“Difficult,Messy, Nasty,and Sensational”

Feminist publishing played an important role in the feminist art movement of the 1970s and into the 1980s, and Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics was a key journal in this landscape. This paper argues that Heresies is important not only because it was a forum for some of the most influential feminist art women of the period, but because it experimented with an editorial structure that required participants to reckon with the discomforts of difference. Editors of the periodical took seriously the feminist critique of hierarchically structured organizational cultures and both promoted and practiced collective publishing. Moreover, through an emphasis on editorial statements, I consider how Heresies gives expression to the affective entanglements of the women involved in Heresies' specific form of collaboration and collective feminist politics. An examination of the editorials as sites of affective intensity helps to come to an understanding not of what women were thinking, writing, and making, but how they may have felt about their work and their relationships with women with whom they worked.     

Exploring Gay Male Erotic Art: An Interview with Edward Lucie-Smith

The last twenty-five years have seen the emergence of a transnational gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender (GLBT)/queer cultural movement unprecedented historically in its scope and openness. This interview with British art historian and critic Edward Lucie-Smith examines the role of gay male erotic art and film within that movement. Taking its start from the centrality of same-sex sexual orientation to the sense of gay identity and the importance of erotic art in validating that identity, it explores the historical, psychological, and social significance of a branch of visual art that until recent decades was not even acknowledged to exist, much less considered an appropriate subject of scholarly interest. By discussing gay male erotic art within a serious art-historical context, the article aims at providing a framework for examining the topic more systematically within the GLBT/queer studies domain.     

Why Aesthetic Patterns Matter: Art and a “Qualitative” Social Theory

This paper argues that an explanation of the role of aesthetic patterning in human action needs to be part of any “qualitative” social theory. It urges the social sciences to move beyond contextualism and to see art as visual, acoustic and other media that lead to heightened sensory perception and the coordination of feelings through symbols. The article surveys the argument that art provides a basic model of how the self learns to interact with external environments; and the complementary thesis that art could be seen as integral to the emergence of systems of human knowledge, communication and economy. Ornamentation and stylization are advanced as two concrete devices through which human attention is captured and experience is ordered through aesthetic patterns. The conclusion is drawn that art offers the social sciences a meaningful account of the perceptual or “qualitative” dimensions of social interactions; and that this is much needed today.     

Sociology and Art: An Interview with Howard S. Becker

This is an interview with Howard S. Becker, and the focus is sociology and art. In this interview, Howard S. Becker talked about many interesting and important topics such as his sociological lineage, his difference with the estheticians Arthur Danto and George Dickie, traditional sociologist of art such as Lukacs and Goldmann, his Tactile Art Group, the universality of his art worlds, Richard A. Peterson and his production of culture perspective, the sociology of “sociology of art” in America, French sociologists of art, and his own art life, and so on.     

Maintenance work: Interrogating the sociology of art

The following article explores the different ways art sociologists investigate art that is based in the participatory arts. The aim is to shift the empirical focus to the art practice, which speaks for itself, and to place the work of the artist and all who cooperate or collaborate in the making of the artwork at the center of sociological analysis. By allowing the artist to speak fully about their work, art sociologists can uncover new social and cultural phenomena and better understand the different motivations underlying art-making. The following literature highlights the recent tendencies in the sociology of art, explores the “social turn” in art and presents different sociologists who focus on the art practice and the art’s voice. For further development of the field, I suggest the sociology of art needs to catch-up with the recent tendencies in art by placing the empirical focus on participatory art practices that will not only give us a better understanding about the intricate actions taking place in the art making, but it will also illuminate new layers of social life that are hidden. To conclude, I suggest that sociologists engage with participatory-based artists to enhance sociology through a public sociology of art.     

Can art-based reflection help us cope with organisational change in the public sector?

Never before have public sector jobs been so threatened. Fear and anxiety have shifted their focus, from performance to survival. With reference to immediately contemporary works on the NHS in particular, such as Mandelstam (2011) and Leys and Player (2011), the paper establishes the factual validity of the crisis.

