Chim↑Pom reenact their “100 Kiai” (100 Cheers). Photo courtesy Gadabout. February 15th I will be giving a paper on Disaster and Creativity panel at the 101st Annual CAA Conference. Here is the short abstract: “Between Awe and Anger: Young Japanese Artists Respond to Tohoku and Fukushima” Artistic responses to the twin disasters that struck Northeastern […]
I posted this blog entry exactly one month ago on Le Huffington Post. By the end of the first week if was the most emailed article on the site, and as of today it was still the most emailed entry of the month. Make sure to view the slideshow, the images speak for themselves. HuffingtonPost.fr […]
My latest Huffington Post article about Arizona based artists Geny Dignac and Rotraut Klein-Moquay is out now. To view full text click here.
May 2, our very last seminar meeting, we had a pleasure of Bill Berkson’s company. What a great end to a great semester! Thank you, everyone! Born in New York in 1939, Bill Berkson is a poet, critic, teacher and sometime curator, who has been active in the art and literary worlds since his early twenties. Director […]
On view through April 14.
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Beyond Symbolism and Surrealism: Alexei Remizov's Synthetic Art by Julia Friedman The great modernist eccentric Alexei Remizov was a “writers’ writer” whose innovative poetic prose has long since entered the Russian literary canon. Gradually expanding his working methods to make drawing an integral part of the writing process, during the 1930s and 1940s, Remizov created hundreds of albums that combined texts with collages and india ink and watercolor illustrations. In Beyond Symbolism and Surrealism, Julia Friedman provides the first extensive examination of the dynamic interplay between text and image in Remizov’s albums, revealing their coequal roles in his oneiric and synaesthetic brand of storytelling. (more) Northwestern University Press 7 x 10, 300 pgs, Trade Cloth ISBN 0-8101-2617-6 / $69.95 |
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| Consuming Russia: Popular Culture, Sex, and Society since Gorbachev Adele Marie Barker (Editor), Eliot Borenstein (Contributor), Julia Friedman (Contributor), Adam Weiner (Contributor), Elizabeth Kristofovich Zelensky (Contributor), Robert Edelman (Contributor) With the collapse of the Soviet empire in the late 1980s, the Russian social landscape has undergone its most dramatic changes since the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, turning the once bland and monolithic state-run marketplace into a virtual maze of specialty shops—from sushi bars to discotheques and tattoo parlors. In Consuming Russia editor Adele Marie Barker presents the first book-length volume to explore the sweeping cultural transformation taking place in the new Russia. (more) Paperback: 488 pages Publisher: Duke University Press Books (June 10, 1999) Language: English ISBN-10: 0822323133 ISBN-13: 978-0822323136 Google Books: Link |
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“A Powerless Seeker: Merezhkovsky’s Romance as Life-Writing” by Julia Friedman The notion of the symbol is at the root of the Symbolist movement, but this symbol is different from the way it was used and understood in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. In the Symbolist movement, a symbol is not an allegory. The Belgian writer Maurice Maeterlinck defined its essence in an article that appeared on April 24, 1887, in L'Art moderne. He wrote that the notion of a symbol in the Symbolist movement is the opposite of the notion of the symbol in classical usage: instead of going from the abstract to the concrete (Venus, incarnated in the statue, represents love), it goes from the concrete to the abstract, from 'what is seen, heard, felt, tasted, and sensed to the evocation of the idea.' This volume attempts to give a glimpse into the power of the Symbolist movement and the nature of its fundamental and interdisciplinary role in the evolution of art and literature of the twentieth century. It records the studies of a group of scholars, who met and discussed these topics together for the first time in 2009. While illuminating the specificity of Symbolism in art, architecture and literature in different European countries, these articles also demonstrate the crucial role of French Symbolism in the development of the international Symbolist movement. |
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“The Writing-Drawing Continuum of Alexei Remizov,” by Julia Friedman Paperback: 422 pages "Elective affinities" - a notion originally borrowed by Goethe for his 1809 novel of the same title from eighteenth-century chemistry - here refers to the active role of the two partners in the relationship of the pictorial and the verbal. Following the experimental modalities opened up by Goethe, the present volume is divided into three sections, which explore, respectively, how words and images can merge in harmony, engage in conflicts and contestations, and, finally, interact in an experimental way that self-consciously tests the boundaries and relations among verbal and visual arts. New perspectives on word and image relationships emerge, in periods, national traditions, works, and materials as different as (among many others) an installation by Marcel Duchamp and the manual accompanying it; the impact of artificial light sources on literature and art; nineteenth-century British illustrations of Native Americans; the contemporary comic book; a seventeenth-century Italian devotional manuscript uniting text, image, and music; Chinese body and performance art. |
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“Alexei Remizov’s Creative Act,” by Julia Friedman |
