Jean Rhys,William Orpen and the Frames of Modernist Representation

The female body as artist’s model and its exchange value—both the woman and her painted image—are deployed by Caribbean modernist Jean Rhys to question representational structures as they exist in the modernist art context. This article considers the relation between literary modernism and the visual arts, between text and image, in her unpublished novel Triple Sec and short story ‘Tea With an Artist’. Using the fleeting relationship between Rhys and English painter Sir William Orpen, for whom she posed nude aged twenty-three, as my basis, I examine Rhys’s presentation of the power politics that constrain the female model in the contemporary art world. Her allusions to artists, models and artworks in her texts widen out to issues of frames and framing, where narratives of framed pictures, or the female model’s body within a picture’s frame, speak of social acts of framing, containment and objectification within modernist representational structures.     

提升教学艺术构建师生和谐

校园和谐是和谐社会的重要组成部分,构建和谐的师生关系,是校园和谐文化的最佳切合点。在愈来愈人性化的社会环境中,以人为本已成为共识,教育工作者必须重新审视施教手段,提升教学艺术,展现大教育理念的师德师范。     

On representation(s): art,violence and the political imaginary of South Africa

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this article is to explore the multiple layers of representation which occur in the South Africa Pavilion at the Art Biennale in Venice in order to understand how they constitute and affect the state’s political imaginary. By analysing three artworks (David Koloane’s The Journey, Sue Williamson’s For thirty years next to his heart, and Zanele Muholi’s Faces and Phases) which were exhibited in the 2013 Pavilion, two key arguments emerge: 1) in this context artistic representation can be understood as a form of political representation; and, 2) these artists are simultaneously state and citizenry representatives. A tension emerges between the political imaginary desired by the South African state and the political imaginary enacted by its representatives. The article draws on seven months of participant observation fieldwork at the Biennale, which involved 76 interviews with people associated with the South Africa Pavilion, including government representatives, exhibition organisers, artists, and visitors. Part I explores the concept of representation in order to establish the two philosophical trajectories (political and artistic) with which this article engages – with particular reference to Michael Saward’s framework of the representative claim. Part II explores the multiple representative claims which the three artists and their artworks enact.

Abbreviations: Biennale: Venice Art Biennale; DAC: Department of Arts and Culture; For thirty years: For thirty years next to his heart, by Sue Williamson; TRC: Truth and Reconciliation Commission; US: United States of America     

Pragmatized Aesthetics: The Impact of Legitimacy Pressures in Symphony Orchestras

This article explores the balancing exercise between opposing value regimes in symphony orchestras. This complex environment in which art organizations move while producing art will be mapped out in a model called a “biotope.” In recent years, orchestras have been struck hard by declines in the cultural sector. As a result of opposing legitimacy pressures in today’s symphony orchestras, standardized canonical repertoire now serves as a pragmatized aesthetic compromise. This article suggests that although this compromise grants short-term legitimacy to the art organization, it simultaneously brings its biotope out of balance, reinforcing the legitimacy crisis it was meant to avert.     

Counterpublic and counterprivate: Zoe Leonard,David Wojnarowicz,and the political aesthetics of intimacy

In this paper we explore the space that dyadic intimacy plays within the counterpublic world-building of political activism. We reflect on a particular encounter between the artists and ACT UP activists Zoe Leonard and David Wojnarowicz by offering two readings of what we call the “counterprivate” relation between the two. In the first part of our argument, we contend that the counterprivate couple form (found in our case study of Leonard and Wojnarowicz) occasions a space of provisional leave from the normative affective, aesthetic, and identity-based impulses which tend to emerge in social movement group formation. Despite established critiques of the private, dyadic intimacy of the couple within social movement theory and queer and feminist cultural studies, we highlight the value of counterprivate couples – not in place of the collective world-building that is made possible by political organizing and collective identity, but as a necessary aesthetic complement to collective, participatory politics. In the second part of our argument, we read the intimacy between Leonard and Wojnarowicz as a private moment of expressed doubt that has subsequently been institutionalized into a public discourse through the context of art. Here the counterprivate couple form in turn becomes a counterpublic mode of collective world-making once more. This transformation from counterprivate relation to public discourse occasions a practice of collective subject formation (in the institutional terrain of art) that affirms doubt, curiosity, and poetic beauty as part of the reproductive labor involved in political participation.     

日本幼儿美术教育中的造形活动与启示

幼儿的美术教育是幼儿教育的组成部分,也是促进认知,培养美感和发展智力的一种教育手段。日本幼儿美术教育界一致认为：根据幼儿的生理和心理特点,幼儿美术教育的着眼点应落实在造形活动的基础上。造形活动可以使幼儿在体验造形材料和造形表现的过程中萌发美感和创造力,促进幼儿的认知、智力、技能与社会性的发展。通过对日本幼儿造形活动的解读,为我国的幼儿美术教育提供经验。     

“Those who know don’t tell”: David Hammons c. 1981†

Drawing on original archival research, as well as discourses in post-WWII art history, performance studies, and black studies, this article maps the use of rumor closely associated with David Hammons, with regard to two performative actions enacted in downtown Manhattan in 1981, now known as Pissed Off and Shoe Tree. These two performances occurred on and around the public sculpture T.W.U. (1980–81) by Richard Serra. Taking up how these works consider the specificity of social life pertaining to historically marginalized bodies and neighborhoods, this article argues that Hammons’s work in this period employs obscurity as a resistance to knowledge as it is codified and legitimized in institutional discourses within and beyond art institutions.     

A TURNING POINT FOR GUOHUA?: XU BEIHONG AND TRANSFORMATIVE ENCOUNTERS WITH THE SOCIALIST SPIRIT, 1933–1953

Abstract

This article investigates a transformative encounter between the Chinese artist Xu Beihong (徐悲鴻 1895–1953) and audiences in the Soviet Union during his 1933–1934 exhibitions of Chinese art in Europe. While Xu was exchanging perspectives and addressing questions about Chinese painting, a misreading of one of his paintings sparked in him a reconsideration of content and form that eventually led to the creation of some of the earliest Socialist realist ink-and-color paintings in China. This addition to his repertoire is arguably more significant to his legacy than his most popular works because of the way it heralded the coming Socialist realist evolution in guohua (國畫 national painting) and the manner in which Xu’s choices would meet the ideological needs of the Communist Party well before it secured authority over the direction of China’s arts. Special attention is paid to situating Xu’s personal work vis-à-vis Republican and revolutionary art and explaining how the concurrent political milieu paved the way for both the prestige of his art in popular and cultural memory and the unprecedented stature of his art education methodologies in China’s revolutionary times.     

Stolen Art Restitution Claims and the Exhaustion of Local Remedies: How Foreign-Based Plaintiffs are Able to Succeed Under the Foreign Sovereign Immunity Act

Stolen art restitution claims under the Foreign Sovereign Immunity Act (“FSIA”) present unique procedural issues that implicate the history, purpose, and objectives of the FSIA. At the forefront of these issues are how foreign-based plaintiffs are able to bring suits against foreign governments or foreign citizens in US Federal Courts. Whether these foreign-based plaintiffs must exhaust local remedies in their country of origin is another issue that these kinds of suits typically have courts resolve. This article provides answers to these issues through a historical discussion of the implementation of the FSIA and an analysis of recent case law.