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Translated Classics Around the Millennium: Vibrant Hybrids or Shattered Icons?

Lorna Hardwick

in Translation and the Classic: Identity as Change in the History of Culture

This chapter explores the paradox that translations of classical texts are necessary both because the texts are valuable and because they are inadequate and that therefore the translations ensure ... More

This chapter explores the paradox that translations of classical texts are necessary both because the texts are valuable and because they are inadequate and that therefore the translations ensure that the notion of ‘the classic’ is constantly being both reasserted and subverted. The discussion considers examples of overt and covert translation in the work of creative writers and scholarly translators, and demonstrates how translations can become hybrid texts that occupy new sites within and between cultures, transforming temporal and aesthetic relationships as well as provoking resistance and conflict. The impact of recent classical translations in poetry and theatre shows there is a continuing central and catalytic role for Greek and Roman texts. However, this activity challenges some traditional formulations of classical genealogies and values, and requires models of translation theory that conceptualise dialogue and exchange rather than emphasising invasion and violence.Less

Images

Sam Rohdie

in Film Modernism

Most of the images and scenes in Histoire(s) du cinéma are citations. If their origins cannot be found, it is probable, nevertheless, that in time they will be. Some scenes in the film are staged, ... More

Most of the images and scenes in Histoire(s) du cinéma are citations. If their origins cannot be found, it is probable, nevertheless, that in time they will be. Some scenes in the film are staged, for example, monologues by professional actors: The monologues are quotations from philosophy and poetry either directly or in a collage of phrases from different sources.Less

Returns

Sam Rohdie

in Film Modernism

The citations in Histoire(s) are not its models, nor exemplary, but simply material, elements in a surface assembly like a collage. The movement of the film forward is also a movement in reverse. ... More

The citations in Histoire(s) are not its models, nor exemplary, but simply material, elements in a surface assembly like a collage. The movement of the film forward is also a movement in reverse. Godard’s montage transforms a previous image by a subsequent one such that the future does not come after but before. In general, and in its details, and at each moment, the film is a return to overlapping past(s) of the cinema, of the film, of Godard’s own past. The returns are like memories, incursions into an unconscious depth that comes to the surface unannounced. Literally, and constantly, the past is subjected to unforeseen transformations heading toward an unknown future. It is not that the past, is the future but rather that the future is a rearrangement of returns. Such returns are neither stable nor controlled, but perpetual, shifting and open. Every film of Godard’s is so structured and though, often, there is a principal underlying text, the films are not imitations or adaptations, but a recycling of them as one element among others, recalled to be dismantled, dismembered, reconstructed and questioned, a return that moves forward.Less

Music of Disruption: Collage and Fragmentation as an Expression of Trauma in Alfred Schnittke’s Concerto for Piano and Strings

Maria Cizmic

in Performing Pain: Music and Trauma in Eastern Europe

This chapter discusses history, memory, suffering, and truth as themes that circulated in 1970s USSR. The concern for truth in conjunction with the related concepts of realism and authenticity become ... More

This chapter discusses history, memory, suffering, and truth as themes that circulated in 1970s USSR. The concern for truth in conjunction with the related concepts of realism and authenticity become particularly pertinent to Alfred Schnittke’s Concerto for Piano and Strings. As a work that bears witness to its historical moment, Schnittke’s piece offers a disjointed musical surface marked by many different styles and quotations, typical of his “polystylism” of the 1970s and 80s. This chapter argues that Schnittke’s “truth” does not come from the “documentary” quality of his musical quotations, but from the musical narrative they comprise. Through an analogical analysis, this chapter considers the concerto’s fragmented musical surface, with is references to past musical styles and its varied handling of musical time, in relationship to trauma conceptualized as a “disease of time.” His work performs the break down of linear narrative frequently ascribed to the effects of trauma.Less

Introduction: Meaning’s Work

Lisa Siraganian

in Modernism’s Other Work: The Art Object’s Political Life

This introduction defines key terms—air, framing, incorporation—to contextualize the debates about meaning, autonomy, and politics that structure the book, while also setting out a map of its ... More

This introduction defines key terms—air, framing, incorporation—to contextualize the debates about meaning, autonomy, and politics that structure the book, while also setting out a map of its chapters, complete with brief summaries. The chapter recounts how painterly discussions of collage enabled writers to think about the text’s frame as either excluding or including particulars of the reader’s world. Through pointed discussions of Wallace Stevens, Marcel Duchamp, William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, and Michael Fried, we examine this new conception of aesthetic autonomy. The reader’s or viewer’s relation to the art object became a way to envision the political subject’s ideal relation to liberalism and the discourse of individual rights. In addition, this chapter incorporates discussions of theoretical texts by T. S. Eliot, Theodor Adorno, Peter Bürger, and others to distinguish the book’s account of modernism from canonical accounts that focus on post-structuralism and ideology critique.Less

Distilling Complexity: Atmospheric Indeterminacy and the Culture of Disciplined Improvisation

Phaedra Daipha

in Masters of Uncertainty: Weather Forecasters and the Quest for Ground Truth

This chapter takes a systematic look at how NWS forecasters take stock of the weather and establishes that they have cultivated an omnivorous appetite for information, at times even enlisting ... More

This chapter takes a systematic look at how NWS forecasters take stock of the weather and establishes that they have cultivated an omnivorous appetite for information, at times even enlisting personal observations of the weather outside to resolve the ambiguity and complexity of the weather on their screens. To illuminate how forecasters harness diverse information to project themselves into the future, the concept of “collage” is introduced—a heuristic that frames meteorological decision-making as a process of assembling, appropriating, superimposing, juxtaposing, and blurring of information. Weather forecasting as the art of collage underscores the culture of disciplined improvisation that characterizes NWS forecasting operations. And it externalizes into screenwork the cognitive labor of distilling and extrapolating complex atmospheric data into a provisionally coherent prognosis.Less

Surrealism and Jules Verne: Depth of Subtext in a Collage by Max Ernst

Abigail Susik

in Surrealism, Science Fiction and Comics

Surrealism combines discourses of science, modernity, adventure, and documentary reality with modalities of fiction in crucial ways that resonate with the rise of SF in the mid-twentieth century. ... More

Surrealism combines discourses of science, modernity, adventure, and documentary reality with modalities of fiction in crucial ways that resonate with the rise of SF in the mid-twentieth century. Even more fundamental than this assertion, Surrealism is connected to SF through its pursuit of the farthest limits of the known – the ability of consciousness and imagination to stretch past evident knowledge and rational deduction. In this regard, it is helpful to examine one of the few explicit references to Jules Verne in Surrealism that has been so far overlooked, which will serve to illuminate some aspects of Surrealism’s affinity with SF as well as the nature of its reception of Jules Verne This is the collage by German Surrealist Max Ernst from chapter eight of his first collage novel La Femme 100 têtes [The Hundred Headless Woman] (1929). Captioned ‘Fantômas, Dante et Jules Verne,’ this concatenation of temporal references from the twelfth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries suggests that the Surrealist conception of Verne centred upon his projected lineage in a particular strain of European fiction that extended far back in time, and that is what will be argued in this chapter.Less

André Breton, Rodolphe Töpffer and the Automatic Message

Barnaby Dicker

in Surrealism, Science Fiction and Comics

For his seven groundbreaking comic strips, published between 1833 and 1846, Rodolphe Töpffer developed a method very similar to Surrealist automatism. Giving an account of his approach in his 1846 ... More

For his seven groundbreaking comic strips, published between 1833 and 1846, Rodolphe Töpffer developed a method very similar to Surrealist automatism. Giving an account of his approach in his 1846 Essay on Physiognomy, he wrote ‘The picture-story has the unique advantage of springing, so to speak, from intuition,’ and that ‘a single page by a man who is competent in his subject – by the mere fact that it emanates directly from his mind – is an infinitely, incomparably … reliable criterion of his moral and intellectual faculties.’ Taking up André Breton’s insistence on historicising automatism, this chapter examines Breton’s and Töpffer’s complimentary notions of automatism and shows how they can illuminate one another, as well as the endurance of such methods in more recent SF comics, including Moebius’s Upon a Star (1983). The link between the comic strip format and Surrealist automatism is further strengthened by their shared concern with, and exploration of, the graphic interplay between drawing and writing. The chapter closes by looking at Breton’s and Töpffer’s respective conceptions of the ‘page,’ both as the unique object worked on by the artist/writer and as the mass-reproduced object handled by the viewer/reader.Less

Accident and Apocalypse in Alan Burns’s Europe After the Rain

Jeannette Baxter

in Surrealism, Science Fiction and Comics

This chapter examines the alliance of Surrealism and SF in the postwar writings of Alan Burns. From the early apocalyptic novel, Europe After the Rain (1965), through to Celebrations (1967), Babel ... More

This chapter examines the alliance of Surrealism and SF in the postwar writings of Alan Burns. From the early apocalyptic novel, Europe After the Rain (1965), through to Celebrations (1967), Babel (1969), Dreamamerika: A Surrealist Fantasy (1972) and Revolutions of the Night (1986), Burns drew on a range of Surrealist techniques (such as collage, montage, exquisite corpse), often assembling his novels out of ‘found’ linguistic material on large table tops. As the titles of two of his novels suggest, the work of Max Ernst features prominently in Burns’s postwar project, but so, too, do the marvellous sculptures of Joan Miro, and the collages of Kurt Schwitters and Pablo Picasso (when speaking of his visual/literary methodologies, Burns frequently invokes Picasso’s dictum: ‘I don’t seek, I find’). Writing from the edges of the British New Wave, and consistently producing collage-texts, which have been labelled ‘extreme’ and ‘unreadable’, Burns’ Surrealist science fictions have been largely neglected by readers and critics alike. Here, these ‘extreme’ surrealisms are returned to the critical foreground so that their significance as critiques of postwar art, literature and culture can be assessed.Less

“Speech without Practical Locale”: Radio and Lorine Niedecker’s Aurality

Broo Khouglum

in Broadcasting Modernism

When Lorine Niedecker invokes radio as “a good medium for poetry”, she indexes the aural components of poetic writing and reception. This chapter argues that the radio was a sustained subtending ... More

When Lorine Niedecker invokes radio as “a good medium for poetry”, she indexes the aural components of poetic writing and reception. This chapter argues that the radio was a sustained subtending component of Niedecker's composition practices, at times providing a context for her reflections on orality and aurality in poetry and at other times offering a venue for which to write, a subject to write about, and a means to experiment with genre and method. By considering Niedecker's practices of writing script-poems and radio scripts, listening to radio, and incorporating speech in poems, one might understand more closely her attunement to precise qualities, durations, rhythms, and materials of sound that generates a poetics of aural collage, speech reportage, and voice experiment.Less

Heidi Duckler

Melanie Kloetzel and Carolyn Pavlik

in Site Dance: Choreographers and the Lure of Alternative Spaces

Collage Dance Theatre is a Los Angeles-based site-specific dance company in which Heidi Duckler serves as the artistic director. Duckler values community and historical elements, and she is known for ... More

Collage Dance Theatre is a Los Angeles-based site-specific dance company in which Heidi Duckler serves as the artistic director. Duckler values community and historical elements, and she is known for utilizing sites that are often overlooked for performances on a large scale. Along with her sister Merridawn Duckler, she is able to formulate choreography and scripts that reflect the features of her chosen sites. At the beginning of the interview, Duckler is able to implicitly differentiate site-adapted work from site-specific work, and was also able to identify the difference between choreographing for specific sites and conventional theaters. She expresses how she is inspired by ordinary life and utilizing what is available to her for integrating into the performance. Duckler also articulates that the most challenging yet advantageous aspect of doing site work is that she has to work with people who are not involved in the art world.Less

Michael Cummings: Stitching in Tempo

Graham Lock

in The Hearing Eye: Jazz & Blues Influences in African American Visual Art

Michael Cummings belongs to a new generation of art quilters who have moved away from traditional patterns to find fresh images with which to tell their stories. Born in Los Angeles in 1945, he moved ... More

Michael Cummings belongs to a new generation of art quilters who have moved away from traditional patterns to find fresh images with which to tell their stories. Born in Los Angeles in 1945, he moved to New York in 1970, where he hoped initially to become a painter but later switched first to collage and then to quilting. This chapter presents an interview with the quilter Michael Cummings, who is taking a traditional African American art form into new territories with works such as his African Jazz series and his tributes to Josephine Baker. His work has been seen in many solo and group shows, has appeared on the covers of books and CDs, has been featured on American television, and has also been used to illustrate children's books. The author spoke with him in his Harlem brownstone, its walls lined with cultural artifacts from the African diaspora, in October 2003.Less

Sam Middleton: The Painter as Improvising Soloist

Graham Lock

in The Hearing Eye: Jazz & Blues Influences in African American Visual Art

Collagist Sam Middleton has lived in the Netherlands for nearly half a century but he grew up in Harlem in the 1930s and the music he heard and loved then continues to inform his work. In his teens ... More

Collagist Sam Middleton has lived in the Netherlands for nearly half a century but he grew up in Harlem in the 1930s and the music he heard and loved then continues to inform his work. In his teens he joined the merchant marine, traveled the globe, and later lived briefly in Mexico, Spain, Sweden, and Denmark, before settling in the Netherlands, which has been his home since 1962. A self-taught artist, he has specialized in collage for most of his working life and has often taken music, especially jazz and blues, as his theme. He has also worked in the theatre and ballet, designing costumes and decor, and has painted for both book and record covers. This chapter presents an interview with Sam Middleton in his studio in Schagen, the Netherlands, in February 2004.Less

