C&CS

The theme of this C&CS project first came to me a year ago, when I developed a project that I loved for Foundation Part Three, Fear of Ghosts. It was a very emotional work, but as I had less experience, I regretted not taking enough out of it. I then decided I wanted to go deeper, into the meaning of the ghost motif and why I chose to talk about it in the first place. I feel I needed to further my investigation since it’s a theme that continues as one of my biggest and most genuine interests. I had wanted to explore more, but I hadn’t had the right ideas about where to look until a couple of months into this semester. I felt every research I made about this subject lead me into a dead end, such as the one I made about Goya’s Black Paintings. I no longer knew how I could relate to that or how to relate it to my inquiry.

It was by the time I first started reading The Uncanny that things started getting clear. In the book Freud mentions the fact that there were few people in his time talking about the weird, the uncanny. And that made me think about how I was already familiar with the concept even before knowing of that text; there are now a lot of people discussing and producing content about the uncanny. It drew me back to one of my main art references and interests: horror manga by Junji Ito, who uses the element of the unfamiliar brilliantly, and whose work I’ve been reading for over five years.

Strange locations and space

Conflict between times: past comes to derange the present/modern (THE GHOST)

Juxtaposition between powerful and vulnerable beings/characters (sexual)

The uncanny – what looks human, but is not quite human, like dolls, ghosts.

Sublime – overwhelming and overpowering beauty

Supernatural/real

BOWEN, J.

Gothic motifs

Gothic novels are full of such uncanny effects – simultaneously frightening, unfamiliar, and also strangely familiar.

Bowen, J., 2014. Gothic motifs. [online] The British Library. Available at: <https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/gothic-motifs#> [Accessed 16 June 2021].

Gothic literature has always been a theme of my interest, and I feel the uncanny is one of the most important reasons why that is. It doesn’t rely solely on the terrors of the unknown, but also in warping what is, in fact, familiar. It is able to create scenarios that subvert the things we know and turn them into something else, something to be feared.

WOLF, S. E.

How Media Scares Us: The Work of Junji Ito

It's rare that any pre-established horror convention appears in his work […], rather, Ito’s illustrations are primarily centered around the disorientation of the natural world.

Wolf, S., 2016. How Media Scares Us: The Work of Junji Ito. [video] Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIIA6QDgl2M> [Accessed 9 May 2021].

The same concept appears in the manga by Junji Ito. The author/artist subverts and corrupts elements of the day to day and the natural world so they appear as a fright. With this he creates horror much more tangible and dreadful than any conventional trope; making what we take as safe and familiar into a terrible monster or phenomenon.

FREUD, S.

The Uncanny

[...] everything is unheimlich that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light.

Freud, S., 2021. The Uncanny. [ebook] Penguin Books. Available at: <https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Freud_Uncanny.pdf> [Accessed 9 May 2021].

Goya’s Black paintings caught my attention because of their name and because of their reputation for being disturbing. He is already an artist known for his dark subject matters and in this series, they became much bleaker. The article focuses a lot on telling us how little is actually known about the Black Paintings. They were first painted on Goya’s house walls and never meant to be seen by the public. That’s why it puzzles historians so much; there is no one “correct’’ interpretation or explanation for them since they were first created in isolation and for only Goya himself to see.

I would say the CCS class has surprised me in a very positive way. I’ve been in EBAC for two years and something I missed a lot was theorical classes, although not necessarily Art History ones, which is just what this course is. The subjects we discuss are actually interesting and I feel that even when I’m not particularly enthusiastic about a specific subject, other people in the class are, and to me that makes a lot of difference.

Describe a key idea or theory from post modernism.

 Can you explain the significance of this idea to contemporary culture?

Postmodernism has an idea that consists of a disbelief in technological/scientific progress as an inherently positive thing. Many postmodernists believe it can actually be on the contrary, as this type of progress is often fuelled and utilized by people who wish to obtain power over others.

This connects directly with the general disbelief of the postmodern artists and thinkers in the concepts that ruled the generations before them, such as good and bad, inside and out, ugly and beautiful. Questioning the benefits of said progress is something that can be seen in the rise of Las Vegas as a postmodernist city; it represented the utmost progress and wealth but was ultimately a decadent place, dubbed a “junk space”.

Cairn Info

 What was the comiX movement? 

Are these ideas relevant to today’s graphic novels?

The Comix movement was a rise of independent comic artists and writers in the 1960s, that begun producing and self-publishing underground content. This was a direct response not only to the oppressive expectations of American society, but also to the Comics Code Authority and the restrictions it created in order to censor comics being produced at the time. With the aid of independent producing, artists were able to explore themes such as sex, drugs, violence and protest, that were being censored from mainstream content. This allowed for these aspects of society which were usually overlooked by higher art and mainstream media, to find their way to the public, that was mostly alienated from content with any critics to the Vietnam war and other social issues of the US.

