The Orthodox Icon and Postmodern Art: Critical Reflections on the Christian Image and its Theology
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The account of Mary’s presence in the temple shows the author’s knowledge of contemporary Jewish practices concerning women who had such access: accused adulteresses, the weavers of the curtains, and Nazirites.
Leading scholars take a wider view of new media, placing it in the context of art history and acknowledging the necessity of an interdisciplinary approach in new media art studies and practice.
Digital art has become a major contemporary art form, but it has yet to achieve acceptance from mainstream cultural institutions; it is rarely collected, and seldom included in the study of art history or other academic disciplines. In MediaArtHistories, leading scholars seek to change this. They take a wider view of media art, placing it against the backdrop of art history. Their essays demonstrate that today's media art cannot be understood by technological details alone; it cannot be understood without its history, and it must be understood in proximity to other disciplines—film, cultural and media studies, computer science, philosophy, and sciences dealing with images.
Contributors trace the evolution of digital art, from thirteenth-century Islamic mechanical devices and eighteenth-century phantasmagoria, magic lanterns, and other multimedia illusions, to Marcel Duchamp's inventions and 1960s kinetic and op art. They reexamine and redefine key media art theory terms—machine, media, exhibition—and consider the blurred dividing lines between art products and consumer products and between art images and science images. Finally, MediaArtHistories offers an approach for an interdisciplinary, expanded image science, which needs the "trained eye" of art history.
ContributorsRudlof Arnheim, Andreas Broeckmann, Ron Burnett, Edmond Couchot, Sean Cubitt, Dieter Daniels, Felice Frankel, Oliver Grau, Erkki Huhtamo, Douglas Kahn, Ryszard W. Kluszczynski, Machiko Kusahara, Timothy Lenoir, Lev Manovich, W.J.T. Mitchell, Gunalan Nadarajan, Christiane Paul, Louise Poissant, Edward A. Shanken, Barbara Maria Stafford, and Peter Weibel
It has rarely been recognized that the Christian writers of the first millennium pursued an ambitious and exciting philosophical project alongside their engagement in the doctrinal controversies of their age. This book offers for the first time a full analysis of this Patristic philosophy. It shows how it took its distinctive shape in the late fourth century and gives an account of its subsequent development until the time of John of Damascus. The book falls into three main parts. The first of them starts from an analysis of the philosophical project underlying the teaching of the Cappadocian fathers, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory of Nazianzus. This philosophy, arguably the first distinctively Christian theory of being, soon becomes near-universally shared in Eastern Christianity. A few decades after the Cappadocians, all sides in the early Christological controversy take its fundamental tenets for granted. Its application to the Christological problem thus appeared inevitable. Yet it created substantial conceptual problems. Parts II and III of the book describe in detail how these problems led to a series of increasingly radical modifications of the Cappadocian philosophy. The chapters of Part II are dedicated to the miaphysite opponents of the Council of Chalcedon, while Part III discusses the defenders of the Council from the early sixth to the eighth centuries. Through this overview, the book reveals this period as one of remarkable philosophical creativity, fecundity, and innovation.
Three orders of simulacra: 1. counterfeits and false images: from renaissance to industrial revolution, signs become mode of exchange, these signs are obviously flase. 2. Dominated by production and series: mass produced signs as commodities, signs refer not to reality but to other signs (money, posters). 3. Pure simulacra: simulacra mask over the idea that there is no reality, reality is an effect of simulacra (disneyland masks simulacra of LA, Prison masks nonfreedom outside the walls).
This is the first in-depth historical study of Byzantine Cappadocia. The authors draw on extensive textual and archaeological materials to examine the nature and place of Cappadocia in the Byzantine Empire from the fourth through eleventh centuries. © J. Eric Cooper and Michael J. Decker 2012. All rights reserved.
Studies in comparative religion have shown the important role played by the practice of ascetical fasting in the history of man's religious development. But many gaps in that history still exist. We may surmise, for example, that primitive man stumbled on the practice of fasting accidentally, as a way to conserve food in time of shortage, or, again, out of revulsion for food in times of sickness, as well as under stress of sorrow or fear. On the other hand, he would find that overeating might interfere with sleep and cause a feeling of heaviness, or that certain foods could cause sickness and nausea. The lacuna between these primitive experiences and the religious-ascetical practice of fasting still remains a subject for investigation, although, from the point of view of Greece and Rome, it has been adequately treated by Arbesmann. The object of the present work is not to cover the practice of ecclesiastical fasting, either from the canonical point of view (as this has been sufficiently treated by Parra Herrera) or in its connection with prophecy and revelation (as this has again been fully discussed by Arbesmann) — but merely to treat the problem of ascetical fasting as we find it in the Greek patristic writers down to the time of John Damascene.
