Miguel Gaete C.

espanolEl presente escrito plantea una reflexion en torno a una serie de conceptos, enlazados entre si, que formalizan una manera de habitar en las grandes ciudades industriales y pos industriales. Realizaremos, en efecto, una comparacion entre distintos descriptores que han sido utilizados para definir un animus generalizado desde el siglo XIX en adelante: spleen, ennui, Weltschmerz, melancolia y, uno de desarrollo propio: psicoentropia. Estos terminos seran dispuestos en relacion a la arquitectura y la urbanidad, buscando sus infiltraciones en la critica posmoderna y en el relato de artistas y poetas de distinta indole. EnglishThe present paper proposes a reflection about a number of concepts, linked together, which formalizes a way to live in the big industrial and post-industrial cities. We will, in effect, a comparison between different descriptors that have been used to define a generalized animus from the nineteenth century onwards: spleen, ennui, Weltschmerz, melancholy and one of own development: psicoentropy. These terms will be studied in relation to architecture and urbanity, seeking their infiltrations in postmodern criticism and the story of artists and poets of various kinds.

This article examines the view of South America as the Garden of Eden through the lens of three German romantic artists: Johann Moritz Rugendas, Otto Grashof and Carl Alexander Simon. I discuss some of their paintings and drawings of the jungles of Brazil and the forests of Chile, along with notes and entries from their travelogues, to determine the extent to which specific elements from the German Weltanschauung, together with a colonialist gaze, drove their depiction of South America. The general argument is that linkages between South America and paradise raised by German artists throughout the nineteenth century would not have meant a glorification of South American nature, as is usually maintained. On the contrary, they should be read as the conjunction of factors such as racial assumptions prompted by new scientific disciplines, a sense of cultural superiority, and an intense obsession with both the past and an idea of purity projected onto distant lands. This, in turn, would have been part of a series of appropriative discourses concerning regions beyond Europe, put into practice by German romantic explorers of the time. In this fashion, this essay proposes a reoriented interpretation of these artists and their work, challenging the prevalent idea that the development of romantic landscape painting in South America was almost entirely determined by European aesthetic trends such as the sublime and the picturesque.

This paper involves the psychoanalytic and iconological analysis of two paintings by the Romantic artist Carl Alexander Simon held at the Schlossmuseum in Weimar: Selbstbildnis mit Tirolerhut and Die Braut des Künstlers. Simon produced these paintings in 1830, almost 20 years before travelling to South America, where he continued his artistic career and carried out an ambitious colonisation scheme. This is the first study to scrutinise these paintings. This essay’s primary purpose is to unveil overlooked aspects of Simon’s works, determining the extent to which intricate personality traits began to emerge in these works. The central argument is that various features of these paintings are early instantiations of a messiah complex which will be determinant to understanding his colonising endeavour in Chile. 

El presente escrito trata sobre el fotografo Lewis Hine y su particular mirada del progreso y la ciudad de Nueva York. Esto se relacionara con una idea fundamental dentro de la estetica, como es lo sublime, trazando paralelismos entre lo planteado por diversos autores como Edmund Burke e Immanuel Kant con la imagen mas conocida del fotografo estadounidense. A partir de aqui, se intentara desvelar la presencia de lo sublime en la logica del capitalismo y en la construccion de las ciudades modernas, analizando su pervivencia en un modelo ideologico que derruye la idea del limite y promulga lo infinito como una condicion sine qua non del progreso y el desarrollo.

This paper examines the evolution of the concept of the sublime from the Romantic era to the avant-garde movements of the 20th century. Using the idea of immanence as a framework, it explores how the sublime persisted in modern and postmodern art and thought as a reaction against beauty. This sentiment was fueled in part by the experience of the formless and monstrous in the wake of events like Auschwitz and the rise of totalitarianism, which contributed to a pervasive sense of “ennui.” Key questions addressed are the ongoing influence of Romanticism in the post-19th century era, the anti-civilization critique, and how avant-garde artists' ideas about the death of art were shaped by the sublime.

