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The Question of Painting
Since the latter half of the 20th century, committed art has been associated with conceptual, critical and activist practices. Painting, by contrast, is all too often defined as an outmoded, reactionary, market-led venture; an ineffectual medium from the perspective of social and political engagement. How can paintings change the world today? The question of painting, in particular, fuelled the investigations of a major 20th-century philosopher: the French phenomenologist, Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1907-61). Merleau-Ponty was at the forefront of attempts to place philosophy on a new footing by contravening the authority of Cartesian dualism and objectivist thought-an authority that continues to...
Visual Cultures as Objects and Affects
Largely due to the "linguistic turn" that has dominated the humanities since the mid-twentieth century, many contemporary scholars and artists habitually equate works of art with highly coded texts to be deciphered, deconstructed, or otherwise interpreted. Here, meaning, value, and impact have been fundamentally linked to art's capacity to "speak," to represent, to raise questions about representation, to convey a message, or articulate a concept. Much visual culture scholarship has tried to engage with art and the image-world outside of these logics. Within this quest to consider art differently, Jorella Andrews and Simon O'Sullivan pay attention to the asignifying character of art, or simp...
This is Cézanne
Paul Cézanne challenged convention, and proposed new possibilities for modern art. He was remarkable for his ability to perceive and paint everyday places, people, and things in ways that revealed the multiplicity and beauty of vision, while also unveiling the deep, cohesive structures of the visible world. But the intellectual and emotional difficulties of his achievements were considerable. Mainly self-taught, most of his career was plagued by rejection. The critics, and the public, disliked his paintings and, in 1884, Cézanne declared that Paris, the center of the nineteenth-century art world, had defeated him. Repeatedly, he retreated into self-doubt and bad temper. This book follows Cézanne on his extraordinary artistic journey, focusing on his formative discoveries, made not in the flashy, fashionable metropolis but in provincial and rural France and often in isolation. This title is appropriate for ages 14 and up
This is Rembrandt
Rembrandt van Rijn is the quintessential Old Master. His intimately observed, vivid and profoundly atmospheric works are what many museum-goers consider traditional painting ought to be. But in his own lifetime Rembrandt was not always so well regarded. The expressive honesty of his paintings and prints could evoke disdain as easily as admiration. For more than a century after his death his style was dismissed by many academically trained art theorists and critics. In the nineteenth century, however, he was championed by artists fired by the revolution and change of their times. For them, Rembrandt was a kindred, radical spirit, his paintings imbued with a truly modern ethos. Born at the beg...
Visual Cultures as Seriousness
The contemporary art world has become more inhospitable to "serious" intellectual activity in recent years. Critical discourse has been increasingly instrumentalized in the service of neoliberal art markets and institutions, and artists are pressurized by the demands of popularity and funding bodies. Set against this context, Gavin Butt and Irit Rogoff raise the question of "seriousness" in art and culture. What is seriousness exactly, and where does it reside? Is it a desirable value in contemporary culture? Or is it bound up with elite class and institutional cultures? Butt and Rogoff reflect on such questions through historical and theoretical lenses, and explore whether or not it might be possible to pursue knowledge and value in contemporary culture without recourse to high-brow gravitas. Can certain art forms--such as performance art--suggest ways in which we might be intelligent without being serious? And can one be serious in the art world without returning to established assumptions about the high-mindedness of the public intellectual? Copublished with Goldsmiths, University of London
Showing Off!
Drawing on art, media, and phenomenological sources, Showing Off!: A Philosophy of Image challenges much recent thought by proposing a fundamentally positive relationship between visuality and the ethical. In philosophy, cultural studies and art, relationships between visuality and the ethical are usually theorized in negative terms, according to the dyadic logics of seeing on the one hand, and being seen, on the other. Here, agency and power are assumed to operate either on the side of those who see, or on the side of those who control the means by which people and things enter into visibility. To be seen, by contrast - when it occurs outside of those parameters of control- is to be at a di...
Visual Cultures as Recollection
Memory has become a major preoccupation in the humanities in recent decades, be it individual and collective memory, cultural and national memory, or traumatic memory and the ethics of its representation. More recently, concepts such as "transcultural memory," "connective memory," and "multidirectional memory" have been developed in order to think about the ways in which memory is now structured by the global and digital circulation of events across time and space, as well as across social, geographical, and political borders. Additionally, political upheavals around the world have been accompanied by questions about who or what should be memorialized, and who or what cannot be or is not rep...
Secret Spaces, Forbidden Places
In this highly original approach to the study of the construction of culture, this collection of previously unpublished essays explore the topography of the secret and the forbidden, focusing on specific moments in recent cultural and political history. By bringing together writers from different disciplines and different locations, this volume provides a rich and diverse mapping of how the secret and forbidden operate across different subjects and different geographies, extending far beyond physical locations. It is present in domains ranging from language, literature, and cinema to social and political life. This refreshing and thought-provoking collection of essays will prove invaluable for researchers and students.
Futures and Fictions
Futures and Fictions is a book of essays and conversations that explore possibilities for a different ‘political imaginary’ or, more simply, the imagining and imaging of alternate narratives and image-worlds that might be pitched against the impasses of our neoliberal present. In particular, the book contributes to prescient discussions around decolonization, post-capitalism and new kinds of social movements – exploring the intersections of these with contemporary art practice and visual culture. Contributions range from work on science, sonic and financial fictions and alternative space-time plots to myths and images generated by marginalized and ‘minor’ communities, queer-feminist strategies of fictioning, and the production of new Afro- and other futurisms.
