Journal articles on the topic 'The Degenerate Art Exhibition of 1937'

As a genre of cultural production, where iconic (painterly or photographic), sculptural, and architectural conventions intersect to represent the uniquely specific and current conditions of experience in public social space, exhibition design by artists has only recently emerged as a category of art-historical study. While earlier discussions of El Lissitzky's design of the Pressa exhibition in Cologne in 1928, an exhibition that likely had the widest-ranging impact and is the central example of such an emerging genre in the twentieth century, might have served as a point of departure,1 Romy Golan's important, relatively recent book Muralnomad2—primarily concerned with the history of mural painting and its various transitions into exhibition design—has to be considered for the time being the most cohesive account of the development of these heretofore overlooked practices. Yet, paradoxically, two of the most notorious cases of the historical development of exhibition design after Lissitzky are absent from her study: the infamous Degenerate Art exhibition that opened in Munich on July 19, 1937 (two days after the opening of Nazi Fascism's first major propaganda building, Paul Ludwig Troost's Haus der Deutschen Kunst, and its presentation of German Fascist art in the Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung),3 and the Exposition internationale du Surréalisme in Paris, which was installed by André Breton and Marcel Duchamp six months later and 427 miles to the west, on January 17, 1938, at Georges Wildenstein's Beaux Arts Galleries in Paris.4

Nazism’s Fight against the Art of Decay:The article presents a reading of the exhibition »Entartete Kunst« that took place in Munich in 1937. The exhibition was staged by the Nazi regime as an attempt to prove the dangerous nature of modern art. According to Nazi ideology, modern art was not just a reflection of unhealthy interests or degenerate racial mixings but was in itself a threat to the purity of the soul of the German people. Therefore modern art had to be excluded in order to make room for the appearance of the German people and its eternal art. Contrary to the idea of Nazism as being somehow not modern, the article stresses the modernist aspects of the Nazi ideology through a detailed account of Nazism’s racist ideology.

On 5 August 1937, fulfilling the orders of the Chairman of the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts (Reichskammer der bildenden Künste), a confiscation committee showed up at the City Museum in Stettin, and demanded to be presented by the Director of the institution the Museum’s collection in view of ‘degenerate art’. While ‘hunting’ for the Avant-garde and ‘purging museums’, the Nazis confiscated works that represented, e.g. Expressionism, Cubism, Bauhaus Constructivism, pieces manifesting the aesthetics of the New Objectivity, as well as other socially and politically ‘suspicious’ art works from the late Belle Époque, WWI, German Revolution of 1918–1919, or from Weimer Republic Modernism of the 1920s and 30s. The infamous Munich ‘Entartete Kunst’ Exhibition turned into a travelling propaganda display, presented in different variants at different venues. A three-week show (11 Jan.–5 Feb. 1939) was also held in Stettin, in the Landeshaus building (today housing the Municipality of Szczecin). Provenance studies: biographies of the existing works, often relocated, destroyed, or considered to have been lost, constitute an interesting input into the challenging chapter on German and European Avant-garde, Szczecin museology, and on Pomerania art collections. Side by side with the artists, it was museologists and art dealers who cocreated this Pomeranian history of art. The Szczecin State Archive contains a set of files related to ‘degenerate art’, revealing the mechanisms and the course of the ‘museum purge’ at the Stettin Stadtmuseum. The archival records of the National Museum in Szczecin feature fragments of inventory ledgers as well as books of acquisitions, which provide a particularly precious source of knowledge. The published catalogue of the works of ‘degenerate art’ from the Museum’s collections covering 1081 items has been created on the grounds of the above-mentioned archival records, for the first time juxtaposed, and cross-checked. The mutually matching traces of information from Polish and German archives constitute a good departure point for further more thorough studies.

The young Joseph Goebbels, caught up in the heady mix of ideas and ideals permeating German artistic circles during and after the First World War, expressed both his convictions and his confusions through writing plays. None of these deserve much attention as serious drama: but all shed light on the ideological development of the future Nazi Minister of Culture. While also developing an argument on the wider relationship between Expressionism and modernism, David Barnett here traces that relationship in Goebbels' plays, as also the evolution of an ideology that remained equivocal in its aesthetics – the necessary condemnation of ‘degenerate’ art tinged with a lingering admiration, epitomized in the infamous exhibition of 1937. David Barnett has been Lecturer in Theatre Studies at the University of Huddersfield since 1998, and was previously Lecturer in German Language and Literature at Keble College, Oxford. His Literature versus Theatre: Textual Problems and Theatrical Realization in the Later Plays of Heiner Müller was published by Peter Lang in 1998, and other publications include articles on Heiner Müller, Franz Xaver Kroetz, Rolf Hochhuth, Heinar Kipphardt, Werner Schwab, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Peter Handke.

