The Painter of Modern Life - Annotated Bibliography Example

WEEKLY RESPONSE LOGS Name Institution Professor Course Date Week 1 Baudelaire, C 2010, The painter of modern life, UK, Penguin Adult. Baudelaire (2010) explores fashion, dandyism, beauty and the role and purpose of the artist, and defines a painter. The reading addresses problematic and affirmative features of modernism besides promoting modernist aesthetic. Baudelaire defines artists as slaves who include simple manual labourers, village pub-talkers and skilled monsters. He further maintains that an artist is a man of the world and a child; a man who comprehends the world and the lawful and mysterious reasons for all its uses. According to Baudelaire, most of the artists are no more than pure artisans, village intellects, cottage brains and highly skilled animals. The author maintains that artists are always in the condition of convalescent where convalescence returns them towards childhood. Convalescence allows artists to immerse themselves in the faculty of enthusiastically interesting themselves in things. Artists just like Monsieur G, marvels at the eternal beauty and the startling harmony of life in capital cities. Monsieur gazes upon landscapes of great cities and delights in universal life. Baudelaire (2010) stresses on convalescence as a concept of modernist where surviving is very paramount. Convalescence is the cornerstone of the modernism artists, and artists put the yearning into action to utilise the experience into their art. Baudelaire (2010) also talks about modernity. He discusses modernity in relation to Guys. Baudelaire maintains that embodiment of fashion and modernity is after modernity. By this, he implies that through representing fashion, one can develop modern beauty and art where fashion becomes the renovation of the new. According to Baudelaire (2010), for any modernity to take place of ancient times, it is crucial for the mysterious beauty which human life puts into it to be distilled from it. He maintains that the beauty of art should be looked in its present nature in people and streets rather than searching for classical portraits. The author concludes by upholding the need and myth of artists in culture. He defines the magical development procedure as an action that offers objects that carry the soul and nature of their maker. He believes that simplicity towards the present is essential than borrowing artistic ideas from the past. He is more concerned about artists who focus on arts that promote advancement in efforts of searching for modernity. According to Baudelaire, nothing in life is real because everything changes at some point. Similarly, art should not be a copy of nature but should be artificial. In this view, the role of artists is to re-imagine the eternal aspect that captures the disposition of the moment. Although the arguments of Baudelaire are valid with regard to search for modernity, one is left to wonder how art is a renovation of the new and not of the past. Week 2 Jameson, F 1991, Postmodern, or, the cultural logic of late capitalism, UK, Duke University Press. Jameson (1991) offers an influential examination of the current position of modern condition. The author is critical of the present historical circumstance, and he paints a dystopic image of the present. According to Jameson (1991), people have lost connection to history and are becoming more interested to the present. Postermodernism has changed the past history into emptied-out stylizations that hold the chance of being consumed and commodified. The author compares postmodern conditions and the modernist conditions. While modernism still slightly acknowledges nature or history by maintaining that one can work on the nature and change it, postmodernism does not uphold the difference amid the culture and new. Jameson maintains that fashion changes by an older high-modernist urgency of style innovation. The adjustments in the aesthetic production are most visible in the field of architecture. Jameson claims that postmodernism in architecture stages itself to a form of aesthetic populism. He analyzes works of architecture and art from the perspective of high modernism and postmodernism. The modern aesthetic production in the modern world has become incorporated into commodity production. With postmodernism, fresh waves of new goods are produced at greater rates of turnover and aesthetic experimentation and innovation. Jameson affirms that architecture is the closest constitutively to the economic with which it has virtually unmediated links. In this view, it is not surprising to find extraordinary pinnacle of the novel postmodern architecture. Jameson (1991) contends that postmodernism is the cultural reaction to the current systemic shift in capitalism world. He offers a comprehensive discussion of cultural landscape of postmodernity through assessing the political fortunes of the novel. He surveys postmodern development in diverse fields including architecture and concludes that postmodernism is a cultural dominant that hold effects on cultural productions. To bring out the concept of postmodernism clearly, Jameson assesses the weakening of historicity, the breakdown of the difference amid high and low culture, a new deathlessness and an entire novel technology that instigates a novel economic world system. The book by Jameson is essential to the discussion of architecture and postmodernism. Evidently, the postmodern forms of architecture makes a crucial relationship aims history, city and architecture. Jameson categorises the postmodern form of production as a cultural dominant. The question arising from the book is how postmodernism is linked to the sheer commodification of art? Week 3 Hays, K.M 1984, Critical architecture: Between culture and form, Perspecta, vol.21, pp.14-29. Hays (1984) examines the link amid criticism and design in architecture. The author investigates criticism with respect to fields such as literary criticism, cultural and art. He considers how critical practice in design functions via a number of diverse modes that include texts, drawings and buildings. The article brings together different types of writings and projects that challenge the notion that criticism and design should be separated. Additionally, Hays discusses the effects of culture on purpose and form of an object. However, explaining architecture through culture and form calls for societal forms and historical context. Hays discusses architecture as an instrument of culture where he stresses that culture is a content and cause of the built form. Architecture according to Hays (1984) is an epiphenomenon, dependent on technological, political and socioeconomic procedures for its different transformations and states. Architecture ennobles culture that produces it and reconfirms the supremacy of culture. Hays (1984) views architecture as an autonomous form. The total autonomy of form and its pre-eminence over material and historical contingencies is proclaimed by the virtue of acknowledged powerlessness. Critical architecture guarantees a culturally informed product that includes the impact of different and discontinuity from other cultural activities. Hays (1984) assesses the critical architecture through the lens of Mies van der Rohe. He asserts that in 1922, Mies van der Rohe approached a fundamentally novel conception of reciprocity amid the corporeality of the architectural object and the images of culture that enclose it. The design is created as a big horizontal roof-plane through which vertical planes and columns of glass and marble are placed. Mies’s architectural design hides the real origins of its development by displacing them with material substitute. Through the assessment of the design, Hays (1984) confirms that the architectural reality assumes its place at the side of the real world. He maintains that architecture decodes but gives little attention on the recoding aspect of architecture. In conclusion, Hays (1984) rejects the choice amid formal autonomy or cultural dependence of architecture, and instead maintains that architecture ought to be critical. He maintains that architecture should be should made significantly of its culture via its form and language and resistant to the prevailing economic pressures. In the article, Hayes (1984) highlights critical architecture that lowers the dominant culture. How then does Mies van der Rohe use cultural value via an abstract system to create a form of critical architecture? Week 4 Kerckhove, K et al 2004, Devices of Design: Colloquim & Roundtable discussion, Canadian Centre for Architecture, pp. 1-80. The article opens up a debate concerning the link amid the techniques and tools of design and the modes of conceiving and perceiving architecture. The discussions presented in the article are conceived as initial steps in a longer-range attempt to address the crucial conservation and archival issues that have grown with regard to the new-media works of art generated by architects (Kerckhove et al 2004). According to the authors, the hypertexted world integrates the properties and values of both text and context and alters the link amid language elements. The authors further assert that architecture began as a paperless studio with the architects making the required connections to create a building. The sketching of a building required the compass an aspect that categorises architecture as an analogy (Kerckhove et al 2004). The article highlights the emergence of the cloud chamber that became a novel form of epistemology. Precisely, the article highlights the extensive application of the software technology and digital media in construction and design. It addresses the implications of the use of software technology and digital media on the modern architectural theory and practices (Kerckhove et al 2004). More so, the article highlights the upshots of the use of digital media besides the call to comprehend the archival in the best way possible. The article initiates an in-depth debate among designers, theorists and historians in architecture. The results and implications of utilising software and media technology are apparent. However, to comprehend the significance and purpose of novel digital technologies applied in architecture requires reflection on the past revolutions in the media as well as the architectural design modes. Prior to the establishment of digital media, the media in architecture included papers and other instruments of drawing. However, the twenty-first century introduced advancements in technology that was made available to the architects. With introduction of a novel instrument in the field of architecture, a novel perspective towards architecture was established leading to a basic shift and the installation of a novel paradigm. However, the application of the new media by architects raises conservation and archival issues. The major question that arises from the discussion is what differentiates modern architecture from the past one and its relation to devices of design. Week 5 Lepik, A 2010, Small scale, big change: New architectures of social engagement, USA, The Museum of Modern Art. With the advancement in technology besides the shifts prompted by globalisation, the role of architects is changing. Architects are instigating and establishing constructive solutions to address to the drastic changes of living conditions across the world. Lepik (2010) presents under-construction and recently built works in selected communities across the world by eleven architects. The eleven architects have initiated projects that disclose a post-utopian place specifically with their architectural design surfacing from close association with prospective users. The projects include infrastructural interventions, housing, parks and schools. According to Lepik (2010), these projects disclose an exciting shift in the permanent discussion amid society and architecture. More so, the projects provide an extended description of sustainability that surpasses the experimentation with novel technologies and materials to include bigger concepts of economic and social sustainability. In this regard, Lepik (2010) assesses the evolving principles of responsibility and involvement in architecture besides the manner through which architects can address the political, social and economic problems facing communities across the world. According to Lepik (2010), the past decade has seen a developing number of architects taking a fresh look at the economics of building for the underprivileged. The author cites Elemental, an architecture firm, that redefines the perception of such work from being a charity or pro bono to being a profitable business. The fact that the architects decided to build half of each house and living the other half to be completed by the occupants, helped in cultivating social cohesion. A new perspective to building according to the architect implies challenging the conventional top-down planning process. The book provides a different picture and role of architecture in society. It depicts architecture as a field that has attained social relevance and a movement that is directed by a vision to establish a better society. In addition, the book demonstrates that architecture is bound up with finance, social justice, ethics, politics and technology besides the desire to enhance the human condition. The book highlights the importance of architecture that is fully informed by its place and community. The architects should reconsider their responsibilities and roles in the twenty-first century. While designers should seek for architecture of its time, they should ensure that the practices and activities functions to improve human conditions. The book raises the question about how architecture helps in addressing the political, technological, economic and social issues facing the society. References Baudelaire, C 2010, The painter of modern life, UK, Penguin Adult. Hays, K.M 1984, Critical architecture: Between culture and form, Perspecta, vol.21, pp.14-29. Jameson, F 1991, Postmodern, or, the cultural logic of late capitalism, UK, Duke University Press. Kerckhove, K et al 2004, Devices of Design: Colloquim & Roundtable discussion, Canadian Centre for Architecture, pp. 1-80. Lepik, A 2010, Small scale, big change: New architectures of social engagement, USA, The Museum of Modern Art. Read More