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2006 (rok LX) |
Summaries: |
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François Lissarrague, Alain Schnapp Greek Paintings or The first part of the article
presents the history of nineteenth — and twentieth-century
research into the history of vase paintings, the questions
dominating in particular periods, and interpretation keys, focused
either on meaning or formal-aesthetic aspects. Next, the authors
discussed in detail their own premises concerning the exploration of
the world of the images found on Greek vases, the identification of
series (variants, departures, rules), the definition of sets of
paintings, and an analysis of the painting (frame, time). Such an
analysis of the iconic system is to result in establishing the
social imagery and manner of perception applied by the Greeks. The
second part of the text is an example of the realization of the
aforementioned premises, and consists of an all-sided analysis of
the motif of the fallen warrior, carried off the battlefield by his
brother-in-arm. Cynthia Klestinec Vesalius and the Print Culture:
Public Dissection as Intimate Ritual Published in 1543, Andreas
Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica contains one of the most
celebrated and debated images of human dissection. The frontispiece
features a large audience around Vesalius himself, who demonstrates
the reproductive organs from the uterus of a recently dissected
cadaver. Rather than see the image as a reflection of Vesalius’s
modern or humanist approach to the study of anatomy or as a
reflection of an actual public dissection, this essay argues that it
is a response to academic debates about the discipline of medicine
and to the threats and demands of print technology. Rather than
celebrate print for its ability to disseminate his findings,
Vesalius seeks to engineer an atmosphere of intimacy around his book.
He describes the medical community as a guild, transmitting an
embodied form of knowledge and practicing (almost effortlessly) the
manual art of dissection. And the frontispiece reconfigures public
dissection as an academic ritual in which the homosocial
organization of the medical community is thematized as internally
active and intimate. In the frontispiece, the public scene of
dissection becomes a powerful ritual, capable of reconciling the
tactile techniques of dissection with the distanced readership of
the book. Jonathan Simon Invisible and Visible Technology.
The Anatomist, the Corps and the Public Gunther von Hagens’s popular
‘Body Worlds’ exhibition has raised a number of issues
concerning not only the ethics of presenting real human cadavers in
public spaces, but also the question of whether the work of
anatomical preparations is art or science. Here, I compare the work
of this modern anatomist with that of his eighteenth-century
forebear, Honoré Fragonard. While both anatomists share the
virtuosity that is the hallmark of the successful showman or teacher,
the two centuries that separate them give very different meanings to
their preparations. Fragonard operated in a society where scientific
spectacle was a leisure activity for the well-to-do, as well as a
teaching tool for certain professional bodies, and where death was a
relatively common event to be managed by the church and the family.
Von Hagens exhibits bodies in spaces unsanctioned by the medical
profession, and is seen by critics to cater to the profane, offering
titillation under the guise of education to those who encounter
death constantly in the media but rarely outside. Thus, although
they are both composed of human anatomical preparations, I argue
that von Hagens’s and Fragonard’s collections are as different
from one another as our modern medicalized, high-tech. society is
from French society in the second half of the eighteenth century. Anna Wieczorkiewicz The point of departure is the life of
Julia Pastrana, an unusually hirsute Mexican woman who during the
second half of the nineteenth century was exhibited as a freak, the
missing link, or the Ape Woman, and who also attracted the attention
of men of science. Her biography provides us with insight into the
nature of viewing people endowed with bodies contrasting with the
norms recognized by society. Their public display is interpreted as
a phenomenon associated with the social approach to a basically
ambiguous fascination with situations in which „obvious”
cultural divisions into human and animal, female and male, primeval
and civilized, or living and dead, have been crossed. The latter
motif is brought to the forefront by an analysis of the fate of the
mummified mortal remains of Julia Pastrana, on show up to the 1970s.
The article also reflects on the tension emergent between the
domains of entertainment and science, treated as mutually inspiring.
Wojciech Michera In the medieval commentaries on
Genesis 3:1 and in the art of the 13th–17th century, the Edenic
tempter is often visualized as having a maiden’s face. The author
argues that this feminization of the serpent means that the sin is
defined as a „representation”. In Part I, the author examines
the late ancient discourse on the evil. Plotin, who identifies the
evil with the matter as the non-being – intelligible only in the
„bastard” way (gr. notho) – metaphorizes it as the „femininity”:
he reminds the comparison of Aristote (Phys. 192a), and the Plato’s’ figure
of Poverty (Penia) (Conv. 203). The Platos’ story is associated by Orygenes
and Eusebius with the Genesis words. They identify Penia with the
Edenic serpent, in such way defining Eva’s status: her being is
understood as „lack”, privatio,
perceivable only by looking awry, thanks to the serpent which is the
bastard cognitive instrument. In Part II, the author examines the
formulations of Jaś Elsner Seeing and Saying: A Psychoanalytic
Account of Ekphrasis The author theorizes about the
psychodynamics of ekphrasis, exemplified in the Imagines of Philostratus
and in Lucian’s Imagines and De domo. First he explores Freudian dynamic
structure of tendentious jokes as a model for ekphrasis. In the
jokes the desired object of the smutty conversation between two men
(i.e. the female Other, like the picture in ekphrasis) is
simultaneously exposed and occluded. Then he explores a Lacanian
model for viewing analyzing the ekphrastic, complex role of a gaze
as an autonomous object, in the field of desire. In the last section
the author studies the dynamics of desire in the vague relation
between the world of the picture and the viewers’ „reality” as
well as the position of a speaker – both in Freudian and Lacanian
terms. Katarzyna Murawska- Muthesius Caricatures and cartoons, an
established technique of both the ‘overloaded’ and
‘liberated’ image, constitute an especially relevant medium for
the studies on visuality and the mechanisms of representation.
