Arts, Volume 9, Issue 3 (September 2020) – 25 articles

Yves Charles Edgar Bouvier is a founder and/or shareholder of the following firms: Expositions Natural le Coultre SA (Geneva), Fine Art Transports Natural le Coultre SA (Geneva), Le Freeport Management Pte Ltd (Singapore), The Singapore Freeport Real Estate Pte Ltd, The Luxembourg Freeport Management Company SA, The Luxembourg Freeport Real Estate SA, and Art Culture Studio SA (Geneva) [...] Full article

This paper focusses on the animal presence in the archaeological records from the Phoenician island town of Motya (Sicily), which grew to prosperity from its settlement in the 8th century until its destruction in 397 bce. Offering a preliminary review of this material, the paper discusses fantastic beasts, animals of the land, sea and air, creatures from Egyptian tradition and the faunal remains. As such, the overview will be more descriptive than analytic. While osteological evidence confirms the presence of domestic animals, such as poultry, pigs and pets, depictions on all sort of artifacts represent sphinxes and griffins, centaurs and sea-monsters, dolphins and every kind of fish, lions, bulls, horses, deer, pigs and dogs, and many kinds of birds from quails to eagles. Egyptian amulets express the great attraction felt towards the mysterious Nile valley. The great variety of animals attested in the iconography, and the various traditions in which they were depicted, are testament to the diversity of the town’s human population as well as their interactions with the wider Mediterranean world. Full article

The cult of St George in the Eastern Mediterranean is one of the most extraordinary examples of cohabitation among different religious communities. For a long time, Greek Orthodox, Latins, and Muslims shared shrines dedicated to the Cappadocian warrior in very different places. This phenomenon touches on two aspects of the cult—the intercultural and the transcultural—that should be considered separately. My paper mainly focuses on the cross-cultural value of the cult and the iconography of St George in continental and insular Greece during the Latinokratia (13th–14th centuries). In this area, we face the same phenomenon with similar contradictions to those found in Turkey or Palestine, where George was shared by different communities, but could also serve to strengthen the identity of a particular ethnic group. Venetians, Franks, Genoese, Catalans, and Greeks (Ῥωμαῖοι) sought the protection of St George, and in this process, they tried to physically or figuratively appropriate his image. However, in order to gain a better understanding of the peculiar situation in Frankish-Palaiologian Greece, it is necessary first to analyze the use of images of St George by the Palaiologian dynasty (1261–1453). Later, we will consider this in relation to the cult and the depiction of the saint on a series of artworks and monuments in Frankish and Catalan Greece. The latter enables us to more precisely interrogate the significance of the former cult of St George in the Crown of Aragon and assess the consequences of the rulership of Greece for the flourishing of his iconography in Late Gothic art. Full article

This paper discusses how Liu Cixin’s 2000 novella “The Wandering Earth” was adapted into a family melodrama that ultimately reinforces the authority of the Father and the nation-state. It analyzes the complex mechanisms, such as mise en abyme and scapegoating, that serve to condone the patriarch’s power, as well as the intertextuality tying the film to the socialist culture. This paper analyses the social context that foregrounds the conversion from symbolic patricide (breaking the established system) to symbolic patrilineality (integration into the social order) in the film and also discusses the inherent tension between the radical apocalyptic vision offered in the original science fiction story and the cultural industry serving the interests of the established order. Full article

Circus Wols is a multimedia spectacle conceived by Wols during World War II at the Camp des Milles where he was interned between May and October 1940. As a German citizen, the artist was considered an enemy of France and Circus helped him bear the harsh conditions of his imprisonment. Wols envisioned a show of high intellectual and aesthetic value that would employ advanced technology but remain accessible to the masses. As such, it is comparable to a utopian avant-garde total artwork. However, through its assumed incompletion and fragmentation, Circus Wols destabilized the ambitions of the avant-garde and modernism; it even went further, rejecting anthropocentrism. Shortly after his liberation from the camp, Wols began to claim that his art should not be considered a human creation. Prefigured by Circus Wols, the artist’s dismissal of European humanism as a valid social and cultural paradigm only grew after the war. His stance is best understood in relation to the contemporaneous notion of “abhumanism”, first theorized by playwright Jacques Audiberti, and embraced by Wols’s close friend, artist and poet Camille Bryen. The article argues that approaching Wols through the lens of abhumanism highlights the pressing historical concerns of his work, which, associated with post-war Parisian Abstraction, is usually depoliticized. Full article

