Art Theory

If the 21st century is to understood in terms of the proliferation of interface and image exchange platforms and if predominate forms of media only attempt to reconcile and navigate these technologies, theoretical examinations of these platforms aimed at understanding their aesthetics and effects have become imperative. Utilizing an understanding of cognitive technology from Marcelo Dascal, understandings of networks, protocol and control developed by Alexander R Galloway, and a theory of modern technogenesis by Katherine Hayles, this paper maps out emerging aesthetic forms in art and visual production as a result of the preponderance of computer interface in contemporary modes of communication. It examines the function and form of hypertext and protocol as they relate to visual culture. This work examines film and other visual forms with an eye to cognitive development in order to uncover the visual manifestation of networks as well as the systems of control that are embedded within.

Ce livre apporte des éléments de compréhension de l’art contemporain à partir d’une réflexion sur le land art américain, qui a bouleversé le rapport du spectateur aux œuvres d’art en l’invitant au voyage.

Le land art est aujourd’hui très étudié parce qu’il détermine un point à partir duquel on peut comprendre comment les paramètres de l’art ont changé. Or, l’articulation entre la démarche des artistes et l’environnement critique qui accompagne leur création forme des paysages théoriques, c’est-à-dire des moyens de percer les mécanismes sémiotiques et conceptuels qui ont contribué à la reconnaissance de cette mouvance. Parcourir ces paysages théoriques du land art nécessite donc de circuler dans les types de discours produits par ses principaux acteurs, qu’il s’agisse de celui de l’esthéticien ou du spectateur face aux œuvres, ou alors du critique d’art, ou encore de l’artiste.

Libro dedicado al pensamiento de Bataille, incluyendo en primer lugar un importante texto inédito hasta ahora en español (una conferencia sobre el juego y el placer no incluida en las Obras Completas publicadas en Francia).

A través de sus 18 capítulos, el libro recorre el pensamiento de Georges Bataille en todas sus etapas. Pero propone también un diálogo estrecho con muchas de las temáticas tratadas por Bataille (la transgresión, la soberanía, el juego, la muerte, la experiencia interior, la filosofía, la política, el arte), procurando enfrentarlas con los más variados puntos de vista desde dentro y desde fuera de las perspectivas que en su extensa y compleja obra siguió el propio Bataille.

Este libro tuvo su origen en un congreso en torno al pensamiento de la transgresión de Georges Bataille, celebrado en la Universidad Complutense de Madrid y coordinado por el grupo LA EUROPA DE LA ESCRITURA. Incluye en primer lugar los trabajos que se presentaron en él. Pero se ha abierto también a trabajos relevantes de autores muy cercanos a Bataille como, entre otros, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jean-François Lyotard o Georges Didi-Hubeman, que amplían enormemente su alcance.

This book condenses and evaluates hundreds of current journal articles in psychology, neuroscience and cognitive science and makes their principles and results available to art historians, cultural theorists and philsophers in ways that are important for the humanities, and in ways that challenge the sciences to do better when they study art. While recent studies in neuroscience and psychology have shed light on our sensory and perceptual responses to art, they have yet to explain our responses to contemporary art which downplays perceptual responses and instead encourages conceptual thought. The Psychology of Contemporary Art brings together the most important developments in recent scientific research on visual perception and cognition and applies the results of empirical experiments to analyses of contemporary artworks not normally addressed by psychological studies. The author explains, in simple terms, how neuroaesthetics, embodiment, metaphor, conceptual blending, situated cognition and extended mind offer fresh perspectives on specific contemporary artworks - including those of Marina Abramović, Francis Alÿs, Tracey Emin, Felix Gonzales-Torres, Marcus Harvey, Mona Hatoum, Thomas Hirschhorn, Gabriel Orozco, Marc Quinn and Cindy Sherman. This book will appeal to psychologists, cognitive scientists, artists and art historians, as well as those interested in a deeper understanding of contemporary art

A partire dai primi anni del XX secolo, anzitutto
in area germanofona e poi in Italia e
in altri contesti, all’interno delle concezioni
che hanno insistito sull’autonomia come
carattere distintivo dell’arte, si è fatto ricorso
a più riprese alla metafora dell’insularità.
Le particolarità di un’isola – l’essere
separata dalle altre terre e “incorniciata”
dal mare, l’avere contorni ben defi niti, il distinguersi
per particolari elementi autoctoni
– sono state adattate all’opera d’arte per
rivendicarne l’autosuffi cienza semantica
e la conseguente esigenza di essere compresa
e interpretata secondo principi a essa
immanenti. Di qui l’impiego di vocaboli quali
il tedesco Inselhaftigkeit e il suo corrispettivo
italiano “insularità”. Alla storia di questi
termini in ambito estetico e storico-artistico,
che coinvolge personalità come Simmel,
Lukács, Dessoir, Ortega y Gasset, Schlosser,
Croce, Betti, Pareyson e altri studiosi, sono
dedicate le pagine di questo volumetto.

