15792 research outputs found
Sort by
Decadence and Aestheticism through Fashion and Textiles: Guest Editors’ Introduction
Get PDFThe present issue of Volupté explores the connections between Aestheticism and decadence through the lens of fashion and textiles. The theme was inspired by a online series of talks (Jeudis), ‘Decadence & Aestheticism: Truth, Beauty, Exoticism, and the Sublime in Nineteenth Century Fashion’, which we were invited to organize by the British Association of Decadence Studies (BADS) in Autumn 2021. Our own eagerness to explore these connections stemmed from a shared interest in Aestheticism in dress and textile histories, particularly in relation to the performative aspects of Artistic Dress, and its relationship to costume/fashion practice in life and on the stage.
What we have compiled is an exploratory issue, applying approaches from material culture to a literary field and thereby offering interdisciplinary considerations which include not just astute textual analyses, but creative pieces of fiction, poetry, and art practice as well. This collection encompasses a range of sources, disciplines and time periods representing texts, textiles, film, images, interiors, dress, and accessories – real and imagined. The creative responses in particular demonstrate that both Aestheticism and decadence – or neo-decadence and neo-Aestheticism – are living fields that provide inspiration for creativity, questioning, and analysis.
There are still many questions which this issue of Volupté does not address as fully as we would like. For example, we recognize the importance of the debates initiated by the previous issue on Decolonizing Decadence, and there is a great deal more work to be done in this area to deconstruct issues of gender, race, and class.
We therefore offer this issue as more of a provocation, rather than a reflection on the current ‘state of the field’. Our aim is to inspire and invite others to undertake further discussion and research on fashion and textiles in decadence studies, particularly as narrative agents that may reveal deeper complexities and new readings of material and literary culture of the fin de siècle, and their legacies
Ten Texts on Sculpture 5: Sculpture and Ritual
No full textThe fifth of a series of reading group podcasts on sculpture with Andrea Francke. In this episode we talk about the artist Barbara McCullough’s film, ‘Shopping Bag Spirits and Freeway Fetishes’ from 1981. The film takes the form of a series of interviews with Black American artists about their relationship to ritual. We focus on the sections with the sculptors David Hammons, Senga Nengudi and Betye Saar. We also look at an essay by gallerist Linda Goode-Bryant and art historian Marcy S. Philips called, ‘Contextures’ from 1978 that talks about the work of a related group of artists, including Hammons, Nengudi and Saar, who had shown at Goode-Bryant’s New York gallery, Just Above Midtown, in the mid 1970s
chh, chh, chh
No full textWith Kitty Clark and Rebecca Wilcox. Combining music, text and puppet animation on an LED Volume screen, this semi-improvised performance imagines the inner thoughts of cicada nymphs as they wait to emerge in the year 2038 - into possibly a very altered and unstable environment
Ten Texts on Sculpture 4: Sculpture in the Expanded Field
No full textThe third of a series of reading group podcasts on sculpture. In this episode we talk about Rosalind Krauss’s essay, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’ from 1979. In the essay, Krauss lays out what has become an influential idea of postmodern art through defining a very particular genealogy of Minimalist and post-minimalist artists working in the US in the 1960s and 70s. We also read a chapter from Tina Post’s 2023 book, Deadpan, in which Post thinks about Minimalism in relation to an aesthetic of looming and an affect of threat
Stories from third space — A case and considerations of design research education from a Swedish vantage point
Get PDFDebates continue about the positioning of design within research-driven universities. While the idea of autonomy has had a strong appeal, it is the bridging across established academic cultures that has proved especially effective for legitimizing design research and research education. Revisiting a conception of design as a ‘Third Space’ and drawing on a case – the Swedish Faculty for Design Research and Research Education (2008–2015) – we discuss what ‘thirdness’ can entail in context. Our account of this case reveals the unsettled dynamics of navigating in, between and across academic cultures. Design research education, we argue, has prospects to cultivate a critical space within academia, in which its ‘thirdness’ entails sensitization and agitation of the territorial conditions of knowledge. There is a need for a reconsideration of design – and academia more generally – not as a static disciplinary order but as a contested archipelago that opens for alternative orientations
Floriano Romano: A Pele do Mundo
Get PDFThis bilingual (English and Portuguese) book accompanies the exhibition 'A Pele do Mundo' (The Skin of the World) by installation and sound artist Floriano Romano, which took place at the art and technolgy centre 'Futuros - Arte e Tecnologia' in Rio de Janeiro during July and August 2023. The exhibition was curated by Michael Asbury who also edited and authored the reflective essay in this publication. The book is richly illustrated with views of the gallery installations while the essay covers the artist's trajectory to date with references to other significant bibliographical sources on his work
Photographic Non-Self
Get PDFNon-self has unsurprisingly featured very little in explanatory material-object-based contemporary art history. Buddhist nonself has contributed to subjectivity research (Albahari, 2006, Siderits, 2011, 2015) but non-self in photography is, perhaps appropriately, absent. This chapter will explore how the experience of non-self might differ from but overlap with emptiness in the ‘history of art’ specifically ‘photography theory and practice’. My research in experiential non-self (Stephens, 2018, 2019, 2021a, 2021b) wrestles with the complexities of non-representation when articulating embodied affect, of childhood racial discrimination, for instance. Yet, embodied autobiographical non-self is an impossible category. This is a subjugated knowledge that disrupts self-hood, undermines historical artefacts -leaving us with no birth of photography- and ruptures socio-cultural identity. Can a contemporary secular Buddhist non-self function as liberatory? Photographic non-self might render ‘writing on/and photography’ disastrous, when indelibly marked by the failures of representation
Introducing ‘Critical Service Design’
Get PDFThis article proposes ‘critical service design’ as an innovative and effective alternative approach for service designers who are actively seeking to support and facilitate sustainable and ethical place-based climate transitions
François Willème's Photosculpture Apparatus Reconstructed at WSA
No full textVideo documentation of the reconstruction of François Willème's Photosculpture Apparatus at Winchester School of art 2022.
'The true mission of this useful and humble art-form will be to bring sculpture into the private life and to perpetuate the photographic image by petrifying it.