As an intensive housing construction drive in the late 1950s began to provide separate apartments for millions of Soviet citizens, aesthetic experts envisioned the Soviet home as a potential site for the display of works of art and for amateur aesthetic production. In the context of de-Stalinization, reformist artists and aestheticians committed to the liberalization and modernization of Soviet artistic criteria, promoted the value of amateur art and even of home decorating in the formation of the new (...) person who would live under communism. They also pressed for affordable art and craft to be made available to ordinary people for their new homes. Thereby they would dwell in their new apartments surrounded by beauty in their everyday lives, and would thus, the experts argued, be brought closer to communist consciousness. Moreover sales of art to individual citizens would provide an alternative income stream to fund artists’ production. The possibility of private art consumption would therefore free artists to some extent from their reliance on state commissions and from the strict stylistic and thematic norms and hierarchies of Socialist Realism as established under Stalin. (shrink)

Between the time of the Crusades and the end of the Latin political presence in the East, Cyprus, Crete, and Rhodes benefited from an important cultural cross-fertilization. As part of the maritime routes linking Eastern and Western ports, and home to cosmopolitan populations, those islands of the Byzantine Empire respectively came under the control of the Franks, Venice and the Hospitallers in 1191, 1204 and 1306. During the rule of the Franks in Cyprus, of the Venetians in Crete and (...) of the Hospitallers in Rhodes, the Greeks still made up the largest part of the local population. Preserving their identity, they never ceased to consider themselves members of the ecumene of the Eastern Roman Empire. Nevertheless, their attachment to Byzantine culture and their own local traditions did not prevent them from opening to outside models. (shrink)

This article was published in {\em Man and Computer. Proc. int. Conf., Bordeaux 1970, pp. 48-57 (Karger, Basel 1972)}. It is interesting to compare its 1970 proposals with the current situation, 30 years later. I have decorated it with footnotes commenting on the 1970 situation and making comparisons. Some of the improvements advocated in the paper are still yet to come. I claim quite a few prophet points for it.

For a place that is so familiar, home is peculiarly difficult to define and to research. Based on an extended review of recent literature on home, the article shows that there is no place like `home' because people construct its image in memory and imagination. Home, it is argued, is imaged on many different levels. At a surface level, home is known in terms of its location, fabric, decoration, furnishing and amenity - it is a (...) place that is known intimately. At a deeper level, home is defined in terms of the kinds of relationships people have, or would like to have, with others inside and outside of the home. Deeper still, home is a representation of cultural identity and provides a collective sense of social permanency and security. People rarely think about home at this level, it is argued, unless reappraisal is forced upon them by a significant life event like migration between cultures or because of cultural invasion from without. The article argues for an intensification of research that starts from the domestic sphere is order to explore how home life both shapes and reflects wider social continuities and changes. (shrink)

This chapter considers the role of music and dance in the definition of identity by families and individuals in Renaissance Venice, with particular reference to the use of domestic space for music-making. The integration of music into its social and architectural context is discussed in terms of the class identity of different groups. The contexts range from domestic entertainment to family festivities such as marriages. The chapter goes on to explore the kinds of music-making in different spaces in the Venetian (...) dwelling, in terms of the size and loudness of the instrument; the type of music performed; and the size, function and decoration of the room. During the sixteenth century, increasingly specialised rooms were created for music-making, often linked to theatrical performance and/or dance. In parallel, the employment of professional musicians by elite families began to supersede amateur participation on important festive occasions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Individual in Relation to the Sangha in American Buddhism:An Examination of "Privatized Religion"Kenneth K. TanakaIn his celebrated book Bowling Alone (2000), Robert Putnam noted the increased level in the phenomenon of "privatized religion" within the previous thirty-five years. Many of the Baby Boomer generation left churches in the late 1960s and the 1970s. Some sought out new religious movements and religious therapies, but most simply "dropped out" of (...) organized religion altogether. He cites Wade Clark Roof and William McKinney, specialists in American religion, who describe the outcome of this trend in American religious behavior: "[The consequence was a] tendency toward highly individualized religious psychology without the benefits of strong supportive attachments to believing communities. A major impetus in this direction in the post-1960s was the thrust toward greater personal fulfillment and quest for the ideal self.... In this climate of expressive individualism, religion tends to become "privatized," or anchored in the personal realms."1 Putnam observes that although privatized religion may be "morally compelling and psychologically fulfilling," it involves less social capital than environments in which individuals are connected to other individuals in shared faith commitment.Interestingly, American Buddhism may be one of the beneficiaries of this trend, for the recent growth of Buddhism in the United States is partly attributable to the climate of "privatized" religion. Nowhere is this symbolized more than by the so-called Nightstand Buddhists.2The Nightstand Buddhists derive their name from their practice of placing a Buddhist meditation book on the nightstand after reading it before they go to sleep. They get up the next morning and practice to the best of their ability the meditation they had read about the night before. Further, they may frequently attend lectures at the local university and visit a Buddhist center's web-page or participate in an online Buddhist discussion group. And if we were to visit them, we might find their homes decorated with Buddhist artifacts.But these Nightstand Buddhists do not show up in any statistics on the [End Page 115] American Buddhist population because they would not identify themselves as Buddhists. According to Thomas Tweed, who coined the term Nightstand Buddhists, "Sympathizers (= Nightstand Buddhists) are those who have some sympathy for Buddhism but do not embrace it exclusively or fully. When asked, they would not identify themselves as Buddhists. They would say they are Methodists, or Jewish, or unaffiliated."3 However, they have been an important part of the story of Buddhism in America from its beginning and continue to be so today.Among the three million Buddhists currently estimated to be in the United States, I believe there are Buddhists who exhibit many of the same characteristics as the Nightstand Buddhists. And this number is significant, particularly among those converts to Buddhism whose main practice is meditation. This group of convert Buddhists is one segment of the larger Buddhist community in the United States, which I have categorized into four groups.41. New Asian American Buddhists (those who have mostly arrived in the United States since the 1960s: Vietnamese, Thai, Korean, Cambodian, Myanmar, Laotian, and Sri Lankan).2. Old-line Asian American Buddhists (those who were established before World War II: Chinese and Japanese).3. Convert Buddhists whose main practice is meditation (predominately Euro-Americans practicing in the Zen, Vipassanā, and Tibetan traditions).4. Convert Buddhists whose main practice is chanting (Sōkagakkai International–USA, a sizable percentage of whom are African and Hispanic Americans).In this paper, I wish to focus on a Jōdo Shinshū temple from the second group (old-line Asian American Buddhists) and on several centers collectively that belong to the Zen, Vipassanā, and Tibetan traditions from the third group (convert Buddhists whose main practice is meditation), looking at the manner in which individuals relate to their respective institutions and traditions, with special attention given to the phenomenon of "privatized religion."For purposes of this paper, my definition of "privatized religion" is based on the observation of Roof and McKinney, cited above, as "a tendency for individuals (1) to emphasize practicing at home over religious centers, and (2) to value the subjective and the inward." The homebound orientation is connected... (shrink)

Photographs and text document disappearing cultural landscapes and lifestyles in rural China, capturing poignant scenes far from Beijing or Shanghai. Just a few kilometers from the glittering skylines of Shanghai and Beijing, we encounter a vast countryside, an often forgotten and seemingly limitless landscape stretching far beyond the outskirts of the cities. Following traces of old trade routes, once-flourishing marketplaces, abandoned country estates, decrepit model villages, and the sites of mystic rituals, the authors of this book spent seven years exploring, (...) photographing, and observing the vast interior of China, where the majority of Chinese people live in ways virtually unchanged for centuries. China's Vanishing Worlds is an impressive documentation in images and text of modernization's effect on traditional ways of life, and a sympathetic portrait of lives burdened by hardship but blessed by simplicity and tranquility. The scars of China's recent history and the decay of centuries-old traditions are made visible in this volume, but so is the lure and promise of technology and another life for young people. In the next twenty years, an estimated 280 million Chinese villagers will become city dwellers, leaving their ancestral homes in search of urban jobs and opportunities. In striking and evocative color photographs, we see picturesque villages set against a background of rolling hills, planned centuries ago according to the principles of feng shui; a restaurant with bright pink resin chairs and a wide-screen television; traditional buildings preserved by the accident of poverty and isolation; ramshackle rooms decorated with portraits of Chairman Mao; backpack-wearing children walking to school; festivals with elaborately costumed performers; old men playing cards; buyers and sellers at open-air markets. China's Vanishing Worlds offers readers a rare opportunity to glimpse China as it once was, and as it will soon no longer be. (shrink)

