Three paintings from Dalí: Relationship between music and visual arts in the context of İlhan Usmanbaş's music

Abstract

Interart relations indicate a wide range of interdisciplinary fields that leads us to search various artistic practices and pursue the fluid ideas between different art forms. Within this framework, interart relations constitute a collective history, which can be dated back to Antiquity in its search for the secrets of beauty and harmony, leading up to today's inter-artistic practices, such as new media and multimedia art. Mutual influences and interaction between different art forms have been admitted as a topic of interest and, by its very nature, addressed as a multi-directional subject matter. The relationship between music and visual arts, on the other hand, is one of the remarkable subjects in this diversity, and has a vast historiography, often manifest in major turning points, in parallel to the cultural developments in history. Modernism, which is one of the last stages of this process, seen as a catalyst for the transformative experiences in art practices and innovations - concentrating on spatial or temporal concerns - with the idea of medium specificity, brought about an environment where formal relations gradually increased. Faced with the limitations of pure formalism, the 1950s, which brought openness and exchange of ideas in every field, and also indicated a significant shift in modernism discussions. This period offered a transition not only between autonomous disciplines, but also between the boundaries that encircled social, cultural, and political fields. The choice of subject matter from the music discipline as a study of art history, is an unavoidable consequence of this intertwined historical process. However, this inevitable outcome also brings with it the challenges a field of study faces as its scope expands. Nevertheless, this issue opens space for productive questions within art history, enables new inquiries and engagements in interart relations. There are different approaches examining the art practices that articulate visual and sound dimensions. One of them presents a historical, social and cultural flow in the field of interart tradition; the other, investigates the accommodation of sound in visual arts and vice versa, the notion of visuality in musical practices, by exploring their transmedial and conceptual aspects. Recently, intermedial studies have developed categories by means of how the medium is produced.