Digital Commons Network^™

“Putting The Arts In Their Place”: A Case For Map-Making In Art History, Marco Jalla

Artl@s Bulletin

The use of cartography in art history is less than common. Because of its link to the old artistic geography (Kunstgeographie) once used to defend nationalist issues in Nazi Germany, it fell into disfavor until the 1960s and 1970s, when maps regained some attention from a new generation of art historians. Mapping arts indeed proves to be very useful to visualize and organize large dataset and to formulate new hypotheses, both as a descriptive and a prospective tool. The challenge we proposed to the authors was to use maps for questioning the territorial logics, the centers and peripheries of the …

Visual Contagions, The Art Historian, And The Digital Strategies To Work On Them, Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel

Artl@s Bulletin

How do images and styles spread out over time and place? This article presents how art historians can use digital methods to study “visual contagions”– the visual part of globalization: how images circulate, as material artefacts (paintings, sculptures, engravings, etc.…) or in reproductions (in illustrated periodicals, in photography, or on the internet…), through which channels (cultural, geographical, political…) and according to which visual logics. It sketches the new possibilities offered by deep learning and artificial intelligence algorithms applied to images, to better understand the epidemiology of visual diffusions. This Paper is also an opportunity to assess 10 years of digital …

Art | Gallery Gis | Cologne – Ein Digitales Mapping-Projekt Auf Dem Weg Zur Deep Map, Nadine Oberste-Hetbleck, Jun.-Prof. Dr.

Artl@s Bulletin

1967 wurde unter dem Namen Kunstmarkt Köln 67 (heute: ART COLOGNE) die weltweit erste Messe für moderne und zeitgenössische Kunst gegründet. Das Open Access-Projekt ART | GALLERY GIS | COLOGNE (kurz: AGGC) bietet am Beispiel jener Messe erstmals eine interaktive, digitale Map für eine Kunstmesse, die mit Fokus auf die Aussteller sowohl die globale Perspektive als auch die lokale Ebene des Kunsthandels in Köln in einem Recherchetool zusammenführt. Anlässlich einer aktuellen Versionierung der Plattform AGGC skizziert der Beitrag den aktuellen Status Quo im Entwicklungsprozess hin zu einer so genannten Deep Map und beleuchtet hierbei kommentierend die Projektphasen, das Frontend und …

Film And Video As A Space For Political Expression And Social Critique In Syria, Charlotte Bank

Artl@s Bulletin

This article discusses examples of transgressive artistic production in Syria with a focus on moving images. During the 2000s, a young generation of artists began to experiment with digital video and rethink the role of the artist in society. They sought to develop new aesthetic languages and modes of representation. By examining this production in relation to critical and committed works by earlier generations of artists and filmmakers in Syria, I discuss the possibilities and limits of critical art production in the context of the authoritarian Syrian state.

But Them Can’T Be God: Chinese Textiles In Nigerian Dress And The Art Of Ayo Akinwande, Erin M. Rice

Artl@s Bulletin

This article explores the influence of Chinese actors in the Nigerian textile industry through the lens of a work by the artist Ayo Akinwande. By examining a sartorial practice called aso-ebi, the author argues that the growth of this practice over the course of the 20^th century paved the way for an influx of cheap, printed cloth from China. Akinwande’s work titled, “Win-Win,” uses the metaphor of indigenous dress and patterned fabric to illustrate that Chinese involvement in Nigerian affairs extends beyond textiles to the construction industry.

Illness As Political Metaphor In Modernist Arts In Iran, Katrin Nahidi

Artl@s Bulletin

This article explores a political reading of Iranian modernism and analyses art works through the lens of illness as metaphor. This metaphor first emerged in the discourse of gharbzadegi (westoxification) in the 1960s, when the intellectual Jalal al-e Ahmad likened Iran's adaptation of Western modernity to being infected with a highly contagious disease. This article investigates the visual traces of illness as political metaphor in the works of Jalil Ziapour, Bahman Mohassess, Forough Farrokhzad, and Vincenzo Bianchini, while highlighting how these artists reflected one of the most substantial political discourses of their time.

