(H/B) SINCE 1950

Παρουσίαση

In these essays on late twentieth-century art and the critical perspectives it has generated, Charles Harrison offers a particularly compelling and finely argued analysis of the seismic shift that took place when the modernist formalism that had underpinned thinking about art in the first half of the century came to be seen as a spent force. The shift occurred in the wake of the international triumph of American Abstract Expressionist painting in the 1950s - painting that to many at the time seemed to mark the very apogee of modernist abstraction. For Harrison, as for most writers on the period, the crucial turning point came in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the Conceptual Art movement mounted a systematic critique of the aesthetics of modernism and of its ideological underpinnings. This was the juncture at which a modernist focus on the visual and on pure form gave way to a radically different understanding - one that saw art as needing to be grounded in the intellectual and the textual, and as having to engage with the ideological pressures exerted on its practice by the institutions and apparatuses of the art world. Harrison's analysis of the issues at stake reveals the benefits of his close personal involvement with these developments. He played a significant role in the staging of the milestone exhibition When Attitudes become Form when it was shown at its London venue in 1969, and for many years has been actively involved with the British-based practice of Art & Language, which has its origins in the original Conceptual Art movement. [...] (From the publisher)

Περιεχόμενα

Preface by Alex Potts
Introduction
Sculpture's Recent Past
On Writing about
Ben Nicholson and the Decline of Cubism
Roger Hilton: The Obligation to Express
"Englishness" and "Modernism" Revisited
The Power of Modernism
Feeling the Earth Move
A Place of Work: Conceptual Art as Realist Practice?
Drawing: Competence and Incompetence
Keeping Up
Virtual Iconoclasm and Real Expansion
Complexity and Disinterest
Notes
Copyright Acknowledgements
Index