Arts, Volume 7, Issue 4 (December 2018) – 53 articles

A large number of exhibitions worldwide deal with digital games, but curators lack a coherent understanding of the different aspects of games that can be exhibited or a clear vocabulary for talking about them. Based on a literature review on game preservation and visitor behavior in exhibitions, the paper makes an argument for understanding digital games on display as made up of object, experience, and context aspects. The study further presents a matrix model for understanding and working with games in exhibitions. The model makes for a more nuanced understanding of the different ways digital games can be exhibited. Additionally, it clarifies the position of games in exhibitions as socioculturally constructed through inherently ideological curatorial choices. Full article

This paper looks at the creative work of “ghetto potter” Roberto Lugo. Through the examination of his various forms of art-making, various discussions regarding the intersections of ceramics, hip-hop, and visual culture are explored. Through these intersections, issues related to access and equity are explored. This paper explores topics and issues important to visual culture and art education. Full article

This paper introduces the context of European mobilizations for and against refugees and how participatory cinema has become a way of expressing political solidarity with refugees in Italy. We present and discuss ten years of the artistic work of ZaLab and Archivio Memorie Migranti and focus on two film projects of 4CaniperStrada. Central to the production of participatory cinema in Italy is challenging the mainstream narrative of migration through the proactive involvement of asylum seekers, with their political subjectivity, by using a self-narrative method. Full article

This paper presents a comprehensive review of historical and current rock art research on the island of Soqotra, Yemen and places these sites within a spatial framework from which it analyses themes concerning water and the visibility and invisibility of these sites within the broader landscape. The analysis of these sites shows how water was of fundamental importance to the indigenous inhabitants over the longue durée. It also highlights how rock art has not only been able to reinforce the ethnographic and historical accounts of the indigenous inhabitants, but also strengthen our temporal knowledge of the social and cultural lives of the inhabitants of Soqotra. Full article

For most of its history, archaeology has too often taken an indulgent attitude toward looting and antiquities trafficking. The primary response to these dangers has been to publish the main findings made outside of academia. As a result of this approach and the prominent role played by police techniques in investigating such crimes, investigations are primarily based on documentary research. This approach makes it harder to determine such essential factors in this field as an object’s collecting history or discovery date. This paper proposes new ways of studying collecting history, drawing on research projects on the use of archaeometry to shed light on cases of looting or trafficking involving police, court, or government intervention; hence, its qualification as “forensic”. Although the current state of knowledge does not enable the presentation of novel research, we believe that researchers and interested institutions should be made aware of the advisability of using archaeometry more directly in the fight against these scourges. Full article

This paper argues that Hip Hop Pedagogy is a version of Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy and should be a part of art education. Further, we believe that when exploring Hip Hop Pedagogy, teachers need to reference the work of Black female and non-binary artists. After an overview of Hip Hop Pedagogy and Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy, we argue that these approaches should be a consistent part of art education. Through the work of contemporary visual artist and DJ, Rozeal, we offer suggestions for art educators about how they might transition their practice to embrace some aspects of Hip Hop Pedagogy. Specifically, through sampling and the distinction of cultural appreciation versus appropriation, we believe that art educators can change their practice to make their teaching more relevant to their students and to contemporary culture. Full article

The Modernist aesthetic, which spread all over Europe and in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s, found the airbrush decorating technique to be the ideal instrument for expressing the requirements for an extreme synthesis of form. This was considered an essential element of the style, thanks to the areas of uniform color that shaded lighter tones inside basic, often geometric, shapes. The airbrush was used in that period mainly for graphics and for decorating ceramics, but it was also employed in other fields such as textile design. In Italy, the airbrush technique became popular in various artistic sectors including textiles, both for mass production and in the creation of single artistic pieces and in this latter field, Fides Testi was a leading figure. Full article

With the breakthrough of modernism, various efforts were undertaken to rationalize architecture and building processes using industrial principles. Few architects explored these as intensively as Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus. Before World War One, and increasingly in the interwar years, Gropius and a number of colleagues undertook various experiments that manifested in a series of projects, essays, model houses and Siedlungen. These were aimed at conceptually different goals, i.e., they followed two different categories of industrial logic: First, a flexible construction kit and, second, an assembly line serial production. This article traces the genesis of these two concepts and analyses their characteristics using these early manifestations. Compared to existing literature, this article takes into account hitherto neglected primary sources, as well as technological and construction history aspects, allowing for a distinction based not only on theoretical, but also technological and structural characteristics. This article shows that Gropius succeeds in formulating and exploring the two principles, in theory and practice, as well as drawing conclusions by the end of the 1920s. With them, he contributed significantly to the rationalization of architecture, and his principles have been picked up and developed further by numerous architects since then. Full article