In English see here: https://www.academia.edu/72119242/In_the_Depths_of_Perception_Istv%C3%A1n_Nagy_the_Hungarian_Van_Gogh_

Zárkózott, fojtott, szenvedélyes embernek írják le az emlékezők. Némelyek szerint folyton Monopol gyúrógumit, mások szerint kenyérgalacsinokat gyúrogatott, ami, teszik hozzá, állandó idegfeszültségre vall. A tésztagyurma aztán jól jött a szén visszatörléséhez. Beszélnek a csíki székely zömök alkatáról, mélyen ülő, apró, de sötét lobogású szemeiről, átható tekintetéről "titkos méhszúrástól megdagadt szemhéjak alatt", széles arccsontjairól, s arról, hogy keveset beszélt, de akkor vulkáni törmelékként köpte ki az egymáshoz ragasztott szavakat. "Egyetsebeszélj." 

A nyelvteremtés közel áll a dadogáshoz, a diszlexiához, az elnémuláshoz. „Nem értem én az emberi beszédet és nem beszélem a te nyelvedet.” Újra fel kell találni a szavakat, újra fel kell találni a szórendet. A nyelvteremtésben Nagy István éppen eddig ment el. A konszenzusos, az elvárt nem korlátozta. Szándékosan eltért, ellépett a megszokott látványtól. Minden nap új szemmel látta ugyanazt a fekete tavat, ugyanazt az elnyelő szurdokot.

Twórczość Tadeusza Kantora wypełniona jest odniesieniami do innych tekstów kultury i konwencji artystycznych. Odniesienia te badane są w jego twórczości malarskiej i teatralnej, rzadziej – w realizowanych przez niego happeningach. Ponadto, zwraca się uwagę głównie na jawne i łatwo rozpoznawalne cytaty z powszechnie znanych dzieł. Tymczasem dialog wewnątrzartystyczny toczy się w twórczości Kantora na wielu poziomach, z których jawne cytowanie jest zaledwie tym najbardziej oczywistym, co nie znaczy najbardziej znaczeniotwórczym. Niniejszy artykuł prezentuje praktykę artystyczną Kantora jako fundamentalnie intertekstualną, nawet w tych przejawach, które – jak happening – na ogół manifestują się jako moment doświadczenia bezpośredniego.

This article, which is a fragment of my PhD Dissertation written under the supervision of Professor Corina Popa, examines the way in which illusionism is discussed in the early modern period, thus trying to offer, in its original context, a background for understanding the attitude of Roman art theorists from the seventeenth century towards illusionistic painting.
Illusion is the most feared danger in a century obsessively concerned with the certainty of knowledge; asserting the epistemic capacity of painting – which, in my opinion, was a chief concern for Seicento Roman theorists – meant by necessity in the seventeenth century confronting
this problem. The issue was extremely pressing since topoi about painting as an art of illusion were at the core of Renaissance art theory. More so, illusion, had become, on the one hand, associated with the wondrous, thus un-scientific, attitude towards nature characteristic of the now obsolete culture of curiosity; but, on the other hand, it was on occasions considered a tool for understanding the flaws of the visual process of deriving knowledge from nature, and many natural philosophers were interested in the science of optical illusions.
One of the most salient features of the whole debate is the way perspectival effects are assessed. For Renaissance art theorists and practitioners the employment of perspective offered the guarantee
for a “rational,” implicitly “scientific,” representation. Numerous treatises from the seventeenth century, though, discuss it and the anamorphic representations based on it, as means of tricking the senses and it is no surprise that art theorists of the second half of the seventeenth century do not approve of the illusionism based on mathematical rules (anamorphoses, trompe-l’ oeil). Based on the individual, subjective point of view, such artworks cannot find their approval, since they do not partake to the unbiased decorum of objectivity of the scientific endeavour.
I further highlight the difficulty of endorsing trompe-l’ oeil – a type of image that introduces ambiguity and disrupts the transitive function by putting forward the artifice involved – by an art-theoretical system rooted in the belief in the function of the image to represent (in the
cartesian sense) and to communicate. I also put forward a complementary explanation for the disbelief towards illusionism: the conjunction of illusionistic mimesis and the representation of the
particulars challenges the Classicist notion of the Idea, which must, through judicious selection, transcede the particulars in nature and embrace its very essence, and thus guide every artistic act. Finally, I argue that the suspicion of art theorists towards illusionism owes to its futility for scientific representation, in the view of early modern natural historians, which, in its turn, is based on this very issue of the association between illusionism and particulars.
Focusing on the position of illusion in seventeenth-century thinking, I have showed the main reasons for the changes in the discourse of art theorists (Mancini, Bellori, Passeri, etc.) about painting’ s capacity to create illusion.