Beyond Nationalism? Blank Spaces At The Documenta 1955 – The Legacy Of An Exhibition Between Old Europe And New World Order, Mirl Redmann

Artl@s Bulletin

Was the first documenta really beyond nationalism? documenta 1955 has been widely regarded as conciliation for the fascist legacy of the exhibition “Degenerate Art” (1937), and as an attempt to reintegrate Germany into the international arts community. This article employs published and archival sources in order to understand if and how documenta was impacted by the legacy of nationalism in post-fascist Germany. A biographic sketch of Antonio Corpora (1909-2004) shows how the purportedly “universalist” selection criteria employed by documenta erased cultural specificity and solidified nationalist conceptions of center and periphery.

Petit Répertoire Méthodologique Pour Une Approche Multidimensionnelle Des Arts Visuels Contemporains, Clotilde Wuthrich

Artl@s Bulletin

Quels pourraient être les outils contenus dans un petit répertoire méthodologique disponible à la fois pour l’anthropologie et l’histoire de l’art à même d’appréhender et décrire les pratiques multiples des arts visuels contemporains, jusqu’aux plus hétérogènes et hybrides, et de façon rigoureusement symétrique ? J’en évoquerai ici quatre en insistant sur le contexte historique de leur émergence: les approches contraires ; l’art comme technologie sociale et les artistes comme interfaces ; l’art-ethnographie ; et la bricologie.

“Other Modernities”: Art, Visual Culture And Patrimony Outside The West. An Introduction, Silvia Naef, Irene Maffi, Wendy Shaw

Artl@s Bulletin

The notion of modernity as a tabula rasa phenomenon that destroys the present in order to build the future is particularly complicated in the case of non-Western settings, where modernization was often understood as erasing local culture in favor of a template borrowed from the West. Historiographies of non-Western arts have mostly followed such a model, viewing fine arts, associated with modernity, as opposed to “traditional” arts, often commodified in the production of nostalgia or marketed for tourists. This article discusses the complexity of art production in non-Western contexts, beyond such reductive classifications.

Un Viaje Gráfico De Crítica Política: Análisis Geográfico-Temático De Los Diseños De Eneko De Las Heras Sobre Los Periódicos Interviú Y 20 Minutos, Giovanni Pietro Vitali

Artl@s Bulletin

Esta contribución pretende ser una tentativa de análisis crítico y geográfico del trabajo del caricaturista venezolano Eneko de Las Heras Leizaola. En este artículo proponemos un análisis espacial y cronológico de sus dibujos de humor gráfico y de denuncia social publicados en los periódicos Interviú y 20 Minutos entre los años de 2007 a 2018. El sustento de dicho análisis reside en el empleo de herramientas digitales. Demostraremos cómo Eneko representa, incluso si hay algunas críticas sociales en respuesta a fenómenos económicos, políticos y bélicos, nuevas formas de contar cuestiones sociales como el sexismo o la ecología.

Mapping Michelangelo's Marble And Its Temporalities, Catherine Walsh

Artl@s Bulletin

This essay examines the itineraries of blocks of marble quarried for Michelangelo and focuses on sculptures he made for the Tomb of Julius II (completed in 1545). From geographical-geological origins in the Apuan Alps, the marble moved across land and over waterways to Pisa, Florence, Rome, Paris, and beyond. The marbles' movements marked time for Michelangelo and other people who encountered these objects, and marks of time are foregrounded -- but also obscured -- by the marble. The essay and an accompanying interactive digital map trace the material and its movements from primordial deep time, through the early modern period, …

Mining Maps, Making Meaning: An Interview With Kasia Ozga, Nikoo Paydar

Artl@s Bulletin

In the following interview with Kasia Ozga, the Polish-French-American contemporary artist focuses on her Mapping Aluminum series from 2013-2014, metal relief sculptures that throw light on environmental issues arising from bauxite mining and aluminum processing and smelting. Ozga illuminates how she came to focus on the material aluminum, the context in which she developed the project and selected the mapped sites (the Saint Lawrence River in Massena, NY, the Simandou Mountain Range in Guinea, and Ajka Vezprém County, Hungary), and how borders, cartography and maps figure in her larger body of work.

