Anonymity-Sunset-Dance-Party provides a commentary on the essays "Anonymität Tanzen" by Paula Helm and "Crypto Parties" by Linda Monsee. It draws on Whitehead's metaphor of the sunset, as an event that defies the bifurcation of nature, and the empirical material from the two essays to suggest that anonymity practices do not merely obscure identity but radically affect and potentially broaden subject formations. In doing so, it speaks to a politics of anonymity that goes beyond questions of identification.
'Material Trajectories: Designing With Care?' turns towards material-driven design processes with the aim of relocating technoscientific trajectories. Concerned with new forms of caretaking, it combines positions from the extended fields of design research and humanities scholarship including practice-based approaches. The contributions explore current ecological conditions through multiple acts of making-with and seek to complicate questions of sustainability, livability, and cooperation. In reassessing the status quo in design and architecture as material practices, they provide outlines for a nuanced reading of these worldmaking processes and ask what different ways of designing with care and complicity might entail.
In: Studies in Arts and Humanities, Band 2, Heft 2, S. 57-61
Milan-based socially engaged artist, Biancoshock (a pseudonym the artist prefers to use), was kind enough to take time out of his schedule to answer some questions for SAH Journal. We wanted to know more about his diverse, and often provocative urban art projects; as well his time spent travelling and creating in different parts of the world. So far in his career, Biancoshock has realised more than 800 "interventions" on the streets of Italy, Albania, Belgium, Croatia, France, England, Malaysia, Malta, Norway and Singapore, to name but a few. While he exhibits widely, he has also participated in numerous urban art festivals (Citileaks, Memorie Urbane, Stencibility). In 2014, he presented his work at TEDx Oporto, Portugal.1Biancoshock places social activism high on his list of priorities, using art as the mediator for a worthwhile and necessary conversation between each individual who encounters it. By choosing unconventional sites for the creation of his art, and involving those spaces in intimate and challenging critiques, Biancoshock infers his questioning more seriously towards society and the centrally politicised - perhaps overly polished - contemporary art world. The full array of Bianoshock's projects can be found at biancoshock.com
Simultaneously speculative and inspired by everyday experiences, this volume develops an aesthetics of metabolism that offers a new perspective on the human-environment relation, one that is processual, relational, and not dependent on conscious thought. In art installations, design prototypes, and research-creation projects that utilize air, light, or temperature to impact subjective experience the author finds aesthetic milieus that shift our awareness to the role of different sense modalities in aesthetic experience. Metabolic and atmospheric processes allow for an aesthetics besides and beyond the usually dominant visual sense.
This article starts from the analysis of Impressionism, Kazimir Malevich's abstractionism and Hélio Oiticica's penetráveis to think about the process of eliminating the edges of painting. Oiticica's thesis is that, at the moment in which she lived and acted, the painting began to do without the edges, spilling out of it and constituting itself as modus vivendi, thus eliminating the notion of an outside and one inside. With this, it defends the substitution of the spectator by the participant. We wonder if cinema, with its moving edges, is also touched by these changes. For that, we will take Cinema Novo and Cinema Marginal. Finally, we wonder if the school institution, as heir to these questions, has been inserted in this debate and what it has or would be its role. In this sense, the question remains about what to expect from this institution after the dilution of the picture (the great narratives, the modern certainties) and the historical vanguards.
Since the foundation of the German Maritime Museum in 1971, scientific research of German marine painting has enjoyed such high priority that marine painting in Bremerhaven has become a research focus of national and international significance. In 1979 the decision was made as to the four fields of research that would be at the focal centre of the museum's research activities in connection with the "Blue List." (The German Maritime Museum was the sixth research museum to be included on the "Blue List" - so called because it was originally on blue paper - of research institutes to be supported jointly by the federal and state governments.) At that time, the museum's supervisory board agreed to place special emphasis on the research of the "pictorial depiction of German maritime history." In the thirty years since the foundation of the museum and until the very present, the collection of paintings has been continually expanded and is now the most important of its kind in public ownership in Germany. This unique source has frequently served as a point of departure for special exhibitions which would not have been possible without the research that had been carried out previously on the life and work of the respective painters. The results of this research are documented in catalogues, monographs, essays and biographical reference book articles, and have been made accessible to the public for general information and further research. Three monographs are particularly worthy of mention due to the attempt made in them to develop syntheses. Two of these books were written by researchers on the museum staff; one summary was actively supported by the museum. With the explicit encouragement of the German federal Scientific Council, voiced on the occasion of its evaluation of the research undertaken by the German Maritime Museum in the year 2000, the efforts will be further intensified in the future.
