The Art of Observing Art

Research in Pedagogy

With its ambient, interesting and dynamic use of materials, alternative views of materials and objects, with its playfulness and affecting different senses contemporary fine art can be very interesting for art-educational work. Due to its complexity, however, it suffers from misunderstanding, retreat, and last but not least also fears both among teachers and learners. With the present article we wish to present a broader view of basic school pupils of fine art both historically and contemporarily. We wished to determine what views students have of contemporary artistic practices and to what extent they know fine art. The results obtained with guided interviews and worksheets indicate that students are not well informed about contemporary and historical artistic practices. They nevertheless demonstrate great openness, curiosity and relaxation, willingness to get to know these practices deeper under proper guidance of the teacher and also to become enthusiastic about them.

re-published in a modified version as The Psychoanalytic Approach to Artistic and Literary Expression in Toward the Postmodern, ed. R. Harvey and M. Roberts (Amherst, NY, Humanity Books, 1993, pp. 2-11). Opposing itself to various other psychoanalytic approaches to art and literature (approaches that Lyotard criticises along the way), the paper argues that because artistic and literary works are laden with figure, which operates according to a different logic than that of language, artistic expression must be understood as having properties different from those of spoken or written commentary. Expression is thus set off from meaning, and is shown to reveal a very specific kind of truth: the trace of the primary process, free for the moment from the ordering functions of the secondary process. Its formative operations not only leave their mark on the space in which artistic works appear, but produce new, plastic, figures. Lyotard argues that the artistic impulse is the desire to see these unconscious operations, "the desire to see the desire." Attention to this function of truth and to the role of artistic space in giving the artwork its "play" brings attention back to Freud's analysis of expression in tragedy and its link to the results of his own self-analysis -and thus to the very constitution of psychoanalysis itself.

2020

Since its beginnings in the 1990s, “artistic research” has become established as a new format in the areas of educational and institutional policy, aesthetics, and art theory. It has now diffused into almost all artistic fields, from installation to experimental formats to contemporary music, literature, dance or performance art. But from its beginnings—under labels like “art and science” or “scienceart” or “artscience” that mention both disciplines in one breath—it has been in competition with academic research, without its own concept of research having been adequately clarified. This manifesto attempts to resolve the problem and to defend the term and the radical potentials of a researching art against those who toy all too carefully with university formats, wishing to ally them with scientific principles. Its aim is to emphasize the autonomy and particular intellectuality of artistic research, without seeking to justify its legitimacy or adopt alien standards.

PhD Thesis, 2023

In this commentary, I design, implement, and evaluate new ways of writing about art. For this purpose, I contextualise and interrelate four video artworks that I produced between 2013 and 2018. Scaffolding my research framework, in a first inductive research phase, I scope the works and provisionally conclude that the pieces connect through the concepts of Time, Repetition, Absurdity, and Play, and aesthetically, they link by improvisation, lo-tech, static camera, short duration, and linearity. In a second deductive research phase, I connect these findings with concepts and artefacts within and outside the artworld. I then critically question my voices as an artist and as a researcher and evaluate the potentials and limitations of language which I apply in my analysis that I base on a structuralist paradigm. Specifically, I question the correlations between signifiers in the artworks and the above concepts and aesthetics. Challenging the stability of meaning, I then scrutinise my writing through a Derridean, post-structuralist lens, and suggest how different authors would reach alternative insights, had they implemented alternative standpoints, addressed different concepts and aesthetic characteristics. In the final phase, I demonstrate how a poem that I wrote offers deeper insights into one of the artworks, thereby proposing that poetic writing can expand an artwork experience as well. I conclude how and why my research contributes new knowledge to the conceptual and aesthetic discourses in which I contextualised my artworks, how analytical and poetic writing can expand access when observing and interpreting art, why and how language has limitations in comparison to holistic art experiences, and how my research can be used as a methodological tool to write about art. I conclude that my findings primarily add new knowledge to discourses in art practice, art writing, art education, and to the wider art world.

2020

Art Style | Art & Culture International Magazine is an open access, biannual, and peer-reviewed online magazine that aims to bundle cultural diversity. All values of cultures are shown in their varieties of art. Beyond the importance of the medium, form, and context in which art takes its characteristics, we also consider the significance of sociocultural and market influence. Thus, there are different forms of visual expression and perception through the media and environment. The images relate to the cultural changes and their time-space significance-the spirit of the time. Hence, it is not only about the image itself and its description but rather its effects on culture, in which reciprocity is involved. For example, a variety of visual narratives-like movies, TV shows, videos, performances, media, digital arts, visual technologies and video game as part of the video's story, communications design, and also, drawing, painting, photography, dance, theater, literature, sculpture, architecture and design-are discussed in their visual significance as well as in synchronization with music in daily interactions. Moreover, this magazine handles images and sounds concerning the meaning in culture due to the influence of ideologies, trends, or functions for informational purposes as forms of communication beyond the significance of art and its issues related to the socio-cultural and political context. However, the significance of art and all kinds of aesthetic experiences represent a transformation for our nature as human beings. In general, questions concerning the meaning of art are frequently linked to the process of perception and imagination. This process can be understood as an aesthetic experience in art, media, and fields such as motion pictures, music, and many other creative works and events that contribute to one's knowledge, opinions, or skills. Accordingly, examining the digital technologies, motion picture, sound recording, broadcasting industries, and its social impact, Art Style Magazine focuses on the myriad meanings of art to become aware of their effects on culture as well as their communication dynamics.

