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

Erosion and illegibility of images: ‘beyond the immediacy of the present’

The focus of this special journal issue ‘Erosion and Illegibility of Images’ is to explore the relationship of erosion and visibility through contemporary artistic practices at a moment when everything, as Latour suggests, is smashed to pieces. The essays in this issue deploy the notion of erosion as a conceptual tool in order to explore the shifting and depositing of materials, which is observed both on a formal visual level (the breaking up of the image surface) and a critical revaluation of memory, visibility and artistic tools. From an instrumentalist understanding of tools and material, I set out to explore the impact of a radical restriction and limitation of traditional skills and craftsmanship on the artistic process. While recent research has focused predominantly on art theoretical understandings of ruins, the articles collected here aim to interrogate the relationship between artists, artistic tools and the materials of production in contemporary artistic practice by putting them in conversation with each other and scrutinizing interventions such as ‘preservation’, remaking, retro-recuperations and nostalgia work of several kinds

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

Gone to Texas: Eastern-European Jewish and Italian Immigrants in Urban Texas, 1900-1924

This dissertation offers a close examination of the East European Jewish and Italian immigrant populations of three Texas cities---Dallas, Galveston, and Houston---at the turn of the century. Using statistical data derived from the 1900 and 1920 United States federal manuscript censuses, as well as information gathered from a variety of sources including newspapers, census directories, and religious organization records, it weaves together a narrative of the immigrant experience of two populations that receive little scholarly attention in studies of Texas history.Much of the history of southern and eastern European immigrants has been placed in the large immigrant centers of the north and northeastern United States. Despite the relatively small size of the East European Jewish and Italian immigrant populations in Texas' cities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these two groups helped shape the economic and cultural landscape of three of the state's largest urban areas.Through a comparison with East European Jewish and Italian immigrants in other major U.S. cities, it is apparent that the immigrants who settled in Texas cities were not particularly unique in terms of gender distribution, marital status, literacy, or ability to speak English. They were, however, far more likely to be involved in low status white-collar occupations, notably as small business owners. Immigrants in these positions, unlike those working as wage laborers in the employ of another, achieved some level of independence.Far removed from the immigrant centers of the North and Northeast, East European Jewish and Italian immigrants created a variety of institutions to facilitate their transition into their new homes in Texas, defining themselves by their ethnicity and retaining many homeland traditions. Rather than creating tension between the immigrant and native-born population, this practice of ethnic identification was in some cases encouraged by the native-born, even during a period of heightened anti-immigrant sentiment. The immigrants who settled in Texas' urban areas were not, however, rejecting assimilation. In many ways, the ethnic identities they constructed incorporated their new status as Americans and Texans.Thesis (Ph.D.)--The George Washington University, 2012.School code: 0075