An apocryphal tale
More...Keywords: performance and repetition; reference; sense; indexing grammar; documentation; remediation; networked distribution; memory; trauma; assemblages; art of assamblage; moving image; expanded documentary
More...I am standing before this great painting, leaning close as I can over the low cordon, my face all but touching the paint. I am reminded of how Dostoevsky was also afraid of being reprimanded. And that it was also a painting by Holbein that Fyodor Mikhaylovich was beholding. It was 12 August 1867, a muggy summer afternoon at the Basel Gallery. He mounted a chair so as to take a closer look at The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb, then just stared at it transfi xed for fi fteen or twenty minutes. “I was worried he would be punished, for everything here carries a punishment”, Dostoevsky’s wife recalls in her memoirs.
More...Keywords: Lodz as an archive; Łódź; Daria Kubiak; Kim Skjoldager-Nielsen; Museum as a Repository; Local Identity; Social Capital; Audience development; exhibition design; visitor; performance studies; audience development; local identity; social capital
With the performative turn in the humanities, researching the exhibition visitor’s experience has gained ground in museology and arts studies, the notion of an exhibition as something that is performed by the visitor being the crux. Questions like how does the design of an exhibition affect the visitor during the visit, and what does s/he get out of the visit have been raised. This paper explores different strategies of exhibition design from the performance studies approach – the exhibition seen as a staging of the visitor performing the exhibition. The main focus is on how audience development can be a tool for audience emancipation through design and how can a design allow for social inclusion and become a “theatre for development”. In this sense emancipation must strategically rely on the topos or geographical place of the exhibition, in order to speak to the local sense of identity. To make this point we have chosen to analyse two exhibitions in Łódź that for cultural reasons seem to be either uniquely associated with this city (even Poland) or located in a site that poses interesting possibilities for reaching new attendees, namely the Film Museum neighbouring the world-famous Łódź Film School and ms², part of Museum of Arts in Łódź, which exhibits collections of 20th and 21st Century art next to the central shopping and entertainment venue Manufaktura. From the audience development point of view, these museums have potential as repositories for Bourdieusian social capital and local identity, which is readily available to large audiences. Or are they?
More...Keywords: Malevich; Suprematist projecting concept; Suprematist order; international artistic style; architektonа
The paper deals with the semiotics and projecting ideology born within the early 20th century Russian avant-garde movement. V. Kandinsky, M. Larionov, P. Filonov, M. Matiushin, K. Malevich, V. Tatlin were the first artists to step away from representational painting and lay the foundations for nonobjective art. But it was Malevich who applied the new radical approach to three-dimensional art forms and architecture introducing a new form of artistic expression released from the constraints of objectivity. Devoid of meaning, the Supremacists form served to create a new reality on the basis of modular approach both in the two-dimensional and three-dimensional arts and design. Thus, the foundations for a new international art language were laid, making artistic form a universal symbol, and the Suprematist order spread, widely reproduced, closely studied and analyzed. The Suprematist basic forms have been used to create various objects in the field of architecture and design. Seen in this light, the legacy of the early 20th-century art greatly contributes to the vision of design nowadays and shows its prospects, broadening artists’ horizons.
More...Among Valentin Timaru’s theoretical works, we encounter three volumes Aforisme: comentarii și confesiuni (Aphorisms: Comments and Confessions), Muzica noastră cea spre ființă (Our Life-Giving Music), and Frumosul artistic și fațetele sale subiective (Artistic Beauty and Its Subjective Facets), which are approached contextually, in an essayistic, personalized style. The author’s manner of speech often encloses subjective aspects gathered during his lifetime experience, but nevertheless the proposed debate involves a vast knowledge of various stringent (general) artistic, artistic-musical, philosophical, aesthetic, and psychological issues (behavioural conducts and human feelings). In essayistic style because not all aspects required in the elaboration of such a study are observed ad litteram. The large sizes of the works enable us to approach their subjects from various perspectives, advising the reader in perceiving the themes microscopically as well as synoptically.
