Download The history of sociological art might also be traced through the

5 marks:
1. History of art
The history of art is the history of any activity or product made by humans in a visual form
for aesthetical or communicative purposes, expressing ideas, emotions or, in general, a worldview. Over
time visual art has been classified in diverse ways, from the medieval distinction between liberal
arts and mechanical arts, to the modern distinction between fine arts and applied arts, or to the many
contemporary definitions, which define art as a manifestation of human creativity. The subsequent expansion of
the list of principal arts in the 20th century reached to
nine: architecture, dance, sculpture, music, painting, poetry(described broadly as a form of literature with
aesthetic purpose or function, which also includes the distinct genres
of theatre and narrative),film, photography and comics. At the conceptual overlap of terms between plastic
arts and visual arts were added design and graphic arts. In addition to the old forms of artistic expression such
as fashion andgastronomy, new modes of expression are being considered as arts such as video, computer
art, performance, advertising, animation, television and videogames.
The history of art is a multidisciplinary science, seeking an objective examination of art throughout time,
classifying cultures, establishing periodizations and observing the distinctive and influential characteristics of
art.[1] The study of the history of art was initially developed in the Renaissance, with its limited scope being the
artistic production of western civilization. However, as time has passed, it has imposed a broader view of
artistic history, seeking a comprehensive overview of all the civilizations and analysis of their artistic production
in terms of their own cultural values (cultural relativism), and not justwestern art history.
Today, art enjoys a wide network of study, dissemination and preservation of all the artistic legacy of mankind
throughout history. The 20th century has seen the proliferation of institutions, foundations, art
museums and galleries, in both the public and private sectors, dedicated to the analysis and cataloging
of works of art as well as exhibitions aimed at a mainstream audience. The rise of media has been crucial in
improving the study and dissemination of art. International events and exhibitions like theWhitney Biennial and
biennales of Venice and São Paulo or the Documenta of Kassel have helped the development of new styles
and trends. Prizes such as the Turner of the Tate Gallery, the Wolf Prize in Arts, the Pritzker Prize of
architecture, the Pulitzer of photography and the Oscar of cinema also promote the best creative work on an
international level. Institutions like UNESCO, with the establishment of the World Heritage Site lists, also help
the conservation of the major monuments of the planet.
2. Dociology of literature
The sociology of literature is a subfield of the sociology of culture. It studies the social production of literature
and its social implications.
Contents

1 Classical sociology

2 Lukács and the theory of the novel
Classical sociology
None of the 'founding fathers' of sociology produced a detailed study of literature, but they did develop ideas
that were subsequently applied to literature by others. Karl Marx's theory ofideology was directed at literature
by Pierre Macherey, Terry Eagleton and Fredric Jameson.Max Weber's theory of modernity as cultural
rationalisation, which he applied to music, was later applied to all the arts, literature included, by Frankfurt
School writers such as Theodor Adorno and Jürgen Habermas. Emile Durkheim's view of sociology as the
study of externally-defined social facts was redirected towards literature by Robert Escarpit. Bourdieu's work is
clearly indebted to Marx, Weber and Durkheim.
Lukács and the theory of the novel
An important first step in the sociology of literature was taken by Georg Lukács's The Theory of the Novel, first
published in German in 1916, in the Zeitschrift fur Aesthetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft. In 1920 it was
republished in book form and this version strongly influenced the Frankfurt School. A second edition, published
in 1962, was similarly influential on French structuralism. The Theory of the Novel argued that, whilst the
classical epic poem had given form to a totality of life pregiven in reality by the social integration of classical
civilisation, the modern novel had become 'the epic of an age in which the extensive totality of life is no longer
directly given'.[1]The novel form is therefore organised around the problematic hero in pursuit of problematic
values within a problematic world.
Lukács's second distinctive contribution to the sociology of literature was The Historical Novel, written in
German but first published in Russian in 1937, which appeared in English translation in 1962. Here, Lukács
argued that the early 19th century historical novel's central achievement was to represent realistically the
differences between pre-capitalist past and capitalist present. This was not a matter of individual talent, but of
collective historical experience, because the French Revolution and the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars had
made history for the first time a mass experience.[2] He went on to argue that the success of the 1848
revolutions led to the decline of the historical novel into 'decorative monumentalization' and the 'making private
of history'.[3] The key figures in the historical novel were thus those of the early 19th century, especially Sir
Walter Scott.