This article examines the view of South America as the Garden of Eden through the lens of three German romantic artists: Johann Moritz Rugendas, Otto Grashof and Carl Alexander Simon. I discuss some of their paintings and drawings of the jungles of Brazil and the forests of Chile, along with notes and entries from their travelogues, to determine the extent to which specific elements from the German Weltanschauung, together with a colonialist gaze, drove their depiction of South America. The general argument is that linkages between South America and paradise raised by German artists throughout the nineteenth century would not have meant a glorification of South American nature, as is usually maintained. On the contrary, they should be read as the conjunction of factors such as racial assumptions prompted by new scientific disciplines, a sense of cultural superiority, and an intense obsession with both the past and an idea of purity projected onto distant lands. This, in turn, would ...

This paper involves the psychoanalytic and iconological analysis of two paintings
by the Romantic artist Carl Alexander Simon held at the Schlossmuseum in Weimar:
Selbstbildnis mit Tirolerhut and Die Braut des Künstlers. Simon produced these
paintings in 1830, almost 20 years before travelling to South America, where he
continued his artistic career and carried out an ambitious colonisation scheme.
This is the first study to scrutinise these paintings. This essay’s primary purpose is to
unveil overlooked aspects of Simon’s works, determining the extent to which intricate
personality traits began to emerge in these works. The central argument is that various
features of these paintings are early instantiations of a messiah complex which will
be determinant to understanding his colonising endeavour in Chile.

In 1822, the German Romantic painter Johann Moritz Rugendas undertook his famed three-year journey across Brazil. Later, between 1831 and 1846, encouraged by Alexander von Humboldt and other Romantic artists, he would make a second trip through Mexico and South America. In 1832, Eugène Delacroix started a six-month journey to Spain and North Africa as a part of a diplomatic mission. Both artists profusely translated their travels into words and rich images of tropical America and the Orient. Their paintings and illustrations of remote lands and people became milestones in their respective careers while being prime examples of how Europe viewed and perceived the rest of the world in the nineteenth century. In hindsight, they were not only mere agents and promoters of two crucial aesthetic trends of that time: Orientalism and Tropicality but the embodiment of two ways of seeing and imagining the Others. This article places these two artists against each other, contrasting the set of i...

This article examines the view of South America as the Garden of Eden through the lens of three German romantic artists: Johann Moritz Rugendas, Otto Grashof and Carl Alexander Simon. I discuss some of their paintings and drawings of the jungles of Brazil and the forests of Chile, along with notes and entries from their travelogues, to determine the extent to which specific elements from the German Weltanschauung, together with a colonialist gaze, drove their depiction of South America. The general argument is that linkages between South America and paradise raised by German artists throughout the nineteenth century would not have meant a glorification of South American nature, as is usually maintained. On the contrary, they should be read as the conjunction of factors such as racial assumptions prompted by new scientific disciplines, a sense of cultural superiority, and an intense obsession with both the past and an idea of purity projected onto distant lands. This, in turn, would have been part of a series of appropriative discourses concerning regions beyond Europe, put into practice by German romantic explorers of the time. In this fashion, this essay proposes a reoriented interpretation of these artists and their work, challenging the prevalent idea that the development of romantic landscape painting in South America was almost entirely determined by European aesthetic trends such as the sublime and the picturesque.

The appearance of cyberspace in the 1960s and their ongoing development nowadays, has posed questions and theorisations of various types about its nature and future progression. This paper proposes the sublime as a crucial and valid concept to comprehend both the theoretical and aesthetic development of this phenomenon. In so doing, this research looks back at the origin of the sublime. Thus, Longinus, Burke and Kant’s considerations about this concept are the main grounds upon which this investigation stands. Likewise, historic Romanticism and an iconic painting by Caspar David Friedrich serve to shed light on the aspects that cyberspace takes from a worldview that struggled with the surrounding in manners not so different from ours.

