Monthly Archives: November 2016

The Aesthetics of Matter: Modernism, the Avant-Garde and Material Exchange

The Aesthetics of Matter [electronic resource] : Modernism, the Avant-Garde and Material Exchange 

Series: European Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies: Publisher: Berlin/Boston : De Gruyter, 2013.Description: 1 online resource (435 pages).ISBN: 9783110317534.Subject(s)

Contents:

Introduction — Matter on the Move — Translations — Modernism Diffracted — Picture Postcards from The Sturm Gallery and Walden. Collection in Berlin — André Breton’s Autobiographical Cut-Ups — Collages, Photographs, and Cinema — Visual Music, a Missing Link? — From Abstract Film to Op Art and Kinetic Art? — Henryk Berlewi’s Mechano-Facture as a Transmedial Adaptation of Viking Eggeling’s Experimental Films — “hap-hap-hap-hap-happy clothes” — Avant-Garde Experiments in/with Material(s)
Deconstructive Readings of the Avant-Garde Tradition in Post-Socialist Retro-Avant-Garde Theatre — The Materiality of a Contemporary Avant-Garde? — Legacies of Surrealist Collage in Contemporary Art — Spaces and Places — Reproducing the Avant-Garde — The Art of Modernist Magazines — Bedeutungsveränderung und Kanonisierung des deutschen Expressionismus in den USA — Expressionism, Fiction and Intermediality in Nordic Modernism — Materiality and Dematerialization in Paul Neagu’s Work
Embodiment and Visuality in Post-1950 Music — Subjectivities — M/Paternal Meanings in the Neo-Avant-Garde — Raoul Hausmann et le montage de matériau textuel : Hylé I — Georges Hugnet’s Surrealist Monsters and Women — From Material Meaningless to Poetics of Potentiality — The Religious Dimension of Lettrist Visual Poetry — A “Dance of Gestures” — Hyperdialectic in Gertrude Stein’s Compositions — Conceptual Frames of Life — Passage du sujet dans la « matière mentale » surréaliste — List of Contributors — Index
La maison d’artiste en portrait, manifeste et sanctuaire — L’exemple de Fernand Khnopff — Liquid Modernity and the Concrete City — Ford Madox Ford and Virginia Woolf — Bodies and Sensoria — To “Feel Breathing” — Duchamp and the Immaterial Aesthetics of Scent — Synthesis Instead of Analysis — Avant-Garde Eat Art and the Cultural Dimensions of Taste — Lygia Clark, the Paris Years — The Body as Medium and Material — Les matérialités à l’oeuvre dans la « poésie élémentaire » de Julien Blaine — Corps, que me veux-tu?
The Poetic Materiality of Fascism on the British Stage — Dematerializing Verbal and Visual Matter — Wassily Kandinsky’s Bitextuality — Material Memory — Beyond Matter or Form — Invalidating Subliminal Contradictions in the Aesthetics of Matter — Upon Hearing James Joyce — The Anna Livia Plurabelle Gramophone Disc (1929) — Small Press Modernists — Collaboration, Experimentation and the Limited Edition Book — Plaster as a Matter of Memory — Auguste Rodin and George Segal

 

Summary: This volume proposes an in-depth exploration of the materiality of art and writing in modernism and the avant-garde. The essays explore how the avant-gardes and modernism attempted to establish the material specificity and hybridity of media and art forms. The collection sheds light on the full range and import of the aesthetics of matter in avant-garde and modernist practice across all art forms from the 19th century to the present day

Emanations: the Art of the Cameraless Photograph

An unparalleled exploration of the art of cameraless photography, this expansive book offers an authoritative and lavishly illustrated history of photography made without a camera, along with a critical discussion of the practice..

