Theory and Practice of Visual Arts

Przysługujący widmom wywrotowy, niemalże rewolucyjny potencjał został odsunięty oraz zagubiony poprzez pozbycie się tej kontrowersyjnej kategorii z terytorium metafizyki i zbyt pośpieszne odesłanie jej do przestrzeni badań nad literaturą, sprowadzając ją jedynie do roli użytecznego, bezpiecznego narzędzia interpretacji.

Książka Andrzeja Marca odzyskuje niepokojący charakter widmontologii i ponownie wprowadza widma do myśli metafizycznej. Czym nawiedzona i przeniknięta jest tradycyjna metafizyka, co właściwie ją dręczy, nie daje spokoju oraz nieustannie podmywa jej stabilność?

Kategoria widma Derridy posłużyła Marcowi przede wszystkim do rozważań nad charakterem współczesności i przeobrażeń, jakie dokonały się w obrębie myśli ponowoczesnej. Współczesna kultura, zdaniem Marca, stała się miejscem powstawania widm, nieustannie powracających z przeszłości. Uznając, że nie jesteśmy już w stanie tworzyć utopijnych wizji przyszłości, autor stara się zdać sprawę z widmowego charakteru współczesnej kultury, analizując m. in. strategie vintage, retro, nurt no future w kulturze lat 70. czy nurt fantastyki naukowej w literaturze.

Sublim, merak uyandıran, etkileyici, şaşkınlık veren anlamlarında kullanılan bir kelime olmakla beraber, felsefe ve sanatta sublim olgusu üzerinde yapılan tartışmalar göz önüne alındığında sublim içerisinde, kelime anlamının ötesinde gösterenlerin barındığı söylenebilir. Bu makale, Edmund Burke ve Kant'ın temelini oluşturduğu sanat ve estetikte sublim olgusunu, günümüz filozoflarıyla tartışacak ve güncel sanat eserleriyle örneklendirecektir. Bugün; eğer postmodern zamanlar ise, “postmodernite içinde sublim kavramından söz edilebilir mi?”; sorusunu sorarak, günümüzde sublimin tanımları üzerinde durulacak, bu bağlamda sublim estetiği ve postmodernizm üzerine yazılarıyla ünlü; filozof Jean François Lyotard'ın günümüzde sublim ile ilgili savları incelenerek bunların ötesinde ne gibi okumalar ve tanımlamalarda bulunabilineceği tartışılacaktır.

Art review.

Exhibition title: EVA & EMERICK
Artist: Yael Efrati
Curator: Nicola Trezzi
Location: The National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest, Romania.
Dates: 26 April—2 September 2018
Exhibition made with the support of Mifal HaPais Council for the Culture and Arts, The Artis Grant Program & The Embassy of Israel in Romania

South Africa’s educational landscape is scarred with economic and educational inequalities. South African tertiary education today has to deal with a variety of challenges including the lack of funding, both on the student’s side and on the side of the institution.  The most prominent challenge relevant to our research is the extensive lack of skills and knowledge of students when coming from secondary school where they are rarely exposed to cognitive skills. Our students struggle to understand the notion of a ‘concept’ or ‘metaphor’ in an artwork: that art is not just representative or aesthetic, but communicates a message, an idea, a criticism, or appreciation. This requires creative and critical thinking. We present a case study of a drawing and animation project that aimed to facilitate this. We argue that through the integration of art theory and drawing practice, students came to understand not only how to detect critical thinking by other artists, but how to implement concepts, metaphors, or symbols in their own work. Through this project we explored drawing
• as a bridge to close the gap between theory and practice,
• as a tool for creative and critical thinking, and
• as a means to introduce technology on a basic (low-cost) level.
We found that our integrated approach narrowed the theory/practice gap and enhanced creative and critical thinking, resulting in student work of greater conceptual quality.

