scholarly journals Curating The American Algorists: Digital Art and National Identity

Arts ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 106
Author(s):  
Taylor
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Resource Sharing ◽  
American Art ◽  
Digital Art ◽  
College And University ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Aesthetic

This essay details the curating strategies and central premise behind the 2013 traveling exhibition The American Algorists: Linear Sublime. This group exhibition, which showcased the artwork of Jean-Pierre Hébert, Manfred Mohr, Roman Verostko, and Mark Wilson, marked the 20th anniversary of New York Digital Salon. In organizing this exhibit, I attempted to expand the discourse of digital art curation by linking the Algorists, a group formed at the Los Angeles SIGGRAPH conference in 1995, to the broader narrative of American art. Through the exhibition catalogue, I constructed a detailed history of the Algorists and connected the movement’s narrative to ideas of national identity and myth. To cultivate this nexus, I interpreted the Algorists’ unique approach to linear abstraction through the various theories of the sublime active within the history of American art. Ultimately, this case study reveals the incongruities of aligning this group of digital artists—who shared a decidedly internationalist outlook—with a national narrative. While the Algorists resisted parochial characterizations, the concept of the sublime provided a useful vehicle for theorizing the aesthetic response to computer-generated abstraction. The travelling exhibition also offered a potential model, based on effective partnerships and resource sharing, for small college and university galleries.

The Virtual Infernal: Philippe de Loutherbourg, William Beckford and the Spectacle of the Sublime

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iain McCalman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Virtual Reality ◽  
Special Significance ◽  
Virtual Reality Technology ◽  
Gothic Novel ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
William Beckford ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Drury Lane

Abstract In the autumn of 1781, shortly after being elected to the British Academy of Art as a landscape painter, Alsatian-born artist Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg was hired by the wealthy young aesthete William Beckford to prepare a private birthday spectacle at his mansion in Wiltshire. De Loutherbourg, who was also chief scenographer at Drury Lane theatre and the inventor of a recent commercial “moving picture” entertainment called the Eidophusikon, promised to produce “a mysterious something that the eye has not seen nor the heart conceived.” Beckford wanted an Oriental spectacle that would completely ravish the senses of his guests, not least so that he could enjoy a sexual tryst with a thirteen year old boy, William Courtenay, and Louisa Beckford, his own cousin’s wife. The resulting three day party and spectacle staged over Christmas 1781 became one of the scandals of the day, and ultimately forced William Beckford into decades of exile in Europe to escape accusations of sodomy. However, this Oriental spectacle also had a special significance for the history of Romantic aesthetics and modern-day cinema. Loutherbourg and Beckford’s collaboration provided the inspiration for William to write his scintillating Gothic novel, Vathek, and impelled Philippe himself into revising his moving-picture program in dramatically new ways. Ultimately this saturnalian party of Christmas 1781 constituted a pioneering experiment in applying the aesthetic of the sublime to virtual reality technology. It also led Loutherbourg to anticipate the famous nineteenth-century “Phantasmagoria” of French showman, Gaspard Robertson, by producing in 1782 a miniature Gothic movie scene based on the Pandemonium episode in Milton’s Paradise Lost.

Hopps, Walter (1932–2005)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ken D. Allan
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
American Art ◽  
The United States ◽  
Art Museum ◽  
Pop Art ◽  
Marcel Duchamp ◽  
Robert Rauschenberg ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Joseph Cornell

Walter Hopps was an American art dealer and curator of modern and contemporary art. Best known for organizing the first museum retrospective of Marcel Duchamp in 1963 at the Pasadena Art Museum (now the Norton Simon), Hopps was a pioneering example of the independent, creative curator, a model that emerged in the 1960s in the United States From his start as an organizer of unconventional shows of California painters on the cultural fringe of conservative Cold War-era Los Angeles, Hopps became one of the most respected, if unorthodox, curators of his generation, holding a dual appointment at the end of his life as 20th-century curator at Houston’s Menil Collection and adjunct senior curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Some of his noted exhibitions include: in Pasadena, a 1962 group show that helped to define pop art, The New Paintings of Common Objects; the first U retrospectives of Kurt Schwitters (1962) and Joseph Cornell (1967); Robert Rauschenberg retrospectives in 1976 and 1997 at the National Museum of American Art and Menil Collection, respectively; a 1996 survey of Edward Kienholz for The Whitney Museum of American Art; and a James Rosenquist retrospective in 2002 at the Guggenheim.

The Black Diamonds of Sydney Harbour

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 645-664
Author(s):  
Ann Elias
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Mining Company ◽  
Pastoral Area ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Sydney Harbour ◽  
History Of ◽  
Below Ground ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The City

This article explores the case study of a coal mine that was first tunneled under Sydney Harbour in 1897 but closed in 1931. Specifically, it examines how the history of the mine intersects with aesthetics, race, colonialism, and Indigenous dispossession. Centered on the story of an English mining company that first sought a mine site in a pastoral area of the city, but under public pressure was forced to select instead a grimy working class suburb on the opposite harbor shore, the article argues that environmental aesthetics and tastes in beauty collaborated with extractivism. The argument emerges that economics, art, and aesthetics are inextricably linked in this history and further, that while the mine excited the industrial imagination through the aesthetic of the sublime, and associations with darkness and vastness, it conflicted with colonial settler tastes for the pastoral imagination defined by the aesthetics of the beautiful and its associations with light. The article discusses the context of a settler economy in lands stolen from Indigenous peoples, and how conceptualizations of the sublime and beautiful, as well as dark and light, were aligned with the racialization of the properties of coal and space above and below ground.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Jorge Duany
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
American Art ◽  
Art Museum ◽  
Cuban American ◽  
Volume Editor ◽  
History Of ◽  
Florida International University ◽  
Diasporic Identities

Volume editor Jorge Duany briefly reviews the intellectual history of Cuban thought on national identity since the late eighteenth century. Several generations of Cuban writers and artists on the island and abroad have drawn the contours of their “moveable nation,” according to different historical junctures, geographic locations, and ideological perspectives. Duany notes that the search for and affirmation of Cuba’s national identity strongly shaped the history of the visual arts, as well as literature, music, and other cultural expressions. The author then explains the origins of the current volume in an interdisciplinary 2017 conference on Cuban and Cuban-American art held at the Frost Art Museum of Florida International University in Miami. The second part of the introduction summarizes the contents of the volume, highlighting the significance of Cuban and Cuban-American art for the construction of national and diasporic identities.

Punk and the White Atlantic

Damaged ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 139-170
Author(s):  
Evan Rapport
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Music ◽  
Rock And Roll ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Sex Pistols ◽  
History Of ◽  
Musical Resources

Punk emerged as a fully formed and recognizable style in the mid-1970s in the United Kingdom, primarily in London, and in the United States, primarily in New York and Los Angeles. British punk musicians such as the Damned, the Clash, and the Sex Pistols during this period put together elements from American punk and its precedents, including elements that were previously heard in distinction from each other, such as the riff-based blues of the Stooges and back-to-basics rock and roll songs of the Ramones. Although this period is marked by a preoccupation with whether punk was “invented” in the US or UK, in fact, punk is a product of exchanges between musicians across the Atlantic, with much of the music continuing a long history of white people using a vocabulary of Black musical resources, including blues and reggae, to explore identity, class distinctions, and the nature of whiteness itself. These exchanges in punk are comparable to the so-called “British Invasion” of the prior decade. The discourse of making the mid-1970s UK a starting point for punk also appears to be an idea that American musicians were primarily invested in, and an idea that further dissociated punk from its basis in Black American music.

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