This essay reconsiders the photomontages that Martha Rosler began making in the late 1960s to protest the war in Vietnam. Typically understood as a means of protest against the spatial mechanics of domination—against the mediated production of the difference between the home front and the war front or the “here” and “there” that drives modern warfare—the photomontages, this essay argues, also engage the temporal politics of protest. The problem of how to be “in time,” “to be present,” the problem that frames street photography and its critical history, is at the center of this essay and, it contends, Rosler’s protest. By drawing out this critical framework, this essay addresses the still-urgent questions that Rosler’s photomontages pose: When is the time of protest? Does protest happen now? Is there still time for protest? Full article

My paper examines Mieke Bal’s concept of migratory aesthetics through the prism of hospitality. Critical of academic and institutional tendencies that either deny particularism or pin agents and artefacts to their alleged context, Bal develops her concept as a way of accommodating contemporary mobility without undermining cultural specificity. While arguing that “there is no such thing as site-unspecific art”, Bal is also critical of new historicism’s and traditional art history’s overemphasis on “provenance”, and underscores the political ramifications of this approach. Her critique can be read through the framework of hospitality. The notion of “provenance” frames the guest as the other and limits her ability to participate in the host’s culture. Hospitality, however, as Jacques Derrida maintains, is an ambivalent concept. While extending a friendly welcome, it also preserves hierarchy between the host and the guest. In my paper, I examine this other side of hospitality in Yael Bartana’s film True Finn (2014) and in Lost in Space (2005) of Mieke Bal and Shahram Entekhabi. I explore how these films organise the host/guest relation and how they deal with the political entanglement of hospitality. Full article

In the villages Dammūh, near Fustֿׅatׅ, and Jobar, near Damascus, there were places of worship dedicated to Moses and Elijah which were part of central pilgrimage sites. This article will propose a depiction of the architecture and interiors of these places based on visual and literary sources from the Middle Ages. In addition to the realistic aspect, this article will suggest that the unique design of the reviewed illustrations expressed the prevalent belief that when the Temple was destroyed, the Shekhinah was exiled to the holy sites in Dammūh and Jobar. According to a common tradition, these places are located between heaven and earth, and he who prays in them feels like he is in the Garden of Eden. Full article

The avtorski pesni v naroden duh (authored songs in folk spirit) are a modern and multifaceted phenomenon, which has accumulated a rich history in Bulgarian musical culture. This research presents the essential characteristics of these songs and a two-part typology (1. authorized/avtorizirani folk songs; 2. newly composed songs ‘in folk spirit’), which is based on both models of authorship (according to Michel Foucault, authorial function is manifested in two basic forms of authorship—plagiarism and appropriation). This study provides an overview of some of the thematic debates that attempt to resolve the inevitable contradictions and tensions surrounding songwriting in folk spirit. The avtorski pesni v naroden duh have attracted the critical attention of Bulgarian musicians and society and have been the subject of lively discussions, criticisms, and controversy in numerous publications from the first decades of the 20th century to the present. This survey offers different perspectives, opinions and arguments focused on one of the main discussion topics related to the creation and functioning of the avtorski pesni v naroden duh: pro and contra the obrabotvane (transformation, polishing, processing, cultivation) of folklore. This problem has been at the heart of intellectual discussions since the 1930s and during the 1950s–1980s. The critical discussion of the question pro and contra the obrabotvane of folklore, with its whole inconsistency, complexity and impossibility to be reduced to unambiguous answers, leads to sharp confrontations between the holders of different opinions. Full article

In World War II the Allies and Axis deployed propaganda in myriad forms, among which cinema was especially important in arousing patriotism and boosting morale. Britain and Germany made propaganda films from Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 to the war’s end in 1945, most commonly documentaries, historical films, and after 1939, fictional films about the ongoing conflict. Curiously, the historical films included several about fifteenth and sixteenth century England. In The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933), director Alexander Korda—an admirer of Winston Churchill and opponent of appeasement—emphasizes the need for a strong navy to defend Tudor England against the ‘German’ Charles V. The same theme appears with Philip II of Spain as an analog for Hitler in Arthur B. Wood’s Drake of England (1935), William Howard’s Fire Over England (1937), parts of which reappear in the propaganda film The Lion Has Wings (1939), and the pro-British American film The Sea Hawk (1940). Meanwhile, two German films little known to present-day English language viewers turned the tables with English villains. In Gustav Ucicky’s Das Mädchen Johanna (Joan of Arc, 1935), Joan is the female embodiment of Hitler and wages heroic warfare against the English. In Carl Froelich’s Das Herz der Königin (The Heart of a Queen, 1940), Elizabeth I is an analog for an imperialistic Churchill and Mary, Queen of Scots an avatar of German virtues. Finally, to boost British morale on D-Day at Churchill’s behest, Laurence Olivier directed a masterly film version of William Shakespeare’s Henry V (1944), edited to emphasize the king’s virtues and courage, as in the St. Crispin’s Day speech with its “We few, we proud, we band of brothers”. This essay examines the aesthetic appeal, the historical accuracy, and the presentist propaganda in such films. Full article

