Objects in Air

Artworks and Their Outside Around 1900

Objects in Air
Margareta Ingrid Christian
RRP:
NZ$ 136.99
Our Price:
NZ$ 109.59
Hardback
h229 x 152mm - 304pg
25 May 2021 US
International import eta 7-19 days
9780226764771
Out Of Stock
Currently no stock in-store, stock is sourced to your order
Margareta Ingrid Christian unpacks the ways in which, around 1900, art scholars, critics, and choreographers wrote about the artwork as an actual object in real time and space, surrounded and fluently connected to the viewer through the very air we breathe. Theorists such as Aby Warburg, Alois Riegl, Rainer Maria Rilke, and the choreographer Rudolf Laban drew on the science of their time to examine air as the material space surrounding an artwork, establishing its "milieu," "atmosphere," or "environment. " Christian explores how the artwork' s external space was seen to work as an aesthetic category in its own right, beginning with Rainer Maria Rilke' s observation that Rodin' s sculpture "exhales an atmosphere" and that Cezanne' s colors create "a calm, silken air" that pervades the empty rooms where the paintings are exhibited. Writers created an early theory of unbounded form that described what Christian calls an artwork' s ecstasis or its ability to stray outside its limits and engender its own space. Objects viewed in this perspective complicate the now-fashionable discourse of empathy aesthetics, the attention to self-projecting subjects, and the idea of the modernist self-contained artwork. For example, Christian invites us to historicize the immersive spatial installations and "environments" that have arisen since the 1960s and to consider their origins in turn-of-the-twentieth-century aesthetics. Throughout this beautifully written work, Christian offers ways for us to rethink entrenched narratives of aesthetics and modernism and to revisit alternatives.
"Objects in Air is an important and finely conceptualized study of turn-of-the-century writing about the aesthetics of visual phenomena and the conceptualizing of art history. It brings to light a new understanding of the artwork as making its impact, not as a self-contained bounded object, but by way of expanding outward beyond itself in space and time. The carefully honed historical analysis of thinking about the work of art in its spatial and temporal milieus stands as a study in aesthetic theory in its own right, timely and engagingly readable. "--Alex Potts, author of Experiments in Modern Realism: World Making, Politics and the Everyday in Postwar European and American Art "In this thoroughly original book, Christian traces discourses on the external spaces and atmospheres that surround works of art. She thereby elucidates the artwork' s ec-stasis--its reaching out into its environment--as an aesthetic category in its own right. A stylistic and intellectual pleasure to read, Objects in Air adds significantly to our understanding of early twentieth-century aesthetic thought. "--Lucia Ruprecht, author of Gestural Imaginaries: Dance and Cultural Theory in the Early Twentieth Century
Margareta Ingrid Christian is assistant professor of Germanic Studies at the University of Chicago. She has published articles in a range of contributed volumes and journals, among them PMLA, German Studies Review, and History of Photography.
Status: No local stock, title imported to order
ISBN-13: 9780226764771
Published: 25 May 2021
Published In: United States
Imprint: University of Chicago Press
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Format: Hardback
Height: 229mm
Width: 152mm
Pages: 304

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