The Summer of Love Experience, 2017, and Moscoso Cosmos, 2021), this article considers the mechanics of the print itself, curatorial decisions, and visitor engagement to assess the site-specific demands of a genre-bending medium.
]]>Arts doi: 10.3390/arts12050210
Authors: Natalia De la Rosa
This article presents the methodology and collective work strategies that constitute the Club de Lectura y Museo Comunitario de Sierra Hermosa (Sierra Hermosa Community Museum and Reading Club) in Zacatecas, Mexico, a space founded by visual artist Juan Manuel de la Rosa, a native of this place. The museum emerged as a small library in 2000; and a short time after its founding, the museological program incorporated textile workshops and an exhibition gallery for a collection organized with local and external donations. It also operates with a system of rotation within the town. This article reviews the historical, theoretical, and critical implications around the conception and action of the museum, with a focus on the colonial and the migration status that sustains the reality and history of this rural locality, situated on the Tropic of Cancer in the north of Mexico. In the context of extreme violence, extractive politics, and migratory crisis in Zacatecas, this article analyzes two artistic productions by the local painter Luis Lara and artist Cristóbal Gracia, developed in the context of this experimental and rural museum curatorial program. Moreover, this article redefines concepts such as the border, mobility, and cultural contact in an artistic, museological, and pedagogical context, and proposes alternatives to study Sierra Hermosa’s memory, history, and landscape.
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