Pictures of Innocence: David Newnham and Chris Townsend

B.Jayalaksshme (1124135) David Newnham and Chris Townsend: Pictures of Innocence Paragraph 1: Thesis sentence: It is the stuff of nightmares- the sort of things that hardly bears thinking about. It could happen to you tomorrow morning. You are accused of a crime you did not commit, driven by police and interviewed for hours and your family questioned. And there is worse to come. Key words: Accused for crime – not committed-interviewed for hours. Paragraph 2: Topic sentences: The things you are supposed to have done is the very thing which society finds more abhorrent. Supporting sentences: If you are sent to prison, the other prisoners will fall upon you for self righteous rage. If you retain your liberty, establishing your innocence, society will shun you just the same – stained as you by brush with suspicion. Key words: Self-righteous rage, retain liberty Paragraph 3: Topic sentence: the crime of which you are accused is one which you yourself find unthinkable. Supporting sentences: Your victim you told in that unfriendly interview room is someone who is dear to you. Key words: Victim- dear to you. Paragraph 4: Topic sentence: Nightmares like this thrive in a climate of fear and moral outrage. Supporting sentences: At such times, those whose job it is to protect the society from evil are under pressure to seek it out in every quarter, to pursue every possibility and respond to every complaint. By doing so, they may add to the general sense of panic, at the same time creating another sort of fear – the fear of repression. Key words: Protect society from evil, sense of panic – fear of repression Paragraph 5: Topic sentence: In Britain today, no crime is regarded with more abhorrence than the sexual abuse of children. Supporting sentences: As a society, we have become uniquely sensitized to its various manifestations. Many people who have regular contact with children, have come to fear that their contact will be misinterpreted – will attract accusing fingers, even that knock on the door. Key words: Uniquely sensitized Paragraph 6: Topic sentence: A clear idea of what behavior is unacceptable to society is essential to all of us. Supporting sentences: Nowhere is there a greater clarification than on the question of how children may be represented in pictures. When does the family photograph become child pornography? Key words: Greater clarification – represented pictures. Paragraph 7: Topic sentence: Arrest of ITN newsreader Julia Somerville and her partner Jeremy Dixon. Supporting sentences: The couple were taken away and questioned because a photographic processing assistant told the police that a film left at a chemist's shop by Dixon contained 28 photographs of Somerville's seven year- old daughter in bath. Paragraph 8: Topic sentence: after four weeks, the Crown Prosecution Service announced that it was letting the matter drop. Supporting sentences: But by that time, two things happened. First, as the details of the arrest had been leaked to the press, Somerville, Dixon and, most worryingly of all Somerville's daughter, had all been exposed to a month of intense and damaging media speculation. Second, the case had cranked up public anxiety about the representation of child nudity. Key phrase: Details leaked to press-exposed to a month of intense and damaging media speculation. Public anxiety. Paragraph 9: Topic sentence: The Somerville affair was but the most newsworthy of many such incidents in which the police officers, responding to society's detestation of child pornography, have turned their attention to the lives and families of people subsequently found to be innocent of any wrongdoing. Key phrase: Responding to society's detestation of child pornography. Paragraph 10: Topic sentence: After the Somerville arrest, the magazine Amateur photographer launched a campaign for common sense, urging photographic processor to adopt a consistent set of guidelines when it came to interpreting child photographs. Key phrase: Photographic processor to adopt a consistent set of guidelines. Paragraph 11: Topic sentence: Emily Ovenden, 19- year old girl, throughout her childhood modeled nude to her father. Supporting sentences: 'When you were a kid' Emily says, 'you want to be photographed'. Nudity's natural. Key word: Nudity's natural. Paragraph 12: Topic sentence: Emily refuses to be interviewed by the police. Supporting sentences: She knows how her friend Maud was reduced to tears by the questioning about the sexual acts which never took place. She knows how Maud's father felt threatened and bullied. She knows how traumatized they all were by their contact with the police. Paragraph 13: Topic sentence: few people would dispute that pornographic images of children should be illegal. Supporting sentences: Laws by which we circumscribe the existence grow layer upon layer as we attempt to stay one step ahead of the pornographers. Other laws created during moments of moral outrage- some would say hysteria-come in to being fully formed. One such law is Protection of Children Act (1978) Paragraph 14: Topic sentence: The Act has all marks of tactic by moral pressure groups and religious fundamentalists. Supporting sentences: The original Private Member's Bill covered nothing. 'Too often ', said the Home Office, 'the courts are, placed in an almost impossible task by the house'. The Act has become a powerful tool, to be deployed in ways which were never intended. Paragraph 15: Topic sentence: Buoyed up by MP's on all sides of the House, riding on a tidal wave of extraordinary claims, Cyril Townsend's Bill floated easily on the statute book. Supporting sentences: The Bill changed the wording which enshrined the criminalization of imagery. It introduced the concept of 'indecency', but refused to provide definition. 'Indecency' was whatever right-thinking people understood it to mean 'by applying the recognized standards of propriety'. Key word: Indecency Paragraph 16: Topic sentence: In the following year the Act received further refinement for the Court of Appeal. Supporting sentences: New ruling stated that pictures suspected of being indecent must be judged outside the context in which they were created. No witnesses could be called to explain the motive for taking the photographs. In 1994, the Criminal Justice Act gave police the power to arrest people without the warrant on suspicion of the sexual abuse of children. Key word: Judged outside the context. Paragraph 17: Topic sentence: Has the 1978 Act, promoted 'to prevent the exploitation of children by their use in pornographic character' done anything to curb the activities of child abusers? Supporting sentences: According to Stephen J King, a third of all prosecutions under the Act between 1991 and 1993 were either dismissed or not proceeded with. Criminologist Dr Bill Thompson dispute that the 'flood of material' which initiated the legislation ever existed. Key word: Flood of material. Paragraph 18: Topic sentence: Jan Schuijer and Ben Rossen investigated the trade in child pornography. Supporting sentences: According to them all the pictures were commercially produced during seventies. Most of them were in the magazines such as 'Lolita'. Almost the same pictures were being recycled. They concluded that no new child pornography were there since the early eighties. Key word: Pictures recycled. Paragraph 19: Topic sentence: Thompson believes that the much – hyped child porn sweeping across the internet consists of images from 'Lolita', topped up with pictures from clothing catalogues. Supporting sentences: The real child abusers use technology which is beyond policing- to produce images. The fear of porn explosion has meant that the artists and their models, and entire families who want pictures