We have a striking ability to alter our psychological access to past experiences. Consider the following case. Andrew “Nicky” Barr, OBE, MC, DFC, (1915 – 2006) was one of Australia’s most decorated World War II fighter pilots. He was the top ace of the Western Desert’s 3 Squadron, the pre-eminent fighter squadron in the Middle East, flying P-40 Kittyhawks over Africa. From October 1941, when Nicky Barr’s war began, he flew 22 missions and shot down eight enemy planes in his (...) first 35 operational hours. He was shot down three times, once 25 miles behind enemy lines while trying to rescue a downed pilot. He escaped from prisoner of war camps four times, once jumping out of a train as it travelled from Italy into Austria. His wife Dot, who he married only weeks before the war, waited for him at home. She was told on at least three occasions that he was missing in action or dead. For 50 years, Nicky Barr never spoke publicly, and rarely privately, of his war-time experiences. He was very much a forgotten and forgetting hero (for further details, see Dornan, 2002). In his first public interview in 2002 on the Australian documentary program “Australian Story”, Nicky explained his 50 year silence by saying. (shrink)

There is no such thing as ART. There are public monuments and celebrations of victories, icons, religious teaching, civic pride, courtier flattery, family legitimation, secularization of the sacred, celebration of the ordinary as ordinary, attempts to shock, political statements, making money, decoration of homes, corporations, visual debates on what the world looks like—debates about what the world is—debates about what we see. On the other hand, we can look at anything—clouds, a tree, a face, a road, a herd of cows (...) in a field—as if they were works of art, finding a composition of patterns and resonances of color, texture, and form. Directly or indirectly, consciously or unconsciously, works of art.. (shrink)

In World War II, however, that lonely masculine authority of experience—the bitter authority derived from direct exposure to violence, injury, and mechanized terror—was rapidly dispersing among generally populations. Graves, notes, with some discomfort, that the Second World War soldier “cannot even feel that his rendezvous with death is more certain than that of his Aunt Fanny, the firewatcher.”5 American culture was, obviously, characterized by far greater disjunctions between male and female “experience” of war than the British blitz society Graves describes, (...) and the modern tradition of soldier poetry, with its ironic emphasis on unmendable gaps between the soldier author and the civilian reader, retained its strong influence. Still, public discussions of war and literature in the United States dwell frequently on the new conjunctions between civilians and soldiers, front and home front, and men and women, focusing on their shared morale or effort as well as on their common deprivation and vulnerability.In a war newly perceived as “total,” [Marianne] Moore’s work could exemplify the power of a representative civilian voice. It could also represent modernism provisionally embracing realist and didactic functions, coming round to correcting earlier trends toward self-referentiality. Thus Richard Eberhart, arguing in his introduction to a well-known anthology of war poetry that “the spectator, the contemplator, the opposer of war have their hours with the enemy no less than uniformed combatants,” praises Moore for abandoning the “complacencies of the peignoir” to write “In Distrust of Merits.”6 His phrasing links Moore with another civilian war poet, Wallace Stevens; by dressing Moore in Stevens’ Peignoir in order to show her doffing it, he represents her as a formerly feminine object of desire who has emerged from the coquetries of her sex into a new, superior, gender-free authority Now, Eberhart argues, “the bloodshed of which she writes has caused her to break through the decorative surface of her verse” to a “different kind of utterance.” For Eberhart, the poem’s value lies in its violation of Moore’s usual mannered aestheticism. She “breaks through” a feminine surface, as if puncturing skin, but the result is not a wound but a mouth: a “different kind of utterance,” in which “the meaning has dictated the sincerity.”7 Oscar Williams, in the preface to a comparable anthology, also reads the poem as a model of transparent earnestness, offering it as a solution to the problem of Edna St. Vincent Millay, the “bad” woman war poet who is excoriated in these discussions as often as Moore is extolled. Describing one of Millay’s war poems as “a sentimental piece of verse written by an American civilian, designed to be read by … people themselves out of danger because they are protected by a wall of living young flesh, much of which will be mangled,” Williams contrasts Moore’s “In Distrust of Merits”: But with true poets the poetry is in the pity …I ask the reader to study closely a war poem peculiarly fitted to illustrate my present thesis. It is also written by a woman, a civilian. “In Distrust of Merits,” by Marianne Moore, is the direct communication of honest feeling by one ready to search her own hear to discover the causes of war and accept her full share of responsibility for its effects.8 5. Graves, “The Poets of World War II,” p. 310.6. Richard Eberhart, “Preface: Attitudes to War,” in War and the Poet: An Anthology of Poetry Expressing Man’s Attitudes to War from Ancient Times to the Present, ed. Eberhart and Selden Rodman , pp. xv, xiii.7. Ibid., p. xiii.8. Oscar Williams, ed., The War Poets: An Anthology of the War Poetry of the Twentieth Century , p. 6. Susan Schweik is assistant professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. She is at work on a book manuscript entitled A Word No Man Can Say for Us: American Women Poets and the Second World War. (shrink)

A collection of William Morris' letters and lectures on his home furnishings firm, stained glass, textiles, furnishing and decorating a house, printing, and art and society.