Exhibition 58: Modern Architecture in England, held between 10 February and 7 March 1937 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), was a notable event. Amidst claims that ‘England leads the world in modern architectural activity’, the exhibition ‘amazed New Yorkers’ and equally surprised English commentators. However, it has not subsequently received any extended investigation. The present purpose is to look at it as a multiple sequence of events, involving other exhibitions, associated publications and the trajectories of individuals and institutions, through which tensions came to the surface about the definition and direction of Modernism in England and elsewhere. Such an analysis throws new light on issues such as the motives for staging the exhibition, the personnel involved and associated questions relating to the role of émigré architects in Britain and the USA, some of which have been misinterpreted in recent commentaries.Hitchcock's unequivocal claim for the importance of English Modernism at this point still arouses disbelief, and raises a question whether it can be accepted at face value or requires explaining in terms of some other hidden intention.

The article analyses two art exhibitions in the context of Czech-Norwegian relations, presenting both the Czechoslovak book exhibition in Oslo (1937) and the Norwegian painting and applied art exhibition in Prague (1938) as important parts in a bilateral cultural dialogue. The promising initial communication in form of a mutual information exchange was soon disrupted by the beginning of World War II and post-war politics.

The article highlights the history of the prewar collection of the Simferopol Art Museum in 1937–1941 and notes the most important works of art lost. The events that accompanied the loss of the collection during the Great Patriotic War were repeatedly covered by the museum in publications. According to official data, during the evacuation in October 1941, the boxes with the exhibits and the museum archive were transported to Kerch where they were burnt during a fire in the port caused by the bombing of enemy aircraft. For many years, the museum’s employees Galina I. Fedotova, Natalya D. Dyachenko and Natalya F. Grishchenko studied documents in the Simferopol, Moscow and St. Petersburg archives to restore the list of exhibits from the prewar collection. The result of their work was an extensive “Catalog of the values of the Simferopol Art Museum, lost during the Second World War” (2002), which is presented in the documentary archive of the museum. The main sections of the permanent exhibition of the prewar collection of the Simferopol Art Gallery are marked in the catalog. This information is of great importance for Russian museum science: many items transferred in 1937–1941 to the Simferopol collection were previously included in the funds of the State Russian Museum, the Tretyakov Gallery, the Hermitage and other major museum collections.

Durante o Terceiro Reich (1933-1945), os intelectuais nazistas conceberam a música e as artes plásticas como elementos formadores de valores morais, podendo corromper a educação e comprometer a vida política e social. A partir da formulação teórica da estética totalitária, toda arte considerada "degenerada" passou a ser censurada e exposta como exemplo de imoralidade. Inauguradas em 1937, as exposições Entartete Kunst (Arte Degenerada) e Entartete Musik (Música Degenerada) trouxeram até a cidade de Munique obras ligadas ao modernismo, ao bolchevismo, bem como a produção artística de negros, judeus e soviéticos. Com base em uma pesquisa bibliográfica amparada pela teoria crítica da sociedade, o presente artigo analisa o conteúdo dessas exposições, demonstrando a caráter pedagógico da arte na formação dos valores morais da sociedade alemã, sob a ótica dos intelectuais nazistas.

Modern master Oscar Niemeyer (1907-2012) was the most important Brazilian architect. Graduated in the Escola Nacional de Belas–Artes in 1934, he soon became world–known for his role, together with Lúcio Costa (1902–1998), with the design of the Brazilian Ministry of Education (1937) in Rio de Janeiro; or for their Brazilian Pavillion in New York World Fair in 1939. His solo work in the Pampulha buildings was immediately published in the catalogue of the “Brazil Builds” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1943.

