Abstract: received.1 I will seek to explain the significance of these terms?\"myth,\" \"metamorphosis,\" and \"gestalt\"?in light of the fundamental project Einstein was pursuing around 1930: his elusive philosophy of \"the real,\" or what I call his political ontology of form. According to this philosophy, visual art is one of many territories on which we formalize our attitudes?what I call our ontological stances?towards one another and the world at large. The term \"ontology\" still has a vaguely numinous ring these days, so I will point out straight away that Einstein's ontology is strictly concerned with the empirical world, and that in his thought ontological stances are always conceived as historical and political. Which elements of the world humans have at various points in history allowed them to acquire visibility; how within that visibility these elements are translated into formal units and how they are related one to the other and to the viewer?how, in other words, works of art produce definitions of individuality, of collectivity, and of the nonhuman world within which or over against which humans define their own identity: These are the questions Einstein asked himself, and they are questions that implicitly inform, and perhaps always precede, the more straightforwardly political positions we hold.2 The argument of my essay will move from the abstract to the concrete. I will first examine some

Abstract: In his 1927 essay \"Photography/' Siegfried Kracauer argued that the camera's capacity to \"register the spatial imprint of people, conditions, and events from every possible perspective\" led to the eradication of memory, rather than its extension, and it destroyed, rather than enhanced, our consciousness of the real. Kracauer used the word Abklatsch to signify this spatial imprint, connoting both a poor copy and a cast impression taken from an extant model to highlight the indexical nature of the photograph as well as its deficiency in giving us back the world through replication.1 In his diagnosis of photography as a mass medium, he added: \"Artworks are injured by this fate through their reproduction.\" The twin specters of the wounded artwork and the diminished beholder in the wake of an onslaught of photographic images would subsequently haunt the \"Facsimile Debate\" published in the Hamburg art journal Der Kreis in 1929. The contribution provided by Erwin Panofsky, for example, pulled back from the metaphor of suffering central to Kracauer's verdict. Panofsky claimed that reproductions conformed to their own aesthetic criteria irreducible to those in operation for the artworks they registered and that they could even have a salutary effect on the acumen of those confronted with the art of the

Abstract: Le present article1 a pour objet de rendre compte, a travers differentes sources ethnographiques, de I'ancienne societe des Ties Fidji orientales et des commentaires qu'elles susciterent, de ce qui est communement etudie en ethnologie sous le vocable d'organisations et de classifications dualistes.2 A cet egard, il est remarquable que la notion anthropologique de \"dualisme,\" si elle ne nait pas de I'analyse de la culture fidjienne, apparaisse concomitamment a la description et a I'analyse ethnographique de ces Ties sous la plume rigoureuse de A. M. Hocart. Le grand anthropologue ne repetait-il pas d'ailleurs a satiete le proverbe fidjien comme quoi: \"A Fidji, tout va par deux ou les requins attaquent\" (Hocart 1952:57; 1978:232). Cette affirmation peut etre tenue, a bon droit, comme le paradigme de I'analyse \"hocartienne\" des institutions et classifications fidjiennes traditionnelles. Celles-ci, formes archaTques d'une modalite universelle de representation et d'ordonnancement du monde, s'agengaient selon un vaste complexe dualiste, \"essence meme de I'Etat et du rituel aux Fidji\" (Hocart 1978:232). En ce sens, pour Hocart, une relation de complementarite existait entre les deux groupes se faisant face durant le rituel. Chaque partie en scene etait porteuse d'un \"referent\" antithetique a celui de son vis-a-vis. Par-dela I'apparente irreductibilite de ces principes represented, leur association ceremonielle etait la condition imperative afin que naisse le life giving, la \"source de vie,\" octroyee a I'ensemble de la societe par le \"sacrement\" de ses contraires (Hocart 1978:ch.XII et passim).3 Malgre la remarquable systematisation par Hocart de I'agencement duel du rituel et du symbolisme qu'il vehiculait a Fidji, un pessimisme demeurait quant a ses propres investigations. En conclusion de Tune de ses nombreuses syntheses sur le proces de centralisation du rituel a Fidji, ne declarait-il pas: \"Nous ne possedons malheureusement pas assez de connaissances au sujet de la chefferie pour comprendre cet indubitable dualisme\" (Hocart 1978:231)? Deja, avant Hocart, le prisme dualiste fut souvent mis a contribution pour etayer I'analyse des societes non occidentales. Depuis ses travaux, un simple survol bibliographique de la question permet de constater combien il n'a cesse d'etre operatoire.4

