Alex Potts

The sculptural imagination : figurative, modernist, minimalist

A study of the sculptural imagination. Alex Potts explores the special qualities of sculpture as a free-standing, three-dimensional entity, and he considers the distinctive demands sculpture places on the viewer. The book begins with the 18th century and proceeds to the end of the 20th.

What is the History of Art

A history of the visual arts, defined simply as a chronological description of the various objects we now classify as art, would be a pretty marginal affair, probably of less general interest than a history of machinery, or a history of clothing. It would certainly be a history that remained on the fringes of what most people recognise as the central concerns of life. A history of art begins to look a little more interesting where it claims that art has a symbolic value, and that visual artefacts reflect important attitudes and ‘realities’ of the society in which they were produced.

Review of Renew Marxist Art History

tions and practices. For a study that considers aspects of photography’s materiality, the size and quality of some of the illustrations in the book are rather disappointing. A number of the images fall within the narrow outer margins of the text boxes, thereby depriving the reader of an opportunity to fully engage with these rarely published visuals. For example, a low-resolution black-and-white reproduction of a painting by Daoud Corm (fig. 21) appears larger than higher-resolution images by photographer Garabed Krikorian (for example, fig. 39), a central figure in the book. Some of the images are pixelated and have reproduced poorly (such as fig. 62), leading one to question the need for their inclusion if high-quality versions were not available. Additionally, while the highly nuanced and complex framework that the author sets up is commendable and original, it could be argued that the dedication to constructing this theoretical apparatus detracted from the analysis of the photographs themselves (in both their materiality and circulation). The book could also have benefited from a theoretical consideration of other contemporaneous visual practices, specifically, painting, which continued to be popular during this period and, in fact, served as an extension of photographic practice. The designation al-musawwirun, or “the imagemakers,” often referred to pre-twentiethcentury artists who could have been painters or photographers (a point also noted by the author). In fact, many almusawwirun were trained in both fields, and they made no clear distinctions between the two professions. The idea that the photographic practice in general, and the tradition of portraiture in particular, “emerged as the first global visual cultural phenomenon” (p. 12) or exists independently of other artistic traditions is thus easily problematized. The author, in chapter 2, discusses portrait paintings by artists like the Syrian Daoud Corm. However, he describes such works as images that were based on photographs, which implies that they are not necessarily substantial works in or of themselves. Similarly, in Sheehi’s discussion of Ottoman imperial portraiture in chapter 1, he makes no allusion to similar long-held traditions among court painters (who produced portraits well into the nineteenth century). Although The Arab Imago does not set out to explore painting, an argument could be made that during the nineteenth century painting and photography were often inextricably linked. Islamic art historian David Roxburgh, for instance, has maintained that in the context of Qajar Iran, painting was engaged “in a practice of remediation” with the emergence of local photographic traditions. It would have been interesting to consider whether similar developments could be seen in the context of Ottoman and Arab photography. Nevertheless, The Arab Imagomakes a significant contribution to the social history of photography in the Ottoman center and periphery, through an analysis of broad transformations from the uneven imperial Tanzimat to the ideologically motivated nahdah. Sheehi helps the reader understand the people both behind and in front of the camera’s lens by fleshing out the complex social codes informing the most banal of portraits and their production. To illustrate, Sheehi opens almost every chapter with a description of an anecdote, photograph, or individual from which he expands to an exploration of an alternative reading of photographs or their producers. He then proceeds to connect it to his theoretical vision of photography’s history in the Ottoman provinces. The Arab Imago paves the way to a much-needed social history of Ottoman Arab photography, one that has long been shrouded behind a textual, discursive study of Arab modernity.

The image valued 'as found' and the reconfiguring of mimesis in post-war art

Pop and new realist painting, with its deployment of prefabricated images circulating in the mass media, is conventionally seen as operating in a mode like the readymade and as rejecting traditional mimesis. This essay argues that the artistic process involved is better understood as a kind of mimesis in which imagery taken as found is variously replicated and modified while being realized in a medium of some kind. An approach to artistic fabrication in which the basic form of the image is taken as given, so it retains a charge inherent in its existence as cultural or natural artefact, independent of the artists subjective impulses, is hardly particular to this post-war moment in the history of art. What was rejected, it is argued, was a very particular post-Romantic understanding of depiction in which the shaping of the image was valued for conveying an artists imaginative response to something seen or imagined.

Postwar Art and the Psychoanalytic Imaginary

This chapter examines the ways in which ideas of the unconscious informed critical discussion of the new forms of abstract painting that emerged in the years immediately after World War II, variously designated Abstract Expressionist in America and art informel in Europe. Most dramatically represented by the drip paintings produced by Jackson Pollock in the late 1940s and early 1950s, 1 this was work in which the free-form mark making seemed unconstrained either by the demands of depiction—it offered few recognizable motifs let alone naturalistically rendered representations—or by the compositional logic of geometric abstraction. Little in the way of conscious integration or form creation was apparent in its affectively charged pictorial world of accumulated marks and splashes and fluidly undulating lines.

Realism, Brutalism, Pop

This essay explores how the concerns that brought ntogether artists, architects and cultural commentators nin the informally constituted Independent Group nplayed out in an important body of work produced nby Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi in the nlate 1950s and early 1960s. Notable for its depth and nrange of cultural and political resonance, this work nwas characterized by commitment to experimental nmontage and embrace of the heterogeneity of ncontemporary culture that set it at odds with the nformal orthodoxies of mainstream modernism. The ntensions, often productive, that emerged between nits more pop-orientated and its more brutalist ntendencies are discussed. As in a lot of experimental nwork of the period, a realist impulse was clearly in nevidence. It was realism of a distinctively modern nkind, one not of depiction but of evocative imagemaking n– of fascination with confi gurations that were nresonant with the diverse, contradictory impulses of ncontemporary society.

Michael Baxandall and the Shadows in Plato’s Cave

Shadows usually lie on the periphery of our visual awareness and yet they constitute visual appearances. Starting from Michael Baxandall’s discussion of this paradox in his recent work on painting and visual cognition in the Enlightenment, this article explores the kinds of shadowing that occur in eighteenth-century art and also the ambiguous status of shadow effects in contemporary art. It argues that Baxandall’s concerns have significant affinities with those of one of the more important Minimalist artists, Donald Judd. The way Baxandall in his study of shadows seems to abandon the social and cultural historical ambitions of his earlier analysis of Renaissance art, and to adopt a more phenomenological approach, focusing on a viewers immediate visual engagement with a work, is seen here as symptomatic of a larger shift in the discipline – namely the demise of the systematically historicising imperatives previously more or less taken for granted in serious art historical scholarship.

The verbal and visual in winckelmann’s analysis of style

Abstract Style as a concept has played a leading role in the historical and theoretical study of the visual arts, much more so than it has done in literary studies. At the most straightforward level, this is because of the distinctive preoccupation of art history with the taxonomic classification of works of art by place and date of origin and by artist. But it has also been important for the more intellectually ambitious forms of art historical analysis that aim to provide a cultural history of art. Style in this broader sense is envisaged as a visual language, or a mode of representation, within which the art of a culture had to operate.1 It is when used in this stronger sense that the idea of a visual style is inflected by literary and linguistic analysis, as the very term ‘language of art’ demonstrates. Models used in the study of language have been so important2 for the simple reason that style in this stronger sense does not just have to do with the formal visual aspects of a representation, but als...