Journal articles on the topic 'Photography, Artistic – Themes, motives'

The article that aims to analyse the artistic production of photographer Bojan Salaj is based on conversations and reviews of his archive. Among Slovenian photographers, Salaj is the one who has been seen as an embodiment of the decisive shift in perception of the photographic medium that occurred in the late 1980s and early 1990s. He has never worked as documentary photographer or photojournalist; his authorial practice has always been primarily focused on the context of exhibition and against unconventional solutions. Salaj is one of those photographers who are characterized by the deep reflection of the meaning and perception of image from different, mainly philosophical, viewpoints, while at the same time following the objectivistic principles of photography. At a glance, his practice is extremely eclectic and post-modern, which is due to the fact that he is not looking to find an individual and recognizable artistic voice; he dedicates his focus to individual projects, bringing into his work various different references and themes. Nevertheless, a central motive can still be perceived throughout his output. In the past 25 years, Salaj has mostly been attracted to the here and now; this includes the fundamental problems of representation of photography in mass media, iconography of power structures, models of construction of history, and ways of establishing national and cultural identities.

The joys of the Czech avant-garde.On the amalgamation of literature, art and philosophy based on the examples from the works of Jindřich Štyrský, Toyen,Vítězslav Nezval and František DrtikolThe article points out some recurrent themes in the literary and artistic works by the repre- sentatives of the Czech avant-garde of the first half of the twentieth century. It is primarily about the motives of sleep, life, death and eroticism recognized most often in iconoclastic conventions, often on the borders of pornographic description and violating the taboo of eroticism, pleasures of the flesh and religion. In the case of Štyrský, among other topics, the theory of artificialism for- mulated by him and Toyen is discussed. The theory had a close relationship with the poetry, prose and art by this author. On the other hand, based on the example of Nezval, an image of literary pleasures is presented, associated with the often actuated by the author issues of first love and erot- ic sensations. In the end, the figure of František Drtikol is outlined — the creator of photographs, which often depict threads of femme fatale and scandalous nude crucified women.Rozkoše české avantgardy. O fúzi literatury, umění a filozofie na příkladu tvorby Jindřicha Štyrského, Toyen, Vítězslava Nezvala a Františka DrtikolaČlánek poukazuje na stálé motivy v literární a umělecké tvorbě představitelů české avant- gardy první poloviny 20. století. Jde především o motivy snu, života, smrti a erotiky, chápané nejčastěji jako obrazoborecké a nacházející se často na hranici tělesné rozkoše, náboženství a por-nografického obrazu, jenž prolamuje erotická tabu. V případě Štyrského půjde mj. o teorii artifi- cialismu, kterou zformuloval spolu s Toyen. Na příkladu Nezvala bude nastíněn literární obraz rozkoše související s problematikou prvních milostných a erotických zkušeností, které se autor často dotýkal. Závěr příspěvku přiblíží osobu Františka Drtikola — tvůrce fotografií, na kterých jsou často vyobrazena témata osudových žen a skandalizujících aktů ukřižovaných žen.

With Gdansk artists an approach to the subject of the marine photography, was marked on several levels – artistic, documentary, journalistic and usable. Since 1945 to the first half of the 80s, we notice the popularization of maritime theme in the environment throughout artistic exhibition activities, and the program objectives. Maritime photography or maritime themes in photography? An analysis of the photographic medium in terms of belonging to the art can give the answer to this question. It is also worth considering whether there was „Gdansk School of the Maritime Photography”? The phenomenon of Polish marine art in the case of photography has been strongly emphasized in the Gdansk photography environment. The traditional display of the maritime theme has been broken, and with the approval of the authorities. Shipyard workers and dockers joined to the effigy of the sea people (fishermen, sailors). Photographers began to enter the maritime economy and use the effects of cooperation with maritime institutions for artistic purposes. Thematic exhibitions on shipyards and ports were created showing the sea from a different point of view, from the perspective of land. Socio-political events related to Solidarity stopped the promotion of the sea through the image of a shipyard worker and a shipyard, which became icons of the struggle for freedom. The Gdansk photographic community after the socio-political crisis of the first half of the 1980s, has not yet rebuilt its leading position in the dissemination of the maritime theme in photography on a large scale. Maritime exhibitions still appeared, but mainly on the local level, and the sea was reduced to the landscape understood very traditionally. At the same time photographers of the younger generation were interested in completely different issues of the style and aesthetics of photography. Te slogan „face to the sea” ceased to correspond with new times.

Ivan Petrović (1973) has been working in the fields of photography and art for twenty years as a researcher, creator and collector. Since 1997, he has been creating and publishing photographic projects that reflect the spirit of space and time in which they are created, while in his works he uses both documentary approaches as well as research principles. In 2011, together with photographer Mihail Vasiljević, he founded a para-institution, the Centre for Photography (CEF). Despite lacking its own premises, infrastructure or funds for performing its activities, the institution deals with the search, preservation, collection and analysis of local photographic materials from recent history. In the past ten years, Petrović also moved his artistic practice beyond mere artistic expression, since he addresses the phenomena of photography from an analytical-theoretical point of view. His interest lies in the nature of the photographic image and its role in society and historiography. In this spirit, long-term projects such as Documents (1997–2008), Images (2002–), Portfolio Belgrade (2015–) and the latest film production were created. The interview with Ivan Petrović took place on 1 September 2017 in Belgrade. The main themes were the role of photography in the dominant history, the boundary between one’s own practice and archival work, photography as an art and the likes. Keywords: collection, documentary, photography's role, preservation, research

The Dossier entitled “(Audio)Visions: photography, cinema and memory” is edited by Thomas Wiedemann on behalf of the Visual Culture Working Group (VIC) of the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR). Within IAMCR, VIC focuses on artistic, cultural, socio-cultural and technological studies in visual media and communication—pictures and photography, respectively, but also cinema, audiovisuals and arts—from a critical view point that might enhance the international field of communication studies. In this spirit, after the IAMCR Conference 2019 held in Madrid, Spain, the idea arose to publish some of the research papers by members of the working group that dealt with the themes of the dossier.

AbstractPet Sounds, the landmark Beach Boys album of 1966, has received wide acclaim as one of rock’s first ‘concept albums’. It also represents a milestone in the artistic evolution of the group’s primary creative force, Brian Wilson. A thorough examination of the texts and music of the songs of Pet Sounds reveals a unified art work projecting a coherent textual narrative. Songs are associated and interrelated via recurrent motives and harmonic patterns, expressing extremely personal themes of romance and heartbreak. The musical ideas are mostly culminations of Brian Wilson’s earlier work – they are the ‘pet sounds’ that he had been raising and nurturing since the early 1960s – but they appear here in an unprecedented artistic context. Despite Wilson’s continued, if sporadic, productivity in the decades that followed, including the ill-fated Smile project, Pet Sounds stands as his crowning artistic achievement, an album with vast appeal and broad influence.

The artist has created valuable works of art that attract the attention of the most beautiful traditions of the pre-existing artistic heritage with a choice of different themes and styles. He created expressive images that characterize the environment in which any subject is reflected, and tried to make room for elements of national motives. This is an indication of his rich artistic imagination and delicate taste. The carpets created by the carpet artist are distinguished by the fact that the ornaments are very complex and very versatile. The ornament of these carpets will remain the object of research for a long time, because its artistic-schematic aesthetic, spiritual and emotional content is an inexhaustible treasure. The carpet patterns created by the carpet artist attract the audience's attention at first sight. The carpets he authored are always met with interest, love and appreciation. Keywords: Mammadhuseyn Huseynov, fine art, carpet art, composition, ornament

In this artistic research, I argue that a range of artistic practices is capable of addressing relevant issues in our material, specifically our urban, environment. In particular, conceptual interventions or non-theatrical performances, which are in most cases mundane everyday activities that require transformation through media to be understood as art. Yet, as human memory is susceptible, media is also required to provide proof of the action for archives or exhibitions, or simply as a memento of the artwork itself. Lens-based media, such as photography and video-recording, are in most cases the ideal form of documentation and distribution, while the actual performance is transferred to another genre of artistic practice and dissociated from the immediate experience of the moment.This paper introduces the enduring work of the author’s alter ego, The Urban Beautician, and defines her actions and documentation of this work within the framework of the conceptual and performance art scene. An assiduous assessment of her artistic ancestry is given and a catalogue of her endeavours, categorised by diverse subjects, arranged to isolate the themes and to connect the topics.

The paper reflects the specificity of the fundamental ideas of the artistic world of M. G. Atamanov, which includes a wide range of literary facts from the content level of the text of the works to their poetics. A particularly important role in the works of M. G. Atamanov is played by cross-cutting themes and images that reflect the author's individual style and his idea of national-ethnic identity. The subject of the research is the book of essays “Mon - Udmurt. Maly mynym vös’?” (“I am Udmurt. Why does it hurt?”), which most vividly reflected the main spiritual and artistic searches of M. G. Atamanov, associated with his ideas about the Udmurt people. The main motives and plots of the works included in the book under consideration are accumulated around the concept of “Udmurtness”. The comprehension of “Udmurtness” is modeled in his essays through specific leit themes: native language, Udmurt people, national culture, mentality, geographic and topographic features of the Udmurt people’ places of residence, the Orthodox idea. The “Udmurt theme” is recognized and comprehended by the writer through the prism of national identity.

The main purpose of the article is to analyze the poetic texts of Ogdo Aksenova, who is sole representative of the Dolgan national literary tradition. The main themes, key motives and symbols of her artistic world (the image of the northern landscape, the image of the tundra, poetic variations on the theme of the seasons, etc.) are established, the ethnocultural originality of the poetic discourse (linguistic levels of expressiveness, realities of Dolgan culture) is analyzed. Special attention is paid to the genre of the song, which has folklore and mythological roots. It is emphasized that in separate collections and works the boundaries between the authors and folklore are blurred. The article assesses the quality of the literary translation of the texts of the Dolgan poetess into Russian. The work of O. Aksenova is of great research interest from the point of view of identifying specific mechanisms of the formation and development of minority literature.

This article deals with three art projects which take into account the relationship between maps, migration and memory. We shall analyse how Céline Boyer, Bouchra Khalili and Marie Moreau artistically respond to the diverse waves of migration in Europe. In each of their respective projects, engagement with these themes and with individual participants created opportunities for the transmission of knowledge and experience. The connection between maps and power is explored relative to these artistic projects and related processes. Whether it be photography, writing, video installation or participative ateliers, all three artists seem to pinpoint the importance of the hand when it comes to telling and mapping a story.

The article carries out a systematic study of the genre of R. Riggs’ work „Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children”, establishes its genre originality, states the features of different types of genre in the structure of one work, which is manifested in the multi-genre nature of the work. The article thoroughly and consistently proves that the work of R. Riggs „Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children” is a novel form, which is characterized by genre syncretism, as the genre structure combines features of fantasy, adventure, social novels and oral folklore, thoroughly decorated with philosophical motives. This „universality” is formed due to the relevant themes, issues, eidology, plot and compositional features. „Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children” is a multi-genre novel that combines several genres. The genre of the work can be called a fantastic-social novel-fairy tale, where the philosophical and psychological themes are constant. The author managed to reveal important social and psychological themes within the fantastic chronotope, which is presented by comparing real and unreal time-space. Constant in the novel is the image of the protagonist, who is the narrator, through the perspective of which the story achieves its subjectivity. The novel is characterized by a set of motives: social (war, genocide, inclusion, etc.), existential (meaning of life, existence of personality), psychological (loneliness, soul, loss), socio-historical (war, friendship, love, help), philosophical (good and evil, death, life), etc., which, combined, form a complex and unique artistic world of the novel form.

This article is evidence of a practice-based investigation into the imaginative worlds of mining and textiles as a starting point for transforming ways of thinking and creating in the locality. Featuring artist-in-residence and archival processes of research, and performative and site-responsive interventions, a number of recurring themes of enquiry will be developed that combine elements of clothing design, historical studies, nature studies, photography, inflatable construction and social anthropology. The article will draw from the authors artistic practice in the extraction of multi-narrative responses from textiles as an inventive method for engaging site-specifically with former mining locations in UK and Australia.

The object of research is the works of V. Bibik written at the beginning of his mature period. The aim of the research is to reveal the main features of Bibik’s style. Methods of research include technical analysis of the works in the context of the innovative tendencies in the Ukrainian music of 1960–70s, as well as comparative research. Research results. Outstanding Ukrainian composer Valentyn Bibik (1940–2003) wrote over 150 works. Mostly they are large-scale symphonic, choral, vocal, and chamber pieces. Among them are 11 symphonies, over 20 concerti for various instruments with orchestra, vocal and choral cycles, chamber compositions (the last group includes 5 string quartets, 3 piano trios, sonatas for string instruments both solo and with piano), 10 piano sonatas, piano solo works (two sets of preludes and fugues – 24 and 34 total, Dies Irae – 39 variations). The composer was born in Kharkiv. In 1966 he completed studies at Kharkiv Conservatory, where he attended the composition class of D. Klebanov. Since 1994, he had been living in St.-Petersburg, and since 1998, in Israel where he died in 2003. Bibik’s formative period coincided with a substantive modernization of Ukrainian culture in the 1960s. During those years, members of the “Kyiv avantgarde” group (L. Hrabovsky, V. Sylvestrov, V. Godziatsky, et al.) sought to utilize modernistic idioms and techniques, such as free atonality, dodecaphony, sonoristic and aleatoric textures, cluster harmony, etc. Unlike the others, Bibik started with a more conservative style, which bore the influences of Shostakovich, Prokofiev, and Bartók. Bibik’s mature period started several years later in the early 1970s with Piano Trio No. 1 (1972) and the composition Watercolors for soprano and piano (1973). Together with his next piano work 34 Preludes and Fugues, these compositions show extremely individual features of Bibik’s style, such as: 1. Special treatment of the sound, which is considered not just a material for building certain musical structures but a self-valuable substance (Bibik has an original manner of organizing sound). Hence, timbral and textural aspects draw special attention to the composer. 2. The pitch and rhythmic structure of the themes is quite simple. A combination of several simple motives becomes the starting point of long and sophisticated development. These motives are derived from folk music, however, due to rhythmic transformation, they have lost their direct connection with the folk source. 3. Rhythmic structures areal so very simple. They often include sequences of equal rhythmic values (usually crotchets or eights). However, the composer avoids monotony dueto due to variable time signatures and permanent rubato, as well as significant flexibility in phrasing. 4. The development relies mostly on melodic and polyphonic elaboration of initial simple motives. The composer utilizes various kinds of polyphony, such as canonic imitations, various combinations of the main and supportive voices, heterophony, hyper-polyphony. In fugues he employs both traditional and new methods of thematic and tonal distribution. 5. The harmony in Bibik’s works is mostly modal, as well as a combination of modality with free atonality and extended tonality. The structure of the dense chords is close to clusters, while more transparent chords include mostly seconds and fourths (as well as their inversions). He almost never used traditional tonal harmony and chords built up from thirds, and was interested in their color aspect rather than their tonal functionalism. 6. The sonoristic texture is very important. It does not diminish the importance of the melody but gets into special collaboration with it (“singing sonority”). A special “mist” around a clear melodic line is one of Bibik’s most typical devices. Due to special “pedal” orchestration, both the line and the “surrounding” sounds become equally important. 7. Elements of limited aleatoric music may be found in his rhythm and agogics, and sometimes inpitch structures (passages and figurations with free choice of the pitches). His favorite technique is a superposition of two rhythmically and temporally independent textural layers (for instance, a combination of the viola solo and the sonoristic orchestral background in the third movement of the Fourth Symphony). 8. Sonata for mand the fugue were significantly reinterpreted within free atonality and modal harmony. These provisions are the scientific novelty of the study.

The article is based on the thesis that in the writer’s works it is always possible to trace the existence of periods marked by the emergence of new themes and motives. As a rule, this is due both to external circumstances and the artist’s reaction to them, his internal feeling of the need to change the paradigm of his further development. In the work of A.N. Tolstoy one of such periods was the era of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and, in particular, the first revolutionary years, which are characterized by artistic experiments of the writer, allowing to talk about a definitely new vector of his searches. The article analyzes Tolstoy’s stories Mercy!, Peter’s Day, Count Cagliostro and Delirious in the context of the writer’s artistic searches of the 1918–1919. The writer’s work within the boundaries of small prosaic genres at that time allowed him, already in the second half of 1919, to come close to the creation of a full-scale canvas about the Russian Revolution, the novel The Road to Calvary.

The article is based on the thesis that in the writer’s works it is always possible to trace the existence of periods marked by the emergence of new themes and motives. As a rule, this is due both to external circumstances and the artist’s reaction to them, his internal feeling of the need to change the paradigm of his further development. In the work of A.N. Tolstoy one of such periods was the era of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and, in particular, the first revolutionary years, which are characterized by artistic experiments of the writer, allowing to talk about a definitely new vector of his searches. The article analyzes Tolstoy’s stories Mercy!, Peter’s Day, Count Cagliostro and Delirious in the context of the writer’s artistic searches of the 1918–1919. The writer’s work within the boundaries of small prosaic genres at that time allowed him, already in the second half of 1919, to come close to the creation of a full-scale canvas about the Russian Revolution, the novel The Road to Calvary.

This article is concerned with the ratio of plastic arts as exemplified by sculptural works depicting dances of the early 20th century. Special attention is paid to the Greek motives in the Russian art of this period, which became the subject of inexhaustible aesthetic and artistic interest. The representation of ancient dance motifs, their figurative image and the nature of antiquity in sculptural plastics, various approaches to the interpretation of ancient plots and themes, the role and significance of the “antique” component in their artistic structure are considered in the article. The study of multi-level interactions between sculpture and dance in the context of antiquity calls for a comprehensive approach, including historical-cultural, theoretical-analytical and comparative-typological methods. Relating to ancient Greek images, ballet images of S. Konenkov, M. Ryndzyunskaya, N. Andreev, V. Vatagin, V. Beklimishev and S. Erzya provide a purely individual, unique and peculiar vision of dance corresponding to the ancient era. The categories and expressive means of dance were simultaneously analyzed close to the sculptural style of the masters because they are difficult to be divided methodologically and exist as an established artistic system. The concepts of “plastic expressiveness” in relation to the dancers imprinted in sculptures were interpreted. Analyzing the museum materials and sculptures depicting the dancing process, it was concluded that the ancient influence of plastic images on structural and genre determinants may vary.

