This chapter contains sections titled: Nice Tattoo What is Art? Art World Theory: Art is Participation in the Art World Formalism: Art is the Result of Formal Properties Working Together Expressionism: Art Elicits an Emotional Response from the Viewer What Do These Theories Accomplish for Tattoos? Tattoos as Performance Art The Human Canvas Tattoos, Mortality, and Deep Meaning.

If you are interested in art, you engage in artistic evaluation, thinking of one work as being better than another; one artist as being better than another; some works and some artists as being great, mediocre, or poor; and, perhaps, thinking of some forms or genres of art as being superior to others in that works within the favored form or genre have achieved or can aspire to a higher artistic value than is possible for those less (...) favored. The greatest philosophical challenge to this practice—a challenge that, if successful, would have wide-ranging consequences outside philosophy, in particular in undermining the status of the practice of art criticism—would maintain that it is, all of it, taken at face value.. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Artist as Professional in JapanKazuyo Nakamura and Akio OkazakiThe Artist as Professional in Japan, edited by Melinda Takeuchi. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004, 262pp., $45.00 cloth.With the increase of cross-cultural academic exchange in our time, more accurate information on art from other cultures has become more easily available, and curriculum development of art education directed toward multiculturalism has been brought to realization. There is need emerging (...) among art educators for academic resources for teaching cross-cultural subject matters, and The Artist as Professional in Japan provides historical information helpful in gaining a critical understanding of the nature of Japanese art discourse. The volume is edited from a fresh sociocultural perspective by Melinda Takeuchi, professor of Japanese art at Stanford University.Takeuchi, noticing that few scholarly books on the profession of Japanese artists are available to students of art history in the United States, set about the volume in concerted efforts with her colleagues. The volume consists of individual case studies on different Japanese artists; they are well-known sculptors, painters, potters, printmakers, and architects and are recognized in Japan as representative in different eras from the seventh to the twentieth century. Running through the individual studies, there is a concern for political forces that shaped art discourse and the identity of the Japanese artist. The following questions are asked: What degree of control did the artists exercise over their métier? What were some of the dynamics operating in the production, consummation, and evaluation of art and artist? How was the image of the artist formed during various periods? Working with these questions, seven case studies address issues of canon formation of art by looking into the terrain of the meaning of a critical word, Shoku-nin; it literally means people (nin) with an occupation (shoku) and denotes the collective artisan class.Different art historians and art theorists take a unique approach for developing each case study in the volume. Donald F. McCallum's study in chapter 2 is on the Buddhist Icons of the Shaka Triad during the Asuka Period (ca.590-ca.650), and it is asked what were the political forces working on the production of the [End Page 118] icons. In contrary to orthodox view, it is argued that the icons were produced not by an individual sculptor named Tori-busshi but by the guilds of which the supervisor was Tori. Also, it is argued that the icons were produced with the patronage of soga clan, the dominant political force of the time, not by the imperial family, including Shotoku Taishi.Karen L. Brock in chapter 3 examines the case of E'nichibo Jonin (active ca.1211-ca.1243), the painter of Saint Myoe. The case shows that the ateliers of temples, such as Kozanji in Kyoto, played a central role in producing and distributing sacred images. This study makes clear that few individual painters, such as those named ebusshi, participated in the formation of the canon of Japanese painting, but collective political forces, such as Kozanji ateliers, exercised power in bringing out sacred objects.In chapter 4 Melinda Takeuchi takes up the case of Tosa Mitsunobu (1434-ca.1523), an artisan painter active in Kyoto court circles. It shows a historical fact particular to Japanese art discourse—that later artists manipulated the names of earlier ones for professional or cultural merits. Taking notice of the fact that Mitsunobu's name late became synonymous with a production unit that shares secret techniques of products, Takeuchi concludes, "In the end, the name of an artist transcends time, space, materiality, and ultimately discourse itself" (101).The study of Louise Allison Cort in chapter 5 is on the case of Morita Kyuemon in the seventeenth century, a warrior trained as a potter and running the Odo pottery in the Tosa domain. By exploring the motivations of the Tosa domain in trying to transform local products into refined and stylish pottery worthy of formal presentation to other domain rulers (daimyo), to government officials, and to the shogun in Edo, this chapter demonstrates how both the potter and the ruler actively sought to join the aesthetic mainstream of their own day.In... (shrink)

continent. 1.3 (2011): 149-155. The world is teeming. Anything can happen. John Cage, “Silence” 1 Autonomy means that although something is part of something else, or related to it in some way, it has its own “law” or “tendency” (Greek, nomos ). In their book on life sciences, Medawar and Medawar state, “Organs and tissues…are composed of cells which…have a high measure of autonomy.”2 Autonomy also has ethical and political valences. De Grazia writes, “In Kant's enormously influential moral philosophy, autonomy (...) , or freedom from the causal determinism of nature, became prominent in justifying the human use of animals.”3 One of the oldest uses of autonomy in English is a description of the French civil war from the late sixteenth century: “Others of the…rebellion entred in counsell, whether they ought to admit the King vpon reasonable conditions, specially hauing their autonomy.”4 Life, and in particular human life, and in particular human politics, is well served by the usages of autonomy . What about the rest of reality, however? Should it be thought of, if it's even considered real and mind-independent, as pure stuff for the manipulation or decorative tastes of truly autonomous beings? We tend to think of things such as paperweights and iPhones as mere tools of human design and human use. To use them is to cause them to exist as fully and properly as they can. But according to Martin Heidegger, when a tool such as a paperweight is used, it disappears, or withdraws ( Entzug ). We are preoccupied with copying the page that the paperweight is holding down. We are concerned with an essay deadline, and the paperweight simply disappears into this general project. If the paperweight slips, or if the iPhone freezes, we might notice it. All of a sudden it becomes vorhanden (present-at-hand) rather than zuhanden (ready-to-hand).5 Yet Heidegger is unable to draw a meaningful distinction between what happens to a paperweight when it slips from the book I'm copying from and what happens to the paperweight when it presses on the still resilient pages of the thick paperback itself. Further still and related to this point, even when I am using the paperweight as part of some general task, I am not using the entirety of the paperweight as such. My project itself selects a thin slice of paperweight-being for the purposes of holding down a book. Even when it is zuhanden the paperweight is withdrawn. Graham Harman is the architect of this way of thinking.6 Harman discovered a gigantic coral reef of withdrawn entities beneath the Heideggerian submarine of Da-sein, which itself is operating at an ontological depth way below the choppy surface of philosophy, beset by the winds of epistemology, and infested with the sharks of materialism, idealism, empiricism and most of the other isms that have defined what is and what isn't for the last several hundred years. At a moment when the term ontology was left alone like a piece of well chewed old chewing gum that no one wants to have anything to do with, object-oriented ontology (OOO) has put it back on the table. The coral reef isn't going anywhere and once you have discovered it, you can't un-discover it. And it seems to be teeming with strange facts. The first fact is that the entities in the reef—we call them “objects” somewhat provocatively—constitute all there is: from doughnuts to dogfish to the Dog Star to Dobermans to Snoop Dogg. People, plastic clothes pegs, piranhas and particles are all objects. And they are all pretty much the same, at this depth. There is not much of a distinction between life and non-life (as there isn't in contemporary life science). And there is not much of a distinction between intelligence and non-intelligence (as there is in contemporary artificial intelligence theory). A lot of these distinctions are made by humans, for humans (anthropocentrism). And the concept autonomy has come into play in policing such distinctions. In this essay I shall to try to liberate autonomy for the sake of nonhumans. I shall do so by parsing carefully the title, which is taken from Hakim Bey's work The Temporary Autonomous Zone .8 First we shall explore the term autonomous . Then we shall explore what the full meaning of zone is. Finally, we shall investigate what temporary means. Each of these terms is of great value. An object withdraws from access. This means that its very own parts can't access it. Since an object's parts can't fully express the object, the object is not reducible to its parts. OOO is anti-reductionist. But OOO is also anti-holist. An object can't be reduced to its “whole” either, “reduced upwards” as it were. The whole is not greater than the sum of its parts. So we have a strange irreductionist situation in which an object is reducible neither to its parts nor to its whole. A coral reef is made of coral, fish, seaweed, plankton and so on. But one of these things on its own doesn't embody part of a reef. Yet the reef just is an assemblage of these particular parts. You can't find a coral reef in a parking lot. In this way, the vibrant realness of a reef is kept safe both from its parts and from its whole. Moreover, the reef is safe from being mistaken for a parking lot. Objects can't be reduced to tiny Lego bricks such as atoms that can be reused in other things. Nor can be reduced upwards into instantiations of a global process. A coral reef is an expression of the biosphere or of evolution, yes; but so is this sentence, and we ought to be able to distinguish between coral reefs and sentences in English. The preceding facts go under the heading of undermining . Any attempt to undermine an object—in thought, or with a gun, or with heat, or with the ravages of time or global warming—will not get at the withdrawn essence of the object. By essence is meant something very different from essentialism . This is because essentialism depends upon some aspect of an object that OOO holds to be a mere appearance of that object, an appearance-for some object. This reduction to appearance holds even if that object for which the appearance occurs is the object itself! Even a coral reef can't grasp its essential coral reefness. In essentialism, a superficial appearance is taken for the essence of a thing, or of things in general. In thinking essentialism we may be able to discern another way of avoiding OOO. This is what Harman has christened overmining .? The overminer decides that some things are more real than others: say for example human perception. Then the overminer decides that other things are only granted realness status by somehow coming into the purview of the more real entity. When I measure a photon, when I see a coral reef, it becomes what it is. But when I measure a photon, I never measure the actual photon. Indeed, since at the quantum scale to measure means “to hit with a photon or an electron beam” (or whatever), measurement, perception ( aisthesis ), and doing become the same. What I “see” are deflections, tracks in a diffusion cloud chamber or interference patterns. Far from underwriting a world of pure illusion where the mind is king, quantum theory is one of the very first truly rigorous realisms, thinking its objects as irreducibly resistant to full comprehension, by anything.9 So far we have made objects safe from being swallowed up by larger objects and broken down into smaller objects—undermining. And so far we have made objects safe from being mere projections or reflections of some supervenient entity—overmining. That's quite a degree of autonomy. Everything in the coral reef, from the fish to a single coral lifeform to a tiny plankton, is autonomous. But so is the coral reef itself. So are the heads of the coral, a community of tiny polyps. So is each individual head. Each object is like one of Leibniz's monads, in that each one contains a potentially infinite regress of other objects; and around each object, there is a potentially infinite progress of objects, as numerous multiverse theories are now also arguing. But the infinity, the uncountability, is more radical than Leibniz, since there is nothing stopping a group of objects from being an object, just as a coral reef is something like a society of corals. Each object is “a little world made cunningly” (John Donne).10 We are indeed approaching something like the political valance of autonomy . The existence of an object is irreducibly a matter of coexistence. Objects contain other objects, and are contained “in” other objects. Let us, however, explore further the ramifications of the autonomy of objects. We will see that this mereological approach (based on the study of parts) only gets at part of the astonishing autonomy of things. Yet there are some more things to be said about mereology before we move on. Consider the fact that since objects can't be undermined or overmined, it means that there is strictly no bottom object . There is no object to which all other objects can be reduced, so that we can say everything we want to say about them, hypothetically at least, based on the behavior of the bottom object. The idea that we could is roughly E.O Wilson's theory of consilience .11 Likewise, there is no object from which all things can be produced, no top object . Objects are not emanations from some primordial One or from a prime mover. There might be a god, or gods. Suppose there were. In an OOO universe even a god would not know the essential ins and outs of a piece of coral. Unlike even some forms of atheism, the existence of god (or nonexistence) doesn't matter very much for OOO. If you really want to be an atheist, you might consider giving OOO a spin. If there is no top object and no bottom object, neither is there a middle object . That is, there is no such thing as a space, or time, “in” which objects float. There is no environment distinct from objects. There is no Nature (I capitalize the word to reinforce a sense of its deceptive artificiality). There is no world, if by world we mean a kind of “rope” that connects things together.12 All such connections must be emergent properties of objects themselves. And this of course is well in line with post-Einsteinian physics, in which spacetime just is the product of objects, and which may even be an emergent property of a certain scale of object larger than 10?¹?cm).13 Objects don't sit in a box of space or time. It's the other way around: space and time emanate from objects. How does this happen? OOO tries to produce an explanation from objects themselves. Indeed, the ideal situation would be to rely on just one single object. Otherwise we are stuck with a reality in which objects require other entities to function, which would result in some kind of undermining or overmining. We shall see that we have all the fuel we need “inside” one object to have time and space, and even causality. We shall discover that rather than being some kind of machinery or operating system that underlies objects, causality itself is a phenomenon that floats ontologically “in front of” them. In so doing, we will move from the notion of autonomy and begin approaching a full exploration of the notion of zone , which was promised at the outset of this essay. Since an object is withdrawn, even “from itself,” it is a self-contradictory being. It is itself and not-itself, or in a slightly more expanded version, there is a rift between essence and appearance within an object (as well as “between” them). This rift can't be the same as the clichéd split between substance and accidents , which is the default ontology. On this view, things are like somewhat boring cupcakes with somewhat less boring sugar sprinkles on them of different colors and shapes. But on the OOO view, what is called substance is just another limited slice of an object, a way of apprehending something that is ontologically fathoms deeper. What is called substance and what is called accidence are just on the side of what this essay calls appearance. The rift (Greek, chorismos ) between essence and appearance means that an object presents us with something like what in logic is known as the Liar: some version of the sentence “This sentence is false.” The sentence is true, which means that it is a lie, which means that it is false. Or the sentence is false, which means that it is telling the truth, which means that it is true. Now logic since Aristotle has tried desperately to quarantine such beasts in small backwaters and side streets so that they don't act too provocatively.14 But if OOO holds, then at least one very significant thing in the universe is both itself and not-itself: the object. An object is p ? ¬p. To cope with this fact, we shall need some kind of paraconsistent or even fully dialetheic logic, one that is not allergic to dialetheias (double-truthed things). Yet if we accept that objects are dialetheic, p ? ¬p, we can derive all kinds of things easily from objects. Consider the fact of motion. If objects only occupy one location “in” space at any “one” time, then Zeno's paradoxes will apply to trying to think how an object moves. Yet motion seems like a basic, simple fact of our world. Either everything is just an illusion and nothing really moves at all (Parmenides). Or objects are here and not-here “at the same time.”15 This latter possibility provides the basic setup for all the motion we could wish for. Objects are not “in” time and space. Rather, they “time” (a verb) and “space.” They produce time and space. It would be better to think these verbs as intransitive rather than transitive, in the manner of dance or revolt . They emanate from objects, yet they are not the object. “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” (Yeats).16 The point being, that for there to be a question, there must be a distinction—or there must not be (p ? ¬p).17 It becomes impossible to tell: “What constitutes pretense is that, in the end, you don't know whether it's pretense or not.”18 In this notion of the emergence of time and space from an object we can begin to understand the term zone . Zone can mean belt , something that winds around something else. We talk of temperate zones and war zones. A zone is a place where a certain action is taking place: the zone winds around, it radiates heat, bullets fly, armies are defeated. To speak of an autonomous zone is to speak of a place that a certain political act has carved out of some other entity. Cynically, Tibet is called TAR, the Tibetan Autonomous Region, for this very reason. In this phrase, Region tries to emulate zone : it sounds as if the place has its own rules, but of course, it is very much under the control of China. What action is taking place? “[N]ot something that just is what it is, here and now, without mystery, but something like a quest…a tone on its way calling forth echoes and responses…water seeking its liquidity in the sunlight rippling across the cypresses in the back of the garden.”19 If as suggested earlier there is no functional difference between substance and accidence; if there is no difference between perceiving and doing; if there is no real difference between sentience and non-sentience—then causality itself is a strange, ultimately nonlocal aesthetic phenomenon. A phenomenon, moreover, that emanates from objects themselves, wavering in front of them like the astonishingly beautiful real illusion conjured in this quotation of Alphonso Lingis. Lingis's sentence does what it says, casting a compelling, mysterious spell, the spell of causality, like a demonic force field. A real illusion: if we knew it was an illusion, if it were just an illusion, it would cease to waver. It would not be an illusion at all. We would be in the real of noncontradiction. Since it is like an illusion, we can never be sure: “What constitutes pretense…” A zone is what Lingis calls a level . A zone is not entirely a matter of “free will”: this concept has already beaten down most objects into abject submission. Objects are far more threateningly autonomous, and sensually autonomous, than the Kantian version of autonomy cited in the first paragraph of this essay. A zone is not studiously decided upon by an earnest committee before it goes into action. One of its predominant features is that it is already happening . We find ourselves in it, all of a sudden, in the late afternoon as the shadows lengthen around a city square, giving rise to an uncanny sensation of having been here before. Objects emit zones. Wherever I find myself a zone is already happening, an autonomous zone. It is the nonautonomous zones that are impositions on what is already the case. Or rather, these zones are autonomous zones that exclude and police. They are brittle. Every object is autonomous, but some objects try to maintain themselves through rigidity and brittleness, like (and such as) a police state. Paradoxically, the more rigidly one tries to exclude contradiction, the more virulent become the dialetheias that are possible. I can get around “This sentence is false” by imagining that there are metalanguages that explain what counts as a sentence. Then I can decide that this isn't a real sentence. This is basically Alfred Tarski's strategy, since he invented the notion of metalanguage specifically to cope with dialetheias.20 For example we might claim that sentences such as “This sentence is false” are neither true nor false. But then you can imagine a strengthened version of the Liar such as: “This sentence is not true”; or “This sentence is neither true nor false.” And we can go on adding to the strengthened Liar if the counter-attack tries to build immunity by specifying some fourth thing that a sentence can be besides true, false, and neither true nor false: “This sentence is false, or neither true nor false, or the fourth thing.” And so on.21 It seems as if language becomes more brittle the more it tries to police the Liars of this world. Why? I believe that this increasing brittleness is a symptom of a deep fact about reality. What is this deep fact? Simply that there are objects, that these objects are withdrawn, and that they are walking contradictions. This means indeed that (as Lacan put it) “there is no metalanguage,” since a metalanguage would function as a “middle object” that gave coherency and evenness to the others.22 Since there is no metalanguage, there is no rising above the disturbing illusory play of causality. This may even have political implications: no global critique is therefore possible, and attempts to smooth out or totalize are doomed to fail. To think the zone is to think the notion of temporary , which we shall now begin to discuss in greater detail. The zone is not in time: rather it “times.” But because a zone is an emanation of an object, it is based on a wavering fragility, since objects are p ? ¬p. When an object is born, that means that it has broken free of some other object. An object can be born because it and other objects are fragile. If not, no movement would be possible. Objects contain the seeds of their own destruction, a dialetheic sentence that says something like “This sentence cannot be proved.” Kurt Gödel argues that every true system of propositions contains at least one sentence that the system cannot prove. In order to be true, the system must have a minimum incoherence. To be real, it has to be fragile. Imagine a record player. Now imagine a record called I Cannot Be Played on This Record Player . When you play it on this record player, it produces sympathetic vibrations that cause the record player to shudder apart. No matter how many defense mechanisms you build in, there will always be the possibility of at least one record that destroys the record player.23 That is what being physical is. An object is inherently fragile because it is both itself and not-itself. When the rift between appearance and essence collapses, that is called destruction, ending, death. When an object breaks, several new objects are born. An opera singer sings a loud note in tune with the resonant frequency of a wine glass. (See the movie included below.) The singing is a zone, an autonomous level of intensity, opening a rift between appearance and essence. The glass ripples—for a moment it is nakedly a glass and a not-glass—almost as if it were having an orgasm, a little death. It is caught in the rift of the singing. Then its structure can't handle the coherence of the sound waves, and it breaks. It is incoherence and inconsistency that is the mark of existence, not consistency and noncontradiction. When things break or die, they become coherent. Essence disappears into appearance. I become the memories of friends. A glass becomes a dancing wave. Instantly, there are glass fragments, new temporary autonomous zones. The fragments have broken free from the glass. They are no longer its parts, but emanate their own time and space, becoming perhaps accidental weapons as they bury themselves in my flesh. Thus Hakim Bey's instructions on creating temporary autonomous zones oscillate disturbingly between performance art and politics, circus clowning and revolution. To play with the aesthetic is to play with causality, to rip from the sensual ether emanating from things new regions, new zones. Anarchist politics is the creation of fresh objects in a reality without a top or a bottom object, or for that matter a middle object: Everything in nature is perfectly real including consciousness, there's absolutely nothing to worry about. Not only have the chains of the Law been broken, they never existed; demons never guarded the stars, the Empire never got started, Eros never grew a beard. … There is no becoming, no revolution, no struggle, no path; already you're the monarch of your own skin—your inviolable freedom waits to be completed only by the love of other monarchs: a politics of dream, urgent as the blueness of sky.24 Bey imagines that this is because chaos is a primordial “undifferentiated oneness-of-being.” A Parmenides or a Spinoza or a Laruelle would read this a certain way. Individual objects, or decisions to talk about this rather than that, are just maggot-like things crawling around on the surface of the giant cheese of oneness.25 Yet he also describes chaos as “Primordial uncarved block, sole worshipful monster, inert & spontaneous, more ultraviolet than any mythology.” This image is of an inconsistent object, not of an undifferentiated field. An object, indeed, that can be distinguished from other things. If not, then the first part of The Temporary Autonomous Zone , subtitled “The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism,” is a kind of onto-theology. Onto-theology proclaims that some things are more real than others. Bey, however, is writing poetically, and thus ambiguously. We are at liberty to read “undifferentiated oneness-of-being” as something like the irreducibility of a thing to its parts and so forth (undermining and overmining). This certainly seems closer to the language in the following paragraph: “There is no becoming … already you're the monarch of your own skin.”26 On this view, there is no difference between art and politics: “When ugliness, poor design & stupid waste are forced upon you, turn Luddite, throw your shoe in the works, retaliate.” Since Romanticism this has been the war cry of the vanguard artist.27 To say to is to fall prey to the tired axioms of the avant-garde, and we think we know how the game goes. But OOO is not simply a way to advocate “new and improved” versions of this shock-the-bourgeoisie boredom. Bey's text is certainly full enough of that. Rather, since causality as such is aesthetic, and since nonhumans are not that different from humans, the new approach would be to form aesthetic–causal alliances with nonhumans. These alliances would have to resist becoming brittle, whether that brittleness is right wing (authoritarianism) or left wing (the endless maze of critique). No “ism,” especially not the ultimate forms, nihilism and cynicism, is in any sense effective at this point. All forms of brittleness are based on the mistaken assumption that there is a metalanguage and that therefore “Anything you can do, I can do meta.” I will not be listing any approaches here, as Bey does. Such lists and manifestos belong to the vanguardism that no longer works. Why? Not because of some marvelous revolution in human consciousness, but because nonhumans have so successfully impinged upon human social, psychic and aesthetic space. It is the time after the end of the world. That happened in 1945, when a thin layer of radioactive materials was deposited in Earth's crust. Geology now calls it this era the Anthropocene . Ironically, this period, named after humans, is the moment at which even the most thick headed of us make decisive contact with nonhumans, from mercury in our blood to manta rays to magnesium. Richard Dawkins, Pat Robertson and Lady Gaga all have to deal with global warming and mass extinction, somehow. We now live in an Age of Asymmetry marked by a skewed, spiraling relationship between vast knowledge and vast nonhuman things—both become vaster and vaster because of one another and for the same reasons.28 This means that coming up with the perfect attitude or the perfect aesthetic prescription just won't work any more. Even the most hardened anthropocentrist now has to pay through the nose for basic food supplies, and has to use more sunscreen. Whether he knows it or acknowledges it, he is already acting with regard towards nonhumans. There is nothing special to think, no special critique that will get rid of the stains of coexistence. The problem won't fit into the well-established modern boxes, which is why the “mystical,” “spiritual” quality of Bey's prose is welcome. Of course, when I put it this way, you may immediately close off and decide that I am talking about perfect attitudes after all, or something outside of politics, or other ways that the radical left marshals to police its thinking of the nonhuman. Because that is what is really at stake in all this: the nonhuman in its coexistence with the human—bosons, gods, clouds, spirits, lifeforms, experiences, the sunlight rippling across the cypresses. Bey begins to get at this in a Latour litany in the second part of The Temporary Autonomous Zone , “The Assassins”: Pomegranate, mulberry, persimmon, the erotic melancholy of cypresses, membrane-pink shirazi roses, braziers of meccan aloes & benzoin, stiff shafts of ottoman tulips, carpets spread like make-believe gardens on actual lawns—a pavilion set with a mosaic of calligrammes—a willow, a stream with watercress—a fountain crystalled underneath with geometry— the metaphysical scandal of bathing odalisques, of wet brown cupbearers hide-&-seeking in the foliage—“water, greenery, beautiful faces.”29 This will be conveniently dismissed as orientalism. If we're never allowed to escape the crumbling prison of modernity for fear of imperialism there is truly no hope. In a similar way, the fear of anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism is very often staged from a place that just is anthropocentrism .30 Critique turns into ressentiment . An object radiates a zone that is aesthetic and therefore causal. Because objects “time” they are temporary. Not because they exist “in” time that eventually gets the better of them. Their very existence implies the possibility of their non-existence. Since objects are not consistent, they can cease to exist. But nothing, no one, will ever be able to insert a blade between appearance and existence, even thought there is a rift there. Now that's what I call autonomy. NOTES 1. John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 96. 2. P. B. Medawar and J. S. Medawar, The Life Science: Current Ideas in Biology (London: Wildwood House, 1977), 8. 3. David DeGrazia, Animal Rights: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 5. 4. Antony Colynet, A True History of the Civil Warres in France (London, 1591), 480. 5. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time , tr. Joan Stambaugh (Albany, N.Y: State University of New York Press, 1996) 62–71. 6. Graham Harman, Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (Peru, IL: Open Court, 2002). 7. Hakim Bey, The Temporary Autonomous Zone (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1991). 8. Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object (Ripley: Zero Books, 2011), 7–18. 9. This is not the place to get into an argument about quantum theory, but I have argued that quanta also do not endorse a world that I can't speak about because it is only real when measured. This world is that of the reigning Standard Model proposed by Niels Bohr and challenged by De Broglie and Bohm (and now the cosmologist Valentini, among others). See Timothy Morton, “Here Comes Everything: The Promise of Object-Oriented Ontology,” Qui Parle 19.2 (Spring–Summer, 2011), 163–190. 10. John Donne, Holy Sonnets 15, in The Major Works: Including Songs and Sonnets and Sermons , ed. John Carey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 11. Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Knopf, 1998). 12. Martin Heidegger, What Is a Thing? (Washington: Regnery, 1968), 243. 13. Albert Einstein, Relativity: The Special and the General Theory (London: Penguin, 2006); Petr Horava, “Quantum Gravity at a Lifshitz Point,” arXiv:0901.3775v2 [hep-th]. 14. Graham Priest, In Contradiction (Oxford University Press, 2006), passim: the most notable recent quarantine officers have been Tarski, Russell, and Frege. 15. Priest, In Contradiction , 172–181. 16. William Butler Yeats, “Among School Children,” Collected Poems , ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Scribner, 1996). 17. Paul de Man, “Semiology and Rhetoric,” Diacritics 3.3 (Autumn, 1973), 27–33 (30). 18. Jacques Lacan, Le seminaire, Livre III: Les psychoses (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1981), 48. See Slavoj Zizek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006), 206. 19. Alphonso Lingis, The Imperative (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 29. 20. Priest, In Contradiction , 9–27. 21. See Graham Priest and Francesco Berto, “ Dialetheism ,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2010 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta. 22. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection , tr. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1977), 311. 23. The analogy can be found at length in Douglas Hofstadter, “Contracrostipunctus,” Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 75–81. 24. Bey, “ Chaos: The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism ,” Temporary Autonomous Zone . 25. This is closest to the language of François Laruelle in Philosophies of Difference: A Critical Introduction to Non-Philosophy (New York: Continuum, 2011) 179. 26. Bey, “ Chaos: The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism ,” Temporary Autonomous Zone . 27. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 28. For further discussion see Timothy Morton, “From Modernity to the Anthropocene: Ecology and Art in the Age of Asymmetry,” The International Social Science Journal 209 (forthcoming). 29. Bey, “ The Assassins ,” Temporary Autonomous Zone . 30. Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), 75–76. (shrink)

