On Pictures and the Words that Fail Them

On Pictures and the Words that Fail Them

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  • Author: James Elkins
  • Publisher: Cambridge University Press
  • ISBN: 9780521624992
  • Category : Art
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 348

In this innovative, interdisciplinary study, James Elkins argues against the assumption that images can be adequately described in words. In his view, words must always fail because pictures possess a residue of 'meaningless' marks that cannot be apprehended as signs. On Pictures and the Words that Fail Them is a 1998 text which provides detailed, incisive critiques of fundamental notions about pictures: their allegedly semiotic structures; the 'rational' nature of realism; and the ubiquity of the figure-ground relation. Elkins then opens the concept of images to non-Western and prehistoric ideas, exploring Chinese concepts of magic, Mesopotamian practices of counting and sculpture, religious ideas about hypostasis, philosophical discussions concerning invisibility and blindness, and questions on the limits of the destruction of meaning.


Pictures and Tears

Pictures and Tears

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  • Author: James Elkins
  • Publisher: Routledge
  • ISBN: 113595013X
  • Category : Art
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 218

This deeply personal account of emotion and vulnerability draws upon anecdotes related to individual works of art to present a chronicle of how people have shown emotion before works of art in the past.


Likenesses

Likenesses

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  • Author: Matthew Reynolds
  • Publisher: Routledge
  • ISBN: 135156014X
  • Category : Foreign Language Study
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 246

Translation, illustration and interpretation have at least two things in common. They all begin when sense is made in the act of reading: that is where illustrative images and explanatory words begin to form. And they all ask to be understood in relation to the works from which they have arisen: reading them is a matter of reading readings. Likenesses explores this palimpsestic realm, with examples from Dante to the contemporary sculptor Rachel Whiteread. The complexities that emerge are different from Empsonian ambiguity or de Man's unknowable infinity of signification: here, meaning dawns and fades as the hologrammic text is filled out and flattened by successive encounters. Since all literature and art is palimpsestic to some degree - Reynolds proposes - this style of interpretation can become a tactic for criticism in general. Critics need both to indulge and to distrust the metamorphic power of their interpreting imaginations. Likenesses follows on from the argument of Reynolds's The Poetry of Translation (2011), extending it through other translations and beyond them into a wide range of layered texts. Browning emerges as a key figure because his poems laminate languages, places, times and modes of utterance with such compelling energy. There are also substantial, innovative accounts of Dryden, Stubbs, Goya, Turner, Tennyson, Ungaretti and many more.


Art and Globalization

Art and Globalization

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  • Author: James Elkins
  • Publisher: Penn State Press
  • ISBN: 0271074418
  • Category : Art
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 335

The “biennale culture” now determines much of the art world. Literature on the worldwide dissemination of art assumes nationalism and ethnic identity, but rarely analyzes it. At the same time there is extensive theorizing about globalization in political theory, cultural studies, postcolonial theory, political economy, sociology, and anthropology. Art and Globalization brings political and cultural theorists together with writers and historians concerned specifically with the visual arts in order to test the limits of the conceptualization of the global in art. Among the major writers on contemporary international art represented in this book are Rasheed Araeen, Joaquín Barriendos, Susan Buck-Morss, John Clark, Iftikhar Dadi, T. J. Demos, Néstor García Canclini, Charles Green, Suman Gupta, Harry Harootunian, Michael Ann Holly, Shigemi Inaga, Fredric Jameson, Caroline Jones, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Anthony D. King, Partha Mitter, Keith Moxey, Saskia Sassen, Ming Tiampo, and C. J. W.-L. Wee. Art and Globalization is the first book in the Stone Art Theory Institutes Series. The five volumes, each on a different theoretical issue in contemporary art, build on conversations held in intensive, weeklong closed meetings. Each volume begins with edited and annotated transcripts of those meetings, followed by assessments written by a wide community of artists, scholars, historians, theorists, and critics. The result is a series of well-informed, contentious, open-ended dialogues about the most difficult theoretical and philosophical problems we face in rethinking the arts today.


Nothing Happened

Nothing Happened

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  • Author: Darcy Buerkle
  • Publisher: University of Michigan Press
  • ISBN: 0472118552
  • Category : Literary Criticism
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 413

Charlotte Salomon's (1917-43) fantastical autobiography, Life? or Theater?, consists of 769 sequenced gouache paintings, through which the artist imagined the circumstances of the eight suicides in her family, all but one of them women. But Salomon's focus on suicide was not merely a familial idiosyncrasy. Nothing Happened argues that the social history of early-twentieth-century Germany has elided an important cultural and social phenomenon by not including the story of German Jewish women and suicide. This absence in social history mirrors an even larger gap in the intellectual history of deeply gendered suicide studies that have reproduced the notion of women's suicide as a rarity in history. Nothing Happened is a historiographic intervention that operates in conversation and in tension with contemporary theory about trauma and the reconstruction of emotion in history.


Late Modernism and the Avant-garde British Novel

Late Modernism and the Avant-garde British Novel

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  • Author: Julia Jordan
  • Publisher:
  • ISBN: 0198857284
  • Category : Literary Criticism
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 256

A study of the experimental novel of the postwar period in Britain that rethinks the resurgence of the literary avant-garde that occurred in these decades and explains its implications for the history of the novel and late modernism more broadly.


Alan Moore, Out from the Underground

Alan Moore, Out from the Underground

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  • Author: Maggie Gray
  • Publisher: Springer
  • ISBN: 3319665081
  • Category : Social Science
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 308

This book explores Alan Moore’s career as a cartoonist, as shaped by his transdisciplinary practice as a poet, illustrator, musician and playwright as well as his involvement in the Northampton Arts Lab and the hippie counterculture in which it took place. It traces Moore’s trajectory out from the underground comix scene of the 1970s and into a commercial music press rocked by the arrival of punk. In doing so it uncovers how performance has shaped Moore’s approach to comics and their political potential. Drawing on the work of Bertolt Brecht, who similarly fused political dissent with experimental popular art, this book considers what looking strangely at Alan Moore as cartoonist tells us about comics, their visual and material form, and the performance and politics of their reading and making.


What Do Artists Know?

What Do Artists Know?

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  • Author: James Elkins
  • Publisher: Penn State Press
  • ISBN: 0271054247
  • Category : Art
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 242

"Brings together historians, philosophers, critics, curators, artists, and educators to ask how art is and should be taught. Explores the theories that underwrite art education at all levels, the pertinent history of art education, and the most promising current conceptualizations"--Provided by publisher.


"Michael Baxandall, Vision and the Work of Words "

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  • Author: Robert Williams
  • Publisher: Routledge
  • ISBN: 1351558366
  • Category : Art
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 290

'The most important art historian of his generation? is how some scholars have described the late Michael Baxandall (1933-2007), Professor of the Classical Tradition at the Warburg Institute, University of London, and of the History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley. Baxandall?s work had a transformative effect on the study of European Renaissance and eighteenth-century art, and contributed to a complex transition in the aims and methods of art history in general during the 1970s, ?80s and ?90s. While influential, he was also an especially subtle and independent thinker - occasionally a controversial one - and many of the implications of his work have yet to be fully understood and assimilated. This collection of 10 essays endeavors to assess the nature of Baxandall?s achievement, and in particular to address the issue of the challenges it offers to the practice of art history today. This volume provides the most comprehensive assessment of Baxandall?s work to date, while drawing upon the archive of Baxandall papers recently deposited at the Cambridge University Library and the Warburg Institute.


Picturing the Language of Images

Picturing the Language of Images

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  • Author: Laurence Petit
  • Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
  • ISBN: 1443859338
  • Category : Social Science
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 560

Picturing the Language of Images is a collection of thirty-three previously unpublished essays that explore the complex and ever-evolving interaction between the verbal and the visual. The uniqueness of this volume lies in its bringing together scholars from around the world to provide a broad synchronic and diachronic exploration of the relationship between text and image, as well as a reflection on the limits of representation through a re-thinking of the very acts of reading and viewing. While covering a variety of media—such as literature, painting, photography, film and comics—across time—from the 18th century to the 21st century—this collection also provides a special focus on the work of particular authors, such as A. S. Byatt, W. G. Sebald, and Art Spiegelman.