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Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
ARTMargins (2018) 7 (1): 115–127.
Published: 01 February 2018
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The introductory essay places “The True Meaning of the Work of Saturnino Herrán: The False Critics” (1920), a piece of early criticism written by the Guatemalan artist Carlos Mérida during the first year he lived in Mexico City, within the contexts of the cosmopolitan milieu of post-Revolutionary Mexico and the artist's own trajectory. It suggests that the text both demonstrates intellectuals’ interest in questions of form and national art and Mérida's desire to provide a critical framework for his own paintings of indigenous Guatemalan and Mexican women. In “The True Meaning of the Work of Saturnino Herrán: The False Critics,” Mérida lashed out at Mexican critics for praising Herrán as the best and most Mexican painter of the time, arguing, instead that the realism and sentimentalism of Herrán's paintings dishonored national themes by presenting them as picturesque stereotypes. Published in the widely-read magazine El Universal Ilustrado , the text attacks Herrán's paintings and the critics who praise them while also arguing that the predominance of the artist is symptomatic of the predominant problem of the literary nature of Mexican artists’ engagement with autochthonous art and culture.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
ARTMargins (2017) 6 (3): 111–121.
Published: 01 October 2017
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This text introduces the translation of Amir Esbati's essay “The Student Movement [Revolt] of May 1968 and the Fine Art Students,” first published in Labour and Art in Tehran in 1980. In the midst of the Iranian Revolution political and aesthetic upheaval, Amir Esbati, a member of the Marxist Group 57 student organisation, observed the following in the local revue Labour and Art in December 1978: “The walls of the city have become like the pages of a popular history book, so specific that we can tell the date and time of each sign or inscription.” This introduction looks at the most powerful manifestation of street politics shaping visual culture in modern Iran and at the way in which political posters operated, were reproduced, and became the objects of commentary and speculation.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
ARTMargins (2017) 6 (2): 93–109.
Published: 01 June 2017
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This introductory essay examines the role of two articles on the Cuban painters Roberto Álvarez Ríos and Wifredo Lam, “A Young Cuban Painter Before Surrealism: Álvarez Ríos” (1962) and “Lam” (1977), in the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser's writing on art. It argues that these largely ignored articles offer snapshots of two key shifts in Althusser's thought: his transition, during the early 1960s, from Hegelian Marxism to structural Marxism, and, during the late 1970s, from structural Marxism to so-called aleatory materialism. It contextualizes the articles in the social and political milieu of French philosophy during the 1960s and 70s and shows how his articles on the Cuban painters, specifically, and art, more generally, are largely concerned with contemporary developments in the third world, a subject that receives scant attention elsewhere in his work. The articles not only register Althusser's reflections on Lacanian psychoanalysis, the nature of language, and the philosophy of history, but also reveal that his connections with Latin America to exceed mere questions of intellectual reception.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
ARTMargins (2017) 6 (1): 98–107.
Published: 01 February 2017
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This text introduces a programmatic text of Otto Neurath on the educational use of the method of pictorial statistics. Neurath emphasizes the importance of a visual method to transfer scientific knowledge to popular audiences. At the same time, his Vienna Method attempts to adapt the popular educational strategy to an increasingly visual modernity. The specific educational interest of Neurath's Vienna Method consists in political education, in transferring basic knowledge about the general structure and dominant developments of society. His program thus echoes his contemporaries’ debates on the possibilities of social realism. To understand the historical significance of Neurath the introductory text accentuates three lines of possible discussion. It points out the importance of Neurath's visual pedagogy for the tradition of contemporary discussions around the so-called Bildwissenschaften. It also contextualizes Neurath's visual pedagogy in the Austrian tradition of Second International Social Democracy and in the context of the philosophical debates of the Vienna circle. Against this double historical background, the text eventually tries to understand the educational achievements and political pitfalls of Neurath's attempt to represent general societal developments visually.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
ARTMargins (2016) 5 (3): 93–101.
Published: 01 October 2016
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“Umetnost, družba/tekst” was an editorial published in the Slovenian journal Problemi-Razprave (Problems-Debates) in 1975. The journal was the central outlet of the so-called Slovenian Lacanian school and as such the most important place for the reception of French anti-humanist philosophy in the former Yugoslavia. The concept of the journal was based on interpreting French post-structuralism in the spirit of the Tel Quel magazine, anti-humanist Marxism in the spirit of Louis Althusser, theoretical psychoanalysis in the spirit of Jacques Lacan and his followers, as well as on a special blend of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Althusserian ideology critique, which characterised the French journal Cahiers pour l'Analyse . One might also find theoretical and conceptual similarities between Problemi and other French post-structuralist periodicals, such as Peinture, cahiers théoriques and Cahiers du cinéma . The editorial presented here is thus a unique example of introducing structuralism, post-structuralism, and Lacanian psychoanalysis into debates about society, culture, ideology, and art in Yugoslavia in that time.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
ARTMargins (2016) 5 (2): 105–119.
