Greg Thomas
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781789620269
- eISBN:
- 9781789629538
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781789620269.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
This book presents the first in-depth account of the relationship between English and Scottish poets and the international concrete poetry movement of the 1950s-70s. Concrete poetry was a literary ...
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This book presents the first in-depth account of the relationship between English and Scottish poets and the international concrete poetry movement of the 1950s-70s. Concrete poetry was a literary and artistic style which reactivated early-twentieth-century modernist impulses towards the merging of artistic media while simultaneously speaking to a gamut of contemporary contexts, from post-1945 social reconstruction to cybernetics, mass media, and the sixties counter-culture. The terms of its development in England and Scotland also suggest new ways of mapping ongoing complexities in the relationship between those two national cultures, and of tracing broader sociological and cultural trends in Britain during the 1960s-70s. Focusing especially on the work of Ian Hamilton Finlay, Edwin Morgan, Dom Sylvester Houédard, and Bob Cobbing, Border Blurs is based on new and extensive archival and primary research. It fills a gap in contemporary understandings of a significant literary and artistic genre which has been largely overlooked by literary critics. It also sheds new light on the development of British and Scottish literature during the late twentieth century, on the emergence of intermedia art, and on the development of modernism beyond its early-twentieth-century, urban Western networks.Less
This book presents the first in-depth account of the relationship between English and Scottish poets and the international concrete poetry movement of the 1950s-70s. Concrete poetry was a literary and artistic style which reactivated early-twentieth-century modernist impulses towards the merging of artistic media while simultaneously speaking to a gamut of contemporary contexts, from post-1945 social reconstruction to cybernetics, mass media, and the sixties counter-culture. The terms of its development in England and Scotland also suggest new ways of mapping ongoing complexities in the relationship between those two national cultures, and of tracing broader sociological and cultural trends in Britain during the 1960s-70s. Focusing especially on the work of Ian Hamilton Finlay, Edwin Morgan, Dom Sylvester Houédard, and Bob Cobbing, Border Blurs is based on new and extensive archival and primary research. It fills a gap in contemporary understandings of a significant literary and artistic genre which has been largely overlooked by literary critics. It also sheds new light on the development of British and Scottish literature during the late twentieth century, on the emergence of intermedia art, and on the development of modernism beyond its early-twentieth-century, urban Western networks.
Nilo Couret
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780520296848
- eISBN:
- 9780520969162
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520296848.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This book reconceptualizes both the geopolitical boundaries and the periodization of Latin American film histories in order to reveal a predominant comic mode in the cultural practices of Latin ...
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This book reconceptualizes both the geopolitical boundaries and the periodization of Latin American film histories in order to reveal a predominant comic mode in the cultural practices of Latin America in the twentieth century. Comedies have been either relegated to the margins of regional film histories in the shadow of the New Latin American Cinema or articulated to the broader socializing and nationalistic function of earlier commercial traditions. Rather than map Latin American cinema according to radical politics, film directors, or film movements—as do conventional film histories—this comparative project examines the formal and narrative operations of Argentine, Brazilian, and Mexican commercially successful comedies released between the 1920s and the 1950s in order to demonstrate how they functioned as peripheral responses to modernization and prefigured the more explicitly political New Latin American Cinema of the 1960s. Each chapter braids empirical research, close reading, film theory, and Latin American studies to argue that Latin American cinema from the studio period became classical in ways that were phenomenally distinct from but structurally akin to those of Hollywood. To that end, each chapter presents one way that classical Hollywood was constructed within film studies and demonstrates how the ways cinema became classical in Hollywood do not occur identically in Latin America. Using an approach that encompasses both textual analysis as well as a range of practices from the film experience, such as stardom, trade and popular publications, and broadcast media, this book proposes thinking classicism as a discourse that mediates and renders the world, looking at the construction of the aesthetic world as diegetic totality and the circulation of the texts and objects in global circuits of economic exchange.Less
This book reconceptualizes both the geopolitical boundaries and the periodization of Latin American film histories in order to reveal a predominant comic mode in the cultural practices of Latin America in the twentieth century. Comedies have been either relegated to the margins of regional film histories in the shadow of the New Latin American Cinema or articulated to the broader socializing and nationalistic function of earlier commercial traditions. Rather than map Latin American cinema according to radical politics, film directors, or film movements—as do conventional film histories—this comparative project examines the formal and narrative operations of Argentine, Brazilian, and Mexican commercially successful comedies released between the 1920s and the 1950s in order to demonstrate how they functioned as peripheral responses to modernization and prefigured the more explicitly political New Latin American Cinema of the 1960s. Each chapter braids empirical research, close reading, film theory, and Latin American studies to argue that Latin American cinema from the studio period became classical in ways that were phenomenally distinct from but structurally akin to those of Hollywood. To that end, each chapter presents one way that classical Hollywood was constructed within film studies and demonstrates how the ways cinema became classical in Hollywood do not occur identically in Latin America. Using an approach that encompasses both textual analysis as well as a range of practices from the film experience, such as stardom, trade and popular publications, and broadcast media, this book proposes thinking classicism as a discourse that mediates and renders the world, looking at the construction of the aesthetic world as diegetic totality and the circulation of the texts and objects in global circuits of economic exchange.
Catherine Gander and Sarah Garland (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781784991500
- eISBN:
- 9781526115003
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9781784991500.001.0001
- Subject:
- Art, Art History
Mixed Messages presents and interrogates ten distinct moments from the arts of nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first century America where visual and verbal forms blend and clash. Charting ...
