Art

This essay examines the relationship between Jackson Pollock's "action painting" technique, which reached its apogee in 1947-1950, and the jazz music he loved. His spontaneous creation of free-flowing forms is often likened to jazz improvisation, specifically the bebop that was prominent at the time, and many people believe he listened to that music while he painted. Was Pollock responding directly to the rhythms and energies of jazz, or was the music's influence on his art more oblique and subtle?

This paper was presented at a symposium, “Transatlantic Conversations and Abstract Expressionism,” on 20 April 2013 at the Phillips Collection in Washington DC, in conjunction with the exhibition, “Angels, Demons, and Savages: Pollock, Ossorio, Dubuffet.” It discusses the kinship between Ossorio’s so-called Victorias drawings of 1950, which Pollock saw while he and Krasner were staying in Ossorio’s converted carriage house at 9 MacDougal Alley in Greenwich Village, and Pollock’s 1951 series of black pourings on unprimed canvas.

This paper was presented at the Noguchi Museum in Long Island City, NY, on 13 April 2014. It deals with Noguchi’s participation in the Fair, the ways in which artists’ involvement reflected the planners’ agenda, and the role art played in promoting the Fair’s ostensible aim, “Building the World of Tomorrow.” The primary research material is in the 1939/40 New York World’s Fair Collection, New York Public Library Archives and Manuscripts Division, http://archives.nypl.org/mss/2233.

In 1949, the architect Peter Blake designed a building that he felt would be the ideal showcase for Jackson Pollock’s paintings. Blake intended it to be constructed on the grounds of Pollock’s home in Springs, on eastern Long Island, and built a scale model to illustrate his concept. Writing about the project in the January 1950 issue of Interiors, Arthur Drexler coined the misleading term “unframed space” to characterize Blake’s “treatment of paintings as walls,” which he saw as a modern version of the Renaissance fresco, “but this time without message or content.”

My paper addresses the misconceptions behind this interpretation of Blake’s project. The first is that, as Blake presented it in his model, the architectural matrix in which existing paintings are displayed is undefined. Second, the notion that Pollock’s work has no message to convey ignores the rich metaphysical content of his abstract forms. A central question raised by the “ideal museum” is whether, if it had been built, it would have been an appropriate setting for Pollock’s imagery.

Jackson Pollock was famously reluctant to explain or interpret his work, yet there are a few writings and interviews in which he made an effort to discuss his intentions. In one of them, he describes his unusual pouring technique as “a means of arriving at a statement,” although he does not explain what it says, or what it means.  In spite of Pollock's aversion to talking about his work, interpretive clues can be found in his surviving written and oral statements. There is, however, some dispute about which of them are his alone, and which were scripted, or at least polished, by others. My paper is an effort to identify Pollock’s authentic voice, and to use his own words as tools to decipher what he thought was the meaning of his abstract imagery.

, Jackson Pollock sent a postcard from his New York City address to his lover, Lee Krasner, who was visiting her family in Huntington Station, Long Island. "Dear Lee," he wrote, "Have signed the contract and have seen the wall space for the mural-it's all very exciting." 1 The mural in question was being commissioned by Peggy Guggenheim, his dealer and patron, for the hallway of her Manhattan town house. Two weeks later, he wrote in more detail about the project to his eldest brother, Charles, who was then living in Michigan: I have a year's contract with (The Art of This Century) and a large painting to do for Peggy Guggenheims house, 8'11 ½ x 19'9" [sic]. With no strings as to what or how I paint it. I am going to paint it in oil, on canvas. They are giving me a show Nov 16, and I want to have the painting finished for the show. I've had to tear out the partition between the front and middle room to get the damned thing up. [Fig. 1] I have it stretched now. It looks pretty big, but exciting as all hell. 2

In a moment of renewed zeal for resolutely orthodox literature, Torquato Tasso was inspired by a painting of the sorrowing Virgin to pen his Stanze per le lagrime di Maria Vergine santissima e di Giesù Cristo nostro (Rome, 1593). The introductory texts to Tasso’s poems, a ‘Note to readers’ and a sonnet by Angelo Ingegneri, underscore the connection to the anonymous painting and its owner, Cardinal Cinzio Passeri Aldobrandini (1551-1610). A nephew of Pope Clement VIII by his sister, Cinzio took on the Aldobrandini name in a practice referred to by contemporaries as an ‘aggregation’. The name alone did not however ensure his influence and a true ‘blood’ nephew, Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini, persistently challenged his authority. Arising from nepotic tension at the papal court, the publication of Tasso’s Lagrime was a means of promoting Cinzio as a devout, reform-minded prelate favoured by the pope. This essay examines three issues: the status of the aggregated nephew, the nature and reception of the painting at the root of Tasso’s verses, and the conception of sacred art that is presented in the introductory texts accompanying Tasso’s Lagrime. These lines of inquiry open the study of Tasso’s Lagrime to the entwined histories of painting, poetry, and politics in the process of defining what was good sacred art in Counter Reformation Rome.

