Brutal Beauty
Brutal Beauty

Author: Jisha Menon

Publisher: Northwestern University Press

Published: 2021-10-15

Total Pages: 318

ISBN-13: 0810144077

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Brutal Beauty: Aesthetics and Aspiration in Urban India follows a postcolonial city as it transforms into a bustling global metropolis after the liberalization of the Indian economy. Taking the once idyllic “garden city” of Bangalore in southern India as its point of departure, the book explores how artists across India and beyond foreground neoliberalism as a “structure of feeling” permeating aesthetics, selfhood, and everyday life. Jisha Menon conveys the affective life of the city through multiple aesthetic projects that express a range of urban feelings, including aspiration, panic, and obsolescence. As developers and policymakers remodel the city through tumultuous construction projects, urban beautification, privatization, and other templated features of “world‐class cities,” urban citizens are also changing—transformed by nostalgia, narcissism, shame, and the spaces where they dwell and work. Sketching out scenes of urban aspiration and its dark underbelly, Menon delineates the creative and destructive potential of India’s lurch into contemporary capitalism, uncovering the interconnectedness of local and global power structures as well as art’s capacity to absorb and critique liberalization’s discontents. She argues that neoliberalism isn’t just an economic, social, and political phenomenon; neoliberalism is also a profoundly aesthetic project.

Brutal Aesthetics
Brutal Aesthetics

Author: Hal Foster

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2023-10-17

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 0691253080

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How artists created an aesthetic of “positive barbarism” in a world devastated by World War II, the Holocaust, and the atomic bomb In Brutal Aesthetics, leading art historian Hal Foster explores how postwar artists and writers searched for a new foundation of culture after the massive devastation of World War II, the Holocaust, and the atomic bomb. Inspired by the notion that modernist art can teach us how to survive a civilization become barbaric, Foster examines the various ways that key figures from the early 1940s to the early 1960s sought to develop a “brutal aesthetics” adequate to the destruction around them. With a focus on the philosopher Georges Bataille, the painters Jean Dubuffet and Asger Jorn, and the sculptors Eduardo Paolozzi and Claes Oldenburg, Foster investigates a manifold move to strip art down, or to reveal it as already bare, in order to begin again. What does Bataille seek in the prehistoric cave paintings of Lascaux? How does Dubuffet imagine an art brut, an art unscathed by culture? Why does Jorn populate his paintings with “human animals”? What does Paolozzi see in his monstrous figures assembled from industrial debris? And why does Oldenburg remake everyday products from urban scrap? A study of artistic practices made desperate by a world in crisis, Brutal Aesthetics is an intriguing account of a difficult era in twentieth-century culture, one that has important implications for our own. Published in association with the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC Please note: All images in this ebook are presented in black and white and have been reduced in size.

The Return of the Real
The Return of the Real

Author: Hal Foster

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 1996-09-25

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 9780262561075

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In The Return of the Real Hal Foster discusses the development of art and theory since 1960, and reorders the relation between prewar and postwar avant-gardes. Opposed to the assumption that contemporary art is somehow belated, he argues that the avant-garde returns to us from the future, repositioned by innovative practice in the present. And he poses this retroactive model of art and theory against the reactionary undoing of progressive culture that is pervasive today. After the models of art-as-text in the 1970s and art-as-simulacrum in the 1980s, Foster suggests that we are now witness to a return to the real—to art and theory grounded in the materiality of actual bodies and social sites. If The Return of the Real begins with a new narrative of the historical avant-gard, it concludes with an original reading of this contemporary situation—and what it portends for future practices of art and theory, culture and politics.

Atlas of Brutalist Architecture
Atlas of Brutalist Architecture

Author: Virginia McLeod

Publisher: Phaidon

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781838661908

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The Brutalist aesthetic is enjoying a renaissance - and this book documents Brutalism as never before. In the most wide-ranging investigation ever undertaken into one of architecture's most powerful movements, more than 850 Brutalist buildings - existing and demolished, classic and contemporary - are organized geographically into nine continental regions. Much-loved masterpieces in the UK and USA sit alongside lesser-known examples in Europe, Asia, Australia, and beyond - 102 countries in all, proving that Brutalism was, and continues to be, a truly international architectural phenomenon.

Infrastructural Brutalism
Infrastructural Brutalism

Author: Michael Truscello

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2020-09-01

Total Pages: 378

ISBN-13: 0262358727

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How "drowned town" literature, road movies, energy landscape photography, and "death train" narratives represent the brutality of industrial infrastructures. In this book, Michael Truscello looks at the industrial infrastructure not as an invisible system of connectivity and mobility that keeps capitalism humming in the background but as a manufactured miasma of despair, toxicity, and death. Truscello terms this "infrastructural brutalism"--a formulation that not only alludes to the historical nexus of infrastructure and the concrete aesthetic of Brutalist architecture but also describes the ecological, political, and psychological brutality of industrial infrastructures.

After Art
After Art

Author: David Joselit

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 133

ISBN-13: 0691150443

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How digital networks are transforming art and architecture Art as we know it is dramatically changing, but popular and critical responses lag behind. In this trenchant illustrated essay, David Joselit describes how art and architecture are being transformed in the age of Google. Under the dual pressures of digital technology, which allows images to be reformatted and disseminated effortlessly, and the exponential acceleration of cultural exchange enabled by globalization, artists and architects are emphasizing networks as never before. Some of the most interesting contemporary work in both fields is now based on visualizing patterns of dissemination after objects and structures are produced, and after they enter into, and even establish, diverse networks. Behaving like human search engines, artists and architects sort, capture, and reformat existing content. Works of art crystallize out of populations of images, and buildings emerge out of the dynamics of the circulation patterns they will house. Examining the work of architectural firms such as OMA, Reiser + Umemoto, and Foreign Office, as well as the art of Matthew Barney, Ai Weiwei, Sherrie Levine, and many others, After Art provides a compelling and original theory of art and architecture in the age of global networks.