of their children without clothes, are liable to investigation. Attempt to enforce the ill-defined law on child pornography made the adults scared of being intimate even with their own children. Key words: Fear of porn- scared of being intimate . Paragraph 20: Topic sentence: The officers of HM Customs and Excise, the police, and the CPS have had to become the specialized arbiters of indecency. Supporting sentences: In the absence of clear legislation, they seem to operate according to various criteria. One Officer has said, off the record, that 'any nude picture of a child under the age of consent is indecent'. Key word: Picture of a child under the age of consent is indecent'. Paragraph 21: Topic sentence: Most of the convictions secured under the Protection of Children Act have been in the Crown courts, and the majority of those convicted have been fined or put on probation. Supporting sentences: All the indications are that this law is doing little to protect society from real child pornographers. But the bodies charged with enforcement are under pressure to secure convictions. Society wants child abusers brought to justice. Key words: Protect society –justice. Paragraph 22: Topic sentence: The Obscene Publication Squad believed that Ovenden, father of Emily, a painter was at centre of child pornography ring for 15 to 20 years. Supporting sentences: The OPS raided his house and found large quantities of negatives, photographs and videos. He clearly believes in childhood as a state of grace. His paintings often explore the identity and sexuality of the pre-pubescent girl. Key words: State of grace, explore the identity and sexuality of the pre-pubescent girl. Paragraph 23: Topic sentence: It is easy to find elements to object to in Ovenden's art. Supporting sentences: It is sentimental and naïve and it represents adolescent sexuality. It represents sexuality at all is enough to condemn it in the eyes of observers. It contrives to be innocent. Key words: Sentimental- naïve – eyes of observers. Paragraph 24: Topic sentence: David Hockney says 'the idea that children naked are not beautiful seems to me hideous'. Supporting sentences: Of course, what is hideous are the acts perpetrated by child abusers. Key word: Hideous. Paragraph 25: Topic sentence: Ron Oliver was- outside of Britain he still is- a portrait photographer specializing in the family. Supporting sentences: He was frequently commissioned by wealthy, influential parents to record their children. When requested by his subjects he would take tender pictures of their children. Parents see beauty in the bodies of their offspring. But police saw things different. Paragraph 26: Topic sentence: Oliver's photography inspires various reactions. Supporting sentences: It seems open, sincere, at times sentimental. But no one could describe it as 'Kiddie porn'. Three years on from the raid, the police brought no charges. There appears to be a serious fault-line between reality and the police claim of breaking up a major child- porn ring. Key words: Kiddie porn. Paragraph 27: Topic sentence: There are many photographers who focus more obsessively on the naked child than Oliver. Supporting sentences: Sally Mann's studies of her children have been shown at galleries throughout the UK. To many they are disconcerting pictures – to others they are symbol of love, fiercely protective of their subject. Hamilton's work is 'unequivocal in its sexual intent'. But Oliver is considered as demonized pornographer. Key phrase: Symbol of love, unequivocal in its sexual intent'. Paragraph 28: Topic sentence: These days, Oliver lives on the continent, where attitudes to nudity seem more enlightened and the laws governing photography of children are less open to inconsistency of interpretation. Supporting sentences: His possibility of working in Britain is destroyed by smears and innuendo. He says 'all pictures need to show is closeness, affection, or just plain nudity. And frightened trouble minds look into these pictures and suspect abuse' Key words: Pictures show closeness, affection, or just nudity. . Paragraph 29: Topic sentence: Oliver believes people in Britain are not aware that certain sorts of images may trigger investigations by the police. Supporting sentences: Even if those pictures are subsequently deemed not to warrant prosecution, the private lives of everybody involved may come under scrutiny. 'If Britain does decide to regulate family behavior via its police force', Oliver says, 'then there should be law that makes it very clear how far one can go to avoid contact altogether. Such laws would give people the chance to have something that they can fight against – something they can campaign'. Paragraph 30: Topic sentence: Emily still models, fiercely proud of her body. Supporting sentences: She never felt self –conscious. She no longer work with her father but at 19 poses for a photographer called China Hamilton. Key word: Self-conscious. Paragraph 31: Topic sentence: we have problem with nudity. Supporting sentences: To look at our bodies and understand them is to know that we are sinful. As a result we refuse to look at life, its beauty and corruption, and simultaneously we cannot tear our gaze away. Instead of images of sincere sexuality we gorge ourselves on grotesque caricatures. Ovenden's crime was giving his models a stake in the artistic process. In this way he allowed them an awareness of their own sexual identity. 'Nudity at all levels was taken at face value'. Key words: Refuses to look at life, beauty. Sincere sexuality- grotesque caricatures. Awareness of sexual identity. Paragraph 32: Topic sentence: Sensuality changes from century to century. Supporting sentences: Critic John Berger writes: 'He who says "sensuous" – where the human body and the human imagination are concerned – is also "sexual".' What's really at stake in all the push and pull between artists and the law is the right to represent and read childhood in particular ways. We are not arguing about morals but ideology. Key word: Morals- ideology, sensuous. Paragraph 33: Topic sentence: childhood, especially that peculiar, painful interval we call adolescence, is something made by adults. Supporting sentences: Ovenden, Oliver, Sally, Hamilton, the police, all put their own particular spin on it. It is either the romantic Age of Innocence, or the moment of naïve emergence, self-understanding beginning to dawn at the moment the camera clicks shut, or else the place of darkness, of sexual repression, or, the place of sexual exploitation. And despite the endless, obsessive documentation, all the images somehow miss the point. Key words: the romantic Age of Innocence, naïve emergence, self-understanding beginning to dawn - the camera clicks shut, or else the place of darkness, of sexual repression, or, the place of sexual exploitation. Paragraph 34: Topic sentence: The truth of childhood is always in the emotionally wasted gaps between the happy, smiling poses, in absences. Supporting sentences: Adolescence negotiates its own sexual desires, its anarchy, in the interstices of an adult world. There are no pictures of your first cigarette, your first kiss. The childhood which the moral entrepreneurs seem to want is the idealized, sanitized version which forms a matching set in a larger vision of secular, happy nuclear families. Key words: Childhood the entrepreneur need-idealised, sanitized, - larger vision of secular, happy nuclear families. Paragraph 35: Topic sentence: we also need moral panics to regulate our own secret desires. Supporting sentences: By deflecting the crisis of abuse on to demonic, perverted paedophiles in organized rings, we forget that the real centre of abuse is too often the family. Key words: Crisis of abuse, demonic, paedophiles, centre of abuse-family.

