{"title":"Fountains of Beauty (Duchamp’s Other Lesson)","authors":"R. Rothman","doi":"10.1080/00233609.2020.1770329","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00233609.2020.1770329","url":null,"abstract":"Arguably, the great lesson of the avant-garde is the irrelevance of beauty and, by all accounts, the central figure in the lesson is Marcel Duchamp. This essay will argue that the Duchampian readymade offered artists a second, far less readily identifiable legacy, in which the lesson to be learned was not the irrelevance of beauty but rather its ubiquity. The main champion of this antithetical legacy is John Cage, who proposed that what made Robert Rauschenberg’s work so significant was that it demonstrated that “[b]eauty is now underfoot wherever we take the trouble to look.” This essay pursues the implications of Cage’s perspective on Rauschenberg by arguing for a different conception of aesthetic experience, one that can be understood as “uncritical” or “affirmative.” Where the critical avant-garde is distinguished by its institutionality at the service of critical cognition, the affirmative avant-garde, precisely because it rejects institutionality, is utterly incapable of critical cognition.","PeriodicalId":164200,"journal":{"name":"Konsthistorisk tidskrift/Journal of Art History","volume":"29 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122663171","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Within Aesthetic Distance: Artistic Critique from Activism to Eco-realism","authors":"Maryse Ouellet","doi":"10.1080/00233609.2020.1775695","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00233609.2020.1775695","url":null,"abstract":"Summary The postcritical movement in academia has served to highlight the rhetorical strategies and attitudes of critique that have become so habitual in the humanities that they tend to be confused with political participation. In this article, I examine one critical strategy that have become just as habitual in art practices, namely the attempt at negating aesthetic distancing. By contrasting two artworks that address environmental issues – a series of interventions in the public space by the Canadian collective ATSA, Attacks #! (2003–2007), and a video essay by Swiss artist Ursula Biemann, Deep Weather (2013) – I call attention to the different meanings and purposes of critique and demonstrate the relevance of a postcritical approach in art, one that restore the notion of a productive aesthetic distance and broadens the scope of critique beyond the field of the social. Specifically, I look into instances of what I call “eco-realist” approaches, more particularly Biemann’s video, that contribute to our ecological consciousness by producing new, eye-opening visualities of our planetary condition.","PeriodicalId":164200,"journal":{"name":"Konsthistorisk tidskrift/Journal of Art History","volume":"89 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128730760","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Andrea Fraser and the Psychoanalytic Character of Critique: From Normotic Performance to a Space of Play","authors":"R. Sykes","doi":"10.1080/00233609.2020.1779807","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00233609.2020.1779807","url":null,"abstract":"This article will examine how the practice of critique is made vivid in the early performances of Andrea Fraser, the artist associated most conspicuously with Institutional Critique (IC), an umbrella term for a variety of critical artistic practices that developed out of the conceptual art movement of the 1960s. It traces the convoluted position of critique in contemporary art history, as distinct from literary studies, before discussing how academic art criticism privileges psychoanalytic models that articulate strong forms of negative critique at the expense of more affectively attuned and relational readings. Anderson’s (Bleak Liberalism, Chicago and London, 2016) discussion of the relationship between psychology and ideological analysis in literary criticism, in particular her elucidation of the characterological nature of the terms that recur in academic discourse, is used to introduce the ideas of British object relations into the sphere of contemporary art criticism: D. W. Winnicott’s theory of creative play is used to make a ‘playful’ interpretation of Fraser’s performance as the putative docent Jane Castleton in work like Museum Highlights: A Gallery Tour (1989). In comparison to critical accounts of this early work that stress the postmodernist ‘character’ of Jane as the ventriloquist of various ideological texts, this article explicitly acknowledges Fraser’s presence as a charismatic performer in order to discuss how Jane’s ‘normotic personality’, typified by ‘the numbing and eventual erasure of subjectivity’ (Bollas, The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known, London, 1987), is an evocative enactment of the existential dimensions of critique.","PeriodicalId":164200,"journal":{"name":"Konsthistorisk tidskrift/Journal of Art History","volume":"9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130850438","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Cover – title page","authors":"","doi":"10.1080/00233609.2020.1792168","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00233609.2020.1792168","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":164200,"journal":{"name":"Konsthistorisk tidskrift/Journal of Art History","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129562696","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Postcritical or Acritical? Twelve Steps for Art History Writing in the Anthropocene","authors":"Dan Karlholm","doi":"10.1080/00233609.2019.1704863","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00233609.2019.1704863","url":null,"abstract":"Looking at both critique and postcritique in relation to art history, in general, and art historiography, in particular, this article suggests that art history’s critical heritage runs longer and deeper than a “hermeneutics of suspicion” signals, and that this state of affairs is therefore a deeper and wider problem than how to overcome and replace critique. The latter term, for art history, is of a piece with the modernity/modernism/avant-gardism of this discipline, which – despite declarations to the contrary – is not over, and which therefore makes today’s critical (in the sense of dangerous and urgent) situation of imminent climate disaster even harder to come to terms with. What our discipline is arguably in need of in the epoch of the Anthropocene – save for contributing to saving the world – is a new way of composing histories of art. In search of such a more unbiassed model I will discuss temporal conceptions, including the Anthropocene itself