<abstract><title style='display:none'>Summary</title>The article is devoted to the analysis of chosen examples of counterfactual narratives which diverge from the typical alternative accounts of history written in the “what if” mode. It focuses on counterfactual representations of space flight and moon landing as crucial historical events of the 20th century. The point of departure for the text is provided by the New Historicist understanding of historical fact and historical event, with particular attention paid to Hayden White’s concept of metahistory. However, to identify the possible functions of the new counterfactuals, I go beyond the binary of past and present which lies at the core of White’s concept. To this end, I employ Jacques Derrida’s concept of artifactuality, which describes the process of the production of facts about current events. I apply this concept to analyse two examples of counterfactual films about space flight: the comedy <italic>Moonwalkers</italic> (dir. Alain Bardou-Jacquet, 2015) and a mockumentary <italic>First on the Moon</italic> (dir. Aleksey Fedorchenko, 2005). In these examples, I identify strategies of deconstruction of fact-making which Derrida recommended in his essay. In the concluding part, I introduce the third example of counterfactual narrative, which not so much deconstructs factuality but, rather, counteracts the process of cultural oblivion. In <italic>Hidden Figures</italic> (2016), Margo Lee Shetterly reconstructed the role that African-American women played in the space race, introducing them into the official historical narrative. In this case, I also compare the book with its cinematic rendition to argue that counterfactuals introduce a new model of thinking of collective relationship with the past.</abstract>

Counterfactual Histories of Moon Landing

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Summary</title>The process of questioning the authority of academic history—in the form in which it emerged at the turn of the 19th century—began in the 1970s, when Hayden White pointed out the rhetorical dimension of historical discourse. His British colleague Alun Munslow went a step further and argued that the ontological statuses of the past and history are so different that historical discourse cannot by any means be treated as representation of the past. As we have no access to that which happened, both historians and artists can only present the past in accordance with their views and opinions, the available rhetorical conventions, and means of expression.The article revisits two examples of experimental history which Munslow mentioned in his <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="j_mik-2018-0001_ref_009_w2aab3b7b1b1b6b1ab1ab9Aa"><italic>The Future of History</italic> (2010)</xref>: Robert A. Rosenstone’s <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="j_mik-2018-0001_ref_012_w2aab3b7b1b1b6b1ab1ac12Aa"><italic>Mirror in the Shrine</italic> (1988)</xref> and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="j_mik-2018-0001_ref_004_w2aab3b7b1b1b6b1ab1ab4Aa"><italic>In 1926</italic> (1997)</xref>. It allows reassessing their literary strategies in the context of a new wave of works written by historians and novelists who go beyond the fictional/factual dichotomy. The article focuses on Polish counterfactual writers of the last two decades, such as Wojciech Orliński, Jacek Dukaj, and Aleksander Głowacki. Their novels corroborate the main argument of the article about a turn which has been taking place in recent experimental historying: the loss of previous interest in formal innovations influenced by modernist avant-garde fiction. Instead, it concentrates on demonstrating the contingency of history to strategically extend the unknowability of the future or the past(s) and, as a result, change historying into speculative thinking.</abstract>

The History of European Photography, Volume III. 1970–2000

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Summary</title>
Persian and Arabo-Persian texts frequently referred to Silla as a highlighted toponym. Obviously, descriptions used for Silla in Persian texts cannot be comparable with other toponyms. Ajayeb-al-Makhlughat is the name of a manuscript which deals with marvellous lands, islands, seas, animals, birds, people or customs etc. in Persian literature. Qazvini’s versions have no designs/paintings on toponyms. <italic>Haji Mohammad Nasir Khansari</italic> published the lithographical version of the manuscript in Tehran in 1283 Hegira (1904 AD) for the first time. His copyist and graphic designer was <italic>Abas-Ali Tafreshi</italic>. He, in the lithographical version, described the lands and islands of South and Southeast Asia (India to Silla) along with paintings. Most of the people of those islands appeared naked, were uncivilized and had a strange lifestyle. As an exceptional case, Silla is described very positively, civilized, attractive and charming. This paper focuses on the significant difference between Silla and the others, based on the paintings. Nevertheless, this painting is very different from the unpublished painting from <italic>Kush-nama</italic>, the most important book on Iran’s connection with Silla. The first painting of the people of Silla dates back to a unique manuscript of this book copied by <italic>Muhammad ibn Saeed ibn Abdullah</italic>. Herat School of Art, by extending towards Shiraz School, has formed the structure of this unique painting from the eighth century AH. However, the painting of the Kush-nama version is not very far from the time of writing of the original text; but the book Ajayeb-al-Makhlughat (AJ) is dedicated to 865 AH and the painting to 1904 AD. At this time, Western art (Europe) had a great impact on Iran.
</abstract>

