Radio drama is often considered an incomplete or ‘blind’ artform because it creates worlds through sound alone. The charge of incompleteness, I suggest, rests upon the orthodox empiricist conception of sensation as the receipt of separate modalities of sensory impression. However, alternative theories of sensation are offered by phenomenology and—of particular importance to this study—the restructuring of cognition that takes place in these theories plays a central role in phenomenology's account of artistic expression. The significance of this phenomenological (...) link between cognition and expression is that it can provide the basis for a more positive evaluation of the aesthetics of radio drama. From a phenomenological perspective, the alleged ‘incompleteness’ of sound becomes an -exemplary form of the process whereby material elements in an artwork interact with or beckon towards one another to express a world. In this paper, I (i) show how Merleau-Ponty's ‘invitational’ account of the senses meets the charge of ‘blindness’, (ii) -demonstrate how radio drama employs the aesthetic interactions that, from the theoretical standpoints of Merleau-Ponty and Dufrenne, are definitive of expression in art, and (iii) indicate how some of my claims for the aesthetics of radio drama are supported by recent accounts of metaphor in music. (shrink)

This article focuses on soils as more-than-human subjects who are both living entities and ‘lenses’ through which we may begin to rethink some of the conventional parameters of ecology, communication and even the grounding of some western philosophical traditions on which these boundaries have stood. Just as the very term ‘more-than-human’ potentially exceeds the relegation of both soilogic agents and animalities to subservient status, likewise this discussion embarks from a more-than-humanist (‘posthumanist’) position. As we attempt to interact with living systems (...) and ways of being in broader, more expansive terms, it becomes possible to catch conceptual glimpses of less hierarchical ontologies as they are understood by some more-than-western cultures. I have also drawn inspiration from artistic, theoretical and political movements in the west that have sought to interrupt the primacy of Eurocentric humanism in institutions and philosophical arenas. This presages dirty thinking. (shrink)

Sketched in 1979 by graphic designer Peter Saville, the record sleeve of Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures seemingly popularized one of the most celebrated radio-astronomical images: the ‘stacked plot’ of radio signals from a pulsar. However, the sleeve's designer did not have this promotion in mind. Instead, he deliberately muddled the message it originally conveyed in a typical post-punk act of artistic sabotage. In reconstructing the historical events associated with this subversive effort, this essay explores how, after its (...) adoption as an imaging device utilized in radio astronomy, the stacked plot gave representation to the diplomacy agendas of two distinct groups. The post-punk reworking of the stacked plot exemplified the ambition of this artistic movement to attack the images associated with social conventions and norms by amplifying their ‘semantic noise’, and, in so doing, seeking to negotiate a social space for those sharing these subversive goals. Conversely, radio astronomers used the stacked plot to display the presence of interfering radio transmitters in the frequencies exclusively allocated to astronomical research, thus advocating the removal of this electronic noise in the context of international telecommunication negotiations. The article thus shows how the representation of different types of noise through similar images shaped contrasting ambitions in the separate domains of science diplomacy and everyday diplomacy. (shrink)

This essay probes into the possibility of encountering the Deleuzian sense-event in four Tom Stoppard radio plays, Moon (1964), Boot (1964), Glad (1966) and Artist Descending A Staircase (1972). Itself an incorporeal – an occurrence of the interface – the wonderful and strange protagonist of Gilles Deleuze's 1969 Logic of Sense is approached in apophatic gestures, with a glimpse at the various vestiges it has left upon texts. Within this exercise in indirection, ‘empty forms’ present themselves as the texts’ (...) circulating words. Informed by and receiving infusions from two parallel flows of Deleuzian signifiers and signifieds, these entities are singled out as the texts’ pointers that open up a cleavage where the sense-event can issue forth. (shrink)

Artistic function within the global society is not more to produce “beauty” instead to acting inside communication. At Baudelaire’s time beauty was the ephemeral and bizarre. Masterpiece, work of art now is rather an open device. At the beginning of the modern era, cinema creates a new kind of spectator as an absent-minded expert, as W. Benjamin said. The new technological condition produces itself a sort of technical aura (so is for radio, cinema, records etc.) But as K. (...) Marx said «production produce consume». So a new condition of aura in communication era lies in the ephemeral artist’s act. Art is now in the era of “gas”, to live the aura is just to breath an atmosphere as Y. Michaud says. Artistic function is to produce relations and public relations. Curators they work as cool hunters or disc jockey and museums are a new kind of mass media for an absent-minded public enjoying in the supermarket of aura. (shrink)

