Arts

This article investigates the manifestation of Venetian visual culture of the Renaissance in the island of Cyprus, which, between 1474/89 and 1570/1, stood as one of Venice’s Mediterranean colonies. To date, scholarship on panel and wall painting production of Venetian Cyprus has devoted careful attention to the infiltration of Italian details and styles in the broader sense—mainly drawn from the Italian Middle Ages—thus failing to notice any correlations between Cypriot visual arts and contemporary Venetian. In this study, I aim to provide an overarching perspective that will illuminate the presence and assimilation of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Venetian visual vocabulary in Cypriot artistic capital. With an emphasis on devotional painting, I will examine iconographic schemes, such as the Man of Sorrows and the Holy Conversation, and facets of stylistic and iconographic correspondences between the two territories. I will also probe the architectural function, purpose, and tenor of lunette-shaped panels in Cyprus and collate them with their Venetian equivalents. Put simply, I hope to flesh out the artistic contact Cypriot artists and their sponsors maintained with Venice rather than with Italy as a whole. Full article

Chinookan art centered on the Lower Columbia River and was created by Chinookan-speaking people living along the river and its tributaries. The style is unique, focusing on geometric forms, numerical patterns, and anatomical representation. It is embedded in Chinookan mythology and differs considerably from the more widely recognized Formline of Indigenous artists from the northern Pacific Northwest. It also receives less attention, both publicly and scholarly. Due to high rates of death along the Columbia from introduced diseases during colonial invasion, and high levels of looting that followed, Chinookan art nearly disappeared from the landscape. In the 21st century Chinookan art has had a resurgence, led by Chinookan practitioners. The resurgence occurs not only within individual households but also in public settings. This resurgence also includes an emphasis on teaching the style to youth, who learn that this is not just about making art but is integrally attached to culture more broadly, including connection to language, stories, protocols, and Indigenous identity itself. It is ultimately a source of pride, resilience, and resistance. As a result, where there were once generations who never saw a landscape with Chinookan art, there are now generations who will never know a landscape without it. Full article

The YouTube channel “Serbian Composers” was founded in 2012 by four musicology students from Belgrade. As the first page dedicated to both art music and applied music of Serbian composers on this popular video-sharing website, over the past 11 years this channel has shown itself to be an excellent platform for the promotion, multi-media archiving, research, digitalization, and preservation of Serbian music. The founders of the channel—nowadays active researchers in the field—recognized the potential of YouTube for applied musicological work and worked diligently on making this channel the most reliable online source for anyone interested in Serbian composers and their works. In this article, we elaborate on what working on this channel throughout the years has entailed. We cover the realities of both the social media and internet presence of one such endeavor and situate the research in the domain of seeing YouTube as an informal multimedia archive. We also discuss the ongoing processes of collecting music and data, digitalization and preservation, selection and categorization, and the presentation of material on YouTube and other relevant social media platforms. Full article

In 2022, the UN marked the International Year of Glass, celebrating the essential role glass has, and will continue to have, in society. One element of this celebration was the importance of glass within art and its history, which the Craft Scotland 2022 Conference: The Power of Glass looked to explore. The aim of the conference was to allow a range of individuals, be they academics, researchers, or students of glass and art history within Scotland and the UK, to access contemporary thought within an under-represented field in the UK craft sector. In this paper, we look to highlight the links between the aims of the International Year of Glass and the proceedings of The Power of Glass Conference, demonstrating how glass artists, makers, and designers are part of a growing international body of creatives who are using the communicative possibilities of glass as a vehicle in which to raise pertinent questions and platform unheard and overlooked narratives. Moreover, they seek to overturn perceived biases of what glass is and its future potential by placing their craft within an arena of judgement beyond discussions of process and technique and by elevating socio-political glass art on par with other forms of artistic protest and commentary. Full article

By the end of the 16th century, finger rings in reverse glass painting technique became increasingly popular in Europe. Often, they are used in the context of signet rings with the monogram together with the coat of arms of its beholder depicted on the glass bezel. The following paper concentrates on nine finger rings of this group. Instead of an actual coat of arms though, these finger rings carry the device V(G)MN or FGMN (for-get-me-not) accompanied by a depiction of little blue forget-me-not flowers as the coat of arms. By collecting and describing the so far existing material, the paper aims to contextualize the use and function of the finger rings with the symbol of the forget-me-not flower in the fields of love, friendship and faith. Furthermore, it links the symbol of the for-get-me-not on finger rings and the imperative power of the written letters V(G)MN or FGMN to its tradition in German literature and texts. Full article