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Mixed Messages presents and interrogates ten distinct moments from the arts of nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first century America where visual and verbal forms blend and clash. Charting correspondences concerned with the expression and meaning of human experience, this volume moves beyond standard interdisciplinary theoretical approaches to consider the written and visual artwork in embodied, cognitive, and contextual terms.
Offering a genuinely interdisciplinary contribution to the intersecting fields of art history, avant-garde studies, word-image relations, and literary studies, Mixed Messages takes in architecture, notebooks, poetry, painting, conceptual art, contemporary art, comic books, photographs and installations, ending with a speculative conclusion on the role of the body in the experience of digital mixed media. Each of the ten case studies explores the juxtaposition of visual and verbal forms in a manner that moves away from treating verbal and visual symbols as operating in binary or oppositional systems, and towards a consideration of mixed media, multi-media and intermedia work as brought together in acts of creation, exhibition, reading, viewing, and immersion. The collection advances research into embodiment theory, affect, pragmatist aesthetics, as well as into the continuing legacy of romanticism and of dada, conceptual art and surrealism in an American context.Less
Mixed Messages presents and interrogates ten distinct moments from the arts of nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first century America where visual and verbal forms blend and clash. Charting correspondences concerned with the expression and meaning of human experience, this volume moves beyond standard interdisciplinary theoretical approaches to consider the written and visual artwork in embodied, cognitive, and contextual terms.
Offering a genuinely interdisciplinary contribution to the intersecting fields of art history, avant-garde studies, word-image relations, and literary studies, Mixed Messages takes in architecture, notebooks, poetry, painting, conceptual art, contemporary art, comic books, photographs and installations, ending with a speculative conclusion on the role of the body in the experience of digital mixed media. Each of the ten case studies explores the juxtaposition of visual and verbal forms in a manner that moves away from treating verbal and visual symbols as operating in binary or oppositional systems, and towards a consideration of mixed media, multi-media and intermedia work as brought together in acts of creation, exhibition, reading, viewing, and immersion. The collection advances research into embodiment theory, affect, pragmatist aesthetics, as well as into the continuing legacy of romanticism and of dada, conceptual art and surrealism in an American context.
Paul Steinbeck
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780226375960
- eISBN:
- 9780226376011
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226376011.001.0001
- Subject:
- Music, Ethnomusicology, World Music
Message to Our Folks is the first book about the Art Ensemble of Chicago, one of the most influential groups in jazz and experimental music. Unlike many texts in jazz studies and improvisation ...
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Message to Our Folks is the first book about the Art Ensemble of Chicago, one of the most influential groups in jazz and experimental music. Unlike many texts in jazz studies and improvisation studies, Message to Our Folks combines musical analysis with historical inquiry. The book offers a detailed history of the Art Ensemble, from its 1966 founding on Chicago’s South Side to its final performances in the 2010s. But the book’s greatest contribution to music theory (and a range of other disciplines) may be its analyses of the Art Ensemble’s performances. Message to Our Folks proposes a new theory of group improvisation that explains how the Art Ensemble members are able to improvise together in many different styles while drawing on an extensive repertoire of notated compositions. The book also examines the intermedia dimensions of the Art Ensemble’s performances, which integrate music with poetry, theater, costumes, and movement. Additionally, Message to Our Folks investigates the connections between the group’s performances and its distinctive model of social relations—practices of cooperation and personal autonomy that the group members adapted from the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), the Chicago collective from which the Art Ensemble emerged.Less
Message to Our Folks is the first book about the Art Ensemble of Chicago, one of the most influential groups in jazz and experimental music. Unlike many texts in jazz studies and improvisation studies, Message to Our Folks combines musical analysis with historical inquiry. The book offers a detailed history of the Art Ensemble, from its 1966 founding on Chicago’s South Side to its final performances in the 2010s. But the book’s greatest contribution to music theory (and a range of other disciplines) may be its analyses of the Art Ensemble’s performances. Message to Our Folks proposes a new theory of group improvisation that explains how the Art Ensemble members are able to improvise together in many different styles while drawing on an extensive repertoire of notated compositions. The book also examines the intermedia dimensions of the Art Ensemble’s performances, which integrate music with poetry, theater, costumes, and movement. Additionally, Message to Our Folks investigates the connections between the group’s performances and its distinctive model of social relations—practices of cooperation and personal autonomy that the group members adapted from the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), the Chicago collective from which the Art Ensemble emerged.
Jonathan Walley
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- August 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780190938635
- eISBN:
- 9780190938673
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190938635.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
Cinema Expanded: Avant-Garde Film in the Age of Intermedia is a comprehensive historical survey of expanded cinema from the mid-1960s to the present. It offers an historical and theoretical revision ...
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Cinema Expanded: Avant-Garde Film in the Age of Intermedia is a comprehensive historical survey of expanded cinema from the mid-1960s to the present. It offers an historical and theoretical revision of the concept of expanded cinema, placing it in the context of avant-garde/experimental film history rather than the history of new media, intermedia, or multimedia. The book argues that while expanded cinema has taken an incredible variety of forms (including moving image installation, multi-screen films, live cinematic performance, light shows, shadow plays, computer-generated images, video art, sculptural objects, and texts), it is nonetheless best understood as an ongoing meditation by filmmakers on the nature of cinema, specifically, and on its relationship to the other arts. Cinema Expanded also extends its historical and theoretical scope to avant-garde film culture more generally, placing expanded cinema in that context while also considering what it has to tell us about the moving image in the art world and new media environment.Less
Cinema Expanded: Avant-Garde Film in the Age of Intermedia is a comprehensive historical survey of expanded cinema from the mid-1960s to the present. It offers an historical and theoretical revision of the concept of expanded cinema, placing it in the context of avant-garde/experimental film history rather than the history of new media, intermedia, or multimedia. The book argues that while expanded cinema has taken an incredible variety of forms (including moving image installation, multi-screen films, live cinematic performance, light shows, shadow plays, computer-generated images, video art, sculptural objects, and texts), it is nonetheless best understood as an ongoing meditation by filmmakers on the nature of cinema, specifically, and on its relationship to the other arts. Cinema Expanded also extends its historical and theoretical scope to avant-garde film culture more generally, placing expanded cinema in that context while also considering what it has to tell us about the moving image in the art world and new media environment.