The arts in education can do more to develop dispositions for success and socially responsible action in our
future artists, innovators, and leaders of tomorrow. In order to be a highly effective teacher-leader of art and design, it is
proposed that the development of creativity and innovation must be balanced with analytical thinking and practical
wisdom. Twenty-first century learning demands that teachers become designers of classroom environments and curricula
that enable students to develop their full capacities as human beings, while tapping into a balance of their creative,
analytical and practical entrepreneurial skills and mindsets. Artist-teacher-leaders must also capitalize on students’
abilities for connection making, inquiry, and self-direction to foster their future social-emotional strengths and
dispositions. When more focused on the development of students’ creative process skills and responsibility, art and
design education may be better positioned to foster empathic, interdisciplinary 21st-century skills and habits of mind
success. In this aim, the marriage of design thinking strategies and learner-centered pedagogies serve as catalysts of
change in the visual arts. This paper reports on research and theoretical frameworks of successful intelligence and
balanced intelligence that support innovative and currently implemented programming in a U.S. undergraduate and
graduate teacher training program.

Following the thread of the Feminist New Materialists, in “I Live in this Dress” the author, a visual art performer, examines the workings of materiality and identity within her own practice. The process of three recent works, Point Out, Touch On and Red We (all 2017) includes the design and construction of a sculptural wearable and techniques of traditional garment making—fabric draping, sewing and embroidery—to reveal a co-embodiment and shared authorship between artist and garment, woman and dress. This deep commitment to the material underpins a shift in selfness toward a collective identity, or alterself. Insomuch as the making makes the performance, the author suggests, the making makes the performer.

This text was written for KOW ISSUE 1 and part of the exhibition at
KOW’s storge space at Brunnenstr. 9, Berlin (27.02.– 21.03.2009).
It was inspired by conversations with Nikolaus Oberhuber and
Franz Erhard Walther.

Published in: KOW ISSUE 1, Berlin 2009/2013

The goal of the article is to identify the merit of controversy between essentialism and antiessentialism in contention about definition of art. Both stands I take here as two different, incommensurable ways of understanding of how to define the art – what exact functions its definition is supposed to bear; in what way and on what basis one ought to formulate it. According to my argument, the main motive of divergences – and the hidden merit of controversy by the same time – is not the question whether there are some general properties of artworks (“the essence of art”), but metaaesthetic presumptions concerning the way of how to conceive general properties at all and how one may come to know them. These presumptions are to be identified by differentiation between two aspects of definition’s method – habitual and verbal one. Habitual definition of art is being formulated by competent verdicts within the art world, while verbal reconstruction of presupposed presumptions is the aim of aesthetics.

RESUMO
Com os avanços dos estudos sobre avaliação, vários pesquisadores se dedicam ao tema. Neste artigo faremos não apenas formulações teóricas sobre o processo avaliativo, mas também usá-los de forma que possa ser útil para o leitor. O texto é direcionado para métodos avaliativos e neles foram selecionados os processos somativo e formativo, refletindo sobre avaliação educacional, em nosso caso, avaliação na disciplina Artes, verificados em turmas das primeiras, segundas e terceiras séries do ensino médio em uma escola pública da Região Metropolitana Norte de Natal, Rio Grande do Norte, além de fazer uma conexão entre o método somativo com ensino teórico e formativo com práticas em sala de aula. Foram elencados os trabalhos de Paulo Freire (1996), Oliveira (2004), Milas e Solé (1996), além autores que discorrem sobre o assunto formação e artes, como norteadores para o desenvolvimento deste texto.
--------------------------------------------------------------
With the advances of studies on evaluation, many researchers focus on this issue. In this article we will not formulate just theoretical on the evaluation process, but, also use them in a way that can be useful to the reader. The text is intended for evaluation methods and in them the summative and formative processes were selected, reflecting on educational evaluation in our case assessment in Arts discipline, checked in a Public High School of North Region of Natal, Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil, in addition to a connection between the summative method with theoretical training and formative method with practice in the classroom. Were listed the works of Paulo Freire (1996), Oliveira (2004), Milas and Solé (1996) and authors who talk about the subject training and arts, as guidelines for the development of this text.

