“Studies in Visual Arts and Communication –
an international journal”
Volume 1 – Nr 1, 2014
Table of Contents
June 2014; 1(1)
1. Brian Macaskill
BREAKING SILENCE with an INTRODUCTORY NOTE on BEGINNING with, SORTING through, BUILDING on, and DWELLING in J.M. COETZEE’S SUMMERTIME
Studies in Visual Arts and Communication – an international journal / June 2014 1(1)
ABSTRACT
The generation of sound and sight in any of the arts
—musical, part-aural, graphic, and typo-graphic or literary—
is always preceded by silence and by empty spaces or surfaces.
In this essay I break silence by writing notes on breaking silence in response to death, while thinking about affirmations of life: affirmations whose bringing into being is the function of art, even the ostensibly bleak kind of art. Inaugurated by or at least complicit with death, art celebrates life and the enduring astonishment that accompanies life. Thinking about ethics in “A Lecture on Ethics,” Ludwig Wittgenstein invites us also to think about our “astonishment that anything exits,” pointing out that “This astonishment cannot be expressed in the form of a question and [that] there is no answer to it.” Such thought pointed Wittgenstein later in his life towards ethics as a thrusting against the limits of language, and so again, as always, pointed him back to his life-long love of music; such thought could as easily have pushed him—reading it could push us—towards the example afforded by other arts also—not only philosophy, but architecture, historiography, opera, painting, and so forth—could indeed easily push us towards reading and re-reading the kind of literary narrative exemplified in this essay by the work of J.M. Coetzee—Summertime mostly—which I here only approach, and which, of course, Wittgenstein never had the opportunity to read: their lives overlapped only briefly in time, and never in acquaintance.
Keywords: J.M. Coetzee, Summertime, architecture, music, number, ethics, narrative composition, genre, gender, Heidegger, Paul de Man, Shoah, Holocaust, Herero genocide
2. Ronit Milano
Communicating (with) the Self in the French Enlightenment: Intellectualism, Naturalism and Embodiment in the Bare-Chested Portrait Bust
Studies in Visual Arts and Communication – an international journal / June 2014 1(1)
ABSTRACT
This study centres on classicizing portrait busts of French philosophers created during the second half of the eighteenth century. Drawing on Diderot’s claim that a sculpture, unlike a painting, requires the viewer to communicate with it, I suggest that the portrait bust of that period should be redefined as a conceptual platform of human interaction. The main observation in this study is that portrait busts of French contemporary philosophers constituted a unique case in art because they epitomized main discourses pertaining both to the French society (as a collective idea) and to the individual. I show that such duality, wherein a collective and patriotic identity is expressed synchronically with the rise of the individual, is most acute in representations of philosophers, who sought to be perceived both as ideal figures and as enlightened individuals. In an era characterized by the flourishing of concepts such as unique self, one and only truth, and authenticity, the use of a classicizing style engendered what seems to be, at first sight, a significant conflict between opposing values. The portraits examined in this essay not only surface this idea but also offer an opportunity to reflect upon the performative role of the busts, considering the communication of the viewer with the works. Prompting a conceptual conversation, portrait busts of philosophers made during the second half of the eighteenth century are thus scrutinized here to delineate the intricate interrelations between the self and the society, between simplicity and virtue, and between the concept of ‘here and now’ versus eternality.
Keywords: Portrait bust, eighteenth-century sculpture, classicizing, France, philosophers, reproduction, selfhood
3. Tamar Cholcman, Dafna Maharshak
Advertising Gone Wrong – Sixtus V in the Image of Moses: The Fontana it Dell’acqua Felice as a Failed Communication Channel
Studies in Visual Arts and Communication – an international journal / June 2014 1(1)
ABSTRACT
The public fountains in Rome built under the patronage of the Popes after the Council of Trent (1543-1665), played a part in the Church’s efforts to strengthen papal authority and ‘advertise’ the Catholic position. Placed in the midst of busy streets among the city hubbub – similar to modern advertisement – they needed, first, to attract the attention of passersby from their daily activities; and, second, to apply and appeal to very different crowds and sectors of society.