The greatest intensity of “live” life is captured from as close as possible in order to be borne as far as possible away. Jacques Derrida. Echographies of Television . Rainer Ganahl has made a study of studying. As part of his extensive autobiographical art practice, he documents and presents many of the ambitious educational activities he undertakes. For example, he has been videotaping hundreds of hours of solitary study that show him struggling to learn Chinese, Arabic and a host of (...) other languages. The stacked boxes of tapes are then presented like minimalist monoliths, dense archives of effort. About fifteen years ago, Ganahl began photographing the lectures that he attends. At the time, he hadn’t seen anyone else doing it, so besides his spare selection of images of the speaker and the audience, much of the time the lectures would just pass into memory, undocumented, or recorded in writing alone. Since then, he has felt the transition to digital cause a significant shift in his process. At the same time, he has seen the habit become ubiquitous as others photograph, record, and videotape the lectures all around him. In keeping with the theme of this inaugural issue of continent. , can we propose each small grouping of photographs that result an isthmus stretching between two disparate bodies of mind? The first being the body of the lecture as spelled out in the title of each work – the experience of the event in all its constituent parts. The second is the body of the recipient, the listener, in this case an artist, who plays a minimal role just beyond the prescripted behavior of sitting and listening. He uses a gesture of documentation to draw a line between himself and the event, creating an artwork. Františka + Tim Gilman: As we mentioned before, the theme of the magazine for this issue is "isthmus." It seems like a very good way into your work, and it leads us to ask what connection you see between your photographs of the lecture and the lecture itself? Rainer Ganahl: The relationship is of course a concrete, pictorial one, or if you want a mimetic one but also an abstract one because the photographs carry the title of the lecture, the names of the lecturers, the site, the institution and the time of the lecture. Photos are fixed moments of time and can reproduce images displayed and reproduce visuals presented at a moment but they don’t come with time based recordings that video or sound takes are offering. What remains of a lecture is usually just the memory, some notes and all the announcements of it. In my case I end up with a visual product I declare as my artwork. It might not differ from any snapshot taken by any other student or member of the audience but I do this in a semi-systematic way with certain rules and procedures I have set up. While I am at a lecture I am mainly focusing on the lecture itself. Last night I went to one of Slavoj Žižek which demanded quite some concentration. I even was asking him a question at the end. I took photos as well but still didn’t lose track of the lecture. I didn’t walk around, I was not preoccupied by where I was sitting and what light I was having like some of the other photographing and filming people in the room who came and left, moved around and tried to capture him from this and that angle, from close and far. I just sat there and concentrated on the lecture and yet managed to take about 30 or so images of him, the public around me and of the film clips he presented. Once the lecture is over the story changes: it all becomes a question of the images, their selection, their visual qualities, their labeling and archiving. The function of the images also change: not only do they stand for an intellectual event in a row of lectures that become part of my intellectual history within many possible such histories but they also have to function as art, something not everybody else with images of lecturers demands of their images. This is my specific claim as an artist to impose them as artworks. And as with all artistic propositions the offer can be accepted or rejected. I basically spend my life trying to do exactly that: making what I declare as art, offering something to anybody interested in it as my art, an offer that is not and will never be accepted as such by all people. F+T: What are your criteria for selection, i.e. how do you choose which lectures to photograph, by lecturer, by topic, or do you photograph any and every lecture you can? RG: As everything in my life, I go by my interest which is the result of many factors. If I am aware of a lecturer, read his books or appreciate his works my interest of attending his much higher than if I am not aware of it. I usually don’t go to lecturers simply based on their subjects—something that can happen of course, if the subject, the title of the lecture is promising or at the heart of my interest. Sometimes I also wait for years to get a change to photograph certain people but I do that in a very low-level “keep your ears up” mentality and not in a systematic scanning of all channels and possibilities. I do not go into philosophy departments and photograph everybody teaching there. I go with the flow—and unfortunately a great deal of great talks I also miss because I hear too late of them. Often, I also stumble into them by traveling, by getting emails from friends and by simply being in the right spot at the right time. Somehow you could look at my lecture par cours as some kind of loose intellectual flâneurism . If you know of interesting lectures and events, please, let me know. F+T: Is your selection of images more of a production or post-production method? That is, do you take a lot of photos and select only a few images from each lecture, or do you take them very selectively? Do you have a particular methodology for the selection of images? RG: This all changed a bit with the arrival of digital photography. In the beginning I had to pay a lot of money for film developing. Hence, I was taking either one role - 36 images - or half a role - 13 images - depending on who talked and whether they projected images. With the unlimited capacity of digital imaging I easily end up between 30 and 150 images of one event still depending of whether images are presented or not. In the first years of that project when I wasn’t fully aware yet of what I was doing, I printed at least 2 images of any lecture and sometimes three or even four, a choice that was also constrained by costs. But again, since I have a web site and since images can easily be selected and presented on my web site without generating remarkable costs I have now more and more pain to reduce them to less than ten or eight images for an event. Now, before I have them printed which really is expensive, I can present them already as artwork on my web site without any immediate costs. Thus the economic factor is at the end of the chain which enables me to be more ‘generous’ and include more images. Over the last years I have been mostly selecting at least four photographs for a lecture unit but recently also as many as ten. But so far only one set above four images has been actually printed and sold. What might sound even more shocking is the likely fact that if a curator or a collector demands me to reduce the number of images due to costs, I might compromise at this current stage if the images have not been yet printed or published outside my own web site. This means that to a certain degree any selection that has only seen publication on my web site and not yet been produced runs the risk to change in numbers of images included. Needless to say, I am the last one that finally makes a decision and I do honor all given earlier decision if those were final. F+T: How do you feel the act of photographing the lecture affects your reception of the contents of the lecture? And your recollection afterwards, do you remember the lecture more having photographed it, or just having sat and listened? RG: As mentioned above, I get very little distraction from photographing since I can multitask well and do not obsess about the quality of the image: I photograph from where I am and listen with my ears and not my eyes. I am not sure whether the images serve as a mnemonic devise to the content of the lecture if there are no images involved but they at least remind me that the lecture existed, the title of the lecture and the name of the people and institutions involved. The titles of the hundreds of lectures I took during the past 15 years can also be read as an essay of theoretical life in that period. This will be come more and more visible as time passes by. These images age much better than I do. F+T: You mentioned at the outset of our discussions that you started this practice some time ago and have seen the practice of photographing lecturers become more commonplace. Why do you think that this shift has taken place? RG: The answer is very simple. Photographing is now free of any charge and hence omnipresent. You buy a phone or any other personal digital assistant and it has a camera integrated in it whether you want it or not. There is no need to develop images and there is no hassle to keep images, to distribute images, to organize images and save them. It is all virtual, not creating any costs and doesn’t require any efforts. You don’t spend twenty dollars for photo-developing anymore, you don’t need to walk anymore to your pharmacy or your photo shop to drop off and return to pick up and pay. You don’t need to go to the post office to send somebody a picture. You have a program like Photoshop already built into your camera. Photographing is now a thing for everybody—with functioning cameras made for two year olds. It is technically now nearly impossible to make bad images. The image quality is virtually guaranteed by cheap, high performing, mini-computers packed into miniscule cameras. With all these technological changes, we are undergoing now a cultural paradigm shift that includes permanent recording (not only still image taking) of everything. I wonder even whether babies are just born to be photographed—at least a process where the first photograph is right there. What is interesting now, is how the law is trying to catch up. I am experiencing and expecting more restrictions on photographing and recording—something already in place in many museums and in certain galleries—as the recording devices become more and more invisible and undetectable. It is an interesting cat and mouse play and will end up with some of us that are photographing the world around us in court. The world has become very transparent and everybody is contributing to it with social networking technologies—like twitter and Facebook—that are designed to monitor and communicate every step we make in our lives. F+T: Why did you start the practice? As a way to remember, or to capture the experience of the lecture and the environment there? RG: A couple of years earlier I started to photograph my own reading seminars as part of my art work with results that surprised me positively. I really liked these images of students and people discussing heavy non-fiction with me. The reading seminars justified this kind of pictorialism. Then in 1995 I had the chance to attend an entire seminar by Edward Said entitled “The Representation of Intellectuals at Columbia University,” which really gave me the idea to start this series. Why not also photograph these lectures I visit all the time since this really is a way of representing intellectuals? F+T: The constellation of images and the title seem like a kind of portrait, do you agree? If so, is it a portrait of the speaker, of yourself, or of the event? RG: Well, to follow up on the previous question the lectures are more than just portraits of lecturers since I include not only the speakers but also the audience, an audience that is not named or specifically highlighted as is the speaker. So if we stick with the metaphor of the portrait we would have to extend it also to the environment, the class room, the lecture hall, the arrangements of seats or benches, tables, lecture stands and other stuff typically seen on my images. Often the walls are decorated or even tagged with graffiti or posters and other stuff. There is a big difference between a small seminar room at the English Department of Columbia University, full with books and cabinets and a lecture room at a Paris or Frankfurt university that accommodates 50 to 150 people. We should, maybe, also distinguish between lectures that are one time events—mostly open to the public, free of charge or paid—and events that are weekly, closed to the public and held mostly in universities that can cost fortunes or be paid by the State as it is still predominantly the case in continental Europe. All this, of course, is not necessarily announced in the title of the lecture and is subject to information that isn’t visible on the images. To a certain degree we see also portraits of a general privilege when it comes to the public of certain institutions that are highly selective and extremely costly without forgetting that most of the lectures are dealing with theory, art, philosophy and other highbrow subjects. In general, I would say we see very little if we don’t know already what’s going on, who the lecturer, the institutions, the context are in which we subsequently can zoom into variants like sexual, racial, or age-related make-up without ignoring clothing fashions, hair styling, body mannerisms, gadgets and stuff. F+T: Do you see a relation between this body of work and your other work, for example your language studies? RG: Everything I do is “unfortunately” related. I say unfortunately because this makes my work not so easy to grasp. The relationship to the language studies is relatively clear since both are originally grounded in the domain of education and knowledge production. Nearly all my work comes across that nexus where knowledge and power are addressed. I was at one point wondering what the relationship was to some of my earlier indexical work where I was happy alone with footnotes from books painted on the walls: I came to understand that both are just different manifestations of knowledge and information. F+T: Do you foresee continuing the series indefinitely, or is there an end to it? RG: I think that I will continue this series indefinitely or to be more precise, as long as I go listen to lectures and want to learn something which brings me to your previous question: What do the reading seminars, language studies, historical research and lecture hopping have in common: I learn something. Further Reading Rainer Ganahl’s website William Kaizen. “ Vulgar Politics .” art&education . April 2009. Web. Smith, Roberta. “ Rainer Ganahl: ‘Language of Emigration & Pictures of Emigration .’” New York Times April 23 2010. Web. (shrink)

