Antimodernism and Artistic Experience


Book Description

Scholars in art history, anthropology, history, and feminist media studies explore Western antimodernism of the turn of the 20th century as an artistic response to a perceived loss of ?authentic? experience.




Antimodernism and Artistic Experience


Book Description

Antimodernism is a term used to describe the international reaction to the onslaught of the modern world that swept across industrialized Western Europe, North America, and Japan in the decades around the turn of the twentieth century. Scholars in art history, anthropology, political science, history, and feminist media studies explore antimodernism as an artistic response to a perceived sense of loss – in particular, the loss of 'authentic' experience. Embracing the 'authentic' as a redemptive antidote to the threat of unheralded economic and social change, antimodernism sought out experience supposedly embodied in pre-industrialized societies – in medieval communities or 'oriental cultures,' in the Primitive, the Traditional, or Folk. In describing the ways in which modern artists used antimodern constructs in formulating their work, the contributors examine the involvement of artists and intellectuals in the reproduction and diffusion of these concepts. In doing so they reveal the interrelation of fine art, decorative art, souvenir or tourist art, and craft, questioning the ways in which these categories of artistic expression reformulate and naturalise social relations in the field of cultural production.




No Place of Grace


Book Description

"T. J. Jackson Lears's No Place of Grace is a landmark book in the fields of American Studies and history, known for its rigorous research and original, near-literary style. A study of responses to the culture of corporate capitalism at the turn of the twentieth century, No Place of Grace charts the development of modern consumer society through the embrace of antimodernism, the effort among many middle and upper class Americans to recapture feelings of authenticity, vigor, depth, and connection. Rather than offer true resistance to the increasing corporate bureaucratization of the time, however, antimodernism helped accommodate Americans to the new order-it was therapeutic rather than oppositional, a forerunner to today's self-help culture. And yet antimodernism contributed a new dynamic as well, "an eloquent edge of protest," as Lears puts it, which is evident even today in anticonsumerism, sustainable living, and other practices. This edition, with a lively and discerning foreword by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, celebrates the book's 40th anniversary"--




Art Since 1900


Book Description

Groundbreaking in both its content and its presentation, Art Since 1900 has been hailed as a landmark study in the history of art. Conceived by some of the most influential art historians of our time, this extraordinary book has now been revised, expanded and brought right up to date to include the latest developments in the study and practice of art. It provides the most comprehensive critical history of art in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries ever published. With a clear year-by-year structure, the authors present 130 articles, each focusing on a crucial event - such as the creation of a seminal work, the publication of an important text, or the opening of a major exhibition - to tell the myriad stories of art from 1900 to the present. All the key turning-points and breakthroughs of modernism and postmodernism are explored in depth, as are the frequent antimodernist reactions that proposed alternative visions. This third edition includes a new introduction on the impact of globalization, as well as essays on the development of Synthetic Cubism, early avant-garde film, Brazilian modernism, postmodern architecture, Moscow conceptualism, queer art, South African photography, and the rise of the new museum of art. The book's flexible structure and extensive cross-referencing enable readers to plot their own course through the century and to follow any one of the many narratives that unfold, be it the history of a medium such as painting, the development of art in a particular country, the influence of a movement such as Surrealism, or the emergence of a stylistic or conceptual body of work such as abstraction or minimalism. Illustrating the text are reproductions of almost eight hundred of the canonical (and anti-canonical) works of the century. A five-part introduction sets out the methodologies that govern the discipline of art history, informing and enhancing the reader's understanding of its practice today. Two roundtable discussions consider some of the questions raised by the preceding decades and look ahead to the future. Background information on key events, places and people is provided in boxes throughout, while a glossary, full bibliography and list of websites add to the reference value of this outstanding volume. Acclaimed as the definitive work on the subject, Art Since 1900 is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the complexities of art in the modern age.