More...Theatre review of M.I.S.A. PĂRUT, by Alexa Bacanu, a production of Reactor, Cluj, directed by Dragoș Alexandru Muşoiu and Reacting Chernobyl, based on texts by Svetlana Aleksievici and Wladimir Tchertkoff, a production of Varoterem Project, dramaturgy by Raluca Sas-Marinescu, directed by Cosmin Matei
More...Keywords: Nikola Dobrović;regional context;Herceg Novi;urban identity;Montenegro;Herceg Novi;Croatia;Dubrovnik;Czech Republic;Prague
In the conditions of current globalization trends, the creation of a new European political and spatial context and the expression of regional cultural differences, a need has emerged to redefine cultural and urban identity. Spatial-cultural identity is particularly strong in settings enriched by a recognisable geo-climate and cultural and built heritage such as the Adriatic Coast, with specific emphasis on the Bay of Kotor (Boka Kotorska) and Herceg Novi, its largest town. The main subject of the this paper is the architecture of Nikola Dobrović as realised during the 1960s and 1970s in Herceg Novi. Ranging from the first town planning of Herceg Novi, and plans for the central town zone to a large corpus of unaccomplished projects and several realised buildings, it represents an illustrative response to the context and new programme visions. All this work was carried out in the context of the dynamic post-war development of the town and the architectural paradigms valid in that period.The general goal of this paper is to define and explain the character and scope of the works of Nikola Dobrović in Herceg Novi, through analysis of their relation to the regional context. Additionally, a comparison is made with his early contextual sensitivity demonstrated in the project examples of Dubrovnik. The final goal of this paper is to raise awareness of the significance of 20th-century architectural heritage as a valid element of urban identity, a source of inspiration and creativity of future generations, as well as a supply of usable and current project methods in building the urban landscape of a coastal town.
More...Keywords: theater; television; art, communication; information;
The present article is a brief presentation of the way the development of the post – modern society influences the manner in which the performing arts must reference modernitys' contribution to contemporary society. Information overload has cultivated a selective assimilation mechanism in the audience, which theater couldn't ignore, adapting its' means of expression to captivate the spectator.This creates a need for balance between theater as pure emotion and the avalanche of digital information which dominates communication and art, in general. The audiences' impaired taste has driven the performing arts down a superficial slope, where the motor of a play must be visual at any cost.
More...Keywords: architecture;image;sacred space
Aim. The subject of this work is reduction of architecture complexity to particular image, deprived of its context and time. The author aims to present the problem of perceiving architecture through visual experience only. Methods. The author of the article describes the process of reduction basing on example of iconic sacred building – Church if the Light, designed by Japanese architect Tadao Ando. The analysis of all stages of transformation and reinterpretation of original complex design is conducted. The aim is to indicate how misrepresentation of design and reduction to particular image was transferred to architecture once again. Results and Conclusion. The essential conclusion of the article is the impact and power of image culture. The author of the article indicates how contemporary world of pictures influences human perception of space and limit it to one sense – sight.
More...Keywords: IMS Žeželj; technology export; post-colonial assistance; Non-Aligned;
After fifteen years of helping Angola’s decolonization struggle, in 1976 Yugoslav Committee for Technical Assistance came to Luanda, to negotiate the technical assistance to Angolan people. They had discovered the factory of the IMS Žeželj housing technology, brought in 1975 by Cubans - one of three facilities Yugoslavia had delivered to Cuba during 1960s, and based assistance around this factory. Already in 1977 a well-trained crew of builders, accompanied by architect Ivan Petrović, arrives to Luanda. Alongside, from Belgrade, documents are traveling: a project named “Lixeira-Luanda Experimental Construction Site of IMS Technology” as a tool of postcolonial and Non-Aligned assistance.
More...Keywords: theater;society;communitas;
Introduction to the essay cluster "Theater and Communitas."
More...Keywords: communitas; avant-garde theater; non-performance; excess; uselessness; queer community;transversality;
The term communitas, introduced into anthropological discourse by Victor Turner in the late 1960s, returned to humanist debates at the threshold of the twenty-first century by way of Roberto Esposito. Referring to Esposito’s concept of communitas, this essay brings out the anthropological tradition in thinking about the common, which Esposito had marginalized. The present author emphasized the importance of processuality and antistructural dimensions of egalitarian forms of togetherness, along with their potential to liberate human capacities of creativity. Examining the relation between munus and ludus, she shows theatricality residing immanently in the root of communitas. Focusing on the aesthetic and creative dimensions of togetherness helps in detecting multiple forms of commonality, and indicates various models of theatrical communitas. Exploring a nonnormative, transformative potential in experimental theater (Jerzy Grotowski, Sarah Kane, Ron Athey, Krzysztof Garbaczewski), she emphasizes collective, temporal, and excessive natures of theater that eschews the market-driven economy, along with the importance of a transversal communitas where the human being is only one of many actors. Some threads of the argumentation are expanded upon in a conversation with Leszek Kolankiewicz, included as an appendix.
More...Teatr Dramatyczny im. Jerzego Szaniawskiego, Wałbrzych: "Lady of Pestilence" (Pani Moru); written and directed by Sebastian Majewski; choreography by Wojciech Marek Kozak; premiered on September 4th, 2020
More...Keywords: Art and Documentation; Socialist Realism; Overseas Exhibitions; Polish School of Posters
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