Writing (And Righting) Wrongs: Feminist Art Publications: Carrie Rickey

Yukta (1124132)

Writing (And Righting) Wrongs: Feminist Art Publications

Thesis Statement: Although through the twentieth century women artists had been part of vanguard movements, in the 1970s women artists were the vanguard of vanguard.

Paragraph 1:

Topic Sentence: Imagine, if you will, a far flung network of moles, each tirelessly burrowing underneath a cultural landscape that spans from Los Angeles County Museum of Art to the Whiteny Museum in New York.

Key Word: Massive Reconfiguration of American art.

Key Ideas: Imagine- network of moles- tirelessly burrowing- unaware- history of women's achievements-anticipation of art and intellectual inquiry- result: massive reconfiguration of American art.

Paragraph 2:

Topic Sentence: The moles, of course are the many feminist artists, historians, critics, chroniclers, and theorists who, during the 1970s, created a thriving cultural network that, despite the demise of many venues and outlets, continues to influence the discourse about – not to mention the practice of – art well into 1990s.

Key Word: Feminist Art Press

Key Ideas: Moles- feminist artists, historians, critics etc of 1970s- produced great works – influenced 1990s art also – feminist art press of 1970s: one of the best predictors of American Art during 1980s

Paragraph 3 - 4:

Topic Sentence: In newsletter and reviws as different in frequency and texture as the monthly Women Artists News, the quarterly Feminist Art Journal, those quasi-quarterlies Chrysalis and Heresies, and the semiannual Woman's Art Journal, interviwes, manifestos, and questions appeared, presaging the changes in American Art.

Key Word: Presaging the changes in American Art

Key Ideas: Women began to be highlighted – questions rose by 1978 asking, 'why art history has reverses and feminine, lyrical or luxurious styles are replaced by virile, heroic and austere ones.