Greg Thomas
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781789620269
- eISBN:
- 9781789629538
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781789620269.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
For poets such as Finlay and Morgan, concrete poetry remained a fundamentally linguistic practice, with visual effects used to enhance or methodically alter a central semantic message. For the ...
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For poets such as Finlay and Morgan, concrete poetry remained a fundamentally linguistic practice, with visual effects used to enhance or methodically alter a central semantic message. For the Guernsey-born, Gloucestershire-based poet Dom Sylvester Houedárd, concrete poetry came to entail a grammar of abstract visual forms, constructed from letters and diacritical marks, in which semantic meaning was largely subsumed. This quality is most virtuosically expressed in the so-called ‘typestracts’ which he created on his Olivetti typewriter. Houédard’s wordless poetics partly exemplifies the re-conceptualisation of concrete poetry as an intermedia, neo-dada artform across the 1950s-70s, which often manifested itself through a movement away from language, and in attachments to the sixties counter-culture. But the unique distinction of Houédard’s work is its attempt to express a wordless or apophatic awareness of God, in which sense his concrete poetry is connected to his vocation as a Benedictine monk, priest, and theologian. This chapter traces the development of these entwined impulses, moving from his beat-influenced verse of the 1940s-50s to his ‘kinetic’ concrete poetry of the mid-1960s, and finally to the typestracts of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Influences touched on along the way include Wittgenstein, auto-destructive art, and Tantric ritual.Less
For poets such as Finlay and Morgan, concrete poetry remained a fundamentally linguistic practice, with visual effects used to enhance or methodically alter a central semantic message. For the Guernsey-born, Gloucestershire-based poet Dom Sylvester Houedárd, concrete poetry came to entail a grammar of abstract visual forms, constructed from letters and diacritical marks, in which semantic meaning was largely subsumed. This quality is most virtuosically expressed in the so-called ‘typestracts’ which he created on his Olivetti typewriter. Houédard’s wordless poetics partly exemplifies the re-conceptualisation of concrete poetry as an intermedia, neo-dada artform across the 1950s-70s, which often manifested itself through a movement away from language, and in attachments to the sixties counter-culture. But the unique distinction of Houédard’s work is its attempt to express a wordless or apophatic awareness of God, in which sense his concrete poetry is connected to his vocation as a Benedictine monk, priest, and theologian. This chapter traces the development of these entwined impulses, moving from his beat-influenced verse of the 1940s-50s to his ‘kinetic’ concrete poetry of the mid-1960s, and finally to the typestracts of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Influences touched on along the way include Wittgenstein, auto-destructive art, and Tantric ritual.
Marilyn D. Walker and Donald A. Walker
- Published in print:
- 2001
- Published Online:
- November 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780195117288
- eISBN:
- 9780197561171
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780195117288.003.0012
- Subject:
- Environmental Science, Applied Ecology
The vegetation of Niwot Ridge has a rich history of study, beginning with phytosociological studies directly on the Ridge and in the surrounding mountains ...
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The vegetation of Niwot Ridge has a rich history of study, beginning with phytosociological studies directly on the Ridge and in the surrounding mountains and incorporating more experimental and dynamic approaches in later years. This chapter provides an overview of the spatial patterns of Niwot Ridge plants and plant communities relative to the primary controlling environmental gradients at scales from the individual to the landscape. The spatial patterns of vegetation at all scales are dominated by physical forces, particularly the interaction of wind, snow, and topography. The controls of biotic factors on the distribution and abundance of plant species on Niwot Ridge have received considerably less attention than have physical factors, but recent studies have revealed the importance of competition and certain mutualisms in structuring community composition. Community research on Niwot Ridge has been organized around a hierarchy of spatial scales, from the plot to the region. Plot-based studies have focused on physiological and ecological dynamics of specific species and communities, and more spatially extensive studies have provided a hierarchical framework for the plot studies. In this chapter, we first present an overview of the broader patterns in the vegetation, followed by descriptions of the communities, and then the specifics of physical and biotic controls on species and plant growth that drive the community patterns. The landscape-scale patterns in the Niwot vegetation are driven by a complex elevation gradient, which is a combination of temperature and snow regime, with wind modifying and interacting with temperature and snow at all points along the gradient (chapter 2). Certainly the most critical boundary in the system is the upper tree limit, which defines the alpine system and which lies roughly between 3400 and 3600 m elevation on Niwot Ridge. Billings (1988) provided a climatic-floristic-physiographic review of major North American alpine systems that helps to place Niwot Ridge into a larger perspective. Climatically, Niwot is intermediate between the dry Sierras, which have greater precipitation but almost none of it falling during the summer, and the wetter northern Appalachians (Mt. Washington), which have fairly even annual precipitation and no drought.
