The Big Archive

The Big Archive PDF Author: Sven Spieker
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 026253357X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
The archive as a crucible of twentieth-century modernism and key for understanding contemporary art. The typewriter, the card index, and the filing cabinet: these are technologies and modalities of the archive. To the bureaucrat, archives contain little more than garbage, paperwork no longer needed; to the historian, on the other hand, the archive's content stands as a quasi-objective correlative of the “living” past. Twentieth-century art made use of the archive in a variety of ways—from what Spieker calls Marcel Duchamp's “anemic archive” of readymades and El Lissitzky's Demonstration Rooms to the compilations of photographs made by such postwar artists as Susan Hiller and Gerhard Richter. In The Big Archive, Sven Spieker investigates the archive—as both bureaucratic institution and index of evolving attitudes toward contingent time in science and art—and finds it to be a crucible of twentieth-century modernism. Dadaists, constructivists, and Surrealists favored discontinuous, nonlinear archives that resisted hermeneutic reading and ordered presentation. Spieker argues that the use of archives by such contemporary artists as Hiller, Richter, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Walid Raad, and Boris Mikhailov responds to and continues this attack on the nineteenth-century archive and its objectification of the historical process. Spieker considers archivally driven art in relation to changing media technologies—the typewriter, the telephone, the telegraph, film. And he connects the archive to a particularly modern visuality, showing that the avant-garde used the archive as something of a laboratory for experimental inquiries into the nature of vision and its relation to time. The Big Archive offers us the first critical monograph on an overarching motif in twentieth-century art.

Age of Surrealism

Age of Surrealism PDF Author: Wallace Fowlie
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781258799090
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description


Down Below

Down Below PDF Author: Leonora Carrington
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1681370611
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 113

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Book Description
A stunning work of memoir and an unforgettable depiction of the brilliance and madness by one of Surrealism's most compelling figures In 1937 Leonora Carrington—later to become one of the twentieth century’s great painters of the weird, the alarming, and the wild—was a nineteen-year-old art student in London, beautiful and unapologetically rebellious. At a dinner party, she met the artist Max Ernst. The two fell in love and soon departed to live and paint together in a farmhouse in Provence. In 1940, the invading German army arrested Ernst and sent him to a concentration camp. Carrington suffered a psychotic break. She wept for hours. Her stomach became “the mirror of the earth”—of all worlds in a hostile universe—and she tried to purify the evil by compulsively vomiting. As the Germans neared the south of France, a friend persuaded Carrington to flee to Spain. Facing the approach “of robots, of thoughtless, fleshless beings,” she packed a suitcase that bore on a brass plate the word Revelation. This was only the beginning of a journey into madness that was to end with Carrington confined in a mental institution, overwhelmed not only by her own terrible imaginings but by her doctor’s sadistic course of treatment. In Down Below she describes her ordeal—in which the agonizing and the marvelous were equally combined—with a startling, almost impersonal precision and without a trace of self-pity. Like Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, Down Below brings the hallucinatory logic of madness home.

Exquisite Corpse

Exquisite Corpse PDF Author: Mark Nelson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780821258194
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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Book Description
Presenting the most compelling explanation yet for the bizarre nature of the Black Dahlia murder, this volume includes never-before published crime-scene photographs and links the alleged killer to a vast array of influential people.

Bureau of the Centre for the Study of Surrealism and Its Legacy

Bureau of the Centre for the Study of Surrealism and Its Legacy PDF Author: Mark Dion
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 136

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Book Description
"Recalling the short-lived Bureau de Recherches Surréalistes of 1924-1925 - part information centre and 'public relations' office, and part surrealist archive - Mark Dion has trawled the Manchester Museum's own collections and found the raw material for this book and a new installation in the museum. Museums' attempts to classify and present the world in miniature inevitably mean that much of their collections are forgotten and marginalized. Renowned for his work exploring taxonomy, archaeology and ecology, Mark Dion, in his Bureau documents his opportunistic encounters with the Museum of Manchester's neglected drawers and overlooked recesses that are home to redundant labels, orphaned mounts, defunct teaching models, botanical freaks, Egyptian fakes and the minutiae that have fallen through the cracks of museum practice and lain abandoned. Dion's Bureau of the Centre for the Study of Surrealism and its Legacy is both a repository for the detritus of museum life and a working process, classifying the museum's un-classifiable whilst exploring the bureaucratic workings of the institution." [Publisher's statement].