Art of Recovery explores the potential of a participatory arts engagement with place to contribute toward the recovery and reconnection of refugees who experience trauma. The study responded to the international challenge of refugees’ mental health as a global priority as they experience higher prevalence rates of severe mental health disorders in comparison with the general population. The role of participatory arts in contributing toward recovery and reconnection is growing, but policymakers and health professionals are constrained by the lack of research exploring its benefits. We worked with 14 participants in four participatory arts workshops exploring the benefits of artwork focusing on remembered or imagined healing places. A qualitative thematic analysis of the artwork drew on Herman’s theory of recovery identifying “remembrance”, “mourning”, and “reconnection” to assess the elements of potential recovery, including aspects of the participants’ experience of transition between their homeland and the United Kingdom (UK), and new social connections. In conclusion, the study suggests that participating in a group making artworks of places associated with safety may contribute to processes of transition and social connectedness, prompting in turn feelings of wellbeing. The study offers insights into arts and health issues of interest to refugee-supporting communities, health professionals and policymakers. Full article

Gisaku (2005), by Baltasar Pedrosa, is a unique Spanish movie that was produced to sell the Spanish country brand to visitors attending the Spanish Pavilion at Expo Aichi 2005. It is a cartoon feature production that builds a fantastic plot combining the Expo’s theme, the Spanish institutional objective of showing a good image of the country, and the aim of pleasing the target. This paper focuses on the last issue, more specifically on the narrative and production strategies of transcultural exchange developed to attract the Japanese audience. We analyze the movie from a discursive perspective. It is our hypothesis that Gisaku tries to empathize with its target by constructing a certain representation of the Japanese national culture the features of which come from an imagery of Japan negotiated in both traditional and renewed ways from Spain. It is a hybrid anime that deals with transnational representations of the Japanese national identity. Full article

This article close-reads Modernist architect Ludwig Hilberseimer’s early architectural projects, which employed a language of uniform fenestration, repetition and geometrically reduced typical forms, as embodying Georg Simmel’s blasé attitude in analogical form, and places this reading in relation to Aldo Rossi’s concept of the analogical city and the political theorist Paolo Virno’s notion of the multitude. The first part outlines the discourse around Simmel, Hilberseimer and Rossi to note salient connections between these figures, their thought and the process of modernization. The second part discusses Simmel’s and Hilberseimer’s readings of the metropolis and interprets Hilberseimer’s formal language as embodying the blasé attitude. The third part places Hilberseimer in dialogue with Rossi and interprets Rossi’s analogical city as inhabited by another of Simmel’s figures, the stranger. The article concludes by tracing a line from Simmel’s figures of the blasé and the stranger via Hilberseimer’s metropolis architecture and Rossi’s analogical city toward the contemporary multitude, a collective linguistic subject. In doing so Hilberseimer’s and Rossi’s grammar of the metropolis can be rethought in relation to contemporary subject positions as a critical project toward an architectural theory of the multitude pushing back against the increasingly individualised city and market urbanism prevalent today. Full article

This paper explores the cinematic meta-theme of the “death of cinema” through the lens of Taiwanese director, Tsai Ming-liang’s 2003 film, Goodbye, Dragon Inn. In the film, the final screening of the wuxia pian classic, Dragon Inn, directed by King Hu, provides a focal point for the exploration of the diminished experience of institutional cinema in the post-cinematic age. Using the concept of “dissipation” in conjunction with a reappraisal of the turn to affect theory, this paper explores the kinds of subjective experiences that cinema can offer, and the affective experience of cinema-going itself, as portrayed in Goodbye, Dragon Inn. More specifically, in theorizing the role of dissipation in cinema-going, this paper explores the deployment of time and space in Goodbye, Dragon Inn and how it directs attention to the bodily action of cinema-going itself. The result is a critique of the possibilities of post-cinematic affects, rooted in an understanding of the way that late-capitalism continues to dominate and shape the range of experiences in the contemporary moment. Full article

