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Article

Eggeling, Viking  

(b Lund, Oct 21, 1880; d Berlin, May 19, 1925).

Swedish draughtsman, film maker, painter and writer. After a limited education in Sweden he emigrated to Germany in 1897, where he received a commercial training at Flensburg that year. Around 1900 he began work as a bookkeeper at a watch factory in Le Locle in Switzerland, and from c. 1901 to c. 1907 he worked as a bookkeeper in Milan. There he attended the Accademi di Belle Arti di Brera in the evenings. In 1907 he obtained a post as a bookkeeper at the Lyceum Alpinum in Zuoz, Switzerland, where he was also allowed to teach art. His wife’s ill-health forced him to resign the post and, after a visit to Essen in 1910, he moved to Paris (1911) and became acquainted with Arp, Modigliani, Othon Friesz and Moise Kisling; he was particularly impressed by the work of André Derain, but he probably also studied the work of the Cubists....

Article

Erdély, Miklós  

Annamaria Szőke

(b Budapest, July 4, 1928; d Budapest, May 22, 1986).

Hungarian architect, sculptor, conceptual and performance artist, teacher, theorist and film maker. He came from a Jewish–Christian family, many of whom were killed during World War II. In 1947 he began training as a sculptor at the College of Fine Arts in Budapest, but he left and continued his studies in the studio of Dezső Birman Bokros (1889–1965), before training as an architect from 1947 to 1951 at the Technical University in Budapest. During the 1950s and early 1960s he worked as an architect and began experimenting with painting and graphic art, as well as writing poems and short stories. During this period he became acquainted with such artists as Dezső Korniss, László Latner and, most importantly, Béla Kondor and Sándor Altorjai (1933–79), with whom he began a lifelong friendship. In 1959 and 1963 he also enrolled at the Budapest College of Theatre and Film Arts but was advised to leave both times....

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

Gaze, the  

Amanda du Preez

Term used to indicate the complex visual matrix incorporating the one who looks as well as the one who is looked at. This means the one who imposes the gaze and the one who is the object of the gaze are both implicated in the construction of the gaze. The concept was addressed initially by Sigmund Freud’s concept of scopophilia (‘pleasure in looking’ or voyeurism) and later in Jacques Lacan’s formulation of the mirror stage and its role in identity formation. Lacan formulated the complex role of the gaze in constructing the relation between interior self and exterior world as two kinds of subjects—not only as a powerful subject gazing at the world but also as a lacking, objectified subject encountering the gaze outside himself. For the most part the link between the gaze and power is entrenched in theories on the gaze, since the directed gaze of the powerful subject has the ability to subjugate and even petrify its objects as exemplified in the terrifying gaze of Medusa in Greek mythology. The construction of the gaze happens within an asymmetry of power. In recent times, the gaze has become a trope within visual culture for the critical analysis of several entwined ideas concerning class, race, ethnography, sex, gender, religion, embodiment, ideology, power, and visuality. In this article the powerful directed gaze is analysed through the categories of the clinical gaze, colonial gaze, touristic gaze, and the male gaze. Finally, theorizing possibilities of going beyond the gaze are considered....

Article

Höller, Carsten  

German, 20th – 21st century, male.

Born 1961, in Brussels.

Installation artist, video artist.

From 1979 to 1985, Carsten Höller studied agronomy in Kiel, before embarking on his artistic career. His work is based on the future and the Darwinian theory of the evolution of the species as developed most famously by biologist Richard Dawkins. This theory repudiates, as far as evolution is concerned, any notion of romanticism about universal love and the well-being of species. Effectively, genes programme the living organism in a selfish way; their primary function is replication. So Höller’s works, which are mainly interactive installations, take pleasure in demythologising our so-called altruistic, but unconsciously selfish, behaviour and propose new approaches to the subject, particularly in the fields of sex and passion. Nevertheless, the human species has the ability to operate in the cultural domain, as demonstrated in his video, Chaffinches of Love, in which the artist teaches love songs to chaffinches....

Article

Koolhaas, Rem  

Richard Dagenhart

(b Rotterdam, Nov 17, 1944).

Dutch architect, architectural theorist, and urbanist. Brought up in Rotterdam, Jakarta, and Amsterdam, Koolhaas studied script writing at the Netherlands Film and Television Academy in Amsterdam and was a film scriptwriter in Amsterdam and Los Angeles. He studied architecture at the Architectural Association in London (1968–72), where his ideas were shaped by the architectural neo-avant-garde of the 1960s. He continued his architectural studies at Cornell University (1972–5) and initiated conceptual design projects focused on contemporary metropolitan culture and New York City, including The City of the Captive Globe (1974), Hotel Sphinx (1975), and New Welfare Island/Palace Hotel (1975-6). He founded the Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) in Rotterdam in 1975 and wrote Delirious New York (1978) while he was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York City. These experiences combined to set out a critical framework for his design practice by engaging and revealing the contradictions between architecture and urbanism—one humanist, human-scaled, and moral; the other technocratic, amoral, and global. This is the context that has framed his prolific writing and architecture/urban design practice in OMA and its media based twin, AMO....