Tracing The Routes Of Floating Exhibitions: A Fluid Cartography Of Post-War Modernism Around 1956, Laura Bohnenblust

Artl@s Bulletin

This article discusses the phenomenon of floating art exhibitions based on the examples of the Argentinian exposición flotante and the Australian Pacific Loan Exhibition (both 1956). They manifested themselves at the same time as the “second wave of biennials” and can be interpreted as floating national pavilions. Through a spatial analysis of the routes taken across the open ocean, it is shown how the ships’ movements form what can be understood as a ‘negative map’ of canonical art history, oriented around the North Atlantic. This cartographic approach reveals blind spots in art historical research and contributes to the creation of …

Cartographier L’Essor D’Un Modèle : Le Chapiteau Ionique De Michel-Ange De L’Invention Au Début Du Xviie Siècle, Federica Vermot

Artl@s Bulletin

This study proposes to map the propagation of an alternative type of ionic capital invented by Michelangelo in 1563. We proceed to a comparative analysis of the new buildings erected in Rome from the invention of the new capital to the beginning of the 17th century, in order to highlight spatial and temporal correlations peculiar to its diffusion. The study of this issue allows to understand the perception of the capital that the next generation of roman architects developed, which is a less known aspect of Michelangelo's reception. Overall, it invites to shape the stylistic evolution of an architectural motif.

Rome Vaut Bien Un Prix. An Artistic Elite In The Service Of The State: The Pensionnaires Of The Académie De France In Rome, 1666-1968, Annie Verger

Artl@s Bulletin

The Dictionnaire biographique des pensionnaires de l’Académie de France à Rome serves as a register for the artists sent to Italy by the French state from the time of Louis XIV in 1666 up until the abolition of the Prix de Rome concours in 1968. After this year, the selection of pensionnaires nonetheless continued this tradition in another form, and the Académie de France in Rome thus celebrated its 350^th anniversary in 2016. This notion of continuity lies at the heart of the present study, which has been carried out over a number of years.

The dictionary was published …

Rome Vaut Bien Un Prix. Une Élite Artistique Au Service De L’État : Les Pensionnaires De L’Académie De France À Rome De 1666 À 1968, Annie Verger

Artl@s Bulletin

Le Dictionnaire biographique des pensionnaires de l’Académie de France à Rome a essentiellement pour objet le recensement du groupe des praticiens envoyés en Italie par l’État, depuis Louis XIV en 1666 jusqu’à la suppression du concours du Prix de Rome en 1968. Le recrutement des pensionnaires n’ayant pas cessé après cette date, en dépit des changements de régimes politiques, de théories esthétiques et de conditions de production, l’institution a fêté son 350ème anniversaire en 2016. Cette continuité est au principe même de l’étude engagée depuis plusieurs années. Cet article se propose de présenter les premiers résultats rendus possibles par l’étude …

Une Rencontre Manquée : Confrontation, Défiance Et Stéréotypes Entre Suds Dans Milano, Fin Qui Tutto Bene De Gabriella Kuruvilla, Nicola Brarda

Artl@s Bulletin

Tony, a Milanese youngster of Neapolitan descent, encounters an Egyptian migrant, Samir, in a bar. Tony is drunk and Samir steals his mobile phone. This episode is narrated briefly in two chapters of Gabriella Kuruvilla’s novel Milano, fin qui tutto bene. We will try to analyze, within this misunderstanding, the ways in which the novel questions the apparent homogeneity of the notion of South, by staging the collision between two distinct Souths within the city : the South embodied by former generations of migrants originating from the Mezzogiorno, as opposed to new migrants coming from the global South.

The Dilemmas Of African Diaspora In The Global Art Discourse, Sabrina Moura

Artl@s Bulletin

In this paper, I explore how the notion of African diaspora has been used as a framework for the reassessment of essentialized identity narratives in field of art history and curatorship, between the1980s and 2000s. For this, I examine the emergence of the concept in the field of cultural studies and how it served as a tool for unsettling the narratives of belonging associated to nation and ethnicity. Such contextualization provides the ground for the analysis of the dilemmas introduced by a diasporic perspective in relation to the field of African art and the local-global art discourse.

