Presentation Tiere are seven articles and three new reviews for our - - PDF document

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Presentation

Tiere are seven articles and three new reviews for our thirteenth issue, in

• 2013. Tie numbers cross while the fjgures play to indicate us that all of this, at

least in the territory of specialized culture, does not necessarily mean addition or it is not the metaphor for some lucky sign that harbors a secret to be discovered.

• No. Tiese numbers simply quantify constant works and achievements of

essential scholarly seriousness. Tiere are seven texts of investigative accounts and

• f specialized private or collective searches and three reviews written by experts

who have been seduced by some artifact or artistic, aesthetic or cultural event. Tie thirteenth issue of our journal Cátedra de Artes is nurtured by the num- bers and by the box offjce, not so much to count -in the quantitative sense- but to refer to events or thoughts, or to present structures that showcase epistemic

• narrations. What is it about then? What are the themes developed this time?

And fjnally, what is the news classifjed under the category of reviews in this issue of Cátedra about? Let’s enumerate. One: María Celeste Belenguer, from the Instituto Universitario Patagónico de las Artes (IUPA) in Argentina, proposes to study the strategies deployed in the creation, presentation and functioning of the historical heritage museum “Museo Taller Ferrowhite” -located in Ingeniero White, in Bahía Blanca harbor. For this purpose, she makes an analytical presentation of the modes of discourse and the strategies that the institution uses in order to narrate the story to which said space refers. Notwithstanding it being a museum of cultural history, “Mu- seo Taller Ferrowhite” makes use of difgerent artistic resources, opening -as the author says- an original fjctional fjeld that results in a project in which multiple factors combine to provide it with an exemplary communicative capacity. Two: Evguenia Roubina, from México, builds her research upon the following question: Is an image more worthy…? She keeps the ellipsis to propose what she calls ‘guidelines for the study of organologic evidence in novo-Hispanic musical iconography’. In this way, the Mexican scholar carries out a critical analysis

• f the techniques and procedures that are currently used for the description
• f musical content in fjgurative sources and the evaluation of their meaning;

thereby sketching -and from this point stems the value of this text- a new pro- posal for the classifjcation of the organologic evidence provided by colonial art and for the assessment of its testimonial value. Tiis work could be expanded to cover other cultural, historical and geographical areas; this expansion would contribute to the study and to the broadening of methodologies from diverse contexts and objects of knowledge.

Tiree: Arturo García Gómez from the Universidad Michocana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo, in the beautiful Mexican city of Morelia, tries to elucidate the dimension of memory in the poetic-musical art of Ancient Greece: Mousiké (μουσική), which ranges from the archaic period to the beginning of our era, when the fjrst musical notations of the ancient world emerge. Memory, as the author explains, is more than a technical resource for artistic composition, and it is later perceived as a mythical vision of the Divine and as a philosophical conception of knowledge and the intelligible world; that which is only perceived by intellect. Four: Argentinean scholar Alejandra Lanza inquires into ephemeral art and the mise-en-scène of religious and political festivities in colonial Jujuy in the 17th and 18th centuries, raising theoretical and methodological issues for the study

• f these manifestations. Tie author analyzes the expression of ephemeral art

starting from a historiographical revision in dialogue with a corpus of images from Art History and ethnographic observation in the Quebrada of Humahuaca, assaying, as she explains, a new defjnition of that manifestation. Tiis new defj- nition is centered on the use and/or refunctionalization of the diverse material expressions within the festive event. Ephemeral art is an elusive object of study that leads the author to propose theoretical and methodological instruments that bring together difgerent disciplines and fjelds of knowledge in order to, as she explains, (re)construct the material and symbolic specifjcity (constructive process, use and functionality) of the lost ephemeral artistic manifestations. Five: From the United States, Isabel Baboun develops a very interesting critical view regarding the use of photography in the work of Chilean fjlmmaker Patricio Guzmán, adding to the cinematographic work the category of archive and nostalgia, notions with which the work is already familiar. Chilean docu- mentary director Patricio Guzmán, the author explains, has devoted himself to question the image and its infjnite uses, deploying it as private archive as well as an expressive and collective sign, being photography its object of representation. Tius, the present text attends to said mechanism, which would operate not so much as an intimate narration but as an afgective happening for the spectator. Six: A group of young researchers formed by Simón Castillo from Universi- dad Alberto Hurtado and Marcelo Mardones and Waldo Lira from Pontifjcia Universidad Católica de Chile assumes the task of showing us images and epis- temological paths in relation to the city and the urban imageries that have arisen from public transportation in the city of Santiago, Chile. Tiis task is carried

• ut from an analytical inquiry of photographs taken between 1938 and 1973.

Tie team of researchers considers photography as an expressive medium which is used as a referential aesthetic element for the process of political, economic

12 Cátedra de Artes N°13 (2013): Presentación

and social renovation defjned as desarrollismo. Tiis project is characterized by the intervention of the State in difgerent areas of the social life of this South American capital. In sum, the work is a historiographical contribution to the study of these imageries based on the examination of photographic archives. Tie work thus understands photography as a historical source for the understanding

• f the political and social desarrollista project, as well as for the understanding
• f the imaginative horizons that have arisen from the everyday life of Santiago

in that period. Seven: From Colombia, professor Raúl Niño from Pontifjcia Universidad Católica Javieriana sends us -and in some way, creatively deviate us- towards a look into what he calls an ecologic-aesthetic, associating it by the same concept, and almost unavoidably, to complexity systems. Using aesthetics as a social science, the author explores routes for discussion as well as perceptual analyses to make ecologic environments (where changes and transitions occur and with which the forms of human habitability make the territory their own or secure their permanence by the use of productive systems) an object of analytic and creative study. Raúl Niño links the new contemporary aesthetic theory to the theory of complexity, highlighting the epistemological condition of aesthetic when it comes to assume global problems, or at least, problems that are wider than those that are commonly associated with the discipline. Using the text Las Conexiones Ocultas, this theoretical approach creates a breakpoint on aesthetics and ecology. Also, as it has been mentioned, there are the reviews, equally numbered and dedicated to: a collective and theoretical book about the visual arts in a particular period of the history of Chile, in charge of Ignacio Szmulewicz R.; a book-object

• f a visual and performative artist like Sybil Brintrup, in charge of María Laura

Bermúdez Gallinal; and to fjnish with the third one, the news of the encounter

• f Latin American University Schools of Tieater, Red CITU, Delta 5, carried
• ut in 2012 in the city of Valparaíso, reviewed by Verónica Sentis Hermann.

A fjnal note: We thank Claudia Lira, Jorge Montoya Véliz, Alfonso de Vicente, Sarah Roos, José Pablo Concha, Margarita Alvarado and Lorena Amaro for their valuable contribution to some of the indispensable details of this thirteenth issue, in this year 2000 to which a 13 is added as well. Patricio Rodríguez-Plaza