The year 2017 – a centenary of the “1st Exhibition of Polish Expressionists” – was proclaimed as the Jubilee Year of Polish Avant-garde. To mark the occasion over 200 events were organised by nearly 100 institutions. What is the outcome of it all? Has it changed the way the avant-garde movement and its role in Polish culture and tradition were perceived? Among accomplishments the jubilee year brought about is undoubtedly a number of exhibitions, their catalogues as well as other publications devoted to the avant-garde. Unfortunately, not all the initiatives turned out to be successful. Some of them though will be well remembered, inter alia: the cycle of exhibitions prepared by the Art Museum in Łódź which were accompanied by comprehensive and well edited catalogues; exhibitions: “Urban Revolt” at the National Museum in Warsaw, and “Avant-gardes of Szczecin” at the National Museum in Szczecin. One of the achievements is bigger amount of visual and textual resources available in Poland to explore the subject of the avant-garde. The jubilee publications also contained numerous documental materials that were not well known before. Significant theoretical texts have been published as well: the extended edition of Władysław Strzemiński’s Theory of Vision, and the Athens Charter by Le Corbusier, the importance of which can not be emphasised enough. The publication of relevant source materials must also be brought to attention; they came out as a series of catalogues by the Art Museum in Łódź, inter alia an ample selection of articles written by Debora Vogel in the book that accompanied the exhibition “Montages. Debora Vogel and the New Legend of the City”. During the jubilee year a question whether the avant-garde tradition resonates today was raised on many occasions. Two exhibitions presented various attitudes towards the heritage of the avant-garde: mentioned above “Montages” exhibition in Łódź, and one in the International Cultural Centre in Kraków “Lviv, 24 June 1937. City, Architecture, Modernism”.

By the early 1930s Edward Hopper was a major figure in the American art scene. As is well known, Hopper made no significant sales of paintings until the exhibition of his watercolors at the Rehn Gallery in 1924, by which time he was forty-four years old. However, his career takeoff in the late 1920s and early 1930s was certainly dramatic, and in 1933 Forbes Watson could describe him as a “collector's favorite.” In 1924 the standard price of Hopper's watercolors was $150, by 1925 it had risen to $200, and in 1928–29, $300–400 was the norm. In 1929 alone he sold at least fourteen drawings. Between 1924 and 1930 he also sold sixteen oils at prices ranging between $400 and $2,500 dollars. In the 1930s he was getting between $1,500 and $3,000 for an oil painting, and from 1934 to 1939 he sold several watercolors at $750 each. If, asLifereported in 1937, his receipts from sales did not usually come near $10,000 per year, he was still doing a lot better than most other artists in the Depression years.

James D. Herbert, Paris 1937: Worlds on Exhibition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 207 pp., £31.50, ISBN 0-801-43494-7. Andrea Kupfer Schneider, Creating the Musée d'Orsay. The Politics of Culture in France (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), 150 pp., $25.00, ISBN 0-271-01752-X. Juan Pedro Lorente, Cathedral of Urban Modernity. The First Museums of Contemporary Art, 1800–1930 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), £47.50, ISBN 1-859-28383-7. Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication, Direction des Musées de France, Centre national de la Recherche Scientifique, Centre de Sociologie des Organisations, Musée National du Moyen Age, Publics et projets culturels. Un enjeu des musées en Europe. Actes des Journées d'étude 26 et 27 octobre 1998, Paris, Musée national du Moyen Age (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2000), price not given, ISBN 2-738-48645-2. Paul Rasse, Les Musées à la lumière de l'espace public. Histoire, évolution, enjeux (Paris: L'Harmattan, Logiques Sociales, 1999), 238 pp., price not given, ISBN 2-738-47769-0. Selma Reuben Holo, Beyond the Prado. Museums and Identity in Democratic Spain (Liverpool University Press, 1999), 222 pp., price not given, ISBN 0-853-23535-X. Brandon Taylor, Art for the Nation. Exhibitions and the London Public 1747–2001 (Manchester University Press, 1990), 314 pp., price not given, ISBN 0-719-05452-4.

