Olympic Films and Public Memory

How is our memory of mega‐events structured? This article investigates the relationship between cinema and the Olympic Games. To this end, it first unravels the historical origins of the strong link between the two, as both are symbolic products of the 20th century. The Olympics reaffirm the image of the modern nation‐state; the cinematic medium visually represents the Games as spectacle. Leni Riefenstahl's film, Olympia (1938), recorded at the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, supplies the most enduring imagery of this type. In addition to Riefenstahl's thoughts and methods, this study delves into Kon Ichikawa's Tokyo Olympiad (1965), which was influenced by Olympia. Ichikawa's film, which reflects his artistry and showcases his various skills, won critical acclaim and, intriguingly, precipitated the “document or art” controversy that involved the Japanese state and the mass media. Whether document or work of art, this film has supplied the public with imagery for the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games—various images that most of us recognize—and thereby played a key role in constituting our memory of them. Therefore, our experience of the Games is a mediated experience through the construction of our public memory. Our memory culture is composed of “prosthetic memories” that are technologically assembled through cinema and act as Freudian “screen memories.”     

Ilyenkov on Aesthetics: Realism,Imagination, and the End of Art

It is sometimes claimed that Evald Ilyenkov's writings, particularly those on the problem of the ideal, best express the philosophical framework of Russian cultural-historical psychology and activity theory. In this article I consider a neglected part of Ilyenkov's legacy: his work on aesthetics. Ilyenkov's writings on art cast significant light on his views of culture and mind and on the humanistic vision at the center of his philosophy. In 1964, on a rare trip to the West, Ilyenkov visited an exhibition of pop art in Vienna. He was disgusted by what he saw and wrote a scathing critique entitled "Chto tam, v Zazerkal'e?" ("What's there, through the looking glass?"). Does Ilyenkov's antipathy to pop-and, indeed, to so-called modern art in general-show him to be enamored of a narrow, reactionary form of socialist realism? If so, how can this be squared with his reputation as a creative, critical voice within Soviet Marxism? I examine Ilyenkov's other writings on aesthetics in search of a nuanced interpretation of his reaction to pop. I consider his idea that art should serve to cultivate higher forms of perception and his attendant concepts of aesthetic sensibility and imagination, and I explore how these notions contribute to his view of the unity of the cognitive virtues, his hostility to the division of labor, and his ideal of genuine human activity, guided by reason. Such themes are vital constituents of Ilyenkov's humanism, which celebrates free, creative activity as a life principle that must assert itself against the mortifying forces of mechanization and standardization. Although these ideas may not entirely redeem Ilyenkov's hostility to modern art, they reveal his stance to be far more sophisticated than appears at first sight.     

Castration and Medusa: Orlan's Art on the Cutting Edge

French multimedia artist Orlan (b. 1947) literally altered her body and identity in the name of art by undergoing multiple cosmetic surgeries that replaced her features with those from art historical masterpieces. She transformed herself into an objet d'art as well as a site for public debate, thereby injecting a radical sensibility into Western art and its history. The provocative surgeries at the core of Orlan's “carnal art” both exemplify and expand Freud's notion of castration to include the wish to transcend gender and even the body itself. Like Medusa, Orlan confronts us with blinding images that compel us to question our assumptions about art, beauty, gender, identity, and technology. Her project shows us the fate of human embodiment in a posthuman age. In addition to elucidating her social, feminist, and aesthetic agenda, this paper clarifies her personal psychology and her work's effect on the audience.     

Hand over fist: a chronicle of Cold War photography

Group Material’s Timeline: The Chronicle of US Invention in Latin and Central America (1984) at P.S.1’s Center for Contemporary Art explored the framing devices of installation art and photography in tandem, as a means of reconfiguring the distribution of the sensible at the height of the Cold War. In response to escalating crisis (including continuous Central Intelligence Agency operations being carried out in Nicaragua and El Salvador), this activist project employed postmodern strategies such as appropriation, pastiche and a resistance to conclusiveness in order to suggest provocative and unexpected dialogues between disparate artworks and artefacts across time and geopolitical difference. Artists ranging from Richard Prince and Barbara Kruger to John Heartfield, Tina Modotti and Arellano Bolivar, among others, come together as signs of political and aesthetic conflict, as networks of visual culture that complicate dominant narratives of spatial and temporal reality during the Cold War era. Closer analysis of such works reveals historical ruptures alongside continuities, relayed by official government policy, mass media and the art world more broadly. By excavating a long-standing history of conflict, Timeline addresses the stakes of the ownership of meaning itself in the mid-1980s, with implications regarding art production and politics for generations to come.     

