‘In the Theatrical World our talk is all of holidays.’ So opened one of Hearth and Home magazine’s gossip columns in July 1897. The holidays taken by London’s late-Victorian West End theatre stars attracted regular press coverage and formed a regular subject of letters between actresses, act...
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‘In the Theatrical World our talk is all of holidays.’ So opened one of Hearth and Home magazine’s gossip columns in July 1897. The holidays taken by London’s late-Victorian West End theatre stars attracted regular press coverage and formed a regular subject of letters between actresses, actors and their friends. The narratives of hard work and public service that had played a significant role in improvements in the theatre industry’s reputational and cultural status prompted a secondary narrative around rest: a widely shared understanding that rest was necessary to counter the impacts of the ongoing on- and off-stage labour undertaken by stage stars. Together newspaper accounts and correspondence capture both industry-focused concerns about the maintenance of the strong physical and mental health required to sustain a theatrical career and social disquiet around the changing world of work more widely and patterns of overwork and exhaustion. In this essay I consider a range of press accounts and correspondence to consider how evidence of stage stars’ holidays can extend our understandings of the professional culture of the late-Victorian theatre industry and theatre’s contribution to wider social and political ideas surrounding work and rest, and physical and mental health.
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Posted 2 years ago
Thalia Allington-Wood
Thalia Allington-Wood
Institution: unstated
Email: info@res00.com
The history of a garden is a narrative constructed on the basis of factual evidence, but also shaped by shifting ideological pressures and historical circumstances over the long durée of its existence. The study of the reception or afterlife of a particular garden allows us to see how it changed ov...
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The history of a garden is a narrative constructed on the basis of factual evidence, but also shaped by shifting ideological pressures and historical circumstances over the long durée of its existence. The study of the reception or afterlife of a particular garden allows us to see how it changed over time, was reformulated by its visitors, and how these changes have influenced its subsequent interpretations.1 Despite this widely shared understanding, the afterlife of the Sacro Bosco at Bomarzo has received little critical attention, though its complex historiography was inseparably tied to political and social shifts in twentieth-century Italy.
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Posted 2 years ago
This essay re-examines the once promising idea that style analysis can provide an independent source of insight into an artifact's non-stylistic context. The essay makes explicit the consequences of treating collective style as such a source in archaeology and anthropology of art, and further develo...
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This essay re-examines the once promising idea that style analysis can provide an independent source of insight into an artifact's non-stylistic context. The essay makes explicit the consequences of treating collective style as such a source in archaeology and anthropology of art, and further develops a new framing for the idea that avoids the criticisms largely responsible for the decline in theoretical interest in the epistemic import of visual style analysis since World War II. This re-framing proposes that inference from style to context is permissible on those occasions when a collective style signals by its morphology its suitability to serve a certain function. And it does so because it prescribes publicly certain modes of behavior or spectatorship. Furthermore, the public nature of the signaling may be such that it allows even uninitiated spectators to get a sense of it and thus to gain access to some of the motivations and norms informing the collective's form of life.
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Posted 2 years ago
This article investigates the role of the darkroom in the experiences of British amateur photographers who, between the 1880s and 1900s, chose to process their negatives themselves while travelling. It focuses, in particular, on the reasons underpinning the development of a network of facilities for...
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This article investigates the role of the darkroom in the experiences of British amateur photographers who, between the 1880s and 1900s, chose to process their negatives themselves while travelling. It focuses, in particular, on the reasons underpinning the development of a network of facilities for changing and developing plates available to tourists, and on how photographers’ engagement with this infrastructure expanded its function in ways that implicitly challenged dominant approaches to both photography and travel. It does so by examining the darkroom, first, as an alternative tourist bureau that put travelling photographers in contact with local knowledge, and second, as the site of a material culture that empowered photographers. These experiences demonstrate that close to the heart of these practitioners was not simply photographic mobility but, most importantly, photographic autonomy.
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Posted 2 years ago
Wearable energy harvesting methods have been increasingly researched over the past decade. Due to demands for finding suitable ways of powering wearable devices suited to garment contexts, yarn-based “components” gather increasing interest. However, the focus of textile properties of energy harv...
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Wearable energy harvesting methods have been increasingly researched over the past decade. Due to demands for finding suitable ways of powering wearable devices suited to garment contexts, yarn-based “components” gather increasing interest. However, the focus of textile properties of energy harvesting components often place emphasis on functional performance and limited elements concerning wearability; using terms such as “flexible”, “breathable” and “wearable”. Rarely, is there consideration for degrees of “comfort”, and “softness”. Yet, if such methods are to become integrated into wearable garments and worn on a daily basis, or even in niche contexts, the tactile experience requires attention. To address this, the following research details an exploration of softness of a polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) yarn-based energy harvesting method, amongst brain injury survivors where degrees of sensitivity can vary to extremes; accruing either reduced or heightened levels of sensitivity as a result of stroke, for example. Levels of softness have been defined and quantified from earlier samples responded to by stroke survivors. This has been formed into a chart and used in reference within the development process to refine and detail the methods used to improve the quality of softness in the process of knitting. In contexts, such as the knit lab, participant presence can be limited, yet feedback, especially on subjective matters such as softness, is critical to the development process. The method presented of grading softness in accordance with previous samples is seen to aid the researcher to analyse samples made in situ, within an iterative process of development. The paper focuses on providing conversations around technical data within the knit process to deliver soft and wearable energy harvesting textiles. This forms a part of a wider body of PhD research that explores the use of piezoelectric theory as a technological tool for recovery of upper limb deficits for stroke survivors.