The Philosophy of Modern Song: curious title, a curious book. If you bought it, as I did, because you are a devoted Dylan fan, hoping to find new Dylan songs inside, or at least new Dylan prose, you will be disappointed. In the photo of three musicians on the cover, none of them is Dylan. The one on the left is Little Richard. Who are the other two? Nowhere are we told their names, nor the names of the people in (...) any of the other photos, except for the sixty-six featured artists, though we will recognize many. The photo on the back cover might or might not be of the interior of Izzy Young's “Folklore Center,” reminiscent of Dylan's early days in Greenwich Village in the Sixties, when, together with my guitarist husband, I got to hear him perform after hours at the Gaslight and knew him well enough to say Hi when passing on the street.The basis for selecting the sixty-six songs anthologized and commented on is not immediately obvious. This is not a collection of Dylan's underappreciated favorites, though the taste represented is certainly eclectic and the choices are often surprising. The title does not help the reader who has not yet got her bearings... Philosophy? As if to justify his use of the word, Dylan eventually offers a lengthy comment on Albert Camus, but how relevant is that comment to these songs? And the word modern, too, means so many things—a sudden divergence from the past in the arts and literature; up-to-date and therefore good. These songs are not that kind of modern. If anything, the book looks backward, across the years of Dylan's long life to his musical awakening. Because we are almost the same age, I recognize the hodgepodge of styles and influences assembled here as belonging mostly to the early Fifties, when, like Bob, I was entering my teens by listening to, even dancing to, songs on the radio before I fell asleep at night. Enough about me! But no more apt basis for classifying these songs is suggested. They are not arranged alphabetically or chronologically.As for the anthologized songs, each one, once named, receives a commentary, and every commentary is called a chapter, and every chapter is divided into two parts, spelled out in letters as bold as a movie marquee. We are given the title of each song, the date of its release, and the name of the songwriter. The first part of each commentary consists of a paraphrase of “events” in the song, told almost exclusively in the second-person you rather than the more conventional I or the third-person he or she. Here is a passage from Dylan's paraphrase of “Blue Suede Shoes” by Carl Perkins: You get on well with most people, and you put up with a lot, and you hardly get caught off guard, but your shoes are something else. Minor things may annoy you, but you rise above them. Having your teeth kicked in, being pounded senseless, being dumped on and discredited, but you don't put any weight on that, none of it is as real to you as your shoes. They're priceless and beyond monetary worth.The paraphrase goes on for almost six pages, and to what end? The second half of each commentary, indicated by changes in the type, takes a few steps back to consider the sociological implications of the song in the context of its time. For instance, from the second half of the commentary on “Blue Suede Shoes”: “Shoes reveal character, station, and personality.” But Dylan does not use the opportunity to talk about his own character, station, personality. His associations with Carl Perkins and “Blue Suede Shoes” morph into an anecdote about a man called “Iron Felix, trusted consort to Lenin and Stalin.”A lengthy list of all required photo credits fills the two back pages but is printed in type so small it is almost illegible. If you want more information, and more importantly if you want to experience the songs discussed, your best bet is to search for the recordings on YouTube and to follow along, reading Dylan's commentary, one song at a time, while listening. Or, I hear rumors that we will need to purchase another book, the audio version of Philosophy of Modern Song, not yet released.Every song has its commentary, but nothing about this organization is stable, and as soon as the reader/listener thinks she has discovered a rationale for the order of the works selected, she is met with an exception. Basically, these seem to be songs about which Dylan has something anecdotal to say. More usefully, perhaps, they are organized around certain themes—those that have always preoccupied him: man's inhumanity to man, injustice, self-deception, the human situation. The anonymous author of the blurb on the jacket promises a master class in songwriting, but, if it exists at all, that lecture is exhausted in one or two observations, such as: “ ‘El Paso’ is built on five stanzas, each one two verses and a bridge and then returning to the next stanza.... ”It was almost fifty pages into the book that the sense of something missing overcame me. It was not only the words of the songs and the music that were missing; it was the author, the central intelligence that I love, the singer and songwriter whose name is credited on the cover but who never appears in the book, not even in a photograph. What I missed was Dylan. He had removed himself from his book's pages, except perhaps for a single instance: “You're an eighty-year old man, being wheeled around in a home for the elderly, and the nurses are getting on your nerves.... ”Has Bob Dylan grown weary of himself and all of his creations? The commentaries are not about Bob. In the whole book, the line quoted above may be the only exception. Does he refuse the “first person singular in the hopes of transcending ego”? Maybe; but we want to hear our master's voice. As for the philosophy of song? Besides the remarks on Camus, there is only one commentary in which Dylan explicitly states anything like a philosophy, and that is the one on “Willie the Wandering Gypsy and Me,” written and performed by Joe Shaver. The song has a philosophical point of view: “Keep moving, it's better, let the train keep on rolling.”. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Heavy TrafficDenis DuttonIt was the Reverend Sidney Smith who said, “I never read a book before reviewing it; it prejudices a man so.” Thirty years ago that remark was still a joke. These days, it’s a downright plausible idea, one with a distinctly postmodern ring. If the objects of experience are nothing but constructions, inventions of our cultures and mind-sets, that must go as well for all the books (...) we read—including those books which urge this fact on us. To read them is to construct them, to write them for yourself. But wait—that can’t be a fact, because facts are just prejudices too. Takes your breath away to realize how far scholarship has come.These thoughts drifted through my mind reading The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Art and Anthropology, edited by George E. Marcus and Fred R. Myers (University of California Press, $48.00 cloth, $17.95 paper). It comprises a long introduction plus eleven chapters which “explore the boundaries and affinities between art, anthropology, representation, and culture, casting a critical, ethnographic light on the art worlds of the contemporary West and the ways they give value to cultural form—in short, a “‘traffic’ in culture.” It is not easy to make out a consistent thread in the essays themselves. Carol Vance offers a fine discussion in the form of four small essays on censorship, the NEA, Jesse Helms, and so forth. There is no discernible connection with anthropology, and I cannot see why these pieces are included. Nancy Sullivan, described as a Ph.D. candidate in Fred R. Myers’s NYU anthropology department, struggles with her cumbersome account of the artworld in the last generation. Again, I can detect no hint of how anthropology has helped her understand the artworld. Hal Foster makes a cameo appearance of only a few pages, a kind of postmodern arabesque with lots of big words. Christopher B. Steiner revisits material [End Page 283] presented in his book, African Art in Transit, which is squarely in the field, and Steven Feld agonizes about appropriation of world music into commercial music business while telling some interesting tales about a radio program he produced of music from Papua New Guinea. The feminist Judith L. Goldstein does a late-capitalist, “late-postmodernist” job on women’s makeup, with much reliance on Fredric Jameson but no anthropology I can discern, despite the fact that she gave a version of it at an American Anthropological Association conference. If we really have reached “late-postmodernism” we can only be thankful. Molly H. Mullin’s account of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century enthusiasm for American Indian artifacts, on the other hand, may begin with clichés about “élite responses to the rise of consumer capitalism,” but it soon settles down to a solid account of the people and problems of trying to achieve recognition of Indian handicrafts as art. This was made possible, we learn, by much devoted work from people who were multiculturalists before the word existed, white Americans whose actions were based on a love of Indian cultures and arts, rather than postcolonial theory and the school of resentment. All the issues of art vs. craft, the relation of tourism to artistic development, authenticity, and so on, were raised in the 1920s and 30s, with sophistication not often seen today.But to figure out how it all is supposed to tie together, we have to turn to the book’s explanatory introduction. This is so turgidly vague that when I was done I felt like invoicing the authors for my time. These pages are peppered with half-assertions I’d half want to dispute if their meaning were plainer, and a few that are plain enough to be flat-out wrong. Among many examples: “Ironically, the very category of ‘art’—as opposed to ‘the arts’—goes unexamined in its own hierarchies of sense, so that various forms of popular performance, in which disinterested contemplation does not necessarily reign supreme, are excluded.” Excluded? Notice that irritating passive voice: who, I’d like to know, has left popular performance unexamined and excluded? What are “hierarchies of sense”? The sentence carries no reference. In... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Manos HadjidakisThe Story of an Anarchic Youth and a "Magnus Eroticus"Yiannis MiralisThe name of Manos Hadjidakis is probably unknown to contemporary musicians and music educators. After all, the Greek composer achieved his international fame back in 1961 when he won an Oscar for his soundtrack of the movie, "Never on Sunday." Numerous other awards followed from England, France, Germany, and of course, Greece. After his six years in New (...) York City (1966-1972), the composer returned to Greece where he produced a wealth of diverse musical work and had a profound impact on every aspect of Greek cultural life.Through his radio lectures, the notes on the covers of his records, and his articles in a variety of magazines and newspapers, he expressed his often radical ideas without any fear, but with honesty and passion. His commentaries covered a wide variety of topics such as music, poetry, and the arts, politics and nationalism in art, music education, tradition and change, and the overall cultural problems and dilemmas of his time. The magnitude of his musical and artistic work is yet to be fully discovered and appreciated.In this paper, I will provide a biography of Manos Hadjidakis with a closer [End Page 43] examination and description of his multifaceted work. Through this attempt, a better understanding of who Hadjidakis was and the impact that he had on the musical and cultural life of modern-day Greece will emerge. I decided to use numerous direct quotes from Hadjidakis' books and interviews not only because he eloquently expresses his thoughts and ideas, but also because through these quotes one can get a clear sense of his humor, intellect, and personality. This paper may also serve as food for thought for music educators in and outside of Greece. I say this because much of his work and thought remains unknown to the general public, as well as to music performers and educators. Unfortunately, to some extent this is true even in his own home country of Greece. Even though Hadjidakis was not a music educator in the specific sense of the term, many of the things that he fought for and achieved in his life had an identifiable educational component in them. For example, before each of the performances of the Orchestra of Colors that he founded and conducted, Hadjidakis always gave elaborate lectures on the composers and on the works to be performed at the amphitheatre of the Medical School of the University of Athens. Overall, if we use the Oxford English Dictionary's definition of "education" as "culture or development of powers, formation of character, as contrasted with the imparting of mere knowledge or skill,"1 Hadjidakis can be regarded as a true educator and many of his ideas have a direct implication for music education and education in general. This is what I will examine in the second part of this paper, focusing especially on his ideas on Eros and the importance of song.Hadjidakis' ChildhoodHadjidakis was born on October 23, 1925 in the city of Xanthi in northern Greece. The city was thriving due to the local cultivation and sale of tobacco. His father was a tobacco merchant and his family was initially well off and able to pay for his piano lessons. After the death of his father in 1931, when Hadjidakis was only six years old, the family moved to Athens where he attended high school at nighttime, while working various jobs during the day.During World War II Hadjidakis became involved in a number of political organizations and simultaneously took lessons in diction in order to realize his dream of becoming an actor. However, because he had difficulty pronouncing the letter "r," he had to turn his attention and creativity away from acting and in a different direction. Additionally he received some formal training in classical music, but according to his own words,[m]y relationships with formal music studies were extremely similar to my relationships with dentists; I always approached them and always left them before the end of the treatment. When I was eighteen years old I gave up [End Page 44] music and I surrendered myself to poetry. When... (shrink)