Ghost Image is made up of sixty-three short essays—meditations, memories, fantasies, and stories bordering on prose poems—and not a single image. Hervé Guibert’s brief, literary rumination on photography was written in response to Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, but its deeply personal contents go far beyond that canonical text. Some essays talk of Guibert’s parents and friends, some describe old family photographs and films, and spinning through them all are reflections on remembrance, narcissism, seduction, deception, death, and the phantom images (...) that have been missed. Both a memoir and an exploration of the artistic process, Ghost Image not only reveals Guibert’s particular experience as a gay artist captivated by the transience and physicality of his media and his life, but also his thoughts on the more technical aspects of his vocation. In one essay, Guibert searches through a cardboard box of family portraits for clues—answers, or even questions—about the lives of his parents and more distant relatives. Rifling through vacation snapshots and the autographed images of long-forgotten film stars, Guibert muses, “I don’t even recognize the faces, except occasionally that of an aunt or great-aunt, or the thin, fair face of my mother as a young girl.” In other essays, he explains how he composes his photographs, and how—in writing—he seeks to escape and correct the inherent limits of his technique, to preserve those images lost to his technical failings as a photographer. With strains of Jean Genet and recurring themes that speak to the work of contemporary artists across a range of media, Guibert’s Ghost Image is a beautifully written, melancholic ode to existence and art forms both fleeting and powerful—a unique memoir at the nexus of family, memory, desire, and photography. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Images >> Quan Zhou Wu and Linaje’s GenealogyJulia Haeyoon Chang (bio) Click for larger view View full resolutionQuan Zhou WuENJOY (Linaje 2024)Art and design by Quan Zhou WuDigital infrastructure by Marco Fratini[End Page 5] Click for larger view View full resolutionQuan Zhou WuUNA DE ELLAS (Linaje 2024)Art and design by Quan ZhouWu Digital infrastructure by Marco Fratini[End Page 6] Click for larger view View full resolutionQuan Zhou WuMEMORIAS (...) RETORCIDAS(Linaje 2024)Art and design by Quan Zhou WuDigital infrastructure by Marco Fratini[End Page 30] Click for larger view View full resolutionQuan Zhou Wu,NEGATIVOS (Linaje 2024)Art and design by Quan Zhou WuDigital infrastructure by Marco Fratini[End Page 31] Click for larger view View full resolutionQuan Zhou WuELLAS Y YO (Linaje 2024)Art and design by Quan Zhou WuDigital infrastructure by Marco Fratini[End Page 49] Click for larger view View full resolutionQuan Zhou Wu,STATEMENT (Linaje 2024)Art and design by Quan Zhou WuDigital infrastructure by Marco Fratini[End Page 74] Click for larger view View full resolutionQuan Zhou WuLAS ARTISTAS QUE NO FUIMOS (Linaje 2024)Art and design by Quan Zhou WuDigital infrastructure by Marco Fratini[End Page 75]Quan Zhou Wu’s followers will surely be struck—as I was—by the multisensory digital exhibit “Linaje” (“Lineage”), which was published in 2024 and departs, perhaps unexpectedly, from the artist’s previous well-established oeuvre. Before delving into the work in question, it may be fruitful first to have a glimpse at the artist’s iconic aesthetic. In 2015, and at the age of twenty-seven, Wu, a self-taught artist, debuted her first graphic memoir, Gazpacho Agridulce. The book commences with her parents’ newfound life in Spain after leaving Qingtian, a province of Zhejiang, China, to run a restaurant in Algeciras, a municipality of Cadiz. The opening pages of Gazpacho pack a punch, depicting Wu’s dramatic and untimely birth in a taxicab en route to the hospital.Gazpacho’s publication initiated a crucial sea change in the predominantly white Spanish publishing world, which would soon after be rocked by a boom of racialized1 authors penning anti-racist memoirs and other works of non-fiction.2 Gazpacho would also eventually become the first of the author’s trilogy of graphic memoirs, which was completed by the sequels Andaluchinas por el mundo (2017) and the most recent La agridolce vita (2023).Wu’s narratives capture the familial, identarian, and social conflicts that erupt from cultural disloyalties and racism—direct consequences of migration. She and her sisters, for example, loathe their family’s rigid Chinese and Christian mores and long for the cultural markers of an ordinary Spanish childhood, structured of course by U.S. global consumer culture, e.g. Barbie, Pizza Hut, and McDonald’s.An illustrator, cartoonist, and podcaster, Wu’s talent as a storyteller lies in her complex use of humor. With great care for her subject and her reader, Wu deploys humor to tend to the uncouth, raw, and ugly parts of life. In so doing, the author invites us to laugh and ultimately reckon with our own discomfort as we with sit with the heaviness of racism, sexism, and post-migration melancholy—using humor as a salve.At her best, Wu serves irreverence, rawness, and wit. To be immersed in her books is to rub up against the rough-hewn emotions that bring her characters to life. The vibrancy of her palette and the whimsy of her pen strokes are inviting, animated, and deceptively light-hearted. In an instant, lines and pigment rearrange into abstractions dense with affect. Fiery hollowed eyes, a gaping mouth, and flushed skin burn through the frame—making the volcanic rage of a migrant mother immediately palpable. It’s so emotive, it practically singes your skin. Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 1.Cover of Wu’s first graphic memoir Gazpacho agridulce: Una autobiografía china-andaluza[End Page 102] Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 2.Excerpt from Gazpacho agridulce (courtesy of the artist)[End Page 103]While... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:738 BOOK REVIEWS tical ruin, for what is required is a proper legal response to their illegal acts and a properly political response to their political acts. Burtchaell is usually close to the truth in his ethical judgments, hut one is often uneasy with these judgments either because of some glaring inconsistencies or because they do not seem grounded on a solid theoretical basis. He is possessed of some (...) remarkably clear insights and a powerful rhetorical style, hut these suffer from his inability to string these insights into a consistent outlook on these critical biomedical issues. University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana, Illinois ROBERT BARRY, O.P. Image and Spirit in Sacred and Secular Art. By JANE DILLENBERGER. New York: Crossroad, 1990. Pp. 217. $29.95. In the quarter century since the close of Vatican II, it is surprising how few Catholic seminaries in this country have followed the Council mandate that called for the study of sacred art by candidates preparing for ordination. On the contrary, the preconciliar ambivalence toward the arts in general, and the visual arts in particular, has been superseded by an incipient iconoclasm that has flourished hand in hand with the liturgical renewal. In the exuberance of throwing out the vestiges of preconciliar culture, hasty reformers have unwittingly embraced new art forms that are all too often lacking in aesthetic or spiritual value. Their untrained eyes predictably gravitate toward the insipid, the garish, and the gaudy. Much of what has been lauded as Catholic art in the past two decades finds itself as hopelessly outdated as the burlap banner. Catholic culture has devolved into Catholic kitsch. It is ironic that the most eloquent voice for the study of art in American seminaries today belongs not to any priest or prelate, hut to a Protestant woman, Jane Dillenherger, who has established a long and distinguished career teaching in theological seminaries. These include: Drew Theological Seminary, San Francisco Theological Seminary, the Pacific School of Religion, and the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley. The Harvard-educated Dillenherger is the author of numerous hooks and articles dealing with art and religion. That she foresaw a career dedicated to rebuilding bridges between these two long-estranged fields of study was evidenced early on when she sought an inter-disciplinary doctoral degree with a dissertation committee that would include the theologian Paul Tillich alongside the eminent art historian Erwin Panofsky. The innovative proposal was denied. Undaunted, Dillen· BOOK REVIEWS 739 berger later went on to establish at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley a doctoral program of studies in the Arts and Religion, the only one of its kind in the United States, where theologians, artists, and art historians collaborate in the education of future church leaders. Jane Dillenberger's latest book, Image and Spirit in Sacred and Secular Art, is fitting testimony to a career that has stretched over five decades. The hook is a compendium of essays and lectures addressed to "the inquiring, intelligent adult who has little or no formal background in the visual arts." The offerings include such diverse subjects as "The Image of Evil in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Art" (what would have been her dissertation topic under Tillich and Panof· sky), "Picasso's Transformations of Sacred Art," "The Appearance and Disappearance of God in Western Art,"" Lucas Cranach, Reformation Picture-Maker," and "Images of Women in American Art." Al· together, ten essays have been included in this Crossroad publication which is generously filled with 133 reproductions of works discussed in the text. The overarching theme of this hook is to look at visual images and analyze how they have changed through successive cultural eras. In doing so the author makes every attempt to connect art and religion with everyday life. In her introductory essay, "Looking for Style and Content in Christian Art," Dillenberger calls on all viewers to discard their private prejudices as they gaze upon artworks: "Nothing less than a kind of self-abdication is demanded of us by a great work of art. It asks us to see it, if only for a few moments, in terms of the vision that it represents and expresses." Only by placing biases in check can the... (shrink)

We can say that Picasso’s images speak to us, and, as writing, speak to us from that space in which any text – far from being reduced to a single sense – “disseminates” its “truths”. Using the figure and the story of the Minotaur, Picasso devoted himself to one of the great themes of his pictorial work. The word “labyrinth” connotes, to the European mind, Greece, Knossos, Dedalus, Ariadne and the Minotaur. However, the Greek formula already represents a (...) mythic and poetic outcome thoroughly developed from an imagery forged in the remotest eras of our evolution. The relationship between the image, the spiral, and the word, labyrinth is also linked to the perception of a drilled earth, excavated, with numberless tortuous tunnels which, in our imagination, provoke concern because they lead to the world of the inferi, the unknown depths of the realms of the dead. Juan Larrea, a little-known essayist in the sphere of philosophical studies, although, from the outset of international renown for Picasso’s work, he gives what is perhaps the best interpretation of Guernica and consequently also sheds much light on the engravings immediately preceding the execution of this painting, the Minotauromachy among them. The artist is not a prophet. He is not foreseeing what the future holds for humanity, but he does possess a heightened sensitivity that drives him to minutely scrutinise the conditions of the time that he has had to live, and he has a transforming eye for the symbols that constitute the deepest threads in the fabric of his culture. (shrink)

When a piece of fruit is in a bowl, and the bowl is on a table, we appreciate not only the individual objects and their features, but also the relations containment and support, which abstract away from the particular objects involved. Independent representation of roles (e.g., containers vs. supporters) and “fillers” of those roles (e.g., bowls vs. cups, tables vs. chairs) is a core principle of language and higherlevel reasoning. But does such role-filler independence also arise in automatic visual processing? (...) Here, we show that it does, by exploring a surprising error that such independence can produce. In four experiments, participants saw a stream of images containing different objects arranged in forcedynamic relations — e.g., a phone contained in a basket, a marker resting on a garbage can, or a knife sitting in a cup. Participants had to respond to a single target image (e.g., a phone in a basket) within a stream of distractors presented under time constraints. Surprisingly, even though participants completed this task quickly and accurately, they false-alarmed more often to images matching the target’s relational category than to those that did not — even when those images involved completely different objects. In other words, participants searching for a phone in a basket were more likely to mistakenly respond to a knife in a cup than to a marker on a garbage can. Follow-up experiments ruled out strategic responses and also controlled for various confounding image features. We suggest that visual processing represents relations abstractly, in ways that separate roles from fillers. (shrink)