Portrait of the People of Silla According to the Persian Texts

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Summary</title>When the definition of cultural heritage in architecture is questioned regarding the perception of society, the results demonstrate that people identify cultural heritage as both material and spiritual achievements in the past and as a reflection of identity associated with historical monuments. Furthermore, the distinction between monument and cultural heritage does not have a well-distinguished definition for society in most cases. Therefore, the perception of people in the appraisal of cultural heritage consistently obscures the protection process, especially regarding the heritage of the Modern Movement era in architecture which started to be seen in the 20th century. While the experts acknowledge Modern Movement artefacts as cultural heritage, in most cases the perception of non-experts differs. Therefore, its architectural merit is not appreciated by society in the way it deserves, neither as an artefact nor as cultural heritage. By both literature review and performed research, this paper aims to analyse the reasons which create deprecation regarding the evaluation of Modern Movement heritage. Furthermore, it tries to suggest a series of actions which can be taken for achieving the protection of Modern Movement heritage.</abstract>

Perception of the Modern Movement in Architecture as Cultural Heritage

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Summary</title>The article explores how a number of artists have employed the counter/actual as a form of past-talk in a conscious intervention into socio-political and ethical issues arising from the Israeli occupation of Palestine. I argue that such uses of the counter/actual more effectively foreground the injustices arising from the occupation while not only problematising the process of representation but also deconstructing the ways in which histories are intimately intertwined with relations of power and practises of legitimisation; they do not simply reproduce “the (f)actual” but work to repossess the past from the dominance of hegemonic interests.</abstract>

The Counter/Actual: Art and Strategies of Anti-Colonial Resistance

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Summary</title>
Wabi Sabi is a Japanese concept that, despite lacking a universal definition, comprises three principles: nothing is perfect, nothing is finished and nothing lasts forever.1 While in 2018, an adapted version of Wabi Sabi started to become trendier in the Western world2, this Westernized concept accidentally starts to have parallels with the way in which contemporary circus artists experience their embodiment. The research showed that contemporary circus artists are constantly trying to focus more on what a body can do and how it can do instead of body appearance, they are accepting that bodies are not perfect and share an understanding of the importance of embracing this imperfection. Moreover, contemporary circus artists are having in mind constant bodily changes and reflecting it correspondingly by developing positive relationships with their bodies. This article will be a sociological outlook of interconnections among the already existing beliefs in the contemporary circus field and the new trend of Westernized Wabi Sabi ideas.
</abstract>

Perfecting the Imperfect: Parallels Between the Contemporary Circus Artist’s Embodiment and the Westernized Wabi Sabi Concept

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Summary</title>
The article reveals the features of the graphic language of coded information by identifying, systematizing, and combining QR-codes and AR-codes at the present stage of graphic design development. The analysis of coded information in different types of graphic design is presented: advertising, environmental, motion, print, packaging, set prop, web, mobile app, art, and illustration graphic design. The role of a graphic designer in the development of digital codes of various types for various fields of application is described. It is proved that the coded information is a trigger between the online and offline worlds. The article also reveals the importance of using coded information for the formation, development, and improvement of the brand.
</abstract>

Digital Code as an Object Graphic Design for Dissemination and Promotion of Brand

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Summary</title>
The Romanian Workers’ Party – the political party that led Romania from 1947 until 1965 – need for legitimisation led to the rewriting of history in a way that the history of Romania was presented as a linear progression finally leading to communism. In art history, art also became a linear phenomenon, progressively advancing towards Socialist Realism.
The tactics of constructing the new narrative in art history during the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s can be read as a form of the social history of art. Although the methodology could have led to remarkable results, ethical boundaries were violated: only some historical episodes and moments from artists’ biographies were selected.
Within this context, this study investigates whether papers and monographs about Romanian painters active in the second half of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century can be read as a form of social history of art.
</abstract>