Paragraph 5:

Topic Sentence: From the vantage of the mid – 1990s, just the right distance if you're farsighted, it appears during the 1970s and 1980s that yes, many feminine and expressive styles of art dramatically replace the virile and impersonal austerity of Minimalism.

Key Word: Feminie and expressive style of art dramatically replace the virile and impersonal austerity of Minimalism.

Key Ideas: Mid- 1990s: appears that from 1970s and 1980s feminie style of art began replacing virile ones – Feminie style first surfacing in theory, discussion etc – feminist periodicals of 1970s.

Paragraph 6:

Topic Sentence: The monochrome of Minimalism predominated, from the works on the walls and floors to the walls and floors themselves.

Key Word: Minimalism dominated architecture.

Key Ideas: Vanguard American gallaries or museums – frequented between 1968 and 1978 -

if not frequented: need some color to evoke the period.

Paragraph 7:

Topic Sentence: Minimalism was the final stage (or do you call it the last gap?) of modernism – the belief in the tenet that art had to divest itself of anything not intrinsic to the medium.

Key Word: Evolved

Key Ideas: Minimalism - final stage of modernism – vanguard art evolved – painting: merely pigment on unstretched canvas – further elimination leads to blanks.

Paragraph 8:

Topic Sentence: Minimalism, it must be stressed, was not a men's only club.

Key Word: Not a men's - only club

Key Ideas: Minimalism – not only for men – many women also numbered.

Paragraph 9:

Topic Sentence: The feminist art press that flourished during the 1970s and beyond was not conceived as an aestheic antidote to the prevailing theory and practice of minimalism.

Key Word: Aesthetic antidote

Key Ideas: Feminist art press- 1970s – not conceieved as an aesthetic antidote to prevailing theory and practice of Minimalism – monastic backdrop of Minimalism – antiwar art actions – give rise to feminism and other movements – played out- Flatness of modernist canvases and austerity of Minimalism – brought art world politics into the highest relief.

Paragraph 10:

Topic Sentence: In her critical history of the Feminist Art Journal, Christine C. Rom perceived that the "increasingly obvious gap between the reform rhetoric of the late 60s and the reality of the traditional view of the sexes spawned the feminist artists' movement much as it had the larger American women's movement."

Key Word: Feminist artists' movement

Key Ideas: Critical history of Feminist Art Journal - Cristine C. Rom - percieved gap between rhetoric form of the late 60s and reality- traditional view spawned feminist artists' movement.

Paragraph 11:

Topic Sentence: In New York in 1969, female members of the Art Workers Coalition, appalled to learn that AWC's protests against the art establishment were waged on behalf of minority men only, splintered off from the group to found Women Artists in Revolution (WAR).

Key Word: Female abolitionists

Key Ideas: History repeats itself - debate - female abolitionists: feminists should seek the vote for black men first v/s should seek vote for all women first.

Paragraph 12:

Topic Sentence: LACWA analyzed the museum's exhibition record, which revealed that the fifty-three one - artist shows hosted by the museum; only one was dedicated to a woman, photographer Dorothea Lange.

Key Word: LACWA emerged to protest

Key Ideas: West Coast counterpart to the WAR mobilization – early 1970s – LACWA (group of feminist artists) - emerged to protest – no women artists were invited to participate – only 1/53 shows hosted was dedicated to woman.

Paragraph 13 – 14:

Topic Sentence: Each month, the WEB newsletter originated from a different city, educating its subscribers about the latest happenings, conducting a census of women faculty at major institutions, maintaining a slide registry so that curators and critics would have a visual data bank of work by women.

Key Word: First newsletter

Key Ideas: Curatorial defense: women artists are not exhibited because there are no significant women artists – WEB was conceived, gestated and birthed – women's art movement needs delegates across the country – 1^st newsletter typed – WEB bloomed – representatives in 12 states and 5 nations – each month newsletters originated from different cities – latest happenings published

Paragraph 15:

Topic Sentence: Largely as a result of these political actions and intelligence-sharing, the ususal 5% representation of women artists rises to 22% in the 1971 Whiteny Annual.

Key Word: 5% representations of women rises to 22%

Key Ideas: Political actions – intelligence sharing – 5% representations of women artists rise to 22% in 1971 - Linda Nochilin's essay "Why have there been no great women artists?", January (ARTnews).

Paragraph 16 - 17:

Topic Sentence: While there are no women equivalents for Michelangelo or Rembrandt, Delacroix or Cezanne, Picasso or Matisse, Nochilin argues, "In actuality, as we know, In the arts as in a 100other areas, things remain stultifying, oppressive and discouraging to all those – women included – who did not have a good fortune to be born white, preferably middle – class and above all, male.

Key Word: Fault lies in our institution and our education.

Key Ideas: Nochilin – white western male view points accepted as art historian – inadequate – no women equivalent to many great male artists – women : those who are not fortunate enough to be born as a male – fault: in our institution and education.

