Duchamp and the Aesthetics of Chance

Duchamp and the Aesthetics of Chance

Author: Herbert Molderings

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2010-05-31

Total Pages: 277

ISBN-13: 0231519745

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Marcel Duchamp is often viewed as an "artist-engineer-scientist," a kind of rationalist who relied heavily on the ideas of the French mathematician and philosopher Henri Poincaré. Yet a complete portrait of Duchamp and his multiple influences draws a different picture. In his 3 Standard Stoppages (1913-1914), a work that uses chance as an artistic medium, we see how far Duchamp subverted scientism in favor of a radical individualistic aesthetic and experimental vision. Unlike the Dadaists, Duchamp did more than dismiss or negate the authority of science. He pushed scientific rationalism to the point where its claims broke down and alternative truths were allowed to emerge. With humor and irony, Duchamp undertook a method of artistic research, reflection, and visual thought that focused less on beauty than on the notion of the "possible." He became a passionate advocate of the power of invention and thinking things that had never been thought before. The 3 Standard Stoppages is the ultimate realization of the play between chance and dimension, visibility and invisibility, high and low art, and art and anti-art. Situating Duchamp firmly within the literature and philosophy of his time, Herbert Molderings recaptures the spirit of a frequently misread artist-and his thrilling aesthetic of chance.


Chance Aesthetics

Chance Aesthetics

Author: Meredith Malone

Publisher: Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 184

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Catalog of an exhibition held at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis, Sept. 18, 2009-Jan. 4, 2010.


Sprezzatura

Sprezzatura

Author: Paolo D'Angelo

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2018-03-06

Total Pages: 151

ISBN-13: 0231540345

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The essence of art is to conceal art. A dancer or musician does not only need to perform with ability. There should also be a lack of visible effort that gives an impression of naturalness. To disguise technique and feign ease is to heighten beauty. To express this notion, Italian has a word with no exact equivalent in other languages, sprezzatura: a kind of unaffectedness or nonchalance. In this book, the first to consider sprezzatura in its own right, philosopher of art Paolo D’Angelo reconstructs the history of concealing art, from ancient rhetoric to our own times. The word sprezzatura was coined in 1528 by Baldassarre Castiglione in The Book of the Courtier to mean a kind of grace with a special essence: the ability to conceal art. But the idea reaches back to Aristotle and Cicero and forward to avant-garde works such as Duchamp’s ready-mades, all of which share the suspicion of the overt display of skill. The precept that art must be hidden turns up in a number of fields, from cosmetics to interior design, politics to poetry, the English garden to shabby chic. Through exploring different articulations of this idea, D’Angelo shows the paradox of aesthetics: art hides that it is art, but in doing so it reveals itself to be art and becomes an assertion about art. When art is concealed, it appears as spontaneous as nature—yet, paradoxically, also reveals its indebtedness to technique. An erudite and surprising tour through aesthetics, philosophy, and art history, Sprezzatura presents a strikingly original argument with deceptive ease.


Dadas on Art

Dadas on Art

Author: Lucy R. Lippard

Publisher: Courier Corporation

Published: 2007-01-01

Total Pages: 194

ISBN-13: 0486456994

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A select anthology of the Dada movement focusing mainly on visual artists features prose, poetry, and polemics from such notables as Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Tristan Tzara, Hanna Hèoch, George Grosz, and Jean Cocteau.


Chance, Phenomenology and Aesthetics

Chance, Phenomenology and Aesthetics

Author: Ian Andrews

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2020-11-12

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 1350148482

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In drawing upon the work of Jacques Derrida, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger and aligning it with a new trend in interdisciplinary phenomenology, Ian Andrews provides a unique look at the role of chance in art and its philosophical implications. His account of how the composer John Cage and other avant-garde creatives such as Marcel Duchamp, Tristan Tzara, Sol LeWitt and Ed Ruscha used chance in their work to question the structures of experience and prompt a new engagement with these phenomena makes a truly important contribution to Continental philosophy. Chance, Phenomenology and Aesthetics will appeal to scholars and advanced students in the disciplines of phenomenology, deconstruction and hermeneutics, as well as being compelling reading for anyone interested in pursuing sound studies, art theory and art history through an interdisciplinary post-phenomenological lens.


Thinking with Images

Thinking with Images

Author: John M. Carvalho

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-08-06

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 0429869916

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book advances an enactivist theory of aesthetics through the study of inscrutable artworks that challenge us to think because we do not know what to think about them. John M. Carvalho presents detailed analyses a four artworks that share this unique characteristic: Francis Bacon’s Study After Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953), the photographs of Duane Michals, based on a retrospective of his work, Storyteller, at the Carnegie Museum of Art (2014), Étant donnés (1968) by Marcel Duchamp, and Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 film Le Mépris (released in the United States as Contempt). Carvalho argues against the application of theory to derive appreciation or meaning from these artistic works. Rather, each study enacts an embodied cognitive engagement with the specific artworks intended to demonstrate the value of thinking about artworks that might be extended to our engagement with the world in general. This thinking happens, as these studies show, when we trust our embodied skills and their guide to what artworks and the world around us afford for the activation and refinement of those skills. Thinking with Images will be of interest to scholars working in the philosophy of art and philosophical aesthetics, as well as art historians concerned with the meaning and value of contemporary art.


Unpacking Duchamp

Unpacking Duchamp

Author: Dalia Judovitz

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 1998-04-28

Total Pages: 330

ISBN-13: 9780520213760

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

"Transit, transitional, transition: Dalia Judovitz catches Marcel Duchamp on the run with his art in a suitcase and his thought all boxed and ready to go. . . . She demonstrates how the theme of transition, reappearing from work to work, makes each piece reproduce some other piece, while all continue to exemplify an original which can no longer be found and which has no creator."—Jean-François Lyotard


Pictorial Nominalism

Pictorial Nominalism

Author: Thierry De Duve

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2005-10-01

Total Pages: 255

ISBN-13: 081664859X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Reveals the invention of the readymade as a critical point in contemporary art.


A Companion to Dada and Surrealism

A Companion to Dada and Surrealism

Author: David Hopkins

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2016-05-10

Total Pages: 496

ISBN-13: 1118476182

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This excellent overview of new research on Dada and Surrealism blends expert synthesis of the latest scholarship with completely new research, offering historical coverage as well as in-depth discussion of thematic areas ranging from criminality to gender. This book provides an excellent overview of new research on Dada and Surrealism from some of the finest established and up-and-coming scholars in the field Offers historical coverage as well as in–depth discussion of thematic areas ranging from criminality to gender One of the first studies to produce global coverage of the two movements, it also includes a section dealing with the critical and cultural aftermath of Dada and Surrealism in the later twentieth century Dada and Surrealism are arguably the most popular areas of modern art, both in the academic and public spheres


From Diversion to Subversion

From Diversion to Subversion

Author: David Getsy

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 9780271037035

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

"Examines the wide-ranging influence of games and play on the development of modern art in the twentieth century"--Provided by publisher.