Cinematic Thoughts: Essays on Film and the Philosophy of Film is an anthology of essays Gary Jason published (mainly) between 2012 and 2018. The book has seven parts. Part One consists of essays on propaganda films. The topics include how the Nazi Regime used film as a tool of propaganda, and its use of radio for propaganda. Part Two contains articles on genocide and film. These include two broad surveys of Holocaust documentaries, ranging from those that were done at (...) the end of WWII to Claude Lanzmann’s work. Also included are pieces reviewing the five major propaganda films the Nazi Regime produced aimed at arousing anti-Semitism in the populace leading up to the Holocaust. Part Three of the anthology concerns ethical theory as explored in film. Included here are three essays surveying how egoism is portrayed in classic movies, as well as one showing how Rossian ethical theory can be used to analyze conflicts of loyalty in classic war movies, and pieces illustrating virtue ethics. Part Four includes various articles on the history of cinema. One of the topics raised was whether the American film industry produced better films under the old, allegedly "monopolistic" studio system. Part Five of the anthology contains articles on the aesthetics of film. The topics here include how creativity can be portrayed in film, and why some great actors never win Oscars. Part Six contains pieces on classical liberalism in film, and Part Seven has miscellaneous articles on topics ranging from artists to criminals. (shrink)

Contrary to the received opinion that Pablo Picasso conceived of Guernica only after learning of the bombing of the Basque town on 26 April 1937, and in direct response to it, in this article we demonstrate that the mural was visualized much earlier, as part of Picasso’s larger artistic and intellectual response to war. In February 1937 Picasso met with José Luis Sert, the architect of the Spanish Pavilion planned for the Paris World Fair that was to open in (...) June. That he was so quickly able to provide the architect with the exact dimensions of the mural suggests that he had already conceived a vision and plan for the painting that would only later be known as Guernica—a vision that saw him less preoccupied with iconographical minutiae than with visual problem-solving around a general theme: the types and consequences of political violence in Spain and wars past, present, and future. In searching for inspiration, Picasso paid homage to three other artists whose works reflected different aspects of this theme: Francisco Goya, Robert Capa, and David Seymour. The whole mural was painted in black and white because Picasso was certain that Guernica would be seen as a work of photojournalism, which form of journalism had only recently started to be transmitted by wire and radio services. Lastly, Picasso was confident that his painting would eventually be installed in the Prado Museum and be compared to both of Goya’s paintings, The Second of May 1808 (1814) and The Third of May 1808 (1814). To place himself as pre-eminent, Picasso made Guernica larger than either of Goya’s paintings by subsuming the former into a completely original compositional overlay. (shrink)

In Paris, metropolis of xix century, Benjamin traces the new paradigm of modernity: the modern theatrical dimension corresponds to the artistic innovations and to the reproduction of aesthetical requests. Entfremdung and Neutralisierung are the main characters of the Ästhetisierung and they are one with the distraction as principle of reception and the conformism as principle of valuation. This is the context of the aura’s decline. The Adorno’s critical essay on the radio (1963) analyses the transformation of works of (...) art in cultural gifts and, in particular, the loss of autonomy of the musical work of art in the radio listening. The Adorno’s remarks recognize the historical character of aura and a new possibility that it can re-emerge in a new historical dimension of the music. (shrink)

