In his essay “Walking in the City,” Michel de Certeau describes the interplay between the proper names of streets and the materiality of pedestrians’ movements through them. The very movement of pedestrians, de Certeau argues, recodes those streets’ meanings and grants them a social life that outlives and reconfigures what they were originally named for: “[T]hese names make […]
Spaces of Resistance
In “Happy Objects,” Sara Ahmed argues that happiness is affective, meaning that “to be happy is to be affected by something” (29). Ahmed shifts happiness from a body-centric and body generated response, to a response to a contingent proximity between yourself and objects around you (31). By stressing that happiness is produced by being “directed […]
Sofia Presentation Class Notes
Presentation Notes -Toward a Geography of Art CH 7,8,9 Intro: In this books Kaufmann is describing Kubler’s writings and how he attempted to view art history in terms of analysis and inserts his beliefs about physical geography in relation to “materials, centers, and traditions” (222). This method of making art history a process of examining […]
The Periphery
I’m intrigued by Kauffman’s discussion of the center, the periphery, and their relationship in both the political sense and the artistic sense. The first distinction between these two realms is that capital cities are very rarely the cultural centers of the areas he deals with – something that is true even today (New York, Lahore, St Petersburg […]