Download or read book The Utopian Function of Art and Literature written by Ernst Bloch and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1989-03-06 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays in aesthetics by the philosopher Ernst Bloch that belong to the tradition of cultural criticism represented by Georg Lukács, Theodor Adorno, and Walter Benjamin. The aesthetic essays of the philosopher Ernst Bloch (1885–1977) belong to the rich tradition of cultural criticism represented by Georg Lukács, Theodor Adorno, and Walter Benjamin. Bloch was a significant creative source for these thinkers, and his impact is nowhere more evident than in writings on art. Bloch was fascinated with art as a reflection of both social realities and human dreams. Whether he is discussing architecture or detective novels, the theme that drives his work is always the same—the striving for "something better," for a "homeland" that is more socially aware, more humane, more just. The book opens with an illuminating discussion between Bloch and Adorno on the meaning of utopia; then follow twelve essays written between 1930 and 1973 on topics such as aesthetic theory, genres such as music, painting, theater, film, opera, poetry, and the novel, and perhaps most important, popular culture in the form of fairy tales, detective stories, and dime novels. The MIT Press has previously published Ernst Bloch's Natural Law and Human Dignity and his magnum opus, The Principle of Hope. The Utopian Function of Art and Literature is included in the series Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought, edited by Thomas McCarthy.
Download or read book Utopia Contemporary Art written by Christian Gether and published by Hatje Cantz. This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Utopia has become a controversial concept, spanning the field between the belief in an ideal society and the dystopian nightmare. Within the last decade, the contemporary art scene has witnessed a return of utopia and utopian thinking. Whether detectable as an impulse, critically reassessed as a concept, or cautiously or daringly articulated in a specific vision--utopia continues to matter. This publication investigates the meanings of utopia in contemporary art. Theorists, critics, and curators discuss the different ways of thinking and performing utopia in contemporary art from a broad range of angles. The essays explore the current relevance of utopia as well as how people in different societies live, think, act, and imagine. The two parts, Utopia Revisited and Utopian Positions, provide both a theoretical backdrop for the reformulations of utopia in contemporary art as well as examinations of specific utopian stances in connection with the three-year utopia project at ARKEN Museum of Modern Art and solo shows by Qiu Anxiong, Katharina Grosse, and Olafur Eliasson.
Download or read book Utopia and Dissent written by Richard Candida-Smith and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1996-12-27 with total page 574 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The most important study of art in California, particularly in terms of avant-garde activity around mid-century, that I am aware of."--Paul Karlstrom, Smithsonian Institution
Download or read book In Search of Utopia written by Jan van der Stock and published by Amsterdam University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2016 marks exactly 500 years since the English humanist and statesman Thomas More published in the city Leuven his world-famous book Utopia. Leuven is celebrating this milestone with a major city festival featuring exhibitions, street art, film, music, theatre, dance, literature, lectures and city walks. The cornerstone is the international, art historical exhibition 'In Search of Utopia' at M - Museum Leuven. The festival will officially start on Monday, 26 September 2016 after a festive opening weekend on 24 and 25 September and will end on 17 January 2017. In the book 'In Search of Utopia' the reader is introduced to the world of More and his friends, with the ideals and dreams of the times. The desire of far-away horizons and the cobweb of new sciences that patiently layed upon the reality. Magnificent works of the 15th- and 16th Century artists: Quinten Metsijs, Hans Holbein, Jan Gossaert en Albrecht Dürer are being brought together in this exciting and intriguing story. It shows in an unexceeded way the imagination of an ideal world.
Download or read book Inverted Utopias written by Héctor Olea Galaviz and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2004-01-01 with total page 618 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the twentieth century, avant-garde artists from Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean created extraordinary and highly innovative paintings, sculptures, assemblages, mixed-media works, and installations. This innovative book presents more than 250 works by some seventy of these artists (including Gego, Joaquin Torres-Garcia, Xul Solar, and Jose Clemente Orozco) and artists' groups, along with interpretive essays by leading authorities and newly translated manifestoes and other theoretical documents written by the artists. Together the images and texts showcase the astonishing artistic achievements of the Latin American avant-garde. The book focuses on two decisive periods: the return from Europe in the 1920s of Latin American avant-garde pioneers; and the expansion of avant-garde activities throughout Latin America after World War II as artists expressed their independence from developments in Europe and the United States. As the authors explain, during these periods Latin American art was fueled by the belief that artistic creations could present a form of utopia - an inversion of the original premise that drove the European avant-garde - and serve as a model for
Download or read book To and from Utopia in the New Cuban Art written by Rachel Weiss and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The definitive critical history of the new Cuban art.