"Hungarian Cubes" proposes an aesthetical typology of the ornamentation of cubic houses from the 1960s 70s in Hungary. The book is based on the artistic project Magyar Kocka Hungarian Cube, which German-Hungarian artist Katharina Roters is pursuing since 2005. The origins of the Hungarian Cube, a standardized type of residential house, date back to the 1920s, when the cube as prototype of a radically functional design first appeared in plans for single-family homes in Budapest s suburbs and also in social (...) housing projects. During Hungary s communist era after WW II, many villages were rebuilt on uniform schemes of single-family homes and the "Magyar Kocka "or "Kadar Kocka, " as they were also named after Hungary s communist president Janos Kadar became ubiquitous. A unique characteristic of this housing type is the ornamental decoration of its facades. The facade thereby became an opportunity of both individual and collective expression within uniformity. The ornament is not merely an aesthetic sign. It rather creates meaningful identity and distinguishes the appearance of entire dwellings across the country. Often this individualized ornament can also be read as an act of subversion against the pressure of conformity in the socialist system. Katharina Roters has been investigating and documenting this previously neglected ornamental phenomenon since 2005 from an artistic point of view. The houses are shown in her images cleaned of all surplus information, fences and railings, antennas, road signs, electric power lines. Only by this deletion of additions to each house the project can reach beyond a merely archival nature and the photograph becomes a document of aesthetic typology. The book combines the serial composition of Roters s images with essays on various aspects of this architectural phenomenon. ". (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:_Russell_ journal (home office): E:CPBRRUSSJOURTYPE2602\REVIEWS.262 : 2007-01-24 01:12 Reviews 185 A NORWEGIAN ANTHOLOGY OF RUSSELL ON WAR, PEACE AND PACIFISM Stefan Andersson Theology and Religious Studies / U. of Lund s223 62 Lund, Sweden butterflyandeson@hotmail.com Øystein Hide, ed. Bertrand Russell om krig, fred og pasifisme [Bertrand Russell on war, peace and pacifism]. Oslo: Humanist Forlag, 2006. Pp. 261. isbn 8292622101. 268 Kroner. Paperbound. his is a selected anthology (...) of Russell’s writings and interviews on war, Tpeace and pacifism edited by the Norwegian Øystein Hide, who was born in 1975 and has the equivalent of a ma in philosophy from a Norwegian university. He did graduate work at the University of Southampton in 2001–04. He has worked at the Wittgenstein Archives in Bergen and at the University of Bergen. He has done research at the Bertrand Russell Archives1 and is a member of the Mind Association. He has translated Wittgenstein’s Zettel and Über Gewissheit into Norwegian and has done other philosophically relevant work in both Norwegian and English. Øystein Hide has supplied his anthology with an introduction that contains a number of minor factual mistakes that are a bit disturbing, but they do not overshadow his main message that Russell’s writings on war, peace and pacifism are still worth reading. He starts out by distinguishing between “the two Bertrand Russells”: the philosopher and what he calls “the political humanist”. Although Hide does not spend much energy on explaining exactly what he means by it, I find this a thought-provoking expression that to me suggests a secular humanist who is prepared to act on his convictions. He compares Russell to the Norwegian philosopher Arne Næss, who also was a political activist and acted according to his deepest beliefs. Hide says about Russell: “For many people Russell has become the great philosopher who also actively contributed to the general political debate and who, in the capacity of being a philosopher, gave the lovers of peace a philosophical and intellectual alibi with which they could decorate their struggles” (p. 11). 1 Notably resulting in his article, “Wittgenstein’s Books at the Bertrand Russell Archives and the Influence of Scientific Literature on Wittgenstein’s Early Philosophy”, Philosophical Investigations, 27 (Jan. 2004): 68–91. _Russell_ journal (home office): E:CPBRRUSSJOURTYPE2602\REVIEWS.262 : 2007-01-24 01:12 186 Reviews Russell’s position as a philosopher and political activist in Norway is more or less the same as in the other Nordic countries, and although Hide’s book is Norwegian a lot of Swedes, Danes, Finns and Icelanders will be able to benefit from the collection. There is no mention, however, of Russell’s only trip to Norway (in 1948), which had a political purpose. Hide has divided his collection into two parts. The first part contains ten texts written between 1916 and 1920, and the second part contains five between 1950 and 1960. He does not say a lot about why he has included these texts and excluded others. These are the selections he offers: Part 1: “War as an Institution”, Chapter 3 from Principles of Social Reconstruction (1916) “Why the War Continues”, The UDC, 2 (10 Feb. 1917); in Papers 14 “National Service”, The Tribunal, 47 (15 Feb. 1917); Papers 14 “War and Individual Liberty”, The Tribunal, 50 (8 March 1917); Papers 14 “Pacifism and Revolution”, The Tribunal, 67 (19 July 1917); Papers 14 “The International Outlook”, The Pioneer, 347 (10 Nov. 1917); Papers 14 “Draft of Defence” (for Russell’s 1918 trial); Papers 14 “Government and Law”, Chapter 5 from Roads to Freedom (1918) “The World as It Could be Made”, Chapter 8 from Roads to Freedom (1918) “Bolshevik Criticism of Democracy”, Chapter 3 of Part 2 of The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism (1920) Part 2: “Politically Important Desires”, Chapter 2 of Part 2 of Human Society in Ethics and Politics (1954); Nobel Prize speech, 1950 How Near Is War? (London: Fleet Street Forum, 1952); interview “Man’s Peril”, The Listener, 52 (30 Dec. 1954); Papers 28 “The Road to Peace”, The Bomb: Challenge and Answer (London: Batsford, 1955); Papers 28 “War and Pacifism”, Bertrand Russell Speaks His Mind (1960... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Wisdom's Flowering Cherry:William Johnston's Charismatic ZenLucien Miller Click for larger view View full resolutionIn 1976, when I was about to leave Taiwan after a sabbatical in Taiwan, I happened upon a tattered poster on a telephone pole: [End Page 133]CHRISTIAN-ZEN RETREAT DIRECTOR: WILLIAM JOHNSTON, S.J. ST. BENEDICT'S CONVENT, TAMSUI, TAIWANSunday-FridayI knew that Father Johnston was the well-known Irish Jesuit theologian at Sophia University in Tokyo, widely honored for his (...) studies of mysticism and his major contributions to the development of Buddhist-Christian encounter. I was totally intrigued. Instantly, I decided to attend the retreat.1day oneI was late when I arrived at Saint Benedict's chapel, where the retreat was underway, announcing my presence with a mighty thud of its door to a full gathering of retreatants sitting silently in the pews. Suddenly, here I was, the sole layman among a group of Catholic priests and sisters, most of them American-born, who were serving as missionaries in Taiwan. I looked and felt like a misfit, especially since Father Johnston had to wait to begin the retreat because of me. The chapel setting was Far Eastern in its simplicity and decor. Square in shape, it had a low altar in its center, about a foot and a half high. A plain, muted oil lamp hung to one side, softly gleaming in the semidarkness of late afternoon. Tatami mats and cushions were placed on the spacious floor around the front and two sides of the altar, so that after today's introduction, participants could sit on cushions according to zazen form and face the altar.As I dashed into a pew and looked up, I experienced a Catholic's shock. To my utter surprise, Father Johnston appeared in black Japanese yukata robes, instead of a priest's black suit. He bowed deeply before the altar, where he placed the Eucharist in a ciborium in plain view instead of in the tabernacle where it belonged. Turning to face us, he sat zazen style with his legs crossed on a Zen cushion with the ciborium behind his back. There was no "In the Name of the Father" or "let us pray." We simply maintained a long silence. In imitation of Japanese monks, many of the religious women and men retreatants were wearing robes, while the priests among them had on cassocks. Everyone but me had dressed appropriately for a Zen sesshin. I guessed many were fellow neophytes like me, as we all awkwardly sat zazen with legs crossed as best we could. We would quickly discover together that, for the uninitiated Westerner, zazen would initially prove a painful affair.Father Johnston was partly bald with longish hair at the temples, bushy white eyebrows, and wore a gray-brown beard and radiant smile. While born in Ireland and definitely Irish, you could tell by his clothing, carriage, and bearing that he had been profoundly touched by Japanese culture and language through his long years in Japan. Nonetheless, you readily knew by his sparkling blue eyes amidst his ruddy complexion that the Irish remained in the Japanese.I had brought my Zen sitting cushion all the way from my home in Pelham, MA, to Taiwan, and had practiced daily morning zazen in our Japanese-styled residence while teaching and researching at Tunghai University near Taichung. But feeling late and a bit shy about being up front with esteemed Father Johnston and among the clergy and [End Page 134] religious, I placed my cushion at the back of the chapel, sat down, and crossed my legs. Father Johnston noticed that I was off by myself, and came over. "Good," he laughed, complimenting my sitting posture. "But pretty hard to sit on a marble floor!"He explained to the participants that the schedule he set would be followed beginning the next morning, and that it was entirely voluntary. You could practice crosslegged zazen on your cushion and mat on the chapel floor or sit in the pews. The general atmosphere would be both disciplined, Zen-style, and relaxed. "Please keep silence at all times," he requested. Morning zazen was very early—from... (shrink)

In this response, I suggest that Black southern women in the U.S. have always been central to the “reconstruction” that Taylor identifies as a central theme of Black aesthetics. Building on his allusions to Alice Walker and Jean Toomer, I explore Walker’s tearful response (in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983) to Toomer’s Cane (2011). Walker identifies their mothers’ and grandmothers’ informal arts of storytelling and gardening as the hidden roots of both her and Toomer’s work. I (...) suggest that Walker’s tears function to water her mother’s (and othermothers’) gardens, thereby sustaining southern Black women’s foundational work in reconstruction. Through telling their stories and planting gardens, along with crafting meals, designing clothes, and designing and decorating homes, southern Black women have always been necessary to Black aesthetics—filling worlds with aesthetically-rich and energetic artworks that Black formal artists such as Walker channel and transfigure into their formal artistic productions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 39.3 (2005) 115-120 [Access article in PDF] Commentary Seeing Cultural Conflicts Some years ago the great intellectual historian Isaiah Berlin made an important statement about what has become known as multiculturalism: We are urged to look upon life as affording a plurality of values, equally genuine, equally ultimate, above all equally objective; incapable, therefore, of being ordered in a timeless hierarchy, or judged in (...) terms of some one absolute standard.1He distinguishes such pluralism from relativism, which holds that different cultures (or individuals) have tastes or attitudes that are not objectively valid. Multiculturalism is, he thinks, an important position; relativism is not. Berlin describes what has now become a very familiar cliché. There are many diverse social systems. And since each has real value, we try to understand every other culture on its own terms.A great deal has been written recently about cultural conflicts. What can visual art show us about this subject, about relationships between radically opposed societies? Pre-modern civilizations were not usually tolerant of exotic cultures. Islam and Europe were often at war. "The menace of Islam was seen as something which threatened the souls as well as the bodies of Christian Europe."2 But although the Italians often fought with their Muslim neighbors, they did also import carpets to decorate the interiors of palaces and, in Venice, to adorn the facades of their homes.3 And many Venetian paintings depict these Islamic rugs. In Giovanni Mansueti's Miracles of the Bridge at San Lio (1494), now in the Accademia, Venice, or in Vittore Carpaccio's Meeting and Departure of the Betrothed (1490) showing the Episodes from the Life of St. Ursula, carpets are represented. In such pictures, the historian Paul Hills observes:... rich colours in soft textiles overlay the hardness of marble; and the eye of the Venetian painters and their public became attuned to fine degrees of hardness and softness, of fixity and pliancy, as when silken textiles move in a current of air but marbles stand fast. 4The Venetians were famous for incorporating alien artifacts, making them "their own without losing a sense of the exotic and the unfamiliar."5 And so it is unsurprising that painters freely inserted objects from another culture into works of art. The exotic decorative fabrics must surely have inspired the [End Page 115] Venetians. But because Islamic culture was foreign, Renaissance Europeans did not say much about the aesthetic qualities of these carpets.Representations of carpets are also found elsewhere in Italian art. The Siena Cathedral contains frescoes by Pinturicchio (1502-9) showing the life of Pius II, the fifteenth-century Pope. In the sixth scene, he enters Mantua to preside over the assembly called to mount an expedition against the Turks.6 (The venerable Christian capital Constantinople had just fallen to the Muslims.) On the table in the porch sheltering the Pope and his attendants, under some books, is a magnificent carpet. Even as these Christians plot, the room is decorated by art made by their enemies. Perhaps the carpet placed underfoot in this picture is treated as a trophy, like the flags of the defeated foes displayed in military museums. But often in other European paintings, Islamic rugs are depicted set on tables or hung from windows in ways that acknowledge their visual appeal.7Renaissance Italians seem to have had no concern with understanding Islamic carpets. Modern historians, by contrast, interested in the elaborate symbolism of these carpets, note that the rugs serve sacred functions.8 The Quran gives elaborate directions about how and when to pray. But it does not mention carpets. "Apart from mosque lamps the only other furnishing commonly found in mosques was some kind of floor covering," a historian explains.9 "The custom no doubt evolved from the religious requirement that all must enter the mosque unshod." Because carpets are used for prayer, both believers and Christians naturally associate them with religious observances. Non-Muslims also have long made use of these beautiful artifacts, sometimes cautiously—a fourteenth-century Spanish rabbi did say that a carpet depicting the Kaaba... (shrink)

