Digital Commons Network^™

Digital Art History “Beyond The Digitized Slide Library”: An Interview With Johanna Drucker And Miriam Posner, Miriam Kienle

Artl@s Bulletin

Johanna Drucker and Miriam Posner were two of the organizers of the Getty/UCLA Summer Institute in Digital Art History “Beyond the Digitized Slide Library” that took place in the summers of 2014 and 2015. With their extensive expertise in the field, they developed a program that challenged participant to think about the broad theoretical implications of their respective projects and to gain practical tools in digital art history. In this interview, they will describe some of their thinking behind the institute and the state of the field of digital art history, including a discussion of the impact of network visualizations …

“What You See Is What You Get: The Artifice Of Insight”: A Conversation Between R. Luke Dubois And Anne Collins Goodyear, Anne C. Goodyear

Artl@s Bulletin

The metaphorical relationship between sight and knowledge has long been recognized: the double-entendre of “illumination” promises both light and understanding; “I see” signifies that one “gets it” intellectually. This conversation between R. Luke DuBois and Anne Collins Goodyear addresses how data accrues meaning through pictorial structures that represent it. An artist, DuBois has consistently played with conventions for depicting information visually, revealing the intersections between data and desire they represent. Reexamining the interfaces through which we view the world, DuBois and Goodyear consider what our filters threaten to hide.

La relation métaphorique entre la vue et la connaissance a longtemps …

Enriching And Cutting: How To Visualize Networks Thanks To Linked Open Data Platforms., Lea Saint-Raymond, Antoine Courtin

Artl@s Bulletin

Networks are developing very quickly in the social sciences, and they are beginning to emerge in art history. This paper explores the making of network visualizations, from the building of the dataset to the analysis of results. Starting from an initial corpus regarding the Parisian auction sales for modern paintings, we developed a methodology to enrich it, thanks to linked open data platforms and technologies for realigning datasets. We then call into question the visualization of networks. Although it brings about an overview of the market and allows a very close reading, the best is the enemy of the good: …

The Computer As Filter Machine: A Clustering Approach To Categorize Artworks Based On A Social Tagging Network, Stefanie Schneider, Hubertus Kohle

Artl@s Bulletin

Image catalogs containing several million reproductions of artworks still pose a costly or computationally intensive challenge if one tries to categorize them adequately, either in a manual or automatic way. Using crowdsourced annotations assigned by laypersons, this article proposes the application of a clustering algorithm to segment artworks into groups. It is shown that the resulting clusters allow for a consistent reclassification extending the traditional categories (history, genre, portrait, still life, landscape), and thus enable a finely-grained differentiation which can be used to search in and filter image inventories, among other things.

Network Analysis And Feminist Artists, Michelle Moravec

Artl@s Bulletin

This article examines the benefits and drawbacks of using social network analysis to study feminist artists’ networks. Looking at two of the author’s digital humanities projects, it explores the systemic and structural barriers that limit the utility of social network analysis for feminist artists. The first project on the social network of artist Carolee Schneemann analyzed her female circles through a correspondence network. The second project attempted to trace the circulation of feminist art manifestos in American feminist periodicals. Three factors are identified as constraining network analysis in these case studies, the lack of feminist artists’ archives, an insufficient amount …

Workshop As Network: A Case Study From Mughal South Asia, Yael Rice

Artl@s Bulletin

Over the course of Emperor Akbar’s reign (1556–1605), an exceptionally high volume of illustrated manuscripts was produced. The manuscript workshop was staffed accordingly: between the 1580s and early seventeenth century, over one hundred painters found employ at the Mughal court. Thanks to contemporaneous ascriptions found in the margins of the manuscripts’ illustrated pages, the artists’ names and the capacities (designer or colorist) in which they worked are known. This essay uses digital and sociological methods to examine networks of artistic collaborations across select manuscript projects, arguing that the structure of workshop production teams—in which membership frequently fluctuated—facilitated the formation of …

Keeping Our Eyes Open: Visualizing Networks And Art History, Stephanie Porras

Artl@s Bulletin

Network visualizations have the potential to translate messy archival work into clouds of connection, powerful maps of relations that can reveal hidden agents or nodes of production. But network visualizations must also be understood as artifacts of our own visual culture, laden with the biases and limits of both past and present knowledge systems. Rather than seeing networks as uniform webs of connection, social network analysis must productively interrogate how biopolitical, cultural and social power are manifested within these visualizations, reinforcing the biases and lacunae of the archive.

Continuity And Disruption In European Networks Of Print Production, 1550-1750, Matthew D. Lincoln

Artl@s Bulletin

Computational analysis of the potential historical professional networks inferred from surviving print impressions offers novel insight into the evolution of early modern artistic printmaking in Europe. This analysis traces a longue durée print production history that examines the changing ways in which different regional printmaking communities interacted between 1550 and 1750, highlighting the powerful impact of demographic forces and calling in to question narratives based on single key individuals or the emergence of specific national schools.