Because English faculty are the ones most commonly trusted with the historic, aesthetic, and ideological study of verbally based art forms, they are the ones who will ultimately decide the fate of studies in American phonographic rhapsody . Thus, it is a significant problem that English faculty neither study American rhapsody nor receive training in the art and science of analytic listening, a prerequisite to the successful study of U.S. recorded poetic sound art. More importantly, they have failed to develop (...) field related information and understanding necessary to the development of criticisms of American phonographic rhapsody. This dissertation seeks to redress the present circumstance by providing English faculty with the kinds of rudimentary, foundational knowledges they would need if they were to open the history of U.S. recorded sound poetries to academic inquiry. Chapter One establishes that English faculty turned their back on sound art studies for reasons having nothing to do with the historic importance, artistic merit, and ideological content of poetic sound art. Rather, departments of English, under the direction of an extra-literary historical process, encountered and passed over the historic study of American recorded sound art without ever knowing why they did it. Chapter Two proceeds from the newly established position that English faculty are unjustified in their continued neglect of American phonographic rhapsody. Having noted that English faculty achieve their rank without learning how to think about recorded sound as an object of investigation, the chapter offers a short treatise on the fundamental principles of sound art research which include radio and phonography are divergent modeling systems; the phonographic medium is a first content of any recording; sound art recorded prior to broadcast is recorded sound art; phonographic intention accounts for the "live radio" recording; recorded poetic sound art is "Rhapsody." In the end, this dissertation refrains from attempting to stimulate interest in poetic sound art, opting instead to lay solid historic and theoretic foundations upon which scholars may base and steady their future studies of American rhapsody. (shrink)

Glenn Gould was Canada's greatest musician. From his home in Toronto, he rose to be a world-famous concert pianist and recording artist of the very top rank. Gould's eccentric attitudes and behaviours were well known, but the musical world was astonished when, in his mid-20s, he announced that he had permanently retired from the concert hall. Instead, Gould focused on the recording studio, on radio and television, and on exploring his fascination with the relation between audience and performer. Through (...) wide and innovative use of electronic technologies, he was able to reach enormous audiences before his untimely death. Glenn Gould: Music & Mind focuses not on the details of Gould's life but on his ideas, offering unique insights into this remarkable Canadian and his life's work. Includes bibliographies and discographies of Gould's work. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy of Music Education Review 12.1 (2004) 84-88 [Access article in PDF] Response to Yiannis Miralis, "Manos Hadjidakis: The Story of an Anarchic Youth and a 'Magnus Eroticus'" Jason Helfer University of Illinois There are two issues that struck me as essential from my consideration of Miralis'paper and the ideas of Manos Hadjidakis: Eros as a pedagogical idea and learner interactions in the music classroom. These ideas developed from (...) my interpretation of this paper, from my experiences in teacher training, and teaching in the public schools. I will examine each in turn, after a brief recapitulation of Hadjidakis' ideology.Hadjidakis' ideas were shaped through reaction against much of the work that took place within traditional musical conservatories and the larger Greek culture. They were also shaped by "his close friendships and collaborations with other poets, composers, and artists." Hadjidakis articulated his reactionary ideas not only through sound (that is, composition and performances), but also through the larger media. The cultural content of the broadcasting services in Greece leaves much to be desired although, as head of the radio Third Programme... Manos Hadjidakis brought a breath of fresh air to the stuffy studios of the broadcasting [End Page 84] organizations with talks, readings, discussion programmes-and the highly original daily program This is Lilliput.1The intended result of this work clarifies one of Hadjidakis' fundamental assumptions: one should be led to a deeper understanding of the self and others, beauty and goodness through engagement and perpetual reflection within the arts. Miralis asserts that the idea of reflection and the resultant self-knowledge and growth are qualities to which a good educator should aspire. Central to this claim is the idea of Eros.2Eros can be problematic if narrowly defined. "The name Eros has been wrongly restricted in common speech to what is really only one form of this universal desire. Just as the word "making" really means creation of any kind but has been misappropriated to one species... so the name of Eros is misappropriated to one species of passion, but really means 'any and every desire for good things and happiness.'"3 My understanding of Hadjidakis' idea of Eros is best articulated in the exchange between Socrates and Diotima in Plato's Symposium.4 Plato's idea of Eros is that the individual moves through a series of stages with the help of another until one has a "complete" and "clear" understanding of the good or beautiful.5 He makes a distinction between the good and the beautiful when Diotima asks Socrates to substitute the word "good" for the word "beautiful."6 This is not merely a change in semantic. Rather, it is a necessary transformation insofar as it emphasizes that a good thing may not be physically beautiful, but still considered good (such as the historical Socrates). The transcendence of the beautiful leading toward the "pure" good is an essential step in obtaining the Platonic understanding of Eros. "The state of mind of the philosopher who has attained knowledge of the good or of beauty is a desire to make beauty or goodness present wherever possible to a higher degree, it is not a desire to just to look at goodness or beauty. It is rather a desire to take anything that is partially good or partially beautiful and to make it more good or more beautiful."7 For Hadjidakis, the necessary quest for goodness and beauty was evident in the creation, combining, and sharing of poetry and music. This idea was not only apparent in his musical creations, but also in his work in the socio/political arena.Further, the Symposium begins as a series of speeches on the subject of love, but "Plato makes the word eros bear a burden far in excess of anything it had ever been made to bear; and the 'love' which he goes on to portray strains the language of eros almost out of recognition."8 However, love is not forgotten; rather "'Love'... is to mean not only the whole complex of... (shrink)