After reappearance of Poland on the map of Europe in 1918, the first major manifestation of the new country’s creative potential was at the 1925 International Exhibition of Applied Arts and Modern Industry in Paris. The Polish Pavilion, which had divided the opinion of critics at home, won the Grand Prix. The award of over 170 prizes to the Polish section in different areas and categories – from posters to art schools – gave ample reason to consider the exhibition (...) an unquestionable success. The forms used in the architecture and interior design of the Polish Pavilion inspired various solutions applied in Polish public architecture of the 1920s. On the wave of the “Paris success” designers tried to translate the Polish variety of art deco into a type of national style which some scholars even came to refer to as the “style of regained independence” which manifested itself in architecture, particularly in interior design, bas reliefs, painted decorations textiles and furniture. Its emergence coincided with the introduction of new education methods in art and craft schools. The text discuss the Polish art deco style in context of two basic currents of interwar years: modernity and tradition. The problem of “Polishness” in art relates also to the concepts of interwar culture and visons of its progress or decadence. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Courtesans and Tantric Consorts: Sexualities in Buddhist Narrative, Iconograhy, and RitualRita M. GrossCourtesans and Tantric Consorts: Sexualities in Buddhist Narrative, Iconograhy, and Ritual. By Serinity Young. New York and London: Routledge, 2004. 256 pp.This book is a welcome addition to the growing literature on Buddhism and gender. It presents information and explores issues on this topic in new and innovative ways. It is also well researched and well (...) written. Part of Young's innovation is her use of Buddhist art and iconography, which she takes as seriously as textual sources are usually taken in Buddhist studies. Many of her most interesting suggestions and conclusions result from the seriousness with which she takes Buddhist art as resource for understanding Buddhism more accurately and completely. The other foci are clear from her subtitle: narrative and ritual. There is much less attention to the canonical and philosophical texts of Buddhism that are so often invoked in studies of Buddhism and gender.Studies of sexuality or gender often end up primarily discussing new information about women and new ways of understanding women's participation in or exclusion from religion. This study is no exception, which is not in any way to fault the book. Young's analyses center on ways that women have been both included in the Buddhist world and excluded from that world. Among the many varieties of Buddhism, Young primarily focuses on early Indian Buddhism and Tantric Buddhism, which have the most provocative teachings about gender and sexuality. In Young's analyses, we see how women participated in early Buddhism in ways that have not been recognized in most earlier scholarship and ways in which they are excluded from Tantric Buddhism and most later forms of Buddhism that have not always been acknowledged.Young's interpretations of the traditional life stories of the Buddha are extremely innovative and interesting. She argues that the future Buddha's rejection of women when he left his home and family must be balanced with his reintegration into the world of women before and during his enlightenment experience. She argues that this reintegration is evidenced especially in his acceptance of food from Sujata and in the help he received from the Earth Goddess during his trials with Mara. Young argues that many Buddhists throughout the ages have focused on episodes in his life that deal with rejection of women but have not fully taken in the implications of the stories in which women become important allies in the mission of the Buddha.The sources for early Indian Buddhism most invoked by Western scholars of Buddhism are textual. These textual sources present a very mixed picture of women's lot in early Indian Buddhism. On the one hand, the Therigatha and some stories from the life of the Buddha present a relatively optimistic picture of women's possibilities and their acceptance in the early Buddhist community. On the other hand, texts present a constant message of the importance of renunciation, and much of the recommended renunciation involves women. Texts written by and for monks frequently conflate women with sexuality and hold women responsible for wayward monks' sexual temptations. Against this widely known material, Young calls upon the evidence of early Indian Buddhist art to argue that the monks' anti-women texts [End Page 174] do not tell the whole story about women in early Indian Buddhism. The art work, which was much more important for tutoring largely illiterate Buddhist laypeople, consistently portrays women voluptuously and positively. This contrast between text and art is so great that recently, during a slide show in a class I taught on ancient Indian Buddhism, a student asked point blank how monks could possibly sanction the voluptuous portrayals of women common in early Indian Buddhist sanctuaries. I didn't remember Young's cogent analysis at first, but eventually did reply, using her analysis. The monastic establishment controlled the discourse that eventually became the texts of early Buddhism, but the lay donors controlled the visual representations that decorated the sites where Buddhism was preserved. The lay donors were more than happy to represent the fecundity and beauty of women, without whom there would be no future donors or... (shrink)

One of the important areas where the development of Islamic calligraphy can be observed is the tombstone inscriptions. As a reflection of the evolution of calligraphy in the 18th and 19th centuries of the Ottoman Empire, tombstone inscriptions also began to contain high artistic value. Especially the epitaphs of the tombstones belonging to the noble families, state officials and the people of the palace, combined with the fine workmanship, became works of art. These examples are important records for art history (...) as they mostly contain signatures and dates. Gravestones, which are important in many aspects, especially art, literature and history, are mostly open to the public and therefore to destruction. This situation makes it necessary and meaningful to evaluate historical gravestones in a multi-faceted way and to reveal their value. Therefore, serious research on gravestones is extremely valuable. This article is about the gravestones signed by calligraphers of the cemetery belonging to the Yahya Efendi Complex in Istanbul-Beşiktaş. The study includes the analysis of the data collected before the 2009-2013 restoration, considering the current situation of the cemetery. The cemetery is home to tombstones with high artistic value due to the importance of the buried people. There are over two thousand tombstones in the cemetery, which has an important place within the social complex. Some of these stones attract attention with their decorations and stone workmanship, as well as their inscriptions, which are rare examples of calligraphy art. Among these inscriptions, seventy-nine samples signed by calligraphers were found and these samples were examined within the scope of the article. It is possible to see the prominent artists of the last period among the calligraphers whose works are found in the cemetery. Yahya Efendi Cemetery is home to the signed epitaphs of twenty-seven different calligraphers, mainly Aziz Efendi, Sâmi Efendi, Şefik Efendi, Şevki Efendi, Hulusi Efendi, İzzet Efendi, Nuri Korman, Arif Efendi and Halim Özyazıcı. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Temple as Ship in Odyssey 6.10R. Drew GriffithLike the good eighth-century oecist that he was,1 the founder of Scheria, Phaeacian king Nausithous, son of Poseidon and grandfather of Nausicaa and Clytonaus, adorned his new city with temples of the gods (, Od. 6.10). This phrase, a hapax in Homer, occupies the same metrical seat immediately before the hephthemimeral caesura as the common ship formula (cf., 24.299, also a hapax). (...) It is plausible, therefore, that the bard who described the work of this ship-loving king used the formula as a formal model. The note argues that this bard thought that temples were ships in which gods traveled. Though this claim may seem surprising at first, cultic, architectural, and linguistic aspects of the epics all support it.Let us begin with cult. From Iliad 1 on, epiphanies are common (43-47, 194-95, 359-61).2 While some gods like Apollo work from afar, most need physical contact, for example, in helping suppliants, and human travel to Olympus like that of Otus and Ephialtes or Bellerophon is out of the question. Gods periodically irrupt into the natural world: Zeus comes down in lightning (e.g., Ar. Pax 42); drinkers take in Dionysus and grow giddy (e.g., Soph. Ant. 964); one sees Pan in any sudden skittishness of the flock (e.g., Eur. Med. 1172). The trick, then, is to channel the gods' [End Page 541] strength to make it propitious. Perhaps for this reason, the basic prayer is the cletic hymn (Men. Rhet. 334.25-336.4) that asks the god to come to the worshipper (carm. pop. 871.1 PMG; Sappho fr. 1.5, 25, 2.1 Lobel-Page, Voigt; Anacreon 357.7 PMG = fr. 14.7 Gentili; Pl. Leg. 712B; Apocalypse 22.20) and may describe a magic vehicle for the purpose (Sappho fr. 1.8-9 Lobel-Page, Voigt),3 like the self-moving aerial car, vimāna, of Sanskrit verse to which a boat is compared at Raghuvanśa 16.68.4 Those who pray often do so by the sea (Il. 1.34, 348-51; Od. 2.260-61; Pind. Ol. 1.71-73, 6.58), and ships may be the site of epiphanies (e.g., Hymn. Hom. Dion. 2, etc.; cf. Exekias ABV 146,21; Hymn Hom. Ap. 388-451).When the Trojan women dedicate a robe to Athena (Il. 6.269-78), we are not told that they use a ship to carry it, but in the similar offering at the Panathenaea, such was indeed the case.5 This ship may have been a comparatively late addition to the Athenian festival, but it has a good Bronze Age antecedent as proved by the Theran ship-fresco.6Turning now to architecture, we note that early temples were perhaps quite small, since as adyta (Il. 5.448, etc.) or abata, which worshippers did not enter,7 they have no functional lower size limit. Surviving Greek temples, all of archaic date or later, are imposing stone structures but bear traces of wooden prototypes, pillars having replaced roughhewn logs and decorative guttae treenails. Excavators have found terracotta model-shrines at Perachora and in the Argive Heraeum,8 some of which may have been portable like those of the Egyptian Amun, Mut, and Chonsu, the juggernaut of Puri in Orissa, or the Tent of Meeting, the earliest Israelite shrine (Exod. 33.7, etc.).Greek temples were astronomically oriented, typically facing sunrise on the foundation day (cf. Plut. Num. 14.4; Lucian De Domo 6), while snubbing humbler coordinates like roads or nearby buildings.9 In [End Page 542] this, they resemble Khufu's pyramid in Egypt, the so-called air shafts of which helped the pharaoh's soul sail to its eternal home in the constellation Orion, giving like an alidad the angles between the tomb itself, the pharaoh's "horizon of eternity," (3ḫ.t (nt), Papyrus Abbott 2.2; The Great Harris Papyrus 3.6),10 the pole-star, and his final destination.11 This fact suggests a link with navigation, for Greeks connected ships and stars, thanks to the navigator's art. With both magnetite and iron,12 but... (shrink)