Basil of Caesarea (AD 329–378), his brother, Gregory of Nyssa (335–394), and their friend, Gregory Nazianzen (328–389), are a group of three great Christian thinkers of the late 4th century AD known as the ‘Cappadocian Fathers’. All were steeped in the culture of traditional Hellenism, and at the same time were great theologians and leaders who steered the Christian church of the eastern Roman empire in the turbulent years of the late 4th century. Theologically they are best known for bringing to a close the Arian controversy that had wracked the Christian church for most of the 4th century. Basil, called ‘the Great’ in the Christian tradition for his leading role in steering the Arian controversy to a conclusion, is also known for his reforms of the unruly ascetic movement in Asia Minor, documented in such works as his Asketikon . As a result of his labours he effectively established Greek cenobitic (common-life) monasticism. But his influence as a preceptor of Christian monasticism was destined to spread far, both east in Syria and in the Latin West. A Latin translation was an important source of the Rule of St Benedict , which set the tone of western monasticism for many centuries to come.
Mark 5:1-20, the pericope of the Gerasene demoniac, presents the reader with a number of enigmatic features that have been variously interpreted with reference to differing intertexts. No single intertext, however, has been able to explain multiple puzzling features of the text. The thesis of this article is that the Book of Watchers (1 Enoch 1-36), and the myth that underlies this textual tradition, can best explain the pericope's enigmas. The Book of Watchers was extraordinarily influential in Second Temple Judaism and, therefore, should be interpreted as the formative conceptual framework for this Marcan demonological narrative. To demonstrate this thesis, I argue that Mark 5:1-20 shares at least five strong conceptual and verbal affinities with the Book of Watchers.
Perhaps a failure, certainly a problem Writing on “postmodernism” at the beginning of the twenty-first century is an uneasy business, and perhaps particularly so in relation to the visual arts. The term has undoubtedly gained a certain cultural currency, but its meaning (or meanings) and value seem in many ways more obscure than ever. The most secure usages - in dance and in architecture - seem to pick out a moment of something like style in ways that make it little more than one further moment within the general artistic logic of modernism, while the attempts to use it in ways that pick out some presumably deeper challenge to modernism over all do not seem to have succeeded in doing so. The phrase “postmodern art” seems for the most part to have run aground somewhere between these two possibilities, having secured no particularly strong style or period usage but also having failed to secure any broader or deeper generalization of postmodernism. At times it can seem that all that is actually left is a sort of gesture toward some general social or cultural fact that is taken to be peculiarly resistant to, or evasive of, the kinds of fuller parsing that accompany our usage of terms such as “modern” or “modernist.” This may sometimes function more or less successfully as a password of sorts, but it also feels like a word or phrase whose grammar has more or less mysteriously failed it. One might, of course, hope that what appears as its failure is in fact, but unrecognizably, its actual grammar. © Cambridge University Press 2004 and Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Scholars of the patristic era have paid more attention to the dogmatic tradition in their period than to the development of Christian mystical theology. This book aims to redress the balance. Recognizing that the intellectual form of this tradition was decisively influenced by Platonic ideas of the soul's relationship to God, the book begins with an examination of Plato and Platonism. The discussion of the Fathers which follows shows how the mystical tradition is at the heart of their thought and how the dogmatic tradition both moulds and is the reflection of mystical insights and concerns. This new edition of a classic study of the diverse influences upon Christian spirituality includes a new Epilogue which brings the text completely up to date.
Philo's description of the sober Jewish symposium in De vita contempletiva resembles the attitude of the contemporary elite in Rome and caps a growing disparagement of the traditional Greek symposium that can be traced through his earlier writings.
The presence of the notion of a virginal conception in Luke's annunciation story has sometimes been disputed. While arguing that this notion is indeed to be found there, this article also highlights material in Luke's writings that assumes another version of Jesus' paternity in which he is seen as the physical descendant of David through Joseph as his father. It explores possible tradition-historical explanations for the juxtaposition of these two perspectives before proposing that the inclusion of both would not have been seen as so awkward or inconsistent to Luke and his audience as it appears to present-day readers. The elision of any mention of the male progenitor in significant births was already a feature of the Jewish Scriptures, where only God and the female womb are emphasized. Luke takes this a stage further in the annunciation story, where the male parent is actually absent from the conception. This enables him to present two versions of Jesus' conception in line with the conventions of other ancient biographies that also contain two different accounts of their subject's origins, one natural with two human parents and one miraculous highlighting the subject's descent from the gods. Once this phenomenon of double paternity is recognized, it can be seen to play its part in a broader dialogical reading of Luke's Christology.
