Contemporaneity (E-Journal)
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Review: The New Woman International: Representations in Photography and Film from the 1870s through the 1960s edited by Elizabeth Otto and Vanessa Rocco
Full text linkA review of Elizabeth Otto and Vanessa Rocco’s edited volume The New Woman International: Representations in Photography and Film from the 1870s through the 1960s, published in 2011 by the University of Michigan Press
Contemporaneity in the History of Art: A Clark Workshop 2009, Summaries of Papers and Notes on Discussions
Full text linkSponsored by the Clark Institute, Williamstown, and the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, the workshop was convened by Terry Smith, and held at the Sterling and Francine Clark Institute, Williamstown, Mass., October 8 and 9, 2009. These notes do not record the exact statements of all participants, neither in the summaries of papers nor notes on discussions; rather, they represent the author’s own impressions of the workshop as it unfolded. See also, in this issue of Contemporaneity, Wu Hung’s contribution to the workshop
The Temporalities of Soviet and Postcommunist Visual Culture: Boris Groys and Petre Petrov in Conversation
Full text linkThis discussion took place on April 21, 2010 in the Humanities Center at the University of Pittsburgh. Over the course of two hours, we, Robert Bailey and Cristina Albu, posed to Boris Groys and Petre Petrov a series of questions about temporality and visual culture in the Soviet Union, contemporary Russia, and other formerly communist countries in Eastern Europe. Our hope was to identify the paradoxical instances when multiple temporalities coexist or compete for control of time, or where different forces impose their respective narratives, chronologies, or histories on the same moments and events. We are grateful to Professors Groys and Petrov for their careful and considered answers to our questions. Thanks are also due to Professors Jonathan Arac and Todd Reeser at the Humanities Center for facilitating the discussion, as well as to Contemporaneity editors Heidi Cook, Amy Cymbala, and Rachel Miller for their help with transcription
Cinema as Archeology: The Acousmêtre and the Multiple Layering of Temporality and Spatiality
Full text linkMichel Chion’s concept of the “acousmêtre” is useful when exploring the spectator’s cinematic experience in regard to the juxtaposition of sound and image, as the acousmatic presence troubles the false sense of unity that is created by the synchronization of sound and image by its invocation of off-screen space through sound. The acousmêtre neither prioritizes sound nor image but calls attention to the disjunction between them. Also, the acousmêtre leaves the source of the sound open to imagination and interpretation. Thus the presence of the acousmêtre destabilizes the seemingly unified, contained realm of the film by expanding the temporal and spatial boundaries of the diegesis. In this essay I explore how the power of this ghostly voice of the acousmêtre is manifested in cinema, and the significance of its power to the spectators in their relationship to the film, by asking questions regarding the function and effect of the disembodied voice and spectral presence of the acousmêtre, the scope of the acousmêtre’s power, and what can be created from the disequilibrium that is provoked by this power. I explore possible answers by analyzing the use of the acousmatic voice in Y Tu Mama Tambien (dir. Alfonso Cuaron, 2001) and Calendar (dir. Atom Egoyan, 1993)
Transcultured Architecture: Mudéjar’s Epic Journey Reinterpreted
Full text linkoai:contemporaneity.pitt.edu:article/5The Mudéjar phenomenon is unparalleled in the history of architecture. This style of architecture and ornamentation originated with Arab craftsmen living in reconquered medieval Spain. Embraced by Spanish Christians, Mudéjar traveled over the course of the next four centuries, becoming part of the architectural history of Latin America, especially present-day Mexico and Peru. The style’s transmission across different religions and cultures attests to its ability to unify disparate groups of people under a common visual language. How, then, did mudejar managto gain popularity across reconquered Spain, so much so that it spread to the New World colonies? In this article, I argue that art and architecture move more fluidly than ideologies across boundaries, physical and political. The theory of transculturation makes it possible to understand how an architectural style such as Mudéjar can be generated from a cultural clash and move to an entirely different context. Developed in 1947 by Cuban scholar and theorist Fernando Ortíz, transculturation posited means by which cultures mix to create something entirely new. This process is often violent, the result of intense conflict and persecution, and one culture is almost always defeated in the process. The contributions of both societies, however, coexist in the final product, whether technological, artistic, or even agricultural. I argue that mudejar in Latin America is a product of two separate transculturations: the adoption of Arab design and ornamentation by Spanish Christians, and the subsequent transference of these forms to the New World through the work of indigenous laborers