Romanian Art History During the 1950s as a Form of Social History of Art

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Summary</title>
Michael Fried’s 1967 essay “Art and Objecthood” is one of the most well-known and influential pieces of art criticism ever written, and continues to generate novel interpretations. Its overtly theological cast, however, has never been the subject of close study. This article focuses on Fried’s decision to use a lengthy quotation from Perry Miller’s biography of the theologian Jonathan Edwards as his epigram, and contends that Fried’s essay is informed in significant ways by Edwards’ notions of history and grace, and characterized by wordings that reveal an active engagement with Miller’s text. Certainly, the contexts in which Edwards and Fried worked were irreducibly different. Nevertheless, an examination of the ways in which Fried drew on Miller’s text and Edwards’ ideas demonstrates that he was productively influenced by both in composing “Art and Objecthood.”
</abstract>

“Art and Objecthood,” Michael Fried and Jonathan Edwards

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Summary</title>
This article analyses the development of standard designs of primary school buildings in Lithuania during the 1920s and 1930s. This process aimed to create simple and comfortable standard school buildings and provide them to the primary schools operating in the country. The article presents the development of standard designs that took place at that time, explaining the circumstances of their emergence, and comparing the main designs of such buildings developed at that time. To reveal this process as best as possible, the influence of the then Ministry of Education of Lithuania, local former Lithuanian county municipalities, and various architectural specialists in the standardisation of buildings for primary schools and the development of standard designs are presented and analysed. This aims to introduce the readers to the still little-known process that took place in the architecture of Lithuania during the 1920s and 1930s.
</abstract>

The Development of Standard Designs of Primary School Buildings in Lithuania During the 1920s and 1930s

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Summary</title>
This paper constitutes a reflexive and theoretical approach to the study of iconographies from a cultural perspective. Its aim is to depict iconographies as the structural order which makes images representative of the social frameworks from which they stem. By analysing the stable principles which participate in the production of such representativity in any given iconography, and by considering the cultural agents which socially regulate them and make images culturally specific, it is possible to understand the cultural mechanisms by which the social construction of reality is projected onto images. Consequently, this approach favours a conceptualisation of iconographies as cultural systems through which the identity of social frameworks is conveyed thanks to the use of images.
</abstract>

Iconography as System. The Structural Principles of Representation in Visual Culture

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Summary</title>This article is dedicated to the “Baltars” collective porcelain painting workshop (1924–1930), founded in Riga, Latvia by three modernist artists: painters Romans Suta (1896–1944) and Aleksandra Beļcova (1892–1981) and graphic artist Sigismunds Vidbergs (1890–1970).The “Baltars” phenomenon is significant because of the innovations that the artists brought to the landscape of Latvian porcelain manufacturing and its exhibition activities in the 1920s and the early 1930s, both local and in the Baltic Sea region—Lithuania, Estonia, and Sweden. The article investigates “Baltars” foundation and closure, artistic activities of the company, its attempts to enter the international art and trade scene, and its accomplishments. Special attention is paid to the amalgamation of modernisation, nationalism, and state-building manifested in their paintings on porcelain. Due to the present growing interest in porcelain art in Latvia, triggered by numerous exhibitions and publications, discourse on the “Baltars” phenomenon has become topical.</abstract>

Symbiosis of Modernisation and National Identity in the Legacy of the “Baltars” (Baltic Art) Porcelain Painting Workshop, 1924–1930

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Summary</title>In the history of Lithuanian architecture, the period of soviet modernism has made very problematical mark. The architectural and urbanist changes that were made in Lithuanian cities during this period are linked with the beginning and development of modern building practice. Many discussions causes the changes in the city centres that were made from the 1960s. New modern buildings that were built in the historic context changed its individuality and singularity. This article analyses architectural changes that were made from 1960s to1990s in the historic context of Vilnius and Panevėžys centres. The article suggests that during different decades of the soviet modernism period, the new architecture had a different approach to the historic context. To prove this suggestion, the article presents the most distinctive buildings that were built in the historic context of the selected city centres.</abstract>

