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Looking at the Overlooked. Four Essays on Still Life Painting
... Charles Sterling (1952), Norman Bryson (1990) Os gregos descobriram um outro domínio da natureza-morta que ocupa até os dias de hoje diversos artistas: a pintura de flores. Plínio exemplifica este fato do início do período helenístico por meio da charmosa anedota de Pausias, que rivaliza com sua mestre Glysera, hábil em trançar guirlandas, "e consegue reproduzir em pintura a variedade extrema de tipos de flores". ...
... A consciência da cultura e do imaginário não-ocidental, além da cultura material na sua maior parte, expandiram ainda mais o repertório de seus temas, enquanto a escolha de objetos em si muitas vezes estava subordinada à distribuição deles no espaço. (GALLAGHER, 2004, p. 6) Dessa forma, mais do que uma mensagem subliminar nos elementos escolhidos para compôr a cena e mais do que a própria composição em si, o artista agora se preocupava em usar o gênero pictórico para estudar e comparar propostas estéticas diferentes, exatamente porque a natureza-morta oferecia uma capacidade de isolar um espaço puramente estético, como afirma Bryson (1990). Por essa possibilidade, o gênero se tornou central no modernismo. ...
... Ao fundo, uma parede amadeirada e uma toalha branca decorada complementam a composição (figura 11). Norman Bryson (1990) analisa essa obra como uma pintura que tenta funcionar não em conjunto de todos os elementos, mas isoladamente. Cada figura apresenta individualmente uma proposta estética. ...
O pintor italiano do início do século XX Filippo de Pisis criou, ao longo de aproximadamente quarenta anos, composições de natureza-morta sobre a praia, com a paisagem litorânea de plano de fundo: mar, horizonte, céu e, por vezes, uma figura humana solitária contempladora. A frequência dessa produção e o destaque dado à paisagem apesar de as telas serem batizadas como natureza-morta suscitam, em um primeiro momento, questionamentos a respeito da definição do conceito de natureza-morta, que se mostra complexo e flexível ao longo da história da arte, além de problematizar a tensão entre gêneros pictóricos. Mais do que uma simples sobreposição de gêneros – natureza-morta e paisagem –, a composição evidencia o interesse metafísico do pintor, que contribuiu na década de 1910 com a nascente proposta de Giorgio de Chirico. A Escola Metafísica não foi uma vanguarda e os artistas que participaram dela tiveram produções independentes, difíceis de serem aproximadas pela estética, mas similares para além do visível, por meio do deslocamento do sujeito da obra e da revelação do invisível. A partir disso, esta dissertação analisa a metafísica dos elementos praianos recorrentes da paisagem de Filippo de Pisis, em diálogo constante com o gênero de natureza-morta. A tensão entre os gêneros e a metafísica do italiano apontam para uma ressignificação da morte: não seria mais castigo aos humanos pecadores, mas a concretização da promessa divina de vida eterna.
... In particular, drawing upon James Heffernan's note that ekphrasis "must also open itself up to the vast body of writing about pictures which is commonly known as art criticism " (1991: 304), this paper pursues the extension of ekphrasis along the line of "genres" (Brosch, 2018: 225). Thus the material of the study is the essays about painting as visual art written in English by modern authors (Barnes, 2015(Barnes, /2017Berger, 2015;Bryson, 1990Bryson, /2018Hughes, 1987Hughes, /1992Hustvedt, 2005Hustvedt, /2006Writers on Artists, 2001). The relevance of this study is determined by its focus on the phenomenon of ekphrasis that has been exciting the growing interest of researchers. ...
... In particular, drawing upon James Heffernan's note that ekphrasis "must also open itself up to the vast body of writing about pictures which is commonly known as art criticism " (1991: 304), this paper pursues the extension of ekphrasis along the line of "genres" (Brosch, 2018: 225). Thus the material of the study is the essays about painting as visual art written in English by modern authors (Barnes, 2015(Barnes, /2017Berger, 2015;Bryson, 1990Bryson, /2018Hughes, 1987Hughes, /1992Hustvedt, 2005Hustvedt, /2006Writers on Artists, 2001). The relevance of this study is determined by its focus on the phenomenon of ekphrasis that has been exciting the growing interest of researchers. ...
