100 research outputs found
Spittle, dust, and flies: documents and tuberculosis in the visual culture of interwar France
No full textThe avant-garde journal Documents (Paris, 1929–1931) was an interdisciplinary endeavour. The editorial board consisted of ethnographers, archaeologists, art collectors, and art historians. Among the regular contributors were a group of recently ex-communicated Surrealists. Dubbed the journal's secrétaire général was Georges Bataille, a notoriously slippery character in the avant-garde scene. The result was eclectic: photographs of a Parisian slaughterhouse, stills from Hollywood films and displays of archaeological finds all shared space. In art historical discourse, following Rosalind Krauss’ formative interpretation of the journal, cemented in the 1980s and 1990s, Documents’ criticality tends to be identified in deconstructionist terms: as a text that enacts a radical displacement of meaning by sabotaging the very processes of meaning-production. Seeking to instead establish a historicised understanding of the journal's critical work, this chapter re-inserts Documents into the visual culture of interwar France and re-interprets it through the pragmatist semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce – a theory that locates the process of semiosis in the social use of signs. Focussing on a specific set of signs reproduced in Documents – ‘spittle’, ‘dust’, and ‘flies’ – that, once identified as the primary vehicles for microbial tuberculosis contagion, circulated widely in public health campaigns, political discourse, and popular culture, this chapter suggests that the critical function they enacted within Documents was fuelled not by a deconstructionist capacity to collapse semiosis but by the very particular, charged currency they carried in culture, subversively re-disseminated to avant-garde ends: a lethal threat to the stability, order, and progress of the Third Republican organism
Contexts: modernity, hygiene, and contagion
No full textThis chapter introduces the interdisciplinary context surrounding issues of hygiene and contagion within European modernity c. 1880–1945. Fleshing out the complex web of political, ideological, cultural, and social ambitions, as well as anxieties, informing these hygienic tropes and the accompanying matrix of motifs – for example, infection, bacteria, microbes, germs, bacilli, contamination, and transmission – this chapter situates such issues within a conflicted space where sober observation and paranoid projections are entangled; a space that is, at once, proudly guided by the ideals of rationality and objectivity and, at the very same time, a fertile site of projection for all kinds of anguished fears – real and imagined. Such paradoxical duality mirrors that of modernity itself, experienced as a simultaneous promise of regeneration and as a menacing threat of degeneration. In this way, this chapter sets out a framework – historical as well as theoretical – for the exploration of how and to what critical effect these motifs of hygiene and contagion, and the charged currencies they carried in culture, were mobilised, repurposed, and subversively exploited to critical ends by the European avant-garde, as manifested across various media between c. 1880 and the Second World War
Contagion, Hygiene, and the European Avant-Garde
No full textThis interdisciplinary collection of essays brings together scholars in the fields of art history, theatre, visual culture, and literature to explore intersections between the European avant-garde (c. 1880–1945) and themes of health and hygiene, such as illness, contagion, cleanliness, and contamination.
Examining the artistic oeuvres of some of the canonical names of modern art – including Edgar Degas, Edvard Munch, Pablo Picasso, George Orwell, Marcel Duchamp, and Antonin Artaud – this book investigates instances where the heightened political, social, and cultural currencies embedded within issues of hygiene and contagion have been mobilised, and subversively exploited, to fuel the critical strategy at play. This edited volume promotes an interdisciplinary and socio-historically contextualised understanding of the criticality of the avant-garde gesture and cultivates scholarship that moves beyond the limits of traditional academic subjects to produce innovative and thought-provoking connections and interrelations across various fields.