During the 1944 Warsaw Uprising Witold Kieżun served in the Home Army’s “Harnaś” [Highlander] Special Unit. During an assault on the Polish Post he personally took 14 Germans prisoner, seizing large quantities of arms. He also singlehandedly damaged a German tank in the district Wola. A unit under his command captured the parish office of the Holy Cross Church and a heavy machinegun, and was the first to enter the city’s police headquarters, where it seized another heavy gun.During the (...) Uprising Witold Kieżun was decorated with the Cross of Valor, he also received the Virtuti Militari from the hands of the Home Army Supreme Commander. (shrink)

continent. 1.4 (2011): 242—252. Introduction The following two works were produced by visual artist Jonas Staal and writer Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei during a visit as artists in residence at The Bag Factory, Johannesburg, South Africa during the summer of 2010. Both works were produced in situ and comprised in both cases a public intervention conceived by Staal and a textual work conceived by Van Gerven Oei. It was their aim, in both cases, to produce complementary works that could (...) be read “through each other,” in which the movement of artistic construction would be imitated by textual deconstruction and vice versa. Both works deal with the way in which capital, apartheid, and monumentality are interwoven in South-African society. The Missing Link addresses a monument for democracy, erected on the premises of a private corporation running both an amusement park and the Apartheid Museum franchise. The textual intervention accompanying this public intervention investigates the limits of the inclusiveness of the anti-discrimination section in the South-African constitution, itself a monumental work of democracy. The Monument for the Distribution of Wealth deals with the history and eventual dissolution of a monumental square, commemorating the Soweto Uprising, in one of the poorest townships of Johannesburg. The history accompanying this public dismemberment of memory is equally fragmented, which is expressed by the many voices recounting uncertain and perhaps even irrelevant “facts” about the genius loci, the way in which the memorial space has actually entered into the memory of the inhabitants surrounding it. Next to their individual practices, Staal and Van Gerven Oei have worked together on a number of projects ever since 2007, including several art residencies. Their work involves an investigation of the different interfaces between art, politics, and public space in media ranging from theater and public interventions, to video installations and (co-authored) textual works. The Missing Link Missing Link (1) Missing Link (2) Missing Link (3) Intervention on the monument entitled The Seven Pillars of the Constitution , part of the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, South Africa. The Seven Pillars represent the constitutional values propagated in South Africa since the abolition of the apartheid regime. The monument and museum were built by the Gold Reef Resorts corporation, which is also responsible for the theme park and casino next to it. By placing the word “capitalism” on the wall surrounding the museum, the capitalist system and the constant social divisions that it implies are interpreted as sophistic continuations of apartheid politics. Through the capitalist system, apartheid is still operational within South African society. Whereas during the apartheid regime, the separation clearly ran along race divisions, in the current, “democratic” system, the same actual separation is sustained without it being an explicit element of the foundations of the country, i.e. the constitution. This intervention foregrounds the constant role of capitalism is both periods. At the same time the intervention acknowledges that contemporary Western artisthood is a mirror of the privileges that are offered by the capitalist system, and the type of artist that it produces. The intervention initiates a critical discourse concerning the capitalist system situated within the disaster of capitalism itself, in other words: through the desire to break with the presumption that art would be able to operate outside the capitalist system and to confirm that art—and the artist himself—is in fact modeled on this system. The public intervention by Staal was supplemented by a textual intervention by Van Gerven Oei: a proposition to alter the seventeenth amendment of the South African constitution. Even though the anti-discrimination legislation in South-Africa is one of the most stringent and inclusive in the world, one factor—wealth—remains outside its scope, thus continuing the schisms along racial lines produced during the apartheid regime: §9.3. The state may not unfairly discriminate directly or indirectly against anyone on one or more grounds, including race, gender, sex, pregnancy, marital status, ethnic or social origin, colour, sexual orientation, age, disability, religion, conscience, belief, culture, language, birth, and wealth. Monument for the Distribution of Wealth Intervention concerning the June 16 Memorial Acre in Central Western Jabavu, one of the poorest townships of Johannesburg. The monument comprises a park on which different are placed recalling an important protest the black population against the former apartheid regime. In 1976, from a school adjacent to the park, they started a massive protest against the introduction of Afrikaans in the school curriculum. The police reacted violently, and shot several hundreds of students. The construction of the June 16 Memorial Acre was started in 2005, and from the start was the paragon of corruption. Coordinated by local politicians, some family members of the protest leader from 1976 gained control of the realization of the monument, outside the regulation through external institutions. The available budget of 41 million rand (at that time well over 5 million euro) was largely embezzled. In the meantime, the monument has become fully dilapidated and defaced. The park has become overgrown with weeds and covered in a layer of dirt, and the local population is slowly plundering the square to use the material for the construction and decoration of their own houses. The Monument for the Distribution of Wealth develops the dynamics already existent around the June 16 Memorial Acre. Without obtaining official permission in advance, several local inhabitants were hired to break down the monument, sort the materials, and offer it to the neighborhood. Thus, the redistribution of wealth after the fall of the apartheid regime is finally taking place, albeit from the mere remains of the capital that was once invested in the community. The words “monument” and “for free” are spray-painted on the stacks of material, both in English and Zulu, as these are locally the most common languages. Van Gerven Oei supplemented Staal’s public intervention with an account of the history of the monument based on a series of interviews. The account clarifies how the different interests within the protest 1976 are reflected in the exceeding decay of the park, and how in the end those interests were represented by the June 16 Memorial Acre. Monument for the Distribution of Wealth 1: Removing stones Monument for the Distribution of Wealth 3: Pulling down statues Monument for the Distribution of Wealth 4: Offering the material Monument for the Distribution of Wealth 5: Offering the material Monument for the Distribution of Wealth 6 The next day A Fragmentary History of the Monument for the Distribution of Wealth, Formerly Known as the June 16 Memorial Acre in Central Western Jabavu, Soweto Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei The following text, based on interviews and online research aims to provide parts of a history of the park in front of Morris Isaacson High School in Central Western Jabavu, Soweto. The idea for the transformation of the park into a memorial site has its source in the events of June 16, 1976: the start of the the student uprising in Soweto. The development of the park was started in the early 1980s, and the actual transformation into a memorial site, the June 16 Memorial Acre, was initiated in 2005. Over the last few years, several monumental additions have been made to the park: A marble monument with three pillars was revealed on June 16, 2006. A sculpture of a book and several billboards on June 16, 2008. A sculpture of student leader Tsietsi Mashinini on June 16, 2010. The park was transformed into the Monument for the Distribution of Wealth on August 3, 2010. According to the entry “Youth Struggle” on the website South African History Online, the Bantu Education Act was introduced in 1953 . In 1954 , Dr Verwoerd, Minister of Native Affairs, stated: “What is the use of teaching the Bantu child mathematics when it cannot use it in practice? That is quite absurd.” According to the entry “Soweto uprising” on Wikipedia, the Afrikaans Medium Decree was issued in 1974 , forcing all black schools to use Afrikaans and English in a 50-50 mix as languages of instruction. The Regional Director of Bantu Education (Northern Transvaal Region), J.G. Erasmus, told Circuit Inspectors and Principals of Schools that from January 1, 1975 , Afrikaans had to be used for mathematics, arithmetic, and social studies from standard five (7th grade). English would be the medium for general science and practical subjects. Indigenous languages would be used for religion instruction, music, and physical culture. According the entry “Soweto uprising” on Wikipedia, on April 30, 1976 , students from the Orlando West Junior School in Soweto went on strike, refusing to go to school. Their example was followed by other schools in Soweto. A student from Morris Isaacson High School, Toboho “Tsietsi” Mashinini, proposed a meeting on June 13, 1976 to discuss further action. According to Weizmann Hamilton’s article “The Soweto Uprising 1976,” which appeared in the September 1986 edition of Inqaba Ya Basebenzi (Fortress of the Revolution), on June 13, 1976 , the South African Students’ Movement called a meeting at the Donaldson Community Center in Orlando. 