The role of primitive art on vernacular architecture: Its relevance on contemporary architecture in Papua New Guinea

Papua New Guinea is renowned for its colourful and delightful primitive objects of art. This paper offers an alternative explanation of the role of primitive art on vernacular architecture. To understand this role clearly, the meaning and the functions of primitive art are, first, defined. The role played by primitive art among the Papua New Guinean societies is then explained. Finally, the paper suggests the need for a conscious integration of this art into other aspects of development in Papua New Guinea; contemporary architectural works being one of them.     

Biotech aesthetics: Exploring the practice of bio art

Advances in biotechnology include contemporary artists working in laboratories to create living and semi-living works of art. This paper offers an account of how bio art can be read as an emerging contemporary art practice of the early twenty-first century. This draws on the art-historical precedent of Marcel Duchamp, who transformed objects from commonplace existence into works of art, and contemporary theories of art. Empirical data, in the form of interviews with leading bio art practitioners Oron Catts, Eduardo Kac, Kira O'Reilly, Stelarc and Paul Vanouse, are used to study how artists navigate between disciplines. In doing so, we discuss bio art as a critical practice based on a communal ethos.     

“The Spider Is Alive”: Reassessing Becker's Theory of Artistic Conventions through Southern Italian Music

Howard Becker wrote that art is constructed, and understood, according to conventions. However, Becker does not adequately explain how artists negotiate historical circumstances affecting their work. Using the southern Italian phenomenon of tarantism and its music, I address how contemporary musicians employ conventions to transform sounds with deviant connotations. The alteration of musical conventions reflects material social conditions in the Salento region and provides insight into the formation of a Salentinian cultural movement's ideology. By accounting for how social groups contend with history, I argue that sociologists must reconsider the theory of artistic conventions.     

Before and after science: Admissions process to Australian university social work courses

Abstract

Application processes to Australian university social work courses provide an explicit example through which to explore the influence of two schools of thought — social work as an art and as a science — on social work processes. Using admissions literature and questionnaire data provided by Australian schools of social work, this qualitative study explored the extent to which these perspectives are reflected in admissions processes. It was found that in terms of both qualities sought and techniques utilised, schools are operating essentially from a social work as science perspective, although there exists a desire to access qualities from an art perspective. This is perceived as being the result of institutional requirements, resource constraints, academic conventions and lack of knowledge about how to effectively assess the latter qualities. It is argued that social work needs to assert its unique perspectives in claiming a right to determine application processes for social work courses.     

Beyond the Static Image: Tee Corinne's Roles as a Pioneering Lesbian Artist and Art Historian

While Tee Corinne has been widely recognized as a preeminent lesbian and feminist artist of the last forty years, little has been written about her as an artist or art historian in any substantial way. This article attempts to shed light on Corinne's investment in creating explicitly sexual lesbian visual art and art historical writings that put pressure on the categories of artist and art historian between the 1970s and early 2000s. Corinne's work manages to fulfill feminist ideals while also working outside of the norms set up in both the lesbian and mainstream realms of art and art history.     

Street art in non-capital urban centres: between exploiting commercial appeal and expressing social concerns

ABSTRACT

How do local cultural agents in particular places adopt new policies towards street art as having commercial and political value? The present article takes up this question through a discussion of street art festivals and their role within urban culture and cultural policies in two large Russian cities. It considers the activities of cultural intermediaries promoting street art vis-à-vis the existing constellation of over-centralized politics, creative industries, urban development and precarious labour. Drawing on fieldwork in these cities and conducting critical sociological analysis of the street art curating, I show how the appropriation of street art by cultural intermediaries is subtly changing its ecology and values and argue that this change contributes to the range of ambivalences of neoliberal cultural politics. The article also sheds light on cultural policy and practice in Russia at a juncture characterised by the impact of globalization, on the one hand, and the country's isolationist and conservative politics, on the other.     

Talking about Beauty: A Study of Everyday Aesthetics among Low‐Income Citizens of Milan

This paper reports on research undertaken into the aesthetics of the everyday. As well as the subject matter of aesthetic philosophy, art criticism and of the sociology of art, beauty, and beautiful are of course very ordinary matters too. To shed light on the meanings of beauty as used in everyday settings and in natural language, we use the data collected in a study conducted with a group of low‐income residents of the city of Milan. In this study we were interested in analyzing their lifestyle in terms of their relationship with aesthetics, i.e., with “beautiful” objects and/or experiences. Participants' self‐reported aesthetic appreciations suggest that conceptions of “beauty” are used as devices to narrate pieces of identity, memories, experiences, etc. Their aesthetic judgements take on an anthropological function, creating a framework of meanings that help the participants make sense of the world of objects and of their own lives with/through them.     