... Self-reflexive schemata of ekphrasis are introduced in the Introductions to their collection of essays by Julian Barnes, Siri Hustvedt andRobert Hughes (Barnes, 2015/2017: 3-11;Hustvedt, 2005Hustvedt, /2006Hughes, 1987Hughes, /1992, in the Preface by John Berger (Berger, 2015: xi-xii) and in the Foreword by Norman Bryson (Bryson, 1990(Bryson, /2018. The collection of essays by different authors (Writers on Artists, 2001) includes the Foreword by A. S. Byatt (Byatt, 2001: 6) and the Introduction by Karen Wright (Wright, 2001: 7) which offer the self-reflexive schemata of ekphrasis. ...
... Such objects thus reveal that museums are not only a place where, as the adage would have it, objects come to die. 114 They are also a place where objects come to life. a solution for the privileged few: "Our bread indeed is but indifferent, occasiond bv the quantity of Vermin that are in it, I have often seen hundreds nay thousands shaken out of a single bisket. ...
... Here (again as Kant would have it) creativity adds to Nature but at a price. As Bryson (2001) put it in his analysis of Dutch still life paintings: "{N] othing is accepted as a gift in nature. The Labour of horticulture, the forcing of varieties […] it is as if the value of flowers were created by human effort alone" (p.110). ...
... Take, for instance, Juan Sánchez Cotán's Quince, Cabbage, Melon and Cucumber, where the vegetables are presented in the way that accentuates the geometrical relations between them. This was meant to stimulate religious contemplation (see Bryson 1990) and treating the items as something to be eaten is not a fitting response to that painting. ...
Enticing food photography which stimulates its viewers’ cravings, often given a dismissive label “food porn,” is one of the most popular contents in contemporary digital media. In this paper, I argue that the label disguises different ways in which a viewer can engage with it. In particular, food porn enables us to engage in cross-modal gustatory imaginings of a specific kind and an image’s capacity to afford such imaginings can contribute to its artistic merit.
... à tela) e o tecido narrativo é rasgado (Benamou 1959), parece construir-se, não apenas na imagem da enumeração de coisas sobre a mesa, mas na própria estrutura que dá consistência ao poema, uma natureza-morta. mesmo o quiasmo mencionado acima, que estruturaria as estrofes primeira e última, somado ao padrão antitético entre vida terrena e cenas supranaturais que percorre todas as estrofes (Benamou 1959), parecem invocar a relação opositiva entre ropografia -"representação daquelas coisas que carecem de importância, a base material despretensiosa da vida que a 'importância' constantemente ignora" (ou seja, a laranja, o café, a cacatua) -e megalografia -"representação das coisas do mundo que apresentam grandeza; as lendas dos deuses, as batalhas dos heróis, as crises da história" (o "ancient sacrifice", o "dominion of blood and sepulchre") (Bryson 1990: 61) 7 . a equalização de importância entre esses dois modos de mimese -alcançadas à mesma valoração por serem postas, juntas, em jogo -faz com que a escala narrativa da importância humana seja quebrada. ...
“Em grande medida, os problemas dos poetas são os problemas dos pintores, e os poetas devem não raro se voltar à literatura da pintura para uma discussão de seus próprios problemas” (Stevens 1957: 187). assim o poeta moderno estadunidense Wallace Stevens (1879 - 1955) descreve, ele próprio, sua relação com a pintura e seu posicionamento de que as duas artes são quase irremediavelmente conectadas. ainda que alguns de seus melhores críticos tendam a ignorar essa associação (entre eles estão Harold Bloom, Helen Vendler, Frank Kermode e Eleanor Cook), não é incomum que
análises de seus poemas e poética sejam atravessados por essa leitura. um dos poemas mais explorados nesse sentido é “Sunday morning” – publicado pela primeira vez em sua obra de estreia, Harmonium, de 1923 –, amplamente louvado como um dos melhores de toda a produção de Stevens. aqui, além de expor tais leituras, iremos apresentar uma tradução a este poema e propor outras leituras que o relacionem com diversos aspectos da arte pictórica e, em especial, com as naturezas-mortas.
... 3. Bai 1999 discusses the same topic. Scholars of Western art his tory have iden ti fied a sim i lar per spec tive in their exam i na tion of Dutch stilllife paint ings, which included hid den mean ings tied to the econ omy, polit i cal space, or con sumer moral ity (Bryson 1990). ...
