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1

Marian, Ana. "Stylistic implementations in the genre of Moldovan sculptural portrait." Arta 33, no. 1(AV) (2024): 74–80. https://doi.org/10.52603/arta.2024.32-1.08.

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The transition in the national sculpture from the end of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century from the system of plastic and conventional figurative medieval form to the realistic one led to the assimilation of influences from Russian, Romanian and Western Art. The influences of impressionism can be felt in the creation of Nichifor Colun and in the creation of Alexandru Plămădeala, Claudia Cobizev, Lazăr Dubinovschi, in which classical realist art is combined with modernism. The gallery of portraits in the spirit of socialist realism was represented by Valentin Kuznetsov, Nicolai Gorionashev, Alexandr Maiko, Lev Averbuh. Thanks to the theme of the contemporary’s portrait, there appear galleries of portraits with a romantic allure of the writers and those of the guild colleagues created by sculptors Lazăr Dubinovschi, Alexandra Picunov-Târțău, Iurie Canașin. The coloring of wood, specific to the Impressionists, can be observed in the creation of Brunhilda Epelbaum-Marcenco. Both the portrait and composition are present in the works of Galina Dubrovina, Ion Beldii and Natalia Beldii-Vlasova, Iosif Kitman. Postmodernism is specific to the creation of Ion Zderciuc, Dumitru Verdianu, Valentin Vârtosu, Iurie Platon. Thus, during its evolution, the Moldovan sculptural portrait demonstrates various similarities with the works of the great masters and with the stylistic influences of world art, keeping, however, its independent, creative and original character in its approach.
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Skibiński, Franciszek. "Uwagi na temat gdańskiego budownictwa publicznego drugiej połowy XVI i pierwszej połowy XVII wieku pod kątem zaopatrzenia w materiał kamieniarski." Porta Aurea, no. 17 (November 27, 2018): 5–32. http://dx.doi.org/10.26881/porta.2018.17.01.

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Works of architecture and stone sculpture would never have been created without the existence of a supply network enabling access to assets crucial for their production, including stone. Based on archive quarries and analysis of existing works of architecture and stone sculpture, this article focuses on the importation of stone for the building and stonecutting industry in early modern Gdańsk. In the second half of the 16th and the first half of the 17th century the city was experiencing an era of economic prosperity and became a major center of architecture and stone sculpture in the Baltic region and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The Gdańsk authorities put much effort into securing suitable stone necessary to carry out their ambitious projects. Builders and sculptors based in the Baltic metropolis applied various kinds of stone imported from abroad, including limestone from Oland and Sweden, sandstone quarried in Bückeburg and Bentheim, Belgian marble, and English alabaster. The kind of stone most commonly used in local architecture and sculpture was, however, the sandstone from the Isle of Gotland. To obtain this material the city authorities often approached the Danish king, as revealed by numerous letters preserved in Gdańsk and Copenhagen archives. Each year several shipments of Gotland stone would arrive in the city, the amount of stone reaching up to 10,000 cubic feet. Some of the material destined for the public building works was then prepared by workers supervised by the ‘Bauknecht’. He was an official appointed by the city authorities to support the public building industry and to facilitate the work of specialized building and sculpting workshops by overlooking low-skilled workers and supply of materials. Some of the local builders and stonecutters were also involved in the importation of stone from Gotland. Besides carrying out major architectural and sculptural works, at least some of the guild masters running large workshops were engaged in the supply of necessary materials. For this reason, they had to maintain a network of professional contacts within the Baltic region and beyond. The most prominent among them was Willem van der Meer, called Barth, a stonecutter from Ghent established in Gdańsk. Between roughly 1590 and 1610, he supplied the city with a large amount of Gotland stone, including that used for the building of the Great Arsenal. Other important members of the local milieu engaged in the stone trade were Willem and Abraham van den Blocke as well as Wilhelm Richter, continuator of Van den Blocke’s enterprise often engaged by the city authorities. These findings broaden our understanding of the professional practices of builders and stone sculptors in Gdańsk and the Baltic region in the late 16th and in the 17th centuries.
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STEPANOVA, A. V., and A. V. SUKHOVA. "SCULPTOR AND ARTIST I.I. SEVRYUGIN. HIS CONTRIBUTION TO THE ORGANIZATION OF THE FIRST ANTHROPOLOGICAL EXHIBITION IN 1879." Moscow University Anthropology Bulletin (Vestnik Moskovskogo Universiteta Seria XXIII Antropologia), no. 2/2024 (July 10, 2024): 143–59. http://dx.doi.org/10.55959/msu2074-8132-24-2-12.

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Introduction. The work is devoted to an extraordinary person - the sculptor and artist Ivan Illarionovich Sevryugin (1839-?), his contribution to the organization, holding and sculptural embodiment of the Anthropological Exhibition of 1879, which became the starting point in the development of anthropology as an exact and natural-historical science and the basis for the creation of the department and Museum of Anthropology. Materials and methods. This study is based on the printed works of the second half of the 19th century, published by the Society of Amateurs of Natural History, Anthropology and Ethnography (OLEAE), in the research of which historical-typological and historical-descriptive methods were used. The main attention was paid to the analysis of materials and documents related to the preparation and holding of the First Anthropological Exhibition in Moscow in 1879. Archival documents from the Research Institute and the Museum of Anthropology and literary sources were also studied. Results and discussion. The work examines the creative path of the sculptor and artist I.I. Sevryugin. Coming from a poor family of guild artisans, Ivan Illarionovich received an excellent education at the Moscow School of Painting and Sculpture. Studied under Professor N.A. Ramazanov. During his studies, he was repeatedly awarded for his work and upon graduation received the title of third-degree artist. Along with famous sculptors and artists, he took part in the production of collections of mannequins for the Ethnographic Exhibition of 1867. The most significant peak of his activity was the First Anthropological Exhibition of 1879. The development of the exhibition model, its sculptural embodiment, collection and preparation of exhibits (mounds, burial grounds, masks, busts, etc.), a trip to Paris and much more - all this shows him as an incredibly talented person who masters a variety of artistic and sculptural techniques, who was hard working and earned the highest praise from specialists. Conclusion. Analysis of archival and literary sources showed that I.I. Sevryugin, being a talented artist and an excellent sculptor with a colossal capacity for work, took an active part in the preparation of the Anthropological Exhibition of 1879, and contributed to the solution of one of its main tasks - the popularization of anthropology in Russia. Thanks to his talent, he was able to express scientific ideas in artistic form. His works, exhibited in the gallery halls of the Exhibition, clearly showed the general public the unity of the biological and social in human nature. Collections created by I.I. Sevryugin, formed the basis of the sculptural fund of the photo-illustrative department of the Museum of Anthropology of Moscow State University.
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De Bodt, Saskia. "Borduurwerkers aan het werk voor de Utrechtse kapittel- en parochiekerken 1500-1580." Oud Holland - Quarterly for Dutch Art History 105, no. 1 (1991): 1–31. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/187501791x00047.

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AbstractThe article starts by taking stock of research into North and South Netherlandish professional embroidery in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Such embroidery, which was rarely or never signed, and much of which has been lost, has hitherto been studied largely on stylistic grounds and grouped around noted schools of painting. Classifications include 'circle of Jacob Cornelisz van Oostsanen', for instance, or 'Leiden school/influence of Lucas van Leyden'. The author advocates a more relative approach to such classification into schools. She suggests that only systematic archive research in each location can shed new light on the production of embroidery studios and that well-founded attributions hinge solely on such research. The embroidery produced in Utrecht between 1500 and 1580 is cited as an example. The invoices of Utrecht parish and collegiate churches from circa 1500 to the Reformation record not onlv commissions to painters, goldsmiths and sculptors but also many items referring to textiles, notably embroidery. Together they provide a clear and relatively complete picture of the activities of sixteenth-century Utrecht embroiderers, whose principal customers were the churches. The items in question moreover exemplify the craft of the North Netherlandish embroiderer in that period in general in terms of what was produced as well as of the method and position of these artistic craftsmen, who were less overshadowed by painters than is generally assumed. A brief introduction outlining the organization of professional Utrecht embroiderers, who became independent of the tailors' guild in 1610 and acquired their own warrant, is followed by the analysis of an order from the Buurkerk in Utrecht for crimson paraments in 1530: three copes, a chasuble and two dalmatics. The activities of all those involved in their production are recorded : the merchants who supplied the fabric, the tracers of the embroidery patterns, the embroiderer, the cutter, various silver-smiths and the maker of the chest in which the set of garments was kept. The embroiderer was the best-paid of all these specialists. It is interesting to note that some Utrecht guild-members worked free of charge on these paraments, and that the collection at the first mass at which they were worn was very generous. There were probably political reasons for this: some of the donators, Evert Zoudenbalch and Goerd van Voirde, had been mayors at the time of the guild rebellion in Utrecht, and the Buurkerk was the parish church where the guild altars stood. After this detailed example the author discusses Utrecht embroiderers known by name and their studios,comparing them with a list of major commissions carried out for churches in Utrecht (appendix I). It transpires that in each case one studio received the most important Utrecht orders. This is followed by the reconstruction of three leading figures' careers. First Jacob van Malborch, active till 1525; a contract (1510) with the Pieterskerk in Utrecht regarding blue velvet copes is cited (appendix 11). He is followed by the embroiderers Reyer Jacobs and Sebastiaen dc Laet. Among his other activities, the latter was responsible for repairing and altering the famous garments of Bishop David of Burgundy. Items on invoices arc then cited as evidence that the sleeves of two dalmatics now in the Catharijneconvent Museum, embroidered on both sides with aurifriezes donated by Bishop David, were made by Jacob van Malborch in 1504/1505. This shows that systematic scrutiny of invoices and the results of archive research concentrated on individual embroiderers in a single city, compared with preserved items of embroidery, yield information that can lead to exact attributions to an artist or a studio (figs.4a to c and 5a to c). The Catharijneconvent Museum also possesses a series of figures of saints embroidered by the same hand (fig. 14). Finally, the author points out that a group of embroidered work (previously mentioned by H. L. M. Defoer in the catalogue Schilderen met gouddraad en zyde (1987)) which historical data suggest was done in Utrecht and which was produced in the same period, are almost certain to have come from Jacob van Malborch's studio, despite the lack of archival evidence (figs. 6 to 13).
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Nonthijun, Paradha, Natasha Mills, Nantana Mills, et al. "Seasonal Variations in Fungal Communities on the Surfaces of Lan Na Sandstone Sculptures and Their Biodeterioration Capacities." Journal of Fungi 9, no. 8 (2023): 833. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/jof9080833.

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Environmental factors and climate are the primary factors influencing the microbial colonization and deterioration of cultural heritage in outdoor environments. Hence, it is imperative to investigate seasonal variations in microbial communities and the biodeterioration they cause. This study investigated the surfaces of sandstone sculptures at Wat Umong Suan Phutthatham, Chiang Mai, Thailand, during wet and dry seasons using culture-dependent and culture-independent approaches. The fungi isolated from the sandstone sculptures were assessed for biodeterioration attributes including drought tolerance, acid production, calcium crystal formation, and calcium precipitation. The results show that most of the fungal isolates exhibited significant potential for biodeterioration activities. Furthermore, a culture-independent approach was employed to investigate the fungal communities and assess their diversity, interrelationship, and predicted function. The fungal diversity and the communities varied seasonally. The functional prediction indicated that pathotroph–saprotroph fungi comprised the main fungal guild in the dry season, and pathotroph–saprotroph–symbiotroph fungi comprised the dominant guild in the wet season. Remarkably, a network analysis revealed numerous positive correlations among fungal taxa within each season, suggesting a potential synergy that promotes the biodeterioration of sandstone. These findings offer valuable insights into seasonal variations in fungal communities and their impacts on the biodeterioration of sandstone sculptures. This information can be utilized for monitoring, management, and maintenance strategies aimed at preserving this valuable cultural heritage.
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Stavila, Tudor. "Myth and reality in the sculpture of Tudor Cataraga." Akademos, no. 1(68) (June 2023): 156–60. http://dx.doi.org/10.52673/18570461.23.1-68.21.

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Tudor Cataraga belongs to the generation of the nineties of the last century, who together with his guild colleagues Ion Zderciuc, Valentin Vârtosu or Mihai Damian, directed the national sculpture on a new path of reinterpreting artistic paradigms. With themes and subjects taken from mythology and folk art, from universal art and national literature, they proposed a select artistic language, transforming the sculptural forms into a clear message of national identity. Tudor Cataraga was, in sculpture, different from his contemporaries. He did not seek to conform to the fashion of the time, to accept a certain style or trend, but created his own vision of art and existence.
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7

Belso Delgado, Marina. "Aderezando un retablo: un litigio entre Miguel López y el gremio de carpinteros de Orihuela." Imafronte, no. 32 (April 11, 2025): 103–18. https://doi.org/10.6018/imafronte.615711.

