Arts

By juxtaposing two ostensibly divergent characters, the Jewish art historian and Egyptologist Hedwig Fechheimer (1871–1942) and Soviet filmmaker and theorist Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948), this paper investigates how both approaches folded time, creating Cubist chronologies. Fechheimer adapted the philological focus of her Berlin School contemporaries to create an ahistorical, anti-teleological grammar of ancient Egyptian art which espoused an artistic affinity between the Egyptians and the Cubist movement. Eisenstein, who held a copy of one of Fechheimer’s books in his personal library, took a similar approach in the development of his critiques of historical allegory. This paper looks specifically at two shots of a sphinx during the bridge sequence in the 1927 film October to demonstrate how they correspond to Fechheimer’s views on Egyptian art and also function peculiarly within the film. Ultimately, I aim to demonstrate how the interpellations of the sphinx demonstrate a particular critique of historicity that Eisenstein later expands upon in his Ivan the Terrible films. Full article

The concept of metamodernism relies on our understanding of modernism, postmodernism and the bigger cultural periods that originated them. While modernism is a product of modernity, postmodernism is not situated comprehensively within a well-defined period. Moreover, when dealing with the dichotomy of movement and era in the last century, we are presented with a taxonomic dilemma of conflating eras and their aesthetical manifestations. Contrary to the prevalent view of cultural shifts, here I propose a different attempt at periodising and understanding ontologically the concepts of modernism, postmodernism and metamodernism, and the related cultural periods in which they are situated. I argue that modernism and postmodernism should be considered as a continuum in a temporal sense, but not as equal orders in a categorical sense, and that postmodernism is not an apt descriptor for the period following modernity, nor for the aesthetic paradigm following modernism. To resolve this problem, on the one hand, I propose we adopt the term metamodernity, which better reflects the new era of cultural development. On the other hand, I discuss metamodernism, which is the current aesthetical, and to a degree axiological, manifestation of this new era. Full article

Van Gogh immersive exhibitions—multi-sited, branded multimedia environments inspired by the artist’s life and paintings—are seemingly ubiquitous in 2022. These itinerant digital spectacles bundle reproductions of Vincent Van Gogh’s most recognizable artistic motifs with tropes of fin-de-siècle madness, bathing their visitors in an artistic wonderland of projected images and soundscapes spread throughout cavernous exhibition venues. The popularity of these commercial juggernauts is unmatched. At present, at least five different companies are staging competing versions of digital Van Gogh art exhibitions in dozens of cities worldwide, with a particular emphasis at present on sites throughout North America. How are we as art critics to make sense of these exhibitions as well as their influence within the institutional context of the visual arts? Taking the digital Van Gogh phenomenon as its central case study, this article investigates the emerging art-themed immersive exhibition model and explores the specific mode of spectatorship it promotes. Situating these projects within the broader framework of the contemporaneous attention and experience economies, and with an eye toward the crucial role of social media, I propose that art-themed immersive exhibitions such as the Van Gogh immersive experiences exemplify habits of digitally-mediated, 24/7 immersive attention and consumption in art and in everyday life. Full article

The article contains a comparative study of the visual poetics observed in the literary texts of American writer Ambrose Bierce and Russian-American writer Vladimir Nabokov. In particular, the study focuses on Bierce’s short story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” and Nabokov’s three short stories “Details of a Sunset”, “Aurelian”, and “Perfection”, in all three of which a number of narrative tools, images, and motifs borrowed from Bierce’s text can be found. The representation of the bridge and the narrativization of mystical insight are regarded as the principal features of the correlative imagery systems. These features are analyzed in order to discover Bierce’s and Nabokov’s understandings of the artist, visual imagination, and the freedom of will. Full article

Discussions of conceptual art both East and West have focused on the notion of “dematerialization” of the artwork and the substitution of “art as idea” for concrete works of art. Yet such an approach oversimplifies the role of materiality in works of conceptual art generally and underestimates the transformative role of the concrete object in early Moscow conceptualism in particular. An examination of the Nest, an influential group of artists active from 1974 to 1979, as well as other analytical conceptualists who highlighted materiality in their unofficial art practice suggests that their use of concrete objects and realized metaphors revolutionized late-Soviet unofficial art, moving it from an outdated modernist model of artistic autonomy to a more dynamic and engaged postmodernism. Their previously underappreciated contribution to the evolution of global conceptualism expands our picture of the movement as a whole and provides needed context for late-Soviet art and the post-Soviet period that followed. Full article