The "public sphere" -- an idea with deep roots in the European enlightenment -- has always been a contested concept in American culture and society. American intellectuals, artists, politicians, and activists have stressed the non-unitary, diversified, and oppositional dynamics of all things public. From the early days of the American republic, competing interest groups and commercial mass media (first newspapers, novels, and the theater, then radio, television, and the internet) have worked to pluralize public speech and public action -- (...) and ultimately the notion of "publicness" itself. This essay collection explores the public sphere in North America as a multi-agential, commercially embattled, highly mediated, and ultimately trans-nationalized aggregate of publics and counterpublics. The contributors present innovative theoretical and historical assessments of American counter/publics across an array of fields including social activism, political communication, literary discourse, and contemporary mass media. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:510 Feminist Studies 46, no. 2. © 2020 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Shelley Streeby Speculative Writing, Art, and World-Making in the Wake of Octavia E. Butler as Feminist Theory The late great speculative fiction writer Octavia E. Butler often referred to herself as a feminist. In an autobiographical note she revised frequently over the course of her lifetime, now held in the massive archive of more than 8,000 individually (...) cataloged items that comprise The Octavia E. Butler Papers (OEB) at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, Butler called herself a “hermit in the middle of Los Angeles,” a pessimist when she wasn’t “careful,” and “a feminist” as well as “a Black” and “a former Baptist.”1 Throughout her published work, Butler explores intersections of gender, sexuality, race, and class in ways shaped by her life growing up “black, female, and working class” across town in Pasadena, California.2 The keywords “feminism” and “feminist” pop up often in her archive. In 1988, in one of dozens of notebooks Butler filled with writing, she proudly claimed to be writing “true cross-over science fiction ” that reached both science fiction and general audiences, “encompassing feminists and blacks as well,” a claim she often repeated.3 The thousands of clippings Butler kept and annotated on subjects of interest to her included many on feminism, which she organized to emphasize 1. OEB, Folder 95. The OEB collection organized by Curator Natalie Russell, who authored the finding aid. 2. OEB, Folder 3093. 3. OEB, Folder 3239, November 9, 1988. 511 Shelley Streeby Books Discussed in This Essay Migrant Futures: Decolonizing Speculation in Financial Times. Aimee Bahng. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. Queer Feminist Science Studies: A Reader. Edited by Cyd Cipolla, Kristina Gupta, David A. Rubin, and Angela Willey. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017. Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Shaping Worlds. adrienne maree brown. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2017. Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements. Edited by adrienne maree brown and Walidah Imarisha. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2015. Radio Imagination: Artists and Writers in the Archive of Octavia E. Butler. Edited by Janet Duckworth and Savanah Wood. Los Angeles: Clockshop, 2018. M Archive: After the End of the World. Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. Angels with Dirty Faces: Three Stories of Crime, Prison, and Redemption. Walidah Imarisha. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2016. Old Futures: Speculative Fiction and Queer Possibility. Alexis Lothian. New York: New York University Press, 2018. Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction. Sami Schalk. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. intersections among feminist and other struggles. A 1991 piece by Black syndicated columnist Clarence Page, for instance, called “The F. Word to Watch For: Feminists,” which was written in the wake of the HillThomas hearings and speculated that the Bush administration would demonize “feminists” as a “smoke screen” for “real economic problems,” 512 Shelley Streeby was filed under “Economy.”4 Much of the archival material and fiction that Butler produced relevant to the keyword “feminism” addresses intersections of gender, sexuality, race, and class in right-wing projects of the neoliberal era, from the 1970s through the early 2000s. As both a pejorative epithet used by the right to demonize women who deviated from patriarchally defined gender and sex roles as well as a term she counter-valued by claiming it for herself, intersectional “feminism” was central to Butler’s speculative collecting, research, and fiction-writing. Since her untimely death in 2006, Butler’s fame continues to grow as new generations embrace her work, since it speaks to our present in powerful ways. Butler rejected narrow genre categories and was ambivalent about the term “science fiction” as a descriptor for her writing, often expressing frustration with marketing categories and wondering if they stood in the way of reaching a wider audience. The umbrella term “speculative ” is useful both for recognizing the boundary-crossing dimensions of Butler’s writing, in its defiance of narrow definitions of genre, and for describing Butler’s contributions to feminist theories of knowledge production, political leadership, and imagining the future. Since Butler’s archive at the Huntington opened to researchers in 2013... (shrink)

New York in the mid-1950s was a time of detectives, G-men, mobsters, and crime photographers. Weegee fit this last profile perfectly. Speed Graphic camera in hand, he dashed around the city responding to the police radio, recording accidents, arrests, fires, and murders. This volume in the J. Paul Getty Museum's In Focus series examines approximately fifty of the ninty-five Weegee prints in the collection, surveying his photojournalism as well as additional works that picture life in the Bowery, Greenwich Village, (...) and Harlem. Judith Keller, Associate Curator in the Department of Photographs, provides an introduction to Weegee and commentary on the plates. The photographer was the subject of a colloquium at the Getty Museum on August 27, 2004, where the author was joined by David Featherstone, Michael Hargraves, Weston Naef, Miles Orvell, Ira Richer, Colin Westerbeck, and Cynthia Young in discussing his life and work. This conversation, captured here in an edited transcript, traces Weegee's transition from crime photography to social documentarian, with special attention paid to his publications, including Naked City. William McCleery, in the foreword to that book, calls Weegee "an Artist" with "his own conception of what constitutes beauty." With the issuance of this In Focus installment, readers can again share in Weegee's conception. (shrink)

2021 marks Dylan's 80th birthday and his 60th year in the music world. It invites us to look back on his career and the multitudes that it contains. Is he a song and dance man? A political hero? A protest singer? A self-portrait artist who has yet to paint his masterpiece? Is he Shakespeare in the alley? The greatest living exponent of American music? An ironsmith? Internet radio DJ? Poet (who knows it)? Is he a spiritual and religious parking (...) meter? Judas? The voice of a generation or a false prophet, jokerman, and thief? Dylan is all these and none. The essays in this book explore the Nobel laureate’s masks, collectively reflecting upon their meaning through time, change, movement, and age. They are written by wonderful and diverse set of contributors, all here for his 80th birthday bash: celebrated Dylanologists like Michael Gray and Laura Tenschert; recording artists such as Robyn Hitchcock, Barb Jungr, Amy Rigby, and Emma Swift; and 'the professors’ who all like his looks: David Boucher, Anne Margaret Daniel, Ray Monk, Galen Strawson, and more. Read it on your toaster! (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics & the Environment 8.1 (2003) 74-92 [Access article in PDF] John Dewey's Aesthetic Ecology of Public Intelligence and the Grounding of Civic Environmentalism Herbert Reid and Betsy Taylor "[The problem is] that of recovering the continuity of esthetic experience with normal processes of living." John Dewey, Art as Experience "This is not a protest. Repeat. This is not a protest. This is some kind of artistic expression. (...) Over." --A call that went out on Metro Toronto police radios on May 16, 1998, the date of the first Global Street Party. Quoted from Naomi Klein, No LogoThis paper argues for the importance of John Dewey's aesthetic philosophy to recent efforts to cultivate civic environmentalism while critiquing narrowly conservationist environmentalisms. We call for a strong version of civic environmentalism oriented towards holistic integration of ecological [End Page 74] concerns into all aspects of social, political, economic, and cultural life. Such a civic environmentalism argues that it is not enough to strive to preserve enclaved 'wilderness' or 'biodiversity' (as important as that is). It argues also for fundamental changes in the political and economic status quo, because ecological havoc is understood to be integrally linked with the structural forces that are increasing inequality and weakening democratic publics. Strengthening of the civic commons is integral to protection of the environmental commons. If the environmental commons are the substantive goods in common which are the sustaining grounds of life, the civic commons are the institutions, collective memories, social networks, and skills that enable and inspire individuals to engage with each other in stewarding the common good. Such collective labor for the larger good requires some form of collective imagination which enables awareness of self and other (human or non-human) as inherently valuable. But beyond this, it requires perceptual and social infrastructures that nurture the ability to see self and other as emergent from and dependent on the supra-individual matrix that supports both life and individual. Central to such civic labor, is a non-dualistic understanding of individual/matrix. Such a non-dualistic understanding of self/other-in-matrix is central to political and ecological imaginations that are decentered from ethnic, species, class, gender, or other forms of domination and solipsism.John Dewey's work as a whole is a powerful call for such a non-dualistic understanding of individual-in-matrix, and few have better understood its connections to democracy. But, it is in his philosophy of art that Dewey describes most specifically the central importance of the aesthetic dimension of public culture to overcoming crippling dualisms of Western modernity that vitiate participatory engagement- individual/world, nature/culture, ends/means, leisure/work, art/science, aesthetic/ordinary. His writings on art have not been much utilized in the philosophical work for civic environmentalism. This paper argues for their relevance to its key goal of overcoming the segmentation of life ushered in by modernity and buttressed by these dualisms.We first give an overview of recent theories of civic environmentalism and the crises it engages of inequality, injustice, technocracy, corporatization, and the pervasive assault on place and thinning of public participation. Second, we look at the implications of Dewey'saesthetic ecology for an "environmentalism of daily life" that challenges the false dualisms of neo-liberalism and of technocratic professionalism that undermine place-based [End Page 75] forms of life and knowledge. Third, we draw on Dewey's aesthetic philosophy to suggest ways to rebuild democratic public space at the nexus of body, place, and commons. Finally, we briefly outline key philosophical questions that have emerged in our ethnographic and political study of Appalachian grassroots activisms, and that embody this sort of placed, democratic mobilization to protect the civic and environmental commons. American Environmentalism: Crisis and Challenge Toward the end of the last decade, veteran New York Times journalist and now independent writer Philip Shabecoff set out to engage "a broad spectrum of thoughtful and informed people within and without the environmental movement." His Earth Rising: American Environmentalism in the 21st Century offers a very... (shrink)

