Essays on Art and Language

Essays on Art and Language PDF Author: Charles Harrison
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262582414
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
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.

Essays on Art and Language

Essays on Art and Language PDF Author: Charles Harrison
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262582414
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 350

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Discourse on the Sciences and Arts

Discourse on the Sciences and Arts PDF Author: Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Publisher: Dartmouth College Press
ISBN:
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Rousseau attacks the social and political effects of the dominant forms of scientific knowledge. Contains the entire First Discourse, contemporary attacks on it, Rousseau's replies to his critics, and his summary of the debate in his preface to Narcissus. A number of these texts have never before been available in English. The First Discourse and Polemics demonstrate the continued relevance of Rousseau's thought. Whereas his critics argue for correction of the excesses and corruptions of knowledge and the sciences as sufficient, Rousseau attacks the social and political effects of the dominant forms of scientific knowledge.

Science in Culture

Science in Culture PDF Author: Stephen R. Graubard
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 135130691X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Twenty-five years ago, Gerald Holton's Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought introduced a wide audience to his ideas. Holton argued that from ancient times to the modern period, an astonishing feature of innovative scientific work was its ability to hold, simultaneously, deep and opposite commitments of the most fundamental sort. Over the course of Holton's career, he embraced both the humanities and the sciences. Given this background, it is fitting that the explorations assembled in this volume reflect both individually and collectively Holton's dual roots. In the opening essay, Holton sums up his long engagement with Einstein and his thematic commitment to unity. The next two essays address this concern. In historicized form, Lorraine Daston returns the question of the scientific imagination to the Enlightenment period when both sciences and art feared imagination. Daston argues that the split whereby imagination was valued in the arts and loathed in the sciences is a nineteenth-century divide. James Ackerman on Leonardo da Vinci meshes perfectly with Daston's account, showing a form of imaginative intervention where it is irrelevant to draw analogies between art and science. Historians of religion Wendy Doniger and Gregory Spinner pursue the imagination into the bedroom with literary-theological representations. Science, culture, and the imagination also intersect with biologist Edward Wilson and physicist Steven Weinberg. Both tackle the big question of the unity of knowledge and worldviews from a scientific perspective while art historian Ernst Gombrich does the same from the perspective of art history. To emphasize the nitty-gritty of scientific practice, chemists Bretislav Fredrich and Dudley Herschback provide a remarkable historical tour at the boundary of chemistry and physics. In the concluding essay, historian of education Patricia Albjerg Graham addresses pedagogy head-on. In these various reflections on science, art, literature, philosophy, and education, this volume gives us a view in common: a deep and abiding respect for Gerald Holton's contribution to our understanding of science in culture. Peter Galison is Mallinckrodt Professor of History of Science and of physics at Harvard University. Stephen R. Graubard is editor of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and its journal, Daedalus, and professor of history emeritus at Brown University. Everett Mendelsohn is director of the History of Science Program at Harvard University.

A Search for Structure

A Search for Structure PDF Author: Cyril Stanley Smith
Publisher: Mit Press
ISBN: 9780262690829
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 424

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Book Description
&"As an old admirer of Cyril Smith, I'm delighted to learn that a collection of his essays on the arts will be published. They are a unique body of work which only he could have produced.&" &-Meyer Schapiro Science, art, and history all share common or analogous patterns of hierarchical order that are embedded into the structure of the material world as well. This is a central insight of these essays by a generalist who has also spent a lifetime working in his specialty, the nature of materials. To Cyril Stanley Smith, the transformation of metals from one state to another, or the contrasts at one level that merge through repetition into uniformity at a higher level, carries solid metaphorical implications for the human condition. Cyril Stanley Smith's own expansion of outlook to encompass successively technology, science, history, and art is loosely implicit in the chronological ordering of the fourteen essays included in this volume and explicitly developed in one of them that &"comes as close to an autobiography as I am ever likely to write&" and traces the evolution of Smith's ideas on science and art. Trained as an industrial metallurgist, Smith turned to the purely scientific study of the structure of metals and alloys after his experience at Los Alamos during World War II, drawn in part by his delight in the intrinsic beauty of these structural manifestations of symmetry and natural design. A growing interest in the history of the science and technology of materials led him to consult the artifactual evidence&-the art objects in museums that either greatly predate written historical records or provide, through scientific examination, more reliable information than do the surviving documents of their period. This direct contact with fine or formal art only reinforced Smith's intuition that the aesthetic impulse is at play over the full range of human activity, whether it leads to the making of a bronze sculpture, a scientific theory, or a social reorganization. A variety of investigations of art objects is cited in the text, and the author regards the accompanying illustrations to be as important as the text. In particular, the essays make the case that historically many advances and discoveries regarding metals and ceramics came about through aesthetic curiosity and the desire to improve works of fine and decorative art, rather than through scientific investigation or in response to the need for products having practical utility. Many techniques and even whole industries, Smith writes, began with the making and reproduction of art works. Other essays deal with the emerging understanding of the remarkable properties of steel, the positive uses of corrosion, ancient casting and molding techniques, and the connection between attempts to reproduce oriental porcelain in Europe and modern geological ideas. Still others are more philosophical in approach.

