Search Results

In this, the last of the storytelling chapters, ninety something year old Mike Rowady talks about his Lebanese mother, Rose Rowady, who passed away in the late 1970s. Ninety-three-year old Franklin Moosnick describes his Jewish mother, Rose Moosnick, who died some forty six years ago. The intention is in this chapter is to tell stories that might otherwise be forgotten because these women's imprints have been left mainly on their family members. But both the acknowledged and the unacknowledged marks that Rose and Rose made mirror the marks left by countless Arab and Jewish women in the past. Rose and Rose are archetypes representing other like them-immigrant mothers determined that their children became financially and socially successful.

This chapter recontextualizes the pivotal period of avant-garde art at the turn of the century. Based on Rahel Varnhagen’s “dance dreams,” it first describes the transition from nineteenth-century romanticism to fin de siècle. It then closes with a short look at the “dance ready-mades” of the 1990s.

Chapter One deals with several central issues with regard to understanding the role of religious motifs in contemporary art. Besides being a repetition of imagery from the past, religious motifs embedded in contemporary artworks become a means to problematise not only the way different periods in the history of art are delimited, but larger and seemingly more rigid distinctions as those between art and non-art images. Early religious images differ significantly from art images. The two types are regulated according to different sets of rules related to the conditions of their production, display, appreciation and the way images are invested with the status of being true or authentic instances of art or sacred images. Chapter One provides a discussion of the important motif of the image not made by an artist’s hand, or acheiropoietos, and its survival and transformation, including its traces in contemporary image-making practices. All images are the result of human making; they are fictions. The way the conditions of these fictions are negotiated, or the way the role of the maker is brought to visibility, or concealed, is a defining feature of the specific regime of representation. While the cult image concealed its maker in order to maintain its public significance, and the later art image celebrated the artist as a re-inventor of the old image, contemporary artists cite religious images in order to reflect on the very procedures that produce the public significance and status of images.

This chapter provides an overview of the transformation of the status of religious motifs in the visual art from Surrealism to the late 1990s. When detached from their initial contexts religious motifs cease to signify religious ideas or content, and acquire new meaning. The critical mode of reference to religion, especially in the second half of the twentieth century, articulates a self-reflexive moment that problematises the status of images and the mechanisms of their circulation and display. In the second half of the century, religious motifs embedded in artworks lost their more direct iconoclastic resonances, and were used increasingly as a critical tool directed towards the institution of art itself. An object as the ready-made situated between being an artwork and an object, brought to visibility the “religious” nature of the conditions of the display of art-objects. The medium of video enabled a re-mediation of older art – both film and culturally loaded iconic religious images. This aspect of the medium was by artists to invoke or create a quasi-mystical experience, or to re-frame existing images and film footage in order to make a critical comment on the tradition.

Sewing machines provide the first of three detailed case studies. Sewing machines represent a class of small-scale, multiuse technologies, typically sold as products themselves and integrated into production systems in households, workshops, and factories. Sewing machines arrived early in Mexico, and by the 1870s, they were diffused widely across urban and rural Mexico and become nearly ubiquitous by the century’s end. The Singer Company was not alone, but it dominated the market. Sewing machines were adopted by thousands of women in their homes and by men in workshops and new clothing factories. They made possible a rapidly growing sector for ready-made clothing, marketed to middle-class Mexicans in department stores across the country. But this was a fragile diffusion. Adoption was highly sensitive to economic downturns, and use of the machines was dependent on access to spare parts and repair expertise, which was often difficult to come by. Their consumers quickly mastered the ability to use sewing machines, but learning did not extend to a ready ability to repair, modify, and replicate them.

Beyond traditional art historical practice and its haptophobia with experimental, subjectivist, or speculative methods, what we have already begun to learn from Marcel Duchamp can be further established with the philosophies Henri Bergson and Roger Caillois. An up-to-date philosophy of art might thus be one that combines the potentialities of intuition and a bold imagination with the need for precision and strict controls. In the light of that ‘logic of the imaginary’ which Caillois brought onto the scene with his ‘diagonal sciences’, art and its attendant histories and theories are no longer about substantive messages, but rather about questioning their contingent effects and affects upon a particular environment or beholder. Seen from this angle, philosophy of art might have to deal with unstoppable transformations of dominant structures of knowledge, outpacing self-referential interpretations in favour of a protean field of reciprocal actions and attractions, which can be cultivated by anyone willing to join the game.

Chapter 4 discusses the supply-side influences on and features of the growth of the Indian textile industry. It presents an analysis of the important structural changes that have occurred during the course of revival of the industry. The key argument is that the substantial growth in internal and external demand and the associated changes in the nature of demand have led to inter-fibre and inter-sectoral shifts in production, characterised by the faster growth of synthetic textiles and decline of composite mills and handlooms. The growth of demand has resulted in substantial capacity expansion and modernisation in the spinning sector. Further, these demand-side changes have led to the growth of the sector producing ready-made garments, which have replaced tailor-made goods.