Soviet Modernism in the Historic Context. The Cases of Vilnius and Panevėžys City Centers

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Summary</title>
Walter Benjamin famously argued that the mass public of the twentieth century would necessarily correlate with a newly politicized art. But the world has changed considerably since Benjamin’s article was written, as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer already were assessing less than a decade later. It is the purpose of this article to examine how the aesthetics of the Frankfurt school, though frequently still invoked, have lost some of their immediate relevance. The anti-establishment phase of the 60s, compounded by a pronounced taste for irony, rendered aura and exhibition outmoded values, while on the other hand, more recently, price escalation in the art market and digitization have made certain of the Frankfurt school arguments more pertinent than ever. Taking as examples Goldsworthy and Kentridge, this essay argues that a deliberate loosening of the artist’s control over both medium and reception displaces the warmed-over religious responses endorsed by Benjamin, positing instead increased intellectual agency on the part of viewers, whose identity as a mass public has become newly complicated.
</abstract>

Art, Aura, and Admiration in the Age of Digital Reproduction

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Summary</title>
The artist Albert Rappaport was born in Anykščiai in 1898. In 1911, the family emigrated to New York. Rappaport became an American citizen in 1925 and began to travel widely. He studied fine art in New York, Paris, Dresden and Munich. He visited South America, Africa and traveled extensively through Europe (1925–1927, 1933, 1937–1939), returning to the United States now and again. The artist participated in several dozen exhibitions. He showed his work in Paris, Rome, Florence, Barcelona, Palma de Mallorca, Copenhagen, Mexico City, Havana, New York, Calgary and Montreal, in addition to his solo exhibitions in 1937 in Warsaw and Vilnius, and in Kaunas, Riga and Tallinn in 1938. After Rappaport’s death, in March 17, 1969 in Montreal, his collection of artworks disappeared and has thus far not been found. To date, two of his painted portraits are known to exist – one belongs to the private collection of Jonathan C. Rappaport, another is on display at the Jewish Public Library in Montreal.
</abstract>

In Search of Missing Collection: The Case of Artist Albert Rappaport

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Summary</title>For the purpose of my examination of how literature and art take part in the circulation of significations and representations in the construction of social reality, I concentrate on a specific feature that links and unites the work of four contemporary European authors—the inflation of death and violence, or the “overflow of corpses” in their novels, plays, and performances. My first example will be Bosnian-Croatian theatre director Oliver Frljić, his disturbing, shocking performances in which he uses his own personal, wartime, and political traumas to ask universal questions about the boundaries of artistic and social freedom, individual and collective responsibility, tolerance and stereotypes. As the second and third example I will take plays by two (no longer) dramatic writers, Anja Hilling and Simona Semenič—two outstanding representatives of German and Slovene (no longer) dramatic theatre and drama, exploring in their texts a tension between repetition and representation in which the first mechanism undermines and challenges the second and produces a specific poetic or aesthetic device—an effect of <italic>ostranenie</italic> or defamiliarisation (Shklovsky). The third example will consist of the novels by Winfried Georg Sebald, in which the German author uses the device of his wanderings between signs, punctuated by black and white photographs, producing a specific emblematic of a mutation of space and time, in which history and geography cross-fertilise, tracing out paths and weaving networks. Besides examining the contestation of subject positions, I concentrate on the dialectics of art and society, where fluid, uncontainable subjects are constantly pushing the contours. Revising the critical consensus that contemporary art primarily engages with the real, the essay describes how theatre and fiction today navigate the complexities of the discourse as well as social realities; how the discussed artists all share the belief that creative expression must also be destruction. Art has to go beyond what we are and what we can identify through understanding. Thus, art negotiates, inflects discursive circulation of stories, idioms, controversies, testimonies, and pieces of (mis)information in the face of global uncertainties.</abstract>

Death and Violence in Contemporary Theatre, Drama, and Novel (Oliver Frljić, Anja Hilling, Simona Semenič, and G. W. Sebald)

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Art History & Criticism

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Vytautas Magnus University’s scholarly journal “Art History &amp; Criticism” is a publication in Humanities, the branch of Art History and Criticism, published since 2005. It is...

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Vytautas Magnus University’s scholarly journal “Art History &amp; Criticism” is a publication in Humanities, the branch of Art History and...