Aesthetics of disaster as decolonial aesthetics: making sense of the effects of Hurricane María through Puerto Rican contemporary art

ABSTRACT

On 20 September 2017, Hurricane María made landfall on Puerto Rico causing unprecedented disaster. From that day onwards, the Puerto Rican multi-layered colonial, social and political context was further complicated by the traumatic acceleration of a human disaster via this natural disaster. This crystalized the urgency of using art as vehicle for (social) catharsis, a practice that continues to be used by individual artists, collectives, community organizations, art projects, and other art institutions on the island and abroad, through mural art, community paintings, art exhibitions, literature, music, and many other aesthetic expressions. This article examines, from a decolonial and critical cultural studies perspective, post-Hurricane María artistic expressions in contemporary art as decolonial aesthetics through the cathartic use of the frame of an aesthetics of disaster. It is argued that, an aesthetics of disaster aims to re-assert an artistic form that is able to accelerate the discursive nullification of a deeply rooted colonial, social and cultural problem by way of art as catharsis inspired by the way that Hurricane María unveiled these problems. The piece briefly contextualizes Puerto Rico, and it examines the idea of Puerto Rican contemporary art as catharsis. Then, it describes how Puerto Rican contemporary art exhibitions and associated aesthetic production are processing urgent post-hurricane issues through three illustrative pieces in exhibitions in PR and abroad in the United States (US). Lastly, decolonial aesthetics is reexamined and re-understood, informed by Édouard Glissant's view expressed in Poetics of Relation which aids to the conclusion that Puerto Rican contemporary art using the frame of an aesthetics of disaster functions as a powerful form of decolonial aesthetics.     

Imagination laboratory: making sense of bio‐objects in contemporary genetic art

Public engagement in biotechnology has declined as cloning, genetic engineering and regenerative medicine have become socially and culturally normalized. Zooming in on existing bio‐technological debates, this article turns to contemporary genetic art as sites for ethical reflections. Art can be viewed as an ‘imagination laboratory’, a space through which un‐framing and rupturing of contemporary rationalities are facilitated, and, in addition, enabling sense‐making and offering fantastic connections otherwise not articulated. In this article, the framework of ‘bio‐objectification’ is enriched with Bennett's (2001) notion of enchantment and the importance of wonder and openness to the unusual, in order to highlight alternative matters of concern than articulated through conventional politico‐moral discourse. Drawing on a cultural sociological analysis of Eduardo Kac's Edunia, Lucy Glendinning's Feather Child, Patricia Piccinini's Still Life with Stem Cells and Heather Dewey‐Hagborg's Stranger Visions, we discuss how the intermingling of art, science, critics, art historians, science fiction, internet, and physical space, produce a variety of attachments that this article will unpack. The article demonstrates that while some modern boundaries and rationalities are highlighted and challenged through the ‘imagination laboratory’ of the art process, others are left untouched.     

A matter of culture

Abstract

The nature of culture as the symbolic expression of inarticulate matter is explored from a range of different cultural perspectives. Raymond Williams's work on culture, especially his ideas on material and symbolic production, serves to introduce an analysis of matter and its place in cultural production. The mutable nature of matter is explored through the modern physics of quantum theory as well as modern art, especially the work of Jasper Johns. Late‐modern culture is viewed in terms of a mutable space of matter that resists meaning and location. The implications of this resistance for understanding the cultivation of knowledge and subject‐object relations are then pursued in the contexts of art history (Michael Baxandall), the ‘social body’ (Jean‐Frangois Lyotard), the society of generalized communication (Gianni Vattimo), multi‐media culture (J. Hillis Miller), and computerization.     

On the ruins of the historical avant‐garde: The institution of art and its contemporary exigencies

The focus of this theoretical paper is the analysis of the European historical avant‐garde as an excess of modernism. As such, its goal was two‐fold. First, it tried to transcend the institution of autonomous art and second, it attempted to integrate art into everyday life. In this light, the paper presents the contingencies of the genesis and main features of the historical avant‐garde's doctrine and practice. It further argues that the historical avant‐garde ended in a collapse of the aesthetic and practical dimension without corresponding emancipation. This failure, in turn, laid down the groundwork for the post‐modern art which appropriated the stylistic and formal innovations of historical avant‐garde while comfortably remaining within the institution of art. Thus, the post‐modern betrayal of the values embedded in avant‐garde and modernist works of art appears to be a necessity.     