In 2021, online marketplaces such as Nifty and Opensea gained popularity, and digital art creations, including Beeple’s pieces, made headlines worldwide. This attracted traditional fine art practitioners, artists, dealers, digital content creators, and crypto entrepreneurs who wanted to participate in this trend. Several significant investment and token-funded projects took place in Asia, fueling high hopes of revolutionizing the art market with nonfungible token (NFT) technology. However, the numbers suggest a different story, as NFT transactions have reached a historical low. Critics from both sides challenge the value of NFTs, and there is minimal empirical research on the topic of blockchain technologies in the art market. This paper explores the challenges and misunderstandings in the art market through the lens of the researcher’s insight as an art tech entrepreneur. Its aim is to provide an explorative account of the use cases of NFT and blockchain technology vis-a-vis the traditional art market. The paper discusses the current work in progress at the Art ID Standard consortium, covering decentralized identity, blockchain, and use cases, and provides insights into the implications of these challenges for artists, collectors, and the broader art ecosystem. Full article

This paper is an in-depth analysis of the Chinese movie Coming Home (2014), which mimics the way trauma works and brings the problem of memory into focus. I draw on a psychoanalytic perspective to interpret the storyline, characters, and metaphoric meaning embedded in the construction of the film. My analysis focuses on three symptoms displayed: forgetting, repetition, and historical void. As the most successful Cultural Revolution-related film in the Chinese-speaking world, Coming Home confronts the phenomenon of cultural amnesia and visualizes the subjective experience of struggling to remember. Full article

The main goal of this article is to introduce a new method for the analysis of depicted gestures in painting, namely a transcription system called chiroscript. Based on the model of transcription and annotation systems used in linguistics of co-speech gestures and sign languages, it is intended to provide a more systematic and objective study of pictorial gestures, revealing their modes of combination inside chirographic accords. The place of chirograms (depicted hand gestures) within pictorial semiotics will be briefly discussed in order to better explain why a transcription system is very much needed and how it could expand art historical perspectives. Pictorial gestures form an understudied language-like system which has the potential to increase the intelligibility of paintings. We argue that even though transcription is not a common practice in art history, it may contribute and even transform semiotic analyses of figurative paintings. Full article

This essay examines the converged aesthetic of Anthony Mordechai Tzvi Russell, focusing on the Kosmopolitan video projects. These videos, and Russell’s work overall, resist the singular terms “Black” and “Jew,” constructing a Blewish converged aesthetic by overlaying images of Josephine Baker or a lonely, lost child walking backward with Russell’s rich and full voice singing Yiddish songs. These remarkable videos, and the projects created by Tsvey Brider (Russell and Dimitri Gaskin), disrupt assumptions about race, gender, sexual orientation, and ethnoreligious affiliation in profound and important ways. I argue that this work performs convergence, thus bucking against the very insistence on antagonism that forms the conditions of possibility for racism. Full article

This paper argues that mapping as a methodology can support localised production, as exemplified in the case study of the design studio Atelier NL which marries contemporary design sensibilities with traditional glass and ceramics craft-making techniques. The paper puts forward the argument that by paying attention to local ecosystem services through mapping, place-based design solutions can be developed. Furthermore, the paper argues that the methodologies deployed by Atelier NL borrow from contemporary art creative mapping practices. This case study uses the framework of the Anthropocene to situate these mapping practices identified within the case study and contextualises these within 20th-century environmental arts practices, and those of the environmental art pioneers the Harrisons in particular. Finally, the paper argues that these mapping practices are responding to the conditions of the Anthropocene which increasingly makes clear that culture and nature are enmeshed, an insight that 19th-century town planner Patrick Geddes argued for more than a century ago. Full article