The article discusses an artistic method of the post-Soviet artist Vlad Mamyshev-Monroe (1969–2013) as the nexus of several traditions embedded in modernist legacy. His main genre is remastered (scratched) photographs depicting him impersonating various historical and fictional characters, from Marylyn Monroe (whom he considered his alter ego) to Hitler, Jesus Christ, and Putin. His art and artistically designed image creatively develop the tradition of modernist life-creation (zhiznetvorchestvo), which he enriches by camp, thus becoming a pioneer of this elusive sensibility in post-Soviet culture. Camp, in turn, facilitates Mamyshev-Monroe’s self-fashioning as the trickster whose transgressivity and ambivalence absorb his queerness and drag spectacles, and whose hyperperformativity manifests itself in his performative art. The article analyzes how Mamyshev-Monroe appropriates various cultural material in the trickster’s way by using camp for its critique and deconstruction. The case of Mamyshev-Monroe is especially important since it demonstrates the limits of the trickster’s transgression that resists its instrumentalization by the authoritarian state. Full article

The article considers the concept of new anthropology in the works of Vasily Chekrygin in the context of the scientific and philosophical ideas of his time. Chekrygin’s anthropology drew on the new concepts of life, discoveries made in biology and chemistry and new ideas of matter. A paradoxical fusion of scientific and occult thought, coupled with ideas of Christian anthropology, formed a crucial component of Chekrygin’s works. The artist produced his anthropological project at the intersection of two cultural paradigms: that of Christianity, on the one hand, and science and the occult, on the other. This blend of such heterogeneous concepts was not an accidental fact of the artist’s biography. It makes it possible to see certain problems and antinomies that were fundamental to the Russian culture of the 1910s through the early 1920s. Full article

The article examines the paintings by Eduard Steinberg, a Soviet non-conformist painter from the 1950s to the 1980s from the standpoint of the plastics of his language. The author focuses on Steinberg’s polemical dialogues with the greatest names in Russian and European avant-garde art, including both common points and disagreements. By analyzing the painter’s texts through the prism of poetics of the invisible and the ontology of traces, the author observes Steinberg’s early art of the 1960s and 1970s as an attempt to create a symbolic language and attach an ideographic status to art. Through simultaneous use of two artistic strategies—mystical and religious symbolism, coupled with metageometry Steinberg arrives at optical formalism and spectator dialectics, vying to see the invisible and record the polysemantic nature of the symbolic sign. The article analyzes the influence Vladimir Veisberg and his “invisible painting” had on Steinberg, including the “white on white” style, as well as Giorgio Morandi’s still-life vision of metaphysical painting. The author believes that by relying on analogies and reminiscences, Steinberg refers his audience to his predecessors and joins them in an intertextual dialogue. A special place here belongs to Kazimir Malevich with his radicalism, his trend towards metasymbolism and the language of the basic forms—the circle, square and cross. All of these are close to Steinberg’s geometric plastics of the 1970s and 1980s. Staying true to the pure forms of Suprematism, Steinberg builds up an aesthetics of the geometric forms of his own, where abstract art comes together with the ontological progress towards God. The Countryside series (1985–1987) shows influence of Кazimir Malevich’s Peasant Cycle, some principles of icon painting and Neo-Primitivist art. Full article

In the early years of the discovery of Indigenous bark paintings in Australia, anthropologists regarded this artform as part of a static and unchanging tradition. Inspired by the images of Arnhem Land rock art and ceremonial body design, the bark paintings were innovatively adapted by Indigenous Australians for the bark medium. Today, this art is recognised for its dynamism and sophistication, offering a window into how the artists engaged with the world. Within the context of recent art and anthropological scholarship, the paiFntings are understood as artefacts of Indigenous ‘agency’. They are products of the intentional action of artists through which power is enacted and from which change has followed. This paper reveals how the paintings were influential to their audiences and the discourses arising from their display through the agency of the artists who made them, and the curators who selected them. It underlines how Indigenous agency associated with the aesthetic and semantics values of bark painting has been and continues to be a powerful mechanism for instigating cultural, social, economic and political change. As such, it points to the wealth of Indigenous agency yet to be documented in the other collections of bark painting that are held in institutions in Australia and throughout the world. Full article