Since the early 19th century and the invention of photography, artists have been experimenting with various methods for creating photographs without a camera. At once exhaustive and compelling, this book reveals the myriad approaches artists have used to create photographic images using just paper and a source of radiation. Simultaneously a chronological history and a thematic study, this book explores a range of practices, some of which have been in use for more than a century, while others are entirely contemporary. From placing objects on light-sensitive paper and drawing on blackened glass plates to radiography, photocopying, and digital scanning, this is an elemental kind of photography that repudiates the idea that technology advances in only one direction. By eliminating the camera, artists are able to focus on other ways of making photographic pictures. They allow the world to leave its own imprint, to speak for itself as itself. This volume includes 160 exquisitely reproduced works of this kind. In turns abstract and realist, haunting and intricate, they seem to capture the very essence of their subjects. Featuring artists from the 19th century to today, this book explores cameraless photography as an important and influential medium that deserves to be included at the forefront of today s conversations about contemporary art.

Photography Theory

Photography Theory

Publisher: Florence : Taylor and Francis, 2013.Description: 1 online resource (481 p.).ISBN: 9781135867744

Contents:

Cover — Photography Theory — Title Page — Copyright Page — Table of Contents — Series Preface — Section 1 Introduction — Theories of Photography: A Short History — Section 2 Starting Points — Conceptual Limitations of Our Reflection on Photography: The Question of “Interdisciplinarity” — After Medium Specificity Chez Fried: Jeff Wall as a Painter — Gerhard Richter as a Photographer — Following Pieces: On Performative Photography — Time Exposure and Snapshot: The Photograph as Paradox — Introductory Note — Section 3 The Art Seminar — Jan Baetens — Diarmuid Costello
James Elkins — Jonathan Friday — Margaret Iverson — Sabine Kriebel — Margaret Olin — Graham Smith — Joel Snyder — Section 4 Assessments — Michael Leja — Nancy Shawcross — Anne Collins Goodyear — Peggy Ann Kusnerz — Alan Cohen — Martin Lefebvre — David Green — Sharon Sliwinski — David Bate — Abigail Solomon-Godeau — Michel Frizot — Geoffrey Batchen — Johan Swinnen — Hilde Van Gelder — David Campany — Joanna Lowry — Carol Squiers — Patrick Maynard — Vivan Sundaram — Rosalind Krauss — Liz Wells — Beth E. Wilson — Martin Lister — Shepherd Steiner — Alan Trachtenberg
Victor Burgin — Joel Snyder — Section 5 Afterwords — The Trouble with Photography — Photographs and Fossils — Notes on Contributors — Index

Summary: Photography Theory presents forty of the world’s most active art historians and theorists, including Victor Burgin, Joel Snyder, Rosalind Krauss, Alan Trachtenberg, Geoffrey Batchen, Carol Squiers, Margaret Iversen and Abigail Solomon-Godeau in animated debate on the nature of photography. Photography has been around for nearly two centuries, but we are no closer to understanding what it is. For some people, a photograph is an optically accurate impression of the world, for others, it is mainly a way of remembering people and places. Some view it as a sign of bourgeois life, a kind of addiction of the middle class, whilst others see it as a troublesome interloper that has confused people’s ideas of reality and fine art to the point that they have difficulty even defining what a photograph is. For some, the whole question of finding photography’s nature is itself misguided from the beginning.This provocative second volume in the Routledge The Art Seminar series presents not one but many answers to the question what makes a photograph a photograph?.

The transparency society / Byung-Chul Han

The transparency society / Byung-Chul Han 

Publisher: Stanford, California : Stanford Briefs, an imprint of Stanford University Press, [2015]Description: viii, 58 pages ; 21 cm.ISBN: 9780804794602; 080479460X

Contents:

The society of positivity — The society of exhibition — The society of evidence — The society of pornography — The society of acceleration — The society of intimacy — The society of information — The society of unveiling — The society of control.

