Volume 39, numéro 1, 2014

EN :

This essay traces the origin and stakes of the association between historical Islamic art and works of contemporary art by artists from Muslim countries. The idea that underpins this association—that there is a form of continuity between these works—first appeared in London in 1976 during the World of Islam Festival. This event laid the foundation for the understanding of Islamic art as a vehicle for cultural continuity, so that contemporary art by artists from Muslim countries came to be seen as an extension of Islamic art and became perceived by many as a contemporary Islamic art, that is to say, the art of the Islamic civilization of today. This article argues that the notion of Islamic civilization that the World of Islam Festival vehiculated continues to be felt in the new paradigm for Islamic art that it initiated. This essay analyzes how this event unintentionally spawned a new model for understanding not only Islamic art, but also Islamic civilization, a civilization that is now once again considered alive.

FR :

Par un survol sommaire de la démarche de Vito Acconci – de la poésie à l’art de la performance, à l’installation et à l’art public – et par une discussion plus approfondie de ses récents projets d’architecture et d’aménagement de l’espace public, nous examinons certaines questions centrales de la pratique du design, notamment celle des définitions toujours mouvantes de la criticalité et celle des répercussions sur le design contemporain de la polarité persistante entre le « pur » et l’« appliqué ».

EN :

In 1852, the Museum of Ornamental Art, today the Victoria and Albert Museum, opened its doors to the public. Taking part in a general reform of the British art and design education system, the museum sought to instill what were considered good design principles. To do so, a museographic strategy that proved to be as popular as it was controversial was chosen: the exhibition gallery entitled “Decorations on False Principles,” which immediately became known as the “Chamber of Horrors.” This gallery, a dogmatic expression of the functionalist conception of ornament advocated by the museum, referred through its nickname to another then famous Chamber of Horrors, the one in Mme Tussaud’s wax museum. In this paper, I will first argue that the Museum of Ornamental Art’s Chamber of Horrors is an early example of the association of ornament with crime that reappears in later design theories. Second, by examining the means taken to transmit the idea of the criminalization of ornaments designed after “bad principles,” I demonstrate why the concept of the Chamber of Horrors is in itself doomed to failure. I thus analyze this uncommon exhibition as a manifestation of the museum’s aesthetic philosophy and mechanisms at a time when the institution’s modalities were still in the process of elaboration.

EN :

The ability or inability to perceive facial features and expressions has a direct impact on communication. In this sense, the clarity or elusiveness of the image in the experience of portraiture should influence spectatorship. It is from this perspective that American artist Jim Campbell uses scientific references to explore the effects of visual ambiguity in electronic portraits belonging to his series “Ambiguous Icons.” This article focuses on two of these portraits, namely a matching pair in which the medium significantly obfuscates the representation: Portrait of a Portrait of Harry Nyquist and Portrait of a Portrait of Claude Shannon (2000). The sitters are two scientists whose work laid the foundation for information theory, a mathematical model of communication originally created for telecommunications, but whose applications later extended to cognitive science. I examine how these artworks, by material and formal means, can be understood as artistic analogies of information theory and then argue that through this theoretical reference they evoke a traditional model of human cognition. Lastly, I discuss the strategies adopted to elicit the viewer’s response from two perspectives: the perceptual experience and, more broadly, the aesthetic experience, respectively analyzed through the artist’s reinterpretation of a 1973 experiment on facial recognition and through a 1960s transposition of information theory to the arts.

FR :

En 2011, l’artiste de rue et photographe JR lance un défi à l’auditoire de la conférence TED : l’aider à la réalisation de son projet Inside Out en participant à des projets de montage de portraits publics qui viseront à générer un dialogue, susciter la sensibilisation, raconter des histoires ou rendre les communautés visibles. Trois ans plus tard, avec plus de 196,500 portraits affichés dans le monde entier, 902 actions de groupe et un flot constant de nouveaux projets publiés sur le site web et la page Facebook de Inside Out, ce phénomène mondial continue de croître. Cet article situe Inside Out parmi les cultures de participation qui ont émergé depuis les années 1990. De plus, il explique comment l’impact et les conséquences du néolibéralisme mondial ont contribué à établir les conditions dans lesquelles les actions de groupe de Inside Out peuvent se développer.

EN :

Since the emergence of exhibition practices in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there has been a progressive normalization of the material conditions for observing paintings, such as their placement and the spectator’s distance to them. Just like painters and Salon visitors, art critics needed to move closer to their object of inquiry in order to gain better knowledge of it, but paradoxically, they could not claim objectivity without stepping back. The ideal distance that would allow viewers to simultaneously grasp the whole and the details was a contentious topic of discussion for nineteenth-century artists, critics, and scientists. Among the different ways in which this question was formulated in art criticism, one in particular reveals the presuppositions of the time about proximity: the constant reference to the smell of the painting. Associated with proximity, smell metaphorizes the pleasure or trouble spectators feel when they get close to paintings, to their pictorial materiality, or even to the figures depicted. Because smell always functions as a sign of the substance from which it emanates, art critics’ reference to it allowed them to consider the problem of proximity within the social and aesthetic issues of their time.