SUMMARYAims - To examine earlier uses and abuses of artworks by individuals living with severe mental illnesses, and particularly schizophrenia by both the psychiatric and arts communities and prevailing stereotypes associated with such practices. Further, to explore alternative constructions of the artworks and roles of the artist with schizophrenia and other severe mental illnesses, which may be more consistent with amore contemporary recovery orientation, encompassing their potentials for empowerment, social inclusion as citizens and legitimacy of their cultural role in the community. Results - Earlier practices with regardto the artworks of captive patients of psychiatrists, psychotherapists, art therapists, occupational and diversional therapists, often emphasised diagnostic or interpretive purposes, or were used to gauge progress or exemplify particular syndromes. As artists and art historians began to take an interest in such artworks, they emphasised their expressive, communicative and aesthetic aspects, sometimes in relation to primitive art. These efforts to ascribe value to these works, while well-meaning, were sometimes patronising and vulnerable to perversion by totalitarian regimes, which portrayed them as degenerate art, often alongside the works of mainstream modernist artists. This has culminated in revelations that the most prominent European collection of psychiatric art still contains, and appears to have only started to acknowledge since these revelations, unattributed works by hospital patients who were exterminated in the so-called “euthanasia” program in the Nazi era. Conclusions - Terms like Psychiatric Art, Art Therapy, Art Brut and Outsider Art may be vulnerable to abuse and are a poor fit with the aspirations of artists living with severe mental illnesses, who are increasingly exercising their rights to live and work freely, without being captive, or having others controlling their lives, or mediating and interpreting their works. They sometimes do not mind living voluntarily marginal lives as artists, but they prefer to live as citizens, without being involuntarily marginalised by stigma. They also prefer to live with culturally valued roles which are recognised as legitimate in the community, where they are also more likely to heal and recover.Declaration of Interest: This paper was completed during a Visiting Fellowship, Department of Social Medicine, School of Public Health, & Department of Medical Anthropology, Faculty of Arts & Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass, USA. A condensed version of this paper is published in “For Matthew & Others: Journeys with Schizophrenia”, Dysart, D, Fenner, F, Loxley, A, eds. Sydney, University of New South Wales Press in conjunction with Campbelltown Arts Centre & Joan Sutherland Performing Arts Centre, Penrith, 2006, to accompany with a large exhibition of the same name, with symposia & performances, atseveral public art galleries in Sydney & Melbourne, Australia. The author is also a printmaker, partly trained at Ruskin School, Oxford, Central St. Martin's School, London, and College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, Sydney.

The object of the study consists of the architectural and artistic ensemble of the “Worker and Kolkoz Woman” pavilion created for the Paris International Exhibition in 1937 by architect B.M. Iofan and sculptor V.I. Mukhina as a part of a grandiose architectural idea declaring the aspiration for the future Soviet state and a sacred symbol of communist ideology. The study reveals that the monument was aimed at carrying a more substantial ideological message than just an architectural structure. The study of the sites proposed for the installation of sculptures for prominent figures in politics, science and art, monuments perpetuating the memorable events of Russian history and mankind shows that they constitute an important historical response to the demands by authorities at various levels for artistic solutions to contemporaneous socio-political problems. The subject of the study included the motivating factors in the selection of placement sites for the outstanding work of B.M. Iofan and V.I. Mukhina in the capital city. The article considers the scientific approach to the selection of sites for the placement of significant urban monuments on the basis of historical, cultural and architectural studies following the vector of spatial planning laid down in the General Plan for the Development of the City. The study combines general scientific methods of research (analysis, synthesis) with a number of specialised methods, such as system-structural, formal-logical, graphical virtual reconstruc-tion, complex research and others. Methodological approaches for studying the consequences of non-implementation of urban planning concepts and projects were developed. The result of the research is pre-sented by the proprietary development of approaches to adequate methods for determining the potential im-pact of major unimplemented urban planning projects on the formation of the capital of Russia on the exam-ple of the “Worker and Kolkoz Woman” pavilion.

