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The text is an attempt to indicate the areas of metaphysical competence of the latest art. It points to the fact that it is possible to bring current artistic practices and contemporary religious sensitivity closer together. It contains an outline of the historical changes that have led to today's divergence of the art that is close to religious circles from the institutional mainstream. At the same time, the paper shows that artworks with metaphysical and religious meanings occur in many different areas of today’s artistic circulation and are created also with the use of the latest art media. It emphasizes the role of properly understood tradition, capable of constantly updating its forms while maintaining unchanging spiritual values. The author draws attention to the socio-political context of the influence of art carrying the so-called universal values and the need for a dialogical approach to the programmes od activity of public cultural institutions.
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Ryszard Ryba is a Polish sculptor active in the second half of the 20th century. He was primarily a creator of sacred art, and his works can be found in the churches of the Podkarpacie and Lesser Poland regions (the present dioceses of Przemyśl, Rzeszów, Tarnów and Sandomierz). In addition to sculpting, he was involved in designing sacred interiors and elements of their decor (tabernacles, sedilia, pews, confessionals, etc.), participating in the development of principles for adapting church interiors to the conditions of the reformed liturgy after the Second Vatican Council. He is also the author of graphic and drawing series, which he created especially in the first twenty years of the 21st century. His sculptures, especially those from the beginning of his creative path, are characterised by great simplicity. Their impact is due to their powerful, synthetic form, acting as an expressive sign. With time, his great narrative talent became revealed more and more clearly, and the qualities that built the mood of unique softness and tenderness came to the fore. He was also increasingly willing to reach for topics related to family and everyday life. His artistic oeuvre, however, constitutes a coherent whole which is still intensely impressive.
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The paper entitled Édouard Manet and his Olympia attempts to justify why this painting can be considered one of the founding paintings of modernism in painting. On the one hand, Manet adheres to some of the basic conventions applicable to the genre of the “nude,” as evidenced by the inter-iconic reference to Titian’s painting Venus of Urbino. On the other hand, he partly departs from these conventions and partly enters into open conflict. The image of Olympia does not represent a divine, ideal beauty but a woman’s body, even the body of a prostitute. Manet attempts to represent with the painting what is symptomatic of the present and what is indexical of this present. The painting of Olympia has sparked controversy, sparked by its subject matter and artistic articulation. The paper attempts to interpret this controversy’s thematic and formal causes.
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The attempt to coin the term „Pre-Contemporary Art „serves as the tool to shift our attention from the 19th Century painting patterns, which Slovak modernist painters of the 1920s and 1930s were inspired by, to the principal legacy they left for their successors, comparably to „Kapists“ role in continuous colourism in Polish art throughout the 20. Century, and also to the role of surrealistic revivals that repeatedly happened in Czech art, Janko Alexy’s activism is compared to Alex Mlynárčik’s one. Although they lived in different artistic conditions, their avant-gardist „impresario „role was crucially formative to the broader circles of artists they used to collaborate with.
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The work describes the evolution of cultural and social conditions in the Slovak territory, respectively, in Upper Hungary, in the possible establishment of a public institution collecting exclusively artistic material. The example of the development of art associations and local museums offers a view of this situation through particular historical periods, more precisely from the middle of the nineteenth century to the gallery’s founding in 1948. However, the purpose of the work is not only to outline the social discourse on the possibility of establishing a regional gallery or a public art museum. In addition to concrete examples and evidence of this debate, the work also offers insight into the political orientation of individual institutions that could have been potential players during this development. The work points to a complicated tangle of individual opinions, values and beliefs
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The paper analyzes mutual relationships between three processes from the title on the example of three paintings by Slovak painter Rastislav Podoba. Analysis of the painting Observation from 2011 leads to the need for a deeper examination of the character of relations between observation, painting, and interpretation. The central problem is the problem of observation which leads to questioning the place and the role of theoretical reflection in the creation, experience, and perception of the work of art. The standard philosophical approach to interpreting as an ascription of meaning is questioned. Finally, the paper proposes a different approach to interpretation that could better explain running processes in analyzed works.
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The main goal of the article is to present important highlights of the history and development of the Bulgarian Musical Union. Until now, there have been completely missing information fields, and thus the present exposition is a step forward in the direction of “filling them in”. The prerequisites for the creation of a national musicians’ organization are examined, a periodization of the Union’s activity is proposed, and congress activities and decisions are briefly presented. The paper clarifies some discrepancies in data relating to the history of the Union present in earlier musicological sources. It also focuses on the leading ideas that are in fact the driving force of the Bulgarian Musical Union and which have not been the subject of research interest so far. Their deeper analysis helps to complete the notion of the musical attitudes of this period as well as the specifics in the development of Bulgarian music. Important results achieved by the Bulgarian Musical Union have been indicated, along with their influence on musical life in Bulgaria. The study of the activity of the Bulgarian Musical Union has been part of the current trend over the last three decades towards a new reading of the period from the end of the 19th to the first half of the 20th century. The activation of this process is mainly due to the failure (after 1944) to comprehend the musical phenomena of the previous decades resulting from the imposition of ideological dogmas and censorship on scholarly thought. From the viewpoint of modernity, the existing distance enables new research perspectives.
