Download or read book Idolizing Pictures written by Anthony Julius and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this ground-breaking book Anthony Julius derives a Jewish aesthetic from the Second Commandment. The prohibition of idolatry in fact contains a positive program. It is both an injunction against idol worshipping and a call to idol breaking; it promotes a creative iconoclasm that uses irony to expose inflated claims about art. Examining works by artists such as Chagall and Shahn, Julius finds that much Jewish art does not meet this bracing criterion. But in the output of contemporary artists Komar and Melamid he identifies and celebrates an aesthetic that by irony subverts both artistic and political idolatry. Idolizing Pictures is a manifesto for Jewish art.

Download or read book Image Action and Idea in Contemporary Jewish Art written by Ben Schachter and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2017-12-15 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contemporary Jewish art is a growing field that includes traditional as well as new creative practices, yet criticism of it is almost exclusively reliant on the Second Commandment’s prohibition of graven images. Arguing that this disregards the corpus of Jewish thought and a century of criticism and interpretation, Ben Schachter advocates instead a new approach focused on action and process. Departing from the traditional interpretation of the Second Commandment, Schachter addresses abstraction, conceptual art, performance art, and other styles that do not rely on imagery for meaning. He examines Jewish art through the concept of melachot—work-like “creative activities” as defined by the medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides. Showing the similarity between art and melachot in the active processes of contemporary Jewish artists such as Ruth Weisberg, Allan Wexler, Archie Rand, and Nechama Golan, he explores the relationship between these artists’ methods and Judaism’s demanding attention to procedure. A compellingly written challenge to traditionalism, Image, Action, and Idea in Contemporary Jewish Art makes a well-argued case for artistic production, interpretation, and criticism that revels in the dual foundation of Judaism and art history.

Download or read book Picture Imperfect written by Russell Jacoby and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The choice we have is not between reasonable proposals and an unreasonable utopianism. Utopian thinking does not undermine or discount real reforms. Indeed, it is almost the opposite: practical reforms depend on utopian dreaming."--Russell Jacoby, Picture Imperfect Utopianism suffers from an image problem: A recent exhibition on utopias in Paris and New York included photographs of Hitler's Mein Kampf and a Nazi concentration camp. Many observers judge utopians and their sympathizers as foolhardy dreamers at best and murderous totalitarians at worst. However, as noted social critic and historian Russell Jacoby argues in this salient, polemical, and innovative work, not only has utopianism been unfairly characterized, a return to an iconoclastic utopian spirit is vital for today's society. Shaped by the works of Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Gustav Landauer, and other predominantly Jewish thinkers, iconoclastic utopianism revives society's dormant political imagination and offers hope for a better future. Writing against the grain of history, Jacoby reexamines the anti-utopian mindset and identifies how utopian thought came to be regarded with such suspicion. He challenges standard readings of such anti-utopian classics as 1984 and Brave New World and offers stinging critiques of the influential liberal and anti-utopian theorists Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin, and Karl Popper. He argues that these thinkers mistakenly equate utopianism with totalitarianism. The reputation of utopian thought has also suffered from the failures of, what Jacoby terms, the blueprint utopian tradition and its oppressive emphasis on detailing all aspects of society and providing fantastic images of the future. In contrast, the iconoclastic utopians, like those who follow God's prohibition against graven images, resist both the blueprinters' obsession with detail and the modern seduction of images. Jacoby suggests that by learning from the hopeful spirit of iconoclastic utopians and their willingness to accept new possibilities for society, we open ourselves to new and more imaginative ideas of the future.

Download or read book Negating the Image written by Jeffrey Johnson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do people attack monuments and other public objects charged with authority by the societies that produced them? What do open assaults on images and artworks mean? Iconoclasm, the principled destruction of images, has recurred throughout human history as theory and practice. This book contains seven historical studies of the changing causes and meanings of iconoclasm and the radical transformations in the function of images it has brought about in societies around the world, from Ancient Egypt to Islamic India and Revolutionary Mexico, as well as Medieval and Reformation Europe. Scholars of art history, history and archaeology explore shifting definitions of art and the forms of representation in delineating varied forms of 'iconoclasm'.

