The Linocuts of Ethel Spowers: A Vision Apart

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 354-376
Author(s):  
Lorraine Sim
Keyword(s):  
Positive Affect ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Social Alienation ◽  
Modern Life ◽  
American Modernism ◽  
Art And Design ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Anglo American

This essay discusses the colour linocuts of the Melbourne-born artist and illustrator Ethel Spowers. Although Spowers was a key figure in modern art and design in Australia during the 1920s and 1930s, to date her linocuts have received little critical attention and are appraised only briefly and collectively as part and parcel of the Grosvenor School of Modern Art in London, where she studied for several months under the guidance of Iain Macnab and Claude Flight. This essay argues that her modernism provides an important contrast and supplement to accounts of modern everyday life offered by her British and European colleagues at the School, and canonical British and Anglo-American modernism more generally. Rejecting a view of modern life defined in terms of homogenisation, social alienation and adult experience, I discuss how Spowers's rhythmic compositions express choreographies of community and positive affect, and focus on the experience of children.

Graham, Martha (1894 – 1991)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Franko
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Costume Design ◽  
Vertical Position ◽  
Vertical Posture ◽  
Aaron Copland ◽  
American Modernism ◽  
Martha Graham ◽  
Concert Dance ◽  
Anglo American

In a career as dancer and choreographer that spanned the twentieth century, Martha Graham made major contributions to modernist choreography, dramaturgy, performance, costume design, and dance technique. Her illustrious collaborators—among them Aaron Copland, William Schuman, Erick Hawkins, Isamu Noguchi, Bertram Ross, and Barbara Morgan—underscored her gift of discerning what was necessary to her success. Indeed, her work was seminal in redefining concert dance as modern art alongside literature, music, and painting. To do this, Graham immersed herself in Anglo-American Modernism and its roots in psychology, anthropology and cultural archaeology. But it was her work in the studio and on bodies that brought these ideas to fruition in and as dance. Some of Graham’s movement innovations include the emphasis on weight rather than flight, the contraction of the spine rather than the vertical posture, the flexed foot rather than the pointed foot, the turning in of the legs from the hips rather than the proverbial turning out, running on the knees (and related floor work), new ways of falling to the floor and returning to a vertical position, off-balance extensions of the legs and torso, the dynamic projection of energy from the pelvis, and the dramatic accentuation of gravity and tension as well as an aesthetics of discontinuity and fragmentation.

Das tue ich nicht, weil es nicht Pflicht ist. Das Argument der Supererogation und sein Unanständigkeitsproblem

2020 ◽  
Vol 74 (1) ◽  
pp. 80-104
Author(s):  
Marie-Luise Raters
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Applied Ethics ◽  
Double Effect ◽  
Formal Structure ◽  
Moral Value ◽  
Anglo American

Most arguments of Applied Ethics (e.g.slippery slope argument, argument of double effect) are well analyzed. An exception is the argument 'I do not do this because it is not my duty'. It makes sense to call the argument the 'argument of supererogation' (ASE): Since J. Urmson's essay Saints and Heroes of 1958, those actions are called 'supererogations' which (despite of their moral value) are not supposed to be duties. The argument is widely used not only in Applied Ethics, but also in ordinary moral everyday life. Nevertheless, there is a need of investigation because it has an indecency-problem. The argument is convincing if an actor does not want to risk his life. It seems indecent, however, if an actor refuses a simple favor or a service of friendship with the 'argument of super-erogation', although they both constitute no duties. This paper reconstructs the 'argument of supererogation' as a syllogism. It analyzes its formal structure by benefitting from current Anglo-American literature on supererogation. The overall aim of this paper is to solve the problem of indecency.