In 2017, the City Theater of Munich engaged with a policy of diversity, and decided to include Syrian artists and create the Open Border Ensemble. A German and Syrian refugee and non-refugee cast produced the first performance, “Miunikh–Damaskus: Stories of one city” (May 2018). This mobile play aimed at minimizing stereotypes and deconstructing essentialist cultural identity prejudices. The paper examines how, in this case study, multilayered artistic strategies and relational dynamics came together to implement a ‘third space’. It addresses the challenges and implications of such theater endeavors regarding solidarity and the representation of the figure of the artists within the realm of the migration and refugee discourse. Full article

This article discusses both the complexity and technical benefits of developing an inlaid colouring technique for the hot glass-making process. This technique was inspired by the ancient Korean ceramic decorative technique known as Sanggam, and has allowed me to delineate geometric patterns and counterfeit letters onto glass artworks, before encapsulating them between layers of transparent glass. By developing a typography design that deliberately chooses the wrong consonant and vowel letters, and combines Korean characters, the resulting designs do not fit into either South Korean or British visual culture. A number of optical properties (in particular refraction, reflection, and distortion) provoke a sense of ambiguity in the viewer’s visual experience of, as well as their response to, a series of glass artworks created for experimental purposes. The technique offers an innovative creative tool for artists working in the field of glass art, enabling them to depict expressive drawings and images through a line drawing style, using diverse colours, and in a more controlled manner than the hot glass-making process of the ‘Graal’ technique. The technical possibilities and limitations of the inlaid glass colouring technique are addressed at each step of the development process, while examples of the technical palette serve as a useful reference for artists working in the field of glass art. Full article

Studio-based art and design education provides high levels of individual attention but has been criticized for the high demands for space and staff time that it places on institutions. Furthermore, retention and attainment rates in art and design subjects demonstrate that not all students develop the supportive, individual relationships with their tutors that facilitate development as creative practitioners. This article reports a case study of an initiative to improve retention amongst first year students studying Art, Design and Architecture subjects, by utilizing recent graduates, employed as Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTAs), to create a communications bridge between new students and their subject tutors. The project found that retention rates improved by 50% for these first-year students, who also reported that GTAs are welcoming, approachable, more accessible, and easier to talk to than academic staff. Tutors felt that communication with their students was enhanced by GTAs helping build clear narratives for each student. As the role of GTA becomes more established, further developments will include facilitating peer-to-peer collaboration in the studio through the harnessing and integration of peer mentors to more quickly foster a collaborative and supportive studio culture for new students. Full article

The Western ‘discovery’ of Japanese cinema in the 1950s prompted scholars to articulate essentialist visions understanding its singularities as a result of its isolation from the rest of the world and its close links to local aesthetic and philosophical traditions. Recent approaches however, have evidenced the limitations of this paradigm of ‘national cinema’. Higson (1989) opened a critical discussion on the existing consumption, text and production-based approaches to this concept. This article draws on Higson´s contribution and calls into question traditional theorising of Japanese film as a national cinema. Contradictions are illustrated by assessing the other side of the ‘discovery’ of Japanese cinema: certain gendaigeki works that succeeded at the domestic box office while jidaigeki burst into European film festivals. The Taiyōzoku and subsequent Mukokuseki Action films created a new postwar iconography by adapting codes of representation from Hollywood youth and western films. This article does not attempt to deny the uniqueness of this film culture, but rather seeks to highlight the need to reformulate the paradigm of national cinema in the Japanese case, and illustrate the sense in which it was created from outside, failing to recognise its reach transnational intertextuality. Full article

The inherent traits of digital media have challenged traditional understandings of artistic authorship and creativity. This division in understanding can clearly be observed in the popular culture context of hip-hop music. Hip-hop initially began with analog technologies such as vinyl record players, then transitioned to predominately digital mediums. This changeover in artistic mediums has been well documented by opposing viewpoints from hip-hop artists, consumers, record companies, and lawyers. By focusing on hip-hop for critical discussion on artistic authorship and creativity, art students can engage in discussion reflecting on their own artistic and online practices, and how these behaviors are legally supported or suppressed by copyright law. Full article

This article considers different ways in which Blackness is represented as exceptional in the 2018 film Black Panther. It also considers other iterations of Black visibility and legibility in the current popular culture context which appears to privilege Black narratives in interesting ways. The essay uses conceptual lenses from diaspora studies, Afro science fiction and Black feminist studies to critically engage the film and to critically question the notion of Black exceptionalism. Full article