The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, literature, theatre, cultural studies, modern history, medical humanities, and visual culture
Avant-garde hygiene and contagion: Artaud's ecology in the chemical century
No full textThis chapter tracks the transformations in the trope of what Lavery calls ‘avant-garde contagion’ in Artaud's thinking from his writing on the plague in the mid-1930s to the pesticidal attack on the US agri-military-industrial complex in 1947 – the year of the Marshall Plan. Where theatre is always figured by Artaud as a ‘contact zone’, a space for creaturely transformations and modifications, his aesthetic pharmacy is also a socio-political one, haunted, as it is, in the first instance, by the mustard gas of the First World War and, in the second, by a more complex, staggered ghosting: namely, the chemical contaminants and pathogens that European and US petrochemical corporations used to exterminate various unruly forms of non-human life as well as the spectres of the metabolic and human catastrophe of the Columbian exchange of the sixteenth century. At the root of this complex relation to contagion in Artaud's theatrical thought, there is always a larger microbe to consider: the theological contaminant of God, the paradoxical desire of western ontotheology to immunise itself against ‘infection’ by spreading disease on a planetary scale. Hence, the reason why cruelty, in Artaud's practice, is invariably double but never simply dialectical: a negation of a negation without sublation, the awareness that absolute inoculation is impossible, a futile but destructive chimera
SOURCE OF BOOKING DI PANAHOUSE SURABAYA
No full textThe purpose of writing this final project is to find out the source of
booking reservations at PanaHouse Surabaya is. The author made
observations at the Front Office Department of PanaHouse Surabaya.
From the discussion, it can be concluded that the source of booking at
PanaHouse Surabaya consists of Free Individual Travelers (FIT),
Companies, Government, Online Travel Agents. The biggest source of
bookings for the period January – March 2022 at PanaHouse Surabaya is
from Online Travel Agents
Kvinnligt eller manligt - En studie av könsbedömningsmetodernas utveckling för humant material
No full textThis study focuses on the development of methods for sexual determination of human skeletal remains, mainly between the years 1981 to 2007. By comparing an older analysis from 1983 (Persson and Persson) with my own on the same material, a difference of 40% was shown, which indicates that the methods has changed through time, and that these should not be used for newer conclusions about a population if the method is not throughoutly described. The main cause of the difference was identified as a change in the reliability of the sexual indicators, rather than a total change of method. Any general tendencies did not show, it is however considered that the pelvic bones are able to make a better conformity between the analyses as opposed to using the cranium
Measurement of the Reynolds Stresses in a Circular Pipe as a Means of Testing a DISA Constant-Temperature Hot-Wire Anemometer
No full textMeasurements of the turbulent stresses in fully-developed pipe flow have been made as an overall test of the DISA constant-temperature hot-wire anemometer. The measurements were made with single slanting wires and a normal wire. The shearing stress was measured at two Reynolds numbers and compared with values computed from the pressure drop down the pipe: an accuracy of 10% or better was achieved. The computed longitudinal and transverse normal stresses were in good agreement with the measurements of Laufer. It was confirmed that the heat loss from the wire varied linearly with U^0.45 (Collis' law) rather than U^0.50 (King's law)
Historicising Documents (1929-1931): a Parisian avant-garde journal and the visual culture of interwar France
No full textThe avant-garde journal Documents (Paris, 1929-1931) was an interdisciplinary endeavour, involving ethnographers, archaeologists, art collectors, and art historians. Among the regular contributors were a number of former adherents to André Breton’s Surrealist group. In the role of secrétaire général was Georges Bataille, a notoriously slippery character in the avant-garde scene. The resulting magazine was sprawling, subversively mixing the mainstream and the marginal. In art historical discourse, following Rosalind Krauss’ formative interpretation of the journal, Documents’ criticality tends to be identified in deconstructionist terms: as a text that enacts a radical displacement of meaning by sabotaging the very processes of meaning-production. The radical heterogeneity championed across its pages is thus decontextualised, abstracted to a purely linguistic domain far removed from the materiality of lived experience. Seeking to instead establish a historicised understanding of the journal’s critical work and to explore how it positioned itself as an avant-garde text by critically negotiating, in image and text, various ideologically charged themes in discourse, this thesis re-inserts Documents into the visual culture of interwar France and re-interprets it through the pragmatist semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce – a theory that locates the process of semiosis in the social use of signs.