Paragraph 18:

Topic Sentence: Though many burrowed before her, Nochlin is the mother mole who displaced the most earth and who challenges other historians, artists, and critics to question their institutions of learning and their received wisdom.

Key Word: Institutionalization of inequality.

Key Ideas: Historically, women artists could not paint from the nude – institutionalization of inequality – Nochlin's essays – demand reviewing of whole of western art.

Paragraph 19:

Topic Sentence: The historical/institutional critique provided by Nochlin's essay swiftly achieved critical mass given the feminist art – world activism already sustaining the Ad Hoc Women Artists Groups, LACWA, WAR, and WEB.

Key Word: Conducted a chain reactions from coast to coast.

Key Ideas: Groups formed – groups came together – conducted chain reactions – many participants joined forces – formed Women's Caucus of the College Art Association – ideas exchanged – gave rise to publications of many provocative subjects.

Paragraph 20:

Topic Sentence: During all this intellectual and social ferment many general feminist periodicals were being founded, from the mainstream Ms. to the scholarly Signs.

Key Word: General Feminist periodicals were being founded.

Key Ideas: General feminist periodicals being founded – Journals responsive to literary and social concerns – none sensitive to the aesthetics – feminist art press broke new grounds.

Paragraph 21:

Topic Sentence: It's tempting to think of the Feminist Art movement in terms of a university and the six principal publications that surfaced as different features and courses offered there.

Key Word: Feminist Art Movement

Key Ideas: Feminist Art Movements – in terms of university – six principal publications – different features and courses offered – Feminist Art Journal – lively speaker's program spotlighting underknown women artists.

Paragraph 22 - 23:

Topic Sentence: Finally, there is the Woman's Art Journal, a postgraduate course reexamining art historical subjects from a scholar's perspective. This academy of art publications would define – not to mention alternately embrace and reject – many feminisms.

Key Word: Reexamining art historical subject.

Key Ideas: Chrysalis – interdisciplinary graduate program – exploring confluence of psychology, literature, and art – Heresies – independent study program – devoted to feminism, art and politics of single themes.

Paragraph 24 – 25:

Topic Sentence: "As in the case of many outgrowths of the women's movement, the Feminist Art Journal was a product of collective need and individual determination," wrote editor-in-chief Cindy Nemser in a 1974 edition of the Brooklyn, New York based quarterly that was published from 1972 to 1977.

Key Word: Established Feminist Art Journal

Key Ideas: 3 goals – to be voice of women artists in the world – to improve the status of all women artists – to expose sexist exploitations and discriminations.

Paragraph 26 – 27:

Topic Sentence: However well intentioned, the first two ideals would not be realized during FAJ's five years and the third would be only intermittently addressed.

Key Word: Recorded women's art movements.

Key Ideas: FAJ recorded women's art movements – necessary resource – aesthetically far flung – publication of unusually large range.

Paragraph 28 – 33:

Topic Sentence: FAJ introduced a consideration of Renaissance patroness Marie de' Medici as a tastemaker and history shaper.

Key Word: First woman commissioned by the US

Key Ideas: FAJ considered Renaissance patroness Marie de' Medici as a tastemaker and history shaper - First woman commissioned by the US – published on aesthetic and literature – emergence of women filmmakers – resurrected the careers of architects – celebrated women writers – yet trying to achieve staged goal – magazine seen as the house organ of the Nemser cult of personality

Paragraph 34 – 35:

Topic Sentence: Seigel noted that he (Rosenberg) was quick to deny that there existed art typical of women, because if it did exist it could be used both for and against women.

Key Word: Art typical of women.

Key Ideas: Seigel – 1975 lecture by art critic Harold Rosenberg – noted he'd deny there existed typical of women art – anti-semite views.

Paragraph 36 – 41:

Topic Sentence: While other feminist journals came and went, WAN proved remarkable durable and enduring.

Key Word: WAN paid attention to real politics, chronicling the women artists.

Key Ideas: WAN flourished – feminism – postmodern – History of Art – invited 3^rd world women artists – stream-of-conscious meditation – battled sex discrimination – paid attention to real politics – other feminist journals died out – WAN : remarkably durable and enduring.

Paragraph 42 – 47:

Topic Sentence: Less than a decade after women artists' movement was officially born in 1969, womanart, an exemplary Brooklyn-based quarterly founded by Ellen Lubell in 1976, devoted much of a 1977 edition to the question, "What Ever Happened to the Women Artists' Movement?

Key Word: Womanart, the spiritual daughter of FAJ

Key Ideas: 1969 – womanart founded – spiritual daughter of FAJ – essay on "Making of Modern Art" – careful balance of historical and the current – Contemorary Reinvention of Portraiture and self – portrait – printed on slick paper – also published essays by male historians and critics

Paragraph 48 – 49:

Topic Sentence: The depolarization, anomie and alienation, so much a part of men's world, are balanced in women's by intimacy and connectedness.

Key Word: Published anything that would potentially device women's artists' movement.