This article addresses how global art markets are becoming an outlet of choice for those wishing to hide assets. Recent efforts by the OECD and the U.S. Treasury have made it more difficult for people to avoid taxes by taking money “offshore”. These efforts, however, do not cover physical assets such as fine art. Citing data collected in Luxembourg—a jurisdiction angling to become a worldwide leader in “art finance”—I discuss the characteristics of this emerging system of opaque economic activity. The first of these is a “freeport”, a luxurious and securitized warehouse where investors can store, buy, and sell art tax free with minimal oversight. The second element points to the work of art-finance professionals, who issue loans using fine art as collateral and develop “art funds” linked to the market value of certain artworks. The final elements cover lax scrutiny by enforcement authorities as well as the secrecy techniques typically on offer in offshore centers. Combining these elements in jurisdictions such as Luxembourg can make mobile and secret the vast wealth stored in fine art. I end the article by asking whether artworks linked to freeports and opaque financial products have become the contemporary version of the numbered Swiss bank account or the suitcase full of cash. Full article

How did women architects shape a modern world in the late period of Portuguese colonial Africa, just before the Carnation Revolution? The specific role of women in Portugal working in colonial African architectural culture has now started to be addressed by Portuguese and Lusophone-African historiography. During the 1950s, the presence of women in the metropolitan schools of architecture was reduced. Of those who could graduate, few actually worked as architects. Most were absorbed by the commonly feminine roles, resulting from marriage and from the ideal of family promoted by the Estado Novo dictatorship. To the ones that risked prosecution for working outside the family, the option of jobs associated with the feminine universe, such as teaching, was privileged. Among those who were emancipated from this pattern, the majority worked in familiar partnerships, regarded as an extension of marriage. The women architects that follow the husbands in their African emigration often ended up having the opportunities to work in their professional field partly due to the lack of qualified technicians, and to the high demand of commissions. This paper not only seeks to outline a perspective on these women, but also tries to understand the context of their work by presenting two case-studies in the late in the late period of Portuguese Colonisation: Maria Carlota Quintanilha and Maria Emilia Caria. Full article

Defining the Balkans as a geographic, cultural and semantic entity triggers an interpretation of them as some idea, concept, oftentimes even a stereotype. The Balkans are usually interpreted as a singular entity, generalized and set in a single framework. That generalized view is often ambivalent. The Balkans are often interpreted and presented as a ‘powder keg’, a ‘bridge between the East and the West’, a part of Europe that is simply different, a place of strong emotions and attractive forms of music and dance, etc. However, the Balkans represent a set of cultural units that are in constant interaction, with each of the cultures of the Balkans being specific and authentic. Macedonia, as one of the pages of the ‘Balkan story’, will be presented at three levels—regarding its drama, music and dance. The specific characteristics of the music and the dance fields will be presented through their most significant features and examples, and the treatment of the topic of the Balkans in Macedonian drama will be covered as well. The analysis confirms that generalization is impossible even within a single culture, as each artist and medium of performance has its own unique expression. The cultural forms of Macedonian culture are only part of the wider pluralistic representation of the Balkans. It may be offered under the Balkans as the common denominator, but the truth is that this/representation/concept is polyvalent, multicultural, polysemic and extremely rich. Full article

Teresa Żarnower (1897, Warsaw, Poland–1949, New York, United States), a Polish Constructivist artist of Jewish descent who was forced to emigrate abroad during World War II, became a dominant figure working for the Polish government in exile. She produced a series of photomontages for a book titled The Defense of Warsaw, which was published in 1942 by a “Polish Labor Group” in New York. Żarnower used her technical expertise in photomontage to create new configurations of war photographs documenting Nazi Germany’s attack on Poland in 1939. She chose this shocking and politically loaded content to gain credibility and global attention for her work. Drawing on Benjamin Buchloh’s essay From Faktura to Factography, the aim of this study is to analyze the factographic paradigm in the usage of war photography and in the context of the esthetics of constructivist photomontage. The focus will lie on its mnemonic and archival functions, further highlighting the montage’s function as a key form of social memory model. Full article