To My Wife most modern scholarship has made available, the idea behind the whole work must (as M. Faure himself explains in the preface to the new edition before cited) be tinged with the personality of the writer and by the character of his time. "The historian who calls himself a scientist simply utters a piece of folly." In these matters judgment is inevitable, for to write the history of art one must make one's decisions as to what it is. The writing of it is in itself a work of art-as the style of Élie Faure is there to prove. Only one who feels the emotions of art can tell others which are the great works and make clear the collective poem formed by their history. It is precisely because Élie Faure is adding something to that poem that he has the right to tell us of its meaning.

(Peer-reviewed Journal) Art Style, Art & Culture International Magazine, 2019

[Peer-reviewed article by two scientific committee members of the magazine] This essay seeks to provide an idea of the basis of the main theories of contemporary art criticism. It begins with the assumed knowledge and tradition of the Academies of Fine Art, with their ideal of beauty and classical structure. The importance of such traditional references has its origin in the Renaissance in the 16th century, in Florence with Giorgio Vasari (1511-74), in Haarlem with Karel van Manda (1548-1606) and, above all, in Paris with Charles Lebrun (1619-1690) of the French Royal Academy, which established the first strict rules for the fine arts and was a reference for Europe as a whole. Academies of Fine Art were established in the major European capitals, and from the 19th century, in the Americas and worldwide. The themes and rules presented over the course of history always related to the functions of art and the legacy of classical thought as tradition. However, values and ruptures, ethics, ideologies and political ideals, and the progress of science have conditioned the fundamental importance of the renewal of Western thought. This essay concerns the decline of tradition in the arts, the lack of ideologies guiding modern art, and the transition to contemporary art. The main theories that marked this transition period-20th and 21st century-are analyzed with respect to the art, its criticism, and the theories to the understanding and transformative sense of artistic creation. Such creativity usually appears strange or transgressive to the public and primarily to be seeking a legitimation of the artist's autonomy of choice and freedom of thought. On the whole, this essay presents the main aesthetics notions relating to the critical analysis of traditional European cultures and, more recently, American ones too. American culture, in which the languages of art are based, is analyzed for its effect on occidental philosophy. Both theories of art and contemporary aesthetics are emphasized so as to better understand the work of art's current aim with regard to the discernment of theoretical, prescriptive, and ideological thinking in the visual arts. Cite as: Wagner, Christiane. 2019. “What Matters in Contemporary Art? A Brief Statement on the Analysis and Evaluation of Works of Art.” Art Style, Art & Culture International Magazine, nº 1, (March): 68-82. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5168105

Milena Bartlová, Retrospektiva. Vybrané studie k dějinám umění 12.–16. a 20. století. UMPRUM: Praha 2018, s. 374-376, 2018

Sociology of the Arts, 2018

2020

BEYOND INTERPRETATION Selected Online Proceedings from the 3rd Festival Conference of Music Performance and Artistic Research “Doctors in Performance”, 2021

Starting from the question whether the combination of non-artistic practices could be part of Artistic Research (AR), this paper goes back to an investigation on whether the approach of art & technology projects could be interpreted as AR. The idea draws on the way these projects sought to combine technological innovation and development with artistic production. 2 By seeing these aspects as essential parts of AR, a preliminary definition would be: It is … a) the examination of a defined object or problem (specificity), b) either a relation of the artist's work to (1), defined by other AR practices, or a trial series that shapes in and through the process (methodology), c) defined by an outcome considered as art; it may have features useful to other disciplines or be shaped according to other research interests (artistic & research output), d) a process that is essential to the outcome, which may be multidisciplinary (relation), e) comprehensible that the outcome is the result of the process, and lets others understand this process or continue from there (legibility & transferability). 3 For Leon Harmon's and Kenneth Knowlton's Computer Nude (Studies in Perception I) (silkscreen print, 87x183 cm, 1967) and the follow-up series, art historians suggest that its creation entailed the development of new methods of computation of images, namely the assertion of values of easily displayable signs to certain shades within the image (