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The creation of the Royal Academies established the beginning of the official regularisation of the artists’s studio and work. This new system was opposed to the traditional training and control of the guild workshops, which led to various disputes between academics and non-academics throughout the kingdom. In this context, this article analyses the accusations between the sculptor Miguel López and the Carpenter’s Guild of Orihuela in 1806, in connection with a reform of an altarpiece in the Saint Augustine’s church in the same city, of which a sketch of its finial has been located. La creación de las Reales Academias constituyó el comienzo de la regularización con carácter oficial del estudio y trabajo de los artistas. Este nuevo sistema se oponía a la formación y control tradicional dependiente de los talleres gremiales, lo que generó diversas disputas entre académicos y no académicos por todo el reino. En este contexto, el presente artículo analiza las acusaciones interpuestas entre el escultor Miguel López y el Gremio de Carpinteros de Orihuela en 1806, a colación de una reforma a un retablo de la iglesia del antiguo convento de San Agustín de la misma ciudad, del que se ha localizado un boceto de su remate.
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Chirico, Robert. "From Cave to Caféé: Artists' Gatherings." Gastronomica 2, no. 4 (2002): 33–41. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/gfc.2002.2.4.33.

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Historical documentation regarding public festivals and banquets continually acknowledges the alliance of painting, poetry, music, and design, but in contrast to these records, accounts of artists personal revelries remain scarce. This article discusses the festive, social, political, and artistic aspects of notable gatherings that took place over the past five centuries. Among the examples mentioned are the serious gatherings of Baccio Bandinelli's Academy and the meetings of the Dutch Rhetoricians (Rederijkers); the lavish parties of the 16th century artist Rustici and the modern-day Art Students League;the scandalous doings of the Dutch painters guild (Bentvueghels) in Rome and the antics of the Swedish sculptor Sergel. It also touches upon pre- and postwar banquets in Paris,Futurist and Dadaist gatherings, and the socializing of the New York School.
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Schonfield, Jeremy. "A Totem and a Taboo." European Judaism 49, no. 2 (2016): 87–106. http://dx.doi.org/10.3167/ej.2016.490212.

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AbstractThis article discusses two academic events devoted to Holocaust studies in which participants became unconsciously involved in re-enacting the behaviour respectively of Holocaust perpetrators, and of victims turning aggressively on each other in a manner reminiscent of ghetto life. In one conference an out-group was created and silenced, while in another an individual became the object of projected guilt and was victimized. These projections were mediated by implied competition between film, sculpture and literature as the medium best suited to Holocaust memorialization. A description of each event is followed by analyses of the dynamics involved, with the support of psychoanalytic literature. Factors which led to the author’s twenty-year delay in publishing the article, which was drafted in 1995, are also examined psychologically.
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Bruyn, J. "Het altaar van het Antwerpse kuipersgilde en Quinten Massys'Bewening te Ottawa." Oud Holland - Quarterly for Dutch Art History 116, no. 2 (2003): 65–95. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/187501703x00206.

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AbstractThe Altar of the Antwerp Coopers' Guild and Quinten Massy In 1938 two distinguished scholars, Max J. Friedländer and Floris Prims, one a reknowned connoisseur of Early Netherlandish painting and the other an indefatigable digger in the Antwerp archives, published articles that might well have bearing on the same picture, yet have never been connected either then or later. From the evidence collected by Prims (notes 2 to 7) it appears that the Antwerp coopers, after having separated from the joiners with whom they had shared a guild until 1497, obtained an altar of their own in Our Lady's church. A picture standing on this altar is mentioned first in 1655. It is described as representing The 'Afdoening' of Our Lord from the Cross with two doors (the term 'afdoening' being used to describe a Deposition as well as a Lamentation). An inventory of 1660 gives the same description with the addition 'made by Quinten Massys'. The altar survived until about 1680, when a new marble altar with sculpture and paintings was ordered; this was completed by 1684 and the old altar-piece was hung above the entrance door of the guild room without the doors being mentioned. It was sold in 1697 when the guild had run into financial trouble. Half a century later the painter Jacob de Wit still knew of it and described it as showing 'figures smaller than life, Christ taken from the Cross with Our Lady, St Mary Magdalen and others, (....) by Quinten Massys, the second painting he did, not quite as good as the one in the Cirumcision chapel [originally on the altar of the joiners; fig. 2]; it was sold but is still in the town' (note 3,). Friedländer, for his part, concluded that the Lamentation which was to be purchased by the National Gallery of Canada in 1949 'cannot be regarded as anything but an early work by Quentin' (note I). This attribution, which had earlier been refuted by Baldass, was then disputed by Silver (note II). This author considered the Ottawa picture a somewhat later pastiche after a lost Lamentation in Massys' mature style of which a fragment in Berlin, showing s'Lamentation in Ottawa a weeping woman (wrongly called Mary Magdalen), resembles one of the mourning women in the Ottawa Lamention (fig. 7). This theory is however contradicted by the picture's quality and seems to be prompted by a mistaken reconstruction of Massys' early development (see below). Similarities between the Lamentation and other early works that can be ascribed tot Massys (figs 3 and 17) are obvious though the course of his development prior to the great altar-pieces of 1507-1511remains in many respects unclear. When attempting to bring some light to the chronology of Massys' works from about 1491 (when he left Louvain for Antwerp at the age of 25) to 1507, one may take into account three medallions that have been attributed to him, two of them being dated 1491 and one 1495 (notes 18-24). They may be loosely associated with features that recurr in the Lamentation. An Italian-style medal of William Schevez, archbishop of St. Andrews, who stayed for a few months at Louvain in 1491, raises the question of whether the same sitter may be recognised in a painted portrait, which would then be Quinten's earliest datable picture (figs 8 and 9). The portrait of the artist himself, dated 1495 (fig 10), was in great esteem and provided the prototype for a print by Jheronimus Wierix (published by Lampsonius in 1572), where the bust was extended to a half-figure; it was also copied in an oval painting that was reproduced in a work by Frans Francken II (figs. I and IIa) and it was probably that very painting which was owned by the Antwerp guild of St. Luke and was considerd an original self-portrait when it was confiscated by the French in 1794 (and subsequently disappeared). It seems likely that the medallion's date of 1495 provides a terminus post quem for the Ottawa Lamentation. A more precise date may be inferred from the obvious borrowings from the Lamentation found in a large triptych in Lisbon (figs 13 and 14). This work may be attributed to one 'Eduwart Portuga
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Amore, Valentina, Malva I. M. Hernández, Luis M. Carrascal, and Jorge M. Lobo. "Exoskeleton may influence the internal body temperatures of Neotropical dung beetles (Col. Scarabaeinae)." PeerJ 5 (May 18, 2017): e3349. http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.3349.

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The insect exoskeleton is a multifunctional coat with a continuum of mechanical and structural properties constituting the barrier between electromagnetic waves and the internal body parts. This paper examines the ability of beetle exoskeleton to regulate internal body temperature considering its thermal permeability or isolation to simulated solar irradiance and infrared radiation. Seven Neotropical species of dung beetles (Coleoptera, Scarabaeinae) differing in colour, surface sculptures, size, sexual dimorphism, period of activity, guild category and altitudinal distribution were studied. Specimens were repeatedly subjected to heating trials under simulated solar irradiance and infrared radiation using a halogen neodymium bulb light with a balanced daylight spectrum and a ceramic infrared heat emitter. The volume of exoskeleton and its weight per volume unit were significantly more important for the heating rate at the beginning of the heating process than for the asymptotic maximum temperature reached at the end of the trials: larger beetles with relatively thicker exoskeletons heated more slowly. The source of radiation greatly influences the asymptotic temperature reached, but has a negligible effect in determining the rate of heat gain by beetles: they reached higher temperatures under artificial sunlight than under infrared radiation. Interspecific differences were negligible in the heating rate but had a large magnitude effect on the asymptotic temperature, only detectable under simulated sun irradiance. The fact that sun irradiance is differentially absorbed dorsally and transformed into heat among species opens the possibility that differences in dorsal exoskeleton would facilitate the heat gain under restrictive environmental temperatures below the preferred ones. The findings provided by this study support the important role played by the exoskeleton in the heating process of beetles, a cuticle able to act passively in the thermal control of body temperature without implying energetic costs and metabolic changes.
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Veldman, Ilja M. "Keulen als toevluchtsoord voor Nederlandse kunstenaars (1567-1612)." Oud Holland - Quarterly for Dutch Art History 107, no. 1 (1993): 34–58. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/187501793x00090.

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AbstractIn the latter half of the 16th century a conspicuously large number of Netherlandisch artists emigrated to Cologne. The majority came from the south Netherlands after 1567, forced to leave for political and religious reasons during Alva's reign of terror. Worsening economical conditions were another reason. Cologne offered good prospects for immigrants. Most of the Dutch artists who settled there were engravers, designers and publishers of prints, professions which were much in demand. Skilled native artists were rare in Cologne, and the wealthy, art-loving patricians and prosperous burghers were eager customers. From a different point of view, though, Cologne was not the ideal place for refugees. The city was a bastion of Catholicism, and the Netherlandish emigrants were only tolerated on condition that they showed no signs of their Protestant faith. Protestants were regularly arrested and expelled. Only Lutherans were treated with a modicum of lenience; although they, too, were forbidden to practise their religion, they were eligible for citizenship. After the fall of Antwerp in 1585, when a fresh stream of emigrants descended on Cologne, things became even more difficult for non-Catholics, many of whom were forced to leave the city around 1600. Adriaan de Weert (d. ca. 1590) went to Cologne in about 1567. Despite being a Lutheran (in 1579 he was arrested during a sermon), he joined the Cologne guild of painters and was granted citizenship in 1577. De Weert's work is best known from prints after his designs engraved by his close friend Dirck Volkertsz. Coornhert (fig. 2). Coornhert, who had fled from Haarlem to the Rhineland in 1568, also invented subjects for the two friends' prints, and moreover inspired a few moral-philosophical prints after De Weert which were probably engraved by Hendrick Goltzius (figs. 3 and 4). Their prints reflect a personal, unorthodox and anti-clerical view of religion (fig. 2), and are unlikely to have been published in Catholic Cologne. Isaac Duchemin, who like De Weert came from Brussels, made prints of De Weert's more conventional designs (figs. 1 and 6). A later Duchemin print after his own design (1612; fig. 15) shows a horde of ignorant donkeys practising the arts, lampooning the situation of the arts and sciences in Cologne in a period when the last dissident artists and scientists had died or been expelled and the heyday of culture was over. Frans Hogenberg, who was banished by Alva in 1568 and sought admission to Cologne in 1570, was another active Lutheran. During the aforementioned gathering in 1579 he, too, was arrested, but let off with a fine. Hogenberg may originally have had Calvinist sympathies; a print made while he was still in Antwerp (fig. 7) depicts Predestination. He joined the Cologne painters' guild, and was a highly productive engraver and publisher until his death in 1590. Notably his town views and history prints of contemporary war activities and other political events (figs. 8 and 9) were held in high esteem. Crispijn dc Passe the Elder opted for his baptist faith after the fall of Antwerp (1585) and was compelled to leave the city. After a brief sojourn in Aachen in 1589 he moved that same year to Cologne, where he published and engraved a large number of prints. Some were his own designs (fig. i 3), but more often those of Maartcn de Vos, his wife's uncle (figs. 11-12). Despite his friendship with such well-known Protestants as Carel Utenhoven and Matthias Quad, De Passe seems to have been careful to keep out of trouble. His prints catered to the taste of a conservative, Catholic elite, and he endeavoured to gain the favour of prominent citizens of Cologne by dedicating prints to them (fig. 14). However, the city grew increasingly intolerant of the Protestant immigrants. During a campaign to flush them out, especially the baptists, De Passe was registered in 1610 and along with all the other baptists had to leave the city in 1611. He settled in Utrecht, where his prints were published from 1612 on. Catholic Dutch artists also emigrated to Cologne. The public's hostile attitude towards Willem van Tetrode's work (his recently completed high altar in Delft was destroyed in the iconoclasm of 1573) induced the sculptor to seek commissions from Cologne patricians a successful venture, as it turned out. The Catholic painter Geldorp Gortzius of Louvain became Cologne's favourite portraitist (fig. 10). He lived there from 1579 until his death in 1619), holding an administrative post and living in financial circumstances which he would never have enjoyed in the south Netherlands, where there was fierce competition among the many painters.
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Goja, Bojan. "Oltar Sv. Jeronima u crkvi Sv. Šime u Zadru i radionica Bettamelli." Ars Adriatica, no. 2 (January 1, 2012): 203. http://dx.doi.org/10.15291/ars.449.