Three Subterranean Transnationality: Race, Affect, and Material Form in Circle K Cycles

in Across Meridians: History and Figuration in Karen Tei Yamashita's Transnational Novels

This chapter explores the issue of subterranean transnationality in Karen Tei Yamashita's novel Circle K Cycles. It highlights the focus of the novel on representational politics, and describes how ... More

This chapter explores the issue of subterranean transnationality in Karen Tei Yamashita's novel Circle K Cycles. It highlights the focus of the novel on representational politics, and describes how the persistent mythology of race-based cultural uniformity and the circular movement of Japanese Brazilian migration as its economic expression were visualized in the text. The chapter also considers Yamashita's experiment with the postmodern technique of collage and her mixing of sociological reportage with fictional representation at various junctures of the book.Less

‘To Make Strange Things Possible’: The Photomontages of the Bakor Photo Studio in Lamu, Kenya

Heike Behrend

in Media and Identity in Africa

The Bakor Studio in Lamu, situated on one of the main streets of the Old Town, was established in the 1960s. The founder, Mr Omar Said Bakor, born in 1932, was a self-made man and brilliant ... More

The Bakor Studio in Lamu, situated on one of the main streets of the Old Town, was established in the 1960s. The founder, Mr Omar Said Bakor, born in 1932, was a self-made man and brilliant bricoleur, who never went to school. Before opening the studio, he worked for ten years as a street photographer. Bakor's photographic montages may serve as examplars in the discussion of the complicated processes of the localisation and hybridisation of a new global media: photography. Of interest in such a discussion are the points of contacts and ‘third spaces’ that come into being when images and visual media travel to and enter other cultures and representational regimes. Photography is connected to already-existing local artistic traditions, and is shaped and transformed by them. Through local interventions and the mediation of local social, religious and cultural values, it is reworked to attract local customers. In the case of Bakor's photographic collages, these mediating forces specifically include the phenomenon of Islamic revival and the tensions between the new picture media and the Islamic prohibition of images.Less

Memory Pieces: Collage, Memorial and the Poetics of Intimacy in Joe Brainard, Jasper Johns and Frank O'Hara

Nick Selby (ed.)

in Frank O'Hara Now: New Essays on the New York Poet

This chapter presents a reading of O'Hara alongside examples of work by his artist friends and collaborators Joe Brainard and Jasper Johns. It argues that O'Hara's sense of his poetry — and indeed ... More

This chapter presents a reading of O'Hara alongside examples of work by his artist friends and collaborators Joe Brainard and Jasper Johns. It argues that O'Hara's sense of his poetry — and indeed his body — as a self-aware performance unpicks, as it were, the textual stitches in which authenticity and feelingness might be located. The chapter examines the work of O'Hara, Brainard and Johns work in terms of a poetics of collage and how such a poetics might be seen to open out questions of what — literally — to put in the picture. If, for Brainard, memory and feelingness are key elements to his art and writing, this is also true of the elegiac pieces made by Johns that reflect upon his friendship with O'Hara. What unites these works is their questioning of the efficacy of a poetics of elegy and of touch.Less

Reinventing the Past: Pastiche, Collage, or “Criticism”?

Arthur Berger

in Reflections of an American Composer

The chapter traces the rise of neoclassicism in music at the beginning of the twentieth century at about the same time that a new complexity was gathering momentum in the early music of Schoenberg ... More

The chapter traces the rise of neoclassicism in music at the beginning of the twentieth century at about the same time that a new complexity was gathering momentum in the early music of Schoenberg and Stravinsky. The seeds of simplification as a reaction against the growing density of Romantic and early modern music were beginning to sprout. It is still believed in some quarters that the neoclassical music's admittedly greater accessibility was what must have fueled the movement. On the contrary, what much of the public saw in middle-period Stravinsky was a gross mishandling of their favorite older masters. In listening to this music, if one does not assume the role of tune detective, dispensing demerits upon every allegedly “illegal” allusion to other music, one must inevitably be aware of the ingenuity and invention that can be found to be there. The originality of middle-period Stravinsky was completely invisible to members of the press, who responded by complaining about the utter lack of personal style and integrity and bemoaning how the disparate sources, such as manipulating tones, timbres, and rhythms, on which he drew resulted in total incoherence. Neoclassicism in whatever field of the arts has long had a bad press, its products treated as hand-me-downs, not even as acceptable as something recycled.Less