Less
The vegetation of Niwot Ridge has a rich history of study, beginning with phytosociological studies directly on the Ridge and in the surrounding mountains and incorporating more experimental and dynamic approaches in later years. This chapter provides an overview of the spatial patterns of Niwot Ridge plants and plant communities relative to the primary controlling environmental gradients at scales from the individual to the landscape. The spatial patterns of vegetation at all scales are dominated by physical forces, particularly the interaction of wind, snow, and topography. The controls of biotic factors on the distribution and abundance of plant species on Niwot Ridge have received considerably less attention than have physical factors, but recent studies have revealed the importance of competition and certain mutualisms in structuring community composition. Community research on Niwot Ridge has been organized around a hierarchy of spatial scales, from the plot to the region. Plot-based studies have focused on physiological and ecological dynamics of specific species and communities, and more spatially extensive studies have provided a hierarchical framework for the plot studies. In this chapter, we first present an overview of the broader patterns in the vegetation, followed by descriptions of the communities, and then the specifics of physical and biotic controls on species and plant growth that drive the community patterns. The landscape-scale patterns in the Niwot vegetation are driven by a complex elevation gradient, which is a combination of temperature and snow regime, with wind modifying and interacting with temperature and snow at all points along the gradient (chapter 2). Certainly the most critical boundary in the system is the upper tree limit, which defines the alpine system and which lies roughly between 3400 and 3600 m elevation on Niwot Ridge. Billings (1988) provided a climatic-floristic-physiographic review of major North American alpine systems that helps to place Niwot Ridge into a larger perspective. Climatically, Niwot is intermediate between the dry Sierras, which have greater precipitation but almost none of it falling during the summer, and the wetter northern Appalachians (Mt. Washington), which have fairly even annual precipitation and no drought.
Kathryn H. Fuller-Seeley
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780520295049
- eISBN:
- 9780520967946
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520295049.003.0008
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Radio
Jack Benny was not only radio’s biggest star after the mid-1930s, but he was the most visible celebrity in Hollywood. This chapter examines the many ways that Benny’s radio program, and Benny’s ...
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Jack Benny was not only radio’s biggest star after the mid-1930s, but he was the most visible celebrity in Hollywood. This chapter examines the many ways that Benny’s radio program, and Benny’s performance career, intertwined radio and film, two powerful media industries that were often said to be at war with one another. While media conglomeration today means that performers and story ideas are moved freely across media, there were many impediments to do so in the past. Benny’s radio show was the first to parody popular movies, but he could not mention the radio stars who sold rival products. Benny’s radio-themed films made at Paramount between 1939 and 1941, met with significant box office success and even greater critical disparagement.Less
Jack Benny was not only radio’s biggest star after the mid-1930s, but he was the most visible celebrity in Hollywood. This chapter examines the many ways that Benny’s radio program, and Benny’s performance career, intertwined radio and film, two powerful media industries that were often said to be at war with one another. While media conglomeration today means that performers and story ideas are moved freely across media, there were many impediments to do so in the past. Benny’s radio show was the first to parody popular movies, but he could not mention the radio stars who sold rival products. Benny’s radio-themed films made at Paramount between 1939 and 1941, met with significant box office success and even greater critical disparagement.
Rens Vliegenthart and Stefaan Walgrave
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- March 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780198835332
- eISBN:
- 9780191872945
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198835332.003.0028
- Subject:
- Political Science, Comparative Politics
This chapter discusses what role the media agenda has played in (comparative) agenda research. Studies into the characteristics of the media agenda demonstrate that, compared to other agendas, the ...
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This chapter discusses what role the media agenda has played in (comparative) agenda research. Studies into the characteristics of the media agenda demonstrate that, compared to other agendas, the media agenda is characterized by high levels of responsiveness and volatility and that various outlets that jointly constitute the agenda strongly influence each other. In recent years, a vast amount of research has considered the impact of the media agenda on the parliamentary agenda (political agenda-setting) and how the size of this impact depends on a wide variety of contingent factors. Our empirical example uncovers considerable overlap in media agendas across various Western European countries, reflecting the importance of the international context in the construction of news.Less
This chapter discusses what role the media agenda has played in (comparative) agenda research. Studies into the characteristics of the media agenda demonstrate that, compared to other agendas, the media agenda is characterized by high levels of responsiveness and volatility and that various outlets that jointly constitute the agenda strongly influence each other. In recent years, a vast amount of research has considered the impact of the media agenda on the parliamentary agenda (political agenda-setting) and how the size of this impact depends on a wide variety of contingent factors. Our empirical example uncovers considerable overlap in media agendas across various Western European countries, reflecting the importance of the international context in the construction of news.
Holly Rogers
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199861408
- eISBN:
- 9780199332731
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199861408.001.0001
- Subject:
- Music, History, Western, Popular
This book explores the first decade of creative video work, focusing on the ways in which video technology was used to dissolve the boundaries between art and music. Becoming commercially available ...