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Based on the book, the full title of which is Registro delle Administrationi de Signori Governatori di San Gerolimo della Nation Oltramarinna in Dalmatia et Albania, this paper discusses the altar of St Jerome in the church of St Simeon at Zadar. It is already known that the altar was commissioned and maintained by the confraternity of Croatian and Albanian soldiers (Croatti a cavallo and Soldati Albanesi) founded in 1675 at Zadar, who were in the service of the Venetian Republic. New archival research has established that on 26 September 1694 the confraternity authorized the expense of 200 silver ducats intended for two Venetian carvers, the Bettamelli brothers, as a down payment for the making of the altar. The work on the altar began in April 1696 and several local master craftsmen took part in it: Zanotti, Rodo and Radičić, as well as smith Rosini. Since the Bettameli brothers, the makers of the altar of St Jerome, are not mentioned in the records by their first names, it should be noted that an altar-maker of the name of Alberto Bettamelli from Venice was responsible for the construction of the high altar and its tabernacle in the cathedral of St Maurus at Maniago (Friuli), as we learn from a contract made in 1693. Alberto Bettamelli also made the tabernacle in the parish church at Marsure (Aviano, Friuli). Bortolo Betamelli (Bettamelli), a tagliapietra, is mentioned between 1646 and 1682 in the ledgers containing contracts of apprenticeship to various sculptors, stone-cutters and carvers kept by the Giustizia Vecchia, a magistracy which supervised the activities of Venetian guilds. Two tabernacles have been attributed to the Bettamelli workshop: one on the high altar of the parish church at Maniago Libero (Maniago, Friuli) of 1694, and one in the parish church at Provesano (Friuli). Based on the records about the construction of the altar of St Jerome, it can be suggested that the coat of arms (composed of a cartouche with a shield emblazoned with a left-facing rampant lion and the initials C.C.S.F. above) depicted on the east pillar of the altar base, previously linked to the members of the Civran family, refers to Šimun Fanfogna (Zadar, 7 April 1663 - Lendinara, 6 March 1707), a Zadar nobleman and distinguished commander in the Venetian army who was the caretaker of the altar. The altar of St Jerome together with the surrounding area inside the church aisle - also called the chapel of St Jerome - represented an isolated unit delineated by a balustraded rail which could be used separately from the rest of the church, on certain occasions and festivities, by the members of the confraternity as well as the representatives of local and regional Venetian government at Zadar, and ecclesiastical and other dignitaries. Numerous works on the decoration of the altar and chapel of St Jerome were carried out throughout the whole of the eighteenth century and large numbers of local craftsmen skilled in different arts were engaged in them. Over a number of years, the Registro mentions the builders Antonio Piovesana (1742) and Antonio Bernardini (1789), the altar-maker Girolamo Picco (1756), the marangon Domenico Tomaselli (1743), blacksmith Antonelli (1744) and the goldsmiths Zorzi Cullisich (1738), Nicolò Giurovich (1752) and Giuseppe (Josip) Rado (1755). A number of other interesting pieces of information concerning the decoration of the altar and the activity of the confraternity of St Jerome is also presented.
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Lundgreen-Nielsen, Flemming. "Grundtvig i guldalderens København." Grundtvig-Studier 46, no. 1 (1995): 107–39. http://dx.doi.org/10.7146/grs.v46i1.16185.

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Grundtvig and Golden Age CopenhagenBy Flemming Lundgreen-NielsenThe article has originally been given as a public lecture at the University of Copenhagen during the Golden Days in Copenhagen festival in September 1994. By way of introduction the question is posed to which extent Grundtvig belongs to the Golden Age period in Danish cultural and artistic life. Though he lived in the capital for 65 years, he never orientated himself towards the places that interested most other educated Copenhageners. The University rejected his applications for a professorate, and he in return vehemently attacked the dead learning of the institution. He hardly ever went to the Cathedral or other of the city churches, since he was at odds with most of the clergy. The art of acting he considered to be organized hypocrisy and accordingly avoided the Royal Theatre. He had good relations to the Kings (and Queens!), but did not involve himself in the affairs of the Royal Court. Unlike most contemporary writers and artists, he never took the Grand Tour of the Continent, in fact apart from four journeys to England (1829-31 and 1843) and one to Norway (1851), he stayed at home in his study, travelling in time through his comprehensive readings rather than in actual space. As he grew older, he got quite popular among his younger followers and ended up becoming one of the tourist attractions of the city, as witnessed 1872 by the young English poet Edmund Gosse briefly before Grundtvig’s demise.Grundtvig cared little for the kind of elite culture that dominated Copenhagen for most of his life. Though singing of national ballads was inaugurated during his 1838 lectures and since then has been a part of Danish tradition for public meetings, he had no ear for music at all and never communicated with the fine composers who set music to his texts. Sculpture and painting he rejected as base materialistic arts, only acknowledging the Danish sculptor of European fame, Bertel Thorvaldsen, because of his unassuming and genial personality, not on account of his reliefs and statues. Even his fellow poets he in general criticized harshly, excepting a few works by B.S. Ingemann. On the whole he did not think that, the first third of the 19th century constituted any Golden Age: it was a period filled with drowsiness and shallow entertainment, devoid of anything but sensualistic or even materialistic pleasures.Inspired by writers from Classical Greece and Rome, older humanists such as professor K.L. Rahbek nourished a hopeless longing for a lost Golden Age. Modem romanticists, however, such as the philosopher Henrich Steffens, the poet Adam Oehlenschl.ger and the above mentioned Thorvaldsen strove to regain or recreate a true Golden Age in the near future. Spurred on by Norse mythology as well as by his Christian belief, Grundtvig from around 1824 increasingly came to share this attitude. He distinguished between Guld-Alder (Golden Age) as a thing of the past, and Gylden-Aar (literally: Golden Year) as a state of earthly and heavenly happiness soon to be achieved or even existing in the present moment-the word refers to the Biblical Year of Jubilee as rendered in a medieval Danish translation of the Old Testament. Unfortunately no all-encompassing examination of Grundtvig’s use of these terms has been executed, but from his secular poetry a series of instances are given in the following, starting with a somewhat overlooked poem called »Gylden-Aaret« from January 1834, celebrating three moments in the life of King Frederik VI: his recovery from a serious illness in Schleswig and his triumphant return to Copenhagen in August 1833, hisbirthday in January 1834 and his 50 years’ jubilee as a ruler in the following April. The modem Gylden-Aar is defined as happiness for all of the people through enlightenment about life, procured by the king and all the fine poets surrounding him. Thus Grundtvig gives a unique priority to the art of poetry. No matter what occurred to Denmark in the rest of Grundtvig’s life-time, he managed to interpret the events as pains of child-birth heralding the approaching Gylden-Aar rather than as death throes. Instead of confining himself to the refined small-scale topics of most contemporary poets, he time and again energetically prophecied about the expected Gylden-Aar as a solid historical fact. In a period where elitist art according to the doctrines of romantic poetics was literally idolized, he maintained that the highest form of art consists in organizing society and the lives of common people so that all innate talents and latent possibilities are being developed in the due course of time. He believes this to be happening under the benevolent reign of the present Danish kings, among others things because the Danes have been reared to pay attention to each other and are generally uninterested in pursuing power and glory, honour and greatness. Grundtvig deduces this attitude partly from the role played by the peasants in the formation of the modem Danish national character, partly from the influence of the exeptionally loving, loveable and lovely Danish womanhood. Even the geographical position of Copenhagen between the Sound (the scene of the heroic battle against Lord Nelson in 1801) and the impressive beeches of Charlottenlund Forest (a beautiful and peaceful idyll of nature) becomes symbolic of Denmark’s state of mind, demonstrating a harmony between nature and history, reality and dream, simplicity and majesty, people and royalty. Though Grundtvig remained much of an outsider in Golden Age Copenhagen, his interest in the common citizen, in family and home and everyday life, relates him to the then current concept of ’cozy’ (hyggelig) Biedermeier art after all. Because of his view of universal history, he was able to give depth and significance even to the smallest and most trivial elements in his environment. Grundtvig simply could not help converting the exclusive Golden Age of the poets and artists into a fruitful Gylden-Aar for the whole nation.
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García Melero, José Enrique. "Orígenes del control de los proyectos de obras públicas por la Academia de San Fernando (1768-1777)." Espacio Tiempo y Forma. Serie VII, Historia del Arte, no. 11 (January 1, 1998). http://dx.doi.org/10.5944/etfvii.11.1998.2312.

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Trata sobre los orígenes de la censura de obras públicas en España por la Academia madrileña entre los años 1768 y 1777. Se estudian a través de la documentación hallada en su Archivo y la bibliografía paralela complementaria. Se hallan en una serie de representaciones de los académicos al Rey Carlos III, fechadas en los años 1768 y 1777, sobre la actividad gremial. Entonces se criticaba el empleo del estilo barroco por los gremios. La crítica se centró, sobre todo, en el retablo. En su realización participaban tanto los maestros gremiales como los arquitectos, escultores y pintores académicos. En este artículo se destaca la influencia indirecta de la Academia de San Carlos de Valencia en las reales órdenes de 1777. Con ellas se cumplió el ideal político de centralización de las obras públicas en la Corte, tan del agrado de los reyes españoles de la Ilustración.This article treats about the origins ofthe censure ofpublic works in Spain done by the Madrilenian Academy from 1786 to 1777. The studies done in this article are based on the documentation found in the own Academy's Archive and in other complementary sources. We can find these origins in a serie ofrequests made by the academics to the king Carlos III and that are dated between the years 1768 and 1777, about the guild activity. By this time it was criticised the use of the Baroque style by the guilds. The critic was basically focusedin the retablo. Its realization not only was a task of the guild masters but also architects, painters and sculptors take part. In this work we point out the indirect influence ofthe San Carlos Academy, from Valencia, in the roya! orders made in 1777.
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Miklósik, Elena. "Botezuri, cununii și inmormantări. Insemnări manuscrise și informații tipărite dezvăluind prezența artiștilor in cetatea Timișoarei in prima jumătate a secolului al XIX-lea / Christenings, weddings and burials. Manuscript records and printed information revealing the presence of artists in the fortified town of Timişoara in the first half of the 19th century." Analele Banatului XXV 2017, January 1, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.55201/khdz8504.

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The first half of the 19th century provided the areas from Banat with a certain degree of material prosperity, which could be closely pursued in the county’s capital, Timişoara. Although it preserved a prevalent military character, the town also comprised numerous civilians (noblemen living in the town, clerks, traders, doctors, teachers etc.) who gradually secured the commodity market for the art products. The orders of this social class had drawn the artists of the time towards the Empire’s eastern area, where they hoped to ensure their livelihood from their creation, which was paid more or less. Among these travelling artists – painters, drawers, gilders, engravers, stucco workers and, more seldom, sculptors – there had already been some who could be proud of their academic artistic training. Thus, K. Brocky, B. Schäffer, A. Faix, I. Neugass, N. Aleksić, J. Krämer or H. Dunajszky had graduated from the Art Academies of the great European centres (Vienna, Berlin, München). They were the ones who conducted the Central European art – even if only for a short period of time, as long as they worked here – towards the areas of Timiş county. Besides well-known artists, there were some other painters (J. Fiala, K. Daniel, S. Petrović, I. Vizkelety), living in the town, and specialised in local workshops, who contributed to the improvement of public preferences: they made portraits, frescoes, historical and religious paintings, guild flags or miniatures, they adorned the sleeping partners’ churches and houses. Some of the works created by the artists in the first half of the century were preserved in family and museum collections. Another aspect of their presence in the town is certified by Registers of births, marriages and burials (Civil registries), the List of Citizens, the private notes/records of the time or by the newspapers/weekly papers letting the eager public know about their specialized services. The confirmation of more documents allows us to outline a dynamic artistic life in the fortified town during the first half of the 19th century while emphasizing new data regarding the biography and creation of some of these artists.
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Peng, Yuhe. "Study of Grey Sculpture Art in Zigong Xiqin Guild Hall." September 2, 2024. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13626800.

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During the Qing Dynasty, the economy of the Zigong salt fields flourished, and the Shaanxi merchants established the Xiqin Guild Hall, a quintessential Qing-era edifice, which holds significant historical importance in the annals of Zigong’s salt industry. The Zigong Xiqin Guild Hall, an architectural manifestation borne from the management needs of the salt industry, emerged during the heyday of Zigong's salt trade prosperity. Encompassing a wealth of architectural artistry such as stone carvings, wood carvings, and plaster reliefs closely intertwined with salt culture, it embodies the aspirational pursuits of the Shaanxi salt merchants in Zigong during this era, as well as the artistic achievements of the Qing Dynasty's salt field craftsmen. This paper examines the plaster relief and sculpture art of the Zigong Xiqin Guild Hall from an aesthetic perspective, analyzing the socio-economic context of the salt industry era that gave rise to this art, the techniques employed, the spiritual ethos, artistic forms, and stylistic elements. The study aims to provide practical experience for the preservation of intangible cultural heritage, such as plaster reliefs and sculptures, within Zigong’s salt industry history.
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Ruiz, Jiménez Juan. "Ceremonias de proclamación del rey Fernando VI en la ciudad de Huesca (1746)." Paisajes sonoros históricos (c.1200-c.1800), December 16, 2023. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10395088.

