Search Results (20)

This article examines the persistent conceptual and structural obstacles that pluralism faces within the Euro-United-Statesian art system, particularly in the fields of criticism, art history, and aesthetics. The study situates its inquiry within broader debates around the politics of difference and the decolonization of knowledge, aiming to understand how theoretical frameworks historically incorporated plurality in ways that ultimately neutralize its disruptive potential. Methodologically, the article combines philosophical analysis with a critical rereading of canonical texts by figures such as Clement Greenberg and Arthur Danto, juxtaposed with insights from Indigenous, Black, and decolonial thinkers. The findings suggest that pluralism, while rhetorically embraced, is frequently rendered compatible with a teleological and universalizing narrative that privileges Western aesthetic trajectories. As a result, forms of difference are tolerated only insofar as they can be translated into hegemonic terms. The article concludes by advocating for critical practices that sustain rather than resolve difference, calling for frameworks capable of embracing dissonance, incommensurability, and multiple ontologies without collapsing them into sameness. In doing so, it repositions the contemporary struggle over meaning in art not as a problem to be overcome, but as a necessary symptom of epistemic plurality. Full article

This essay discusses the genesis, evolution, and impact of the Leningrad Contemporary Music Club (CMC), a pivotal hub for avant-garde and experimental music in the late Soviet Union. Founded amidst the socio-political constraints of the late 1970s, the CMC emerged as a sanctuary for jazz, classical avant-garde, and progressive rock enthusiasts. This paper chronicles the CMC’s unique ability to foster creative expression within the repressive Soviet cultural framework, driven by a coalition of visionaries including such musicians as Sergey Kuryokhin and jazz theoreticians like Efim Barban. The narrative highlights the club’s seminal role in introducing Western avant-garde music to Soviet audiences, hosting groundbreaking performances, and cultivating a vibrant community of musicians, critics, and fans. Through an exploration of the CMC’s organisational strategies, cultural exchanges, and its ultimate closure following state intervention, the paper examines how the Club bridged underground and mainstream music while navigating ideological constraints. The research underscores the CMC’s legacy as a microcosm of resistance and innovation, situating its contributions within broader discussions of Soviet countercultural movements and global avant-garde practices. This work contributes to the historiography of Soviet underground culture, shedding light on the interplay between art, politics, and social transformation in late 20th-century Leningrad. Full article

An unknown aspect of Josep Lluís Sert (Barcelona, 1902–1983) is his deep engagement with Christian spirituality, particularly following his American exile. This perspective is beautifully reflected in his religious-themed projects, among which historiography has highlighted the church of Puerto Ordaz (Venezuela, 1951), the Chapel of St. Botolph (Boston, 1963–1968), and the Carmel de la Paix Chapel (Mazille, 1967–1972), designed, respectively, before, during, and after the Second Vatican Council. Using these three well-known projects as a starting point, our aim is to expand the discussion around this topic to encompass the entirety of Sert’s sacred architecture. The contributions of Sert to the design of modern religious architecture are analyzed in this study, firstly through the distinctive aspects of his architecture, such as its urban scale and interactions between various plastic arts, and secondly through his theological references. This study is based on Sert’s original drawings, as well as specific bibliographic sources and articles from specialized journals. At the same time, it seeks to highlight an aspect of the architect that, despite the significance and brilliance of his designs, has received little attention until now. Full article

The research area of the interaction between religion, politics, and medieval Hispanic art has been pioneering and at the cutting edge of contemporary historiography in recent years. The deployment of iconographic and calligraphic motifs in medieval religious spaces has been identified as a key means of propagating legitimating messages of power and disseminating Christian doctrines. This interdisciplinary study proposes an analysis of the artistic vestiges present in the refectory of the Monastery of San Salvador de Oña (Burgos), with a view to establishing their decorative evolution during the 14th century and their symbolic significance. In order to establish a chronological proposal for the remains, the historical, artistic, and architectural contexts of the monastery are analyzed. This is complemented by a study of materials and techniques and a symbolic and iconographic analysis of the signs of power and evangelical concepts from the time of Pedro I until the transition to the Trastámara dynasty. In this way, a cross-disciplinary investigation is proposed, with the aim of elucidating how a sacred artistic work situated within a secular context can serve multiple purposes of political and religious legitimation through the adaptation of its iconography over time. Full article

Though often under-represented in the official and national narratives and in Canadian military historiography more broadly, the intimate and personal lived experiences of Canadian prisoners of war (POW) during the Second World War can be found in archives, photography collections, and collections of war art. In an attempt to see past the mythologised versions of POWs that appear in Hollywood films, best-selling monographs, and other forms of popular culture, it is through bits of ephemera—including wartime log books and the drawings carefully kept and sent home to loved ones along with handwritten letters—that the stories of non-combatant men and women who spent their war as POWs, can be told. Together, Canadian POWs created and curated community and fostered unconventional family ties, sometimes called “emotional communities”, through the collection and accumulation of drawings, illustrations, paintings, and other examples of war art on the pages of their wartime log books while living behind barbed wire. This article uncovers some of these stories, buried in the thousands of boxes in the George Metcalf Archival Collection—the textual archives—at the Canadian War Museum (CWM) in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Full article

