ANIMAE

The invisible sources of the artwork: talks with today’s artists

Emma Coccioli

Romanticism, the brooding and intensely personal eighteenth-century art and literary movement, takes on a new lease of life in this carefully curated collection of interviews with contemporary artists from around the world. Informed by the writings of the renowned psychoanalyst James Hillman, Romanticism is reconsidered from a twenty-first-century perspective. Moving past a purely formal presentation of the artists’ work, this text strives to uncover the deeper meaning and more pressing issues present in the artworks. All connected by a similar romantic vein, Emma Coccioli explores each artist’s individual practice through a series of carefully selected questions. For Coccioli, discussions of ‘the moral issue’ and the future of the world also form an important part of the interviews. Coccioli acknowledges that artists have often been asked questions about their role in relation to the moral issue and the problem of nihilism. However, even if we have an inherent understanding of the concepts of good and evil, Coccioli argues that there is a need to re-examine the modern-day psyche as it tends to be apathetic and with little emotional resonance on our actions and behaviour. Global overpopulation, climate change, and the planet’s limited resources are also meaningfully discussed in this collection of interviews. In questioning the artists, whose work addresses, even remotely, these topics, Coccioli encourages them to consider what they believe to be the greatest threats to today’s global community and to suggest solutions that might be adopted by future generations. This original and engaging look at contemporary art practice presents a sophisticated discussion of some of the most pressing issues for modern-day society. The interdisciplinary nature of this book means that it will appeal to students, scholars, artists and to anyone with an interest in the fascinating world of contemporary art.

Staying Open: Charles Olson’s Sources and Influences

Edited by Joshua S. Hoeynck, Case Western Reserve University

“Staying Open, Charles Olson’s Sources and Influences” investigates the inter-disciplinary influences on the work of the mid-Century American poet, Charles Olson. This edited collection of essays covers Olson’s diverse non-literary interests, including his engagement with the music of John Cage and Pierre Boulez, his interests in abstract expressionism, and his readings of philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. The essays also examine Olson’s pedagogy, which he developed in the experimental environment at Black Mountain College, as well as his six-month archeological journey through the Yucatan Peninsula in 1950 to explore the culture of the Maya. This book will, therefore, be a strong research aid to scholars working in diverse fields – music, archeology, pedagogy, philosophy, art, and psychology – as it outlines methods for close inter-disciplinary work that can uncover the mechanics of Olson’s creative, literary processes. Building on the straightforward scholarship of George Butterick, whose Guide to the Maximus Poems remains indispensable for readers of Olson’s work, the essays in this volume will also guide readers through the thick allusions within The Maximus Poems itself. New interest in the wide-ranging and non-literary nature of Olson’s thought in several recent academic works makes this book both timely and necessary. Physics Envy: American Poetry and Science in the Cold War and After by Peter Middleton as well as Contemporary Olson edited by David Herd have started the process of uncovering the extent to which Olson’s inter-disciplinary interests inflected his poetic compositions. “Staying Open” extends the preliminary investigations of Olson’s non-literary sources in those volumes by bringing together a community of scholars working across disciplines and within a wide variety of humanistic concerns.

Parallaxic Praxis: Multimodal Interdisciplinary Pedagogical Research Design

Pauline Sameshima, Lakehead University, Canada et al.

Winner of the '2020 Society of Professors of Education Outstanding Book Award' Parallaxic Praxis is a research framework utilized by interdisciplinary teams to collect, interpret, transmediate, analyze, and mobilize data generatively. The methodology leverages the researchers’ personal strengths and the collective expertise of the team including the participants and community when possible. Benefits include the use of multi-perspective analyses, multi-modal investigations, informal and directed dialogic conversations, innovative knowledge creation, and models of residual and reparative research. Relying on difference, dialogue, and creativity propulsion processes; and drawing on post-qualitative, new materiality, multiliteracies, and combinatorial, even juxtaposing theoretical frames; this model offers extensive research possibilities across disciplines and content areas to mobilize knowledge to broad audiences. This book explains methods, theories, and perspectives, and provides examples for developing creative research design in order to innovate new understandings. This model is especially useful for interdisciplinary partnerships or cross-sector collaborations. This book specifically addresses issues of research design, methodology, knowledge generation, knowledge mobilization, and dissemination for academics, students, and community partners. Examples include possibilities for scholars interested in doing projects in social justice, community engagement, teacher education, Indigenous research, and health and wellness.

Parallaxic Praxis: Multimodal Interdisciplinary Pedagogical Research Design

Pauline Sameshima, Lakehead University, Canada et al.

Winner of the '2020 Society of Professors of Education Outstanding Book Award' Parallaxic Praxis is a research framework utilized by interdisciplinary teams to collect, interpret, transmediate, analyze, and mobilize data generatively. The methodology leverages the researchers’ personal strengths and the collective expertise of the team including the participants and community when possible. Benefits include the use of multi-perspective analyses, multi-modal investigations, informal and directed dialogic conversations, innovative knowledge creation, and models of residual and reparative research. Relying on difference, dialogue, and creativity propulsion processes; and drawing on post-qualitative, new materiality, multiliteracies, and combinatorial, even juxtaposing theoretical frames; this model offers extensive research possibilities across disciplines and content areas to mobilize knowledge to broad audiences. This book explains methods, theories, and perspectives, and provides examples for developing creative research design in order to innovate new understandings. This model is especially useful for interdisciplinary partnerships or cross-sector collaborations. This book specifically addresses issues of research design, methodology, knowledge generation, knowledge mobilization, and dissemination for academics, students, and community partners. Examples include possibilities for scholars interested in doing projects in social justice, community engagement, teacher education, Indigenous research, and health and wellness.

The Centre as Margin: Eccentric Perspectives on Art

Edited by Joana Antunes, Group of Multidisciplinary Studies in Art, CEAACP/Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Coimbra, Portugal et al.

The Centre as Margin. Eccentric Perspectives on Art is a multi-authored volume of collected essays that answer the challenge of thinking Art History, and the Arts in a broader sense, from a liminal point of view. Its main goal is thus to discuss the margin from the centre - drawing on its concomitance within study themes and subjects, ontological and epistemological positions, or research methodologies themselves. Marginality, eccentricity, liminality, and superfluity are all part of a dynamic relationship between centre and margin(s) that will be approached and discussed, from the point of view of disciplines as different and as close as art history, philosophy, literature and design, from medieval to contemporary art. Resulting from recent research developed from the privileged viewpoint offered by the margin, this volume brings together the contributions of young researchers along with the work of career scholars. Likewise, it does not obey a traditional or a rigid diachronic structure, being rather organized in three major parts that organically articulate the different essays. Within each of these parts in which the book is divided, papers are sometimes organized according to their timeframes, providing the reader with an encompassing (though not encyclopedic) overview of the common ground over which the various artistic disciplines build their methodological, theoretical, and thematic centers and margins. The intended eccentricity of this volume – and the original essays herein presented – should provide researchers, scholars, students, artists, curators, and the general reader interested in art with a refreshing approach to its various scientific strands.