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Williams, Graeme Henry. "Australian Artists Abroad." M/C Journal 19, no. 5 (2016). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1154.

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At the start of the twentieth century, many young Australian artists travelled abroad to expand their art education and to gain exposure to the modern art movements of Europe. Most of these artists were active members of artist associations such as the Victorian Artists Society or the New South Wales Society of Artists. Male artists from Victoria were generally also members of the Melbourne Savage Club, a club with a strong association with the arts.This paper investigates the dual function of the club, as a space where the artists felt “at home” in the familiar environment that the club offered whilst they were abroad and, at the same time, a meeting space where they could engage in a stimulating artistic environment and gain introductions to leading figures in the art world. For those artists who chose England, London’s arts clubs played a large role, for it was in these establishments that they discussed, exhibited, shared, and met with their English counterparts. The club environment in London would have a significant impact on male Australian artists, as it offered a space where they were integrated into the English art world, which enhanced their experience whilst abroad.Artists were seldom members of Australia’s early gentlemen’s clubs, however, in the late nineteenth century Melbourne, artists formed less formal social groupings with exotic names such as the Prehistoric Order of Cannibals, the Buonarotti Club, and the Ishmael Club (Mead). Melbourne artists congregated in these clubs until the Melbourne Savage Club, modelled on the London Savage Club (1857)—a club whose membership was restricted to practitioners in the performing and visual arts—opened its doors in 1894.The Melbourne Savage Club had its origins in the Metropolitan Music Club, established in the late 1880s by a group of professional and amateur musicians and music lovers. The club initially admitted musicians and people from the dramatic professions free-of-charge, however, author Randolph Bedford (1868–1941) and artist Alf Vincent (1874–1915) were not content to be treated on a different basis to the musicians and actors, and two months after Vincent joined the club, at a Special General Meeting, the club resolved to vary Rule 6, “to admit landscape or portrait painters and sculptors without entrance fee” (Melbourne Savage Club). At another Special General Meeting, a year later, the rule was altered to admit “recognised members of the musical, dramatic and artistic professions and sculptors without payment of entrance fee” (Melbourne Savage Club).This resulted in an immediate influx of prominent Victorian male artists (Williams) and the Melbourne Savage Club became their place of choice to gather and enjoy the fellowship the club offered and to share ideas in a convivial atmosphere. When the opportunity arose for them to travel to London in the early twentieth century, they met in London’s famous art clubs. Membership of the Melbourne Savage Club not only conferred rights to visit reciprocal clubs whilst in London, but also facilitated introductions to potential patrons. The London clubs were the venue of choice for visiting artists to meet their fellow artist expatriates and to share experiences and, importantly, to meet with their British counterparts, exhibit their works, and establish valuable contacts.The London Savage Club attracted many Australian expatriates. Not only is it the grandfather of London’s bohemian clubs but also it was the model for arts clubs the world over. Founded in 1857, the qualification for admission was (and still is) to be, “a working man in literature or art, and a good fellow” (Halliday vii). If a candidate met these requirements, he would be cordially received “come whence he may.” This was embodied in the club’s first rules which required applicants for membership to be from a restricted range of pursuits relating to the arts thought to be commensurate with its bohemian ideals, namely art, literature, drama, or music.The second London arts club that attracted expatriate Australian artists was the New English Arts Club, founded in 1886 by young English artists returning from studying art in Paris. Members of The New English Arts Club were influenced by the Impressionist style as opposed to the academic art shown at the Royal Academy. As a meeting place for Australia’s expatriate artists, the New English Arts Club had a particular influence, as it exposed them to significant early Modern artist members such as John Singer Sargent (1856–1925), Walter Sickert (1860–1942), William Orpen (1878–1931) and Augustus John (1878–1961) (Corbett and Perry; Thornton; Melbourne Savage Club).The third, and arguably the most popular with the expatriate Australian artists’ club, was the Chelsea Arts Club, a bohemian club formed in 1891 by local working artists looking for a place to go to “meet, talk, eat and drink” (Cross).Apart from the American-born founding member, James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903), amongst the biggest Chelsea names at the time of the influx of travelling young Australian artists were modernists Sir William Orpen, Augustus John, and John Sargent. The opportunity to mix with these leading British contemporary artists was irresistible to these antipodean artists (55).When Melbourne artist, Miles Evergood (1871–1939) arrived in London from America in 1910, he had been an active exhibiting member of the Salmagundi Club, a New York artists’ club. Almost immediately he joined the New English Arts Club and the Chelsea Arts Club. Hammer tells of him associating with “writer Israel Zangwill, sculptor Jacob Epstein, and anti-academic artists including Walter Sickert, Augustus John, John Lavery, John Singer Sargent and C.R.W. Nevison, who challenged art values in Britain at the beginning of the century” (Hammer 41).Arthur Streeton (1867–1943) used the Chelsea Arts Club as his postal address, as did many expatriate artists. The Melbourne Savage Club archives contain letters and greetings, with news from abroad, written from artist members back to their “Brother Savages” (Various).In late 1902, Streeton wrote to fellow artist and Savage Club member Tom Roberts (1856–1931) from London:I belong to the Chelsea Arts Club now, & meet the artists – MacKennel says it’s about the most artistic club (speaking in the real sense) in England. … They all seem to be here – McKennal, Longstaff, Mahony, Fullwood, Norman, Minns, Fox, Plataganet Tudor St. George Tucker, Quinn, Coates, Bunny, Alston, K, Sonny Pole, other minor lights and your old friend and admirer Smike – within 100 yards of here – there must be 30 different studios. (Streeton 94)Whilst some of the artists whom Streeton mentioned were studying at either the Royal Academy or the Slade School, it was the clubs like the Chelsea Arts Club where they were most likely to encounter fellow Australian artists. Tom Roberts was obviously attentive to Streeton’s enthusiastic account and, when he returned to London the following year to work on his commission for The Big Picture of the 1901 opening of the first Commonwealth Parliament, he soon joined. Roberts, through his expansive personality, became particularly active in London’s Australian expatriate artistic community and later became Vice-President of the Chelsea Arts Club. Along with Streeton and Roberts, other visiting Melbourne Savage Club artists joined the Chelsea Arts Club. They included, John Longstaff (1861–1941), James Quinn (1869–1951), George Coates (1869–1930), and Will Dyson (1880–1938), along with Sydney artists Henry Fullwood (1863–1930), George Lambert (1873–1930), and Will Ashton (1881–1963) (Croll 95). Smith describes the exodus to London and Paris: “It was the Chelsea Arts Club that the Heidelberg School established its last and least distinguished camp” (Smith, Smith and Heathcote 152).Streeton, who retained his Chelsea Arts Club membership when he returned for a while to Australia, wrote to Roberts in 1907, “I miss Chelsea & the Club-boys” (Streeton 107). In relation to Frederick McCubbin’s pending visit he wrote: “Prof McCubbin left here a week ago by German ‘Prinz Heinrich.’ … You’ll introduce him at the Chelsea Club and I hope they make him an Hon. Member, etc” (Streeton et al. 85). McCubbin wrote, after an evening at the Chelsea Arts Club, following a visit to the Royal Academy: “Tonight, I am dining with Australian artists in Soho, and shall be there to greet my old friends. How glad I am! Longstaff will be there, and Frank Stuart, Roberts, Fullwood, Pontin, Coates, Quinn, and Tucker’s brother, and many others from all around” (MacDonald, McCubbin and McCubbin 75). Impressed by the work of Turner he wrote to his wife Annie, following avisit to the Tate Gallery:I went yesterday with Fullwood and G. Coates and Tom Roberts for a ramble … to the Tate Gallery – a beautiful freestone building facing the river through a portico into the gallery where the lately found turners are exhibited – these are not like the greater number of pictures in the National Gallery – they represent his different periods, but are mostly in his latest style, when he had realised the quality of light (McCubbin).Clearly Turner’s paintings had a profound impression on him. In the same letter he wrote:they are mostly unfinished but they are divine – such dreams of colour – a dozen of them are like pearls … mist and cloud and sea and land, drenched in light … They glow with tender brilliancy that radiates from these canvases – how he loved the dazzling brilliancy of morning or evening – these gems with their opal colour – you feel how he gloried in these tender visions of light and air. He worked from darkness into light.The Chelsea Arts Club also served as a venue for artists to entertain and host distinguished visitors from home. These guests included; Melbourne Savage Club artist member Alf Vincent (Joske 112), National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) Trustee and popular patron of the arts, Professor Baldwin Spencer (1860–1929), Professor Frederick S. Delmer (1864–1931) and conductor George Marshall-Hall (1862–1915) (Mulvaney and Calaby 329; Streeton 111).Artist Miles Evergood arrived in London in 1910, and visited the Chelsea Arts Club. He mentions expatriate Australian artists gathering at the Club, including Will Dyson, Fred Leist (1873–1945), David Davies (1864–1939), Will Ashton (1881–1963), and Henry Fullwood (Hammer 41).Most of the Melbourne Savage Club artist members were active in the London Savage Club. On one occasion, in November 1908, Roberts, with fellow artist MacKennal in the Chair, attended the Australian Artists’ Dinner held there. This event attracted twenty-five expatriate Australian artists, all residing in London at the time (McQueen 532).These London arts clubs had a significant influence on the expatriate Australian artists for they became the “glue” that held them together whilst abroad. Although some artists travelled abroad specifically to take up places at the Royal Academy School or the Slade School, only a minority of artists arriving in London from Australia and other British colonies were offered positions at these prestigious schools. Many artists travelled to “try their luck.” The arts clubs of London, whilst similarly discerning in their membership criteria, generally offered a visiting “brother-of-the-brush” a warm welcome as a professional courtesy. They featured the familiar rollicking all-male “Smoke Nights” a feature of the Melbourne Savage Club. With a greater “artist” membership than the clubs in Australia, expatriate artists were not only able to catch up with their friends from Australia, but also they could associate with England’s finest and most progressive artists in a familiar congenial environment. The clubs were a “home away from home” and described by Underhill as, “an artistic Earl’s Court” (Underhill 99). Most importantly, the clubs were a centre for discourse, arguably even more so than were the teaching academies. Britain’s leading modernist artists were members of the Chelsea Arts Club and the New English Arts Club and mixed freely with the visiting Australian artists.Many Australian artists, such as Miles Evergood and George Bell (1878–1966), held anti-academic views similar to English club members and embraced the new artistic trends, which they would bring back to Australia. Streeton had no illusions about the relative worth of the famed institutions and the exhibitions held by clubs such as the New English. Writing to Roberts before he joins him in London, he describes the Royal Academy as having, “an inartistic atmosphere” and claims he “hasn’t the least desire to go again” (Streeton 77). His preference lay with a concurrent “International Exhibition”, which featured works by Rodin, Whistler, Condor, Degas, and others who were setting the pace rather than merely continuing the academic traditions.Architect Hardy Wilson (1881–1955) served as secretary of The Chelsea Arts Club. When he returned to Australia he brought back with him a number of British works by Streeton and Lambert for an exhibition at the Guild Hall Melbourne (Underhill 92). Artists and Bohemians, a history of the Chelsea Arts Club, makes special reference of its world-wide contacts and singles out many of its prominent Australian members for specific mention including; Sir John William (Will) Ashton OBE, later Director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and Will Dyson, whose illustrious career as an Australian war artist was described in some detail. Dyson’s popularity led to his later appointment as Chairman of the Chelsea Arts Club where he initiated an ambitious rebuilding program, improving staff accommodation, refurbishing the members’ areas, and adding five bedrooms for visiting members (Bross 87-90).Whilst the influence of travel abroad on Australian artists has been noted, the importance of the London Clubs has not been fully explored. These clubs offered artists a space where they felt “at home” and a familiar environment whilst they were abroad. The clubs functioned as a meeting space where they could engage in a stimulating artistic environment and gain introductions to leading figures in the art world. For those artists who chose England, London’s arts clubs played a large role, for it was in these establishments that they discussed, exhibited, shared, and met with their English counterparts. The club environment in London had a significant impact on male Australian artists as it offered a space where they were integrated into the English art world which enhanced their experience whilst abroad and influenced the direction of their art.ReferencesCorbett, David Peters, and Lara Perry, eds. English Art, 1860–1914: Modern Artists and Identity. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000.Croll, Robert Henderson. Tom Roberts: Father of Australian Landscape Painting. Melbourne: Robertson & Mullens, 1935.Cross, Tom. Artists and Bohemians: 100 Years with the Chelsea Arts Club. 1992. 1st ed. London: Quiller Press, 1992.Gray, Anne, and National Gallery of Australia. McCubbin: Last Impressions 1907–17. 1st ed. Parkes, A.C.T.: National Gallery of Australia, 2009.Halliday, Andrew, ed. The Savage Papers. 1867. 1st ed. London: Tinsley Brothers, 1867.Hammer, Gael. Miles Evergood: No End of Passion. Willoughby, NSW: Phillip Mathews, 2013.Joske, Prue. Debonair Jack: A Biography of Sir John Longstaff. 1st ed. Melbourne: Claremont Publishing, 1994.MacDonald, James S., Frederick McCubbin, and Alexander McCubbin. The Art of F. McCubbin. Melbourne: Lothian Book Publishing, 1916.McCaughy, Patrick. Strange Country: Why Australian Painting Matters. Ed. Paige Amor. The Miegunyah Press, 2014.McCubbin, Frederick. Papers, Ca. 1900–Ca. 1915. Melbourne.McQueen, Humphrey. Tom Roberts. Sydney: Macmillan, 1996.Mead, Stephen. "Bohemia in Melbourne: An Investigation of the Writer Marcus Clarke and Four Artistic Clubs during the Late 1860s – 1901.” PhD thesis. Melbourne: University of Melbourne, 2009.Melbourne Savage Club. Secretary. Minute Book: Melbourne Savage Club. Club Minutes (General Committee). Melbourne: Savage Archives.Mulvaney, Derek John, and J.H. Calaby. So Much That Is New: Baldwin Spencer, 1860–1929, a Biography. Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 1985.Smith, Bernard, Terry Smith, and Christopher Heathcote. Australian Painting, 1788–2000. 4th ed. South Melbourne, Vic.: Oxford University Press, 2001.Streeton, Arthur, et al. Smike to Bulldog: Letters from Sir Arthur Streeton to Tom Roberts. Sydney: Ure Smith, 1946.Streeton, Arthur, ed. Letters from Smike: The Letters of Arthur Streeton, 1890–1943. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1989.Thornton, Alfred, and New English Art Club. Fifty Years of the New English Art Club, 1886–1935. London: New English Art Club, Curwen Press 1935.Underhill, Nancy D.H. Making Australian Art 1916–49: Sydney Ure Smith Patron and Publisher. South Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1991.Various. Melbourne Savage Club Correspondence Book: 1902–1916. Melbourne: Melbourne Savage Club.Williams, Graeme Henry. "A Socio-Cultural Reading: The Melbourne Savage Club through Its Collections." Masters of Arts thesis. Melbourne: Deakin University, 2013.
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Feisst, Debbie. "Lovely, Dark and Deep by A. McNamara." Deakin Review of Children's Literature 2, no. 4 (2013). http://dx.doi.org/10.20361/g2801h.

