Another Deleuzian Resnais: l'année dernière à Marienbad as conflict between sadism and masochism

The Deleuzian reading of L'Année dernière à Marienbad proposed here draws less on what has become a virtually canonical concept in film studies – Deleuze's time-image – than on a much earlier work by the same author, Masochism, which treats sadism and masochism as qualitatively different symbolic universes. Resnais's film, with its deployment of mirrors and statuary and its suggestion of a contract between the characters A and X, presents striking resemblances to the world of masochism as described by Deleuze (drawing on the work of Theodor Reik). At the same time, the role of the third protagonist, M, like that of Robbe-Grillet who wrote the screenplay, has Sadean overtones, suggesting that it might be possible to read the film with its diegetic ambiguities as a Möbius strip linking the sadistic and the masochistic world not only with each other, but with the crystalline universe of the time-image

Melissa Ichiuji: In the Flesh

When she dances, acts, sculpts, sews or films, artist Melissa Ichiuji presents the human figure in political and personal terms, examining its various states of desire or distortion. This exhibition In the Flesh presents three discrete recent bodies of Ichiuji’s work: a series of busts of political figures from the 2012 election season entitled Fair Game, a trio of life-sized sculptures of female bodies, and lastly, Everything to Lose, a film and corresponding photographs of the artist donning an elaborately sculpted costume. Despite seeming differences in medium and subject in this exhibition, Ichiuji works with similar materials and artistic practices in each. She sculpts with fabric and pantyhose and does not hide raw, purposefully crude stitches and seams. Because the pantyhose stands in for flesh; bits of thread under the surfaces look like veins, and gestures seem animated, Ichiuji’s heads and bodies are paradoxically naturalistic and doll-like. “My background as a dancer and an actor,” Ichiuji explains, “informs the physicality of my figures.” Mimeticism, or the evocation of the “real” body, in Ichiuji’s work is mesmerizingly fraught. One sees abstraction and strange realism at once. Her political portraits are uncannily accurate; life-size sculptures approximate the presence of a live figure, and her own body in performance and film hypnotically and paradoxically is obscured and revealed. The perceived fantasy implicit in her work chafes against the viewer’s detection of the “real.” This friction can be seen in how Ichiuji’s real body—her hand, her upper back, her own curves and flesh—is perceptible through the doll-like costume she wears in Everything to Lose. Likewise, from the Fair Game series, one can recognize Newt Gingrich’s characteristic smile through a tangle of women’s underwear, and the distorted figures in her larger-scaled sculptures appear on the brink of movement. [excerpt]https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/artcatalogs/1011/thumbnail.jp

Time, and the static image

Photographs, paintings, rigid sculptures: all these provide examples of static images. It is true that they change-photographs fade,paintings darken and sculptures crumble-but what change they undergo (unless very damaging) is irrelevant to their representational content. A static image is one that represents by virtue of properties which remain largely unchanged throughout its existence. Because of this defining feature, according to a long tradition in aesthetics, a static image can only represent an instantaneous moment, or to be more exact the state of affairs obtaining at that moment'. It cannot represent movement and the passage of time. This traditional vieu- mirrors a much older one in metaphysics: that change is to be conceived of as a series of instantaneous states and hence that an interval of time is composed of extensionless moments. The metaphysical view has been involved in more controversy than its aesthetic counterpart. Aristotle identified it as one of the premises of Zeno's arrow paradoxZ and Augustine employed it in his proof of the unreality of time. The aesthetic view, for its part, was subjected to a blistering attack in Ernst Gombrich's brilliant essay 'Moment and movement in Art'", uhich persuasively argues, not only against the doctrine that the changeless cannot represent change, but also against the very idea of an instant of time. Still, Gombrich overstates his case. Is the idea of an instant simply a philosophers' fiction? And if we allow such an idea into our conception of the world, are we thereby committed to a mistaken view of pictorial representation? Implicit in Gombrich's argument is a link between depiction and perception. But what is this link, and what role does it play in the argument? I propose in this essay to take another look at the question of what time-span is represented by the static image, and consider whether answering this question presupposes a view of time and change. I shall begin with a brief resume of Gombrich's discussion

