The report introduces the work of Cindy Sherman, a visual and conceptual artist, who has mainly worked in the field of gender and identity politics. The author of the text describes Sherman ́s best known series of photographs Untitled Film Still as well as a series of photographs taken for Vogue Paris. Sherman ́s work is compared to the work of Slovak conceptual artist Lucia Nimcova and her series of photographs called Women. Later in the text, the author describes the field of recipients, divided into men and women, and the emotions they feel and their thoughts, as they look on the work of Sherman.
'Visualisation' is nowadays one of the most expansive notions in cultural (semiotic) studies, including literary research. By means of introductory remarks to the periodical's present issue, the author discusses the notion's various meanings and applications - from' practical/service-oriented' in the domain of computer graphics, through to psychotherapeutic ones, various varieties of visual arts, anthropology of sensuality and its cultural forms, visual-arts concepts and visual arts' associations with literature, up to theoretical afterthought on the status of literary text.
One of the important cultural events of the second half of the 50's was the foundation and activities of the Mikulás Galanda Group and the same can be said about the non-public exhibitions of the loose circle of Bratislava's Confrontations, taking place in the beginning of the 60's. Even if their activities remained unaccompanied by the avant-garde gesture of the programmatic manifesto in the strict sense of the word, they did produce some introductory statements and, above all, significant exhibitions. H. Belting in his book, entitled 'The End of Art History', claimed that the European tradition created a historical cycle, reaching from the times of ancient Greece and Rome till modernity, using the so-called 'cultural archive'. All innovations arise outside of this archive or as its competition. The acceptance of the innovations then means acceptance into the archive of cultural memory. To understand the intent of the above mentioned cultural events we have to deal with the following questions: 1. What was the nature of the respective cultural contexts of the Mikulás Galanda Group and its foundation and the exhibitions of the Bratislava Confrontations group? 2. Can their activities be described as innovation within late modernity? 3. In what sense, intensity and extent were works of art, representing innovation, also an act of artistic experiment? Members of both groups have found themselves inside the cultural archive for a short period of time during the second half of the 60's. That means that in the years od the ideological 'thaw' they relinquished a part of their gesture of revolt in favor of the strategy of reinforcing the closeness of artistic programs of a rather wide and disparate 'cultural front'. Of course, at the end of the sixties they abruptly found themselves outside the cultural archive, which was then being painted in the protective red colour. The 'return' to the archive of cultural memory at the beginning of the 90‘s seemed to be triumphant. Yet it was impossible to engage the young generation from within the cultural archive. The young generation did not believe in the autonomy of the modern art, had no faith in tradition, seeing it only as a deposit to be cited, appropriated, for anything goes... Thus Y. Lotman's axiom: if we look forward, we see incidents, if we look backwards, we see regularities... we serve as an optical device revealing that both events of Slovak figurative art in the 50's and 60's conclude the period of late modernism, naturally in the Slovak way.
The article presents the case of Craigie Horsfield - an artist of the middle generation (1949), Englishman, who spent over six years (1972-1979) in Poland, straightaway after his study (St. Martin's School, London 1967-1971), and whose photographs taken in Kraków in the 1970s two decades later are to be found in the most prestigious museums. The first, most important reason is an artistic value of his works created in various periods of his artistic life. Second motive are his far from routine mechanisms of a 'late' worldwide career, realised outside the photographic mainstream, and - last but not least - the artist's theoretical reflection on the Status of photographic representation and its social references. One of such references analysed in the present essay is an incorporation of photography into museum frames, with an active participation of art historians. A scientific training influenced a hierarchy that afflicts also modern photography which is also evaluated in the course of a dynamic debate of the current art. A description of the career of the artist in the domain of photography - though outside its main streams - was to emphasise the characteristics of the Anglo-Saxon System of visual arts and to reveal a significance of promotional critical infrastructure. The changes concern the functioning of the art within the institutionalised frames in reference to new expectations towards museum. Important in this process are also relations between institutions promoting social projects and the marked on which Horsfield depended. The last two parts of the article focus on two aspects of the Horsfield's photographs: photography as a 'medium' and photography identified with a 'picture'. The artist's attitude toward the medium is a complex one: it uses both historical 'novelties' of Talbot and digital photography, subjecting them to artistic representation. The analyses of a suggestive, saturated with the art of the old masters visual material are compared with the interpretations of the artist himself and critical reviews of his artistic creativity that goes beyond one medium.
The article is a summary of the Polish edition of Bruce Block’s The Visual Story: Seeing the Structure of Film, TV, and New Media. In this book, Block puts forward this thesis: Film has from its very beginnings been a visual art; the chief goal of any filmmaker should be telling the story in a way that will incline the audience to accept their point of view without fail. The review of Block’s study focuses primarily on the discussion of those elements of the language of film that most contribute to the process of making film a visual art. Taking into account the strong points of the book — the proper ordering of ideas and their clarity — the reviewer highlights its generalizations and the lack of focus, and poses this question: “To what reader is The Visual Story told?”
The revival of documentary film at the turn of the millennia, caused by the influence of available digital technology and the advent of the young generation, has also been reflected in visual arts - in their need to provide testimonies about private, personal, family, and partner situations or stereotypes (Gabika Binderová, Pavlína Fichta Čierna, Anton Čierny), which sometimes overreach into public, socio-political affairs and phenomena (Ľubomír Ďurček, Peter Rónai, Elena Pätoprstá, Pavlína Fichta Čierna, Ilona Németh, Anna Daučíková, Kristián Németh, Mária Štefančíková, Katarína Karafová). Several authorial strategies, for example, journal entries, reality staging, observational, participation, performative, and reflexive approaches to processing reality, inspired by world trends and by theory, touch upon topical and universal themes – personal and collective memory (recording and erasing), memory places, the political and social body, gender stereotypes, etc. Despite common points of departure, motivations, used means or anti-audience “artsiness”, visual arts and documentary film preserve their own rules of game and specific manners of re/presentation.
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