Download or read book Judaism and the Visual Image written by Melissa Raphael and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2009-02-19 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The widespread assumption that Jewish religious tradition is mediated through words, not pictures, has left Jewish art with no significant role to play in Jewish theology and ethics. Judaism and the Visual Image argues for a Jewish theology of image that, among other things, helps us re-read the creation story in Genesis 1 and to question why images of Jewish women as religious subjects appear to be doubly suppressed by the Second Commandment, when images of observant male Jews have become legitimate, even iconic, representations of Jewish holiness. Raphael further suggests that 'devout beholding' of images of the Holocaust is a corrective to post-Holocaust theologies of divine absence from suffering that are infused by a sub-theological aesthetic of the sublime. Raphael concludes by proposing that the relationship between God and Israel composes itself into a unitary dance or moving image by which each generation participates in a processive revelation that is itself the ultimate work of Jewish art.

Download or read book Idolizing Pictures written by Julius Anthony and published by . This book was released on 2001-01-01 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Art Agency and Living Presence written by Caroline van Eck and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2015-03-10 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout history, and all over the world, viewers have treated works of art as if they are living beings: speaking to them, falling in love with them, kissing or beating them. Although over the past 20 years the catalogue of individual cases of such behavior towards art has increased immensely, there are few attempts at formulating a theoretical account of them, or writing the history of how such responses were considered, defined or understood. That is what this book sets out to do: to reconstruct some crucial chapters in the history of thought about such reflections in Western Europe, and to offer some building blocks towards a theoretical account of such responses, drawing on the work of Aby Warburg and Alfred Gell.

Download or read book Broken Idols of the English Reformation written by and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on with total page 1129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Art and Religion in Eighteenth Century Europe written by Nigel Aston and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2009-07-15 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eighteenth-century Europe witnessed monumental upheavals in both the Catholic and Protestant faiths and the repercussions rippled down to the churches’ religious art forms. Nigel Aston now chronicles here the intertwining of cultural and institutional turmoil during this pivotal century. The sustained popularity of religious art in the face of competition from increasingly prevalent secular artworks lies at the heart of this study. Religious art staked out new spaces of display in state institutions, palaces, and private collections, the book shows, as well as taking advantage of patronage from monarchs such as Louis XIV and George III, who funded religious art in an effort to enhance their monarchial prestige. Aston also explores the motivations and exhibition practices of private collectors and analyzes changing Catholic and Protestant attitudes toward art. The book also examines purchases made by corporate patrons such as charity hospitals and religious confraternities and considers what this reveals about the changing religiosity of the era as well. An in-depth historical study, Art and Religion in Eighteenth-Century Europe will be essential for art history and religious studies scholars alike.

Download or read book Under the Hammer written by James Simpson and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2010-11-30 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When we think of breaking images, we assume that it happens somewhere else. We also tend to think of iconoclasts as barbaric. Iconoclasts are people like the Taliban, who blew up Buddhist statues in 2001. We tend, that is, to look with horror on iconoclasm. This book argues instead that iconoclasm is a central strand of Anglo-American modernity. Our horror at the destruction of art derives in part from the fact that we too did, and still do, that. This is most obviously true of England's iconoclastic century between 1538 and 1643. That century of legislated early modern image breaking, exceptional in Europe for its jurisdictional extension and duration, stands at the core of this book. That's when written texts, especially poems, rather than visual images became our living monuments. Surely, though, the story of image breaking stops in the eighteenth century, with its enlightened cultivation of the visual arts and the art market. Not so, argues Under the Hammer: once started, iconoclasm is difficult to stop. It ripples through cultures, into the psyche, and it ripples through history. Museums may have protected images from the iconoclast's hammer, but also subject images to metaphorical iconoclasm. Aesthetics may have drawn a protective circle around the image, but as it did so, it also neutralised the image. The ripple effect also continues across the Atlantic, into puritan culture, into twentieth-century American Abstract Expressionism, and into the puritan temple of modern art. That, in fact, is where this book starts, with mid-twentieth-century abstract painting: the image has survived, just, but it bears the scars of a 500 year history.

Download or read book Broken Idols of the English Reformation written by Margaret Aston and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-11-26 with total page 1994 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why were so many religious images and objects broken and damaged in the course of the Reformation? Margaret Aston's magisterial new book charts the conflicting imperatives of destruction and rebuilding throughout the English Reformation from the desecration of images, rails and screens to bells, organs and stained glass windows. She explores the motivations of those who smashed images of the crucifixion in stained glass windows and who pulled down crosses and defaced symbols of the Trinity. She shows that destruction was part of a methodology of religious revolution designed to change people as well as places and to forge in the long term new generations of new believers. Beyond blanked walls and whited windows were beliefs and minds impregnated by new modes of religious learning. Idol-breaking with its emphasis on the treacheries of images fundamentally transformed not only Anglican ways of worship but also of seeing, hearing and remembering.

Download or read book Censorship written by Derek Jones and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2001-12-01 with total page 10599 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Download or read book Through A Bible Lens written by Mel Alexenberg and published by Elm Hill. This book was released on 2019-01-08 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through a Bible Lens: Biblical Insights for Smartphone Photography and Social Media by Professor Mel Alexenberg teaches people of all faiths how biblical insights can transform smartphone photography and social media into creative ways for seeing spirituality in everyday life. It develops conceptual and practical tools for observing, documenting and sharing reflections of biblical messages in all that we do. It speaks to Jews and Christians who share an abiding love of the Bible by inspiring the creation of a lively dialogue between our emerging life stories and the enduring biblical narrative.The author is an artist, educator and writer exploring the interface between biblical consciousness, creative process, and postdigital culture. His artworks are in the collections of museums worldwide. He was professor at Columbia University and research fellow at MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies. In Israel, head of Emunah College School of the Arts and professor at Ariel and Bar-Ilan universities. He is author of The Future of Art in a Postdigital Age: From Hellenistic to Hebraic Consciousness.Through a Bible Lens speaks in the language of today's digital culture of smartphones and social media. It demonstrates to both young and old the most up-to-date thoughts on the interactions between The Bible and the impact of new technologies on contemporary life. Christians and Jews will enjoy sharing the book’s spiritual messages with their children and grandchildren.Professor Alexenberg draws on six Divine attributes in the biblical verse “Yours God are the Compassion, the Strength, the Beauty, the Success, the Splendor, and the Foundation of everything in heaven and earth” (Chronicles 1:29) to demonstrate how smartphone photographers become God’s partners in creation when photographing daily life through a Bible lens.He describes how the lives of biblical personalities exemplify these Divine attributes: Abraham and Ruth embody Compassion, Isaac and Sarah are models of Strength, Jacob and Rebecca represent Beauty, Success is demonstrated by Moses and Miriam, Splendor by Aaron and Deborah, and Foundation by Joseph and Tamar. There is a confluence emerging in the 21st century between biblical consciousness and a postdigital culture that addresses the humanization of digital technologies. Both share a structure of consciousness and its cultural expression that honors creative process and seeing with a different spirit, like Caleb who saw goodness in the Land of Israel while others could not (Numbers 14:24). We are fortunate to be living in age of digital technologies that gives us ways to experience invisible worlds becoming visible. These experiences give clues that help us appreciate the insightful imagination of ancient spiritual teachers who visualized invisible realms. Smartphones are gateways to the world that make invisible realms blanketing our planet become visible with a flick of a finger. Their imbedded cameras capture images, store them as invisible bits and bytes, and display them as colorful pictures. In all of human history, never has there been such a proliferation of images. A centuries-old Jewish method of Bible study called PaRDeS offers creative ways for looking beyond the surface of smartphone images by extending contemporary methods of photographic analysis to reveal spiritual significance. An exemplary blogart project, Bible Blog Your Life http://throughabiblelens.blogspot.com, turns theory into practice. The author and his wife Miriam created it to celebrate their 52nd year of marriage. For 52 weeks, they posted photographs reflecting their life together with a text of Tweets that relate to the weekly Bible portion. Selected blog posts from each of the first five books of the Bible demonstrate how to transform the ancient biblical narrative into a mirror for people today to see themselves. Fifty photographs from these posts are reproduced in color in the book.