This publication accompanies the exhibition At the Mercy of Others: The Politics of Care, May 18-June 25, 2005, organized by the 2004-05 Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellows of the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program: Sasha Archibald, Sarah Lookofsky, Cira Pascual Marquina, and Elena Sorokina

People are witnesses ‘living in a convergence culture’, with meetings between old and new media creating new possibilities' in the contemporary culture. One of the cultures that emerged since late nineteenth century is comics. The amusement of comics seems to invite more people – young or adult – to be immersed into the world of comics. Studying visual art is an intriguing task, especially if taking underrated
subject matter from a popular visual culture media such as comics. Articulating the
expression of contemporary Malaysian comics is not a lucid task. The understanding
of the art of comics can help public awareness to go beyond the initial appreciation
of drawings and stories it contains. There is somewhat a contradiction in public
awareness of comics or cartoon. While most of Malaysians would agree that cartoons
are a valuable reflection of society, but taking it as a subject matter of a study is an arduous task since generally it was not counted as a truly significant scholarship. The lack of appreciation made the richness of local comics unseen, and as an important cultural heritage its values remains undiscovered. The researcher works pace by pace in this study; beginning with documenting to perform an initial reading/viewing of all sources and to take notes about the general ways the visually appeared in the contents of four limited, established and eligible comics’ magazines, for the time being such as Gila Gila, Ujang, Gempak, and G3, and considers to study its visual subject matter and form. The researcher then makes a categorization through the analysis of visual form by using semiotics. Finally, based on the contents of formal visual structure and semiotics visual analysis, describes the findings with some suggestion to gain insight from the point of view of the phenomenology of the arts. It is important yet meaningful to understand how comics invite its readers into its world which researcher should involve and take part as a reader by experience the reading moments as first-person perspective pre-reflectively.

To state that there is no 'single' role of the architect today is to state the obvious. Particularly due to the crisis, the role the architect inhibits varies from person to person, from well-known roles to interesting and surprising new roles in society. To discuss the nowadays diversity of roles that can be taken therefore is used in this introductory paper used as a starting point to reflect on the specificity of the profession. This reflection always needs to be a theory of practice (Bourdieu).This paper is written as an introduction to a series of reflections written by post graduate students from The Berlage Advanced Studies in Architecture and Urbanism (2015)

En este capítulo se analiza todo el trabajo de campo sobre imágenes y sus relaciones con el cuerpo, en búsqueda de entender nuevos dispositivos mediológicos, intentando en 1996 entrever las consecuencias mediológicas que luego se han visto desarrolladas casi 20 años después

In this chapter we introduce the topic of the materiality of writing and the approaches and methods needed to study writing from a material perspective. Within this interpretive theme analysis concentrates not on the linguistic and semantic meanings of ‘texts’ but on their physicality and how this relates to creators and users. We also introduce the individual chapters of the book, which cover a chronological span from c.3200 bce to the present day and a geographical range from the Americas to the Near East and Europe. We end with a brief survey of research on writing as material practice and set out the role that we hope the present volume will play in developing this exciting new research theme.

…how will I ever know if I have reached the horizon?
There will always be a horizon waiting.
11.10.‘15

The pages that follow envelop around the developments in my work within the past two years spent at Shiv Nadar University.
My work revolves around me and penetrates deeply in my life, every corner is submerged in between life and art which are inseparable; it is a Mobius strip with no inside or outside, no beginning or end, just an infinite loop of time. I’m walking on this loop,
gathering what comes,
lingering in the gaps
of absurdity
of boredom and monotony,
the present, now
coils around me
with each iteration,
creating a restlessness,
where meanings
are effaced,
to float
within
the meaningless darkness,
where my eyes carry the weight
of the piercing light
which perpetually precedes
me,
I walk slowly, embracing every step
an inexhaustible
gulp of water
travelling through every inch
of my throat
finally vanishing
into a void,
I can feel
all these
fleeting moments,
these fragile words marked by ascending numbers
onto the white pages
where
my fingers caste fleeting shadows,
I can smell the sweet ink of this
tired length of silence,

Silently walking.


It is a visual poem on the never ending futility of life which is magnified with the repetition of now. The immaterial is touched and activated while gathering experiences, holding the traces of the past, and erasing the line between the intelligible and unintelligible; meaning and form.
The intention is not to reach at a definite conclusion, but to speculate and linger around certain experiences, to be conscious and observe minutely; to defamiliarize the monotony.

