Arts, Volume 10, Issue 2 (June 2021) – 20 articles

This article is an attempt to define the ambiguous specificity of artistic deflation in the sculpture of the Wroclavian artist Leon Podsiadły. At the outset, the author describes the principle of deflationist art and proposes a method of approach. She then discusses the “imperfections” within Podsiadły’s sculpture, the main manifestations of which include the use of common materials and mundane objects, secondary anti-mastery, and dememorization. These features coexist with well-thought-out composition, the inventiveness of the choice-making artist, and the creative fascination of unconventional artistic qualities, to which deflationist unlearning adds a unique slant. Seen from this perspective, Podsiadły’s deflationist caprice persuasively affirms the elasticity of the oscillation between the optics of modernism and postmodernism that defines his art. This oscillation can be seen, for instance, in those among his sculptures that were inspired by his stay in Africa in 1960s; in his “erotic” compositions; and in his installations of the 2010s in which he used the ready made. His “reductive” artistic experiments testify to a need for ironic distance; they individually gravitate toward the transgressive avant-garde and at the same time respond to the current trend of deskilling in art. Full article

In the third quarter of the eighteenth century, Santo Domingo archbishop Isidoro Rodríguez Lorenzo (s. 1767–1788) issued a decree officializing the day of the cult for the Virgin of Altagracia as January 21 and made it a feast of three crosses for the villa of Salvaleón de Higüey and its jurisdiction, meaning all races (free and enslaved) were allowed to join the celebrations in church. Unrelated to the issuance of this decree and approximately during this time (c. 1760–1778), a series of painted panels depicting miracles performed by the Virgin of Altagracia was produced for her sanctuary of San Dionisio in Higüey, in all likelihood commissioned by a close succession of parish priests to the maestro painter Diego José Hilaris Holt. Painted in the coarse style of popular votive panels, they gave the cult a unifying core foundation of miracles. This essay discusses the significance of the black bodies pictured in four of the panels within the project’s implicit effort to institutionalize the regional cult and vis-à-vis the archbishop’s encouragement of non-segregated celebrations for her feast day. As January 21 was associated with a renowned Spanish creole battle against the French, this essay locates these black bodies within the cult’s newfound patriotic charisma. I examine the process by which people of color were incorporated into this community of faith as part of a two-step ritual that involved seeing images while performing difference. Through contrapuntal analysis of the archbishop’s decree, I argue the images helped model black piety and community membership within a hierarchical socioracial order. Full article

This article explores the role played by images of the Virgin Mary in the ordering of space during the colonial period, as well as in the disruption of such order as a gesture of resistance by subordinate groups. In the Real Audiencia de Quito of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, civil and religious authorities used miraculous images of the Virgin Mary as aids in the founding of reducciones, which assured the imposition of Christian civility upon the Native population. Legal records suggest that in the second half of the eighteenth century Indigenous communities deployed similar strategies as a means of asserting their own concerns. Native actors physically manipulated Marian images in times of conflict, moving them around or apprehending them either to legitimize their desertion of colonial settlements or to resist forced relocation. In both the early colonial period and in the eighteenth century, the key strategy of shaping sacred landscapes was implemented in both Andean and Christian traditions. Full article

The expansion of the British auction houses Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Bonhams to markets in the Middle East has played a crucial role in building an international market for art from the region. They have also been essential in providing an international platform for the sale of art from Iran, a country whose economy is otherwise isolated from global markets. In this paper, I address the growth of the market for Iranian art specifically via Christie’s auctions in Dubai. Through close analysis of auction catalogs, ethnographic data drawn from live auctions and interviews with key staff members, I document the emergence of Iranian art into the international arena and the solidification of both Iranian and Middle Eastern art as a distinct category of sales. In particular, I explore the notion of “seeing with the other eye”, a way that auction specialists nudge local collectors into the arena of “international” taste. Through analysis of the particular tropes used to narrate artist biographies in auction catalogs, I demonstrate how artists are painted as interpreters and translators of “local” and “global” aesthetic registers. Full article