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This book explores the first decade of creative video work, focusing on the ways in which video technology was used to dissolve the boundaries between art and music. Becoming commercially available in the mid 1960s, video became integral to the experimentalism of New York City’s music and art scenes. The medium was able to record image and sound at the same time, allowing composers to visualize their music and artists to sound their images in a quick and easy manner. Video also enabled the creation of interactive spaces that questioned conventional habits of music and art consumption. The medium’s audiovisual synergy could be projected, manipulated and processed live and the closed-circuit video feed drew audience members into the heart of the experience. Such activated spectatorship resulted in improvisatory and performative events, in which the space between artists, composers, performers and visitors collapsed into a single, yet expansive, intermedial environment. Many believed that audiovisual video signalled a brand-new art form that only began in 1965. This book suggests that this is inaccurate. During the twentieth century, composers were experimenting with spatialising their sounds, while artists were attempting to include time as a creative element in their visual work. Pioneering video work allowed these two disciplines to come together. Shifting the focus from object to spatial process, Sounding the Gallery uses theories of intermedia, film, architecture, drama and performance practice to create an interdisciplinary history of music and art that culminates in the rise of video art-music in the late 1960s.Less
This book explores the first decade of creative video work, focusing on the ways in which video technology was used to dissolve the boundaries between art and music. Becoming commercially available in the mid 1960s, video became integral to the experimentalism of New York City’s music and art scenes. The medium was able to record image and sound at the same time, allowing composers to visualize their music and artists to sound their images in a quick and easy manner. Video also enabled the creation of interactive spaces that questioned conventional habits of music and art consumption. The medium’s audiovisual synergy could be projected, manipulated and processed live and the closed-circuit video feed drew audience members into the heart of the experience. Such activated spectatorship resulted in improvisatory and performative events, in which the space between artists, composers, performers and visitors collapsed into a single, yet expansive, intermedial environment. Many believed that audiovisual video signalled a brand-new art form that only began in 1965. This book suggests that this is inaccurate. During the twentieth century, composers were experimenting with spatialising their sounds, while artists were attempting to include time as a creative element in their visual work. Pioneering video work allowed these two disciplines to come together. Shifting the focus from object to spatial process, Sounding the Gallery uses theories of intermedia, film, architecture, drama and performance practice to create an interdisciplinary history of music and art that culminates in the rise of video art-music in the late 1960s.
Andrew V. Uroskie
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- September 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780226842981
- eISBN:
- 9780226109022
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226109022.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Media Studies
Treats the contemporary explosion of artist film & video practice obliquely, using the 1960s Expanded Cinema as a historical and conceptual optic through which to reconsider entrenched paradigms of ...
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Treats the contemporary explosion of artist film & video practice obliquely, using the 1960s Expanded Cinema as a historical and conceptual optic through which to reconsider entrenched paradigms of medium- and disciplinary-specificity. Contesting an endemic, medium-specific framework that would reinforce film’s proper place within the cinematic theater, the Expanded Cinema sought to displace the moving image from its established situation within the cinematic theatre so as to initiate a series of disruptive encounters across interdisciplinary institutions of artistic exhibition and spectatorship. While existing scholarship on Expanded Cinema has typically focused on European practices of the 1970s, this study explores its earlier emergence within mid-‘60s New York alongside the rise of Minimalist aesthetics and compositional revolution inaugurated by John Cage. The first chapter establishes the conceptual framework for the investigation, differentiating the idea of Expanded Cinema from the multiscreen cinema with which it was historically conflated. Situating it within a broader, post-Cagean aesthetic of institutional disruption, the Expanded Cinema circa 1966 is conceptualized as a fulcrum for the historical emergence of the moving image in the spaces of postwar art. The following chapters then trace a brief history of the idea as it grew from of the Lettrist deconstruction of the cinematic theater in the early ‘50s (chapter 2) to challenge the institutional spaces of the art gallery (chapter 3) and performance stage (chapter 4), before the incorporation of real-time video feedback begins to occasion a shift torwards the more problematically diffuse institutions of televisual culture (chapter 5).Less
Treats the contemporary explosion of artist film & video practice obliquely, using the 1960s Expanded Cinema as a historical and conceptual optic through which to reconsider entrenched paradigms of medium- and disciplinary-specificity. Contesting an endemic, medium-specific framework that would reinforce film’s proper place within the cinematic theater, the Expanded Cinema sought to displace the moving image from its established situation within the cinematic theatre so as to initiate a series of disruptive encounters across interdisciplinary institutions of artistic exhibition and spectatorship. While existing scholarship on Expanded Cinema has typically focused on European practices of the 1970s, this study explores its earlier emergence within mid-‘60s New York alongside the rise of Minimalist aesthetics and compositional revolution inaugurated by John Cage. The first chapter establishes the conceptual framework for the investigation, differentiating the idea of Expanded Cinema from the multiscreen cinema with which it was historically conflated. Situating it within a broader, post-Cagean aesthetic of institutional disruption, the Expanded Cinema circa 1966 is conceptualized as a fulcrum for the historical emergence of the moving image in the spaces of postwar art. The following chapters then trace a brief history of the idea as it grew from of the Lettrist deconstruction of the cinematic theater in the early ‘50s (chapter 2) to challenge the institutional spaces of the art gallery (chapter 3) and performance stage (chapter 4), before the incorporation of real-time video feedback begins to occasion a shift torwards the more problematically diffuse institutions of televisual culture (chapter 5).
Holly Rogers
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199861408
- eISBN:
- 9780199332731
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199861408.003.0001
- Subject:
- Music, History, Western, Popular
This chapter uses the specificities of analogue video to argue that the genre has a double lineage that runs through music and art histories. The theoretical work of Gene Youngblood, André Gaudreault ...