‘What common perception trivializes and misses, an artwork apprehends in its irreducible essence.’ – Levinas

Meyers plumbs the boundaries between contemporary art and music. In his artistic practice Meyers explores the immaterial and social nature of music and searches at the same time for new formal and visual languages to display it. In his work the constant permutation of different levels of time and space creates situations in which a 'series of futures' are produced – thereby modifying the present by opening endless possibilities. This interview with Ari Benjamin Meyers highlights a multifaceted body of work by an artist who works not only with different media but also at the border of the arts. In this conversation, Meyers explains his artistic practice and reflects on his own status in the field of art, or what it means to be a visual artist with musical training and history. Thus one of his principle artistic engagements is how to present and display music.

O presente trabalho expõe o resultado do projeto "Arte & Tecnologia: ensino e práticas em sala de aula", que foi desenvolvido dentro do programa da disciplina Artes I e II - módulo Arte Contemporânea, no primeiro trimestre de 2014, com as turmas dos primeiros e segundos períodos do curso médio técnico em Química do IFRJ, campus São Gonçalo. O projeto teve como alvo pesquisar movimentos e artistas que surgiram a partir do início do século XX até o presente momento, cujas obras exploraram as diversas linguagens e meios tecnológicos em suas produções, sobretudo em manifestações que dialogam com a fotografia, o vídeo e a música.

In the Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord explores the idea that in a consumer society, social life is not about living but about having and appearing. I will discuss how photography in advertising works to encourage us to consume, and the importance of appearance.

In response to recent developments in pictorial practice and critical discourse, Painting beyond Itself: the Medium in the Post-Medium Condition seeks new ways to approach and historicize the question of the medium. Reaching back to the earliest theoretical and institutional definitions of painting, this book—based on a conference at Harvard university in 2013—focuses on the changing role of materiality in establishing painting as the privileged practice, discourse, and institution of modernity. Myriad conceptions of the medium and its specificity are explored by an international group of scholars, critics, and artists. Painting Beyond Itself is a forum for rich historical, theoretical, and practice-grounded conversation.
Contributions by Carol Armstrong, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Sabeth Buchmann, Réné Démoris, Isabelle Graw, David Joselit, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Jacqueline Lichtenstein, Julie Mehretu, Matt Saunders, Amy Sillman

This text aims at systematizing and analysing a photography production methodology observed from practices situated within the Photography Department in the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, in The Netherlands. The theoretical reasoning and practical applications of the referred working method parts from a specific visuality characterized by an engagement and estrangement towards the photographic subject (DEXTER, 2003), using as main reference the catalogue ‘Cruel and Tender: The Real in the Twentieth‐Century Photograph’. Contemporary publications on this topic have also been used for this analysis, along with interviews with key photographers of the art academy in The Netherlands. The research investigated how procedural steps can dramatically influence a project or work of art, not only for educational purposes, but also as a tool for creating new ways of retrieving knowledge over images and their connection to world experience. The proposed photography methodology works as an instrument to potentialize revelations regarding fascinations and interests of a photographer towards his or her topic, still largely based on the actual experience of visualizing a subject matter, facilitating conscious aesthetic choices.

An analysis of the Ghent Altarpiece shows that the depicted figures are arranged according
to the dualism of earthly versus heavenly space. Two kinds of perspective are presented here:
that of an external observer (who belongs to our, earthly space) and that of an internal observer
imagined to be within the depicted world (i.e. the Divine perspective). This opposition is
specifically revealed on the opened altar panels in the right-left orientation. Both in the
foreground and in the middle ground the right side has priority: in both cases it is marked
as more important. However, in the foreground the organisation of figures is correlated with our
point of view (that of external observer) while in the middle ground the figures are arranged
according to the point of view of internal observer.
The same opposition between divine and human, celestial and terrestrial may also be observed
in the closed altarpiece. However, it is expressed here in a different way: not compositionally,
but stylistically; not by coordination with this or that visual position of the observer
(external or internal), but by special stylistic devices, in particular by colour. It is argued
that the opposition between the earthly and the heavenly is not only a principle of composition
of the Ghent Altarpiece but also its central theme.