In this article we take the use of examples as a means to explore the processes of persuasion and consensus-construction involved in the legitimation of popular management knowledge. Examples, as concrete instances or events used to substantiate a wider argument, have been variedly regarded in different research traditions. Classical logic and rhetoric have considered them an inferior form of argument, useful for pedagogic or public debate but inadequate for higher forms of thought. This spirit still permeates much psychological research on (...) communication, where the great persuasive import of examples has been contrasted with more scientific and formal resources for argumentation. Considered in this light, the contingent and episodic nature of examples seems to make them cognitively inferior to explicit statements of general rules. However, various strands of research on the nature of scientific knowledge have shown that implicit forms of knowledge are an integral part of scientific expertise. Examples may thus be more central to disciplinary thought than the conventional normative view seems to allow. In this spirit, we explore the use of examples in a hotly contested field, that of popular discourse on business and management. The profusion of examples in this kind of writing has been often noted, and almost as often criticized. We seek to explore more fully how these examples are deployed, examining the discursive devices that mark examples within the development of the text, their function as rhetorical moves, and their role in presenting arguments that are never otherwise made explicit. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to explain why creativity is an artistic merit. Artworks and non-artworks can both be creative. But creativity does not help make many other creative things good of their kind. A creative explanation is not a better explanation in virtue of being creative. Why, then, is a creative artwork a better artwork in virtue of being creative? Understanding this will give us a better understanding of the nature of artistic merit. The (...) approach adopted in this paper is as follows. First, I say what creativity is and what an artistic merit is. Second, I identify reasons to doubt that creativity is an artistic merit. A good explanation of the merit of creativity should address these doubts. Third, I develop a theory of artistic merit that appeals to the final value of acting excellently – for example, virtuously or skilfully. Finally, I argue that this enables us to explain why creativity is an artistic merit. This account also enables us to argue that artistic merits give some things final value, and not merely instrumental value. It also provides reason to believe that ethical qualities of artworks enhance their artistic merit for the same reason creativity does. (shrink)

니체에게 위버멘쉬가 인간을 넘어선 다른 존재라면, 최상의 인간 유형은 위대한 예술가 이다. 니체에게 위대한 예술가는 예술적 활동으로 도달할 수 있는 최상의 인간 유형일 뿐 만 아니라 그 위대함으로 인해 시대를 넘어선 인간으로서 시대적 사건이 된다. 특히 위대 한 예술가는 예술과 철학의 뫼비우스 띠와 같은 관계 속에서 변곡점에 위치하여 예술이 철 학이 되고 철학이 예술이 되는 과정을 보여준다. 그래서 니체의 위대한 예술가란 예술가- 철학자이며, 예술가로서 시대를 넘어 자신의 삶의 예술을 창조한 자이자 철학자로서 세계 와의 관계성 속에서 자신의 관점에 입각하여 새로운 가치를 (...) 창조하는 자이다. 이 논문은 니체의 위대한 예술가를 위대한 예술가의 삶의 예술을 통해 분석하면서 예술이 철학으로 나아가는 이유와 근거를 밝히고자 한다. (shrink)

In Scotland, residents have fought open-net salmon farms and their toll on human and nonhuman bodies for decades. This paper recollects seven years of work in Skye and Raasay, two islands off the northwest coast of the country, developing strategies to divest away from salmon aquaculture. Addressing the contemporary wave of underwater clearances created by UK’s top food export industry, it unpacks the implementation of a transition into alternative horizons by embracing the legacies of toxicity inherited from salmon extractivist industries. (...) CLIMAVORE, a framework developed as a research-led artistic practice by the authors, investigates how to eat in the new seasons of the climate crisis. In a season of marine dead zones, it facilitates new approaches to aquaecology and coastal care that cultivate coastal livelihoods. CLIMAVORE began with a new public forum, shaped as a multispecies intertidal table, established in Skye in 2017 to envision environmentally regenerative and socially reparative forms of food production based on metabolic interactions between humans and depleted landscapes that benefit a plethora of species. CLIMAVORE’s site responsive methodology relies on a socially-engaged art practice, consisting of fieldwork, interviews, working groups, oral histories, performative meals, cooking and building apprenticeships, tidal gardening, material testing and public art installations. Ongoing collaboration with residents, scientists, and policymakers critically explores ways of living not only on but with the coast. This new holistic approach to coastal nourishment provides methodologies for ecological praxis as well as a platform for researchers and the general public to imagine an alternative ecological future: the tidal commons. (shrink)

The main theme of the article, which by genre falls into the area of semiotically influenced philosophy, is a reflection on the relationship between the human and the non-human, using two partial but parallel discourses. The first discourse is the perspective of general semiotics, which is defined in the article on the basis of two distinct forms of rationality that, in different guises, still intervene in debates about the nature of the humanities and social sciences today. The first form of (...) this rationality is semiological, which can be classified under the encyclopaedic rubric of structuralism, and which has its main source of inspiration in general linguistics and its continuation in philosophical anti-humanism. The second perspective has its origins in Peirce’s logicist theory of the sign and his pragmatist metaphysics, and opens up thinking about the sign, the human, and the non-human to a non-language-centric view of the world. Despite their demonstrable theoretical and methodological incompatibility, the present text treats them as incompatible but largely complementary perspectives. It is in their mutual exposition that one can see the moments in which the view of modern human as a semiological and semiotic animal takes shape. The text brings this fundamental and founding theoretical schism into focus by examining two images from post/modern art: Ted Chiang’s “The Great Silence” and Jorge Luis Borges’ “Averroës’s Search.”. (shrink)

If we say that on the level of form, works of art correspond to the humanization of sense perception in the human psychology, then on the level of the image, they correspond on the whole to the humanization of desire. As a result, their aesthetic effect is manifested as artistic sedimentation.