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This chapter uses the specificities of analogue video to argue that the genre has a double lineage that runs through music and art histories. The theoretical work of Gene Youngblood, André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion and Yvonne Spielmann is used to situate early video art-music within the expansive multimedia culture of the 1960s. Contrasting the electromagnetic basis of the medium with the technologies of film and television, the issues of transmission, preservation and deliberation are used to demonstrate how the simultaneity of the video signal enabled image and sound to be produced, projected and manipulated at the same time. Nam June Paik, Steina Vasulka, Robert Cahen, Tony Conrad and Bill Viola provide examples of musically-trained artists who embraced video as an audiovisual agent for transformation. With the experimental nature of these musicians in mind, video art-music is discussed as a form of visual noise-composition able to produce a form of live intermedia.Less
This chapter uses the specificities of analogue video to argue that the genre has a double lineage that runs through music and art histories. The theoretical work of Gene Youngblood, André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion and Yvonne Spielmann is used to situate early video art-music within the expansive multimedia culture of the 1960s. Contrasting the electromagnetic basis of the medium with the technologies of film and television, the issues of transmission, preservation and deliberation are used to demonstrate how the simultaneity of the video signal enabled image and sound to be produced, projected and manipulated at the same time. Nam June Paik, Steina Vasulka, Robert Cahen, Tony Conrad and Bill Viola provide examples of musically-trained artists who embraced video as an audiovisual agent for transformation. With the experimental nature of these musicians in mind, video art-music is discussed as a form of visual noise-composition able to produce a form of live intermedia.
Paul Steinbeck
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780226375960
- eISBN:
- 9780226376011
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226376011.003.0001
- Subject:
- Music, Ethnomusicology, World Music
The members of the Art Ensemble belonged to the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), an African American community organization on Chicago’s South Side. Formed in 1965, the ...
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The members of the Art Ensemble belonged to the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), an African American community organization on Chicago’s South Side. Formed in 1965, the AACM was the most influential artists’ collective in jazz and experimental music, and the Art Ensemble was its flagship band, the first AACM group to tour the world and record for major labels. The Art Ensemble’s model of social relations, adapted from the AACM, made all of these accomplishments possible. Although AACM musicians composed and performed in many different styles, they were bound together by a shared commitment to support one another’s creative explorations. Drawing on the Association’s example, the members of the Art Ensemble established their own social model based on the practices of cooperation and personal autonomy. The Art Ensemble’s revolutionary musical practices were also rooted in the early discoveries of the Association. In the 1960s, AACM members devised new means of integrating improvisation and composition, hybrid modes of music-making not previously envisioned by jazz players or experimentalist composers. The Art Ensemble took AACM-style hybridity to a new level, developing a unique performance practice that combined group improvisation with intermedia and a large repertoire of written compositions.Less
The members of the Art Ensemble belonged to the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), an African American community organization on Chicago’s South Side. Formed in 1965, the AACM was the most influential artists’ collective in jazz and experimental music, and the Art Ensemble was its flagship band, the first AACM group to tour the world and record for major labels. The Art Ensemble’s model of social relations, adapted from the AACM, made all of these accomplishments possible. Although AACM musicians composed and performed in many different styles, they were bound together by a shared commitment to support one another’s creative explorations. Drawing on the Association’s example, the members of the Art Ensemble established their own social model based on the practices of cooperation and personal autonomy. The Art Ensemble’s revolutionary musical practices were also rooted in the early discoveries of the Association. In the 1960s, AACM members devised new means of integrating improvisation and composition, hybrid modes of music-making not previously envisioned by jazz players or experimentalist composers. The Art Ensemble took AACM-style hybridity to a new level, developing a unique performance practice that combined group improvisation with intermedia and a large repertoire of written compositions.
Paul Steinbeck
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780226375960
- eISBN:
- 9780226376011
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226376011.003.0003
- Subject:
- Music, Ethnomusicology, World Music
Chapter 2 chronicles the early years of the Association for Creative Musicians (AACM). Malachi Favors, Joseph Jarman, and Roscoe Mitchell joined the Association at its founding in 1965, enlisting in ...
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Chapter 2 chronicles the early years of the Association for Creative Musicians (AACM). Malachi Favors, Joseph Jarman, and Roscoe Mitchell joined the Association at its founding in 1965, enlisting in a nationwide movement of African American organizations working to achieve social change through the arts. By 1966, the preeminent bands in the AACM were Jarman’s quartet and Mitchell’s Art Ensemble, which featured Favors on bass and a new arrival from St. Louis, trumpeter Lester Bowie. The two groups were developing distinct yet compatible approaches to improvisation, composition, intermedia, and instrumentation (multi-instrumentalism, little instruments), and the members of the Art Ensemble started inviting Jarman to collaborate with them. He joined the Art Ensemble in 1969, just as the group was planning a voyage to Paris.Less
Chapter 2 chronicles the early years of the Association for Creative Musicians (AACM). Malachi Favors, Joseph Jarman, and Roscoe Mitchell joined the Association at its founding in 1965, enlisting in a nationwide movement of African American organizations working to achieve social change through the arts. By 1966, the preeminent bands in the AACM were Jarman’s quartet and Mitchell’s Art Ensemble, which featured Favors on bass and a new arrival from St. Louis, trumpeter Lester Bowie. The two groups were developing distinct yet compatible approaches to improvisation, composition, intermedia, and instrumentation (multi-instrumentalism, little instruments), and the members of the Art Ensemble started inviting Jarman to collaborate with them. He joined the Art Ensemble in 1969, just as the group was planning a voyage to Paris.
Paul Steinbeck
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780226375960
- eISBN:
- 9780226376011
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226376011.003.0005
- Subject:
- Music, Ethnomusicology, World Music
Chapter 4 examines A Jackson in Your House, the first of fifteen albums the Art Ensemble of Chicago recorded in Europe. A Jackson in Your House brilliantly illustrates the band’s innovations in ...
