Art for All
Featured Social Impact of Music View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Shveata Mishra, Ina Shastri
We as a human kind is blessed to have music in our lives. The mystical impact of music always surprises us with its impact physiologically, psychologically and also socially. Music has been passed down from generations to generations and has shaped the culture and societies around the world. It’s undeniable that everyone is some how connected with music on a personal level and have a personal relationship with the music which has the power to alter one’s mood, change perceptions and inspire change The impact and effect of music might not be evident immediately but will be apparent defiantly. This research paper outlines some interesting concepts related to the social impact of music.
#BlackLivesMatter Arts: Exploring Deep Community Engagement View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Antonio C. Cuyler, Lawrence Jackson
This paper explores the question, in what ways might artists and arts leaders collaborate to foster deeply impactful community engagement initiatives in support of #BlackLivesMatters? Co-moderated by an arts leader and a dance artist, the discussion focuses on using culture as a meaning-making system to advance racial justice in communities by using the arts to ask provocative questions in service to envisioning and actualizing an antiracist world. Furthermore, we explore the importance of creating, encouraging, and expecting collaboration in support of culture that engages communities in addressing the historic and continuous discrimination, marginalization, oppression, and subjugation experienced by Black people specifically.
Struggle for Identity: A Contextual Study of Post-Colonial Folk Art in India View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Guruprasad Dey
On 26th January 1950 the constitution of the Republic of India became effective. To my understanding some phrases in the preamble of the constitution have politically shaped the identity of the post-colonial Indian peoples. Through the passage of political understanding and participation in parliamentary democracy the constitutional phrases -‘Justice, social, economic and political’, ‘Liberty of thought’, ‘Equality of status and opportunity’, ‘Fraternity assuring the dignity of the individual..’ transform ‘the people of India’ into ‘the peoples of India’. Since the 19th Century, Indian Nationalist thinkers and connoisseurs started acknowledging Indian Folk practices through the lens of European Modern art. After independence, under the developmental schemes of the Govt. of India, Folk and Tribal communities in India were given distinctive traditional identities. Post-colonial art institutions in India tried to include the country’s Folk practices on their own term. Needless to say, it was no sincere acknowledgement but a surreptitious form of exploitation. Jaynagar-Majilpur’s clay doll tradition, a century-old craft practice in West Bengal-the substantial theme of my PhD research- where I have heard the voice of a subaltern resistance against the seemingly generous institutional inclusion. This paper includes research using both anthropological and historical methods. My questions are – Why do we need a community to be in, even though not being communal? The idea of nation gives us identity. But why do we need a given identity?
Inefficient, Unsustainable, and Fragmentary: The Rauschenberg Combines as Disabled Bodies View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Cole James Graham
In a 1960 article entitled “Younger American Painters,” William Rubin accused Rauschenberg’s Combines of rendering the “inherently biographical style of Abstract Expressionism… even more personal, more particular, and sometimes almost embarrassingly private.” Rubin’s choice of the word “embarrassingly” is telling; the Combines are not just private, but embarrassingly so; that is, the problem the Combines present is that they are not private when good sense/taste tells us they should be. This spilling over of the supposed-to-be-private into the embarrassingly deviant public has been read as an insistence on the work of art as both in its environment and in communication with it, as a valorization of the femininity associated with the interior/personal and relatedly, as a refusal of heteronormative subjectivity as dictated in the Cold War era. This paper suggests another reading—not as an alternative, but as a supplement to these: a reading of Rauschenberg’s Combines through the lens of disability theory. If Rauschenberg’s Combines are debased (and there seems to be some agreement that they are), and if one’s experience of them is bodily (and this experience seems if not universal, then nearly so), then their association with the debased/abject body demands inquiry. Made up of disparate parts that insist upon their discrete, adjunctive identities and former lives, the Combines might be best understood as Frankensteins—disabled bodies that refuse to comply and in so doing inscribe new ways of being (corporeally) in the world.