*note: 'Lucrezia Borgia' (pg. 5) is incorrect - it should read 'Lucrezia d'Este'

When Bernini's equestrian statue of French King Louis XIV was shipped from Rome to Versailles in 1685, it was packed up and accompanied by a mason and master artisan named Giacomo Borzacchi. Borzacchi had been in the employ of the Building Works of St. Peter's for over twenty years, working under artists such as Bernini and Carlo Maratti to carry out the unglamorous but crucial tasks necessary to the completion and decoration of one of Rome's most important monuments. In France Borzacchi was presented as an architect and engineer, a significant step up in professional status. His work for the French crown earned him significant monetary rewards, including a gold medal from the French Academy in Rome. Yet, on his return from France Borzacchi went back to his anonymous work at the Vatican, and on his death several years later he left a decidedly modest estate to his wife. Borzacchi's trip with the Louis XIV raises questions about what kinds of expertise were required to move monumental sculpture and what kinds of benefits could be expected from the successful completion of such a task, while his return to relative anonymity highlights the difficulty of long-term upward social mobility among Rome's artisan classes. Incorporating previously unpublished archival material on Bernini's Louis XIV and key works for St. Peter's, this essay examines Borzacchi's career between Rome and France as a micro-history of the practical challenges, professional hierarchies, and potential rewards encountered by the craftsmen who created 'Bernini's Rome'.

Drawing on rich archival research and focusing on works by leading artists including Guido Reni and Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Karen J. Lloyd demonstrates that cardinal nephews in seventeenth-century Rome – those nephews who were raised to the cardinalate as princes of the Church – used the arts to cultivate more than splendid social status.

Through politically savvy frescos and emotionally evocative displays of paintings, sculpture, and curiosities, cardinal nephews aimed to define nepotism as good Catholic rule. Their commissions took advantage of their unique position close to the pope, embedding the defense of their role into the physical fabric of authority, from the storied vaults of the Vatican Palace to the sensuous garden villas that fused business and pleasure in the Eternal City. This book uncovers how cardinal nephews crafted a seductively potent dialogue on the nature of power, fueling the development of innovative visual forms that championed themselves as the indispensable heart of papal politics.

The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, early modern studies, religious history, and political history.

Part of the series Visual Culture in Early Modernity, Routledge

Pinch and Bijsterveld's edited publication is a significant book contributing to the discussion on sound within science, technology and society studies (STS). The contribution that this edited book makes lies in its focus on sound: sound as a material, product, object, as well as a social concept.  The book examines such topics as listening as a practice within medicine, sounds within design, the production and consumption of sound and embodied listening, and filters the extensive data that surrounds technology and society, questions the way that sound has constructed and/or shaped technology and explores the impact of sound within the empirical sciences. The book and its approach to sound are situated firmly within the socio technological,  drawing upon the fields of social constructivism and social shaping theories on technology. This approach reflects the increasing awareness of sound within society, as integral to certain disciplines such as urban and industrial design, ecological and anthropological studies and music and art theory. Pinch and Bijsterveld suggest this interest echoes the increased presence of audio monitoring technologies, within western cultures, as in schools or industry.

Since 2010, as part of my PhD research, I have conducted over two dozen sound walks through the Smithfield Square and its environs, in Dublin’s North Inner city; with teenagers, by myself and through organising deep listening group walks as part of World Listening Day. These walks were designed to encourage the participating walkers to listen intently to this space and compare it to other spaces on the north side of Dublin city. The walks were also designed to examine the changing use and design of the Smithfield space over the past four years. This essay is drawn from the findings of this research, which explored the co-production of space and soundscapes with 84 teenagers (43 girls and 41 boys) from Dublin, Ireland. I include some of their observations of Smithfield Square here.

In order to design a computer game soundscape that allows a game player to feel immersed in their virtual world, we must understand how we navigate and understand the real world soundscape.  In this chapter I will explore how sound, particularly in urban spaces, is increasingly categorised as noise.  This description fails to understand the social significance of any soundscape and it also ignores how sound is something that we use to both interpret and negotiate space.  I will explore the use of innovative methodologies as a tool for identifying the individual’s perception of the soundscape.  These methods could potentially highlight the problematic issue of designing virtual soundscapes without prior investigation into their cultural and social meaning.