Infidelity As Reality: Re-Staging The Global South With Abbas Kiarostami’S Close-Up, Sinan Richards

Artl@s Bulletin

In this article, we contend that, in the fields of art and visual culture, the Global South is both an elaborate lie and a radical opportunity for transformation. We investigate Kiarostami’s Close-up alongside Lacan’s psychoanalysis to show how Close-up’s filmic narrative evokes the same ‘polyvalence’ and ‘slipperiness’ as the notion of the Global South. We argue that Kiarostami’s Close-up retroactively changed Sabzian’s fate, and in so doing, Kiarostami’s re-staging actively overwrites History itself. We read the same narrative move in the concept of the Global South to suggest that the Global South adopts the Kiarostamian strategy of infidelity as reality …

Parler Des Suds : Le Défi De Caliban, Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, Roland Béhar

Artl@s Bulletin

Depuis les années 1990, voire 2000, une nouvelle dimension s'est imposée dans la lecture des productions culturelles contemporaines. Elle rompt avec la logique Orient-Occident puis Est/Ouest, qui avait été jusque-là celle du « monde connu ». De nombreux auteurs, artistes, écrivains et théoriciens ont mis en évidence la notion de Sud pour montrer combien la puissance du monde Nord-Atlantique reposait, depuis les premières vagues de colonisation, sur une relation inégale entre Nord et Sud, au détriment du Sud. Cette notion, jusqu’à celle de « Sud Global », irrigue de nombreux débats sans que pour autant l’on discrimine plus précisément comment …

Women Artists Shows·Salons·Societies: Towards A Global History Of All-Women Exhibitions, Catherine Dossin, Hanna Alkema

Artl@s Bulletin

The Women Artists Shows·Salons·Societies project was launched in 2017 as a collaboration between Artl@s and AWARE. Combining AWARE’s ambitions to restore the presence of 20th-century women artists in the history of art, and Artl@s’s desire to provide scholars with the data and tools necessary to question the canonical art historical narratives through quantitative and cartographic analyses, we decided to work on group exhibitions of women artists.
Our first ambition is to build a community of scholars and work together to develop a common terminology and even possibly a common and consistent methodology to study these events, because the ones used …

À L’Assaut ! Explosion D’Expositions De Femmes Artistes En France Pendant Le Mouvement Féministe, Fabienne Dumont

Artl@s Bulletin

En France, durant les années 1970, les plasticiennes se sont regroupées afin de lutter contre leur invisibilité sur la scène artistique. Plusieurs collectifs ont porté leurs revendications, accompagnés de quelques théoriciennes qui ont œuvré pour faire connaître leurs travaux. La décennie voit ainsi surgir de multiples expositions de femmes artistes, liées à des collectifs aux idéologies variées. Cet article s’attache au foisonnement d’expositions, à partir de recherches pionnières, parues dans l’ouvrage Des sorcières comme les autres. Artistes et féministes dans la France des années 1970.

Femmes Artistes Italiennes Du Xxe Siècle : Il Complesso Di Michelangelo, Rome 1977, Laura Iamurri

Artl@s Bulletin

Une exposition historique de femmes artistes s’ouvrit à Rome en février 1977 : installée dans une galerie privée, la première rétrospective consacrée aux artistes italiennes du XX^e siècle avait été organisée à l’occasion de la parution du livre Il complesso di Michelangelo [Le complexe de Michel-Ange], écrit par l’artiste Simona Weller. Cet ouvrage, premier essai de recensement de la présence féminine dans l’art contemporain en Italie, citait 270 artistes tout au long du siècle, la plupart d’entre elles oubliées ou inconnues ; seules les artistes professionnelles étaient prises en considération.

Se Rendre Visible Dans L’Espagne De Franco: Le Salón Femenino De Arte Actual (1962-1971), Maria Lluïsa Faxedas, Isabel Fontbona, Patricia Mayayo

Artl@s Bulletin

The paper examines the history and the critical reception of the Salón femenino del arte actual, an annual all-female exhibition organized by a group of women artists in Barcelona between 1962 and 1971. Unique at the time, the Salón challenged the traditional role attributed to women under Franco's dictatorship, managing at the same time to obtain support from local authorities. The paper argues that it was the ability of the organisers to take advantage of political ambivalence, to find a delicate balance between complicity and resistance, which allowed the exhibition to survive for a decade.

