Surrealism has long been seen as its founder, André Breton,wanted it to be seen: as a movement of love and liberation. In Compulsive Beauty, Foster reads surrealism from its other, darker side: as an art given over to the uncanny, to the compulsion to repeat and the drive toward death. To this end Foster first restages the difficult encounter of surrealism with Freudian psychoanalysis, then redefines the crucial categories of surrealism - the marvelous, convulsive beauty, objective chance - in terms of the Freudian uncanny,or the return of familar things made strange by repression. Next, with the art of Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, and Alberto Giacometti in mind, Foster develops a theory of the surrealist image as a working over of a primal fantasy. This leads him finally to propose as a summa of surrealism a body of work often shunted to its margins: the dolls of Hans Bellmer, so many traumatic tableaux that point to difficult connections not only between sadism and masochism butal so between surrealism and fascism. At this point Compulsive Beauty turns to the social dimension of the surrealist uncanny. First Foster reads the surrealist repertoire of automatons and mannequins as a reflection on the uncanny processes of mechanization and commodification. Then he considers the surrealist use of outmoded images as an attempt to work through the historical repression effected by these same processes. In a brief conclusion he discusses the fate of surrealism today ina world become surrealistic. Compulsive Beauty not only offers a deconstructive reading of surrealism, long neglected by Anglo-American art history, it also participates in a postmodern reconsideration of modernism, the dominant accounts of which have obscured its involvements in desire and trauma, capitalist shock and technological development. Hal Foster is Associate Professor of Art History and Comparative Literature at Cornell University. He is an editor of the journal OCTOBER.

Compulsive Beauty (October Series)

Arts & Photography

FOSTER, HAL

History & Criticism

Mit Pr

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-garde; it concludes with an original reading of this contemporary situation—and what it portends for future practices of art and theory, culture and politics.

The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century

How to imagine not only a new art or architecture but a new self or subject equal to them? In Prosthetic Gods, Hal Foster explores this question through the works and writings of such key modernists as Gauguin and Picasso, F. T. Marinetti and Wyndham Lewis, Adolf Loos and Max Ernst. These diverse figures were all fascinated by fictions of origin, either primordial and tribal or futuristic and technological. In this way, Foster argues, two forms came to dominate modernist art above all others: the primitive and the machine. Foster begins with the primitivist fantasies of Gauguin and Picasso, which he examines through the Freudian lens of the primal scene. He then turns to the purist obsessions of the Viennese architect Loos, who abhorred all things primitive. Next Foster considers the technophilic subjects propounded by the futurist Marinetti and the vorticist Lewis. These "new egos" are further contrasted with the "bachelor machines" proposed by the dadaist Ernst. Foster also explores extrapolations from the art of the mentally ill in the aesthetic models of Ernst, Paul Klee, and Jean Dubuffet, as well as manipulations of the female body in the surrealist photography of Brassai, Man Ray, and Hans Bellmer. Finally, he examines the impulse to dissolve the conventions of art altogether in the drip paintings of Jackson Pollock, the scatter pieces of Robert Morris, and the earthworks of Robert Smithson, and traces the evocation of lost objects of desire in sculptural work from Marcel Duchamp and Alberto Giacometti to Robert Gober. Although its title is drawn from Freud, Prosthetic Gods does not impose psychoanalytic theory on modernist art; rather, it sets the two into critical relation and scans the greater historical field that they share.

Prosthetic Gods (An October Book)

Preface by David A. Ross Endgame provides the first comprehensive discussion of two interrelated groups of artists who have recently emerged amidst brisk critical debate and who all, in various ways, represent a critique of the commodity, or the commodification of art objects. These are the painters Ross Bleckner, Peter Halley, Sherrie Levine, and Philip Taaffe, who have ironically adopted the visual strategies of earlier modern artists, and the sculptors General Idea, Jon Kessler, Jeff Koons, Joel Otterson, and Haim Steinbach, who use consumer objects and their modes of presentation as raw material in their sculpture. Both sets of artists draw upon the formal lessons of Pop Art, Minimalism, and the more recent work of "appropriation" artists, as well as upon current theories of the political economy of the image. The book includes substantial essays by some of today's most noted art historians and critics: Yve-Alain Bois (Associate Professor, Johns Hopkins University) charts the history of the belief in "the end of painting" which he sees as central within 20th-century art, and he compares the diverse strategies that Mondrian, Rodchenko, Duchamp, and more recently Robert Ryman have employed to work out an "end of painting," with the qualitatively different apocalyptic tone of Halley, Levine, Bleckner, and Taaffe. Hal Foster (Senior Editor of Art in America) examines the critical position of the sculpture of Steinbach, Koons, Kessler, and General Idea in relation to the history of the opposition between commodity and art object within modern art as first dramatized by Duchamp's readymades. Thomas Crow (Associate Professor of Art History, University of Michigan) charts the recent history of image appropriation as an antimodern or postmodern gesture of art's apparent loss of originality and cultural or social powerlessness in the face of the paradoxically thriving art market. The iconography of the sculptures included in Endgame is the focus of David Joselit's essay Modern Leisure, which notes in particular the frequency with which objects associated with sports and housecleaning are incorporated in their works. Elisabeth Sussman charts the transition between widespread appropriation of imagery drawn from mass media sources in the late 1970s and early 1980s to the use of fine art referents (like Op Art) in recent abstract painting. Bob Riley describes media performances by Richard Baim, Gretchen Bendes and Perry Hoberman which accompany Endgame. David Joselit, Bob Riley, and Elisabeth Sussman are curators at The Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. Distributed by The MIT Press.

Endgame: Reference and Simulation in Recent Painting and Sculpture

Bois, Yve-Alain

Joselit, David

Sussman, Elisabeth

Crow, Thomas

Riley, Bob

Travel

From the distinguished art critic and historian, vital essays on key artists and critics, revealing how they redefined art and criticism over the last six decades. "Serious art anticipates the future as much as it reflects the present," Hal Foster remarked in a 2015 interview. "By the same token serious art history is driven by the present as much as it is informed by the past." In Fail Better, Foster, an art critic and historian whose influential work spans disciplines and decades, brings this peripatetic perspective to contemporary art, art criticism, art history, and his own work over the past 50 years. In these 40 texts, Foster reviews artists from Richard Hamilton and Jasper Johns to Gerhard Richter and Ed Ruscha; considers contemporaries from Louise Lawler and Cindy Sherman to Jeremy Deller and Adam Pendleton; and traces the development of criticism since the early 1960s, with essays on such influential figures as Susan Sontag and Rosalind Krauss and institutions like Artforum magazine and the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. Taking his title from Beckett--"try again, fail again, fail better"--Foster notes that, etymologically, an essay is always an attempt, more or less failed. Critics fail artworks, because there can never be a definitive reading; art fails its historical moment, because it cannot resolve the contradictions that prompt it. But in these failures Foster finds historical consciousness, and with it the promise of future work, future illumination. In his "reckonings" he turns his own long history of criticism to account, and succeeds in conveying shifting concepts of art and criticism, the work of key artists and critics, and the relationships between criticism, theory, history, and politics over the last six decades.

