Arts, Volume 11, Issue 2 (April 2022) – 15 articles

The church of St Ignatius of Loyola in Rome, together with the Church of the Gesù, represents the most significant artistic contribution of the Jesuits in the Eternal City. Incorporated in the broader context of the Roman College, and built between 1626 and 1650 following a project by Padre (Father) Orazio Grassi S.J., it is the only one of the great Roman churches without a dome. The projects for the helioscopic dome by Orazio Grassi, the Cortonesque dome by Armando Brasini and the perspective dome by Andrea Pozzo represent the difficult attempt to create a perfectly rational layout for Rome, an ideal scientific and theological city. These projects tell the story of three different ways of conceiving architectural space affecting the city: political manifesto, imaginative introspection and colossal scenography. This paper describes the history of an “impossible” dome, analysing the historical evolution of the project and its three potential authors, three magnificent and idealist designers. Full article

In 1969, American artist Robert Mallary (1917–1997) coined the term ‘transductive art’ to describe an approach to art based on the notion of receiving energy from one system and retransmitting it, often in a different form, to another. Long before the realm of techno-art became a recognizable construct, Mallary was interested in a system of relationships, seeking in his words, ‘an element of perfection’ in combinations of materials and technologies to make ‘a beautiful whole’. From his experiments with the Mexican Muralists to assemblage and Neo-Dada sculpture, and finally, his synergistic relationship with the computer, Mallary’s work addressed the place of the human in a technological world. He instigated one of the first American computer art curriculums within a fine art department, developing early examples of software created by artists for use by artists. His espousal of the digital to become a ‘Supermedium’, led him to conceptualise a ‘spatial-synesthetic art’, a multi-media immersive environment combining three-dimensional projected visual elements, motion, and sound. Although unrealised, this system anticipated future VR/virtual reality developments such as the ‘Cave Automatic Virtual Environment’ (CAVE™) system developed at the University of Illinois, Chicago, in 1992. The current review will therefore argue, by example, that Mallary deserves a prominent position in the history of techno-art, and by virtue of both the several emerging influences he had the insight to recognise and bring together and his numerous subsequent contributions as simultaneously an artist, a theorist, and an educator. Full article

Since its publication in 1964, Australians have used the title of Donald Horne’s book, The Lucky Country, as a term of self-reflective endearment to express the social and economic benefits afforded to the population by the country’s wealth of geographical and environmental advantages. These same advantages, combined with strict border closures, have proven invaluable in protecting Australia from the ravages of the global COVID-19 pandemic, in comparison to many other countries. However, elements of Australia’s arts sector have not been so fortunate. The financial damage of pandemic-driven closures of exhibitions, art events, museums, and art businesses has been compounded by complex government stimulus packages that have excluded many contracted arts workers. Contrarily, a booming fine art auction market and commercial gallery sector driven by stay-at-home local collectors demonstrated remarkable resilience considering the extraordinary circumstances. Nonetheless, this resilience must be contextualised against a decade of underperformance in the Australian art market, fed by the negative impact of national taxation policies and a dearth of Federal government support for the visual arts sector. This paper examines the complex and contradictory landscape of the art market in Australia during the global pandemic, including the extension of pre-pandemic trends towards digitalisation and internationalisation. Drawing on qualitative and quantitative analysis, the paper concludes that Australia is indeed a ‘lucky country’, and that whilst lockdowns have driven stay-at-home collectors to kick-start the local art market, an overdue digital pivot also offers future opportunities in the aftermath of the pandemic for national and international growth. Full article