Science, Curriculum, and Liberal Education

Science, Curriculum, and Liberal Education PDF Author: Joseph J. Schwab
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226741871
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
What is a liberal education and what part can science play in it? How should we think about the task of developing a curriculum? How should educational research conceive of its goals? Joseph Schwab's essays on these questions have influenced education internationally for more than twenty-five years. Schwab participated in what Daniel Bell has described as the "most thoroughgoing experiment in general education in any college in the United States," the College of the University of Chicago during the thirties, forties, and fifties. He played a central role in the curriculum reform movement of the sixties, and his extraordinary command of science, the philosophy of science, and traditional and modern views of liberal education found expression in these exceptionally thoughtful essays.

Essays in Arts and Sciences

Essays in Arts and Sciences PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 456

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Book Description


Wartime Kiss

Wartime Kiss PDF Author: Alexander Nemerov
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691145784
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
A deeply personal meditation on the haunting power of American photos and films of the 1940s Wartime Kiss is a personal meditation on the haunting power of American photographs and films from World War II and the later 1940s. Starting with a stunning reinterpretation of one of the most famous photos of all time, Alfred Eisenstaedt's image of a sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square on V-J Day, Alexander Nemerov goes on to examine an array of mostly forgotten images and movie episodes—from a photo of Jimmy Stewart and Olivia de Havilland lying on a picnic blanket in the Santa Barbara hills to scenes from such films as Twelve O'Clock High and Hold Back the Dawn. Erotically charged and bearing traces of trauma even when they seem far removed from the war, these photos and scenes seem to hold out the promise of a palpable and emotional connection to those years. Through a series of fascinating stories, Nemerov reveals the surprising background of these bits of film and discovers unexpected connections between the war and Hollywood, from an obsession with aviation to Anne Frank's love of the movies. Beautifully written and illustrated, Wartime Kiss vividly evokes a world in which Margaret Bourke-White could follow a heroic assignment photographing a B-17 bombing mission over Tunis with a job in Hollywood documenting the filming of a war movie. Ultimately this is a book about history as a sensuous experience, a work as mysterious, indescribable, and affecting as a novel by W. G. Sebald.

Inventing Falsehood, Making Truth

Inventing Falsehood, Making Truth PDF Author: Malcolm Bull
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691138842
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
How the philosophy of Giambattista Vico was influenced by eighteenth-century Neopolitan painting Can painting transform philosophy? In Inventing Falsehood, Making Truth, Malcolm Bull looks at Neapolitan art around 1700 through the eyes of the philosopher Giambattista Vico. Surrounded by extravagant examples of late Baroque painting by artists like Luca Giordano and Francesco Solimena, Vico concluded that human truth was a product of the imagination. Truth was not something that could be observed: instead, it was something made in the way that paintings were made--through the exercise of fantasy. Juxtaposing paintings and texts, Bull presents the masterpieces of late Baroque painting in early eighteenth-century Naples from an entirely new perspective. Revealing the close connections between the arguments of the philosophers and the arguments of the painters, he shows how Vico drew on both in his influential philosophy of history, The New Science. Bull suggests that painting can serve not just as an illustration for philosophical arguments, but also as the model for them--that painting itself has sometimes been a form of epistemological experiment, and that, perhaps surprisingly, the Neapolitan Baroque may have been one of the routes through which modern consciousness was formed.

New Essays on the Psychology of Art

New Essays on the Psychology of Art PDF Author: Rudolf Arnheim
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520055537
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
Thousands of readers who have profited from engagement with the lively mind of Rudolf Arnheim over the decades will receive news of this new collection of essays expectantly. In the essays collected here, as in his earlier work on a large variety of art forms, Arnheim explores concrete poetry and the metaphors of Dante, photography and the meaning of music. There are essays on color composition, forgeries, and the problems of perspective, on art in education and therapy, on the style of artists' late works, and the reading of maps. Also, in a triplet of essays on pioneers in the psychology of art (Max Wertheimer, Gustav Theodor Fechner, and Wilhelm Worringer) Arnheim goes back to the roots of modern thinking about the mechanisms of artistic perception.

The Melancholy Art

The Melancholy Art PDF Author: Michael Ann Holly
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400844959
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
Why the art historian's craft is a uniquely melancholy art Melancholy is not only about sadness, despair, and loss. As Renaissance artists and philosophers acknowledged long ago, it can engender a certain kind of creativity born from a deep awareness of the mutability of life and the inevitable cycle of birth and death. Drawing on psychoanalysis, philosophy, and the intellectual history of the history of art, The Melancholy Art explores the unique connections between melancholy and the art historian's craft. Though the objects art historians study are materially present in our world, the worlds from which they come are forever lost to time. In this eloquent and inspiring book, Michael Ann Holly traces how this disjunction courses through the history of art and shows how it can give rise to melancholic sentiments in historians who write about art. She confronts pivotal and vexing questions in her discipline: Why do art historians write in the first place? What kinds of psychic exchanges occur between art objects and those who write about them? What institutional and personal needs does art history serve? What is lost in historical writing about art? The Melancholy Art looks at how melancholy suffuses the work of some of the twentieth century's most powerful and poetic writers on the history of art, including Alois Riegl, Franz Wickhoff, Adrian Stokes, Michael Baxandall, Meyer Schapiro, and Jacques Derrida. A disarmingly personal meditation by one of our most distinguished art historians, this book explains why to write about art is to share in a kind of intertwined pleasure and loss that is the very essence of melancholy.