‘Ink Art’ as strategy for Hong Kong institutions

Abstract

In both their wider cultural dimensions and the institutional practices they stem from, the practices of ink art in Hong Kong manifest themselves in a variety of discourses ranging from the ‘traditionalism’ of the conservative nativists to the ‘contemporaneity’ of artists and institutions often identified as being closer to ‘Western’ culture. Even though the most influential discourse about ink art in Hong Kong has clearly been produced by official institutions, like the future museum of visual culture called M+ and the already existing Museum of Art, it has also been profoundly influenced by private associations whose influence has been far reaching. The most visible of these private associations in Hong Kong is the Ink Society, whose founding members and their affiliates and friends have played a central role in the early debate about the nature of ink art in the history of local arts. Through an analysis of a failed attempt by the Ink Society to bid for the right to manage a historical site, this paper attempts to unravel some of the ideas that support the notion of ink art in Hong Kong.     

Fast Mapping but Poor Retention by 24‐Month‐Old Infants

Four experiments explored the processes that bridge between referent selection and word learning. Twenty‐four‐month‐old infants were presented with several novel names during a referent selection task that included both familiar and novel objects and tested for retention after a 5‐min delay. The 5‐min delay ensured that word learning was based on retrieval from long‐term memory. Moreover, the relative familiarity of objects used during the retention test was explicitly controlled. Across experiments, infants were excellent at referent selection, but very poor at retention. Although the highly controlled retention test was clearly challenging, infants were able to demonstrate retention of the first 4 novel names presented in the session when referent selection was augmented with ostensive naming. These results suggest that fast mapping is robust for reference selection but might be more transient than previously reported for lexical retention. The relations between reference selection and retention are discussed in terms of competitive processes on 2 timescales: competition among objects on individual referent selection trials and competition among multiple novel name–object mappings made across an experimental session.     

CRIME,ART AND PUBLIC CULTURE

Jane Alexander's ‘Security’ was installed at the 2009 Joburg Art Fair as a Special Project. This essay investigates notions of being guarded and fenced-in, which are implicit in this piece, in an attempt to breathe new life into a space that has all too easily been blanketed as a new form of ‘apartheid’ in contemporary South Africa. Rather, I suggest, what ‘Security’ allowed its publics to experience was a complex process of working through the everyday ingredients of the post-apartheid, and so to realize new connections between strangers. I argue that this work, at this time, probes at the nexus of a private–public sphere that allows for a real-time grappling with issues of a private nature in the public. The essay further positions this work in relation to some others by Alexander in an attempt to more fully grasp what ‘Security’ says about the present moment. Finally, the Joburg Art Fair is investigated as a setting richly suggestive of this moment in South Africa that simultaneously projects, and allows for, ambivalence in its art publics.     

Portfolio assessment in a collaborative program evaluation: the reliability and validity of a family literacy portfolio

Evaluations increasingly use open-ended assessments, such as portfolios, to gather information about program impact. Portfolios, however, present challenges in achieving acceptable levels of reliability and often lack evidence to support validity. This article describes the components of a portfolio assessment system developed in a collaborative evaluation of a family literacy program. Staff of a family literacy program and two evaluators collaborated to develop the assessment and the tools that frame the review of the portfolios. Rubrics, exemplar portfolios, portfolio logs, and lists of ‘look-fors’ were developed to guide raters in the scoring and to improve the reliability of scores and validity of decisions about the program. Inter-rater reliability for the portfolio assessment was 0.79 for holistic scores and 0.74 for analytic scores. With respect to validity, holistic and analytic scores correlated with criterion measures from 0.50 to 0.59, providing initial evidence of a common construct.     

Voicing Gay Women's Liberation: Judy Grahn and the Shaping of Lesbian Feminism

A closer look at the rich world of California feminisms demonstrates how Judy Grahn served as a central figure in bay area feminism, working to establish and support lesbian activist organizations, feminist publications, women's cultural events, and more. Two of Grahn's early political writings consider how lesbians sat at the nexus of homophobia and sexism. These writings demonstrate the formative role played by San Francisco lesbians in reframing ideas about “women-loving women” and the intersections of gender and sexuality in creating the oppressions faced by all women.     

(Dis)embodied encounters between art and academic writing amid a pandemic

The current account recounts the authors’ artistic virtual interactions during the COVID‐19 period of quarantine to discuss how connections between art, writing, humans’ embodied struggles and technologies can enable forms of feminist writing, as a cyborg practice, which have the political potential to meaningfully voice embodied experiences of inter‐sectionality and vulnerability that remain increasingly under‐expressed, in a neoliberal world of pandemic. Presented in a creative prose, whereby theory interweaves with artistic performances, poetry and extracts of the authors’ virtual exchanges, this account reflects how hybrid, non‐conventional, cyborg writing explorations can connect different bodies in an academic text even when these bodies are physically kept apart. By invoking hybridity that counters the masculine conventions of academic writing, this text aspires to produce academic knowledge that writes and speaks of embodied experiences of othering that urgently seek expression under the COVID‐19 pandemic. The current account builds on the burgeoning stream of organizational literature on writing differently and especially feminist forms of writing integrating genre‐blurring prose, poetry and art‐based research.     