300-400 Students representing 55 schools decided to hold a mass demonstration on June 16. According to Brian Mokhele, member of the Joint Community Safety Forum, Dr Edelstein was the first victim of the Soweto uprising and killed the day before the march on June 15, 1976 . Edelstein was an administrator at the pass office in Jabavu and gave golf courses to the local community. Edelstein was put in a garbage bin and pierced by pickaxes. The garbage bin was left at the very spot of the murder for many years. A few years ago, a child was beheaded at the same spot, and the basketball court next to it has been abandoned since. According to Marcus Neustetter, founder of the Trinity Session, this story is untrue. According the entry “Soweto uprising” on Wikipedia, on June 16 , Tsietsi Mashinini led students from Morris Isaacson High School to join up with others who walked from Naledi High School. A crowd of between 3,000 and 10,000 eventually ended up near Orlando High School. According to Raymond Marlowe, a local photographer, Tsietsi Mashinini was heading the march. According to the entry “Hector Pieterson” on Wikipedia, Dr Edelstein died on June 16, 1976 , stoned to death by mob and left with a sign around his neck proclaiming “Beware Afrikaaners.” The first child to die that day was called Hastings Ndlovu. According to Pat Motsiri, Orlando West is claiming struggle heritage through the Hector Pieterson Museum, while Hector Pieterson was from Jabavu. According to Pat Motsiri, his generation effectively struggled between 1980 and 1991, forcing the release of Nelson Mandela and negotiations with the apartheid regime while the 1976-generation was safely in exile. Nevertheless, this has not been recognized in any monument. After the abolition of apartheid, the generation from 1976 returned from exile, occupied important government and ANC positions, creating an abundance of 1976 memorials and refusing to acknowledge that this was only possible because of the younger generation’s struggle. He calls this a generational conflict. According to Archibald Dlamini, the park officer responsible for the Memorial Acre, he started working for the municipality in 1978. In 1981/82 , Isaac Makhele from Pimville, who used to work in the cemetery business, was the first developer of the park. It used to be just a normal park until City Parks decided to develop the Memorial Acre in 2006. In 2007 the work was stopped by the community. According to Brian Mokhele, he left the country in 1989 after he participated in the riots of 1986. But when he returned in 1999 he found that nothing had changed. He says that they were promised to be protected by the Constitution, but that reality is different. The police uses fear to suppress them so that they don’t come out to talk openly. He has been arrested twice, both times harassed and tortured by the police, but in the end always released without indictment. He says that this is their way to threaten communities to back off from politics. According to Moses, who is sitting outside rolling a joint, Brian knows everything. He tells Brian to tell me everything he knows. According to Brian Mokhele, Tsietsi Mashinini was possibly murdered in 1990 during his exile in New York. Two weeks before he was supposed to return to South Africa, his papers in order, he was found dead under mysterious circumstances. His coffin was sealed when he was buried. According to Pat Motsiri, he came up with the idea for the Memorial Acre in 2003 . He submitted the documents for the proposal to the council, which sidelined him as soon as the budget came out in 2005 . According to Brian Mokhele, there was on estimation R 41,000,000 spent to redesign the park and turn it into the Memorial Acre. The millions were divided by Amos Masondo, the mayor of Soweto, the local councilor Bongani D. Zondi, and the director of the city of Johannesburg, Pat Lephunya. They were dividing the money between several contractors: Tsietsi Mashinini’s brothers were involved in the development of the park, they got the tender to do the green areas, the landscaping. Construction was done by other companies, some did the paving, the toilets, etc. EMBA, a private company appointed by the municipality was in control of the money flow, but the money was quickly gone. According to Raymond Marlowe, the contractor bought a BMW with the money. According to Archibald Dlamini, the Mashinini brothers got the tender, so the space would look more like the other places around in Soweto. It was agreed that after they were done, they would return the property to the municipality. They did whatever they could do. According to Mafaisa, a member of the Jabavu business community, he was one of the contractors for the landscaping and the pavement under Mpho Mashinini, one of the brothers. He says that I should contact Mavi for information on Mpho. According to Poi Stuurman, a local youth worker, Mafaisa is one of the guys who ran away with the money. According to Mavi, Mpho Mashinini was never a contractor. The contracts were organized by Sbu Butelezi, the former head of the Gauteng Department for Public Works. The June 16 Foundation and the Mashinini brothers will be the beneficiaries of the park when it is finished. According to Brian Mokhele, City Parks did not accept the Memorial Acre because it was not finished. The rest of the year, the unfinished park is not maintained, as should have happened. This was done deliberately so that in the end they can just clean the whole thing up and have a reason to redo the whole park. According to Brian Mokhele, the Mashinini brothers now work for the government. People that manipulate for money purposes always come from the government’s side. Because the park was left unfinished, the people from the neighborhood are taking away the stones to decorate their own homes with. According to Archibald Dlamini, because City Parks doesn’t accept responsibility of the park, he officially has nothing the guard, except for his cottage, which is municipal property. The thieves come at night and destroy the park, but he cannot do anything because he is sleeping. According to the website of the Thanda Foundation on June 16, 2006 a bronze statue of Hector Pieterson, the first child to die in the 1976 protests, made by Kobus Hattingh and Jacob Maponyane was unveiled in the Maponya Mall in Soweto. The statue is sculpted after the famous image shot by Sam Nzima of Mbuyisa Makhubo carrying the dead body of the boy. The sculpture was sponsored by the Thanda Foundation, founded by the Swedish entrepreneur Dan Olofsson and South-African entrepreneur Matthews Phosa. According to the official website of the City of Johannesburg, the Memorial Acre and Artwork were unveiled in 2006. According to a blog post on sowetouprisings.com, the Memorial Acre was still under development on July 24, 2006. According to Archibald Dlamini, City Parks only cleans up the park once a year just before the June 16 celebrations. Everybody is waiting for the Mashinini brothers to finish their job. The last time he talked with them was in 2007 . According to a sign on the school grounds of the Morris Isaacson High School, the June 16 Trail will be finished in 2008 . According to a blog post on sowetouprisings.com, the Memorial Acre contains another monument erected in Tsietsi’s honor. The monument was created as part of the Sunday Times Heritage Public Art program. Its physical form resembles a giant book which symbolizes the crisis in education experienced in 1976. On the face of the book is the map of the route taken by the students from Morris Isaacson High School in Central Western Jabavu to Phefeni Junior Secondary in Orlando West (currently the site of the Hector Pieterson Museum), while the back cover of the ‘book’ is inscribed with a tribute to Tsietsi Mashinini. The monument was revealed on June 16, 2008 . According to Marcus Neustetter, the billboards on the Memorial Acre were part of a school project realized in 2008. Following several workshops, the students from different high schools along the June 16 Trail were invited to work with artists on the billboards, while the neighborhood community was invited to watch the process during the festivities on June 15 and 16, 2008 . The billboards were supposed to be removed because of construction works on the Memorial Acre, which never ended up happening. According to Brian Mokhele, the former toilet facilities were converted into a house for the park officer. This park officer has been working for city parks for more than 12-15 years, but does nothing here, because the park, including the new toilet buildings, is not finished. The government is now moving around looking for people to take this job because they stopped it. They confronted everybody who was going in and chased them away. According to John, in 2009 , some girls, around 16 or 17 years old, were raped by four men who had been drinking in a local shebeen. When the bar quit they said that they would go home by car, but instead raped the girls on the Memorial Acre nearby. This happened in the unfinished toilets, because the doors couldn’t be closed. According to Brian Mokhele, there used to be some fences around the park because of the construction work that was eventually stopped, but these were also stolen. According to Archibald Dlamini, people from the neighborhood started about two and a half years ago, and the last piece was stolen near the end of 2009 . Sometimes he would catch someone with a roll of fence, and then use it for his own cottage. According to the official website of the City of Johannesburg, a statue of Tsietsi Mashinini by Johannes Pokhela was revealed on June 16, 2010 , “Youth Day.” According to Shirley Makutoane, deputy principal of Isaac Morrison High School, the statue of Tsietsi Mashinini, funded by the June 16 Foundation, has temporarily been placed within the school perimeter. The statue will be moved to the Memorial Acre when it will be finished, in 2011 . According to Brian Mokhele, beside the June 16 Foundation, there is also a June 16 Memorial Acre Foundation. Both foundations are quarreling about the money involved in the Memorial Acre project. Nobody knows who’s involved in them. According to Marcus Neustetter, the June 16 Foundation consists of people that were part of 1976 protest movement, local government officials, representatives of the Hector Pieterson Museum, and the council. According to students from the Isaac Morrison High School, the statue of Tsietsi Mashinini is on the school ground because on the Memorial Acre it would be vandalized by youths from White City, an adjacent neighborhood. Accorcing to Brian Mokhele, the statue of Tsietsi should eventually be mounted on the Memorial Acre. It is wrong that the statue is in the school at the moment, because it is not a public school. He wants the statues to depict the massiveness of the force that was coming into Soweto after the protests. According to Brian Mokhele, City Parks, City of Jo’burg, City Lights, and SAPS are making some sort of plan to take the plan back. They want to remove the trees from the Memorial Acre, and redesign the Memorial Acre into a relaxing park, without political content. They want to depoliticize the square. In doing so,they will have their own employment and not use local workforces. According to Brian Mokhele, the community wants to remove the monuments, amphitheater, and sculptures from the Memorial Acre because they do not resemble anything. The sculptures should be depicting the truth of what happened, because the Memorial Acre is a political heritage site. He wants to involve the people that actually participated in the struggle to make the monument so that everyone can enjoy it and get a better understanding of the struggle heritage. Therefore, he proposes collective ideology in which everyone has a say. This would prevent future vandalization of the monument. According to Pat Motsiri, the sculptures must depict the event around June 16, 1976. Like the story of Dr Edelstein, who was pierced by pickaxes, forced into a garbage bin and burned alive. According to Jonas Staal, the Memorial Acre should be destroyed, its elements stacked on pallets, thus forming the Monument for the Distribution of Wealth . According to Mafaisa, his men can do the work quickly. He has about twenty men working under him. (shrink)

