Art beyond representation : the performative power of the image / Barbara Bolt.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Bolt, Barbara.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Conceptual art.

Art--Philosophy.

Art.

Physical Description:

x, 209 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm

Place of Publication:

London : I.B. Tauris ; New York : Palgrave Macmillan [U.S. distributor], 2004.

Summary:

This fascinating book refutes the notion that art is a representational practice - an assumption so commonplace as to be rarely questioned - with a striking new paradigm in visual aesthetics, formulated through in-depth engagement with the work of Martin Heidegger as well as numerous other thinkers including Deleuze and Guattari, C.S.Peirce and Judith Butler. Drawing on themes as diverse as the painting practice of Paul Cezanne and Francis Bacon, the transubstantiation of the Catholic sacrament and Oscar Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, Barbara Bolt also considers her own experience as a painter working 'in the heat of the moment'. Challenging standard metaphors of light, enlightenment, vision and knowledge, with the 'revealing' light of European sunshine reconceived as the blinding 'glare' of the Australian sun, she suggests that too much 'light' may in fact reveal nothing, disorienting both eye and mind. She cites too, the relationship between maker and land of Indigenous peoples' ritual art practices, to argue for a performative relationship between art and artist within the 'fuzziness' of practice. Finally and controversially she asks: how does such 'embodied' practice fare within the post-medium culture of conceptual and virtual art?

Contents:

Transcending Representationalism 11

Contingency and the Emergence of Art 52

The "Work" of Art 87

Shedding Light for the Matter 123

Working Hot: A Materialist Ontology 149.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 201-209)

ISBN:

1850434107 :

1850434115

OCLC:

56458743