Category: Volume 11, Issue 3

More Phemes

A reading of Hurufism, a Sufi movement based on the science and mysticism of letters, the authors consider a range of affective, performative becomings in this unlikely Persian and Anatolian movement. Hurufism sees multiples of 14 and 28 (from the Perso-Arabic alphabet) in the corresponding hairs of the human face. Accordingly, Slavs and Tatars consider the implications for gender variation and fluidity in these otherwise overburdened graphemes.

ARTMargins, Volume 11, Issue 3, pp. 89-104.

doi:10.1162/artm_a_00328

https://direct.mit.edu/artm/article/11/3/89/114609/More-Phemes

Out of the Outback, into the Art World: Dotting in Australian Aboriginal Art and the Navigation of Globalization

In recent decades, the popularity of Australian Aboriginal dot painting overseas has exploded, with works by some of Australia’s leading artists selling for millions of dollars at auction, as well as featuring in major international exhibitions like the Venice Biennale and documenta. While this carries with it the risk of Aboriginal art and culture becoming diluted or commodified, this essay explores the origins and use of the ‘dotting’ typical of much Australian Aboriginal art of the Western and Central Deserts of Australia, as well as Aboriginal dot painting’s circulation internationally, to consider how Aboriginal art’s entry into the global art … Read more

Homegrown Heroes: Peasant Masculinity and Nation-Building in Modern Egyptian Art

On January 18, 1938 the Fuad I Agricultural Museum in Cairo opened its palatial doors to the local public and featured four untitled portraits (1934–1937) of peasant men sporting distinctive costumes and handicrafts. The artist behind these prominent paintings was an Egyptian named Aly Kamel al-Deeb (1909–1997), whose early career combined commissions at official museums and participation in anti-establishment artist groups in Egypt. What could explain al-Deeb’s transition from creating art in opposition to national museums, to painting for such institutions? This essay analyzes al-Deeb’s four paintings, which I call Homegrown Heroes, and argues that they began shifting the … Read more

Degraded Objects, Harrowed Bodies: Roman Stańczak and Shock Therapy in Poland, 1990–96

Roman Stańczak’s artistic practice can be seen as a symptomatic expression of the multi-layered processes of degradation as experienced in some Polish regions with the advent of capitalism and the country’s entry into the global market at the turn of the 1990s. The neoliberal reforms in Poland brought about dramatic social consequences, leading to an exponential increase in income inequality, unemployment rate and the share of population living below the minimum subsistence level. On the rise throughout the 1990s and reaching its peak in the 2000s, the degradation suffered by some social groups and communities was both material and psychological, … Read more

Sadism to Solidarity: Notes on Art, Philosophy, and the Algerian War

This essay considers a range of artistic and intellectual responses to the Algerian War of Independence that foregrounded the problem of extreme violence. It homes in on the suggestive nexus between anti-colonial solidarities in the metropole and the obsessive concern of artistic, literary, and philosophical avant-gardes with the thought of the Marquis de Sade. It explores how the returns to and of Sade that punctuated the French intellectual scene over the twentieth century could serve as a prism through which to politicize, represent and challenge the manifestations of extreme state and para-state violence in a colonial setting.

ARTMargins, Volume … Read more

Introduction: Art’s Histories Without Art History

The introductory text situates the therapeutic practices of Gina Ferreira and Lula Wanderley in relation to the work of Brazilian modernist artist Lygia Clark. Ferreira is a social psychologist who uses the arts—for instance, photography and film—for the socialization and treatment of psychiatric patients. Wanderley is an artist who brings creativity into the realm of psychiatric care. Both have significantly expanded the sites and amplified the applications of Clark’s Estruturação do self (Structuration of the self) therapy sessions by working in public psychiatric hospitals and clinics in Rio de Janeiro and with marginalized populations. In “Lend Me Your Eyes,” Gina … Read more

From the Editors

The struggle for freedom does not give back to the national culture its former value and shapes; this struggle which aims at a fundamentally different set of relations among men cannot leave intact either the form or the content of the people’s culture. After the conflict there is not only the disappearance of colonialism but also the disappearance of the colonized man.1

ARTMargins, Volume 11, Issue 3, pp. 3-7.

doi:10.1162/artm_e_00322

https://direct.mit.edu/artm/article/11/3/3/114602/From-the-Editors

The Silence That Words Hold

The introductory text situates the therapeutic practices of Gina Ferreira and Lula Wanderley in relation to the work of Brazilian modernist artist Lygia Clark. Ferreira is a social psychologist who uses the arts—for instance, photography and film—for the socialization and treatment of psychiatric patients. Wanderley is an artist who brings creativity into the realm of psychiatric care. Both have significantly expanded the sites and amplified the applications of Clark’s Estruturação do self (Structuration of the self) therapy sessions by working in public psychiatric hospitals and clinics in Rio de Janeiro and with marginalized populations. In “Lend Me Your Eyes,” Gina … Read more

Lend Me Your Eyes

The introductory text situates the therapeutic practices of Gina Ferreira and Lula Wanderley in relation to the work of Brazilian modernist artist Lygia Clark. Ferreira is a social psychologist who uses the arts—for instance, photography and film—for the socialization and treatment of psychiatric patients. Wanderley is an artist who brings creativity into the realm of psychiatric care. Both have significantly expanded the sites and amplified the applications of Clark’s Estruturação do self (Structuration of the self) therapy sessions by working in public psychiatric hospitals and clinics in Rio de Janeiro and with marginalized populations. In “Lend Me Your Eyes,” Gina … Read more

The Persistence of Primitivism and the Debt Collectors

 

Abstract

As the discipline of Art History increasingly aims to decolonize the gaze, questions have become paramount around cross-cultural influence and indebtedness, the traffic and translation of forms and ideas in the colonial modern era, and the mechanisms of postcolonial retrospection.Harney addresses these questions and the resonances of aesthetic primitivism in scholarship on African and diasporic modernisms and global contemporary artistic practices through a critical review of their weight within three recent volumes: Suzanne Preston Blier’s Picasso’s Demoiselles: The Untold Origins of a Modern Masterpiece (Duke UP, 2019), Joshua I. Cohen’s The Black Renaissance: African Sculpture and Modernism Across Read more

Retraction of Holmes, Ros. 2018. “Meanwhile in China … Miao Ying and the Rise of Chinternet Ugly.” Artmargins 7 (1): 31–57

“Meanwhile in China … Miao Ying and the Rise of Chinternet Ugly,” published in ARTMargins Volume 7, Issue 1, (https://doi.org/10.1162/ARTM_a_00199) has been retracted by agreement between the author, the ARTMargins editors, and the MIT Press. A reader conveyed concerns regarding the originality of parts of the author’s article in May 2022. The journal independently investigated the charges and verified them. Following Dr. Holmes’s admission of plagiarism in all the instances identified by the ARTMargins investigation, the journal informed the journals and authors whose work was left un-cited, as well as the Ethics Committee at the author’s university. Below Read more