Fail Better: Reckonings with Artists and Critics

The MIT Press

In Compulsive Beauty, Foster reads surrealism from its other, darker side: as an art given over to the uncanny, to the compulsion to repeat and the drive toward death.
Surrealism has long been seen as its founder, André Breton, wanted it to be seen: as a movement of love and liberation. In Compulsive Beauty, Foster reads surrealism from its other, darker side: as an art given over to the uncanny, to the compulsion to repeat and the drive toward death. To this end Foster first restages the difficult encounter of surrealism with Freudian psychoanalysis, then redefines the crucial categories of surrealism―the marvelous, convulsive beauty, objective chance―in terms of the Freudian uncanny, or the return of familar things made strange by repression. Next, with the art of Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, and Alberto Giacometti in mind, Foster develops a theory of the surrealist image as a working over of a primal fantasy. This leads him finally to propose as a summa of surrealism a body of work often shunted to its margins: the dolls of Hans Bellmer, so many traumatic tableaux that point to difficult connections not only between sadism and masochism butal so between surrealism and fascism. At this point Compulsive Beauty turns to the social dimension of the surrealist uncanny. First Foster reads the surrealist repertoire of automatons and mannequins as a reflection on the uncanny processes of mechanization and commodification. Then he considers the surrealist use of outmoded images as an attempt to work through the historical repression effected by these same processes. In a brief conclusion he discusses the fate of surrealism today in a world become surrealistic. Compulsive Beauty not only offers a deconstructive reading of surrealism, long neglected by Anglo-American art history, but also participates in a postmodern reconsideration of modernism, the dominant accounts of which have obscured its involvements in desire and trauma, capitalist shock and technological development.

Compulsive Beauty (October Books)

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.

The Return of the Real: The Avante-Garde at the End of the Century

MIT Press]

Imagining a new self equal to the new art of modernism; primordial and futuristic fictions of origin in the work of Guaguin, Picasso, F. T. Marinetti, Max Ernst, and others.How to imagine not only a new art or architecture but a new self or subject equal to them? In Prosthetic Gods, Hal Foster explores this question through the works and writings of such key modernists as Gauguin and Picasso, F. T. Marinetti and Wyndham Lewis, Adolf Loos and Max Ernst. These diverse figures were all fascinated by fictions of origin, either primordial and tribal or futuristic and technological. In this way, Foster argues, two forms came to dominate modernist art above all others: the primitive and the machine. Foster begins with the primitivist fantasies of Gauguin and Picasso, which he examines through the Freudian lens of the primal scene. He then turns to the purist obsessions of the Viennese architect Loos, who abhorred all things primitive. Next Foster considers the technophilic subjects propounded by the futurist Marinetti and the vorticist Lewis. These "new egos" are further contrasted with the "bachelor machines" proposed by the dadaist Ernst. Foster also explores extrapolations from the art of the mentally ill in the aesthetic models of Ernst, Paul Klee, and Jean Dubuffet, as well as manipulations of the female body in the surrealist photography of Brassai, Man Ray, and Hans Bellmer. Finally, he examines the impulse to dissolve the conventions of art altogether in the drip paintings of Jackson Pollock, the scatter pieces of Robert Morris, and the earthworks of Robert Smithson, and traces the evocation of lost objects of desire in sculptural work from Marcel Duchamp and Alberto Giacometti to Robert Gober. Although its title is drawn from Freud, Prosthetic Gods does not impose psychoanalytic theory on modernist art; rather, it sets the two into critical relation and scans the greater historical field that they share.

Prosthetic Gods (October Books)

“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.

Conversations about Sculpture

SERRA, Richard

Yale University Press

Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism

A landmark study in the history of modern art€”revised, updated, and expanded.Conceived by four of the most influential art historians of our time, this groundbreaking book has now been updated and expanded to include the most recent developments in contemporary art. The original authors have been joined by David Joselit to provide the most comprehensive history of art in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries ever published.More than 120 articles are presented in a year-by-year structure, with each focusing on a crucial event€”from the creation of a seminal work to the opening of a major exhibition€”to tell the myriad stories of art from 1900 to the present. Key turning points and breakthroughs in modernism are explored, as are the antimodernist reactions that proposed alternative visions of art and the world. The book€™s flexible structure and extensive cross-referencing allow readers to follow the many developments in the art world

KRAUSS, ROSALIND

Buchloh, Benjamin H.D.

Reference

Thames&Hudson

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