Acrobatic Modernism from the Avant-Garde to Prehistory
Acrobatic Modernism from the Avant-Garde to Prehistory

Author: Jed Rasula

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2020-02-27

Total Pages: 473

ISBN-13: 0192570714

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This is a book about artistic modernism contending with the historical transfigurations of modernity. As a conscientious engagement with modernity's restructuring of the lifeworld, the modernist avant-garde raised the stakes of this engagement to programmatic explicitness. But even beyond the vanguard, the global phenomenon of jazz combined somatic assault with sensory tutelage. Jazz, like the new technologies of modernity, re-calibrated sensory ratios. The criterion of the new as self-making also extended to names: pseudonyms and heteronyms. The protocols of modernism solicited a pragmatic arousal of bodily sensation as artistic resource, validating an acrobatic sensibility ranging from slapstick and laughter to the pathos of bereavement. Expressivity trumped representation. The artwork was a diagram of perception, not a mimetic rendering. For artists, the historical pressures of altered perception provoked new models, and Ezra Pound's slogan 'Make It New' became the generic rallying cry of renovation. The paradigmatic stance of the avant-garde was established by Futurism, but the discovery of prehistoric art added another provocation to artists. Paleolithic caves validated the spirit of all-over composition, unframed and dynamic. Geometric abstraction, Constructivism and Purism, and Surrealism were all in quest of a new mythology. Making it new yielded a new pathos in the sensation of radical discrepancy between futurist striving and remotest antiquity. The Paleolithic cave and the USSR emitted comparable siren calls on behalf of the remote past and the desired future. As such, the present was suffused with the pathos of being neither, but subject to both.

Flintstone Modernism
Flintstone Modernism

Author: Jeffrey Lieber

Publisher: National Geographic Books

Published: 2018-02-09

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 0262037491

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Ancient history, midcentury modernism, Cinemascope, humanism and monumentality, totalitarianism and democracy: transformations in American culture and architecture. In Flintstone Modernism, Jeffrey Lieber investigates transformations in postwar American architecture and culture. He considers sword-and-sandal films of the 1950s and 1960s—including forgotten gems such as Land of the Pharaohs, Helen of Troy, and The Egyptian—and their protean, ideologically charged representations of totalitarianism and democracy. He connects Cinemascope and other widescreen technologies to the architectural “glass curtain wall,” arguing that both represented the all-encompassing eye of American Enterprise. Lieber reminds us that until recently midcentury modern American architecture was reviled by architectural historians but celebrated by design enthusiasts, just as sword-and-sandal epics are alternately hailed as cult classics or derided as camp. Lieber's argument is absorbing, exuberant, and comprehensive. Following Hannah Arendt, who looked for analogies in the classical past in order to understand midcentury's cultural crisis, Lieber terms the postwar reckoning of ancient civilizations and modern ideals “Flintstone modernism.” In new assessments of the major architects of the period, Lieber uncovers the cultural and political fantasies that animated or impinged on their work, offering surprising insights into Gordon Bunshaft's commonsense classicism; Eero Saarinen's architectural narratives of ersatz empire and Marcel Breuer's mania for Egyptian monoliths; and Edward Durell Stone's romantic “flights of fancy” and Philip Johnson's wicked brand of cynical cultural and sociopolitical critique. Deftly moving among architecture, film, philosophy, and politics, Lieber illuminates the artifice that resulted from the conjunction of high style and mass-cultural values in postwar America.

The New Monuments and the End of Man
The New Monuments and the End of Man

Author: Robert Slifkin

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2019-11-05

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 0691194262

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How leading American artists reflected on the fate of humanity in the nuclear era through monumental sculpture In the wake of the atomic bombings of Japan in 1945, artists in the United States began to question what it meant to create a work of art in a world where humanity could be rendered extinct by its own hand. The New Monuments and the End of Man examines how some of the most important artists of postwar America revived the neglected tradition of the sculptural monument as a way to grapple with the cultural and existential anxieties surrounding the threat of nuclear annihilation. Robert Slifkin looks at such iconic works as the industrially evocative welded steel sculptures of David Smith, the austere structures of Donald Judd, and the desolate yet picturesque earthworks of Robert Smithson. Transforming how we understand this crucial moment in American art, he traces the intersections of postwar sculptural practice with cybernetic theory, science-fiction cinema and literature, and the political debates surrounding nuclear warfare. Slifkin identifies previously unrecognized affinities of the sculpture of the 1940s and 1950s with the minimalism and land art of the 1960s and 1970s, and acknowledges the important contributions of postwar artists who have been marginalized until now, such as Raoul Hague, Peter Grippe, and Robert Mallary. Strikingly illustrated throughout, The New Monuments and the End of Man spans the decades from Hiroshima to the Fall of Saigon, when the atomic bomb cast its shadow over American art.