As a participant in the internationally presented eight part series The Scientists - Profiles of Discovery in 1979 by the Science-Unit of Australian National Television my subtitle was Pope the Catalyst. In that year UNESCO appointed me as a Special Science-Art Delegate to the Second Marcel Grossmann Meeting on General Relativity in Honour of Albert Einstein, Trieste, Italy. At the conference I discussed with China’s most highly awarded physicist, Kun Huang, about his paper with the Nobel Laureate in Physics, Max Born, entitled Dynamical Theory of Crystal Lattices containing a criticism of Einstein’s mechanistic worldview. My Science-Art Research Centre of Australia had also criticised Einstein's mechanistic worldview for not being stabilised by Plato’s Science-Art to balance the forces of nature.

Art and Ideas
Francisco de Hollanda and Sixteenth-Century Aesthetics

The historians of aesthetics who have studied the problem of
ideas in art theory (from Panofsky to Baeumler and Tatarkiewicz) have overlooked Da pintura antiga, by Portuguese artist and theoretician Francisco de Hollanda (1517-1584), a text where the Platonic notion of idea enters a treatise on art for the first time.
The present volume aims to fill such gap by shedding light on an author who has long been overshadowed by the great Michelangelo (whom Hollanda met during his stay in Rome in the years 1538-1540), as well as by advancing an analysis of the aesthetic concepts that emerge not only from Da pintura antiga, but from the entire body of Hollanda’s works.
The most significant element is that in Hollanda’s approach art
theory appropriates connotations previosuly reserved for poetic
creativity. In fact, poetry had borrowed from Platonic philosophy the notion of “divine frenzy” to describe the inspired poet. According to Hollanda, on the contrary, it is the artist who, possessed by such frenzy, is able to rise to the world of ideas. Artistic creativity thus acquires a sacred dimension: “ancient painting” is seen as a sort of “prisca pictura” that, like Ermete Tremegisto’s “prisca theologia”, reveals the most hidden truths. The “melancholic”
artist, who possesses an inspired and bizarre imagination,
as best exemplified by “grottesche”, is the only one capable of
grasping the idea and fixing it with uncommon rapidity in a
sketch. This is a complex and not always immediately successful procedure. Thus, Hollanda considers blindness as a privileged factor to grasp the kind of beauty that the artist, like the prophet, can see only with his “inner eyes”, eyes that are not dimmed by sensible perceptions.
Consequently, “drawing” becomes a key element of Hollanda’s
thought. Drawing emerges as the basis not only of painting,
sculpture, and architecture, but of all the arts that are connected with images: from martial strategy to civil and military engineering; from maps to the design of insignia, livery, clothes, and ornaments.
Hollanda moves beyond the distinction between major
and minor arts, and his approach emerges as more modern than the one that Vasary will articulate a few years later in his famous definition of the “arts of drawing”.

