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Books > Arts & Architecture > The arts: general issues > Theory of art
Walled Gardens: Autonomy, Automation, and Art After the Internet is the study of a young generation of artists characterised by their engagement with new Internet technologies that have come to reorganize life and labour online, from mobile Internet and social media to Cloud Computing. Often grouped around the much-contested term 'post-Internet art', these artists work across a range of genre - including sculpture, performance, and moving image - in order to confront the relationship between technology and society in the twenty first century. Focusing on art works produced between 2008 and 2016 in Europe and the US, this book situates the emergence of the field in a historical context of global economic downturn and climate catastrophe, positing that new Internet technologies were developed in a mutually co-constitutive relationship with crisis. Characterised by ease of use, portability, and accessibility, such technologies are the reason why the Internet has become an ever-increasing part of daily life. Yet they are also examples of 'walled gardens': proprietary formats in which one's control over functionality or content is highly restricted. Strikingly, many artists have chosen to work with rather than against these technologies and, in so doing, perform complicity with the very structures that they seek to interrogate. Walled Gardens asks how might we make sense of this assimilation with proprietary technologies, and argues that what these artworks reveal is a model of subjectivity conditioned by a dynamic between autonomy and automation.
Reimagines black and brown sensuality to develop new modes of knowledge production In Sensual Excess, Amber Jamilla Musser imagines epistemologies of sensuality that emerge from fleshiness. To do so, she works against the framing of black and brown bodies as sexualized, objectified, and abject, and offers multiple ways of thinking with and through sensation and aesthetics. Each chapter draws our attention to particular aspects of pornotropic capture that black and brown bodies must always negotiate. Though these technologies differ according to the nature of their encounters with white supremacy, together they add to our understanding of the ways that structures of domination produce violence and work to contain bodies and pleasures within certain legible parameters. To do so, Sensual Excess analyzes moments of brown jouissance that exceed these constraints. These ruptures illuminate multiple epistemologies of selfhood and sensuality that offer frameworks for minoritarian knowledge production which is designed to enable one to sit with uncertainty. Through examinations of installations and performances like Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party, Kara Walker's A Subtlety, Patty Chang's In Love and Nao Bustamante's Neapolitan, Musser unpacks the relationships between racialized sexuality and consumption to interrogate foundational concepts in psychoanalytic theory, critical race studies, feminism, and queer theory. In so doing, Sensual Excess offers a project of knowledge production focused not on mastery, but on sensing and imagining otherwise, whatever and wherever that might be.
This volume brings philosophers, art historians, intellectual historians, and literary scholars together to argue for the philosophical significance of Michael Fried's art history and criticism. It demonstrates that Fried's work on modernism, artistic intention, the ontology of art, theatricality, and anti-theatricality can throw new light on problems in and beyond philosophical aesthetics. Featuring an essay by Fried and articles from world-leading scholars, this collection engages with philosophical themes from Fried's texts, and clarifies the relevance to his work of philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell, Morris Weitz, Elizabeth Anscombe, Arthur Danto, George Dickie, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schiller, G. W. F. Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Denis Diderot, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Roland Barthes, Jacques Ranciere, and Soren Kierkegaard. As it makes a case for the importance of Fried for philosophy, this volume contributes to current debates in analytic and continental aesthetics, philosophy of action, philosophy of history, political philosophy, modernism studies, literary studies, and art theory.
The Fundacion Cisneros' Conversaciones/Conversations series is dedicated to preserving firsthand testimonies of leading artists and intellectuals from Latin America. Argentinian artist Liliana Porter has lived and worked in New York since 1964; her work has been exhibited internationally and is represented in many public and private collections. Using a wide range of media--including sculpture, printmaking, works on canvas, photography, video and installation--Porter playfully mixes the absurd with the philosophical to create extraordinary portrayals of everyday scenes and plights. In this, the seventh volume of the Conversaciones series, Porter is in dialogue with art historian and critic Ines Katzenstein. She describes with simplicity and humor the ways in which her work blends the real with the representational, often in hypothetical yet convincing mini-dramas using mass-produced, kitsch objects that elicit both our compassion and laughter."
