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Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) is best known as a media theorist—many consider him the founder of media studies—but he was also an important theorist of art. Though a near-household name for decades due to magazine interviews and TV specials, McLuhan remains an underappreciated yet fascinating figure in art history. His connections with the art of his own time were largely unexplored, until now. In Distant Early Warning, art historian Alex Kitnick delves into these rich connections and argues both that McLuhan was influenced by art and artists and, more surprisingly, that McLuhan’s work directly influenced the art and artists of his time. Kitnick builds the story of McLuhan’s entangl...
"The texts by John McHale that comprise this volume were first published in a variety of different publications."
John Miller's PowerPoint presentation, Reconstructing a Public Sphere, focuses on a specific location, Battery Park City and the adjacent World Trade Center in New York. It is both a photographic essay and critical text -- and despite its title, Miller's most autobiographical work to date.Microsoft's PowerPoint, the heir apparent to the 35-mm slide projector, sadly now "the staple of comedy skits," is subverted by Miller's narrative of personal memory and experience: he ponders the park's civic history and public art projects, as well as his evacuation from the area in the wake of 9/11.Upon returning to the park fifteen years later, Miller questions how public space develops from reconstruction--and the function of the public within it. Akin to the effects of photography, he considers how public space redacts local history as much as it conjures subjective memory.
Martin Beck's exhibition “Program” at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts comprised a sequence of interventions, installations, events, and displays that drew on the exhibition histories and academic pursuits of the famed 1963 Le Corbusier building at Harvard University. The sequence of explorative strategies—each node of which Beck considered an “episode”—lent particular attention to the founding aspirations of the Carpenter Center, which sought to cultivate its position as simultaneously an iconic modernist building, school, and exhibition venue. Beck performed and critically reflected on the kinds of activity an institution uses to build, organize, and engage with its aud...
Catalogue published for the exhibition organized by the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and the Râeunion des Musâees Nationaux-Grand Palais, with the participation of the Niki Charitable Art Foundation, Santee. Held at the Grand Palais, Galeries Nationales, Paris, France, September 17, 2014-February 2, 2015 and Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain, February 27-June 11, 2015.
Play and the Artist’s Creative Process explores a continuity between childhood play and adult creativity. The volume examines how an understanding of play can shed new light on processes that recur in the work of Philip Guston and Eduardo Paolozzi. Both artists’ distinctive engagement with popular culture is seen as connected to the play materials available in the landscapes of their individual childhoods. Animating or toying with material to produce the unforeseen outcome is explored as the central force at work in the artists’ processes. By engaging with a range of play theories, the book shows how the artists’ studio methods can be understood in terms of game strategies.
How artists created an aesthetic of “positive barbarism” in a world devastated by World War II, the Holocaust, and the atomic bomb In Brutal Aesthetics, leading art historian Hal Foster explores how postwar artists and writers searched for a new foundation of culture after the massive devastation of World War II, the Holocaust, and the atomic bomb. Inspired by the notion that modernist art can teach us how to survive a civilization become barbaric, Foster examines the various ways that key figures from the early 1940s to the early 1960s sought to develop a “brutal aesthetics” adequate to the destruction around them. With a focus on the philosopher Georges Bataille, the painters Jean ...
Offering an alternative mode of visual cultural analysis to the prevalent discursive model, this book proposes to situate analysis of Image within ‘formal’ analyses of culture experience. Specifically, the discussion draws on theories of affective aesthetics with the view of addressing the sensual form of culture (i.e. ‘cultural form’). Therefore, the volume puts forward a mode of formalist analysis in visual cultural research which takes purchase on the idea of ‘cultural form’. A continuum of formalist attention between Image analysis (visual media, industrial design) and probing of ‘cultural forms’ establishes the theoretical underpinning of the book. These concepts are expounded through a case study which looks at formal experimentations and debates arising from 1960s avant-garde artistic practices in London.