The church of Saint Mamas is a small, domed structure that lies close to Menetes village in Karpathos. It preserves most of its painted decoration, consisting of the scene of the Ascension of Christ on the dome and saintly figures on the rest of the surfaces. A dedicatory inscription, read here for the first time, dates the frescoes to 1312/3 and places them in the broader context of precisely dated monuments. Certain features of the iconographic program, such as the presence of healer saints (Panteleemon and Kyprianos) but mostly of the officiating Pope Sylvester and the passage used in the codex of Christ Pantocrator on the apse of the altar, lead us to interesting conclusions concerning, among other things, the perception of anti-Latin propaganda in the islands of the South Aegean. Also, the stylistic affinities between the art of Karpathos and Crete corroborate the diachronic interrelations between the two islands. The church of Saint Mamas is an exceptional example and one of the few Byzantine-decorated monuments that survive on the island. Full article

Lessing’s Laokoon from 1766 is still an important text in the discussion on the borders between different arts and their media. Especially in the 20th century, texts were written that referred back to Lessing’s seminal text. One of the most important ones, which will receive a detailed discussion, is Clement Greenberg’s “Towards a Newer Laocoon”. The discussion will on the one hand start from the observation that drawing borders between different arts and their media has always had political implications. On the other hand, this discussion will be related to the transformation to digital media in the late 20th century. By reading Greenberg and discussing some examples from art, especially from the recent field of AI-generated imagery, the concept of “digital modernism” and its political implications will be introduced. The two main findings are as follows: Firstly, it might be problematic to construct a progression from medium-centered to multimedial art since both tendencies coexist in contemporary art. Secondly, the current situation once again points to the politics of drawing borders between different arts (and their respective media). Full article

The museum’s instrumentalisation of contemporary art as a visitor attraction has come to mean that any use of live animals in art now must participate in and acknowledge the politics of spectacle, which for other animals means the optics of the zoo or the circus. At the same time, established social media can now deliver mass criticism of an artwork, requiring artists to learn how to manage reputation as a matter of professional art practice. In this article, I examine art’s changing ethics by working from a dilemma I faced recently as an artist over a simple 30-s video I had made featuring a wild house mouse that I had trained between COVID-19 lockdowns to take food from my shoe. Subsequently, I decided not to exhibit, publish or broadcast that video. I argue that it is the digital—its exposure of the micro-issue, its close focus on the individual case, its onus on linguistic precision and its diligent proofing and testing of arguments large or small—that now transforms the work the artwork does. This may now push artists into a much wider range of ethical decision-making about artworks to arrive at the artist’s regular mode of reflection and evaluation via a level of hyper detail and super nuance that, historically, artists of no particular celebrity have had little or no reason to engage with before. Full article

To the Academy is a multi-media performance work that makes poignant and humorous commentary about education, common paradigms of diversity, and the oppressive nature of institutional labor. Created through a dialogue between myself, an Indian American with training in various forms of physical theatre and Indian dance, and Guyanese-Canadian actor Marc Gomes, it has been performed at several universities and arts centers since 2015. In this essay, I will interrogate the ways in which we place select elements of “Indian tradition” at the service of the piece’s overarching theme of histories of European domination, asking whether making these cultural materials subservient to our political agenda constitutes a form of appropriation. I examine three components of the work: the character of the classical Indian dancer who appears in the first section of the show, the explicit references to the ancient Sanskrit treatise on performance, the Natyashastra, and the framing of both these elements within our adaptation of Franz Kafka’s story, “Report to an Academy,” about an ape who learns to impersonate humans. In so doing, I explore the ethical responsibilities artists of color have in working with intercultural aesthetics. Furthermore, I assert the inevitably ambivalent nature of activist performance, even if artists aim to resist hegemonic structures. Full article

Contemporary systems painting directly engages with the material of contemporary culture, not necessarily the technological substrates of computation, social media, the Internet, and artificial intelligence, but the concept of the algorithm and the circulation and patterning of information at the limit of human apprehension. Systems painting emerged as part of the wider category of systems art in the 1960s—a heterogenous collection of artists who were focused on the exploration of social, ecological, and technological systems, and the processes that underpin them. These systemic fields increasingly define and shape our lifeworld in the 21st century, producing an excess of algorithmically generated information. It is, therefore, appropriate to consider the role system painting plays in addressing the conceptual, aesthetic, and affective aspects of information derived from computational, algorithmic, and rule-based processes. This paper discusses the practice of the contemporary systems painter James Hugonin and his series of paintings Fluctuations in Elliptical Form (2015–2021). Karl Popper’s theory of three worlds is introduced, and the concepts of ‘concrete’ and ‘abstract’ objects are described and applied to Hugonin’s painting as a way of understanding the role externalised rules and internal intuitive decisions play in the construction of these complex and visually mesmerising paintings. Full article