Zinovy Zinik's Narratives of Cultural Dislocation

Abstract

The study examines Zinik's use of translation, theatre and misreading as metaphors for the act of border crossing in his novels and short stories. Through close readings of Zinik's novels The Lord and the Gamekeeper, The Mushroom Picker and The Russian Service, it is demonstrated that Zinik integrates these themes into his work with intent to expose novelistic conventions, confuse the boundary between art and life, and blur the roles of the author, reader and literary protagonist. Zinik's invitations to the reader to enter the worlds of his texts and experience cultural dislocation firsthand are continued in his recent short stories, which reflect the social changes and fluid cultural boundaries associated with globalisation. It is argued that, at the same time, Zinik's work reveals the limitations of conventional binary oppositions such as actor/audience and the utopian claims behind translation, interpretation and globalisation. Thus, it asserts the need to affirm new cultural symbols and practices through which individuals will shape transcultural identities as visions of a homogeneous global culture become more prevalent.     

Why Did Adorno 'Hate' Jazz?

Adorno's jazz essays have attracted considerable notoriety not only for their negative and dismissive evaluation of jazz as music but for their outright dismissal of all the claims made on behalf of jazz by its exponents and admirers, even of claims concerning the black origins of jazz music. This paper offers a critical exposition of Adorno's views on jazz and outlines an alternative theory of the culture industry as the basis of a critique of Adorno's critical theory. Adorno's arguments are discussed in the context of his wider theoretical commitment to a model of structuration—in both musical and social relations—that establishes a dividing line between a moral aesthetic praxis that can be approved as having 'truth-value' and one that betrays and subverts the truth. In Adorno's analysis, jazz finds itself positioned on the wrong side of that line and, accordingly, is condemned. It is argued that it is Adorno's commitment to a formalist model of art works that has been superseded by modern aesthetic practice in both so-called 'serious' art as well as in the works of the culture industries that binds him to a regressive model of aesthetic praxis. An alternative theory of the culture industry is outlined that explores its positive functions in enhancing the resources available for culture creation through its transmission of aesthetic codes, and in mediating relations between so-called high and low art.     

A Critique of Max Horkheimer’s <Emphasis Type="Italic">Critique of Instrumental Reason</Emphasis>

I produce a critique of Marx Horkheimer’s book Critique of Instrumental Reason as a way to introduce the concept of pragmatic critical theory. I start by mentioning that C. Wright Mills’s concept of “The Sociological Imagination” has many of the qualities of critical theory while emphasizing its potential for pragmatic solutions to social problems. I discuss some of the qualities of German social theory including its tendency toward over-philosophizing, before going on to discussing this book as well as the work of such scholars as W. I. Thomas and Emile Durkheim who produced morally-relevant social analysis, and especially the work of Max Weber whose exposition on the nature of rationality is used to provide background information that puts the work of Max Horkheimer in broader sociological context. I discuss how fantasies and substitute satisfactions are substitutes for a well-balanced life. I emphasize why Horkheimer and the Frankfurt School in general did not appreciate the American concern for pragmatism, but I nevertheless show the importance of a pragmatic approach to social reform. His critique of nationalism that runs as a theme throughout this book as offering a poor substitute for a sense of community is also pertinent. I end by emphasizing that Horkheimer’s emphasis on authoritarianism as a reaction to modernization, and Christopher Lasch’s emphasis on narcissism as a reaction to modernization, both emphasize negative aspects of their own societies, and learning how to avoid both extremes is a useful lesson to take away from both of their writings.     

Georg Simmel from a different standpoint. Cultural variants and the limits of interpretation

Georg Simmel was recently included among sociology's founding fathers, after years of neglect. This article contends that it happened because Western culture is facing a deep crisis and is no longer able to ostracize authors who think along different lines. Simmel's success proves that the cultural variant that dominated the West for three centuries is losing its supremacy and can no longer cope with thinkers belonging to alternative variants. On the basis of Dumont's work on European culture and the German variant it is possible to deconstruct the main issues that were raised against Simmel. They turn out to stem from prejudice and misunderstanding, as those who criticized Simmel either could not understand his Weltanschauung or did not share it and considered it a threat to the modern way of life.     