Don't tell terrible stories—everyone here has enough of their own. Everyone here has a whole bloody sack of terrible stories, and at the bottom of the sack is a hammer the narrator uses to pound you on the skull the instant you dare not believe your ears. Or to pound you when you do believe. Not long ago I saw a tomboyish girl on Khreshchatyk Street demand money of an elderly woman, threatening to bite her and infect her with syphilis. (...) Don't stroll through Volodymyr Hill Park, don't stroll around the botanical garden, and especially don't stroll on Kontraktova Square. Don't stroll anywhere. Don't go to the pavilion with the Golgotha panorama near St. Alexander's Church. Not even the twelve-meter-tall crucified Christ will save you. Don't go outside when it's dark and people turn into shadows a shade darker than dark. Also don't go where you can be seen from far away. Not to imply that people used to be like a bunch of lilies, but now they stink like a cellar of cabbage.The city, which earlier might have had some fun, is now going crazy. It's like a fish in warm water: it doesn't react to anything, swims slowly like it doesn't care if it swallows a hook or not. The excitement and exaltation pass into oppression, just as our necks have sunk into our shoulders, our shoulders into our lumbars, our lumbars into our nether regions. The holiday turns into a funeral, the parades into explosions, depression into mania. Winter passes into summer, people turn into beasts, the hours into ages, and the ages into hours. It's worth simply walking around the city to see a soldier from an unknown army taking a piss near the opera. Farther on is a row of identical old widows selling ball gowns and candelabra. Then there are the aristocrats and manufacturers who throw so much at the prostitutes that they'll soon be richer than their wives.I returned late through the Kyryliv Wood, not heeding all the warnings that I myself have given here. It really is dangerous—the place is famous for it. There's a madhouse nearby, caves where criminals and the sick can hide out. Also, once upon a time, as they say in fairy tales, the great dragon Zmei Gorynich lived here beside the Puchai River. The stench in these places drives away the most committed misanthropes and even one type of philanthrope—that is, perverts. It sounds dumb, but the stench is cleansing. I don't know where it comes from. After the operating theaters and the rooms with amputees, the stench no longer repelled or attracted me; it just was. And this was a great place to think. As I walked, I considered an incident with our patient.The patient, a respectable individual whose name carries too much weight for me to state it directly, one day began to assault people. He nearly strangled a merchant who he believed asked too much for a beaver coat. He likewise wanted to kill his business partner when he didn't say hello loudly enough. But the worst was, he lost all shame of his own nakedness. At first it was the police who took care of it. When our future patient slipped off his pants and undergarments, he was taken to Kyrylivska, which has had means for dealing with such cases dating back to the day when unhinged Cossacks and composers from Kyiv Mohyla Academy were taken there.During the examination we determined that the patient was experiencing a severe breakdown. His wife added that lately, more than once, he had allowed himself strong words in front of the children and often suffered from ennui. Furthermore, she said, the patient had been undergoing treatment for “the French disease” for some years—which was, obviously, where we needed to start.“Syphilis!” Skorsky spat out the matchstick he was chewing on. He was a specialist on the psychological aspects of diseases related to the venereal. “Tertiary syphilis! When poorly treated, over time ‘the French disease’ can destroy the central nervous system. Hence the patient's chicanery. Such theater!”Skorsky and I had not spoken since the incident at Bilinsky's. Meanwhile, something significant had happened to him. The most boring person on earth, Skorsky had simply caught fire. He said hello and kibitzed. I even heard the doctor got drunk alone in his office, then wandered through the forest. Could he be using narcotic substances?“Cocaine!” was the doctor's second proclamation. It was his favorite treatment for the psychological complications of syphilis. Skorsky himself never took what he called “the universal drug”—good for alcoholism and toothaches, neuroses and morphine dependency—though he had read in an article by a respectable Viennese physician, who used cocaine as a panacea, that it was not addictive. That doctor subsequently recanted, but Skorsky paid no attention. He believed the retraction was made under pressure from pharmacologists who had no incentive to cease production of the medications that cocaine might supplant. Their representatives either paid or threatened the Viennese to repent.As the patient was escorted to his room, he assaulted the orderly, Alevtyna. They tried pulling him off her, but, though he released his fingers from her neck, he buried his teeth in her leg. The poor orderly, who had not until then been attacked by a psychotic, nearly died of fear. Later, panic set in over Skorsky's diagnosis. He told her about the consequences of syphilis: grotesque patterns on one's face due to infection of the skin, mucous membranes, cartilage, and bones. He went on about the devastation to the central nervous system, which they had just observed in real life: “The face starts to look like lace some mangy dogs fought over before rolling in the mud.”Alevtyna, who had not yet regained her faculty of speech, straightened up. Ignoring the slavering male orderlies, she bared her leg to get a better look at the wound. She then ran down the hall and out into the garden, where she fell on the ground to rip up grass and small bunches of daisies. Alevtyna ate them along with the soil in their roots.“Minor hysteria. She needs fifteen milligrams of cocaine.”Skorsky took a snuff box out of his pocket and scooped up some white powder with a toothpick made from a goose feather. He gave the order to close Alevtyna's mouth and one of her nostrils, forcing her to snort the medication.We fretted over her so long that evening fell. I decided to walk down, along the ravine, behind the church.It was unlikely there were any large beasts there, but something was rustling. The pits and mounds, ravines, paths, graves of witches whose living sisters flew in the treetops from time to time, the whispers of the forest spirits, the spirits of the nutcases who died in the hospital, the spirits of the monks from the St. Cyril Monastery, Zmei Gorynich and the bogatyrs who wanted to defeat him. The city would be calmer without this forest. I saw the gaps between the trees and went off in the direction of the tram tracks.As I was coming out of the forest, there was a patch of Amanita muscaria that had been trampled into porridge. A bit farther on, the body of Professor Bilinsky lay killed in the blackberry bushes. The way he was lying it looked as though he had not struggled before death. I quickly examined his body but saw nothing out of the ordinary. There were no wounds, no dirt under the fingernails. Animals had not yet smelled the carrion, but swarms of various insects covered him. Oh, why did I have to find the putrid body?The best thing would be to take the tram to his house to inform his relatives. The doors closed, and I noticed my own calm. This death had not evoked any emotions in me other than a feeling of responsibility, the need to tell the family. But also—some alarm at the thought of who the murderer could be. I knew that it was murder.“Your nose is bleeding.” A woman as round as an onion, carrying two baskets full of strawberries, offered me an ironed and starched handkerchief.“Have I dirtied my shirt?”“No, it's as neat as a pin. It's just your nose that's dirty. Wipe it now before you spray blood on my strawberries.”“No one will see the red on red.”“Ah, but it's salty!”“You know why it's not sweet? We'd drink it like syrup.”“Those with Christ in their heart do not talk that way.”“Are your strawberries expensive?”“Why? What?”“I'm checking to see if you have God in your heart.”“Child, if you knew how I have to work for this berry! I have to weed it a hundred times. In a week, the quitch grass grows as high as a horse. And I water it with water I carry from the stream, it kills my arms... ”“How much are the berries?”“They're not for sale. Anyway, soon money won't mean a thing. Soon all money, all these papers made from the skins of sinners on their satanic presses will be annulled. What matters is how we treat each other.”“So if I try your strawberries for free, my ‘thank you’ will be enough?”“Hands off!” she said and thwacked my fingers.I heard loud laughter behind me—same laughter as from the café near the Continental. There was no one sitting near Alina. (This is what fate looks like, remember.) Without asking, I sat next to her, away from the old lady.“Excuse me, but the night before last didn't you, yes, didn't you intrude on my privacy?” She started right away.“I saw it a little differently. Who was that young man with the mustache who paid me for you?”“Are you checking to see if you can flirt?”The tram stopped. People got on and off.“Are you coming back from the hospital?” she asked. “Don't be shocked. My uncle works there. He's told me all about you.”“An uncle by the name of Skorsky?”(Remember: this is what fate looks like.)“Yes. Skorsky's been strange recently—says things that make me wonder if he hasn't lost his mind. Have you noticed anything?”“I don't know.”“You know perfectly well.”“Where are you going?” I tried to change the subject.“I have to send something to my theater friends in Odesa. By the way, they'll be putting on Oedipus Rex soon in Kyiv—in Ukrainian.”“Greek tragedy in Ukrainian! That's a first.”“Exactly. The troupe is rehearsing now in Odesa. The theater where they will perform this fall is being remodeled.”“Wait. Now I remember where I've seen you before—it was at a performance! Vynnychenko's Black Panther and White Bear, at the Bergonier on Fundukleivska.“The same director is doing the Oedipus. He's my friend.”“He's your friend in what sense?”“Again with that tired subject. By the way, I've been thinking about you.”“And I about you.”“That's good. I was thinking not about you, to be precise, but about that elevator you invited me on.”“Who was that man with you?”“Like a broken record! Even if he had been my fiancé, I'm not bought or inherited. I'm not a brooch or a hundred acres of land, and I'm not a house in Kaniv!... Who was with you when you saw Black Panther?“Ah, so.”“Answer!”“That was my mother. She looks very young. She is coming to Kyiv the day after tomorrow. I can introduce you.”“Oh, this is my stop.”I looked out the window and realized that I had long since passed the stop for Bilinsky's.“Can we see each other again?”“We can. But you have only one chance.”Alina the anarchist wrote something on a scrap of paper and handed it to me.Morning, not morning but a thick porridge (I hate porridge). Dew, thick spit, crushed fruits, urine, all on the sparkling cobblestones. The sun, just barely having made its appearance, is already scorching. The human masses scurry and grumble like poorly digested food inside a stomach.I walked diagonally across St. Sofia's Square, then along the perimeter, then one edge, then again diagonally across. I went underground. The basement café of the Continental Hotel was practically empty. I again asked the server to bring the cloth with the embroidered portrait, but I couldn't remember the musician's last name, only that it ended with -sky. The server said that -sky was currently in the southern cities of Yalta and Odesa. I added that Kurbas, the director, Alina's friend, was also in Odesa, rehearsing Oedipus Rex, and that he'd previously put on Black Panther.I was bored, so I walked along Khreshchatyk and then headed down, calling to mind all the Kyiv churches of Podil: there's Birth of Christ, St. Nicholas on the Shore, Intercession, Pyrohoshcha, Holy Presentation, St. Dymytrii Rostovsky, St. Illia's. And also the Epiphany Brotherhood Monastery, Ascension Convent, and St. Katherine's, all these whipped-cream churches on the waffles of our streets. A few of them reminded me of themselves by appearing suddenly out of nowhere.The smells on Kontraktova Plaza where commerce buzzed were like multicolored light bulbs turning on one after another. Here you could catch the aroma of Balabukha jam, which blended with the next smell, English shoe polish at the Raiskys’ shop. Then the crunchy-smelling cabbage from old women standing in a row like herons and spitting out the shells of sunflower seeds. Farther on, the stench of a good-sized rat that crawled under Mrs. Shevchuk's shop where she sells broadcloth. Oh, she can't scream: no, she'll quietly dig that rat out herself so as to not scare off her clients.I bought a paper and two pairs of underwear. I asked two laughing young chambermaids who were secretly puffing in a grape-filled yard for a smoke. I wandered around Podil until evening when I came across a sawmill near the Dnipro that surprisingly smelled pleasantly of mazut fuel oil. The weather was dry, yet in the middle of the road was an enormous puddle, a deep dark black. A forty-year-old woman in a pale pink dress stood near it. The theatricality of it all provoked me to pose her a question,“Ma'am, what should I do?”But she paid me no attention. I shouted,“What should I do?”“What to do, what to do?” she said in Polish. “Jump in the water and swim so far away that you cannot return.”I quickly crossed a section of the forest. The wind brought a mixture of unpleasant air, like a stinky handkerchief held under one's nose. Passing the trees, I saw light in the spaces between them and exited at the hospital.Outside the windows, two orderlies lay in chairs with their heads thrown back. Two others—fools—ran around the yard in different directions, peering out at... something. The lights on the first floor of the hospital were on, and the staff milled about.“You're just in time!” said Ivan, a tall, young orderly.“For what?”“Your patient ran away! We went into his room and he wasn't there.”“What patient?”“The one who bit Alevtyna,” said Danylo, the other orderly, short and middle-aged.“That's Skorsky's patient, not mine.”I had no intention of helping them. This was all history—like my family, Kyiv, and my previous life. I had no intention of thinking about it. I wanted to go to my office, pack up my field surgery kit, and get out. So what? Their psychotic syphilitic ran away—it happened.Of course, that patient could have something to do with Bilinsky's murder. But that was no longer my problem.“What a strange coincidence!” the doctor on duty said. “Comrade doctor, the other one responsible for this patient was just here.”“And where is he now?”“He took off toward the church to look for the patient.”“Didn't the patient escape earlier?”“Don't know.”“How do you not know? You had better call the police, moron, before he kills someone. And get those sleeping orderlies to look for him.”“They can't... ”“Why not? Should I go wake them?”“They're on morphine.”“And you, I can see, have lost your mind. Go, catch your psycho! If it turns out that he killed Bilinsky—and on your watch—you can't imagine what's in store for you.”I adjusted my homburg and set off in the direction of St. Cyril's, that unwelcoming monolithic cube. I glanced around—what if our escaped syphilitic were to jump out of the bushes and bite or strangle me. I looked around because I wasn't sure of my actions, wasn't sure of my choices. Tripping over a clump of clover, I reached the open doors of the church. I couldn't stop myself from going in.The walls and ceiling were covered with frescoes. There was what used to be an angel rolling up the sky on the southern column of the narthex. But also graffiti: people scratched their names on it so as not to be forgotten—their idea of eternity. Prince Volodymyr the Great compared this activity to the desecration of graves. The vandals paid a fine and were beaten with canes. During the raids of Batu Khan, the church was deserted and cracks appeared all over it. Wild martens and feral dogs sought shelter here; insects swarmed under the ceiling with its red mosaics. Birches grew in its midst. Water seeped in the cracks, the water became ice, the ice widened the cracks, more water seeped in the cracks, becoming more ice that further widened the cracks, the wall split and nearly fell over, and then the wall fell over. Yet the angel is still rolling up the sky... When I reached the exit, I heard a rustling behind me. I turned after I stepped outside: in the depths of the church, like a stick in a pot of tar, stood a man with a large bag thrown over his shoulder and a revolver pointed right at me.“Is that you, Doctor?“Don't move!”“What's... Skorsky, what's with you?”“Don't move, I say!”“What are you doing here?”And finally I understood... Skorsky was himself the psycho! (Really, I had known for a while.)“You are the murderer! I knew it! But—why?”“Shut up.”“It was you. You! The stolen cigarettes, the strange behavior, Bilinsky. If I shout, everybody will come running. They've already called the police!”There was heavy breathing behind me. And then a gun rang out.The city is overgrown with new buildings. They encircle everything that was once on the periphery. Kyiv has become an old lady that can no longer restrain herself in the face of pastries. The city climbs farther. It steps over the swamps, turns the old rivers into a series of lakes; the other bodies of water it drives into canals. The grain that falls from the wild wheat is black. When the sun heats it, the grain melts and trickles into the earth. St. Cyril's stands indestructible. No one spackles the small cracks in its walls with either expensive putty or glues, nor with cheap cement and whitewash. One day a small fox appears in the doorway. It runs inside and along the floor of simple gray tiles. The gods watch from the walls, watch and fall into ruin. The fox runs to the iconostasis. Before it is a time-darkened Virgin Mother and Child in oil on sheets of zinc. The fox runs the metal steps that wind up to the second floor. The fox runs past all the vaults, naves, all the frescoes. A buckthorn seed flies in through a broken window. It will be the first. Soon the buckthorn will grow everywhere. A dumb hare will make its nest in the buckthorn bushes and nightingales will settle in the upper branches to sing until the end of the world. The fox runs between the thick rays that penetrate the windows. It catches one of the rays, squints its eyes, and warms itself in the sun.The shot rang out, but I did not fall. I looked around—and on the church threshold was our syphilis patient bearing a rod. His head lay on the rocks by the doorway.“If only he'd been at the stage of nose deformity! Just imagine: a hole instead of a nose plus a hole from the bullet—like an extra pair of eyes!” Skorsky laughed at the corpse.“We need to call the orderlies.”“They heard the shot. They'll run here on their own. You see, Professor Bilinsky believed it would take two or three years to wrap up this patient's case,” Skorsky told me. “But I took care of it much faster!”“Excuse me, but I'm going crazy in this city. I thought that you were Bilinsky's murderer.”“Just so. Why not? I am Bilinsky's murderer.”“Don't tease. You've changed a lot recently, so... ”“Yes, I've started killing people. You might term such a change significant.”“You have the right to irony.”“I am not being ironic.”“Let's call it sarcasm.”“It's the honest-to-God truth.”“And yes, you have the right to mock me.”“Well then, let's be done. To the horses!”“What horses?”“Alina's waiting!”Alina, her uncle Skorsky, a few others I didn't know, and I rode like the wind that ripped off my homburg and carried it back to Kyiv.“There's a fresco in the choir loft at St. Cyril's where Vrubel painted himself and patients from the hospital as the apostles. When I came across it by accident, I really believed they were saints,” Alina said.“I've never been up there. I've only seen the church from below.”“Remember the way back so you can see it sometime.”“The Puchai River used to flow here. You shouldn't trust the landscape,” Skorsky said, reaching for something, perhaps his bag, just when we left the darkness of the trees and saw the endless steppe ahead of us.We rode all night without stopping. Though no one was chasing us. Though we had nowhere to be. We rode like beasts released from a cage. The promises of the horizon turned what we'd left behind into a cage fit for those from whom freedom had been severed, like an anomaly, at birth.The pre-morning sky looked at first like a sack of turnips—filled with something heavy. But with each verst, the sky became lighter. When it was finally light enough to see clearly, we arrived at a knoll at the foot of a stone wall that from a distance had appeared to be a gigantic piece of halva. The exterior ruins of the castle gave no hint of how it was when all was fine here, when people defended themselves successfully from the nomads’ raids. From far off, the wreckage looked like a natural agglomeration of stones—a rocky elevation, no more: a cluster of cliffs. It would rain a few hundred more times, a few hundred more winds from a few hundred directions would blow on this heap, and it would collapse as though nothing had ever been here.A few stalks of wheat grew from one of the rocks. Someone had probably cast a handful of grain here for some birds that forgot to eat it.“Who could this castle belong to?” I asked Skorsky.“I reckon the Swan Princess,” the doctor rejoined, hoping to sound knowledgeable.From behind one of the piles of gray sandstone emerged a young man in a black reptilian coat and a white papakha as lush, bright, and out of place as a dahlia. His name was Artem. The heat was melting our brains, but he was dressed like that, in rooster fashion, which was popular among the otamans. Artem helped Alina dismount her horse and tried to kiss her on the lips, but she offered him a cheek instead.Had she been racing to see this clown?We entered the yard—the ruins had fashioned an internal space that was more or less protected, at least from strangers’ eyes. It turned out that there were even places where it was possible to hide from the rain, and from there the ruins didn't look half bad.In the center of the court was a table, and on it a wooden bucket with pink gladiolas. How romantic! It all looked like it came from outer space. Where on earth, in the middle of the steppe, far from any village or town, did this table, this simple table, come from? And the gladiolas? The steppe hadn't been plowed in so long that any cultivars would have gone wild, degenerated, dried up completely.A campfire crackled nearby—a little preview of what we would soon do to the houses, villages, and cities. Artem the otaman brought over a cezve from the fire and poured the first portion into a small, copper cup for Alina. He also got out a porcelain cup with images of rosy cherubim—but how...?“Who else would like coffee?”Only Skorsky and I responded. The question excited me, even distracted me from the thought of the kiss I had recently witnessed and the Kyiv I had recently left.“It's obvious who the professors here are; cultured people drink coffee. Are you both doctors?”“Uh-huh.”“For wolves of the steppe, like us, doctors are gold, even more precious than gold. Actually, a Hippocrates like you should eat more, because those in your profession will soon be worth your weight in gold. Work on your figures, both of you.”“Who will take pity on the horses that have to carry us?”“We'll find the horses. And very large doctors can be transported on machine-gun carts. We'll need to seat the otamans near you. Only a fool would shoot at a doctor.”“I think we'll find quite enough fools here.”“With your beard, Doctor, you look like Tsar Nicholas II. But even so you won't be shot. You might even be canonized!”“We've only just arrived and you're going on about executions,” Skorsky grumbled and checked to make sure that he still had his bag.“Apologies, apologies, pardonnez-moi. But you are not merely a doctor. A venereologist! Skorsky, you're a specialist! A venereologist is the most important person in wartime. The most valuable! You are the botanists of war. You can't imagine what varieties of flowers grow here, and these beds have long awaited a proper gardener. Or even just a man with a scythe!”“Bite your tongue,” Alina said. “I don't need to listen to this.”“Yes, yes, of course. Excuse me, my r—. ” He almost said “rose.”We rested all day. We went down to a surprisingly close river overgrown with lilies. We rowed the boats left by fishermen. I talked to Skorsky. He took his bag everywhere, refusing even to swim so he wouldn't have to part with it. I asked him what he had in it, but he said it wasn't my damned business.Alina rowed with the otaman to the middle of the river. They were having a loud discussion. She was waving her hands. The current carried their boat downstream slowly and smoothly. What a nuisance, that current!I tried to meet with Alina one-on-one, but she was avoiding me. In the morning I was confused, by lunch I was sad, and after lunch I got angry.In the evening, I lay on the hot grass and drank another cup (I have no idea where they got such good coffee), which had no effect at all on my sleep. I watched the Perseids. Every year, the Earth passes through the tail of Comet Swift-Tuttle. People can see the meteor shower and make a wish. I wished. I counted forty-seven falling stars. All forty-seven of my wishes were for the same thing.Around the campfire, they were sitting, talking. I saw how he tickled her face with a piece of grass and she brushed him off in annoyance. Then they were screaming at each other. Later they again spoke kindly, after which they again quarreled. My joy grew after each tiny mistake that Artem made. I wanted him to show the worst he was capable of.They were screaming at each other, but all I could hear was beautiful opera singing. The stars fell to the sound of their screaming. The stars blessed my joy.Then this happened: Alina kicked the fire, scattered burnt kindling, and burned some of the grass. Artem grabbed her by the arm, but she broke away from him and ran off to the horses.“Go then! I guarantee you'll get to Katerynoslav and return with your tail between your legs.”“I'm going to Huliai-Pole! To Father Makhno!”I jumped up and ran after her.“Where do you think you're going?” Artem shouted.Really—where was I going? I was going after her: to Huliai-Pole, to Katerynoslav, to Rome, to Washington, to Istanbul, to Montevideo... “Go to sleep,” he said. “Come morning, this coquette will be here, right as rain. We've already been through this show. Tomorrow she'll be right here next to my boot!”... No, she won't.In some sort of shape we entered some town. There were some buildings that were some colors, some trees, some streets, some roads, and some signs. Posts, flustered birds’ nests, echoes, colors, shapes—each of some kind. A wedding procession was coming toward us. If you want to make orange, you need to add yellow to red, and then bam—it's black. If you want to salt the soup, shake in a little, and then bam—two handfuls. You want to say a kind word, and then bam—a punch in the face. I was rocked around like a watermelon on a boat and threw up my breakfast straight into the horse's fluffy mane. Sanko found this hilarious, but I said I'd pulverize him. So Sanko sped ahead.No one knew anything about Alina. The daytime sky was like a poorly washed bowl. The sun was a squashed, rotten apricot. The night sky looked like the sole of a boot to me. The moon was a dirty cheap copper coin that had gotten stuck to the sole. Everything seemed spoiled to me, irrelevant, unnecessary. Without her, this journey was a waste of time.“You'd better stay away from everyone,” Artem said. “You'll infect us with your pining, and pining is worse than the clap.”The wedding procession was before us. The young couple, still utter children, walked so calmly it was as if they didn't see us. As if we were made of a light breeze—our bodies, clothes, our horses and their iron shoes—of the lightest gasses. As if we were visible only to ourselves and the coal-black dog that barked, panting and gasping.The wedding was headed straight for us. We were in the middle of the road, and so were they. We approached each other slowly, a wave going toward a wave. Some ten meters before their indifferent faces, I noticed the color of the bride's eyes. And the coral-colored tulips that fell on the road before her. Round goose eggs on meaty stems, the flowers were falling and falling before her. The bride's eyes were almond shaped.“Hey there,” Artem shouted at me. “Wake up!”I came to and saw the whole village, everyone there, not realizing my group had turned left onto a side street away from the procession. The tulips disappeared—where'd they get tulips in the fall? I was sitting alone on my horse in the middle of the road, and the entire wedding procession came to a stop. I moved to the side, and the throng marched on, cutting off our escape route. We rode a few more meters and came across the synagogue.“You know what, you're right,” said the otaman.“Who is?”“Oleksii is the only one here who's right.”“About what?”Artem turned his horse and raced back. Everyone stood still while he ran his horse into the crowd and began firing his revolver. People scattered in all directions. Artem trotted, cackling like an imbecile. The horse kicked an old guy in the mouth. The man fell, spitting out his gold teeth. We rode up to the commotion and formed ranks, but none of us wanted to join the otaman.The bride stopped in the middle of the street. On both sides were buildings and trees, as well as dust, sky, and sun. She stood still, beautiful, as if nothing had happened. Then she adjusted her garland and walked calmly on.“Well, should we get some sugar now?” Artem laughed, looking at the bride, and off he went toward the sugar factory.It was then I noticed that all of the houses had shutters—fuchsia, blue, ocher—and that all the shutters were closed.We flew toward the dirty building, whistling and shouting. If there had been aesthetes among the otamans, they would certainly have razed the abomination in this field after seizing it. They would have spread soil on top and sown buckwheat. Long live buckwheat!, that wonderful crop. Like hunting dogs hot on the trail, we raced to our defenseless victim, with the baying of hundreds of hounds behind us. The field shook beneath us. We became an artist's canvas, evolving from Realism to Romanticism, Romanticism to Expressionism, Expressionism to Suprematism. If we had been painted in black and white, we would have been splotches (until the ink ran, annihilating all remaining patches of white).Two men stood near the gate—unarmed and undressed, in nothing but their undershirts and boots. Our fervor, our kinship with the elements, our entirety, were all for naught.“Jesus Christ! What bores!” Artem exclaimed. “How boring you are!”“Maybe boring for us, but fireworks for them,” Sanko said, dismounting his horse.“The fear of death engenders creativity,” our otaman—a distinguished philosopher of the early twentieth century, that demonic breed—prophesied.He went on, “Excuse me, but with all due respect, we are not going to search you. Just show us right away where the money is. Why are there so few of you? Don't say there's not much money. I want piles and piles of money! If you don't show it to us, we'll print our own on your skin. Believe me, we will.”We entered the factory grounds. There were no workers, only an enormous mountain of sugar beets that looked like a pile of coal from a distance and a pile of dead rats from up close.“So, did you have a good year?” Artem asked a man in an undershirt.“Not really—too dry.”“Nah, that's fine. You wouldn't have been able to gather most of the harvest this year anyway. There's a fire burning across all of Ukraine, all of Russia. The whole world!”While Artem tossed thoughts like well-chewed sunflower seeds into the crowd, the two men quietly stepped aside and then ran fast ahead to the factory's main hall. The gigantic door slammed shut. The gate was locked behind us! The windows were smashed! The factory roared from inside like a cumbersome machine starting up. Bullets whirred through every window.“Bastards! It's a trap! Quick, after me!”Still on horseback, Artem bounded over to a vast window, low to the ground, and smashed it mercilessly. He broke the frame and jumped inside on his horse. I and a few others followed. We broke into their lair, threw open the doors, and let the other warriors inside.Iron vats of hot sugar were steaming, pipes were clattering; machinery groaned.“Parasites!” Artem gritted his teeth. “I'll get you. I'll get you red sons of bitches. Painted whores!”At the word “painted,” his horse fell to the ground. Lying prone, Artem continued fighting, but the red soldiers wouldn't let him stand. Fighting nearby, I rode over to assist but did not know where to aim. Artem got up, ran forward, and brought his sword down on the head of the closest soldier, all the way to the middle of his skull, to the bridge of his nose. It was like butchering a pig. Artem thrust the sword into the buttock of another who was fleeing and cut off his leg at the bend in the knee.“I'll cut off every last one of your asses! Cut off your asses!” Artem bellowed.A half hour later, the dead were lying, the captured sitting, and the victors doing anything they pleased.“Skorsky, are there a lot of casualties?” I asked the doctor, whose hour it was. I hoped not, because I was too tired to help him.“Just a few. The dead are already dead, and the wounded are not ours.”Though Skorsky rarely asked my help, and though I'd become an ordinary soldier, the doctor in me was still present in the most unpleasant attribute—knowledge. Others saw an eviscerated man, pieces of dusty flesh smeared with clay, soil, sand, and straw. I saw a perfectly formed kidney hanging perfectly from the rest of its body like a child's mitten from its coat. You could try this death on for size. Wear it like a sanbenito of the Inquisition.Artem counted the money and then lay on the floor alongside the gigantic sugar mountain in the middle of the room. From time to time, the crystals rustled as they fell.“I didn't think you'd be such a fighter!” the otaman said without turning toward me. “I thought you'd be healing us. You'd keep to the rear and we'd hide you like a girl. But here you are, in the vanguard, like a lion!”“I got excited,” I told him, choosing not to react to the “girl” part.“’Cause Alina said there was no sense counting on you to fight.”“Really?”“Does that sting?”“Why would it? I'm a doctor—not everyone is. It requires a brain. Unlike waving a sword.”“Yeah, yeah. I gave her gladiolas. We were lying in the boat near that castle, doing all manner of things, and she told me all about you. How you met.”“You were lying in that boat talking about me?”“It was the day before you left Kyiv. You agreed to go with the anarchists so quickly!”“Were you surprised? Doctors make fast decisions.”“But you probably had great prospects. Your parents are rich, right?”“And who are your parents?”“Probably all your relatives fled abroad—bourgeois. Why did you stay?”“What the hell's your point?”“Alina, by the way, died a while ago. Probably.”“Don't jinx her.”“Listen here,” he said, staring at the ceiling. “And listen good. If you have designs on her—dead or alive—it's best you castrate yourself now.”“After you.”“If I want to kill somebody, you know, I just do it.”At last he looked at me. I was lying on the floor nearby and looking in his direction, sweaty and relaxed, my appearance complemented by my disdain for his opinion, his authority, his stupid hat. His everything.Artem raised his arm above his head, stuck a finger in the sugar mountain, and licked it. We both got up. Had I anticipated this turn of events, I would have readied a gift for him. Artem held his revolver. Under my hand I found a knife the workers used for gathering beets: it was a deliberately sharpened arc they sank into the swollen brassicas. I jumped up and quickly stepped around the sugar mountain.Artem's bullet hit a pane and broke the glass.“Not man enough for hand-to-hand?”The otaman shot again.“You should've challenged me to a duel, you romantic!”Encrusted with white crystals, I charged Artem from the sugar mountain. We fell in, and the sugar stuck in our hair, mustaches, nostrils, armpits.The gang ran in to get us apart, then backed off because it had nothing to do with them. By now the sugar mountain had burst its banks. Of the once perfect pyramid, a deformed mound remained.Wounded, Artem fell on the sugar mound, turning the white red.I stood before the gang sugar-coated and holding a bloody hook. The old otaman was drawing his last breath. Blood trickled from the corner of Artem's mouth and streamed from the left side of his breast.“What's the commotion?” Old Roman had just come in.“Be quiet,” the boys told him. And a good thing they did.“You killed him? You killed the otaman!”“Shut your mouth,” the boys told him.“You... ”I slugged Roman's stinky herring mouth. How did that son of a bitch find pickled herring in a sugar factory? My fist was now bigger and stronger than ever before, a steel anvil that could split nails and shatter memorial plaques. The unfortunate man's jaw twisted like an upper millstone that had gone off track from the lower.“Let's get out of here and go to Makhno's camp,” I gave my first order.We galloped so fast the grass burned beneath us. The birds and bugs had no time to fly out of the way; hooves trampled the burrows of rodents who didn't dare crawl out of their holes for a long time after. We raced like no one had ever raced before.The steppe, that sly fox, pretended to be an innocent fool. The steppe said, “I'm like Adam: I don't even know my own name.” But its grass harbored the tracks of thousands of armies and the heels of Herodotus, the crunch of Trypillia vessels, and the smell of Scythian hemp, Roman coins, clay figures of wolf people, the chevrons of Denikin's army, glass from the Chekists’ ruby stars, traces of uranium from flying saucers. I threatened it: “Steppe, show me your layers, or I will burn you, plow you under, flood you.” But it just replied: “I'm like Adam: I don't yet know my name.”I lost geography as if it were a silver coin. It fell out of my pocket and rolled through the feather grass that blanketed the steppe in white foam. The open space ahead was so endless that the whole world might as well have been steppe. If people ended up here from somewhere else, they would conclude they were on another planet. The coin fell and became an argentum, became one with the ring on the hand of the princess who had one green eye and one blue, with the twisted candlestick at the monastery on the other side of the steppe, with melted ingots. It broke down into simpler elements, simpler and simpler yet. The horse carried me spreading the seeds of northern plants to the south, just as southern riders had once brought flowers and weeds to the north. And then I turned back. Just as I had no geography, I had no time. Every night I fell asleep with the thought that the next day I would again race. Through all spacelessness, all timelessness. I exchanged one horse for another, got on a train, on a boat, traversed forty versts on foot—in rain that brought the river up to the road, in heat that overturned cattle. The earth I walked on became mine. Mine was the water in the lakes and springs, clean water, dirty water, enlightened water, contaminated with oil, stinking of algae, of fish that died in wells, stinking of the memory of atrocities, water as clean as broken bread. The water did not become Alina.I was doing this for her: I got the basturma out from under my saddle, sodden with the horse's sweat, sliced the throat of a rich man whose daughter I had danced with at a ball, climbed into a vat of beet juice and took a sugar bath, carried out the expropriation of the savings banks, wiped the sweat from my face with my shirt—and the cloth turned red; I didn't know from what. If it was someone else's blood, I didn't care; if it was my own, even less.We mostly came across Reds. We scraped them up like old red paint on a door in order to repaint the boards black. Black looked better. Red is tasteless, but black has style. Healthy men died before us of myocardial rupture like bunnies found in the nest. The ones whose hearts were sewn of steel wire envied the deceased. Seizing estates, banks, distilleries, and prisons reminded us of gathering in the harvest. If you're too lazy to pick an apple, you can shake the tree; some of the fruit gets bruised when it falls. We seized buildings like we were shaking apple trees. No one picked the fruits, we just shook: shook under the beds, under the tables, behind the curtains. No, there was no picking. We just shook until the red juice spurted from the apples.Near the Khorol River with Father Makhno and me in charge, we captured sixteen machine guns and four cannons, as well as five hundred prisoners who immediately came over to our side. The villagers voluntarily gave us bread and cheese, chickens and kvas. People joined us. The front of the machine-gun cart said “You can't run,” and “You won't catch us” at the back. We took factory after factory. Millions of karbovantsi, thousands of poods of sugar, weapons. We smashed the telephone exchanges and captured the telegraphs. We made alliances with some and then with others. Lenin, Wrangel, Frunze, the Germans, Chinese, Australians, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Cleopatra, Maria Theresa Walburga Amalia Christina. We ran the steppe. There were a hundred thousand of us. There were three hundred thousand of them. There were three hundred thousand of us. There were a million of them. There were two million of them. We were all of humanity. We were so many that we were none.The nobles’ estates were long ago forsaken. In the people's deepest trunks lay silks and guipure laces that were once perhaps used only to cover a table. Five steps from the barn in the direction of the pear tree, some silver candlesticks are buried; there's a plaster figure of an angel in the chicken coop, covered with shit and feathers.I was reluctant to be going to my home, but I didn't see any way out. Fate intended me to be a different being from the one I was before.Here my grandfathers and great-grandfathers were born. Here the ones who caused my grandfathers and great-grandfathers to flee had stopped. When we were still far off I noticed that someone was in the house. It was our men—Skorsky had brought them here, about twenty in all. I asked Sanko, whom I had walked with side by side more than once, where the doctor was now. All the men answered that he was around somewhere, but I didn't see him that evening.In 1918, the spirit of my great-grandfather Stepan, along with my mother and uncle, had gotten into a britzka and scrambled off to Paris, to Napoleon, against whom my great-grandfather had fought with the Cossacks, to whom the Russians promised to return self-rule. Following him in the cart went the soul of Grandpa Oleh, who lost a finger when he cut down the old linden near the house; his second finger was blown off by a cannonball near Balaklava, and later his entire hand was cut off by some Turk. Next went the spirit of my father, also Stepan, who did not take part in any war but died of measles at the age of forty. They all got the hell out of here. First, they went to Kyiv, led by my mother, Tamara Makarivna, in order to collect Uncle's family and me, their son. And their son, it turns out, has now come back to rob his own home (I didn't drive my war buddies away, did I?). It's a shame that I didn't know where the bathtub was, or whatever they bathed me in when I was small. It would have been good to walk through the ranks of anarchists with that basin and tell them all to spit into it.Remembering every room, I carried Alina upstairs to my mother's bedchamber. There was no longer furniture or pictures, only bare walls. The bed and mattress remained, but that was enough. Mother hated noise, so she set up her room far away from the running in the halls and the creaks on the stairs. I adjusted the mattress; in a gap, looking like a stalk of wheat, there lay a gold bracelet that she lost in the haste and that the thieves could not find in the mayhem. I tucked it into my pocket.The place could still be saved. It was strong, built under the leadership of my grandfather, who knew how to do it right. He built a sawmill, a gristmill, a dress factory (today it's probably been ransacked, maybe even by our own men).Alina had a complete, displaced break in her right fibula. We needed water first. I went downstairs—the guys were dragging out the piano like an old cow to the slaughter.“What are you doing with that?”“Taking it out.”“Why?”“What's it to you? We want to have fun.”“Can you play?”“We're not your bourgeois lily-handed bitches.”They couldn't play, but they were famous at destruction. “Noise is the music of the new time,” one of the smarter among them might have said. “But noise is the opposite of music. Just as a rose is the opposite of your ugly mugs,” I'd have responded if there was anyone to say it to. I could also have said that this was a Bosendorfer grand piano, that it was very valuable—but do the guys not deserve such a luxury?“Why are you so boring? We're relaxing.”“Then let me play a little first.”“Go ahead, but fast. One-two.”So I played. As before. My fingers ran up and down the black and white keys, which weren't simply keys of these, the simplest, colors. These were the keys that remembered my fingers specifically—achieved by that slovenly German Katerina, our governess. She knew a bundle of languages, could play the piano, and was interested in the latest scientific discoveries. But she had not an ounce of sympathy for anyone who couldn't master anything on the first try. More than once she hit my pinkie against the black key that remembered every one of its four thousand touches. She would pound it on the key and shout, “Si bémol! Si bémol,” and later bang my fingers and translate, “B flach! B flach!”I played. I could not expose myself, so the only thing I could do was believe in miracles. What if these coarse men saw value in this bit of furniture so unintelligible to them? And what if they didn't destroy it, this emblem of my childhood, my land, my air, which I could protect in no other way? My air. My water.“Shchedryk, shchedryk, shchedrivochka,” one of them who recognized the tune began to sing along.“Look at you.” They did not expect music from me, who had until recently been drinking blood like water.They said, “Again, again!”A group of curious men gathered around me. They were ordinary farmers, thieves, and recidivists, peasants and workers, everyone except for Skorsky. They needed this music as they needed baths. The music cleansed them from the inside, perhaps. They had not heard anything besides the whistle of a bullet, the neighing of a horse, or the knocking of a chisel and the whirring of a saw, amputating limbs, for a long time.But it could not go on long. I did not close the piano lid, just stood and went to fetch water for Alina, leaving the unfinished song for later. The well was to the north—that is, at the “Head.” My father once promised to give me a compass if I could learn to identify the ends of the earth by means of the sun. And to make it easier to remember, I gave each one of them a name: the east where the day begins was “Right” (my right hand), the west “Left,” the north “Head,” and the south “Feet.” Back when I could still do whatever I wanted all day long, I would wake in the morning and say: I'm going to the Feet. The mound was at the Feet, Left had the river, Right had the forest. It was only to the Head that I rarely went, because a village was located there. When the villagers saw me, they would speak in whispers and avoid the master's son.... I wiped her brow and her burning, sunken cheeks. I lay down next to her to feel the heat of her skin.When the fire in Alina calmed slightly, I went out into our orchard. My father had once been given a gift from Japan—a tulip tree that blossomed with yellow-green flowers. It had to have grown in the time that I was away. It would have been fatal had it been cut down. I again took the stairs down into the drawing room and came across nobody—they had all disappeared in search of food or were hidden away in their burrows. In the middle of the hall, like an opened rib cage, was the piano, irreparably shattered.B Flach! B Flach!Translation © Ali Kinsella 2022. (shrink)