This study explores the allegorical usage of hawk painting to praise a hero with meritorious deeds in Yuan China (1271–1368) and early Chosŏn Korea (1392–1910). Through an analysis of Yuan-dynasty poems inscribed on hawk paintings, this article demonstrates that paintings of a hawk sitting still on a tree in the woods conveyed the allegory of a hero subduing wily beings, such as rabbits and foxes. Moreover, Yuan paintings of a hawk and a bear (yingxiong 鷹熊) employed a Chinese rebus and represented the animals as heroes, comparing them to historical heroic and loyal figures. This article then turns to Chosŏn Korea, where two types of hawk paintings reflected the Korean reception of Yuan counterparts. One was the painting of a hawk sitting still, which indicated the hero's readiness for future achievements. Another, with the motif of a rabbit caught in the hawk's talons, emphasized the hero's successful achievements and gained popularity through the late Chosŏn dynasty. The Chinese and Korean allegories of heroic contributions emerged in response to complicated politics, as the Yuan government comprised multiple ethnic groups and the early Ming and early Chosŏn were newly established after the fall of previous dynasties. For the same reason, the hawk-hero allegory began to lose its relevance over time, and hawk paintings came to take on rather mundane meanings.
One reason why the concept of the quotidian has proved elusive to critics of literature and the visual arts is that the commonplace in art and literature so often refuses to remain untransfigured, not least because of its power to confront us with the material detritus with which we surround ourselves and which we will eventually join. It is not surprising, then, that contemporary artists share a preoccupation with finding both mortality and transcendence in what John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester called “the lumber of the world.” In this paper, I shall consider how an early Damien Hirst mini-installation, consisting of a glass tumbler of water and a ping-pong ball, takes its only partly mocking place in a still life tradition going back to Roman xenia and seventeenth-century vanitas paintings, and to a related literary tradition typified by Thomas Hardy’s Under the Waterfall and James Joyce’s great prose aria to water all its forms in the Ithaca section of Ulysses.
This chapter discusses Objects as Friends (2011) by the artists’ duo Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys, a series of 311 still life photographs showing strange configurations of banal objects, from theater garb and office supplies to bathroom accessories and trash. The chapter examines this work, and the artists’ practice at large, in relation to issues of depression, societal dysfunction, and photography theory. The first part discusses de Gruyter and Thys’ earlier videos, in which amateur actors or the artists’ family members play autist figures caught in claustrophobic spaces. The chapter maintains that de Gruyter and Thys’ provocative use of depression as a metaphor for a society in decline resonates with the pathology of culture by Spengler and Sedlmayr, thus hinting at the tension within this rhetoric. The second part looks at the artists’ photographic work made since the mid-2000s, and ultimately to Objects as Friends. Using theories of photography by Metz and Flusser, and showing echoes of the systematized, “factual” photography of Conceptual Art, the text aims to articulate how the artists’ meaningful uses of photography matches their videos and corresponds with their criticism of a conservative, depressed society from which man has withdrawn.
Scientific materialism reveals some aspects of nature but obscures others. As early modern naturalists sought to define pollen, pitcher plant, and armadillo, they separated them from other ecological and cultural landscapes that shaped their meanings. Simultaneously, alienation became more central to European science as it made experiment and empiricism the bedrock of the new science. For naturalists for whom travel was a challenge, in order to complete an empirical study, alienation of the natural thing was a necessity. Knowing is a world making practice: through knowing, historical actors “make the worlds they know.” By building on the recent ontological and material turns in scholarship, the natural things examined are in-between concepts, objects, and materials. Natural Things features object biographies as nonhuman nature passed into human hands. Through the paradoxical process of alienation as both an extractive and a generative force in knowledge construction, natural things transformed, were transformed, and transformed others.
The purpose of this article is to make some reflections about a specific type of art that, in a large part of its history, was especially concerned with the issues of death and the transience of existence: still-life paintings, especially those made by the Dutch in the 17th century. For that, it is necessary to retrace a path about the history of this genre, to then analyze the works of the period, and, in them, visualize the symbolic universes that alert us to the brevity of existence
Focusing on the objects left behind when a person dies, this chapter reflects upon the history of a life as evidenced in the wounds and scars distinguishing personal possessions from commodities. Using photographic practice as a ritual of mourning, it charts a personal journey following the loss of a loved one. The iconic and indexical qualities of photographic representation make it the ideal medium for the creation of narratives that embody an emotional investment in everyday objects. The accretions of wear and tear on material objects becomes an important motif that finds analogy in the photographic process itself. The traces of touch on possessions are made visible by the traces of light on film.