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McNamara, Amy. Lovely, Dark and Deep. New York: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 2012. Print. Lovely, Dark and Deep is Brooklyn-based poet and photographer Amy McNamara’s debut novel. The title, well-chosen and from the last stanza of Robert Frost’s poem Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening – The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep. captures the main character’s mindset perfectly as she distances herself, both physically and emotionally, from her friends and family after a tragic car accident. Wren Wells, whom her mom still calls by her original name, Mamie, has moved in with her sculptor father, to an isolated house by the sea in rural Maine. Dealing with immense guilt and grief after surviving the crash that claimed the life of her high school boyfriend Patrick, Wren spends her days yearning to be left alone. Her father, a famous artist out of touch with his daughter’s life, is at a loss for how to help, and her well-meaning and understandably worried mother asks frequently about when Wren will go to college. Wren’s friends from her seemingly previous life struggle to understand the changes she is going through and in the process feel alienated. To pass the never-ending days, Wren runs - a lot. She runs to get away and be alone with her thoughts. And during this time, Wren meets Cal, who is hiding away from his own troubles. The chemistry between them, and the glimpses of joy she feels while with Cal is unnerving to Wren, who believes that she should feel guilty forever about Patrick, who was not given a second chance. Wren needs to make a choice – move on and try again or be lost forever. The character of Wren is not endearing to the reader; she is self-absorbed and manic, and selfish to the point of frustration. Her actions and of those around her often seem unauthentic. The plot line is slow, yet McNamara’s beautiful prose makes it bearable. Wren is, however, a young, depressed girl coping with deep grief and the story may resonate with young women who have experienced similar situations. Recommended with reservations: 2 stars out of 4 Reviewer: Debbie FeisstDebbie is a Public Services Librarian at the H.T. Coutts Education Library at the University of Alberta. When not renovating, she enjoys travel, fitness and young adult fiction.
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Miklósik, Elena. "Anton Schmidt (1786-1863), constructorul uitat al Timisoarei moderne / Anton Schmidt (1786-1863), the long-forgotten builder of modern Timisoara." Analele Banatului XXI 2013, January 1, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.55201/pjxu1435.

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At the beginning of the 19th century, caught within the ring of the massive walls of the fortress, Timişoara town had been hardly defining its new profile. From 21 military buildings, 20 were situated in the inner side of the fortress. In 1807 this town and its church represented the target of the orations of one young bricklayer who had arrived from Arad: he was also asking for a house in this settlement. e story turned real: for four decades the builder had built princely houses, administrative palaces, barracks, hospitals, churches and record houses throughout the historical Banat. His name had become well-known in the villages and towns of this region. Anton Schmidt – a former pupil of Franz Pumberger, a builder of fortifications in Aradul Nou – had more unacknowledged projects before becoming a significant member of the guild in Timişoara. At the time of his first marriage, with Anna Frantz in 1809, the documents mention him as a simply “Murar”. He participated, for the first time in 1818, in a contest promoted for the construction of an inn named “At the Queen of England,” in the suburb of the Fabric district. Scheduled with halls for dancing and playing billiards, the building had to offer several rooms for travelers too. e edifice, designed from a symmetrical viewpoint, with a central risalit on its façade, and its fronton sustained by four columns with Ionic capitals, which tower a terrace at the first floor level, the exterior of the ground floor decorated “in rustica,” had not been approved by the management board of the town. In 1834 Anton Schmidt signed onto the project of a Communal eatre, a building which was supposed to be raised within the inner side of the walls. Its façade re-engaged the clearer and more balanced elements of the unachieved inn. He proposed a new edifice, with some modern stage equipment, an easy access (separate entrance for the artists and public), a comfortable ground floor and dress circles on the floor for the onlookers, and ball rooms for the high life public too. Yet, because of low financial resourses, this project had not been finalized either. In the meantime, the tireless architect also designed other important and utilitarian buildings: a factory and a wine storehouse (Pesac village), a treatment resort (Băile Buziaş), and manor houses (in Herneacova, Sângeorgiu, Beodra/Serbia). He constructed an impressive number of barracks for the army in the fortress of Timişoara or in the region, he designed and built the Town-Hall (currently the Town Museum) and the Hospital in Pančevo (Serbia), a new one storried barracks in Timişoara (1836), he added some more floors at the Catholic Seminar and executed some repairs at the St. George Church. He traveled to Austria and Hungary and returned with the cathedral project from Eger (Hungary, made by József Hild). In 1841 he proposed the construction of a church for the believers from Călacea, several plans for Catholic (with 300 or 500 people) and Orthodox churches, in 1835 he signed a plan for the Evangelic Lutheran Church in Timişoara. e documents in 1836 mention him as an outstanding member of the society in Timişoara: “Muratorium Magister et Selecta Civica.~ Com~unitatis Membrum”. Getting married, for the second time in 1823, to Anna, the sister of senator Franciscus Mayer, he succeeded in founding a happy family. He was the first builder who had influenced the architecture in Timişoara through his activity. His buildings, most of them scheduled on three levels (wine cellars, ground floors and one upper floor), were characterized by balance, reason and few classical ornaments (columns with Ionic or composite capitals, pilasters, gates marking the axle of the building developed symmetrically on the horizontal level). e more important edifices benefited by one more floor and an attic mounted on classically symbolic sculptures. Only a few of creations have been preserved. e greatest part of the buildings meant to the army (e Genista Barrack, e New Engineers’ Barrack etc.) was demolished when the town was brought up to date. e one-storried castle from Elemir was sold as construction material. We have no information related to the manor house in Banatsko Aranđelovo (Serbia) nor to the Barracks of the Cavalry Squadron in Sânnicolaul Mic (today part of Arad). In Timişoara, in the old historical centre, there is only the imposing building of a business man, Franciscus Xaverius Strohmayer, watching the town out of its numerous windows. He retired in 1851 with a considerable fortune visiting Italy twice. He remained a consultant regarding the important buildings of the town: he elaborated the development plans of the Old Prefecture Palace, he modified his own house in the Iozefin Suburb, sold to the Gendarme Station (1857), he designed for his relatives, he drew and dreamt of ideal familial residencies. Some of these, incomplete drawings and projects, were deposited to the museum in 1908, certifying the fact that... the beseech of the young builder had been finally accomplished.
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22

Phillips, Dougal, and Oliver Watts. "Copyright, Print and Authorship in the Culture Industry." M/C Journal 8, no. 2 (2005). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.2340.