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Chapter 4 examines A Jackson in Your House, the first of fifteen albums the Art Ensemble of Chicago recorded in Europe. A Jackson in Your House brilliantly illustrates the band’s innovations in intermedia performance. On the album’s A-side, the musicians use verbal commentary and dramatic scenarios to address a number of political and cultural issues—notably the reception of black experimental music, including their own. However, on the B-side, they take a different approach, blending music with poetry and theater to create the kinds of vibrant soundscapes that Paris audiences found so compelling.Less
Chapter 4 examines A Jackson in Your House, the first of fifteen albums the Art Ensemble of Chicago recorded in Europe. A Jackson in Your House brilliantly illustrates the band’s innovations in intermedia performance. On the album’s A-side, the musicians use verbal commentary and dramatic scenarios to address a number of political and cultural issues—notably the reception of black experimental music, including their own. However, on the B-side, they take a different approach, blending music with poetry and theater to create the kinds of vibrant soundscapes that Paris audiences found so compelling.
Paul Steinbeck
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780226375960
- eISBN:
- 9780226376011
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226376011.003.0009
- Subject:
- Music, Ethnomusicology, World Music
Chapter 8 addresses the Art Ensemble’s tenure at ECM Records, when the group achieved international renown and critical acclaim. By the 1980s, the band was touring more widely than ever, both abroad ...
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Chapter 8 addresses the Art Ensemble’s tenure at ECM Records, when the group achieved international renown and critical acclaim. By the 1980s, the band was touring more widely than ever, both abroad and at home. In the United States, the musicians’ mastery of intermedia allowed them to break into the performing-arts scene, while the success of their ECM albums earned them a prominent place in the jazz community, which was contending with the rise of a powerful traditionalist movement headed by Wynton Marsalis. This movement attracted many opponents, including the members of the Art Ensemble, who resisted traditionalism by proposing an alternative aesthetic, expressed in their evocative slogan “Great Black Music, Ancient to the Future.”Less
Chapter 8 addresses the Art Ensemble’s tenure at ECM Records, when the group achieved international renown and critical acclaim. By the 1980s, the band was touring more widely than ever, both abroad and at home. In the United States, the musicians’ mastery of intermedia allowed them to break into the performing-arts scene, while the success of their ECM albums earned them a prominent place in the jazz community, which was contending with the rise of a powerful traditionalist movement headed by Wynton Marsalis. This movement attracted many opponents, including the members of the Art Ensemble, who resisted traditionalism by proposing an alternative aesthetic, expressed in their evocative slogan “Great Black Music, Ancient to the Future.”
Paul Steinbeck
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780226375960
- eISBN:
- 9780226376011
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226376011.003.0010
- Subject:
- Music, Ethnomusicology, World Music
Chapter 9 concentrates on Live from the Jazz Showcase, a video recording that captures all the sounds and sights of an Art Ensemble performance. In this concert, the band plays pieces inspired by the ...
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Chapter 9 concentrates on Live from the Jazz Showcase, a video recording that captures all the sounds and sights of an Art Ensemble performance. In this concert, the band plays pieces inspired by the African diaspora, from Nigeria, Mali, and Morocco to New Orleans and New York. As the music unfolds, the group members’ onstage movements turn the performance into an immersive intermedia experience. Live from the Jazz Showcase is a ritual, a community celebration, and a captivating sonic and visual narrative about the meaning of Great Black Music.Less
Chapter 9 concentrates on Live from the Jazz Showcase, a video recording that captures all the sounds and sights of an Art Ensemble performance. In this concert, the band plays pieces inspired by the African diaspora, from Nigeria, Mali, and Morocco to New Orleans and New York. As the music unfolds, the group members’ onstage movements turn the performance into an immersive intermedia experience. Live from the Jazz Showcase is a ritual, a community celebration, and a captivating sonic and visual narrative about the meaning of Great Black Music.
Jonathan Walley
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- August 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780190938635
- eISBN:
- 9780190938673
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190938635.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
This chapter defines expanded cinema, traces its history broadly from the 1960s to the present, and reviews previous scholarly and critical literature on the subject. It argues that while expanded ...
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This chapter defines expanded cinema, traces its history broadly from the 1960s to the present, and reviews previous scholarly and critical literature on the subject. It argues that while expanded cinema has traditionally been seen as a rejection or abandonment of cinema in its conventional form, and as a form of “intermedia” or “new media,” with historical perspective it is better understood as an attempt to define and explore the limits and essences of cinema as an art form. While it takes forms commonly associated with the other arts (including installation, performance, sculptural objects, and even text), it is precisely by exploring this aesthetic territory that avant-garde/experimental filmmakers have tested the boundaries and clarified the specific nature of their art form. The introduction also defines the category of “avant-garde” or “experimental” cinema, defining it as a distinct cinematic culture and historical tradition, which represents a set of aesthetic and social values that can be traced through works of expanded cinema. The title of the introduction indicates the book’s larger argument: that expanded cinema does not represent the end of cinema as we know it, but its persistence, albeit in new and unconventional forms.Less
This chapter defines expanded cinema, traces its history broadly from the 1960s to the present, and reviews previous scholarly and critical literature on the subject. It argues that while expanded cinema has traditionally been seen as a rejection or abandonment of cinema in its conventional form, and as a form of “intermedia” or “new media,” with historical perspective it is better understood as an attempt to define and explore the limits and essences of cinema as an art form. While it takes forms commonly associated with the other arts (including installation, performance, sculptural objects, and even text), it is precisely by exploring this aesthetic territory that avant-garde/experimental filmmakers have tested the boundaries and clarified the specific nature of their art form. The introduction also defines the category of “avant-garde” or “experimental” cinema, defining it as a distinct cinematic culture and historical tradition, which represents a set of aesthetic and social values that can be traced through works of expanded cinema. The title of the introduction indicates the book’s larger argument: that expanded cinema does not represent the end of cinema as we know it, but its persistence, albeit in new and unconventional forms.