Although traditionally perceived as ‘weapons’, the instruments
of social and political interventionism, caricatures and cartoons
have been demystified as ‘sermons’, the tools of policing the
established regimes of truth. This article looks at various
approaches to studying cartoons, borrowed from semiotics and
psychoanalysis. For John Fiske, cartoons, which combine the
complexity of the signified with the alleged simplicity of the
signifiers, offer a good opportunity to study the processes of
visual signification. For Freud and, subsequently, for Ernst Kris
and Ernst Gombrich, caricatures and cartoons, comparable to jokes
and dreams, are vehicles of aggression and act as manifestations of
the unfulfilled wish repressed in the unconscious; they adopt the
technique analogous to dream-work, revealing their latent content by
obscuring it through the process of condensation and displacement.
Referring to both of those methods, the article examines a cartoon
about the Solidarity revolution, which was published in „The
Independent” in January 1989, and was discussed by Gombrich in
August 1989 as an example of the upholding strategy rather than the
subversive power of cartoons which ‘like other ritual acts, exist
to renew and reinforce the ties of common faith and common values
that hold a community together’. I wish to argue that, ultimately,
Derrida’s method of focusing on the seemingly incidental details
repressed by the authors makes it possible to deconstruct not only
the manifest content of the cartoon-text, but also that of its
interpretation by Gombrich. Both of these texts repress a latent
anxiety of the British subject faced with the destabilization of the
post-WWII episteme, leading to the abolition of the Cold War
hierarchical binaries. Łukasz Zaremba The article deals with the
institution of the exhibition and, quite possibly first and foremost,
with the manner of „displaying” (representation), characteristic
for this institution as well as reception and comprehension, closely
associated with it, whose range transcends far beyond museum walls.
Similarly to the map, the museum constitutes a point of departure
for further reflections about perception (the gaze). The opening
part of the text is an attempted analysis of the phenomenon of Aleksandra Melbechowska-Luty The retrospective exhibition of
paintings, drawings and graphic art by Stanisław Fijałkowski, held
in Yannis Papadopulos An analysis of the Platonian concept
of virtue, Aristotle’s „golden mean”, and the role played by
them in moulding the socio-political reality of Greece. The author
ponders on the place assigned to man in the conceptual structure
spanning between two extremities defined as „wild animals” or
„gods”. Within this context he reflects on the social function
of politics, which in its capacity as an ideological yardstick and a
practically applied virtue defines the conditions of the relations
between itself and the other arts, the most prominent being mimesis
and tragedy. Szymon Wróbel Casting Spells on Representation Where should one seek the
archaeological sources of the representation system? Are those
skills embedded in our behavioral and even emotional functioning
since in accordance with the suggestion formulated by Freud sources
of human symbolism should be sought in defensive mechanisms which
allow us to deal with the first painful wounds inflicted against our
narcissism? In the beginning there was the sexual drive, and
representation appears to be its mere perception; on the other hand,
since in das Es we
encounter only representations of the drive and not the drive itself,
then the life of representation seems to precede that of the forces
of the drive. Or should we look for the origin of human symbolism in
linguistic systems, i. e. in the ability to produce an endless
sequence of sentences and to refer it to the world, as has been
suggested by Chomsky? The basic purpose of this study is to attempt
answering the above posed questions and, consequently, to confront
the psychoanalytical and cognitivistic discourse. The author claims
that the superiority of the former discourse consists predominantly
in the fact that it tries to understand the root of representation avant la lettre, i. e. to
comprehend the essence of representation before it started to
fulfill orientation (representation) functions vis a vis the outer word.
Moreover, S. Wróbel maintains that the fundamental paradox of the
human representation system consists in the fact that representation,
whose initial yardstick is escape from the world of drives, is to
become an appliance whose measure is adequacy. Representation, whose
initial function was prolonging the existence of forces more
powerful and primeval than itself (i. e. drives), is to become a
depiction of something that is diametrically different from it and
ontically totally alien, in other words, the outer world.
Representation was the outer quality of the world of nature (the
body) in the psychic apparatus; it is to become an inner simulation
of the outer quality (nature) in the same apparatus. Hence the
possibly hasty but indispensable conclusion that representation is a
fold, a knot, a bow, a stratification, a crisis, and a meeting point
of elements of the natural world, albeit experienced from two sides:
the body and the world. That what we call an interior (representation)
is only the outcome of a collision of two tectonic slabs in the
world of nature: the physics of the outer world and the biology of
the corporeal world. Only such a geographic location of
representation in the world allows us to reconstruct the contents of
this conception. Zbigniew Osiński This text emerged gradually in the
course of several years. Its consecutive stages were composed of my
speeches at conferences and symposia dedicated to Jerzy Grotowski:
in Katarzyna Barańska The text originated from a selection
of recorded interviews conducted with Maria Parczewska and Janusz
Byszewski from the Creative Education Laboratory at the Centre for
Contemporary Art in |