This study investigates how patterns of media use and exposure to media messages are related to attitudes about artificial intelligence (AI) image generators. In doing so, it builds on theoretical accounts of media framing and public opinion about science and technology topics, including AI. The analyses draw on data from a survey of the US public (N = 1,035) that included an experimental manipulation of exposure to tweets framing AI image generators in terms of real art, artists’ concerns, artists’ outrage, (...) or competing interpretations. The results show that technology news use and science fiction viewing predicted support for AI art but also predicted belief that AI image generators will take jobs and steal art styles from human artists. In addition, the experimental results demonstrate that exposure to specific media messages can influence these responses. The findings carry implications for understanding the future adoption, use, and regulation of AI image generators. (shrink)

This article examines the role bureaucracy has in enhancing the social diversity of judiciaries. It does so by analyzing the Israeli judiciary and its reforms over the last three decades, and the interaction of these reforms with the appearance of intersectional judges—Arab women, Jewish women of Orthodox background, and Jewish women from geographic and economic peripheries—into the Israeli judiciary. Based on an original empirical study, the article shows that the career paths of intersectional judges include administrative roles in the judiciary (...) more often than non-intersectional judges. The article further demonstrates how these administrative career paths were shaped by bureaucratic-minded reforms. The Israeli case study thus shows how the bureaucratic design of the judiciary can accommodate diversity efforts, sometimes unintendedly, and discusses the merits, boundaries, and drawbacks of such bureaucratic design. (shrink)

As a conceptual approach in art practice, the female body has represented both a cultural barrier and a source of inspiration throughout art history. The adoption of the female body as an art theme is prevalent across many different artistic movements, using varying conceptual approaches. Women struggle against paradigms of inferiority to this day, though their individual cultural identity varies according to their society’s beliefs and customs – for example, many contemporary Middle Eastern cultures and customs are based on (...) a patriarchal past, when men wielded power over women. Women all over the world experience subjugation to varying degrees in the fields of employment, education, sexuality and reproductive choice. The female body in Middle Eastern societies is a red line that artists are not allowed to cross. Though many Middle Eastern civilizations have dealt freely with the female body, as can be seen in the paintings and sculptures of ancient Egypt, many social and religious factors made the female body taboo in most Middle Eastern cultures. However, on close scrutiny of modern art history in Middle Eastern and Islamic countries, we can identify outstandingly courageous female artists who succeeded in breaking the rules. They chose to express themselves through their own own form of art as an expression of freedom. They chose to use their own bodies as an art medium, which made them pioneers in their countries, and many female artists followed their example. Media art has flourished in Arab countries since the 1990s, especially in Egypt. Many of these female artists distinguished themselves as pioneers, aligning themselves with new art forms and challenging the prevailing stereotypical notion of the female artist at that time. This new mode of female self-expression and identity has developed over time and remains an ongoing process in the twenty-first century. This article considers how Middle Eastern female media artists have struggled to transform stereotypes of women by using their own bodies as an artistic element, and how they have expressed the concept of freedom through their self-body image. (shrink)

