scholarly journals The feminist avant-garde and feminaissance in american poetry and the visual arts

2021 ◽  
Vol 69 (2) ◽  
pp. 275-287
Author(s):  
Dubravka Djuric

In this article, I will discuss the appearance and meaning of the terms feminist avant/garde and feminaissance. I will point to the differences in the mediums of these two fields of cultural production (verbal art and visual art). I am interested in the way these terms help us to construe histories but also impact the contemporary production of radical feminist practices. The notion of the feminist avant-garde was introduced by the American critic Elizabeth A. Frost in 2003 in order to point to the feminist avant-garde poetry tradition. In 2016, the curator Gabrielle Schor introduced the same term, using it for the international exhibition of performance artists from the 1970s. In both fields, the term avant-garde had been used to refer to male artistic and poetry practices. By applying it to radical women?s poetry and performance practices, these practices became visible, valued and recognizable. Feminaissance was introduced in the US in 2007 and referred to the several exhibitions dedicated to female art. The term expressed the optimistic re-actualization of female art, but at the same time, it provoked polemics regarding the contemporary construction of feminist art history. In the field of experimental poetry, feminaissance was used with the same meaning in 2007, at a conference dedicated to feminist experimentation. Within the visual arts, the term feminaissance foregrounded the problematics of the historization of female art, while in experimental poetry this discussion took place around the feminist positions of essentialism and anti-essentialism.

Author(s):  
Anna Nikiforova

This article is dedicated to examination of art synthesis as a phenomenon that extended to various spheres of culture and art of the XIX–XX centuries. This period marks the emergence of a different visual language and new forms of perception of artistic expression. Analysis is conducted on the  forms of implementation of the idea Gesamtkunstwerk, and their development throughout the XX century: mythologization as a peculiar method of thinking, strive to go beyond the purely artistic imagery, subjectification of the perception of time and space, creation of the organized aesthetic environment, aesthetic dimension of humanism, synthetism of mentality and universalism of the artist. Special attention is given to the historical-cultural context, from the views of the Jena Romantics and musical theory of R. Wagner to the works of the masters of Art Nouveau, avant-garde and innovators of the theatrical scenery. The author also reviews the advent of the new forms of artistic expression. The analysis of the key trends allows determining the broad sense of the idea of art synthesis for the culture: philosophy, poetry, architecture, visual arts, design, and performance. The novelty of this study consists in description of the idea of art synthesis as one of the key meaning-forming factors in the European culture of the XIX–XX centuries. The article examines the problem of performativity of modern art as the logical continuation of the evolution of forms of artistic expression. Modern theatrical and performative practices (“live” exhibitory spaces, “museum of senses”, “theater of plentitude”, exploratory theater, promenade theater, and other) can be viewed as the reconceived version of the idea of art synthesis that originated in the culture of German Romanticism.


2014 ◽  
Vol 11 (26) ◽  
Author(s):  
Aneta Mancewicz

AbstractThe controversy around the RSC & The Wooster Group’s Troilus and Cressida (Stratford-upon-Avon 2012) among the spectators and critics in Britain revealed significant differences between the UK and the US patterns of staging, spectating, and reviewing Shakespeare. The production has also exposed the gap between mainstream and avant-garde performance practices in terms of artists’ assumptions and audiences’ expectations. Reviews and blog entries written by scholars, critics, practitioners, and anonymous theatre goers were particularly disapproving of The Wooster Group’s experimentation with language, non-psychological acting, the appropriation of Native American customs, and the overall approach to the play and the very process of stage production. These points of criticism have suggested a clear perception of a successful Shakespeare production in the mainstream British theatre: a staging that approaches the text as an autonomous universe guided by realistic rules, psychological principles, and immediate political concerns. If we assume, however, that Troilus and Cressida as a play relies on the dramaturgy of cultural differences and that it consciously reflects on the notion of spectatorship, the production’s transgression of mainstream patterns of staging and spectating brings it surprisingly close to the Shakespearean source.


2001 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
pp. 5-11
Author(s):  
Michael Parsons

The Scratch Orchestra, formed in London in 1969 by Cornelius Cardew, Michael Parsons and Howard Skempton, included visual and performance artists as well as musicians and other participants from diverse backgrounds, many of them without formal training. This article deals primarily with the earlier phase of the orchestra's activity, between 1969 and 1971. It describes the influence of the work of John Cage and Fluxus artists, involving the dissolution of boundaries between sonic and visual elements in performance and the use of everyday materials and activities as artistic resources. It assesses the conflicting impulses of discipline and spontaneity in the work of the Scratch Orchestra and in the parallel activity of the Portsmouth Sinfonia and other related groups. The emergence in the early 1970s of more controlled forms of compositional activity, in reaction against anarchic and libertarian aspects of the Scratch Orchestra's ethos, is also discussed.


2014 ◽  
Vol 11 (26) ◽  
pp. 65-79
Author(s):  
Aneta Mancewicz

The controversy around the RSC & The Wooster Group’s Troilus and Cressida (Stratford-upon-Avon 2012) among the spectators and critics in Britain revealed significant differences between the UK and the US patterns of staging, spectating, and reviewing Shakespeare. The production has also exposed the gap between mainstream and avant-garde performance practices in terms of artists’ assumptions and audiences’ expectations. Reviews and blog entries written by scholars, critics, practitioners, and anonymous theatre goers were particularly disapproving of The Wooster Group’s experimentation with language, non-psychological acting, the appropriation of Native American customs, and the overall approach to the play and the very process of stage production. These points of criticism have suggested a clear perception of a successful Shakespeare production in the mainstream British theatre: a staging that approaches the text as an autonomous universe guided by realistic rules, psychological principles, and immediate political concerns. If we assume, however, that Troilus and Cressida as a play relies on the dramaturgy of cultural differences and that it consciously reflects on the notion of spectatorship, the production’s transgression of mainstream patterns of staging and spectating brings it surprisingly close to the Shakespearean source.