This article presents a project which is an experiment in the emerging field of human-machine artistic collaboration. The author/artist investigates responses by the generative pre-trained transformer (GPT-2) to poetic and esoteric prompts and curates them with elements of digital art created by the text-to-image transformer DALL-E 2 using those same prompts; these elements are presented in the context of photographs featuring an anthropomorphic female avatar as the messenger of the content. The tripartite ‘cyborg’ thus assembled is an artificial intelligence endowed with the human attributes of language, art and visage; it is referred to throughout as Madeleine. The results of the experiments allowed the investigation of the following hypotheses. Firstly, evidence for a convergence of machine and human creativity and intelligence is provided by moderate degrees of lossy compression, error, ignorance and the lateral formulation of analogies more typical of GPT-2 than GPT-3. Secondly, the work provides new illustrations supporting research in the field of artificial intelligence that queries the definitions and boundaries of accepted categories such as cognition, intelligence, understanding and—at the limit—consciousness, suggesting that there is a paradigm shift away from questions such as “Can machines think?” to those of immediate social and political relevance such as “How can you tell a machine from a human being?” and “Can we trust machines?” Finally, appearance and epistemic emotions: surprise, curiosity and confusion are influential in the human acceptance of machines as intelligent and trustworthy entities. The project problematises the contemporary proliferation of feminised avatars in the context of feminist critical literature and suggests that the anthropomorphic avatar might echo the social and historical position of the Delphic oracle: the Pythia, rather than a disembodied search engine such as Alexa. Full article

In Diagrammatic Writing (2013), Johanna Drucker discusses the power dynamics between texts interacting on a page. So-called autotheoretical texts often engage in similar types of performative and relational lay-outs, and yet, not much has been written about this formal phenomenon. Bearing this in mind, I propose an experiment that performs relations by thinking with, and through, Las Meninas, a self-portrait that is not strictly about the self. All that surrounds Velázquez in the painting (the work-in-progress we do not see, the ensemble of courtly characters, the framed reproductions of masters’ works, the much-discussed mirror reflection) informs and contextualises the portrait, but also explodes it into much more. This paper thus attempts to ask whether autotheory can, by being aware of performative and diagrammatic writing, together with the use of images as citations, decentralise the auto- and become a more choral scene, a cluster, a textual quodlibet or medley. Can a form of writing make space for a multitude, or even, a multitude into a space? Can the autotheoretical self be only one more of many characters, present, with agency, but off-centred? Full article

The role of female collectors in the promotion of non-official Soviet art is rarely reflected in texts on the history of art. In the shadow of the well-known figures, their patronage stays obscure. This article proposes to reflect on the exhibition practice of the Marie-Thérèse first Gallery in order to add to art history by rethinking the context with a gendered lens. Full article

This article examines autotheory and clinical trauma theory in relation to the author’s studio-based visual arts practice. This is addressed through surveying the development of the drawing series An open love letter. This ongoing series stems from an expanded practice of life drawing and explores experiences of love in relation to PTSD. Trauma is an event that fractures the sense of self, sometimes culminating in PTSD. As someone who experiences PTSD, physical symptoms (sweating, vertigo, emotional flooding) have pulsed against researching trauma. Memory, symptoms, and theory tangle together, challenging expectations of objectivity. The article addresses how autotheory supports the validity of establishing visual arts research engaged with trauma and trauma theory from the embodied experiences of a trauma survivor. The article additionally traces how readings of clinical trauma theory and autotheory inflected across each other in this research. First, through a clinical-trauma-theory reading of autotheory, it examines how autotheory positions itself as restorative of ideological dissociations. Specifically, autotheory intervenes in trends in art practices by privileging conceptual modes over the embodied and emotional. Following, this research establishes the significance of an autotheoretical reading of trauma theory to articulate the embodied experience of the theory. This demonstrates the capacity of autotheory to embrace the associations between research, practice, and lived experiences. Full article

This article scrutinizes the use of liminality as a term to understand medieval dance practices. With the case of the feast day of St. Eluned described in Gerald of Wales Itinerarium Cambriae, I first present common ways that historians and theologians have used the term liminality in order to describe historical depictions of feasts of saints where more unruly forms of movement and dancing have happened. I then analyze this specific depiction by Gerald of Wales through a combination of a kinesic approach and a hermeneutics of suspicion and charity. This approach shows that earlier understandings of dancing always being a problematic element in traditions of Christianity in the west needs to be nuanced. After this, I turn to the critique that Caroline Bynum Walker has brought up, concerning the use of the term liminality in the medieval context. Taking her critique seriously, I return to the story of St. Eluned by focusing on the lived religion from the perspective of the female characters in the setting. Finally, I also bring in Vincent Lloyd’s distinction between rituals and liturgy, to further strengthen how theological discussions can bring in more nuanced and important additions in how we may understand chaotic forms of medieval dance in new ways. Full article

