Beginning in the seventeenth century, the greatest French writers and artists became embroiled in a debate that turned on the priority of painting or sculpture, touch or sight, color or design, ancients or moderns. Jacqueline Lichtenstein guides readers through these historic quarrels, decoding the key terms of the heated discussions and revealing how the players were influenced by the concurrent explosion of scientific discoveries concerning the senses of sight and touch. Drawing on the work of René Descartes, Roger de Piles, Denis Diderot, Charles Baudelaire, and Émile Zola, among others, The Blind Spot lets readers eavesdrop on an energetic and contentious conversation that preoccupied French intellectuals for three hundred years.
Critical and theoretical essays by a long-time participant in the Art & Language movement. These essays by art historian and critic Charles Harrison are based on the premise that making art and talking about art are related enterprises. They are written from the point of view of Art & Language, the artistic movement based in England—and briefly in the United States—with which Harrison has been associated for thirty years. Harrison uses the work of Art & Language as a central case study to discuss developments in art from the 1950s through the 1980s. According to Harrison, the strongest motivation for writing about art is that it brings us closer to that which is other than ourselves. In seeing how a work is done, we learn about its achieved identity: we see, for example, that a drip on a Pollock is integral to its technical character, whereas a drip on a Mondrian would not be. Throughout the book, Harrison uses specific examples to address a range of questions about the history, theory, and making of modern art—questions about the conditions of its making and the nature of its public, about the problems and priorities of criticism, and about the relations between interpretation and judgment.
Art Essays is a passionate collection of the best essays on the visual arts written by contemporary novelists. With an introduction by literary critic and editor Alexandra Kingston-Reese, Art Essays is an enthralling vision of a new wave of literary essays shaping contemporary culture.
Drawing on (s)cul(p)tural paradigms as diverse as paper-doll books, Mad magazine fold-ins and exploded schematic diagrams, the artists in The Paper Sculpture Book offer a hands-on, self-contained art show. Artworks meant to be cut out by the reader and assembled using very basic materials such as tape and rubber bands have been designed by 29 established and emerging contemporary artists, including The Art Guys, Minerva Cuevas, Seong Chun, Nicole Eisenman, Spencer Finch, Rachel Harrison, Stephen Hendee, Patrick Killoran, Glenn Ligon, Helen Mirra, David Shrigley, Sarah Sze, Chris Ware and Allan Wexler. Fred Tomaselli merges images from a birding book and an outdoor-clothing catalogue to create an ironic yet beautiful aviary. Janine Antoni's Crumple provides precise instructions for recreating a crumpled ball of paper, while Luca Buvoli invites the reader to take a pop-up flying lesson from the mysterious Professor M.a.S. Obviously, these are not your elementary-school paper airplanes.
Since 1945 the modern revolution in sculpture has gathered pace, and sculpture has now ceased to be the fixed category it once was. In recent decades the modernist idea of sculpture across the UK, America, and Europe, has been challenged, and issues such as nationalityand politics have been brought in to the arena of public discussion. In this ground-breaking account of the development of post-War sculpture Andrew Causey examines innovative and avant-garde works in relation to contemporary events, festivals, commissions, the marketplace, and the changing functions of museums. He explores the use of everyday objects and the importance of sculptural context, discussing figurative and non-figurative works, Anti-form, Minimalism, experimental form, Earth Art, landscape sculpture, installation, and Performance Art. The holistic picture of post-War sculpture which emerges establishes for the first time the key events and themes round which future debate will centre. From the pre-publication reviews: Andrew Causey weaves his way adroitly through the labyrinth of post-War sculpture ... No one else has charted the territory so comprehensively s Professor Stephen Bann, University of Kent at Canterbury stimulating and persuasive ... balances a searching analysis of the impact of institutional change, issues of sites and environment, and key critical debates with revealing commentaries on individual artists and works of art ... a discerning guide for anyone interested in contemporary art and culture. s Elizabeth Cowling, University of Edinburgh a clear guide to the various directions of sculpture and the work of sculptors in the years when modern sculpture has begun to stand in its own right as a major art form. s Sir Anthony Caro, Sculptor
Much acclaimed and highly controversial, Michael Fried's art criticism defines the contours of late modernism in the visual arts. This volume contains 27 pieces--uncompromising, exciting, and impassioned writings, aware of their transformative power during a time of intense controversy about the nature of modernism and the aims and essence of advanced painting and sculpture. 16 color plates. 72 halftones.
Georg Simmel is one of the most original German thinkers of the twentieth century and is considered a founding architect of the modern discipline of sociology. Ranging over fundamental questions of the relationship of self and society, his influential writings on money, modernity, and the metropolis continue to provoke debate today. Fascinated by the relationship between culture, society, and economic life, Simmel took an interest in myriad phenomena of aesthetics and the arts. A friend of writers and artists such as Auguste Rodin, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Stefan George, he wrote dozens of pieces engaging with topics such as the work of Michelangelo, Rembrandt, and Rodin, Japanese art, naturalism and symbolism, Goethe, “art for art’s sake”, art exhibitions, and the aesthetics of the picture frame. This is the first collection to bring together Simmel’s finest writing on art and aesthetics, and many of the items appear in English in this volume for the first time. The more than forty essays show the protean breadth of Simmel’s reflections, covering landscape painting, portraiture, sculpture, poetry, theater, form, style, and representation. An extensive introduction by Austin Harrington gives an overview of Simmel’s themes and elucidates the significance of his work for the many theorists who would be inspired by his ideas. Something of an outsider to the formal academic world of his day, Simmel wrote creatively with the flair of an essayist. This expansive collection of translations preserves the narrative ease of Simmel’s prose and will be a vital source for readers with an interest in Simmel’s trailblazing ideas in modern European philosophy, sociology, and cultural theory.
Framed in a lucid discussion of the intellectual issues surrounding the postmodern movement, the essays in this book re-examine the course of twentieth-century art through the work of twenty-five major sculptors. McEvilley masterfully traces the evolution of modern sculpture from the readymades of Marcel Duchamp to the anti-painting statements of the 1960s to the spiritualism and conceptualism of the 1980s and 1990s. This is a groundbreaking work in the field of art criticism and a fundamental text for anyone interested in the history of current art and culture. Allworth Press, an imprint of Skyhorse Publishing, publishes a broad range of books on the visual and performing arts, with emphasis on the business of art. Our titles cover subjects such as graphic design, theater, branding, fine art, photography, interior design, writing, acting, film, how to start careers, business and legal forms, business practices, and more. While we don't aspire to publish a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are deeply committed to quality books that help creative professionals succeed and thrive. We often publish in areas overlooked by other publishers and welcome the author whose expertise can help our audience of readers.
What is a woman? What is a man? How do they—and how should they—relate to each other? Does our yearning for "wholeness" refer to something real, and if there is a Whole, what is it, and why do we feel so estranged from it? For centuries now, art and literature have increasingly valorized uniqueness and self-sufficiency. The theoreticians who loom so large within contemporary thought also privilege difference over similarity. Silverman reminds us that this is but half the story, and a dangerous half at that, for if we are all individuals, we are doomed to be rivals and enemies. A much older story, one that prevailed through the early modern era, held that likeness or resemblance was what organized the universe, and that everything emerges out of the same flesh. Silverman shows that analogy, so discredited by much of twentieth-century thought, offers a much more promising view of human relations. In the West, the emblematic story of turning away is that of Orpheus and Eurydice, and the heroes of Silverman's sweeping new reading of nineteenth- and twentieth-century culture, the modern heirs to the old, analogical view of the world, also gravitate to this myth. They embrace the correspondences that bind Orpheus to Eurydice and acknowledge their kinship with others past and present. The first half of this book assembles a cast of characters not usually brought together: Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Marcel Proust, Lou-Andréas Salomé, Romain Rolland, Rainer Maria Rilke, Wilhelm Jensen, and Paula Modersohn-Becker. The second half is devoted to three contemporary artists, whose works we see in a moving new light:Terrence Malick, James Coleman, and Gerhard Richter.
