This essay comprises an investigation of ekphrasis in the work of J. J. Winckelmann and particularly in his presentation of famous statues in the Vatican Belvedere courtyard collection. Key treatments of statues are revealed as offering much more than descriptions or art-historical analyses. Rather, they detail emerging relationships with works of art, relationships the dynamic nature of which is captured in the rhetoric of the descriptions. And like many good relationships these are informed by sex -but perhaps not in the obvious manner. It is more than a matter of Winckelmann taking a fancy to the objects he describes. Writing on art is revealed as an important site of repressed/submerged homosexuality. Following theoretical leads offered by Michel Foucault and Michael Worton, the essay investigates the disguised discursive existence of homosexuality in the rhetoric of aesthetics and explains its importance and subversive potential in a world where homosexuality cannot easily exist in the open; it then reflects upon the fact that in the apparently more liberated twentieth century, discussion of the sexual subtext to Winckelmann is still remarkable for its absence. Winckelmann is thus preserved in the literary/historical consciousness as the initiator of a rather arid brand of NeoClassicism -all noble simplicity and calm grandeur -when his own writing reveals opposite, more human qualities.The body, and particularly the body as depicted in art, is one of the most important sites for the discussion of aesthetics. The Classical nude statue and its more modern variants in a variety of media have often had canonical status; they have come to embody not just stylistic norms of the given age but also aesthetic principles which could have value beyond their own age. And the aesthetic was often more or less directly connected to moral principles which were understood to inform the realm of art. Thus the famous Laocöon statue could be seen (misguidedly) as the perfect illustration of the stylistic simplicity and clarity of great Greek art. 1 What is more, it can be seen as likely to promote stylistic improvements in the art of later periods exposed to it. It can be seen as an aesthetic incarnation of a brand of stoic philosophy which enables Laocöon in this representation to bear his own and his sons' suffering with dignity. In interpreting the statue in this way, I do so knowingly; the voice is not my own but something of a composite of representative eighteenth-century voices, not 1 The statue is now generally regarded as representative of late Hellenistic baroque art. The very presence of the word 'baroque' in any stylistic categorisation of the statue would surely have been most painful to Winckelmann, since the Baroque was precisely what he was writing against. It shows that Winckelmann often saw what he wanted to see in art -and interestingly, from our point of view, that his writing often tells you more about him than about the given work of art.
This editorial marks my last communication as Editor-in-Chief of the Voice and Speech Review. I've been involved with the journal for roughly 10 years-the last five as Editor-in-Chief and five years prior to that as Associate Editor for the pedagogy and coaching section. It's been a great honor and privilege to serve the Voice and Speech Trainers Association and its members in this manner. After having read literally every article published in the VSR, both in the recent publications and in the ones from before my time, I've learned a tremendous amount. I've met many wonderful and fascinating authors-some I've actually met in person!-but now it's time for me to pass the responsibility to someone else. Rockford Sansom will be taking over after this issue is complete, and he is going to do a fantastic job. He is already applying his great intelligence, energy, and enthusiasm to the project of keeping the journal a vital source of inspiration and scholarship as well as moving it forward to take full advantage of the opportunity provided us as an imprint of Routledge/Taylor and Francis. If one counts my completion of a decade of work on the journal as marking a sort of anniversary, then this volume represents an anniversary for the journal as well. It's the 10th volume. The journal has been in publication since 2000, but as many of you remember, it used to be published once every two years, making the volume count uneven. We have a faster production calendar now, publishing a volume every year since 2014, and so here we are: 10 volumes. That's no small achievement for an endeavor that Founding Editor Rocco Dal Vera recalls was met with a great deal of skepticism when it was first conceived. This issue is typical of the best of the VSR, featuring a breadth of topics covered in its roughly 100 pages. Our new Editor-in-Chief, Rockford Sansom, took his last opportunity to publish as a VSR author to address one of the most persistent conceptual and practical conflicts in the voice and speech teaching world in his essay "The unspoken voice and speech debate [or] the sacred cow in the conservatory. " In it, he addresses head-on the philosophical divide between teachers who prefer direct instruction and those who teach from a more experiential place, and he makes a compelling case for including both teaching styles in the classroom. We have a somewhat unusual for us contribution from choral director Leonard Raybon who explains how he uses a modified version of the IPA coupled with simple hand signals to create uniformity in vowel formation in his work with choral singers in "The 'Vowels in Hand' System: A Time-Out with Five Quite Contrary Letters. " Shannon Holmes examines her own process using her voice in performance in her essay "Autoethnography and Voicework" and in so doing provides a great model for the application of academic rigor to personal process, which is an important aspect of the VSR and of the practical, professional world of the voice and speech trainer. Elizabeth Terrel gives us a unique look into a little ...
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