Art and Text

What is the relationship between art history and its objects? Responding to Jaś Elsner’s claim that art-historical writing is inevitably ekphrastic, this essay revisits a site of intense disciplinary anxiety—Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s 1759 description of the Belvedere Torso and its revised version in his 1764 History of Ancient Art. Description has been cast as the “scapegoat” (or pharmakos) of Winckelmann’s art history—that which must be excised yet is fundamental to the operations of the whole. But although it often serves as a site of perceived excess and sublimation in his work, the ekphrastic elements of Winckelmann’s prose are nevertheless some of the most historicist aspects of his scholarship, shaped by a deep engagement with Greco-Roman ekphrastic literature. Description, in this sense, serves as a Platonic pharmakon—both affliction and cure for classical art history’s medial and ontological separation from its ruined and fragmented objects. In Winckelmann’s description of the torso, ekphrasis holds out the potential for the statue’s “completion” (Ergänzung). But understood according to eighteenth-century practices of visual restoration, this raises the question of whether such “whole-making” should be understood as proper or supplemental to the original image. What does it mean to “re-member” the Belvedere Torso through ekphrastic strategies drawn from antiquity itself? And what does this imply for our own textual (and pharmacological) mediations of the visual?

El estereotipo de la mujer busca ser modificado a través de distintas campañas sociales y prácticas artísticas como la de Barbara Kruger, quien desde las décadas de los setenta y ochenta se interesa en las creencias, el género, los medios de comunicación, la cultura de consumo.

יצירתה של האמנית הישראלית מיכל נאמן זכתה לתשומת לב פרשנית רבה, אולי רבה יותר מאשר אמנים אחרים בני דורה. למרות השפע הטקסטואלי הזה המלווה אותה מאז שנות השבעים,  יש עדיין תחומים בעבודתה שזכו לטיפול מצומצם בלבד, אולי משום שדגש רב הושם עד כה על פרשנות הנשענת על תיאוריות פסיכואנליטיות ועל היבטים שונים של הלשון. יתכן שהדיון התיאורטי שמלווה את עבודתה מסתיר ומסיט את המבט מהתבוננות ישירה בתכנים שכיחים בעבודתה: הנוכחות הבולטת של אלימות, אכזריות ואסונות: הרג ורצח, כריתת ראש ועקירת עיניים, סכינים וחיתוכים, מחלות, מפלצות ויצורי כלאיים. היבט נוסף הוא השימוש של נאמן בביטויים, פסוקים ושברי פסוקים מן התנ"ך כחלק מהרפרטואר הלשוני בעבודתה. המאמר מראה  שיש זיקה בין שני העניינים האלה -  המוטיבים האלימים והמוטיבים התנכיים, ולמעשה התנ"ך של מיכל נאמן הוא טריטוריה של אימה וזוועה.

הרצאה בכנס התנ"ך באמנויות / אוניברסיטת תל אביב / מרץ 2006

The Apologies is an ongoing project first created for a 2012 performance at Night Gallery in Los Angeles, California. This iteration of the work, developed by artist Amy Howden-Chapman in collaboration with the writer Andrew Michael Gorin, represents a series of twenty apologies etched on brass sheets that have been cut in the dimensions of legal-sized paper. The reflective sheets lean on wall shelves mounted behind an empty podium. An audio recording gives voice to this language.

The Apologies dramatises issues of blame, culpability, complicity, and uncertainty surrounding the climate crisis. As the human and environmental costs of climate change have increasingly been realised, questions of liability shift from being matters of speculation to matters of immediate concern. Yet securing acknowledgments of accountability from those responsible has been no easy task, in part because of the vast temporal and spatial scale of the problem. On the one hand, fossil fuel companies and the governments that have supported them are unequivocally at fault. On the other, the fact that the worst impacts of carbon emissions are often felt at a distance from sites of emission, coupled with the historical tendency to locate responsibility at the level of the individual consumer, has made it easier for the prime movers of climate breakdown to evade being held accountable.

In response to this circumstance, Howden-Chapman and Gorin imagine apologies for the climate crisis. Drawing on research into the historical form of the public apology, their installation represents durable commemorations of apologies not yet given. Gallery visitors are invited to move among the installation’s texts, stand at the podium, and sit on the benches positioned in the space of the audience. The Apologies call for consideration of our individual relations to the problem of personal responsibility, foregrounding everyday anxieties about carbon footprints and inaction, while asking us to contend with the question of who is to blame and why this matters.

La vigencia de la estrategia de apropiación apunta a la importancia dentro del ámbito artístico de la mirada constante que visita el pasado. Las ideas surgen en parte, del mirar hacia atrás para hacer una crítica, revalorizar determinadas aportaciones estéticas o para evidenciar la influencia del contexto en cada propuesta emergente. 

Esto puede demostrarse a través de la obra de dos artistas que se han apropiado de la serie Titled (Art as Idea as Idea) realizada a partir de 1966 por el artista estadounidense Joseph Kosuth: el mexicano Stefan Brüggemann en su serie Untitled (Joke and Definition Paintings) de 2011; y el español Marti Cormand en Formalizing their concept, serie creada desde 2013.

