Imagescapes
Italian Costumes Study: A Focus on Victor Meirelles
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Mara Rúbia Sant´Anna
This article aims to present the analysis of twenty-six works belonging to the Italian Costumes Study collection, performed by Victor Meirelles in Italy. The analysis identified the components in common these works in six items: environment, position, body, clothes, colors and shapes to reflect on the artist's motivation to carry out the study and the aesthetic standard which directed the execution of the same. To place the production, artistic painter course, aspects of his life were discussed at the time of such work, the current artistic movements and associated with their production and the historical context in which it entered the work.
Visualising "Feeblemindedness": Diagnosis of Developmental Inhibitions in Weimar and Nazi Germany
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Michael Hau
The paper examines the history of constitutional therapy in Weimar and Nazi Germany. Focusing on Walter Jaensch’s “Institute for Constitutional Therapy” in Berlin, it shows how a medical scientist successfully negotiated the changing social and political landscape of two very different political regimes. The focus will be on Jaensch's visual diagnostic system which promised to diagnose children and youths with "developmental inhibitions" based on images of their capillaries. The structure of children’s capillaries, Jaensch claimed, could be determined through the microscopic examination of their skin. The resulting capillary image (Kapillarbild) could then be read like a text which revealed children’s mental age. Jaensch successfully positioned himself as a researcher on the verge of developing new diagnostics and therapies for feebleminded people, who threatened to become an intolerable burden on the German state. During the Nazi period he cast himself as a racial hygienist by convincing influential medical leaders that his ideas were a valuable complement to the negative eugenics of Nazi racial policies. “Constitutional therapy,” he claimed, could turn genetically healthy people with “inhibited mental development” into fully productive citizens and therefore make a valuable contribution to Nazi bio-politics.
Traveling Eyes, Traveling Mind: The Distance between Fantasy and Reality in the Created Landscape
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Mira Thurner
In film, illustration and digital art we create worlds, utopian and dystopian. The images created illustrate a narrative whether internal to the artist or external for the writer, reflecting the creator and the viewers' desire for escapism, to reconcile our wishes for, or fears of the world around us, to warn against possible futures and to safely explore the potential of theories and realities. But what of the semiotics and symbolism of the image itself; what is present and absent, are there geographical and topological features that we recognise, how alien are the landscapes in these images? This paper will analyse a series of fantasy images taken from contemporary film stills, book illustration digital and fine art to provide insight into the construction of alternate reality locations and the rationale behind them. The analysis will include how the image might impact on the psyche of the viewer and the rationale behind the style and presentation of the image; an exploration of the daydreams, film images, the drawings, the writings, the makings of alternate worlds in image.
Noir as Spatial History of Los Angeles : The Historicisation of Los Angeles through Film Noir and Neo Noir
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sean Maher
Los Angeles and Noir are historically intertwined through Hollywood cinema and hard-boiled detective fiction. In this discussion film noir and neo noir are employed to map the spatial transformations that have shaped the actual city of Los Angeles throughout the twentieth century. The shift from modernity to postmodernity in Los Angeles coincided with the demise of film noir and rise of neo noir representations of the city. The 1970s saw key neo noir films like The Long Goodbye (1973) and Chinatown (1974) capture developments in the built environment of Los Angeles that reflect the city's transformation from modernist centripetal urbanism to postmodern centrifugal urban formation. Neo noir representations of Los Angeles in the 1970s will be examined in terms of their potential as urban historiography and the expanded role city-cinema criticism affords cinematic representation of urban space.
Gendered Urbanities: Understanding City Experiences of Women through Street Art in Delhi
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Paridhi Gupta
Street art has recently come up in India as a tool of feminist articulation. It is used by various feminist and artist collectives to comment on the experiences of women in their location. While the methods and intents used by various such collectives is different, they come up with an interesting commentary on gendered experiences of the urban landscape. The images are inserted in very masculine landscape, thus not only transforming the nature of the very site, but also of the subjects as well. It is however known, that once drawn, the image takes the life of its own, the paper then, also looks at the impact it has on the audience and its relationship to the artists' intent.
