“Studies in Visual Arts and Communication –
an international journal”
Volume 1 – Nr 2, 2014
Table of Contents
Dec 2014; 1(2)
1. Fabio Colonnese
Beyond Perspective. Francesco Salviati’s Depiction of Time in Space
Studies in Visual Arts and Communication – an international journal / Dec 2014 1(2)
ABSTRACT
Among the capricciose et ingegnose invenzioni that made Francesco Salviati a famous and discussed mannerist painter, a special place is occupied by Bathsheba goes to David he painted in 1552 in the fresco cycle at Palazzo Ricci in Rome. He depicted Bathsheba four times while approaching a towered alcove via a sinuous staircase: one can see her climbing the stairs, entering David’s room and joining him as four subsequent moments overlapped in the same picture. Such a narrative device has remote origins but appears unusual in an artistic context theoretically dominated by the perspective representation. A perspective should be like a photograph: an instant projection of three-dimensional space from a centre on a plane. Time flowing should be conceptually excluded from such a representation. Even the fictive architectural background Salviati painted, responds to no canonical perspective construction: the stair follows a curved geometry that is hardly detectable and incongruous with the human figures depicted on. But the little painting is only part of a wider anti-perspectival visual program in which the whole hall is involved to move the observer along invisible narrative tracks.
Keywords: Francesco Salviati, Palazzo Ricci, Sala dei Mappamondi, Bathsheba and David, Representation of time in space, Fictive architecture, Perspective decoration, Optical illusions, Trompe l’oeil.
2. Timothy Keane
No Real Assurances: Late Modernist Poetics and George Schneeman’s Collaborations with the New York School Poets
Studies in Visual Arts and Communication – an international journal / Dec 2014 1(2)
ABSTRACT
Painter George Schneeman’s collaborations with the New York School poets represent an under-examined, vast body of visual-textual hybrid works that resolve challenges to midand-late century American art through an implied alliance with late modernist literary practices. Schneeman worked with New York poets intermittently from 1966 into the early 2000s. This article examines these collagist works’ from a formalist perspective, uncovering how they incorporate gestural techniques of abstract art and the poetic use of juxtaposition, vortices, analogies, and pictorial and lexical imagism to generate nonrepresentational, enigmatic assemblages. I argue that these late modernist works represent an authentically experimental form, violating boundaries between art and writing, disrupting the venerated concept of single authorship, and resisting the demands of the marketplace by affirming for their creators a unity between art-making and daily life—ambitions that have underpinned every twentieth century avant-garde movement.
3. Diego Batista Rey
Discovering Reality through Body Disintegration in Abre los Ojos by Alejandro Amenábar
Studies in Visual Arts and Communication – an international journal / Dec 2014 1(2)
ABSTRACT
Many Spanish auteurs make use of the body in their works to criticize and expose the problems of a society in the process of economic, cultural and identity deterioration. This paper analyzes how by employing specific universal fears, Abre los Ojos by Alejandro Amenábar, serves as the basis for the staging of an incomplete and confusing “reality” that leads the viewers to question their existence and begin a personal search within their surroundings.
Keywords: Alejandro Amenábar, Open your Eyes/Abre los Ojos, Body, Spanish Cinema, Psychological Thriller, Fears
4. Lara E. Mazurski
Stereotypes of Muslim women in the Post-9/11 Era: An Analysis of the Burka Avenger
Studies in Visual Arts and Communication – an international journal / Dec 2014 1(2)
ABSTRACT
In August of 2013 the animated action-television series Burka Avenger was released in Pakistan, quickly garnering the attention of the international mainstream media for its apparent paradoxicalness – entailed by its progressive framing of the burka. Combining superhero plot lines that resonate with the Batman franchise or the US-American comic book series Ms Marvel (Marvel Comics) with the more negative and indeed cultural stereotypes of Muslim women, the Burka Avenger provocatively situates the woman under the burka as a superheroine of sorts. Disrupting static and essentialized imaginings of Muslim women that dominate European and North American popular culture today, those that frame women in burka’s as oppressed, victimized, and backwards subjects, the TV show offers a number of different ways for audiences to rethink the “collectivized other” in the mainstream media (Ayotte and Husain 125). First, it makes a series of interesting remarks about the audience’s cultural familiarity with the burka and its powerful visuality that propels both the character and the narrative forward, repurposing the garment for audiences. Secondly, the program’s origin story tells viewers something new about Pakistan’s socio-political landscape, through which its characters must maneuver. Audiences encounter a woman who not only educates children but also heroically protects them fighting for education and