The launch of this important book appropriately takes place near Collingwood's childhood home in the Lake District-- a book decorated by illustrations from the work of his own father who taught him so much. It is a pleasure that his daughter Teresa is here, whose own memoir 'Early Influ-ences' helped in our thinking about her father. I join the edi-tors whose skill deserves the highest praise, in expressing gratitude both for Teresa's encouragement throughout the preparation of this book and (...) for her permission to publish her father's previously unpublished papers. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Written on the Body, Written by the SensesJennifer L. Hansen"Explore me," you said and I collected my ropes, flasks and maps, expecting to be back home soon. I dropped into the mass of you and I cannot find the way out. Sometimes I think I'm free, coughed up like Jonah from the whale, but then I turn a corner and recognize myself again. Myself in your skin, myself (...) lodged in your bones, myself floating in the cavities that decorate every surgeon's wall. That is how I know you. You are what I know.1Ever since Plato wished to banish the poets from the republic (Republic 607b2),2 philosophy has stood in a vexed relationship to literature. There seem to be at least three reasons for philosophy's traditional contempt for literature as a reliable means to truth: (a) because literature engages the passions of a reader, it may cloud the reader's ability to deliberate calmly and rationally about any given account of how things really are; (b) literature most commonly deals with the particular and concrete and therefore cannot claim to a more general or universal truth, and; (c) literature is too open-ended and ambiguous in its meaning, which, again, obstructs the reader's view of how things really are. Though the writer is imitating the world, is holding up a mirror to it—a speculum mundi—literature's images are mere appearances.Philosophy, on the contrary, aims for a kind of "transcendental vision." Either philosophy looks beyond the particular appearances of things in the world to find the one structure which unites all instances of the thing, or philosophy claims that the structure of each object is supplied by consciousness, which then delimits and bounds each object, and places it in space and time so that the scientist can better dissect, measure, and catalogue it. That is, either philosophers, in the [End Page 365] tradition of Parmenides, aim to find the one in the many—as Socrates explains in the Republic "we are accustomed to assuming one Form in each case for the many particulars" (596a4–5)—or as in Kant's Copernican revolutionary thinking, consciousness renders the object of experience a knowable thing.While this transcendental vision proves quite useful for the scientist who deals with the empirical, it proves less useful where the task would be to conceptualize what is not a possible object of experience. While the scientist can indeed dissect and probe the body to understand how it functions, the scientist is less likely to discover what it means for a body to love, or to be free. In the "The Antinomy of Pure Reason" in the first Critique, Kant, in fact, left us with a choice about what philosophy's true object should be: either we restrict philosophy to the empirical world and its logic, or we pursue metaphysical questions about God or Freedom which cannot be grasped.3 On pain of contradiction, we cannot have both. In chapter three of the Transcendental Doctrine Judgment, "The Ground of the Distinction of all Objects in General into Phenomena and Noumena," Kant uses a wonderful metaphor to illustrate the dangers of Pure Reason venturing into metaphysical questions, and thereby employing the categories beyond the empirical: "This domain is an island, enclosed by nature itself with unalterable limits. It is the land of truth—enchanting name!—surrounded by a wide and stormy ocean, the native home of illusion, where many a fog bank and many a swiftly melting iceberg give the deceptive appearance of farther shores, deluding the adventurous seafarer ever anew with empty hopes, and engaging him in enterprises which he can never abandon and yet is unable to carry to completion" (CR, 257). If we allow ourselves to be allured by the deceptive appearance of farther shores, then we are not engaged in philosophy, but speculation or mysticism. We cannot provide an account for such knowledge in universal terms, in arguments, in logic. And yet, as Kant himself very well knew, these are questions that we are, as humans, compelled to raise. At the outset of the Transcendental Dialectic, Kant makes clear that reason will ineluctably be led... (shrink)

Why do caravans matter? Australians, like others, holiday in them, travel in them, cook, eat, drink, play, sleep and have sex in them. They also live in them, often involuntarily. Caravans have a longer history than this, however caravan life has almost no presence in existing historical or cultural sociology scholarship. Our immediate interest is in caravans in Australia, modernity and mobility. Some broader interest is apparent. Theoretical arguments about mobility on a global scale have been developed by Bauman and (...) Urry. Sociologists like Jasper have connected mobility, masculinity and automobility in Restless Nation. The sociologist and writer Marina Lewycka has used caravans as the locus of everyday life study in her novel Two Caravans. In this paper we background some of these broader issues, and offer a case study of postwar caravan manufacturing. This paper anticipates a larger possible research project in these fields. We anticipate this project raising themes like freedom, mobility, escape, utopia; images of domesticity on wheels, décor and design, materials, technology, DIY production and Fordism; caravan parks as homes and as itinerant and long-term accommodation. These themes and images are also necessarily interwoven with class, gender, sex and age. We are interested in the possibilities of using the caravan as a carrier for making sense of postwar Australia. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reply to My CommentatorsDavid CarrierI am immensely thankful to Rika Burnham and Elliott Kai-Kee, Enrique Martínez Celaya, Klaus Ottmann, and Sean Ulmer for their comments on my book. And to Daniel A. Siedell for organizing this mini-symposium, which really is an author's dream. By gently pressing me to think about important issues, these sympathetic commentators have advanced dialogue.When writing Museum Skepticism I became very aware that there are two (...) kinds of literature that discuss museums. There are memoirs of curators or other museum employees, and there are the commentaries by academics, which usually look at museums from the outside. My ambition was to look at this institution in a way that would both be sympathetic to the practical concerns and embody a theoretical point of view. One otherwise sympathetic reviewer complained that I was only looking at the museum from the outside.1 That certainly is correct, but for obvious reasons people who work in museums are unusually unwilling to describe their inner workings. To have a good theory of the museum, you need to be practical. Often, for example, critics complain about the proliferation of shops and restaurants, urge that admission be free, or say that blockbuster shows are destructive and overcrowded. However one judges such moralizing, the museum director who needs to balance the budget can hardly be guided by such reasoning. One can be critical, as I am, about the power of the super-rich in museum life. But in what other way could funding be found? The history of debates about the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) points to obvious ways in which, in America at least, reliance on public funding poses problems. My goal, then, was to develop a realistic analysis.Sean Ulmer correctly notes that to understand the art in museums, we must consider its prior history. Chinese paintings, Islamic decorations, Maori sculpture, and premodern European art were not made to be displayed in public galleries. And so there are legitimate questions about how to set it alongside modernist art, whose natural home is the art museum. Allowing this much, I am not sure why he thinks it impossible to describe museums in a single book. We need to understand how artifacts with such varied origins can be coherently displayed in one building. Here, then, we get to Ulmer's second concern—museum displays. Recently museums have experimented with thematic displays. The Museum of Modern Art in New York did that before its recent reconstruction; the Tate Modern has such a system; and during summer 2006 the Whitney tried such a plan. I understand the need of museums to experiment, to find new ways to attract visitors to the permanent collection. Still, a straight chronological display has the obvious advantage of presenting that history of art in which, for example, Impressionism leads to Cubism, and then on to Abstract Expressionism. The obvious danger of thematic displays is that they bewilder the larger public. [End Page 22]When I said that museums are top-down institutions, I was thinking of the grander public museums where the function of the trustees is to raise money, either by giving themselves or by networking. These people who provide funding no doubt have their own agendas, but they, in turn, respond to larger economic and political concerns. I would be astonished if the Metropolitan Museum of Art asked Arthur Danto or Leo Steinberg to be a trustee; or, to look closer at hand, if the Carnegie Museum of Art or the Cleveland Museum of Art asked me to play that role. Since we are mere professors, what practical help could we provide? I expect that at smaller museums the situation is different. But here, again, it is important to be realistic. Cleveland's art historians have not had any influence on the rebuilding plan for the Cleveland Museum of Art. Of course I would be flattered if the new director asked for my opinion, but to be honest, I am not sure that I could tell him anything useful. When Ulmer discusses the comparative role of permanent collections and temporary exhibitions, he touches on a very important point. Like him, I... (shrink)

