scholarly journals The Aura of Eccentricity: Reflections on Outsider Art Rhetoric and its Impact on a Critical Discourse

2020 ◽  
Vol 88-89 ◽  
pp. 36-44
Author(s):  
Cortney Anderson Kramer
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Art History ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Central Mechanism ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Outsider Art ◽  
Theodor Adorno ◽  
Aesthetic Affect

In the field of Art History, affecting art with the artist’s aura is a central mechanism of canon creation that mythologizes artists into objects of desire. This tendency permeates outsider art whose appeal is rooted in biographical exceptionalism and eccentricity rather than aesthetic aptitude (see Morgan 2018). Reviewing the work of Henry Darger, Eugene Von Bruenchenhein, and A.G. Rizzoli—artists whose works are accumulative, some suggest compulsive, in reiteration and magnitude—this essay explores the pitfalls of projecting an aesthetic affect onto the artist and in turn building their value upon a fabricated aura of eccentricity. The aura of eccentricity resides at the nexus between material and idea. It is both real and mythologized, materially communicated through excess, opulence, and exaggeration of shapes, scale, colour, and medium yet ideologically created in the realm of differentiating adjectives and semantic flourishes. Engaging with Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, this essay argues that material culture demands self-awareness of our own interpretive prejudices, in this case fashioning the artist outsider with eccentric narratives retroactively projected upon them through the interpretation of their work.

The Reincarnation of the Aura

2018 ◽  
pp. 221-230
Author(s):  
Victoria Bigliardi
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Art History ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Original Art ◽  
Art Object ◽  
Object Biography ◽  
Material Record ◽  
Plaster Casts

In 1935, Walter Benjamin introduced the aura as the abstract conceptualization of uniqueness, authenticity, and singularity that encompasses an original art object. With the advent of technological reproducibility, Benjamin posits that the aura of an object deteriorates when the original is reproduced through the manufacture of copies. Employing this concept of the aura, the author outlines the proliferation of plaster casts of sculptures in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, placing contextual emphasis on the cultural and prestige value of originals and copies. Theories of authenticity in both art history and material culture are used to examine the nature of the aura and to consider how the aura transforms when an original object is lost from the material record. Through an object biography of a fifteenth-century sculpture by Francesco Laurana, the author proposes that the aura does not disappear upon the loss of the original, but is reincarnated in the authentic reproduction.

The Reincarnation of the Aura

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 72-80
Author(s):  
Victoria Bigliardi
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Art History ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Original Art ◽  
Art Object ◽  
15Th Century ◽  
Object Biography ◽  
Material Record ◽  
Plaster Casts

In 1935, Walter Benjamin introduced the aura as the abstract conceptualization of uniqueness, authenticity, and singularity that encompasses an original art object. With the advent of technological reproducibility, Benjamin posits that the aura of an object deteriorates when the original is reproduced through the manufacture of copies. Employing this concept of the aura, I outline the proliferation of plaster casts of sculptures in 18th- and 19th-century Europe, placing contextual emphasis on the cultural and prestige value of originals and copies. Theories of authenticity in both art history and material culture are used to examine the nature of the aura and to consider how the aura transforms when an original object is lost from the material record. Through an object biography of a 15th-century sculpture by Francesco Laurana, I propose that the aura does not disappear upon the loss of the original, but is reincarnated in the authentic reproduction.

Grand Illusion

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gabriela Cruz
Keyword(s):  
Karl Marx ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Richard Wagner ◽  
Giuseppe Verdi ◽  
Theodor Adorno ◽  
Tristan Und Isolde ◽  
Giacomo Meyerbeer ◽  
History Of ◽  
Grand Opera ◽  
Philosophical Understanding

Grand Illusion is a new history of grand opera as an art of illusion facilitated by the introduction of gaslight illumination at the Académie Royale de Musique (Paris) in the 1820s. It contends that gas lighting and the technologies of illusion used in the theater after the 1820s spurred the development of a new lyrical art, attentive to the conditions of darkness and radiance, and inspired by the model of phantasmagoria. Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno have used the concept of phantasmagoria to arrive at a philosophical understanding of modern life as total spectacle, in which the appearance of things supplants their reality. The book argues that the Académie became an early laboratory for this historical process of commodification, for the transformation of opera into an audio-visual spectacle delivering dream-like images. It shows that this transformation began in Paris and then defined opera after the mid-century. In the hands of Giacomo Meyerbeer (Robert le diable, L’Africaine), Richard Wagner (Der fliegende Holländer, Lohengrin, and Tristan und Isolde), and Giuseppe Verdi (Aida), opera became an expanded form of phantasmagoria.

