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Article

Acoustics  

Michael Forsyth

Sound can be defined as audible vibrations within a relatively steady medium, and in buildings sound may be air-borne or structure-borne. The science of architectural acoustics is divisible into noise control and room acoustics. The following article is mainly concerned with the latter and the ‘desired’ sound generated within a space, because its design has had a significant impact on architectural form; it concentrates on examples of Western architecture.

For an extended discussion of acoustics see Grove 6.

Different acoustical conditions are preferable for listening to the spoken word as compared with different types of music. The shape, size and construction of halls and theatres—and to some extent other building types, including churches—developed historically in response to acoustical requirements. Room-acoustic design, however, is a relatively recent subject of study. Until the 20th century this relationship between acoustical requirements and the building form resulted from trial and error, involving the architect’s intuition and awareness of precedent rather than scientific knowledge. Acoustically inadequate halls were usually demolished within about 50 years, so that most surviving older halls are probably among the best that were built....

Article

Breitz, Candice  

Carol Magee

(b Johannesburg, 1972).

South African multi-media artist, active in the USA. She received a BA in fine arts (University of Witwatersrand, 1993), an MA in art history (University of Chicago, 1995), and an MPhil in art history (Columbia University, New York, 1997). She was a fellow of the Whitney Independent Studio Program, New York (1996–7). Her work has been regularly included in biennials (including among others Johannesburg 1995, São Paulo 1998 and Venice (2005)), has been shown extensively in international solo and group exhibitions, and is owned by museums and private collectors throughout the world. In 2007 she was awarded the Prix International d’Art Contemporain by the Fondation Prince Pierre de Monaco. In photography, video, and installation, Breitz turns an insightful, playful, and critical eye towards issues of representation, identity, media, global capital, consumerism, celebrity, fandom, and language. Her work stretches from the problem of the cult of the individual to the question of how cultural and other forms of identity are established and maintained. In ...

Article

Deuelle-Luski, Aïm  

Israeli, 20th – 21st century, male.

Born 1951.

Photographer. Multimedia.

A theorist and art and philosophy critic, he is also an editor and artist.

He takes part in group exhibitions, notably Implicit Connections in 1997 at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

Article

Flynt, Henry  

Scott Davis

(b Greensboro, NC, 1940).

American composer, philosopher, writer, and conceptual artist. Henry Flynt is best known as the author of “Concept art.” Flynt briefly attended Harvard University (1957–1960) to study mathematics. In this period, he created some of his earliest extant works such as Ugly Drawing (1959; New York, MOMA). He would also make an important friendship with fellow student Tony Conrad. Through Conrad, Flynt would be introduced to La Monte Young, whose early word scores would exert a strong influence upon Flynt, resulting in Work Such That No One Knows What’s Going On (1961). In 1961 Young included Flynt in an influential series of performances and concerts organized at Yoko Ono’s Chambers Street loft and a concert at Fluxus impresario George Maciunas’ AG Gallery. He would also include Flynt’s essay “Concept Art” in the publication An Anthology of Chance Operations (1963).

By 1962 Flynt had begun calling for an anti-art campaign, based in part on the work of John Cage. Flynt theorized that existing notions of art should be replaced by what he first termed “veramusement,” and later “brend.” The new category would be defined through each individual’s unique forms of subjective aesthetic enjoyment in contrast to traditional acknowledged forms of artistic practice. This resulted in the destruction of much of the visual art Flynt had made until that time....

Article

Fusco, Coco  

American, 20th – 21st century, female.

Born 18 June 1960, in New York City.

Performance artist, writer, art historian, curator. Multimedia, video, film, Internet art. Multiculturalism, feminism.

Coco Fusco studied semiotics at Brown University (1982) and received a MA in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University (...

Article

John Cage’s Experimental Composition Class  

Julia E. Robinson

American experimental music class held by John Cage in New York. Although Cage had been faculty at the New School for Social Research (called the University in Exile in the period of and immediately after World War II, and subsequently, The New School University) since the early 1950s, team-teaching with his early mentor Henry Cowell (1897–1965), his critical tenure there was 1956–1960. It was in these years that his own work was hitting its greatest strides, and his dynamic classes reflected as much. The class focused on Cage’s most exploratory moves in music, not only his own trajectory—informed by Marcel Duchamp, Zen, and the international postwar avant-garde scene—but also new developments at Darmstadt (whether he was for them or against them), the world epicenter for exploratory musical work, which was driven by a younger generation mostly engaged with new sound technology.

Cage’s pedagogical modus operandi was surprising, in part due to his strikingly “low-tech” means. He was known for exemplifying the spatialization of sound, and its capacity for constant change, by such methods as placing a pencil—rubber eraser pointing down—between the strings of the New School classroom piano, to show students how, via direct alterations to the source, sound could be ...

Article

Kac, Eduardo  

Susan Snodgrass

(b Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1962).

Chicago-based multimedia artist, poet, and theorist. Kac’s pioneering works lie at the intersection of telecommunications and biotechnology, forging new, hybrid forms that merge biological processes and new media. Early works include body-based performances, holopoetry (Kac’s invented form of visual poems using holography; see Hologram), robotics, and innovative online projects at the Web’s infancy.

Kac’s interest in telecommunications, computers, and robotics led to experimental projects that integrated these various systems under the rubric of what the artist has termed “telepresence art” (2005; see Kac 2005, 127; see also Computer art). In 1989, he created the wireless robot Ornitorrinco (platypus in Portuguese), in collaboration with Ed Bennett, used in a nearly decade-long series of works that explored communication between humans and robots. A-positive (1997), in which a human and a robot engage in a physical exchange via an intravenous needle, probes the ethical implications of the human–machine interface. Working across disciplines, the artist defined (and redefined) the arena of electronic space to include “dialogical” means of interactivity and interspecies communication, as in ...

