ARTMargins

Contemporary art across the evolving global peripheries

Monthly Archive: March 2006

ARTMargins Online: Articles

—

 by Mikhail Epstein (Atlanta) ·

Towards the Techno-Humanities: A Manifesto

The creative aspect of the humanities has not yet found its recognition in the established classification and methodology of scientific disciplines. Are the humanities a purely scholarly field, or should there be some active, constructive supplement to them? We know that technology serves as the practical extension (“application”) of natural sciences and politics as the extension of social sciences.

Both technology and politics are designed to transform what their respective disciplines study objectively. Is there any activity in the humanities that would correspond to this transformative status of technology and politics? In the following schema, the third line demonstrates a … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Exhibition Reviews

—

 by Sebastian Cichocki (Bytom) ·

Bloody Dew and Other Prophesies: On the Art of Bogna Burska

A Peculiar Fluid

“Blut ist ein ganz besonderer Saft” (blood is a very peculiar fluid) says Mephistopheles in Goethe`s Faust. Indeed, blood attracts us and makes us avert our eyes, it fills us with fear and tenderness. What a symbolic potential it has! After all, blood is a symbol of sacrifice, martyrdom and redemption as well as war, murder, and sustenance to the dead. On the one hand, the artist deprives human blood of its magical, ritual power using it in spite of the Biblical curse (“Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Articles

—

 by Jovana Stokic (New York) ·

Un-Doing Monoculture: Women Artists from the “Blind Spot of Europe” – the Former Yugoslavia

Since the 1970s, critical practices of women artists in the region of the former Yugoslavia have proven that these women are not only subjects to ideology imposed on them. Their works actively participate in politics of representation: by refuting simplified notions of self-representation, these artists contribute to the feminist critique of identity politics.

This paper deals with feminine (self)representations that challenge viewers’ expectations in many different ways. Specifically, I am interested in bringing into focus self-representations by the artists that deal with notions of feminine beauty and body image, as they are perceived in ideological and media environments of the … Read more