What are the possibilities of a body? This is a question that is answered best by thinking prosthetically. After all, the possibilities of a body extend beyond flesh and bone. Asked another way, one might query: what are the affective capacities of bodies—animal or otherwise? Philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari focus on affectivity as capacity, on what the body does or can do; thinking through Baruch Spinoza’s writing on the body, they state, “we know nothing about a body until we know what it can do, in other words, what its affects are, how they can or cannot enter into composition with other affects” (257). If bodies are defined by their affective capacities, I wonder: how can prosthetics be used to alter dominant and dominating relationships between the human and the non-human animal, particularly as these relationships bear on questions of race? In this essay, I forward a contemporary media installation, “The Slug Princess”, as a productive site for thinking through the prosthetic possibilities around issues of race, animality, and aesthetics. I contend that the Degenerate Art Ensemble’s installation works through uncommon prosthetics to activate what Deleuze and Guattari describe as becoming-animal. While animality has historically been mobilized to perpetuate Orientalist logics, I argue that DAE’s becoming-slug rethinks the capacities of the body prosthetically, and in so doing dismantles the hierarchy of the body normativity.The Degenerate Art Ensemble (DAE) is a collective of artists with international showings co-directed by Haruko Crow Nishimura, originally from Japan, and Joshua Kohl, from the United States. The ensemble is based in Seattle, Washington, USA. The group’s name is a reference to the 1937 Degenerate Art Exhibition in Munich, Germany, organized by Adolf Ziegler and the Nazi Party. The exhibition staged 650 works from what Nazi officials referred to as “art stutterers”, the pieces were confiscated from German museums and defined as works that “insult German feeling, or destroy or confuse natural form or simply reveal an absence of adequate manual and artistic skill” (Spotts 163). DAE “selected this politically charged moniker partly in response to the murder in Olympia [Washington] of an Asian American youth by neo-Nazi skinheads” (Frye). DAE’s namesake is thus an embrace of bodies and abilities deemed unworthy by systems of corrupt power. With this in mind, I argue that DAE’s work provides an opportunity to think through intersections of prostheticity, animality, and race.“The Slug Princess” is part of a larger exhibition of their work shown from 19 March to 19 June 2011 at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle. The installation is comprised of two major elements: a crocheted work and a video projection. For me, both are prosthetics.A Crocheted Prosthetic and Orientalist AnimalityThe crocheted garment is not immediately recognizable as a prosthetic. It is displayed on a mannequin that stands mostly erect. The piece, described as a headdress, is however by no means a traditional garment. Yellow spirals and topographies flow and diverge in tangled networks of yarn that sometimes converge into recognizable form. The knit headdress travels in countless directions, somehow assembling as a wearable fibrous entity that covers the mannequin from head to ground, spreading out, away, and behind the figuration of the human. In slumped orbs, green knit “cabbages’ surround the slug princess headdress, exceeding the objects they intend to represent in mass, shape, and affect. In this bustling excess of movement, the headdress hints at how it is more than a costume, but is instead a prosthetic.The video projection makes the prosthetic nature of the crocheted headdress evident. It is a looped performance of Nishimura that runs from ceiling to floor and spans the semi-enclosed space in which it is displayed. In the video, Nishimura walks, then crawls – slowly, awkwardly – through a forest. She also eats whole cabbages, supporting procedure with mouth, foot, and appendage, throwing the function of her body parts into question. The crocheted element is vital to her movement and the perception of her body’s capacities.As Nishimura becomes slug princess, the DAE begins to intervene in complex regimes of racial identification. It is imperative to note that Nishimura’s boy gets caught up in interpretive schemas of Western constructions of Asians as animals. For example, in the early diaspora in the United States, Chinese men were often identified with the figure of the rat in 19th-century political cartoons. Mel Y. Chen points to the ways in which these racialized animalities have long reinforcing the idea of the yellow peril through metaphor (Chen 110-111). These images were instrumental in conjuring fear around the powerfully dehumanizing idea that hordes of rats were infesting national purity. Such fears were significant in leading to the Chinese exclusion acts of the United States and Canada. Western tropes of Asians find traction in animal symbolism. From dragon ladies to butterflies, Asian femininity in both women and men has been captured by simultaneous notions of treachery and passivity. As Nishimura’s body is enabled by prosthetic, it is also caught in a regime of problematic signs. Animal symbolism persists throughout Asian diasporic gender construction and Western fantasies of the East. Rachel C. Lee refers to the “process whereby the human is reduced to the insect, rodent, bird, or microbe” as zoe-ification, which she illustrates as a resolute means of excluding Asian Americans from species-being (Lee Exquisite 48). DAE’s Slug Princess, I argue, joins Lee’s energies herein by providing and performing alternative modes of understanding animality.The stakes of prosthetics in becoming-animal lie in the problem of domination through definition. Orientalist animality functions to devalue Asians as animals, ultimately justifying forms of subordination and exclusion. I want to suggest that becoming-slug, as I will elaborate below, provides a mode of resisting this narrow function of defining bodies by enacting prosthetic process. In doing so, it aligns with the ways in which prosthetics redefine the points of delineation against normativity. As Margarit Shildrick illuminates, “once it is acknowledged that a human body is not a discrete entity ending at the skin, and that material technologies constantly disorder our boundaries, either through prosthetic extensions or through the internalization of mechanical parts, it is difficult to maintain that those whose bodies fail to conform to normative standards are less whole or complete than others” (24). DAE’s Slug Princess transmutates how animality functions to Orientalize Asians as the degenerate other, heightening the ways in which prosthetics can resist the racialized ideologies of normative wholeness.Why Prosthetics? Or, a Comparative Case in Aesthetic AnimalityDAE is of course not alone in their animalistic interventions. In order to isolate what I find uniquely productive about DAE’s prosthetic performance, I turn to another artistic alternative to traditional modes of Orientalist animality. Xu Bing’s performance installation “Cultural Animal” (1994) at the Han Mo Art Center in in Beijing, China can serve as a useful foil. “Cultural Animal” featured a live pig and mannequin in positions that evoked queer bestial sexuality. The pig was covered in inked nonsensical Roman letters; the full body of the mannequin was similarly tattooed in jumbled Chinese characters. The piece was a part of a larger project entitled “A Case Study of Transference”. According to Xu’s website, “the intention was both to observe the reaction of the pig toward the mannequin and produce an absurd random drama—an intention that was realized when the pig reacted to the mannequin in an aggressively sexual manner” (Xu). The photographs, which were a component of the piece, indeed evoke the difficulty of the concept of transference, imbricating species, languages, and taboos. The piece more generally enacts the unexpected excesses of performance with non-scripted bodies. The pig at times caresses the cheek of the mannequin. The sensuous experience is inked by the cultural confusion that images the seeming sensibility of each language. Amidst the movement of the pig and the rubbings of the ink, the mannequin is motionless, bearing a look of resigned openness. His eyes are closed, with a slight furrowing of the brow and calm downturned lips. The performance piece enacts crossings that reorient the historical symbolic force of racialization and animality. These forms of species and cultural miscegenation evoke for Mel Y. Chen a form of queer relationality that exemplifies “animalities that live together with race and with queerness, the animalities that we might say have crawled into the woodwork and await recognition, and, concurrently, the racialized animalities already here” (104). As such, Chen does the work of pointing out how Xu destabilizes notions of proper boundaries between human and animal, positing a different form of human-animal relationality. In short, Xu’s Cultural Animal chooses relationality. This relationality does not extend the body’s capacities. I argue that by focusing in on the pivotal nature of prosthesis, DAE’s slug activates a becoming-animal that goes beyond relationship, instead rethinking what a body can do.Becoming-Slug: Prosthetics