Search results for ""Author Hal Foster""

From the late 1950s to the late 1960s the word Pop described art, film, photography and architectural design which engaged with the new realities of mass production and the mass media. Unlike books which present Pop art in isolation, this is a comprehensive survey of Pop in all its forms across America, Britain and Europe. In addition to the key artworks by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Ed Ruscha, Richard Hamilton, Sigmar Polke, Martial Raysse and many others the book includes works of photography and avant-garde film, as well as what the critic Reyner Banham defined as Pop architecture, ranging from Alison and Peter Smithson’s House of the Future to Archigram’s Walking City and Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’s Learning from Las Vegas.Editor Mark Francis was former Founding Director of the Andy Warhol Museum and editor of ‘Les Années Pop’ (Centre Georges Pompidou, 2001). Survey author Hal Foster is Professor of Art at Princeton University, author of The Return of the Real and editor of the bestselling The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture and Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics.

Read more less

If farce follows tragedy, what follows farce? Where does the double predicament of a post-truth and post-shame politics leave artists and critics on the left? How to demystify a hegemonic order that dismisses its own contradictions? How to belittle a political elite that cannot be embarrassed, or to mock party leaders who thrive on the absurd? How to out-dada President Ubu? And, in any event, why add outrage to a media economy that thrives on the same? What Comes After Farce? comments on shifts in art, criticism, and fiction in the face of the current regime of war, surveillance, extreme inequality, and media disruption. A first section focuses on the cultural politics of emergency since 9/11, including the use and abuse of trauma, paranoia, and kitsch. A second reviews the neoliberal makeover of art institutions during the same period. Finally, a third section surveys transformations in media as reflected in recent art, film, and fiction. Among the phenomena explored here are m

Read more less

Who branded painting in the Pop age more brazenly than Richard Hamilton, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter, and Ed Ruscha? And who probed the Pop revolution in image and identity more intensely than they? In The First Pop Age, leading critic and historian Hal Foster presents an exciting new interpretation of Pop art through the work of these Pop Five. Beautifully illustrated in color throughout, the book reveals how these seminal artists hold on to old forms of art while drawing on new subjects of media; how they strike an ambiguous attitude toward both high art and mass culture; and how they suggest that a heightened confusion between images and people is definitive of Pop culture at large. As The First Pop Age looks back to the early years of Pop art, it also raises important questions about the present: What has changed in the look of screened and scanned images today? Is our media environment qualitatively different from that described by Warhol and company? Have we moved beyond the Pop age, or do we live in its aftermath? A masterful account of one of the most important periods of twentieth-century art, this is a book that also sheds new light on our complex relationship to images today.

Read more less

If farce follows tragedy, what follows farce? Where does the double predicament of a post-truth and post-shame politics leave artists and critics on the left? How to demystify a hegemonic order that dismisses its own contradictions? How to belittle a political elite that cannot be embarrassed, or to mock party leaders who thrive on the absurd? How to out-dada President Ubu? And, in any event, why add outrage to a media economy that thrives on the same? What Comes After Farce? comments on shifts in art, criticism, and fiction in the face of the current regime of war, surveillance, extreme inequality, and media disruption. A first section focuses on the cultural politics of emergency since 9/11, including the use and abuse of trauma, paranoia, and kitsch. A second reviews the neoliberal makeover of art institutions during the same period. Finally, a third section surveys transformations in media as reflected in recent art, film, and fiction. Among the phenomena explored here are "machine vision" (images produced by machines for other machines without a human interface),"operational images" (images that do not represent the world so much as intervene in it), and the algorithmic scripting of information so pervasive in our everyday lives.