Α “Guarantee Of Clustered Energy And Collective Promotion”: The Association Of Greek Women Artists And Its Exhibitions In The 50s And 60s, Glafki Gotsi

Artl@s Bulletin

Founded in Athens in 1954 the Association of Greek Women Artists aimed at promoting art among the Greek public, confronting the problems of women artists through collective action, and encouraging the presentation of Greek art on the international scene. In the 1950s and 1960s it organized a significant number of group exhibitions in Greece as well as abroad, where its members showed their work. This paper examines the context of the association’s all-women shows and their meaning in relation to feminist cultural politics inside but also beyond national borders. More specifically, it analyzes the circumstances under which the collectivity was …

Women Artists' Salon Of Chicago (1937-1953): Cultivating Careers And Art Collectors, Joanna P. Gardner-Huggett

Artl@s Bulletin

This article reconstructs the history of the Women Artists’ Salon of Chicago, which was founded as an exhibition society in Chicago in 1937, and argues that the Board of Directors turned to the 19^th century precedents of the Palette Club and the Woman’s Building at the World’s Columbian Exhibition as models for their organization. The essay also traces how members of the Women Artists’ Salon deliberately exhibited traditional artworks associated with the feminine and domestic and coordinated social events in order to cultivate greater sales and a new generation of female art collectors.

Women's Art Club And Women’S Group Exhibitions In Zagreb From 1928 Until 1940, Darija Alujević, Dunja Nekić

Artl@s Bulletin

In 1927 painters Nasta Rojc and Lina Crnčić Virant, inspired by their British colleagues founded the Women's Art Club in Zagreb. From 1928 until 1940 the Club organized group exhibitions of its members. The main idea of the Club was to improve arts and crafts, to organize female exhibitions and to collaborate with other international women associations. The Club took part in the organisation of the exhibition of Bulgarian women artists and the exhibition of the Little Entente of Women held in 1938 in Zagreb. Women`s Art Club was an important factor of the female artists' emancipation – organizing the …

The Exhibitions Of The Femmes Artistes Modernes (Fam), Paris, 1931-38, Paula J. Birnbaum

Artl@s Bulletin

The Société des Femmes Artistes Modernes (FAM) opened up a productive space for women artists who were active in Paris during the 1930s through annual multigenerational exhibitions and international collaborations. I argue that FAM embodied a paradox: on the one hand, it supported artists wishing to question stereotypes of gender, race, class, and nation; on the other, its institutional structure and leadership did not challenge patriarchal assumptions about women’s subordinate role in society. The paper explores this tension by comparing the work and critical reception of several artists in the group who represented the theme of motherhood.

An Exhibition Of One’S Own: The Salón Femenino De Bellas Artes (Buenos Aires, 1930s-1940s), Georgina G. Gluzman

Artl@s Bulletin

From the late 1920s on, Buenos Aires witnessed the emergence of exhibition spaces of a separatist character for women artists. In spite of their importance, these regular shows have not received any attention from art history literature. Their vast development, the extensive coverage by the press, and their links to feminist institutions have gone completely unnoticed. Focusing on the Salón Femenino organized by the Club Argentino de Mujeres, the purpose of this article is to reconstruct the organization of these events, to examine their reception by art critics, and to analyze the careers of some of the participating women …

The Exhibition Of Former Students Of The Elise Von Jung-Stilling Drawing School In Riga In 1904, Baiba Vanaga

Artl@s Bulletin

In the 19th century, the art scene in the Baltic provinces and their largest city, Riga, was fairly undeveloped: it was impossible to acquire good arts education, the art market practically did not existed and only a comparatively small number of artists educated outside of the Baltics were working there. The local art scene became significantly more active after 1870, when the Riga Art Society was established. In 1898, Society opened its Art Salon, which held several solo exhibitions of women artists and at least two group shows where all of the participants were women: the exhibition of works by …