Article

Marshall, Kerry James  

Dennis Raverty

(b Birmingham, AL, Oct 17, 1955).

African American painter, writer, film production designer, and multimedia installation artist. Marshall’s works portray idealized subjects derived from African American experience in large-scale, multiple-figure paintings and installations that share many characteristics with European history painting in the “grand manner” of Peter Paul Rubens, Benjamin West, Jacques-Louis David, and the 19th-century academic tradition. This “high culture” Euro-American tradition is juxtaposed with elements of African American vernacular culture in order to reinsert African American subjects and aesthetics into the larger mainstream of America’s artistic and cultural history—a history from which, the artist believes, blacks have been largely excluded.

Marshall was born in Birmingham, AL, one of the most segregated cities in the United States at that time, and the site of civil rights demonstrations in the early 1960s. He moved with his parents in 1963 to Nickerson Gardens public housing project in Watts, CA, just a few years before the riots there. Consequently, the struggles of the civil rights movement profoundly affected him and are a major theme in his mature work....

Article

Musa, Hassan  

Kimberly Bobier

(b El Nuhud, 1951).

Sudanese multimedia and performance artist, art critic, and art historian, active in France. Musa graduated from the College of Fine and Applied Art, Khartoum Polytechnic, in 1974. After moving to Italy from Sudan, Musa relocated to France and matriculated at Montpellier University, earning ah Doctorate in Art History in 1989 and a teaching diploma in Fine Arts from Montpellier University in 1995. Subsequently, Musa created artist’s books and illustrated tomes of Sudanese folktales and taught calligraphy. His work critiques European imperialism by parodying the authoritative spectacles of Western museum displays, popular icons, and artistic masterpieces such as Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (c. 1500–07; Paris, Louvre) and Gustave Courbet’s the Origin of the World (1866; Paris, Mus. Orsay), both referenced in Musa’s The Origin of Art (1998). Musa’s artwork has frequently addressed stereotypes of Africans and Arabs.

From the late 1980s Musa’s ongoing performance series ‘Graphic Ceremonies’ engaged public audiences in exploring the intersection between the art exhibition and ritual. In a performance at the ...

Article

Television and art  

Elizabeth K. Mix

The influence of television on art can be considered broadly in terms of context (the role of television in contemporary culture), media (both the hardware of the monitor and the nature of the analogue, and later digital, signal), content (various genres of television programming), and viewing practices, such as channel surfing. Artists’ leveraging of television began with analogue television in the 1960s, accomplishing post-modern blurring of boundaries between high art and popular culture, as well as removing a measure of control from commercial galleries. Sony’s Portapak camera, introduced in 1967, helped the development of Video art and stimulated interest in television for artistic inspiration.

Because it lacked a history circumscribed by Western white European hierarchies, video was particularly attractive to alienated groups, including feminists, who fomented social protest in the 1960s and who sought an artistic language without many rules. At the same time, television technology evolved rapidly, and some artists deliberately sought out aspects that were becoming outmoded, which they viewed as potentially more artistic because they were no longer part of a common experience. Examples include the use of older versions of television cases after they were no longer fashionable and, later, the continued use of analogue signals after the invention of digital television. In such practices, artists followed the ideas of Canadian media theorist ...

Article

Visual culture  

Marita Sturken

Culture of images and visuality that creates meaning in our world today. This includes media forms such as photography, film, television, and digital media; art media such as painting, drawing, prints, and installations; architecture and design; comic books and graphic novels; fashion design, and other visual forms including the look of urban life itself. It also encompasses such social realms as art, news, popular culture, advertising and consumerism, politics, law, religion, and science and medicine. The term visual culture also refers to the interdisciplinary academic field of study that aims to study and understand the role that images and visuality play in our society; how images, gazes, and looks make meaning socially, culturally, and politically; how images are integrated with other media; and how visuality shapes power, meaning, and identity in contemporary global culture.

The emergence of the concept of visual culture as a means to think about the role of images in culture and as an academic field of study is a relatively recent phenomenon, emerging in the late 1980s and becoming established by the late 1990s. There were numerous factors that contributed to the idea that images should be understood and analysed across social arenas rather than as separate categories, including the impact of digital media on the circulation of images across social realms, the modern use of images from other social arenas (such as news and advertising) in art, and the cross-referencing of cultural forms displayed in popular culture and art. It was also influenced by the increasingly visible role played by images in political conflict and a general trend toward interdisciplinarity in academia....

Article

Williamson, Sue  

Kevin Mulhearn

(b Lichfield, Staffordshire, Jan 22, 1941).

South African multimedia artist, art critic, and art historian of English birth. Williamson immigrated to South Africa in 1948. She studied at the Art Students League of New York from 1965 to 1968 and received an Advanced Diploma from the Michaelis School of Fine Art, Cape Town, in 1983. One of South Africa’s most distinguished artists, she has also served a critical role as an interpreter and disseminator of information about the country’s art scene.

Williamson’s work has consistently engaged with South Africa’s social and historical circumstances. In the 1980s she endeavoured to reveal through images the people and ideas that the apartheid regime worked to suppress. In the series A Few South Africans (1983–5), for example, she produced postcard-sized prints of women engaged in the anti-apartheid struggle, such as Winnie Mandela and Helen Joseph, which could circulate at a time when the women themselves were often prohibited from doing so. ...