Dentro del organigrama de la industria musical, las casas discográficas y emisoras radiales generan su dependiente relación por medio de la música grabada. En nuestro país, entre los años 1964-67, los sellos fonográficos nacionales lograron que muchos de sus artistas fueran invitados a las estaciones radiales por los disc-jockeys más famosos para promocionar sus discos. No obstante, se produjeron constantes discusiones y polémicas cuando las radios no difundieron, o bien, silenciaron muchos registros discográficos de intérpretes criollos, puesto que consideraron que (...) las casas disqueras plasmaron mucha música que no merecía ser editada. Las emisoras radiales se defendieron argumentando que, prácticamente,no valía la pena ser dueño de un pequeño sello discográfico, ni invertir en promoción, ni conseguir discos de éxito cuando sus artistas no podían demostrar su talento en directo. En otras palabras, las radios chilenas exigieron calidad integral al artista nacional: hit radial y presentación en vivo. (shrink)

As this century has found new temporalities to replace linearity, discontinuities have become commonplace. Discontinuity, if carried to a pervasive extreme, destroys linearity…There were two enormous factors, beyond the general cultural climate, that promoted composers' active pursuit of discontinuities. These influences did not cause so much as feed the dissatisfaction with linearity that many artists felt. But the impact has been profound. One factor contributing to the increase of discontinuity was the gradual absorption of music from totally different cultures, which (...) had evolved over the centuries with virtually no contact with Western ideas…Cross-cultural exchange in music will, of course, never destroy aesthetic boundaries, but music of non-Western cultures continues to show Western composers new ways to use and experience time. The second tremendous influence on twentieth-century musical discontinuity was technological rather than sociological: the invention of recording techniques. Recording has not only brought distant and ancient musics into the here and now, it has also made the home and the car environment just as viable for music listening as the concert hall. The removal of music from the ritualized behavior that surrounds concertgoing struck a blow to the internal ordering of the listening experience. Furthermore, radios, records, and, more recently, tapes allow the listener to enter and exit a composition at will. An overriding progression from beginning to end may or may not be in the music, but the listener is not captive to that completeness. We all spin the dial, and we are more immune to having missed part of the music than composers might like to think. Jonathan D. Kramer is an associate professor of music theory and composition and director of electronic music at the College-Conservatory of Music of the University of Cincinnati. The present essay is part of his book, Time and Meaning in Music. (shrink)

Joseph Beuys was one of the most significant artists of the 20th century. He was a gunner and radio operator in the German Air Force during World War II, and was severely injured several times. In March 1943 he had a life-changing experience after the dive bomber he was assigned to crashed in the Crimean peninsula. This trauma influenced Beuys' entire artistic career, and is known in art history as the ’Tartar Legend’ or ’Tartar Myth’. Profoundly affected by (...) the crash, the severe trauma, the near-death experience and his rescue, which he perceived as a “rebirth”, Beuys no longer saw himself, other people or society as a whole in the same way as previously. With his new consciousness, he ignored boundaries and created visions whereby all mankind could experience the healing he had undergone. Beuys did not bring society far enough for the turning point towards “the healing of the world” to be visible, yet today it is important to keep his work alive as a record of his extraordinary strength, which arose from trauma and severe injury, and was carried by a passionate commitment to mankind and to life itself. (shrink)

Essays and documents surveying the post-communist architectural scene in the Czech Republic. - 1/ “Wild & Wilder” (1997) – A brief travelogue with comments on Kew Gardens, London, and Mies van der Rohe’s Villa Tugendhat (1930), Brno. 2/ “Angel City” (1999) – A short report on Jean Nouvel’s Golden Angel office tower in Smíchov, Prague. 3/ “Read & Weep: Scandal in Bohemia” (1999) – Essay on post-communist machinations within the architectural scene in the Czech Republic, including reports on: Jean Nouvel’s (...) Angel City and its critics; charges of “lite (postmodern) neo-functionalism” here and there; a cooked “open” competition for a proposed Kupka museum in an old mill on the island of Kampa (in the Vltava); a tourist-dodging transit through Josip Plečnik’s gardens at Prague Castle; and stories and legends regarding the Star Pavilion and oak wood at White Mountain. 4/ “The Body of the City” (2001) – Critique of Richard Meier and Partners’ proposed ECM Radio Plaza, a series of towers meant to complete an unfinished, communist-era “Rockefeller Center” in the Pankrác district of Prague. 5/ “Gnomic Works: The Sculptural Works of Kurt Gebauer” (2002) – Essay on the sculpture of Czech artist Kurt Gebauer with images from his exhibition in Zlín in 2001. 6/ “House of the Wind: May Day” (2004) – Prose poem written on May Day 2004 regarding wandering around Olšanské hřbitovy, a mostly 19th-century cemetery in the Žižkov district of Prague. 7/ “Architectural Eyewash” (2004) – An essay surveying: various complaints within the Czech architectural community regarding an outbreak of “architectural eyewash” in the 2004 Chamber of Architects’ Grand Prix competition; rumors and innuendo regarding a proposed Kupka museum on Kampa; complaints about Daniel Libeskind’s proposed Dalí House, Prague; etc. 8/ “Moravian Shadows” (2004) – Essay on “cultural shadows” in the context of Czech architecture, with a nod to Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy. 9/ The Near & The Far: Moravian Garden (2006) – Notes and discursuses on a very small, yet “immense” South Moravian country garden in Skryje, Czech Republic. (shrink)