The LIfeforce of mankind is money - the oxygen network that should be given as a Universal salary to all human beings to vote the re=production and consumption in a demand based democratic economy of the welfare goods they need to survive. Once the yous steal it converting WHealthy grain given to each citizen in the neolithic into hypnotic parasitic go(l)d tax farmed from them to multiply the weapons that control them 5000 years ago allied to germanic weapons, corrupting every organ of humanity with it, History went down, all the way to its present state in which 50 yous own as much as the 50%, for they issue in monopoly the blood of mankind to maximize the equation of you capitalism Max. profits = Goods of max. pricesales (weapons) - mind. cost (hate memes). This is the basis of a you capitalist civilination. But nobody explains it for class-ist economics has brain washed scholars, so the organism of History is ignored. So as we move to the predicted W.W.III to maximize those profits humanity goes down the gutter.
It is only fitting to conclude the encyclopedia with the last 2 books I printed on the economic system and the extinction of the earth to get to the magic number of 60 that completes the hexadecalogic structure of the universe. So I am republishing at academia the books i published every decade in world war III since 30 years ago during my masters at Columbia University,  I discovered an error in the periodicity of the most important cycle of the science of economics, the Kondratieff cycle that separates the different St-ages of the Industrial r=evolution of machines.  Kondratieff analyzed the Industrial Revolution in Russia, concluding that for 50 years the train was the engine of its development; thus establishing a 50 year cycle of economical activity that bears his name. However in 3rd World countries machines arrive latter, when they have already evolved in the Industrial World. So the Russian cycle of steam was shorter than the World’s cycle. When we make an exhaustive analysis of the cycle in the Western World, where those machines were discovered, we find a longer 72 years generational cycle.  The causes of that exact 72±8 year cycle of global stock-crashes are simple. The Industrial Revolution is the Evolution of Machines & Money, energetic and informative systems, traditionally made of metal, which follow the laws of morphologic evolution. Machines and money evolve according to the energy and information, they use to become re=produced.
Humans evolve a new type of energy and information, derived from that energy, which renews all the machines and financial instruments of the economy every human generation of 72 years, in which a nation of ‘founding fathers’, captains of industries, their sons and grand-sons, reproduce and evolve a new energy, machine and form of money to its perfection. Yet at the end of the cycle, the machine and money becomes over-reproduced, saturating the market and provoking, due to a crisis of growth, a global economical crash. Those generations bring the nation that discovered the new energy to a top predator status of history, as the substance of which weapons are made.
—Thus, we had an age of steam machines, the age of England, between 1780s and 1857, followed by a crisis of overproduction of steam machines and stock-money that brought the 1857±7 years crashes of the train-based economy.
—From 1857 to 1929, we lived in the age of electro-chemical energies, machines and chemical explosives, dominated by Germany, followed by a crisis of overproduction of cars and radios, which caused the 1929 crash, 72 years after the train crash.
—It came then the III cycle of electronic machines, electronic money and Nuclear Bombs that took place from 1929-2001, the age of America; which again ended in the dotcom and mortgage crashes, 72+7 years after 1929.
- Followed by the Age of the Singularity, the IV Cycle of Evolution of machines, dominated by robots that would come after an age of global wars that unmistakably separated those cycles but was a taboo subject in the study of economics as a science.
And yet the dates of the war phase of Kondratiff’s cycle were clear. Each technological cycle started and ended in an age of global wars in which machines were reconverted into its ‘evil twins’, top predator weapons used then in a crescendo period of global wars, starting by ‘splendid little wars’ when those machines were tested in 3rd world countries, followed by an age of ‘civil wars’ in the peripheral regions of decadent, broken old empires, followed by an industrial all-out war between the old and new industrial powers of the cycle, concluding with a holocaust of the financial and military elites that carried the cycle to its conclusion. This part of the generNational cycle of global power was unsettling. So I researched in depth all its details before daring to write a paper for publication.
Then it came another disquieting surprise: scholar historic and economic magazines refused to publish; a book I wrote on the subject was rejected by over one hundred editorials and so I had to pay a small printing press (Bookmasters, Ohio) to print ‘Bio-History, Bio-Economics’, the full model which had by then grown to an entire analysis of Human history, since the cycle as most periodic processes of Nature had a longer and shorter decametric wave of 800 years cycles of evolution and reproduction of top predator weapons that erased all Eurasian civilinations (cultures divided in tribal nations that oppose each other in wars); the bronze, chariot, iron, coin, chivalry, gunpowder and digital age of weapons that now become the protagonists of III world war, and the short ±8 years cycle of splendid little wars.
So 30 years ago came out the first book on the series of World Wars, which I send to different think-tanks and Universities that ignored it, because of what I came to call the anti-quantum paradox: Unlike in physics where the scientist is so large it influences the observable in History the social scientist is inside the organism, either a fascist dictatorship or a capitalist society ruled by those company-mothers of machines and weapons and its lobbies that corrupt its politicos.
So they don’t distribute ideas against the cycle. And both sides of it, fascist dictators and capitalist speculators work to make it happen. Thus in this 3rd round on the global age of wars between two different blocks of Earth’s nations, roughly divided into a capitalist, dominant block that produces the best weapons, and a fascist, smaller group more warrior-prone… that will take war to its natural final stage of annihilation, I don’t expect the world to listen.
This was the last published book in English, again in a small print X-libris after several rejections, a decade ago...

