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The challenge of the sublime argues that the unprecedented visual inventiveness of the Romantic period in Britain could be seen as a response to theories of the sublime, more specifically to Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). While it is widely accepted that the Enquiry contributed to shaping the thematics of terror that became fashionable in British art from the 1770s, this book contends that its influence was of even greater consequence, paradoxically because of Burke’s conviction that the visual arts were incapable of conveying the sublime. His argument that the sublime was beyond the reach of painting, because of the mimetic nature of visual representation, directly or indirectly incited visual artists to explore not just new themes, but also new compositional strategies and even new or undeveloped pictorial and graphic media, such as the panorama, book illustrations and capricci. More significantly, it began to call into question mimetic representational models, causing artists to reflect about the presentation of the unpresentable and the inadequacy of their endeavours, and thus drawing attention to the process of artistic production itself, rather than the finished artwork. By revisiting the links between eighteenth-century aesthetic theory and visual practices, The challenge of the sublime establishes new interdisciplinary connections which address researchers in the fields of art history, cultural studies and aesthetics.
their own artistic processes and dance works. Correlatively, this approach also challenges community dancers with Parkinson’s to step out of their role as care receivers to position them firmly as co-creators who have some agency over their bodies and creativity. Community dance developed in the West through the work of practitioners, such as Rudolf Laban in the 1930s. Participatory in approach, it ‘involves a set of attitudes or precepts’ with ‘the belief that artistic practices can have an effect on the social world’ (Kuppers and Robertson, 2007 : 2). Diverse in
course most graphically in films like Numéro Deux (1975), Sauve qui peut (la vie) (1979), and Passion (1981), 4 and like Cocteau acknowledges the centrality of violence to the artistic process. For both artists, the sublimating project of creating forms is derived precisely from a profound understanding of its anal lining or ‘depravation’ (Cocteau). In Histoire(s) Godard taps primarily into the prehistory and spatial
is evident in the fact that Nietzsche will ask closely related questions about Greek art in The Birth of Tragedy (BT) (1872), linking them to music. Echoing Idealist and Romantic philosophy, Marx sees Greek art as based on mythology, which he characterises, in the manner of the later Schelling, as a collective ‘unconsciously artistic processing [Verarbeitung] of nature’. Mythology makes sense of natural forces via the imagination, by telling stories about them and making them into repeatable images. These images give a feeling of control over what is otherwise
The Restoration court painter and poet Anne Killigrew features several written works in her Poems (posthumously published in 1686) explaining her visual artistry in relation to her Christian beliefs, and these poems helped Killigrew to re-define her poetic wit in relation to her spirituality rather than to secularism. Her poems, ‘St. John the Baptist Painted by herself in the Wilderness, with Angels appearing to him, and with a Lamb by him’ and ‘Herodias’s Daughter presenting to her Mother St. John’s Head in a Charger, also Painted by herself,’ accompany the John the Baptist paintings and show Killigrew’s interest in engaging religious ideas in her artistic process. Critics have rightly read Killigrew’s poems in relation to the proto-feminist texts that began to emerge in the period and acknowledge that Killigrew has a distinct and often angry voice in her works about women’s oppression. Anxious to separate her writings from courtly libertine texts, Killigrew looked to religious narratives for inspiration in articulating a self that was both witty and sacred, a unique artistic position in an age where wit was often collapsed with irreligious expressions and outrageous libertinism. This chapter examines that ‘self’ – a spiritual wit – in Killigrew’s verse and the larger implications for the gendered boundaries that women writing in the period negotiated.
This book presents a study of material images and asks how an appreciation of the making and unfolding of images and art alters archaeological accounts of prehistoric and historic societies. With contributions focusing on case studies including prehistoric Britain, Scandinavia, Iberia, the Americas and Dynastic Egypt, and including contemporary reflections on material images, it makes a novel contribution to ongoing debates relating to archaeological art and images. The book offers a New Materialist analysis of archaeological imagery, with an emphasis on considering the material character of images and their making and unfolding. The book reassesses the predominantly representational paradigm of archaeological image analysis and argues for the importance of considering the ontology of images. It considers images as processes or events and introduces the verb ‘imaging’ to underline the point that images are conditions of possibility that draw together differing aspects of the world. The book is divided into three sections: ‘Emergent images’, which focuses on practices of making; ‘Images as process’, which examines the making and role of images in prehistoric societies; and ‘Unfolding images’, which focuses on how images change as they are made and circulated. The book features contributions from archaeologists, Egyptologists, anthropologists and artists. The contributors to the book highlight the multiple role of images in prehistoric and historic societies, demonstrating that archaeologists need to recognise the dynamic and changeable character of images.
This book presents new research on the histories and legacies of the German Expressionist group, Der Blaue Reiter, the founding force behind modernist abstraction. For the first time Der Blaue Reiter is subjected to a variety of novel inter-disciplinary perspectives, ranging from a philosophical enquiry into its language and visual perception, to analyses of its gender dynamics, its reception at different historical junctures throughout the twentieth century, and its legacies for post-colonial aesthetic practices. The volume offers a new perspective on familiar aspects of Expressionism and abstraction, taking seriously the inheritance of modernism for the twenty-first century in ways that will help to recalibrate the field of Expressionist studies for future scholarship. Der Blaue Reiter still matters, the contributors argue, because the legacies of abstraction are still being debated by artists, writers, philosophers and cultural theorists today.
’ ( 2006 : 42). In the remainder of the chapter, I discuss Betty’s engagement with laundry practices in the art sessions to further explore how a relational approach to care that involves the performance of care for objects can support care home residents’ identities and to build an understanding of the specific role artistic processes can play in care. First, I identify how the role of looking after objects is lost when older people, especially those living with dementia, enter institutional care and I argue that this loss can have a significant impact on their sense
the general context of digital capitalism (Avanessian and Malik 2016 ). The time of circulation is comparable to the time of stock exchanges, where values and stocks are flipped in nanoseconds. In artistic networks, and especially on the global art market, people speculate about future values of artistic trajectories and art objects, commodifying them both. Every project shreds time into bits and pieces. Past achievements are recycled to secure future prospects while applications entomb artistic processes by formulating schedules into the future, well before anyone
necessarily been complex and prolonged, but Burke’s challenging conception of painting played a part in inciting visual artists to reach beyond the paradigms that were available to them, and its relevance to our understanding of art historical developments 299 300 THE CHALLENGE OF THE SUBLIME should not be underestimated. I have stopped short of saying that a necessary consequence of Burke’s aesthetics was pictorial abstraction, and the work of Turner in particular has indicated that the most his conception called for was a disjunction between the artistic process and