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 Historically the impact of the printing press on Western culture is a truism. Print gave rise to the mass reproduction and circulation of information with wide reaching consequences in all fields: political, social, and economic. An aspect that this paper wishes to focus on is that this moment also saw the birth (and necessity) of copyright legislation, to administer and protect this new found ability to package and disseminate text. The term copyright itself, used freely in debates surrounding contemporary topics such as iTunes, DVD piracy, and file-sharing, is not only semantically anachronistic but, as will be shown, is an anachronistic problem. The history that it carries, through almost three hundred years, underscores the difficulties at the heart of copyright in the contemporary scene. Indeed the reliance on copyright in these debates creates an argument based on circular definitions relating to only the statutory conception of cultural rights. No avenue is really left to imagine a space outside its jurisdiction. This paper asserts that notions of the “culture industry” (as opposed to some other conception of culture) are also inherently connected to the some three hundred years of copyright legislation. Our conceptions of the author and of intellectual pursuits as property can also be traced within this relatively small period. As clarified by Lord Chief Baron Pollock in the English courts in 1854, “copyright is altogether an artificial right” that does not apply at common law and relies wholly on statute (Jeffreys v Boosey). Foucault (124-42) highlights, in his attack on Romantic notions of the author-genius-God, that the author-function is expressed primarily as a legal term, through the legal concepts of censorship and copyright. Copyright, then, pays little attention to non-economic interests of the author and is used primarily to further economic interests. The corporate nature of the culture industry at present amounts to the successful application of copyright legislation in the past. This paper suggests that we look at our conception of literary and artistic work as separate from copyright’s own definitions of intellectual property and the commercialisation of culture. From Hogarth to File-Sharing The case of ‘DVD Jon’ is instructive. In 1999, Jon Lech Johansen, a Norwegian programmer, drew the ire of Hollywood by breaking the encryption code for DVDs (in a program called DeCSS). More recently, he has devised a program to circumvent the anti-piracy system for Apple’s iTunes music download service. With this program, called PyMusique, users still have to pay for the songs, but once these are paid for, users can use the songs on all operating systems and with no limits on copying, transfers or burning. Johansen, who publishes his wares on his blog entitled So Sue Me, was in fact sued in 1999 by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) for copyright infringement. He argued that he created DeCSS as part of developing a DVD player for his Linux operating system, and that copying DVD movies was an ancillary function of the program for which he could not be held responsible. He was acquitted by an Oslo district court in early 2003 and again by an appeals court later that year. During this time many people on the internet found novel ways to publish the DeCSS code so as to avoid prosecution, including many different code encryptions incorporated into jpeg images (including the trademarked DVD logo, owned by DVD LLC) and mpeg movies, as an online MUD game scenario, and even produced in the form of a haiku (“42 Ways to Distribute DeCSS”). The ability to publish the code in a format not readily prosecutable owes less to encryption and clandestine messages than it does to anachronistic laws regarding the wholly legal right to original formats. Prior to 1709, copyright or licensing related to the book publishing industry where the work as formatted, pressed and disseminated was more important to protect than the text itself or the concept of the author as the writer of the text. Even today different copyrights may be held over the different formatting of the same text. The ability for hackers to attack the copyright legislation through its inherent anachronism is more than smart lawyering or a neat joke. These attacks, based on file sharing and the morphing fluid forms of information (rather than contained text, printed, broadcast, or expressed through form in general), amount to a real breach in copyright’s capability to administer and protect information. That the corporations are so excited and scared of these new technologies of dissemination should come as no surprise. It should also not be seen, as some commentators wish to, as a completely new approach to the dissemination of culture. If copyright was originally intended to protect the rights of the publisher, the passing of the Act of Anne in 1709 introduced two new concepts – an author being the owner of copyright, and the principle of a fixed term of protection for published works. In 1734, William Hogarth, wanting to ensure profits would flow from his widely disseminated prints (which attracted many pirate copies), fought to have these protections extended to visual works. What is notable about all this is that in 1734 the concept of copyright both in literary and artistic works applied only to published or reproduced works. It would be over one hundred years later, in the Romantic period, that a broader protection to all artworks would be available (for example, paintings, sculpture, etc). Born primarily out of guild systems, the socio-political aspect of protection, although with a passing nod to the author, was primarily a commercial concern. These days the statute has muddied its primary purpose; commercial interest is conflated and confused with the moral rights of the author (which, it might be added, although first asserted in the International Berne Convention of 1886 were only ratified in Australia in December 2000). For instance, in a case such as Sony Entertainment (Australia) Ltd v Smith (2005), both parties in fact want the protection of copyright. On one day the DJ in question (Pee Wee Ferris) might be advertising himself through his DJ name as an appropriative, sampling artist-author, while at the same time, we might assume, wishing to protect his own rights as a recording artist. Alternatively, the authors of the various DeCSS code works want both the free flow of information which then results in a possible free flow of media content. Naturally, this does not sit well with the current lords of copyright: the corporations. The new open-source author works contrary to all copyright. Freed Slaves The model of the open source author is not without precedent. Historically, prior to copyright and the culture industry, this approach to authorship was the norm. The Roman poet Martial, known for his wit and gifts of poetry, wrote I commend to you, Quintianus, my little books – if I can call them mine when your poet recites them: if they complain of their harsh servitude, you should come forward as their champion and give your guarantees; and when he calls himself their master you should say they are mine and have been granted their freedom. If you shout this out three or four times, you will make their kidnapper (plagiario) feel ashamed of himself. Here of course the cultural producer is a landed aristocrat (a situation common to early Western poets such as Chaucer, Spencer and More). The poem, or work, exists in the economy of the gift. The author-function here is also not the same as in modern times but was based on the advantages of reputation and celebrity within the Roman court. Similarly other texts such as stories, songs and music were circulated, prior to print, in a primarily oral economy. Later, with the rise of the professional guild system in late medieval times, the patronage system did indeed pay artists, sometimes royal sums. However, this bursary was not so much for the work than for upkeep as members of the household holding a particular skill. The commercial aspect of the author as owner only became fully realised with the rise of the middle classes in the eighteenth and nineteenth century and led to the global adoption of the copyright regime as the culture industry’s sanction. Added to this, the author is now overwhelmingly a corporation, not an individual, which has expanded the utilisation of these statutes for commercial advantage to, perhaps, an unforeseen degree. To understand the file-sharing period, which we are now entering at full speed, we cannot be confused by notions found in the copyright acts; definitions based on copyright cannot adequately express a culture without commercial concerns. Perhaps the discussion needs to return to concepts that predate copyright, before the author-function (as suggested by Foucault) and before the notion of intellectual property. That we have returned to a gift economy for cultural products is easily understood in the context of file-sharing. But what of the author? Here the figure of the hacker suggests a movement towards such an archaic model where the author’s remuneration comes in the form of celebrity, or a reputation as an exciting innovator. Another model, which is perhaps more likely, is an understanding that certain material disseminated will be sold and administered under copyright for profit and that the excess will be quickly and efficiently disseminated with no profit and with no overall duration of protection. Such an amalgamated approach is exemplified by Radiohead’s Kid A album, which, although available for free downloads, was still profitable because the (anachronistic) printed version, with its cover and artwork, still sold by the millions. Perhaps cultural works, the slaves of the author-corporation, should be granted their freedom: freedom from servitude to a commercial master, freedom to be re-told rather than re-sold, with due attribution to the author the only payment. This is a Utopian idea perhaps, but no less a fantasy than the idea that the laws of copyright, born of the printing press, can evolve to match the economy today that they purport to control. When thinking about ownership and authorship today, it must be recalled that copyright itself has a history of useful fictions. References Michel Foucault; “What Is an Author?” Twentieth-Century Literary Theory. Eds. Vassilis Lambropoulos and David Neal Miller. Albany: State UP of New York, 1987. 124-42. “42 Ways to Distribute DeCSS.” 5 Jun. 2005 http://decss.zoy.org/>. Jeffreys v Boosey, 1854. Johansen, Jon Lech. So Sue Me. 5 Jun. 2005 http://www.nanocrew.net/blog/>. 
 
 
 
 Citation reference for this article
 
 MLA Style
 Phillips, Dougal, and Oliver Watts. "Copyright, Print and Authorship in the Culture Industry." M/C Journal 8.2 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0506/06-phillipswatts.php>. APA Style
 Phillips, D., and O. Watts. (Jun. 2005) "Copyright, Print and Authorship in the Culture Industry," M/C Journal, 8(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0506/06-phillipswatts.php>. 
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23

Schmid, David. "Murderabilia." M/C Journal 7, no. 5 (2004). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.2430.

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Online shopping is all the rage these days and the murderabilia industry in particular, which specializes in selling serial killer artifacts, is booming. At Spectre Studios, sculptor David Johnson sells flexible plastic action figures of Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and John Wayne Gacy and plans to produce a figure of Jack the Ripper in the future. Although some might think that making action figures of serial killers is tasteless, Johnson hastens to assure the potential consumer that he does have standards: “I wouldn’t do Osama bin Laden . . . I have some personal qualms about that” (Robinson). At Serial Killer Central, you can buy a range of items made by serial killers themselves, including paintings and drawings by Angelo Buono (one of the “Hillside Stranglers”) and Henry Lee Lucas. For the more discerning consumer, Supernaught.com charges a mere $300 for a brick from Dahmer’s apartment building, while a lock of Charles Manson’s hair is a real bargain at $995, shipping and handling not included. The sale of murderabilia is just a small part of the huge serial killer industry that has become a defining feature of American popular culture over the last twenty-five years. This industry is, in turn, a prime example of what Mark Seltzer has described as “wound culture,” consisting of a “public fascination with torn and open bodies and torn and opened persons, a collective gathering around shock, trauma, and the wound” (1). According to Seltzer, the serial killer is “one of the superstars of our wound culture” (2) and his claim is confirmed by the constant stream of movies, books, magazines, television shows, websites, t-shirts, and a tsunami of ephemera that has given the figure of the serial murderer an unparalleled degree of visibility and fame in the contemporary American public sphere. In a culture defined by celebrity, serial killers like Bundy, Dahmer and Gacy are the biggest stars of all, instantly recognized by the vast majority of Americans. Not surprisingly, murderabilia has been the focus of a sustained critique by the (usually self-appointed) guardians of ‘decency’ in American culture. On January 2, 2003 The John Walsh Show, the daytime television vehicle of the long-time host of America’s Most Wanted, featured an “inside look at the world of ‘murderabilia,’ which involves the sale of artwork, personal effects and letters from well-known killers” (The John Walsh Show Website). Featured guests included Andy Kahan, Director of the Mayor’s Crime Victim Assistance Office in Houston, Texas; ‘Thomas,’ who was horrified to find