But why to publish in smaller books, obscure academic outlets and blogs blocked in both blocks? Because after the war ends, and the ‘belli nervi, pecunia et cadaver infinita’ engine of war and its idol-ogies of nationalism (the worship of weapons) and capitalism (the worship of go(l)d) recede, there will be if humanity survives, a last chance for humanism, as there was the (wasted) chance of Bretton Woods and UNO, when humanity might humbly reflect on their Nature as ‘dust of spacetime’, and before returning to dust, reform the system along the organic, natural measures explained in the larger humanist model of those texts, which is the final evolution of a perfect, ideal world that serves the need of the 99%, not those of dictators & stockrats owners of arm companies that seek only power and profits with p-lineal momentum and manifest destiny all the way to hell.  There is still a window for peace if EU nations recognize NATO’s militarism was part of the problem, by-pass Zelenski’s TV-hero role & press hate memes, let Russia withdraw with honor, phasing out sanctions, offering both nations entrance to EU, as Putin might accept democratic reforms before retiring. But if those sanctions destroy Russia he’ll go into an all-out revenge Nuclear war before submitting. We are NOT justifying him but asking mankind to come to its senses before destroying itself once more.

Le développement dans l’art contemporain de pratiques artistiques qui se situent à la croisée de plusieurs médiums (intermedia, mixed media, multimedia) ou qui ont recours aux « nouveaux médias », tout comme dans le domaine du cinéma le passage de l’argentique au numérique et l’apparition de nouveaux dispositifs et de nouvelles formes de captation, de manipulation, de visionnement et d’archivage des images en mouvement, ont précipité la nécessité de repenser ce qu’est un médium. Face à un panorama artistique, cinématographique et technologique en constante transformation, ce colloque se propose de rouvrir la question de la définition du médium en interrogeant la distinction entre « médium » et « média(s) ». Suivant l’essor actuel d’un champ de recherche transdisciplinaire sur ces questions (Medienwissenschaft allemande, media studies anglophones, études médiatiques canadiennes, ou encore médiologie et travaux sur les appareils et la philosophie de la technique en France), il s’agit d’envisager l’ensemble des médiations se manifestant à l’intérieur d’un contexte culturel donné : les conditions de possibilités technico-matérielles de toute forme de perception et d’expérience, de représentation et de communication, d’enregistrement et de transmission.
Pour cela, il convient d’opérer un retour sur les différentes significations et connotations qui ont été attribuées au terme d’origine latine « médium » dans le cadre d’une longue généalogie qui a ses racines dans les notions aristotéliciennes de metaxu et de diaphanes et trouve ses points focaux au XXe siècle dans les écrits de László Moholy-Nagy et Walter Benjamin, Rudolf Arnheim et Clement Greenberg, Marshall McLuhan et Friedrich Kittler. Il s’agit ainsi de faire un état des lieux de la recherche actuelle sur ce thème en contribuant simultanément au décloisonnement entre les disciplines de l’histoire de l’art, des études cinématographiques et audiovisuelles et de l’histoire et de la théorie des médias.