This paper focuses on Media study which is an emerging field within visual studies. To understand the phenomenon of semiotics we have adopted Ronald Barthes approach who was born in November 19151(1), according to whom an image is a medium of communication having a signifier and signified. This approach provides a new essence to the selected movie taken as case to explain shots communicating verbally and non-verbally. The paper addresses the novel approach of semiotics allowing media to examine the signs in a given image. This analysis explains that how connotative meanings of visuals are derived even by nonverbal communication. This approach contains fresh semiotics with costume and colors as sign indicators. This paper is an attempt to understand that how semiology can be applied to visuals in media studies. The qualitative study conferring Roland Barthes perspective analyses within the messages or images are purposefully shown to the viewer. The paper will analyze Shatranj ke Khilari (Chess players), a Hindi film by renowned director Satyajit Ray as case study of a narrative around 1856 in Awadh-a princely state in India.
The book is driven by a central dynamic between form and formlessness, further staging an investigation of the phenomenon of fascination using Lacanian psychoanalysis, suggesting that the psychodrama of subject formation plays itself out ...
The remains of ancient Mediterranean art and architecture that have survived over the centuries present the modern viewer with images of white, the color of the stone often used for sculpture. Antiquarian debates and recent scholarship, however, have challenged this aspect of ancient sculpture. There is now a consensus that sculpture produced in the ancient Mediterranean world, as well as art objects in other media, were, in fact, polychromatic. Color has consequently become one of the most important issues in the study of classical art. Jennifer Stager's landmark book makes a vital contribution to this discussion. Analyzing the dyes, pigments, stones, earth, and metals found in ancient art works, along with the language that writers in antiquity used to describe color, she examines the traces of color in a variety of media. Stager also discusses the significance of a reception history that has emphasized whiteness, revealing how ancient artistic practice and ancient philosophies of color significantly influenced one another.
In view of the centrality of the human skull in Vanitas imagery as a recall that time is not endless, the essay presents contemporary artworks in which the skull is central, but each time making its call for memory differently. Marlene Dumas, Jeannette Christensen, Nalini Malani and Maya Watanabe, from different regions and in different media and styles all brought the ancient symbol of the skull back to (aesthetic) life; they revitalized it. They thereby remind us that it is not time that needs killing, as the saying has it, but that it is people who kill, and not just then, but now.
In this essay I consider the counter-intuitive (even apparently impossible) enterprise of picturing ekphrasis—of visually depicting the verbal representation of the visual. I do so by attending to two paintings, by William Martin and James Barry, of the disturbing scene in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline in which Iachimo gains illicit entry to Imogen’s bedroom and proceeds to record details of both the room and her body, details he later uses to convince Posthumus, Imogen’s exiled husband, of her infidelity. I argue that Martin’s and Barry’s attempts to paint this event of ekphrasis—of ekphrasis as violation—respond to and need to be understood within the specific institutional and aesthetic contexts of vexed intermediality in late-eighteenth century London, in particular the ascendancy of spectacular dramaturgy, the arrival of the literary gallery, and entrenched notions of painting’s textuality. Martin and Barry, I suggest, show ekphrasis in order to interrogate and eschew both its rhetorical imperative (image as word) and its iconophobic implication (image as less than word). In picturing ekphrasis, their paintings trouble the conception of the painting as a would-be poem and resist the textual and textualizing gaze that demands that they submit to the procedures of reading.
My chapter foregrounds the role of knowledge management systems such as plant nomenclature, classification and herbaria in appropriating, translating and exploiting the natural knowledge built up over thousands of years by peoples around the world. The contributions of indigenous peoples, their languages and ways of using and understanding plants, undergird what has for too long been taken to be a European project of accumulating, translating and assembling plant knowledge.
p>This submission comprises a series of individual and collaborative research projects from the period 2003-2007 with material from 1999-2002 providing a background context.
The research proposes an approach to time in painting aligned with Deleuzian/Leibnizian time and Proustian ‘time regained’ as opposed to the Freudian model of ‘return’ and preoccupation with absence and mourning often assigned to painting. It claims that such a positioning of painting’s temporal continuum enables it to reflect the complexity of our lived experience of time. It is argued that this alignment is realised through an engagement with the requisite literary and philosophical writings, but that crucially, a dialogue with digital imaging offers contemporary painting an expanded topography and contributes to its ability to ‘think’ time in these terms.
The research reveals a means of theorising process in which a systematisation of theoretical discourse takes place within practice, through the application of the research methods. The submission includes a series of ‘process notes’ and a section of ‘visual footnotes’, articulating a distinctive perspective upon practice-based enquiry.