Published: 01 June 2016
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The introductory text foregrounds the article “From the Stamps to the Bubble” (1968) by Brazilian historian and curator Aracy A. Amaral. It seeks to locate the primary document within a broader historiography of Brazilian art in the second half of the 1960s, and examine the ways in which the military dictatorship, along with certain cultural exchanges facilitated by Brazil's economic development in this period affected artistic production. Placing particular attention on the multiple terminologies that were in use when the article was written, the introduction focuses on the contiguities of Pop Art in the Brazilian cultural milieu. It argues that Pop was present inasmuch as it inspired artists to initiate a process of radical experimentation, which empowered them to depart from an avant-garde tradition founded on geometric abstraction.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
ARTMargins (2016) 5 (1): 108–120.
Published: 01 February 2016
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This essay analyzes three polemic newspaper articles written in the early 1950s by the art critic, gallerist, and future Turkish prime minister Bülent Ecevit (1925–2006), “Artistic Awakening in Ankara” (1953), “The Artist and Politics” (1954), and “The Burden of the Intellectual” (1956). It argues that Ecevit's articles document a local intelligentsia's efforts to theorize the role of art in Turkish society at a crucial moment of political transformation. As Turkey abandoned its authoritarian past in order to conduct its inaugural experiment with multi-party democracy, Ecevit's columns took up two of the period's most pressing questions: the extent to which the state should control the local art world, and in what ways Turkey's newly enfranchised citizens might enact their individual rights within the realm of culture. The essay also demonstrates the importance of these three articles to Ecevit's subsequent political and intellectual trajectory: they were central to his lifelong efforts to continue the progressive social and political modernization project of the early Turkish Republic, while developing new forums for its critique, reinterpretation, and reinvigoration.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
ARTMargins (2015) 4 (3): 103–114.
Published: 01 October 2015
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This introduction situates Akasegawa Genpei's text “The Objet after Stalin” and the events surrounding his reproduction of the 1,000-yen note in the art-historical and political context of Japan's postwar avant-gardes. It explores Akasegawa's conception of the objet both in terms of its lineage within the history of Surrealism and its reception in Japan and of Akasegawa's original theoretical claims concerning the political potential of artistic practice.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
ARTMargins (2015) 4 (2): 97–107.
Published: 01 June 2015
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This introduction situates the conversation between Hsieh Teh-Ching, Ai Weiwei and Xu Bing within a larger historic and socio-cultural framework, as well as elaborates a brief history of the publication in which the conversation was first published, The Black Cover Book . The text also elaborates on the unarticulated issues informing their discussion, such as their émigré status, and briefly outlines a history of the artists' work at the time of the conversation. The work of other avant-garde artists in the Chinese diaspora whose work was published in The Black Cover Book is also touched upon briefly. This introduction reclaims some of the history behind the publication and argues for understanding the act of self-publication as not only a new conduit for artistic interaction but also a political act. Furthermore, it argues that it not only congealed an emerging art movement on Mainland China, but that this avant-garde and conceptual art movement was, at its very core, defined by a global field of reference.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
ARTMargins (2015) 4 (1): 102–118.
Published: 01 February 2015
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This introduction and commentary on Saloua Raouda Choucair's article “How the Arab Understood Visual Art” (translation by author in this issue) sets the context in which a private rebuke Choucair addressed to a former colleague for his ethnocentric cultural criticism became a quasi-manifesto for art (and social) modernism. It inventories the conceptual shifts Choucair pursued in her reevaluation of cultural criticism: shifts in the approach to time, matter, visuality, and Arabness. It explicates the lessons Choucair learned from Sufic Arab science, math, and philosophy (particularly Alhazenian optics) toward extracting an essentialist view of matter, which allowed art a serious public role for teaching people the possibilities available in modern social existence. It relates these findings to Choucair's own visual art.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
ARTMargins (2014) 3 (3): 111–125.
Published: 01 October 2014
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Aiming to contextualize Turkish artist İsmail Saray's artist book Leonardo da Vinci (1976), this text centers around the artist's educational formation and the early years of his artistic practice between the years of 1973–1980, when he was based in Turkey. Tracing key moments in this period including his participation in the Paris Biennial of 1977, the Yeni Eğilimler [New Trends in Art] exhibition of 1979 in Istanbul as well as his guest appearance in the exhibition Sanat Olarak Betik [Book as Art] organized by the conceptualist artist collective Sanat Tanım Topluluğu. This essay also gives a glimpse of the conditions under which artists were operating at the time, heavily influenced by the political developments in Turkey. The dematerialization of Saray's practice is traced through the artist books and his production on paper, including correspondence that led to the production of his artworks by fellow artists elsewhere, a phenomenon that awaits further investigation.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
ARTMargins (2014) 3 (2): 118–128.