Tarihin her döneminde, o dönemin politik özeliğine, düşünme tarzına, teknolojik gelişmelerine ve zevklerine bağlı olarak değişik sanatsal anlatım biçimleri doğar. Zevk, insan doğasının bilinmeyen yönlerinin ortaya çıkartılması kadar, toplumsal yapıyı belirleyen ve sınırları az çok belli olan yaşam koşullarına bağlı olarak biçimlenir. Kralların etkin olduğu dönemindeki sanatta, portelerde hükümdarlara yaraşır bir görünüm sergileme hevesi baskındı. Bu ancak ve en iyi portelerde yapılabiliyordu. Aynı şey burjuvazinin egemen olmaya başladığı dönemde de geçerli bir savdır. Aydınlanma Çağı ve akabinde sanayi devriminin bütün hayatı olduğu gibi sanatı da kökten değiştirmesi kaçınılmazdı. Bunu şu şekilde formüle edebiliriz; Bu sanatsal üretimler; toplumun gereksinimlerinden ve geleneklerinden doğar ve bir şekilde bunları yansıtır. Toplumsal yapıdaki ve teknolojideki her değişim beraberinde sanatsal anlatım biçimlerini de dönüştürdü. 19. yy. makinelerin hüküm sürdüğü dönemde sadece portrelerdeki yüzler değişmedi, bunun yanı sıra sanatsal üretim şekilleri de değişime uğradı. Bu yeni teknolojik gelişmeler (litografi vb.) sanatın geçireceği evrimde çok önemli belirleyenler oldu. Bu değişimi en iyi gözlemleyebileceğimiz, bu değişimin getirdiği sorunları, açmazları ya da olanakları en iyi anlayabileceğimiz metinlerden bir tanesi de Walter Benjamin'in 1935 yazıp yayınladığı " Tekniğin Olanaklarıyla Yeniden Üretilebildiği Çağda Sanat Yapıtı " adlı eseridir. Bu yazıda da konu edeceğimiz metin olan bu makale, yazıldığı tarihten bu yana tartışma konusu olmuş, birçok çalışmaya kaynaklık etmiş bir çalışmadır. Makale temel olarak kapitalizmin yükseliş dönemine denk gelen bir çağda sanat yapıtının bundan etkilenmesi üzerine durmaktadır. Bunu da teknolojinin sanatsal üretimi ve teknolojiyle aracılanmış sanat ürünün yeniden üretimini sorunsallaştırmaktadır. Walter Benjamin'in de dâhil olduğu Frankfurt Okulu modern toplum üzerine yaptıkları eleştirilerinde, teknolojinin ve bu teknolojinin sermayedarlarının toplum üzerinde kurmuş oldukları tahakküm ilişkileri üzerine durmaktadırlar. Eleştirel teoriye dâhil olan bu okul ağırlıklı olarak kültürel çalışmalar ile kültürel üretim, ekonomi politik, kültürel yapıtların sınıfsal mücadelede aracı haline gelmesine kadar çeşitli alanlarda tezler ortaya koymuşlardır. Her ne kadar Benjamin okulun diğer üyelerinden belli oranda farklı düşünse de kültürün toplumu manipüle ettiğine inanırlar. Bunu da 'Kültür Endüstrisi' olarak kavramlaştırdıkları tezlerinde kültürün toplum tarafından değil egemen olan sınıflar tarafından üretildiğine bağlamaktadırlar. Buda mevcut olan haksız durumun devam etmesinden başka işe yaramadığını söylemektedirler. Sanatın yeniden üretilmesini izlerini Marx'ta da görebilmekteyiz. Marksist teorinin özünü oluşturan kapitalist üretimin eleştirisi ve karşı bir sistem oluşturma istenci sanatta da kendisini göstermiştir. Seri üretimin bütün alanlarda etkin olduğu bir dönemde bunu sanatta da kendini göstermesi kaçınılmazdı. Giséle Freund Fotoğraf ve Toplum adlı eserinde sanatın tekniğin olanaklarıyla yetiden üretim döneminde zanaat olmaktan çıkıp nasıl sanayi dönüştüğünü şu cümleleriyle belirtmektedir: " 1867 yılında atölyede yüzden fazla işçi çalışıyordu ve o döneme kadar bir zanaat olarak kabul edilen çoğaltım mesleği, artık bir sanayi dalına dönüşüyordu. " (Freund, 2006:91) Benjamin bu tartışmaların ayyuka çıktığı bir dönemde bunu yazması birazda dönemin tartışma çerçevesiyle bağlantılıydı. Sanatta kapitalist üretimin en belirgin olduğu alan kuşkusuz görüntüydü ve bununla bağlantılı olarak fotoğrafçılıktı. Sanat, fotoğraf makinesinin bulunmasıyla büyük dönüşüme uğramıştır.

Przysługujący widmom wywrotowy, niemalże rewolucyjny potencjał został odsunięty oraz zagubiony poprzez pozbycie się tej kontrowersyjnej kategorii z terytorium metafizyki i zbyt pośpieszne odesłanie jej do przestrzeni badań nad literaturą, sprowadzając ją jedynie do roli użytecznego, bezpiecznego narzędzia interpretacji.

Książka Andrzeja Marca odzyskuje niepokojący charakter widmontologii i ponownie wprowadza widma do myśli metafizycznej. Czym nawiedzona i przeniknięta jest tradycyjna metafizyka, co właściwie ją dręczy, nie daje spokoju oraz nieustannie podmywa jej stabilność?

Kategoria widma Derridy posłużyła Marcowi przede wszystkim do rozważań nad charakterem współczesności i przeobrażeń, jakie dokonały się w obrębie myśli ponowoczesnej. Współczesna kultura, zdaniem Marca, stała się miejscem powstawania widm, nieustannie powracających z przeszłości. Uznając, że nie jesteśmy już w stanie tworzyć utopijnych wizji przyszłości, autor stara się zdać sprawę z widmowego charakteru współczesnej kultury, analizując m. in. strategie vintage, retro, nurt no future w kulturze lat 70. czy nurt fantastyki naukowej w literaturze.

This thesis studies a specific relationship between matter and form which can no longer be related to stability, solidity and objectuality, as it has been traditionally interpreted. To this aim, it firstly explores the plurivocity in the concepts of 'matter' and 'artistic material'; and secondly it examines a case study about water as a material presence in contemporary art. Over the course of the study, certain issues arise, such as the problematic use of notions like form, information and memory in the specific context of the artwork .