Modern communications theory enables the taking into account of all these changing communication environments as well as the changing awareness and knowledge of the crowds they address, by enabling a simultaneous consideration of the source, the message, and the receiver. The way and manner in which the fountain’s visual imagery conveyed its messages to the different audiences is analyzed in reference to the three components of advertisement (picture, headline, text), which suggests also a consideration of the viewing order. The spatial position of the fountain is used thus as a methodological framework for reading the imagery by considering its spatial order (near, far), linear order (first, last), and observational state (static, dynamic).
Using modern marketing communication theory we thus propose a multilayered reading of the Fontana dell’Acqua Felice, or the Moses Fountain (1587) as a case study. The analysis of the Acqua Felice fountain reveals the way in which the sender conveyed a clear message of the Church’s strength, of victory and of truth to the receiver by using similarity of meaning – through visual means taken from the cultural and visual world of the target audience. This reading also discloses, however, the presence of a distraction element (noise). In the Acqua Felice fountain, this factor had critical implications, in that it inverted the entire message. Intended by the Pope to glorify his and the Church’s power, the fountain instead became a source of mockery and scorn.
Keywords: Baroque sculpture, fountain, Rome, Sixtus V, Acqua Felice, Moses, Domenico and Giovanni Fontana, Prospero Antichi, communication theory, Communication Channel, advertising, frames of reference, similarity of meaning, Triumph, pasquinata.
4. Romuald Tchibozo
L’art contemporain d’Afrique dans l’ex-République Démocratique Allemande : entre influence idéologique et légitimation
Studies in Visual Arts and Communication – an international journal / June 2014 1(1)
Résumé
La présence de l’art contemporain d’Afrique en ex-RDA apres la deuxieme guerre mondiale est-elle une légitimation de cette production ou une propagande politique ? Telle est la question qu’on est tenté de se poser a la vue de l’évolution des relations d’abord, culturelles et ensuite, artistiques que ce pays a entretenues avec certains pays africains. La mise en ouvre de la politique extérieure du jeune Etat, issu de la partition de l’Allemagne au lendemain de la deuxieme guerre mondiale, a obligé les autorités a développer différentes stratégies pour se faire reconnaître et assumer leur existence internationale. La plupart des pays d’Afrique au Sud du Sahara, encore en lutte pour leur indépendance ont trouvé en ce nouvel Etat, un partenaire de poids pour équilibrer les relations hégémoniques que les puissances colonisatrices entretenaient avec eux. Les normes d’appréciation de l’art contemporain n’étant pas, en ces lieux, les memes qu’en occident, sommes nous en situation de parler de légitimation, de récupération politique ou d’influence idéologique ? Que signifie la présence de l’art contemporain d’Afrique dans ce pays ? Telles sont les questions qui vont nous occuper dans ce papier.
ABSTRACT
La présence de l’art contemporain d’Afrique en ex-RDA apres la deuxieme guerre mondiale est-elle une légitimation de cette production ou une propagande politique ? Telle est la question qu’on est tenté de se poser a la vue de l’évolution des relations d’abord, culturelles et ensuite, artistiques que ce pays a entretenues avec certains pays africains. La mise en ouvre de la politique extérieure du jeune Etat, issu de la partition de l’Allemagne au lendemain de la deuxieme guerre mondiale, a obligé les autorités a développer différentes stratégies pour se faire reconnaître et assumer leur existence internationale. La plupart des pays d’Afrique au Sud du Sahara, encore en lutte pour leur indépendance ont trouvé en ce nouvel Etat, un partenaire de poids pour équilibrer les relations hégémoniques que les puissances colonisatrices entretenaient avec eux. Les normes d’appréciation de l’art contemporain n’étant pas, en ces lieux, les memes qu’en occident, sommes nous en situation de parler de légitimation, de récupération politique ou d’influence idéologique ? Que signifie la présence de l’art contemporain d’Afrique dans ce pays ? Telles sont les questions qui vont nous occuper dans ce papier.
Keywords: Afrique, Ex-République Démocratique Allemande, art contemporain, Réalisme
socialiste, communisme.