Painting robots, like e-David, are currently unable to create precise strokes in their paintings. We present a method to analyse given brushstrokes and extract their trajectory and width using a brush behaviour model and photographs of strokes painted by humans. Within the process, the robot experiments autonomously with different brush trajectories to improve the reproduction results, which are precise within a few millimetres for strokes up to 100 millimetres length. The method can be generalised to other robotic tasks with imprecise tools and visible results, like polishing or milling. Full article

This article examines the trope of amnesia—the crisis of memory—in two recent Chinese-language films dealing with traumatic memories of the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath: Zhang Yimou’s Coming Home (Guilai, 2014) and Wang Xiaoshuai’s Red Amnesia (Chuangru zhe, 2014). Cinematic representation of real and symbolic amnesia, I argue, can be an affective way to overcome historical amnesia, both institutionalized by the Party-state and privatized by individuals. By exploring the dynamics between forgetting and remembering at both collective and individual levels, we can reach a deeper understanding of the profound impact of the Cultural Revolution and its present-day repercussions. Full article

Through bodies with matter, we are always making, performing and learning, so material pedagogy(ies) are embodied; they are intra-actions between bodies and matter, where with matter, bodies are being taught and are learning. But as learners, we are not always conscious of this intra-action or able to easily articulate it. The intention of this paper is to explore and share the creative acts of learning and teaching of bodies with matter and between spaces, where matter teaches us what it can and cannot do—a material pedagogy. Underpinned by new materialist scholarship, where socio-materiality is emphasised, this paper focuses on the relationalities of learning and teaching so that we can become conscious of our ways, materials and spaces of pedagogy. From this, we can then ensure that we explicitly acknowledge and support the creation of these places to enable a sustained pedagogic engagement for all learning environments that can be transformative and emancipatory. Full article

Assessing creative work is a complex issue in fine art education, particularly with the academy’s push toward the standardisation of assessment practices. This creates particular challenges for art educators such as defining creativity; balancing assessment of the person, the process and the outcome; identifying suitable assessment criteria; moderating subjective responses of assessors; providing feedback that does not inhibit future risk-taking, experimentation and creativity; and considering assessment for, as and of learning. This paper reports on a five-year curriculum and assessment project in the fine art undergraduate degree within an Australian university. The project was designed to provide greater clarity and transparency in the assessment of all aspects of creative and written works within the degree. Using case study and action learning methodologies, we found that assessing in fine art requires artistry and engaged dialogue. This dialogue must allow the language of the discipline to emerge and take into account the pedagogical purpose of assessment. When this process is systemically enacted across the curriculum of a program, assessment can move towards a fairer, more rigorous and transparent approach. We present a fine art curriculum and assessment framework that embeds the values of art educators and simultaneously acts within institutional requirements for assessment. Full article

Hip-hop culture is structured around key representational elements, each of which is underpinned by the holistic element of knowledge. Hip-hop emerged as a cultural counter position to the socio-politics of the urban condition in 1970s New York City, fuelled by destitution, contextual displacement, and the cultural values of non-white diaspora. Graffiti—as the primary form of hip-hop expression—began as a political act before morphing into an artform which visually supported the music and dance elements of hip-hop. The emerging synergies graffiti shared with the practices of DJing, rap, and B-boying (breakdancing) forged a new form of art which challenged the cultural capital of music and visual and sonic arts. This article explores moments of intertextuality between visual and sonic metaphors in hip-hop culture and the canon of fine art. The tropes of Michelangelo, Warhol, Monet, and O’Keefe are interrogated through the lyrics of Melle Mel, LL Cool J, Rakim, Felt, Action Bronson, Homeboy Sandman and Aesop Rock to reveal hip-hop’s multifarious intertextuality. In conclusion, the article contests the fallacy of hip-hop as mainstream and lowbrow culture and affirms that the use of fine art tropes in hip-hop narratives builds a critical relationship between the previously disparate cultural values of hip-hop and fine art, and challenges conventions of the class system. Full article