Alois Riegl's art history has influenced thinkers as diverse as Erwin Panofsky, Georg Lukacs, Walter Benjamin, Paul Feyerabend, Gilles Deteuze, and Felix Guattari. One of the founders of the modern discipline of art history, Riegl is best known for his theories of representation. Yet his inquiries into the role of temporality in artistic production - including his argument that art conveys a culture's consciousness of time - show him to be a more wide-ranging and influential commentator on historiographical issues than has been previously acknowledged. In ""Time's Visible Surface"", Michael Gubser presents Riegl's work as a sustained examination of the categories of temporality and history in art. Supported by a rich exploration of Riegl's writings, Gubser argues that Riegl viewed artworks as registering historical time visibly in artistic forms. Gubser's discussion of Riegl's academic milieu also challenges the widespread belief that Austrian modernism adopted a self-consciously a historical worldview. By analyzing the works of Riegl's professors and colleagues at the University of Vienna, Gubser shows that Riegl's interest in temporality, from his early articles on calendar art through later volumes on the Roman art industry and Dutch portraiture, fit into a broad discourse on time, history, and empiricism that engaged Viennese thinkers such as the philosopher Franz Brentano, the historian Theodor von Sickel, and the art historian Franz Wickhoff. By expanding our understanding of Riegl and his intellectual context, ""Time's Visible Surface"" demonstrates that Riegl is a pivotal figure in cultural theory and that fin-de-siecle Vienna holds continued relevance for today's cultural and philosophical debates.
This book explores the persona of the artist in Archaic and Classical Greek art and literature. Guy Hedreen argues that artistic subjectivity, first expressed in Athenian vase-painting of the sixth century BCE and intensively explored by Euphronios, developed alongside a self-consciously constructed persona of the poet. He explains how poets like Archilochos and Hipponax identified with the wily Homeric character of Odysseus as a prototype of the successful narrator, and how the lame yet resourceful artist-god Hephaistos is emulated by Archaic vase-painters such as Kleitias. In lyric poetry and pictorial art, Hedreen traces a widespread conception of the artist or poet as socially marginal, and sometimes physically imperfect, but rhetorically clever, technically peerless, and a master of fiction. Bringing together in a sustained analysis the roots of subjectivity across media, this book offers a new way of studying the relationship between poetry and art in ancient Greece.
There is no soundtrack is a study of how sound and image produce meaning in contemporary experimental media art by artists ranging from Chantal Akerman to Nam June Paik to Tanya Tagaq. It contextualises these works and artists through key ideas in sound studies: voice, noise, listening, the soundscape and more. The book argues that experimental media art produces radical and new audio-visual relationships challenging the visually dominated discourses in art, media and the human sciences. In addition to directly addressing what Jonathan Sterne calls 'visual hegemony', it also explores the lack of diversity within sound studies by focusing on practitioners from transnational and diverse backgrounds. As such, it contributes to a growing interdisciplinary scholarship, building new, more complex and reverberating frameworks to collectively sonify the study of culture. -- .
How to Enjoy Art: A Guide for Everyone provides the tools to understand and enjoy works of art. Debunking the pervasive idea that specialist knowledge is required to understand and appreciate art, instead How to Enjoy Art focuses on experience and pleasure, demonstrating how anyone can find value and enjoyment in art. Examples from around the world and throughout art history-from works by Fra Angelico and Berthe Morisot to Kazuo Shiraga and Kara Walker-are used to demonstrate how a handful of core strategies and skills can help enhance the experience of viewing art works. With these skills, anyone can encounter any work of art-regardless of media, artist, or period-and find some resonance with their own experiences. How to Enjoy Art encourages us to rediscover the fundamental pleasure in viewing art.
Linda Nochlin's seminal essay on women artists is widely acknowledged as the first real attempt at a feminist history of art. Nochlin refused to handle the question of why there had been no 'great women artists' on its own, corrupted, terms. Instead, she dismantled the very concept of 'greatness', unravelling the basic assumptions that had centred a male-coded 'genius' in the study of art. With unparalleled insight and startling wit, Nochlin laid bare the acceptance of a white male viewpoint in art historical thought as not merely a moral failure, but an intellectual one. Freedom, as she sees it, requires women to risk entirely demolishing the art world's institutions, and rebuilding them anew - in other words, to leap into the unknown. In this stand-alone anniversary edition, Nochlin's essay is published alongside its reappraisal, 'Thirty Years After'. Written in an era of thriving feminist theory, as well as queer theory, race and postcolonial studies, 'Thirty Years After' is a striking reflection on the emergence of a whole new canon. With reference to Joan Mitchell, Louise Bourgeois, Cindy Sherman and many more, Nochlin diagnoses the state of women and art with unmatched precision and verve. 'Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?' has become a slogan and rallying cry that resonates across culture and society; Dior even adopted it in their 2018 collections. In the 2020s, at a time when 'certain patriarchal values are making a comeback', Nochlin's message could not be more urgent: as she herself put it in 2015, 'there is still a long way to go'. With 14 illustrations
What can art tell us about how the brain works? And what can the brain tell us about how we perceive and create art? Humans have created visual art throughout history and its significance has been an endless source of fascination and debate. Visual art is a product of the human brain, but is art so complex and sophisticated that brain function and evolution are not relevant to our understanding? This book explores the links between visual art and the brain by examining a broad range of issues including: the impact of eye and brain disorders on artistic output; the relevance of Darwinian principles to aesthetics; and the constraints imposed by brain processes on the perception of space, motion and colour in art. Arguments and theories are presented in an accessible manner and general principles are illustrated with specific art examples, helping students to apply their knowledge to new artworks.