Unexpected Journeys

Unexpected Journeys PDF Author: Janet A. Kaplan
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
"The adventures that fill the strange and wonderful paintings by Remedios Varo (1908-1963) reflect the physical and psychological journeys of her own tumultuous life. Raised in a strict Spanish family and rigorously trained in academic art, Varo first found escape in Barcelona's bohemian avant-garde. After fleeing the Spanish Civil War with the poet Benjamin Péret, later her husband, she entered the inner circle of the Surrealists in Paris. Forced to flee again by the Nazis, she and Péret faced a year of mounting danger in Marseilles before securing passage to Mexico. Finding welcome refuge in Mexico City, where she remained until her death, Varo produced the extraordinary paintings for which she gained renown. Janet A. Kaplan's vivid chronicle, the first on the subject in English, weaves Varo's life with the artist's exquisite work. Painted with a jewellike palette and old-master precision, Varo's intimate tableaus, rich with details of women's experience, tell fantasy tales of alchem, science, mysticism, and magic. Fifty color reproductions capture the wit and beauty of her major paintings; numerous black-and-white illustrations document other works and portray the compelling artist with her circle of lifelong friends and admirers. The book is further enlivened by her own voice, conveyed in hilarious letters and surreal stories, published here for the first time. An instant celebrity in Mexico--where her retrospectives have drawn record crowds--Varo has recently found enthusiastic audiences in Europe and the Americas. A woman of intense magnetism and powerful imagination, Varo has been little known outside Mexico. The fascinating story of her life and dazzling intricacy of her art will prove a revelation."--Front flap of book jacket.

The Big Archive

The Big Archive PDF Author: Sven Spieker
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 026253357X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
The archive as a crucible of twentieth-century modernism and key for understanding contemporary art. The typewriter, the card index, and the filing cabinet: these are technologies and modalities of the archive. To the bureaucrat, archives contain little more than garbage, paperwork no longer needed; to the historian, on the other hand, the archive's content stands as a quasi-objective correlative of the “living” past. Twentieth-century art made use of the archive in a variety of ways—from what Spieker calls Marcel Duchamp's “anemic archive” of readymades and El Lissitzky's Demonstration Rooms to the compilations of photographs made by such postwar artists as Susan Hiller and Gerhard Richter. In The Big Archive, Sven Spieker investigates the archive—as both bureaucratic institution and index of evolving attitudes toward contingent time in science and art—and finds it to be a crucible of twentieth-century modernism. Dadaists, constructivists, and Surrealists favored discontinuous, nonlinear archives that resisted hermeneutic reading and ordered presentation. Spieker argues that the use of archives by such contemporary artists as Hiller, Richter, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Walid Raad, and Boris Mikhailov responds to and continues this attack on the nineteenth-century archive and its objectification of the historical process. Spieker considers archivally driven art in relation to changing media technologies—the typewriter, the telephone, the telegraph, film. And he connects the archive to a particularly modern visuality, showing that the avant-garde used the archive as something of a laboratory for experimental inquiries into the nature of vision and its relation to time. The Big Archive offers us the first critical monograph on an overarching motif in twentieth-century art.

The Unraveling Archive

The Unraveling Archive PDF Author: Anita Plath Helle
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472069279
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
A collection of eleven essays on Plath's writing with the archive as its informing matrix.

A Surreal Life

A Surreal Life PDF Author: Royal Pavilion, Art Gallery, and Museums
Publisher: Philip Wilson Publishers
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description
A series of essays examining the many facets of the man known for his patronage of surrealist art.

The Archive of Development

The Archive of Development PDF Author: Annette W. Balkema
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9789042004313
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
In the current debate on art, thought on time has commanded a prominent position. Do we live in a posthistorical time? Has objective art historical time and belief in a continual progress shifted to a more subjective experience of the ephemeral? Has (art) history fallen away and, if so, what does this mean for the future of art? How does a visual archive relate to artistic memory? This volume investigates positions, arguments and comments regarding the stated theme. Philosophers and theorists explore the subject matter theoretically. Curators articulate the practice of art. The participants are: Hans Belting, Jan Bor, Peter Bürger, Bart Cassiman, Leontine Coelewij, Hubert Damisch, Arthur C. Danto, Bart De Baere, Okwui Enwezor, Kasper König, Sven Lütticken, Manifesta (Barbara VanderLinden), Hans Ulrich Obrist, Donald Preziosi, Survival of the Past Project (Herman Parret, Lex Ter Braak, Camiel Van Winkel), Ernst Van Alphen, Kirk Varnedoe, Gianni Vattimo, and Kees Vuyk.

Surrealist Ghostliness

Surrealist Ghostliness PDF Author: Katharine Conley
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496211529
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
In this study of surrealism and ghostliness, Katharine Conley provides a new, unifying theory of surrealist art and thought based on history and the paradigm of puns and anamorphosis. In Surrealist Ghostliness, Conley discusses surrealism as a movement haunted by the experience of World War I and the repressed ghost of spiritualism. From the perspective of surrealist automatism, this double haunting produced a unifying paradigm of textual and visual puns that both pervades surrealist thought and art and commemorates the surrealists’ response to the Freudian unconscious. Extending the gothic imagination inherited from the eighteenth century, the surrealists inaugurated the psychological century with an exploration of ghostliness through doubles, puns, and anamorphosis, revealing through visual activation the underlying coexistence of realities as opposed as life and death. Surrealist Ghostliness explores examples of surrealist ghostliness in film, photography, painting, sculpture, and installation art from the 1920s through the 1990s by artists from Europe and North America from the center to the periphery of the surrealist movement. Works by Man Ray, Claude Cahun, Brassaï and Salvador Dalí, Lee Miller, Dorothea Tanning, Francesca Woodman, Pierre Alechinsky, and Susan Hiller illuminate the surrealist ghostliness that pervades the twentieth-century arts and compellingly unifies the century’s most influential yet disparate avant-garde movement.