interactivityinteractivityparticipatory artaudience involvementrelational aestheticsRelational Aesthetics is also when a successful artist, um, who is too busy touring the globe going from biennial to biennial, and they have no time to make physical art objects any more, so the famous artist uses the attendees at the exhibition as the artwork in some way, you know what I’m saying, like to explore the social relationships between people and y’know this kind of practice is really good when you’re a

From the beginning, video art was understood as anti-establishment. It can lay claim to a unique origin: unlike other visual arts media, it was forged in the crucible of contemporary, rather than modern, classical or ancient, art. It had no tradition so was not beholden to it. It had no canon so could start from scratch in response to its immediate circumstances. It had no critical discourse so was not accountable to it. It promised to democratize the production of images. Video art emerged at th

Minimalist artists constructed simple, monochromatic, geometric objects of formal symmetry, characterized by an absence of traditional composition. Minimalism was an extreme abstract art, not imitative but solipsistic, self-referential: it was unto itself, harking back to the idea of truth to materials whose lineage can be located in the Russian Constructivists (particularly Rodchenko, AleksandrRodchenko and El Lissitzky) through to Moore, HenryMoore, Hepworth, BarbaraHepworth, Gabo, NoamGabo, Pe

jazzorigins ofNew Orleansslave performancesBechet, Sidneyon slave performances/New Orleansartinfluence of AfricanAfrican ritualsAfrican art/dressDecades before the Civil War, a gathering of inspired people seeking self-determination initiated the birth of a musical genre that flourished throughout America. Congo SquareCongo Square in New Orleans, Louisiana is the highly renowned ground where slaves gathered for spiritual communion on free Sunday. By 1800, these assemblies swelled to six hundred i

Adding to his narrative, Michel Fontanes, a former executive, author and jazz musician, articulated the French impression of African American male instrumentalists that expatriated to the country. “They were considered in France as Gods. All black musicians not the white musicians.” Regarding his trip to Paris in 1949, Miles Davis offered consensus. “It was the freedom of being in France and being treated like a human being, like someone important. Even the band and the music we played sounded be

A convenient starting point to discuss the fashion-Islam nexus is the eight-page article ‘Hip with the Headscarf’. Appearing in 1999 in the weekend magazine of an upscale Dutch daily, Volkskrant Magazine, this article started with the observation that ‘more and more women with headscarves wear fashionable styles of dress and lots of make-up’ (Jungschleger and Riemersma 1999). Next to portraying a number of young women wearing such fashionable styles, it also presented the points of view of ‘expe

The most obvious feature of dress is its proximity to the body and the intimacy of our relationship to it. Whilst sociologists of the wardrobe rightly remind us that some clothing remains forever unworn or may be kept only for special occasions, it is nonetheless true that it is through being worn that dress springs into life and attains its primary purpose. This intimate relationship between our bodies and our clothes is not, however, without potential conflict. Bodies animate clothes, but they

Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime influence many aspects of popular culture, including fashion. The Nazi aesthetic is an artistic and ideological style created by Adolph Hitler, which characterizes the idealization of the male human form, violence, the heroic ideal, and Aryan mythology. This style was critical in the design of the Nazi machine, especially architectural and transportation design, the visual arts, politics, and the propaganda of the Third Reich. Less well documented has been the use

The Gapsin Reform in 1884, prompted by a coup d’état staged by a group of reformists called the Progressives, initiated the transformation of Korea into a modern society by diffusing foreign ideas and cultures. Western fashion, as a symbol of modernization, became widespread in everyday life, supplanting the traditions that had dominated Korea’s clothing system for hundreds of years. During the twentieth century, the five-thousand-year-old traditional dress culture was made over through an accult

Clothes are animated by bodies moving in space, and attitudes toward work and leisure that have changed dramatically across culture and time. In early modern Europe until the eighteenth century, sumptuary laws extended well beyond dress to even the type of finish and materials used in interior design. Other societies, including China and Thailand, continuously attempted to control these appearances. In England in the post-Restoration decades, very wealthy women exhibited new independence in the d

When the Scholastics spoke about beauty they meant by this an attribute of God. The metaphysics of beauty (in Plotinus, for instance) and the theory of art were in no way related. ‘Contemporary’ man places an exaggerated value on art because he has lost the feeling for intelligible beauty which the neo-Platonists and the Medievals possessed… . Here we are dealing with a type of beauty of which Aesthetics knows nothing.E. R.Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, translated by Will

Il te fauldra de vert vestir,

From the Middle Ages on, every failure of physical uprightness has been attributed to two main categories: the stigma of deformity, sanctioned by the attention given to strength and aesthetic qualities, and the lack of the proper deportment prescribed mainly by socialized ethics. In both cases, however, medieval comments were unpolished and hasty, even weak compared with those which would be made in the sixteenth century. The strongest and most valiant knight was lost if disabled – “he falls to t

Zambia is one of the world's least developed countries. This was not always the case, but the economy has been on a downward slide since the mid-1970s. Between 1980 and 1994, Zambia received numerous structural adjustment loans from the World Bank and its sister agency, the International Monetary Fund. Today Zambians are poorer, on a per capita basis, than they were at independence from British colonial rule in 1964 (UNDP 2001). Yet the enormous crossover appeal of secondhand clothing cannot be e

There are two passages in the Koran that address proper behaviour between men and women who mix outside kinship bonds, including ways of clothing and adornment:

Through considering the material microscopics of particular women's personal aesthetic, the focus is upon how clothing mediates this relationship between the individual woman and the outside world. The assemblage of outfits involves negotiating whether an outfit is ‘really me’ and equally the expectations of the occasion of wearing, and the gaze of those present. The process of combining items to be worn involves the process of constructing the individual in the eyes of others. In tracing a ‘pers