Womanart polled feminist artists and historians – making innovations in resisting – published the artists' meditations on recurring themes in women's art.

 

yukta

Making Space:image events in an extreme state: Johanna Drucker

Neethu Ann Jose (1124113)

Map of Johanna Drucker's essay "MAKING SPACE: IMAGE EVENTS IN AN EXTREME STATE"

Thesis Statement

In place of the act of making strange, or de-familiarization, so banalized as shock-effect tactics in the last century, Jaar's Lament shows the need for refamiliarization, an act of connection and association that takes full account of the gap between image and referent, between images and systems of belief.

Para 1:

Topic sentence: In THE LAMENT OF THE IMAGES, Alfredo Jaar confronts the stark inadequacy of photographs to register with any significant impact the image-saturated state of our current culture.

Key ideas: not simply quantity of images - but breakdown in our belief in the ability of photographic documentation to bear witness - ethical dilemma and collapse of faith - traumatic blindness - exploitative tactics of media production

Para 2:

Topic sentence: Does his crisis and subsequent recoil from this documentary work apply equally to images created within the aesthetic frame of the art?

Key ideas: aesthetic images –tasked with imagining rather than presenting - exempt from breakdown of belief?

Para 3:

Topic sentence: The belief system Jaar is questioning has deep roots in Enlightenment thought and the wellsprings of modernity.

Key ideas: aesthetic images can shock us into awareness of our stable condition- inadequacy of documentary images- can no longer show us what is – elegy for aesthetic work- imaginative images show us what might be or how we think about what is-documentary images should show version of reality-"what is"

Para 4:

Topic sentence: The demise marked by Jaar's project is the end to belief in the defamiliarizing effect that was a tenet of the historical avant- garde.

Key ideas: aesthetic images linked to making strange- real and symbolic are traumatically disjunctive- need for critical shift- refamiliarization- returns images and symbolic expression to a system of cultural and symbolic production with which they are codependent- act of recovery and connection-not innovation, novelty or shock exposure

Para 5:

Topic sentence: Jaar's poignant Lament is not a work of refamiliarization.

Key ideas: activism has become impotent- effects of image culture crushed avant-garde impulse

Para 6:

Topic sentence: Jaar's work tells us much about the larger scenes of fine art and visual culture.

Key ideas: visual communication as "a regime to be managed" vs. "business as usual"- galleries become venues for image commodities- artist's dilemma to establish brand identity- offered as works of opposition or resistance- "critique" the culture industry or "transgress" the symbolic discourses of power

Para 7:

Topic sentence: When Jaar collapses his "art" work into the general category of "images" the distinction between fine and culture industry visual production becomes difficult to maintain.

Key ideas: existential dilemma- can images matter in extreme state of current visual culture?- artist as agent of social change or magical politics- counter extreme is impossibility of efficacy in our supposedly completely virtual condition or simulacral disorder

Para 8:

Topic sentence: The current crisis of visual images is twofold- epistemological and cultural.

Key ideas: structural problem- media image is most often smokescreen- images don't show us what is- managed deception- capacity to imagine and capacity to bear witness are radically different facets of visual expression

Para 9:

Topic sentence: "Exactly repeatable images," as William Ivins famously called them, provide a consensual knowledge base.

Key ideas: visual images constitute system of belief- shared social experience- mass media are symptom not cause of extreme condition in which images circulate without accountability

Para 10:

Topic sentence: Modern fine art took its historical shape from two determining moments: the separation from mass media culture brought about in the Industrial Revolution, and the utopianism that sprang from nineteenth-century romanticism to shape the early twentieth-century avant-garde commitment to alterative discourse.

Key ideas: beliefs in art's autonomy and efficacy are not un-truths but masking ideologies

Para 11:

Topic sentence: These myths are not lies, but they are structures of belief whose basis may be obsolete.

Key ideas: autonomy, once foundation of aesthetic identity is now condition of consumption- extreme state- simulacral images and rhetoric serves to produce and sustain political administration whose terrifying power is effected through visual regimes

Para 12:

Topic sentence: Under these extreme conditions, the challenge isn't to expose an imagined "real" through its representation

Sub-topic sentence: We face a more difficult task: reconceptualizing images as events that expose the systems in which cultural forces and interests create networks of power and its simulacra.

Key ideas: power – illusions-corrupt and simulacral world- epistemological and cultural crises are intertwined

Para 13:

Topic sentence: Within received convention, we think of images as things (reified, static, material, self-evident, in- themselves).

Key ideas: de-familiarization proposed slap-in-the-face shock effect- refamiliarization asks images to show relations of complex systems to expose vectors and forces of interests, desires, and power- connected to lived experience of persons and peoples- image events emerge from systems of codependency

Para 14:

Topic sentence: Our sense that the world is broken and that we have the obligation to put it right descends through the modern era from certain tenets of romanticism.

