UNESCO Courier articles from December 1996

UNESCO Courier archives from December 1996

Swimming against the tide: a quest for duration in societies whose only permanent feature is change.(Ephemeral Art)
December 1, 1996... Design is inseparable from its age. But its role may also be to break away from the spirit of the age and herald a new era. Two hundred years ago, the seemingly static pre-industrial world began to stir. Slowly at first, and then with growing...

A moment of grace. (ephemeral sacred paintings by Indian women)(Ephemeral Art)
December 1, 1996... Millions of Indian women decorate their houses with sacred paintings that fade within hours "In nature around us, beauty is fleeting; it has no permanence. Droplets of morning dew on a leaf, the billowing shapes of clouds, the dancing...

Dancing with masks. (ceremonial masks in community dance and drama)(Ephemeral Art)
December 1, 1996... For the Indians of North America's northwestern coast, ceremonial dance and drama bring ritual masks to life The ceremonial art of the northwest coast of North America has long inspired admiration. In the past, huge carved and painted totem...

Cosmetics and culture: the cultural significance of body painting.
December 1, 1996... Body painting and scarification are, like jewelry and costume, ways of covering, disguising and transforming the body. But although the aim is almost without exception to beautify the body, aesthetic considerations are usually ancillary to...

Art's back-to-the-land movement. (creating new links between space, time and spectator)(Ephemeral Art)
December 1, 1996... By intervening in the environment, land art creates a new relationship between space, time and the spectator At the end of the 1960s, a number of artists, most of them American, challenged the notion that galleries and museums are the most...

Working notes. (on land art)
December 1, 1996... Draw with flowers. Paint with clouds. Write with water. Record the May wind, the flutter of a falling leaf. Work for a storm. Anticipate a glacier. Curve the wind. Give direction to water and light. The cuckoo's verdant call, the invisible...

Installation art: provocative artworks designed for spectator involvement.(Ephemeral Art)
December 1, 1996... Once upon a time there was painting and there was sculpture. But that was a long time ago. The technologies employed by artists now include film, video, slide projection, sound and computers, and there is no limit placed upon the materials that...

From image to environment. (virtual reality)
December 1, 1996... Virtual reality is bringing a three-dimensional world to our fingertips In the galaxy of three-dimensional virtual images into which we have entered, paintings and the handful of sculptures still produced using traditional methods have become...

Higher education and new technologies.
December 1, 1996... New information and communication technologies, especially the Internet, are offering researchers, educators, artists and administrators all over the world an opportunity to form the most cultivated, specialized, versatile and active intellectual...

Lake Ferto: shallow waters steeped in wildlife. (Greenwatch in Hungary)(includes related article on the Regional Environmental Center for Central and Eastern Europe)(Column)
December 1, 1996... From each side of the grassy causeway dominating the vast expanse of water a gaggle of wading birds - a white heron, several grey herons, two purple herons - slowly took off, their long legs dangling beneath their bodies. Ahead, the horizon was...

Tai National Park. (Cote d'Ivoire, West Africa)(Column)
December 1, 1996... Both a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve and a World Heritage site, Cote d'Ivoire's Tai National Park is an area of remarkable biological diversity and home to one of the last representative samples of forest wildlife in West Africa. The African...

Portrait: Bohdan Khmelnytsky (1595-1657). (forger of the first Ukrainian state)
December 1, 1996... A Cossack leader whose exploits are celebrated in many epic poems, Bohdan Khmelnytsky was the architect of the first Ukrainian state. In the first half of the seventeenth century the territory known nowadays as the Ukraine was embroiled in the...

Bernard Maury. (interview with a jazz musician)(Interview)
December 1, 1996... A talented pianist and a fine teacher, Bernard Maury is a spiritual son and disciple of the American jazz pianist Bill Evans(1). He fails from southernwestern France, where he grew up in a music-loving family. * You have often said that if...