The  methodological lines of this thesis are an alternative approach to the artwork technical and material system, this understood as a synergistic and complex structure of symbolic, technological and imaginative relations. This methodology focuses on the evolution of the technical and technological thinking in the 20th century, establishing the connection between past and current uses of media and materials. Based on the principle of transversality, this study contributes to the expansion of the Third Culture by visualizing the dialogical relationship between art, science, technology and aesthetics. Thus, its starting point is the states of water (solid, liquid, and gas) as well as the technical and conceptual operations associated with this specific material. A selection of 258 artists or working groups and more than 500 works have been gathered along diverse actional and conceptual tendencies of water in its three states.

Archeology, technological thinking, anthropology, and material imagination are the key epistemological elements used to reflect on the encounter between the so-called traditional art mediums and new media in the 20th century —or from a broader perspective, between both the deterministic-mechanistic and the systemic-cybernetic currents of thought. In this context, water provides a paradoxical and exemplary temporal connectivity.

Resumen
La presente investigación tiene por objeto definir una zona muy poco tratada dentro de la historia del arte, en la que la relación entre materia y forma deja de poder aprehenderse como un fenómeno vinculado a los sentidos de estabilidad, solidez y objetualidad tal como se ha interpretado tradicionalmente. Para ello explora la plurivocidad de los sentidos de `materia´ y `material artístico´, confrontando esta perspectiva con el estudio del agua como presencia material en el arte contemporáneo, de lo que se derivan una serie de problemáticas respecto a los conceptos de forma, información, y por extensión memoria de la obra de arte.

Paralelamente se dibujan las líneas metodológicas de la semántica material como alternativa de aproximación al sistema técnico-material de la obra de arte, entendiendo éste como una estructura sinérgica y compleja de relaciones simbólicas, tecnológicas e imaginativas. La metodología propuesta pretende incidir en la evolución del pensamiento técnico y tecnológico del siglo XX, estableciendo puntos de conexión entre el uso actual de los medios y materiales artísticos, y sus antecedentes. Partiendo de la transversalidad, esta investigación se propone en última instancia contribuir a la expansión de la tercera cultura visibilizando las relaciones dialógicas entre creación artística, ciencia, tecnología y estética. Su puesta en práctica toma como punto de partida el agua en todos sus estados y las operaciones técnico-conceptuales asociadas a este material concreto. Una selección constituida por 258 artistas o grupos de trabajo y más de quinientas obras han sido recogidas en torno a las tendencias accionales y conceptuales del agua en sus estados sólido, líquido y gaseoso.

En definitiva, arqueología y antropología del pensamiento tecnológico e imaginación material son los elementos epistemológicos clave utilizados para reflexionar acerca de las cuestiones que definen el encuentro en el siglo XX entre los medios artísticos llamados tradicionales y los new media −o en un plano más amplio entre el pensamiento determinista-mecanicista y el sistémico-cibernético−, vehiculizadas por la paradójica conectividad temporal que ofrece el agua.

This thesis is an investigation into the legitimacy and limits of the term “body art” in its vernacular sense, wherein it refers to methods of decorating or ornamenting the body, such as tattooing or piercing. Though the term is widely used and widely understood, it has rarely appeared in any writing which takes an explicitly arthistorical or art‐critical approach, and has never been subjected to any sustained analysis which uses the methodologies deployed by specialists when engaging with other forms of art. If tattooing and its coincident technologies are “body art”, they have not as yet been understood as such by art historians.

The arguments made over the course of this work thus amount to a case for the applicability of art‐historical and art‐theoretical methodologies to body modification practice. The thesis first establishes the existence of a rhetorical yet broadly undefended case for the artistic status of practices which alter the form of the body. This claim is to be found amongst both the contemporary subcultural body modification community and amongst plastic surgeons. With particular reference to theories of art and aesthetics by John Dewey, Richard Shusterman, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the work investigates whether such claims are tenable. In light of these investigations, the thesis then presents a number of problems which immediately arise from such a claim – problems of authorship, ownership, objectivity and value – and attempts to resolve them through detailed analysis of a number of case‐studies.

(The full thesis can be downloaded from the British Library's EThos Service at http://ethos.bl.uk by searching "Lodder" or the thesis' persistent ID, 525734 - registration required)

Santiago Sierra once described himself as a “minimalist with a guilt complex.”  This essay explores how he has addressed his socio-economic concerns within his art practice. Sierra’s interest appears to lie as much with 'work' as labour, as with the 'work' as art object.

In the article «From zombie art to dead art» philosopher Raamy Majeed from Cambridge University touches on a number of traditional issues for the philosophy of art and aesthetics. Considering the phenomenon of zombie art, – these artworks of art have received so much physical damage that they no longer treat like these as such, – Raamy Majeed makes a provocative conclusion that any artwork can be regarded as identical to itself as an artifact. This conclusion allows us to take radical physicalism position in the field of art. It makes doubts on most of the traditional theories of art treating artworks as non-identical to artifacts that represent them.