Ambivalence is often regarded as a ‘negative’ emotion—an ‘ugly feeling’ as Sianne Ngai outlines—where not knowing and being unsure are seen as suspicious or mentally unhealthy. In this article, I outline the initial exploratory stage of the development of a new affective theory that I have termed ‘Unsure Theory’, in which ambivalence is observed as a mobile and aporetic state that, from an individual perspective, embraces the holding of multiple contradictory personal opinions. Unsure Theory also outlines ambivalence as an appropriate contemporary, meta-modernist response to late stage capitalism, our current socio-political moment, and its often negative impact on mental health. The aesthetics of ambivalence is explored through embracing a hesitant vernacular, an oscillating humorous, dry and ironic to sincere tone, and an internal, anecdotal first person voice that often addresses the reader. This exploration of Unsure Theory operates in an adjacent, feminist lineage of, and in homage to, Sad Girl Theory, as coined by writer, critic and artist Audrey Wollen, and Sick Woman Theory, by artist, writer and musician Johanna Hedva, as well as Lauren Fournier’s critical responses to both. Written within the genre of art writing and in reference to my own interdisciplinary creative practice, this article exemplifies autotheoretical writing as an extension of contemporary visual art practice. This article is partially situated within my own personal experience of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy from 2020–2022 and reading the autotheoretical novel Chelsea Girls by Eileen Myles at the beginning of 2021. Through unpacking these personal experiences, I begin to outline an argument for embracing ambivalence, particularly within autotheoretical practice, where Unsure Theory seeks to repoliticise uncertainty towards a new generative, critical and personal perspective on not knowing. Full article

An important aspect of robotic painting is replicating human painting techniques on machines, in order to automatically produce artwork or to interact with a human painter. Usually, painterly rendering techniques are transferred to the machine, and strokes are used as the basic building block of an image, as they can easily be mapped to the robot. In contrast, we propose to consider regions as a basic primitive to achieve more human-like results and to make the painting process more modular. We analyze the works of Kadinsky, Mondrian, Delaunay, and van Gogh to show the basis of region-based techniques in the real world and then transfer them to an automatic context. We introduce different types of region primitives and show procedures for how to realize them on our painting machine e-David, capable of painting with visual feedback. Finally, we present machine-created artwork by painting automatically generated sets of shapes in the styles of various artists. Full article

Ever since Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714–1762) introduced the concept of aesthetics, the prevailing idea has been that the fine arts provide an alternative source of knowledge to the traditional sciences. Art, however, has always been closely associated with emotions. Taking Baumgarten’s treatise on poetry as a point of departure, I argue that Baumgarten laid the ground for a conception of art that emphasizes emotion rather than cognition with a particular appeal to psychology to provide principles of aesthetic appreciation of art. This appeal is met here with a phenomenological discussion of a series of precepts within contemporary emotion theories, which provides the necessary and sufficient conditions for a psychological theory of aesthetic appreciation of art. Full article

As part of my practice-based research, I host a monthly radio show based on the principle of ‘waking sleep’, resulting in a largely silent experiment in dispersed communion with an audience. Silence—though frowned upon in standard broadcasting—has long been a feature of artworks from Marina Abramović (1973–present), to John Cage’s 4′33 (1952), to Gillian Wearing’s Sixty MinutesSilence (1996). The power of collective silence is harnessed by many doctrines: in Quaker meetings for worship, in the practice of Zen Buddhism, and in the Memorial observance of a minute’s silence. The practice of ‘waking sleep’ was coined by Ned Hallowell M.D. as a means of refreshing the brain and combatting the effects of ADHD. It is simply the act of letting the mind wander, without feeding it the next dopamine hit from a stimulant like a conversation or screen-scroll. Holding My Nerve is a radio show, and an ongoing autotheoretical artwork. It is part-field recording, part-endurance performance, and tracks my research process as it evolves. Using transcripts of the show, diaristic writing, and reflections on art history and my past works, this article explores the often-fraught relationships between autotheory, visual art, neurodivergence, and practice-based research. Full article

How do changes in the perception of the arts stemming from activism, government policies, precarity and the ongoing crises unfolding in the world affect the autonomy of the artist? In this article, I analyse three cases of young and emerging theatre makers in Flanders and Brussels that each deal with the economic, social precarity of the arts, as well as the general precarious state of the world. Camping Sunset, Ne Mosquito Pas, and Anna Franziska Jäger and Nathan Ooms each explore new ways of maintaining autonomy, be it by collective collaboration, creating a network and an aesthetics of failures and cynicism or a performance of overpositivity and a revaluation of the comic. My claim is that these artists find autonomy in the ‘making’ of a work itself, placing poetics back at heart of artistic work instead of performance. I argue that their poetics can be described as a poetics of inoperativity (Agamben), which places resistance and criticality on the level of making theatre and performance itself instead of making large societal claims. Full article