In the mid-1970s, underground comix started giving place to a new genre of independent publications: alternative comics, which were usually longer and had more complex narratives. These narratives still had humorous critiques in them, but drove further from satire and onto more introspective subjects. This is something that we can observe today in most of what’s being published besides superhero comics; most comics being released are dubbed graphic novels, as they are essentially novels in their length and complexity. But there’s also a few differences, especially when comparing today to the underground comix before the publication of Maus in the 1980s, which led the way to comics being recognized as a relevant literary format, which is nowadays largely appreciated and spread in mainstream culture.  

Cal Poly

Art History Teaching Resources

How to understand the idea of marginality in Brazilian Cultural situation? 

What does it mean to be marginal for the 60s in Brazil?

There was this idea of modernization in Brazil that was deeply connected to that of European modernism, which was rooted in the industry and mechanization. The upper classes’ debate as to how they could make the Brazilian modernity equivalent to that, made their conservative discourse start to pop up and become more relevant than ever. They found the “popular culture” of the Brazilian people – consisting of samba, carnaval, football – to be going against their European notions of modernity. That created an alibi for them, in order to maintain the status quo and feed their conservative ideals.

The marginality in Brazil consisted precisely of the ones that wanted to subvert the idea of “popular culture”, since it was being used against the people in order to further alienate and exploit them. Being marginal was a form of protest, and that translated into art. Poetry and especially film were the main vehicles to create marginal art. These pieces contained every ugly aspect the elite were disgusted by when they thought of “popular culture”; sex, violence, drugs, death, and poverty. It was a cry saying that the people would not be ignored.

Portal Brasileiro de Cinema

What were Dieter Rams 10 Principles of Good Design 

Do you feel that these ideas are relevant today?

Good design is innovative: good design is able to maintain itself updated to the new demands of its time and the demands that are about to come, otherwise it serves less purpose as the context changes and transforms.

Good design makes a product useful: design is not about making a product look appealing. Good design helps to emphasize and increase its functionality.

Good design is aesthetic: aesthetics can affect how a product is perceived, consequently affecting its relevance. Thus, good design will increase it aesthetic value.   

Good design makes a product understandable: it can make a product more intuitive, easy to comprehend, use and interact with, which increases its value and relevance. 

Good design is unobtrusive: it will disregard what is irrelevant to the product, in order to signify only what is important and fulfils a need within the context.

Good design is honest: it does not exaggerate the products quality. It keeps things as they are; only in the most effective way possible.

Good design is long-lasting: it will not fade over time if done correctly as it won’t rely solely on the context of the present.

Good design is thorough down to the last detail: it doesn’t leave anything out, at random.

Good design is environmental-friendly: it won’t overuse resources, because of the last principle

Good design is as little design as possible: it does not necessarily mean minimalism, but rather focus on the essential.

I only feel these are relevant to this day because this is what good design is supposed to be like; it’s supposed to last for a long time. I believe these concepts were thought out to be timeless, but I wont judge if they are correct or not, I’m only judging their own propositions.

World Design Guide

 Why does William Morris want to reunite Arts and Crafts? 

 What kind of work of art is more suitable to transform the everyday life?

The Arts & Crafts movement started with the idea of going against the practicality of the personal life. That was being instilled due to the industrial context, which required from workers very specific and repetitive work, considering they would only contribute a small fraction of the production line. Work had become completely depersonalized. William Morris believed that an Aesthetic Revolution would be the solution for the problems he saw in this context. It would be a counterpart to the “man of industry”, the “man of crafts”. Through craft, he wanted to restructure the industrial society from the core, changing its ideals of the working man and the part he played. The role of the “man of industry” was alienating and only reinforced class segregation. Thus, Morris affirmed that, by uniting the craftsmanship that used to define “work” with Art, he could then subtract the alienation from the work and reinvent industrial society.

This movement took interior decoration as a form of art at its core, as it became a way of understanding that each element in a decorative space has been planned and worked on manually; crafted. Each object is treated individually, so it never truly loses its manual quality, no matter the scale in which it is placed. The Arts & Crafts believed that through making they would be able to transform the industrial cities, as long as the decorative objects remained a way of maintaining the manual scale of the objects inside the homes.

Arts and Crafts idea made its way into everyday homes, transforming the lives of ordinary people in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and remaining influential to this day. 

The Rise of Everyday Design

The Collector

My Modern Met