Abstract: First come the illustrations, an array of spectacular examples, and only at their close appears theory, equally spectacular, yet increasingly abstract and therefore, as its author bemoans, less \"entertaining.\" The closing sentences of the first part of Gottfried Semper's 1856 lecture on adornment offer a glimpse into the twofold structure of the architect's enterprise?an edifice that, on the one hand, is abstract and mathematical in its theoretical foundations, and on the other, highly ornate and elaborate in its symbolic and sociohistorical associations. The methodological shift from demonstration to theorization that marks the center of

Abstract: Max Ernst arrived in New York on July 14, 1941, one of the many European artists seeking asylum in America during World War II.1 Visual documentation of this artistic exodus survives in several group photographs such as the group portrait taken at Peggy Guggenheim's New York home in 1941 (fig. 1). Ernst sits farthest left in the center row, his son Jimmy and Guggenheim behind him. Such group photos support the image of 1940s New York as an artistic melting pot in which oppositional strands of European modernism merge and are then transformed by young American artists into Abstract Expressionism. The melting pot myth elides the very real dislocation and alienation of these artists; a more suitable metaphor might be Ernst's definition of Surrealist collage as \"the fortuitous encounter upon a non-suitable plane of mutually distant realities.\"2 This definition characterizes the Guggenheim photo in which artists representing antithetical movements sit side by side to form a community based on circumstance rather than affinity. If, as their fellow refugee anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss later wrote, \"mythical thought always progresses from the awareness of oppositions toward their resolution,\" this photograph clearly partakes in historical myth making.3 Besides the forced juxtaposition of the European artists, the partial inclusion of Ernst's kachina doll at the far right indexes the cultural alienation, geographic dislocation, and mythic potential of the image. Ernst and his Surrealist colleagues shared a fascination with myth, and its centrality to their thought expanded noticeably during their years of exile in America. In this article I explore the myth-making strategies of Ernst as he struggled to adapt to a new environment and establish himself in America. Marshaling his impressive knowledge of psychoanalysis and contemporary anthropology and cultivating an avid interest in Native American art and culture, Ernst, upon his arrival in America, adopted the persona of a Native American shaman.4 As he developed this role, it characterized not only his public face, but also his work and life in his new surroundings. During the five years Ernst lived in New York City, he visited the American Southwest in 1941 with Peggy Guggenheim and again in the summer of 1943 with American painter Dorothea Tanning.5 In contradiction to

Abstract: Nearly eighty years ago, Alfonso Caso discovered a hidden world, concealed beneath the once-lavish palaces of Monte Alban?the great mountain-city of the Zapotecs, which flourished from 200 b.c. to a.d. 800 in the Central Valleys of Oaxaca, Mexico (Caso 1932, 1938). What Caso brought to light were the remains of a painted world, where the living shared a space with their forebears: deeply excavated tombs, sculpted within the entrails of the earth and entirely covered with mural paintings, which could be accessed from a central room inside the palace. Archaeological, art historical, and ethnographic evidence suggests that these tombs were visited many times on prescribed ritual occasions, but their painted spaces remained hidden and enclosed in an alternative world of the dead, tinted in varying shades of red (Miller 1995; Urcid 2008; Magaloni and Falcon 2008).