Disrupting the Gaze is written in three parts. The first chapter Art Intervention and the Tate Gallery investigates contemporary art intervention at the Tate Gallery. It includes artists, art groups and activists: Graham Harwood, Platform, Liberate Tate, IOCOSE, Tamiko Thiel, Mel Evans, Mark McGowan, Mark Wallinger, Damien Hirst and Britart. The second chapter The Power and the Gaze studies the history of the Tate Gallery, its connection with the Millbank Penetentiary and the “Panopticon", Jeremy Bentham’s design and concept for the prison. The third chapter explores different concepts of “the gaze” and includes feminist, societal and media art contexts. Together they form part of a larger study that looks at dissent in the context of contemporary art, technology and social change.
Each artist(s) featured in this chapter delivers his or her own particular unofficial and official mode of art intervention at the Tate Gallery. Whether these interventions concern economic, social or political conditions, they all connect in different ways. Less in their style or genre than as contemporary artistic practitioners exploring their own states of agency in a world where our public interfaces are as much a necessary place of creative engagement, as is the already accepted physical ‘inner’ sanctum of the gallery space. These artists’ and their artworks have become as equally significant (perhaps even more) than, the mainstream art establishment’s franchised celebrities.
In his vindication of those artists hidden away in places where the art establishment’s light rarely shines, Gregory Sholette observes that “when, the excluded are made visible, when they demand visibility, it is always ultimately a matter of politics and rethinking history.”  (Sholette 2011) This draws upon a contemporary art culture and its audiences beyond the mainstream. These artistic discoveries and discourse arise from an independent art culture that is rarely reflected back to us. Instead, we receive more of the same, marketed franchises. The central, mainstream version of contemporary art has found its allies within a global and corporate culture, where business dictates art value. Meanwhile, a spirit of artistic emancipation thrives. It is self styled, self governed and liberated from the restrictive norms that dominate our mediated gaze.

We live in an age of movement. More than at any other time in history , people and things move longer distances, more frequently, and faster than ever before. All that was solid melted into air long ago and is now in full circulation around the world like dandelion seeds adrift on turbulent winds. We find ourselves, in the early twenty-first century, in a world where every major domain of human activity has become increasingly defined by motion. 1 We have entered a new historical era defined in large part by movement and mobility and are now in need of a new historical on-tology appropriate to our time. The observation that the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first was marked by an increasingly " liquid " and " mobile modernity " is now something widely recognized in the scholarly literature at the turn of the century. 2 Today, however, our orientation to this event is quite different. Almost twenty years into the twenty-first century we now find ourselves situated on the other side of this heralded transition. The question that confronts us today is thus a new one: how to fold all that has melted back up into new solids. 3

La storia recente dell’umanità è stata segnata da profondi cambiamenti tecnico-
scientifici. La tecnologia ha cambiato il nostro modo di percepire, di agire
e di comunicare. Solamente negli ultimi anni, la rivoluzione di internet ha cambiato
completamente le menti ed i comportamenti degli esseri umani. Questo
cambiamento sostanziale non poteva che influenzare il modo in cui si produce,
si pensa e si fruisce l’arte. Inoltre, grazie alla sua natura immaginifica e visionaria,
l’arte ha anticipato ed esplorato questi cambiamenti nei modi che le
sono propri: aprendo orizzonti, creando mondi, scovando contraddizioni.

Convocarte — Revista de Ciências da Arte n.º 5
Revista Internacional Digital com Comissão Científica Editorial e Revisão de Pares
Tema do Dossier Temático ARTE E ACTIVISMO POLÍTICO: PERSPETIVAS DA HISTÓRIA DA ARTE E ESTUDOS DE CASO
Ideia e Coordenação Geral Fernando Rosa Dias
Coordenação Científica do Dossier Temático Cristina Pratas Cruzeiro

Dada was born out of negative reaction to the horrors of the First World War. This international movement was begun by a group of artists and poets associated with the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, began in 1916, spreading to Berlin shortly thereafter, but the height of New York Dada was the year before, in 1915. Dada formed the foundation for Surrealism, influenced Pop Art, and was a prelude to post-modernism and a celebration of anti-art.The term anti-art was coined by Marcel Duchamp around 1913 when he created his first ready-mades. Dada represented the opposite of everything which art stood for. Where art was concerned with traditional aesthetics, Dada ignored aesthetics. If art was to appeal to sensibilities, Dada was intended to offend.