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Posted 2 years ago
Weiwei Wang
Weiwei Wang
Institution: Science and Technology College Gannan Normal University,
Email: info@res00.com
Nowadays, art design majors are offered in all art colleges and universities in China, but the students and teachers of this major often do not have a deep understanding of art design, which hinders the folk art inheritance of Chinese art design students. This paper explains folk art and art design,...
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Nowadays, art design majors are offered in all art colleges and universities in China, but the students and teachers of this major often do not have a deep understanding of art design, which hinders the folk art inheritance of Chinese art design students. This paper explains folk art and art design, analyzes its characteristics, puts forward the problems of folk art inheritance in China, and puts forward the effective path of art design into folk art.
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Posted 2 years ago
The following pages are four out of the fifteen graphic pages ‘Papiers Voisins’, in my PhD thesis Reading in
Performance, Lire en Spectacle: The solitude of reading merged with the collective nature of an audience (2021).
Through my practices as a spectator, a participant of a performing art...
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The following pages are four out of the fifteen graphic pages ‘Papiers Voisins’, in my PhD thesis Reading in
Performance, Lire en Spectacle: The solitude of reading merged with the collective nature of an audience (2021).
Through my practices as a spectator, a participant of a performing arts works, a reader of performance
documentation and a choreographer I collect visual elements that I then assemble. This process is my way
of cultivating attention to what is active in documentations and attending to their contingencies. The texts
on this page provide the title and some references for each graphic page.
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Posted 2 years ago
ȘTEFAN GAIE
ȘTEFAN GAIE
Institution: niversity of Oradea, Romania, Department of Arts:
Email: stgaie@yahoo.com
Rising in an extremely troubled context in the first decades of the 20th century, the so-called radical avant-garde (especially Futurism, Dadaism, Suprematism and Constructivism) obsessively pleaded for a “new beginning”, a real “restart” of art. Its disco...
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Rising in an extremely troubled context in the first decades of the 20th century, the so-called radical avant-garde (especially Futurism, Dadaism, Suprematism and Constructivism) obsessively pleaded for a “new beginning”, a real “restart” of art. Its discourse, both theoretical, of the avant-garde manifestos, and visual, aimed at giving alternatives for what were meant to become the new benchmarks of art history.We know today that the face of art definitely changed as a result of avant-garde assaults. Even if the effects of this radicality faded in the past century, they are still evident. This study is intended to understand this radicality within the context of its occurrence, to find some of its constants, and to follow its effects upon contemporary art, in order to attempt to understand to what extent we can speak about a success or a failure of the avant-garde.
Keywords: art history, modern art, avant-garde, beginning, contemporary art
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Posted 2 years ago
Paul Haynes
Paul Haynes
Institution: School of Business and Management, Royal Holloway,
Email: Paul.haynes@rhul.ac.uk
Cultural appropriation, as both concept and practice, is a hugely controversial issue. It is of particular importance to the arts because creativity is often found at the intersection of cultural boundaries. Much of the popular discourse on cultural appropriation focusses on the commercial use of in...
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Cultural appropriation, as both concept and practice, is a hugely controversial issue. It is of particular importance to the arts because creativity is often found at the intersection of cultural boundaries. Much of the popular discourse on cultural appropriation focusses on the commercial use of indigenous or marginalized cultures by mainstream or dominant cultures. There is, however, growing awareness that cultural appropriation is a complicated issue encompassing cultural exchange in all its forms. Creativity emerging from cultural interdependence is far from a reciprocal exchange. This insight indicates that ethical and political implications are at stake. Consequently, the arts are being examined with greater attention in order to assess these implications. This article will focus on appropriation in literature, and examine the way appropriative strategies are being used to resist dominant cultural standards. These strategies and their implications will be analyzed through the lens of Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of minor literature.
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Posted 2 years ago
Why has the Jewish-Romanian identity of the Dadaists Tristan Tzara, Marcel Janco, and Arthur Segal been overlooked or critically unexamined in art historical discourse? Until recently, this significant and complicated identity warranted a brief mention
in biographical and Dada studies, such as in ...
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Why has the Jewish-Romanian identity of the Dadaists Tristan Tzara, Marcel Janco, and Arthur Segal been overlooked or critically unexamined in art historical discourse? Until recently, this significant and complicated identity warranted a brief mention
in biographical and Dada studies, such as in those of Robert Motherwell (1951), George Hugnet (1971) Harry Seiwert (1996)
and François Buot (2002), which gave prominence to the three Dadaists’ ties to Switzerland, France, Germany. Romania, their
country of birth, was mentioned briefly to indicate the international character of the Dada movement in Zurich, for besides the
Romanians, the Dada group comprised of artists from Germany, Russia, Sweden, and France, among them, the main contributors
Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings, Richard Huelsenbeck, Hans Richter, Hans Arp, and Sophie Taeuber-Arp. Their country of origin was
also used in the description of Zurich and its international, intellectual scene during the war. Their Jewish upbringing and religious and cultural affiliation are even less acknowledged.
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Posted 2 years ago
