The redemption of the gaze: the crisis of observation in the "fin de siècle" and the advent of cinema

The intention of this article is not to affirm, but rather to question wether it is possible to speak of a loss of the ability to gaze in the context of the nineteenth century and especially in the context of the fin de siècle, in the bosom of the epistemological crisis that beset the Turn of the Century. And very especially, this article tries to question about the impact this crisis had, perhaps, in the birth of cinema. Is in this context that arises the work of Marey and the advent of the cinematograph of the Lumière brothers in the fin de siècle Europe, both of them showing a deep faith in a mechanical apparatus that would allow the redemption of a battered gaze. And it seems to be a dream that continues over time through the tradition of shooting the everyday life.

Ai Weiwei: La recepción de su producción artística

Actualmente Ai Weiwei es el creador con mayor proyección dentro y fuera de China, destacando especialmente por su prolífica, heterogénea, comprometida y polémica producción artística. Sus propuestas suscitan un gran interés y obtienen una destacada repercusión tanto en China como en un escenario internacional. Precisamente, es uno de los artistas contemporáneos chinos que ha logrado una mayor presencia en los medios de comunicación y en los espacios expositivos españoles, siendo un ejemplo de ello la organización de la primera exposición museística de su obra en el Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo (2013) y el estreno de la película documental sobre su vida y su obra Never Sorry (2013), dirigida por Alison Klayman. Ai Weiwei es un autor mediático y su visibilidad deviene una plataforma desde donde articular proyectos artísticos que enfocan determinadas problemáticas sociales. A la vez, la crítica política de Ai Weiwei resulta especialmente atractiva en un contexto euroamericano que subraya su papel de disidente y agitador. Dentro de tales parámetros se ahondará en la recepción de la producción artística de Ai Weiwei en el marco internacional y en el contexto español, analizando la aproximación que la prensa esboza sobre dicho autor.

Primitivismo y Feminismo en el arte contemporáneo

Para la mentalidad colonialista del siglo XIX la raza negra estaba provista de una extraordinaria sexualidad y lujuria. En la metrópolis el equivalente era la mujer sexuada, la prostituta. En los primeros años del siglo XX este tándem, prostituta-colonizado, sirve a los artistas vanguardistas como elemento de confrontación con la moral imperante. Son las artistas mujeres, con una intención feminista, quienes principalmente utilizan el primitivismo asociado a la mujer en su crítica a los estereotipos. Figura pionera en ello es Hannah Höch, especialmente en su serie De un Museo Etnográfico, en el que asocia figuras femeninas y objetos de arte primitivo. En los años 70 del siglo XX, algunas artistas de la performance, como Carolee Schneemann o Ana Mendieta reivindican el cuerpo femenino con el significado de Origen y Fertilidad que tiene en las culturas primitivas. En este mismo contexto puede inscribirse la escultura Maman de Louise Bourgeois. El elemento de crítica social, que está vigente aún en nuestros días, puede verse en las obras de las Guerrilla Girls.

(Pro)Motion Pictures: Len Lye in the Thirties

This article examines Len Lye’s film-making in the 1930s within a broader visual arts context, seeking to clarify the nature and extent of his involvement in British documentary film culture at this time. In particular, it demonstrates how Lye's method of fusing 'live action', found footage, and animation techniques created the possibility of a radical documentary practice that could reconcile promotional advertising and commercial art with avant-garde abstraction and kinaesthetic experimentation. In particular, the article focusses on Lye's N. or N.W. (1937, 35mm, b&w, 10 mns), arguing that his work from this period should be regarded as central - and not marginal - to any serious reassessment of Britain's “Documentary Movement” of the inter-war era, and its relations to any history of the cinema and visual culture.

“La littérature est la seule patrie”: Nabile Farès and the Poetry of Postcolonial Displacment

Nabile Farès is a key author within postcolonial studies, due in particular to his uniquely expressive writing style. This article discusses writing style in his 1982 text, L’état perdu: précédé du discours pratique de l’immigré. Throughout the mainly French text, different alphabets are woven, alluding to the complexity of Algerian linguistic history and the importance of language in the construction and expression of identity. Meanwhile, the grammar and structure of the French language seems confused and at times illogical, raising further questions about use of a colonial language in a postcolonial context. Farès’s writing style is avant-garde in nature, and deliberate intertextuality with the Surrealists situates the text within an avant-garde tradition in the French language, developing new ideas surrounding the effect of this written genre in the aftermath of colonialism.

Parker Morris and the economies of the Fordist house

The Parker Morris report of 1961 attempted, through the application of scientific principles, to define the minimum living space standards needed to accommodate household activities. But while early modernist research into ideas of existenzminimum were the work of avant-garde architects and thinkers, this report was commissioned by the British State. This normalization of scientific enquiry into space can be considered not only a response to new conditions in the mass production of housing – economies of scale, prefabrication, system-building and modular coordination – but also to the post-war boom in consumer goods. The domestic interior was assigned a key role as a privileged site of mass consumption as the production and micro-management of space in Britain became integral to the development of a planned national economy underpinned by Fordist principles. The apparently placeless and scale-less diagrams executed by Gordon Cullen to illustrate Parker Morris emblematize these relationships. Walls dissolve as space flows from inside to outside in a homogenized and ephemeral landscape whose limits are perhaps only the boundaries of the nation state and the circuits of capital.