3. Contemporary understandings
Over the course of the nineteenth century and well into
the twentieth, the rising tide of nationalism led to an eclipse of interest in world literature, but in the
postwar era, comparative and world literature began to enjoy a resurgence in the United States. As a
nation of immigrants, and with a less well established national tradition than many older countries
possessed, the United States became a thriving site for the study of comparative literature (often
primarily at the graduate level) and of world literature, often taught as a first-year general education
class. The focus remained largely on the Greek and Roman classics and the literatures of the major
modern Western European powers, but a confluence of factors in the late 1980s and early 1990s led
to a greater openness to the wider world. The end of the Cold War, the growing globalization of the
world economy, and new waves of immigration from many parts of the world led to several efforts to
open out the study of world literature. This change is well illustrated by the expansion of The Norton
Anthology of World Masterpieces, whose first edition of 1956 featured only Western European and
North American works, to a new “expanded edition” of 1995 with substantial non-Western
selections, and with the title changed from “masterpieces” to the less exclusive “Literature.” [5] The
major survey anthologies today, including those published by Longman and by Bedford in addition
to Norton, all showcase several hundred authors from dozens of countries.
The explosive growth in the range of cultures studied under the rubric of world literature has inspired a variety of
theoretical attempts to define and delimit the field and to propose effective modes of research and teaching. In his
2003 book What Is World Literature? David Damrosch argued for world literature as less a vast canon of works and
more a matter of circulation and reception, and he proposed that works that thrive as world literature are ones that
work well and even gain in various ways in translation. Whereas Damrosch’s approach remains tied to the close
reading of individual works, a very different view was taken by the Stanford critic Franco Moretti in a pair of articles
offering “Conjectures on World Literature.”[6] Moretti argued that the scale of world literature far exceeds what can be
grasped by traditional methods of close reading, and he advocated instead a mode of “distant reading” that would
look at large-scale patterns as discerned from publication records and national literary histories, enabling one to trace
the global sweep of forms such as the novel or film.
Moretti’s approach combined elements of evolutionary theory with the world-systems analysis pioneered
by Immanuel Wallerstein, an approach further discussed since then by Emily Apter in her influential book The
Translation Zone.[7] Related to their world-systems approach is the major work of French critic Pascale Casanova, La
République mondiale des lettres (1999).[8] Drawing on the theories of cultural production developed by the sociologist
Pierre Bourdieu, Casanova explores the ways in which the works of peripheral writers must circulate into metropolitan
centers in order to achieve recognition as works of world literature. Both Moretti and Casanova emphasize the
inequalities of the global literary field, which Moretti describes as “one, but unequal.”
The field of world literature continues to generate debate, with critics such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak arguing that
too often the study of world literature in translation smooths out both the linguistic richness of the original and the
political force a work can have in its original context. [9]Other scholars, on the contrary, emphasize that world literature
can and should be studied with close attention to original languages and contexts, even as works take on new
dimensions and new meanings abroad. Once a primarily European and American concern, world literature is
now actively studied and discussed in many parts of the world. World literature series are now being
published in China and in Estonia, and a new Institute for World Literature, offering month-long summer
sessions on theory and pedagogy, had its inaugural session at Peking University in 2011, with its next
sessions at Istanbul Bilgi University in 2012 and at Harvard University in 2013. Since the middle of the
first decade of the new century, a steady stream of works has provided materials for the study of the
history of world literature and the current debates. Valuable collections of essays include Manfred
Schmeling,
20 marks:
1. from 1968 to 1974
As early as 1968, art critics Pierre Restany and François Pluchart used the term “sociological art” to refer to
socially engaged and less commercial practices among a diverse set of artists, including body artists Gina
Pane and Michel Journiac, Spanish-born video artist Joan Rabascall, Hervé Fischer, Fred Forest, and JeanPaul Thenot.[1] In the fall of 1973, François Pluchart initiated a debate between Journiac, Pane, Fischer, and
Thenot, which was published as “Ten Questions on Sociological Art” (“Dix questions sur l’art sociologique”) in
the art magazine artTitudes, which he had founded in 1971.
The history of sociological art might also be traced through the independent practices of Fischer, Forest, and
Thenot who would later form the Sociological Art Collective. These practices must themselves be put into
dialogue with broad international artistic tendencies towards social engagement and the social sciences,
evident, for instance, in the work of Stephen Willats and Hans Haacke, exhibitions such as Art into Society,
Society into Art (Institute of Contemporary Art, London, 1974), and the intellectual histories of social art history
and sociology of art.