The article deals with genre-style modifications of the realistic essay of the 19th-20th centuries. In the article the author studies Anton Krushelnytsky’s artistic legacy (1878–1937) in the context of the dominant trends of Ukrainian literature at the end of XIX – the beginning of XX century and through the receptive dimensions of modern theory of literature. The paper defines the ideological and axiological background of the writer’s artistic understanding the reality and aesthetic nature of his creativity. The unity of the form and contest of prose texts is determined. The prose of the given period has a great variety of intra-genre modifications: essay, feuilleton, short story, story, novel. The works demonstrate exceptional multidimensionality of their inner structure, style diffusion, eclecticism of belles lettres methods and ways to achieve reality; the motives of «true morals» appear, which form counterbalance and alternative to moral chaos. Syncretic interaction of aesthetic paradigms of neorealism with impressionism, expressionism, symbolism is observed in prose. The characteristic features of the literature of the transitional stage in the moral-ethical, psychological and emotional aspects are revealed. Ukrainian literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was accompanied by the synthesis of sociological, psychological, aesthetic systems. The genre and style features and modifications of A. Krushelnytsky’s small form of prose are considered. The narrative models of the writer’s novels are analysed. Consequently, the essay as a genre of small prose is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon that contains philosophical and aesthetic representations, artistic, socio-political, and moral-ethical quest for the breakthrough of the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. The artistic practice of writers contributed to enriching of Ukrainian writing with new themes, images and genre forms, expanding the limits of traditional realism, so, updating the artistic and stylistic palette. The given motives of writers’ works reflected to the inside feelings and experiences of heroes are present as intertextual inclusions in prose of M. Kotsubinskiy, V. Stefanik, P. Mirniy, L. Ukrainka, O. Kobilianska and other writers at the turn of XIX-XX centuries. Being an organic component of Ukrainian literature, the narrative represents a tendency to expand the social sphere of personality images, to deepen the personal psychological characteristics of the individual. The place and role of prose creative works in Ukrainian literary process at the turn of the century are grounded.

This article discloses scientific, organizational, didactic and literary activity of the most outstanding Belarusian scientist, a professor of the University of Warsaw and, for many years, the head of the Department of Belarusian Studies – Alexander Barshchewski. In the article his academic achievements were outlined, the most important directions of his researches were presented and a special attention has been drawn not only to multidimensionality and interdisciplinarity of issues and problems that he had been taking up in his monographs and scientific articles, but also to impressive didactic and organizational achievements that resulted in numerous awards and prizes. Also, his poetic work has been synthetically presented and the most significant themes and motives of his lyrics, that impresses with the subtlety of artistic expression, the power of emotions and the concentration on spiritual reality, has been determined.

RESUMO: Este ensaio parte da obra de Francesca Woodman para traçar, sobre a mesma, um fio narrativo sustentado nas ideias de dispersão, metamorfose e construção identitária. Considera algumas das suas principais temáticas, assim como os géneros e movimentos artísticos com que mais tem sido identificada, para alargar alguns posicionamentos críticos daí decorrentes. PALAVRAS-CHAVE: Francesca Woodman, fotografia, corpo, desejo, metamorfose, extravasação. _____________________ ABSTRACT: This essay is based on the work of Francesca Woodman to draw a narrative thread based on the ideas of dispersion, metamorphosis and identity construction. It considers some of its main themes, as well as the artistic genres and movements with which it has been most identified, in order to broaden some critical positions resulting from it. KEYWORDS: Francesca Woodman, photography, body, desire, metamorphosis, extravasation.

Prince V.F. Odoyevsky (1803-1869) was the Russian writer, philosopher, musicologist and subtle musical critic, public figure, founder of «Society of philosophy-lovers» and author of «Motley Tales with Witticisms», fascinating monument of native culture; the book was published only once during the life of the writer and afterwards was not republished as the cycle. In literary criticism «Motley Tales» as the unified and important cycle by V.F. Odoyevsky were given scant coverage, although this literary work marked the beginning of new period in the writer’s oeuvre; an image of narrator Homoseyko is especially interesting because it is not only the intellectual hero, but also the alter ego of the writer. «Motley Tales» manifest a unique opportunity of watching the rising of themes and motives which will be revealed in the writer’s creation later, as well as following the formation of philosophical, aesthetic and artistic principles of author, as his fairy tales include the patterns of philosophical grotesque, social and moralizing story, folklore/psychological fantasy.

The article considers the possibility to interpret motive and concept as two parallel ways of pre-predicative matter of internal speech incarnation. Lev Vygotsky’s doctrine about thought and word, which arose in the philosophical context of neo-Kantianism and dialectics peculiar to the beginning of the 20th century, creates the possibility of such interpretation. The primacy and substantiality of art’s content before its incarnation was recognized and declared by such thinkers and poets of The Silver Age as Andrey Bely and Boris Pasternak. The word “matter” itself was a working concept in the aesthetic reflections of Pasternak. In his own work, invariant themes were embodied in both narrative and lyrical modality, and in the form of reasoning. Generic boundaries, thus, shown their permeability and, therefore, a conventionality. On the other hand, the adjacent status of artistic and theoretical ways of speech was realized in the search of the formal school of poetics in 1920s. Boris Tomashevsky in his classical textbook of poetics interpreted the “theme” as an atom of “matter”. In the status of thematic units, that is, units of “matter” division, the scientist considered both the plot and the motive. With this, he stated the possibility of two paths to dispose thematic elements: fabulous story based on causal- temporal relationships, and without fable. On the second way, according to Tomashevsky, lyrical works emerge, and it also generates dialectics of theoretical reasoning. This allows to consider theoretical reasoning as a parallel method of organizing thematic material – “matter”. Concepts are joined in the propositions exactly the same as the motives are combined in the plots. Additional similarity of concepts and motives is created by the only systemic way of their existence, established by such researchers as, on the one hand, Lev Vygotsky, on the other, Vladimir Propp. So there is a prospect of parallel systematization of categories: motive, concept, plot, proposition, and others related to them. Reference to the experience of literature shows that the thematic elements of the matter can be embodied both as concepts and as motives even within one work. The example is the “Word of Law and Grace”, in which the themes of Law and Grace, first, are revealed in the conceptual comparison, and secondly, are embodied in the images of Hagar and Sarah from the Old Testament. So clearly appears concurrency of concepts and motives as ways of realization of thematic “matter”.

This article addresses the questions triggered by the work of the Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta, who has a large part of her work composed exclusively of camera performances and what she termed earth-body-works. Through her strategies of representation based on the disappearance of the female body, Mendieta draws our attention to the legitimized violence and erasures through the establishment of fixed identities – ethnic and gender – within the hegemonic discourses of power. The notions of performance as an instrument for transmission of knowledge and cultural memory, of performativity as a constitutive factor of the categories of identity, as well as of archive, repertory and live event will be explored in the effort to problematize as the themes of exile and feminine, regular in the art of Mendieta, reach a deeply political dimension based on their artistic propositions that integrate photography with performance art.

The article examines the artistic and aesthetic parallels in the Mari epic “Yugorno” and the Udmurt “Tangyra” - the heroic legends of the peoples of the Finno-Ugric world. The idea is that the poetic commonality between them is a consequence of folklore and cultural typology and historical connection. The similarity of motives and plots is manifested in the pantheon, in views on the world order, in the nature of the relationship between gods and people, in the types of characters. By their poetic nature “Tangyra” and “Yugorno” occupy a place among the classical European epics, with which they are brought together by themes, socio-cultural status of heroes (cultural and social demiurges), views on the ancestors, descriptions of clashes between princes as representatives of the highest level and relations with neighboring peoples, philosophical views of the Udmurts and Mari on the past, present and future. It is about the main differences between the epics “Yugorno” and “Tangyra”, which lie in the peculiarities of plots and composition, poetics and aesthetics of works, their ethnic philosophy and social utopia.

<strong>Abstract</strong><br />Designing the Batik Motif Based on the Philosophy of Pencak Silat Cimande’s Movement. For the last three decades, the pencak silat Cimande had progressed more than before. The center of development is the group of Cimande’s art environment. This phenomenon has created the using of silat costume as group identity. The costume includes headband and sarong with batik motives. The lack of textile culture and specific motives become the problem. This reseach’s purpose is to find the solution through designing batik motives based on the philosopy of pencak silat Cimande’s movement. Artistic research is forming by using qualitative method with practice-based research approach. The reseach process is devide in two stages, (a) Case study of Cimande’s silat<br />movement through photography and (b) Visual design process. The result is the basic motives that include main object with Taqlid meaning or surrender to Tauhid, pictured as Kelid movement. The basic motives applicated to layout and hopefully becomming one of the support system to developing pencak silat Cimande as part of creative economy<br />and stimulate the visual creator to participate in developing local content.<br /><div> </div><div><strong>Abstrak</strong></div>Perancangan Motif Batik Berbasis Filosofi Gerak Pencak Silat Cimande. Selama kurang lebih tiga dekade terakhir, pengembangan pencak silat Cimande melaju pesat tidak seperti era sebelumnya. Pengembangan pusat pembelajaran silat dipusatkan dalam kelompok atau lingkungan seni aliran Cimande. Fenomena tersebut salah satunya memunculkan penggunaan kostum silat sebagai identitas kelompoknya. Dalam kostum<br />tersebut terdapat ikat kepala dan sarung yang menggunakan motif batik. Permasalahan muncul karena Cimande tidak memiliki budaya wastra dan motif spesifik yang memiliki kekhasan. Penelitian ini mencari solusi melalui perancangan motif batik yang berbasis filosofi gerak pencak silat Cimande. Penelitian artistik dalam bentuk perancangan ini menggunakan metode kualitatif dengan bentuk pendekatan practice based reseach.<br />Proses penelitian ini terbagi dalam dua tahap yaitu (a) Studi kasus gerakan silat Cimande melalui fotografi dan (b) Proses perancangan visual. Hasil dari penelitian ini adalah motif dasar terdiri dari obyek utama yang memiliki makna Taqlid atau berserah kepada Tauhid, yang digambarkan dengan gerakan jurus Kelid. Motif dasar diaplikasikan pada<br />layout dan diharapkan menjadi salah satu penunjang dalam pengembangan pencak silat Cimande bagian dari potensi devisa ekonomi kreatif dan ikut memberi stimulus para pelaku kreatif visual untuk ikut berpartisipasi mengembangkan konten lokal.<br /><br />

The article is focused on the aspects of the lyrical motive theory connected with the project of the motives’ index of Gabdulla Tuqay’s lyric poetry. The conceptual provisions for the index are formulated on the basis of systematized works on the lyrical motive problem. The lyrical motif is considered as a theme-rematic unity based on the functional identity of the motif and the theme. When analyzing lyrical motifs, it is important to establish the contexts that determine their semantics: biographical, cultural-historical, literary (components of literary tradition (traditional images, motives, themes) and modern artistic and non-artistic texts). These theoretical and methodological provisions are demonstrated by the example of the motivational analysis of Gabdulla Tuqay’s poems, united by the theme of hope and hopelessness. It is established that poems in which the lyrical personage experiences a value crisis prevail among the works of this thematic group: “Omid” (“Hope”, 1910), “Ozelgan Omid” (“Broken Hope”, 1908), “Omidsezlek” (“Hopelessness”, 1910). Semantic representations of the motive of hope and hopelessness in these poems by G. Tuqay are revealed. The factors influencing the semantics of this motif of his poetry are determined, the intertextual connections of the analyzed poems, biographical, cultural and historical contexts determining the semantics of the studied motif are analyzed. The article raises the question of the influence of the Eastern poetic tradition and the principles of meaning formation typical for the Arab-Muslim culture on the semantics of G. Tuqay’s lyrical motifs. In accordance with the special nature of the connection between word and meaning in Arab-Muslim Philology (“indication of meaning”), the analysis of G. Tuqay’s poem “Ber Man” (1910) demonstrates the possibility of transition from the explicit content of the poem to the hidden meaning. The analysis let us determine the role of reminiscences for the meaning of the poem interpreted as a work about a transcendental event (G. Tuqay’s poem “Poet and Khatif”, Quranic reminiscence-quote from 107th ayat of the 21st Surah of the Quran). In “Ber Man” there is an actualization of the internal form of the word, in accordance with the etymological meaning of the word “man” (from Arabic “ma’na” – meaning), which gives reason to consider the change in the mental condition of the lyrical personage as a process of acquiring the once lost meaning. At the same time, considering that G. Tuqay’s poetic talent developed at the intersection of Tatar, Russian, and European literatures, it should be mentioned that it is inadmissible to absolutize the Eastern origin as the only one which determines the motives’ semantics in the lyrics of the Tatar poet.

For the first time in literary criticism, the author of the article turns her attention to the image of the estate in Tolstoy’s later artistic work, showing the dynamics of the writer’s views on estate life, the image of an ideal estate, which for Tolstoy was always associated with the motives of work, family life, proper attitude towards the people, etc. It is noted that in 1880–1910, the estate theme in Tolstoy’s creative imagination was directly related to the problems of land ownership, proper management and correct and gradual path of the individual and their spiritual growth. The picture of estate life In Leo Tolstoy’s novel “Resurrection” is realized in two contrasting versions: luxurious existence of the upper class and the aristocracy, not supported by any content, and transforming into a new image of the working life of the intelligentsia and landowners on the land. The author demonstrates the facts of impoverishment of estate life at the turn of the 19th–20th centuries, which are introduced in the artistic world of the novel. It is proved that the idea in the work of inseparable connection of a person with the people around him and with humanity at large, which is the key conception of the novel, is directly related to Tolstoy’s understanding of the change of the forms of estate life, important and dear for the writer himself. Of great importance in the novel is the awareness of the characters of natural life, which is presented in contrast to civilization, which deviates from the basic laws of love and goodness. On the basis of an analytical comparison of the drafts of the novel and the final text, the author substantiates the importance of the estate theme for understanding the feelings of the protagonist and his inner life, for organizing the epic artistic world of the novel. The article illustrates the stages of the dialectical movement of Dmitry Nekhlyudov and the connection between the estate and family themes. The author rethinks some episodes of the novel that have received controversial interpretations in science and reveals the artistic links that connect different chapters of the work.

Developing intensively and in its own way throughout the 20th century, Hungarian sculpture has gained recognition as one of the leading European schools. Much in its creative image was determined between the two world wars when romantic tonality, combining dynamic activity and plastic flexibility, became a high priority. Romantic pantheism made itself felt in the artistic works of the Hungarians, successfullyshown at the All-Union Art Exhibition in Moscow in 1957-1958. The appeal to the motives and forms of nature enriched the human modulus of Hungarian sculpture.The period between 1960-1970 is its most fruitful time. The combination of romantic concepts and themes with object textures and aesthetics of simplicity, inherent in pop art, among the masters of the older generation, Imre Varga and Erzsébet Schaár who were recognized in Europe, was the biggest event among the variants of its creative movement. Imre Varga’s evolution in this direction, from grotesque-naturalistic publicism to the use of pop art techniques as a means of the dramatic theatricalization of human life and history, is illustrated in the article. Varga developed a synthesis of the pop art-inspired landscape and romantic portrait in the best monuments of these decades. In Erzsébet Schaár’s art, the objective world more than once turned into an artistic metaphor of independent significance. However, for her, the most important meeting of romanticism and pop art happened, the same as for Varga, in the search for synthesis and the creation of an ensemble. Her Street, which is exhibited in the city of Pecs, is perceived as a combination of symbolic figures and environmental objects, imbued with the idea of infinity of the world.

The Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878 spawned a request from both the government and the public for an appropriate pictorial representation to be evaluated in the categories of ‘high art’, a request which revealed the inability of the predominant aesthetics to be satisfied. The paintings on the subjects of the preceding Balkan Crisis of 1875–1876 easily appealed to the existing reserve of descriptive means in primarily appealing to Orientalist motives by using the international Oriental-artistic language. In this case, painters such as K. Makovsky or V. Polenov did not need to resort to some inversions in the “Turkestan Series” by V. Vereshchagin: the developed artistic language allowed the conveying of the desired content without loss. On the contrary, attempts to present pictorial representations of the Russo-Turkish War found that the old military art was no longer perceived as genuine “art”. Thus, in not being regarded as a proper fixation of “memorable events”, the prevailing new aesthetics was unable to convey the pathos and heroics desired by the authorities. At the same time, it was found that a strong aesthetic effect in military plots was achieved through “seriality”, the interpretation of similar plots as isolated and independent. However, this did not produce a significant effect, that is to say, painting as such was not self-sufficient since it required the assistance of the text, the sequence of images, etc. The problem was reduced significantly with the new aesthetics of the 20th century, and in the last decades of the 19th century, in connection with mentioned above difficulties of painting, historical plots acquired new value, providing new opportunities for the representation of heroic themes while simultaneously giving greater aesthetic freedom.

In 2007, Marie Clements, a Canadian playwright, was asked to prepare a play about the cultural history of Canada. She decided to write a play about Edward S. Curtis, the author of an epic series of photographic works titled The North American Indian, published between 1900 and 1930. Clements invited to the project Rita Leistner, a Canadian photographer, who was responsible for the graphic aspect of the play. Her task was to recreate the way taken by Curtis while immortalizing scenes from the life of the indigenous peoples. Both artists took a fascinating journey following the footsteps of Curtis documenting today’s presence of the First Nations in the United States and Canada. This article, based on the project of Clements and Leistner, discusses the ambiguity of the medium of photography, one which ‘recreates’the reality and at the same time allows the authors to‘create’ it. It presents three basic themes: the mission and work of Edward S. Curtis; the play titled The Edward Curtis Project: A Modern Picture Story by Marie Clements; and the photographs – prepared by Rita Leistner – which were used in play and then published in the book of the same title. The purpose of this text is to present the project of the Canadian authors in the context of visual sociology and anthropology, and to show the potential of photography as a means of building social discourse and creating a narrative of a specific community. It is founded on the assumption that the artistic project in question – based on (both passive and active) participation of the authors in the everyday life of the community presented in it – becomes a source of valuable research material, which can then be subjected to scientific interpretations.