Between Nodes And Edges: Possibilities And Limits Of Network Analysis In Art History, Miriam Kienle

Artl@s Bulletin

This article examines a number of prominent network analysis projects in the field of art history and explores the unique promises and problems that this increasingly significant mode of analysis presents to the discipline. By bringing together projects that conceptualize art historical networks in different ways, it demonstrates how established theories and methods of art history—such as feminist and postcolonial theory—may be productively used in conjunction with quantitative/computational approaches to art historical analysis. It argues that quantitative analysis of art and its networks can expand the qualitative approaches that have traditionally defined the field, particularly if theorizing is not positioned …

Circulation And Resemanticization: An Aporetic Palimpsest, Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel

Artl@s Bulletin

Studies of the processes of resemanticization at work in artistic circulation are few and far between; attempts at articulating a theoretical understanding of such processes are rarer still. This paper will investigate the questions raised by a circulatory approach to the history of art, and review the methods and sources which can allow us to answer them. How is the meaning of a work of art conveyed? How is this meaning constituted, and how does it evolve across different places and moments? What are the factors that contribute to such changes? What are the possible consequences of artistic resemanticization? Are …

The Global History Of Art And The Challenge Of The Grand Narrative, Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel

Artl@s Bulletin

It might seem rather early to propose an assessment of the famous ‘global turn’ in the history of art. However, the challenge of globalisation and of the ‘decolonization’ of our thought is now a daily preoccupation for many art historians. In order to propose a ‘global history’, one that would do justice to art from all continents, and in particular from those that have long been neglected and scorned, the ideal solution comes in the form of an articulation of a truly global narrative. Where could these new stories come from? We have sought to interrogate actors from the world …

Circulations, Resémantisations. Le Palimpseste Aporétique, Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel

Artl@s Bulletin

Pourquoi trouve-t-on si peu d’études sur les resémantisations à l’œuvre dans les circulations artistiques ? Pourquoi dispose-t-on encore moins de théorie générale pour comprendre ces resémantisations ? Ce papier, s’interrogeant sur les questions que lève une approche circulatoire de l’histoire de l’art, passe en revue les méthodes et les sources qui peuvent contribuer à y répondre. Qu’est-ce qui porte le sens d’une œuvre d’art ? Comment le sens se constitue-t-il et évolue-t-il selon les temps et les lieux ? Quels sont les facteurs qui le font changer ? Quelles sont les conséquences possibles d’une resémantisation artistique ? Y a-t-il des …

Moving Significances (Within 52 Days), Plinio Ribeiro Jr

Artl@s Bulletin

This proposition was composed from a reconstitution of elements that integrated the project “Paris – Tokyo by train,” third part of the Japan trilogy, realized by the artist in 2009. More than illustrate or reveal the background of this project, the texts and images that are reproduced here intend to open new perspectives on how the echoes of the past can be articulated with the personal narrative. This approach allows as well as to resignify the dynamics implied in this quest of new senses.

Magie, Terre Et Cri. Les Resémantisations Politiques De L’Œuvre D’Antoni Tàpies Sous Le Franquisme., Claudia Grego

Artl@s Bulletin

Tout au long de sa carrière, Antoni Tàpies (1923-2012) fut partisan d’un modèle interprétatif qui permit l’appropriation individuelle de ses œuvres. Le peintre fut le défenseur et le bénéficiaire d’un mode de signification du tableau qui n’était ni univoque, ni prédéterminé. Dans cet article, on analysera comment cette ductilité interprétative a permis la resémantisation politique des œuvres de Tàpies pendant l’époque du franquisme (1939-1975). Guidés par une de ses premières créations, Croix de journal (1946 – 1947), nous tracerons les déplacements de ses toiles pour classifier les déclinaisons sémantiques de l’œuvre en trois grandes étapes : d’abord, l’émergence de Tàpies …

Kisses Sweeter Than Wine. Öyvind Fahlström And Billy Klüver: The Swedish Neo-Avant-Garde In New York, Per Bäckström

Artl@s Bulletin

The Swedish artist Öyvind Fahlström moved to New York in 1961, where he meet the Swedish engineer Billy Klüver, and became part of the international neo-avant-garde movement. Fahlström’s performance, New York 1966, part of Klüver’s performance series 9 Evenings, is my point of departure for an analysis of the role of migration for the neo-avant-gardes in the 1960s. As intermediaries, Fahlström and Klüver brought new ideas both to New York and Stockholm, thus challenging the established view that American art was exported to the periphery. In reality, the New York art scene grew out of ideas and experiences arriving …

Artistic Emigration From Portugal To Paris In The First Half Of The 1960s: Six Portuguese Painters From Paris Revisited, Joana Baião

Artl@s Bulletin

This paper proposes to revisit some issues related to the impact of emigration on the paths followed by a group of six Portuguese painters who settled in Paris between 1958 and 1961. To do that, it will analyze and contextualize the evolution of their work in the first half of the 1960’s, and it will recall the small exhibition Seis Pintores Portugueses de Paris that opened in 1966 in Lisbon with the purpose of highlight the particularities of the artistic research that was being developed by those artists in Paris, integrating them into the international artistic movements of the period.

