Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Art, Religion and Resistance in (Post-)Communist Romania
This book illuminates the interconnections between politics and religion through the lens of artistic production, exploring how art inspired by religion functioned as a form of resistance, directed against both Romanian national communism (1960-1989) and, latterly, consumerist society and its global market. It investigates the critical, tactical and subversive employments of religious motifs and themes in contemporary art pieces that confront the religious ‘affair’ in post-communist Romania. In doing so, it addresses a key gap in previous scholarship, which has paid little attention to the relationship between religious art and political resistance in communist Central and South-East Europe.
Aesthetics, Disinterestedness, and Effectiveness in Political Art
Should politically concerned and engaged artistic production disregard questions or/and requirements of aesthetic reception and value? Whether art should be “aesthetic” or “political” is not a new question. Therefore, in spite of those several contemporary approaches of this issue, the answer is not set in stone and the debate is still going on. This volume aims to broaden these debates and it stems from numerous conversations with politically engaged artists and artist collectives on issues related to the “aesthetitzation of politics” versus the “politicization of art,” as well as the phenomenon of the so-called “unhealthy aestheticism” in political art. Thus, this study...
Dropping out of Socialism
The essays in this collection make up the first study of “dropping out” of late state socialism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. From Leningrad intellectuals and Berlin squatters to Bosnian Muslim madrassa students and Romanian yogis, groups and individuals across the Eastern Bloc rejected mainstream socialist culture. In the process, multiple drop-out cultures were created, with their own spaces, music, values, style, slang, ideology and networks. Under socialism, this phenomenon was little-known outside the socialist sphere. Only very recently has it been possible to reconstruct it through archival work, oral histories and memoirs. Such a diverse set of subcultures demands a multi-disciplinary approach: the essays in this volume are written by historians, anthropologists and scholars of literature, cultural and gender studies. The history of these movements not only shows us a side of state socialist life that was barely known in the west. It also sheds new light on the demise and eventual collapse of late socialism, and raises important questions about the similarities and differences between Eastern and Western subcultures.
Ion Grigorescu
The Man with a Single Camera provides an extraordinary overview of Ion Grigorescu's body of work since the late 1960s until today. Regarded as one of the key protagonists of Eastern European conceptualism, the Romanian artist advocates a radical convergence between the organic and spiritual, an uninhibited immersion of life into art. The concept of “reality” is at the heart of Grigorescu's work. His ritualized actions and intimate performances, his films and photographs, and his paintings and writings allow, in a unique and antitraditional manner, existential concerns to proliferate. This book is a result of long-term research conducted in the artist's archive. It brings together a complete selection of source materials and theoretical contributions, which grasp the complexity of the social and political surroundings in which Grigorescu has worked, and provides an extended insight into the particularity of his artistic strategies. Copublished with Asociația pepluspatru, ERSTE Foundation, Kontakt. Art Collection Contributors Maria Alina Asavei, Nuno Faria, Klara Kemp-Welch, Anders Kreuger, Ileana Pintilie, Alina Şerban
Art and Politics under Modern Dictatorships
This book analyzes the relationship between art and politics in two contrasting modern dictatorships. Through a detailed look at the Chilean and Romanian dictatorships, it compares the different ways in which political regimes convey their view of the world through artistic means. It examines how artists help \ convey a new understanding of politics and political action during repressive regimes that are inspired by either communism or anti-communism (neoliberalism, traditionalist, conservative). This book demonstrates how artistic renderings of life during dictatorships are similar in more than one respect, and how art can help better grasp the similarities of these regimes. It reveals how dictatorships use art to symbolically construct their power, which artists can consolidate by lending their support, or deconstruct through different forms of artistic resistance.
Religious Narratives in Contemporary Culture
"This book analyses the meaning and role of religion in western cultural practices in the twenty-first century. This inquiry situates itself at the intersection between cultural memory studies and the transmedial study of narrative and art"--
Imagining Human Rights
Why is it that human rights are considered inviolable norms of justice at local and global scales although the number of their violations has steadily increased in modern history? On the surface, this paradox seems to be reducible to a straightforward discrepancy between idealism and reality in humanitarian affairs, but Imagining Human Rights complicates the picture by offering interdisciplinary perspectives on the imaginary status of human rights. By that the contributors mean not merely subject to imagination, open to interpretation or far too abstract, but also formative of a social imaginary with emphatic identifications and shared values. From a variety of disciplinary perspectives, the...
Reckonings
Reckonings documents how Holocaust victims have sought justice over the decades and the haunting disparity between crime and punishment.
Political Violence and the Imagination
Using a variety of theoretical reflections and empirically grounded case studies, this book examines how certain kinds of imagination – political, artistic, historical, philosophical – help us tackle the challenge of comprehending and responding to various forms of political violence. Understanding political violence is a complex task, which involves a variety of operations, from examining the social macro-structures within which actors engage in violence, to investigating the motives and drives of individual perpetrators. This book focuses on the faculty of imagination and its role in facilitating our normative and critical engagement with political violence. It interrogates how the ima...
Beauty
Key texts on beauty and its revival in contemporary art.