Antilogies, or pairs of symmetrically opposed speeches or arguments, were generally ignored by Plato, Isocrates, Aristotle, Cicero, and Diogenes Laertius, and, later, by Eduard Norden, Hermann Diels, and most modern scholars of antiquity. As a consequence, until the end of the twentieth century CE, antilogies have been ignored or, at best, treated as a minor literary device to be mentioned only with reference to individual writings. Nevertheless, during the second half of the fifth century, antilogies were a crucially important form of argument and persuasion in ‘sophistic’ thought, philosophy, historiography, comedy and tragedy, and other fields. In order to redress the historical neglect of the art of antilogy, this essay provides an inventory (doubtless incomplete) of some 30 antilogies composed by playwrights such as Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes, historians such as Herodotus and Thucydides, and, most importantly, ‘sophists’ such as Protagoras, Gorgias, Prodicus and Antiphon (in addition to a few other writers of the same period). Building on this inventory, the second part of the essay seeks to establish identifying features of antilogy and assess its cultural significance in the Athenian context (in the second half of the fifth century BCE). Full article

Well (2020) is an installation by Israeli artists Noga Or Yam and Faina Feigin. It investigates the story of an underground passage in Tel Aviv designed by a British Mandate-era Jewish architect. Starting from this building, the artists’ archival research leads them to the story of a water source which does not figure in the architect’s plan. While the story of the well is unearthed, so is one about the tense relations between the Jewish architect and the Palestinian orange merchant who inhabited the site before 1948. By restaging a hypothetical archive, Well reminds us of the problems inherent in narrative formation and erasure in the context of the Palestinian–Israeli conflict. Noga Or Yam also examined space and water in an earlier work, Black Soldier, White Soldier (2018): with the background sound of water drilling in southern Israel, urban photographic landscapes of Palestinian rooftops covered with water tanks are projected onto the walls. Water, either concealed or lacking, emerges in both works as a vehicle for unearthing a historical narrative that counters the official one. This research article reflects on contemporary art’s engagement with the formation of history, and how such engagement shapes the identity of present-day art in postcolonial realities. Full article

In response to the absence of a critical discussion of race within his historiography, this essay focuses on José Campeche (1751–1809) as an artist of African descent and argues that the socially and culturally inscribed constructs of race and Campeche’s lived experiences of them in late eighteenth-century Puerto Rico shaped and informed his participation in the arts. Campeche lived both as an artist and as a free man of color within a racialized colonial society, and as such, inquiries regarding how race affected Campeche’s life and artistic practice, and particularly how his immersion in the community of free people of color in San Juan possibly impacted the manner in which he was trained and worked, allow for a more comprehensive understanding of his art production. Using comparable examples of African descendant artists and artisans active in other colonial centers, such as Mexico City and Havana, this article elucidates connections between Campeche’s socioracial reality, his artistic career, and his work through an examination of the relationship between race and art making in Puerto Rico, the broader Caribbean region, and the greater Spanish Empire during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This analysis of Campeche’s career and work prompts new questions about the artist that have not been asked in previous scholarship, such as how the structures of race would have defined his position and interactions within colonial society and also how his complex multiracial identity may have allowed him access to the different kinds of artistic exposure, training, and opportunities he likely had in San Juan. Full article

The article focuses on Brazil’s visual arts historiography from the 1990s onwards when institutions in Europe and the U.S. began to present Brazil’s art more frequently amid the growing globalization of the art system. Edge cases are highlighted to demonstrate how scholars based outside Brazil are helping to build a canon of that country’s visual arts that contrasts and surpasses the canon of Brazil’s visual arts outlined in Brazil’s collections, exhibitions, publications, and scholarly production. The image of roda (circle) in Ronald Duarte’s Nimbo/Oxalá and Ricardo Basbaum’s image/idea of “terreiro de encontros” (terrace of encounters) are proposed as Afro-Brazilian references with which to face the challenges of these historiographic crossroads. Full article

This article traces the history of the medieval oasis city of Sijilmassa, southeastern Morocco, and that of its modern, continuation city of metropolitan Rissani in the Tafilalt region. Elements of mobility and transition are discussed in light of the prominent historical role of the urban settlement in Tafilalt in long-distance trans-Saharan trade infrastructure. These elements are developed with a focus on the region’s Jewish communities, their socio-spatial characteristics, the employed toponymy with respect to Sijilmassa, and the material culture. Within the material culture of Tafilalt’s Jewry until the 1950s and 1960s (that is, upon their dramatic emigration from Morocco, mostly to Israel), the article analyzes in an original manner their traditional marriage contracts (ketubah-s) as a textual and especially as an esthetic artifact. The analysis interprets the visual imagery that appears in these manuscripts—an imagery that corresponds with global Jewish symbols, with the vernacular architecture in the Tafilalt, and with wider regional, trans-Saharan conceptual motifs. Revealing the composite symbolic imagery and decoding the visual repertoire of the ketubah-s against the rich cultural histories of the pre-Sahara region—with affinity to both northern Morocco and sub-Saharan, “black”, Africa—necessitates an interdisciplinary approach. This study brings together area studies (of the Middle East and Africa), art histories (of architecture and built forms, artifacts, and manuscripts), cultural studies (critical intra-group relations between Arabs, Berbers and Jews), and human geography (forms of settlements and long-distance trade activity)—in a type of meeting that is quite uncommon in the relevant research literature. Its contribution lies in tracing the dissemination of ideas and material cultures among less researched groups (southeastern Jewry) and regions (pre-Saharan) in Morocco, through engaging a transdisciplinary lens that requires an intimate acquaintance with associated research historiographies. Full article