The Reception Of Modern European Art In Calcutta: A Complex Negotiation (1910s-1940s), Julia Madeleine Trouilloud

Artl@s Bulletin

This article analyzes the reception of Modern European Art in Calcutta in the early decades of the twentieth century. In the initial years, the knowledge of the European avant-gardes was limited. It then got rejected as a legitimate source of influence by the Bengal School ideologues close to the nationalist movement. In the early 1930s, the painter Jamini Roy paved the way for a new aesthetics which rejected the Bengal School ideological project and turned to folk arts as models. The style he pioneered naturally appealed to the global modern sensibility. The 1940s are marked by a phase of enthusiasm …

« Dégénérés » En France. Tentatives De Définition D'Une Identité Collective Par Les Artistes Germaniques Exilés En France À La Fin Des Années 1930, Hélène Duret

Artl@s Bulletin

Cet article examine les stratégies d'identification mises en œuvre par les artistes allemands et autrichiens exilés en France au moment où les expositions d'art « dégénéré » circulent dans l'Allemagne hitlérienne. Dans un contexte de tensions internationales et d'accueil méfiant des réfugiés allemands en France, certains collectifs d'artistes se définissent tour à tour comme fers de lance de l'« autre Allemagne », d'un héritage français de liberté artistique ou d'une « Internationale » artistique. En revanche, ces artistes ne franchissent pas le pas d'un « retournement du stigmate » (Goffman) vis-à-vis du qualificatif nazi « dégénéré ».

Nothing To Do With Politics, Only Art? On Wassily Kandinsky's Work In Paris, From 1934 Until The Outbreak Of The War, Kate C. Kangaslahti

Artl@s Bulletin

Following his move to Paris at the end of 1933, Wassily Kandinsky clung to his conviction that art must remain free of politics. The purpose of this essay is to consider both the limitations and advantages of this position in the polarized political climate of the French capital and to chart the aesthetic path he embarked on after his arrival, with particular reference to the personal ties and artistic alliances that he forged (or not) in this complex cultural terrain. Far from having nothing to do with politics, the transformation his painting underwent in Paris, the period he dubbed “synthetic,” …

Unwanted By Both The Political Left And Right: Interwar Europe’S Hungarian Migrating Artists, Eva Forgacs

Artl@s Bulletin

A little known group of Hungarian artists who were students at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts, Budapest in 1927-1930, joined by a few artists from outside the Academy, were modernists, explored the Soviet Russian avant-garde and abstraction, and therefore were rejected by the mainstream, official art in Hungary. However, the strictly principled left-wing Munka (Work) Circle of Lajos Kassák was not hospitable to therm, either. Members of “The Progressives” group left Hungary in 1930. The increasingly classicist Hungarian avant-garde did not tolerate bias; thus the idiosyncratic poet and artist Tamkó-Sirató had to leave Hungary, too and develop his Dimensionism …

From Foix To Dalí: Versions Of Catalan Surrealism Between Barcelona And Paris, Enric Bou

Artl@s Bulletin

The purpose of this article is to illustrate a little known episode of Salvador Dalí’s initial intervention in the surrealist movement: his relationship with Catalan writer Josep Vicenç Foix. To what extent writers such as Foix adapted Surrealism in his own writing and what kind of exchanges he had with Paris? Was Foix a predecessor of Dalí’s surrealist writing? As early as 1918, J.V. Foix made an impact in Catalan literary circles and one of the first imitators of Apollinaire (and maybe Breton). After 1926 Foix he developed a close relationship with Dalí and helped him with the publication of …

Distance And Distortion: Amadeo Souza Cardoso's And Joan Miró'S War-Years Painting And The Words That Fail Them, Joana Cunha Leal

Artl@s Bulletin

This essay considers art historical discourses on the work produced during the First World War by two painters born and living in the Iberian Peninsula: the Portuguese Amadeo de Souza Cardoso (1887–1918) and the Catalan Joan Miró (1893–1983). It considers the dialogues and relations maintained by these painters in their war-affected national artistic milieus and with the equally disrupted, international avant-garde circles, while discussing historiographical biased assumptions about production-places and their meanings, namely how localness was read as expressing isolation, distance, and lack of aesthetic significance.