Charles Demuth is widely recognized as one of the most significant American modernists. His precisionist cityscapes, exquisite flowers, and free-wheeling watercolors of vaudeville performers, homosexual bathhouses, and cabaret scenes hang in many of the country's most prestigious collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Columbus Museum of Art, the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, the Art Institute of Chicago, and in Demuth's Lancaster, Pennsylvania, family residence, now home of the Demuth Foundation. At (...) a time when many American artists remained tied to Europe, Demuth "Americanized" European modernism. This collection of 155 of his letters offers valuable views of the arts and letters colonies in Provincetown, New York, and Paris. Besides offering information on Demuth's own works, the letters also shed light on the output of his contemporaries, as well as references to their trips, liaisons, and idiosyncrasies. Demuth numbered among his correspondents some of the most famous artists and writers of his time, inluding Georgia O'Keeffe, Eugene O'Neill, John Reed, Gertrude Stein, Alfred Stieglitz, Carl Van Vechten, and William Carlos Williams. In his travels in the United States and abroad, he encountered many other talented contemporaries: Peggy Bacon, Muriel Draper, Marcel Duchamp, the Stettheimer sisters, artists and writers, patrons, and gallery owners. Whether he is offering to pick up a copy of Joyce'sUlyssesfor Eugene O'Neill or trying to convince Georgia O'Keeffe to decorate his music room, Demuth is always in the thick of art and literary life. Flamboyant in attire but descreet in his homosexuality, Demuth also reveals in his letters the life of a talented homosexual in the teens and twenties. With his best friends Robert Locher and Marsden Hartley, he circulated through the art colonies of Greenwich Village, Provincetown, and Paris, meeting everyone. The book also contains reprints of some short appraisals of Demuth and his work that were published during his lifetime, long out of print, including pieces by A. E. Gallatin, Angela E. Hagen, Marsden Hartley, Helen Henderson, Henry McBride, Carl Van Vechten, Rita Wells, and Willard Huntington Wright. Author note:Bruce Kellneris Emeritus Professor of English, Millersville University, and a member of the Demuth Foundation Board of Directors. He is the author or editor of 10 other books. (shrink)

What is kitsch? The varieties of phenomena which can fall under the name are bewildering. Here, I focus on what has been called “traditional kitsch,” and argue that it often turns on the emotional effect specifically captured by Edmund Burke’s concept of “beauty” from his 1757 'A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful.' Burkean beauty also serves to distinguish “traditional kitsch” from other phenomena also often called “kitsch”—namely, entertainment. Although I argue that Burkean beauty in domestic decoration allows for (...) us to see “traditional kitsch” as resting on natural and even healthy impulses, I also argue that an all-too-common political function of traditional kitsch directs it to dangerous ends. (shrink)

Progress cannot be reversed; what it has killed, we cannot restore to life. Professionalism, like pollution, is here to stay. However, the fact that professionalism and pollution are facts does not force us to welcome and implement them. Indeed, there are those who would accelerate "progress," their effective definition of which is what is going to happen willwe nillwe. I wonder why progressive thinkers do not, since it is inevitable we shall all die one day, advocate present universal suicide. Preferring (...) to cling to the remains of life rather than renounce it, preferring to strive for light so long as I can see a glimmer, I first recall the qualities ideal in one who is to search and trace the development of science.1 The workshop of the scholar in the history of science is the periods in which his authors lived. He should know those periods' ways of life and belief and education, both the common and the eccentric; their political histories; their variety in aspects; their social and economic structures; their architectures, literatures, and arts. He should feel at home in the houses of those times, sit easily in their chairs, both figurative and wooden, and discern what was then mostly admired or rejected in painting and sculpture and decoration. He should have read not only the books that carried the intellectual products of his period but also those that were then the fare of young minds as they were taught, such books having been commonly of an earlier time. The student who does not command, as a minimum, the main episodes of Holy Scripture, classic mythology, and the corpus of golden Latin is glaucomatose in the modes of thought of Western men educated before 1900. · 1. The text printed here is based on an address delivered at the banquet of the History of Science Society and the Society for the History of Technology, Washington, D.C., December 29, 1972. So as to retain definiteness and immediacy, I have not blurred the original focus upon the history of science and technology, trusting that any reader who can understand me at all will be able to turn the same lens upon his own field of learning or pseudolearning. Clifford Ambrose Truesdell, III, Professor of Rational Mechanics at John Hopkins University, is the author of, among others, Rational Thermodynamics, Six Lectures on Modern Natural Philosophy, and Essays in the History of Mechanics. He has edited or coedited six volumes of the Encyclopedia of Physics; he has founded three international journals of scientific and historical research and continues to edit two of them. Among his many honors, Professor Truesdell is a Foreign Member of seven European National Academies of Science. (shrink)

In recent years, a number of authors have started studying Aristotelian diagrams containing metalogical notions, such as tautology, contradiction, satisfiability, contingency, strong and weak interpretations of contrariety, etc. The present paper is a contribution to this line of research, and its main aims are both to extend and to deepen our understanding of metalogical diagrams. As for extensions, we not only study several metalogical decorations of larger and less widely known Aristotelian diagrams, but also consider metalogical decorations of another type (...) of logical diagrams, viz. duality diagrams. At a more fundamental level, we present a unifying perspective which sheds new light on the connections between new and existing metalogical diagrams, as well as between object- and metalogical diagrams. Overall, the paper studies two types of logical diagrams and four kinds of metalogical decorations. (shrink)

Fragments of painted plaster found in the destruction layer of three first floor rooms in the House of Seals and of one first floor room of the House of the Sword had broken from the ceiling. They allow the restoration of the schema in the room of the House of the Sword and of two of the rooms in the House of Seals, the latter in colour. Composed of bands surrounding a quadrangular field, these décorations, evoking carpets stretched on the (...) ceiling, are richer (costly pigments, gold leaf) and more complex (some fifteen motifs) than those in tombs of the same period, which adopted the same « carpet » composition and which borrowed from the same repertoire, often confirmed by the textiles. Since we know of no other ceiling decoration in habitation rooms, it is unwise to contrast the exuberance of these ceilings with the tomb ceilings. The room that could not be restored had moreover a much more perfunctory decoration. (shrink)

It may be seen, then, that if one was prepared to accept the existence of insulating sheaths on the nerves, all the arguments raised against the proposed identification of the nervous and electrical fluids, except one, could be answered satisfactorily. The single exception involved the question of how an electrical disturbance in the brain could be confined to a single nerve, and, as was indicated earlier, it was scarcely fair to hold this sort of objection against the electrical theory alone. (...) In that case, there remained no convincing argument to show why one should not accept the identification of the two fluids. On the other hand, of course, it remained an open question as to whether there was any convincing argument to show why one should accept the identification either. Galvani thought that his experiments provided just such an argument. (shrink)

The Decoration on the Cult Chapel Walls of the Old Kingdom Tombs at Giza: A New Approach to Their Interaction. By Leo Roeten. Culture & History of the Ancient Near East, vol. 70. Leiden: Brill, 2014. Pp. lix + 436, illus. $218.

Physics first became established in Australia and Japan at the same period, during the final quarter of the nineteenth and the first years of the twentieth century. A comparison of the processes by which this happened in these two developing countries on the Pacific rim shows that, despite the great cultural differences that existed, and that might have been expected to have been a source of major differences in national receptiveness to the new science, there were in fact many parallels (...) between the patterns of development in the two cases. Identifying these enables us to draw attention to a number of significant features of the physics discipline more generally at this period. Such differences as emerge in the early history of physics in the two countries seem to have arisen more from the different political situations that prevailed than from anything else; in particular they reflect the fact that Australia was a part of the British Empire while Japan was an independent political power. (shrink)

Discussions on the nature of reality between Albert Einstein and Rabindranath Tagore, Bengali poet, philosopher and Nobel laureate, have provoked interest among both physicists and philosophers since their first publication in 1930/31. This article points out their relevance to past and present debates about the meaning of quantum mechanics.

In 1914, the physics discipline had reached a very similar stage of development in Australia and Japan. A generation later the paths of development had considerably diverged. A systematic comparison of the evolution of physics in the two countries during these years identifies factors—political, economic and cultural—that led to this divergence, but it also uncovers a number of underlying parallels.

We argue that the inference of CP violation in experiments involving the K0-K0 system in weak interactions of particle physics is facilitated by the assumption of particle trajectories for the decaying particles and the decay products. A consistent explanation in terms of such trajectories is naturally incorporated within the Bohmian interpretation of quantum mechanics.

In this article we attempt to bring out some significant general aspects of what we call collapse-induced quantum nonlocal effects resulting from the use of the hypothesis of wave function collapse.