Hollywood Animation, Late Modernity and Contemporary America

2021 ◽  
pp. 78-108
Author(s):  
Noel Brown
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Similar Function ◽  
Contemporary Culture ◽  
Modern Life ◽  
Social Commentary ◽  
Late Modernity ◽  
Intertextual Allusion ◽  
Distinguishing Features

One of the primary distinguishing features of post-1990s Hollywood animation is its foregrounding of contemporary culture and society. While many of the ‘classic’ Disney films are set in fantastical or fairy tale landscapes geographically and temporally removed from everyday life (‘once upon a time…’), most animated features from the early 1990s onwards are self-conscious artefacts of late modernity. There are two primary manifestations of the foregrounding of contemporary culture in post-1990s Hollywood animation. The first, and most immediately visible, is (a usually comic) intertextuality that takes the form of an intensified referentiality to other works of popular culture and modern life more broadly. The second form is that of social commentary, which is often satirical in nature and tends to be a more abiding thematic focus than the intertextual allusion. This chapter argues that both forms serve a similar function: they are strategies of proximation that anchor films to recognisable and identifiable situations and events.

Grosvenor School of Art, London (1925–1940)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juliette Peers
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Art And Design ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Elites ◽  
Art School

The Grosvenor School of Art, also known as the Grosvenor School of Modern Art, was founded in 1925 by Scottish artist and printmaker Iain McNab. In 1940, it merged with the more traditional Heatherley’s Art School, which is still operating in London. The Grosvenor was famous across Britain and the British Empire in the interwar period for promoting modernist art and design. Its contribution to introducing and acclimatizing continental modernism to an extended anglophile audience was substantial. Pupils came from Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, as well as other countries, and through them the experience of modernism was brought back to their homelands. Across the British Empire, the Grosvenor School made modernism acceptable and praiseworthy, representing the authority of what Australian artist Arthur Streeton called "the Centre of Empire," combined with the glamorous social cachet that London symbolized for the social elites in the colonies.

Page as alternative space redux: artists’ magazines in the 21 st century

2013 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 10-17
Author(s):  
David Senior
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Art History ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Museum Of Modern Art ◽  
Art And Design ◽  
The Past ◽  
Production And Distribution ◽  
New Challenges ◽  
Selection Of

In the past few years, several new publications and exhibitions have presented surveys of the genre of artists’ magazines. This recent research has explored the publication histories of individual titles and articulated the significance of this genre within contemporary art history. Millennium magazines was a 2012 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art that traced the artists’ magazine into the 21st century. The organizers, Rachael Morrison and David Senior of MoMA Library, assembled a selection of 115 international tides published since 2000 for visitors to browse during the run of the exhibition and created a website as a continuing resource for information about the selected tides. The exhibition served as an introduction to the medium for new audiences and a summary of the active community of international artists, designers and publishers that still utilize the format in innovative ways. As these projects experiment with both print and digital media in their production and distribution of content, art libraries are faced with new challenges in digital preservation in order to continue to document experimental publishing practices in contemporary art and design.

Positive affect and biological function in everyday life

2005 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 108-112 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Steptoe ◽  
Jane Wardle
Keyword(s):  
Positive Affect ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Biological Function

Everyday Life as Critique in Late Colonial Korea: Kim Namch'ŏn's Literary Experiments, 1934–43

2009 ◽  
Vol 68 (3) ◽  
pp. 861-893 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sunyoung Park
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
The Other ◽  
Colonial Korea ◽  
Modern Life ◽  
Urban Modernity ◽  
Utopian Vision ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Aesthetic Principle ◽  
The One ◽  
Aesthetic Sensibility

Perhaps the most renowned leftist writer of late colonial Korea, Kim Namch'ŏn left a complex body of work that has so far defied an encompassing interpretation. On the one hand, in his theoretical writings, Kim consistently advocated realism as his aesthetic principle. On the other hand, within his fictional writings, Kim also displayed an antithetical interest in the fragmentary scenes of modern life, which he often depicted through experimental techniques of a modernist aesthetic sensibility. In this essay, an attempt is made to provide a unified account of Kim's works. Special attention is given to Kim's early theorization of the everyday as a proper literary space for a materialist critique of society. This focus on everyday life, it is argued, enabled Kim to critique both the teleological outlook of dogmatic socialism and the utopian vision of pan-Asianism, but it did not shelter him from a fascination with the daily spectacles of urban modernity.

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