“The Captain Doesn’t Count Alone…”: M. Kuzmin and “The Sailors of Marseilles”...

The paper is dedicated to the history of a short-lived Petrograd literary group “The Sailors of Marseilles” (spring-autumn, 1917) united around M. Kuzmin. Despite its ambitious plans announced in the press, and self-positioning as a literary and artistic society, the creative output of the group was quite modest. The degree of commitment within the group remains unclear – to what extent the members of the Second Workshop of poets were involved in the new literary project? The paper brings out certain coincidences and similarities in the texts of the poets – regular members of the group, highlights their connections with other artistic communities. A special attention is paid to the name of the group – “The Sailors of Marseilles”, and a new hypothesis about its origin is put forward. The paper comprises the first publication of a fragment of Marseillaise translated by M. Kuzmin in 1921.

Epilogue

THIS BOOK HAS uncovered the aesthetic variety and documentary richness of the Islamic arts of the book of the late medieval Lands of Rūm and produced new ways of understanding this material in its proper cultural and intellectual contexts. It has done so by considering the manuscripts as ‘whole’, complex objects. This approach has entailed looking closely at the codicological and visual properties of the manuscripts themselves, reading their inscriptions and analysing this material within a framework that accounts for patronage beyond dynastic confines – a facet that is sometimes overlooked in the wider scholarly field of Islamic art history. The manuscripts discussed here show that some of Rūm’s cities (particularly Konya) were home to dynamic artistic communities that consisted of local and émigré craftsmen, including converts to Islam and, possibly, Christians. This material also reveals that patrons were often drawn from the political classes, but were, generally speaking, otherwise not well-known from historical sources. In some cases, patrons’ affiliations and intellectual interests challenge simplistic or unambiguous conceptions of the ‘frontier’ and the role of ‘Turkishness’ in late medieval Rūm....

“Living big in a loft”

In the early 1960s, the cast-iron loft district below Houston Street in Lower Manhattan was on the verge of demolition. Artists seeking large, inexpensive spaces to live and work in began moving into vacant industrial lofts, developing a community and new collaborative sites of performance and display that offered an alternative to the mainstream art world. By the end of the 1970s, the neighbourhood now known as “SoHo” was home to an increasingly affluent population living in co-operatively owned loft buildings, while alternative art spaces were closing to make way for commercial galleries and upscale boutiques. This paper explores the dramatic, artist-led transformation of SoHo by focusing on three texts from 1970: the inaugural show at the influential alternative art space 112 Greene Street; an LP recorded by jazz musician Ornette Coleman in his Prince Street loft; and an article from Life magazine that introduced loft living to a wider audience. 1970 is significant as the year in which the underground community of the 1960s became increasingly visible and professional, in an effort to secure the future of the neighbourhood for artists. By exploring the ways in which the space of the loft is articulated in each text, I attempt to understand the contradictory role played by artists in the development of SoHo, who were complicit in the rapid gentrification of the neighbourhood, while simultaneously conceptualising a swathe of genuinely radical collaborative practices that continue to be inspirational to artistic communities today.

Indian Artistic Communities and Trance Practices: Local Traditions of Gujarat, Assam and Kerala

The paper provides a comprehensive comparative cultural and anthropological study of Indian artistic communities — dynasties of musicians, dancers, actors, performers of epic legends playing ritual drama, martial arts masters. A peculiar common Indian feature is the combination of three factors in their activity: artistic skills passed during regular training; religious service (most artistic activities are in one way or another devoted to certain cults and/or turn out to be part of ceremonies) and skills of controlled trance, specific psychophysical states, which in this case include on-stage reincarnation and the ability to impact spectators. The ethnographic material obtained during the expedition helps to trace the social and psychological features of some dynasties of artistic communities.