Visual Art

The corpus of art from the Pleistocene has grown substantially in recent decades, and with it, the earliest evidence of visual art has become much older than previously anticipated, going back over 100,000 years. This new information has rendered some traditional ideas about the recent origins of visual art obsolete. Existing archaeological and evolutionary models that aim to explain the mergence of visual art should now be reassessed in light of current data. That is the aim of this book. First, it reviews the earliest examples of different forms of visual art in two important archaeological periods of human artistic innovation, the height of the African Middle Stone Age, and the European Early Upper Palaeolithic. It then takes a critical view at three influential origins-of-art models, namely, the sexual selection model, the social cohesion model, and the cognitive evolution model. Finally, it offers an alternative proposal that redefines visual art as a communication signal and, using the archaeological evidence, relates its emergence and development to the evolution of human cooperation strategies. This book will appeal to anyone interested in the debate of the origins of art and the evolution of modern human cognition, behaviour, and culture.

This paper argues that visual art coevolved with typically human ways of social organization and cooperation strategies. My argument, in brief, is that Late Pleis-tocene human groups became organised in band societies that established net-works of indirect reciprocal cooperation, which favoured cultural strategies of in-dividual recognition such as social markers, e.g. styles of personal ornamentation. These early forms of visual art, by conveying information about social identity, became important in recalling and assessing individual interactions in cooperative networks. I also argue that as a cultural strategy, visual art could have been adap-tive by reducing risk of aggression and increasing resource acquisition through exchange. As other evolved cultural traits, like tool-making and cooking, visual art too could have had an important impact on shaping modern human cognition and behaviour.

Kotlyar Eugeny. Riga – St. Petersburg – Kharkov: Origins and Interconnections of Jewish Architecture of Jacob Gevirtz // Jews in a Changing World. 5th International Conference. Riga, Latvia, 16-17 September 2003. Ed.: H. Branover, R. Ferber. – Riga: Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Latvia, 2005. – P. 162-170. (in Russian)

Abstract: This article focuses on the aesthetic and affective techniques of saturation through which posters legitimated the Party-State in Mao’s China by closing the gap between everyday experience and political ideology. Propaganda posters were designed to put into practice the principle of unity, as conceptualised by Mao Zedong. The argument posits that while the “poster” is normally a printed edition of a painting or design intended for mass distribution in this way,
the term may fairly be deployed to capture other cultural objects that function as “posters”, in that they provide public, political information that expresses or constructs a political self in aesthetic form. This approach requires a metonymic understanding of a visual field in which cultural objects are interrelated and mutually reinforcing. The essay draws on recent in-depth interviews with poster artists of the 1960s and 1970s.
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10357823.2014.955835#.VDEBjildWTV

Art is a form of beauty and it needs encouragement to be developed. This Encouragement must come from a wider circle and Jamini Roy took his art works to all classes of people. The name of Jamini Roy shines among the most notable painters of India, especially modern India. He gave a fresh expression to his ideas and thoughts through colours. Jamini Roy, a great artist who changed the concept of Indian modern art.

Starting from Maurizio Lazzarato’s reworking of the debtor/guilty concept developed by Nietzsche in his work On the Genealogy of Morality, the present article approaches the images that represent debt in the context of present capitalism. We will also see how debt and the indebted individual take part in a broader repertoire of images that, by their particular harshness and reference to the body, are easily taken in. These are the images that constitute the ‘mnemotechnics of cruelty’. But the same images that serve to consolidate the memory, or its elaborations in the domain of gothic horror fiction, can as well function in a critical sense. Here we are no longer talking about debt but of the use of art-horror images as part of a progressive machinery, or simply a liberating one, among which stands out the image of the vampire. The images used to denounce the abuses of capital establish, from the 18th century, the ‘gothic capitalism’: a vision of the modern world through images from another time.

A significant step along the road which led Boris Schatz (1866–1932) to Jewish national art was the period he spent in Bulgaria (1895-1905), where he became one of the founders of a national modern art. His formula for a “national art” was building upon the materials available through the nation’s folk traditions; it entailed romanticizing national history and providing for mass art production which would serve as a vehicle of expression for collective identity. His “Bulgarian” artistic experiment with ideals of Zionism played a key role in the creation of “Bezalel” (1906) and “new” Israeli art.
(Kotlyar, E. The Making of a National Art: Boris Schatz in Bulgaria // Ars Judaica. The Bar-Ilan Journal of Jewish Art. (Ed. Bracha Yaniv, Miriam Rajner, Ilia Rodov). – Ramat-Gan: Department of Jewish Art, Bar-Ilan University, 2008. – V.4. – P. 43-60.)

The paper deals with the concepts of fragmentation and reconstruction in the field of portraiture. Taking a portrait as a large fragment of information, we look into ways in which it can be optimised and reduced such that it remains valid but becomes more efficient. The paper commences by exploring the concept of the fragment from various facets, including historically, especially from the modernist point of view, and goes forth to investigate various techniques from practices both adjunct and outside of the field of art in order to inform the portraiture process itself on how information can be collected, optimised and presented to the viewer.