Spartan Daily, April 27, 2016

Volume 146, Issue 35https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartan_daily_2016/1033/thumbnail.jp

The symbolic dimension of the city : the presence of a dragon in the urban space of Krakow

Praca porusza problematykę symbolicznego wymiaru miasta tworzonego z podsystemu urbanistycznego i społecznego. Miasto i jego krajobraz są tu rozumiane jako system znaków funkcjonujący w dwóch odrębnych, zależnych od siebie porządkach rzeczywistości: porządku materialnym i porządku wyobrażeniowym. W pracy stawiane są pytania o rolę symbolu we współczesnym procesie tworzenia specyfiki miejsca; jest tu też mowa o tożsamości miejsca, o nadawaniu miejscu cech swojskości, o społecznej potrzebie dostrzegania symbolu. Jako przykład do rozważań na temat symbolicznego wymiaru miasta wybrano obecność smoka - stwora zrodzonego w ludzkiej wyobraźni - w przestrzeni miejskiej Krakowa. Kraków jest miastem historycznym, dawną stolicą Polski, jest miastem bogatym w zróżnicowane kapitały symboliczne. Symbolem Krakowa jest smok; smok jest obecny w legendzie o powstaniu miasta, jest też powszechnie obecny w materialnej przestrzeni Krakowa. Jest częścią tożsamości miasta.The paper deals with the issues of the symbolic dimension of a city created from the urban and social subsystems. The city and its landscape are understood here as a system of signs functioning in two distinct orders of reality, yet still dependent on each other, i.e. the material order and the imaginary one. In the paper, we ask questions about the role of the symbol in the contemporary process of creating the specificity of a place. We also speak about the identity of a place, about endowing a place with features of familiarity, about the social need to recognise the symbol. The presence of a dragon, a creature born in the human imagination, in the urban space of Krakow was chosen as an example of the symbolic dimension of the city. Krakow is a historic city, the former capital of Poland, a city rich in diverse symbolic capitals. The dragon is a symbol of Krakow. It is present in the legend about the city’s origins, and is also commonly present in the material space of Krakow. It is part of the city’s identity

Cloud Sculpture Final Design Report

The design team has improved the functionality of the paper cloud sculpture, created originally by Bridge LLC, to include a colored response to weather or user-based input. In mid March of this year, the scope of our project shifted in order to comply with the distance-learning protocols put in place by the university. Without access to our materials or prototype, additional work shifted to addressing the weaknesses of our most recent full prototype. Due to the pandemic and lack of access to the labs, the team was not able to implement the final prototype for testing. However, each individual component, namely response to weather conditions in real time, reliable connection to a weather database and fire safety was thoroughly tested and verified. The material used for the cloud is the one suggested by Paper Cloud to make the final product aesthetically pleasing. The facets of the prototype that fall short of our original project plan include ease of maintenance, installation, and ability to transport. While the wire connections in this prototype have little improvement to maintenance ability compared to the original sculpture, we have provided suggestions in the manufacture and structural layout of the weather-adaptive cloud sculpture to address these issues. Since our team produced a prototype with demonstrable basic functionality, and addressed each weak point of the prototype with specific suggestions, we consider this prototype to be working. For thoroughness and safety, we have included detailed instructions for creating the electronic setup in Appendix A, along with the suggestion of welding wire connections for added stability

Digital technologies for virtual recomposition : the case study of Serpotta stuccoes

The matter that lies beneath the smooth and shining surface of stuccoes of the Serpotta family, who used to work in Sicily from 1670 to 1730, has been thoroughly studied in previous papers, disclosing the deep, even if empirical, knowledge of materials science that guided the artists in creating their master- works. In this work the attention is focused on the solid perspective and on the scenographic sculpture by Giacomo Serpotta, who is acknowledged as the leading exponent of the School. The study deals with some particular works of the artist, the so-called "teatrini" (Toy Theater), made by him for the San Lorenzo Oratory in Palermo. On the basis of archive documents and previous analogical photogrammetric plotting, integrated with digital solutions and methodologies of computer- based technologies, the study investigates and interprets the geometric-formal genesis of the examined works of art, until the prototyping of the whole scenic apparatus.peer-reviewe

Adjustable systems in wood

A Thesis Report Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture