The Return of the Real: The Avante-Garde at the End of the Century
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.90 (612 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0262561077 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 299 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2015-10-21 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
A Customer said How can this be anything but five stars!. Granted, I'm not a Phd. in art history, so I can't claim how much of Foster's thinking is his own and how much he "borrows," but these essays, all interrelated and commenting on each other, carefully dissect postwar art, culture, politics, theory. I've read these essays four or five times and come away with a different insight on art each time. The definite highlight for me was the essay on traumatic realism (which ranges from the opposing simulacral and ideological readings of Warhol, to the tearing of the screen in Cindy Sherman, to the abject . A Customer said Very productive reading. The book is full of productive suggestions for writing on contemporary visual arts. For a foreign reader, it provides a cogent overview of different moments in recent art; a fine sampling of commentary on theoretical writing, and valuable insight into current art criticism in the U.S. "The Return of the Real", meaning by that the Lacanian "Real", is a thought-provoking, stimulating idea that runs through the book and has refreshed my own critical work. I am indebted to this book.. Shana Mason said An Essential Guidebook to Postwar/Contemporary Visual Theory. This book was instrumental during my research in graduate school on the nature of contemporary aesthetics and parsing dialogues on contemporary visual art. I think of this as a guidebook: Foster's lucid, approachable tone to the art of looking at Art is invaluable to student, scholar, and art enthusiast. Art becomes grounded firmly in the present, and any reference or inference to the "past" is one invoked by nostalgia and context, almost entirely. Postwar theory didn't experience proper documentation until the mid to late 1980's, and Foster's te
. Foster, who teaches art history and comparative literature at Cornell and is an editor of the journal October, claims for his generation of cultural theorists, who came of age in the wake of minimalist and conceptual art, the primacy of ideas with their potential connection to real political time and space over objects. This book, however, is heavy reading throughout, and not a sentence goes by without linguistic convolution bringing the mind to a halt and forcing a re-reading. Thus as the old academy of t
If The Return of the Real begins with a new narrative of the historical avant-gard, it concludes with an original reading of this contemporary situation -- and what it portends for future practices of art and theory, culture and politics.. In The Return of the Real Hal Foster discusses the development of art and theory since 1960, and reorders the relation between prewar and postwar avant-gardes. Opposed to the assumption that contemporary art is somehow belated, he argues that the avant-garde returns to us from the future, repositioned by innovative practice in the present. And he poses this retroactive model of art and theory against the reactionary undoing of progressive culture that is pervasive today.After the models of art-as-text in the 1970s and art-as-simulacrum in the 1980s, Foster suggests that we are now witness to a return to the real -- to art and theory grounded in the materiality of actual bodies and social sites