Decadent Conservatism: Politics and Aesthetics in The Senate

The relationship between late-Victorian Decadence and Aestheticism and politics has long been vexed. This article explores the hitherto under-explored confluence of conservatism and avant-garde literature in the period by introducing The Senate, a Tory-Decadent journal that ran from 1894-7. While Decadent authors occupied various political positions, this article argues that The Senate offers a crucial link between conservatism and Decadence The article presents the journal in its political and publishing context, outlining its editorial position on such issues as the Liberal Unionist-Conservative coalition governments, Britain's relationship with Europe and the threat of ‘State Socialism’, as well as its valorisation of Bollingbroke and eighteenth-century Toryism, and its relationship to, and difference from, key Decadent journals the Yellow Book and The Savoy. It then goes on to articulate its relationship to Decadence by focussing on the presence of Paul Verlaine in its pages and its vitriolic response to the press coverage of Oscar Wilde's trials. The article concludes by exploring the surprising wake of The Senate, briefly tracing the editors' influence in the development of Modernism and links with the journal BLAST.

Mixed Messages: American Correspondences in Visual and Verbal Practices

Mixed Messages presents and interrogates ten distinct moments from the arts of nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first century America where visual and verbal forms blend and clash. Charting correspondences concerned with the expression and meaning of human experience, this volume moves beyond standard interdisciplinary theoretical approaches to consider the written and visual artwork in embodied, cognitive, and contextual terms.

Offering a genuinely interdisciplinary contribution to the intersecting fields of art history, avant-garde studies, word-image relations, and literary studies, Mixed Messages takes in architecture, notebooks, poetry, painting, conceptual art, contemporary art, comic books, photographs and installations, ending with a speculative conclusion on the role of the body in the experience of digital mixed media. Each of the ten case studies explores the juxtaposition of visual and verbal forms in a manner that moves away from treating verbal and visual symbols as operating in binary or oppositional systems, and towards a consideration of mixed media, multi-media and intermedia work as brought together in acts of creation, exhibition, reading, viewing, and immersion. The collection advances research into embodiment theory, affect, pragmatist aesthetics, as well as into the continuing legacy of romanticism and of dada, conceptual art and surrealism in an American context.

Parker Morris and the Fordist House

6.00 pm. If people like watching T.V. while they are eating their evening meal, space for a low table is needed (Ministry of Housing and Local Government, Space in the Home, 1963, p. 4).

This paper re-examines the 1961 Parker Morris report on housing standards in Britain. It explores the origins, scope, text and iconography of the report and suggests that these not only express a particularly modernist conception of space but one which presupposed very specific economic conditions and geographies.

Also known as Homes for Today and Tomorrow Parker Morris attempted, through the application of scientific principles, to define the minimum living space standards needed to accommodate household activities. But while early modernist research into notions of existenzminimum were the work of avant-garde architects and thinkers, Homes for Today and Tomorrow and its sister design manual Space in the Home were commissioned by the British State. This normalization of scientific enquiry into space can be considered not only as a response to new conditions in the mass production of housing – economies of scale, prefabrication, system-building and modular coordination – but also to the post-war boom in consumer goods. In this, it is suggested that the domestic interior was assigned a key role as a privileged site of mass consumption as the production and micro-management of space in Britain became integral to the development of a planned national economy underpinned by Fordist principles. Parker Morris, therefore, sought to accommodate activities which were pre-determined not so much by traditional social or familial ties but rather by recently introduced commodities such as the television set, white goods, table tennis tables and train sets. This relationship between the domestic interior and the national economy are emblematized by the series of placeless and scale-less diagrams executed by Gordon Cullen in Space in the Home. Here, walls dissolve as space flows from inside to outside in a homogenized and ephemeral landscape whose limits are perhaps only the boundaries of the nation state and the circuits of capital.

In Britain, Parker Morris was the last explicit State-sponsored attempt to prescribe a normative spatial programme for national living. The calm neutral efficiency of family-life expressed in its diagrams was almost immediately problematised by the rise of 1960s counter-culture, the feminist movement and the oil crisis of 1972 which altered perhaps forever the spatial, temporal and economic conditions it had taken for granted. The debate on space-standards, however, continues.