This study investigated traditional conservation and storage methods for Chinese silk manuscripts containing painting and calligraphy from the Warring States period (475–221 BC), the Qin dynasty (221–207 BC), the Han dynasty (202–8 BC; AD 25–220), and from the end of the Han to the present. At present, there is gap in the literature regarding the application of such methods to these works. The study methods include a literature review (classical and contemporary sources), expert interviews, and observation of traditional masters. The findings provide an improved understanding of the development of traditional technologies used for painting and calligraphy conservation since 475 BC. In this way, this work contributes to the body of knowledge regarding traditional conservation and storage methods, including mounting practices, scroll unfolding, and box storage. Full article

This article presents an in-depth study of Raphael’s drawing of Leda and the Swan (RCIN 912759), preserved at Windsor Castle. The research aims to make the paper’s physical properties accessible and extend the information on the watermark. The methodology follows an artistic–design-oriented approach. The data extraction process uses a back-lighting photographic technique combined with image post-processing operations. The work catalogues in scientific terms the complete paper mould lines of the Windsor sheet according to the International Standard of Paper Classification (IPH). Based on comparisons with a series of drawings by Leonardo da Vinci, the contribution suggests a chronological and provenance estimate of the paper used by Raphael. Full article

This paper investigates a select number of examples in which largely non-literate First Nation peoples of Australia, like some First Nations peoples around the world, when faced with a judicial challenge to present evidence in court to support their land title claim, have drawn on their cultural materials as supporting evidence. Specifically, the text highlights the effective agency of indigenous visual expression as a communication tool within the Australian legal system. Further, it evaluates this history within an indigenous Australian art context, instancing where of visual art, including drawings and paintings, has been successfully used to support the main evidence in native title land claims. The focus is on three case studies, each differentiated by its distinct medium, commonly used in indigenous contemporary art—namely, ink/watercolours on paper, (Case study 1—the Mabo drawings of 1992), acrylics on canvas (Case study 2—the Ngurrara 11 canvas 1997) and ochre on bark, (Case study 3—The Saltwater Bark Collection 1997 (onwards)). The differentiation in the stylistic character of these visual presentations is evaluated within the context of being either a non-indigenous tradition (e.g., represented as European-like diagrams or sketches to detail areas and boundaries of the claim sites in question) or by an indigenous expressive context (e.g., the evidence of the claim is presented using traditionally inspired indigenous symbols relating to the claimant’s lands. These latter images are adaptations of the secret sacred symbols used in ceremonies and painting, but expressed in a form that complies with traditional protocols protecting secret, sacred knowledge). The following text details how such visual presentations in the aforementioned cases were used and accepted as legitimate legal instruments, on which Australian courts based their legal determinations of the native land title. Full article

Trisha Brown (1936–2017) forged her artistic identity as part of Judson Dance Theater, which embraced everyday pedestrian movement as dance. Between 1966 and 1969, Brown’s work took a surprisingly theatrical turn. Five unstudied dances from this period reflect concerns with autobiography, psychology, and catharsis, influences of her exposure to trends in Gestalt therapy and dance therapy during a sojourn in California (1963–1965). Brown let these works fall from her repertory because she did not consider them to qualify as ‘art’. Close readings of these works shed light on a period in Brown’s career before she rejected subjectivity as the basis for her creative process prior to her consolidation of her identity as an abstract choreographer in the 1970s and 1980s, while raising intriguing questions as to Brown’s late-career devotion to exploring emotion, drama and empathy in the operas and song cycle that she directed between 1998 and 2003. Full article

There exists a consensus in academic literature regarding the centrality of engraved prototypes for the production of colonial paintings in the Spanish Americas. In Peru, these artistic models were written into legal contracts between painters and clients. An examination of the notarial contracts produced in Cusco from 1650 to 1700 suggests that prototypes in a variety of formats were not only central to artistic professional practice, but that adherence to their images may have provided one motive for entering into such agreements. This study leans upon the centrality of Flemish print sources to confirm the attribution of a partial canvas at the Pinacoteca Universidad de Concepción, Chile as an episode of the series on the life of Diego de Alcalá (c. 1710) in Santiago, Chile. Commissioned from Cusco by the Franciscans of Santiago, the status of the hagiographic cycle as the most extensive ever produced on the subject of this missionary saint dictates that a multiplicity of sources was necessary for its creation. By identifying two engravings that served as its models, this study recovers the subject of this painting as a miracle that sustained Diego during an arduous journey. Full article