Proust's butterfly James McNeill Whistler and painterly writing in In Search of Lost Time

Abstract

This article examines the influence of Whistler's art on Proust and the role it plays in Proust's analysis of involuntary memory in In Search of Lost Time. Whistler (a near anagram of Proust's 'Elstir'), alongside Monet and Paul César Helleu, is generally credited with making up the composite figure of Elstir, the painter who takes his place as one of the central characters in Proust's novel and plays a pivotal role in linking the experiences of Proust's youthful narrator, Marcel, with those of the older Swann, and of reconciling the cultural shift in emphasis from portraits painted in studios to the en plein air style of the Impressionists. Whistler's, though, is an influence that runs deeper than historical or biographical contingency. Whistler, too, saw memory rather than direct observation as central to the creative act; and in the way in which his increasingly strictly pictorial art dramatizes the act of looking, he provides a parallel to Proust's concern with how memory, through the rhetoric of metaphor, is transformed into art.     

Making claims on value: The rhetoric construction of aesthetic innovation by ethnic minority creatives

Conceptualizing aesthetic innovation as the social and cultural act of claiming value, we investigate how ethnic minority creatives rhetorically construct their work as innovative, while dealing with contradictory discourses of ethnicity. From our analysis of the rhetorical schemes they deploy to construct aesthetic innovation, three types of argumentations emerged: (1) argumentations relating one's creative work to one's unique self and biography through liaisons of coexistence; (2) argumentations establishing aesthetic innovation vis-à-vis other products and traditions through comparisons and model schemes and (3) argumentations highlighting power struggles between the creative and some ‘significant others’ in the creative industries through personifications and hierarchies. This study contributes to a better understanding of rhetorical strategies to construct aesthetic innovation focusing on the role social identities play in this process. More generally, it shows the suitability of rhetoric theory and method to analyse claims on value.     

Authorizing Art: The Effect of Multimedia Formats on the Museum Experience*

Les galeries d'art utilisent des techniques médiatiques particulières pour donner un caractère didactique a ce qu'elles présentent. L'expo-sition Art for a Nation proposée à l'Art Gallery of Ontario en 1996 illustre l'utilisation de techniques modernes, basees sur des documents imprimés, pour structurer l'exposition d'oeuvres d'art et guider le visiteur. L'exposition présentait le Groupe des Sept comme des artistes célébres, décrivait leur parcours sous la forme d'un récit historique et donnait une opinion d'expert sur leurs ceuvres. L'atelier Oh! Canada Workshop, organisé en parallèle, utilisait quant à lui le multimédia et des techniques postmodernes. Dans cet atelier, les ceuvres étaient placees au hasard, sans notes historiques. Cela permettait aux visiteurs de creer leurs propres ceuvres d'art et de devenir critiques d'art. Un sondage effectué parmi les visiteurs ainsi que l'étude de leur comportement ont révéle une nette préferénce pour l'exposition Art for a Nation. Les visiteurs recherchaient les techniques médiatiques directives que les galeries d'art proposent habituellement plutôt qu'un environnement multimedia totalement libre, qui s'apparente à ce que les visiteurs vivent quotidiennement. Pour eux, un musée doit rester un lieu où il faut être respectueux envers ce qui est montré, un lieu antipopulaire par excellence. Art galleries use special media formats to authorize what they display. The art Gallery of Ontario's 1996 Art for a Nation exhibition exemplifies the use of print-based, modern means of authorization. It presented the Group of Seven as famous artists, contructed an historical narrative of their development and provided expert opinion on their work. The Gallery's accompanying Oh! Canada Workshop used multimedia, postmodern means of authorization. It distributed exhibits randomly without an historical narrative, and allowwed visitors to create their own art and to be art critics. A survey of visitors and observations of their activties revealed an overwhelming     

Tomorrow,things will be different Qiu Zhijie’s concept of keeping alive life through art

Abstract

The paper examines Qiu Zhijie’s multi-layered project A Suicidology of the Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge (since 2008) and asks what is at stake when art literally and metaphorically is assigned with life-saving functions. Based on the artist’s assumption that today’s social and political reality as well as its subjects are historically constructed the article conceives of the Nanjing Bridge as an embodiment of a historically constituted contemporary Chinese reality. Through close readings of the works as well as analyses of theoretical writings by Qiu Zhijie the article scrutinises the relationship Total Art assumes between the social and the aesthetic realm and examines the premises and strategies the artist adopts in order to produce socially and aesthetically effective art that keeps ‘alive’.     