Die voranschreitenden Forschungen zum Nachlass Hans Blumenbergs zeichnen ein immer scharferes Bild eines Denkers, der sowohl umfangreiche Arbeiten zur Geistes- und Technikgeschichte vorlegte als auch das offentliche Denken beeinflusst hat - unter anderem durch Prasenz im Radio und regelmassige Beitrage zum Feuilleton von FAZ und NZZ. Der Sammelband wird durch ein bisher unveroffentlichtes Forschungsmanuskript Hans Blumenbergs aus dem Themenbereich der Technikphilosophie abgerundet, das fur den Band transkribiert und kommentiert wurde. Mit Beitragen von Hans Blumenberg (aus dem Nachlass), Alberto Fragio, (...) Andrew Hines, Sandra Markewitz, Marco Mauerer, Angus Nicholls, Martina Philippi, Josefa Ros Velasco, Nicola Zambon und Rudiger Zill. (shrink)

The article is an attempt at interpreting two Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz’s texts: Brzezina and Sława i chwała. The authoress examines the presence in texts by Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz two interrelated elements: tuberculosis and music. This relationship resulted from the characteristic image of tuberculosis - the disease of the soul, which gave ill features artists. Music became a special language, which spoke of tuberculosis in Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz’s texts. This is particularly interesting falls in the story Brzezina and the novel Sława i chwała. Music (...) accompanies the heroes dying there in various forms: nature sounds, piano, radio, singing women. (shrink)

When fat people are depicted in popular media, we often take their behavior to be representative of all fat people. How one fat person acts becomes representative of a broader pattern of behavior that all fat people are presumed to share, shaping the way we understand fatness. This way of generalizing presents fatness as a singular experience, reducing fat people to a monolithic narrative that often reinforces anti-fat bias. How do we avoid this reduction? How can we responsibly depict fat (...) characters without perpetuating negative stereotypes about real fat people? Using the case of “Fat Thor” from Avengers: Endgame, I propose the beginnings of an account of responsible artistic agency which can be used to improve the ways that marginalized communities are depicted in art, with a particular focus on fat communities. Central to this account are two features: inclusion of and deference to members of the communities depicted from a variety of backgrounds throughout the production process, and mindfulness of the preexisting narrative web built around the communities depicted. I will use this discussion to highlight the need for a drastic shift in how we consider marginalized populations in art—in reimagining both who tells their stories, and what stories are told on their behalf. (shrink)

The rejection of beauty from a political standpoint is a significant part of the legacy of avant-gardism in contemporary art. In particular, Arthur Danto signaled that artistic activism should avoid beauty simply because beauty induces the wrong perspective on whatever it is desired to have an impact upon. While artistic beauty’s tendency would be to heal, he claimed, political protest needs anger as its trigger. This article challenges such an argument that opposes beauty’s emotional effects on political action (...) by examining the complex nature of both beauty and anger. I contest a mere contemplative view of beauty and, using Carolyn Korsmeyer’s account of “terrible beauties,” bound up with discomforting emotions, I defend that beauty can be compatible with anger albeit, in order to be politically truly effective, anger must move from the wish to punish toward more productive forward-looking thoughts. Though often being necessary as a source of motivation to fight for justice, I believe, with Martha Nussbaum and Myisha Cherry, that anger is truly politically effective and keeps its noble side when detached from revenge and directed by hope, a value related to beauty. (shrink)

This article, corresponding to a part of the restitution of a financed international research project between France, Brazil, Canada, Italy and Belgium, aims to offer a modelisation and qualitative evaluation of mediation care settings based on an original methodological tool that involves identifying the typical games at the foundations of creativity, following a multidisciplinary perspective. Therapeutic mediations are settings or devices organised around a “pliable medium”, often artistic, like painting, modeling, writing, ​and theatre, which are very widespread in institutional (...) practices, both in France and abroad. The scientific objectives of this research consist in a multi-disciplinary exploration (anthropology, criminology, neuroscience, clinical psychology) of the process of creative symbolisation understood as a process of transformation involving play. According to this orientation, play can be defined as a psychic process whereby a subjective experience can be explored with pleasure, and consequently symbolised and appropriated. Our fundamental and original hypothesis is that play is at the source of the creative process, conceived as a work of metabolisation by the psyche of playful experiences during the different stages of life. The review of the understanding of play in psychoanalysis, anthropology, criminology and neuroscience emphasises the richness of this model and the importance of reflecting on the typical games in the field of psychic care. A clinical example of treatment in a pictorial therapeutic mediation setting of a child with psychotic disorders makes it possible to identify a number of typical games as well as the modalities of interpretation of the therapists through play. These multidisciplinary studies lead to the presentation of a general table of typical games, and these first results highlight the richness of identifying typical games in clinical settings. Ultimately, the multidisciplinary approach shows the interest of the model of play in the evaluation of therapeutic mediation settings, with a convergence of the different disciplines emphasising the pertinence of this model. The scientific impact of this research overlaps with its societal impact, through the development of innovative tools for evaluating therapeutic mediations, in order to take account of the evolution of the different forms of social expression of psychic suffering. (shrink)

Commented article: WANG, Z. Philosophical Perspective on Artistic Development and Historic Animation Thinking. Trans/Form/Ação: revista de filosofia da Unesp, v. 47, n. 5, “Eastern thought 2”, e02400159, 2024. Available at: https://revistas.marilia.unesp.br/index.php/transformacao/article/view/15071.