equality. Lastly, its subject considers in part the subject of Orientalist tropes, those that identify representations of women in burka’s through simple binary forms of identification such as West-East, secular-religious, dominant-submissive, civilized-barbaric, or modern-traditional. In light of these characterizations and the polarizing debates that continue to circulate in the Western public sphere about the burka and its symbolic meanings, the garment has emerged as a generic signifier that not only singles out Islamic fundamentalism but also Muslim women as other, framing Islam as morally inferior, irrational, backwards and barbaric (Moallem 8; Skalli 47). Yet, in spite of these politically charged discourses, the Burka Avenger offers a series of compelling counter examples for viewers in lieu of such sensationalist representations. In this article, I analyze the forms of representation that dominate the Burka Avenger, those that offer viewers a conceptual space where they can confront their collective fears and anxieties when encountering visually loaded symbols of Islamic iconoclasm. By simultaneously deploying and retooling powerful cultural icons, the Burka Avenger effectively counters hegemonic representations that situate the burka as an icon of women’s oppression. Taking my cue from Lila Abu-Lughod and Mireille Rosello’s discussion of stereotypes as discursive constructs, I show how the representations and concepts deployed in this TV show are productive in resisting stereotypical representations of the burka (and the women who wear them).
5. Miguel Duarte
The Regenerative Cinematic Surface: Contractions, Expansions and Migrations in The Aleph and Sans Soleil
Studies in Visual Arts and Communication – an international journal / Dec 2014 1(2)
ABSTRACT
This paper introduces a comparative study relating the famous long sentence of The Aleph, by Jorge Luis Borges, and the documentary film Sans Soleil, by Chris Marker. The processes used by both artists can be studied in parallel in order to consider the construction of a complex surface in which heterogeneous fragments belonging to dissimilar times and spaces are articulated, combined and juxtaposed, exceeding the aesthetic purity of a fixed and immobile whole. Our argument is that the capacity of this surface, or screen, to constantly dismantle and reassemble disparate sets of images and conceptual directions should be understood according to the concepts of “plane of immanence” and “ideal game”, prominently developed by Gilles Deleuze in his Logique du Sens (1969). These concepts connect to a constellation of other terms, like event, paradox, becoming, and, notably, Chronos and Aion, through which Deleuze conceives a tension between the transitory present that passes and the expansion of a past that remains. Our approach is that all such terms and, very specially, this coexistence between a time simultaneously contracted and expanded in vast circuits, emerges as a key point to develop an in-depth comprehension of Deleuze’s time-image, finding in the works of Borges and Marker two valuable and unexpected examples of analysis. As in Deleuze’s theory of planes and becomings, in both Borges’ and Marker’s oeuvres the paradoxical space is also affected by a paradoxical time that is infinitive, unreservedly multiple, and conveying the possibility to reinterpret facts and history.
Keywords: Time, Plane(s), Deleuze, Borges, Marker.
6. Martin de la Iglesia
Presence in Comics
Studies in Visual Arts and Communication – an international journal / Dec 2014 1(2)
ABSTRACT
The term ‘presence’ is often used to denote a trait of an artwork that causes the feeling in a viewer that a depicted figure is a living being that is really there, although the viewer is aware that this is not actually the case. So far, scholars who have used this term have not explicitly provided criteria for the assessment of the degree of presence in a work of art. However, such criteria are implicitly contained in a number of theoretical texts. Three important criteria for presence appear to be:
1. size – the larger a figure is depicted, the more likely this artwork will instil a feeling of presence.
2. deixis – the more the work is deictically orientated towards the beholder, e.g. if figures seem to look or point at the beholder, the higher the degree of presence.
3. obtrusiveness of medium – if there is a clash of different diegetic levels within an artwork, the degree of presence is reduced.
These criteria can be readily applied to a single image like a painting or a photograph. A comic, however, consists of multiple images, and the presence of each panel is influenced by the panels that surround it by means of contrast and progression. Another typical feature of comics is written text: speech bubbles, captions etc. do not co-exist with the drawings on the same diegetic level, thus betraying the mediality of their panels and reducing their degree of presence. A comic that makes striking use of effects of presence, which makes it a suitable example here, is the superhero series The Ultimates by Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch (Marvel 2002 – 2004). The characters in this comic are often placed on splash pages and/or seemingly address the reader, resulting in a considerable experience of presence.