Focussing on the journal’s critical treatment of three areas where French fragilities were felt to be particularly prominent in the interwar period – the perceived feeble health and strength of the nation (Chapter 1), America’s increasing dominance and the influx of Hollywood films (Chapter 2), as well as the seemingly fragile built space of Paris (Chapter 3) – this thesis resituates various signs mobilised in Documents within their socio-cultural contexts, excavates the currency they carried in culture through extensive examination of primary materials e.g., contemporary press, advertisements, political debate, official campaigns, etc. Subsequently, it will be argued that the journal actively intervened into infected debates only to disruptively redeploy the anguished signs and motifs they encompassed to dissident ends. Indeed, once reinterpreted through a different theoretical and methodological framework, once recontextualised and rehistoricised, a critical strategy very different from that identified in the prevailing deconstructionist identification emerges. This is one that did not work to sabotage meaning-production but to subversively participate in such cultural processes. This is a strategy whose criticality stemmed not from an unveiling of the undecidability of signs or a reduction of meaning but, on the contrary, from radical re-dissemination of the heightened meaning those signs carried in culture. Diffusing motifs that troubled topical Third Republican anxieties – tuberculosis microbes, monstruous children, Hollywood talkies, and American skyscrapers; defunct sewage systems, slaughterhouses, statuary programmes, and Parisian slums - Documents, however, not only prodded and pressurised French wounds. It enacted a critical recalibration of reality too. The transgressive heterogeneity promoted by the journal, a critical philosophy developed by Bataille during the Documents-years, operated not on the level of language but on the level of experience, within the fabric of life. Signs, wrapped up in and charged by their use in anguished discourses, were strategically re-circulated to expose a counter-portrayal of humanity, decidedly deglorified and incongruously heterogenous
Historicising the Monstrous: Georges Bataille’s ‘Les écarts de la nature’ (1930), Pronatalism and French Eugenics in the Interwar Period
No full textIn 1930, six teratological illustrations of children, victims of infant mortality or stillborn, appeared in the avant-garde magazine Documents. Nuancing the deconstructionist reception of the journal, this essay historicises Documents’ ‘monstrous’ children, returning them to the visual culture of interwar France to reinterpret their criticality. Once resituated within such an image economy, the avant-garde strategy that emerges hinges not on an ability to displace signification but on the legibility of an anxiety-laden motif, radically repurposed. Indeed, permeated by fears of impending depopulation, the image of the infant occupied charged territory in Third Republican France. Consequently, French eugenicists too anchored their rhetoric in this anguished terrain. When Documents intervened in France’s longstanding obsession with the child, its ideological currency was agitated. The political programme that it upheld was subverted. As Georges Bataille joyously announced alongside the teratological illustrations, all eugenics proved was that each ‘individual’, unable to meet its ultra-utopian ideals, is ‘a monster’
An Imperial Story: Paul Gauguin and the Idealised ‘Primitive’
No full textThis article examines the relationship between the French fin-de-siècle painter Paul Gauguin’s (1848-1903) anti-modernism and the ideology behind the colonial project. Setting out to refute the Western materialistic ‘civilisation’, Gauguin embraced the supposed savage, primitive, and pure ‘Other’. In paintings such as ‘Breton Calvary’ (1889) and ‘The Specter Watches Her’ (1892), Gauguin uses Breton farmers and Tahitian women as formal embodiments of his imagined ‘earthly paradise’ and the primordial ‘savage’ character. However, as the postmodern philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-1984) argues, there is always a relationship of power within a discourse. Through defining what is ‘primitive’ and what is ‘civilised’ from within a Western paradigm, Gauguin is testifying to a Western hegemony. Though Gauguin’s idealisation of the ‘primitive’ essentially sought to criticise the Western colonial discourse, it essentially reinforces its main ideological justification: the hierarchical dichotomy between the ‘primitive’ and the ‘civilised’
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