The recent emergence of new regions in the global art market has been structured by hub cities that concentrate key actors, such as global auction houses, influential art fairs, and galleries. Both Singapore and Hong Kong have developed explicit strategies aimed at positioning themselves as Asia’s art market hub. This followed the steep rise of the Chinese art market, but also the general perception of Asia as the world’s most dynamic art market. While Hong Kong’s emergence derives from its status as gateway to the Chinese market, and has been driven by key global players, such as the auction houses Christies’ and Sotheby’s, the Art Basel fair, and mega-galleries, Singapore’s strategy has been driven by the state. At the end of the 2000s, the city identified the art market as a new growth sector, and proactively invested, by creating a cluster concentrating international galleries and supporting art fairs, art weeks, and new world-class cultural institutions. Based on comparative fieldwork, and interviews with actors of the Singapore and Hong Kong art markets, this article shows that the two cities’ distinct strategies have generated contrasted models of “cultural hubs”, and that they play complementary roles in the structuration of the region’s art market. Full article

This article presents the iProbe concept developed by the Canadian photographer Rita Leistner. This analytical tool is one of the ways to present the image of modern warfare that emerges from messages in social media and photographs taken using smartphones. Utilized to understand the approach are photographs Leistner took at the American military base in Musa Qala (Helmand province, Afghanistan) during the implementation of the “Basetrack” media project in 2011. The theoretical basis for this study is Marshall McLuhan’s media theory, which was used by the photographer to interpret her works from Afghanistan. Leistner is the first to apply the various concepts shaped by McLuhan in the second half of 20th century, such as “probe”, “extension of man”, and the “figure/ground” dichotomy, to analyze war photography. Her blog and book entitled Looking for Marshall McLuhan in Afghanistan shows the potential of using McLuhan’s concepts to interpret the image of modern warfare presented in the contemporary media. The application of McLuhan’s theory to this type of photographic analysis provides the opportunity to focus on the technological dimension of modern war and to look at warfare from a technical perspective such as what devices and communication solutions are used to solve armed conflicts as efficiently and bloodlessly as possible. Therefore, this article briefly presents twelve iProbes that Leistner created based on her experiences from working in Afghanistan concerning photography, military equipment, interpersonal relations, and various types of communication. Full article

This article discusses the art of Alina Rome Cohen, a woman artist from the former Soviet Union who immigrated to Israel. Her glass sculptures highlight her hyphenated, multilayered, and dynamic identity, illustrating identity construction processes of migrant women under conditions of uprooting and re-grounding in the globalized era of transnationalism. The discussion feeds from theories influenced by “the material turn”, suggesting that artifacts “speak”. I will therefore argue that the material—glass—is involved in the active discussion and negotiation of power relations within society. Framed through Alfred Gell’s anthropological theory of art, first introduced in his book titled Art and Agency from 1998, this approach proposes a horizon of agency for the artworks themselves, which function in the world alongside other actants operating in the field, such as human beings. This article will analyze Rom Chohen’s artworks and will be informed by cultural theories from migration studies and gender studies, in order to ask new questions about the dynamics of the exclusion and inclusion of migrants under the ethno-national state of Israel, while offering alternative ways by which to think of concepts such as memory and time, as past and present are brought to a simultaneity. Full article

During the seventeenth century, the use of smalt and indigo became increasingly common among painters’ workshops in New Spain. The unprecedented importance of these two blue pigments in oil painting may be explained by artistic and geopolitical circumstances. This article expands on the use of blue smalt—a byproduct of glass production and a material that lacks in-depth study in viceregal painting—by focusing on the technical analysis of El Triunfo de la Eucaristía and La Asunción painted by Cristóbal de Villalpando (ca. 1649–1714), which are part of the collection of the Museo Regional de Guadalajara (Mexico). The technological and material study of both paintings, situated within the trade and circulation of painting materials at the turn of the eighteenth century, shows how the painter deployed techniques rooted in his predecessors while incorporating particular technical adaptations. The authors examine cross-section samples of Villalpando’s paintings with optical microscopy, Scanning electron microscopy with energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (SEM-EDX), and Fourier-transformed infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR), and were able to identify different qualities of smalt as well to suggest a possible provenance. These analyses evidence novel aspects in the painting tradition of workshops in New Spain that ultimately reverberated in practices of the long eighteenth century. Full article

