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In this elegant new study Galen Johnson retrieves the concept of the beautiful through the framework of Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetics. Although Merleau-Ponty seldom spoke directly of beauty, his philosophy is essentially about the beautiful. In Johnson’s formulation, the ontology of Flesh as element and the ontology of the Beautiful as elemental are folded together, for Desire, Love, and Beauty are part of the fabric of the world’s element, Flesh itself, the term at which Merleau-Ponty arrived to replace Substance, Matter, or Life as the name of Being. Merleau-Ponty’s Eye and Mind is at the core of the book, so Johnson engages, as Merleau-Ponty did, the writings and visual work of Paul ...
A beautifully produced, comprehensive look at Cuban artist Zilia Sánchez that traces her alluring and evocative paintings and sculpture from the 1950s to today Cuban artist Zilia Sánchez (b. 1926) often says, “Soy isla” (“I am an island”), expressing her desire for solitary, uncompromising practice. It also serves as a metaphor for her experience as an islander—connected to and disconnected from both the mainland and mainstream art currents, such as concretism, gestural abstraction, and minimalism. Characterized by reductive forms, clean lines, and sensuous curves suggestive of the female body, Sánchez’s work frequently references protagonists from ancient mythology and lunar ...
This collection of trans-disciplinary essays addresses the artistic, cultural, and political legacies of Joseph Beuys' expanded concept of art and its societal application, for example, through the Free International University (FIU). Since the 1980s, Beuys' practice has had a strong influence on the Peaceful Revolution, "relational aesthetics" and the "art and reconciliation" movement, attempting to bring about cultural understanding and reconciliation in situations of conflict. His work is pertinent to how we think about diversity and sustainability and may constitute an applied anthropology. (Series: European Studies in Culture and Policy - Vol. 6)
"Matters of Inscription: Reading Figures of Latinidad argues that Latinx inscriptions require us to read at the edge of materiality and semiosis, charting a nimble method for "reading" various forms of Latinx marks and even the word Latinx across art, performance, poetry, plays, and fiction"--
Presents three hundred images and essays from the 2008 Biennial Exhbition at the Whitney Museum of Art.
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Few Americans are aware that Washington is the country’s largest single patron of art. Every year a group of unelected federal bureaucrats and congressmen spends millions of taxpayer dollars on monuments, sculptures, buildings, plays, and exhibitions, largely without public knowledge or involvement. Frank Gehry’s outlandish memorial to President Eisenhower, an installation that blinks quotes from Eleanor Roosevelt in Morse code at a cash-strapped Veterans Administration hospital, a giant $750,00 wood sculpture whose fumes sickened workers in an FBI building in Miami, FL, and funding for research on the visual cultures of tea consumption in Imperial India are just a few of the hundreds of unwanted and wasteful projects supported annually by the General Services Administration, the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities, and their enablers on Capitol Hill. In this book, Bruce Cole, the longest serving chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, exposes the programs and policies responsible for this glut of unsupervised bureaucratic pork and offers suggestions for their reform or elimination.
How the queer correspondence art of Ray Johnson disrupted art world conventions and anticipated today’s highly networked culture Once regarded as “New York’s most famous unknown artist,” Ray Johnson was a highly visible outlier in the art world, his mail art practice reflecting the changing social relations and politics of queer communities in the 1960s. A vital contribution to the growing scholarship on this enigmatic artist, Queer Networks analyzes how Johnson’s practice sought to undermine the dominant mechanisms of the art market and gallery system in favor of unconventional social connections. Utilizing the postal service as his primary means of producing and circulating art, ...
"Laszlo Moholy-Nagy is the first monograph on Moholy to attend to the fraught but central role painting played in shaping his aesthetic project. His reputation has been that of an artist far more interested in exploring the possibilities offered by photography, film, and other new media than in working with what he once called the 'anachronistic' medium of painting. And yet, with the exception of the period between 1928 and 1930, Moholy painted throughout his career. Joyce Tsai argues that his investment in painting, especially after 1930, emerged not only out of pragmatic and aesthetic considerations, but also out of a growing recognition of the economic, political, and ethical compromises required by his large-scale, technologically mediated projects aimed at reforming human vision. Without abandoning his commitment to fostering what he called New Vision, Moholy came to understand painting as a particularly plastic field in which the progressive possibilities of photography, film and other emergent media could find provisional expression."--Provided by publisher.