Search results for ""Author Ernst van Alphen""
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Reaktion Books Staging the Archive: Art and Photography in the Age of New Media
Dedicated to art practices that mobilize the model of the archive, this book demonstrates the ways in which such 'archival artworks' probe the possibilities of what art is and what it can do. Through a variety of media, methodologies and perspectives, the artists surveyed here also challenge the principles on which the notions of organization, evidence and documentation are built. The earliest examples of the modern archival artwork were made in the 1930s, but it is since the 1960s that archival principles have increasingly been used by artists to inform, structure and shape their works. This includes practices that consist of archive construction, archaeological investigation, record keeping or the use of archived materials; however, they also interrogate the principles, claims and effects of the archive. Staging the Archive shows how artists read the concept of the archive against the grain, questioning not only what the archive is and can be but what materials, images or ideas can be archived. In this book Ernst van Alphen examines these archival artists and artworks in detail, setting them within their social, political and aesthetic contexts. Exploring the work of Marcel Duchamp, Marcel Broodthaers, Christian Boltanski, Annette Messager, Fiona Tan and Sophie Calle, among others, this book reveals how modern and contemporary artists have used and contested the notion of the archive to establish new relationships to history, information and data.
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The University of Chicago Press Art in Mind: How Contemporary Images Shape Thought
Art has the power to affect our thinking, changing not only the way we view and interact with the world but also how we create it. In Art in Mind, Ernst van Alphen probes this idea of art as a commanding force with the capacity to shape our intellect and intervene in our lives. Rather than interpreting art as merely a reflection of our social experience or a product of history, van Alphen here argues that art is a historical agent, or a cultural creator, that propels thought and experience forward. Examining a broad range of works, van Alphen - a renowned art historian and cultural theorist - demonstrates how art serves a socially constructive function by actually experimenting with the parameters of thought. Employing work from artists as diverse as Picasso, Watteau, Francis Bacon, Marlene Dumas, and Matthew Barney, he shows how art confronts its viewers with the "pain points" of cultural experience - genocide, sexuality, diaspora, and transcultural identity - and thereby transforms the ways in which human existence is conceived. Van Alphen analyzes how art visually "thinks" about these difficult cultural issues, tapping into an understudied interpretation of art as the realm where ideas and values are actively created, given form, and mobilized. In this way, van Alphen's book is a work of art in itself as it educates us in a new mode of thought that will forge equally new approaches and responses to the world.
£32.41