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Wounds and Willful Objects: Art, Abject Sorrow and Adorno’s Totality
No full textAdorno’s conception of “serious art” posits that art rejects mimesis, has autonomy from the world as well as from itself but can, however, simultaneously be about the world. Autonomy, from my vantage, has always signaled will, volition, positive and negative freedom. Positive freedom being freedom from internal restraints—the art being autonomous from itself—while negative freedom is freedom from external restraints—the art being autonomous from the world. My interest here is directly implicated in Adorno’s totality. This totality, I posit, is the culture industry. However, through the course of this essay I argue that film’s that prompt abject sorrow—or perhaps anxiety—can rupture or go un-subsumed by this totality. This rejection of subsumption, I posit, implicated in what Sara Ahmed calls “willful objects”. To demonstrate this I take as my objects, Sean Baker’s 2017 film The Florida Project, Steve McQueen’s 2009 Hunger and Jonathon Demme’s 1991 The Silence of the Lambs. The integral aspect to the potential rupturing of the culture industry, and what I ultimately hope to explicate, is through the duration of affect in the body of the spectator by the film. Time is made insignificant by the culture industry; I endeavor to make it significant again
Disneyland and the American Frontiers: A Timeless Utopia
Get PDFIn 1955, Disneyland opened its doors and the American public descended into the fantastical world of Walt Disney. While Disneyland corresponded to the company's growing brand as a movie-making empire, it also reflected the way that the original American colonies and the ever-developing Western frontier shaped the American mindset. Based on the arguments of Louis Marin in his 1984 book Utopics: Spatial Play, this essay builds upon his statement that Disneyland “is the representation realized in a geographical space of the imaginary relationship that the dominant groups of American society maintain with their real conditions of existence, with the real history of the United States, and with the space outside of its borders." Through an analysis of the park's layout and select relevant cultural case studies such as the Monsanto House of the Future (1957), John Turner's Frontier Thesis, and John F. Kennedy's rhetoric in the early sixties, this essay looks to understand how Disneyland visually manifests distinctly American narratives and how these mythologies contribute to the theatrical distortion of reality in the park
The Challenge of Depicting Divinity: Stefano da Putignano’s Trinity
Get PDFStefano da Putignano’s Trinity (1520) depicts Jesus on the cross placed between the legs of an enthroned God the Father with the dove of the Holy Spirit connecting the two. Located in the small southern Italian city of Turi, this painted stone statue is one of the earliest examples of a human-sized statue of God the Father. It is unique in its medium and method but also fits into a larger discourse from this period on representing the ineffable.
The Hebrew Bible claims that the worship of any idol, whether “in heaven above, or earth beneath” is strictly forbidden (Exodus, 20:2-6). From the very beginning of the Christian faith, the destruction of idols and denouncement of idolatry was a symbol of Christian triumph over Paganism. The Renaissance marked a significant change in devotional practices. The discourse of artists and intellectuals expanded the way humans conceived of and interacted with embodied divinity.
Through significant visual comparison, this project fits Stefano’s Trinity into the iconographic tradition of representing God and the Trinity and incorporates that into a larger discussion on idolatry and the role of devotional images in the Italian Renaissance. It outlines the changing discourse around images both in artistic and religious contexts. Analyzing the Trinity, it questions how an artist can capture the unknowable qualities of God and how His embodiment in stone changes not only the way we see but interact with the statue. Through an exploration of idolatry, this project serves as a case study on the limits of representing the bodily divine in the Renaissance
Flat Tire
Get PDFFlattened, the tire was. Pedalling with great strength, I push myself forward in the country road illuminated by lonely street lamps, leading the front tire—headstrong—advancing. Trailing behind, the synthetic black rubber greets the asphalt paved road with a kiss from a frail body. In turn, a bathetic road rash of a romance cut short by the jealous effort of the front wheel..
Faith, Memory, and Barnyard Foul: The Hen and Chicks Sculpture of the Basilica di Giovanni Battista at Monza
Get PDFWithin the treasury of the Basilica di San Giovanni Battista, in Monza, Northern Italy, one object stands out: a golden statue of a hen, surrounded by her seven chicks, all placidly pecking grain from a large disk (figure 1). According to local tradition, the hen and her brood were discovered in the thirteenth century within the sarcophagus of Queen Theodelinda (c. 570-628 C.E.), when her remains were transferred from their original resting place in the chapel of her sixth-century palace to Monza’s newly-built basilica. Among the remnants of medieval treasuries that have managed to survive to the present day, the hen is undoubtedly an unusual piece. Yet it is often described as unique, “un unicum assoluto” without any point of comparison —an assertion that is patently untrue
Framing Parmigianino
Get PDFThis paper will examine two works by Parmigianino in different media, in particular the Bardi Altarpiece, and Design for an Altarpiece in its Frame, which were completed at the beginning of his career.T hrough the reconsideration of Parmigianino’s use of parergon and ergon as discussed by Jacques Derrida, and of specific artistic elements, I will assert that these two works were meant to be displayed together. These works, I argue, shed light onto the artist’s creative process, his understanding of the nature of frames, and his thinking about centre and border of the images. I will demonstrate why the similarities and connections that these two works share are too intertwined to not inherently go together; as they can be seen as the harmonious amalgamation of ergon and parergon
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
This Glass Thing: Empty, full, solid, liquid; an exercise in paradoxical thing(k)ing
No full textDrawing together the writings of Georg Theiner and Chris Drain; Andy Clark; Martin Heidegger and Susan Sontag; and relying heavily on the historical and archeological research of Robert Brill and Julian Henderson, this paper presents the flask not as a simple museum artefact, but as a container that ultimately keeps an imprint of the person who made it
Interiors That Conform to Our Existence: Eileen Gray, Evelyn Wyld, Eyre de Lanux, and Sapphic Primitivism in Interwar Paris
No full textIn the interwar period, Paris was the centre for Sapphic Modernism and was recognized as the capital of same-sex love and creative intellectualism. Numerous lesbian women moved to Paris during this period to pursue careers in painting, writing, design, and architecture. The city provided them an opportunity to live more openly and to form creative and social networks. This era was also the apogee of French colonialism, and many prominent creatives living and working in Paris engaged philosophically and artistically with primitivist ideas and aesthetics. Simultaneously, growing interwar concerns about French national stability focused on the relationship between the health of the nation, normative sexuality, and racial purity. The emerging field of sexology established strong associations between the primitive Other and homosexuality, an association that was taken up by Europeans seeking to understand and define their own sexual difference
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