John McCrae's "In Flanders Fields" now appears on the ten-dollar bill, its place firmly established within Canadian iconography. Yet the poem has been dismissed by both critics and poets as blithely Romantic and/or jingoistic, yet a close reading of the text reveals a deeper, conflicted significance. In the first two stanzas, McCrae uses conventional pastoral imagery to disrupt the familiar association between Christian ideals of redemption and renewal with nature, hauntingly capturing the uncertainty and fear that pervaded the collective consciousness of soldiers and civilians alike, both during and after World War I. However, in the last stanza, McCrae abandons his skillful representation of the war torn, spiritually diseased soul by applying an ideological gloss that reads like a recruiting poster. The critical silence surrounding the complexities of this poem have led to its reappropriation by the Canadian government as a symbol of the military and heroism rather than a rite of genuine war remembrance.

John McCrae's "In Flanders Fields" now appears on the ten-dollar bill, its place firmly established within Canadian iconography. Yet the poem has been dismissed by both critics and poets as blithely Romantic and/or jingoistic, yet a close reading of the text reveals a deeper, conflicted significance. In the first two stanzas, McCrae uses conventional pastoral imagery to disrupt the familiar association between Christian ideals of redemption and renewal with nature, hauntingly capturing the uncertainty and fear that pervaded the collective consciousness of soldiers and civilians alike, both during and after World War I. However, in the last stanza, McCrae abandons his skillful representation of the war torn, spiritually diseased soul by applying an ideological gloss that reads like a recruiting poster. The critical silence surrounding the complexities of this poem have led to its reappropriation by the Canadian government as a symbol of the military and heroism rather t...

In the interest of reexamining the site of Fajada Butte in Chaco
Canyon, this paper seeks to recontextualize discussions of its controversial spiral petroglyphs and astronomical phenomena (Sun Daggers) with reference to landscape phenomenology, visual and literary poetics, and the astronomical orientation of contemporary Pueblo ceremonial practices. The dearth of recent scholarship on Fajada Butte may have arisen from the many controversial arguments about its function from a variety of disciplinary locations including archaeology, anthropology, geology, and archeoastronomy. Via an emphasis on the physical landscape, storytelling, contemporary ceremonial practices and ancestral ties to Chaco Canyon, the Zuni and Hopi pueblos provide a context for re-examining the astronomical phenomena of Fajada Butte as a natural shrine of the of Chacoan culture and repository of an array of symbolic content.

“Abramović|Ulay’s Night Sea Crossing: ‘Conjunction’ and the Transculturation of the Sacred”

Art+Religion :  Max and Iris Stern International Symposium 4

Musée d'art Contemporain de Montréal / Concordia University, April 15-17, 2010; Montreal, Canada

This paper seeks to draw attention to new views of transcultural religious and spiritual content in the works of Marina Abramovic.  It refers to the specificity of religious traditions, and addresses performance as a key context for the observation of religion in contemporary art.  In her collaboration with Ulay, Night Sea Crossing, a series of 90 tableau pieces performed at exhibitions and contemporary exhibitions during the early 1980’s, Abramovic first explores themes of fasting, silence, stillness and presence that have developed into salient themes in her later works.  Drawing on the traditional modes of bodily observation described in the Mahasatipatthana Sutta of the Buddhist Canon (The Great Discourse on the Establishment of Awareness), which are sitting, standing, walking and lying down; Night Sea Crossing foregrounds sitting.

