Objects in Air: Artworks and Their Outside around 1900 - Hardcover

Christian, Margareta Ingrid

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 022676477X ISBN 13: 9780226764771

Verlag: University of Chicago Press, 2021

Inhaltsangabe

Margareta Ingrid Christian unpacks the ways in which, around 1900, art scholars, critics, and choreographers wrote about the artwork as an actual object in real time and space, surrounded and fluently connected to the viewer through the very air we breathe. Theorists such as Aby Warburg, Alois Riegl, Rainer Maria Rilke, and the choreographer Rudolf Laban drew on the science of their time to examine air as the material space surrounding an artwork, establishing its “milieu,” “atmosphere,” or “environment.” Christian explores how the artwork’s external space was seen to work as an aesthetic category in its own right, beginning with Rainer Maria Rilke’s observation that Rodin’s sculpture “exhales an atmosphere” and that Cezanne’s colors create “a calm, silken air” that pervades the empty rooms where the paintings are exhibited.

Writers created an early theory of unbounded form that described what Christian calls an artwork’s ecstasis or its ability to stray outside its limits and engender its own space. Objects viewed in this perspective complicate the now-fashionable discourse of empathy aesthetics, the attention to self-projecting subjects, and the idea of the modernist self-contained artwork. For example, Christian invites us to historicize the immersive spatial installations and “environments” that have arisen since the 1960s and to consider their origins in turn-of-the-twentieth-century aesthetics. Throughout this beautifully written work, Christian offers ways for us to rethink entrenched narratives of aesthetics and modernism and to revisit alternatives.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Margareta Ingrid Christian is assistant professor of Germanic Studies at the University of Chicago. She has published articles in a range of contributed volumes and journals, among them PMLA, German Studies Review, and History of Photography.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Chicago Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2021
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 022676477X
• ISBN 13: 9780226764771
• Einband: Tapa dura
• Anzahl der Seiten: 304
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar