Kristen M. Osborne
The 1913 Armory Show was the first major American exhibition of the new European avant-garde art that proved so formative to 20th century American painters and sculptors; its controversial nature and enduring influence secure its central place in the narrative of art history. This paper surveys the contemporary critical reception of various newspaper articles and comic strips and explains the nature of the reactions as well as their import. A look at the origins and process of assembling the show is included, as well as a discussion of preceding styles of American art to elucidate just why the show was so shocking.
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Martin Ries
André Masson had an idyllic childhood in northern France, studied at the École des Beaux-Arts, read avidly, became a Nietzschean, resisted social conventions - and was taken in by the authorities more than once.
He was severely wounded during the offensive at Chemin des Dames in April, 1917, followed by a succession of hospitals and even confinement in a psychiatric ward.
After the war he painted Cubist inspired paintings with dark symbolic overtones. He became involved in the Surrealist movement (he was “the surrealist” according to John Russel) and painted some of his most symbolic and speculative works as his erudition served insight and revelation.
He witnessed the beginnings of the Spanish Civil War, and his Ophelia and In the Tower of Sleep warned of the coming disaster for Europe.
With the fall of France Masson and his family fled to America where his art played a pivotal role in the development of Abstract Expressionism. Influenced by the Asian art in the Metropolitan and Boston Museums, he was drawn to Zen Buddhism. He saw Zen and Surrealism as stimulating new insights and revelations.
With the end of the war, Masson returned to his native France where he was the subject of retrospective and solo exhibitions throughout Europe. In early 1987 a large exhibition was held in London. He died in his Paris home later that year at 91.
André Masson sought the “ecstasy of death” as a young man; he survived and found the ecstasy of life and art, of courage and sagacity in the turmoil that was the twentieth century.
By way of brief synopses of twelve of the artist’s works (with brief asides to Shakespeare, Sophocles, Mallarmé, Heraclitus, Heisenberg, Ugolino, Blake) I show that Masson's art was full of classic content, but his picture-making as a neat Gestalt package was dissolved as his art served insight and revelation.
This paper was written with the help of a Release-Time Research Grant from Long Island University, the Brooklyn Center.
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Joseph Nechvatal
Excerpted from Immersive Ideals / Critical Distances: A Study of the Affinity Between Artistic Ideologies Based in Virtual Reality and Previous Immersive Idioms
My research into Virtual Reality technology and its central property of immersion has indicated that immersion in Virtual Reality (VR) electronic systems is a significant key to the understanding of contemporary culture as well as considerable aspects of previous culture as detected in the histories of philosophy and the visual arts. The fundamental change in aesthetic perception engendered by immersion, a perception which is connected to the ideal of total-immersion in virtual space, identifies certain shifts in ontology which are relevant to a better understanding of the human being. This understanding was achieved through a broad inquiry into the histories of Virtual Reality, philosophy, and the visual arts and has lead to the formulation of an aesthetic theory of immersive consciousness indicative of immersive culture.
The primary subject of this discourse is immersion then: an experience which will be identified within the dissertation as the indispensable characteristic of Virtual Reality. The understanding of immersion arrived at here will be used to fashion a synchronous theory of art particularly informed by encounters and concepts of immersion into virtuality. To sufficiently address this subject in a scholarly fashion, I have researched, found and accumulated aesthetic and philosophic examples of immersive tendencies, as found within the histories of art and philosophy, which subsequently contributed towards the articulation of what I have come to call immersive consciousness. As a result of formulating such an immersive consciousness, a good deal of the basis for the questioning of the Western ontological tradition has been found in the Western tradition itself when we look with new eyes and ask new uncertain questions. Moreover, this immersive consciousness will be used to propose some abstract questions encircling today's electronic-based culture.
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Svetlana Kuyumdzhieva
This text was occasioned by Nedko Solakov’s first solo exhibition in Bulgaria, curated by Iara Boubnova and Maria Vassileva, after a period of more than 20 years. It was originally published in the Kultura weekly (issue 19, 19 March, 2009), and is the point of view of a Bulgarian critic of the new generation whose mind is free from the prejudice and reservations which traditionally accompany the name of Nedko Solakov in Bulgaria.
In 1990, in an exhibition called “Unquote”, curated by Luchezar Boyadjiev, Nedko Solakov showed for the first time his landmark work Top Secret. His public confession that in his youth he had collaborated with the Bulgarian Communist regime secret services brought about a long-term rift with Bulgaria’s art world. This was the reason why Solakov, who in the meantime had attained significant renown, did not have a solo exhibition in Bulgaria for 20 years. Today these past relationships are still the obstacle for any mature communication with Solakov’s art on the tiny Bulgarian art scene. The text deals with this problem by analysing the journey Nedko Solakov has made in his efforts to overcome the conservative tradition he originally comes from and to achieve international success.
Fashioned as a retrospective, the exhibition used the “total installation” format, an arrangement that is both unusual and controversial. It featured early paintings, some of Solakov’s most famous works, documents and fragments from installations, as well as various objects and photographs.
All the exhibited material provided a fertile opportunity for a retrospective analysis and an overview of Nedko Solakov’s work. This article presents, in a polemical manner, the key aspects of Solakov’s art, and seeks to battle the remaining local stereotypes, the ones not strictly confined to this particular artist, but also to contemporary art in the country.
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