This article is dedicated to the analysis of distinctive features of the image of Russian Orthodoxy in the works of the contemporary Russian and English photographers. The authors review various aspects of photography as a research tool. They determine the focus of attention of the English and Russian photographers with regards to Orthodoxy, which aspect of religiosity prevail in their works, and which artistic means of photography are used by the photojournalists to express their position. In the course of research of the existing photo projects, the question is raised of whether they seek to capture negative or rather positive aspects of the Russian religiosity. Analysis is also conducted on the degree of the influence of stereotypes upon photo images. Research methodology employs comparative analysis of the documentary photo projects of the Russian and English photographers. The photographers were selected by regional, professional, and objective-subjective criteria. This article is first to refer to the documentary photo projects for analyzing the perception of Russian Orthodoxy by the Russians and foreigners, which defines the scientific novelty and uniqueness of this research. The conducted analysis reveals the similarities and differences in the approaches of the Russian and English photographers. The conclusion is made that the object of research of the English and Russian photographers differ in themes and aspects they pay attention to. The English photographers are interested in religion as a part of the everyday practices of a modern Russian, while the Russian photographers attempt to demonstrate a profound connection of people with the spiritual world. At the same time, both English and Russians photographers capture Orthodoxy in a positive context, at times even romanticizing the image of Orthodox temples and rituals.

The article is devoted to the connection of the famous English poet, prose writer and preacher John Donne�s (1572�1631) works with the Petrarchan discourse of the European literature. The purpose of the investigation is to reveal and interpret the elements of Petrarchism in spiritual lyrics of the author on the basis of systematic approach with the use of the genealogical and comparative typological methods. The most prominent cases of the traditional Petrarchan themes, motives and images usage in John Donne�s religious texts and the specifity of their functioning have been examined in this article. Our attention has been paid to the genetic interconnection between the courtly rhetoric, which had been inherited by Francesco Petrarch and his numerous followers from the Provencal troubadours, and the traditions of the European mysticism that causes the harmony of the Petrarchan interpretive contexts according to the spiritual lyrics of the writer. Already in his earliest works, in particular in the book �Songs and Sonnets�, John Donne did not avoid mixing the sacred and the profane, quite intensively using religious images and motifs in love poetry. But his Petrarchism is most notable in his �Holly Sonnets�. The poetry of this cycle is not about God at all, but about the author himself in his relationship with Lord. In these sonnets the writer describes his feelings for God in almost the same way as Francesco Petrarch described his love for Laura. In general, if we talk about Petrarchism in relation to the spiritual lyrics of John Donne, it should be noted that for the writer it was not only a convenient source of the �ready� artistic images, motifs or means of expression but a kind of a perfect artistic technique for expressing secret, deeply personal thoughts and emotions. The conclusion has been done that such typically Petrarchan ideas such as: the dedicated service to the object of feelings, slavish adoration, obedience and dependence on its inconstant wishes John Donne has managed to adapt to the special needs of the sacred genres in such a way that his texts look surprisingly attractive, interesting and clear to different readers. Despite his worldwide fame John Donne is still one of the least researched literary figures in Ukrainian science. The article is directed to study only one of many aspects of his many-sided artistic heritage which needs the comprehensive professional analysis of the literary theorists and historians. So this article can be used for the further investigation of the problems, connected with the Petrarchan discourse generally in English literature and particularly in John Donne�s works and the scientific results proposed in it can be used in writing course works, graduation works and thesis on the related themes.

The article discusses the artistic and aesthetic parallels in the Erzya epic “ Mastorava ” and the Udmurt epos “ Dorvyzhy ”, which are heroic epics of the peoples of the Finno-Balto-Ugric world. The idea is being made that the poetic community between them is a consequence of the folk-cultural typology, although historical ties are also not excluded. The similarity of motives and plots is manifested in the pantheon, in views on the world order, in the nature of the relationship between gods and people, types of characters. It is stated that by the poetic nature Dorvyzhy takes a place among the classic European epics, he is related to them by themes, the socio-cultural status of the heroes (cultural and social demiurges), views on the first ancestors (giant people and people of a modern type), a description of the military clashes between princes as representatives of the highest level of Udmurt statehood and relations with neighboring peoples, the philosophical views of the Udmurt people on the past, present and future. We are talking about the main differences between “ Mastoravoi ” and “ Dorvyzhy ”: they consist in the features of the plots and composition, poetics and aesthetics of works, their ethnic philosophy and social utopia. “ Mastorava ” is optimistic about the future; in “ Dorvyzhy ”, the views on tomorrow are contradictory.

The article explores the features of documentary works of art, in particular letters, articles, travel notes, newspaper publications, photo and video materials, which formed the basis of the travelogue «Travelling: Russia» by the Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis. It describes his trips to the Soviet Union in the 20s of the XX century. A complex of themes and motives typical of travelogue, topos is considered, topographic plots focused on the presentation of facts and situations are highlighted. The subject of the image in travel notes and feature articles by N. Kazantzakis is practically everything that he sees and realizes / perceives and, of course, describes: topographic environment, the beauty of nature, mode of life, social relations and the psychology of people. The wandering figure, breaking away from usual life, overcoming the barrier of existence, which forces the author and readers to experience borderline states, ask extreme questions, seek for the answers, fulfilling the mission of the travelogue. Getting into other, unfamiliar conditions, the traveller either gets used to them, or evaluates them, transforming them for himself and for the others. Travelogue N. Kazantzakis «Traveling: Russia» does not always adequately reflect the real space of travel. The repeating routes of Greece – Odesa – Kiev trips by sea and further by rail receive different irradiation depending on optimistic (at the beginning of his philosophical and religious journey) or catastrophic with a touch of disappointment (at the end of his ideological search) premonitions of the author. So, the construction of the travelogue of the Greek writer was greatly influenced by previous trips to the same places. Nikos Kazantzakis often refers reader to facts of history, to cultural codes, to ideological oppositions, to personal memory. Oppositions Europe/Greece – Russia, Vienna – Odesa, Greeks – Russians / Ukrainians – Jews are interpreted nominally in the article, the main task of the writer seems to be a way out to the existential principles of the structure and transformation of person.

The essay presents an overview of Jewish American prose of the second half of the 20th — first two decades of the 21st century within the context of multicultural literature of the USA. The definition of Jewish literature remains a matter of debate. The author of the essay based on the opinions of critics concludes on the criterion for assigning a writer to Jewish literature. It is the artistic embodiment of the personal Jewish experience and identity in the works of literature, the view “from inside,” the perspective of collective memory and the connection to history and culture. Jewish literature today is one of the most developed ethnic segments of multicultural American literature. Writers under study are recognized throughout the world, their works have been translated into many languages, including Russian, they are known to readers and have already become the subject of study by literary scholars. Today, Jewish American literature is represented by two generations of writers. “Senior” generation includes the authors born in the 1920s–30s who began their literary careers in the 60s when there was a generational change in national literature. “Young” generation is represented by the writers who began their literary careers in the 2000s. On the example of the works of the most famous authors of both generations, the author of the essay talks about the factors determining the specific features of Jewish American prose and its characteristic themes, problems, and motives: the search for identity and roots, the representation and rethinking of the Holocaust, ethnic stereotypes, the image of the Jewish family, and the traditions of Jewish humor. The study of the works of modern Jewish writers in the United States allows us to draw conclusions about the display of border consciousness, national and ethnic identity, and collective memory in fiction.

In recent years, the Latino population has increased rapidly in areas with traditionally low concentration of Latinos. In these emerging communities, Latinos often live scattered, confronting social isolation and social services not tailored to serve their cultural and linguistic needs. Latinos’ invisibility in Pittsburgh is evidenced by the absence of records of the Latino presence in the city’s museums and public archives. OjO Latino, a community engaged project, sought to advance the inclusion of the Latino community in Pittsburgh through Photovoice. This participatory expression methodology enables individuals to share their stories with the larger public through cultural and artistic expression. The intentional organization of the project as a group activity facilitated the transfer of power over the project to participants, creating solidarity and fomenting trust. During four meetings participants took part in a short photography training, discussed their photographs addressing the meaning of being Latino in Pittsburgh, and selected 34 photographs for exhibition organizing them in four themes: Work, Costumes, Family and Landscape and climate. OjO Latino held one exhibit in a community venue and another one at the university. In addition, the photographs are available in an electronic public repository. OjO Latino served a dual purpose of expanding the visibility of Latinos in and educating the larger community. The OjO Latino team got closer to the ways Latino immigrants see and experience the city. Their gaze challenged our own views and experiences and also spoke the saliency of nostalgia and social networks in their lives. The open discussion of what it means to be Latino in an emerging community and the opportunity to produce a visual account of it, along with the acknowledgment of the presence of this diverse population promote human rights, ethnic identity as well as mental and social health.

The article deals with the introduction of performances of theatrical musicals into the educational process of preparing future art teachers on the artistic faculty of the Centralukrainian State Volodymyr Vynnychenko Pedadogic State University. Illuminated positive impact of such an introduction on the quality of professional training of students. The motivational approach to the meaningful responsibility of students for training is revealed when they carry out self-control over the process of acquiring the necessary knowledge and skills and become fully responsible for the quality of learned material. All this greatly increases the creative activity of students, prompts them to self-studying and self-development, forms an active life position. The role of a teacher in this system of educational process is the role of the coordinator. He carries out a general leadership of the educational and creative process, acts as a consultant, an assistant, and most importantly – he is a professional-mentor, a senior mate who helps students to master the whole complex of knowledge, skills and abilities. In such motivated training, it is necessary to point out initial goals, determined by the teacher, which coincides with the educational motives of students. Only under such conditions, academic actions of the students will be transformed into conscious educational activities, the motivation of success will be created. That is why students study on the basis of partnership in the chorus studio. They make their proposals for project themes, develop the concept, choose the form of material presentation, create scenarios and are interested in preparatory and organizational work, as well as independently choose the direction of its own educational activity within the project – write or distribute musical solos and choral parties, make them choral. Arrangement or perform computer arrangement of musical accompaniment, etc. Execution of such a work not only reveals existing knowledge of students on the relevant educational subjects, but also requires mastering new knowledge and skills, assimilating the material of new educational subjects that are needed to implement the plan.

This article deals with Stevan Mokranjac?s fifthteen garlands (rukoveti), which are commonly regarded as the national project in Serbian art music that was accomplished through the producing of the tradition of the Serbian folk song. The garlands are examined by employing the concept of ethno-symbolism, theoretically associated with Anthony Smith. The elements of ethno-symbolism, and especially those aspects of this theory through which the articulation of a national identity activates connections with pre-modern myths, recollections and collective symbols, have proven useful in contextualization of folk material and its ethnological environment, with which the art work establishes intertextual connections. With his project Mokranjac created a rich network of ethno-symbols associated with the themes and motives of both rural and semi-urban communities that were characterized by their preservation of the model of patriarchal culture. Their strong attachment to ?ethno-history? as well as ?symbolic geography? produced various ?ethno-scapes?, which established an increasingly symbiotic context of a ?naturalized? community and ?historicized? nature and territory. Mokranjac presented them as a representative sample in the process of legitimizing national consolidation and homogenization through the folk song. These aspects are observed in both textual and musical dimensions of Mokranjac?s garlands. The connection between his fieldwork and his compositions is also problematized. Mokranjac?s garlands are distinguished by their inclusiveness and a constant blending of older and newer ethno-historical elements, with an aim of constructing a unique tradition of national song, as an integral time-and-space image of the nation. Through this dimension of collectivism we can observe Mokranjac?s close connection to the patriarchal culture, as it remained an important ethno-symbolist element in both the politics and the poetics of his artistic project. At the same time, it provided a platform for free invention when it came to the more advanced stages of composition, when the patriarchal culture would be subjected to transfiguration by his individual creative imperatives. Mokranjac?s Garlands were the first works in Serbian music to emerge as results of an aesthetically rounded and ideologically grounded compositional project, which facilitated their canonization within the framework of Serbian art music.

S. Zoruk was a bright representative of the artistic circle with an original view and individual ap- proach to art. His innovative methodological theories on academic drawing are organically included in the concept of scientific and methodological base of the Department of Drawing NAOMA and drawing school in general. S. Zoruk constantly studied and improved the technique of drawing, built his personal style. It is in the pictorial compositions that his authorial style with an emphatically refined aesthetic and philosophical subtext is most vividly revealed. The line, the stroke, the spot are combined and intertwined, creating elegant images of his paintings. His style of drawing is characterized by a light, free line. It is extremely interesting to see the evolution of the Zoruk artist: "Game-4" (1991), "Breath of the Wind" (1993), diptychs "Farewell to the Hat" (1993) on carnival themes and "Time to scatter stones, time to collect stones" (1993) for biblical motives. They are made in the technique of drawing. Thanks to the compositional techniques of including large sizes of clean planes of paper and the clarity of the line, the artist achieves the effect when the viewer’s imagination continues to paint the plastic life of the image. S. Zoruk’s creative style is characterized by refinement and detail of the image, elegance and lightness of the line and, at the same time, there is a pause, a colon in the story, which gives space for plot fantasizing. An important place in the artist’s creative activity was occupied by his teaching work, which he began in 1989 at the Department of Drawing KDHI. He alternately taught drawing at the Faculty of Architecture, and later at the restoration, theater, and graphic departments. He took a direct part in the forma- tion of the scientific and theoretical basis for the methods of teaching drawing and introduced methodological development, namely "Double productions in the 5th year" in the working program of the drawing. The level of professional qualification of the artist was marked in 1986 by admission to the National Academy of Arts, the rank — Honored Artist of Ukraine (1996), in 2000 the academic rank of associate professor, and since 2003 S. Zoruk held the position of professor. He successfully combined pedagogical and exhibition activities, repeatedly visited and collaborated with art galleries in Suzhou, Wu Xi (PRC). He has about 40 exhibitions in Ukraine and abroad. His works are in the funds of the Ministry of Culture of Ukraine, the National Union of Artists of Ukraine, the museum "Kachanivka" and the Museum of Contemporary Art (Kaliningrad), in private collections in the Netherlands, Russia, Belgium, France, Germany, Austria, USA, China. S. Zoruk’s creative and pedagogical activity were awarded in 2002 by the award of the Ministry of Culture of Ukraine "For out- standing merits in the development of culture and art". Philosophical sound in combination with intellectual- ism, together with high professional skill gave S. Zoruk’s works of extraordinary artistic value, made them an important phenomenon of Ukrainian art of the last quarter of the XX — beginning of the XXI century. His works have a sense of the space of the theatrical stage: the images, which is raised up to generalization are united by a certain game moment, the artist slowly unfolds in front of the spectator the dramaturgy of the plot, leaving a field for his own interpretations.

Background. Mural paintings occupy a special place in the ensemble decoration program of the residential buildings entrance spaces in Eastern Galicia at the end of the XIXth – first third of the XXth century. They are at the same level with decorative sculpture, exquisite staircase forging, ornamental floor decor, and polychrome stained glass. Not only do the decorative compositions in the entrance spaces mural paintings serve as a stylistic feature of decoration, but also are a component of owner's self-identification, testify to their aesthetic preferences and cultural level, demonstrate their material capacities. Practically all wealthy residential buildings and villas of the late XIXth – early XXth centuries contained murals as a necessary element of decoration. They were guided by the principle of uniqueness of each art piece. Preserved mural paintings are characterized by the high quality of execution, variety of scenes and color decisions. Many foreign and Ukrainian scholars look into the aesthetics of architecture and the interaction of the synthesis of arts in it: Y. Biryulov, T. Kazantseva, L. Polischuk, O. Silnyk, I. Zhuk, M. Studnytska and others. However, the authors do not analyze mural paintings of the residential buildings interior in Eastern Galicia, especially of the entrance spaces, which are a buffer zone between outside and inside of the building. Thus, at present, numerous design elements that are in the entrance spaces of residential buildings are at risk of extinction. That is why we need to stress the problem of preservation of the authentic artistic paintings within the program of lobbies and stairwells decoration in the residential buildings of Eastern Galicia at the end of the XIXth – first third of the XXth century. For this reason, our research is relevant and topical. The objectives of this article are to typologize artistic mural paintings in the decoration of the entrance spaces of residential buildings in Eastern Galicia at the end of the XIXth – first third of the XXth century according to the stylistic forms (neo-gothic, neo-renaissance, neo-baroque, neo-baroque, neo-rococo, in the empire style and modern) and to classify them into thematic (mythological and allegorical images) and ornamental compositions. Methods. The article uses a complex method of architectural-stylistic and art-study analysis, which covers traditional general scientific approaches to the solution of the tasks. Additionally, the method of field studies has been applied, through which we can obtain reliable information on the status of entrance spaces of living buildings in modern conditions. According to the results of the field studies, the mural paintings in the decoration of the entrance spaces of residential buildings in East Galicia of the late XIXth – first third of the XXth century have been analyzed. Types of paintings were typologies (neo-gothic, neo-renaissance, neo-baroque, neo-rococo, in the empire style and modern). The mural paintings are classified according to the motives (mythological and allegorical images) and ornamental compositions. The correlation between the adornment of ceilings and walls and other arts in the decoration of the entrance spaces of the Eastern Galician residential buildings at the end of the XIXth – first third of the XXth century has been traced. Conclusions. The architecture of each historical period is characterized by a certain color scheme. In the palette of paintings of the late XIXth – early XX centuries the pastel shades are dominant. They create a particularly elevated atmosphere in the interior of the entrance spaces due to the nuance of tone and color. The architectural and artistic themes on the facades of a building are often supported in the interior – entrance spaces. The stylish total ability of decoration does not interfere with their complex texture and color, which is used, all the elements highlight each other, transferring in the tonal emotionality of the system set by the paintings. Unfortunately, the number of mural paintings in the entrance spaces of residential buildings are often being fixed or non-professionally restored (like the mural paintings on 14 Kravchuk St. in Lviv). Because of these factors, the authentic colors fade away and their value significantly decreases. Moreover, mural paintings often crumble as time passes.

Background. I.Stravinsky’s orchestration is quite an original phenomenon; its essential characteristics are influenced not only by objective intra-musical factors (reconfiguration of musical language on the verge of XIX–XX centuries) or by subjective individual and stylistic determinants, but also by the changes, which occurred in the cultural context of the first half of XX century under influence of scientific and technical progress (Arkadev, 1992; Gerasimova-Persidskaya, 2012). The first two decades of XX century became the time, when the new generation of composers emerged, who reflected complexity of the world and different understanding of temporal and spatial relations in sound matter of their works. First, we mean C. Debussy, I. Stravinsky, the composers of the Second Viennese School and B. Bart&#243;k. Objectivation of the worldview largely influenced the orchestration as it is one of the means to organise musical matter in space-time. Literature review. Orchestration by I. Stravinsky is the object of research in the articles of V. Gurkov (1987) and A. Schnittke (1967; 1973). Valuable observation and commentary on composer’s orchestration are found in several monographs (Asafev, 1977; Baeva, 2009; Druskin, 2009; Savenko, 2001; Yarustovskiy, 1982). In the available works, orchestral writing by I. Stravinsky has not been examined, especially in the aspect of its constant principles. Results. Concept of “orchestral writing” needs to be clarified; it is widely used, although scarcely developed. We suggest our own definition of this concept. Orchestral writing is an individual system of technological devices and principles, determined by composer’s musical language and common, basic rules of orchestration, aimed at realisation of timbre and textural aspects of the work, conditioned by style, genre and artistic idea and incarnated in functional interaction of orchestral parts in horizontal and vertical axes. General principles of I. Stravinsky’s orchestral writing became discernible in his early works; we define them as multi-figure composition, combinatorics and plastique. Combinatorics can be understood as universal principle of I. Stravinsky’s compositional method and orchestral writing, which affects all the levels of compositional whole, the work itself. Combinatorics is widely used in visual arts, where it is interpreted as a method to find various combinations through rearrangements, moving, different configurations of given elements, their juxtaposition in a certain order. Used as a term to define orchestral writing, combinatorics supposes manipulation with small timbre and textural elements and structures; this is conditioned by type of the themes, used by the composer as well as by variability of intervals and motives. Frequent succession of thematic structures causes rushed tempo of changes of timbre and textural structures, which, in its turn, causes musical time to be densely filled with informational events, and musical space became heterogeneous, contrasting, motley. Combinatorics is embodied in such tools as timbre transmissions and switching, when thematic structures distributed between several timbre groups by the means of split, handoff or juxtaposition, combination of orchestral groups, while remaining in the same structural and compositional section; as a rule, this does not result in a change of orchestral texture. This engenders mosaic-like orchestration, intense contrasts of timbre. Combinatorics in I. Stravinsky’s scores is skillfully realized through increase and decrease in quantity of voices (timbres) in horizontal and vertical axes. In vertical axis it is achieved by usage of incomplete and inexact (fragmentary, variable) doubles, having role of timbre “highlighting”, creating timbre variants of the main line, filling orchestral texture with unremitting timbre move and spatiality. As fragmentary and variable doubles are used, density of the texture is regulated through pauses in doubling lines; thus, the composer avoids risk of overloading the texture. In horizontal axis combinatorics causes alternation of timbres and timbre mixtures within rather shorts periods of musical time with the same orchestral texture, which causes constant timbre development and indicates wise usage of orchestral resources. In the light of combinatorics it is possible to examine and a type of orchestral tutti, raising on the basis of multi-layered orchestral texture, composed from several timbre and textural strata. Conclusions. Continuous usage of combinatorics allows to interpret it not only as constant principle of I. Stravinsky’s orchestral writing, but also as “universal” (according to definition of S. Savenko, 2001) in composer’s orchestral thinking. The same can be applied to such principles as multi-figure and plastique. Their interaction spawns diverse combinations in the Stravinsky’s compositions of the “Russian”, “Neo-Classical” and late stages of his creativity, their influence might be either conspicuous or hidden. Abovementioned principles are used to different extent in each case, depending on the type of space-time that I. Stravinsky employs in the works of different periods: time filled with events and motley, heterogeneous space in the works of the “Russian” period; relatively continuous time, rich with information and events, and more homogenous space in the works of the “Neo-Classical” period; Eternity and simultaneous usage of different time models and strictly geometrical (pure in its abstractness) Space in the works of the late period.

Background. In recent scholar resources musicologists actively study the problem of typology of chamber song cycle. The article cites analytical observations of M. Kolotylenko on works in this genre by R. Strauss (2014), of I. Leopa – on G. Mahler’s (2017), of N. Vlasova – on A. Schoenberg’s (2007). It is stated, that unlike Austro-German phenomena of this kind have been studied to a certain degree, song cycle “Summer Nights” by H. Berlioz hasn’t received adequate research yet, although it is mentioned by N. Vlasova as on of the foremost experiences of this kind. It allows to regard the French author as a pioneer in tradition of chamber song cycle. The aim of given research is to reveal the essence of orchestration as a part of songs cycle’s artistic whole. In order to achieve it, semantical, compositionally-dramaturgical and intonational methods of research are used. Originally, “Summer Nights” were meant to be performed by a duo of voice and piano (1834). It was not until 1856 that composer orchestrated this cycle, similarly to the way G. Mahler and in several cases R. Strauss done it later. The foundation of cycle by H. Berlioz are six poems from a set by T. Gautier «La Com&#233;die de la mort», published in 1838. In spite of having epic traits, this set is still an example of lyrical poesy, where subjective is being generalised, while chosen motive of death, according to L.Ginzburg, corresponds to existential essence of lyric (L. Ginzburg). French poet, prose writer, critic, author ow the poems set to music in “Summer Nights” by H. Berlioz – Th&#233;ophile Gautier (1811–1872) – is one of the most enigmatic and singular figures in history of XIX century art. He was eclipsed by his contemporaries, although his creativity paved the way for upcoming symbolism, that incarnated in poetry of C. Baudelaire, and set “&#201;maux et Cam&#233;es” became an aesthetic ideal for Parnassian School. A work by H. Berlioz on lyrics by T. Gautier consists of four songs: “Villanelle”, “Le Spectre de la Rose”, “Sur le lagunes”, “Absence”, “Au cimetiere. Clair de Lune” and “L`ile Inconnue”. It is founded on a plot of lyrical type, that is built according to the principle of appearing associations. Lyrical “I”, whose inner world is revealed during the cycle, provides logical congruity of the work. Each m&#233;lodie has its own spectrum of images, united by general lyrical plot. The first and last songs, grounding on a theme of nature, create thematic arch. The denouement of the plat falls on “L`ile Inconnue”, where hero’s conclusion about impossibility of everlasting love is proclaimed. The orchestra part is equal significance with the voice and intonated verbal text, simultaneously playing an important role in illuminating underlying meaning of the lyrics. H. Berlioz doesn’t tend to use supplementary woodwind instruments. Although, each instrument reveals its unique sonic and expressive possibilities, demonstrating its singular characteristics. Due to that an orchestra becomes differentiated, turning into a flexible living organism. Composer doesn’t use exceedingly large orchestra, moreover, each song has its unique set of performers. However, there are stable players: strings (including double basses), two flutes, 2 clarinets (in A and in B). Besides of that, H. Berlioz occasionally uses the timbre of solo oboe, bassoons, natural French horns in different keys, and in the second song he employs coloristic potential of the harp. From a standpoint of the semantics, the score is built according to the principle of the opposition between two spheres. The former one is attached to the motives of the nature and has pastoral mod. At the same time, it reveals idealistic expanse of dreams and vision, thus being above the existing realm. This sphere is represented by woodwinds and brass. The latter, on the contrary, places the hero in real time. It is a sphere of sensuality, of truly human, it also touches themes of fate and inevitable death. It is characteristic that this sphere is incarnated through string instruments. Although, the harp cannot be bracketed with either of the groups. This elusive timbre in instrumental palette is saved for “Le Spectre de la Rose” and creates unsubstantial image of a soul ascending to Heaven. H. Berlioz evades usage of mixed timbers in joining of different groups of the orchestra. Even when he does it, it has sporadic nature and provides emphasis on a particular motive. Orchestral tutti are almost non-existent. Composer uses concerto principle quite regularly as well. Additional attention must be drawn to psychologising of role of clarinet and semantisation of flute and bassoon. Clarinet becomes a doppelganger of lyrical “I” and, quite like a personality of a human, acquires ambivalent characteristics. Because of that, it interacts not only with its light group, but with low strings as well, thus demonstrating an ability to transformation of the image. Bassoon reflects the image of the death. This explains its rare usage as well as specific way of interaction with other instruments and groups. Flute is attached to the image of the nature, symbolises a white dove, that in a poetry of T. Gautier represents an image of beautiful maiden. Consequently, this allows to state that timbre of flute incarnates the image of lyrical hero’s love interest. The most significant instruments of string group are the low ones, accenting either the aura of dark colours or sensuality and passion. Neglecting the tradition requiring lyrical hero to be paired with a certain voice type, H. Berlioz in each m&#233;lodie uses different timbres, that suit coloristic incarnation of the miniature the most in the terms of tessiture and colour. A conclusion is made, that composer become a forefather of chamber song cycle of new type, with its special trait being equivalence of the voice and the orchestra, that allows them to create united multi-layered integrity

This research aims to contribute to the improvement of initial teacher training in Art Education. For this purpose Arts-Based Educational Research methodology is used to unveil invisibilities that occur in the field of situated cognition. We will approach to three main themes that are developed in the university classrooms by using photography and also by using text fragments associated with pictures. Those themes are: artistic activities, interpersonal relationships, situations and environments.

In this paper artistic photography will be presented as a methodological approach to the visual concept of education mainly in two ways: first, we propose photography as an aesthetic value in documentary information within image-based educational research; second, through a visual essay, we will propose different visual compositions about four key issues for the construction of the visual school concept. Artists interested in photography have approached the school and education creating an extensive visual archive since the late 19th century. Beyond the documentary value of these images, we hypothesize that these images can be important to our intuitions and ideas about school and education. In the work that follows, we distinguish between art photography and documentary photography, basically to point out the predominance of aesthetic information above the use of referential realism that prefer documentary photography. On the other hand, our visual discourse is structured around five photo essays, organized each one with two photographs made by the author along with two visual quotations in the history of photography. These photo-essays have been organized by contrasting the four main topics that documentary and art photography has traditionally preferred: the school environment, the students, the teachers and the interactions between them. In the following photo-essays, we propose cross-readings between these four themes. The result of these visual interference and free associations offers some visual findings of our study.

В статье анализируется буддийское изобразительное искусство. Подчеркивается специфика тибетского буддизма в сравнении с исходным индийским вариантом буддийского вероучения, что наложило отпечаток как на тематику произведений, так и на художественное воплощение основных идей и мотивов. Приводится классификация пантеистической вселенной ваджраянского буддизма, детально анализируется символика, которая образует основу буддийского искусства (символика цвета, жестов-мудр и т.д.), а также принципы иконологии. Делается вывод о том, что для адекватной оценки этого искусства важно понять его интеллектуальную сущность и значимость его символики, так как само художественное мастерство здесь является не самоцелью, а инструментом для достижения духовной цели. The article analyzes Buddhist art. The specificity of Tibetan Buddhism is emphasized in comparison with the original Indian version of the Buddhist creed, which left its mark on the themes of the works, as well as on the artistic embodiment of the main ideas and motives. The pantheistic universe of Vajrayan Buddhism is classified, the symbolism that forms the basis of Buddhist art (symbolism of color, gestures-wise, etc.), as well as the principles of iconology, are analyzed in detail. The conclusion is made that for an adequate assessment of this art it is important to understand its intellectual essence and the significance of its symbolism, since Buddhist art is a tool to achieve a spiritual goal.

Статья посвящена творчеству современного бурятского живописца, скульптора, сценографа Бато Дашицыренова, выставка работ которого состоялась в 2019 году в Художественном музее им. Ц. Сампилова (Улан-Удэ). Произведения художника были представлены на многочисленных выставках России, Франции, США, Нидерландов. Автор ставит целью исследования определить соотношение национальных и общекультурных смыслов в творческом наследии Бато Дашицыренова. Для этого в живописи, графике и скульптуре мастера отмечены образы, мотивы, сюжеты, укорененные в национальной культуре, традициях, обычаях монгольских народов, древней культуре Центральной Азии. С другой стороны, определены элементы техники, средства художественной выразительности, характерные для европейского экспрессионизма и символизма или метаисторического экспрессионизма. Почерк мастера включает и опыт театрального художника, и приверженность музыкальной тематике, и интертекстуальность, и связь знака и архетипа, и своеобразие пластики, палитры, фигуративные особенности (например, акцент на голове персонажа, где, по представлениям бурят, сосредоточен источник души человека), и свободу переходов от живописи к пластическим образам. Результаты и выводы исследования значимы в контексте изучения современных художественных процессов Республики Бурятия, России и Центральной Азии. The article is about the work of a modern Buryat painter, sculptor, stage designer Bato Dashitsyrenov. The exhibition of his artworks took place in 2019 at The Buryatia Republican Art Museum named after Ts.S. Sampilov (Ulan-Ude). The artists works were previously presented at numerous exhibitions in Russia, France, the USA, and the Netherlands. The purpose of the study is to determine the correlation of national and general cultural meanings in the creative heritage of Bato Dashitsyrenov. For this, the author notes images, motives, plots rooted in the national culture, traditions, customs of the Mongolian peoples, the ancient culture of Central Asia in the painting, graphics and sculpture of the master. On the other hand, the author defines elements of technology, means of artistic expression, characteristic of European expressionism and symbolism or metahistorical expressionism. The masters manner includes the experience of a theater artist, commitment to musical themes and intertextuality, the connection of the sign and archetype, the originality of plastics, palettes, figurative features (for example, emphasis on the characters head, where, according to Buryat ideas, the source of the human soul is concentrated), and freedom of transition from painting to plastic images. The results and conclusions of the study are significant in the context of studying contemporary art processes in the Republic of Buryatia, Russia and Central Asia.

As the distinction between disclosure-fuelled celebrity and lasting fame becomes difficult to discern, the “based on a true story” label has gained a particular traction among readers and viewers. This is despite much public approbation and private angst sometimes resulting from such disclosure as “little in the law or in society protects people from the consequences of others’ revelations about them” (Smith 537). Even fiction writers can stray into difficult ethical and artistic territory when they disclose the private facts of real lives—that is, recognisably biographical information—in their work, with autoethnographic fiction where authors base their fiction on their own lives (Davis and Ellis) not immune as this often discloses others’ stories (Ellis) as well. F. Scott Fitzgerald famously counselled writers to take their subjects from life and, moreover, to look to the singular, specific life, although this then had to be abstracted: “Begin with an individual, and before you know it, you find that you have created a type; begin with a type, and you find that you have created—nothing” (139). One of the problems when assessing fiction through this lens, however, is that, although many writers are inspired in their work by an actual life, event or historical period, the resulting work is usually ultimately guided by literary concerns—what writers often term the quest for aesthetic truth—rather than historical accuracy (Owen et al. 2008). In contrast, a biography is, and continues to be, by definition, an accurate account of a real persons’ life. Despite postmodern assertions regarding the relativity of truth and decades of investigation into the incorporation of fiction into biography, other non-fiction texts and research narratives (see, for instance: Wyatt), many biographers attest to still feeling irrevocably tied to the factual evidence in a way that novelists and the scriptors of biographically-based fictional television drama, movies and theatrical pieces do not (Wolpert; Murphy; Inglis). To cite a recent example, Louis Nowra’s Ice takes the life of nineteenth-century self-made entrepreneur and politician Malcolm McEacharn as its base, but never aspires to be classified as creative nonfiction, history or biography. The history in a historical novel is thus often, and legitimately, skewed or sidelined in order to achieve the most satisfying work of art, although some have argued that fiction may uniquely represent the real, as it is able to “play […] in the gap between the narratives of history and the actualities of the past” (Nelson n.p.). Fiction and non-fictional forms are, moreover, increasingly intermingling and intertwining in content and intent. The ugly word “faction” was an attempt to suggest that the two could simply be elided but, acknowledging wide-ranging debates about whether literature can represent the complexities of life with any accuracy and post-structuralist assertions that the idea of any absolute truth is outmoded, contemporary authors play with, and across, these boundaries, creating hybrid texts that consciously slide between invention and disclosure, but which publishers, critics and readers continue to define firmly as either fiction or biography. This dancing between forms is not particularly new. A striking example was Marion Halligan’s 2001 novel The Fog Garden which opens with a personal essay about the then recent death of her own much-loved husband. This had been previously published as an autobiographical memoir, “Cathedral of Love,” and again in an essay collection as “Lapping.” The protagonist of the novel is a recently widowed writer named Clare, but the inclusion of Halligan’s essay, together with the book’s marketing campaign which made much of the author’s own sadness, encourages readers to read the novel as a disclosure of the author’s own personal experience. This is despite Halligan’s attempt to keep the two separate: “Clare isn’t me. She’s like me. Some of her experience, terrors, have been mine. Some haven’t” (Fog Garden 9). In such acts of disclosure and denial, fiction and non-fiction can interrogate, test and even create each other, however quite vicious criticism can result when readers feel the boundaries demarking the two are breached. This is most common when authors admit to some dishonesty in terms of self-disclosure as can be seen, for instance, in the furore surrounding highly inflated and even wholly fabricated memoirs such as James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, Margaret B. Jones’s Love and Consequences and Misha Defonseca’s A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years. Related problems and anxieties arise when authors move beyond incorporating and disclosing the facts of their own lives in memoir or (autobiographical) fiction, to using the lives of others in this way. Daphne Patai sums up the difference: “A person telling her life story is, in a sense, offering up her self for her own and her listener’s scrutiny […] Whether we should appropriate another’s life in this way becomes a legitimate question” (24–5). While this is difficult but seemingly manageable for non-fiction writers because of their foundational reliance on evidence, this anxiety escalates for fiction writers. This seems particularly extreme in relation to how audience expectations and prior knowledge of actual events can shape perceptions and interpretations of the resulting work, even when those events are changed and the work is declared to be one of fiction. I have discussed elsewhere, for instance, the difficult terrain of crafting fiction from well-known criminal cases (Brien, “Based on a True Story”). The reception of such work shows how difficult it is to dissociate creative product from its source material once the public and media has made this connection, no matter how distant that finished product may be from the original facts.As the field of biography continues to evolve for writers, critics and theorists, a study of one key text at a moment in that evolution—Jill Shearer’s play Georgia and its reliance on disclosing the life of artist Georgia O’Keeffe for its content and dramatic power—reveals not only some of the challenges and opportunities this close relationship offers to the writers and readers of life stories, but also the pitfalls of attempting to dissemble regarding artistic intention. This award-winning play has been staged a number of times in the past decade but has attracted little critical attention. Yet, when I attended a performance of Georgia at La Boite Theatre in Brisbane in 1999, I was moved by the production and admiring of Shearer’s writing which was, I told anyone who would listen, a powerfully dramatic interpretation of O’Keeffe’s life, one of my favourite artists. A full decade on, aspects of the work and its performance still resonate through my thinking. Author of more than twenty plays performed throughout Australia and New Zealand as well as on Broadway, Shearer was then (and is) one of Australia’s leading playwrights, and I judged Georgia to be a major, mature work: clear, challenging and confident. Reading the Currency Press script a year or so after seeing the play reinforced for me how distinctive and successful a piece of theatre Shearer had created utilising a literary technique which has been described elsewhere as fictionalised biography—biography which utilises fictional forms in its presentation but stays as close to the historical record as conventional biography (Brien, The Case of Mary Dean).The published version of the script indeed acknowledges on its title page that Georgia is “inspired by the later life of the American artist Georgia O’Keeffe” (Shearer). The back cover blurb begins with a quote attributed to O’Keeffe and then describes the content of the play entirely in terms of biographical detail: The great American artist Georgia O’Keeffe is physically, emotionally and artistically debilitated by her failing eyesight. Living amidst the Navajo spiritual landscape in her desert home in New Mexico, she becomes prey to the ghosts of her past. Her solitude is broken by Juan, a young potter, whose curious influence on her life remains until her death at 98 (Georgia back cover). This short text ends by unequivocally reinforcing the relation between the play and the artist’s life: “Georgia is a passionate play that explores with sensitivity and wry humour the contradictions and the paradoxes of the life of Georgia O’Keeffe” (Georgia back cover). These few lines of plot synopsis actually contain a surprisingly large number of facts regarding O’Keeffe’s later life. After the death of her husband (the photographer and modern art impresario Alfred Steiglitz whose ghost is a central character in the play), O’Keeffe did indeed relocate permanently to Abiquiú in New Mexico. In 1971, aged 84, she was suffering from an irreversible degenerative disease, had lost her central vision and stopped painting. One autumn day in 1973, Juan Hamilton, a young potter, appeared at her adobe house looking for work. She hired him and he became her lover, closest confidante and business manager until her death at 98. These facts form not only the background story but also much of the riveting content for Georgia which, as the published script’s introduction states, takes as its central themes: “the dilemma of the artist as a an older woman; her yearning to create against the fear of failing artistic powers; her mental strength and vulnerability; her sexuality in the face of physical deterioration; her need for companionship and the paradoxical love of solitude” (Rider vii). These issues are not only those which art historians identify as animating the O’Keeffe’s later life and painting, but ones which are discussed at length in many of the biographies of the artist published from 1980 to 2007 (see, for instance: Arrowsmith and West; Berry; Calloway and Bry; Castro; Drohojowska-Philp; Eisler; Eldredge; Harris; Hogrefe; Lisle; Peters; Reily; Robinson).Despite this clear focus on disclosing aspects of O’Keeffe’s life, both the director’s and playwright’s notes prefacing the published script declare firmly that Georgia is fiction, not biography. While accepting that these statements may be related to copyright and privacy concerns, the stridency of the denials of the biography label with its implied intention of disclosing the facts of a life, are worthy of analysis. Although noting that Georgia is “about the American artist Georgia O’Keeffe”, director of the La Boite production Sue Rider asserts that not only that the play moves “beyond the biographical” (vii) but, a few pages later, that it is “thankfully not biography” (xii). This is despite Rider’s own underscoring of the connection to O’Keeffe by setting up an exhibition of the artist’s work adjacent to the theatre. Shearer, whose research acknowledgments include a number of works about O’Keeffe, is even more overtly strident in her denial of any biographical links stating that her characters, “this Juan, Anna Marie and Dorothy Norman are a work of dramatic fiction, as is the play, and should be taken as such” (xiii).Yet, set against a reading of the biographies of the artist, including those written in the intervening decade, Georgia clearly and remarkably accurately discloses the tensions and contradictions of O’Keeffe’s life. It also draws on a significant amount of documented biographical data to enhance the dramatic power of what is disclosed by the play for audiences with this knowledge. The play does work as a coherent narrative for a viewer without any prior knowledge of O’Keeffe’s life, but the meaning of the dramatic action is enhanced by any biographical knowledge the audience possesses. In this way, the play’s act of disclosure is reinforced by this externally held knowledge. Although O’Keeffe’s oeuvre is less well known and much anecdotal detail about her life is not as familiar for Australian viewers as for those in the artist’s homeland, Shearer writes for an international as well as an Australian audience, and the program and adjacent exhibition for the Brisbane performance included biographical information. It is also worth noting that large slabs of biographical detail are also omitted from the play. These omissions to disclosure include O’Keeffe’s early life from her birth in 1887 in Wisconsin to her studies in Chicago and New York from 1904 to 1908, as well as her work as a commercial artist and art teacher in Texas and other Southern American states from 1912 to 1916. It is from this moment in 1916, however, that the play (although opening in 1946) constructs O’Keeffe’s life right through to her death in 1986 by utilising such literary devices as flashbacks, dream sequences and verbal and visual references.An indication of the level of accuracy of the play as biographical disclosure can be ascertained by unpacking the few lines of opening stage directions, “The Steiglitz’s suite in the old mid-range Shelton Hotel, New York, 1946 ... Georgia, 59, in black, enters, dragging a coffin” (1). In 1946, when O’Keeffe was indeed aged 59, Steiglitz died. The couple had lived part of every year at the Shelton Towers Hotel at 525 Lexington Avenue (now the New York Marriott East Side), a moderately priced hotel made famous by its depiction in O’Keeffe’s paintings and Steiglitz’s photographs. When Stieglitz suffered a cerebral thrombosis, O’Keeffe was spending the summer in New Mexico, but she returned to New York where her husband died on 13 July. This level of biographical accuracy continues throughout Georgia. Halfway through the first page “Anita, 52” enters. This character represents Anita Pollitzer, artist, critic and O’Keeffe’s lifelong friend. The publication of her biography of O’Keeffe, A Woman on Paper, and Georgia’s disapproval of this, is discussed in the play, as are their letters, which were collected and published in 1990 as Lovingly, Georgia (Gibiore). Anita’s first lines in the play after greeting her friend refer to this substantial correspondence: “You write beautifully. I always tell people: “I have a friend who writes the most beautiful letters” (1). In the play, as in life, it is Anita who introduces O’Keeffe’s work to Stieglitz who is, in turn, accurately described as: “Gallery owner. Two Nine One, Fifth Avenue. Leader of the New York avant-garde, the first to bring in the European moderns” (6). The play also chronicles how (unknown to O’Keeffe) Steiglitz exhibited the drawings Pollitzer gave him under the incorrect name, a scene which continues with Steiglitz persuading Georgia to allow her drawings to remain in his gallery (as he did in life) and ends with a reference to his famous photographs of her hands and nude form. Although the action of a substantial amount of real time is collapsed into a few dramatic minutes and, without doubt, the dialogue is invented, this invention achieves the level of aesthetic truth aimed for by many contemporary biographers (Jones)—as can be assessed when referring back to the accepted biographical account. What actually appears to have happened was that, in the autumn 1915, while teaching art in South Carolina, O’Keeffe was working on a series of abstract charcoal drawings that are now recognised as among the most innovative in American art of that time. She mailed some of these drawings to Pollitzer, who showed them Steiglitz, who exhibited ten of them in April 1916, O’Keeffe only learning of this through an acquaintance. O’Keeffe, who had first visited 291 in 1908 but never spoken to Stieglitz, held his critical opinion in high regard, and although confronting him over not seeking her permission and citing her name incorrectly, eventually agreed to let her drawings hang (Harris). Despite Shearer’s denial, the other characters in Georgia are also largely biographical sketches. Her “Anna Marie”, who never appears in the play but is spoken of, is Juan’s wife (in real life Anna Marie Hamilton), and “Dorothy Norman” is the character who has an affair with Steiglitz—the discovery of which leads to Georgia’s nervous breakdown in the play. In life, while O’Keeffe was in New Mexico, Stieglitz became involved with the much younger Norman who was, he claimed, only his gallery assistant. When O’Keeffe discovered Norman posing nude for her husband (this is vividly imagined in Georgia), O’Keeffe moved out of the Shelton and suffered from the depression that led to her nervous breakdown. “ Juan,” who ages from 26 to 39 in the play, represents the potter Juan Hamilton who encouraged the nearly blind O’Keeffe to paint again. In the biographical record there is much conjecture about Hamilton’s motives, and Shearer sensitively portrays her interpretation of this liaison and the difficult territory of sexual desire between a man and a much older woman, as she also too discloses the complex relationship between O’Keeffe and the much older Steiglitz.This complexity is described through the action of the play, but its disclosure is best appreciated if the biographical data is known. There are also a number of moments of biographical disclosure in the play that can only be fully understood with biographical knowledge in hand. For instance, Juan refers to Georgia’s paintings as “Beautiful, sexy flowers [... especially] the calla lilies” (24). All attending the play are aware (from the exhibition, program and technical aspects of the production) that, in life, O’Keeffe was famous for her flower paintings. However, knowing that these had brought her fame and fortune early in her career with, in 1928, a work titled Calla Lily selling for U.S. $25,000, then an enormous sum for any living American artist, adds to the meaning of this line in the play. Conversely, the significant level of biographical disclosure throughout Georgia does not diminish, in any way, the power or integrity of Shearer’s play as a literary work. Universal literary (and biographical) themes—love, desire and betrayal—animate Georgia; Steiglitz’s spirit haunts Georgia years after his death and much of the play’s dramatic energy is generated by her passion for both her dead husband and her younger lover, with some of her hopeless desire sublimated through her relationship with Juan. Nadia Wheatley reads such a relationship between invention and disclosure in terms of myth—relating how, in the process of writing her biography of Charmain Clift, she came to see Clift and her husband George Johnson take on a larger significance than their individual lives: “They were archetypes; ourselves writ large; experimenters who could test and try things for us; legendary figures through whom we could live vicariously” (5). In this, Wheatley finds that “while myth has no real beginning or end, it also does not bother itself with cause and effect. Nor does it worry about contradictions. Parallel tellings are vital to the fabric” (5). In contrast with both Rider and Shearer’s insistence that Georgia was “not biography”, it could be posited that (at least part of) Georgia’s power arises from the creation of such mythic value, and expressly through its nuanced disclosure of the relevant factual (biographical) elements in parallel to the development of its dramatic (invented) elements. Alongside this, accepting Georgia as such a form of biographical disclosure would mean that as well as a superbly inventive creative work, the highly original insights Shearer offers to the mass of O’Keeffe biography—something of an American industry—could be celebrated, rather than excused or denied. ReferencesArrowsmith, Alexandra, and Thomas West, eds. Georgia O’Keeffe & Alfred Stieglitz: Two Lives—A Conversation in Paintings and Photographs. Washington DC: HarperCollins and Calloway Editions, and The Phillips Collection, 1992.Berry, Michael. Georgia O’Keeffe. New York: Chelsea House, 1988.Brien, Donna Lee. The Case of Mary Dean: Sex, Poisoning and Gender Relations in Australia. Unpublished PhD Thesis. Queensland University of Technology, 2004. –––. “‘Based on a True Story’: The Problem of the Perception of Biographical Truth in Narratives Based on Real Lives”. TEXT: Journal of Writers and Writing Programs 13.2 (Oct. 2009). 19 Oct. 2009 < http://www.textjournal.com.au >.Calloway, Nicholas, and Doris Bry, eds. Georgia O’Keeffe in the West. New York: Knopf, 1989.Castro, Jan G. The Art and Life of Georgia O’Keeffe. New York: Crown Publishing, Random House, 1985.Davis, Christine S., and Carolyn Ellis. “Autoethnographic Introspection in Ethnographic Fiction: A Method of Inquiry.” In Pranee Liamputtong and Jean Rumbold, eds. Knowing Differently: Arts-Based and Collaborative Research. New York: Nova Science, 2008. 99–117.Defonseca, Misha. Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years. Bluebell, PA: Mt. Ivy Press, 1997.Drohojowska-Philp, Hunter. Full Bloom: The Art and Life of Georgia O’Keeffe. New York: WW Norton, 2004.Ellis, Carolyn. “Telling Secrets, Revealing Lives: Relational Ethics in Research with Intimate Others.” Qualitative Inquiry 13.1 (2007): 3–29. Eisler, Benita. O’Keeffe and Stieglitz: An American Romance. New York: Doubleday, 1991.Eldredge, Charles C. Georgia O’Keeffe: American and Modern. New Haven: Yale UP, 1993.Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Diamond as Big as the Ritz and Other Stories. Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1962.Frey, James. A Million Little Pieces. New York: N.A. Talese/Doubleday, 2003.Gibiore, Clive, ed. Lovingly, Georgia. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990.Halligan, Marion. “Lapping.” In Peter Craven, ed. Best Australian Essays. Melbourne: Bookman P, 1999. 208–13.Halligan, Marion. The Fog Garden. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2001.Halligan, Marion. “The Cathedral of Love.” The Age 27 Nov. 1999: Saturday Extra 1.Harris, J. C. “Georgia O’Keeffe at 291”. Archives of General Psychiatry 64.2 (Feb. 2007): 135–37.Hogrefe, Jeffrey. O’Keeffe: The Life of an American Legend. New York: Bantam, 1994.Inglis, Ian. “Popular Music History on Screen: The Pop/Rock Biopic.” Popular Music History 2.1 (2007): 77–93.Jones, Kip. “A Biographic Researcher in Pursuit of an Aesthetic: The Use of Arts-Based (Re)presentations in “Performative” Dissemination of Life Stories”. Qualitative Sociology Review 2.1 (Apr. 2006): 66–85. Jones, Margaret B. Love and Consequences: A Memoir of Hope and Survival. New York: Riverhead Books, 2008.Lisle, Laurie. Portrait of an Artist: A Biography of Georgia O’Keeffe. New York: Seaview Books, 1980.Murphy, Mary. “Limited Lives: The Problem of the Literary Biopic”. Kinema 17 (Spr. 2002): 67–74. Nelson, Camilla. “Faking It: History and Creative Writing.” TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses 11.2 (Oct. 2007). 19 Oct. 2009 < http://www.textjournal.com.au/oct07/nelson.htm >.Nowra, Louis. Ice. Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin, 2008.Owen, Jillian A. Tullis, Chris McRae, Tony E. Adams, and Alisha Vitale. “Truth Troubles.” Qualitative Inquiry 15.1 (2008): 178–200.Patai, Daphne. “Ethical Problems of Personal Narratives, or, Who Should Eat the Last Piece of Cake.” International Journal of Oral History 8 (1987): 5–27.Peters, Sarah W. Becoming O’Keeffe. New York: Abbeville Press, 1991.Pollitzer, Anita. A Woman on Paper. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988.Reily, Nancy Hopkins. Georgia O’Keeffe. A Private Friendship, Part II. Santa Fe, NM: Sunstone Press, 2009.Rider, Sue. “Director’s Note.” Georgia [playscript]. Sydney: Currency Press, 2000. vii–xii.Robinson, Roxana. Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1990. Shearer, Jill. Georgia [playscript]. Sydney: Currency Press, 2000.Smith, Thomas R. “How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves [review]”. Biography 23.3 (2000): 534–38.Wheatley, Nadia. The Life and Myth of Charmian Clift. Sydney: Flamingo, 2001.Wolpert, Stanley. “Biography as History: A Personal Reflection”. Journal of Interdisciplinary History 40.3 (2010): 399–412. Pub. online (Oct. 2009). 19 Oct. 2009 < http://www.mitpressjournals.org/toc/jinh/40/3 >.Wyatt, Jonathan. “Research, Narrative and Fiction: Conference Story”. The Qualitative Report 12.2 (Jun. 2007): 318–31.

Cities have long been important sites of collective memory. In this paper, I highlight the ritual and memorial functions of cities by focusing on Gibellina, a Sicilian town destroyed by earthquake, and the subsequent struggle among its community to articulate a sense of spatial belonging with its remains. By examining the productive relationships between art, landscape and collective memory, I consider how memorial objects in Gibellina have become integral to the reimagining of place, and, in some cases, to forgetting. To address the relationship between memorial objects and the articulation of communities from this unique vantage point, a significant part of my analysis compares memorial initiatives both in and around the old site on which Gibellina once stood. More specifically, my paper compares the aesthetic similarities between the Italian artist Alberto Burri’s design for a large concrete overlay of the city’s remains, and the Berlin Holocaust Memorial by the American architect Peter Eisenman. To reveal the distinctiveness of Burri’s design in relation to Eisenman’s work and the rich commentaries that have been produced in its name, and therefore to highlight the specificity of their relationship, I extend my comparison to more recent attempts at rebuilding Gibellina in the image of a “frontier city of art” (“Museum Network Belicina”).Broadly speaking, this paper is framed by a series of observations concerning the role that landscape plays in the construction or naturalization of collective identity, and by a further attempt at mapping the bonds that tend to be shared among members of particular communities in any given circumstance. To organize my thoughts in this area, I follow W. J. T. Mitchell’s interpretation of landscape as “a medium of exchange,” in other words, as an artistic practice that galvanizes nature for the purpose of naturalizing culture and its relations of power (5). While the terms of landscape art may in turn be described as “complicated,” “mutual” and marked by “ambivalence,” as Mitchell himself suggests, I would further argue that the artist’s sought-after result will, in almost every case, be to unify the visual and the discursive fields through an ideological operation that engenders, reinforces, and, perhaps also mystifies the constituents of community in general (9). From this perspective, landscape represents a crucial if unavoidable materialization both of community and collective memory.Conflicting viewpoints about this formation are undoubtedly present in the literature. For instance, in describing the effects of this operation, Mitchell, to use one example, will suggest that landscape as a mode of creation unfolds in ways that are similar to that of a dream, or that the materialization of landscape art is in accordance with the promise of “emancipation” that dreams inscribe into imaginaries (12). During the course of investigating and overturning the premise of Mitchell’s claim through a number of writers and commentators, I conclude my paper by turning to a famous work on the inoperative community by Jean-Luc Nancy. This work is especially useful for bringing clarity for understanding what is lost in the efforts by Gibellina’s residents to reconstruct a new city adjacent to the old, and therefore to emancipate themselves from their destructive past. By emphasizing the significance of acknowledging death for the regeneration and durability of communities and their material urban life, I suggest that the wishes of Gibellina’s residents have resulted in an environment for memory and memorialization despite apparent wishes to the contrary. In my reference to Nancy’s metaphor of ‘inoperativity’, therefore, I suggest that the community to emerge from Gibellina’s disaster is, in a sense, yet to come.Figure 1. The “Cretto di Burri” by Alberto Burri (1984-1989). Creative Commons.The old city of Gibellina was a township of Arabic and Medieval origins located southwest of Palermo in the heart of Sicily’s Belice valley. In January 1968, the region experienced a series of earthquakes as it had before. This time, however, the strongest among them provoked a rupture that within moments led to the complete destruction of towns and villages, and to the death of nearly 400 inhabitants. “From a seismological point of view,” as Susan Hough and Roger Bilham write, the towns and villages of the Belice valley were at this time “disasters in the making” (87). Maligned by a particular configuration of geological fault lines, the fragile structures along the surface of the valley were almost certain to be destroyed at some point in their lifetime. In 1968, after the largest disaster in recent history, the surviving inhabitants of the dilapidated urban centres were moved to the squalor conditions of displacement camps, in which many lived without permanent housing into the 1970s. While some of the smaller communities opted to rebuild, a number of the larger townships made the decision to move altogether. In 1971, a new settlement was created in Gibellina’s name, just eighteen kilometres west of the ruin.Since that time, I claim that a pattern of memory and forgetting has developed in the space between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’. For instance, the old city of Gibellina underwent a dramatic refurbishment in the 1980s when an internationally renowned Italian sculptor, Alberto Burri, was invited by the city to build a large concrete structure directly on top of the city’s remains. As depicted in Figure One, the artist moulded the destroyed buildings into blocks of smooth concrete surfaces. Standing roughly at human scale, Burri divided these stone slabs, or stelae, in such a way as to retain the lineaments of Gibellina’s medieval streets. Although unfinished and abandoned by the artist due to lack of funds, the tomb of this destroyed city has since become both an artistic oddity and a permanent fixture on the Sicilian landscape. As Elisebha Fabienne and Platzer write,if an ancient inhabitant of Gibellina walks in the inside of the Cretto, he is able to recognise the topic position of his house, but he is also forced by the Verfremdung [alienting effect] of the topical elements to distance himself from the past, to infer new information. (75)According to this assessment, the work’s intrinsic merit appears to be in Burri’s effort to forge a link between a shared memory of the city’s past, and the potential for that memory to fortify the imagination towards a future. In spatial terms, the merit of the work lies in preserving the skeletal imprint of the urban landscape in order to retain a semblance of this once vibrant and living community. Andrea Simitch and Val Warke appear to corroborate this hypothesis. They suggest that while Burri’s structure includes a specific imprint or reference point of the city’s remains, “embedded within the masses that construct the ghosted streets is the physical detritus of imagined narratives” (61). In other words, Simitch and Warke maintain that by using the archival or preserving function to communicate a ritual practice, Burri’s Cretto is intended to infuse the forgotten urban space of old Gibellina with a promise that it will eventually be found and therefore remembered. This promise is met, in turn, by the invitation for visitors to stroll through the hallowed interior of Gibellina as they would any other city. In this sense, the Cretto invites a plurality of narratives and meanings depending on the visitor at hand. In the absence of guidance or interruption, the hope appears to be that visitors will gain an experience of the place that is both familiar and disturbing.But there is a hidden dimension to this promise that the authors above do not explore in sufficient detail. For instance, Nigel Clark analyzes the way in which Burri has insisted upon “confronting us with the stark absence of life where once there was vitality,” a confrontation by the artist that is materialized by “cavernous wounds” (83). On this basis, by interpreting the promise of memory that others have discussed in terms of a warning about the longevity or durability of the built environment, Clark writes that Burri’s Cretto represents “an assertion of the forces of earth that have not been eclipsed by other forms of endangerment” (83). The implication of this particular forewarning is that “the precariousness of human settlement” is guaranteed by a non-human world that insists upon the relentless force of erasure (83). On the other hand, I would argue that Clark’s insistence upon situating the Cretto in relation to the natural forces of destruction ultimately represents a narrowing of perspective on Burri’s work. Significantly, by citing Burri’s choice of supposedly abstracted shapes made from lifeless concrete, Clark reduces the geographical intervention of the artist to “a paradigm of modernist austerity” (82). From Clark’s perspective, the overture to Modernism is meant to highlight Burri’s attempt at pairing the scale and proportion of the work with an effort to convey a sense of purity through abstraction. However, while some interpretations of Burri’s Cretto may be dependent upon its allusion to such Modernist formalism, it should also be recognized that the specific concerns raised by Gibellina go significantly beyond these equivocations.In fact, one crucial element of Burri’s artistic process that is not recognized by Clark is his investment in the American land art movement, which at the time of Burri’s design for Gibellina was led by Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson and other prominent artists in the United States. Burri’s debt to this movement can be detected by his gradual shift towards landscape throughout his career, and by his eventual break from the enclosed and constrained space of the gallery. On this basis, the crumbling city design at Gibellina obliterates the boundaries as to what constitutes a work of art in relation to the land it occupies, and this, in turn, throws into question the specific criteria that we use to assess its value or artistic merit. In an important way, land art and landscape in general forces us to rethink the relationship between art and community in unparalleled ways. To put it another way, if Clark’s overriding concern for that which lies beneath the surface allows us to consider the importance of relationships between memory, forgetting, and erasure, I argue that Burri’s concern with the surface and the ground make it clear that projects such as the Gibellina Cretto might be better paired with memorial sites that deal in architecture.Figure 2. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe / Berlin Holocaust Memorial, by Peter Eisenman. Photograph courtesy of the author.A useful comparison in this regard is Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in downtown Berlin. For one, not only is Eisenman’s site composed of a similar exterior of concrete stelae, those concrete blocks resembling gravestones, but it has also been routinely scorned for the same reasons that Clark raised against Burri as mentioned above. To put it another way, while visitors may be struck by the memorial’s haunting and inspirational configuration of voids, some notable commentators, including the venerable James E. Young, have insinuated that the site signifies a restoration of the monument, derived as it is from a modernist architecture in which recuperation and amnesia are at play with each other (184-224). A more sympathetic reading of Eisenman’s memorial might point to the uniquely architectural vision he held for cultural memory. With Adrian Parr for instance, we find that the traumatic memory of the Holocaust can be effectively transposed through the virtual content of the imagination as personified by visitors to Eisenman’s memorial. That is, by attending to the atrocities of the past, Parr claims that we need not be exhausted by the overwhelming sense of destruction that the memorial site brings to the literal surface. Rather, we might benefit more from considering the event of destruction as but one aspect of the spatial experience of the place to which it is dedicated—an experience that must be open-ended by design. By using the topographical lens that Parr, taking several pages from Gilles Deleuze, describes as “intensive,” I argue that Eisenman’s design is unique for its explicit encouragement to be both creative and present simultaneously (158).On this account, Parr makes the compelling assertion that memorial culture facilitates an epistemic rupture or “break,” that that it reveals an opportunity to restore the potential for using the place occupied by memory as a starting point for effecting social change (3). Parr writes that “memorial culture is utopian memory thinking”—a defining slogan, to be sure, but one with which the author hopes will re-establish the link between memory and the force of life, and, in the process, to recognize the energetic resources that remain concealed by the traditional narratives of memorialization (3). Stefano Corbo corroborates Parr’s assertion by pointing to Eisenman’s efforts in the 1980s to supplement formal concerns with archaeological perspectives, and therefore to develop a theory whereby architecture presages a “deep structure,” in which the artistry or attempt at formal innovation ultimately rests on “a process of invention” itself (41). To accomplish this aim, a specific reference should be made to an early period in Eisenman’s career, in which the architect turned to conceptual issues as opposed to the demands of materiality, and more significantly, to a critical rethinking of site-specific engagement (Bedard). Included in this turn was a willingness on Eisenman’s part to explore the layered and textured history of cities, as well as the linguistic or deconstructive relationships that exist between the ground and the trace.The interdisciplinary complexity of Eisenman’s approach is one that responds to the dominance of architectural form, and it therefore mirrors, as Corbo writes, a delicate interplay between “presence and absence, permanence and loss” (44). The city of Berlin with its cultural memory thus evinces a sort of tectonic rupture and collision upon its surfaces, but a rupture that both runs parallel and opposite to the natural disaster that engulfed Gibellina in 1968. Returning to Parr’s demand that we begin to (re)assert the power of virtual and imaginative space, I argue that Eisenman’s memorial design may be better appreciated for its ability to situate the city itself in relation to competing terms of artistic practice. That is, if Eisenman’s efforts indicate a softening “of the boundary between architecture and the landscape,” to quote Tomà Berlanda, the Holocaust Memorial might in turn be a productive counterpoint in the task of working through the specificity of Burri’s design and the meaning with which it has since been attached (2).Burri’s Cretto raises a number of questions for this hypothesis, as with the Cretto we find a displacement of the constitutive process that writers such as W.J.T. Mitchell describe above in relation to the generative potential of community. Undoubtedly, the imperative to unify is present in the Cretto’s aesthetic presentation, as the concrete surfaces maintain the capacity to reflect the light of the sun against a wide green earth that stretches beyond the visitor’s horizon. On the other hand, while Mitchell, along with Parr and other commentators might opt to insist upon a deeper correlation between the unifying function of the landscape and the forces of life, intensity, or desire, I would only reiterate that Burri’s design is ultimately based on establishing a meaningful relationship with death, not life, and he is consequently focused on the much less spectacular mission of providing solutions as to what the remains should become in the aftermath of total destruction. If there is an intensity to speak of here, it is a maligned intensity, and an intensity that can only be established through relation.Figure 3. The “Porta del Belice” by Pietro Consagra (2014). Wiki Commons.If Burri’s Cretto were measured by the criteria that are variously described by Mitchell and others, the effects that the landscape produces would have necessarily to account for an expression of desire for emancipation from death. However, in a significant departure from Eisenman’s Holocaust Memorial, Burri’s design by itself is marked by a throughout absence of any expression of desire for emancipation as such. Indeed, finding such a promised emancipatory narrative would require one to cast their gaze away from the Cretto altogether, and towards a nearby urban center that has supposedly triumphed over the very need for a memory culture at all. This urban center is none other than Gibellina Nuova. As a point in fact, the settlers of Gibellina Nuova did insist upon emancipating themselves from their destructive past. In 1971, the city planners and governors of Gibellina Nuova made efforts to attract contemporary Italian artists and architects, to design and build a series of commemorative structures, and ultimately to make the settlement into a “città di frontiera dell’arte”—a frontier city of art (“Museum Network Belicina”). With the potential for rejuvenation just a stone’s throw away from the original city, the former inhabitants appear to have become immediately invested in the sort of utopian potential that would make its architectural wonders capable of transgressing the line that perennially divides art from community and from the living world. Rivalled only by the refurbishment of Marfa, Texas, which in the last twenty years has become a shrine to minimalist sculpture, the edifices at Gibellina Nuova have been authored by some of Italy’s better-known mid-century artists and architects, including Ludovico Quaroni, Vitorrio Gregotti, and, most notably, Pietro Consagra, whose ‘Porta del Belice’ (Figure Two) has become the most iconic urban fixture of the new urban designs. With the hopes of becoming a sort of “open-air museum” in which to attract international visitors, the city is now in possession of an exceedingly large number of public memorials and avant-garde buildings in various states of decay and disrepair (Bileddo). Predictably, this museological distinction has become a curse in many ways. Some commentators have argued that the obsession among city planners to create a “laboratory of art and architecture” has led in fact to an urban center of monstrous proportions: a city space that can only be described as “elliptical and spinning” (Bileddo). Whereas Gibellina Nuova was supposed to represent a rebalancing of the forces of life in relation to the funereal themes of the Cretto, the robust initiatives of the 1980s have instead produced an egregious lack of cohesiveness, a severed link to Sicilian culture, and a stark erasure of the distinctive traditions of the Belice valley.On the other hand, this experiment in urban design has been reduced to a venerable time capsule of 1970s Italian sculpture, an archive that persists but in constant disrepair. More significantly, however, the city’s failure to deliver on its many promises raises important questions about the ritual and memorial functions of urban space in general, of what specific relationships need to be forged between the history of a place and its architectural presentation, and the ways in which memorials come to reflect, privilege or convoke particular values over those of others. As Elisebha Fabienne Platzer writes, “Gibellina portrays its future in order to forget,” as “its faith in contemporary art is precisely a reaction to death,” or, more specifically, to its effacement (73). If the various pastiche designs of the city’s buildings and ritual edifices fail to stand the measure of time, I claim that it is not simply because they are gaudy reminders of a time best forgotten, but rather because they signify the restless hunt for resolution among inhabitants of this still-unsettled community.Whereas Burri’s Cretto activates a process of mourning and working-through that proves to be unresolvable and yet necessary, the city of Gibellina Nuova operates instead by neutralizing and dividing this process. Taken as a whole, the irreparable relationship between the two sites offers competing images of the relation between place and community. From the time of its division by earthquake if not sooner, the inhabitants of Gibellina became an “inoperative” community in the same way that the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy has famously described. In the specific hopes of uncovering the motives of Burri and those of the designers and architects of Gibellina Nuova, I argue that Nancy uses the terms of inoperability as a makeshift solution for the persistent rootedness of communities in an atomized metaphysics for which the relationality between subjects is an abiding problem. Nancy defines community on the basis of its relational content alone, and for this reason he is able to make the claim that death itself should be a necessary moment of its articulation. Nancy writes that “community has not taken place,” as beyond “what society has crushed or lost, it is something that happens to us in the form of a question, waiting, event or imperative” (11).Though Nancy is attempting to provide his own interpretation of the impervious dialectic between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, between “community” and “society,” the substance of his assertion can be brought into a critical reading of Gibellina’s abiding problem of its formations of collective memory in the aftermath of destruction. For instance, it might be argued that if we leave the experience of loss aside, we can perhaps begin to acknowledge that communities are transformed through complex interactions for which their inert physicality provides but one important indication. While “old” Gibellina was not lost in a day, Gibellina Nuova was not created in an instant. For Nancy, it would rather be the case that “death is indissociable from community, and that it is through death that the community reveals itself” (14). Given this claim, while Gibellina Nuova has undoubtedly been shaped and reconstituted by the architecture of the future and the desire to forget, it could equally be argued that this very architecture shares in a reciprocal exchange with the Cretto, a circuit of memory that inadvertently houses an archive of the city’s destructive past. As the community comes into being through resistance, entropy, possibility and reparation, the city landscape provides some clues regarding the trace of this activity as left upon its ground.ReferencesBedard, Jean-Francois, ed. Cities of Artificial Excavation: The Work of Peter Eisenman, 1978-1988. New York: Rizzoli Publishing, 1994.Berlanda, Tomà. Architectural Topographies: A Graphic Lexicon of How Buildings Touch the Ground. New York: Routledge, 2014.Bileddo, Marco. “Back in Sicily / The Three Dogs Gibellina.” Eodoto108 Magazine. 30 July 2014. Bilham, Roger G., and Susan Elizabeth Hough. After the Earth Quakes: Elastic Rebound on an Urban Planet. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.Clark, Nigel. Inhuman Nature: Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, 2010.Corbo, Stefano. From Formalism to Weak Form: The Architecture and Philosophy of Peter Eisenman. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014.Mitchell, W.J. Thomas. Landscape and Power. University of Chicago Press, 2002.Museum Network Belicina. Nancy, Jean-Luc. Inoperative Community. Trans. Christopher Fynsk. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991.Parr, Adrian. Deleuze and Memorial Culture: Desire, Singular Memory and the Politics of Trauma. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008.Platzer, Elisbha Fabienne. “Semiotics of Spaces: City and Landart.” Seni/able Spaces: Space, Art and the Environment. Edward Huijbens and Ólafur Jónsson, eds. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007.Simitch, Andrea, and Val Warke. The Language of Architecture: 26 Principles Every Architect Should Know. Rockport Publishers Incorporated, 2014.Young, James E. At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002.