Les Recueils D'Ornements Latino-Américains. Instrumentalisations Nationales Et Internationales (1923 - 1947), Élodie Vaudry

Artl@s Bulletin

L'étude des recueils d'ornements latino-américains publiés au cours de la première moitié du xx^e siècle propose une nouvelle lecture de l'indigénisme et une approche spécifique des processus de resémantisation des motifs précolombiens à l'époque contemporaine. Cette analyse permet de cerner la volonté des gouvernements d'Amérique latine d’établir un socle culturel national mais aussi continental et de les étudier comme une des manifestations plastiques des processus indigénistes. Ce sujet tente de montrer, par le biais de l’ornement, les dynamiques communes et l’hybridation diachronique et diasporique de la culture visuelle latino-américaine.

Art History And The Global Challenge: A Critical Perspective, Paula Barreiro López

Artl@s Bulletin

The challenge of globalization and the “decolonization” of our way of thinking have become a major concern for most art historians. While it is still too early to assess the impact on the discipline of the “Global turn”—a turn that is all the more timid that it materializes more slowly in public collections and public opinions than in books—we nonetheless wanted to probe scholars who are paying close attention to the new practices in global art history. Coming from different cultural milieus and academic traditions, and belonging to different generations, they agreed to answer our questions, and to share with …

L'Histoire De L'Art Au Défi De La Mondialisation: Une Position Critique, Paula Barreiro López

Artl@s Bulletin

Le défi de la mondialisation et de la “décolonisation” de nos pensées est désormais une préoccupation quotidienne pour la majorité des chercheurs en histoire de l’art. Il est trop tôt pour faire le bilan du fameux « Global turn », tournant d’autant plus timide qu’il se concrétise plus lentement dans les collections publiques et dans l’opinion que dans les livres. Mais nous avons voulu interroger, un peu partout dans le monde, des acteurs à l’écoute des nouvelles pratiques mondiales en histoire de l’art. Issus de milieux culturels et de traditions universitaires variées, de générations diverses, ils ont accepté de répondre …

Art History And The Global Challenge: A Critical Perspective, Patrick D. Flores

Artl@s Bulletin

The challenge of globalization and the “decolonization” of our way of thinking have become a major concern for most art historians. While it is still too early to assess the impact on the discipline of the “Global turn”—a turn that is all the more timid that it materializes more slowly in public collections and public opinions than in books—we nonetheless wanted to probe scholars who are paying close attention to the new practices in global art history. Coming from different cultural milieus and academic traditions, and belonging to different generations, they agreed to answer our questions, and to share with …

Art History And The Global Challenge: A Critical Perspective, Jonathan Harris

Artl@s Bulletin

The challenge of globalization and the “decolonization” of our way of thinking have become a major concern for most art historians. While it is still too early to assess the impact on the discipline of the “Global turn”—a turn that is all the more timid that it materializes more slowly in public collections and public opinions than in books—we nonetheless wanted to probe scholars who are paying close attention to the new practices in global art history. Coming from different cultural milieus and academic traditions, and belonging to different generations, they agreed to answer our questions, and to share with …

Art History And The Global Challenge: A Critical Perspective, Atreyee Gupta

Artl@s Bulletin

The challenge of globalization and the “decolonization” of our way of thinking have become a major concern for most art historians. While it is still too early to assess the impact on the discipline of the “Global turn”—a turn that is all the more timid that it materializes more slowly in public collections and public opinions than in books—we nonetheless wanted to probe scholars who are paying close attention to the new practices in global art history. Coming from different cultural milieus and academic traditions, and belonging to different generations, they agreed to answer our questions, and to share with …

Art History And The Global Challenge: A Critical Perspective, Nuria Rodríguez Ortega

Artl@s Bulletin

The challenge of globalization and the “decolonization” of our way of thinking have become a major concern for most art historians. While it is still too early to assess the impact on the discipline of the “Global turn”—a turn that is all the more timid that it materializes more slowly in public collections and public opinions than in books—we nonetheless wanted to probe scholars who are paying close attention to the new practices in global art history. Coming from different cultural milieus and academic traditions, and belonging to different generations, they agreed to answer our questions, and to share with …

Art History And The Global Challenge: A Critical Perspective, Sven Spieker

Artl@s Bulletin

The challenge of globalization and the “decolonization” of our way of thinking have become a major concern for most art historians. While it is still too early to assess the impact on the discipline of the “Global turn”—a turn that is all the more timid that it materializes more slowly in public collections and public opinions than in books—we nonetheless wanted to probe scholars who are paying close attention to the new practices in global art history. Coming from different cultural milieus and academic traditions, and belonging to different generations, they agreed to answer our questions, and to share with …