Article

Korean art after 1970  

Sook-Kyung Lee

One of the characteristics of Korean contemporary art is a continuous effort in employing and interpreting international art practices and discourses. Art movements from Europe and North America in particular, including Abstract Expressionism, Art informel, Minimalism, Conceptual art and Post-modernism, have influenced many Korean artists’ styles and ideas since the 1950s, providing formal and conceptual grounds for critical understandings and further experiments. Whilst some artists who maintained traditional art forms such as ink painting and calligraphy exercised modernist styles and abstract forms largely within the norms and conventions of traditional genres, a large group of artists proactively adapted to Western styles, employing new materials and techniques as well as the notions of avant-garde and experimentalism (see fig.).

A major critique of the reception of Western art and aesthetics came from ‘Minjung art’ (People’s Art) in the 1980s as part of instigating a nationalist and politically charged art strategy. Several art historians and critics who emerged in the 1990s also expanded the scope of the debate with postcolonial and pluralist points of view. The shift in social, economic and political environments played an important role in changing sensibilities in art, along with the advances of technology and new media in the 2000s. The high degree of diversity and sophistication of Korean art in terms of media and subject matters became widely acknowledged within and outside the nation, and an increasing number of artists started to work on the cutting edge of international art....

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

Post-structuralism in the USA  

Shana Gallagher Lindsay

Shana Gallagher Lindsay

Post-structuralism is a term given to a critical movement that formed in succession to the structuralist theories of the 1960s, in some cases propounded by the same, mostly French, philosophers, but in which some of the basic hypotheses challenge those of Structuralism.

Post-structuralism in the USA was a hybrid. In the American art world, transformed in the post-war period through the rise of the professionalized art school, with its increased emphasis on reading theory and philosophy, post-structuralism became a guiding force. The term ‘post-structuralism’ denotes various developments in the fields of continental philosophy and critical theory. It can be said to be one of the many interdisciplinary threads that formed the complex fabric of Post-modernism. Though the tendency originated in Europe, it was never clearly defined. Indeed, the term is more widely used in American academic circles, and very few practitioners accept the label ‘post-structuralist’. Post-structuralism involves a critique of metaphysics, of the concepts of causality, of identity, of the subject, and of truth....

Article

Raqs Media Collective  

Peter A. Nagy

Indian new media artists and theorists . Raqs Media Collective was formed in 1991 by New Delhi artists, Jeebesh Bagchi (b 6 July 1965), Monica Narula (b 13 June 1969) and Shuddhabrata Sengupta (b 12 Feb 1968), who met when they were studying for their masters’ degrees in mass communication at Jamia Milia University, New Delhi. The collective have explained the significance of their name in stating that:

Raqs is a word in Persian, Arabic and Urdu that means the state that whirling dervishes enter into when they whirl. It is also a word used for dance. At the same time, Raqs could be an acronym, standing for “rarely asked questions.”

Their practice incorporates new media, digital art, documentary filmmaking, photography, media theory and research, writing, criticism and curation ( see fig. ).

In 2002 they shot onto the international art world stage by being included in ...

Article

Richter, Hans  

Gisela Hossmann

[Johannes] (Siegfried)

(b Berlin, April 6, 1888; d Minusio, nr Locarno, Feb 1, 1976).

American painter, film maker, theorist and writer of German birth. He studied at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Berlin and at the Akademie in Weimar from 1908 to 1909. Until c. 1910 he produced academic figure drawings, individual genre scenes and book illustrations (e.g. for Boccaccio’s Decameron). His early paintings showed the influence of Symbolism and of Jugendstil. Between 1911 and 1914 he came under the influence of Cézanne and also of Expressionism. At this time his paintings were flat in character, but with a fluid, dynamic and expressive drawing style, strongly outlined forms and powerful brushstrokes, as in Kurfürstendamm (1911; Locarno, Pin. Casa Rusca).

From 1914 until 1916 Richter’s work was influenced by Cubism, and he realized his idea of the visualization of rhythmical movements, proportion and order. His aim was the ‘free orchestration of forms …as music has orchestrated time …with sound’. Following the example of Picasso and Braque, Richter chose musical subjects for his paintings, such as ...

Article

Steyerl, Hito  

Ying Sze Pek

(b Munich, June 26, 1966).

German film maker, artist, and theorist. Steyerl trained as a film maker at the Academy of Visual Arts, Tokyo (1987–90), and the Hochschule für Fernsehen und Film, Munich (1992–8); and later received a PhD in philosophy from the Akademie der bildenden Künste, Vienna (2001–3). In the first decade of the 2000s, Steyerl’s work negotiated the boundaries of the documentary film genre, just as her writings theorized the documentary as a mode that operates between fact and fiction, rather than one that constitutes an objective depiction of reality. At this time, European and international biennales such as documenta and Manifesta showcased an increasing number of documentary works in photography and video. These exhibitions would serve as the contemporary art venues at which Steyerl’s films and videos received acknowledgement.

Steyerl’s work often took the form of the essay film, a non-linear exposition that combines disparate footage in such a way that its constructedness is emphasized. Her films incorporated material from popular culture alongside documentary footage shot by the artist. In ...

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....