Description
Book SynopsisBeholding considers the spatially situated encounter between artwork and spectator. It argues that artworks created for specific places or conditions structure a reciprocal encounter, which is completed by the presence of a beholder. These are works which demand the ''beholder''s share'', but not, as Ernst Gombrich famously claimed, to sustain an illusion. Rather,
Beholding reconfigures Gombrich''s notion of the beholder''s share as a set of ''licensed'' imaginative and cognitive projections.Each chapter frames a particular work of art from the remit of a complementary theoretical text. The book establishes a transhistorical notion of the spatially situated encounter, and considers the role of the architectural host in bringing the beholder's orientation into play. The book engages a diverse range of practices: from Renaissance painting and group portraiture to intermedia practices of installation and performance art. Written within the broad remit of reception aesthetics
Trade ReviewA beautifully-written interdisciplinary book that acknowledges the permeability of the once strong divisions that separated art, architecture, the cinema and design. Artist and theorist Ken Wilder explains, through his theory of beholding, how the audience’s viewing conditions can shape their understanding of an art work. -- Stephen Farthing, artist, UK
Table of ContentsList of Plates List of Figures Preface Acknowledgments Introduction Part I: Sacred Imagery Chapter 1: The Beholder As Witness Chapter 2: Of Clouds and Terrestrial Beholders Chapter 3: The Melancholic Beholder Part II: Group Portraiture Chapter 4: The Artist as Beholder Chapter 5: Two Modes of Beholding Chapter 6: Theatricality and the Beholder PART III: Abstraction Chapter Seven: Beholding a ‘Reversible’ Space Chapter Eight: Virtual Space and the ‘Literal’ Beholder Chapter Nine: On Repetition and Beholding PART IV: Intermedia Chapter Ten: The Complicit Beholder Chapter Eleven: The Beholder in the Expanded Field Chapter Twelve: The Dislocated Beholder Bibliography Notes