This article examines Le Corbusier’s architectural design processes, paying special attention to his concept of “ineffable space”. Le Corbusier related “ineffable space” to mathematics, arguing that both mathematics and the phenomenon of “ineffable space” provoke an effect of “concordance”. He also argued that when the establishment of relations is “precise” and “overwhelming”, architectural artefacts are capable of “provoking physiological sensations”. For Le Corbusier, the sentiment of satisfaction and enjoyment that an architectural artefact can provoke is related to a perception of harmony. This article analyzes the reasons for which Le Corbusier insisted on the necessity to discover or invent “clear syntax” through architectural composition. He believed that the power of architectural artefacts lies in their “clear syntax”. Particular emphasis is placed on the relationship of Le Corbusier’s theories of space with those of Henri Bergson and the De Stijl movement. At the core of the reflections that are developed here are Le Corbusier’s “patient search” (“recherche patiente”) and the vital role of the act of drawing for the process of inscribing images in memory. For Le Corbusier, drawing embodied the acts of observing, discovering, inventing and creating. This article also relates Le Corbusier’s interest in proportions and his conception of the Modulor to post-war Italian neo-humanistic approaches in architecture. It intends to render explicit how Le Corbusier’s definition of architecture was reshaped, shedding light on the shift from defining architecture as clear syntax to defining architecture as the succession of events. Full article

For its enthusiasts, the blockchain is an archivist’s dream come true: an immutable historical record that is publicly accessible and immune from censorship. Distributed file systems such as IPFS aim to store creative works in a redundant, networked fashion outside the control of any single cloud provider. Projects designed to work with blockchains such as Filecoin and Arweave propose a dedicated cryptocurrency as financial incentive to support the cost of governing and sustaining this “permaweb”. As dreamy as this picture sounds, many of these promises depend on technologies that have yet to be sufficiently developed or adopted. Rather than forecast the future, we can separate the hype from the reality in the present day by examining a real-life example, namely the 2021 auction of Andy Warhol’s digital art with NFTs. This essay focuses less on blockchain’s general promise as a preservation medium and more on the particular case of the digital Warhols, which both in form and spirit would seem a perfect application of NFTs to preserve historically important works of digital art. Which promises of the crypto-dream of permanent access to digital heritage ring true for this case study, and which are overblown? Full article

R. Goto Collins and T. Collins are environmental artists. Their goal is to challenge their own subjectivity through research and practice. Reiko’s interest in relational and collaborative artwork with the more-than-human world goes back to the 1980s. In 2014, she decided to engage a horse (Darkness) as a collaborative partner, with Tim’s support. In this article, the reader will find a reflection on a creative inquiry between a horse, two humans and their shared environment. How a practice (of being with) might reveal an evolving subjectivity (becoming) with a horse? With a foundation of reading and practical testing of Edith Stein’s ideas in we then looked to Charles Sanders Pierce’s work on signs. This would provide a structure that enabled us to appreciate and process the range of signs discovered as we sought to communicate across species. Specific questions include: does Darkness interact with and adapt to changes in his environment? Is he self-aware and evolving through life experience, uniquely engaged with his environment? By recognizing and supporting his life and intelligence, would he reveal a world Tim and I were immersed in but could not perceive? How could we communicate that world through arts-based research? Full article

In 1931, Fortune published an article entitled ‘American Workingman’, a survey of labor in the midst of the worsening Depression, with an emblematic composite image of hands at work to indicate the manual character and the diverse jobs of industrial work. The picture conveys the polysemy of hands as a synecdoche of labor, and witnesses the prevalence of close-up depictions of hands at work in other Fortune features on specific industries, from which these fragments derived. This article explores the implications of Fortune’s representation of the ‘hands of labor’ at a time of escalating industrial conflict, defined by redundancies, strikes, and protests. If Fortune was a self-styled ‘super-class’ publication for a corporate elite, conceived for the ‘heads’ of industry, then to what extent do these othered hands operate ideologically to represent labor’s compliance at a time of crisis? If abstracted hands were ubiquitous in modernist photography, then Bourke-White’s images also equated a putative subgenre of Communist iconography, in which the hand, or fist, connoted proletarian solidarity and strength. Yet leftist militant agitation provoked antipathy in Fortune, and so I examine the representation of labor in the article and the magazine more broadly as industrial relations intensified in the 1930s. I consider further the extent these automatic hands allude to the narrative of ‘technological displacement’, or workerless factories, as a response to strikes. Full article

