THE PROPERTY OF KNOWLEDGE

We can note three phases in the tradition of the readymade and appropriation since Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel of 1913. First, they include early enactments in which the readymade posed an onto- logical challenge to artworks through the equation of commodity and art object. Second, practices in which readymades were de- ployed semantically as lexical elements within a sculpture, paint- ing, installation or projection. In a third phase, which most directly encompasses the global, the appropriation of objects, images, and other forms of content challenges sovereignty over the cultural and economic value linked to things that emerge from particular cultural properties ranging from Aboriginal painting in Australia to the ap- propriation of Mao’s cult of personality in 1990s China. This essay considers the most recent phase of the readymade in terms of its century-long history

Joaquim Rodrigo’s Painting : A Particularity in the Portuguese Case

Capítulo da obra "RETHINKING EUROPE: ARTISTIC PRODUCTION AND DISCOURSES OF ART IN THE LATE 1940S AND 1950S.", que resultou da conferência ocorrida em 2018.In the postwar period, Portuguese art faced a politically-imposed isolation that prevented emerging artists from engaging and interacting with the rest of Europe. For these artisits, other geographical, cultural contexts were no more than remote possibilities of exchange: sometimes mythical places of an avant-garde known through magazine articles, sometimes places they had briefly visited in search of a more direct link with their time. Portugal lived in an established dictatorship known as Estado Novo (New State) that lasted until 1974. The regime's anti-modernism sought to eliminate all modern artistic practices in an attempt to preserve its traditional cultural values, strongly dominated by the government's fascist ideology. The absence of structures for the production, exhibition, and reception of modern art during the twentieth century contributed towards the lessening of modern pratices in the national context, hindering the development of knowledge updated by artists, critics, and audiences. In spite of these setbacks, overall Portuguese artists succeded in overcoming this aloofness to which the regime condemned them. Over time, these artists managed to find ways to a distant modernity - which had become predominant in the process of reconstructing a new world in the postwar period in Wetern Europe. [com o apoio à tradução da Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia - FCT]info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

‘It doesn’t reveal itself’: erosion and collapse of the image in contemporary visual practice

The article explores the extent to which ‘pictorial art’ resists legibility, transparency and coherence. The analysis of three artistic case studies, Idris Khan, Maria Chevska and Jane and Louise Wilson, serves to investigate established hierarchies in our perception of visual referents. In the discussion, the article inquires the means of erosion, veiling and dissemblance as ways to critique assumption of the homogeneity of the image. All artists cast a view of the external world by diverting it, defacing it and distancing themselves from the external environment. However, the distancing is never disconnected from the everyday and never succumbs to abstraction. The article argues that the crisis of the image offers a productive framework that allows artists to draw attention to the absence of logical structure and the instability of the visual sign

A Questionnaire on Materialisms

Recent philosophical tendencies of “Actor-Network Theory,” “Object-Oriented Ontology,” and “Speculative Realism” have profoundly challenged the centrality of subjectivity in the humanities, and many artists and curators, particularly in the UK, Germany, and the United States, appear deeply influenced by this shift from epistemology to ontology. October editors asked artists, historians, and philosophers invested in these projects—from Graham Harman and Alexander R. Galloway to Armen Avanessian and Patricia Falguières to Ed Atkins and Amie Siegel—to explore what the rewards and risks of assigning agency to objects may be, and how, or if, such new materialisms can be productive for making and thinking about art today