The attempts to understand Nature through the intellect, as well as the sensuous connection of man and landscape, were amongst the most captivating chapters in German Romanticism. German philosophers, in particular, strove to comprehend these aspects of reality from objective reason, but also, they sought an alternative appreciation of Nature through sensory-emotional values as part of their new philosophy based on aesthetics. Theoretical constructions such as ‘the philosophy of Nature’ as well as discussions on taste and arts were driven by ideas about the sublime and the beautiful and flourished extensively among German intellectuals and artists. These elements, moreover, would come to gain new meanings when used to understand philosophical and visual approaches particularly to the New World throughout the nineteenth century.

F.W.J Schelling’s  Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature (1797), his inaugural publication on Naturphilosophie, has been rated as one of the most influential theoretical treatises on Nature ever developed in Germany. However, its use in interpreting artworks has hitherto been a problematic subject for most of the scholars who have tried to apply his philosophical theory of natural sciences to elucidations on art and landscape paintings of that period.

Various factors make Schelling’s theory a challenge. To begin with, Schelling was a pioneer in incorporating an understanding of Nature within a deeply intricate philosophical system that addressed a mystical orientation toward the determination of its essence, cause and origin.  The outcome was that the internal dynamic of Nature became a philosophical system fully grounded in tenets of polarity and dualism, that is, on the belief that matter admitted only two forces “attraction and repulsion”.  Moreover, Schelling’s Naturphilosophie projected an understanding of Nature as a whole which became a theoretical framework that served as the foundation of natural sciences.  The main difficulty with linking Naturphilosophie to a philosophy of art was that Schelling’s purpose was to trigger a cultural revolution that would allow natural sciences themselves “to arise philosophically” and not just to apply philosophy instrumentally to natural sciences.  As a result, Schelling’s philosophy would be “itself nothing else than natural science". 

The aim of this article is to investigate this philosophical notion and to determine to what extent it represents a valid theoretical resource to construe specific artworks on Nature accomplished by a group of German explorers in Chile. This group were Otto Grashof, Carl Alexander Simon, Johann Moritz Rugendas, Eduard Friedrich Poeppig and Rudolf Amandus Philippi. Accordingly, historical facts about these explorers, as well as part of their artistic output not only on subjects such as the Andes Mountains but also their illustrations of scientific botany will be contrasted with some crucial ideas drawn from Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, seeking connections among them. Additionally, various theories to ascertain the impact of Naturphilosophie on these explorers will be presented. These range from the direct influence of Schelling on them, including Schelling’s implication in nineteenth-century Germany education, to the indirect influence of his ideas via figures such as Alexander von Humboldt.

Resumen El presente texto es un estudio que ofrece una revisión crítica al concepto de lo sublime basándose en la teorización clásica de esta idea, es decir, la adjudicada a Longino, Ed-mund Burke e Immanuel Kant. A partir de aquí, se intentará descubrir la presencia de lo sublime como un factor relevante en la configuración cultural del mundo contemporáneo, pasando por su presencia innegable en el arte de las vanguardias o en la concepción de la Naturaleza y el entorno. Finalmente, el objetivo central de este escrito es demostrar como lo sublime ofrece también una alternativa para comprender el problema de "lo infinito" y "lo ilimitado" en el marco de las tecnologías, la eclosión de las grandes ciudades y su filtración en el sustrato retórico del capitalismo, ofreciendo así una vía diferente en el estudio de este tema clásico de la estética. Palabras clave: lo sublime, lo infinito, naturaleza, ciudad, posmodernismo.

El presente escrito se enfoca en el análisis crítico del concepto de “ópera electrónica” en la obra del artista coreano Nam June Paik.
A partir de la revisión de una de sus obras más emblemáticas, “Electronic Ópera nº1”, se indagará en cómo en este artista se produce una reinterpretación de la idea wagneriana de Gesamtkunstwerk
mediante la utilización de dispositivos electrónicos y tecnológicos. Para ello, comenzaremos esclareciendo las distintas significaciones establecidas en torno a la ópera, pasando evidentemente por Wagner, hasta llegar a una construcción posmoderna del lenguaje operístico visibilizado por Nam June Paik y su visión de la sociedad del espectáculo.