Abstract: On several occasions, Michel de Certeau has put forward a structural analogy between believing and seeing.1 Both the act of believing as well as the act of seeing, he claims, are extremely complex stratified practices, expressions, and outcomes of highly articulated life forms. They are a mix of giving and taking, an asymmetrical dynamic exchange of assets and debits wherein a subject takes shape and adopts a position in the world. The difference is that in the case of believing, the relationship between subject and object is deeply affected by time and is necessarily set within an external social temporalization. This eventually makes it a temporal practice and, I would say, an alienated practice of difference. In the case of seeing, de Certeau claims, the temporalization relates to a register of expectations and anticipations as much as the sensorial ways of achieving visual perception. This disparity will bring us to the debate on issues of beholding as made visible by postwar neo-avant-garde artists, and more specifically Yves Klein. De Certeau alludes to the notion of Urglaube or Urdoxa, taken from Husserl's Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology which is central in Merleau Ponty's unfinished The Visible and the Invisible.2 It regards an original belief in the perceptual presence of the world, the belief that the real experience of living in the world bodily is, as Merleau-Ponty writes, \"older than any opinion/' An intuition like this is the genetic moment preceding every thematization of the world as object of thought and knowledge: It is belief in and not knowledge about this world. It is, in fact, immanent and embodied in every act of perception, as performed by the simple and natural man as well as by the philosopher and phenomenologist (or, in reference to the artworld, by the amateur beholder as well as by the critic). Not by chance is such natural evidence of the world nowadays assumed by neurophenomenology with regard to a naturalization of intentionality and logical intersubjectivity founded on embodied simulation. Whereas for de Certeau belief in seeing involves a social and pragmatic contextual dimension (perhaps?I would take the liberty to suggest?it even involves an institutional one in the case of the artworld), this dimension is completely lacking in the sensorial belief in the evidence of the lifeworld, of the Lebenswelt and its bodily, empathetic, and intersubjective foundation. I would like to dwell precisely on this difference between believing and seeing and, more particularly, on this temporalization of the space of the appearance of the Other in general, whether this be world or event, thing, artifact, artwork, or institution. To interrogate the role played by time in practices of believing as opposed to those of seeing, as de Certeau invites us to do, means interrogating the destiny and status of the place, or local support, and material of the aesthetic and sensible manifestation of the Other. Does it have just a function or is it a real substance? What matter is such

Abstract: The quatrefoil, a four-lobed flower-shaped symbol, is ubiquitous in Mesoamerican iconography and traces its roots back to the Preclassic period. This consideration of quatrefoils concentrates on evidence from the Preclassic; the sheer quantity of quatrefoil representations throughout Mesoamerica precludes a detailed discussion of this motif in later periods. Nonetheless, this survey integrates the symbolic aspects, formal design, and archaeological contexts of Preclassic quatrefoils within a continuum of quatrefoil iconography that persisted into the Postclassic. It focuses on the quatrefoil as a symbol imbued with political and cosmological associations that played a significant role in Preclassic elite communication spheres and which was manipulated and reconfigured to suit each site's individual circumstances and agendas. While the antecedents for many of the symbolic associations of quatrefoils can be traced to the Early Preclassic, it appears that it was not until the Middle Preclassic that these concepts coalesced into the symbol of the quatrefoil, which could be expressed as curvilinear or rectilinear, complete or partial, horizontal or vertical, of clay or stone, as a freestanding monument, architectural feature, petroglyph, or portable vessel. The fact that different Preclassic sites emphasized varying thematic aspects of the quatrefoil, modified its shape, or implemented diverse materials in its representation is not surprising. While its invocation was evidence of participation in broadly shared communication spheres, each site took advantage of the inherent fluidity of the form, manipulated it to serve a unique historical situation, and tailored it to best suit their own ideological agenda. Emphasis is paid in this study to the diversity

Abstract: Surrounded by a world full of wonder and forces?whose laws he is aware of and strives to resolve, yet never unravels, laws that thrust towards him as individual fragmentary harmonies and sustain his feelings in a continuous state of unfulfilled excitation?man conjures up the perfection that eludes him through play and builds for himself a miniature world in which the cosmic laws appear in their most narrow and compact form, yet complete in themselves, and in this respect perfect. And it is through such play that man fulfills his cosmogonic instinct. ?Gottfried Semper, ''Prolegomena" to Style*