Compulsive Beauty
Compulsive Beauty

Author: Hal Foster

Publisher: Mit Press

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 9780262560818

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Surrealism has long been seen as its founder, André Breton,wanted it to be seen: as amovement of love and liberation. In Compulsive Beauty, Foster reads surrealism from its other,darker side: as an art given over to the uncanny, to the compulsion to repeat and the drive towarddeath.To this end Foster first restages the difficult encounter of surrealism with Freudianpsychoanalysis, then redefines the crucial categories of surrealism - the marvelous, convulsivebeauty, objective chance - in terms of the Freudian uncanny,or the return of familar things madestrange by repression. Next, with the art of Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, and Alberto Giacomettiin mind, Foster develops a theory of the surrealist image as a working over of a primal fantasy.This leads him finally to propose as a summa of surrealism a body of work often shunted to itsmargins: the dolls of Hans Bellmer, so many traumatic tableaux that point to difficult connectionsnot only between sadism and masochism butal so between surrealism and fascism.At this pointCompulsive Beauty turns to the social dimension of the surrealist uncanny. First Foster reads thesurrealist repertoire of automatons and mannequins as a reflection on the uncanny processes ofmechanization and commodification. Then he considers the surrealist use of outmoded images as anattempt to work through the historical repression effected by these same processes. In a briefconclusion he discusses the fate of surrealism today ina world become surrealistic.Compulsive Beautynot only offers a deconstructive reading of surrealism, long neglected by Anglo-American arthistory, it also participates in a postmodern reconsideration of modernism, the dominant accounts ofwhich have obscured its involvements in desire and trauma, capitalist shock and technologicaldevelopment.Hal Foster is Associate Professor of Art History and Comparative Literature at CornellUniversity. He is an editor of the journal OCTOBER.

Bad New Days
Bad New Days

Author: Hal Foster

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2015-09-29

Total Pages: 239

ISBN-13: 1784781460

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One of the world’s leading art theorists dissects a quarter century of artistic practice Bad New Days examines the evolution of art and criticism in Western Europe and North America over the last twenty-five years, exploring their dynamic relation to the general condition of emergency instilled by neoliberalism and the war on terror. Considering the work of artists such as Thomas Hirschhorn, Tacita Dean, and Isa Genzken, and the writing of thinkers like Jacques Rancière, Bruno Latour, and Giorgio Agamben, Hal Foster shows the ways in which art has anticipated this condition, at times resisting the collapse of the social contract or gesturing toward its repair; at other times burlesquing it. Against the claim that art making has become so heterogeneous as to defy historical analysis, Foster argues that the critic must still articulate a clear account of the contemporary in all its complexity. To that end, he offers several paradigms for the art of recent years, which he terms “abject,” “archival,” “mimetic,” and “precarious.”

Aesthetics and Marxism
Aesthetics and Marxism

Author: Kang Liu

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2000-03-10

Total Pages: 247

ISBN-13: 0822380536

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Although Chinese Marxism—primarily represented by Maoism—is generally seen by Western intellectuals as monolithic, Liu Kang argues that its practices and projects are as diverse as those in Western Marxism, particularly in the area of aesthetics. In this comparative study of European and Chinese Marxist traditions, Liu reveals the extent to which Chinese Marxists incorporate ideas about aesthetics and culture in their theories and practices. In doing so, he constructs a wholly new understanding of Chinese Marxism. Far from being secondary considerations in Chinese Marxism, aesthetics and culture are in fact principal concerns. In this respect, such Marxists are similar to their Western counterparts, although Europeans have had little understanding of the Chinese experience. Liu traces the genealogy of aesthetic discourse in both modern China and the West since the era of classical German thought, showing where conceptual modifications and divergences have occurred in the two traditions. He examines the work of Mao Zedong, Lu Xun, Li Zehou, Qu Qiubai, and others in China, and from the West he discusses Kant, Schiller, Schopenhauer, and Marxist theorists including Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, and Marcuse. While stressing the diversity of Marxist positions within China as well as in the West, Liu explains how ideas of culture and aesthetics have offered a constructive vision for a postrevolutionary society and have affected a wide field of issues involving the problems of modernity. Forcefully argued and theoretically sophisticated, this book will appeal to students and scholars of contemporary Marxism, cultural studies, aesthetics, and modern Chinese culture, politics, and ideology.

Black is Beautiful
Black is Beautiful

Author: Paul C. Taylor

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2016-03-24

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 1118328671

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Black is Beautiful identifies and explores the most significant philosophical issues that emerge from the aesthetic dimensions of black life, providing a long-overdue synthesis and the first extended philosophical treatment of this crucial subject. The first extended philosophical treatment of an important subject that has been almost entirely neglected by philosophical aesthetics and philosophy of art Takes an important step in assembling black aesthetics as an object of philosophical study Unites two areas of scholarship for the first time – philosophical aesthetics and black cultural theory, dissolving the dilemma of either studying philosophy, or studying black expressive culture Brings a wide range of fields into conversation with one another– from visual culture studies and art history to analytic philosophy to musicology – producing mutually illuminating approaches that challenge some of the basic suppositions of each Well-balanced, up-to-date, and beautifully written as well as inventive and insightful Winner of The American Society of Aesthetics Outstanding Monograph Prize 2017