The chosen methodology is characterised by a cyclical approach to action and reflection, and the text maps the development of the research as a series of interconnected circuits, operating on rhizomatic principles. The research finds that a rhizomatic model, as a non-linear, non-teleological structure, echoes the experience of practice and is appropriate in addressing the given proposition as it recognises that the shifting territory of the temporal and of memory produces a multiplicity of divergent, overlapping lines of thought.</p
The Roman asàrotos òikos (“Unswept Floor/Room”) mosaics, which were discovered in Italy and in Tunisia, and date from the end of the first to the sixth century AD, showcase a seemingly popular theme: scraps of food that had fallen (or were thrown) under the table during the banquet, colourfully displayed, appealing and appetising to the eyes. These mosaics are, in fact, Roman variations on a famous prototype created by Sosus in Hellenistic Pergamon, which was never discovered. The Roman mosaics reveal a unique tension between the display of impersonal, mundane reality in an illusory manner and the use of irony and disguised symbolism. The depiction of everyday life and elements that carry various symbolic meanings in trompe-l’œil prompts an interpretive reading of the artwork. The use of visual deception not only forms the ground for contemplative thought, but also enriches the reading by adding more layers of veiled meanings that need to be recognised and decoded by the viewers. This particular combination of aesthetics and iconography forms complex allegorical content. This article focuses on the asàrotos òikos mosaics which were discovered in Italy, and their particular combination of a popular theme, symbolism and illusionism.
My chapter on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century plant science and technology in A Cultural History of Plants, vol. 4 foregrounds the role of knowledge management systems such as plant nomenclature, classification and herbaria in appropriating, translating and exploiting the natural knowledge built up over thousands of years by peoples around the world. The contributions of indigenous peoples, their languages and ways of using and understanding plants, undergird what has for too long been taken to be a European project of accumulating, translating and assembling plant knowledge.
Tendo partido da proposta de observar a representação de Lisboa na poesia de Fiama Hasse Pais Brandão, este artigo se desvia do objeto referencial para os modos de sua percepção, e se detém sobre uma coleção de instrumentos de que a poeta se vale para inscrever a paisagem da cidade em poesia. Unidos pelo aspecto da agudeza e por propriedades perfuro-cortantes, estes objetos materializam poeticamente o estilo (forma particular de expressão, mas também haste pontiaguda que servia à escrita dos antigos) de uma escritura esporeante, que Derrida reconheceu como um atributo do feminino: capaz de desestabilizar saberes, a um tempo rasgando e defendendo os véus de uma verdade que só se desvela à distância e como distância.
A relação entre a pintura e a literatura não é nada recente, e a forma mais costumeira de adaptação do meio visual – espacial – para o das palavras – temporal – é a écfrase. O poeta modernista estadunidense Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), no entanto, quando se aproxima com mais veemência da pintura, busca assimilar os elementos formais e estruturantes de um gênero e retrabalhá-los em sua poesia. Afinal, para o poeta, os problemas dos pintores são os mesmos dos poetas e “os poetas devem não raro se voltar à literatura da pintura para uma discussão de seus próprios problemas” (STEVENS, 1957, p. 187). Stevens compartilhava do gosto que outros artistas modernos nutriam pelo gênero das Naturezas-Mortas, um espaço, à primeira vista, sem a dramaticidade das grandes narrativas, mas quase puramente estético, regrado por suas linhas internas. Assim, analisaremos aqui o poema Floral Decorations for Bananas, de seu livro de estreia, Harmonium (1923) e, a partir dele, analisaremos três quadros da chamada Era de Ouro dos Países Baixos, mais exatamente três obras pertencentes ao gênero pictórico das Naturezas-Mortas, pintados por Adriaen Von Utrecht, Willem Kalf e Clara Peeters. Assim, será possível observar como Stevens fez uso da própria estruturação formal desse gênero para compor seu poema moderno.