Belgian art historian and filmmaker Paul Haesaerts (1901–1974) made a significant contribution to the promotion of modern Flemish art. In the late 1940s, he started experimenting with the medium of film to practice a new form of lens-based art criticism. The understudied documentary Quatre peintres belges au travail (1952) presents Belgian artists Edgar Tytgat, Albert Dasnoy, Jean Brusselmans and Paul Delvaux at work in their studio. On a large sheet of glass placed in front of the camera, they each paint one of the seasons that also represent a stage in a person’s life. A close reading of this Kodachrome color film sheds light on the context of mid-century art reproductions, mass media and post-war Flemish culture. It also examines in what way this film operates as Haesaerts’s concept of cinéma critique, while raising questions as to the way Haesaerts attempted to reconcile the spatial art of painting with the temporal medium of film. Full article

This review considers the British Museum’s exhibition, Thomas Becket: Murder and the Making of a Saint, curated by Lloyd de Beer and Naomi Speakman. Following a brief description of the show and its relationship to current art-historical scholarship, I offer a detailed study of one exhibit, a late-twelfth-century font from Lyngsjö in Sweden, and briefly sketch the significance of Becket for the historiography of medieval art in Britain. Full article

An exploration of industrial ruin sites has received sufficient attention in the past. Framed under the hybrid perspective of non-representational theory and paralleled with Ingold’s taskscape conceptualized terms, this study examines the TSA (train service area), an opencast mining ruins site in Gongguan town of Maoming, southern China, as a case locus to depict the ‘lives lived’ and the textures of the taskscape encountered by locales and to sketch out the iterative and eventful movements of human and non-human dynamic phenomena at the rural-urban interface from the 1960s to the 1980s, with the aim to re-examine the locality of one industrial city and regenerate the local culture. As actualized through ‘stories and dramatic episodes’, i.e., an art intervention of a new geographical historiography, the ‘thick’ landscape of mine transport comes to the stage as the self-landscape and of group-place scenes. In the first scene, the industrial past is evoked along the actor’s movement, through situated knowledge and through shared personhood; thus, the spirit of place is finally obtained through the aesthetic sublimation in the landscaping. In the second scene, the movement between the workplace and other rural areas, which are rural and seasonal, has balanced the gap between the urban and the rural, whilst the proximity of the village to the TSA accelerates the process of rural urbanization in this area. Among which, tea, as a non-human item, irreducibly produces a ‘structure of feeling’ and conjures up a sense of past people and past times and of customs, beliefs and localism. Full article

The Broadway musical, balancing as it does artistic expression and commerce, is regularly said to reflect its sociocultural surroundings. Its historiography, however, tends for the most part to emphasize art over commerce, and exceptional productions over all else. Broadway histories tend to prioritize the most artistically valued musicals; occasional lip service, too, is paid to extraordinary commercial successes on the one hand, and lesser productions by creators who are collectively deemed great artists on the other. However, such a historiography provides less a reflection of reality than an idealized and thus somewhat warped portrait of the ways the commercial theater, its gatekeepers, and its chroniclers prioritize certain works and artists over others. Using as examples Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death (1971), Merrily We Roll Along (1981), Carrie (1988), and Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark (2011), I will suggest that a money-minded approach to the study of musicals may help paint a clearer picture of what kinds of shows have been collectively deemed successful enough to remember, and what gets dismissed as worthy of forgetting. Full article

From the starting point of a 1975 artwork made by Norwegian artist Kjartan Slettemark in Sweden to stop a tennis match in resistance to the Chilean military dictatorship, this article reframes the linear image of networks of solidarity and resistance through the gaps and connectivity of a mesh. It expands the figure of the mesh taken from critical materialism into the affective realm of art, historiography, and art institutions by exploring the cases of the museums Museo de la Solidaridad (1971–1974) and Museo Internacional de la Resistencia “Salvador Allende” (1975–1990). As this article delves into various knots and lacunas of the meshes of solidarity and resistance partaking in these museums, and analyzing the relations they wove, it also aims to reflect on the capacity of resilience of arpilleras, as well as on the generative possibilities of the incomplete labor of art history and its ethical and political responsibilities. Full article