Inca Aesthetics and Scholarly Inquiry

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Herring
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Art History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Art Historians ◽  
Scholarly Inquiry ◽  
Andean Culture

This chapter discusses the interpretive challenges that art historians and anthropologists have faced in approaching Inca intellectual and artistic achievements, which do not fit comfortably in Western categories. George Kubler took up the question of Inca art in the mid-twentieth century, creating a space in art history for studying the Incas. This development occurred at a time when archaeologists such as John Rowe worked to place the Incas within the broader context of Andean civilizations, and structuralists like Tom Zuidema were beginning to challenge historical narratives in search of underlying elements of Andean culture. The scholarly interest in Inca art, material culture, and intellect was but one aspect of the Inca focus of that time, as artists found inspiration in Inca ruins and museum galleries in the United States, and other countries began to exhibit Inca artifacts as an art to be approached on its own terms.

Material Culture and Healing Practice

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 251-290
Author(s):  
Anna Elizabeth Winterbottom
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Sri Lanka ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Art History ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Medical Culture ◽  
Museum Collections ◽  
Practice Of Medicine ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Abstract The practice of medicine and healing is always accompanied by a range of paraphernalia, from pillboxes to instruments to clothing. Yet such things have rarely attracted the attention of historians of medicine. Here, I draw on perspectives from art history and religious studies to ask how these objects relate, in practical and symbolic terms, to practices of healing. In other words, what is the connection between medical culture and material culture? I focus on craft objects relating to medicine and healing in Lanka during the Kandyan period (ca. 1595–1815) in museum collections in Canada and Sri Lanka. I ask what the objects can tell us, first, about early modern Lankan medicine and healing and, second, about late nineteenth- and twentieth-century efforts to reconstruct tradition. Finally, I explore what studying these objects might add to current debates about early modern globalization in the context of both material culture and medicine.

Memorial Museum: Existential Optics of Space

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (3-2) ◽  
pp. 389-409
Author(s):  
Lev Letyagin ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Rapid Development ◽  
Internal Conflict ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Self Disclosure ◽  
Memorial Museum ◽  
The Status ◽  
Historical Authenticity ◽  
Key Aspects

The modern museum is not only in the sphere of mass interests, but also serves as a reflection and expression of certain mass trends. While maintaining the status of a classical cultural institution, it was to a large extent precisely the museum that has become an arena of public discord on determining the strategies of cultural reproduction. This issue gains a pronouncedly contentious character due to the rapid development of information formats of traditional leisure now including interactive technologies, arbitrary historical reconstructions, elements of theatricalization. In “Escape from Amnesia” (A. Huyssen) the ‘society of total spectacle’ demands searching for new means, which often contribute to loss and substitution of values. The visitor’s interest towards the history of the quotidian greatly influences the dynamics of changing the creative potential of a museum, predominantly a memorial museum. Long-term practices of modeling the historical space reveal the internal form of the concept of ‘ex-position’. This is the natural cause of an internal conflict, when being ‘arranged in a straight line’ replaces the principles of accurate and documentally verified positioning of memorial objects. ‘Museumness’ should not supplant ‘the quotidian’, ‘the existential’; however, the functional principle of arranging the objects, their ‘pattern’ is often replaced by the composite approach, in which ‘decorative’ or ‘design’ solutions become dominant. This trend actively competes with the key theoretical foundations of museum source studies, and the traditional museum is increasingly transforming into a kind of parallel model of culture. The memorial object, as a fact of intellectual history, is significant within the material culture and spiritual heritage. At the same time, the alleged meanings and false semiotization often substitute the biographical realities, when ‘fit for exposition’ is everything that the mass museum visitor connects in his mind with his arbitrary understanding of the past. These are key aspects of the subject of modern museum criticism. This article discloses our understanding of the memorial exposition as a self-organizing system with a certain aesthetic code. Methodologically significant is the existential turn towards ‘evidence paradigm’ – giving up the impersonal demonstration of old things. This is a turn towards the model ‘things-speak’ (self-awareness, self-disclosure of things) – towards the structure that communicates ideas and life meanings. It is where the memorial object, understood as ‘message’, ‘material communication’, can disclose the fullness of its historical authenticity.