as InterventionBy way of differentiation, how might “The Slug Princess” function beyond symbolic universalism and in excess of human-animal relations? In an effort to understand this distinction, I forward DAE’s installation as a practice of becoming-animal. Becoming-animal is a theoretical intervention in hierarchy, highlighting a minoritarian tactic to resist domination, akin to Shildrick’s description of prosthetics.DAE’s installation enacts becoming-slug, as illustrated in an elaboration of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept they argue: “Becoming-animal always involves a pack” “a multiplicity” (Deleuze and Guatttari 239). The banner of becoming-animal is “I am legion”. DAE is and are a propagation of artists working together. They enact legion. Led by a pack of collaborators, DAE engage a range of artists in continual, ongoing, and fluctuating process. Their current collaborators include (and surpass): architect/designer Alan Maskin, costume designer ALenka Loesch, dancer/singer Dohee Lee, performance artist/expressionist/songwriter/shape-shifter Okanomodé, and sound/installation artist Robb Kunz. For the broader exhibition at the Frye, they listed the biographies of fifteen artists and the names of around 200 artists. Yet, it is not the mere number of collaborators that render DAE a multiplicity – it is the collaborative excess of their process that generates potential at the intersection of performance and prosthetic. Notably, it is important that the wearable prosthetic headpiece used in “Slug Princess” was created in collaboration. “The contagion of the pack, such is the path becoming-animal takes” (Deleuze and Guattari, 243). Created by Many Greer but worn by Nishimura, it weighs on Nishimura’s body in ways that steer her performance. She is unable to stand erect as the mannequin in the exhibition. The prosthetic changes her capacities in unpredictable ways. The unexpected headdress causes her to hunch over and crawl, pushing her body into slow contact with the earth. As the flowing garment slows her forward progress, it activates new modes of movement. Snagging, and undulating, Nishimura moves slowly over the uncertain terrain of a forest. As Greer’s creation collides with Nishimura’s body and the practice of the dance, they enact becoming-slug. This is to suggest, then, following Deleuze and Guattari’s affective understanding of becoming-animal, that prosthetics have a productive role to play in disrupting normative modes of embodiment.Further, as Deleuze and Guattari indicate, becoming-animal is non-affiliative (Deleuze and Guattari 238). Becoming-animal is that which is “not content to proceed by resemblance and for which resemblance, on the contrary, would represent an obstacle or stoppage” (Deleuze and Guattari 233). Likewise, Nishimura’s becoming-slug is neither imitative (305) nor mimetic because it functions in the way of displaced doing through prosthetic process. Deleuze and Guattari describe in the example of Little Hans and his horse, becoming-animal occurs in putting one’s shoes on one’s hands to move, as a dog: “I must succeed in endowing the parts of my body with relations of speed and slowness that will make it become dog, in an original assemblage proceeding neither by resemblance nor by analogy” (258). The headdress engages an active bodily process of moving as a slug, rather than looking like a slug. Nishimura’s body begin as her body human begins, upright, but it is pulled down and made slow by the collaborative force of the wearable piece. As such, DAE enacts “affects that circulate and are transformed within the assemblage: what a horse [slug] ‘can do’” (257). This assemblage of affects pushes beyond the limited capacities of the screen, offering new productive entanglements.The Stuplime Loop as ProstheticTo the extent that conceiving of a headdress as a collaborative bodily prosthetic flows from common understandings of prosthetic, the medial interface perhaps stirs up a more foreign example of prosthesis and becoming-animal. The medial performance of DAE’s “The Slug Princess” operates through the video loop, transecting the human, animal, and technological in a way that displaces being in favor of becoming. The looping video creates a spatio-temporal contraction and elongation of the experience of time in relation to viewing. It functions as an experiential prosthetic, reworking the ability to think in a codified manner—altering the capacities of the body. Time play breaks the chronological experience of straight time and time as mastery by turning to the temporal experience as questioning normativity. Specifically, “The Slug Princess” creates productive indeterminacy through what Siane Ngai designates as “stuplimity”. Ngai’s punning contraction of stupidity and sublimity works in relation to Deleuze’s thinking on repetition and difference. Ngai poses the idea of stuplimity as beginning with “the dysphoria of shock and boredom” and culminating “in something like the ‘open feeling’ of ‘resisting being’—an indeterminate affective state that lacks the punctuating ‘point’ of individuated emotion” (284). Ngai characterizes this affecting openness and stupefying: it stops the viewer in their/her/his tracks. This importation of the affective state cannot be overcome through the exercise of reason (270). Departing from Kant’s description of the sublime, Ngai turns to the uglier, less awe-inspiring, and perhaps more debase form of aesthetic encounter. This is the collaboration of the stupid with the sublime. Stuplimity operates outside reason and sublimity but in alliance with their processes. Viewers seem to get “stuck” at “The Slug Princess”, lost in the stuplimity of the loop. Some affect of the looping videos generates not thoughtfulness or reflection, but perhaps cultural stupidity – the relative and temporary cessation or abatement of cultural logics and aesthetic valuations. The video loop comes together with the medial enactment of becoming-slug in such a manner that performs into stuplimity. Stuplimity, in this case, creates an opening of an affectively stupid or illegible (per Xu) space/time alternative being/becoming. The loop is, of course, not unique to the installation and is a common feature of museum pieces. Yet, the performance, the becoming-slug itself, creates sluggishness. Ngai posits that sluggishness works out the boredom of repetition, which I argue is created through the loop of becoming-slug. The slug princess’ slowness, played in the loop creates a “stuplimity [that] reveals the limits of our ability to comprehend a vastly extended form as totality” (271). That is, the loop, by virtue of its sluggishness, opens up becoming-animal not as a finite thing, but as an ongoing, cycling, and thoughtlessly tedious process. DAE’s installation thus demonstrates an attempt to adopt prosthetics to rethink the logics of control and power. In his writing on contemporary shifts in prosthetic function, Paul Preciado argues that digitalization is a core component of the transition from prosthetics to what emerge as “microprosthetic”, in which “power acts through molecules that incorporate themselves into our [bodies]” (78-79). I would like to consider the stuplime loops of becoming-slug to counter what Preciado describes as an “ensemble of new microprosthetic mechanisms of control of subjectivity by means of biomolecular and multimedia technical protocols” (33). Emerging in the same fashion as microproesthetics, which function as modes of control, the stuplime loops instead suspend the logics of control and power enabled by dominant modes of microprosthetic technologies. Rather than infesting one’s body with modes of control, the stuplime loops hijack the digital message and present the possibility of thinking otherwise. In her writing on queer cyborgs, Mimi Nguyen argues that “as technologies of the self, prostheses are both literal and discursive in the digital imaginary. They are a means of habitation and transformation, a humanmachine mixture engaged as a site of contest over meanings – of the self and the nonself” (373). Binaries perhaps structure a thinking between human and animal, but prosthetics as process goes beyond the idea of the cyborg as a mixture and maps a new terrain altogether.ReferencesChen, Mel Y. Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012.Frye. “Degenerate Art Ensemble.” Frye Museum. 2017. <http://fryemuseum.org/exhibition/3816/>.Lee, Rachel C. The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman Ecologies. New York: New York University Press, 2014.Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005. Nguyen, Mimi. “Queer Cyborgs and New Mutants: Race, Sexuality, and Prosthetic Sociality in Digital Space.” American Studies: An Anthology. Eds. Janice A. Radway, Kevin K. Gaines, Barry Shank, and Penny Von Eschen. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. 281-305.Preciado, Beatriz [Paul]. Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitis in the Pharmacopornographic Era. Trans. Bruce Benderson. New York: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2013.Shildrick, Margarit. “‘Why Should Our Bodies End at the Skin?’: Embodiment, Boundaries, and Somatechnics.” Hypatia 30.1 (2015): 13-29.Spotts, Frederic. Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics. New York: Harry N. Abrams Publishers, 2003.Xu, Bing. “Cultural Animal.” 2017. <http://www.xubing.com/index.php/site/projects/year/1994/cultural_animal>.