hair samples from “The Railroad Killer,” the individual who killed his mother, for sale on the Internet; Elmer Wayne Henley, a serial killer who sells his artwork to collectors; Joe, who runs “Serial Killer Central” and sells murderabilia from a wide range of killers, and Harold Schechter, a professor of English at Queens College, CUNY. Despite the program’s stated intention to “look at both sides of the issue,” the show was little more than a jeremiad against the murderabilia industry, with the majority of airtime being given to Andy Kahan and to the relatives of crime victims. The program’s bias was not lost on many of those who visited Joe’s Serial Killer Central site and left messages on the message board on the day The John Walsh Show aired. There were some visitors who shared Walsh’s perspective. A message from “serialkillersshouldnotprofit@aol.com,” for example, stated that “you will rot in hell with these killers,” while “Smithpi@hotmail.com” had a more elaborate critique: “You should pull your site off the net. I just watched the John Walsh show and your [sic] a fucking idiot. I hope your [sic] never a victim, because if you do [sic] then you would understand what all those people were trying to tell you. You [sic] a dumb shit.” Most visitors, however, sympathized with the way Joe had been treated on the show: “I as well [sic] saw you on the John Walsh show, you should [sic] a lot of courage going on such a one sided show, and it was shit that they wouldnt [sic] let you talk, I would have walked off.” But whether the comments were positive or negative, one thing was clear: The John Walsh Show had created a great deal of interest in the Serial Killer Central site. As one of the messages put it, “I think that anything [sic] else he [John Walsh] has put a spark in everyones [sic] curiousity [sic] . . . I have noticed that you have more hits on your page today than any others [sic].” Apparently, even the most explicit rejection and condemnation of serial killer celebrity finds itself implicated in (and perhaps even unwittingly encouraging the growth of) that celebrity. John Walsh’s attack on the murderabilia industry was the latest skirmish in a campaign that has been growing steadily since the late 1990s. One of the campaign’s initial targets was the internet trading site eBay, which was criticized for allowing serial killer-related products to be sold online. In support of such criticism, conservative victims’ rights and pro-death penalty organizations like “Justice For All” organized online petitions against eBay. In November 2000, Business Week Online featured an interview with Andy Kahan in which he argued that the online sale of murderabilia should be suppressed: “The Internet just opens it all up to millions and millions more potential buyers and gives easy access to children. And it sends a negative message to society. What does it say about us? We continue to glorify killers and continue to put them in the mainstream public. That’s not right” (Business Week). Eventually bowing to public pressure, eBay decided to ban the sale of murderabilia items in May 2001, forcing the industry underground, where it continues to be pursued by the likes of John Walsh. Apart from highlighting how far the celebrity culture around serial killers has developed (so that one can now purchase the nail clippings and hair of some killers, as if they are religious icons), focusing on the ongoing debate around the ethics of murderabilia also emphasizes how difficult it is to draw a neat line between those who condemn and those who participate in that culture. Quite apart from the way in which John Walsh’s censoriousness brought more visitors to the Serial Killer Central site, one could also argue that few individuals have done more to disseminate information about violent crime in general and serial murder in particular to mainstream America than John Walsh. Of course, this information is presented in the unimpeachably moral context of fighting crime, but controversial features of America’s Most Wanted, such as the dramatic recreations of crime, pander to the same prurient public interest in crime that the program simultaneously condemns. An ABCNews.Com article on murderabilia inadvertently highlights the difficulty of distinguishing a legitimate from an illegitimate interest in serial murder by quoting Rick Staton, one of the biggest collectors and dealers of murderabilia in the United States, who emphasizes that the people he sells to are not “ghouls and creeps [who] crawl out of the woodwork”, but rather “pretty much your average Joe Blow.” Even his family, Staton goes on to say, who profess to be disgusted by what he does, act very differently in practice: “The minute they step into this room, they are glued to everything in here and they are asking questions and they are genuinely intrigued by it . . . So it makes me wonder: Am I the one who is so abnormal, or am I pretty normal?” (ABCNews.Com). To answer Staton’s question, we need to go back to 1944, when sociologist Leo Lowenthal published an essay entitled “Biographies in Popular Magazines,” an essay he later reprinted as a chapter in his 1961 book, Literature, Popular Culture And Society, under a new title: “The Triumph of Mass Idols.” Lowenthal argues that biographies in popular magazines underwent a striking change between 1901 and 1941, a change that signals the emergence of a new social type. According to Lowenthal, the earlier biographies indicate that American society’s heroes at the time were “idols of production” in that “they stem from the productive life, from industry, business, and natural sciences. There is not a single hero from the world of sports and the few artists and entertainers either do not belong to the sphere of cheap or mass entertainment or represent a serious attitude toward their art” (112-3). Sampling biographies in magazines from 1941, however, Lowenthal reaches a very different conclusion: “We called the heroes of the past ‘idols of production’: we feel entitled to call the present-day magazine heroes ‘idols of consumption’” (115). Unlike the businessmen, industrialists and scientists who dominated the earlier sample, almost every one of 1941’s heroes “is directly, or indirectly, related to the sphere of leisure time: either he does not belong to vocations which serve society’s basic needs (e.g., the worlds of entertainment and sport), or he amounts, more or less, to a caricature of a socially productive agent” (115). Lowenthal leaves his reader in no doubt that he sees the change from “idols of production” to “idols of consumption” as a serious decline: “If a student in some very distant future should use popular magazines of 1941 as a source of information as to what figures the American public looked to in the first stages of the greatest crisis since the birth of the Union, he would come to a grotesque result . . . the idols of the masses are not, as they were in the past, the leading names in the battle of production, but the headliners of the movies, the ball parks, and the night clubs” (116). With Lowenthal in mind, when one considers the fact that the serial killer is generally seen, in Richard Tithecott’s words, as “deserving of eternal fame, of media attention on a massive scale, of groupies” (144), one is tempted to describe the advent of celebrity serial killers as a further decline in the condition of American culture’s “mass idols.” The serial killer’s relationship to consumption, however, is too complex to allow for such a hasty judgment, as the murderabilia industry indicates. Throughout the edition of The John Walsh Show that attacked murderabilia, Walsh showed clips of Collectors, a recent documentary about the industry. Collectors is distributed by a small company named Abject Films and on their website the film’s director, Julian P. Hobbs, discusses some of the multiple connections between serial killing and consumerism. Hobbs points out that the serial killer is connected with consumerism in the most basic sense that he has become a commodity, “a merchandising phenomenon that rivals Mickey Mouse. From movies to television, books to on-line, serial killers are packaged and consumed en-masse” (Abject Films). But as Hobbs goes on to argue, serial killers themselves can be seen as consumers, making any representations of them implicated in the same consumerist logic: “Serial killers come into being by fetishizing and collecting artifacts – usually body parts – in turn, the dedicated collector gathers scraps connected with the actual events and so, too, a documentary a collection of images” (Abject Films). Along with Rick Staton, Hobbs implies that no one can avoid being involved with consumerism in relation to serial murder, even if one’s reasons for getting involved are high-minded. For example, when Jeffrey Dahmer was murdered in prison in 1994, the families of his victims were delighted but his death also presented them with something of a problem. Throughout the short time Dahmer was in prison, there had been persistent rumors that he was in negotiations with both publishers and movie studios about selling his story. If such a deal had ever been struck, legal restrictions would have prevented Dahmer from receiving any of the money; instead, it would have been distributed among his victims’ families. Dahmer’s murder obviously ended this possibility, so the families explored another option: going into the murderabilia business by auctioning off Dahmer’s property, including such banal items as his toothbrush, but also many items he had used in commission of the murders, such as a saw, a hammer, the 55-gallon vat he used to decompose the bodies, and the refrigerator where he stored the hearts of his victims. Although the families’ motives for suggesting this auction may have been noble, they could not avoid participating in what Mark Pizzato has described as “the prior fetishization of such props and the consumption of [Dahmer’s] cannibal drama by a mass audience” (91). When the logic of consumerism dominates, is anyone truly innocent, or are there just varying degrees of guilt, of implication? The reason why it is impossible to separate neatly ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ expressions of interest in famous serial killers is the same reason why the murderabilia industry is booming; in the words of a 1994 National Examiner headline: “Serial Killers Are as American as Apple Pie.” Christopher Sharrett has suggested that: “Perhaps the fetish status of the criminal psychopath . . . is about recognizing the serial killer/mass murderer not as social rebel or folk hero . . . but as the most genuine representative of American life” (13). The enormous resistance to recognizing the representativeness of serial killers in American culture is fundamental to the appeal of fetishizing serial killers and their artifacts. As Sigmund Freud has explained, the act of disavowal that accompanies the formation of a fetish allows a perception (in this case, the Americanness of serial killers) to persist in a different form rather than being simply repressed (352-3). Consequently, just like the sexual fetishists discussed by Freud, although we may recognize our interest in serial killers “as an abnormality, it is seldom felt by [us] as a symptom of an ailment accompanied by suffering” (351). On the contrary, we are usually, in Freud’s words, “quite satisfied” (351) with our interest in serial killers precisely because we have turned them into celebrities. It is our complicated relationship with celebrities, affective as well as intellectual, composed of equal parts admiration and resentment, envy and contempt, that provides us with a lexicon through which we can manage our appalled and appalling fascination with the serial killer, contemporary American culture’s ultimate star. References ABCNews.Com. “Killer Collectibles: Inside the World of ‘Murderabilia.” 7 Nov. 2001. American Broadcasting Company. 9 May 2003 http://www.abcnews.com>. AbjectFilms.Com. “Collectors: A Film by Julian P. Hobbs.” Abject Films. 9 May 2003 http://www.abjectfilms.com/collectors.html>. BusinessWeek Online. 20 Nov. 2000. Business Week. 9 May 2003 http://www.businessweek.com/2000/00_47/b3708056.htm>. Freud, Sigmund. “Fetishism.” On Sexuality. Trans. James Strachey. London: Penguin Books, 1977. 351-7. The John Walsh Show. Ed. Click Active Media. 2 Jan. 2003. 9 May 2003 http://www.johnwalsh.tv/cgi-bin/topics/today/cgi?id=90>. Lowenthal, Leo. “The Triumph of Mass Idols.” Literature, Popular Culture and Society. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1961. 109-40. National Examiner. “Serial Killers Are as American as Apple Pie.” 7 Jun. 1994: 7. Pizzato, Mark. “Jeffrey Dahmer and Media Cannibalism: The Lure and Failure of Sacrifice.” Mythologies of Violence in Postmodern Media. Ed. Christopher Sharrett. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1999. 85-118. Robinson, Bryan. “Murder Incorporated: Denver Sculptor’s Serial Killer Action Figures Bringing in Profits and Raising Ire.” ABCNews.Com 25 Mar. 2002. American Broadcasting Company. 27 Apr. 2003 http://abcnews.com/>. Seltzer, Mark. Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture. New York: Routledge, 1998. Sharrett, Christopher. “Introduction.” Mythologies of Violence in Postmodern Media. Ed. Christopher Sharrett. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1999. 9-20. Tithecott, Richard. Of Men and Monsters: Jeffrey Dahmer and the Construction of the Serial Killer. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1997. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Schmid, David. "Murderabilia: Consuming Fame." M/C Journal 7.5 (2004). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/10-schmid.php>. APA Style Schmid, D. (Nov. 2004) "Murderabilia: Consuming Fame," M/C Journal, 7(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/10-schmid.php>.
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24

