Suchergebnisse

In this article, Healoha Johnston considers how five contemporary artists describe the interconnectivity of the environment and aloha ʻāina through their work. Recent installations and exhibitions featuring artwork by Bernice Akamine, Maile Andrade, Sean Browne, Imaikalani Kalahele, and Abigail Romanchak engage issues of sustainability, articulate genealogical connections to ʻāina, and decribe the possibilities for regenerative relationships to ʻāina through materials, form, and content. This essay considers the impact of the 1970s Hawaiian Renaissance as a cultural and political movement that re-centered the relationship between Kānaka and ʻāina, and catalyzed Hawaiʻi's contemporary art scene with a political dimension that visualized Kanaka ʻŌiwi resurgence.

This project aims to explore the connection between history, memory, political power, and visual art. It aims to contribute insight to how contemporary visual artists, like the filmmaker Jean Luc Godard, and the installation artist Christian Boltanski, confront politics through the reformation of collective memory. In their case the memory and history that they evoke are connected to Second War World and the Holocaust. In a very schematic way I will try to describe their role as a provider of a sight; a sight of the political struggle. I structured our investigation of Boltanski and Godard's works around three general questions on art, history and power. These questions provided a point of departure for my exploration, and helped with the formation of my arguments. At first, I tried to understand the presence of history in both Boltanski's and Godard's works. As I explained in this project, their motivations come from different reasons and events. Above all, as I have presented in this project, these artists use history in order to understand the conditions of the present moment. Therefore, I will argue that both Boltanski and Godard are historians of the present. Secondly, it was important for me to understand their specific use of the Holocaust and Auschwitz in their works. Here we notice how this event is perceived, as a reflection of social structures, and our understanding of the way power operates has grown accordingly. In this respect, Boltanski and Godard's works fall, both directly and indirectly, under the theoretical framework formulated by Michel Foucault, Adi Ophir, and Giorgio Agamben. The third question relates specifically to the art world and art practice, focusing on the attempt to expose how artistic methods and technique function as apparatuses of power. In other words, I wanted to understand and expose how power suffuses art through artistic practices. Here, I followed Godard's own investigation of cinematic montage, and Boltanski's challenges of archival practice. Therefore, it was through their paradigms that I was able to consider alternatives

In the 1930s, when the world-renowned Medieval and Renaissance art scholar Erwin Panofsky became acquainted with the New York contemporary art scene, he was challenged with the most difficult dilemma for art historians. How could Panofsky, who was firmly entrenched in the kunstwissenschaftliche study of art, use his historical methods for the scholarly research of contemporary art? Can art historians deal with the art objects of their own time? This urgent and still current question of how to think about "contemporaneity" in relation to art history is the main topic of this paper, which departs from Panofsky's 1934 review of a book on modern art. In his review of James Johnson Sweeny's book Plastic Redirections in 20th Century Painting, Panofsky's praise for Sweeney's scholarly "distance" from contemporary art developments in Europe is backed by a claim for America's cultural distance, rather than a (historical) removal in time. Taking a closer look at Panofsky's conflation of historical/temporal distance with geographical/cultural distance, this paper demonstrates a politically situated discourse on contemporaneity, in which Panofsky proposes the act of writing about the contemporary as a redemptive act, albeit, as this paper will demonstrate, without being able to follow his own scientific method.

How California's counterculture of the 1960s to 1980s profoundly shaped—and was shaped by—West Coast artistsThe 1960s exert a special fascination in modern art. But most accounts miss the defining impact of the period's youth culture, largely incubated in California, on artists who came of age in that decade. As their prime exemplar, Bruce Conner, reminisced, "I did everything that everybody did in 1967 in the Haight-Ashbury. . . . I would take peyote and walk out in the streets." And he vividly channeled those experiences into his art, while making his mark on every facet of the psychedelic movement—from the mountains of Mexico with Timothy Leary to the rock ballrooms of San Francisco to the gilded excesses of the New Hollywood. In The Artist in the Counterculture, Thomas Crow tells the story of California art from the 1960s to the 1980s—some of the strongest being made anywhere at the time—and why it cannot be understood apart from the new possibilities of thinking and feeling unleashed by the rebels of the counterculture.Crow reevaluates Conner and other key figures—from Catholic activist Corita Kent to Black Panther Emory Douglas to ecological witness Bonnie Ora Sherk—as part of a generational cohort galvanized by resistance to war, racial oppression, and environmental degradation. Younger practitioners of performance and installation carried the mindset of rebellion into the 1970s and 1980s, as previously excluded artists of color moved to the forefront in Los Angeles. Mike Kelley, their contemporary, remained unwaveringly true to the late countercultural flowering he had witnessed at the dawn of his career.The result is a major new account of the counterculture's enduring influence on modern art