African Performance Arts and Political Actspresents innovative formulations for how African performance and the arts shape the narratives of cultural history and politics. This collection, edited by Naomi André, Yolanda Covington-Ward, and Jendele Hungbo, engages with a breadth of African countries and art forms, bringing together speech, hip hop, religious healing and gesture, theater and social justice, opera, radio announcements, protest songs, and migrant workers’ dances. The spaces include village communities, city landscapes, prisons, urban hostels, Township theaters, opera houses, and broadcasts through the airwaves on television and radio as well as in cyberspace. Essays focus on case studies from Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, and Tanzania.
Forging a style of criticism where aesthetic, critical, theoretical, and activist concerns converge, Afterimage has shaped American debates around the politics of visual production and arts education while offering a voice to politically involved artists and scholars. Art, Activism, and Oppositionality insists not only on the continuing relevance of an activist stance to contemporary art practice and criticism, but also on the significance of an engaged art practice that is aligned with social or political activism. With essays that span fifteen years—roughly from Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential win to the 1994 Republican victories in Congress, a period marked by waning public support for the arts and growing antagonism toward activist art—Art, Activism, and Oppositionality confronts issues ranging from arts patronage, pedagogy, and the very definitions of art and activism to struggles involving AIDS, reproductive rights, sexuality, and racial identity.
Contributors. Maurice Berger, Richard Bolton, Ann Cvetkovich, Coco Fusco, Brian Goldfarb, Mable Haddock, Grant H. Kester, Ioannis Mookas, Chiquita Mullins Lee, Darrell Moore, Lorraine O’Grady, Michael Renov, Martha Rosler, Patricia Thomson, David Trend, Charles A. Wright Jr., Patricia R. Zimmerman
What does a life with art offer that a life without art does not? Art and Freedom asserts that the fundamental point of the enterprise of art is the creation and delivery of values that are not singularly available in the nonart world.
E. E. Sleinis discusses visual art, literature, music, theater, and other art forms, arguing that as art both liberates and provides new points of focus and awareness, the art enterprise depends on a positive freeing from the nonart world, rather than on mere addition to it.
Art and Freedom introduces a novel classificatory system for representation, expression, and formalist theories of art. Sleinis argues that a characteristic defect of contemporary theories of art is their neglect of the issue of value. Challenging these reductive, formalist notions of art, he emphasizes the potential, and the need, for art to evolve and make progress in ways comparable to the sciences, albeit on a very different model.
A smart blend of incisive commentary and illuminating philosophy, Art and Freedom provides a useful context for transforming a sometimes baffling medium into a means of fostering personal growth and creating and sharing values.
In the face of a great work of art, we so often stand mute, struck dumb. Is this a function—perhaps the first and foremost—of aesthetic experience? Or do we lack the words to say what we feel? Countering current assumptions that art is valued only according to taste or ideology, Peter de Bolla gives a voice—and vocabulary—to the wonder art can inspire. Working toward a better understanding of what it is to be profoundly moved by a work of art, he forces us to reconsider the importance of art works and the singular nature and value of our experience of them.
In many ways a "practical aesthetics," Art Matters proceeds by way of example. Through chapters attending to three works of art—Barnett Newman's painting Vir Heroicus Sublimis, pianist Glenn Gould's second recording of Bach's Goldberg Variations, and William Wordsworth's poem "We Are Seven"—de Bolla plots a personal history of aesthetic experience that opens up the general forms of art appreciation. His book invites us to a closer encounter with art, and to a deeper appreciation and clearer expression of what such an encounter might hold.
This arresting graphic provides a visual overview of the impacts of arts integration and interdisciplinarity in the university. It can be a tool for case-making, communication, and further inquiry.
In this lively and informed book, Bernard Taper, a writer for the New Yorker, scrutinizes the social and economic characteristics of the arts in Boston, seeking specific answers to the questions: What might be done to foster, strengthen, enrich, and invigorate the arts? What can make them more meaningful to a larger segment of the community?
“The arts,” he writes, “have been more honored in Boston than in most American cities, and by ‘the best people’; but they have possibly been enjoyed rather less than they have been honored.” Throughout his book Mr. Taper stresses that the arts, both visual and performing, “should be recognized as a human need, not a luxury; nor should they be something to which we pay solemn, periodic respect—like going to church on Sunday...Ideally, the whole city should serve the purpose of satisfying the need for beauty.” And he looks forward to the day when Boston—as well as other cities—will have a daily life in which the arts are intimately involved.
Included in the book are a number of vivid and informal interviews with a variety of people in the arts. Here people like Sarah Caldwell of the Opera Company of Boston, E. Virginia Williams of the Boston Ballet Company, Perry Rathbone of the Museum of Fine Arts, Elma Lewis of the National Center of Afro-American Artists, David Wheeler of the Theatre Company of Boston, and mathematician-satirist Tom Lehrer speak their minds on the condition of the arts.
“All of us in the arts have one problem in common,” says Miss Caldwell in her interview. “That problem is how to survive.” Financial problems plague nearly all of Boston's arts organizations and, for many of them, each new season is a tightrope walk over Niagara Falls. Mr. Taper examines the economic situation of the arts in Boston and estimates the sums needed to sustain them in less precarious fashion. Boston's arts, he finds, still have to rely on the noble but no longer practicable tradition of private contributions. He contends that the two potential sources of subsidy most inadequately represented are corporations and government—particularly local and state government. Indeed, the city of Boston contributes less subsidy to the arts than any other major city in the United States!