Transparency is the order of the day. It is a term, a slogan, that dominates public discourse about corruption and freedom of information. Considered crucial to democracy, it touches our political and economic lives as well as our private lives. Anyone can obtain information about anything. Everything–and everyone–has become transparent: unveiled or exposed by the apparatuses that exert a kind of collective control over the post-capitalist world. Yet, transparency has a dark side that, ironically, has everything to do with a lack of mystery, shadow, and nuance. Behind the apparent accessibility of knowledge lies the disappearance of privacy, homogenization, and the collapse of trust. The anxiety to accumulate ever more information does not necessarily produce more knowledge or faith. Technology creates the illusion of total containment and the constant monitoring of information, but what we lack is adequate interpretation of the information. In this manifesto, Byung-Chul Han denounces transparency as a false ideal, the strongest and most pernicious of our contemporary mythologies.

The history of motion graphics : from avant-garde to industry in the United States

The history of motion graphics : from avant-garde to industry in the United States / Michael Betancourt.

Publisher: [Rockville, Md.] : Wildside Press, [2013]Description: 314 pages : illustrations (black and white) ; 23 cm.ISBN: 1434441504; 9781434441508.

Contents:

Prehistory — Synaesthesia — Color music — Color music inventors — Visual music — Kinetic typography — Inventing the abstract film — The futurist abstract films (1909-1912) — Léopold Survage (1879-1968) — The Dada/Constructivist cinema (1919-1929) — Man Ray’s Le retour à la raison (1923) — Murphy & Léger’s Ballet mécanique (1924) — Walther Ruttmann (1887-1941) — Viking Eggeling (1880-1925) — Hans Richter (1888-1976) — Marcel Duchamp’s Anémic cinéma (1926) — Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946) — Towards a universal language of media — The sound film — Montage — Oskar Fischinger (1900-1967) — Mary Ellen Bute (1906-1983) — Len Lye (1901-1980) — Norman McLaren (1914-1987) — Modernist television — John (1917-1995) & James (1921-1982) Whitney — Harry Everett Smith (1923-1991) — Avant-garde film in parallax — American modernism — The rise of post-war abstraction — Design on TV — The “television project” — Commercials & the experimental film — Mainstreaming the avant-garde — Museum validation — Intermedia — The Vortex concerts — ‘Structural’ film studies — The invention of video art — Signal/image processing — Inventing computer art — The computer film — Programmed animations — Stan VanDerBeek (1927-1984) — Lillian Schwartz (1927-) — John Whitney’s ‘Digital harmony’ — Media convergence — Digital video — Feature film title design — The early (experimental) period — The studio period — The designer period — The logo period — The contemporary designer period — TV & video game title design — Live TV — Broadcast/network TV — Cable TV — Internet — Video game titles — Video game end titles — The context of title design — The continuing synaesthetic tradition — Stan Brakhage (1933-2003) — Dennis H. Miller — The digital experiment — Commercial synaesthesia.

Note: Includes bibliographical references (pages 297-300) and index.

Time and photography / Jan Baetens

Time and photography / Jan Baetens

Series: Lieven Gevaert series: Publisher: Leuven, Belgium : Leuven UP, 2010.Description: xii, 187 pages : illustrations (black and white), portraits : 23 cm.ISBN: 9058677931; 9789058677938

Photography is fundamentally a time-based medium. The relationships between photography and time are manifold: snapshots are “slices of time,” time can be directly represented within the image, time can be photography’s theme and philosophical horizon, photographic practices develop and change across time. This book brings together the various aspect of time in photography and of photography in time. Its chapters focus on seminal authors (including Fox Talbot, Victor Burgin, and Robert Morris) and genres (spirit photography, montage photobooks, and tableau photography), with examples ranging from the very first photographic pictures to the most recent uses of photography in and outside art. Given the multifaceted dimensions of the notion of time, the book fosters an interdisciplinary approach, gathering essays by historians of photography as well as by authors with a critical or philosophical background. It shows how some interpretations of photography are indebted to fields that have a great expertise in analyzing time, such as narratology and literature. Written by international specialists for a nonspecialist audience and displaying extraordinary breadth and erudition, this book reshapes our vision of photography, time, culture, and art.