Investigating the Relation Between Infants' Manual Activity With Objects and Their Perception of Dynamic Events

We examined the relation between 6‐ and 7‐month‐old infants' (N = 60) manual activity with objects during free play and their perception of the features of dynamic, multimodal events. Infants were habituated to a single event in which a hand reached for and manipulated a colorful, multifeatured object, and a sound was heard (e.g., a hand squeezed a purple round object, causing a whistling sound) and then their response to events that involved a change in the appearance of the object, the action, or the sound was assessed. Infants responded least to changes in the appearance of the objects, and their sensitivity to this feature was related to their manual activity with objects during free play. Infants' responding to changes in the sound or action was unrelated to motor activity, suggesting that at this age motor achievements related to object exploration are associated with infants' perception of some, but not all, object features.     

Sample Selection in Models of Academic Performance

This article shows how admission and enrollment processes affect the interpretation of simple validation studies of academic performance. In a competitive market for students, optimal behavior of admissions committees and applicants drives the simple correlation between test scores and performance toward zero, regardless of the relationship in the population of prospective students. Data from our university's MBA program support the prediction that applicants exhibit a higher correlation between test scores and undergraduate GPAs than do current students. This suggests that standard validation studies will understate the importance of GMAT scores in predicting performance of potential MBA students. (JEL C24 , I121 , C52 )     

Who Should Be a Family Therapist? A Personal View of Selection for Training

The author presents a view of the selection of applicants for training programs in family therapy, drawing on his own experience. A case is made for the importance of selection, based in the notion that the profession is responsible for attempting to protect the therapy consumer from practitioners who are potentially unhelpful or even damaging. The qualities that are desirable in a trainee family therapist are itemised and discussed. The article then describes how particular selection processes can be used to identify appropriate and inappropriate applicants. The author stresses that a good selection process should be isomorphic with the program of which it forms the first stage.     

Painting in a Different Kind of Void

The reception of Forrest Bess's work has primarily portrayed the artist as a “visionary” without external influence. By doing this, critics have downplayed the historical and cultural moment of Bess's productions and, subsequently, the well-developed interpretive models available from the history of art. This essay positions Bess and his work within the New York School of painting and its critical discourses of gendered metaphors and heteronormative formal evaluation. Recognizing how the artist participated in the conventions of vanguard painting of this time period offers new insights into Bess's singular style. Bess's works reveal the blind spots created by the visual grammar of Abstract Expressionism in his attempts to figure his repressed same-sex desires.     

Art in Social Movements: Shantytown Women's Protest in Pinochet's Chile

How social movements use art is an understudied question in the social movements literature. Ethnographic research on the use of art by the prodemocracy movement in Pinochet's Chile suggests that art plays a very important role in social movements, which use it for framing, to attract resources, to communicate information about themselves, to foster useful emotions, and as a symbol (for communicating a coherent identity, marking membership, and cementing commitment to the movement).     

At Home with Media Technology

ABSTRACT

People's engagement with media devices in the domestic sphere varies greatly, as do the decisions they make regarding when, where, and how the devices are utilized. How do we organize our houses for media consumption and/or creation? How do our houses' spatial configurations affect our media consumption and habits? How does time play a role in media engagement? These questions directly relate to design—our homes are both spatially and temporally designed—by us, and for us. The design issues of creating and maintaining a “home” are compounded by the various media devices we use—telephone, TV, stereo, Internet-enabled computer, and so on. We not only “design” how we use these devices, but where and when they are used. In this context, media devices are not passive objects, but rather through our engagement with them, they alter domestic space/time, and may ultimately challenge how we understand and define domesticity. Media technology simultaneously constructs new, and interrupts existing, domestic territories. We will explore the reciprocal impact of domestic space/time and media technology, with a view to revealing the ways in which this nexus becomes a question of design.     

The Makings of Political Art

Sociological work on how cultural objects are produced tends to neglect the politcal context of such production, whereas work on social movements and art neglects how movement artwork acquires its form and content. This article aims to fill these lacunae by analyzing the protest art of shantytown women against Pinochet. Artists, movement organizers, movement sponsors, and buyers interact to shape political art. The national and international political and economic contexts also play a part in that shaping. Ethnographic data from Chile and Europe, as well as a study of the art forms themselves, form the basis for the article's claims.