Read more less

Bad New Days examines the evolution of art and criticism in Western Europe and North America over the last twenty-five years, exploring their dynamic relation to the general condition of emergency instilled by neoliberalism and the war on terror.Considering the work of artists such as Thomas Hirschhorn, Tacita Dean, and Isa Genzken, and the writing of thinkers like Jacques Rancière, Bruno Latour, and Giorgio Agamben, Hal Foster shows the ways in which art has anticipated this condition, at times resisting the collapse of the social contract or gesturing toward its repair; at other times burlesquing it.Against the claim that art making has become so heterogeneous as to defy historical analysis, Foster argues that the critic must still articulate a clear account of the contemporary in all its complexity. To that end, he offers several paradigms for the art of recent years, which he terms "abject," "archival," "mimetic," and "precarious."

Read more less

Established following the 125th anniversary of the Chair of Fine Art at the University of Edinburgh and named after the painter Sir John Watson Gordon, the Watson Gordon Lectures Typify the long-standing positive collaboration between the University of Edinburgh and the National Galleries of Scotland: two partners in the Visual Arts Research Institute in Edinburgh. The fifth lecture was given by Hal Foster of Princeton University. Professor Foster is an acknowledged expert on modernist art and architecture, and has a particular fascination with Pop art. His wide-ranging lecture on Roy Lichtenstein is a gripping engagement with the multiple aspects of the artist's work: the conjunctions of art and technology, the satirical playing with previous modernist styles, and the sinister background of the military-industrial complex.

Read more less

How artists created an aesthetic of “positive barbarism” in a world devastated by World War II, the Holocaust, and the atomic bombIn Brutal Aesthetics, leading art historian Hal Foster explores how postwar artists and writers searched for a new foundation of culture after the massive devastation of World War II, the Holocaust, and the atomic bomb. Inspired by the notion that modernist art can teach us how to survive a civilization become barbaric, Foster examines the various ways that key figures from the early 1940s to the early 1960s sought to develop a “brutal aesthetics” adequate to the destruction around them.With a focus on the philosopher Georges Bataille, the painters Jean Dubuffet and Asger Jorn, and the sculptors Eduardo Paolozzi and Claes Oldenburg, Foster investigates a manifold move to strip art down, or to reveal it as already bare, in order to begin again. What does Bataille seek in the prehistoric cave paintings of Lascaux? How does Dubuffet imagine an art brut, an art unscathed by culture? Why does Jorn populate his paintings with “human animals”? What does Paolozzi see in his monstrous figures assembled from industrial debris? And why does Oldenburg remake everyday products from urban scrap?A study of artistic practices made desperate by a world in crisis, Brutal Aesthetics is an intriguing account of a difficult era in twentieth-century culture, one that has important implications for our own.Published in association with the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

Read more less

In Junkspace (2001), architect Rem Koolhaas itemises in delirious detail how our cities are being overwhelmed. His celebrated jeremiad is here updated and twinned with Running Room, a fresh response from architectural critic Hal Foster. 'The manifesto is a modernist mode, one that looks to the future… Junkspace makes no such claim: “Architecture disappeared in the twentieth century,” states Koolhaas matter-of-factly. Junkspace does a harder thing: it “foretells” the present, which is to say that it calls on us to recognize what is already everywhere around us.’ Hal Foster

Read more less

Announcing the new Princeton University Art Museum Monograph Series:Princeton University Art Museum Monographs is a new series of in-depth explorations of the museum's rich collections. Beautifully designed and produced, these books by leading and emerging scholars offer new insights and perspectives on a single work or group of works from Princeton's distinguished permanent collection.Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, Tom Wesselmann, Robert Indiana, and Alex Katz have all come to define the Pop art movement that emerged in America in the 1960s. This handsomely illustrated book focuses on 40 understudied and rarely seen late paintings, works on paper, and sculptures by these influential artists in the collection of the Princeton University Art Museum.Pop Art offers fresh insights into the ways in which artists radically transformed the mediums of painting and sculpture. For example, Lichtenstein is repositioned as a classical “studio artist”; Wesselmann is shown to be playfully preoccupied with academic genres; and Indiana is interpreted less as a Pop artist than as a folk artist in a mass-cultural context. This important book also features an engaging introduction by Hal Foster that places these new interpretations in the context of the history of Pop art and its critical literature.Distributed for the Princeton University Art MuseumExhibition Schedule:Princeton University Art Museum (March 24 – August 12, 2007)