Remedios Varo's Feminine, Spiritual Quest

Remedios Varo occupies a marginal position in the Surrealist canon, despite her direct involvement with Breton’s circle and in spite of the fact that her work is attributed a universal significance. It has been interpreted as representing a journey towards identity and freedom, a search for female empowerment, and as a spiritual quest. Moreover, critical focus on the mythic/exoteric ‘female’ quest has been to the detriment of the mystical/esoteric significance of the paintings. This article argues that it is in the combination of these strands that Varo’s radicalism might be found. It shows that by presenting a female, spiritual quest for enlightenment—which exists apart from a traditionally male-dominated, western religious schema—Varo circumvented her ordained role within the artistic, spiritual, and political communities of which she was a part.

To Hell with Herbert Read

Freee write manifestos by taking a pencil (or a laptop) to an historical text, usually belonging to the entwined traditions of the avant-garde and political activism. Sometimes, as Tristan Tzara advised, we choose the text according to its length, while other times, such as in this instance, we selected the text according to the conditions of the invitation that triggered the writing of the manifesto. Our manifesto ‘To Hell with Herbert Read’ was written originally as a contribution to a conference held in Manchester that took its title from Herbert Read’s book ‘To Hell with Culture’. ‘To Hell with Culture’ is a book that cuts itself off from the world whereas ‘To Hell with Herbert Read’ relocates Read’s book in a world of cultural, social, economic and political actualities that are part of common experience. Read rejects culture because he thinks it is a useless, wasteful, elitist, puffed-up, decorative supplement to the functional, factual, palpable, purposeful world of things. He is a positivist kind of modernist who presents himself as the opposite, an enemy of the status quo. He is an anarchist of a particularly bourgeois hue: he wants us all to have decent pots and pans, not the inferior ones that are supplied by market forces cheaply. Rather than taking his aim precisely to target the dominant forces of his day - the industrial capitalists and their financiers - he rejects the world and all its inhabitants. He not only despises elitist culture but popular culture too.

To Hell with Herbert Read

Freee write manifestos by taking a pencil (or a laptop) to an historical text, usually belonging to the entwined traditions of the avant-garde and political activism. Sometimes, as Tristan Tzara advised, we choose the text according to its length, while other times, such as in this instance, we selected the text according to the conditions of the invitation that triggered the writing of the manifesto. Our manifesto ‘To Hell with Herbert Read’ was written originally as a contribution to a conference held in Manchester that took its title from Herbert Read’s book ‘To Hell with Culture’. ‘To Hell with Culture’ is a book that cuts itself off from the world whereas ‘To Hell with Herbert Read’ relocates Read’s book in a world of cultural, social, economic and political actualities that are part of common experience. Read rejects culture because he thinks it is a useless, wasteful, elitist, puffed-up, decorative supplement to the functional, factual, palpable, purposeful world of things. He is a positivist kind of modernist who presents himself as the opposite, an enemy of the status quo. He is an anarchist of a particularly bourgeois hue: he wants us all to have decent pots and pans, not the inferior ones that are supplied by market forces cheaply. Rather than taking his aim precisely to target the dominant forces of his day - the industrial capitalists and their financiers - he rejects the world and all its inhabitants. He not only despises elitist culture but popular culture too.

Étude comparative d'un journalisme de 1955 avec celui de 2006 dans le quotidien québécois La Presse le cas du journalisme sportif

La recherche porte sur les changements que le journalisme a subis au fil du temps, et particulièrement sur les mutations de toutes sortes que connaît le journalisme sportif entre 1955 et 2006. Elle a pour objectif la mise en évidence des ressemblances et des dissemblances des pages sportives des deux époques étudiées et s'inscrit ainsi dans la lignée des recherches sur les changements paradigmatiques du journalisme, dont les théories ont été proposées par Colette Brin, Jean Charron et Jean de Bonville (1996, 2002, 2004). Le corpus est constitué des pages sportives du quotidien québécois La Presse de 1955 et de 2006. La date des deux journaux a été choisie en fonction d'un événement de référence, le match final de la Coupe Stanley, respectivement le 15 mars 1955 et le 20 juin 2006. Les méthodes retenues, une analyse de contenu et une analyse de textes, visent essentiellement à permettre l'atteinte de notre objectif principal, à savoir une étude comparative des pages sportives de 1955 et de 2006. Trois hypothèses ont été posées. La première, postulant l'existence de différences marquées entre 1955 et 2006, a été confirmée, puisque de nombreuses dissemblances ont été observées, particulièrement en ce qui a trait à l'aspect visuel des deux journaux et à la nature impressionniste du langage. La seconde hypothèse, liée à l'existence présumée d'une relation différente ente le journaliste et le lecteur, a également été largement confirmée. La troisième hypothèse, selon laquelle certains éléments caractéristiques du journalisme de communication allaient jaillir de l'analyse interprétative, a été partiellement confirmée. Les mises en garde de plusieurs chercheurs ainsi que les limites d'une telle recherche ne nous permettent pas d'affirmer l'existence effective du journalisme de communication, mais plutôt de faire ressortir certains points qui montrent que le journalisme contemporain semble aller dans la direction de la communication plutôt que celle de l'information.