In recent years, a rising interest in scientific imaging has become apparent, in art production and in thematic exhibitions, as well as in popular media and advertising. Images captured by, and supposedly read through, machines open up a new era – not only for an as-yet-undefined aesthetic journey, but also to reveal insight into a normally invisible layer of reality. A wide range of techniques is already well established – not only in science, but also in an artistic (...) context. Based on an overview of different media and their applications, the term phasmagraphy is introduced to be applied to the expanded boundaries of the visible photographic spectrum to the adjacent wavelengths beyond full-spectrum photography. (shrink)

This article examines the artistic potential of forms of image-making that involve registering the features of real objects using mind-independent processes. According to skeptics, these processes limit an agent’s intentional control over the features of the resultant “automatic images,” which in turn limits the artistic potential of the work, and the form as a whole. I argue that this is true only if intentional control is understood to mean that an agent produces the features of the work (...) by their own bodily movements alone. Not only is this an unrealistic standard to uphold, but I show that a definition of intentional control based on the skeptic’s position does not prohibit an agent from realizing the features of an image by means beyond their own actions. An agent can exercise intentional control over the features of an image if they successfully anticipate the effect that the remote consequences of their actions will have on these. This, I argue, entails that to exert intentional control over the features of an image is to exercise “creative agency,” which is a species of executive agency. Consequently, I defend the idea that the origin of automatic images in creative agency grounds their artistic significance. (shrink)

The merited response argument is an argument in favor of artistic ethicism. According to this view, the interaction between art and morality is such that a moral defect in a work of art negatively influences the work's artistic value (and a moral merit, when relevant, is always an artistic merit). I contend that the argument relies on a criterion of aesthetic and artistic relevance that, when properly understood, fails to constitute a premise that either (...) the artistic contextualist or the autonomist would accept. I then offer a version of the merited response argument that supports artistic contextualism and argue that, given certain controversial assumptions, immoral art in the Western tradition is more common than typically acknowledged in the recent literature on the topic. (shrink)

The emergence of generative artificial intelligence, such as large language models and text-to-image models, has had a profound impact on society. The ability of these systems to simulate human capabilities such as text writing and image creation is radically redefining a wide range of practices, from artistic production to education. While there is no doubt that these innovations are beneficial to our lives, the pervasiveness of these technologies should not be underestimated, and raising increasingly pressing ethical questions that require (...) a radical resemantization of certain notions traditionally ascribed to humans alone. Among these notions, that of technological intentionality plays a central role. With regard to this notion, this paper first aims to highlight what we propose to define in terms of the intentionality gap, whereby, insofar as, currently, (1) it is increasingly difficult to assign responsibility for the actions performed by AI systems to humans, as these systems are increasingly autonomous, and (2) it is increasingly complex to reconstruct the reasoning behind the results they produce as we move away from good old fashioned AI; it is now even more difficult to trace the intentionality of AI systems back to the intentions of the developers and end users. This gap between human and technological intentionality requires a revision of the concept of intentionality; to this end, we propose here to assign preter-intentional behavior to generative AI. We use this term to highlight how AI intentionality both incorporates and transcends human intentionality; i.e., it goes beyond (preter) human intentionality while being linked to it. To show the merits of this notion, we first rule out the possibility that such preter-intentionality is merely an unintended consequence and then explore its nature by comparing it with some paradigmatic notions of technological intentionality present in the wider debate on the moral (and technological) status of AI. (shrink)

Striving to find a simple characterization of the essence of the imagination, philosophers have argued that it consists in the power to call up before the mind mental images, either in recollection and recognition or in fancy. Wittgenstein's interest in the imagination focused upon six interrelated themes. First, the concept of imagination is associated with the concept of a mental image. Second, imagination is connected in various ways with perception. Third, the faculty of imagination is associated with artistic (...) creativity and no less so with intellectual creativity, with originality, insight and deviation from stock solutions to problems. Fourth, 'to imagine' is connected not only with intellectual creativity, but also more generally with thought, conception or supposition. Fifth, 'to imagine' is associated with false belief, mistaken memory and misperception. Finally, the imagination is connected with make‐believe, pretence, play‐acting or idle fancy. The multitude of grammatical similarities between the visual imagination and visual perception is deceptive. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Three Ovidian Tails PAUL BAROLSKY Kneeling at the edge of a pond in push-up position, a beautiful nude boy crowned with flowers gazes down at the water in which he beholds his reflection. In love, he is enthralled. Thus, the image of Narcissus rendered by the Florentine painter Alessandro Allori in a work that has been largely overlooked until recently. Datable to the second half of the sixteenth century, (...) it now hangs in the Turkish Embassy in Washington, DC. In the distant background of the picture we behold Echo, who extends an arm upward seemingly in a gesture of despair, since she is rejected by Narcissus. She stands before a mass of rock, her left leg beginning to turn to stone, the very stone into which she vanishes as only her voice remains when she echoes her beloved. The painting abounds in Alessandro Allori, Narcissus. Photograph © Patricia Rubin. arion 26.3 winter 2019 closely observed passages such as the little fish in the pond, one of which has captured a worm. There are other notable details such as the crab on a rock in the foreground, or the clusters of pendulous, ripe grapes, fruit of Bacchus, to whom androgynous Narcissus is likened in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Allori also employs poetic simile in his picture, since the fingers of the youth’s left hand rhyme with the finger-like roots that emerge from the water. These roots are magnified in turn by their reflected image on the water’s surface. 136 three ovidian tails Abraham Janssens, Nymph and Pan Among the Reeds. AKG / Museen Böttcherstra ße. The apex of the picture, we might say, is baby Cupid who, hovering above, aims his dart at Narcissus and thus arouses the boy’s desire. The shape of Cupid’s bow echoes that of Narcissus ’s prominent buttocks which are framed by the attractive, bright golden drapery fluttering prominently around the youth’s posterior. One might well say that Allori features the buttocks of Narcissus’s body most provocatively in a kind of butt which recalls that of Cupid in the famous Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Time painted by the artist’s teacher, Bronzino. What Allori pictures is not exactly what Ovid writes. It is, however, how Allori imagines the Narcissus of Ovid’s tale. Allori is not alone among Ovidian artists in focusing on the backside of the human body. The posterior is especially prominent in another mythological picture, this one from the early seventeenth century, executed by a disciple of Rubens, Abraham Janssens. This work has found its way to Bremen, where it is now housed in the Ludwig Roselius Museum. It illustrates Pan’s pursuit of Syrinx, who is metamorphosed into reeds in a story told by Mercury in order to put Argus asleep. Ovid is Janssens’s point of departure. The artist depicts the moment when a muscular Pan with a ruddy, almost leathery face embraces Syrinx in her new form as a bunch of reeds. Janssens departs from Ovid with a most novel invention. He depicts a woman, seen from behind, who dominates the composition. With sharp contrasts of lights and darks, vestiges of Caravaggio, the painter emphasizes the female’s imposingly broad backside, which is framed by a billowing, bright, attention-grabbing red drapery that she seems to hold across the front of her body. Could it be that Janssens here alludes to the backside of Syrinx as Pan would have seen it when he chased her? It would seem that we are given not only a view of Pan embracing reeds, we are simultaneously given a Pan’s-eye view of Syrinx’s prominent and provocative backside before her metamorphosis. I wish to consider one final example of the derrière in Ovidian art, this one prominent in a picture painted well Paul Barolsky 137 over a hundred years after Janssens worked: Louis-JeanFran çois Lagrenée’s Abduction of Deianira by the Centaur Nessus, a work which is now in the Louvre. In Ovid’s story, Hercules arrives with his bride Deianira at the shore of the river Evenus where she is abducted by Nessus, who flees only to have Hercules shoot him with... (shrink)

In premodern China, elite painters used imagery not to mirror the world around them, but to evoke unfathomable experience. Considering their art alongside the philosophical traditions that inform it, _The Great Image Has No Form_ explores the “nonobject”—a notion exemplified by paintings that do not seek to represent observable surroundings. François Jullien argues that this nonobjectifying approach stems from the painters’ deeply held belief in a continuum of existence, in which art is not distinct from reality. Contrasting this perspective (...) with the Western notion of art as separate from the world it represents, Jullien investigates the theoretical conditions that allow us to apprehend, isolate, and abstract objects. His comparative method lays bare the assumptions of Chinese and European thought, revitalizing the questions of what painting is, where it comes from, and what it does. Provocative and intellectually vigorous, this sweeping inquiry introduces new ways of thinking about the relationship of art to the ideas in which it is rooted. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:ImagesSelected work, 2004–2017Goldschmied and Chiari Click for larger view View full resolutionIMAGE: Goldschmied & Chiari NYMPHEAS #37, 2011 Lambda print, 120 cm (diam.) Click for larger view View full resolutionIMAGE: Goldschmied & Chiari UNTITLED VIEW, 2017 Digital print on glass and glass mirror, 115 × 70 cm[End Page 49] Click for larger view View full resolutionGoldschmied & Chiari DUMP QUEEN #1 (triptych panels B and C), 2008 Diasec print, (...) 180 × 180 cm each[End Page 50] Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 51] Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 52] Click for larger view View full resolutionGoldschmied & Chiari GENEALOGY OF DAMNATIO MEMORIAE 1965–1981, 2009 Two carved living trees, 450 cm (height)Installation view (left); detail (right) Collection of MACRO (Museo d'Arte Contemporanea di Roma) Photo: Altrospazio[End Page 53] Click for larger view View full resolutionGoldschmied & Chiari NYMPHEAS #12, 2007 Lambda print, 125 × 333 cm Collection of Michele and Philippe Levy[End Page 55] Click for larger view View full resolutionIMAGE: Goldschmied & Chiari WELCOME, 2004 Sheetrock, plaster, cement, paint, 10 × 1.5 × 2.35 mt Collection Ugolini Photo: Gabriele Basilico[End Page 57]Sara Goldschmied and Eleonora Chiari are an artist duo from Italy, working with varied media: photography, video, performance, and installation. They work and live in Milan.Girls Just wanna have fun: Goldschmied & Chiari's Irreverent HumorHumor is not a trait for women, even less so for women artists in the Italian art world, where women's creativity has historically focused either on intimacy or on abstraction. In order to be taken into consideration by a male-dominated art scene, women artists working in the Italian peninsula have, since the '70s, consistently been obliged to be extremely serious about their work and its content. This trait can be traced all the way to the present with few exceptions, making Goldschmied & Chiari's (Sara Goldschmied and Eleonora Chiari) artistic practice exceptional in its constant employment of a peculiar, irreverent form of humor that functions as subliminal social critique.Humor used as a strategy to reconsider historical events in a post-ideological form of feminism develops in their work in witty installations that articulate a lucid critique of contemporary society and its relationship to history. Radically distancing themselves from the stereotype of authoritative and earnest feminism, Goldschmied & Chiari turn laughter into a metaphor for transformation. Their images trigger subtle political disruptions, allowing them to delve into the complex history of post-Cold War narratives, offering the public a new understanding of the relationships between the symbolic and the social.My first encounter with Goldschmied & Chiari's work (goldiechiari at the time) dates back to 2002 when I was working on a large survey show of emerging Italian art, exIT: Nuove geografie della creatività italiana, curated by Francesco Bonami. I was surprised by their work Senza titolo #17 that portrayed in a full-color photograph two girls dressed as if they were in boarding school, in plaid skirts and colored stockings, with long braids, sitting on the floor helping an elderly "grandmother" knitting in her armchair by making a hank of yarn. Looking closer, one sees that the girls were actually adolescents trapped in a parody that the artists further highlighted by installing in front of the photo what looked like a gigantic ball of yarn but was actually a sphere made of 1,500 cm of barbed wire (Sfera, 2002). The "tableau vivant" quality of the image made it both funny and critical, as visitors could relate as much to the stereotyped enactment of women's domestic roles as to the artists' rebellious desire. Instead of relegating their creativity to the domestic sphere, these "mischievous little girls" had wound a menacing barbed-wire ball that evoked Italy's recent past of social unrest and urban guerrillas. The assumption of ironic activist alter egos in one way referenced feminist practices of the '70s, yet at the same time seemed to mock the violence associated with protest and its success. [End Page 116]This type of atmosphere linked to city barricades and acts of protest is the inspiration for a large... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:ArtistsJennifer and Kevin McCoy are Brooklyn-based artists who make projects about how our thoughts, experiences, and memories are structured through genre and repetition. In order to focus attention on these structures, they often reexamine classic works of science fiction or television narrative, creating sculptural objects, video projections, or live events from what they find.Their work has been exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, (...) The New Museum (all in New York), and The Renaissance Society (Chicago). International exhibitions include projects at ZKM (Karlsruhe, Germany) and Kunst Werke (Berlin), and a solo exhibition at The British Film Institute (London, UK). Articles about their work have appeared in Art News, Art in America, Artforum, Flash Art, The Wire, dArt International, Spin Magazine, Feed, and The Independent. Installation view and detail images of Double Fantasy 2 (Sex) were shown in the solo exhibition "Directed Dreaming" at Postmasters, New York, March–April 2006. The Double Fantasy image was part of the exhibition "Night Sites" at the Hannover Kunstverein in Hannover Germany, November 2005. Each side of the sculpture has a model of a childhood sex fantasy for each of us. Cameras project large-scale images of it onto the wall, accompanied by a soundtrack. Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 1.Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Double Fantasy 2 (Sex). "Directed Dreaming," installation view. March–April 2006 at Postmasters Gallery, New York(Cover) Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 2.Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Double Fantasy 2 (Sex). "Directed Dreaming," installation view. March–April 2006 at Postmasters Gallery, New York(Page 2) Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 3.Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Double Fantasy 2 (Sex). "Directed Dreaming," detail. March–April 2006 at Postmasters Gallery, New York(Page 16) Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 4.Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Double Fantasy 2 (Sex). "Directed Dreaming," detail. March–April 2006 at Postmasters Gallery, New York(Page 32) Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 5.Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Double Fantasy 2 (Sex). "Directed Dreaming," installation view. March–April 2006 at Postmasters Gallery, New York(Page 47) Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 6.Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Double Fantasy 2 (Sex). "Directed Dreaming," installation view. March–April 2006 at Postmasters Gallery, New York(Page 63) Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 7.Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Double Fantasy 2 (Sex). "Directed Dreaming," installation view. March–April 2006 at Postmasters Gallery, New York(Page 77) Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 8.Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Double Fantasy 2 (Sex). "Directed Dreaming," detail. March–April 2006 at Postmasters Gallery, New York(Page 92) Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 9.Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Double Fantasy. "Night Sites," installation view. November 2005 at Hannover Kunstverein, Hannover, Germany(Page 107)Copyright © 2007 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:ImagesAntoni Muntadas (bio)The seven images in this issue are from Gestes, a book by Antoni Muntadas and published by Bookstorming (2003). The complete set of fifty-two portraits were collected from media images of various political figures during the Iraq War. Muntadas emphasizes the gestural movement of the hands, creating a strange and hypnotic choreography.Antoni Muntadas — born in Barcelona, Spain, in 1942 — has lived and worked (...) in New York since 1971.His work addresses social, political, and communications issues, the relationship between public and private space within social frameworks, and investigations of channels of information and the ways they may be used to censor central information or promulgate ideas. He works in various media: photography, video, publications, internet, and multi-media installations.He studied at the Escuela Tecnica Superior de Ingenieros Industriales in Barcelona and the Pratt Graphic Center in New York. He has taught and directed seminars at the University of California in San Diego, the École des Beaux Arts in Bordeaux and Grenoble, the CAVS at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the San Francisco Art Institute, the École Nationale des Beaux Arts in Paris, the University of São Paulo in Brazil, Cooper Union in New York, and many other institutions.Muntadas has received several prizes and grants including those of the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, Arts Electronica in Linz/Austria, Laser d'Or in Locarno, Switzerland, and the Premi Nacional d'Arts Plastiques de la Generalitat de Catalunya.He created works commissioned by the Centre Nacionale des Arts Plastiques in Paris, the Fonds d'Arts Publiques in Marseille, the Public Art Fund in New York, and has been resident artist and consulting advisor in several research and education centers, including the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, the Banff Center in Canada, Arteleku in San Sebastian, Spain, and the University of Western Sydney in Australia.His works have been exhibited throughout the world, including the Venice Biennale, Documenta Vl and X in Kassel, the São Paulo Biennal, la Biennale de Lyon et La Havana and The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Berkeley Art Museum in California, the Wexner Arts Center in Columbus, Ohio, le Musée d'Art Contemporain de Montreal, le CAPC de Bordeaux, France, the Museu de Arte Moderna de Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, the Ludwig Museum in Budapest, Hungary, and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, Spain. Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 1.(Cover) Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 2.(Page 2) Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 3.(Page 10) Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 4.(Page 31) Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 5.(Page 52) Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 6.(Page 74) Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 7.(Page 95)Antoni Muntadas Antoni Muntadas —born in Barcelona, Spain, in 1942 —has lived and worked in New York since 1971.Copyright © 2003 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