Giving the Modern Artworld a Social Purpose: Museums and Dealers in the US Progressive Era, 1900-1929 View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Julie Codell
In this paper I assess the growing social role of visual culture and public taste in US civic culture, 1890-1920 through the lens of the Metropolitan Museum and several progressive dealers, such as Martin Birnbaum, Alfred Stieglitz and Joseph Brummer, all of whom helped shape the early 20th-c. US artworld by seeking to spread cultural knowledge to a wide general public and fuel a growing US cosmopolitanism. These dealers' attention to public access to historical and cultural knowledge was aligned with the new radical social mission of museums in the "Progressive Era," 1890-1920: to expand public access (Sunday openings begun in 1891), apply democratic principles, remove elite associations, develop public education programs, and adopt European museums' art historical chronologies and display practices. The lead reformer, New York's Metropolitan Museum, motivated changes that spread to emerging Midwest museums and the popular press that increasingly wrote about artworld cultural events. While anticipated in the mid-19th century, as critics, artists, dealers and collectors became more prominent in public life and sought to reach a wide public, these change met with limited success. After 1900, however, a widely literate public with educational and economic resources and leisure to enjoy new modes of transportation and communication began avidly seeking cultural capital by collecting prints and photographs of European art and attending museums, stimulating prolific photographic companies, urban museums, a flourishing art press, myriad books about art, artists, and collectors, and museums' new attention to their social role.
New Aesthetics in History: The Changes of Idealism View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Kim Thu Le
This research examines how new aesthetics as a means of sharing cultural values appeared in the Ancient, Medieval, Modern Capitalist and Marxist communist eras in Western and Eastern cultures. Three aesthetic approaches – aesthetic concepts, state of mind, and aesthetic object – are used to examine evidence of new aesthetic experiences through architecture, visual arts, and literature with the support of philosophies to argue that new aesthetics are as integral to the organic completion of the human condition in societies as changes in idealism. The Odyssey epic by Homer presents evidence of the aesthetics for the ancient period. In the Medieval period the Gothic and Hindu architecture show the two religious contexts, created new aesthetic influences. The art of the Tang Dynasty in China, the Tale of Genji in Japan complement the philosophical discussion about how the new aesthetics in the East arose. The Hadji Murat, a work of literature work by Leo Tolstoy, presents new aesthetic heroism contexts. In the modern period, artwork by Edwards Munch and Pablo Picasso represent an individual’s right to free speech and feature capitalist contexts, while artworks by Russian Soviet and Chinese artists, Kliment Redko, and Luo Zhongli represent Marxist aesthetics.
Teaching Acoustic Ecology: Social Engagement in a Time of Crisis View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Thomas Ciufo
This paper shares pedagogical strategies developed for an interdisciplinary course on acoustic ecology and sonic art. The unifying theme of this course is an engagement with sound, environment, and society at large, through contemplative, critical and creative exploration. Critical listening approaches and strategies are drawn from many sources, including deep listening practice (Oliveros) sonological competence (Schafer) soundwalks (Westerkamp) compassionate listening (Thich Nhat Hanh) and many others. These awareness practices are combined with readings from acoustic ecology, sound art, experimental music, sound theory, aesthetics and ethics. The students engage in listening practices, soundwalks, and field recording exercises that lead into projects in soundscape studies, community engagement, and creative sound composition. Strategic listening exercises are used throughout the course, including describing and analyzing sounds, keeping listening diaries, using audio recorders for investigation, and then using their new-found skills to create soundscape compositions. Students move from basic listening practices and field recording into more complex projects, including creative sound compositions that explore aspects of location, context, transformation and musical / sonic esthetics, as well as the embedded meanings in the sounds they discover or create. By creating a safe, reflective, and collaborative environment, students from a wide range of backgrounds are able to come together and explore this interdisciplinary field, while increasing their understanding of themselves and the world around them. In this paper, I share some of the strategies I have developed for facilitating this type of engaged interdisciplinary learning experience.