Ponowoczesny model recepcji malarstwa barwnego pola to projekt przepisania historii ekspresjonizmu abstrakcyjnego – najbardziej narcystycznego z nowoczesnych „izmów” w sztuce zachodniej, a także przełamania jego kapitalistycznego impasu. Autorka przedstawia meandrujący proces dekonstrukcji modernizmu, a także proponuje nieopowiedziane dotąd, emancypacyjne historie prac artystycznych liderów malarstwa barwnego pola: Barnetta Newmana, Clyfforda Stilla i Marka Rothki. Poszukuje ich poza stezaurowanymi, modernistycznymi ramami, z których wykluczone zostały takie emancypacyjne tematy jak: cielesność, partnerstwo, taniec, burze pyłowe (dustery), peryferie, ubóstwo czy zapośredniczenia obrazów malarskich w kulturze popularnej. Poprzez studia przypadków dowodzi, że istnieje wiele możliwych narracji historii malarstwa barwnego pola, które rzucają wyzwanie dominującym opowieściom poprzez włączenie współczesnych interpretacji.
Art interpretation in practice, not theory.
How do people make sense of works of art? And how do they write to make others see the same way? There are many guides to looking at art, histories of art history and art criticism, and accounts of various ‘theories’ and ‘methods’, but this book offers something very unlike the normal search for difference and division: it examines the general and largely unspoken norms shared by interpreters of many kinds.
Ranging widely, though taking writing within the Western tradition of art history as its primary focus, Interpreting Art highlights the norms, premises, and patterns that tend to guide interpretation along the way. Why, for example, is the concept of artistic ‘intention’ at once so reviled and yet so hard to let go of? What does it really involve when an interpretation appeals to an artwork’s ‘reception’? How can ‘context’ be used by some to keep things under control and by others to make the interpretation of art seem limitless? And how is it that artworks only seem to grow in complexity over time?
Interpreting Art reveals subtle features of art writing central to the often unnoticed interpretative practices through which we understand works of art. In doing so, the book also sheds light on possible alternatives, pointing to how writers on art might choose to operate differently in the future.
‘It's wonderful to have a book that focuses on what art historians actually do when we interpret art, as opposed to the claims we make about our methods and their histories… Interpreting Art shows how apparently well-understood paths of interpretation are actually half-articulated ideals that are as likely to run away with our texts as support them, and for that reason it should be on the desk of every doctoral student when they set out to write.’ – James Elkins, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
‘In this lucid, sensible and insightful book, Sam Rose investigates interpretive practices common to almost all professional art historians, regardless of their objects of study, their professed "methods" and their schools of historical thought. Anyone curious about the “how” of art history as an intellectual and aesthetic endeavour will find Rose to be an invaluable guide.’ – Whitney Davis, University of California at Berkeley
This paper focuses on Media study which is an emerging field within visual studies. To understand the phenomenon of semiotics we have adopted Ronald Barthes approach who was born in November 19151(1), according to whom an image is a medium of communication having a signifier and signified. This approach provides a new essence to the selected movie taken as case to explain shots communicating verbally and non-verbally. The paper addresses the novel approach of semiotics allowing media to examine the signs in a given image. This analysis explains that how connotative meanings of visuals are derived even by nonverbal communication. This approach contains fresh semiotics with costume and colors as sign indicators. This paper is an attempt to understand that how semiology can be applied to visuals in media studies. The qualitative study conferring Roland Barthes perspective analyses within the messages or images are purposefully shown to the viewer. The paper will analyze Shatranj ke Khiladi (Chess players), a Hindi film by renowned director Satyajit Ray as case study of a narrative around 1856 in Awadh-a princely state in India.
Over three and a half centuries, the genre of flower still life created by Dutch artists experienced ups of interest and oblivion. There were the maximum assessment of society in the form of high fees of the 17th century artists; the criticism of connoisseurs and art theorists; the neglect in the 19th century and the rise of auction prices and close attention of art critics, manifested from the middle of the 20th century to the present day. In the middle of the 17th century, there was already a hierarchy of genres, based on both the subject and the size of the paintings, which was reflected in the price. Still lifes and landscapes were cheaper than allegorical and historical scenes, but there were exceptions, for example, in the works of Jan Brueghel the Elder and Jan Davidsz. de Heem. Art theorists Willem van Hoogstraten and Arnold Houbraken, resting upon academic tastes, downplayed the importance of still-life painting. Meanwhile, the artists themselves, determining the worth of their paintings, sought for maximum naturalism, and such paintings were sold well.
