Rembrandt, Lievens, Dou

Taking license from Just Kids, Patti Smith’s 2010 memoir of her youthful, intense working friendship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, this essay examines Rembrandt’s artistic friendships with his colleague Jan Lievens, and his first pupil, Gerrit Dou. The burst of competitive, extreme co-creativity of Rembrandt and Lievens during their Leiden years comes to a head in their rendering of the raising of Lazarus; its strains are evident in Rembrandt’s Oriental heads. The life-long, seemingly more sustained friendship of Rembrandt and Dou is encapsulated in Dog at rest, Dou’s homage to his master as exemplary teacher. These two working relationships point not only to the power of artists serving as each other’s muses, but also to the need for further investigation into the value, and exploitation, of friendships for Rembrandt.

Estrategias translúcidas y contraimágenes: romper con la representación hegemónica

Este artículo estudia dos diferentes estrategias utilizadas por artistas que pertenecen a colectivos vulnerables para subvertir el régimen hegemónico de las imágenes. Las contraimágenes consisten en representaciones que se sitúan más allá de lo aceptable dentro de la normatividad del canon y se posicionan en contraposición a éste. Las estrategias translúcidas, en cambio, juegan con la visibilidad y la ocultación, creando imágenes más ambiguas que pueden infiltrarse en el régimen de representación y subvertirlo desde su interior. La combinación de ambas supone una mayor potencialidad de perturbación. Para presentar estas estrategias se utilizan obras de Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Robert Mapplethorpe y el colectivo Señora Polaroiska.

Gravai o buril nos pátrios anais do vosso poder ou #vaipracincinnati

As três décadas mais recentes dos extremismos ideológicos e da celebrização instantânea são relacionadas, neste artigo, a partir da sucessão dos acontecimentos expositivos que as representam: de uma emblemática individual de Robert Mapplethorpe, The perfect moment, em 1990, diversos museus e galerias brasileiros herdam e sequenciam, nos dois últimos anos, os antagonismos das guerras culturais.

Archiving an Epidemic

Archiving an Epidemic is the first book to examine the devastating effect of the AIDS crisis on a generation of Chicanx artists who influenced transgressive genders and sexualities operating in the Chicana and Chicano art movement in Southern California. From mariconógraphy to renegade street graffiti, from the Barrio Baroque to Frozen Art, these visual provocateurs introduced a radical queer languageemboldened by opportunities in LA’s art and retail culturein the 1980s. AIDS not only ravaged their lives, but also devastated their archives. A queer archival methodology is demanded to ascertain how AIDS and its losses and traumas have rearticulated recordkeeping practices beyond systemic forms of preservation. The resulting “archival bodies/archival spaces” of queer Chicanx avant-gardists Mundo Meza (1955–1985), Teddy Sandoval (1949–1995), and Joey Terrill (1955–present) refutes dismissive arguments that these provocateurs have had little consequence for the definition of the aesthetics of Chicano art and performance. With appearances by Laura Aguilar, Cyclona, Simon Doonan, David Hockney, Christopher Isherwood, Robert Mapplethorpe, and even Eddie Murphy, this book stands in defense of the alternative archivesthat emerged from this plague. Thinking outside traditional terms of institutional mediation, Archiving an Epidemic speculates not what Chicana/o art is but what it could have been.

The Artist, the Image and the Self: Representation in Rembrandt, Bacon, Mapplethorpe, Sherman, and Nan Goldin

Before photography, only painters, printmakers, and sculptors could tell, through self-portraits, how they saw themselves and how they were perceived. In the past, only artists had the resources to capture and picture themselves. From one brushstroke to another, this mediated gesture marked the perception of the self. Western art highlights numerous works from artists who wrote the history of culture through portraiture and self-representation. In contemporary art, some artists have been able to explore new means to investigate new possibilities of representing the self. In the past, painters seemed to scrutinize the mirror in search for hidden truths; in our era, however, dominated by uncertainty, ambiguity, and speedy records that carry out their obsolescence, new issues cross the representation in contemporary art. It is undeniable that the history of art reveals how self-representation has been an essential tool for artists, regardless of the historical time in which they are inserted, in their search to reflect on themselves and their relations with the world. In the face of an immensely large and virtually inexhaustible universe, in this study we focus on five artists: Rembrandt, Francis Bacon, Robert Mapplethorpe, Cindy Sherman, and Nan Goldin.