Jonathan Walley
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- August 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780190938635
- eISBN:
- 9780190938673
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190938635.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
This chapter, one of two that make up Part I of the book, provides a revised history of expanded cinema from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s. It divides this period into two phases or waves of ...
More
This chapter, one of two that make up Part I of the book, provides a revised history of expanded cinema from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s. It divides this period into two phases or waves of expanded cinema. During the first phase, the term was more or less synonymous with “intermedia,” connoting hybridity, the dissolution of artistic boundaries, and the questioning of traditional art forms. But the liberatory rhetoric of this phase was countered by concerns that the expansion of cinema threatened to dilute and destabilize the art form that generations of filmmakers and film critics had worked to establish. It was within avant-garde film that the perceived threat to cinema’s identity caused the most anxiety, as that mode of film practice had always been the most preoccupied with the nature of cinema. Within a few years, the term “expanded cinema” was reclaimed by filmmakers whose work extended avant-garde cinema’s longstanding tradition of specifying the cinematic into a wide range of new, “expanded” forms. This phase of expanded cinema lasted through the 1970s into the first few years of the 1980s. Chapter 1 also introduces two other major themes: a historical process of negotiation between cinema’s specificity and its connections to the other arts, which works of expanded cinema enact, and the interplay between two conceptions of cinema—as a physical material and an ephemeral experience. This reciprocal movement between the material and ephemeral is a key factor in expanded cinema’s formal mutability.Less
This chapter, one of two that make up Part I of the book, provides a revised history of expanded cinema from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s. It divides this period into two phases or waves of expanded cinema. During the first phase, the term was more or less synonymous with “intermedia,” connoting hybridity, the dissolution of artistic boundaries, and the questioning of traditional art forms. But the liberatory rhetoric of this phase was countered by concerns that the expansion of cinema threatened to dilute and destabilize the art form that generations of filmmakers and film critics had worked to establish. It was within avant-garde film that the perceived threat to cinema’s identity caused the most anxiety, as that mode of film practice had always been the most preoccupied with the nature of cinema. Within a few years, the term “expanded cinema” was reclaimed by filmmakers whose work extended avant-garde cinema’s longstanding tradition of specifying the cinematic into a wide range of new, “expanded” forms. This phase of expanded cinema lasted through the 1970s into the first few years of the 1980s. Chapter 1 also introduces two other major themes: a historical process of negotiation between cinema’s specificity and its connections to the other arts, which works of expanded cinema enact, and the interplay between two conceptions of cinema—as a physical material and an ephemeral experience. This reciprocal movement between the material and ephemeral is a key factor in expanded cinema’s formal mutability.
Jonathan Walley
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- August 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780190938635
- eISBN:
- 9780190938673
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190938635.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
Chapter 3 is the first of four chapters that make up Part II of Cinema Expanded. This part of the book considers different general modes that expanded cinema has taken, each mode representing ...
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Chapter 3 is the first of four chapters that make up Part II of Cinema Expanded. This part of the book considers different general modes that expanded cinema has taken, each mode representing aesthetic territory and ideas usually associated with a different art form (e.g. performance or sculpture). Chapter 3 considers a variant of expanded cinema that integrates live performance into projection of moving images, usually called “projection performance” or “projector performance.” In this type of expanded work, the tactility of both filmstrip and projector are on display, as is the performer (typically the filmmaker—the representative of avant-garde cinema’s more intimate relationship between artist and audience). But alongside these markers of cinema’s physicality and presence is the ephemerality of live performance. Non-repeatable, site-specific, aleatory instead of mechanistically automatic, projection performance is centered upon the moment when the material of film is transformed into the far less tactile play of light, shadow, and illusion, and when objects give way to processes and experiences. The integration of performance into cinema was initially understood as a blurring of art forms. But the intermedia film-theater hybrids of the first wave of expanded cinema gave way to subsequent projection performances that claimed a performative dimension for cinema itself, rather than thinking of it as an alien form grafted onto film in a new intermedia format.Less
Chapter 3 is the first of four chapters that make up Part II of Cinema Expanded. This part of the book considers different general modes that expanded cinema has taken, each mode representing aesthetic territory and ideas usually associated with a different art form (e.g. performance or sculpture). Chapter 3 considers a variant of expanded cinema that integrates live performance into projection of moving images, usually called “projection performance” or “projector performance.” In this type of expanded work, the tactility of both filmstrip and projector are on display, as is the performer (typically the filmmaker—the representative of avant-garde cinema’s more intimate relationship between artist and audience). But alongside these markers of cinema’s physicality and presence is the ephemerality of live performance. Non-repeatable, site-specific, aleatory instead of mechanistically automatic, projection performance is centered upon the moment when the material of film is transformed into the far less tactile play of light, shadow, and illusion, and when objects give way to processes and experiences. The integration of performance into cinema was initially understood as a blurring of art forms. But the intermedia film-theater hybrids of the first wave of expanded cinema gave way to subsequent projection performances that claimed a performative dimension for cinema itself, rather than thinking of it as an alien form grafted onto film in a new intermedia format.