2000 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 107-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louis M. Hsu ◽  
Judy Hayman ◽  
Judith Koch ◽  
Debbie Mandell

Summary: In the United States' normative population for the WAIS-R, differences (Ds) between persons' verbal and performance IQs (VIQs and PIQs) tend to increase with an increase in full scale IQs (FSIQs). This suggests that norm-referenced interpretations of Ds should take FSIQs into account. Two new graphs are presented to facilitate this type of interpretation. One of these graphs estimates the mean of absolute values of D (called typical D) at each FSIQ level of the US normative population. The other graph estimates the absolute value of D that is exceeded only 5% of the time (called abnormal D) at each FSIQ level of this population. A graph for the identification of conventional “statistically significant Ds” (also called “reliable Ds”) is also presented. A reliable D is defined in the context of classical true score theory as an absolute D that is unlikely (p < .05) to be exceeded by a person whose true VIQ and PIQ are equal. As conventionally defined reliable Ds do not depend on the FSIQ. The graphs of typical and abnormal Ds are based on quadratic models of the relation of sizes of Ds to FSIQs. These models are generalizations of models described in Hsu (1996) . The new graphical method of identifying Abnormal Ds is compared to the conventional Payne-Jones method of identifying these Ds. Implications of the three juxtaposed graphs for the interpretation of VIQ-PIQ differences are discussed.


2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-211
Author(s):  
Patricia E. Chu

The Paris avant-garde milieu from which both Cirque Calder/Calder's Circus and Painlevé’s early films emerged was a cultural intersection of art and the twentieth-century life sciences. In turning to the style of current scientific journals, the Paris surrealists can be understood as engaging the (life) sciences not simply as a provider of normative categories of materiality to be dismissed, but as a companion in apprehending the “reality” of a world beneath the surface just as real as the one visible to the naked eye. I will focus in this essay on two modernist practices in new media in the context of the history of the life sciences: Jean Painlevé’s (1902–1989) science films and Alexander Calder's (1898–1976) work in three-dimensional moving art and performance—the Circus. In analyzing Painlevé’s work, I discuss it as exemplary of a moment when life sciences and avant-garde technical methods and philosophies created each other rather than being classified as separate categories of epistemological work. In moving from Painlevé’s films to Alexander Calder's Circus, Painlevé’s cinematography remains at the forefront; I use his film of one of Calder's performances of the Circus, a collaboration the men had taken two decades to complete. Painlevé’s depiction allows us to see the elements of Calder's work that mark it as akin to Painlevé’s own interest in a modern experimental organicism as central to the so-called machine-age. Calder's work can be understood as similarly developing an avant-garde practice along the line between the bestiary of the natural historian and the bestiary of the modern life scientist.


2014 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 6-11
Author(s):  
Thomas Crombez

The research project Digital Archive of Belgian Neo-Avant-garde Periodicals (DABNAP) aims to digitize and analyse a large number of artists’ periodicals from the period 1950–1990. The artistic renewal in Belgium since the 1950s, sustained by small groups of artists (such as G58 or De Nevelvlek), led to a first generation of post-war artist periodicals. Such titles proved decisive for the formation of the Belgian neo-avant-garde in literature and the visual arts. During the sixties and the seventies, happening and socially-engaged art took over and gave a new orientation to artist periodicals. In this article, I wish to highlight the challenges and difficulties of this project, for example, in dealing with non-standard formats, types of paper, typography, and non-paper inserts. A fully searchable archive of neo-avant-garde periodicals allows researchers to analyse in much more detail than before how influences from foreign literature and arts took root in the Belgian context.


2013 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 385-403
Author(s):  
HANNAH DURKIN

A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945) is a collaborative enterprise between avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren and African American ballet dancer Talley Beatty. Study is significant in experimental film history – it was one of three films by Deren that shaped the emergence of the postwar avant-garde cinema movement in the US. The film represents a pioneering cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary dialogue between Beatty's ballet dancing and Deren's experimental cinematic technique. The film explores complex emotional experiences through a cinematic re-creation of Deren's understanding of ritual (which she borrowed from Katherine Dunham's Haitian experiences after spending many years documenting vodou) while allowing a leading black male dancer to display his artistry on-screen. I show that cultures and artistic forms widely dismissed as incompatible are rendered equivocal. Study adopts a stylized and rhythmic technique borrowed from dance in its attempt to establish cinema as “art,” and I foreground Beatty's contribution to the film, arguing that his technically complex movements situate him as joint author of its artistic vision. The essay also explores tensions between the artistic intentions of Deren, who sought to deprivilege the individual performer in favour of the filmic “ritual,” and Beatty, who sought to display his individual skills as a technically accomplished dancer.


2015 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 10-33 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sigrid Hartong

This article focuses on the discussion of global policy convergence through the implementation of “distributed governance” within the education policy sector. Here, the focus is directed at the emergence of national education standards (NES) as a simultaneous instrument of fair school control and performance increase. Both the US and Germany show a high traditional resistance to nationally centralised educational control, but experienced a massive transformation in this direction by the recent implementation of a national core curriculum initiative (National Education Standardsin Germany andCommon Core State Standardsin the US). This article will rely on global governance and distributed governance research, focusing on the concept of “heterarchies”, to analyse the interplay of global and national contexts in the case of the rise of NES in the US and Germany, ultimately showing the concepts' contributions (and limits) to explain policy convergence.


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