Maggie Nelson has established herself as one of our foremost cultural critics in this landmark work about representations of violence in art. An important and frequently surprising book . . . could be read as the foundation for a post-avant-garde aesthetics. ?. . . Nelson, who is also a poet, is such a graceful writer that ?I . . . just sat back and enjoyed the show. Laura Kipnis, New York Times Book Review, front-page review Nelson s] critiques of individual artists are delightfully fierce without being mean spirited. . . . Fascinating and bracingly intelligent. . . . The Art of Cruelty s prose is often gorgeous. Troy Jollimore, Boston Globe A lean-forward experience, and in its most transcendent moments, reading it can feel like having the best conversation of your life. Rachel Syme, NPR Books I hope that critics, and aspiring critics, and those who are interested in the relationship between art and ethics, read The Art of Cruelty]. Susie Linfield, New Republic/The Book"
Based on John Dewey's lectures on esthetics, delivered as the first William James Lecturer at Harvard in 1932, "Art as Experience" has grown to be considered internationally as the most distinguished work ever written by an American on the formal structure and characteristic effects of all the arts: architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and literature.
The nature of fiction has long been debated across the humanities, and is of considerable importance for philosophical aesthetics, literary theory, narratology and the history of ideas. This volume offers something entirely new: a selection of multidisciplinary perspectives on fiction written by an international team of contributors at the forefront of their fields, providing a spectrum of approaches to compare and contrast. This volume, divided between historical, cognitive, aesthetic and non-western approaches, targets a wide range of topics, including mathematics, history, religion and metaphysics. This is a seminal volume on one of the most important topics in the humanities.
Originally published in 1958, this book by artist Joyce Cary examines 'the relation of the artist with the world as it seems to him, and to see what he does with it'. Cary speaks from practical experience when describing artistic inspiration and the ways in which varying arts present different forms of 'truth'. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in art and the psychology of the artist.
Over the course of her career, Barbara Stafford has established herself the preeminent scholar of the intersections of the arts and sciences, articulating new theories and methods for understanding the sublime, the mysterious, the inscrutable. Omnivorous in her research, she has published work that embraces neuroscience and philosophy, biology and culture, pinpointing connections among each discipline's parallel concerns. Ribbon of Darkness is a monument to the scope of her work and the range of her intellect. At times associative, but always incisive, the essays in this new volume take on a distinctly contemporary purpose: to uncover the ethical force and moral aspects of overlapping scientific and creative inquiries. This shared territory, Stafford argues, offers important insights into--and clarifications of--current dilemmas about personhood, the supposedly menial nature of manual skill, the questionable borderlands of gene editing, the potentially refining value of dualism, and the limits of a materialist worldview. Stafford organizes these essays around three concepts that structure the book: inscrutability, ineffability, and intuitability. All three, she explains, allow us to examine how both the arts and the sciences imaginatively infer meaning from the "veiled behavior of matter," bringing these historically divided subjects into a shared intellectual inquiry and imbuing them with an ethical urgency. A vanguard work at the intersection of the arts and sciences, this book will be sure to guide readers from either realm into unfamiliar yet undeniably fertile territory.
Do the artist's intentions have anything to do with the making and appreciation of works of art? In Art and Intention Paisley Livingston develops a broad and balanced perspective on perennial disputes between intentionalists and anti-intentionalists in philosophical aesthetics and critical theory. He surveys and assesses a wide range of rival assumptions about the nature of intentions and the status of intentionalist psychology. With detailed reference to examples from diverse media, art forms, and traditions, he demonstrates that insights into the multiple functions of intentions have important implications for our understanding of artistic creation and authorship, the ontology of art, conceptions of texts, works, and versions, basic issues pertaining to the nature of fiction and fictional truth, and the theory of art interpretation and appreciation. Livingston argues that neither the inspirationist nor rationalistic conceptions can capture the blending of deliberate and intentional, spontaneous and unintentional processes in the creation of art. Texts, works, and artistic structures and performances cannot be adequately individuated in the absence of a recognition of the relevant makers intentions. The distinction between complete and incomplete works receives an action-theoretic analysis that makes possible an elucidation of several different senses of 'fragment' in critical discourse. Livingston develops an account of authorship, contending that the recognition of intentions is in fact crucial to our understanding of diverse forms of collective art-making. An artist's short-term intentions and long-term plans and policies interact in complex ways in the emergence of an artistic oeuvre, and our uptake of such attitudes makes an important difference to our appreciation of the relations between items belonging to a single life-work. The intentionalism Livingston advocates is, however, a partial one, and accomodates a number of important anti-intentionalist contentions. Intentions are fallible, and works of art, like other artefacts, can be put to a bewildering diversity of uses. Yet some important aspects of arts meaning and value are linked to the artists aims and activities.
Art + Archive provides an in-depth analysis of the connection between art and the archive at the turn of the twenty-first century. The book examines how the archive emerged in art writing in the mid-1990s and how its subsequent ubiquity can be understood in light of wider social, technological, philosophical and art-historical conditions and concerns. Deftly combining writing on archives from different disciplines with artistic practices, the book clarifies the function and meaning of one of the most persistent artworld buzzwords of recent years, shedding light on the conceptual and historical implications of the so-called archival turn in contemporary art. -- .
This is a critical edition of the art writings of the painter Paul Nash (1889-1946). Alongside the very different Wyndham Lewis, Nash was the only major British artist of his generation who was also a regular critic of, and essayist on, art. He knew and read the leading critics of his day, and evolved a distinctive position in relation to them. His relationship to British modernism and the mutual stimulus of art and criticism, the opening up of his criticism and that of others to poetic and literary influences under the influence of Surrealism is discussed by Andrew Causey.
This book gathers together essays written by leading scholars of adaptation studies to explore the full range of practices and issues currently of concern in the field. The chapters demonstrate how content and messaging are shared across an increasing number of platforms, whose interrelationships have become as intriguing as they are complex. Recognizing that a signature feature of contemporary culture is the convergence of different forms of media, the contributors of this book argue that adaptation studies has emerged as a key discipline that, unlike traditional literary and art criticism, is capable of identifying and analyzing the relations between source texts and adaptations created from them. Adaptation scholars have come to understand that these relations not only play out in individual case histories but are also institutional, and this collection shows how adaptation plays a key role in the functioning of cinema, television, art, and print media. The volume is essential reading for all those interested both in adaptation studies and also in the complex forms of intermediality that define contemporary culture in the 21st century.
Contemporary art is often preoccupied with time, or acts in which the past is recovered. Through specific case studies of artists who strategically work with historical moments, this book examines how art from the last two decades has sought to mobilize these particular histories, and to what effect, against the backdrop of Modernism. Drawing on the art theory of Rosalind Krauss and the philosophies of Paul Ricoeur, Gerhard Richter, and Pierre Nora, Retroactivity and Contemporary Art interprets those works that foreground some aspect of retroactivity - whether re-enacting, commemorating, or re-imagining - as key artistic strategies. This book is striking philosophical reflection on time within art and art within time, and an indispensable read for those attempting to understand the artistic significance of history, materiality, and memory.
The Language of Displayed Art, first published in 1994, is a seminal work in the field of Multimodality and one of the few to be entirely dedicated to the analysis and interpretation of works of art. This book explores the "grammar" of the visual arts of painting, sculpture and architecture, proposing that as viewers we simultaneously read three different kinds of meaning in them:
The second edition features: two new chapters; an extended discussion of Chapter 5 "Why Semiotics"; and an extended version of Chapter 7 with more illustrations of language forms, discourse norms and genres, as well as non-art visual modes. The book is now accompanied by a CD, created by the author and features a virtual gallery of twenty-eight additional paintings with questions to encourage analysis and interpretation, and model answers to these questions in the book s appendix. The CD also includes a notebook for readers to record their own observations and ideas. The Language of Displayed Art is an indispensable text for those studying Multimodality, Applied Linguistics, Language and Art.
Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity offers a radical new interpretation of Heidegger's later philosophy, developing his argument that art can help lead humanity beyond the nihilistic ontotheology of the modern age. Providing pathbreaking readings of Heidegger's The Origin of the Work of Art and his notoriously difficult Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), this book explains precisely what postmodernity meant for Heidegger, the greatest philosophical critic of modernity, and what it could still mean for us today. Exploring these issues, Iain D. Thomson examines several postmodern works of art, including music, literature, painting, and even comic books, from a post-Heideggerian perspective. Clearly written and accessible, this book will help readers gain a deeper understanding of Heidegger and his relation to postmodern theory, popular culture, and art. |
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