Download or read book The Idol in the Age of Art written by Rebecca Zorach and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 423 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After 1500, as Catholic Europe fragmented into warring sects, evidence of a pagan past came newly into view, and travelers to distant places encountered deeply unfamiliar visual cultures, it became ever more pressing to distinguish between the sacred image and its opposite, the 'idol'. Historians and philosophers have long attended to Reformation charges of idolatry - the premise for image-breaking - but only very recently have scholars begun to consider the ways that the idol occasioned the making no less than the destruction. The present book focuses on how idols and ideas about them matter for the history of early modern objects produced around the globe, especially those created in the context of an exchange or confrontation between an 'us' and a 'them'. Ranging widely within the early modern period, the volume contributes to the project of globalizing the study of European art, bringing the continent's commercial, colonial, antiquarian, and religious histories into dialogue. Its studies of crosses, statues on columns, wax ex-votos, ivories, prints, maps, manuscripts, fountains, banners, and New World gold all frame Western 'art' simultaneously as an idea and as a collection of real things, arguing that it was through the idol that object-makers and writers came to terms with what it was that art should be, and do.

Download or read book Reading Texts Reading Lives written by Daniel Morris and published by University of Delaware. This book was released on 2012-06-14 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our culture attempts to separate competing ideological factions by denying relationships between multiple perspectives and influences outside of one’s own narrow interpretive community. The distinguished essayists in this volume find Daniel R. Schwarz’s pluralistic, self-questioning approach to what he calls “reading texts and reading lives” quite relevant to the current historical moment and political situation. A legendary scholar of modernist literature, Schwarz’s critical principles are a healthy corrective to cultural hubris. The essayists treat works ranging from fictions by Joyce, Conrad, Morrison, and Woolf to the poetry of Yeats, to Holocaust literature, to the environmental writings of Wendell Berry, to the photographs of Lee Friedlander. The authors focus on different works, but they follow Schwarz in stressing formal elements most often associated with traditional realism while keeping an eye on historical and author-centered approaches. The essayists also follow Schwarz in their emphasis on narrative cohesion and in how they look for signs of agency among characters who possess the will to alter their fate, even in a seemingly random universe such as the one depicted by Conrad. Readers with eyes to ethics and aesthetics, they follow Schwarz in encouraging a values-centered approach that leaves room for the reader to address the ways in which reading a text correlates to the reader’s ability to find meaning and value in experience outside the text. Like Schwarz, the essays look for intentionality of authorial meaning (rather than something called an “author function”) as well as for the relationship between lived experience and the imagined world of the literary work (rather than the endless semiotic play of an ultimately indecipherable text).

Download or read book Sensible Religion written by Christopher Lewis and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-01 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Around the globe religion is under attack. Humanists, secularists and atheists depict believers as deluded and dangerous. The aim of this book is to challenge this perception. Sensible Religion defends the validity and emphasises the excitement of the religious quest across the faiths. It demonstrates that the practice of sensible religion is often a courageous path pitted against religious extremism and secularism. Written by committed believers from the major world's faiths, the book endorses the term 'sensible' as expressing religious reasonableness as well as sensitivity to criticism and new insights. Followers of the different traditions live ordinary lives in the mainstream of the world. This volume therefore addresses beliefs and the manner in which these convictions relate to social, political and ethical action. Countering the argument that religion is at root extremist and irrational, Sensible Religion brings together thoughtful and critical reflections by leading thinkers about humanity's spiritual quest.

Download or read book The Politics of Iconoclasm written by James Noyes and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2013-09-10 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From false idols and graven images to the tombs of kings and the shrines of capitalism, the targeted destruction of cities, sacred sites and artefacts for religious, political or nationalistic reasons is central to our cultural legacy. This book examines the different traditions of image-breaking in Christianity and Islam as well as their development into nominally secular movements and paints a vivid, scholarly picture of a culture of destruction encompassing Protestantism, Wahhabism, and Nationalism. Beginning with a comparative account of Calvinist Geneva and Wahhabi Mecca, The Politics of Iconoclasm explores the religious and political agendas behind acts of image-breaking and their relation to nationhood and state-building. From sixteenth-century Geneva to urban developments in Mecca today, The Politics of Iconoclasm explores the history of image-breaking, the culture of violence and its paradoxical roots in the desire for renewal. Examining these dynamics of nationhood, technology, destruction and memory, a historical journey is described in which the temple is razed and replaced by the machine.