Abject Art

Abject Art
Author: Jack Ben-Levi
Publisher: Whitney Museum of American Art
Total Pages: 116
Release: 1993
Genre: Art
ISBN:

Abject Visions

Abject Visions
Author: Rina Arya
Publisher:
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2016
Genre: Abjection in literature
ISBN: 9780719096280

An impressive list of authors examine how abjection can be discussed in relation to a host of different subjects, including marginality and gender.

Abject Performances

Abject Performances
Author: Leticia Alvarado
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 204
Release: 2018-04-19
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0822371936

In Abject Performances Leticia Alvarado draws out the irreverent, disruptive aesthetic strategies used by Latino artists and cultural producers who shun standards of respectability that are typically used to conjure concrete minority identities. In place of works imbued with pride, redemption, or celebration, artists such as Ana Mendieta, Nao Bustamante, and the Chicano art collective known as Asco employ negative affects—shame, disgust, and unbelonging—to capture experiences that lie at the edge of the mainstream, inspirational Latino-centered social justice struggles. Drawing from a diverse expressive archive that ranges from performance art to performative testimonies of personal faith-based subjection, Alvarado illuminates modes of community formation and social critique defined by a refusal of identitarian coherence that nonetheless coalesce into Latino affiliation and possibility.

Abject Eroticism in Northern Renaissance Art

Abject Eroticism in Northern Renaissance Art
Author: Yvonne Owens
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2020-10-29
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1350190500

Hans Baldung Grien, the most famous apprentice and close friend of German artist Albrecht Dürer, was known for his unique and highly eroticised images of witches. In paintings and woodcut prints, he gave powerful visual expression to late medieval tropes and stereotypes, such as the poison maiden, venomous virgin, the Fall of Man, 'death and the maiden' and other motifs and eschatological themes, which mingled abject and erotic qualities in the female body. Yvonne Owens reads these images against the humanist intellectual milieu of Renaissance Germany, showing how classical and medieval medicine and natural philosophy interpreted female anatomy as toxic, defective and dangerously beguiling. She reveals how Hans Baldung exploited this radical polarity to create moralising and titillating portrayals of how monstrous female sexuality victimised men and brought them low. Furthermore, these images issued from-and contributed to-the contemporary understanding of witchcraft as a heresy that stemmed from natural 'feminine defect,' a concept derived from Aristotle. Offering new and provocative interpretations of Hans Baldung's iconic witchcraft imagery, this book is essential reading for historians of art, culture and gender relations in the late medieval and early modern periods.

Powers of Horror

Powers of Horror
Author: Julia Kristeva
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2024-03-26
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0231561415

In Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva offers an extensive and profound consideration of the nature of abjection. Drawing on Freud and Lacan, she analyzes the nature of attitudes toward repulsive subjects and examines the function of these topics in the writings of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and other authors. Kristeva identifies the abject with the eruption of the real and the presence of death. She explores how art and religion each offer ways of purifying the abject, arguing that amid abjection, boundaries between subject and object break down.

Disgust

Disgust
Author: Winfried Menninghaus
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 483
Release: 2012-02-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0791486311

Disgust (Ekel, dégoût) is a state of high alert. It acutely says "no" to a variety of phenomena that seemingly threaten the integrity of the self, if not its very existence. A counterpart to the feelings of appetite, desire, and love, it allows at the same time for an acting out of hidden impulses and libidinal drives. In Disgust, Winfried Menninghaus provides a comprehensive account of the significance of this forceful emotion in philosophy, aesthetics, literature, the arts, psychoanalysis, and theory of culture from the eighteenth century to the present. Topics addressed include the role of disgust as both a cognitive and moral organon in Kant and Nietzsche; the history of the imagination of the rotting corpse; the counter-cathexis of the disgusting in Romantic poetics and its modernist appeal ever since; the affinities of disgust and laughter and the analogies of vomiting and writing; the foundation of Freudian psychoanalysis in a theory of disgusting pleasures and practices; the association of disgusting "otherness" with truth and the trans-symbolic "real" in Bataille, Sartre, and Kristeva; Kafka's self-representation as an "Angel" of disgusting smells and acts, concealed in a writerly stance of uncompromising "purity"; and recent debates on "Abject Art."

The Picture of Abjection

The Picture of Abjection
Author: Tina Chanter
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 392
Release: 2008
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0253349176

"In The Picture of Abjection, Tina Chanter addresses a fundamental problem in film theory by negotiating a middle path between "gaze theory" approaches to film and spectator studies or cultural theory approaches that emphasize the position of the viewer. Chanter argues that abjection is the unthought ground of fetishistic theories. By mobilizing a theory of abjection, the book shows how the appeal to phallic, fetishistic theories continues to deify the hegemonic categories of race, class, sexuality, and gender, as if they stood as self-evident." -- Publisher.

Critical Terms for Art History, Second Edition

Critical Terms for Art History, Second Edition
Author: Robert S. Nelson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 558
Release: 2003-04
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780226571669

The words used to describe and analyse art are the subject of this examination of the new scope of art history and the terms used by those involved in visual and pictorial theory.

The Abuse of Beauty

The Abuse of Beauty
Author: Arthur C. Danto
Publisher: Open Court Publishing
Total Pages: 198
Release: 2003
Genre: Aesthetics
ISBN: 9780812695403

Leading art critic and philosopher Arthur Danto here explains how the anti-beauty revolution was hatched, and how the modernist avant-garde dislodged beauty from its throne. Danto argues not only that the modernists were right to deny that beauty is vital to art, but also that beauty is essential to human life and need not always be excluded from art.

The Return of the Real

The Return of the Real
Author: Hal Foster
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 332
Release: 1996-09-25
Genre: Design
ISBN: 9780262561075

In The Return of the Real Hal Foster discusses the development of art and theory since 1960, and reorders the relation between prewar and postwar avant-gardes. Opposed to the assumption that contemporary art is somehow belated, he argues that the avant-garde returns to us from the future, repositioned by innovative practice in the present. And he poses this retroactive model of art and theory against the reactionary undoing of progressive culture that is pervasive today. After the models of art-as-text in the 1970s and art-as-simulacrum in the 1980s, Foster suggests that we are now witness to a return to the real—to art and theory grounded in the materiality of actual bodies and social sites. If The Return of the Real begins with a new narrative of the historical avant-gard, it concludes with an original reading of this contemporary situation—and what it portends for future practices of art and theory, culture and politics.