In this article, I discuss the persistence of Byzantium as a cultural model in the arts, and in music in particular, in the countries of the Balkans after the fall of Constantinople. By examining ways in which the idea of Byzantium persisted in Balkan artistic cultures (and especially in music) after the fall of Byzantium, and the way in which this relates to the advent of modernism during the later construction of the Balkan nation-states, I illustrate not only the pervasiveness but also the strength of Byzantinism as a pan-Balkan characteristic. Full article

How are we to tackle digital heritage? The fact that its code can be copied, combined with a strong reliance on user interaction, is a distinguishing characteristic of digital art, one which also complicates framing it with the traditional categories of art history. Therefore, in my search for the new ways to preserve heritage, appropriate for digital objects, I will use a case study where technical and social elements play an important role and where we can already speak of a partly institutionalized network aimed at preservation, even if its identification within the field of art, or heritage, is not exactly obvious. I propose an analysis based on the research of the Polish community of pinball machine collectors. My case study will also address the question of the category of locality with regard to projects featuring seemingly universal digital elements. Reflecting on the strategies that the pinball community uses to preserve its artifacts and to animate social activity centered upon those artifacts, can help facilitate modeling at least some practices needed to preserve digital art, practices more inclusive than the traditional approaches, and uniting, even if imperfectly, rather than dividing various social groups. Full article

This paper examines how Takahata Isao’s reputation as a filmmaker was established, focusing on the period between Horus: The Prince of the Sun (1968) and Only Yesterday (1991), using Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of “field” and “consecration”. Through detailed analysis of promotion strategies, popular and critical reception of his films, and his appearance in different types of media in the form of essays and interviews, I will discuss how Takahata and his films were “consecrated”, or came to be recognized as something respectable and deserve critical attention. Throughout the analysis the focus will be on the relationship between different “fields” rather than his films. I will contend that the process of his consecration is deeply related to that of the establishment of the field of anime and its fandom in the late 1970s, and its relationship with other fields with greater cultural capital, such as literature and live-action films as well as non-Japanese animations. The association of Takahata and his films with these fields was used by media, stakeholders in film productions including Studio Ghibli and publishing houses Tokuma shoten and Shinchōsha, as well as Takahata himself, to distinguish him and his films from other anime. Full article

In this paper, I argue that interwar pacifists working in France presented an evolving narrative of what the First World War represented in order to maintain support for their movement and a continued peace in Europe. Utilizing posters, photographs, pamphlets, and art instillations created by pacifist organizations, I interject in ongoing debates over the First World War as a moment of rupture in art and pacifism in France, arguing that the moment of rupture occurred a decade after the conflict had ended with the failure of the Conference for the Reduction and Limitation of Armaments of 1932–1934 and the election of Hitler as the leader of a remilitarized Germany. Pacifist art of the 1920s saw a return to traditional motifs and styles of art that remembered the horrors of the past war. This return to tradition aimed to inspire adherence to the new pacifist organizations in the hopes of creating a new peace-filled world. The era of optimism and tradition ended with the economic and political crisis of the early 1930s, forcing pacifists to reconceptualize the images and styles of art that they utilized. Instead of relying on depictions of the horrors of the past war, these images shifted the focus to the mass civilian casualties future wars would bring in a desperate struggle to prevent the outbreak of another world war. Full article

The aim of this study is to analyze the convergence of art, design and craftsmanship for the creation of glass objects within the context of the 20th and 21st centuries, in the Portuguese panorama. In the late 1920s and 1950s, Portuguese artists established a growing collaboration with the glass industry situated in the Marinha Grande region and started to produce their work alongside glassblowers. The relationship between artists and craftsmen progressively evolved, influencing the evolution of glass design in Portugal. In the last decades, glass factories have tried to enhance the excellence of their products by appointing designers to develop more elaborate concepts for glass pieces, as well as to improve the quality of the material. This essay will answer questions regarding the relationship and boundaries between design and craft in the creation of glass objects in the context of the state of the art of Portuguese glass design, related to the production of glassblowing glass and the region of Marinha Grande due to its historical importance. A case study will be presented regarding the brand MGlass and the new glass designers in the region. Full article