In the mid-1960s, Forest (born 1933, Algeria) began a series of actions using of audiovisual and
communication technologies to challenge conventional artistic media and activity. [3] Images of many works are
available at Webnetmuseum He projected slides onto his paintings (Tableau Ecran, 1963), initiated community
events in impoverished neighborhoods (Family Portrait, 1967), and used video to engage social spaces ("Mur
d’Arles and Cabine Telephonique", 1967). In the early 1970s, his utilization of the press and video as tools of
social engagement and political provocation expanded. In January 1972, Forest began his "Space Media"
project by placing a blank rectangle in the newspaper Le Monde and inviting readers to fill it in and mail it to
him. For an exhibition entitled “Archeology of the Present” (“Archeologie du present”) at the Galerie Germain,
Paris, in May 1972, Forest took the street where the gallery was located, Rue Guénegaud, as a topic, creating
a video circuit displaying the street in the gallery and the gallery in the windows facing the street and collecting
trash from the street to show in the gallery. Pierre Restany carried out short interviews with passersby for an
episode of “Forum des Arts", aired on May 13, 1973. In June 1973, with the collaboration of the philosopher
Vilem Flusser and sociologist Philippe Butaud, Forest set up a video studio in a community of retirees to launch
a video exchange in the south of France ("Video Troisieme Age", 1973). On the occasion of the XII Bienal de
São Paulo in October 1973, he effectuated a series of events, including a version of Space Media, a
sociological walk, and a procession through the city center with participants holding white placards ("Blancs
evanhit la ville"), all of which were provocations in the face of the established military dictatorship. Always
highly critical of those in power, committed to participatory art, and deeply engaged with new communication
technologies, Forest would continue these pursuits after joining the collective in October 1974.
Hervé Fischer (born 1941, France) was a student of sociology and taught the sociology of communication and
culture at the Sorbonne beginning in the early 1970s. Initially involved with“Support/Surface,” Fischer did a
series of “Essuie-mains” paintings with handprints on cloth rolls as a means of deconstructing the medium of
painting. He also began various campaigns, grouped under the title “Hygiene de l’art,” to eradicate art of
traditional mores and media, and even invited artists to send him their works, which he tore up and displayed in
small plastic bags (“La déchirure des oeuvres d’art”). Around 1974, his projects shifted away from the medium
of painting toward more marginal and popular visual idioms, such as stamps and street signs, and into
performances in the social realm.
Jean-Paul Thenot (born 1943, France) was trained as a psychotherapist, a profession he continued while
producing art. Around 1969, he began creating artworks, beginning with his “Interventions in the Street,” which
consisted of a series of scaled sculptures of everyday objects, such as mousetraps, set up in public space.
Around 1970, he moved away from producing objects into largely textual and conceptual works, such as his
“Constats d’existence,” typed pages of commentary on contemporary artists that were mailed to various figures
in the art world. In 1972, he began conducting interactive surveys about art and perception. In response to the
infamous, state-sponsored “Expo 72” (“Douze ans de l’art contemporain en France”), he carried out a large
survey inviting respondents to select the most representative French artists and then declared the person
whose submitted list was closest to the averaged, final list the honorary curator of a public exhibition opening
that May.
The three artists met at openings and events in the early 1970s and were part of a global trend in artistic
practice toward more conceptual and less skill-based art that was intentionally anti-commercial. In France, the
events of May and June 1968 had irrevocably changed how many artists conceived of their work. While each
artist brought areas of expertise—Forest’s interest in new media, Fischer’s theoretical grounding, and Thenot’s
inquiry-based research—a commitment to engage the public, to oppose traditional and commercially-driven art,
and to affect social change united the three artists.
2. from 1974 to 1980
In the summer of 1974, Journiac organized a series of meetings at his apartment on Île Saint-Louis in Paris to
discuss the initiation of an artist movement engaged with critical and sociological realities. The meetings
brought together artists such as Gina Pane, Bertrand Lavier, Thierry Agullo, Joan Rabscall, Jocelyne Hervé,
Sonso, Hervé Fischer, Jean-Paul Thenot as well as art critics François Pluchart and Bernard Teyssedre.[4] It
was from these meetings that the impulse to form the Sociological Art Collective emerges, and on October 10,
1974, the Sociological Art Collective was officially declared with the publication in newspaper Le Monde of its
first manifesto, signed by Hervé Fischer, Fred Forest, and Jean-Paul Thénot. From this date onwards, these
artists would alternate between practices claiming this lineage and their own personal practices. Concretely
speaking, the collective published a number of texts, including three manifestos; organized and effectuated a
series of projects, including four group exhibitions and large-scale urban interventions; and founded the Ecole
Sociologique Interrogative.