Published: 01 June 2014
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The introductory text introduces two pre-revolution Iranian manifestos of modern art, namely the “Nightingale's Butcher Manifesto” (1951) and “Volume & Environment 2” (1976). It describes the socio-political context in which the texts emerged and compares them as different responses to similar issues separated by a time span of 25 years. It argues that these rare examples of Iranian art manifestos can be regarded as milestones of an entry into and an exit from modernism in Iranian art.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
ARTMargins (2014) 3 (1): 109–118.
Published: 01 February 2014
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This stenogram was recorded at an artists' meeting that took place in 1951 in Kishinev (as the capital of today's Republic of Moldova was called in those days). The discussion among the members of the local Union of Artists—a new type of art organization that was implemented in Moldova after the advance of the Red Army westwards—revolves around the organization of their annual art exhibition of 1951. The text discloses some of the major issues and challenges faced by the members of this artist organization during the late Stalinist era.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
ARTMargins (2014) 3 (1): 102–108.
Published: 01 February 2014
Abstract
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This stenogram was recorded at an artists' meeting that took place in 1951 in Kishinev (as the capital of today's Republic of Moldova was called in those days). The discussion among the members of the local Union of Artists—a new type of art organization that was implemented in Moldova after the advance of the Red Army westwards—revolves around the organization of their annual art exhibition of 1951. The text discloses some of the major issues and challenges faced by the members of this artist organization during the late Stalinist era.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
ARTMargins (2013) 2 (3): 114–122.
Published: 01 October 2013
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The text presented here constitutes the first time that Ronald Kay's work has been rendered and published in English translation. A fundamental figure within Chile's art scene during its recent dictatorial period (1973–1990), Kay's written, pedagogic, and editorial contributions were instrumental in shaping the sophisticated and insurgent discourse of the artists working under the rubric now known as the neovanguardia . The first chapter of Ronald Kay's Del Espacio de Acá (1980), “ On photography Time split in two” lays out, in a style and rhetoric that are both lyrical and rigorous, Kay's theorization of the photographic phenomenon as a miniature geological event.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
ARTMargins (2013) 2 (2): 163–171.
Published: 01 June 2013
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Leonhard Lapin's “Objective Art” was written for “Event Harku '75. Objects, Concepts” – an exhibtion and an accompanying symposium on the premises of the Institute of Experimental Biology in Harku, near Tallinn, Estonia, in December 1975. Objective art, in the artist's mind, answered to the industrialization and urbanization of the late 20th century, to the growing significance of not only mechanical but also electronic machines in everyday life, and to the emergence of the so-called artificial environment. Rather than representing this environment, new art had to intervene in it or even produce it. Lapin's call was quite different from other reactions to the changing postindustrial environment in the mid 1970s in the Soviet Union in that instead of active intervention many of them proposed withdrawal as the most appropriate tactics to resist the grim surrounding reality.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
ARTMargins (2012) 1 (2–3): 186–190.
Published: 01 June 2012
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An introduction to and abridged translation of Romanian Surrealist Dolfi Trost's 1953 book Visible et Invisible . Trost was part of a semi-clandestine and infrequently studied Bucharest Surrealist group; his book is about forming a new kind of revolutionary collectivity on the basis of what he calls a self-regarding or “cosmic” consciousness” made manifest within certain forms of dreams, as well as on the basis of a “spiritually heightened schizophrenia.” Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari were attentive readers of his work, and I place the translation in the context of their anti-oedipal and schizoanalytic theories.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
ARTMargins (2012) 1 (1): 120–124.
Published: 01 February 2012
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“In Search of a Model for Life” traces a brief history of the autonomous, experimental art movement known as los Grupos (the Groups) in which the essay’s author, Felipe Ehrenberg, played a central role. Based mostly in Mexico City in the late 1970s, the Groups critiqued the predominant academicism as well as the burgeoning support for commercially viable experimental work in Mexico’s state-run art institutions. “In Search of a Model for Life” first appeared as one of three external appendices to the catalog for the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil’s 1985 retrospective of the Groups, De los Grupos los individuos (From the Groups, Individuals). Ehrenberg’s essay challenges the teleological narrative that the catalog’s text traces, from a collective movement of rebellion to the individual insertion of the movement’s members into the art market. In doing so, “In Search of a Model for Life” begins to theorize the conditions for a critical and emancipatory art practice beyond the complicity of state and market.