5. Ignacio Pérez-Jofre Santesmases
IMÁGENES BORROSAS
Studies in Visual Arts and Communication – an international journal / June 2014 1(1)
Resumen
El recurso de la borrosidad en la pintura contemporánea remite tanto al desenfoque en fotografía como a la tradicional técnica pictórica de difuminado de los límites entre los planos de color. En ambos casos, sus efectos se asocian a una descripción ambiental del espacio. En tanto que disminuye la cualidad descriptivos de la imagen, se da también un aumento de la atención del espectador. Este artículo analiza la manera en que una serie de pintores actuales llevan este efecto de borrosidad hacia el ámbito político, al poner de manifiesto la confusión presente en los mensajes visuales y la necesidad de que el espectador se implique de manera activa en la construcción de sentido, desde una perspectiva crítica.
Palabras clave: Borrosidad, desenfoque, ambiente, atención, confusión.
ABSTRACT
Fuzziness as a contemporary painting resource refers both to the out-of-focus in photography and to the traditional technique of blurring the limits among colour fields. In both cases, its effects relate to an ambiental description of space. As long as the image’s descriptive qualities decrease, the viewer’s attention grows. This article analyzes the way in which some present painters bring the effect os fuzziness to the political sphere, showing the confusion inherent to visual messages and the viewer’s need to actively involve in sense construction from a critical point of view.
Keywords: Fuzziness, blur, ambient, attention, confusion.
6. Per Nilsson
Encountering Hearts of Darkness
Studies in Visual Arts and Communication – an international journal / June 2014 1(1)
Opening up Littoral Landscapes
Francis Ford Coppolas film Apocalypse Now can be read as an allegory concerning how the concepts de-creation and destruction can be related. As an allegory it raises questions about language, images and their relations to a cultural landscape. It also asks questions about art’s status as knowledge, in this case exemplified by such an allegorical reading of the film. In my view art’s merit is first and foremost critical, i.e. it function as a tool for un-masking rigid dogmas that portray themselves as second nature.
One gain of experiencing the film in an allegorical manner is that it provide opportunities for us to understand a fundamental aesthetic sphere first present at the depth of our selves as becoming, a vulnerable sphere easily destroyed even if only in certain senses and from perspectives blind for their own presuppositions. Even if this aesthetic sphere is destroyed from the view of such a perspective, it is not clear if this also means that it is abolished from mankind per se, that is if it would be impossible to regain a profound aesthetic understanding of man and his cultural landscape. In other words, could man loose his depth irreversibly? In fact, our capability of providing new allegories and new vivid metaphors speaks to the contrary. It puts us within an aesthetic, in Jean-Luc Marions words even erotic, realm of possibility, as opposed to the standstill of ideological dogmatic epistemological certainty.
I will relate to such an aesthetic realm as to a littoral landscape, and to the being travelling such a landscape as an amphibian. This in order to, metaphorically, give attention to the openness that lay bare possibilities of self-fashioning as well as cultural critical transformations through encountering aesthetic and erotic expressions.
Concerning destruction we can here remind ourselves of Nietzsche who detected archaic passions erupting in certain individuals even in an age where resentment had become creative giving birth to destructive values to the world. The aim and purpose of re-active resentment is to abolish and destroy old active archaic passions, more aesthetical than ethical. As in Nietzsche’s view of extraordinary individuals expressing archaic passions, each allegorical reading is here treated as parole, i.e. as an individual empirical expressive instance of speech as opposed to formal, general and abstract facts of discursive reasoning (Langue). Here parole focuses the artistic poetic aspect rather than the rational discursive, which means that parole always is within the littoral landscape of the possible rather than in the abstract realm of certainty. Therefore my allegorical reading of Apocalypse Now should be looked upon as an instance of Parole in the same manner as new and lucid metaphors are considered as such. In fact I characterise parole in the manner Albrect Wellmer, while giving a nod to Adorno, characterises the sublime: “The contingent, the meaningless, the absurd, that which is excluded from the world of linguistic meaning because it is disparate or heterogeneous, the nonsensical other side of the world that is disclosed through language.”
This means that, for me, parole goes beyond linguistic poetic expression, also for example into bodily per-formative and visual art but also into expressions of erotic desire. But as far as language is concerned I will hold the position that poetry is a species of parole rather than a species of discursive language, which is the ideological language through which an epistemological reduced world is disclosed.
