Real spaces : world art history and the rise of Western modernism / David Summers.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Summers, David, 1941-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Art criticism.

Art--History.

Art.

History.

Space (Art).

Physical Description:

687 pages : illustrations, maps ; 25 cm

Place of Publication:

London ; New York : Phaidon, 2003.

Summary:

In this bold, brilliant, original and important book, David Summers argues that current formalist, contextual and post-structural approaches to art cannot provide the basis for a truly global and intercultural art history. He believes that assumptions right at the heart of Western thinking about art must therefore be re-examined, and the new framework he offers is an attempt to resolve some of the problems that arise from doing so. At the core of the argument is a proposal to replace the modern Western notion of the 'visual arts' with that of the 'spatial arts', comprising two fundamental categories: 'real space' and 'virtual space'. Real space is the space we share with other people and things, and the fundamental arts of real space are sculpture, the art of personal space, and architecture, the art of social space. Virtual space, space represented in two dimensions, as in paintings, drawings and prints, always entails a format in real space, thus making real space the primary category.

Adopting a wide definition of art that in principle embraces anything that is made, and underpinning his arguments with detailed examination of artifacts and architecture from all over the world, the author develops his thesis in a series of chapters that broadly trace the progress of human skill in many different traditions from the simple facture of hominid tools to the sophisticated universal three-dimensional grid of modern technology, which he describes as 'metaoptical' space. In wide-ranging and revealing discussions of facture, places, centres, two-and three-dimensional and planar images, virtuality and perspective, and the essentially centreless world of Western modernism, he creates a conceptual framework that, by always relating art to use, enables us to treat all traditions on an equal footing. At the same time this framework can help to accommodate and understand opposition and conflict both within and between cultures. In this wider framework, formalism and other theories of art can be seen and evaluated within the Western tradition whence they originated, without universal validity being claimed for them.

Within this broad plan there is great richness of detail and vividness of description, based on a constant engagement with actual works of art, and the author's analysis of the concrete metaphors that lie behind our critical vocabulary is revealing and thought-provoking. New terms are carefully defined and explained in such a way that any reader can appreciate why such terminology is necessary and useful. The author insists that all art is made to fit human uses, and can never be separated from the primary spatial conditions of those uses. With its universal scope and its sympathetic understanding of the innumerable forms art takes, this book will stimulate people to think in new and fruitful ways about the human purposes of art, and also to think more deeply and critically about the relations between art, political order and technology.

Contents:

1 Post-formalist Art History 15

2 Form, Pictorial Imagination and Formalism 28

3 Real Spaces, Conditions and Cardinality 36

4 The 'Visual Arts' and the Spatial Arts 41

5 Real Space and Virtual Space 43

6 An Image in Real Space: The Aztec Coatlicue 45

7 Virtual Space and the Primacy of Real Space 50

8 Given Nature and Second Nature 53

9 Real Space and Art-Historical Interpretation 55

10 Art History and Aesthetics 58

Chapter 1 Facture

1.1 Conditions of Presentation 61

1.2 Configuration: Functions and Purposes 62

1.3 Arbitrariness 63

1.4 The Principle of Definition and Series 64

1.5 Authority and Series 65

1.6 Technology, Medium, Technique and Style 66

1.7 Diachronic and Synchronic 72

1.8 Facture 74

1.9 Facture and Materials 77

1.10 Facture and Value 84

1.11 Refinement and Distinction 86

1.12 Ornament 1 98

1.13 Play 101

1.14 Notionality 107

1.15 Models 114

Chapter 2 Places

2.2 Place, Relation and Hierarchy 123

2.3 The Navajo Hogan 125

2.4 Real Space, Gender and Ritual 127

2.5 Centres 130

2.6 A Traditional African Social Space 137

2.7 Shrines 139

2.8 Jerusalem 140

2.9 Boundaries and Precincts 152

2.10 Paths 157

2.11 Elevation 159

2.12 Difficulty of Approach 163

2.13 Centres and Verticality 166

2.14 Ascent 178

2.15 Alignment and Orientation 180

2.16 North, South, East, West 184

2.17 Tumuli and Domes 186

2.18 Peripheries 194

2.19 Land and Division 197

Chapter 3 The Appropriation of the Centre

3.1 Orientation, Kingship and Empire 201

3.2 The Sumerians 203

3.3 Temple and Palace 204

3.4 Kingship in Egypt 205

3.5 The Pyramids at Giza 214

3.6 The Lord of the Four Quarters 220

3.7 Augustus 224

3.8 Angkor 228

3.9 Chinese Imperial Cities 231

3.10 Beijing 237

3.11 Versailles 241

3.12 Revolution 245

Chapter 4 Images

4.1 The Origins of Images 251

4.2 Realities of Images 252

4.3 Images and Cultural Difference 254

4.4 Traces, Images of Traces, Sight and Abstraction 255

4.5 Real Metaphor 257

4.6 Real Metaphor and Recognition 259

4.7 Contour and Comprehension 260

4.8 Lepinski Vir 263

4.9 Shiva 264

4.10 Upright Stones and Aniconic Images 266

4.11 Maya Stelae: 18 Rabbit at Copan 271

4.12 Manipulation 274

4.13 Votive Images 279

4.14 Icons 284

4.15 Magnified Anthropomorphism 287

4.16 Effigies and Images with the Value of Effigies 288

4.17 Effigies and Size 294

4.18 Icons and Iconoclasm 294

4.19 Masks 300

4.20 Greek Drama 307

4.21 Theatre and Politics 309

4.22 Character and Comedy 310

4.23 Fooling the Gods: On the Beginnings of Metric and Optical Naturalism 312

4.24 Abstraction, Vision and Drawing 316

4.25 Mental Images 319

4.26 Icons and Imagination 326

4.27 Automata 326

4.28 Some Italian Renaissance Portraits 329

4.29 Images on Surfaces: Effigy, Surface and 'Field of Vision' 331

4.30 Surficiality and Planarity 336

4.31 Sur-face 337

4.32 Double Distance 338

4.33 Surfaces, Recognition and Relation 339

4.34 Virtuality, Completion and Double Metaphor 339

4.35 Succession, Narrative and Fiction 341

Chapter 5 Planarity

5.2 Palaeolithic Women 346

5.3 Ex-planation 349

5.4 Planes and Places 350

5.5 Independence and Dependence 350

5.6 Images and Places as Vertical and Horizontal Planes 355

5.7 Recognition and Planarity, Contour and Definition 356

5.8 Order and Proportion 358

5.9 Ambivalences of Measure 360

5.10 Planar Images, Redundancy and Absolute Colour 360

5.11 Definition, Division and Format 361

5.12 Rotation and Translation 363

5.13 Planar Arrangement and Hierarchy 368

5.14 Planar Oppositions 369

5.15 Pharaoh and Centre 381

5.16 Ashurnasirpal's Throne Room 383

5.17 A Benin Royal Plaque 385

5.18 A Chinese Emperor Portrait 388

5.19 Identity and Opposition 390

5.20 Full-face, Profile and Virtuality 394

5.21 Ornament 2 395

5.22 Ornament, Sacred Texts and Places 398

5.23 Measure and Ratio 403

5.24 Ratio, Proportion and Harmony 405

5.25 Grids 410

5.26 Grids and Cardinality 414

5.27 Scale and Format 414

5.28 Planes, Grids and Social Space 415

5.29 Grids, Measure and Agriculture 416

5.30 Colonies 417

Chapter 6 Virtuality

6.2 Surfaces and Virtuality 433

6.3 Surface as Potential Random Order 434

6.4 Framing 438

6.5 Groundlines and Surfaces; Stage Space and Viewer Space 439

6.6 The Virtual Co-ordinate Plane 445

6.7 Relief Space 448

6.8 Overlapping, Foreshortening, Oblique Lines, Diminution 450

6.9 The Optical Plane and Stage Space 454

6.10 Optical Planar Order 457

6.11 Viewer Space: Framing and Detail in Chinese Painting 458

6.12 Light as a Theme 467

6.13 Modelling, Depicted Shadows and Reflection 477

6.14 The Optical Plane and the Visual Angle 486

6.15 Classical Skenographia 487

6.16 The Optical Plane in Greek and Roman Painting 489

6.17 The Ambiguity of the Optical Plane 492

6.18 The Optical Plane in the European Middle Ages 493

6.19 The Optical Cube 497

6.20 Skene, Hierarchy and Theatre 503

6.21 Alhazen's Theory of Vision 508

6.22 Brunelleschi's First Perspective Demonstration 511

6.23 Renaissance Painters' Perspective 517

6.24 Isometry and the Ambiguity of Perspective 526

6.25 Composition, Rhetoric and Allegory 527

6.26 Quadratura 534

6.27 Perspective, Modelling and Chiaroscuro 544

Chapter 7 The Conditions of Modernism

7.2 Metaopticality 555

7.4 Force and Counterforce 567

7.5 Force and Representation 573

7.6 The Ends of Art, Nature and Man 579

7.7 Perspectives 580

7.8 Sublimity 582

7.9 Two German Romantic Landscapes 586

7.10 Impression 588

7.11 Caricature 592

7.12 Naturalism and Photography 601

7.13 From Realism to Construction 621

7.14 The Rothko Chapel 643.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [665]-[682]) and index.

ISBN:

0714842443

OCLC:

52056487