Yet there are things that money can't buy. Mr. Taper points out many intangible ways in which the arts may be fostered or thwarted and, citing examples from various cities, particularly New York, San Francisco, and St. Louis, he shows how much difference is made simply by the attitude of a city's administration toward the arts. He discusses what he believes is the need for a radical reorientation of the role of education and includes as well a novel proposal that would enable Boston to obtain the physical facilities grievously needed for the arts.
Mr. Taper was invited to Boston by the Permanent Charity Fund in collaboration with the Joint Center for Urban Studies of M.I.T. and Harvard to make this important study of the visual and performing arts. He succeeds in evoking and illuminating the special quality and atmosphere of Boston, and, although some aspects of his study are peculiar to that city, he clearly relates his analysis to the overall situation of the arts in America.
Ingenious automatons which appeared to think on their own. Dubious mermaids and wild men who resisted classification. Elegant sleight-of-hand artists who routinely exposed the secrets of their trade. These were some of the playful forms of fraud which astonished, titillated, and even outraged nineteenth-century America's new middle class, producing some of the most remarkable urban spectacles of the century.
In The Arts of Deception, James W. Cook explores this distinctly modern mode of trickery designed to puzzle the eye and challenge the brain. Championed by the "Prince of Humbug," P. T. Barnum, these cultural puzzles confused the line between reality and illusion. Upsetting the normally strict boundaries of value, race, class, and truth, the spectacles offer a revealing look at the tastes, concerns, and prejudices of America's very first mass audiences. We are brought into the exhibition halls, theaters, galleries, and museums where imposture flourished, and into the minds of the curiosity-seekers who eagerly debated the wonders before their eyes. Cook creates an original portrait of a culture in which ambiguous objects, images, and acts on display helped define a new value system for the expanding middle class, as it confronted a complex and confusing world.
“How almost true they sometimes almost ring!” Samuel Beckett’s character rues his words. “How wanting in inanity!” A person could almost understand them! Why taunt and flout us, as Beckett’s writing does? Why discourage us from seeing, as Mark Rothko’s paintings often can? Why immobilize and daze us, as Alain Resnais’s films sometimes will? Why, Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit ask, would three acknowledged masters of their media make work deliberately opaque and inhospitable to an audience? This book shows us how such crippling moves may signal a profoundly original—and profoundly anti-modernist—renunciation of art’s authority.
Our culture, while paying little attention to art, puts great faith in its edifying and enlightening value. Yet Beckett’s threadbare plays Company and Worstward Ho, so insistent on their poverty of meaning; Rothko’s nearly monochromatic paintings in the Houston Chapel; Resnais’s intensely self-contained, self-referential films Night and Fog and Muriel all seem to say, “I have little to show you, little to tell you, nothing to teach you.” Bersani and Dutoit consider these works as acts of resistance; by inhibiting our movement toward them, they purposely frustrate our faith in art as a way of appropriating and ultimately mastering reality.
As this book demonstrates, these artists train us in new modes of mobility, which differ from the moves of an appropriating consciousness. As a form of cultural resistance, a rejection of a view of reality—both objects and human subjects—as simply there for the taking, this training may even give birth to a new kind of political power, one paradoxically consistent with the renunciation of authority. In its movement among these three artists, Arts of Impoverishment traces a new form of movement within art.
Many spectacular examples of Persianate art survive to the present day, safeguarded in Istanbul and beyond—celebrating the glory of the Persian Empire (and, later, the Ottoman Empire). These include illustrated books, featuring exquisitely painted miniatures artfully embedded in the texts of literary masterpieces, as well as tile decorations in medieval Anatolian architecture.
Because of their beauty, many Persianate books were deliberately disassembled, their illustrations re-used in newer books or possessed as isolated art objects. As fragments found their way to collections around the world, the essential integration of text and image in the original books was lost. Six art historians and a literary historian—instrumental in reconstruction efforts—trace the long journey from the destructive dispersal of fragments to the joys of restoration.
Together, the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium, and the Institut des Musées Nationaux du Zaire (IMNZ) in the Congo have defined and marketed Congolese art and culture. In Authentically African, Sarah Van Beurden traces the relationship between the possession, definition, and display of art and the construction of cultural authenticity and political legitimacy from the late colonial until the postcolonial era. Her study of the interconnected histories of these two institutions is the first history of an art museum in Africa, and the only work of its kind in English.
Drawing on Flemish-language sources other scholars have been unable to access, Van Beurden illuminates the politics of museum collections, showing how the IMNZ became a showpiece in Mobutu’s effort to revive “authentic” African culture. She reconstructs debates between Belgian and Congolese museum professionals, revealing how the dynamics of decolonization played out in the fields of the museum and international heritage conservation. Finally, she casts light on the art market, showing how the traveling displays put on by the IMNZ helped intensify collectors’ interest and generate an international market for Congolese art.
The book contributes to the fields of history, art history, museum studies, and anthropology and challenges existing narratives of Congo’s decolonization. It tells a new history of decolonization as a struggle over cultural categories, the possession of cultural heritage, and the right to define and represent cultural identities.
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