Thereby I consider poetry to be a presupposition for discourse and capable of de-creating it. Poetry brings language into ambiguity and multiplicity of aesthetic expressions and mediations. Poetry opens up an aesthetic sphere and mediates its content aesthetically into littoral landscapes inhabited by amphibians that are the receptors of the mediated and who utilise this content in order to make sense of their surroundings.
In a similar fashion Pier Paolo Pasolini utilises the distinction between parole and langue to distinguish between cinema and film: “Cinema is similar to “Langue” while films correspond to “Paroles”; in a strictly Saussurean context this means that only Films (as only Paroles) exist in practise and concretely, while Cinema (as Langue) does not exist — it is simply an abstract and normalizing deduction which has its point of departure in infinite Films (understood as Paroles).” This implies, when it comes to language that langue is a deduction from all empirical instances of language use and that texts that portray themselves to be langue actually are examples of parole. It also implies that paroles are in effect on a variety of levels in this text, and even though it disguises itself as discursive it remains an instant of parole.
I will in this essay explain the problem with destructive tendencies and also, by way of parole, i.e. by providing an allegory, tell a story of how an aesthetic experience provided by film can transform itself into an individual example of how aesthetic expressions can de-create forces of destruction. It should be noted that even if de-creation not can be generalised, the same does not hold for destruction. In fact, the aim of destruction is complete abolishment of certain non-generalizable phenomena. The resistance I use are, among other things film, stories, allegories and metaphors in a singular, contingent and per-formative fashion. The meaningless, particular and absurd status of aesthetic expression or parole is such only from the viewpoint of an abstract, general and dogmatic epistemology aiming for certainty, which in itself more is an expression of a certain ideology than an expression of science, an ideology which today is globally predominant.
7. Matthew Ryan Smith
Family Photography and the Documentation of Trauma in Contemporary Art
Studies in Visual Arts and Communication – an international journal / June 2014 1(1)
Introduction:
English photographer Richard Billingham and Canadian photographer and filmmaker Jaret Belliveau produce unconventional photographs to investigate family dynamics. The artists are part of a broader movement in contemporary art photography aimed at representing everyday lived experience that include candid documentation of tragedy and loss. In 1996, Billingham published photographs of his father’s chronic alcoholism and his family’s debilitating poverty in the poignant and politically charged photo book Ray’s a Laugh to much critical acclaim. Over a decade later, Belliveau exhibited a body of work titled Dominion Street at Gallery TPW in Toronto in 2010. The exhibition featured old family photographs, sculptural objects, and a narrative series of pictures representing his mother in the years leading up to her cancer diagnosis, her ensuing medical treatment, and subsequent passing. By making their private lives a public display through art exhibitions and book publications, Billingham and Belliveau use their family’s trauma as a meaningful source of subject matter. In this regard, these artists are in the contradictory position that many autobiographical photographers encounter: they experience trauma while recording the traumatic experiences of others. However, as literary theorist Leo Bersani makes clear, it is important that audiences do not reduce trauma to points of aesthetic concern. To do so suggests a troubling lack of empathy and marginalizes the real life suffering that undercuts their photographs. Instead, their work allows audiences to reflect upon the possibilities, limitations, and ethics of framing family trauma as art photography.
Billingham and Belliveau’s work also allows audiences to conceptualize how trauma-related art operates on audiences through affect. The term affect is derived from the Latin affectus or adfectus, which, roughly translated to English, means passion or emotion. However, Jill Bennett describes affect as an embodied sensation, “a process of seeing feeling where feeling is both imagined and regenerated through an encounter with the artwork.” For Teresa Brennan, affect is an energetic dimension and social phenomenon that is largely physiological in origin. In her definition, affect is interactive, intercommunicative and interpersonal; in other words, little differentiation exists between an individual and their environment. Benedict de Spinoza also connects affect to the emotions and passions that preside over human beings. He maintains that individuals negotiate emotions and passions using ethical judgements and reasoning in order to achieve freedom, survival, and happiness in their daily lives. Each of these examples help to illustrate that affect is fundamentally relational, radically subjective, and associated with bodily sensations.