This paper provides embedded, reflective practice-based insight arising from my experience collaborating to produce online and print-on-demand editions of a magazine showcasing the photography of members of haphazart! Contemporary Abstracts group (hereafter referred to as haphazart!). The group’s online visual, textual and activity-based practices via the photo sharing social networking site Flickr are portrayed as achieving cohesive visual identity. Stylistic analysis of pictures in support of this claim is not attempted. Rather negotiation, that Elliot has previously described in M/C Journal as innate in collaboration, is identified as the unifying factor. However, the collaborators’ adherence to Flickr’s communication platform proves problematic in the editorial context. Some technical incoherence with possible broader cultural implications is encountered during the process of repurposing images from screen to print. A Scan of Relevant Literature The photographic gaze perceives and captures objects which seem to ‘carry within them ready-made’ a work of art. But the reminiscences of the gaze are only made possible by knowing and associating with groups that define a tradition. The list of valorised subjects is not actually defined with reference to a culture, but rather by familiarity with a limited group. (Chamboredon 144) As part of the array of socio-cultural practices afforded by Web 2.0 interoperability, sites of produsage (Bruns) are foci for studies originating in many disciplines. Flickr provides a rich source of data that researchers interested in the interface between the technological and the social find useful to analyse. Access to the Flickr application programming interface enables quantitative researchers to observe a variety of means by which information is propagated, disseminated and shared. Some findings from this kind of research confirm the intuitive. For example, Negoecsu et al. find that “a large percentage of users engage in sharing with groups and that they do so significantly” ("Analyzing Flickr Groups" 425). They suggest that Flickr’s Groups feature appears to “naturally bring together two key aspects of social media: content and relations.” They also find evidence for what they call hyper-groups, which are “communities consisting of groups of Flickr groups” ("Flickr Hypergroups" 813). Two separate findings from another research team appear to contradict each other. On one hand, describing what they call “social cascades,” Cha et al. claim that “content in the form of ideas, products, and messages spreads across social networks like a virus” ("Characterising Social Cascades"). Yet in 2009 they claim that homocity and reciprocity ensure that “popularity of pictures is localised” ("Measurement-Driven Analysis"). Mislove et al. reflect that the affordances of Flickr influence the growth patterns they observe. There is optimism shared by some empiricists that through collation and analysis of Flickr tag data, the matching of perceptual structures of images and image annotation techniques will yield ontology-based taxonomy useful in automatic image annotation and ultimately, the Semantic Web endeavour (Kennedy et al.; Su et al.; Xu et al.). Qualitative researchers using ethnographic interview techniques also find Flickr a valuable resource. In concluding that the photo sharing hobby is for many a “serious leisure” activity, Cox et al. propose that “Flickr is not just a neutral information system but also value laden and has a role within a wider cultural order.” They also suggest that “there is genuinely greater scope for individual creativity, releasing the individual to explore their own identity in a way not possible with a camera club.” Davies claims that “online spaces provide an arena where collaboration over meanings can be transformative, impacting on how individuals locate themselves within local and global contexts” (550). She says that through shared ways of describing and commenting on images, Flickrites develop a common criticality in their endeavour to understand images, each other and their world (554).From a psychologist’s perspective, Suler observes that “interpersonal relationships rarely form and develop by images alone” ("Image, Word, Action" 559). He says that Flickr participants communicate in three dimensions: textual (which he calls “verbal”), visual, and via the interpersonal actions that the site affords, such as Favourites. This latter observation can surely be supplemented by including the various games that groups configure within the constraints of the discussion forums. These often include submissions to a theme and voting to select a winning image. Suler describes the place in Flickr where one finds identity as one’s “cyberpsychological niche” (556). However, many participants subscribe to multiple groups—45.6% of Flickrites who share images share them with more than 20 groups (Negoescu et al., "Analyzing Flickr Groups" 420). Is this a reflection of the existence of the hyper-groups they describe (2009) or, of the ranging that people do in search of a niche? It is also probable that some people explore more than a singular identity or visual style. Harrison and Bartell suggest that there are more interesting questions than why users create media products or what motivates them to do so: the more interesting questions center on understanding what users will choose to do ultimately with [Web2.0] capabilities [...] in what terms to define the success of their efforts, and what impact the opportunity for individual and collaborative expression will have on the evolution of communicative forms and character. (167) This paper addresseses such questions. It arises from a participatory observational context which differs from that of the research described above. It is intended that a different perspective about online group-based participation within the Flickr social networking matrix will avail. However, it will be seen that the themes cited in this introductory review prove pertinent. Context As a university teacher of a range of subjects in the digital media field, from contemporary photomedia to social media to collaborative multimedia practice, it is entirely appropriate that I embed myself in projects that engage, challenge and provide me with relevant first-hand experience. As an academic I also undertake and publish research. As a practicing new media artist I exhibit publically on a regular basis and consider myself semi-professional with respect to this activity. While there are common elements to both approaches to research, this paper is written more from the point of view of ‘reflective practice’ (Holmes, "Reconciling Experimentum") rather than ‘embedded ethnography’ (Pink). It is necessarily and unapologetically reflexive. Abstract Photography Hyper-Group A search of all Flickr groups using the query “abstract” is currently likely to return around 14,700 results. However, only in around thirty of them does the group name, its stated rules and, the stream of images that flow through the pool arguably reflect a sense of collective concept and aesthetic that is coherently abstract. This loose complex of groups comprises a hyper-group. Members of these groups often have co-memberships, reciprocal contacts, and regularly post images to a range of groups and comment on others’ posts to be found throughout. Given that one of Flickr’s largest groups, Black and White, currently has around 131,150 members and hosts 2,093,241 items in its pool, these abstract special interest groups are relatively small. The largest, Abstract Photos, has 11,338 members and hosts 89,306 items in its pool. The group that is the focus of this paper, haphazart!, currently has 2,536 members who have submitted 53,309 items. The group pool is more like a constantly flowing river because the most recently added images are foremost. Older images become buried in an archive of pages which cannot be reverse accessed at a rate greater than the seven pages linked from a current view. A member’s presence is most immediate through images posted to a pool. This structural feature of Flickr promotes a desire for currency; a need to post regularly to maintain presence. Negotiating Coherence to the Abstract The self-managing social dynamics in groups has, as Suler proposes to be the case for individuals, three dimensions: visual, textual and action. A group integrates the diverse elements, relationships and values which cumulatively constitute its identity with contributions from members in these dimensions. First impressions of that identity are usually derived from the group home page which consists of principal features: the group name, a selection of twelve most recent posts to the pool, some kind of description, a selection of six of the most recent discussion topics, and a list of rules (if any). In some of these groups, what is considered to constitute an abstract photographic image is described on the group home page. In some it is left to be contested and becomes the topic of ongoing forum debates. In others the specific issue is not discussed—the images are left to speak for themselves. Administrators of some groups require that images are vetted for acceptance. In haphazart! particular administrators dutifully delete from the pool on a regular basis any images that they deem not to comply with the group ethic. Whether reasons are given or not is left to the individual prosecutor. Mostly offending images just disappear from the group pool without trace. These are some of the ways that the coherence of a group’s visual identity is established and maintained. Two groups out of the abstract photography hyper-group are noteworthy in that their discussion forums are particularly active. A discussion is just the start of a new thread and may have any number of posts under it. At time of writing Abstract Photos has 195 discussions and haphazart! — the most talkative by this measure—has 333. Haphazart! invites submissions of images to regularly changing themes. There is always lively and idiosyncratic banter in the forum over the selection of a theme. To be submitted an image needs to be identified by a specific theme tag as announced on the group home page. The tag can be added by the photographer themselves or by anyone else who deems the image appropriate to the theme. An exhibition process ensues. Participant curators search all Flickr items according to the theme tag and select from the outcome images they deem to most appropriately and abstractly address the theme. Copies of the images together with comments by the curators are posted to a dedicated discussion board. Other members may also provide responses. This activity forms an ongoing record that may serve as a public indicator of the aesthetic that underlies the group’s identity. In Abstract Photos there is an ongoing discussion forum where one can submit an image and request that the moderators rule as to whether or not the image is ‘abstract’. The same group has ongoing discussions labelled “Hall of Appropriate” where worthy images are reposted and celebrated and, “Hall of Inappropriate” where images posted to the group pool have been removed and relegated because abstraction has been “so far stretched from its definition that it now resides in a parallel universe” (Askin). Reasons are mostly courteously provided. In haphazart! a relatively small core of around twelve group members regularly contribute to the group discussion board. A curious aspect of this communication is that even though participants present visually with a ‘buddy icon’ and most with a screen name not their real name, it is usual practice to address each other in discussions by their real Christian names, even when this is not evident in a member’s profile. This seems to indicate a common desire for authenticity. The makeup of the core varies from time to time depending on other activities in a member’s life. Although one or two may be professionally or semi-professionally engaged as photographers or artists or academics, most of these people would likely consider themselves to be “serious amateurs” (Cox). They are internationally dispersed with bias to the US, UK, Europe and Australia. English is the common language though not the natural tongue of some. The age range is approximately 35 to 65 and the gender mix 50/50. The group is three years old. Where Do We Go to from Here? In early January 2009 the haphazart! core was sparked into a frenzy of discussion by a post from a member headed “Where do we go to from here?” A proposal was mooted to produce a ‘book’ featuring images and texts representative of the group. Within three days a new public group with invited membership dedicated to the idea had been established. A smaller working party then retreated to a private Flickr group. Four months later Issue One of haphazart! magazine was available in print-on-demand and online formats. Following however is a brief critically reflective review of some of the collaborative curatorial, editorial and production processes for Issue Two which commenced in early June 2009. Most of the team had also been involved with Issue One. I was the only newcomer and replaced the person who had undertaken the design for Issue One. I was not provided access to the prior private editorial ruminations but apparently the collaborative curatorial and editorial decision-making practices the group had previously established persisted, and these took place entirely within the discussion forums of a new dedicated private Flickr group. Over a five-month period there were 1066 posts in 54 discussions concerning matters such as: change of format from the previous; selection of themes, artists and images; conduct of and editing of interviews; authoring of texts; copyright and reproduction. The idiom of those communications can be described as: discursive, sporadic, idiosyncratic, resourceful, collegial, cooperative, emphatic, earnest and purposeful. The selection process could not be said to follow anything close to a shared manifesto, or articulation of style. It was established that there would be two primary themes: the square format and contributors’ use of colour. Selection progressed by way of visual presentation and counter presentation until some kind of consensus was reached often involving informal votes of preference. Stretching the Limits of the Flickr Social Tools The magazine editorial collaborators continue to use the facilities with which they are familiar from regular Flickr group participation. However, the strict vertically linear format of the Flickr discussion format is particularly unsuited to lengthy, complex, asynchronous, multithreaded discussion. For this purpose it causes unnecessary strain, fatigue and confusion. Where images are included, the forums have set and maximum display sizes and are not flexibly configured into matrixes. Images cannot readily be communally changed or moved about like texts in a wiki. Likewise, the Flickrmail facility is of limited use for specialist editorial processes. Attachments cannot be added. This opinion expressed by a collaborator in the initial, open discussion for Issue One prevailed among Issue Two participants: do we want the members to go to another site to observe what is going on with the magazine? if that’s ok, then using google groups or something like that might make sense; if we want others to observe (and learn from) the process - we may want to do it here [in Flickr]. (Valentine) The opinion appears socially constructive; but because the final editorial process and production processes took place in a separate private forum, ultimately the suggested learning between one issue and the next did not take place. During Issue Two development the reluctance to try other online collaboration tools for the selection processes requiring visual comparative evaluation of images and trials of sequencing adhered. A number of ingenious methods of working within Flickr were devised and deployed and, in my opinion, proved frustratingly impractical and inefficient. The digital layout, design, collation and formatting of images and texts, all took place on my personal computer using professional software tools. Difficulties arose in progressively sharing this work for the purposes of review, appraisal and proofing. Eventually I ignored protests and insisted the team review demonstrations I had converted for sharing in Google Documents. But, with only one exception, I could not tempt collaborators to try commenting or editing in that environment. For example, instead of moving the sequence of images dynamically themselves, or even typing suggestions directly into Google Documents, they would post responses in Flickr. To Share and to Hold From the first imaginings of Issue One the need to have as an outcome something in one’s hands was expressed and this objective is apparently shared by all in the haphazart! core as an ongoing imperative. Various printing options have been nominated, discussed and evaluated. In the end one print-on-demand provider was selected on the basis of recommendation. The ethos of haphazart! is clearly not profit-making and conflicts with that of the printing organisation. Presumably to maintain an incentive to purchase the print copy online preview is restricted to the first 15 pages. To satisfy the co-requisite to make available the full 120 pages for free online viewing a second host that specialises in online presentation of publications is also utilised. In this way haphazart! members satisfy their common desires for sharing selected visual content and ideas with an online special interest audience and, for a physical object of art to relish—with all the connotations of preciousness, fetish, talisman, trophy, and bookish notions of haptic pleasure and visual treasure. The irony of publishing a frozen chunk of the ever-flowing Flickriver, whose temporally changing nature is arguably one of its most interesting qualities, is not a consideration. Most of them profess to be simply satisfying their own desire for self expression and would eschew any critical judgement as to whether this anarchic and discursive mode of operation results in a coherent statement about contemporary photographic abstraction. However there remains a distinct possibility that a number of core haphazart!ists aspire to transcend: popular taste; the discernment encouraged in camera clubs; and, the rhetoric of those involved professionally (Bourdieu et al.); and seek to engage with the “awareness of illegitimacy and the difficulties implied by the constitution of photography as an artistic medium” (Chamboredon 130). Incoherence: A Technical Note My personal experience of photography ranges from the filmic to the digital (Holmes, "Bridging Adelaide"). For a number of years I specialised in facsimile graphic reproduction of artwork. In those days I became aware that films were ‘blind’ to the psychophysical affect of some few particular paint pigments. They just could not be reproduced. Even so, as I handled the dozens of images contributed to haphazart!2, converting them from the pixellated place where Flickr exists to the resolution and gamut of the ink based colour space of books, I was surprised at the number of hue values that exist in the former that do not translate into the latter. In some cases the affect is subtle so that judicious tweaking of colour levels or local colour adjustment will satisfy discerning comparison between the screenic original and the ‘soft proof’ that simulates the printed outcome. In other cases a conversion simply does not compute. I am moved to contemplate, along with Harrison and Bartell (op. cit.) just how much of the experience of media in the shared digital space is incomparably new? Acknowledgement Acting on the advice of researchers experienced in cyberethnography (Bruckman; Suler, "Ethics") I have obtained the consent of co-collaborators to comment freely on proceedings that took place in a private forum. They have been given the opportunity to review and suggest changes to the account. References Askin, Dean (aka: dnskct). “Hall of Inappropriate.” Abstract Photos/Discuss/Hall of Inappropriate, 2010. 12 Jan. 2010 ‹http://www.flickr.com/groups/abstractphotos/discuss/72157623148695254/>. Bourdieu, Pierre, Luc Boltanski, Robert Castel, Jean-Claude Chamboredeon, and Dominique Schnapper. Photography: A Middle-Brow Art. 1965. Trans. Shaun Whiteside. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990. Bruckman, Amy. Studying the Amateur Artist: A Perspective on Disguising Data Collected in Human Subjects Research on the Internet. 2002. 12 Jan. 2010 ‹http://www.nyu.edu/projects/nissenbaum/ethics_bru_full.html>. Bruns, Axel. “Towards Produsage: Futures for User-Led Content Production.” Proceedings: Cultural Attitudes towards Communication and Technology 2006. Perth: Murdoch U, 2006. 275–84. ———, and Mark Bahnisch. Social Media: Tools for User-Generated Content. Vol. 1 – “State of the Art.” Sydney: Smart Services CRC, 2009. Cha, Meeyoung, Alan Mislove, Ben Adams, and Krishna P. Gummadi. “Characterizing Social Cascades in Flickr.” Proceedings of the First Workshop on Online Social Networks. ACM, 2008. 13–18. ———, Alan Mislove, and Krishna P. Gummadi. “A Measurement-Driven Analysis of Information Propagation in the Flickr Social Network." WWW '09: Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on World Wide Web. ACM, 2009. 721–730. Cox, A.M., P.D. Clough, and J. Marlow. “Flickr: A First Look at User Behaviour in the Context of Photography as Serious Leisure.” Information Research 13.1 (March 2008). 12 Dec. 2009 ‹http://informationr.net/ir/13-1/paper336.html>. Chamboredon, Jean-Claude. “Mechanical Art, Natural Art: Photographic Artists.” Photography: A Middle-Brow Art. Pierre Bourdieu. et al. 1965. Trans. Shaun Whiteside. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990. 129–149. Davies, Julia. “Display, Identity and the Everyday: Self-Presentation through Online Image Sharing.” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 28.4 (Dec. 2007): 549–564. Elliott, Mark. “Stigmergic Collaboration: The Evolution of Group Work.” M/C Journal 9.2 (2006). 12 Jan. 2010 ‹http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0605/03-elliott.php>. Harrison, Teresa, M., and Brea Barthel. “Wielding New Media in Web 2.0: Exploring the History of Engagement with the Collaborative Construction of Media Products.” New Media & Society 11.1-2 (2009): 155–178. Holmes, Ashley. “‘Bridging Adelaide 2001’: Photography and Hyperimage, Spanning Paradigms.” VSMM 2000 Conference Proceedings. International Society for Virtual Systems and Multimedia, 2000. 79–88. ———. “Reconciling Experimentum and Experientia: Reflective Practice Research Methodology for the Creative Industries”. Speculation & Innovation: Applying Practice-Led Research in the Creative Industries. Brisbane: QUT, 2006. Kennedy, Lyndon, Mor Naaman, Shane Ahern, Rahul Nair, and Tye Rattenbury. “How Flickr Helps Us Make Sense of the World: Context and Content in Community-Contributed Media Collections.” MM’07. ACM, 2007. Miller, Andrew D., and W. Keith Edwards. “Give and Take: A Study of Consumer Photo-Sharing Culture and Practice.” Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 2007. 347–356. Mislove, Alan, Hema Swetha Koppula, Krishna P. Gummadi, Peter Druschel and Bobby Bhattacharjee. “Growth of the Flickr Social Network.” Proceedings of the First Workshop on Online Social Networks. ACM, 2008. 25–30. Negoescu, Radu-Andrei, and Daniel Gatica-Perez. “Analyzing Flickr Groups.” CIVR '08: Proceedings of the 2008 International Conference on Content-Based Image and Video Retrieval. ACM, 2008. 417–426. ———, Brett Adams, Dinh Phung, Svetha Venkatesh, and Daniel Gatica-Perez. “Flickr Hypergroups.” MM '09: Proceedings of the Seventeenth ACM International Conference on Multimedia. ACM, 2009. 813–816. Pink, Sarah. Doing Visual Ethnography: Images, Media and Representation in Research. 2nd ed. London: Sage, 2007. Su, Ja-Hwung, Bo-Wen Wang, Hsin-Ho Yeh, and Vincent S. Tseng. “Ontology–Based Semantic Web Image Retrieval by Utilizing Textual and Visual Annotations.” 2009 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology – Workshops. 2009. Suler, John. “Ethics in Cyberspace Research: Consent, Privacy and Contribution.” The Psychology of Cyberspace. 1996. 12 Jan. 2010 ‹http://www-usr.rider.edu/~suler/psycyber/psycyber.html>. ———. “Image, Word, Action: Interpersonal Dynamics in a Photo-Sharing Community.” Cyberpsychology & Behavior 11.5 (2008): 555–560. Valentine, Mark. “HAPHAZART! Magazine/Discuss/image selections…” [discussion post]. 2009. 12 Jan. 2010 ‹http://www.flickr.com/groups/haphazartmagazin/discuss/72157613147017532/>. Xu, Hongtao, Xiangdong Zhou, Mei Wang, Yu Xiang, and Baile Shi. “Exploring Flickr’s Related Tags for Semantic Annotation of Web Images.” CIVR ’09. ACM, 2009.