In the following paper, we look at the Alhambra from a perspective of architectural ceramics, an essential element in the understanding of the monument. From the Nasrid era onward, glazed ceramic tile mosaics were used to adorn the walls, a style that extended into the Christian conquest, when the palace complex was used as a royal residence. Since then, restoration work has continued to be carried out on the alicatados that cover the Alhambra’s walls, especially during an intense period in the 19th century, when it was the subject of much interest from Romantic travellers to Granada. A detailed, documented analysis of this work shows the complexity of the palace and fortress complex, helping us to better understand a part of its history. In the following pages, we specifically focus on one room in the Alhambra, the so-called Cuarto Dorado (Golden Room), outlining the preliminary findings of a research project that we are undertaking in association with the University of Granada and the Patronato de la Alhambra y el Generalife (Council of the Alhambra and the Generalife). Full article

Alvar Aalto created innovative architecture in his breakthrough work, Paimio Sanatorium, located in Southwestern Finland and designed between 1928 and 1933. This empirical case study looked at the iconic piece of architecture from a new angle by implementing the actor-network theory (ANT). The focus was on how the architecture of the sanatorium came to be. A detailed description of the chronology and administration of the building process enabled observing on the role of the agency of the architect. The study surveyed the cooperation, collaboration, and decision making of the agency during the construction period. The first part of this paper focused on the relations and conditions of producing the sanatorium and analyzed the building through drawings and archive material; the second part linked to the actor-network theory of Bruno Latour and included a discussion on how Aalto managed to bring along the other actors. The study clearly showed the importance of a collaborative effort in a building project. The most special architectural solutions for Paimio Sanatorium, a demanding institutional building project, came into being in circumstances where the architect managed to create a viable network that merged collective competence with material factors. Full article

This is an overview of the houses in southern Portugal, at the final stages of the Islamic period, using Mértola as the case study. Recent archaeological works, performed in different places, give us information on the houses’ organization, as well on the daily life of the population. Alimentary habits have been disclosed through a series of analyses. Full article

This article argues that Wolfenstein: The New Colossus, a AAA First-Person Shooter, is not only politically themed, but presents in itself a critical engagement with the politics of its genre and its player base. Developed at the height of #Gamergate, the game is interpreted as a response to reactionary discourses about gender and ability in both mainstream games and the hardcore gamer community. The New Colossus replaces affirmation of masculine empowerment with intersectional ambiguities, foregrounding discourses of feminism and disability. To provoke its players without completely alienating them, the game employs strategies of carnivalesque aesthetics—especially ambivalence and grotesque excess. Analyzing the game in the light of Bakhtinian theory shows how The New Colossus reappropriates genre conventions pertaining to able-bodiedness and masculinity and how it “resolves” these issue by grafting the player character’s head on a vat-grown Nazi supersoldier-body. The breaches of genre conventions on the narrative level are supported by intentionally awkward and punishing mechanics, resulting in a ludo-narrative aesthetic of defamiliarization commensurate to a grotesque story about subversion and revolt. Echoing the ritualistic cycle of death and rebirth at the heart of carnivalesque aesthetics, The New Colossus is nothing short of an ideological re-invention of the genre. Full article

Many architects of the modern movement who, in theory, refused luxury nonetheless responded to the demand for it. Richard J. Neutra was one of them: Although he mostly rejected luxury in his writings, he gained fame for his skills in constructing luxurious residences. This paper explores how he handled such discrepancies. For this purpose, it relates his understanding of luxury to the German debates on the luxury of the interwar period and analyzes two of his most important expensive residences: the Lovell Health House (1927–1929) and the Kaufmann Desert House (1946–1947). It comes to the conclusion that Neutra took an intermediate position between socialist opponents and idealist proponents of luxury. While he acknowledged the importance of objectivity and scientific thinking and agreed to give priority to the improvement of the living conditions of the masses, he was nevertheless much interested in comfort, aesthetics, details, and individualization. Moreover, it draws attention to the fact that Neutra’s houses also reflected his clients’ relationship to luxury. The Kaufmanns asked for a luxurious background for leisure; the Lovells’ wanted a place for a disciplined life that lacked certain essential traits of luxury. Full article

This paper examines an important moment in the recent history of UK art education by examining the magazine Block, a radical and interdisciplinary publication produced from within the art history department of an art school in the late 1970s and 1980s. Block was created and edited by a small group of lecturers at Middlesex Polytechnic, most of whom were art school educated; it was formed by, and in turn influenced, the milieu of studio-based art education in the UK. Despite the small scale of its operation, the magazine had a wide distribution in art colleges and was avidly read by lecturers looking for ways to incorporate new theoretical, often Marxist, feminist, poststructuralist, perspectives into their teaching. Full article