Transhistorical and cross cultural aesthetics

In the 1920s, the Mexican composer Julián Carrillo (1875-1965) developed a microtonal system called El Sonido 13 (The 13th Sound). Although his pioneering role as one of the first proponents of microtonality within the Western art music tradition elevated Carrillo to iconic status among European avant-garde circles in the 1960s and 1970s, his music and legacy have remained largely overlooked by music scholars, critics, and performers.

Confronting this paucity of scholarship on Carrillo and his music, Alejandro L. Madrid goes above and beyond "filling in" the historical record. Combining archival and ethnographic research with musical analysis and cultural theory, Madrid argues that Carrillo and Sonido 13 are best understood as a cultural complex: a network of moments, spaces, and articulations in which Carrillo and his music continuously re-acquire significance and meaning. Thus, Madrid explores Carrillo's music and ideas not only in relation to the historical moments of their inception, but also in relation to the various cultural projects that kept them alive and re-signified them through the beginning of the twenty-first century. Eschewing traditionally linear historical frameworks, In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13 employs an innovative transhistorical narrative in which past, present, and future are explored dialogically in order to understand the politics of performance and self-representation behind Carrillo and Sonido 13.

In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13 transforms the traditional genre of the composer study, treating it not as a celebration of "masters" and "masterworks," but as a pointed postcolonial intervention that offers invaluable insight into the politics of cultural exchange, experimentalism, marginality, and cultural capital in twentieth century Mexico.

This article examines the impact of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European perspectives on the development of Alhambra scholarship. An Islamic palatine fortress built near the city of Granada during the Nasrid period (1232-1492), the monument has undergone substantial transformations under Christian occupation, and through its ‘rediscovery’ by foreign visitors in the nineteenth century. The fragmentation of its surfaces through a variety of Romantic and modernising frameworks served to dislocate its decorative forms from their historical and architectural contexts, leading many historians to discuss its designs in relation to previous periods and traditions. The pervasive view of the period and its art as ‘past-facing’ would postpone a critical consideration of the ornament of the Alhambra on its own formal and ideological terms. Only in recent decades has this position been challenged and the monument discussed in terms of its regional specificity and its multiple periods of production and reception.

Ausstellungen vermitteln Wissen und zugleich ästhetische Erfahrungen - aber wie genau tun sie das? Die Beiträge des Tagungsbandes gehen an der Schnittstelle von Ausstellungstheorie und kuratorischer Praxis der Frage nach, wie in Museen und Ausstellungen durch expositorische Konstellationen Evidenzerfahren erzeugt, bewusst unterlaufen oder oder problematisiert werden. Ausgehend von Harald Szeemanns Begriff der Evidenzhängung werden in der Einführung die leitenden Fragestellungen des Tagungsbandes in Bezug auf die Evidenzen, die Präsenz der Dinge und das Expositorische erläutert.

Appreciation and aesthetic experience of the art of the past seem to us a commonplace and even a cultural duty. Perhaps many would generally agree with Théophile Gautier that, while “Tout passe, l’art robuste seul a l’éternité”. But how many would also be willing to claim that what we today consider as “art” is actually the same thing that the builders of the Gothic cathedrals or the authors of the Elizabethan Age had in mind? If it is true, as Bakhtin wrote, that “works break the frontiers of their time and live over the centuries, that is, in the great time”, then our relationship with the history of art constantly risks anachronism. Indeed, the fear of anachronism is the tacit contradiction underlying the practice of art history. How to overcome it?

Collections of Catholic diocesan museums have represented a significant section of art from the Middle Ages to the present day. In recent decades, diocesan museums have paid attention to new approaches in exhibiting works of art, in particular, to the principles of a "transhistorical" museum. This approach emphasizes the dialogic nature of works of art from different eras, the importance of direct visual associative connections and presence of a range of interpretations of the concept of curators. Since the Second Vatican Council, diocesan museums have included works by contemporary artists in their collections; they formed the basis of the transition to new methods of exhibiting. Accents in the interpretation of contemporary art are existential issues and spiritual communication. The author analyses permanent collections and exhibitions of 2017-2019 in the diocesan museums of Germany (the "Museum at the Cathedral" in Würzburg, the "Kolumba-Museum" in Cologne, the Bamberg Diocesan Museum). The author comes to the conclusion that the curators of museums are driven by a transhistorical approach by striving to establish visual and existential "bridges" between works of art from different eras and thereby demonstrate the "spark of God" and the fundamental nature of spiritual issues. At the same time, diocesan museums by no means refuse the theological and philosophical interpretation of the meanings of works, i.e. do not rely on subjective aspects of their visual perception by the public. Work with the "individual" visitor and close cooperation with museums of other profiles determine one of the possible directions for the development of diocesan museums.

Dansaekhwa, which means ‘one-colour painting’ in Korean, is a stylistic term now employed as a way of drawing attention to a tendency in Korean art that came to the fore in the 1970s. While Dansaekhwa artists adopted procedures and underlying assumptions from the modern Western tradition, they also sought to cleave to what they understood to be key characteristics of a traditional Korean culture that was fast disappearing. I draw on Jörn Rüsen and Chun-Chieh Huang’s work on historical consciousness and the ‘Tao’ of history,  the writings of François Jullien on East Asia, and  the writings of the Dansaekhwa  artist, Lee Ufan. I make an argument for Dansaekhwa as the transhistorical re-visioning of temporality in terms not of the rigid historical categories  of ‘past’ and ‘present’ but as a more subjectivized ‘then’ and ‘now’ grounded in somatic experience.

By analyzing both texts and paintings by the de Chirico brothers this study shows that Ludovico Ariosto was a primary source of inspiration for the Scuola Metafisica, possibly Italy’s most influential contribution to international modernism. It demonstrates that Ariosto—hardly mentioned by scholars, but influential throughout the brothers’ lives—is the “poet in marble” in Savinio’s Hermpahrodito and “the great metaphysician” in de Chirico’s eponymous masterpiece. A double revelation triggered by the poet’s monument in Ferrara’s cityscape during WWI inspired a turn in the de Chiricos’ poetics and aesthetics, and Ariosto’s model permeated their interwar theories, self-portraits, novels, and so-called ‘romantic’ paintings.

This paper asks whether an aesthetics of Paleolithic tools is possible, and if so, what it might be. The application of our own aesthetic sensibilities to artifacts of prehistory is not difficult. We easily recognize and appreciate their visual and tactile qualities. The more complicated questions that the paper explores are whether we can uncover the aesthetic sensibilities of their makers and, if we cannot, whether aesthetic examination of prehistoric tools from our own perspectives is adequate or useful. The paper is based on study of Paleolithic flints from French archaeological sites dating from about 500,000 years ago to about 11,000 years ago. The stone tools are held in the collections of the Wilson Museum (Castine, Maine, U.S.A.), and the paper is illustrated from these collections.

It's been said that in order to understand a man one should first look into the relationship he has with his mother, thus Sigmund Freud must have really been onto something when he coined his theory of the Oedipus Complex as few people in history seem to embody it as effortlessly as Mr. Bonaparte. In addition to the Oedipus Complex, I was also interested in fleshing out the idea of Bonaparte’s stereotypically fiery nature as a result of post-traumatic stress disorder in relation to his numerous war campaigns. As a future graduate school candidate, both of these phenomena have merged together in the production of this paper to shine a light on a long maligned figure in history in order to further understand the more mysterious aspects of his nature through a textual analysis. Because his meteoric rise in French society is reliant on such a psychological evaluation, this paper seeks to determine the historical legitimacy of his infatuation with his mother, as well as his penchant for “war mongering”, and assess the effect it had on his relationships by molding the identity of the future French emperor.

... The Paleolithic period in human prehistory began about 2.3 million years ago, when the unquestionably tool-using hominin Homo erectus ... of the Neolithic, or New Stone Age, added grinding and polishing to the original Paleolithic techniques of hammering and chipping. ...

Abstract: This article examines the impact of nineteenth-and early twentieth-century European perspectives on the development of Alhambra scholarship. An Islamic palatine fortress built near the city of Granada during the Nasrid period (1232-1492), the ...

The Alhambra, a palatine fortress perched on a mountainous outcrop above the city of Granada, has held a unique place in the historiography of Islamic architectural monuments, owing both to its European location in modern-day Spain and to the character of its 'rediscovery' by European travellers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Originally constructed under a succession of Nasrid rulers between 1232 and 1492, the exceptionally well-preserved palace complex later became archetypal to Western scholarship of 'Moorish' architecture and ornament, despite its many subsequent alterations under the Catholic monarchs.1 Like all residential monuments with long histories of continuous use, the Nasrid fortress had been occupied and altered numerous times following its capture in 1492; after the conquest by monarchs Ferdinand II and Isabella I (who ruled as joint sovereigns of Aragon and Castile from 1479 until Isabella's death in 1504), the site was occupied by the...

On the occasion of the Anniversary exhibition 'Treasury!' I collected a few thoughts about art history in connection with my work of 18 years collaborating with the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. Working with its collections and its curators have broadened my view on the history of art.
The design of the catalogue was done by www.gebr.silvestri.nl.