El presente escrito plantea una reflexión en torno a una serie de conceptos, enlazados entre sí, que formalizan una manera de habitar en las grandes ciudades industriales y postindustriales.

Realizaremos, en efecto, una comparación entre distintos descriptores que han sido utilizados para definir un animus generalizado desde el siglo XIX en adelante: spleen, ennui, Weltschmerz, melancolía y, uno de desarrollo propio: psicoentropía. Estos términos serán dispuestos en relación a la arquitectura y la urbanidad, buscando sus infiltraciones en la crítica posmoderna y en el relato de artistas, arquitectos y poetas de distinta índole.

El presente artículo ofrece un análisis y reflexión en torno a la entropía cultural y su repercusión en las problemáticas estéticas y sociales de las metrópolis del mundo globalizado. Para ello, se establecerán los cruces entre el trabajo del artista y teórico estadounidense de las Segundas Vanguardias Robert Smithson, con la teoría entrópica de Claude Levi-Strauss.

Desde el análisis de algunas obras importantes del catálogo de Smithson y de algunos conceptos suyos como “non-sites” y “nuevos monumentos”, intentaremos descubrir la relevancia de la entropía para comprender la eclosión de las periferias y la arquitectura posmoderna. Analizaremos, por ejemplo, su “Tour por Passaic” para extrapolar su crítica a los fenómenos urbanos sujetos a la ideología del capital, estudiando lo que él mismo llama “...heridas y los fragmentos producidos por el sistema capitalista”.

El objetivo es ofrecer una mirada desde las distopías críticas que conforman un registro disidente dentro del panorama de la nueva arquitectura.

Palabras claves: Robert Smithson, arquitectura, entropía, ciudad, periferias.

Ensayos escrito por Miguel Angel Gaete. 17 de julio de 2010, Arte y Crítica La obra del español Daniel García Andújar (Almoradí, 1966) se enmarca dentro de las nuevas prácticas artísticas tendientes a la descentralización de las estructuras de poder jerárquico presentes en la web y en los medios de información y opinión, así como en un ejercicio critico-creativo que aborda problemáticas inherentes a la multiculturalidad, indagando en distintos tópicos como el racismo, la discriminación social y la xenofobia. En el planteamiento estético y conceptual de Andújar se conjugan una amplia gama de herramientas de trabajo, como el video, el diseño o el net art La utilización de estas herramientas con un fin crítico que cuestiona y subvierte su propio uso en nuestro medio hipertecnologizado, junto a la preeminencia colaborativa que define su obra, hace que su praxis fluctúe dentro de lo que en la actualidad se define ampliamente como art-hacktivismo. En este neologismo se advierte el quid de su obra: una imbricación entre el discurso político-social, las técnicas del hacker computacional y el arte, enlazándose con un movimiento que pretende desestabilizar el complejo juego de relaciones de poder emergidos junto con el desarrollo de los entornos virtuales y la proliferación de medios masivos de comunicación. Dentro de la labor de este artista y gestor, se pueden destacar los portales o espacios cívicos de libre participación inscritos en el ámbito de algunas ciudades específicas como Barcelona, Valencia o Sevilla. Su inicio dentro de este modelo de práctica artística se puede situar en el proyecto Irational.org, bajo el cual, a mediados de los años noventa y en colaboración con los artistas Marcus Valentine, Heath Bunting y Minerva Cuevas, germina la plataforma "Technologies to the People" (TTTP). irational.org se inscribe como una asociación internacional de artistas que produce una cantidad importante de información de libre acceso (freedata) y que presta servicio y ayuda a los desplazados. Adicionalmente, esta asociación suministra apoyo a artistas independientes y a organizaciones que, con una perspectiva crítica, desarrollan un trabajo vinculado a distintos aspectos de la "sociedad de la ARTE, HACKTIVISMO Y SUBVERSIÓN SOCIAL EN LA WEB 2.0