Their activity instantiates an early moment in the history of what would be called in the mid-1990s relational art
or socially-engaged art but also connected with a number of artistic tendencies of the 1970s, such as
conceptual art, performance art, and institutional critique. For example, the Collective’s two-week intervention
in the southern French town of Perpignan in July 1976, entitled "Study and Animation of Perpignan" began with
a study of the conditions and needs of neighborhoods in Perpignan by a thirty-person, interdisciplinary team
and then led to dozens of direct interventions, which included pop-up exhibitions, screenings, interviews,
parties, and a multi-neighborhood photograph swap, all aimed to, as the press release notes, “bring together
different neighborhoods [. . .], which although geographically close remain distant at the level of social
communication.” After setting out four principles—critique, communication, intervention, and pedagogy—the
group proposes sociological art as means to overcome the divide between “a quasi-scientific approach to the
environment and a lived connection established among individuals [. . .] and the studied environment.
This project and related texts indicate three key aspects that broadly characterized sociological art. First,
artistic labor included activities such as organizing, writing, research, and teaching. The expansion of traditional
artistic skills to integrate intellectual and white-collar skills related to the broader transition from an industrial
economy to service and information economy. Second, projects developed in dialogue with specific sites and
their associated audiences. Whether focused on a town or a particular community, sociological art aimed to
increase awareness about social conditions of existence through exchange with sites and humans. Third,
sociological art was usually time-based and ephemeral and funded primarily by grants, personal finances, and
commissions. The remaining material, therefore, consists largely of documentation rather than “rarified” art
objects bought, sold, and collected.
For six years, the Collective carried out a handful of collaborative sociological art projects, participated in
colloquia and exhibition, generated a community of collaborators, and provided support for independent work.
Interlocutors included Henri Lefebvre, Edgar Morin, Vilem Flusser, Jean Duvignaud, Jorge Glusberg, Kristine
Stiles, and numerous artists, including John Latham of the Artist Placement Group, Stephen Willats, and Ken
Friedman. Tensions developed among Fischer, Forest, and Thenot, and in 1980, Forest and Thenot published
an ad in Art Press selling the Ecole Sociologique Interrogative, which was located in Fischer’s apartment, and
wrote a tract declaring the end of the Collective.
3. Sociology .
Sociology is a branch of the social sciences that uses systematic methods of empirical investigation
and critical analysis to develop and refine a body of knowledge about human social structure and activity,
sometimes with the goal of applying such knowledge to the pursuit of government policies designed to
benefit the general social welfare. Its subject matter ranges from the micro level to the macro level.
Microsociology involves the study of people in face-to-face interactions. Macrosociology involves the
study of widespread social processes.
Sociology is a broad discipline in terms of both methodology and subject matter. Its traditional focuses
have included social relations, social stratification, social interaction, culture and deviance, and its
approaches have included both qualitative and quantitative research techniques. As much of what
humans do fits under the category of social structure or social activity, sociology has gradually expanded
its focus to such far-flung subjects as the study of economic activity, health disparities, and even the role
of social activity in the creation of scientific knowledge.[1] The range of social scientific methods has also
been broadly expanded. The "cultural turn" of the 1970s and 1980s brought more humanistic interpretive
approaches to the study of culture in sociology. Conversely, the same decades saw the rise of new
mathematically rigorous approaches, such as social network analysis.
The social world is changing. Some argue it is growing; others say it is shrinking. [2] The important point to
grasp is: society does not remain unchanged over time. As will be discussed in more detail below,
sociology has its roots in significant societal changes (e.g., the industrial revolution, the creation
of empires, and the age of enlightenment of scientific reasoning). Early practitioners developed the
discipline as an attempt to understand societal changes.