Molnar, Tamas. "Spectre of the Past, Vision of the Future – Ritual, Reflexivity and the Hope for Renewal in Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s Climate Change Communication Film "Home"." M/C Journal 15, no. 3 (2012). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.496.

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About half way through Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s film Home (2009) the narrator describes the fall of the Rapa Nui, the indigenous people of the Easter Islands. The narrator posits that the Rapa Nui culture collapsed due to extensive environmental degradation brought about by large-scale deforestation. The Rapa Nui cut down their massive native forests to clear spaces for agriculture, to heat their dwellings, to build canoes and, most importantly, to move their enormous rock sculptures—the Moai. The disappearance of their forests led to island-wide soil erosion and the gradual disappearance of arable land. Caught in the vice of overpopulation but with rapidly dwindling basic resources and no trees to build canoes, they were trapped on the island and watched helplessly as their society fell into disarray. The sequence ends with the narrator’s biting remark: “The real mystery of the Easter Islands is not how its strange statues got there, we know now; it's why the Rapa Nui didn't react in time.” In their unrelenting desire for development, the Rapa Nui appear to have overlooked the role the environment plays in maintaining a society. The island’s Moai accompanying the sequence appear as memento mori, a lesson in the mortality of human cultures brought about by their own misguided and short-sighted practices. Arthus-Bertrand’s Home, a film composed almost entirely of aerial photographs, bears witness to present-day environmental degradation and climate change, constructing society as a fragile structure built upon and sustained by the environment. Home is a call to recognise how contemporary practices of post-industrial societies have come to shape the environment and how they may impact the habitability of Earth in the near future. Through reflexivity and a ritualised structure the text invites spectators to look at themselves in a new light and remake their self-image in the wake of global environmental risk by embracing new, alternative core practices based on balance and interconnectedness. Arthus-Bertrand frames climate change not as a burden, but as a moment of profound realisation of the potential for change and humans ability to create a desirable future through hope and our innate capacity for renewal. This article examines how Arthus-Bertrand’s ritualised construction of climate change aims to remake viewers’ perception of present-day environmental degradation and investigates Home’s place in contemporary climate change communication discourse. Climate change, in its capacity to affect us globally, is considered a world risk. The most recent peer-reviewed Synthesis Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggests that the concentration of atmospheric greenhouse gases has increased markedly since human industrialisation in the 18th century. Moreover, human activities, such as fossil fuel burning and agricultural practices, are “very likely” responsible for the resulting increase in temperature rise (IPPC 37). The increased global temperatures and the subsequent changing weather patterns have a direct and profound impact on the physical and biological systems of our planet, including shrinking glaciers, melting permafrost, coastal erosion, and changes in species distribution and reproduction patterns (Rosenzweig et al. 353). Studies of global security assert that these physiological changes are expected to increase the likelihood of humanitarian disasters, food and water supply shortages, and competition for resources thus resulting in a destabilisation of global safety (Boston et al. 1–2). Human behaviour and dominant practices of modernity are now on a path to materially impact the future habitability of our home, Earth. In contemporary post-industrial societies, however, climate change remains an elusive, intangible threat. Here, the Arctic-bound species forced to adapt to milder climates or the inhabitants of low-lying Pacific islands seeking refuge in mainland cities are removed from the everyday experience of the controlled and regulated environments of homes, offices, and shopping malls. Diverse research into the mediated and mediatised nature of the environment suggests that rather than from first-hand experiences and observations, the majority of our knowledge concerning the environment now comes from its representation in the mass media (Hamilton 4; Stamm et al. 220; Cox 2). Consequently the threat of climate change is communicated and constructed through the news media, entertainment and lifestyle programming, and various documentaries and fiction films. It is therefore the construction (the representation of the risk in various discourses) that shapes people’s perception and experience of the phenomenon, and ultimately influences behaviour and instigates social response (Beck 213). By drawing on and negotiating society’s dominant discourses, environmental mediation defines spectators’ perceptions of the human-nature relationship and subsequently their roles and responsibilities in the face of environmental risks. Maxwell Boykoff asserts that contemporary modern society’s mediatised representations of environmental degradation and climate change depict the phenomena as external to society’s primary social and economic concerns (449). Julia Corbett argues that this is partly because environmental protection and sustainable behaviour are often at odds with the dominant social paradigms of consumerism, economic growth, and materialism (175). Similarly, Rowan Howard-Williams suggests that most media texts, especially news, do not emphasise the link between social practices, such as consumerist behaviour, and their environmental consequences because they contradict dominant social paradigms (41). The demands contemporary post-industrial societies make on the environment to sustain economic growth, consumer culture, and citizens’ comfortable lives in air-conditioned homes and offices are often left unarticulated. While the media coverage of environmental risks may indeed have contributed to “critical misperceptions, misleading debates, and divergent understandings” (Boykoff 450) climate change possesses innate characteristics that amplify its perception in present-day post-industrial societies as a distant and impersonal threat. Climate change is characterised by temporal and spatial de-localisation. The gradual increase in global temperature and its physical and biological consequences are much less prominent than seasonal changes and hence difficult to observe on human time-scales. Moreover, while research points to the increased probability of extreme climatic events such as droughts, wild fires, and changes in weather patterns (IPCC 48), they take place over a wide range of geographical locations and no single event can be ultimately said to be the result of climate change (Maibach and Roser-Renouf 145). In addition to these observational obstacles, political partisanship, vested interests in the current status quo, and general resistance to profound change all play a part in keeping us one step removed from the phenomenon of climate change. The distant and impersonal nature of climate change coupled with the “uncertainty over consequences, diverse and multiple engaged interests, conflicting knowledge claims, and high stakes” (Lorenzoni et al. 65) often result in repression, rejection, and denial, removing the individual’s responsibility to act. Research suggests that, due to its unique observational obstacles in contemporary post-industrial societies, climate change is considered a psychologically distant event (Pawlik 559), one that is not personally salient due to the “perceived distance and remoteness [...] from one’s everyday experience” (O’Neill and Nicholson-Cole 370). In an examination of the barriers to behaviour change in the face of psychologically distant events, Robert Gifford argues that changing individuals’ perceptions of the issue-domain is one of the challenges of countering environmental inertia—the lack of initiative for environmentally sustainable social action (5). To challenge the status quo a radically different construction of the environment and the human-nature relationship is required to transform our perception of global environmental risks and ultimately result in environmentally consequential social action. Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s Home is a ritualised construction of contemporary environmental degradation and climate change which takes spectators on a rite of passage to a newfound understanding of the human-nature relationship. Transformation through re-imagining individuals’ roles, responsibilities, and practices is an intrinsic quality of rituals. A ritual charts a subjects path from one state of consciousness to the next, resulting in a meaningful change of attitudes (Deflem 8). Through a lifelong study of African rituals British cultural ethnographer Victor Turner refined his concept of rituals in a modern social context. Turner observed that rituals conform to a three-phased processural form (The Ritual Process 13–14). First, in the separation stage, the subjects are selected and removed from their fixed position in the social structure. Second, they enter an in-between and ambiguous liminal stage, characterised by a “partial or complete separation of the subject from everyday existence” (Deflem 8). Finally, imbued with a new perspective of the outside world borne out of the experience of reflexivity, liminality, and a cathartic cleansing, subjects are reintegrated into the social reality in a new, stable state. The three distinct stages make the ritual an emotionally charged, highly personal experience that “demarcates the passage from one phase to another in the individual’s life-cycle” (Turner, “Symbols” 488) and actively shapes human attitudes and behaviour. Adhering to the three-staged processural form of the ritual, Arthus-Bertrand guides spectators towards a newfound understanding of their roles and responsibilities in creating a desirable future. In the first stage—the separation—aerial photography of Home alienates viewers from their anthropocentric perspectives of the outside world. This establishes Earth as a body, and unearths spectators’ guilt and shame in relation to contemporary world risks. Aerial photography strips landscapes of their conventional qualities of horizon, scale, and human reference. As fine art photographer Emmet Gowin observes, “when one really sees an awesome, vast place, our sense of wholeness is reorganised [...] and the body seems always to diminish” (qtd. in Reynolds 4). Confronted with a seemingly infinite sublime landscape from above, the spectator’s “body diminishes” as they witness Earth’s body gradually taking shape. Home’s rushing rivers of Indonesia are akin to blood flowing through the veins and the Siberian permafrost seems like the texture of skin in extreme close-up. Arthus-Bertrand establishes a geocentric embodiment to force spectators to perceive and experience the environmental degradation brought about by the dominant social practices of contemporary post-industrial modernity. The film-maker visualises the maltreatment of the environment through suggested abuse of the Earth’s body. Images of industrial agricultural practices in the United States appear to leave scratches and scars on the landscape, and as a ship crosses the Arctic ice sheets of the Northwest Passage the boat glides like the surgeon’s knife cutting through the uppermost layer of the skin. But the deep blue water that’s revealed in the wake of the craft suggests a flesh and body now devoid of life, a suffering Earth in the wake of global climatic change. Arthus-Bertrand’s images become the sublime evidence of human intervention in the environment and the reflection of present-day industrialisation materially altering the face of Earth. The film-maker exploits spectators’ geocentric perspective and sensibility to prompt reflexivity, provide revelations about the self, and unearth the forgotten shame and guilt in having inadvertently caused excessive environmental degradation. Following the sequences establishing Earth as the body of the text Arthus-Bertrand returns spectators to their everyday “natural” environment—the city. Having witnessed and endured the pain and suffering of Earth, spectators now gaze at the skyscrapers standing bold and tall in the cityscape with disillusionment. The pinnacles of modern urban development become symbols of arrogance and exploitation: structures forced upon the landscape. Moreover, the images of contemporary cityscapes in Home serve as triggers for ritual reflexivity, allowing the spectator to “perceive the self [...] as a distanced ‘other’ and hence achieve a partial ‘self-transcendence’” (Beck, Comments 491). Arthus-Bertrand’s aerial photographs of Los Angeles, New York, and Tokyo fold these distinct urban environments into one uniform fusion of glass, metal, and concrete devoid of life. The uniformity of these cultural landscapes prompts spectators to add the missing element: the human. Suddenly, the homes and offices of desolate cityscapes are populated by none other than us, looking at ourselves from a unique vantage point. The geocentric sensibility the film-maker invoked with the images of the suffering Earth now prompt a revelation about the self as spectators see their everyday urban environments in a new light. Their homes and offices become blemishes on the face of the Earth: its inhabitants, including the spectators themselves, complicit in the excessive mistreatment of the planet. The second stage of the ritual allows Arthus-Bertrand to challenge dominant social paradigms of present day post-industrial societies and introduce new, alternative moral directives to govern our habits and attitudes. Following the separation, ritual subjects enter an in-between, threshold stage, one unencumbered by the spatial, temporal, and social boundaries of everyday existence. Turner posits that a subjects passage through this liminal stage is necessary to attain psychic maturation and successful transition to a new, stable state at the end of the ritual (The Ritual Process 97). While this “betwixt and between” (Turner, The Ritual Process 95) state may be a fleeting moment of transition, it makes for a “lived experience [that] transforms human beings cognitively, emotionally, and morally.” (Horvath et al. 3) Through a change of perceptions liminality paves the way toward meaningful social action. Home places spectators in a state of liminality to contrast geocentric and anthropocentric views. Arthus-Bertrand contrasts natural and human-made environments in terms of diversity. The narrator’s description of the “miracle of life” is followed by images of trees seemingly defying gravity, snow-covered summits among mountain ranges, and a whale in the ocean. Grandeur and variety appear to be inherent qualities of biodiversity on Earth, qualities contrasted with images of the endless, uniform rectangular greenhouses of Almeria, Spain. This contrast emphasises the loss of variety in human achievements and the monotony mass-production brings to the landscape. With the image of a fire burning atop a factory chimney, Arthus-Bertrand critiques the change of pace and distortion of time inherent in anthropocentric views, and specifically in contemporary modernity. Here, the flames appear to instantly eat away at resources that have taken millions of years to form, bringing anthropocentric and geocentric temporality into sharp contrast. A sequence showing a night time metropolis underscores this distinction. The glittering cityscape is lit by hundreds of lights in skyscrapers in an effort, it appears, to mimic and surpass daylight and thus upturn the natural rhythm of life. As the narrator remarks, in our present-day environments, “days are now the pale reflections of nights.” Arthus-Bertrand also uses ritual liminality to mark the present as a transitory, threshold moment in human civilisation. The film-maker contrasts the spectre of our past with possible visions of the future to mark the moment of now as a time when humanity is on the threshold of two distinct states of mind. The narrator’s descriptions of contemporary post-industrial society’s reliance on non-renewable resources and lack of environmentally sustainable agricultural practices condemn the past and warn viewers of the consequences of continuing such practices into the future. Exploring the liminal present Arthus-Bertrand proposes distinctive futurescapes for humankind. On the one hand, the narrator’s description of California’s “concentration camp style cattle farming” suggests that humankind will live in a future that feeds from the past, falling back on frames of horrors and past mistakes. On the other hand, the example of Costa Rica, a nation that abolished its military and dedicated the budget to environmental conservation, is recognition of our ability to re-imagine our future in the face of global risk. Home introduces myths to imbue liminality with the alternative dominant social paradigm of ecology. By calling upon deep-seated structures myths “touch the heart of society’s emotional, spiritual and intellectual consciousness” (Killingsworth and Palmer 176) and help us understand and come to terms with complex social, economic, and scientific phenomena. With the capacity to “pattern thought, beliefs and practices,” (Maier 166) myths are ideal tools in communicating ritual liminality and challenging contemporary post-industrial society’s dominant social paradigms. The opening sequence of Home, where the crescent Earth is slowly revealed in the darkness of space, is an allusion to creation: the genesis myth. Accompanied only by a gentle hum our home emerges in brilliant blue, white, and green-brown encompassing most of the screen. It is as if darkness and chaos disintegrated and order, life, and the elements were created right before our eyes. Akin to the Earthrise image taken by the astronauts of Apollo 8, Home’s opening sequence underscores the notion that our home is a unique spot in the blackness of space and is defined and circumscribed by the elements. With the opening sequence Arthus-Bertrand wishes to impart the message of interdependence and reliance on elements—core concepts of ecology. Balance, another key theme in ecology, is introduced with an allusion to the Icarus myth in a sequence depicting Dubai. The story of Icarus’s fall from the sky after flying too close to the sun is a symbolic retelling of hubris—a violent pride and arrogance punishable by nemesis—destruction, which ultimately restores balance by forcing the individual back within the limits transgressed (Littleton 712). In Arthus-Bertrand’s portrayal of Dubai, the camera slowly tilts upwards on the Burj Khalifa tower, the tallest human-made structure ever built. The construction works on the tower explicitly frame humans against the bright blue sky in their attempt to reach ever further, transgressing their limitations much like the ill-fated Icarus. Arthus-Bertrand warns that contemporary modernity does not strive for balance or moderation, and with climate change we may have brought our nemesis upon ourselves. By suggesting new dominant paradigms and providing a critique of current maxims, Home’s retelling of myths ultimately sees spectators through to the final stage of the ritual. The last phase in the rite of passage “celebrates and commemorates transcendent powers,” (Deflem 8) marking subjects’ rebirth to a new status and distinctive perception of the outside world. It is at this stage that Arthus-Bertrand resolves the emotional distress uncovered in the separation phase. The film-maker uses humanity’s innate capacity for creation and renewal as a cathartic cleansing aimed at reconciling spectators’ guilt and shame in having inadvertently exacerbated global environmental degradation. Arthus-Bertrand identifies renewable resources as the key to redeeming technology, human intervention in the landscape, and finally humanity itself. Until now, the film-maker pictured modernity and technology, evidenced in his portrayal of Dubai, as synonymous with excess and disrespect for the interconnectedness and balance of elements on Earth. The final sequence shows a very different face of technology. Here, we see a mechanical sea-snake generating electricity by riding the waves off the coast of Scotland and solar panels turning towards the sun in the Sahara desert. Technology’s redemption is evidenced in its ability to imitate nature—a move towards geocentric consciousness (a lesson learned from the ritual’s liminal stage). Moreover, these human-made structures, unlike the skyscrapers earlier in the film, appear a lot less invasive in the landscape and speak of moderation and union with nature. With the above examples Arthus-Bertrand suggests that humanity can shed the greed that drove it to dig deeper and deeper into the Earth to acquire non-renewable resources such as oil and coal, what the narrator describes as “treasures buried deep.” The incorporation of principles of ecology, such as balance and interconnectedness, into humanity’s behaviour ushers in reconciliation and ritual cleansing in Home. Following the description of the move toward renewable resources, the narrator reveals that “worldwide four children out of five attend school, never has learning been given to so many human beings” marking education, innovation, and creativity as the true inexhaustible resources on Earth. Lastly, the description of Antarctica in Home is the essence of Arthus-Bertrand’s argument for our innate capacity to create, not simply exploit and destroy. Here, the narrator describes the continent as possessing “immense natural resources that no country can claim for itself, a natural reserve devoted to peace and science, a treaty signed by 49 nations has made it a treasure shared by all humanity.” Innovation appears to fuel humankind’s transcendence to a state where it is capable of compassion, unification, sharing, and finally creating treasures. With these examples Arthus-Bertrand suggests that humanity has an innate capacity for creative energy that awaits authentic expression and can turn humankind from destroyer to creator. In recent years various risk communication texts have explicitly addressed climate change, endeavouring to instigate environmentally consequential social action. Home breaks discursive ground among them through its ritualistic construction which seeks to transform spectators’ perception, and in turn roles and responsibilities, in the face of global environmental risks. Unlike recent climate change media texts such as An Inconvenient Truth (2006), The 11th Hour (2007), The Age of Stupid (2009), Carbon Nation (2010) and Earth: The Operator’s Manual (2011), Home eludes simple genre classification. On the threshold of photography and film, documentary and fiction, Arthus-Bertrand’s work is best classified as an advocacy film promoting public debate and engagement with a universal concern—the state of the environment. The film’s website, available in multiple languages, contains educational material, resources to organise public screenings, and a link to GoodPlanet.info: a website dedicated to environmentalism, including legal tools and initiatives to take action. The film-maker’s approach to using Home as a basis for education and raising awareness corresponds to Antonio Lopez’s critique of contemporary mass-media communications of global risks. Lopez rebukes traditional forms of mediatised communication that place emphasis on the imparting of knowledge and instead calls for a participatory, discussion-driven, organic media approach, akin to a communion or a ritual (106). Moreover, while texts often place a great emphasis on the messenger, for instance Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth, Leonardo DiCaprio in The 11th Hour, or geologist Dr. Richard Alley in Earth: The Operator’s Manual, Home’s messenger remains unseen—the narrator is only identified at the very end of the film among the credits. The film-maker’s decision to forego a central human character helps dissociate the message from the personality of the messenger which aids in establishing and maintaining the geocentric sensibility of the text. Finally, the ritual’s invocation and cathartic cleansing of emotional distress enables Home to at once acknowledge our environmentally destructive past habits and point to a hopeful, environmentally sustainable future. While The Age of Stupid mostly focuses on humanity’s present and past failures to respond to an imminent environmental catastrophe, Carbon Nation, with the tagline “A climate change solutions movie that doesn’t even care if you believe in climate change,” only explores the potential future business opportunities in turning towards renewable resources and environmentally sustainable practices. The three-phased processural form of the ritual allows for a balance of backward and forward-looking, establishing the possibility of change and renewal in the face of world risk. The ritual is a transformative experience. As Turner states, rituals “interrupt the flow of social life and force a group to take cognizance of its behaviour in relation to its own values, and even question at times the value of those values” (“Dramatic Ritual” 82). Home, a ritualised media text, is an invitation to look at our world, its dominant social paradigms, and the key element within that world—ourselves—with new eyes. It makes explicit contemporary post-industrial society’s dependence on the environment, highlights our impact on Earth, and reveals our complicity in bringing about a contemporary world risk. The ritual structure and the self-reflexivity allow Arthus-Bertrand to transform climate change into a personally salient issue. This bestows upon the spectator the responsibility to act and to reconcile the spectre of the past with the vision of the future.Acknowledgments The author would like to thank Dr. Angi Buettner whose support, guidance, and supervision has been invaluable in preparing this article. 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