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Among the numerous musicological disciplines co-existing in the wide academic space, cultural musicology stands out with a particular iridescence. In accordance with their point of view, academic history and research interests, some scholars define it as an alternative to ethnomusicology, others – as a successor to the New musicology, and yet others see in cultural musicology the potential and capacity to become a base for all types of formal thinking and study of music. This article explores the context of the emergence of the discipline at the turn of the 21st century, focusing on a few pivotal moments in the transition of musicology to transdisciplinarity and its entry into the postmodern phase. The profile of cultural musicology is delineated in relation to, against, like, despite, with, beyond (ethno)musicology; among the discussed topics are concerns and perspectives of the discipline, as well as its scope, themes, methods and approaches. The text introduces the most active scholars working with the principles of cultural musicology today along with some of the foundational texts outlining the territory and ethos of the discipline.
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In the 21st century, a large part of folklore-based music, popular and jazz music with folklore elements is developing very dynamically in Bulgaria. One of the most essential directions of this development concerns meter and rhythm. Local drumming styles, in turn, have a leading role in the emergence of completely new, more complex and multi-layered metric events unknown in earlier forms of folk music. In order to analyze these metric phenomena in the context of the new musical currents, a new approach to metric analysis and a new set of terminological tools are needed. The present text is a step towards delineating a research framework, tracking in a synthesized way the most important views on meter and rhythm both in Bulgarian musicology (Dobri Hristov, Vasil Stoin, Stoyan Djoudjeff, Todor Djidjev, etc.) and in foreign musicology. Recent researchers, such as Neil Fracile, Aleksandra Vojcic, Daniel Goldberg, etc. appeal for a working methodology for the analysis of “non-isochronous” meters and approaches to rhythmic and metrical analysis that are standardized and compatible with each other. Besides foreign scholars, serious attempts in that direction at the beginning of the 21st century were made by the Bulgarian theorist Kalin Stanchev Kirilov, who has now lived and developed his research activity in the USA for over two decades. He presents a set of terms for analyzing the intricate metric phenomena in the music performed by Bulgarian wedding bands in the 1980s and seeks commonality between established concepts in Bulgarian musicology, the theoretical concepts of Western European music theory, and the latest studies in contemporary American ethnomusicology. Some of these views create a prerequisite for the introduction of new terms specifically related to the study of drumming styles related to folk music from Bulgaria.
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The book was published under the editorship of Yulian Kujumdzhiev (who has already brought out several similar editions with published documents from the archives of composer Lazar Nikolov plus composer and conductor Konstantin Iliev) and with the assistance of Angelina Petrova (the foreword author and a long-time researcher of Lazar Nikolov’s work). Its publication was one of the important events of musical year 2022 in Bulgaria, when the 100th anniversary of the composer’s birth was celebrated. This is the largest complete text from Lazar Nikolov’s archive and arguably the innermost description of his life. His notes were made between 1973 and 1988. These memories hold great informative value as they provide detailed and concrete information about the composer’s ancestors, his childhood, and entry into the musical world, about his training and his teachers, about his personal and professional friendships, about the setting and environment in which an artist lived and worked in those years, about many events and processes at the time, about domestic adversities, about the compositions written, about his unpreserved works, the personalities in that milieu, his own views on music, and the development of his composing language. Written without the idea of being published, these memories also contain the author’s personal feelings about the complex relations of the New Music figures in Bulgaria, both with one another and with musicians of the previous generation in the 1950s – 1980s. Thus, for researchers, the manuscript shows an internal picture of these processes in socialist Bulgaria according to which its own dramas and clashes are to a large extent the result of personal relationships and character traits in relation to which communist power appears rather as an instrument or stimulus. For Lazar Nikolov, however, these pages are a kind of “Life and Passions” – their role was to help the author protect himself and resist an environment felt by him as hostile in principle and too often so in practice.
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This paper is not a study, but just notes. Their purpose is to present a possible historical approach, for which mostly prayer images have been used. The text attempts to provide insight into how an image was perceived by a community or how that community might have perceived it. The author believes that the effort to understand the motives, desires, and values of a historical social environment is equivalent to recognizing its right to exist. The questions which the paper seeks answers to are: – Why did religious and secular communities need to stand face to face with images of Jesus at the end of the 14th century, and why did they need the test of his gaze?; – What was the nature of the experience in the direct, unmediated interaction between the image and the believer; – How did this new way of dealing with the divine affect behaviour?; – How was what we may call the ‘inner world’ created, which was not only communal, but also personal?; – What did the believer pray to: the image or the presence of the power of the holy person in the image? Religious images create a desired belonging to a certain social environment. Believers recognize what they see as their own, regardless of the fact that they see a real and an imaginary world, a real and an imaginary self simultaneously. The author tries to substantiate the understanding of co-belonging to the two worlds – the sacred and the earthly one in the images. He also seeks to justify why the presence of the assignors in the images most often represents the visions of the assignors themselves.