Some early sociological theorists (e.g., Marx, Weber, and Durkheim) were disturbed by the social
processes they believed to be driving the change, such as the quest for solidarity, the attainment of social
goals, and the rise and fall of classes, to name a few examples. The founders of sociology were some of
the earliest individuals to employ what C. Wright Mills (a prominent mid-20th century American
sociologist) labeled the sociological imagination: the ability to situate personal troubles within an informed
framework of social issues.[3] Mills proposed that:
"What people need... is a quality of mind that will help them to use information and to develop
reason in order to achieve lucid summations of what is going on in the world and of what may be
happening within themselves. The sociological imagination enables its possessor to understand
the larger historical scene in terms of its meaning for the inner life and the external career of a
variety of individuals."[3]
As Mills saw it, the sociological imagination could help individuals cope with the social world by
helping them to step outside of their personal, self-centric view of the world. In employing the
sociological imagination, people are able to see the events and social structures that influence
behavior, attitudes, and culture.
The sociological imagination goes beyond armchair sociology or common sense. Many people
believe they understand the world and the events taking place within it, even though they have not
actually engaged in a systematic attempt to understanding the social world, as sociologists do.
Humans like to attribute causes to events and attempt to understand what is taking place around
them.[4] This is why individuals have been using religious ceremonies for centuries to invoke the will
of the gods - because they believed the gods controlled certain elements of the natural world (e.g.,
the weather). Just as sacrificing two goats to ensure the safe operation of a Boeing 757 (and
propitiate Akash Bhairab, the Hindu sky god) is an attempt to influence the natural world without first
trying to understand how it works,[5] armchair sociology is an attempt to understand how the social
world works without employing scientific methods.
It would be inaccurate to say sociologists never sit around (even sometimes in comfy armchairs)
trying to figure out how the world works. But induction is just a first step in understanding the social
world. In order to test their theories, sociologists get up from their armchairs and enter the social
world. They gather data and evaluate their theories in light of the data they collect (a.k.a.deduction).
Sociologists do not just propose theories about how the social world works. Sociologists test their
theories about how the world works using the scientific method.
Sociologists, like all humans, have values, beliefs, and even pre-conceived notions of what they
might find in doing their research. But, as Peter Berger, a well-known sociologist, has argued, what
distinguishes the sociologist from non-scientific researchers is that "[the] sociologist tries to see what
is there. He may have hopes or fears concerning what he may find. But he will try to see, regardless
of his hopes or fears. It is thus an act of pure perception..."
Sociology, then, is an attempt to understand the social world by situating social events in their
corresponding environment (i.e., social structure, culture, history) and trying to understand social
phenomena by collecting and analyzing empirical data.
4.Classical sociology
None of the 'founding fathers' of sociology produced a detailed study of literature, but they did develop ideas
that were subsequently applied to literature by others. Karl Marx's theory ofideology was directed at literature
by Pierre Macherey, Terry Eagleton and Fredric Jameson.Max Weber's theory of modernity as cultural
rationalisation, which he applied to music, was later applied to all the arts, literature included, by Frankfurt
School writers such as Theodor Adorno and Jürgen Habermas. Emile Durkheim's view of sociology as the
study of externally-defined social facts was redirected towards literature by Robert Escarpit. Bourdieu's work is
clearly indebted to Marx, Weber and Durkheim.
Lukács and the theory of the novel
An important first step in the sociology of literature was taken by Georg Lukács's The Theory of the Novel, first
published in German in 1916, in the Zeitschrift fur Aesthetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft. In 1920 it was
republished in book form and this version strongly influenced the Frankfurt School. A second edition, published
in 1962, was similarly influential on French structuralism. The Theory of the Novel argued that, whilst the
classical epic poem had given form to a totality of life pregiven in reality by the social integration of classical
civilisation, the modern novel had become 'the epic of an age in which the extensive totality of life is no longer
directly given'.[1]The novel form is therefore organised around the problematic hero in pursuit of problematic
values within a problematic world.
Lukács's second distinctive contribution to the sociology of literature was The Historical Novel, written in
German but first published in Russian in 1937, which appeared in English translation in 1962. Here, Lukács
argued that the early 19th century historical novel's central achievement was to represent realistically the
differences between pre-capitalist past and capitalist present. This was not a matter of individual talent, but of
collective historical experience, because the French Revolution and the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars had
made history for the first time a mass experience.[2] He went on to argue that the success of the 1848
revolutions led to the decline of the historical novel into 'decorative monumentalization' and the 'making private
of history'.[3] The key figures in the historical novel were thus those of the early 19th century, especially Sir
Walter Scott.