as well as François Hartog’s ideas on “presentism”, and draw on Piotr Piotrowski’s attempt to construct a spatially extended “horizontal art history”, as opposed to the hierarchical West-centered one, in order, finally, to propose the outlines of an alternative, inspired by Bruno Latour – a twelve-step sketch that is horizontal in a more neutral and material sense, and which responds to the keywords anachronic, amodern and acritical.","PeriodicalId":164200,"journal":{"name":"Konsthistorisk tidskrift/Journal of Art History","volume":"87 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123778108","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Refugees of War: Federico Barocci’s Aeneas Fleeing Troy, Classical Antecedents to Contemporary Issues","authors":"Elizabeth A. Lisot-Nelson","doi":"10.1080/00233609.2020.1742786","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00233609.2020.1742786","url":null,"abstract":"Aeneas Fleeing Troy, painted by Federico Barocci (1535–1612), depicts a scene from Vergil’s Aeneid (29–15 BCE). This article offers interpretations of text and image highlighting the complexity of the refugee experience and the possibilities for a future society comprised of blended populations. Aeneas negotiated a new world for his progeny while suffering through war, displacement and loss. History suggests that art and literature are compelling translators of our shared human experience, which can encourage the creation of an inclusive civilization and give warnings about potential conflict. The battles and blood-shed, religious and civil wars that transpired while Barocci created his artwork and as it was transferred between owners, such as the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, Queen Christina of Sweden and Louis Philippe II (Philippe Égalité), cousin of the beheaded King Louis XVI, offer insights into alternative paths forward for Europe. History, literature, and art provide – not only instruction from the past – but guidance to negotiate a future in which contributions by the indigenous populations of Europe are honoured and cherished, while the integration of different cultures provides change for a new shared European future.","PeriodicalId":164200,"journal":{"name":"Konsthistorisk tidskrift/Journal of Art History","volume":"16 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124553150","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Vitalitá nell’arte: An Entry into the Trans-European Birth of the Contemporary Art Exhibition?","authors":"Kristian Handberg","doi":"10.1080/00233609.2020.1758771","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00233609.2020.1758771","url":null,"abstract":"The article positions the exhibition Vitalitá nell’arte (1959–60) as a significant event in the postwar art world. It proposes the hypothesis that the development of the curated exhibition of contemporary art should be seen as a key concern of the 1945–1968 art world and that this new medium emerged in a complex alliance between new institutions, artistic aims and personal contacts. This is exemplified through an analysis of Vitalitá nell’arte with an emphasis on the thematic agenda towards the contemporary condition as a thematic synthesis of (Western) art since 1945, its creators (Paolo Marinotti, Willem Sandberg, and Asger Jorn), and its touring at venues across Europe (Palazzo Grassi, Kunsthalle Recklinghausen, Stedelijk Museum, and Louisiana Museum). The article also proposes to rethink Asger Jorn’s engagement in exhibitions: as “shadow curator” of Vitalitá nell’arte as well as the concurrent Ny international kunst (Silkeborg Museum 1959) his interest in museal projects and curatorial work evokes the image of a museology artist, which differs from the promoted anti-museal image of the artist.","PeriodicalId":164200,"journal":{"name":"Konsthistorisk tidskrift/Journal of Art History","volume":"16 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131782019","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Birgittaskolorna – Modeateljéer och sömnadsskolor mellan tradition och förnyelse","authors":"P. Rasmussen","doi":"10.1080/00233609.2020.1767201","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00233609.2020.1767201","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":164200,"journal":{"name":"Konsthistorisk tidskrift/Journal of Art History","volume":"13 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121665312","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘ … a Tasteful Decoration of the Crematory, without any Distracting Content and Meaning.’ The Exhibition Klar Form in 1951 and the Dispute on the Potential of Abstract Art","authors":"Mette Højsgaard","doi":"10.1080/00233609.2020.1735510","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00233609.2020.1735510","url":null,"abstract":"Summary An abstract follows here, if needed: In December 1951 the exhibition Klar Form opened in Copenhagen. It was the first venue of a Scandinavian tour that included Oslo, Stockholm and Helsinki. It was organized by the prolific Galerie Denise René, Paris in collaboration with the Galerie Børge Birch, Copenhagen and the Danish artists Richard Mortensen and Robert Jacobsen. The exhibition showed a mixture of the pioneers of abstract art such as Le Corbusier and Fernand Léger, and the younger generation including artists such as Victor Vasarely, Jean Dewasne, Robert Jacobsen, Richard Mortensen and Serge Poliakoff. Klar Form could be seen as an art political statement meant to strengthen the impact of geometrical abstract art and has gained a place in Danish art history as a crucial exhibition with great influence on the subsequent development of the abstract art of the 1950s. However, the critique of Klar Form in the Danish press was far from univocally positive. Instead, as the sharply negative voices reveal, the exhibition was the object of fierce debate based on a broader underlying debate on cultural politics in the early years of the Cold War and on art in society. This article focusses on these negative voices in an attempt to reveal new aspects of this debate.","PeriodicalId":164200,"journal":{"name":"Konsthistorisk tidskrift/Journal of Art History","volume":"24 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134449018","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Cover - Title Page","authors":"Kristian Handberg, Elizabeth A. Lisot-Nelson","doi":"10.1080/00233609.2020.1775370","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00233609.2020.1775370","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":164200,"journal":{"name":"Konsthistorisk tidskrift/Journal of Art History","volume":"48 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130244483","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}