Download or read book Figuration Abstraction written by Charlotte Benton and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The notion that the practice of abstraction was confined to Western Europe while a stereotyped form of figuration defined the art of the Eastern bloc continues to dominate art historical accounts of public sculpture of the post-war period. This book offers a number of alternative readings, and demonstrates strategic uses of figuration and abstraction across East and West. Encompassing sites of memory (including war memorials and Holocaust memorials), state, civic and corporate sculpture, as well as temporary and unexecuted projects, the book shows that persuasive advocates of figuration were to be found in the West, while in the East imaginative experiments in abstraction were proposed in the name of Social Realism. Presenting fresh insights into sculptural practice in the period between 1945 and 1968, this book brings together a wide range of authors, some of whom have never before been published in English. Their essays are complemented by extracts from documentary texts, which give a flavour of contemporary debates, and a biographical section includes entries on many sculptors who will be unfamiliar to an English-speaking audience.
Download or read book Figuration Abstraction written by Charlotte Benton and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 537 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The notion that the practice of abstraction was confined to Western Europe while a stereotyped form of figuration defined the art of the Eastern bloc continues to dominate art historical accounts of public sculpture of the post-war period. This book offers a number of alternative readings, and demonstrates strategic uses of figuration and abstraction across East and West. Encompassing sites of memory (including war memorials and Holocaust memorials), state, civic and corporate sculpture, as well as temporary and unexecuted projects, the book shows that persuasive advocates of figuration were to be found in the West, while in the East imaginative experiments in abstraction were proposed in the name of Social Realism. Presenting fresh insights into sculptural practice in the period between 1945 and 1968, this book brings together a wide range of authors, some of whom have never before been published in English. Their essays are complemented by extracts from documentary texts, which give a flavour of contemporary debates, and a biographical section includes entries on many sculptors who will be unfamiliar to an English-speaking audience.
Download or read book Abstraction in Medieval Art written by Elina Gertsman and published by Amsterdam University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-26 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Abstraction haunts medieval art, both withdrawing figuration and suggesting elusive presence. How does it make or destroy meaning in the process? Does it suggest the failure of figuration, the faltering of iconography? Does medieval abstraction function because it is imperfect, incomplete, and uncorrected-and therefore cognitively, visually demanding? Is it, conversely, precisely about perfection? To what extent is the abstract predicated on theorization of the unrepresentable and imperceptible? Does medieval abstraction pit aesthetics against metaphysics, or does it enrich it, or frame it, or both? Essays in this collection explore these and other questions that coalesce around three broad themes: medieval abstraction as the untethering of image from what it purports to represent, abstraction as a vehicle for signification, and abstraction as a form of figuration. Contributors approach the concept of medieval abstraction from a multitude of perspectives-formal, semiotic, iconographic, material, phenomenological, epistemological.
Download or read book It s Figuration Groundly written by John McGreal and published by Troubador Publishing Ltd. This book was released on 2017-02-21 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John McGreal's three new books – It’s Abstraction, Concretely, It’s Figuration, Groundly and It’s Representation, Really – continue the ‘It’ Series published by Matador since 2010. They constitute another stage in an artistic journey exploring the visual and audial dialectic of mark, word and image that began over 25 years ago. Emerging out of the first books on the Bibliograph published in 2016, initiated with It’s Nothing, Seriously, these new texts retain some of the same structural features. The Bibliographs contain the same focus on repetition and variation in meaning of their dominant motifs of representation, abstraction and figuration which have framed philosophical discourse on epistemology and ontology in aesthetics; their chance placement in each Bibliograph interspersed with one another displaying and enhancing similarities and differences. At the same time these works constitute a development in the aesthetic form of the Bibliograph. In earlier works on Nothing, Absence and Silence, it was just a question of finding and transferring given textual references from their source to construct their Bibliographs, with the focus being on the strategic position of the latter within each book. In these new works, the concern has been with working on the line and shape of the references themselves, with their enhanced spacial form as well as that of each Bibliograph as a whole. In shaping and spacing the referential images, the place of words and letters became as important as their semantic & syntactical role. Expansion and contraction of whole words was used to enhance this process. Under such detailed attention their breakdown into particles of language, into part-words and single letters was a result. The recombination of elements produced new words in a process of restrangement with new sequences of letters having visual rather than semantic value. The play on prefixes of dominant motifs yielded new words as did tmesis. This concern with the form of referential images does not preclude an equal commitment to their content. The aleatory character of textual entries in each Bibliograph encourage the reader to let his or her mind go; to read in a new way on diverse contemporary issues across conventional boundaries in the arts and sciences at several levels of physical, psychical and social reproduction.
