Avant-garde Gambits, 1888-1893

Avant-garde Gambits, 1888-1893 PDF Author: Griselda Pollock
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
ISBN: 9780500550250
Category : Art and race
Languages : en
Pages : 80

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Book Description
In the late 1880s Gauguin, Van Gogh and Bernard, fledgling members of the subculture we call the avant-garde, abandoned Paris, the capital of modernity, to seek out in rural Brittany, Provence - and later in Tahiti - what Van Gogh called "a purer nature of the countryside". Griselda Pollock challenges art history's usual interpretations of this search in the distant and exotic regions by arguing that these artists were cultural colonizers. They exhibited the modern tourist's attachment to home - modern Paris and its art worlds - while being fascinated by what they imagined was a pre-modern "other". Through a thorough textual and social reading of Gauguin's 1892 painting of his Tahitian wife, Manao Tupapau, the author proposes a new theory about the avant-garde as a series of gambits, a game of reference, deference and difference. This painting refers and defers to Manet's Olympia (1863), a notorious avant-garde image of prostitution in the modern city. Where it was seen to differ was in the color of the nude: critics named it a "brown Olympia". Careful deconstruction of this epithet allows Professor Pollock to explore the ways in which racist discourse structures art and art history, posing questions of cultural, sexual and ethnic difference in order to make us all self-critical, not only in regard to the gender, but also to the color of art history.

Avant-garde Gambits, 1888-1893

Avant-garde Gambits, 1888-1893 PDF Author: Griselda Pollock
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
ISBN: 9780500550250
Category : Art and race
Languages : en
Pages : 80

Get Book Here

Book Description
In the late 1880s Gauguin, Van Gogh and Bernard, fledgling members of the subculture we call the avant-garde, abandoned Paris, the capital of modernity, to seek out in rural Brittany, Provence - and later in Tahiti - what Van Gogh called "a purer nature of the countryside". Griselda Pollock challenges art history's usual interpretations of this search in the distant and exotic regions by arguing that these artists were cultural colonizers. They exhibited the modern tourist's attachment to home - modern Paris and its art worlds - while being fascinated by what they imagined was a pre-modern "other". Through a thorough textual and social reading of Gauguin's 1892 painting of his Tahitian wife, Manao Tupapau, the author proposes a new theory about the avant-garde as a series of gambits, a game of reference, deference and difference. This painting refers and defers to Manet's Olympia (1863), a notorious avant-garde image of prostitution in the modern city. Where it was seen to differ was in the color of the nude: critics named it a "brown Olympia". Careful deconstruction of this epithet allows Professor Pollock to explore the ways in which racist discourse structures art and art history, posing questions of cultural, sexual and ethnic difference in order to make us all self-critical, not only in regard to the gender, but also to the color of art history.

Radical Art and the Formation of the Avant-Garde

Radical Art and the Formation of the Avant-Garde PDF Author: David Cottington
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300265077
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 418

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Book Description
An authoritative re-definition of the social, cultural and visual history of the emergence of the “avant-garde” in Paris and London Over the past fifty years, the term "avant-garde" has come to shape discussions of European culture and modernity, ubiquitously taken for granted but rarely defined. This ground-breaking book develops an original and searching methodology that fundamentally reconfigures the social, cultural, and visual context of the emergence of the artistic avant-garde in Paris and London before 1915, bringing the material history of its formation into clearer and more detailed focus than ever before. Drawing on a wealth of disciplinary evidence, from socio-economics to histories of sexuality, bohemia, consumerism, politics, and popular culture, David Cottington explores the different models of cultural collectivity in, and presumed hierarchies between, these two focal cities, while identifying points of ideological influence and difference between them. He reveals the avant-garde to be at once complicit with, resistant to, and a product of the modernizing forces of professionalization, challenging the conventional wisdom on this moment of cultural formation and offering the means to reset the terms of avant-garde studies.

Avant-Garde / Neo-Avant-Garde

Avant-Garde / Neo-Avant-Garde PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9401202583
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 346

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Book Description
This collection of critical essays explores new approaches to the study of avant-garde literature and art, film and architecture. It offers a theoretical framework that avoids narrowly defined notions of the avant-garde. It takes into account the diversity of artistic aims and directions of the various avant-garde movements and encourages a wide and open exploration of the multifaceted and often contradictory nature of the great variety of avant-gardist innovations. Individual essays concentrate on cubist collage and dadaist photomontage, on abstract painting by members of the Dutch group De Stijl, on verbal chemistry and dadaist poetry and on body art from futurism to surrealism. In addition, the collection wishes to open up the discussion of the avant-garde to a thorough investigation of neo-avant-garde activities in the 1950s and 1960s. For decades the appreciation of neo-avant-garde art and literature, film and architecture suffered from a general and all-inclusive rebuke. This volume is designed to contribute to a breakthrough towards a more competent and more precise investigation of this research field. Contributions include a discussion of Warhol’s multiples as well as Duchamp’s editioned readymades, forms of concrete and digital poetry as well as the architectural “Non-Plan”. The main body of the volume is based on presentations and discussions of a three-day research seminar held at the University of Edinburgh in September 2002. The research group formed around the Avant-Garde Project at Edinburgh will continue with its efforts to elaborate a new theory of the avant-garde in the coming years.

The Public and Private in Dutch Culture of the Golden Age

The Public and Private in Dutch Culture of the Golden Age PDF Author: Arthur K. Wheelock (Jr.)
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
ISBN: 0874136407
Category : Art and society
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
This volume of essays derives from a memorable interdisciplinary symposium. At issue were various fundamental questions about the nature of Dutch sixteenth-and seventeenth-century society that fall under three broad categories: civic culture, art, and religion. The fourteen papers presented in this volume offer a number of fascinating insights into these and other questions that, taken together, greatly enrich our perception and understanding of this rich and varied society.

The Challenge of the Avant-garde

The Challenge of the Avant-garde PDF Author: Paul Wood
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300077629
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
The Challenge of the Avant-Garde is the fourth of six books in the series Art and its Histories, which form the main texts of an Open University course. The course has been designed for students who are new to the discipline but will also appeal to those who have undertaken some study in this area. This volume traces the challenge posed to the academic canon by the emergent avant-garde of the early and mid-nineteenth century.It looks at significant shifts in the development of the concept, both in moves away from the sense of social leadership to a desire for artistic autonomy in the later nineteenth century and then a reverse movement to bridge the gap between art and life in the revolutionary avant-gardes of the early twentieth century. The book closes with an examination of the eventual incorporation of the avant-garde as a form of modern canon by the eve of World War II. Throughout, it seeks to relate the discourse of artistic avant-gardism in all its forms to contemporary social and political histories.

Anywhere or Not at All

Anywhere or Not at All PDF Author: Peter Osborne
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1781684782
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 375

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Book Description
Winner of the 2014 Annual Book Prize of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (USA). Contemporary art is the object of inflated and widely divergent claims. But what kind of discourse can open it up effectively to critical analysis? Anywhere or Not at All is a major philosophical intervention in art theory that challenges the terms of established positions through a new approach at once philosophical, historical, social and art-critical. Developing the position that "contemporary art is postconceptual art," the book progresses through a dual series of conceptual constructions and interpretations of particular works to assess the art from a number of perspectives: contemporaneity and its global context; art against aesthetic; the Romantic pre-history of conceptual art; the multiplicity of modernisms; transcategoriality; conceptual abstraction; photographic ontology; digitalization; and the institutional and existential complexities of art-space and art-time. Anywhere or Not at All maps out the conceptual space for an art that is both critical and contemporary in the era of global capitalism.