The monumental state-commissioned Execution of Torrijos and his Companions on the Beach at Málaga by Antonio Gisbert Pérez has only recently begun to receive earnest scholarly attention in Spanish-language literature after decades of relative obscurity, with no known lengthy discussion in English. Yet, it is a major Spanish history painting, commissioned as a monument to Spanish nation building in the wake of despotic monarchism. It is remarkable for its innovative composition and sensitive portrayal of liberal General José María Torrijos and his men, executed without trial on a Málaga beach in December 1831 for rallying against the absolutist monarch Ferdinand VII. In addition to Torrijos, among the dead were liberal politician Manuel Flores Calderón and the Byronic, Northern Irish-born Robert Boyd, active in the final years (1830–1831) of the Greek War of Independence and who was inspired by Torrijos’ cause. Introducing new material that builds on existing research, this essay offers a detailed analysis of the painting’s content and composition within its historical context. It carefully explores its production as a pivotal example of the Spanish visual culture of war and as a sensitively crafted memorial both to the men portrayed and the struggles of Spanish liberalism during the nineteenth century, a context that links it closely to Goya’s Third of May 1808, against which it is often compared, but which is at odds with the remarkably original composition of Gisbert’s work. Full article

French artist and poet Camille Bryen (1907–1977) is usually, and always very briefly, cited as a member of the post-Second World War (1939–1945) lyrical abstraction trend in Paris, often designated as Ecole de Paris or Nouvelle Ecole de Paris, Tachisme, or Informel. Bryen painted hybrids of plants, animals, rocks, and humans, mixing the organic with the inorganic, evoking cellular agglomerations, geological structures, or prehistorical drawings. He emphasized the materiality and the process through thick impasto, visible brushstrokes, and automatic drawing. Along with other abstract painters in post-war Paris, Bryen’s work is usually associated with vague humanist interpretations and oversimplified existentialism. If the above statement is true for a number of his peers, it does not correspond to the way he envisaged his art, and art in general. His views are reflected in his intense theoretical reflection revolving around the term of “Abhumanism”, too often completely ignored in the critical literature. Coined by his close friend, the playwright and writer Jacques Audiberti, Abhumanism claimed the inconsistency of a fallacious and pretentious humanism faced with the rawness and cruelty of recent history, and called for a revision of the humanist subject, including anthropocentrism. Both men considered art, namely painting, as a salvatory vitalist “abhumanist” act. In this paper, which is the first consistent publication on Bryen in English, I will argue that Abhumanism is essential for the understanding of the artist’s work because, separating him from the School of Paris, it is, first, harmonious with his artistic production—paintings and writings; second, it clarifies Bryen’s place in the history of the avant-garde, in the wake of Dada and Surrealism. This essay will contribute to the re-evaluation not only of Bryen’s still underestimated œuvre, but more largely to the reappraisal of the artistic life in Paris after the Second World War. Full article

During the late colonial period, numerous Novohispanic cities embarked on an unprecedented number of projects aimed at reshaping their urban spaces and improving infrastructures, including new facilities for grain storage and supply. The construction of alhóndigas (public granaries), along with other public works and infrastructures, was further propelled by the implementation of Bourbon reforms in Spanish America and the 1780s reorganization of the colonies into intendencias (provinces), as part of the monarchy’s efforts to improve the colonial administration and economy and centralize royal power. The newly appointed royal officials (intendentes) were instrumental in the implementation of these reforms, overseeing tax collection, promoting economic growth and agricultural production, improving mining, and developing a program of public works to embellish and modernize the urban environments and ameliorate the living conditions of their residents in sanitation, public health, water infrastructure, and food supply. This essay explores the projected alhóndigas for two late colonial Mexican cities and how they engaged with contemporary discussions about the efficacy of public works, the circulation of ideals promoted by enlightened reformers on good governance and civic order, issues of artistic and architectural production, and the transmission of a reformist aesthetic agenda from the center to the provinces of New Spain. Full article

The article examines the War in Heaven scene depicting the Fall of the Rebel Angels in the 1200s Anglo-Norman group of illustrated Apocalypse manuscripts, key in the development of Apocalypse illustration as far as quality, quantity, and art historical heritage are concerned. The iconography of the crucial War in Heaven scene shows a variety in the manuscript group; the compositions, divided into three well-defined groups at Satan’s pivotal moment of defeat, are depicted in three principal compositional types: one manuscript group focuses on the narrative of the battle, the second fuses the battle and its victorious result, and the third type focuses on the victory itself. The article establishes further subgroups on the basis of compositional similarities, and results occasionally strengthen or weaken existing theories about the traditional grouping of the manuscripts. The highlighted iconographical similarities provide new material for the reconsideration of the manuscripts’ artistic relations and dating. Full article

There is an Esther scroll in the Braginsky manuscript collection (Braginsky Collection Megillah 7) that was produced in Alsace in the second half of the eighteenth century. The manuscript has not yet caught the attention of scholars, and I would like to shed some light on its artistic design in the context of French noble society. Although its illustrations appear naïve, they are typical of other Esther scrolls of that time and place. Based on contemporary art and textual evidence, I focus on the depiction of women in the megillah, and I argue that the scroll portrays an intimate understanding of the cultural ambience and the decorum of Parisian high society and bourgeoisie during Marie-Antoinette’s lifetime. Full article

At both the individual and societal levels, we are entangled within environmental, social, and technological systems that shape our material and emotional states. Contemporary art needs to integrate and challenge the information circulating within these interacting systems to address our increasingly complex lifeworld. This systemic understanding emerged in the 1960s as part of a broader growth in relational thinking within the natural and social sciences, which extended the conceptual boundaries of the artwork. The ecosystem, a model originally developed within ecology, is an example of a systems model as it describes the flow of matter, energy, and information through the physical world. This model has evolved into a powerful analogical tool to describe contemporary culture’s entanglement with nature and technology. The ecosystem model is invoked here to describe how information flows through the artwork. The paper suggests that art is a vital form of communication as it can channel noise or unknown information. This channelling is demonstrated with the artwork, The Creation Myth (1998), by Jason Rhoades. This work anticipated the convergence of natural and technological systems, and it demonstrates the ability of the arts to channel unknown messages or noise, thereby disrupting the dominant signals of contemporary culture. Full article

Art collectives come into existence for many reasons, whether to collaborate on art making or to generate a space for contemporary art outside of the established channels of exhibition and the art market. These efforts have been captured in recent exhibitions such as The Ungovernables, organized by the New Museum in 2012; Six Lines of Flight, which was launched at SFMOMA in 2013; and Cosmopolis I, organized by the Centre Pompidou in 2017. Artist collectives have received some scholarly attention, primarily as producers of artworks, but their exhibition-making practices have not been explored. Some of the collectives included in these exhibitions have also been very involved in exhibition making themselves. The Indonesian art collective ruangrupa was selected to curate the 2022 edition of documenta. This selection emerges not only from their participation in international biennials and their own exhibition practice in Jakarta—including the organization of regular exhibitions, workshops and film screenings at their compound—but also more ambitions events such as Jakarta 32 °C, a festival of contemporary art and media (2004–2014), or O.K. Video (2006–2018). Another group, the Raqs Media Collective, based in Delhi, curated the Shanghai Bienniale in 2016 and the Yokohama Trienniale in 2020. This paper will connect the local and the global through an examination of art collectives’ community-based work in their own cities, and the way it translates into global art events. Full article

Recycled, re-engineered and transformed pornography has often been appropriated by many of the industrial music movement’s female personalities who are invested in an anti-censorship discourse. This contrasts with the dominant form of feminism in the 1970s, which railed against the depiction of all aspects of sexuality. Artists Cosey Fanni Tutti, Lisa Carver, Diamanda Galás, Mïrka Lugosi, Antal Nemeth, Diana Rogerson and Jill Westwood challenged the codes of male domination by reconfiguring gender and overturning the violence perpetrated by men within the industrial movement. Following the artistic and cultural context of the 1970s and 1980s, such issues gave rise to the radical performances that are discussed throughout this article. Full article