The Architecture of Good Behavior
The Architecture of Good Behavior

Author: Joy Knoblauch

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press

Published: 2020-04-07

Total Pages: 427

ISBN-13: 0822987031

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Inspired by the rise of environmental psychology and increasing support for behavioral research after the Second World War, new initiatives at the federal, state, and local levels looked to influence the human psyche through form, or elicit desired behaviors with environmental incentives, implementing what Joy Knoblauch calls “psychological functionalism.” Recruited by federal construction and research programs for institutional reform and expansion—which included hospitals, mental health centers, prisons, and public housing—architects theorized new ways to control behavior and make it more functional by exercising soft power, or power through persuasion, with their designs. In the 1960s –1970s era of anti-institutional sentiment, they hoped to offer an enlightened, palatable, more humane solution to larger social problems related to health, mental health, justice, and security of the population by applying psychological expertise to institutional design. In turn, Knoblauch argues, architects gained new roles as researchers, organizers, and writers while theories of confinement, territory, and surveillance proliferated. The Architecture of Good Behavior explores psychological functionalism as a political tool and the architectural projects funded by a postwar nation in its efforts to govern, exert control over, and ultimately pacify its patients, prisoners, and residents.

The Clear Line in Comics and Cinema
The Clear Line in Comics and Cinema

Author: David Pinho Barros

Publisher: Leuven University Press

Published: 2022-06-30

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 9462703205

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Historical and theoretical analysis of the “clear line” style in comics and cinema The “clear line”, a term coined in 1977 by Dutch essayist and artist Joost Swarte, has become shorthand in the field of comics studies for the style originally developed by Hergé and the École de Bruxelles. It refers to certain storytelling strategies that generate a deceptively simple, lucid, and hygienic narration: in Philippe Marion’s words, it is a style “made out of light, fluidity and limpid clarity”. By cataloguing and critically analysing clear line comics from historical and theoretical perspectives, this book offers a new outlook on the development of the style in the 20th and 21st centuries, especially focused on the context of the European bande dessinée. In addition, it pioneeringly expands the concept of “clear line” to other artistic domains by introducing and defending its transmedial use, which is particularly relevant for the understanding of the oeuvres of certain filmmakers of the 20th century working in the postwar period, such as Yasujirô Ozu in Japan, Jacques Tati in France and Frank Tashlin in the United States. The Clear Line in Comics and Cinema is therefore a key theoretical work for both bande dessinée enthusiasts and comics scholars, as well as a fundamental contribution to present-day film studies and transmedial narratology.

Home, Heat, Money, God
Home, Heat, Money, God

Author: Kathryn E. O'Rourke

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2024-05-07

Total Pages: 401

ISBN-13: 1477328920

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"The idea for this book came about when architectural historian Kathryn O'Rourke and architect / photographer Ben Koush collaborated on a piece on postmodern architecture for Texas Architect. The two enjoyed working together--with O'Rourke writing and Koush providing visuals--and, together with UTP, developed the framework for a similarly rich, book-length treatment of modern architecture in Texas. Conceived to be accessible to a general readership, this project explores in photographs and words approximately fifty years of Texas modern architecture, from the 1930s to the 1980s. As O'Rourke writes, "In this period, modern architecture and Texas grew and changed at an astonishing pace. The state became a significant force in national and international affairs, chiefly as a consequence of the oil industry and the presence of politically powerful Texans in Washington, D.C. Major buildings, many designed by regionally and nationally-prominent architects, followed the money in the state as the influence and image of Texas grew. Relentless ambition, a forward-looking attitude, and a strong sense of place combined to make Texans particularly receptive to modern architecture's implication of newness, its future-oriented image, and its capacity to reinterpret historical forms in novel ways." While many books on Texas architecture focus on one building type (residential architecture, courthouses, and so on), this project adopts a broader lens. A dozen chapters presented under four thematic headings explore buildings through a variety of frameworks--there are the inescapable forces of heat and money, essential functions like caregiving and government, and groupings for leisure and multi-building sites such as museums and campuses. In each of these sections, the authors present a "constellation" of buildings, with one central example and several supporting ones. So, for instance, the "God" chapter presents O'Neil Ford's Little Chapel in the Woods in Denton as its main building, alongside the Antioch Baptist Church in San Antonio and the Congregation Rodef Shalom in Waco. This sort of geographical diversity, with big cities sitting alongside smaller and lesser studied places, runs through the volume as a whole"--

