All tagged ritual

A Drawing Out: Visibilizing the Labor of Care, Enacting Mutual Aid

A Drawing Out: Visibilizing the Labor of Care, Enacting Mutual Aid

Angela Beallor
Articles

The author explores the proposals and policies for radical caretaking labor reform drafted by Soviet theorist and policymaker Aleksandra Kollontai during the Soviet 1920s. She meditates on the potential of depiction and enaction in artistic production and collaborative performance. This is to help pre-figure mutual aid, collaboration, community organization, and caretaking in the current world as we struggle to upend the current capitalist and patriarchal status quo(s). She draws on her collaborative performance project, A Drawing Out :: Lactic Orchestration, first staged in 2018, as well as the ideas of those, such as Angela Garbes, who have made compelling intersectional calls for valuing the essential labor of care work within the context of the current global pandemic.

Transformations on the Margin: Jack Smith’s Vital and Difficult Art

Transformations on the Margin: Jack Smith’s Vital and Difficult Art

Sanya Osha

Jack Smith was a visionary American filmmaker, photographer and avant-garde performance artist. Smith was able to get his co-travelers to believe in the transformative dimensions of his singular art events, adopting lowly, discarded film materials, in other words trash, marginal people and seemingly marginal subjects, to provide the grounds for transmogrification, with almost incredible results. Smith’s life and work demonstrate that a condition of absolute lack is not necessarily to be equated with inadequacy. An ostensibly deprived state can in fact be inspiring occasion to reconsider the meaning of art, the role of the artist and artistic valuation.

Breaking Down Colston: Destruction and Transformation in London and Bristol

Breaking Down Colston: Destruction and Transformation in London and Bristol

Lindsay P. Crisp
Articles, Peer Reviewed

This article investigates articulations of material and cultural affects in the deplinthing of the Bristol memorial to Edward Colston in June 2020, and Michael Landy’s destruction of his belongings in the art event Break Down in February 2001. In Break Down, as in the deplinthing of the Colston memorial, destruction changes and expands the plane upon which objects are intelligible by bringing to our attention their material composition. The protesters’ action in Bristol and Landy’s project of systematic dismantling and granulation differ profoundly in epistemological, ethical, and aesthetic terms. However, both events confront us with the fact that matter is never entirely ‘gone.’

Of Kiwi Fruit and Kewpie Dolls: The Wonder of Modern Alankara in Bangalore

Of Kiwi Fruit and Kewpie Dolls: The Wonder of Modern Alankara in Bangalore

Tulasi Srinivas
Photo Essays

The daily aesthetic ornamentation of the deity known as alaṅkāra is an everyday feature of temple ritual. This colorful ornamentation, traditionally of flower garlands and fruit offerings, is synchronized to daily and festival calendars, with spectacular alaṅkāra offered during festivals. Alaṅkāra offers the temple priests scope for creativity, yet it is carefully controlled and codified according to liturgical texts, for it is thought to how God is revealed. Speaking to new practices of alaṅkāra in temples in Bangalore through the usage of new materials such as Kiwi fruit and Kewpie dolls the author suggest a new understanding of modernity and Hindu aesthetics, not only expanding devotees’ understandings of divinity, but inviting devotees to feel adbhutha or wonder.

2020 Summer Issue, Part 2, Innovation and Material Religion - Editorial

2020 Summer Issue, Part 2, Innovation and Material Religion - Editorial

Urmila Mohan
Editorials, Issues

Our Summer 2020 issue on the theme of Innovation is the second of a two-part series that explores instances of creativity and change drawn from various parts of the globe – India, Thailand, and the Western world. Our offerings include a photo essay on jugaad practices among costumers in the Indian film industry, a photo essay on sensory and community aesthetics in a South Indian flower market, a photo essay on care practices and questions of change in Thailand, and an article by Aimee Hinds on how color (or its absence) perpetuates false racial narratives in modern classical reception of the Greco-Roman past.

Immaterial Religion – Yves Klein’s Ex-voto to St Rita of Cascia

Immaterial Religion – Yves Klein’s Ex-voto to St Rita of Cascia

Jessica Hughes
Articles

An essay on the details and aesthetic significance of a votive offering that artist Yves Klein made to St. Rita of Cascia. While art has always played an ineliminable role in the Judeo-Christian tradition, it seems that Klein was particularly sensitive to the entanglement of votive offering, economic sacrifice, and the experiential dimensions of ritual. In many of Klein's works, it would seem that the subsumption of art into religion has been inverted.