Key ideas: refamiliarization isn't prescriptive, but richly descriptive-refamilialization as a critical approach not limited to study of contemporary works

Para 15:

Topic sentence: In her current study of images of Condoleeza Rice, Karen Finley is painting and redrawing media image photographs of the Secretary of State.

Key ideas: images not the way we know Rice- public image does not mask a knowable person- persona, representations and psychic identity bound together- assumption of de-familiarization was that the surface was false- but surface is true as well- she is imaged reality-a realized image- not surface image hiding the real- not a simulation without a reality effect

Para 16:

Topic sentence: Finley's project engages directly with the epistemological crisis of images in our culture.

Key ideas: attempt to ask how knowledge is produced, visually, across these images- what appears to be natural- exposes images as documents of relations within systems of power- visual regimes

Para 17:

Topic sentence: Rice is a paradigmatic expression of the Xtreme state, the familiar face of that smiling fascism inconspicuously announced in the disappearance of discourse.

Key ideas: habits of media have become parodic- support of imperialistic impulses - commentary passing as reasoned and reasonable narrative of unjustifiable actions- are images obsolete?

Para 18:

Topic sentence: Conceived in a human – a compromised – rather than an ideal frame, fine art registers conditions within a social scale.

Key ideas: refamiliarization is always flawed, unfinished, and partial as a process- propaganda images try to show a fixed reality- partial knowledge continually provokes reading and interpretation-rather than keep familiar things out of thought, he brings masked into a familiar scene- another kind of space to refamiliarize us with set of lived conditions

Para 19:

Topic sentence: The rhetorical force of fine art also derives from the affective impact of images and from the imaginative view that powerful works bring to awareness, not just from their conceptual strength.

Key ideas: imaginatively transformative properties of works of art distinguish them from commercial or industrial ones- "Xtreme" state capable of monumental folly- casts us daily into the shadow of possible apocalypse- purveyors of visual criticism came to believe that images circulate with no referent to the real- theory language feels bankrupt in the face of destruction-images produce their own testimonial perhaps more suspect than language

Para 20:

Topic sentence: In Longo's drawings for Sickness of Reason, the new sleep. Toxic and intoxicating, rises in archetypal mushroom cloud formations as if to glory in the climax of an atomic reaction.

Key ideas: sublime is always terrifying-sickness is not sleep- sleep is forgetting and rewarding but sickness lives with its condition, perverted and compromised

Para 21:

Topic sentence: The drawings are too perfect – indeed too perfectly historical.

Key ideas: culture has become consistent- propaganga has migrated into terror industry- language, image, media, and discourse would align with facist and totalitarian agendas to cover the tracks of repression so completely that the citizens became active in their own submission to authority that did not serve their interests

Para 22:

Topic sentence: Political theory and paranoid fictions notwithstanding, the imperative to artists remains much the same today as it was in the era in which Goya raised his graphic protest to the unimaginable cruelties of human beings: to resist the closure to which administrative reason is prone when it turns culture to its propagandist purposes.

Key ideas: reason in the service of administration is a weapon of terror- art in the service of bureaucratic culture becomes a commodity

Para 23:

Topic sentence: Adorno's arguments remain central to any project of critical epistemology, especially in the aesthetic realm.

Key ideas: the capacity of fine art to expose the systems and forces of cultural conditions and ideological production remains vital- fine art embodies capitalist mythology

Para 24:

Topic sentence: In another series of drawings of planets, Longo's rendering shows Saturn ringed with its belt of sparkling dust, catching the sun's rays on one bald face profiled against an interstellar darkness utterly unmitigated by the presence of even a single star.

Key ideas: the sheer force of aesthetic impact is vital, not trivial to, to engagements

Para 25:

Topic sentence: Making space suggests an active role for fine art events, as Alain Badiou calls them.

Key ideas: shifting from object to process- from thing to action- substitutes systems theory for critical theory and cultural studies

Para 26:

Topic sentence: Badiou says that a "passion for the real" dominated twentieth-century thought.

Key ideas: democratic materialism means there are bodies and languages; there are individuals and communities and nothing else- multiplicity- liberty- rights-considers what exists to be objects and cultures absorbed into their market dimension

Para 27:

Topic sentence: True enough, but the reductive phrase "market dimension" with its suggestion that a critique of consumption is the goal of critical thought is naïve.

Key ideas: fine art participates in mass culture- value is a codependent entity not an essence

Para 28:

Topic sentence: The work of Geoff Mcgann brings connections between fine art and image industries into focus with different effects than those of Finley or Jaar.

Key ideas: Geoff's work comes from experience in advertising industry- combined high-end production values of the industry with intriguingly near- incidental insights- point at which document and artifice meet

Para 29:

Topic sentence: The uncompromised consumable quality of the images gives them an effervescence that arouses the most repressed imagination.

Key ideas: kitsch consumerism

Para 30:

Topic sentence: But these images are all paired with photographs that document their making.