Read more less

Kerry James Marshall is one of America’s greatest living painters. History of Painting presents a groundbreaking body of new work that engages with the history of the medium itself. In Kerry James Marshall: History of Painting, the artist has widened his scope to include both figurative and nonfigurative works that deal explicitly with art history, race, and gender, as well as paintings that force us to reexamine how artworks are received in the world and in the art market. In all the paintings in this book, Marshall’s critique of history and of dominant white narratives is present, even as the subjects of the paintings move between reproductions of auction catalogues, abstract works, and scenes of everyday life. Essays by Hal Foster and Teju Cole help readers navigate Marshall’s masterful vision, decoding complexly layered works such as Untitled (Underpainting), 2018, and Marshall’s own artistic philosophy. This catalogue is published on the occasion of Marshall’s eponymous exhibition at David Zwirner, London in 2018.

Read more less

“The rhythm of the body moving through space has been the motivating source of most of my work.”—Richard Serra Drawn from talks between celebrated artist Richard Serra and acclaimed art historian Hal Foster held over a fifteen-year period, this volume offers revelations into Serra’s prolific six-decade career and the ideas that have informed his working practice. Conversations about Sculpture is both an intimate look at Serra’s life and work, with candid reflections on personal moments of discovery, and a provocative examination of sculptural form from antiquity to today. Serra and Foster explore such subjects as the artist’s work in steel mills as a young man; the impact of music, dance, and architecture on his art; the importance of materiality and site specificity to his aesthetic; the controversies and contradictions his work has faced; and his belief in sculpture as experience. They also discuss sources of inspiration—from Donatello and Brancusi to Japanese gardens and Machu Picchu—revealing a history of sculpture across time and culture through the eyes of one of the medium’s most brilliant figures. Introduced with an insightful preface by Foster, this probing dialogue is beautifully illustrated with duotone images that bring to life both Serra's work and his key commitments.

Read more less

The enormous, photorealistic charcoal drawings by American artist Robert Longo (*1953 in Brooklyn, New York) show the beauty and horror of the present day and age. His large-format works contrast the innocence of sleeping toddlers, the tranquil grandiosity of Earth and the planets, roses in bloom, and Gothic cathedrals with threatening images of atom bomb explosions, fighter pilots, monster waves, sharks, and the muzzles of revolvers. Inexorably and seismographically precise, the winner of the 2005 Goslar Kaiserring and 2010 inductee into the French Order of Arts and Letters records the state of our world. Longo’s powerful motifs give form and expression to the feelings of fear and longing felt by people in the twenty-first century, and affect the viewer with the full force of the medium.This large-format, elaborately designed book, printed on natural paper using a tritone process, bound in half cloth and distributed in four different cover designs, has been created in close collaboration with the artist and affords a comprehensive overview of his charcoal drawings from the past decade. Exhibition schedule: Kunsthalle Weishaupt, Ulm, November 28, 2010–September 25, 2011

Read more less

Thomson’s epic stop-animation project opens a startling and profound conversation about history, technology and perception This volume documents eight short stop-motion animations by Los Angeles–based artist Mungo Thomson (born 1969) that use reference encyclopedias, photobooks, how-to guides and production manuals as their raw material. The project imagines these books being scanned by a high-speed robotic book scanner of the type used by universities and tech companies to digitize libraries, and proposes such a device as a new kind of filmmaking apparatus. Thomson exploits the dualities of the digital and the analog, the video and the book, the automated and the handmade, binding them each together. The videos feature soundtracks by Andrea Centazzo and Pierre Favre, Laurie Spiegel, Sven-Åke Johansson, Lee Ranaldo, Ernst Karel, Pauline Oliveros, Adrian Garcia and John McEntire. The New York Times called Time Life a "thrilling accomplishment, adding a new chapter to the long conversation about photographs, mechanical reproduction and ways of seeing."

Read more less