Middlebrow Modernism
Middlebrow Modernism

Author: Christopher Chowrimootoo

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2018-10-09

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 0520970705

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A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Situated at the intersections of twentieth-century music history, historiography, and aesthetics, Middlebrow Modernism uses Benjamin Britten’s operas to illustrate the ways in which composers, critics, and audiences mediated the “great divide” between modernism and mass culture. Reviving mid-century discussions of the middlebrow, Christopher Chowrimootoo demonstrates how Britten’s works allowed audiences to have their modernist cake and eat it: to revel in the pleasures of consonance, lyricism, and theatrical spectacle even while enjoying the prestige that came from rejecting them. By focusing on moments when reigning aesthetic oppositions and hierarchies threatened to collapse, this study offers a powerful model for recovering shades of grey in the traditionally black-and-white historiographies of twentieth-century music.

The Forgotten Jesuit of Catholic Modernism
The Forgotten Jesuit of Catholic Modernism

Author: Anthony M. Maher

Publisher: Fortress Press

Published: 2017-12-01

Total Pages: 437

ISBN-13: 1506438512

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This book illustrates how George Tyrrell‘s theological challenge to those who would take the church out of history was never effectively refuted, either at the time or since, and that the issues Tyrrell raised are still relevant and alive in the church today. In highlighting Tyrrell‘s liberation of theology from dogmatism, the current work describes why he was vilified by the Roman hierarchy, expelled from the Jesuits, and eventually excommunicated. Tyrrell‘s Ignatian-inspired, hope-filled theology should not be forgotten, not least because it sheds further light on another courageous and prophetic Jesuit, Pope Francis. In revisiting Tyrrell‘s Ignatian theology, this book celebrates the promise that Vatican II presents to the future church, namely, a universal call to holiness as embraced by Pope Francis.

Remembering and Forgetting the Ancient City
Remembering and Forgetting the Ancient City

Author: Javier Martínez Jiménez (Archaeologist)

Publisher:

Published: 2022

Total Pages: 361

ISBN-13: 1789258189

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The Greco-Roman world is identified in the modern mind by its cities. This includes both specific places such as Athens and Rome, but also an instantly recognizable style of urbanism wrought in marble and lived in by teeming tunic-clad crowds. Selective and misleading this vision may be, but it speaks to the continuing importance these ancient cities have had in the centuries that followed and the extent to which they define the period in subsequent memory. Although there is much that is mysterious about them, the cities of the Roman Mediterranean are, for the most part, historically known. That the names and pasts of these cities remain known to us is the product of an extraordinary process of remembering and forgetting stretching back to antiquity that took place throughout the former Roman world. This volume tackles this subject of the survival and transformation of the ancient city through memory, drawing upon the methodological and theoretical lenses of memory studies and resilience theory to view the way the Greco-Roman city lived and vanished for the generations that separate the present from antiquity.This book analyzes the different ways in which urban communities of the post-Antique world have tried to understand and relate to the ancient city on their own terms, examining it as a process of forgetting as well as remembering. Many aspects of the ancient city were let go as time passed, but those elements that survived, that were actively remembered, have shaped the many understandings of what it was. In order to do so, this volume assembles specialists in multiple fields to bring their perspectives to bear on the subject through eleven case studies that range from late Antiquity to the mid-twentieth century, and from the Iberian Peninsula to Iran. Through the examination of archaeological remains, changing urban layouts and chronicles, travel guides and pamphlets, they track how the ancient city was made useful or consigned to oblivion.

Branding the Middle East
Branding the Middle East

Author: Steffen Wippel

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2023-10-02

Total Pages: 676

ISBN-13: 3110741105

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This edited volume investigates place, product, and personal branding in the Middle East and North Africa, including some studies from adjacent regions and the wider Islamicate world. Going beyond simply presenting logos and slogans, it critically analyses processes of strategic communication and image building under general conditions of globalisation, neoliberalisation, and postmodernisation and, in a regional perspective, of lasting authoritarian rule and increased endeavours for "worlding." In particular, it looks at the multiple actors involved in branding activities, their interests and motives, and investigates tools, channels, and forms of branding. A major interest exists in the entanglements of different spatial scales and in the (in)consistencies of communication measures. Attention is paid to reconfigurations of certain images over time and to the positioning of objects of branding in time and space. Historical case studies supplement the focus on contemporary branding efforts. While branding in the Western world and many emerging economies has been meticulously analysed, this edited volume fills an important gap in the research on MENA countries.