Cinematic adaptations of videogames are an increasingly common feature of film culture, and the adaptive relationship between these mediums is an increasingly common subject of film and videogame studies. However, our ability to historicize and theorize that relationship is hampered by a failure to fully define the generic character of our object of study. This essay asks, what is a videogame movie? It argues that film scholars (1) have not considered the full range of ways videogames have been represented in film; (2) have not attended fully to the historical, technological, figurative, and social dimensions of videogames; and therefore (3) have limited the set of possible texts that comprise the genre “videogame cinema.” The essay recommends a tropological approach to the problem, defining six tropes that comprise the “videogame movie” as a genre, and applying them to two films, Her and 1917, neither of them a direct adaptation of a videogame, the latter not “about” or referencing videogames in any way, yet both exemplary of a broadened concept of “videogame cinema”. Full article

From the turn to seventeenth through the early eighteenth century, three retablos (altarpieces) were created in Yucatán that relied on a similar Renaissance design. The retablos located in the ex-convents of Mani and Teabo all adopt the Spanish sixteenth-century Renaissance style of the Plateresque. Further, the retablos are connected by the inclusion of caryatid framing devices that establishes a strong affinity among the works. Two of the retablos are located in Mani: the Retablo of San Antonio de Padua and the Retablo of Nuestra Señora de Soledad (or sometimes called the Dolores Retablo). At Teabo is the Retablo de Santa Teresita del Niño Jesús (or Las Ánimas). This paper explores the relationships among the retablos by considering their iconography and their styles to address the retablos’ dates and their current locations. While offering insights about these retablos, this contribution also provides a rich discussion of the thriving artistic industry that was present in Yucatán. Full article

This article explores the local histories and ecological knowledge embedded within a Spanish print of enslaved, Afro-descendant boatmen charting a wooden vessel up the Chagres River across the Isthmus of Panamá. Produced for a 1748 travelogue by the Spanish scientists Antonio de Ulloa and Jorge Juan, the image reflects a preoccupation with tropical ecologies, where enslaved persons are incidental. Drawing from recent scholarship by Marixa Lasso, Tiffany Lethabo King, Katherine McKittrick, and Kevin Dawson, I argue that the image makes visible how enslaved and free Afro-descendants developed a distinct cosmopolitan culture connected to intimate ecological knowledge of the river. By focusing critical attention away from the print’s Spanish manufacture to the racial ecologies of the Chagres, I aim to restore art historical visibility to eighteenth-century Panamá and Central America, a region routinely excised from studies of colonial Latin American art. Full article

This paper presents the results of a research that was carried out in a castle in Prószków, a town near Opole, Poland. The investigations were based on the conducted architectural research, including iconographic studies and the analysis of the technology, building materials, and architectural details. The conducted research demonstrated that the Renaissance structure in question was built by Baron Jerzy Prószkowski as a palazzo in fortezza, most likely in the years 1563–1571. The residence is planned around a rectangular courtyard with four bastion towers. The scope of the architectural transformations of the complex during the baroque period and the 19th century was also presented. In the summary, it was highlighted that the castle is one of the first buildings located north of the Alps that refers to the designs of Villa Farnese in Caprarolli, which was designed by Giacomo Barozzi da Vignioli. It is in the style of palazzo in Fortezza, similar to residences in Czechia, Silesia, and Poland. Here, we emphasized the uniqueness of the complex, which stands out from other residences in Silesia and areas of the former Republic of Poland due its original form and innovative solutions. Full article

This article compares Ridley Scott’s film Alien (1979) with Creative Assembly’s video game Alien: Isolation (2014), which is based on Scott’s film. Guidance for academics who teach creative writing—as well as for working screenwriters and video game narrative designers—emerges in the comparison, particularly with regard to the importance of developing strong yet vulnerable main characters who put themselves in danger in order to protect other characters with whom they have meaningful relationships. Examples from other media, including Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby (1967), James Cameron’s Aliens (1986), Telltale Games’ The Walking Dead (2012), and Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us (2013), are also discussed as they relate to larger principles involved in crafting sympathetic characters, realistic settings, and compelling gameplay for media within the horror and sci-fi genres. Full article