Art as worldmaking : critical essays on realism and naturalism / edited by Malcolm Baker and Andrew Hemingway.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Baker, Malcolm, editor.

Hemingway, Andrew, editor.

Potts, Alex, honouree.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Realism in art.

Naturalism in art.

Genre:

Festschriften.

Physical Description:

xx, 346 pages : illustrations, portraits (black and white) ; 25 cm

Place of Publication:

Manchester : Manchester University Press, [2018]

Summary:

Art as worldmaking is a response to Alex Potts's provocative 2013 book Experiments in modern realism. Twenty essays by leading scholars test Potts's recasting of realism through examinations of art produced in different media and periods, ranging from eighth-century Chinese garden aesthetics to video work by the contemporary Russian collective Radek Community. While the book does not neglect avatars of pictorial realism such as Menzel and Eakins, or the question of nineteenth-century realism's historical antecedents, it is contemporary in orientation in that many contributors are particularly concerned with the questions that sculpture, photography and non-traditional media pose for realism as an aesthetic norm. It will be essential reading for students of art history concerned with art's truth value or more broadly with conceptual problems of representation and the intersections of art and politics.

Contents:

1 The transactions of detail p. 23 / Briony Fer

2 Realism's credibility problem p. 32 / Joshua Shannon

3 Attending to the veristic sculptural portrait in the eighteenth century p. 53 / Malcolm Baker

4 Elasticity and sculptural form p. 70 / Caroline Arscott

5 A portrait of the artist as a dead man p. 88 / Jon Wood

6 Death metal p. 100 / Anne M. Wagner

Part III Landscape design

7 Recurrent dialogues in the history of Chinese and English garden design p. 115 / Martin J. Powers

8 Traditional views: conservative anti-naturalism and landscape aesthetics in France around 1900 p. 128 / Neil McWilliam

Part IV Painting, photography and making strange

9 Willem Kalf on reflexykonst: the aesthetics of transformation in still life p. 147 / Celeste Brusati

10 Democratic light: phenomenology and the worldliness of painting p. 165 / Brendan Prendeville

11 Body and soul in the work of Thomas Eakins and F. Holland Day p. 181 / Rebecca Zurier

12 From Menzel to Burtynsky: episodes from an imagery of capitalism p. 198 / T.J. Clark

Part V Photography and cinema

13 Constance Stuart's war: women and documentary's excess p. 213 / Tamar Garb

14 Antonioni's Blow-Up (1966): photography and film p. 232 / Lisa Tickner

15 'Dirty realism': documentary photography in 1970s Britain - a maquette p. 248 / Steve Edwards

Part VI Post-media/contemporary practices

16 The roots of Mike Kelley's Realism: subterranean homesick blues p. 271 / Thomas Crow

17 The moment of guerrilla art p. 287 / Alistair Rider

18 Every day something happens to us: realism at the crossroads p. 303 / Gail Day.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

1526114909

9781526114907

OCLC:

1028590859