Publications by the Frances Rich School of Fine and Performing Arts
Department of Visual Arts and Art History
Bahtsetzis, S. (2019a). Branding images: The anthropotechnics of digital gaming culture. In E. Zantides (Ed.), Semiotics and visual communication III: Cultures of branding (pp. 361–375). Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
The chapters in this book consist of selected papers that were presented at the 3rd International Conference and Poster Exhibition on Semiotics and Visual Communication at the Cyprus University of Technology in November 2017. They investigate the theme of the third conference, “The Semiotics of Branding”, and look at branding and brand design as endorsing a reputation and inhabiting a status of almost mythical proportion that has triumphed over the past few decades. Emerging from its forerunner (corporate identity) to incorporate advertising, consumer lifestyles and attitudes, image-rights, market-research, customisation, global expansion, sound and semiotics, and “the consumer-as-the-brand”, the word “branding” currently appears to be bigger than its own umbrella definition. From tribal markers, such as totems, scarifications and tattoos, to emblems of power, language, fashion, architectural space, insignias of communal groups, heraldic devices, religious and political symbols, national flags and the like, a form of branding is at work that responds to the need to determine the presence and interaction of specific groups, persons or institutions through shared codes of meaning.
Bahtsetzis, S. (2019b). Ē phainomenologia tēs eikonas stēn istoria tēs technēs: Ē periptōse tou Heinrich Wölfflin [The phenomenology of the image in history of art: The case of Heinrich Wölfflin]. In A. Adamopoulou, L. Gyioka, & K. I. Stefanis (Eds.), Istoria tēs Technēs: Zētēmata istorias, methodologias, istoriographias [History of art: Issues of history, methodology, historiography] (pp. 45–61). Gutenberg Publications; Association of Greek Art Historians.
Bahtsetzis, S. (2019c). O Piet Mondrian kai oi amerikanoi zōgraphoi tes dekaetias tou 1960: O chōros kai o theatēs [Piet Mondrian and the American painters of the sixties: The beholder and the visual space]. Istoria tēs Technēs [Art History], (8), 51–81.
The article explores the concept of space as the central category of signification in the painting of Piet Mondrian. It analyses on the one hand the relationship of the virtual space with the actual viewing space of the beholder, and on the other, the ways in which the work focuses on activating an embodied and lived experience. The article then focuses on a parallel reading of the work of Piet Mondrian and Barnett Newman in order to demonstrate equivalent conceptualizations of the space in the work of the two artists. The parallel analysis of the work of the two painters as well as the interpretation of the theoretical work of art critic Clement Greenberg demonstrates in more detail the consequences that the innovative vision of Mondrian had for the works of American painters of the 1960s. Therefore, investigating how new perceptual patterns are structured (this is the ultimate goal of both Mondrian and Newman) enables us to understand the broader historical context in which the modern and optically defined subject is formed, that is, the Western man at the height of the industrialization of the postwar 20th century. At this point the formal analysis which expands towards phenomenology helps us to understand the broader sociocultural context – an interpretative approach that governs the methodology of the article.