By exploring photography that represents family-related tragedy and loss, I consider the ways that trauma and affect work on the photographer and the audience. For the photographer, taking photographs of family trauma is bound up in experiencing suffering and loss as a member of that family. How does the photographer negotiate between the dual roles of family member and photographer in a way that remains creatively beneficial, critical, and ethically responsible? For the audience, how does the site of the encounter with traumatic imagery operate? Do responses change when looking at a book publication compared to an exhibition setting? Because Billingham and Belliveau record everyday traumatic events that some viewers might have experienced or can identify with, how does this change their reading of the work?
Through my analysis of trauma, affect, and the ethics of exhibiting trauma-related art, I consider how viewers relate to images of suffering, what kinds of responses may be produced, and what can be gained from these encounters. I am particularly concerned with the rhizomatic field of relations enacted between audiences and artwork. Because everyday, structural trauma is inclusive and recognizable throughout society, I argue that affective responses to artwork representing trauma can offer new ways of bridging cultural differences that may limit our understanding of each other. Thus, artwork that engages affect connects individuals and groups while producing new social relationships.
8. David Sperber
“Hosting Culture”: The Relationship between Judaism and Islam in the Works of Three Religious Female Artists
Studies in Visual Arts and Communication – an international journal / June 2014 1(1)
ABSTRACT
This article is directed to uncovering an unknown branch of contemporary Israeli art that examines the ties between Judaism and Islam in general, and specifically the cultural ties between Jews and Arabs in Israel. This branch is developing among women artists who are active in the Modern Orthodox social sphere.
Central to this article is the understanding that the local art discourse rests on European models and these are tied directly to the world of Christian iconography. However, the artists who appear in this article do not yield to these accepted standards. Not infrequently they aim at appropriating, or at least examining, the possibility of a deep connection between their world of Jewish art and the Muslim cultural milieu.
A study of their artistic works that will be presented in this article reveals that they reflect a clear independent identity, which does not contradict a complex, multi-dimensional, challenging view of the “Other”, and deals with the tension between Jewish and Muslim culture. On the one hand, their works sharpen a focus on the dichotomy between them, but, on the other hand, they also strengthen the areas shared between them.
9. Aikaterini Delikonstatinidou
Catherine Breillat’s Cine-erotic Anti-Romance: Visualizing the Extremities of Desire
Studies in Visual Arts and Communication – an international journal / June 2014 1(1)
ABSTRACT
Working contiguously with the tradition of feminist explicit body performance art and within the contours of the newly named movement of French cinema dubbed “Cinema du corps,” or the “New French Extremity,” Catherine Breillat has been teasing daringly the slippery, porous, and much-contested borders separating art from pornography throughout her entire, almost forty-year, filmmaking career. Her “erofilms” are visually and performatively allied with a politically motivated, contemporaneous tendency in the visual arts: the proliferation of female-authored visual images featuring the (female) body nude and sexual. Breillat’s self-conscious—albeit extremely controversial—engagement with and representation of nudity, unflinching eroticism, and sexual frankness in films such as Romance X (Romance) (1999) seeks to strategically break down artistic and bodily protocols, claiming the right to self-representation for women and attempting to expose the omissions and absences perpetrated within and by the dominant, male-authored visual tradition. Strongly inflected by her intellectual, aesthetic, and feminist sensibilities, Romance X, Breillat’s challenging filmic tale, manifests the filmmaker’s firm intention to visually explore the, often, unarticulated and unrepresented aspects of female desire, female sexual experience, and female-male relations. In this film, the first of three films in which she addresses female sexuality in unprecedentedly explicit terms, Breillat engages the female erotic/sexual nude and recreates it outside of the patriarchal visual vocabulary in order to present a self-contained, self-defined, pleasured female-identified erotic integration, and, eventually, liberation. By adapting and subverting both experimental film traditions and mainstream porn tactics, Breillat manages to unsettle authoritative presumptions underpinning the erotic image in these two representational domains. The power of her cine-erotic fable lies in its ability to provide a conduit into the dominant, masculinist-inflected culturescape (or “imagescape”), allowing her cinematic vision—highly distinctive if not radically new—to function correctively on it, without, however, exhibiting the pedantic affectations of other (feminist) avant-garde filmmakers.
Keywords: Catherine Breillat, Romance, erotic, visual tradition, feminism