Suchergebnisse

The author treats the topic of AIDS as a focal point for artistic politics in the United States and, eventually, in a larger international context as well. He considers a range of representations of AIDS in contemporary art since the 1980s & considers how AIDS became a pivotal point around which thinking about artists' activism & art as social intervention turned. He discusses AIDS as a paradigmatic case for a new global, biopolitical, & mediatized cultural phenomenon that bore with it a new ensemble of political, moral, & economic effects, in turn profoundly affecting conceptions of aesthetics & activist art. In the latter part of the essay, he develops a typology of strategies utilized by artists in addressing the problem of AIDS: 1) transcoding strategies; 2) media critiques and/or critiques of culture industry representations of AIDS; 3) alternative publicity; 4) AIDS exemplars; & 5) strategies of mourning & memoralization. Adapted from the source document.

Þórarinn B. Þorláksson (1867–1924) has been credited with being the first Icelandic professional painter. His reception, both during his lifetime and posthumously, is therefore an interesting indication of the changes in the outlook and ideology surrounding the reception of Scandinavian fin­de­siécle art up to the present. He was honourably mentioned by his contemporaries and then was forgotten in the upheavals surrounding the adoption of modern styles, such as abstract art, in Ice­land around the Second World War. He re­gained attention in the sixties and has since then been revered as an important, though problematic, pioneer of Icelandic painting. This has in recent years been especially evident in the way he has been mentioned in the context of the revival of Nordic and Scandinavian late 19th and early 20th century art in Northern­Europe and America. The paper reviews and analyses the historical reception Þorláksson has received and the way his work has been inscribed into the narrative of Icelandic and Scandinavian Art History. This process is an attempt to understand and contextualise Þorláksson's work in aesthetic terms, while at the same time function as a critical mirror of the trends and ideolo­gies surrounding the Nordic revival in recent years.