Waiting for Art: The Experience of Real Time in Sculpture
Full text linkWhy and how does some contemporary art make us wait, and why does the beholder choose to stay? This study seeks to answer this question by exploring what happens to the viewer while waiting in front of a “time sculpture,” a term coined here to mean a three-dimensional artwork that is dynamic over a set period of time. Through an analysis of select works by artists Anish Kapoor, Amelia Whitelaw, Michael Sailstorfer, and Roman Signer, the article posits that while in front of these time sculptures, the viewer experiences an anxiety of waiting and temporal confusion that glues him to the spot. Ultimately, by drawing upon Henri Bergson’s concept of duration, the essay suggests that the viewership of time sculpture allows for a heightened state of perception
"The Man of these Infinite Possibilities": Max Ernst’s Cinematic Collages
Full text linkOn more than one occasion in his critical writings of the 1920’s, surrealist leader André Breton compared Max Ernst’s collages to cinema. In his first essay on the artist in 1921, Breton aligned Ernst’s collages with cinematic special effects such as slow and accelerated motion, and spoke of the illusionistic ‘transformation from within’ that characterized Ernst’s constructed scenes. For Breton, Ernst’s collages employing found commercial, scientific and journalistic images approximated the naturalistic movement of film, and thereby contributed to the radical obsolescence of traditional two-dimensional media such as painting and drawing, which remained frozen in stillness. Thus, Ernst’s images were provocative witnesses to the way in which modern technology fundamentally altered the perspectivally-ordered picture plane. But at the same time that Ernst’s collages rendered painting obsolete, they likewise depended upon fragments of outmoded popular culture themselves. For Breton, Ernst was a magician, “the man of these infinite possibilities,” comparable to cinematic prestidigators like turn-of-the-century filmmaker Georges Méliès. By drawing on the influence of recently outmoded popular culture such as early trick films, Ernst provides a crucial early example of the post-war fixation on counter-temporalities and anti-production. At once technologically advanced and culturally archeological, Ernst’s collages cannily defy strict categorization as “Modernist.
From “Modern” to “Contemporary”: A Case in Post-Cultural Revolutionary Art
Full text linkThis paper was to have been Wu Hung’s contribution to the conference “Contemporaneity in the History of Art” at the Sterling and Francine Clark Institute, Williamstown, Mass., October 8 and 9, 2009. However, he was unable to attend. The paper is presented here in the form in which it would have been presented. See also, in this issue of Contemporaneity, notes from this conference by its convener, Terry Smith
Re-Composing the Digital Present
Full text linkThis paper investigates the temporality that is produced in some recent and historical examples of media art. In exploring works by Janet Cardiff, Dennis Del Favero, and Omer Fast, I use the philosophy of Michel Serres and Gilles Deleuze to understand the convergence of temporalities that are composed in the digital present, as one moment in time overlays another moment. Developing Serres\u27 concept of multi-temporality and Deleuze\u27s philosophy of time and memory into a means to understand the non-linear time presented in these works, I argue that the different compositional strategies enacted by these artists provide the aesthetic grounding to experience “temporal thickness.” From here I investigate the interactive digital artworks Frames by Grahame Weinbren and Can You See Me Now? by the artist group Blast Theory. In this investigation, I understand interaction with technology, and the way that it shapes our sensory and processual experience, as a specifically temporal and temporalizing transaction, where human movements in the present are overlayed by technological processes
Review: Anachronic Renaissance by Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood
Full text linkA review of Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood’s book Anachronic Renaissance, published in 2010 by Zone Books