فصلنامه کیمیای هنر
پیاپی 26 (بهار 1397)

GroundedThe present article deals with one of Kant’s most significant pre-Critical text, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime (1764), from the viewpoint of Kant’s methodology and conceptual means in dealing with the most important subjects of aesthetics in eighteenth-century, the beautiful and the sublime. Our main purpose is to demonstrate that albeit being inspired by his predecessors and contemporaries both in Britain and Germany in matters of taste (also our main presumption), Kant adopted a genuine approach in Observations. Through an in-depth analysis of the text we have endeavoured to show that the reasons for this originality are firstly, Kant’s specific observational, empirical method combined with his trying to find a universal principle for ethics, and secondly, Kant’s persistent concerns about ethics, anthropology and pedagogy presented by a taxonomic structure – issues present in the pre-Critical period and central to Kant’s philosophy all through the critical period. Our analysis is based on a close reading of the text, revealing its formal structure, leading to the conclusion that Observations is for the most part a taxonomically structured text on anthropology and ethics than aesthetics. Otherwise put, through aesthetics Kant is dealing with central issues in ethics and anthropology, i.e. highest principle of morality, the sexes, human temperaments and the ends of nature. We hope to succeeded in shedding a light on another aspect of the transcendental Kant: the empirical one

Through the confrontation between the two traditions of phenomenology and structuralism in the film critique, this study adopts Emanuel Levinas’ ideas to investigate the realization of ‘the Saying’ in Abbas Kiarostami’s cinema. Having examined Levinas’ approach to the concepts of Otherness and language, this study also demonstrates the ways through which the Cinematic Phenomenology seeks the notion of the irreducibility of the Individual to the Total through certain attitudes towards the film form and insistence on realism that also happens to be the main feature of Levinas’ philosophy. Such irreducibility, however, includes the irreducibility of the very subject too, in terms of its being appeared to be the Other’s Other. In the meantime, the struggle for realism in the phenomenological tradition of film has opened up the potentiality for the subject to be in crisis. As this study shows, the notion of ‘the Said’ has overwhelmed ‘the Saying’ in the first stage of Kiarostami’s carrier as a filmmaker while the latter Kiarostami reveals such strong elements
of ‘the Saying’ that the subject now may let the Other interpret independently and loom out as a collocutor to the degree that the existence of such subject faces crisis. This crisis in the latest stage of the Kiarostami Cinema could be read as the crisis of the Real as confused with the Unreal

This article is concerned with the relation between dialogism and art criticism. Dialogism is a notion introduced by Mikhail Bakhtin based on his analysis on the concept of polyphony which is borrowed from music. In this article, the importance of dialogism is discussed in philosophical anthropology, culture, and contemporary art criticism. Moreover, the notion of dialogism is studied in relation to Bakhtin’s latest concepts of answerability and unfinalizability. Criticism is a dialogue between two semiological systems, for instance, between language and language or language and a visual semiological system. Therefore, dialogism is located within any criticism. This article discusses that the most important aspects of dialogic quality of the contemporary art criticism are the increased interactive role of the audience, the importance of the indeterminacy of meaning, and its receptiveness of other disciplines. Eventually, the development of a dialogic criticism among various artistic discourses which leads to the production of an artistic text has been discussed in this research.
The approach of this work is a combination of approaches which an artistic research is concerned with, such as art, philosophy, linguistics, sociology, and cultural studies

This study is in fact an attempt made to come to an understanding and achieve a theory of text interpretation (that of the Visual Arts, here) from a deconstructive perspective. On the basis of Derrida’s work, one can sum up his theory with regard to the analysis of the visual work in three main areas: the context, background, or material of the work, signs of the work that pursue the signification process in form of traces, and, eventually, Parergon that defines the limits of the work and its scope and, more generally, that of the art and non-art. From a deconstructive perspective, each of the three aforesaid concepts does in fact render the interpretation of the work undecidable in the process of signification. This study first delves into the concept of Parergon, which is originally introduced in Kant’s third Critique, and then applies Derrida’s interpretation and analysis of it to its own selected works of art. Thus, with regard to the concept of Parergon, art comes to intake new meanings and also gain the possibility of expanding into other fields and areas. In the practical criticism conducted by this study, three of the paintings created by Alireza Espahbod, one by Ismail Shishehgaran, and one by Babak Golkar are put to analysis. The works of Espahbod and Shishehgaran are delved into on the basis of the concept of Parergon and with the centrality of text, while this is done to Golkar’s work with the centrality of the author. The analysis of these case works can be considered as an attempt to give an account of the status of Iran’s contemporary art by seeking its own aesthetic paradigm.

In this article, the images of BĀYSONGORĪ ŠĀH-NĀMA (833 Ah) are studied based on the two principal components of time and place. By studying the method of representation and manifestation of these two inseparable and intertwined phenomena in these images, we try to open a way into their world; namely, the world that emerges in the consciousness and perception of the artist, and consequently the viewer, not the universe in itself. Therefore, we’ve chosen the phenomenological approach which is based on the functions of consciousness. This approach will help us unravel how the artist’s consciousness and perceptual mechanism affect his creation as he encounters the phenomena of time and place. The coexistence of different times in one picture, the simultaneity of the representation of inside and outside, and a lack of one-point perspective are the main features related to time and place that are studied in this article. Eventually we’ll see that the nature of time and place in these pictures are not always heavenly, but in fact they are very familiar and worldly, and their source is entirely in nature and the truth of the artist’s consciousness

The history of Zoroastrianism is not rich in terms of visual documentation and one of the reasons declared is their opposition to the iconolatry. In their view, making image is considered to be a disregard toward religious affairs, as well as an attempt to a bad creation; the result of image making would be to provide the evil forces a place to enter, hence it is considered a sin. On the one hand, Sasanian who were biased Zoroastrians have depicted the images
of their sacred gods on the rock reliefs though they were stubborn opponents to standing images and sculptures. That’s why some scholars regard them as iconoclast and believe that iconoclasm movements in Christianity and Islam are inspired by them. On the other hand, some have said that Sasanian follow aniconism movement in the creation of their god images. But according to pictorial and literary works of this era it seems that they had no imagination in imaging their gods