El lenguaje se encuentra en una movilidad constante provocada por el dinamismo de nuestro contexto socio-político. El tiempo, el cambio de generaciones y el desplazamiento de grupos étnicos hacia otras geografías, así como el préstamo de palabras entre culturas, llevan a la inevitable transformación del lenguaje. El presente texto busca reflexionar por un lado, sobre los procesos de traducción a partir de la obra del artista mexicano Emilio Chapela; y por el otro lado, cuestionar la homogeneización del idioma en la práctica textual en el arte contemporáneo.

David Mabb
‘Announcer’
Printed newspaper, produced in an edition 2000
This publication was produced to accompany David Mabb's exhibition 'Announcer', Focal Point Gallery, 12 April to 12 July 2014.
ISBN 978-1-907185-17-5
Free
http://www.focalpoint.org.uk/printed_matter/publications/
"This exhibition marks the culmination of Mabb’s work which, for over fifteen years, has investigated the utopian socialist concerns in Morris’ designs by contrasting them with other forms of modernist and utopian production. The main gallery space was dominated by a new installation of paintings entitled Announcer. Composed of thirty large canvases, the work covers three walls of the space and surrounds the audience. Each canvas is pasted with pages from facsimile editions of the Kelmscott Chaucer, a collection of works by Geoffrey Chaucer published by the Kelmscott Press [1896], which Morris founded and worked on as a typographer and designer. Onto this surface are painted enlarged recreations of El Lissitzky’s Constructivist illustrations from Vladimir Mayakovsky’s book of revolutionary poems For the Voice [1923]. In this work, the publications cease to be objects that can be held and digested, instead becoming an environment. Rather than simply combining the designs, Announcer interweaves and juxtaposes them. Sections of the Kelmscott Chaucer are left unpainted to disrupt the geometric Lissitzky designs. A dialogue is created between the two, which are simultaneously frozen, but never fixed, unable to fully merge or separate".
See also https://www.academia.edu/11592255/Announcer
https://www.academia.edu/15684201/The_Background_Speaks_David_Mabbs_Announcer_and_the_Emergence_of_Information

Cet article, intitulé « Visions parlantes : représentations transatlantiques d’Ariane et du Minotaure chez Catulle et Borges », analyse les rapports d’intertextualité entre le poème 64 de Catulle et la nouvelle « Astérion » de Jorge Luis Borges. Ces deux œuvres canoniques se caractérisent en effet par leur représentation novatrice du mythe de Thésée selon le point de vue de ses victimes, respectivement Ariane (abandonnée à Naxos par son amant ingrat) et le Minotaure (tué par le héros dans le labyrinthe avec l’aide d’Ariane). Les deux textes donnent ainsi à entendre une parole paradoxale, voire une parole impossible : le discours direct d’Ariane émerge d’une tapisserie, et le témoignage du Minotaure d’un manuscrit problématique puisque le monstre se dit analphabète. Ainsi, les deux textes manient l’intertextualité au sens large de la mise en relations d’écrits mais aussi d’images : Catulle comme Borges choisissent un mythe omniprésent dans les arts figurés de leur temps pour en subvertir la représentation et questionner le rapport entre littérature et arts figurés. Comparer la poésie néotérique du Ier s. av. J.-C. et la littérature post-moderne permet ainsi de révéler les aspects les plus novateurs de l’une comme de l’autre.

Should we be surprised that as the new computer-based media expand throughout the world, intellectual horizons and aesthetic possibilities seem to be narrowing? If one scans Internet-based discussion groups and journals from London to Budapest, New York to Berlin, and Los Angeles to Tokyo, certain themes are obsessively intoned, like mantras: copyright; on-line identity; cyborgs; interactivity; the future of the Internet. This follows from the Microsofting of the planet, which has cast a uniform digital aesthetics over national visual cultures, accelerating the globalization already begun by Hollywood, MTV, and consumer packaging: hyperlinks and cute icons, animated fly-throughs, rainbow color palettes, and Phong-shaded spheres are ubiquitous, and apparently inescapable.
So, given its intellectual traditions, totalitarian experience, distinct twentieth century visuality (a particular mixture of the Northern and the Communist, the gray and the bleak), and finally, its continuing pre-occupation with the brilliant avant-garde experimentation on the 1910s and 1920s, can we expect a different response to new media on the part of Russian artists and intellectuals? What will - or could - result from the juxtaposition of the Netscape Navigator web browser's frames with Eisenstein's theories of montage? It would be dangerous to reduce heterogeneous engagements to a single common denominator, some kind of unique "Russian New Media" meme. Yet a number of common threads do exist. These provide a useful alternative to the West's default thematics, while articulating a distinctive visual poetics of new media.

This paper examines the fourth-century 'Exeter pelike' (ARV² 1516.80) by the Jena Painter, and includes three new colour photographs. The front side depicts the meeting of Orestes and Electra at the tomb of Agamemnon, and the vase is commonly interpreted (e.g. by Taplin, 'Pots and Plays') as relating closely to Aeschylus' Choephori. I focus on a widely missed inscription ΙΣΜ[ΗΝΗ, which must be an error on the part of the painter for Chrysothemis, a slip mediated through knowledge of Sophocles. Taking this error as its starting point, my discussion places the Exeter pelike within wider iconographical traditions, and scrutinises the much-debated relationship between vase-painting and tragic text and performance to demonstrate how this pelike creates a complex allusive relationship with numerous pictorial and textual traditions.