Why do painters paint? Obviously, there are numerous possible reasons. They paint to create images for others’ enjoyment, to solve visual problems, to convey ideas, and to contribute to a rich artistic tradition. This book argues that there is yet another, crucially important but often overlooked reason. -/- Painters paint to feel. -/- They paint because it enables them to experience special feelings, such as being absorbed in creative play and connected to something vitally significant. Painting may even (...) transform the painter’s whole sense of being. Thus, painting is not only about producing art, communicating content, and so on, but also about setting up and inhabiting an experiential space wherein highly valued feelings are interactively enabled and supported. This book investigates how and why this happens by combining psychoanalytical theorization on creativity with philosophical thinking on affectivity. It focuses on creative experience itself, and illuminates the psychological mechanisms and dynamics that underlie the affects at stake. Painters’ own descriptions of how they feel at work are used throughout to give an accurate, true-to-life portrayal of the experience of painting. -/- The strength of the book lies in its open-minded yet critical integration of contemporary psychoanalytic and philosophical thinking, and in its truthfulness to painters’ experiential descriptions of the painterly process. On the whole, it enriches our understanding of artistic creativity and sheds more light on how and why we come to feel the things we do. As such, the book will appeal to philosophers, psychoanalysts, and art researchers alike. (shrink)

Following the socialist revolution, a colossal shift in everyday realities began in the 1920s and '30s in the former Russian empire. Faced with the Siberian North, a vast territory considered culturally and technologically backward by the revolutionary government, the Soviets confidently undertook the project of reshaping the ordinary lives of the indigenous peoples in order to fold them into the Soviet state. In Agitating Images, Craig Campbell draws a rich and unsettling cultural portrait of the encounter between indigenous Siberians (...) and Russian communists and reveals how photographs from this period complicate our understanding of this history. Agitating Images provides a glimpse into the first moments of cultural engineering in remote areas of Soviet Siberia. The territories were perceived by outsiders to be on the margins of civilization, replete with shamanic rituals and inhabited by exiles, criminals, and "primitive" indigenous peoples. The Soviets hoped to permanently transform the mythologized landscape by establishing socialist utopian developments designed to incorporate minority cultures into the communist state. This book delves deep into photographic archives from these Soviet programs, but rather than using the photographs to complement an official history, Campbell presents them as anti-illustrations, or intrusions, that confound simple narratives of Soviet bureaucracy and power. Meant to agitate, these images offer critiques that cannot be explained in text alone and, in turn, put into question the nature of photographs as historical artifacts. An innovative approach to challenging historical interpretation, Agitating Images demonstrates how photographs go against accepted premises of Soviet Siberia. All photographs, Campbell argues, communicate in unique ways that present new and even contrary possibilities to the text they illustrate. Ultimately, Agitating Images dissects our very understanding of the production of historical knowledge. (shrink)

Experience of matter can be described in the context of time and space, whereas, some people say, experience of mind may be described according to time only. Accordingly, though time and space together are regarded as objective forms, one may have a propensity for treating time alone as a particular form of the subjective consciousness. For space is indeed referred to the self-evidence of being, while time is thought to belong rather to the self-evidence of our own consciousness. According to (...) my opinion, however, even the spatial description is indispensable for the state of “mind”. For instance, the contents of our consciousness can be described only in terms of the localized phases of their images. Contrary to Kant, who regarded time and space together as forms of the outer intuition (i.e. as conditions of sensation), and time alone as form of the inner sense, I have a firm intention to assert them both as two forms of objective being because it is the being itself that can be the ultimate object of any of our cognitive powers — sensation, understanding and reason. Time and space are not forms proper to a particular “being” such as conscious existence like ours; they are also, nay, above all, two objective forms of being in general that transcends all such limited existences. It follows that these forms themselves, once abstracted in our mind, must, first of all, be valid for material beings; after that, i.e. derivatively and analogically, they may also be valid for mind-beings. The main aim of this paper is “dialectically” to elucidate that fact on the subject of time in particular. (shrink)

Is it appropriate to honor artists who have created great works but who have also acted immorally? In this article, after arguing that honoring involves identifying a person as someone we ought to admire, we present three moral reasons against honoring immoral artists. First, we argue that honoring can serve to condone their behavior, through the mediums of emotional prioritization and exemplar identification. Second, we argue that honoring immoral artists can generate undue epistemic credibility for the artists, which can (...) lead to an indirect form of testimonial injustice for the artists’ victims. Third, we argue, building on the first two reasons, that honoring immoral artists can also serve to silence their victims. We end by considering how we might respond to these reasons. (shrink)

Mathematical images occur in lectures, books, notes and posters, and on the internet. We extend Kennedy's proposal for classifying these images. In doing so we distinguish three uses of images in mathematics: iconic images; incidental images; and integral images. An iconic image is one that so captures the essence of a concept or proof that it serves for a community of mathematicians as a motto or a meme for an area or a result. A (...) system such as Euclid's can combine such apprehensions with other forms of logical inference and an image that is built into a system of exposition is called an integral image. An incidental image is an image used by a mathematician to reason with a particular concept. In addition to this thematic characterization, we also explore one concept, infinity, in some depth by comparing representations of the infinite by mathematicians and artists. (shrink)

Drawing on psychoanalytic discourse, the author of this work probes the use of words and images in contemporary culture. She draws upon a number of artistic movements and exhibitions to examine the emotional and intellectual responses to art.

Thoughtful Images: Philosophy Illustrated is the first systematic investigation of how artists throughout the ages have illustrated philosophical texts, ideas, concepts, and theories. The book begins by developing a theory of visual illustrations of philosophical texts and undermining what the author calls "the denigration of illustration." The book then takes a more historical approach, beginning in Ancient Greece and Rome and proceeding through Medieval illuminations and printed broadsides to the frontispieces of philosophical texts. Throughout, attention is paid to how (...) technological developments enable different means for illustrating philosophy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Aesthetics, Education, the Critical Autonomous Self, and the Culture IndustryMarianna Papastephanou (bio)IntroductionE Lucevan le Stelle disconnected both from Tosca and Puccini becomes incidental music and brings strong recollections of the detergent advertisement it once coated. Last Year in Marienbad has caused some of the deepest yawn relief to many hopefuls for the title of the sophisticated who wished to cash out the film's cultural and social capital. A painting (...) by a well-known artist in the living room of a middle-upper-class residence often matches the colors of the carpet, and a piece of African art in the corner testifies to the hosts' cosmopolitan respect for otherness and the proper dose of hybridity in their selfhood. The young of the family are said to search for freedom from the puritan lifestyle in Ecstasis. Or, they rebel against the oppressive order of the system through idolizing music bands of an unconventional style and, as a matter of fact, of "unconventional" wealth accumulated precisely through the systemic exploitation of their idolization. The whole family, including the discontented young, will unite in the enjoyment of a new movie in which, just as in hundreds before it, police detectives can solve cases only after their suspension from duty and foreigners prefer to converse in perfect English when they are alone. What all members of the family are sure of by the end of the day, some of them through the prism of heavy drinking and others in the sober appreciation of the latest reality show, is that they exercised once again their free will in all instances. For they oriented their desires, treated as natural and self-posited, to objects they initially lacked but "autonomously" and "critically" found and selected from a rich and all-encompassing marketplace of culture. [End Page 75]How are art, its education, and its educational ideals of autonomy and critique related to this particular cultural reality that I have highlighted? Pseudo-individualism, escapism, Ersatzbefriedigung, fetishization, reification, and educationalization are some of the terms Adorno employed to approach the reality of artistic production and reception in capitalist times while preserving the distance that art offers for critiquing reality.1 In contrast with the above-sketched reality, in Adorno's ultimate aesthetic vision through art the self is not supposed to "forget in dreams the present world, but to change it by the strength of an image."2 Adorno attacks the drive toward a "totally administered" society—that of late capitalism—which "reduces every aspect of present-day life to the dead level of conformist popular 'taste' as dictated by a wholesale culture industry given over to the purposes of mass indoctrination."3 Fundamentally, the culture industry hinders the formation of autonomous, critical, and independent individuals.4I shall argue that such a theoretical framework gives us additional insight through which to combat what has already been perceived in pedagogical discourse as educational inability to cultivate reflective and critical subjectivities. Instead of autonomy, education nurtures narcissism. and instead of critique, it promotes appeasement5 —all the more so when education succumbs to the culture industry or fails to encourage students' critical stance to its imperatives.My position here is that by reclaiming their own valuable connection to reflective artistic experience and reception, aesthetic theory and art education can contribute to a reconceptualization of autonomy and critique and, perhaps more importantly, to a reorientation of educational practice.6 Adorno's aesthetics is exceptionally relevant to this aim because his work exemplifies in a unique way the necessary awareness of the antinomic qualities of autonomy and critique, their ineluctable dependence on society and culture, and their secret culpability in domination. Moreover, Adorno's cultural criticism comprises an unsurpassable diagnosis of those social pathologies that leads away from critical and reflective subjectivity and offers conceptual means for setting a critical eye on some current impoverished practices of teaching art. Above all, Adorno's aesthetic theory displays a remarkable topicality regarding contemporary positions on purely artistic concerns and contentions. Thus, the current neglect of his work in aesthetic educational theory7 must be dealt with since accommodation of such aesthetics within art educational discourse will serve significantly the latter's... (shrink)

Tandis que la théologie de l’icône reposait sur une justification christologique, la doctrine augustinienne de l’image repose sur une image de l’essence divine, commune à la Trinité. Ainsi, l’image est une fiction, construite librement par l’esprit humain, à l’occasion de l’interprétation de l’Écriture. Cette doctrine ouvre la voie à la liberté de l’artiste médiéval.While the theology of icons was based on a christological justification, the augustinian doctrine of image is based on the image of the divine essence, common to the (...) Trinity. Therefore, the image is a fiction, freely made up by the human mind, when he interprets Scripture. This theory paves the way to the freedom of the medieval artist. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Why Artists StarveKevin MelchionneAlthough cultural types may fear being branded as philistines for saying so, a remarkable amount of contemporary art is so awful that the very fact and regularity of this awfulness is in want of an explanation. Outside the art world, this observation is jejune. Inside, it makes for immediate disqualification. Is there something about the most common artistic motivations and attitudes that make this awfulness (...) bound to happen yet hard for insiders to sniff out?There are probably many factors in need of elaboration. One reason is widespread self-deception about the motivations for pursuing art. We often hear artists explain their commitment to art by a desire to express themselves or develop their gifts. We hear of a love of beauty or the challenges of craft or the chance for insight into self and world. Frequently, artists describe being called to art, a feeling of being chosen by art rather than choosing it. These are familiar accounts of what makes a life or career in art worth pursuing. But the piety of these high sounding explanations is strikingly incongruent with so much—though by no means all—contemporary art and suggests that, among artists, self-deception about motivations looms large.Franz Kafka's "A Hunger Artist" is a parable of artistic motivation and a case study in the self-deception of the artist. In the brief story, Kafka unwinds an account of artistic motivation that begins with the familiar explanations but gives way eventually to less flattering admissions about artistic ambition. Professional fasting ultimately becomes a path to truth for the hunger artist. But the truth that it yields reduces [End Page 142] art from a source of intrinsic value to a somewhat desperate form of attention seeking. In the figure of the hunger artist, Kafka captures one self-delusion common among artists.IIn "A Hunger Artist," Kafka charts the decline of an accomplished artist.1 Kafka tells us that the artist, a practitioner of what the author describes as a now forgotten genre of performance art known as professional fasting, garners a degree of notoriety for his ability to sustain fasts of death-defying lengths. Half-art, half-sport, Kafka's professional fasting amounts to sitting in a contained but public space such as a cage, where the fast is observable round-the-clock by watchers whose job is to verify its authenticity. The fast is also subject to the attention of paying spectators. Presumably, it is this commercial element as well as the secular hubbub surrounding the fast that most distinguishes it from religious fasting (out of which artistic fasting must have emerged sometime in previous centuries, had Kafka also bothered to concoct a history of the practice). A professional fast typically lasts for periods of up to the biblically resonant forty days, after which the artist is carried from his cage with great fanfare to a modest, performance ending breakfast. Through the practice of fasting, the hunger artist lifts self-denial and by implication, self-control, to the level of virtuosity. The grace of the fast and even a sense of moderate contentment in it are part of what is on display for the audience.Notwithstanding a light routine of bonhomie, Kafka's hunger artist remains distant from his audience. He is neither buoyed by their adoration nor deflated by their vulgarity. Instead, the hunger artist seems entirely sustained by his practice. In his self-possession, we glimpse a familiar ideal of the authentic artist devoted to his practice for the sake of its intrinsic rewards. Indeed, doubts about the authenticity of his performance only fuel the hunger artist's determination. Far from insulted by the zeal of official observers, the hunger artist welcomes their vigilance. In their distrust of the hunger artist, the most severe of watchers convey a respect for the practice of professional fasting. Their desire to scrupulously ratify the authenticity of his effort is also an endorsement of its value. The earnestness of the referees pleases the hunger artist, though we are assured that their presence hardly matters. As in any authentic art, the bystanding critics are hardly necessary to ensure the integrity of the performance... (shrink)

This paper examines the interrelations between astronomical images of nebulae and their observation. In particular, using the case of the ‘Great Spiral’ , we follow this nebula beginning with its discovery and first sketch made by the third Earl of Rosse in 1845, to giving an account, using archival sources, of exactly how other images of the same object were produced over the years and stabilized within the record books of the Rosse project. It will be found (...) that a particular ‘procedure’ was employed using ‘working images’ that interacted with descriptions, other images and the telescopic object itself. This stabilized not only some set of standard images of the object, but also a very potent conception of spirality as well, i.e. as a ‘normal form’. Finally, two cases will be contrasted, one being George Bond's application of this spiral conception to the nebula in Orion, and the other Wilhelm Tempel's rejection of the spiral form in M51. (shrink)

The ancients, Friedrich Nietzsche notes, held Homer's objective art and Archilochus's subjective art in equally high esteem. However, if a work of art must be "objective," how are we to understand the subjective artist, who, like Archilochus, produces art from his own subjective experience? Guided by a clue from Schiller's May 18, 1796 letter to Goethe, Nietzsche employs Schopenhauer's theory of music in his consideration of the subjective artist. Turning to Paul Ricoeur's distinction between image as copy and image as (...) fiction, I argue, will assist us in understanding how Nietzsche resolves the problem of the subjective artist. (shrink)

Researchers have increasingly been creating chimeras – combinations of cells from two species – raising profound ethical, social and scientific controversies. Such research could lead to the creation of animals such as pigs that contain human organs for transplantation, yet public fears have emerged. Scientists have thus called for enhanced public education and discussion, but these efforts require comprehension of the nature of public concerns. While arguments have viewed chimeras as either “good” or “bad,” artists have long depicted chimeras in (...) ways that can inform these discussions. Chimeras have a long history – the term itself is from Greek mythology – and have generated complex and ambivalent responses, reflecting deep questions regarding who we are as humans. Images across disparate cultures suggest how humans have long seen species boundaries as fluid but in differing ways. These images suggest that emotional, not just rational, utilitarian perspectives need to be addressed and that challenges may arise in altering views of all individuals. Nonetheless, public messages could draw on historic examples of positive such combinations. Thus, artistic representations can aid scientists, policymakers, educators and members of the public-at-large recognize and better comprehend and address the discomforts chimeras can foster. (shrink)

Philosophical analysis of metaphor in the non-linguistic arts has been biased towards what I call the ‘aesthetic metaphor’: metaphors in non-linguistic art are normally understood as being completely formed by the work'sinternalcontent, that is, by its perceptual and aesthetic properties such as its images. I aim to unearth and analyse a neglected type of metaphor also used by the non-linguistic arts: the ‘artistic metaphor’, as I call it. An artistic metaphor is composed by an artwork's internal content, (...) but also by itsexternalcontent, which is provided by the work's artistic properties such as its history. The artistic metaphor has been gestured at but not afforded a considered analysis; I aim to do this. Identifying the artistic metaphor has at least two benefits. It shows how curation plays a role in generating metaphors in artworks, which has been overlooked, and it illuminates a potentially powerful tool to interpret and understand ‘conceptual’ art. (shrink)

Artists’ books are challenging to photograph. They function as a unit of tightly conceptually-bound visual, textual and material elements in addition to a heightened self-awareness of the work's booksness. Binding, size, weight, and shape of the book, translucency, texture, thickness of paper, placement of images and/or text on the page or off the page interact with other graphic elements; they control, and direct the reader towards the expressive components of meaning which arise from pace, haptic experience, and visual or (...) structural stylistic choices. Most of such information gets sacrificed in the process of documentation. Here I discuss some of such issues of photographing artists books for this journal and my solutions to replicating each artists’ book within the physical and thematic constraints of this publication: I tried not only to visualize the books’ content but also to translate some of the experience of how that content makes itself meaningful to the reader. (shrink)