In the 20th century, this genre attracted the attention of collectors in Europe and the United States. A revival of interest in Dutch still lifes in general, and in flower ones in particular, began in the 20th century, the paintings rose in price at auctions, and collecting them became almost a fashion. Art societies and art dealers of the Netherlands and Belgium organized several small exhibitions of still lifes. The course for studying symbolic messages in still lifes, presented by Ingvar Bergström, is continued by Eddie de Jong, who emphasizes the diverse nature of symbolism in Dutch painting of the 17th century. Svetlana Alpers, on the contrary, criticizes the iconological method and presents the Dutch painting of that period as an example of visual culture. Norman Bryson’s view of Dutch still lifes is formed against the background of the development of a consumer society, economic prosperity and abundance. Finally, there has been an increasing interest in the natural science aspects of flower still-life painting in the researches of the last twenty years. Curiosity, skill, and admiration for nature are the impulses that can still be felt in the images of bouquets and fruits.
Este ensayo aborda la película El otro día (2014), de Ignacio Agüero, centrándose en las estrategias mediante las cuales el documental construye un espacio fílmico y un modo de mirar a partir de la exploración de la casa de su director y los lugares de residencia de quienes tocan su puerta, como punto de partida para una meditación sobre la vita cotidiana y la memoria personal y colectiva. Se analiza la presencia en el documental de diversos tipos de imágenes (fotografías, pinturas, dibujos, grabados, afiches, citas fílmicas) y la construcción por medio de diversas estrategias de una mirada respetuosa y reflexiva hacia los sujetos que protagonizan el filme.
Este trabalho investiga relações entre a estética do cotidiano e as fotografias de natureza morta nas primeiras décadas após a invenção da técnica fotográfica no século XIX. Ao pensarmos este objeto como um elemento de junção entre os regimes da arte propostos por Rancière – ético, representacional e, mais enfaticamente, estético – visamos revelar o surgimento de uma cultura visual que passa a valorizar objetos da rotina cotidiana como protagonistas nas novas formas de expressão estética que despontam com a modernidade.
This thesis develops a sociosemiotic model specifically focussed upon the semiotic interpretation of sculpture, and proposes that this type of artefact is susceptible to a systemic-functional approach, as explored in the work of M.A.K. Halliday and Michael O'Toole. This model is then allied with a sociosemantic model, in an endeavour to draw together synchronic, diachronic and discursive aspects of the sculptural object and its situation within discursive and ideological structures. This is further explored in the second chapter where the human body is examined as a historical site of discourse, where forms of bodily legibility have been encoded and have undergone transformations across time: this posits the issue of the discourse of bodiliness, and its semiotics, as a fundamental domain within which sculptural discourse must be seen to unfold. The argument then pursues an investigation of specifically monumental sculpture, especially in its appearance in Western European cemeteries (with an emphasis upon the nineteenth-century), to delineate and explore its institutional and sociohistorical contexts and a variety of convergent discourses within which it is situated. These include such things as the history of cemeteries and their designs, the semiotics of bodily representation (both historically and in a more semiotic and phenomenological sense), the relationship between the sculptural monument per se and its associated texts: epitaphs, ordinances, public rituals, modalities of portraiture, allegory' and personification, amongst others. These discussions proliferate further into arguments about cities, architecture and bodily representation and embodiment, where the discussion necessarily problematises some of the assumptions made by the semiotic approaches utilised, and moves into a more postmodern or deconstructive mode, where the funerary monument is seen to exemplify some of the problematics of these critical approaches, especially in its counterpoint with death. Thus the trajectory of the argument moves from a concern with the specifically sculptural and funereal, outwards towards a more general concern with the constitution of the semiotics of objects and how these participate in, and reciprocate with, the sociocultural construction of the human subject.
The social distancing does represent an oxymoron: how can there be distancing if what characterizes the very sociality is the proximity between individuals, and generally living beings? Comparable to living dead space (Todd R.W., 2007) or more notorious “still life” or “natura morta”, the paradox remains unsolved: how can something like nature that is impregnated with life, be dead?