Download or read book Dutch Utopia written by Annette Stott and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Showcasing more than seventy paintings from public and private collections throughout the United States and Europe, Dutch Utopia: American Artists in Holland, 1880-1914 explores the work of forty-three American artists drawn to Holland during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Escaping from the rapid urbanization of their time, these artists established colonies in six communities in the Netherlands—Dordrecht, Egmond, Katwijk, Laren, Rijsoord, and Volendam—with all but Dordrecht being small, preindustrial villages. Inspired by their pastoral surroundings as well as the great traditions of seventeenth-century Dutch art and the contemporary Hague school, these American artists created visions of Dutch society underpinned by a nostalgic yearning for a premodern way of life. Some even alluded to America’s own colonial Dutch heritage, exploring shared histories and cultural connections between the two countries. Organized by the Telfair Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia, Dutch Utopia examines the appeal of Holland for American artists during this period, through six pivotal themes: the influence of seventeenth-century Dutch painting; the impact of the contemporary Hague School; antimodernism and the American Progressive Movement; points of convergence in national identities; the proliferation of artist colonies in Holland; and the popular construction of “Dutchness” beyond the stereotypes of wooden shoes and windmills. Dutch Utopia includes works by artists who remain celebrated today, such as Robert Henri, William Merritt Chase, and John Singer Sargent, and by painters admired in their own time but less well-known now. These include accomplished women such as Elizabeth Nourse and Anna Stanley, as well as George Hitchcock, Gari Melchers, and Walter MacEwen, who built international reputations with Salon pictures of Dutch landscapes and costumed figures. These artists were among hundreds of Americans who traveled to the Netherlands between 1880 and 1914 to paint and to study. Some lived in Holland for decades, while others stayed only a week or two, but most passed quickly through the major cities to small rural communities, where they created picturesque idylls on canvas.
Download or read book Art Nouveau written by Klaus-Jürgen Sembach and published by Taschen. This book was released on 2002 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Gaming Utopia written by Claudia Costa Pederson and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2021-04-06 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Gaming Utopia: Ludic Worlds in Art, Design, and Media, Claudia Costa Pederson analyzes modernist avant-garde and contemporary video games to challenge the idea that gaming is an exclusively white, heterosexual, male, corporatized leisure activity and reenvisions it as a catalyst for social change. By looking at over fifty projects that together span a century and the world, Pederson explores the capacity for sociopolitical commentary in virtual and digital realms and highlights contributions to the history of gaming by women, queer, and transnational artists. The result is a critical tool for understanding video games as imaginative forms of living that offer alternatives to our current reality. With an interdisciplinary approach, Gaming Utopia emphasizes how game design, creation, and play can become political forms of social protest and examines the ways that games as art open doors to a more just and peaceful world.
Download or read book Sustainable Utopias written by Jennifer L. Allen and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2022-03-08 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To reclaim a sense of hope for the future, German activists in the late twentieth century engaged ordinary citizens in innovative projects that resisted alienation and disenfranchisement. By most accounts, the twentieth century was not kind to utopian thought. The violence of two world wars, Cold War anxieties, and a widespread sense of crisis after the 1973 global oil shock appeared to doom dreams of a better world. The eventual victory of capitalism and, seemingly, liberal democracy relieved some fears but exchanged them for complacency and cynicism. Not, however, in West Germany. Jennifer Allen showcases grassroots activism of the 1980s and 1990s that envisioned a radically different society based on community-centered politicsÑa society in which the democratization of culture and power ameliorated alienation and resisted the impotence of end-of-history narratives. BerlinÕs History Workshop liberated research from university confines by providing opportunities for ordinary people to write and debate the story of the nation. The Green Party made the politics of direct democracy central to its program. Artists changed the way people viewed and acted in public spaces by installing objects in unexpected environments, including the Stolpersteine: paving stones, embedded in residential sidewalks, bearing the names of Nazi victims. These activists went beyond just trafficking in ideas. They forged new infrastructures, spaces, and behaviors that gave everyday people real agency in their communities. Undergirding this activism was the environmentalist concept of sustainability, which demanded that any alternative to existing society be both enduring and adaptable. A rigorous but inspiring tale of hope in action, Sustainable Utopias makes the case that it is still worth believing in human creativity and the labor of citizenship.
Download or read book Better Worlds written by Peter Roberts and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2013-02-21 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Better Worlds: Education, Art, and Utopia provides a fresh examination of utopia and education. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach and drawing on literature and the visual arts as well as traditional non-fiction sources, the authors explore utopia not as a model of social perfection but as the active, imaginative building of better worlds. Utopian questions, they argue, lie at the heart of education, and addressing such questions demands attention not just to matters of theoretical principle but to the particulars of everyday life and experience. Taking utopia seriously in educational thought also involves a consideration of that which is dystopian. Utopia, this book suggests, is not something that is fixed, final, or ever fully realized; instead, it must be constantly recreated, and education, as an ongoing process of reflection, action, and transformation, has a central role to play in this process.