Before the advent of modern whaling in the 1860s, few professional, academically trained artists had the opportunity to witness whaling operations themselves. Jean-Baptiste-Henri Durand-Brager (1814-79) is one of them. Besides pursuing a maritime career he was schooled by renowned French marine painters. This article presents the entire whaling-related oeuvre by Durand-Brager hitherto known, viz. three lithographs, one drawing and one oil painting, all produced in the years 1844 and 1845. In the Bruhn Whaling Collection in the German Maritime Museum is a remarkable crayon and charcoal drawing by this artist, signed and dated 1844. It shows a whaling ship with the carcass of a right whale alongside, while cutting-in operations are about to begin and a whaling boat in the foreground is waiting for another whale to resurface. A long sea swell and an approaching rain front impart an atmosphere of terse action set on a vast ocean. The drawing is correct in every detail, be it the representation of ship handling, ship architecture, rigging, whale anatomy, the seascape and the weather. Durand-Brager created a very similar version of this scene which was the basis for a lithograph published in 1844 or 1845. This is a print which Herman Melville, the author of Moby- Dick, who himself had gathered extensive whaling experience in 1841-1843, commended above all other prints of whaling available at his time for its painstakingly correct representation of whaling as he had witnessed it. A second, matching print by Durand-Brager of whale ships in a calm in a tropical roadstead received similar praise by Melville. The article further presents an oil painting that varies the whaling scene, and finally a lithograph of whalers after the end of the whaling season in the roadstead off a high cliff. In both the oil painting and the third lithograph a critical viewer familiar with historical whaling practise, naval architecture and ship handling finds a few details which seem slightly inconsistent with current knowledge of historical practise in both whaling and ships' architecture. But given the extreme accuracy displayed in other works of Durand-Barger's whaling art, which corresponds exactly to what is known from other contemporary sources, one may do well to interpret these unusual details provisionally as hypothetical findings, which may in due course be corroborated by other sources.
Six faience jugs on display at the Deutsches Schiffahrtsmuseum serve as examples of the importance of privately owned objects bearing guild marks, a topic hitherto ignored by research. Guild marks, especially on drinking vessels, rendered the latter objects of prestige, and reflect a strict system of social rank and representation among the guild masters: In their eyes, the most magnificent items were the faience jugs with their brilliant colours. Only merchants used even more valuable works of goldsmithery or glass goblets for private occasions. If the guild masters worked on the water, they belonged to the same guild in every harbour town on the Main and the Danube, yet distinguished themselves from most other masters in that their work was far more diversified and their voyages of very different lengths. These varied activities of fishing and shipping masters, reflecting different levels of social rank, were represented by different guild marks. Recognized and understood by all at that time, they fell into obscurity when the guilds were dissolved in the mid nineteenth century; here their meaning is rediscovered. The collection at the Deutsches Schiffahrtsmuseum includes not only an example once owned by a member of the highest-ranking group - the shipmen in distant trade - who was also active in rafting and the wood trade, but also jugs once belonging to fishermen operating only within a limited local framework, as well as cargo shipmen only active on short voyages. The jugs also show the expenses the masters were willing to go to for these status symbols, ranging from individually ordered jugs to objects selected from mass-produced series. Wherever possible, the municipal fishermen and shipmen lived on the water front in order to have direct boat access to their property. Originally, authorization to fish was closely associated with these parcels of land. It can be shown that, even before the development of the medieval municipal constitution, fishermen were the subjects of a local landlord who owned the fishing grounds, and were compelled not only to supply him with fish but also to transport goods and people across the water. They also had to build their own boats, maintain them and keep them at the ready. The variety of professional occupations typical of the fishing and shipmen guilds thus predates the formation of those guilds by a long period.
Martin Franz Glüsing was a marine painter of Hamburg who had been a seafarer for several years before devoting himself to painting. A self-taught artist who signed his paintings "Fräncis- Glüsing", he attained initial success in the mid 1920s when one of his compositions appeared in a representative book published by Felix Graf Luckner. Glüsing portrayed primarily large-scale sailing ships and fishing vessels. To this day, his renown has remained limited to Hamburg and the surrounding area. His paintings are regularly offered for sale on the art market.