The Allegory of Transience by Philipp Sauerland (Gdańsk 1677 – Wrocław 1762), an artist specializing in still life and animal painting, was purchased in 2015 by the National Museum in Gdańsk. The painting allows us to deepen our knowledge of Sauerland’s artistic roots, as well as the interpretation of the painting in the socio-cultural context of the development of Europe in the early 18th century. In the paper a thesis is put forward about the Leiden sources of Sauerland’s work, which are connected with the painting tradition of the so-called fijnschilders, especially the work of Willem van Mieris. In the first decade of the 18th century, Sauerland painted The Young Woman in the Kitchen Interior, surrounded by perfectly rendered victuals, showing a similar gesture as in the famous painting by Van Mieris The Mouse Trap. In the signed painting from a private collection in New York, Sauerland chose historical themes. He presented a rare scene of David Giving Uriah a Letter to Joab. The painting refers to two famous works by Pieter Lastmann, but it is placed in an architectural set design analogous to Van Mieris’s paintings. An important element of the Allegory of Transience, in turn, is the relief visible by sliding down a carpet. This motif is also taken from the work of Van Mieries, but the iconography of the sculptural representation refers to Gerard de Lairesse’s print showing Chronos prevented by Prudence from destroying the statues. Sauerland is therefore close to the artists from Leiden in terms of the choice of themes, motifs, and the way they are painted. He also usually used a similar format of paintings. Like Van Mieris, the artist from Gdańsk signed his works with longer inscriptions. Although references to the Leydians are obvious in Sauerland’s early works, he does not make copies of their works, but focusing on the still life genre, he transforms them in his own style. The second thesis of our essay is related to the transformation of vanitas motifs, which in Sauerland’s work reveal their secularized character. The traditional symbolism of transience, which draws on religion, is replaced by the ideas of rationalism, accompanied by the idea of reason that opens a possibility of overcoming sensual and emotional limitations. The work becomes an expression of emancipatory processes that take place at the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries in European culture. Referring to the philosophical work of Baruch Spinoza (notion of knowledge), we interpret Sauerland’s work as an expression of the emerging modern ideal of freedom, which was based on a rationalistic paradigm. It is thanks to wisdom (sapientia) that the subject is able to transcend the reality of the sensual guise. In the last part of the text we point to the important role of practical wisdom (prudentia) and art (ars) in the process of liberalization that accompanied the social changes of the time. Using illusionism, Sauerland proposes an interpretative key to the viewer: the meaning of life is complemented by art: by making art, understanding art, or collecting artworks, the rational man can free himself from the fear of his own finiteness. The function of this still life is not to remind us of death, but to point out that contemplation of art is an intellectual and spiritual exercise that allows us to find the right attitude to life.
Arthur Danto's meditation, in his “Works of Art and Mere Real Things,” on a square of red paint and its various possible readings serves as a warning about multiple interpretations. This painting might be a story of the Egyptians and the Red Sea, after the Israelites crossed over. Or, then, a work by a Danish portraitist, labeled “Kierkegaard's Mood.” Or, then, one by a politically active painter, “Red Square.” Or by a disciple of Henri Matisse, “Red Table Cloth”—in this one, the paint would be more thickly applied. In my view, the most appropriate state we can muster is what the surrealists called “availability” ( disponibilité )—openness to whatever might, of a sudden, happen in our understanding to achieve a presentness of perception , even as we note the clear risk of boundary crossings between the arts.
This chapter offers an exploration of some of the more obsessive and meticulous approaches to drawing that result in an extremity of finish. Weighted with time, complex working methods and illusionism, the discussion touches upon the hidden difficulties of conveying an effortless finish, and the influence of working from photographic media. It looks at certain practices that have operated against prevailing trends within conceptual art, specifically the work of Vija Celmins (born 1938, Latvia) and Ed Ruscha (born 1937, United States), who rearticulated drawing's terms for deskilling and dematerialization in the 1960s. This chapter asks, via Ruscha and Celmins, if it is possible to find something productive in the relatively unexamined encounter between illusionism and conceptualism. Their concerns have an urgency and relevancy for artists working with photo‐mimetic forms of drawing in the present moment, such as the Glasgow‐based artist Kate Davis (born 1977, New Zealand). Her practice, specifically her monumental, photo‐uncanny still life drawings, is the focus of the concluding section. In positioning Ed Ruscha and Vija Celmins's work of the mid‐1960s as a productive confrontation between drawing and photography, this chapter articulates how their focus on finish enables drawing to operate both as a medium and as media within these artists’ complex responses to the apparently deskilled, data‐focused trajectory of conceptual art. Together, these three artists rigorously explore the problematic of drawing – not as sketch – but as ultra‐finished depictive ground.
Weathering is atmospheric, geological, temporal, transformative. It implies exposure to the elements and processes of wearing down, disintegration, or accrued patina. Weathering can also denote the ways in which subjects and objects resist and pass through storms and adversity. This volume contemplates weathering across many fields and disciplines; its contributions examine various surfaces, environments, scales, temporalities, and vulnerabilities. What does it mean to weather or withstand? Who or what is able to pass through safely? What is lost or gained in the process?
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