Autor twierdzi, że współczesna kultura odeszła od pragnienia nieskazitelności i przestała interesować się tym, co bezbłędne. Stara się odpowiedzieć na pytanie dlaczego zakłócenia i mankamenty zajmują centralne miejsce w świecie sztuki najnowszej oraz pragnie zbadać ich rolę w kształtowaniu obrazu współczesnej rzeczywistości. Odpowiedzi na zadane pytania znajduje w późnej filozofii Jacquesa Derridy, badaniach w ramach glitch studies (Rosa Menkman, Michael Betancourt) oraz pracach dwóch współczesnych artystów wizualnych: Andy’ego Denzlera oraz Davida Szaudera.

In 1997 I wrote this essay reflecting on two important exhibitions in London: Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection, at the Royal Academy of Arts ( sponsored by Christie’s), and Objects of Desire: The Modern Still Life, at the Hayward Gallery (sponsored by BMW).

Still life emerged as a modern painting genre in the early seventeenth century, and by the turn of this century included sculpture as a medium. It originates and defines its limits architecturally, that is, on the near side of perspective’s picture window, in the intimate presence of domestic space, the place of everyday life. Still life or nature morte is empirically constituted by its subject matter. Typically, the raw foods that sustain life and the implements related to them in the domestic scene are presented horizontally on a table-top, the quotidian stage of the private human drama.
Those things which appear in the still life are denoted already at a remove from nature, conscripted into the service of human life. These are not sublime objects of love or veneration from the tradition of art which serves and constitutes religion. Instead, their mundanity limits the potentiality of human relations toward them, and the still life articulates and explores this delimited mortal sphere as the repetitive theatre of subsistence.
Although its objects may be commonplace, their deliberate choice and organization identify them as objects of desire.

The interest in Aboriginal art in Europe and in the whole Western world has grown exponentially since the late 1980s. Larger and smaller, more and less prestigious institutions and galleries are staging Aboriginal art, trying to simultaneously remove it from the ethnographic field, and introduce it into the global art market. Visual accordance between Aboriginal art-especially acrylic paintings from the Desert-and Western modernist painting makes the former desirable objects on the art market, but it also leads to laziness in learning about their real meaning within Aboriginal culture as well as to debates on their artistic and anthropological significance, interpretations, and values. In this article, I briefly present ongoing debates on the artistic character of Aboriginal artefacts and the aesthetic values of Aboriginal paintings from the Desert, in order to argue that the specific conditions of the painting production process should be considered in their interpretation. These conditions have their roots and explanations (I prefer narratives here) in Aboriginal traditions related to the Dreamtime, that is, their mythical past in which their ancestors created the land, which is not past history, but the continuous past-present influencing contemporary forms of life. I will address four important features of acrylic paintings from the region of the Desert. First, the change of medium-from coloured sand in the desert, to acrylic painting on canvas laid on the ground. Second, the realistic character of representing landscape in the form of painted topographic maps. Third, the importance of the use of traditional images and stories, and the simultaneous impossibility of using sacred images and symbols, which develops the discussion about the originality of Aboriginal paintings. Fourth, the collective method of artistic work. These issues are broadly discussed in Australian artistic research. However, they are sometimes overlooked in Western presentations of Aboriginal art. Our understanding of Aboriginal art should not devalue it by forcing it into our ready Western concepts of art, for example, those of modernist painting. Instead, we should explore its histories more deeply and examine Aboriginal within its own context.

Prolonging the concept in art theory related to Andy Warhol's art, whose (photo)graphic series are characterized by " traumatic" , id est repetitive, operation of technique, Hal Foster introduces the term traumatic sublime to describe Bill Viola's video works. The term relates not only to themes presented in the videos, but also to the media presenting them. Through HD installation Ocean without Shore at the 52 nd Venice Biennale, Viola emphasised how important technical specifications of media are for his work, defining the colour saturation on the video with water curtains. The paper gives an overview of technical evolution of Bill Viola's works and of the term sublime, from Longinus, over Immanuel Kant, to Hal Foster and Jean-François Lyotard. It concludes that traumatic sublime can be related to several forms of new media art, not exclusively to Bill Viola's work.