Studies in Irreversibility

Studies in Irreversibility PDF Author: Benjamin Schreier
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443815276
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
The premise of Studies in Irreversibility: Texts and Contexts is that there is a big difference between phenomena, practices, processes, and events that are irreversible and those that are reversible, and moreover that this difference and its manifold implications remain underappreciated so long as the analysis of culture continues to anchor itself in an emphasis on the capacities of human agency. If messianic modes posit a future to justify the present, and so interpret the influence of the past, the papers in this collection are devoted to examining the present of experience from the perspective of its uncompromising and irreducible past, finding in irreversibility a key to an interpretation of futurity. Together, these papers outline a method of examining experience as something more—or at least other—than the desire to know it, and in so doing they shed light on the powerful role of normativity in the narratives we construct in and about culture. Through novel analyses from the disciplines of literature, art criticism, history, philosophy, ethnic studies, and ethics, the contributors to this book address key questions about the nature of irreversibility: What differentiates the experience of the irreversible from the experience of the reversible? How is irreversibility recognized? What happens when we acknowledge something to be irreversible? How has society contended with irreversibility, and what sorts of tools exist today to interpret its significance? Wary of impetuously fixing the meaning of a still-elusive concept, this volume collects papers that employ a wide array of methodologies, mindful that no one critical approach may yet have proved itself. Irreversibility is not simply a quality of the texts examined in this volume, nor is it strictly speaking a lens through which otherwise coherent or stable texts are examined; rather, it emerges as a model that brings together texts and the thinking of them. By together outlining a method of examining culture that moves beyond reliance on tropes such as functionalism, teleology, and chance, tropes that have dominated twentieth century cultural analysis, these papers help to inaugurate a new paradigm in the study of culture.

Nature’s Experiments and the Search for Symbolist Form

Nature’s Experiments and the Search for Symbolist Form PDF Author: Allison Morehead
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 027107938X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 467

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Book Description
This provocative study argues that some of the most inventive artwork of the 1890s was strongly influenced by the methods of experimental science and ultimately foreshadowed twentieth-century modernist practices. Looking at avant-garde figures such as Maurice Denis, Édouard Vuillard, August Strindberg, and Edvard Munch, Allison Morehead considers the conjunction of art making and experimentalism to illuminate how artists echoed the spirit of an increasingly explorative scientific culture in their work and processes. She shows how the concept of “nature’s experiments”—the belief that the study of pathologies led to an understanding of scientific truths, above all about the human mind and body—extended from the scientific realm into the world of art, underpinned artists’ solutions to the problem of symbolist form, and provided a ready-made methodology for fin-de-siècle truth seekers. By using experimental methods to transform symbolist theories into visual form, these artists broke from naturalist modes and interrogated concepts such as deformation, automatism, the arabesque, and madness to create modern works that were radically and usefully strange. Focusing on the scientific, psychological, and experimental tactics of symbolism, Nature’s Experiments and the Search for Symbolist Form demystifies the avant-garde value of experimentation and reveals new and important insights into a foundational period for the development of European modernism.

Becoming

Becoming PDF Author: Carol Mavor
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822323891
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
A writerly study of Lady Hawarden's photographs and other visual representations of the complex erotics of adolescent girlhood.

Eyesight Alone

Eyesight Alone PDF Author: Caroline A. Jones
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226409538
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 600

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Book Description
Even a decade after his death, Clement Greenberg remains controversial. One of the most influential art writers of the twentieth century, Greenberg propelled Abstract Expressionist painting-in particular the monumental work of Jackson Pollock-to a leading position in an international postwar art world. On radio and in print, Greenberg was the voice of "the new American painting," and a central figure in the postwar cultural history of the United States. Caroline Jones's magisterial study widens Greenberg's fundamental tenet of "opticality"-the idea that modernist art is apprehended through "eyesight alone"-to a broader arena, examining how the critic's emphasis on the specular resonated with a society increasingly invested in positivist approaches to the world. Greenberg's modernist discourse, Jones argues, developed in relation to the rationalized procedures that gained wide currency in the United States at midcentury, in fields ranging from the sense-data protocols theorized by scientific philosophy to the development of cultural forms, such as hi-fi, that targeted specific senses, one by one. Greenberg's attempt to isolate and celebrate the visual was one manifestation of a large-scale segmentation-or bureaucratization-of the body's senses. Working through these historical developments, Jones brings Greenberg's theories into contemporary philosophical debates about agency and subjectivity. Eyesight Alone offers artists, art historians, philosophers, and all those interested in the arts a critical history of this generative figure, bringing his work fully into dialogue with the ideas that shape contemporary critical discourse and shedding light not only on Clement Greenberg but also on the contested history of modernism itself.