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Interior design is constantly evolving. This process is dynamic and accompanied by constantly emerging new ideas. The leading industry innovations reinforce this trend. Among the emerging design solutions is one that, until recently, was unusual outside of the realm of industrial space remodelling, namely the growing use of concrete in interior design. It corresponds to the principles of minimalist design which is devoid of clutter, and, as such, every element of it stands out. This design style showcases the raw beauty of concrete, allowing it to be much more than just a building material. The result is a skilful combination of texture and visual appeal. A significant part of this paper concerns itself with both the methods for obtaining photo concrete and the peculiarities of project implementation.
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The first official edition of the anatomy of the human body, intended for artists, appeared in Paris in 1668. Its author is the French artist and engraver François Tortebat (1616–1690). It was intended to be used for teaching anatomy to artists 20 years earlier, in 1648, at the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture. The text is very little and the illustrations are copies of those from Andreas Vesalius’ groundbreaking work 𝐷𝑒 𝐻𝑢𝑚𝑎𝑛𝑖 𝐶𝑜𝑟𝑝𝑜𝑟𝑖𝑠 𝐹𝑎𝑏𝑟𝑖𝑐𝑎. François Tortebat’s 𝐴𝑏𝑟é𝑔é 𝑑’𝑎𝑛𝑎𝑡𝑜𝑚𝑖𝑒, 𝑎𝑐𝑐𝑜𝑚𝑚𝑜𝑑é 𝑎𝑢𝑥 𝑎𝑟𝑡𝑠 𝑑𝑒 𝑝𝑒𝑖𝑛𝑡𝑢𝑟𝑒 𝑒𝑡 𝑑𝑒 𝑠𝑐𝑢𝑙𝑝𝑡𝑢𝑟𝑒 is very popular, which is indicated by the fact that it was republished in France in 1733 and in 1760. Thus, his textbook has been used by generations of artists in their academic training in art.
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The research focuses on a group of reliquaries called taxidiot boxes. As part of the donation practice of the Balkans, they functioned as portable small altars in the church rituals of taxidiot monks during the Bulgarian National Revival. The technical processes and technological concepts in the goldsmith’s craft at that time are examined, as well as their application in the objects of ecclesiastical metalwork in Bulgaria.
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Soviet avant-garde filmmaker and film theorist Sergei Eisenstein introduced the term “plasmacity” almost one hundred years ago. He used it to describe Disney’s ability to play with his characters’ bodies by elongating them, making them bigger or smaller, or even by transforming them into other characters altogether. In his notes, Eisenstein mentioned that plasmacity is able to create a certain freedom for spectators and hinted at its ability to address traumata. However, he didn’t go into any details, focusing instead on spectators rather than creators. In this paper,1 I am exploring two animated shorts, Mizuko (Water Child) and Egg, using the interviews I have conducted with co-directors Kira Dane and Katelyn Rebelo and director Martina Scarpelli. I am looking at the two films from the perspective of plasmacity in order to talk about the politics and the poetics of corporal trauma.
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How is the non-normative body affected by representation? And how is the viewer perceiving and decoding such representation? What does the viewer feel, how does the viewer approach the other body? Would the viewer experience a warm feeling of sameness when encountering the body? Or would they dismiss it with a violent jerk? What is behind the dismissiveness? Is it hate, fear, or just pure abject? These are the questions that I try to untangle in my paper, using Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror as a guide, while departing from its psychoanalytical premises.
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The article approaches the reinterpretation of Molière’s plays through contemporary perspectives and taking into account the expectations of the audience. Since the twentieth century, the director has become co-author with the playwright, reading between the lines and searching for new meanings in the subtext. The director’s creative approach re-signifies canonical texts atesting their validity over time. Silviu Purcărete turns the stakes of Dom Juan upside down by transforming the eternal conqueror into a woman. Constructing stage situations in tandem or deliberately in contradiction with the text is a catching technique that the stage director uses to energize the performance. On the other hand, the Molière trilogy (Le ciel, La nuit, La fête/Tartuffe, Dom Juan, Psyché) staged by members of “Le Nouveau Théâtre Populaire” portrays a Molière whose work is still germinating creative ideas. Always performing on wooden platforms, the actors jump effortlessly from one style to another, from one role to another, central or supporting the others, from prose to verse, rigorously, precisely, musically, from text to concert. An inventive tour de force.
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his article proposes a parallel semiotic analysis of two contemporary stage adaptations of Molière’s The Misanthrope by Stéphane Braunschweig (Théâtre national de Strasbourg, 2003) and Clément Hervieu-Léger (Comédie Française, 2017). Keeping the classic text unaltered, the two directors offer totally different perspectives, accessing new layers of the literary reference. While Braunschweig is more concerned with how the scenography and costume design can keep the stakes of Molière’s play unaltered when transposing it in modern times, Hervieu-Léger applies a more radical reading, moving away from the demands of a comedy to provide the premises for a drama of ideas.
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