Disney’s Mulan (1998) has generated much scholarly interest in comparing the film with its hypotext: the Chinese legend of Mulan. While this comparison has produced meaningful criticism of the Orientalism inherent in Disney’s cultural appropriation, it often ironically perpetuates the Orientalist paradigm by reducing the legend into a unified, static entity of the “authentic” Chinese “original”. This paper argues that the Chinese hypotext is an accumulation of dramatically conflicting representations of Mulan with no clear point of origin. It analyzes the Republican-era film adaptation Mulan Joins the Army (1939) as a cultural palimpsest revealing attributes associated with different stages of the legendary figure’s millennium-long intertextual metamorphosis, including a possibly nomadic woman warrior outside China proper, a Confucian role model of loyalty and filial piety, a Sinitic deity in the Sino-Barbarian dichotomy, a focus of male sexual fantasy, a Neo-Confucian exemplar of chastity, and modern models for women established for antagonistic political agendas. Similar to the previous layers of adaptation constituting the hypotext, Disney’s Mulan is simply another hypertext continuing Mulan’s metamorphosis, and it by no means contains the most dramatic intertextual change. Productive criticism of Orientalist cultural appropriations, therefore, should move beyond the dichotomy of the static East versus the change-making West, taking full account of the immense hybridity and fluidity pulsing beneath the fallacy of a monolithic cultural “authenticity”. Full article

The incorporation of women in society, as active professionals, was probably one of the most important parameters of modernity in the last century. Until the beginning of the twentieth century, women who entered the world of architecture were, generally, assigned to the design of domestic interiors. Thus, they were always in the background, which contributed to the concealment of the female gender perspective in architecture and an incomplete vision of its history. The general purpose of this article is to address the implicit problematic of the female contribution to architecture, through a theoretical reflection that aims at recognizing the relevant impact of Pascuala Campos’s work to the discipline in Galicia, Spain. The Spanish social and architectonic contexts, as well as the biography of Pascuala Campos, are analyzed to better understand her theoretical and architectonic production. The analysis combines data from different sources, mainly documental research, interviews, and architectonic surveys. The basic principles stressed in the theoretical production of Pascuala Campos are thus identified and served as analytic categories for the survey of the Combarro Urban Intervention. These results allowed the identification of concepts and projected guidelines interpreted as gender perspective-oriented. Full article

Henry Ries (1917–2004), a celebrated American-German photojournalist, was born into an upper-class Jewish family in Berlin. He immigrated to the U.S. in 1938 to escape Nazi Germany. As a new American citizen, he joined the U.S. Air Force. After the war, Ries became photo editor and chief photographer for the OMGUS Observer (1946–1947), the American weekly military newspaper published by the Information and Education Section of the Office of Military Government for Germany (OMGUS). One photograph by Ries that first appeared in this newspaper in 1946, and a second, in a different composition and enlarged format, that he included in his 2001 autobiography, create significant commentaries on postwar Germany. The former image accompanies an article about the first post-WWII German feature film: Wolfgang Staudte’s The Murderers Are Among Us. The photograph moves from functioning as a documentation of history and collective memory, to an individual remembrance and personal condemnation of WWII horrors. Both reveal Ries’s individual trauma over the destruction of Berlin and the death of family members, while also conveying the official policy of OMGUS. Ries’s works embody a conflicted, compassionate gaze, conveying ambiguous emotions about judgment of Germans, precisely because of his own identity, background and memories. Full article

This article presents an analysis of a collective housing project designed by the architects Emilia Bisquert Santiago, Carmen González Lobo, Jose Miguel de Prada Poole and Ricardo Aroca in the Arturo Soria neighbourhood in Madrid in 1975. This project is noteworthy for its architects’ preference for designing flexible and adaptable spaces, both in the interior distribution of the homes spaces and in the common spaces of the building itself. Their main aim was to eliminate the rigid spatial segregation that was a dominant feature of Spanish housing estates promoted by the OSH (House Building Union) during the Franco Regime (1939–1975). To understand this idea, this research proposes a comparison between a Housing Estate promoted by the OSH in 1956 and the Arturo Soria building designed in 1975. The article explains and analyses the different architectural strategies that the architects proposed to achieve that flexibility and adaptability: a permanent structural ‘infrastructure,’ an intermediate architectural system adaptable over time, and finally, a range of possible configurations for the individual dwelling. Another important issue is the relationship between the construction system and alternative development of both horizontal and vertical living space. Explaining this relationship could help shape the habitability of future homes, the development of a sense of community, the possibility of designing for tenancies of different lengths and needs and the management of constant changes to a collective society. Full article