Key ideas: angel pictures are excuse for glimpses of models in the daily business of producing themselves- the goddess portraits provide a consumable product- pretending to be more when they are less than the situation from which they are extruded

Para 31:

Topic sentence: The angel pictures are the cast-off shins of the illusion machine.

Key ideas: show that documentary photos are not authentic through a simple opposition- pictures matter because of associations to situation and circumstance, the lived and embedded relations of production and product- pseudo-documentary images are deceptive

Para 32:

Topic sentence: By contrast to McGann's flirtations with commercial culture, photographer William Wylie's work is squarely within a fine arts tradition.

Key ideas: marble is treated with reverence- the material is inherently beautiful- but also because of association with great pieces of sculpture

Para 33:

Topic sentence: Wylie is not in any sense making the marble, the quarry, or the men whose color portraits accompany the black-and-white prints of the stones "strange".

Key ideas: images of potentiality- image events show art activity as a relation between various processes of labour, social and cultural relations, skills of varying kinds and degrees- circumstances are not a context or fixed system, but a set of conditions and processes.

Para 34:

Topic sentence: Aesthetic documents in their own right – large-scale, highly refined digital prints that reward repeated looking- Wylie's images are also document of what "art" is in the refamiliarized sense.

Key ideas: ideological meanings are integral to formal richness- multiplicity of meanings is inexhaustible and unstable- chain of associations

Para 35:

Topic sentence: The split between the black-and–white images of the marble blocks and the color portraits of the men introduces one kind of "space" for critical dialogue.

Key ideas: dynamic readings- pairings create their own splits and associations

Para 36:

Topic sentence: In an era where there is no order to return to, where nothing can be made stranger than the daily business of mediated imagery and experience with its fully exploitative tactics of shock and relation to the extreme state of a politics of aggression and violence, the task of a reader of ideological values is to see how we are situated within the networks that produce us as subjects.

Key ideas: aesthetic acts in modern autonomy function as things apart but the task now is to reconstruct sites and circumstances of production with the meanings the images provoke

Para 37:

Topic sentence: In conclusion, I want to mention the reflections of an art historian and critic on the condition of art and theory.

Key ideas: Xtreme state conjures an image of managed and administered culture that penetrates every aspect of society – terror industry is the public relations arm of the Xtreme state.

Para 38:

Topic sentence: No truth can be revealed under such a regime.

Key ideas: entities become events and images dissolve into circumstantial expressions- splits every notion of the real into unreconcilable set of contradictory conditions

Para 39:

Topic sentence: In that space of play, we can imagine - not "otherwise" but instead – into recognition, awareness of our place within ideological conditions.

Key ideas: The more a phenomenon appears to be natural, the more truly it is cultural

Para 40:

Topic sentence: Wylie's blocks, McGann's angels, and Finley's Condoleezza Rice images are striking examples of refamiliarization.

Key ideas: images reify illusion as well as perform it- not matter of simple concealment or deception but of ignorance

Para 41:

Topic sentence: We are far from the era of the early twentieth-century avant-garde.

Key ideas: refamiliarization- an act of connection and association that takes full account of the gap between image and referent, between images and systems of belief- can aesthetic works answer the crisis of epistemology and culture?

CIA 2

Why Google+ Is an Education Game Changer - Environment - GOOD - StumbleUpon

Why Google+ Is an Education Game Changer - Environment - GOOD - StumbleUpon

The Prophet by Khalil Gibran

Attention: I MAites


Looks like the exact I emailed has created a lot of interest in many of you and has touched some of you. Amol asked for the details of the extract. The extract is from the book The Prophet (1923) by Gibran Khalil Gibran.

You can read the pdf version by clicking here.
To download the book, click here.
To read more about Gibran from Wikipedia, click here.
To find other works of Gibran click here

Google celebrated Khalil Gibran’s Birthday with special logotype - Click here to see it

National Conference on Knowledge Dissemination through Journal Publications

Christ University is organising a three-day National Conference on Knowledge Dissemination through Journal Publications from 28 through 30 September 2011 at Christ University, Bangalore. The conference is organised to help participants understand the processes of journal publications, interact with editors and journal publishers and to give a platform to share their research in the area of research publication in journals.

Call for Papers and Presentations
Papers in the following areas are invited:
Peer review
E-publishing
Journal styles
Self-publication
Citation indexes
Creative commons
Citations and review
Open Journal System
Open access initiatives
Copyright issues in academic publishing
Interdisciplinary research and challenges of publication
Disciplinary differences in research writing and publication

Important Dates
Last date for submission of abstract   :   July 30, 2011
Communication from the Centre on selected papers  :   August  16, 2011
Last date for submission of full length paper  :   September 15, 2011
Last date for  all  registrations :   September 25, 2011

Further details may be obtained from: 

www.christuniversity.in

Email:  <cedbecATchristuniversity.in>

Mobile : 080-40129442 or 40129443

Link: http://anilpinto.blogspot.com/2011/07/national-conference-on-knowledge.html

DOWNLOAD the Conference Pre-notice Clicking Here.