Download or read book Primitivism Cubism Abstraction written by Charles Harrison and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1993-01-01 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On art in the early 20th century
Download or read book Abstraction in Reverse written by Alexander Alberro and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-05-25 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduction: spectatorship after abstract art -- Concrete art, and invention -- Time-objects -- Subjective instability -- The instituting subject -- Conclusion
Download or read book Abstract Crossings written by María Amalia García and published by University of California Press. This book was released on 2019-07-16 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Toward the middle of the 1950s, abstract art became a dominant trend in the Latin American cultural scene. Many artists incorporated elements of abstraction into their rigorous artistic vocabularies, while at the same time, the representation of geometric lines and structures filtered into everyday life, appearing in textiles, posters, murals, and landscapes. The translation of a field-changing Spanish-language book, Abstract Crossings analyzes the relationship between, on the one hand, the emergence of abstract proposals in avant-garde groups and, on the other, the institutionalization and newfound hegemony of abstract poetics as part of Latin America’s imaginary of modernization. A profusion of mid-century artistic institutional exchanges between Argentina and Brazil makes a study of the trajectories of abstraction in these two countries particularly valuable. Examining the work of artists such as Max Bill, Lygia Clark, Waldemar Cordeiro, and Tomás Maldonado, author María Amalia García rewrites the artistic history of the period and proposes a novel reading of the cultural dialogue between Argentina and Brazil. This is the first book in the new Studies on Latin American Art series, supported by a gift from the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art.
Download or read book The Iconology of Abstraction written by Krešimir Purgar and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-06-15 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book uncovers how we make meaning of abstraction, both historically and in present times, and examines abstract images as a visual language. The contributors demonstrate that abstraction is not primarily an artistic phenomenon, but rather arises from human beings’ desire to imagine, understand and communicate complex, ineffable concepts in fields ranging from fine art and philosophy to technologies of data visualization, from cartography and medicine to astronomy. The book will be of interest to scholars working in image studies, visual studies, art history, philosophy and aesthetics.
Download or read book Dick Watkins written by Mary Eagle and published by ANU Press. This book was released on 2024-09-17 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dick Watkins belongs to the generation of artists whose careers were launched at the high-flying end of American-based Abstraction. Almost immediately he faced up to the abrupt end of the Modern era. Culture was no longer to be framed by ‘progress’. In 1970, taking stock of the situation, he announced that he was a copyist, there being no such thing as a new creation in art, shaped as it was by visual languages. Nor did he intend to limit his curiosity about the relation of art to life by restricting himself to a ‘personal’ style. There followed a long and passionately adventurous exploration into many subjects and styles, during which Watkins was often the first to signal changes taking place in Western culture. The result is that for half a century he has been a major, if controversial figure in Australian art.
Download or read book Abstract Bodies written by David J. Getsy and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2015-11-03 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Original and theoretically astute, Abstract Bodies is the first book to apply the interdisciplinary field of transgender studies to the discipline of art history. It recasts debates around abstraction and figuration in 1960s art through a discussion of gender’s mutability and multiplicity. In that decade, sculpture purged representation and figuration but continued to explore the human as an implicit reference. Even as the statue and the figure were left behind, artists and critics asked how the human, and particularly gender and sexuality, related to abstract sculptural objects that refused the human form. This book examines abstract sculpture in the 1960s that came to propose unconventional and open accounts of bodies, persons, and genders. Drawing on transgender and queer theory, David J. Getsy offers innovative and archivally rich new interpretations of artworks by and critical writing about four major artists—Dan Flavin (1933–1996), Nancy Grossman (b. 1940), John Chamberlain (1927–2011), and David Smith (1906–1965). Abstract Bodies makes a case for abstraction as a resource in reconsidering gender’s multiple capacities and offers an ambitious contribution to this burgeoning interdisciplinary field.
Download or read book Bay Area Figurative Art 1950 1965 written by Caroline A. Jones and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Should be the classic, central, definitive work on the emergence of Bay Area Figurative painting."--Paul Mills, author of The New Figurative Painting of David Park
Download or read book Women Can t Paint written by Helen Gørrill and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2020-02-06 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2013 Georg Baselitz declared that 'women don't paint very well'. Whilst shocking, his comments reveal what Helen Gørrill argues is prolific discrimination in the artworld. In a groundbreaking study of gender and value, Gørrill proves that there are few aesthetic differences in men and women's painting, but that men's art is valued at up to 80 per cent more than women's. Indeed, the power of masculinity is such that when men sign their work it goes up in value, yet when women sign their work it goes down. Museums, the author attests, are also complicit in this vicious cycle as they collect tokenist female artwork which impinges upon its artists' market value. An essential text for students and teachers, Gørrill's book is provocative and challenges existing methodologies whilst introducing shocking evidence. She proves how the price of being a woman impacts upon all forms of artistic currency, be it social, cultural or economic and in the vanguard of the 'Me Too' movement calls for the artworld to take action.