The authors conducted a series of workshops for public sector staff to enable them to explore their reactions to the current situation.

It is possible to identify increasing levels of denial and other forms of resistance to change similar to those first identified by Menzies' (1959). Drawing on the work of Bion (cited Obholzer & Roberts, 1994) the paper considers the dangers of a retreat to the paranoid schizoid position, and identifies a theoretical clue in Halton (2004) for turning the trauma of change into a creative opportunity.

Art has access to emotional, spiritual and creative facets of the human mind that science cannot explore. Klein's (1975) consideration of the infantile and regressive aspect of art is acknowledged. The paper then considers what is revealed by a study of specific works of art which were presented in the workshops; including paintings by Bosch, Rousseau, Breughel and Goya. The work of Zagier-Roberts (1998) and Winnicott (1971) is called upon to endorse the usefulness of such a playful collage of responses.

Art can be used to help people move through Kubler Ross' stages of bereavement (1997); not to acceptance but out of the paranoid schizoid position into the depressive position (Klein 1975). Revisiting the work of Halton (2004) and the concept of evolutionary creativity, a move on from the depressive position can begin. Collective validation can be affirmed through a rebooting of the essential public sector values while a radical turning away from organisational priorities, to face the service user, provides a more far reaching optimism than any envisaged by an essentially limited demand for modernisation.

In conclusion the paper considers the recent contributions of Dienst (2011) and Dumenil and Levy (2011) to advocate tactical resistance to the denigration of the public sphere.     

高校传统武术国际化课程教学的实践探索

高校传统武术的国际化发展对高校走向世界、承接国外交流等有着重要的意义。我国高校目前面临着武术边缘化发展特点,很少将中国武术作为国术精髓带出国界,带上国际交流平台。针对当前实际,从武术国际化课程教学实践出发,对武术国际化课程的教学内容以及教学环境等方面进行了探索与研究。     

Site-Writing: She is Walking about in a Town Which She does not Know

ABSTRACT

Recently my writing has explored the position of the author, not only in relation to theoretical ideas, art objects, and architectural spaces but also to the site of writing itself. This interest has evolved into a project of “site-writing” that aims to spatialize criticism. “Site-writing” occurs when discussions concerning site specificity extend to involve art criticism, and the spatial qualities of writing and reading become as important in conveying meaning as the content of the criticism. This article suggests that this kind of criticism or critical spatial writing, in operating as mode of a practice in its own right, questions the terms of reference that relate the critic to the work positioned “under” critique. This is an active writing that constructs as well as traces the sites of relation between critic and work. Outlining the conceptual concerns that frame my project of “site-writing” with particular reference to current debates in art criticism, this article then draws on psychoanalytic theory to think through relationships between the spatial politics of internal psychical figures and external cultural geographies, drawing in particular on the work of psychoanalytic practitioners and theorists Jessica Benjamin and Jean Laplanche. Then, in “She is Walking about in a Town Which She Does Not Know,” this article demonstrates the practice of “site-writing” through an essay located on threshold spaces both real and fictional, exterior and interior which link and separate the critic from the work of the eight women artists included in Elles sont passées par ici, Loguivy de la Mer, Brittany, France, 2005.     

中西艺术审美比较刍议

艺术研究期待拓宽视野和运用新方法。本文摆脱了将中西方艺术作为两个互不相关的系统来加以介绍的模式,用新的视角审视中西艺术创作的思维特点,着重论述了中西艺术审美文化特征之异同。     

《墨子》的思维语言艺术

《墨子》是战国时期墨家著作的总集。由墨子初创,墨子后学增益。现存53篇,9万余字,包含多种文体类别。本文从《墨子》全书,勾勒其思维语言艺术,认为其文字表达具有3个重要的特征,即是准确性和鲜明性,生动性和简练性,理趣性和功利性的统一。在中国古籍浩瀚的思维语言艺术历史长河中,具有独特的原创性价值和意义,值得仔细品味,借鉴传承。