Artificial intelligence is now capable of generating sophisticated and compelling images from simple text prompts. In this paper, I focus specifically on how artists might make use of AI to create art. Most existing discourse analogizes AI to a tool or collaborator; this focuses our attention on AI’s contribution to the production of an artistically significant output. I propose an alternative approach, the exploration paradigm, which suggests that artists instead relate to AI as a participant: artists create a space for (...) interaction with the AI algorithm by way of their prompts, thereby allowing them to explore the way that the algorithm “sees” and “represents.” AI art practiced in this fashion bears a striking resemblance to contemporary conceptual and participatory art. Viewing AI art in this way has implications for the appreciation of style in AI art; concerns about novelty and originality; and the assignment of artistic credit and copyright. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Response to David Elliott’s “Music Education as/for Artistic Citizenship”Richard ColwellThe September issue of the Music Educators Journal contained an article by David Elliott entitled “Music Education as/for Artistic Citizenship”1 that I believe warrants considerable discussion by individuals conversant with the philosophy of music education in 2014.The journal is not known for its coverage of philosophy and an article in the Music Educators Journal is likely to influence (...) far more individuals than the Wayne Bowman and Anna Lucia Frega Oxford Handbook of Philosophy in Music Education. Some of the statements may be misleading and/or readers unfamiliar with philosophy may misunderstand the present rationale for music education in the schools. There is a difference between advocacy and philosophy.Elliott has long been a close friend and I have admired his writings for decades. The article struck me as misplaced in MEJ and I immediately contacted Elliott about it. He replied that the article was based on a speech he had recently given and that the editors of the journal had asked that it be included in an early edition. [End Page 105]The basic thrust of the article appears to be philosophical with Elliott’s argument for praxial music education and his worry about teaching great works and great artists under some rubric connected with aesthetic education. I do not think this is what he means as he would support musical criticism. The attempt to reach the public directly through multiple approaches assumes that criticism is artificial and public taste natural.The opening paragraphs suggest that music education can be used in the service of additional or alternative aims and these appear to be unlimited. The basic ideas seem to contradict Elliott in his chapter on Music Education Philosophy in the McPherson andWelch Oxford Handbook of Music Education (2012) where he states, that “if everything counts, then nothing counts (p 68).” The MEJ article is a long-list of possibilities with an emphasis on three themes—music making for the betterment of social well-being, music making for social justice, and the infusion of school music with an ethic of care—three areas he felt were under-emphasized in his classic text Music Matters.Thus, there are a number of areas where I would seek clarification realizing that describing music education philosophy in fifty minutes is impossible if not misleading.The title indicates a plea for artistic citizenship. One can easily find artistic citizenship in every country in the world: Venezuela is a present example where artistic citizenship is promoted through social programs using great music supported by the World Bank and others and resulting in a reasonable type of citizenship based on the poll numbers for ex-President Chavez. I assume that Elliott supports the West-East Divan Orchestra project that brings together students from Mid-East countries where artistry for great music has little to do with the political and religious citizenships of sending countries.Valid examples are cited for protest songs that have addressed injustices through the centuries and against government practices. If the point is that music can expand our horizons, great. When possible, I would suggest that music be used that leads to greater growth: growth in musical understanding or in this instance, positive citizenship. Music can have both political and social meanings and the music used should have a positive objective in mind. Elliott might conclude that music education is divorced from the real world and too often it is. Dewey wanted a connection and that connection would have included making music for one’s own satisfaction or playing in the town band as well as listening to live and recorded music that dominated the first half of the 20th century.What seems important in education, in music, and in philosophy is that we build on the best ideas and writings available to us. Culture can be changed and may need to be. Kurt Vonnegut learned as a prisoner during WWII that culture [End Page 106] was as separate from the brain as a Model T Ford, and it could be tinkered with. It is an easy jump from there to believing that a culture can... (shrink)

In our everyday lives, we often have to blend our different roles and various selves. Sometimes, they coexist in harmony. But there are times when they come into conflict, and we have to make a significant effort to get them back in balance. This paper focuses on my scientific/artistic practice in anthropological documentary film-making. Drawing on two films I have directed, I reflect on situations where I needed to compromise my different roles and perspectives on the film set and (...) beyond. My actions and decisions have drawn on anthropological principles in documentary film-making. Through my autoethnographic reflection, I have come to the inevitable conclusion that in anthropological film-making, anthropology cannot be dominant nor submissive to storytelling. It should be the principle that guides the author (director) in achieving their focus and in creating the meaning of the story. (shrink)

In Merleau-Ponty and Nishida, Adam Loughnane initiates a dialogue between two of the twentieth century's most important phenomenologists from the Eastern and Western philosophical worlds. Loughnane guides the reader through the complexities and innovations of Nishida's and Merleau-Ponty's theories of artistic expression and their rarely explored concepts of faith. The intricacies of both philosophers' views are illuminated by analyses of artists, including Cézanne, Sesshū, Rodin, Hasegawa, and other major figures of European, Chinese, and Japanese art history, who enact a (...) radical form of expression that Loughnane calls the practice of "motor-perceptual faith." He argues that the artist's motor-perceptual body, as poetically articulated in Nishida's and Merleau-Ponty's early works, enacts a form of faith that can be parsed in the final writings of both philosophers. The concept of faith is enlarged through its enactment by the artist, while the concept of artistic expression is broadened by casting it as a motor-perceptual conception of faith. Merleau-Ponty and Nishida is an exciting new intercultural reading of these philosophers' writings that opens up under-explored areas of their projects. It forms an important conceptual bridge between the two, while challenging distinctions between art, philosophy, and religion, and ultimately philosophy East and West. (shrink)

This article examines the diversity of tactical interventions that transpired at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2019, culminating in the resignation of the vice-chairman of its Board of Trustees. Instead of accepting the myth of museum neutrality, the activist campaign, spearheaded by the action-oriented movement Decolonize This Place, treated the Whitney as a site of ideological struggle, permeated by inner divisions and conflicting interests. Through their organizing efforts, activists prefigured a movement-based form of cultural production, mapped connections between (...) seemingly disparate struggles, and built decolonial solidarities. While the activists’ actions were essential to stage the antagonisms that had been dormant in the institution, a multiplicity of actors needed to step in during the process, creating multiple pressure points and taking sides in the division. To amplify the Whitney staffers’ attempt to hold the museum leadership accountable, they sought to bring political protest into the institution, challenging the very principle of counting who belongs to the community and who is excluded. (shrink)

Volume 11, Issue 1-2, January–December 2024.