We (I, Robert Lawrence and, in a rare display of unity, all my online avatars and agents)hereby render and proclaim thisMANIFESTO OF PIECES AND BITS IN SERVICE OF CONTRADICTIONAL AESTHETICSWe start with the simple premise that art has the job of telling us who we are, and that through the modern age doing this job while KEEPING UP with accelerating cultural change has necessitated the invention of something we might call the avant-garde. Along the way there has been an on-again-off-again affair between said avant-garde and technology. We are now in a new phase of the new and the technology under consideration is the Internet.The recent hyperventilating about the term postInternet reflects the artworld’s overdue recognition of the effect of the Internet on the culture at large, and on art as a cultural practice, a market, and a historical process.I propose that we cannot fully understand what the Internet is doing to us through a consideration of what happens on the screen, nor by considering what happens in the physical space we occupy either before or behind the screen. Rather we must critically and creatively fathom the flow of cultural practice between and across these realms. This requires Hybrid art combining both physical and Internet forms.I do not mean to imply that single discipline-based art cannot communicate complexity, but I believe that Internet culture introduces complexities that can only be approached through hybrid practices. And this is especially critical for an art that, in doing the job of “telling us who we are”, wants to address the contradictory ways we now form and promote, or conceal and revise, our multiple identities through online social media profiles inconsistent with our fleshly selves.We need a different way of talking about identity. A history of identity:In the ancient world, individual identity as we understand it did not exist.The renaissance invented the individual.Modernism prioritized and alienated him (sic).Post-Modernism fragmented him/her.The Internet hyper-circulates and amplifies all these modalities, exploding the possibilities of identity.While reducing us to demographic market targets, the Web facilitates mass indulgence in perversely individual interests. The now common act of creating an “online profile” is a regular reiteration of the simple fact that identity is an open-ended hypothesis. We can now live double, or extravagantly multiple, virtual lives. The “me meme” is a ceaseless morph. This is a profound change in how identity was understood just a decade ago. Other historical transformations of identity happened over centuries. This latest and most radical change has occurred in the click of a mouse. Selfhood is now imbued with new complexity, fluidity and amplified contradictions.To fully understand what is actually happening to us, we need an art that engages the variant contracts of the physical and the virtual. We need a Hybrid art that addresses variant temporal and spatial modes of the physical and virtual. We need an art that offers articulations through the ubiquitous web in concert with the distinct perspectives that a physical gallery experience uniquely offers: engagement and removal, reflection and transference. Art that tells us who we are today calls for an aesthetics of contradiction. — Ro Lawrence (and all avatars) 2011, revised 2013, 2015, 2018. The manifesto above grew from an artistic practice beginning in 1998 as I started producing a website for every project that I made in traditional media. The Internet work does not just document or promote the project, nor is it “Netart” in the common sense of creative work restricted to a browser window. All of my efforts with the Internet are directly linked to my projects in traditional media and the web components offer parallel aesthetic voices that augment or overtly contradict the reading suggested by the traditional visual components of each project.This hybrid work grew out of a previous decade of transmedia work in video installation and sculpture, where I would create physical contexts for silent video as a way to remove the video image from the seamless flow of broadcast culture. A video image can signify very differently in a physical context that separates it from the flow of mass media and rather reconnects it to lived physical culture. A significant part of the aesthetic pleasure of this kind of work comes from nuances of dissonance arising from contradictory ways viewers had learned to read the object world and the ways we were then still learning to read the electronic image world. This video installation work was about “relocating” the electronic image, but I was also “locating” the electronic image in another sense, within the boundaries of geographic and cultural location. Linking all my projects to specific geographic locations set up contrasts with the spatial ubiquity of electronic media. In 1998 I amplified this contrast with my addition of extensive Internet components with each installation I made.The Way Things Grow (1998) began as an installation of sculptures combining video with segments of birch trees. Each piece in the gallery was linked to a specific geographic location within driving distance of the gallery exhibiting the work. In the years just before this piece I had moved from a practice of text-augmented video installations to the point where I had reduced the text to small printed handouts that featured absurd Scripts for Performance. These text handouts that viewers could take with them suggested that the work was to be completed by the viewer later outside the gallery. This to-be-continued dynamic was the genesis of a serial form in work going forward from then on. Thematic and narrative elements in the work were serialized via possible actions viewers would perform after leaving the gallery. In the installation for The Way Things Grow, there was no text in the gallery at all to suggest interpretations of this series of video sculptures. Even the titles offered no direct textual help. Rather than telling the viewers something about the work before them in the gallery, the title of each piece led the viewer away from the gallery toward serial actions in the specific geographic locations the works referred to. Each piece was titled with an Internet address.Figure 1: Lawrence, Robert, The Way Things Grow, video Installation with web components at http://www.h-e-r-e.com/grow.html, 1998.When people went to the web site for each piece they found only a black page referencing a physical horizon with a long line of text that they could scroll to right for meters. Unlike the determinedly embodied work in the gallery, the web components were disembodied texts floating in a black void, but texts about very specific physical locations.Figure 2: Lawrence, Robert, The Way Things Grow, partial view of webpage at http://www.h-e-r-e.com/growth_variant4.html, 1998.The texts began with the exact longitude and latitude of a geographical site in some way related to birch trees. ... A particularly old or large tree... a factory that turned birch trees into popsicle sticks and medical tongue depressors... etc. The website texts included directions to the site, and absurd scripts for performance. In this way the Internet component transformed the suite of sculptures in the gallery to a series of virtual, and possibly actual, events beyond the gallery. These potential narratives that viewers were invited into comprised an open-ended serial structure. The gallery work was formal, minimal, essentialist. On the web it was social, locative, deconstructive. In both locations, it was located. Here follows an excerpt from the website. GROWTH VARIANT #25: North 44:57:58 by West 93:15:56. On the south side of the Hennepin County Government Center is a park with 9 birch trees. These are urban birches, and they display random scratchings, as well as proclamations of affection expressed with pairs of initials and a “+” –both with and without encircling heart symbols. RECOMMENDED PERFORMANCE: Visit these urban birches once each month. Photograph all changes in their bark made by humans. After 20 years compile a document entitled, "Human Mark Making on Urban Birches, a Visual Study of Specific Universalities". Bring it into the Hennepin County Government Center and ask that it be placed in the archives.An Acre of Art (2000) was a collaborative project with sculptor Mark Knierim. Like The Way Things Grow, this new work, commissioned by the Minneapolis Art Institute, played out in the gallery, in a specific geographic location, and online. In the Art Institute was a gallery installation combining sculptures with absurd combinations of physical rural culture fitting contradictorily into an urban "high art" context. One of the pieces, entitled Landscape (2000), was an 18’ chicken coop faced with a gold picture frame. Inside were two bard rock hens and an iMac. The computer was programmed to stream to the Internet live video from the coop, the world’s first video chicken cam. As a work unfolding across a long stretch of time, the web cam video was a serial narrative without determined division into episodes. The gallery works also referenced a specific acre of agricultural land an hour from the Institute. Here we planted a row of dwarf corn at a diagonal to the mid-western American rural geometric grid of farmland. Visitors to the rural site could sit on “rural art furniture,” contemplate the corn growing, and occasionally witness absurd performances. The third stream of the piece was an extensive website, which playfully theorized the rural/urban/art trialectic. Each of the three locations of the work was exploited to provide a richer transmedia interpretation of the project’s themes than any one venue or medium could. Location Sequence is a serial installation begun in 1999. Each installation has completely different physical elements. The only consistent physical element is 72 segments of a 72” collapsible carpenter's ruler evenly spaced to wrap around the gallery walls. Each of the 72 segments of the ruler displays an Internet web address. Reversing the notion of the Internet as a place of rapid change compared to a more enduring physical world, in this case the Internet components do not change with each new episode of the work, while the physical components transform with each new installation. Thematically, all aspects of the work deal with various shades of meaning of the term "location." Beginning/Middle/End is a 30-year conceptual serial begun in 2002, presenting a series of site-specific actions, objects, or interventions combined with corresponding web pages that collectively negotiate concepts related to time, location, and narrative. Realizing a 30-year project via the web in this manner is a self-conscious contradiction of the culture of the instantaneous that the Internet manifests and propagates.The installation documented here was completed for a one-night event in 2002 with Szilage Gallery in St Petersburg, Florida. Bricks moulded with the URLs for three web sites were placed in a historic brick road with the intention that they would remain there through a historical time frame. The URLs were also projected in light on a creek parallel to the brick road and seen only for several hours. The corresponding web site components speculate on temporal/narrative structures crossing with geographic features, natural and manufactured.Figure 3: Lawrence, Robert, Beginning/Middle/End, site-specific installation with website in conjunction with 30-year series, http://www.h-e-r-e.com/beginning.html, 2002-32.The most recent instalment was done as part of Conflux Festival in 2014 in collaboration with painter Ld Lawrence. White shapes appeared in various public spaces in downtown Manhattan. Upon closer inspection people realized that they were not painted tags or stickers, but magnetic sheets that could be moved or removed. An optical scan tag hidden on the back of each shape directed to a website which encouraged people to move the objects to other locations and send a geo-located photo to the web site to trace the shape's motion through the world. The work online could trace the serial narrative of the physical installation components following the installation during Conflux Festival. Figure 4: Lawrence, Robert w/Lawrence, Ld, Gravity Ace on the Move, site-specific installation with geo-tracking website at http://www.h-e-r-e.com/gravityace/. Completed for Conflux Festival NYC, 2014, as part of Beginning/Middle/End.Dad's Boots (2003) was a multi-sited sculpture/performance. Three different physical manifestations of the work were installed at the same time in three locations: Shirakawa-go Art Festival in Japan; the Phipps Art Center in Hudson, Wisconsin; and at the Tampa Museum of Art in Florida. Physical components of the work included silent video projection, digital photography, computer key caps, and my father's boots. Each of these three different installations referred back to one web site. Because all these shows were up at the same time, the work was a distributed synchronous serial. In each installation space the title of the work was displayed as an Internet address. At the website was a series of popup texts suggesting performances focused, however absurdly, on reassessing paternal relationships.Figure 5: Lawrence, Robert, Dad’s Boots, simultaneous gallery installation in Florida, Wisconsin and Japan, with website, 2003. Coincidently, beginning the same time as my transmedia physical/Internet art practice, since 1998 I have had a secret other-life as a tango dancer. I came to this practice drawn by the music and the attraction of an after-dark subculture that ran by different rules than the rest of life. While my life as a tanguero was most certainly an escape strategy, I quickly began to see that although tango was different from the rest of the world, it was indeed a part of this world. It had a place and a time and a history. Further, it was a fascinating history about the interplays of power, class, wealth, race, and desire. Figure 6: Lawrence, Robert, Tango Intervention, site-specific dance interventions with extensive web components, 2007-12.As Marta Savigliano points out in Tango and the Political Economy of Passion, “Tango is a practice already ready for struggle. It knows about taking sides, positions, risks. It has the experience of domination/resistance from within. …Tango is a language of decolonization. So pick and choose. Improvise... let your feet do the thinking. Be comfortable in your restlessness. Tango” (17). The realization that tango, my sensual escape from critical thought, was actually political came just about the time I was beginning to understand the essential dynamic of contradiction between the physical and Internet streams of my work. Tango Intervention began in 2007. I have now, as of 2018, done tango interventions in over 40 cities. Overall, the project can be seen as a serial performance of contradictions. In each case the physical dance interventions are manifestations of sensual fantasy in public space, and the Internet components recontextualize the public actions as site-specific performances with a political edge, revealing a hidden history or current social situation related to the political economy of tango. These themes are further developed in a series of related digital prints and videos shown here in various formats and contexts.In Tango Panopticon (2009), a “spin off” from the Tango Intervention series, the hidden social issue was the growing video surveillance of public space. The first Tango Panopticon production was Mayday 2009 with people dancing tango under public video surveillance in 15 cities. Mayday 2010 was Tango Panopticon 2.0, with tangointervention.org streaming live cell phone video from 16 simultaneous dance interventions on 4 continents. The public encountered the interventions as a sensual reclaiming of public space. Contradictorily, on the web Tango Panopticon 2.0 became a distributed worldwide action against the growing spectre of video surveillance and the increasing control of public commons. Each intervention team was automatically located on an online map when they started streaming video. Visitors to the website could choose an action from the list of cities or click on the map pins to choose which live video to load into the grid of 6 streaming signals. Visitors to the physical intervention sites could download our free open source software and stream their own videos to tangointervention.org.Figure 7: Lawrence, Robert, Tango Panopticon 2.0, worldwide synchronous dance intervention with live streaming video and extensive web components, 2010.Tango Panopticon also has a life as a serial installation, initially installed as part of the annual conference of “Digital Resources for Humanities and the Arts” at Brunel University, London. All shots in the grid of videos are swish pans from close-ups of surveillance cameras to tango interveners dancing under their gaze. Each ongoing installation in the series physically adapts to the site, and with each installation more lines of video frames are added until the images become too small to read.Figure 8: Lawrence, Robert, Tango Panopticon 2.0 (For Osvaldo), video installation based on worldwide dance intervention series with live streaming video, 2011.My new work Equivalence (in development) is quite didactic in its contradictions between the online and gallery components. A series of square prints of clouds in a gallery are titled with web addresses that open with other cloud images and then fade into randomly loading excerpts from the CIA torture manual used at Guantanamo Bay Detention Center.Figure 9: Lawrence, Robert, Eauivalence, digital prints, excerpts from CIA Guantanamo Detention Center torture manual, work-in-progress.The gallery images recall Stieglitz’s Equivalents photographs from the early 20th century. Made in the 1920s to 30s, the Equivalents comprise a pivotal change in photographic history, from the early pictorial movement in which photography tried to imitate painting, and a new artistic approach that embraced features distinct to the photographic medium. Stieglitz’s Equivalents merged photographic realism with abstraction and symbolist undertones of transcendent spirituality. Many of the 20th century masters of photography, from Ansel Adams to Minor White, acknowledged the profound influence these photographs had on them. Several images from the Equivalents series were the first photographic art to be acquired by a major art museum in the US, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.My series Equivalence serves as the latest episode in a serial art history narrative. Since the “Pictures Generation” movement in the 1970s, photography has cannibalized its history, but perhaps no photographic body of work has been as quoted as Stieglitz’s Equivalents. A partial list includes: John Baldessari’s series Blowing Cigar Smoke to Match Clouds That Are the Same(1973), William Eggleston’s series Wedgwood Blue (1979), John Pfahl’s smoke stack series (1982-89), George Legrady’s Equivalents II(1993), Vik Muniz’sEquivalents(1997), Lisa Oppenheim (2012), and most recently, Berndnaut Smilde’s Nimbus Series, begun in 2012. Over the course of more than four decades each of these series has presented a unique vision, but all rest on Stieglitz’s shoulders. From that position they make choices about how to operate relative the original Equivalents, ranging from Baldessari and Muniz’s phenomenological playfulness to Eggleston and Smilde’s neo-essentialist approach.My series Equivalence follows along in this serial modernist image franchise. What distinguishes it is that it does not take a single position relative to other Equivalents tribute works. Rather, it exploits its gallery/Internet transmediality to simultaneously assume two contradictory positions. The dissonance of this positioning is one of my main points with the work, and it is in some ways resonant with the contradictions concerning photographic abstraction and representation that Stieglitz engaged in the original Equivalents series almost a century ago.While hanging on the walls of a gallery, Equivalence suggests the same metaphysical intentions as Stieglitz’s Equivalents. Simultaneously, in its manifestation on the Internet, my Equivalence series transcends its implied transcendence and claims a very specific time and place –a small brutal encampment on the island of Cuba where the United States abandoned any remaining claim to moral authority. In this illegal prison, forgotten lives drag on invisibly, outside of time, like untold serial narratives without resolution and without justice.Partially to balance the political insistence of Equivalence, I am also working on another series that operates with very different modalities. Following up on the live streaming technology that I developed for my Tango Panopticon public intervention series, I have started Horizon (In Development).Figure 10: Lawrence, Robert, Horizon, worldwide synchronous horizon interventions with live streaming video to Internet, work-in-progress.In Horizon I again use live cell phone video, this time streamed to an infinitely wide web page from live actions around the world done in direct engagement with the horizon line. The performances will begin and automatically come online live at noon in their respective time zone, each added to the growing horizontal line of moving images. As the actions complete, the streamed footage will begin endlessly looping. The project will also stream live during the event to galleries, and then HD footage from the events will be edited and incorporated into video installations. Leading up to this major event day, I will have a series of smaller instalments of the piece, with either live or recorded video. The first of these preliminary versions was completed during the Live Performers Workshop in Rome. Horizon continues to develop, leading to the worldwide synchronous event in 2020.Certainly, artists have always worked in series. However, exploiting the unique temporal dimensions of the Internet, a series of works can develop episodically as a serial work. If that work unfolds with contradictory thematics in its embodied and online forms, it reaches further toward an understanding of the complexities of postInternet culture and identity. ReferencesSaviligliano, Marta. Tango and the Political Economy of Passion. Boulder: Westview Press, 1995.