Paul and Philosophy

2020 ◽  
pp. 52-99
Author(s):  
Ole Jakob Løland
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Carl Schmitt ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
1 Corinthians ◽  
Theodor Adorno ◽  
The Cross ◽  
Conceptual Revolution

Taubes’s readings of Paul demonstrate a hermeneutical art of disagreement within the intellectual life of post-Holocaust Europe. Taubes is a reader who looks for intellectual enemies with whom he can achieve a true disagreement without dismissing their true insights, whether they are historical or philosophical. This hermeneutic is not unattached to Taubes’s Jewish background but reflects a Talmudic spirit inherent within Taubes’s idiosyncratic readings of Paul. Moreover, Taubes’s readings are attuned to nuances, ambivalences, and contradictions within Paul, as Taubes powerfully demonstrates in his exegesis of 1 Corinthians. With the help of Nietzsche’s polemical reading of this Pauline epistle, Taubes detects the instances where Paul’s doctrine of the cross revolutionizes ancient perceptions and passages that contain the power to neutralize this very same conceptual revolution. This results in Taubes’s image of a contradictory apostle, who can be used throughout history for various purposes. In Taubes’s case, Paul becomes a messianic thinker and part of Taubes’s efforts to establish a powerful synthesis of the insights of Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt—against what Taubes considers as the merely aesthetic tradition of “critical theory” in Theodor Adorno that remains indifferent to the historical struggles of the excluded.

The Aesthetic Taboo: Aura, Magic, and the Primitive

2018 ◽  
pp. 124-160
Author(s):  
David Lloyd
Keyword(s):  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Aesthetic Theory ◽  
Ideal State ◽  
Theodor Adorno ◽  
The Aesthetic

“The Aesthetic Taboo” concerns the place of primitive anthropology in the aesthetic theory of Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. It traces the influence of Freud’s Totem and Taboo through their work, in the concepts myth, magic, and aura. Neither thinker ever manages to escape the historical narrative of aesthetics: the transition from a state of necessity that defines the Savage as pathological subject, through a state of domination to an ideal state of freedom. Adorno and Benjamin continue to think within the traditions of Kant and Schiller. Yet in Aesthetic Theory magic images the sensuous remnant in the artwork that withstands rationalization. This “pathological” moment restores to the aesthetic its foundations in pleasure and pain and demands the destruction of the racial regime of representation. Its analogy with the Subaltern suggests another conception of life in common, predicated on the pains and pleasures of the pathological subject.

scholarly journals Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” and Holocaust Literature

Humanities ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Personal Experience ◽  
Ethnic Difference ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Holocaust Literature ◽  
Horror Genre ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
Theodor Adorno ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Us

Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” has been notorious since its first publication in 1948, but rarely, if ever, has it been read in light of its immediate historical context. This essay draws on literature, philosophy, and anthropology from the period to argue that Jackson’s story, which scholars have traditionally read through the lens of gender studies, invokes the themes of Holocaust literature. To support this argument, the essay explores imaginative Holocaust literature from the period by David Rousset, whose Holocaust memoir The Other Kingdom appeared in English translation in 1946, anthropological discourse from the period on scapegoating and European anti-Semitism, and critical discourse on the Holocaust and anti-Semitism from the period by Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno. The analysis finds that, in representing the phenomena of scapegoating and death selection in a small town in the US, Jackson’s story belongs to an abstract discourse on Holocaust-related themes and topics that was actively produced at midcentury, as evidenced partly by Rousset’s influential memoir. A master of the horror genre, Jackson could have drawn on her own experience of anti-Semitism, along with her known interest in the study of folklore, to contribute this chilling representation of the personal experience of death selection to a discourse on Holocaust-related themes. As this article shows, the abstract discourse Jackson’s story joined is marked by skepticism about or disinterest in ethnic difference and anthropological concepts. Due to the fact that this article features comparative analysis of Holocaust literature, a sub-topic is the debate among scholars concerning the ethics of literary representation of the Shoah and of analysis of Holocaust memoir. Jackson’s story and its context invoke perennially important questions about identity and representation in discourse about the Shoah and anti-Semitism.

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