Heroes and Political Communities in John Ford's Westerns: The Role of Wyatt Earp in My Darling Clementine

Abstract

Widespread moral corruption, particularly of the sort fostered by their internal security agencies, was a key feature of communist regimes. The Lives of Others provides a dramatic portrayal of this phenomenon as it occurred in East Germany. The film can appear, given its central story of the moral redemption of a Stasi officer through his becoming intrigued by the lives of artists, to be an overly idealistic or audience-pleasing testament to the humanizing power of art. But the film also reveals the possible moral corruption of the artists. This essay provides a typology of the sorts of moral corruption exemplified by the situations of different characters in the film and shows that the main artist is actually saved from his impending corruption by the Stasi officer's actions. This reciprocal rescue is the key feature of the film's plot; it teaches that while art can undermine and resist totalitarian corruption, it is also susceptible to its snares—especially when it apolitically relies upon its own resources.     

Accommodating ‘design’: introducing the Western concept into Soviet art theory in the 1950s–60s

This article investigates the background of Soviet industrial design in Soviet art theory. Instead of considering design's interconnection with technology and science, or with consumption and everyday life, the author traces its conceptualisation as a new artistic phenomenon. Using archival records of professional discussions, polemical articles in the art press and design projects, the author looks at how industrial design was incorporated into the Soviet order of things. She concludes that accommodation of the Western model was the way to reform the system of socialism from inside, typical for the Soviet intelligentsia of the 1960s.     

Guerilla art,social value and absent heritage fabric

There is extensive commentary on the role of unauthorised art, but little on the coincidence of heritage value and guerilla art. This paper analyses the relationship of the two in a 2007 statue which is a monument to a lost place for which there is no surviving historic fabric. The statue functions not just as a place of memory, but of guerilla art; a complex interplay has emerged between an official piece of government art and unsanctioned community performance. Growing heritage emphasis on social value over the previous dominance of original fabric suggests that the delight with which the statue has been greeted illuminates evolving heritage philosophy, monument language and the emergence of the importance of the heritage community especially for its potential performance value at a site. The dramatic contribution that the statue has made to the city has an impact on the fields of landscaping, planning, history and heritage.     

Problematizing silences in intangible heritage: unsettling historical records of women in protests

Abstract

This paper addresses questions of women’s visibility in constructed histories, as well as levels of recognition concerning their participation in politics through historical narratives. In particular, historical narratives representing women in protest in the context of waterfront heritage zones associated with the shipbuilding industry are examined, based on examples of two public art projects: Strong Women of the Clydeside: Protests and Suffragettes from Govan’s Hidden Histories led by the artist t s Beall in the Govan area of Glasgow, Scotland and Shipyard is a Woman by Arteria Association and Metropolitanka in Gdansk, Poland.     

‘The land and its people’: reflections on artistic identification in an age of nations and nationalism

From the late eighteenth century onwards, increasing numbers of visual artists came to identify with their nations and with the homeland and its people. This development was strongly influenced by growing national cultural support and regulation of the arts by academies, art schools, museums and art markets in Western Europe. On a subjective level, the Rousseauan movement of a ‘return to Nature’, Herder's espousal of vernacular cultural self‐expression and, above all, the widespread Romantic cult of authenticity, were potent influences on the inner self‐identification of visual artists after 1800, and were manifested in the novel importance accorded to landscape and rural genre painting in Western Europe. Here I consider the role of national sentiment, the ‘return to Nature’ and the cult of authenticity, first in landscape paintings by Paul Sandby, J. M. W. Turner and John Constable in early nineteenth‐century Britain, and then in the rural genre paintings of Jean‐Francois Millet and Jules Breton in nineteenth‐century France and Josef Israels, Anton Mauve and Vincent Van Gogh in the later nineteenth‐century Netherlands. Their work reveals how nineteenth‐century visual artists became inwardly identified with the ‘land and its people’, and how they in turn contributed, especially through prints and engravings, to the dissemination of national imagery and a cultural nationalism.     

Danto and the Pale of Aesthetics

Arthur Danto’s Transfiguration of the Commonplace is a new theory of art, seeking to catch the flavour and essence of its contemporary phenomenology. It is obliged, however, to pit itself in toto against aesthetic philosophy, leaning on the derivatives from deuteropraxis and institutional definition while committing itself to a concept of arthood extracted from exoteric ideas, which are held to comprise the artworks’ individuation and identity. This paper examines the principal notions in support of his contentions and contrasts them to the chief principles of aesthetic philosophy. In this juxtaposition, it transpires that conviction eludes Danto, as his suppression of aesthetic criteria yields unsuspected aporias from a disconjugate amalgam of inherence, ontology, epistemology and concept integration. Thus the leap from “mere real things” to the plateau of arthood is never accomplished, as it falters at the step where a perceiving subject has a stake in, and the power of authorisation, of this conception of art.     

Advances in the archaeology of the Pampa and Patagonia

Archaeological data reveal two distinctive cultural adaptations on the Pampa and Patagonia of Argentina: terrestrial hunter-gatherers in the former and most of the latter region and maritime hunter-gatherers along the southern extreme. Both adaptations were achieved by the end of the fifth millennium B.C. Thereafter, a stable equilibrium was maintained, with a slow drift toward greater emphasis on resources providing the maximum return for the least effort. The high productivity of the Fuegian environment sustained a population 30 times greater than occupied the Pampa and continental Patagonia prior to Araucanian penetration in the sixteenth century A.D. The long-term stability is attributable to the absence of environmental or demographic pressures or encroachments by neighboring groups, which might have made more intensive exploitation of the environment necessary.     

晚明文艺思潮对绘画的影响─—徐渭、董其昌比较研究

本文以徐渭和董其昌作为个例分析,讨论了晚明文艺思潮对当时绘画风格、形式变化的影响。     

关于博物馆陈列艺术精品化的思考

博物馆陈列艺术精品化是博物馆事业发展的重要标志,必须从陈列展品、艺术形式设计、外部环境、陈列讲解、发挥馆藏文物潜能特色、提倡馆际区域间的资源共享等方面进行实施。     

太平天国与早期海上画派

海上画派于清末在上海兴起,成为近代美术的开端。太平天国运动衔接了海派肇兴的时机,在地理上对海派形成了一种包围,在文化心理上对其产生了强大的冲击,加快了海派的形成进程。战争对早期海派画家的人生观和艺术观产生了重大影响。太平天国壁画中的民间因素,也被海派绘画所吸收,成为海派审美趣味转变的主要来源。因此,太平天国运动对早期海派的形成和发展具有一定的影响。