Download or read book On Art Artists Latin America and Other Utopias written by Luis Camnitzer and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Artist, educator, curator, and critic Luis Camnitzer has been writing about contemporary art ever since he left his native Uruguay in 1964 for a fellowship in New York City. As a transplant from the "periphery" to the "center," Camnitzer has had to confront fundamental questions about making art in the Americas, asking himself and others: What is "Latin American art"? How does it relate (if it does) to art created in the centers of New York and Europe? What is the role of the artist in exile? Writing about issues of such personal, cultural, and indeed political import has long been an integral part of Camnitzer's artistic project, a way of developing an idiosyncratic art history in which to work out his own place in the picture. This volume gathers Camnitzer's most thought-provoking essays—"texts written to make something happen," in the words of volume editor Rachel Weiss. They elaborate themes that appear persistently throughout Camnitzer's work: art world systems versus an art of commitment; artistic genealogies and how they are consecrated; and, most insistently, the possibilities for artistic agency. The theme of "translation" informs the texts in the first part of the book, with Camnitzer asking such questions as "What is Latin America, and who asks the question? Who is the artist, there and here?" The texts in the second section are more historically than geographically oriented, exploring little-known moments, works, and events that compose the legacy that Camnitzer draws on and offers to his readers.
Download or read book The Struggle for Utopia written by Victor Margolin and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: . Focusing on the difficult relationship between art and social change, Margolin brings important new insights to our understanding of the avant-garde's role in a period of great political complexity.
Download or read book Utopia Post Utopia written by Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston, Mass.) and published by MIT Press (MA). This book was released on 1988 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Much of the art and art theory of the 1980s has addressed the question Abigail Solomon-Godeau asks in her essay for this book: whether "the art object can carve a place for itself outside the determinations of the already-written, the already-seen, the sign." "Utopia Post Utopia" takes up the debate on this issue which has crystallized around the theoretical opposition between nature and culture, or more specifically the analysis of a nature (human and otherwise) which is culturally produced."Utopia Post Utopia" approaches the nature-culture opposition from both the point of view of the lingering nostalgia for an essential nature, as well as the aggressive replacement of "reality" with simulations of both the natural and man-made environment. It documents two shows: a sculptural installation conceived by Robert Gober including work by himself, Meg Webster, and Richard Prince; and an exhibition of photography by James Welling, Oliver Wasow, Dorit Cypis, Lorna Simpson, Jeff Wall, and Larry Johnson.In addition to Abigail Solomon-Godeau's contribution, essays by Fredric Jameson, Alice Jardine, Eric Michaud, Elisabeth Sussman and David Joselit critically examine such issues as the problematic nature of utopian impulses in recent art (Jameson); the question of authenticity (Jardine); the shifting relationship between the represented and real worlds (Michaud); the phenomenon of collaboration and ensemble in recent art production (Sussman); and meaning of photographic serialization and superimposition (Joselit).Distributed for the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston where Elisabeth Sussman is Chief Curator and David Joselit Curator.
Download or read book Utopia Parkway written by Deborah Solomon and published by Other Press, LLC. This book was released on 2015-10-13 with total page 593 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Deborah Solomon’s definitive biography of Joseph Cornell, one of America’s most moving and unusual twentieth-century artists, now reissued twenty years later with updated and extensively revised text Few artists ever led a stranger life than Joseph Cornell, the self-taught American genius prized for his enigmatic shadow boxes, who stands at the intersection of Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, and Pop Art. Legends about Cornell abound—the shy hermit, the devoted family caretaker, the artistic innocent—but never before has he been presented for what he was: a brilliant, relentlessly serious artist whose stature has now reached monumental proportions.
Download or read book Open Field written by Walker Art Center and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Open Field: Conversations on the Commons is a Walker Postscript, the Walker Art Center's print-on-demand publishing imprint, which presents short and focused texts to delve more deeply, or broadly, into the rich concepts that animate the institution's diverse artistic programs." -- Colophon.
Download or read book Carlos Betancourt written by Petra Mason and published by Rizzoli Publications. This book was released on 2015-10-20 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mixed-media artist Carlos Betancourt and his influential studio, Imperfect Utopia, helped to launch the Miami art scene in the 1980’s. Betancourt’s oeuvre is a lush explosion of radiant, eccentric colors in which he explores the kaleidoscope (multi-racial, multi-lingual, trans-cultural) of Caribbean and American culture. His work alludes to issues of memory, beauty, identity, and communication. He bends the lines between art, photography, and nature in his photographs, collages, painting, installations, and conceptual pieces. Carlos Betancourt’s imagery reinterprets the past and present and offers it in a fresh context. He is inspired by Puerto Rico, Miami, and his extensive travels; also artist Ana Mendieta’s interventions in nature, Robert Rauschenberg’s assemblages, Andy Warhol’s perceptions, Neo Rauch compositions, and a Federico Fellini-esque cast of characters for his photo assemblages. This exuberant volume explores Betancourt’s body of work, with more than 250 images and texts by art critic Paul Laster, art history professor Robert Farris Thompson and United States Inaugural Poet, Richard Blanco. His artwork is included in the permanent collections of various museums, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The National Portrait Gallery, and The Smithsonian Institute.