Download or read book Abstraction and the Holocaust written by Mark Godfrey and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2007-01-01 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mark Godfrey looks closely at a series of American art and architectural projects that respond to the memory of the Holocaust. He investigates how abstract artists and architects have negotiated Holocaust memory without representing the Holocaust figuratively or symbolically.
Download or read book Lumen Naturae written by Matilde Marcolli and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2020-05-26 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring common themes in modern art, mathematics, and science, including the concept of space, the notion of randomness, and the shape of the cosmos. This is a book about art—and a book about mathematics and physics. In Lumen Naturae (the title refers to a purely immanent, non-supernatural form of enlightenment), mathematical physicist Matilde Marcolli explores common themes in modern art and modern science—the concept of space, the notion of randomness, the shape of the cosmos, and other puzzles of the universe—while mapping convergences with the work of such artists as Paul Cezanne, Mark Rothko, Sol LeWitt, and Lee Krasner. Her account, focusing on questions she has investigated in her own scientific work, is illustrated by more than two hundred color images of artworks by modern and contemporary artists. Thus Marcolli finds in still life paintings broad and deep philosophical reflections on space and time, and connects notions of space in mathematics to works by Paul Klee, Salvador Dalí, and others. She considers the relation of entropy and art and how notions of entropy have been expressed by such artists as Hans Arp and Fernand Léger; and traces the evolution of randomness as a mode of artistic expression. She analyzes the relation between graphical illustration and scientific text, and offers her own watercolor-decorated mathematical notebooks. Throughout, she balances discussions of science with explorations of art, using one to inform the other. (She employs some formal notation, which can easily be skipped by general readers.) Marcolli is not simply explaining art to scientists and science to artists; she charts unexpected interdependencies that illuminate the universe.
Download or read book Pitch of Poetry written by Charles Bernstein and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-03-28 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Praised in recent years as a “calculating, improvisatory, essential poet” by Daisy Fried in the New York Times, Charles Bernstein is a leading voice in American literary theory. Pitch of Poetry is his irreverent guide to modernist and contemporary poetics. Subjects range across Holocaust representation, Occupy Wall Street, and the figurative nature of abstract art. Detailed overviews of formally inventive work include essays on—or “pitches” for—a set of key poets, from Gertrude Stein and Robert Creeley to John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Larry Eigner, and Leslie Scalapino. Bernstein also reveals the formative ideas behind the magazine L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. The final section, published here for the first time, is a sweeping work on the poetics of stigma, perversity, and disability that is rooted in the thinking of Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and William Blake. Pitch of Poetry makes an exhilarating case for what Bernstein calls echopoetics: a poetry of call and response, reason and imagination, disfiguration and refiguration.
Download or read book On Abstract Art written by Briony Fer and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1997-01-01 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many people are intrigued by the abstract work of artists like Mondrian and Jackson Pollock yet find it difficult to explain why. In this timely and original book, Briony Fer introduces abstract painting and sculpture of the twentieth century and explores new ways to think about abstract art and the problems of interpretation it raises. Fer speculates on the kind of language required to describe the often tantalizing effects of key abstract works and on ways to discuss critical issues when a work of art is without 'subject matter.' Drawing particularly on psychoanalytic theory and the writings of Georges Bataille, she examines a wide range of models of abstraction, ranging from the early European emphasis on the transcendental possibilities of pure form to later modernist frameworks developed in the United States. Each of the ten chapters in the book addresses a particular problem associated with abstract art by focusing closely on specific works produced by such artists as Malevich, Mondrian, Kandinsky, Arp, Miró, Pollock, Eva Hesse, and Donald Judd. Fer investigates the involvement of women artists such as Lyubov Popova and the problems of sexual difference in the development of abstract art. Countering the idealizing rhetoric of modernist criticism, On Abstract Art uncovers a latent corporeal and darker side to abstraction and deepens today’s discussion of a variety of critical concerns in contemporary art.
Download or read book Modern Artists on Art written by Robert L. Herbert and published by Courier Corporation. This book was released on 2012-04-26 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 16 of the 20th century's leading artistic innovators talk forcefully about their work: Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, Henry Moore, Kurt Schwitters, Max Ernst, El Lissitzky, Fernand Léger, and more.