A number of foreign artists received the earliest commissions to represent Napoleon’s Russian Campaign of 1812 for Russian emperors. My paper is a case study of a German artist who served the Russian Imperial court. Peter von Hess trained at the Academy in Munich and served both King Ludwig I of Bavaria and Otto I of Greece. In 1839, Emperor Nicholas I commissioned the artist to complete 12 monumental canvases for the Winter Palace representing key battles that followed Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812. While earlier battle paintings and portraits commissioned by Alexander I dealt only with elite officers and the emperor, Hess’s paintings elevated the common Russian as the bearers of a great sacrifice and as the true defenders of Russia. This representational shift is the product of changing ideas concerning Russia’s involvement in several alliances from 1803 to 1815 that included Austria, England, Sweden, and Prussia. In addition, over the course of Nicholas I’s reign, the concepts of “autocracy, orthodoxy, nationality” crept into representations of the Russian experience of the Napoleonic wars. Full article

This article is an introductory essay to the Special Issue “A Comparative Study of Media in Contemporary Visual Art”. It starts with a short overview of the terminological discussion about intermediality as a concept and its relationship with medialities with other prefixes—such as mixed, intra-, multi-, and transmedialities. So far, intermediality has been discussed less by art historians than by literary scholars. This introductory essay argues that critical analysis of intermediality in contemporary artworks may offer additional insights for investigation of the issues addressed in these artworks. The case studies in this Special Issue underscore this view. As a kind of kick-off, the second part of this essay includes a short case study that focuses on two artworks by the Lebanese artist Rabih Mroué in order to provide insight into how intermedial relations can act as metaphors for the sociopolitical relations addressed in his artworks. Applying philosopher Manuel DeLanda’s “assemblage theory”, philosopher Edward S. Casey’s concept of “absorptive mapping”, and anthropologist Tim Ingold’s view of living beings as consisting of a bundle of lines facilitates the highlighting of the sociopolitical aspects of intermediality in Mroué’s artworks. Full article

This article provides an overview of the recent flourishing of research and pedagogy in higher education that seeks a greater rapprochement between criticism and creativity, bringing together diverse media, disciplines, and modes of knowledge production and expression. It focuses on transformations in film and screen studies and on the ethical and aesthetic possibilities of conducting creative, intermedial research through filmmaking, drawing on the author’s recent, first-hand experiences of conducting such research through her making of two films about the African women filmmakers Judy Kibinge (from Kenya) and Bongiwe Selane (from South Africa). The author gives specific examples from her filmmaking process to show how she has attempted to unsettle the generic space between documentary filmmaking, curatorial practice, and video-essay making to engage in a collaborative research practice with Kibinge, Selane, and their communities, as well as her research teams. Grounding itself in a decolonial feminist framework, this article draws on the perspectives of a wide range of thinkers and filmmaker scholars to explore ways in which the colonial, patriarchal values that have haunted many academic institutions can be reformed to allow for the envisioning of new futures that will lead to a more self-reflexive, socially just higher education environment. Full article

Tacita Dean’s art relies on the perception of liminalities, of moving in-between, of one medium unfolding into another through dispersed, “molecular” sensations, either subverting or augmenting impressions of art forms perceived on the level of larger, structural wholes. Arguing against the wide-angle perspective employed by media studies approaches and for a close-up analysis of an “affective intermediality” in Tacita Dean’s art, the author looks at the landmark exhibitions at the National Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery, and the Royal Academy in London organised in 2018. The article singles out some of the individual works in the context of the exhibition as a work of art, and focuses on questions like the cross-media phenomenon of the “cinematic”, the affective performativity of the various dispositifs employed in her installations of celluloid films, the affordances of Dean’s signature aperture-gate masking technique, as well as the relation between narrative cinema experienced in a theatrical space and film as the medium of a visual artist. The essay concludes with a brief analysis of her gallery film, Antigone (2018), unravelling an allegorical journey through cosmic time and atmospheric landscapes, viewed as an ode to the “blind vision” of photochemical film and as a synthesis of key features of her intermediality conceived as a strategy for the re-sensitization of mediums by approaching one art from the point of view of another. Full article