In order to contribute to the studies of exhibition design, its practice and related fields, the aim of the article is to present and organize in ahistorical perspective some of the contributions and proposals made by Alexander Dorner (1893-1957), art historian, supporter of modern art. Dorner is recognized for his proposals carried out in the design of the exhibition of the rooms of the Landesmuseum in Hannover, Germany, after assuming its direction in the early 1920s. Later, he improved his conceptions when director of the Rhode Island Museum School of Design, in Providence, after immigrating to the United States in 1937. Dorner conceptions were of a living and dynamic museum, not a dead monument in an established way, limited only to a set of exhibition rooms for historical artifacts and artistic treasures closed in shop windows, a kind of deposit of objects. His exhibitions proposals consisted inenvironments for the works, spaces that he called “atmospheric rooms”. In these environments, the aim was to evoke the spirit of each period, in which the user, immersed, would have an opportunity to approach a visual and sensitive logic of the culture in which the works had been created. The idea was not to create a simple imitation of the period, but to allow sensations suggested by colors and shapes, gardens, images of historical exteriors placed over windows, using of devices such as speakers and headphones (for music and poetry of the time), molding a “body imaginary” through experience. In its conception, the museum should demonstrate the history of art and its aesthetic changes over time, as the artistic production of a previous time would allow the exercise of projecting the imagination in the past and updating it with the perspective of the present. This would allow the learning of history, giving more meaning to the present time and boosting and shaping the culture of the future, once the evolutionary connectivity of artistic and cultural production is understood.In order to exhibit the artist production of his time, in partnership with the Russian artist El Lissitzky (1890-1941), he built during 1927 and 1928 what would become known as the first permanent abstract art gallery in a museum, the Abstract Cabinet (Abstraktes Kabinett). With an areasmaller than twenty square meters, it had metal slats on its walls and, as visitors moved, offered a kind of optical illusion. Also sliding panels forcedthe public to manipulate and choose to reveal or hide certain paintings. Historical, theoretical research on exhibition design is the starting point for establishing a historical descriptive method to generate conceptual and morphological analysis parameters to characterizes an exhibition.