Anti-modernism


Book Description

The last volume of the Discourses of Collective Identity in Central and Southeast Europe 1770–1945 series presents 46 texts under the heading of "antimodernism". In a dynamic relationship with modernism, from the 1880s to the 1940s, and especially during the interwar period, the antimodernist political discourse in the region offered complex ideological constructions of national identification. These texts rejected the linear vision of progress and instead offered alternative models of temporality, such as the cyclical one as well as various narratives of decline. This shift was closely connected to the rejection of liberal democratic institutionalism, and the preference for organicist models of social existence, emphasizing the role of the elites (and charismatic leaders) shaping the whole body politic. Along these lines, antimodernist authors also formulated alternative visions of symbolic geography: rejecting the symbolic hierarchies that focused on the normativity of Western European models, they stressed the cultural and political autarchy of their own national community, which in some cases was also coupled with the reevaluation of the Orient. At the same time, this antimodernist turn should not be confused with rightwing radicalism—in fact, the dialogue with the modernist tradition was often very subtle and the anthology also contains texts which offered a criticism of 'modern' totalitarianism in an antimodernist key.




Utopia


Book Description

Utopian hope and dystopian despair are characteristic features of modernism and the avant-garde. Readings of the avant-garde have frequently sought to identify utopian moments coded in its works and activities as optimistic signs of a possible future social life, or as the attempt to preserve hope against the closure of an emergent dystopian present. The fourth volume of the EAM series, European Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies, casts light on the history, theory and actuality of the utopian and dystopian strands which run through European modernism and the avant-garde from the late 19th to the 21st century. The book’s varied and carefully selected contributions, written by experts from around 20 countries, seek to answer such questions as: · how have modernism and the avant-garde responded to historical circumstance in mapping the form of possible futures for humanity? · how have avant-garde and modernist works presented ideals of living as alternatives to the present? · how have avant-gardists acted with or against the state to remodel human life or to resist the instrumental reduction of life by administration and industrialisation?




Modernism's Mythic Pose


Book Description

Modernism's Mythic Pose recovers the tradition of Delsartism, a popular international movement that promoted bodily and vocal solo performances, particularly for women. This strain of classical-antimodernism shaped dance, film, and poetics. Its central figure, the mythic pose, expressed both skepticism and nostalgia and functioned as an ambivalent break from modernity.




Censoring Art


Book Description

Art is continuously subjected to insidious forms of censorship. This may be by the Church to guard against moral degeneration, by the State to promote a specific political agenda or by the art market, to elevate one artist above another. Now, and in the last century, artwork that touches on ethnic, religious, sexual, national or institutional sensitivities is liable to be destroyed or hidden away, ignored or side-lined. Drawing from new research into historical and contemporary case-studies, Censoring Art: Silencing the Artwork provides diverse ways of understanding the purpose and mechanisms of art censorship across distinct geopolitical and cultural contexts from Iran, Japan, and Uzbekistan to Britain, Ireland, Canada, Macedonia, Soviet Russia, and Cyprus. Its contributions uncover the impact of this silent control of the production and exhibition of art and consider how censorship has affected art practice and public perceptions of artworks.




Art Deco


Book Description

"The goal of the logo is to alert readers to the threat that massive unauthorized photocopying poses to the future of the written work. [...] The Deco idiom col- onized broadcast facility, from the world's metropolis in London to the North American prairie, and instrument, the radio cabinet, in the houses of the prosperous to the relatively poor. [...] This book would not have been possible without the vision and support of Luc Noppen and the Institut du patrimoine of the Université du Québec à Montréal and the Society for the Study of Architecture in Canada, which founded the Prix Phyllis-Lambert. [...] In addition to Luc and the Institut du patrimoine, I would like to acknowledge the financial support of the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the IODE (War Memorial Scholarship Program), the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute, the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) (with support of TD Financial Bank), and, at UBC, the Faculty of Graduate Studies and the Department of Art H [...] There are numerous others who gave of their time and expertise: Don Luxton, Linda Fraser at the CAA, Joan Seidl at the Museum of Vancouver, the staff at the City of Vancouver Archives and the Vancouver Public Library, the staff at the Special Collections at UBC, Alexis Sornin and the librarians at the CCA, Kathleen Correia and the staff at the California State Library, Jennifer Whitlock at the Uni"--




Hunters at the Margin


Book Description

Hunters at the Margin examines the conflict in the Northwest Territories between Native hunters and conservationists over three big game species: the wood bison, the muskox, and the caribou. John Sandlos argues that the introduction of game regulations, national parks, and game sanctuaries was central to the assertion of state authority over the traditional hunting cultures of the Dene and Inuit. His archival research undermines the assumption that conservationists were motivated solely by enlightened preservationism, revealing instead that commercial interests were integral to wildlife management in Canada.