Imaginations (Journal)
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A SURREAL LANDSCAPE OF DEVASTATION: AN ANALYSIS OF LEE MILLER’S GRIM GLORY PHOTOGRAPHS OF THE LONDON BLITZ
Get PDFAs surrealist war documents, Lee Miller’s war photographs of the London Blitz, published in Ernestine Carter’s Grim Glory: Pictures of Britain Under Fire (1941), effectively demonstrate what Susan Sontag referred to as “a beauty in ruins”. Miller’s Blitz photographs may be deemed aesthetically significant by considering her Surrealist background and by analyzing her images within the context of André Breton’s theory of “convulsive beauty”. Therefore, this essay aims to demonstrate how Miller’s photographs not only depict the chaos and destruction of Britain during the Blitz, they also expose Surrealism’s love of strange, evocative or humorous juxtapositions in the form of artistic visual representations of a temporary surreal landscape filled with fallen statues and broken typewriters
CONTEMPORARY ARAB MUSIC VIDEO CLIPS: BETWEEN SIMULATING MTV’S GENDER STEREOTYPES AND FOSTERING NEW ONES
Get PDFMTV was the first 24-hour cable network to continuously broadcast music videos in the 1980s, thus establishing the genre. Generally, Arab music video clips differ from Western-produced music videos, because artists are compelled to abide by the conservative cultural norms of Arab societies. However, most Arab music videos, particularly those produced in the last decade, reaffirm Western gender stereotypes intrinsic to those produced by MTV. Contemporary Arab music videos for the most part simulate an MTV aesthetic vocabulary of a gaze that features female sexuality and narratives of seduction. Some new Arab producers, nonetheless, have attempted to avoid reproducing MTV-based gender clichés, but have instead created new gender misconceptions. These productions emphasize depictions of women as untrustworthy and impetuous. Finally, I discuss how young Arab singers have constantly been confronted by the ire of regionally prominent religious figures who denounce the music videos’ endorsement of “anti-Islamic” principles. I contend that Stuart Hall and Paddy Whannel’s early analysis of reactions against popular music styles among British youth as a form of cultural transgression remains relevant to understanding the cultural style of Arab youth as expressed through popular musical performance
MOTHERHOOD AND THE MEDIA UNDER THE MICROSCOPE: THE BACKLASH AGAINST FEMINISM AND THE MOMMY WARS
Get PDFDespite the passing of sexual discrimination legislation, the difficulty of combining work and motherhood repeatedly hits the headlines. This paper looks at the American media phenomenon known as the ‘mommy wars’ and asks if British mothers can expect to face the same issues and attitudes as their American sisters
“WE ARE RESILIENT BY FORCE, NOT BY CHOICE”: TERRIFYING BOMBAY IN NEW BOLLYWOOD CINEMA
Get PDFAs the home of the Hindi film industry, Bombay has occupied center stage in Bollywood’s imaginary of the modern metropolis. Over the last decade, however, cinematic representations of Bombay have undergone drastic transformations: from being the terrain of gang warfare in the 80s and 90s, the cinematic city has become the primary target and habitat of global terrorism. Bollywood’s rendition of a city perpetually under siege resonates with the series of attacks that have plagued the hapless metropolis since 1993. I interrogate Bollywood’s shifting relationship with its hometown and its audiences via two landmark films—A Wednesday and Aamir (2008). I am especially interested in the dialectics of ordinariness and extraordinariness that inflect articulations of the city and its citizenry. In both films a ‘common’ individual is called upon to perform uncommon tasks in order to negotiate the space of potential devastation that is now Bombay. Spectacular performances of technologies and stylistic devices generate the cinematic city as an affective locus of dread. I pay special attention to cinematography and editing, which enable the filmic figuration of the city in these recent films
PERCEPTIONS OF JEWISH FEMALE BODIES THROUGH GUSTAV KLIMT AND PETER ALTENBERG
Get PDFGustav Klimt and Peter Altenberg are two figures within Viennese fin-de-siècle cultural production whose art may reveal a perception of local Jewish culture through their different foci on the non-European female body image. Both men have moments in their career, when their attention turns to non-European cultures, through which they inadvertently represent and interpret their own. A selection of these two artists’ most well-known works demonstrate two frameworks in which Viennese Jewishness can be read through an alignment of the female body with Asian and African cultures
A SCALE THAT EXCEEDS US: THE BP GULF SPILL FOOTAGE AND PHOTOGRAPHS OF EDWARD BURTYNSKY
Get PDFOur fascination with the surveillance video of oil gushing from the British Petroleum Gulf Spill in 2010 expresses a paradox: our ultimate irrelevance to technological progress apparently undertaken for our benefit, in our name, and in response to our demand. These images present a visual model for all future disasters: here, something is happening but nothing is changing. This picture of disaster without progression and syntax has been witnessed before but only on stage, in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Endgame. Art has mustered only a weak rejoinder to the subdued shudder inspired by the BP video. Our fascination with the BP footage is echoed faintly in our response to Edward Burtynsky’s OIL. In his photographs of the petroleum industry, Burtynsky removes the human measuring stick, thereby triggering our sense of the enormity (both of the size and of the crime) of the petroleum industry. Yet unlike the BP video, these images recuperate our horror at the obscure scale of what they show us. Instead of recoiling from Burtynsky’s work, the viewer is placated through an appreciation for the artist’s control of his medium and its iconic language
PORTRAITS D’UN IMAGINAIRE DE L’AVANT-GARDE : LE CARRÉ NOIR SUR FOND BLANC DE KAZIMIR MALEVITCH ET SES RÉINCARNATIONS ARTISTIQUES
Get PDFKazimir Malevitch’s “Black Square” (1915) is one of the most recycled paintings in recent art history. More or less successfully, respectfully or ironically, artists from all around have gleefully reproduced it, ridiculed it, embezzled it and recycled it. In Russia, such has been the gravity of this phenomenon for the last thirty years, so that, it led to contemporary Russian art not being perceived as derived from Malevitch but on Malevitch. By retracing the long and tumultuous history of “Black Square” and its numerous artistic ‘reincarnations,’ this essay focuses on what these practices of reproduction tell us about the attitude of artists towards “Black Square” itself but also, perhaps mainly, about their relationship to an avant-garde with a controversial heritage of which this painting became the icon
TARHANDS: A MESSY MANIFESTO
Get PDFThis essay attempts to make visible the physical reality of the Athabasca oil sands mining developments in Canada, a reality that has been occluded by corporate and governmental disinformation as well as by citizens’ unwillingness to face the consequences of their actions and their inaction. By presenting photographs of oil sands mining operations interspersed with brief ironic narratives, aphorisms and poems, the essay creates a collage of disjunctive responses to the contemporary situation in the Canadian petro-state. Given that this situation is one of national self-deception, denial and fundamentally irrational behavior, the paper sets aside any attempt to make reasoned arguments about conservation or regulation, and instead embraces irrationality as the last possible mode of engagement with a contemporary public that will no longer listen to reason. In tone and structure the essay echoes F. T. Marinetti’s 1909 “Futurist Manifesto,” but it is very different in its intent, mapping a way toward a different kind of future than the technologized and hyper-individualistic one that Marinetti espoused. By moving into the realm of the irrational and engaging with Canadian petroculture as an expression of a kind of national unconscious, the essay attempts to reveal some of the psychological structures that prevent Canadians from seeing the dirt that is on their hands