A study of the work of an unknown to the general public painter middle XX century Serhii Doroshenko is currently at the initial stage. Thanks to the publication of the catalog and the holding of a personal exhibition, the process of putting part of his picturesque heritage into scientific circulation began. Today the life and professional path of the artist, as well as several dozen surviving works of the master are known and partially researched. The fact that the artist had to live under a fictitious name for most of his life makes it difficult to identify individual facts and documents. However, undoubted picturesque talent, a subtle sense of the landscape genre, put Serhii Doroshenko next to the best representatives of the landscape of his time. The return of the artist's name to the history of Ukrainian art will open another page for scholars and connoisseurs of painting. Roman Solovey was born in the village Pavlivka, Cherkasy region in 1915. During the Holodomor, Roman was arrested by the NKVD, but it is unknown how he resigned, and in 1936 he appeared as Serhii Doroshenko. According to the dates on the student card, from 1936 to 1939 he studied at the Kharkiv Art School. However, according to other documents from 1937, the young artist leads an active creative life on the opposite side of the Soviet Union in Buryat-Mongolia. He exhibits his works at the republican exhibition, works as an artist in the club. In 1939, Doroshenko, as a student of the Kharkiv Art School, was transferred to the 3rd year of the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Ukrainian Art Institute. From 1945 Doroshenko was again a student of Kyiv Art Institute and, finally, in 1948 he received a diploma of a painter. From that time until his death he worked in the Kyiv Regional Cooperative Society of Artists. In 1949 Doroshenko made his debut at the 10th Ukrainian Art Exhibition. Since then, his favorite genre - marina - has been determined. He became a regular participant in Ukrainian and Soviet Union exhibitions, where his works are exhibited along with the best examples of landscape painting of that time. In 1950, Doroshenko became a candidate for membership in the Union of artists of Ukraine, and in the registration card indicates a non-existent place in nature of his birth. He was also a member of the board of the Ukrainian branch of the USSR art fund. His life ended on May 27, 1957 due to severe heart disease.