Suchergebnisse

After the political changes in 1989 endowed Slovakia with the prospect of a successful and effective economic transition, the country's theatre scene boldly reflected the euphoria, which drove the society to a path where it could experiment, criticize and shift paradigms. Nonetheless, the artistic revolution of the 1990s (witnessing the advent of such innovative theatre ensembles as Stoka or GuNaGu) soon waned and gave way to a more commercial and politically benign theatre in the 21st century, trailed by the state-funded network of national theatres. This paper endeavors to examine how the dialectical relationship between state-funded national theatres and the fringe scene in Slovakia brought about a state in which political discourse and artistic originality became an inherent part of the independent theatre scene. While very few plays directly addressed the country's political development after 1989, or the dynamically changing social power structures, many productions were intrinsically political in the way they challenged the specifically delineated system of art funding. For example, the aesthetic of the Stoka theatre (and its artistic successor SkRAT), bearing traces of the devised method reminiscent of the American radical theatres of the 1960s and 1970s (such as the Open Theater or the Living Theater), became an artistic channel used to subvert not only traditional ways of theatremaking, but also the long-established torpid system of art funding. This paper aims to trace the development of political theatre in Slovakia after 1989 and speculate about why the political engagement through theatre seems to be losing its sting.

This essay is a critical examination of Jean-François Lyotard's little-known text on the American artist Edward Kienholz, Pacific Wall (Le mur du pacifique). It argues in favor of the experimental methodology that Lyotard developed in his encounter with Kienholz's installation Five Car Stud, suggesting that attention to this aspect of Lyotard's writings might allow us to avoid some of the impasses created by the emphasis upon the sublime aspect of aesthetic experience. Reading Pacific Wall in terms of the problems set out in Lyotard's Libidinal Economy, I contend that one can detect an ethics of thought and commentary at work in these early writings, one according to which the thinker must somehow find a way to imbue his text with a libidinal intensity equal to or greater than the work of art in question.

This essay examines, in Ben Highmore's words, the implications of "a materialist turn towards the immaterial, towards affect, towards thinglyness, the senses" and how this might be determined by "the social world that produced them." In viewing the "social," or "sociocultural," as always affective, and in viewing the significance of landscape in terms of how people define themselves and their relations to the world, this essay explores affect's key role in countering entrenched, predefined systems of thought and feeling and its potential for, in Jacques Rancière's terms, "redistributing the sensible."

This article sketches the development of Jean-François Lyotard's musical thinking through the lens of the composer with whom he was most often associated, John Cage. I contend that the affinity Lyotard felt for Cage's work came about on the basis of two shared concerns: first, an interest in creative strategies hinging on passivity and indifference and, second, a related desire to approach singular events free from the interference incurred by human cognition. In Lyotard's "libidinal" phase, as well as his later Kant-centered work, his investigations indicate that Cage's artistic practice is founded upon a series of logical paradoxes. However, it can be argued that Lyotard's revision of Cage's aesthetic theories in post-Freudian terms more openly faces up to these paradoxes than Cage's own sunny Jungianism does.

No artigo, o autor explora a tese de que não há arte - e, particularmente, não há "arte contemporânea" - sem uma busca por novas ideias de arte, novas ideias do que seja a arte e de suas relações específicas com as instituições artísticas e com o próprio pensamento.

A review essay on a book by Denis Dutton, The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution (Bloomsbury Press).