JÜRGEN HABERMAS AND THE RATIONALIZATION OF COMMUNICATIVE INTERACTION*

This paper analyzes J. Habermas's theory of “universal pragmatics” and examines the extent to which Habermas's ideal speech community is predicted upon a specific type of relationship between the individual and society. The ability of the theory of universal pragmatics to overcome the form of domination institutionalized by modern societies is questioned, and the argument is made that Habermas's radical program of emancipation is vitiated (1) by Habermas's conflation of “transcendental” and “situationally engaged” enlightenment and (2) by Habermas's inability to reintegrate practical-emancipatory and technical forms of reason. Habermas's idea of “communicative competence” replicates, rather than displaces, the “modern” solution to the problem of the relationship between the individual and society.     

Towards sociology from the arts: An epistemological turn

Over the past two decades, Howard Becker's Art Worlds and Pierre Bourdieu's The Rules of Art were guidelines for the dominant paradigms in sociology of art. Nevertheless, according to Bourdieu, sociology and art do not make a good match. To overcome this dilemma, the French sociologist Nathalie Heinich proposed a “sociology from art,” based on the uniqueness of artists and their works, but she neglected artworks as sociological subject. A realistic and persistent criticism against sociology from the arts claims that artworks are fictions created by artists, therefore epistemologically unacceptable as social realities. Is it possible the making of sociology from artworks? Through theoretical review and using the example of literature, I will argue in this paper that artworks are important heuristic resources and a legitimate subject of sociological research.     

Traditional,Problem-Solving and Critical Theory: An Analysis of Horkheimer and Cox's Setting of the ‘Critical’ Divide

Abstract

Robert W. Cox's dictum that ‘(t)heory is for someone and for some purpose’ (emphasis in the original) is said to be the most-quoted line in International Relations (IR) theory. Yet whilst this spurred a revolution in critical thinking in IR, it echoed a far older conception of Critical Theory advanced by Max Horkheimer in the 1930s that claimed there is ‘no theory of society?…?that does not contain political motivations'. Both sentiments emphasize the relation between knowledge and human interests, and yet both formulate two distinct—though allied—ways of approaching ‘critical’ theorizing. In order to understand the similarities and differences in their approaches, this paper draws out three loci of difference between Cox and Horkheimer regarding the question of emancipation: (i) the epistemological relation between ‘critical’ and ‘Problem-Solving’ (Cox) or ‘Traditional Theory’ (Horkheimer); (ii) the emphasis placed on transformation and historical process; and (iii) the importance of intersubjectivity in how each approach emancipation. It is argued that by actively combining critical (dialectical) approaches across the social sciences, broadening human agency through civilizational dialogue, and retaining a commitment to emancipatory (and visionary) political futures based on human association, that Critical International Theory can maintain ongoing relevance in IR.     

Revivifying Russia: Literature,Theory, and Empire in Viktor Shklovskii's Civil War Writings

Abstract

When in 1924 Iurii Tynianov identified Viktor Shklovskii's memoir A Sentimental Journey as a work 'on the margin of literature', he was commenting on the text's generic experimentation. But he also provided an apt label for its geopolitical setting, as war drives Shklovskii back and forth from Russia's dying imperial centre Petrograd to the country's peripheries. The sometimes uneasy relationship between Shklovskii's literary theory and his movement through the disintegrating Empire is this essay's main focus. Drawing on recent scholarship that identifies a fundamental paradox of modern literary theory as both the cosmopolitan study of literature per se and a discipline validated by national literary canons, the essay proposes that Shklovskii negotiates cosmopolitan and national impulses by exploring Russian literature as the expression of a multi-ethnic and multilingual empire. In analogy with Shklovskii's famous dictum that art exists to 'make the stone stony', the argument is made that in his Civil War writings Shklovskii strove to revivify the Russian Empire, that is, to 'make Russia Russian', by presenting his readers with a new and strange view of Russia from its imperial borders.