This review essay closely surveys Jack Whitten's 2014 retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. An emphasis on the aesthetics of gestural abstraction and the Abstract Expressionist movement inform Whitten's work of the last five decades, resulting in a body of work that pushes through historical events and innovative techniques of painting that demonstrate the depths of his commitment to gestural abstraction as his primary mode of creative expression. Attentive to shifting terrain in technology, culture, and African American history during his lifetime, Whitten's work participates in a memorial project that defines his oeuvre as one that establishes his experience as social history through the art of painting. Whitten's lifelong practice as an abstract painter and the resulting bodies of work exhibited in the retrospective confirm a prominent place for Whitten's among the outstanding practitioners of American painting. We the people are the tribe. We no longer accept provincial, nationalistic tribalism. Painting has become global; we live in a complex, and interconnected world. Our space is multi-dimensional, and our aspirations go beyond the personal autobiographical concerns of race, sex, politics and religion. Jack Whitten, Artist's Statement " JACK WHITTEN: 5 DECADES OF PAINTING " was a retrospective of highly focused depth and breadth at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD) curated by Kathryn Kanjo. 1 Among the works selected for the exhibition an emphasis on technology, process, and memorialization reflect Whitten's strength as an innovator and chronicler of American memory

(VIDEO) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zz4Tx6713Yc
Samuel Fosso’s (Cameroon, 1962- ) use of studio self-portraiture to represent the global scope of African accomplishment in politics, arts, and athleticism relies on performance and photography to embody historic images of the diaspora from the photographic archive.  This research asserts African Spirits (2008) appropriates historic images to perform cosmopolitan African identity through transcultural aesthetics.  Fosso’s performative self-portraits recreate 14 iconic photographs of the African diaspora of the 20th century, aestheticizing the politics of resistance through engagement with the photographic archive.  His selections highlight nodes of political power in the diaspora through African and African American figures of global influence in government, social movements, arts, and athletics.  I argue his embodiment of African national leadership, artists of Négritude, and African American social movements including the Civil Rights Movement, the Nation of Islam, and Black Power construct a plural personal identity of cosmopolitan Black political consciousness that operates transculturally in the diaspora across nations, religions, and genders. 
In this short paper, I focus on the American dimensions of Fosso’s portfolio.  Created in 2008, his work follows the exhibition “Check-List Luanda Pop” in the African Pavilion at the 2007 Venice Biennale and coincides with the election of Barack Obama.  A suite of images representing a range of black politics and protest from the 1950s and 60s celebrates the importance of Americans to diasporic identity with photos recreating the images of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Miles Davis, Muhammad Ali, Tommie Smith, and Angela Davis.  Through a close reading of his performance of Muhammad Ali’s Esquire Magazine cover of 1968, I argue Fosso relies on this period as an iconic age for images of radical African Americans, when charismatic religious and political leadership, celebrity, and the news media supported representations of cosmopolitan political consciousness.

Documentary films about Marina Abramović blur the lines between the products of mass media and performance art documentation. This chapter discusses four films, from Murray Grigor’s film for Channel Four, The Great Wall of China: Lovers at the Brink (1989), to Marco del Fiol’s The Space In Between: Marina Abramović in Brazil (2016), arguing documentary films are an important vehicle for the dissemination of Abramović’s performance and aesthetic in addition to her biography. Philip Auslander’s work constellates several issues around the hierarchal relationship of live performance to its documentation through the categories of the theatrical and documentary. Through their engagement with her performances, Abramović documentaries challenge Auslander’s categories, requiring an expanded phenomenology of performance documentation that recognizes how documentary film fuses and expands the theatrical and the documentary, as art works and ethnographic events converge. I define the category of cinematic documentation to account for and describe this unique approach to performance documentation.

The advent of digital humanities now poses the primary historiographical challenge for contemporary and future historians of Islamic art. No longer simply tools to archive and exchange information, digital humanities technologies are evolving into analytical instruments often embedded with under-scrutinized theoretical assumptions. Without a critical mass of systematically developed databases of historical texts, translations, images and overlaying analytical tools, the way Islamic art history is written will increasingly diverge from the rest of art history. This paper makes the case that the pressing need to consider and apply new theoretical frameworks in Islamic art history is being superseded by the digital turn in humanities scholarship. The practice of Islamic art history now needs to actively participate in the design and development of databases and analytical instruments specifically geared toward the interests of Islamic art historians. At the same time, the digital shift presents an opportunity to confront the field’s archival legacies.