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Idiosyncratic Identities

Idiosyncratic Identities

Idiosyncratic Identities

Artists at the End of the Avant-Garde
Donald Burton Kuspit , State University of New York, Stony Brook
December 1996
Unavailable - out of print April 1999
Hardback
9780521553797

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    Postmodernism has been described as a decadent and pluralistic period, where avant-garde art has been institutionalised, stereotyped and effectively neutralised; and where models of art seem to stand in ironical, nihilistic relationship to every other. In this study, Donald Kuspit argues that only the idiosyncratic artist remains credible and convincing in the postmodern era. He pursues a sense of artistic and human identity in a situation where there are no guidelines, art historically or socially. Idiosyncratic art, Kuspit posits, is a radically personal art that establishes unconscious communication between individuals in doubt of their identity. Functioning as a medium of self-identification, it affords a sense of authentic selfhood and communicative intimacy in a postmodern society where authenticity and intimacy seem irrelevant and absurd.

    • Analysis of the postmodern situation of visual art
    • Examination of major American and European contemporary artists
    • Discussion of the issue of identity as it arises in their art

    Product details

    December 1996
    Hardback
    9780521553797
    384 pages
    261 × 183 × 28 mm
    1.012kg
    32 b/w illus.
    Unavailable - out of print April 1999

    Table of Contents

    • Introduction: idiosyncracy: the final frontier
    • Part I. Zeitgeist:
    • 1. The opera is over: a critique of eighties sensibility
    • 2. The appropriation of marginal art in the 1980s
    • 3. The magic kingdom of the museum
    • 4. Sizing art up (and down): the issue of quality
    • 5. The short, happy life of the work of art: from artifact to art to arty fact
    • 6. The end of creative imagination
    • 7. Marcel Duchamp: imposter artist
    • 8. Act out, turn off
    • Part II. Artists:
    • 9. The horse in the industrial age: Deborah Butterfield's sculptures
    • 10. Improbable portraits: George Condo's drolleries
    • 11. Paradox perfected: Agnes Denes's pyramids
    • 12. The cunning of unreason: Charles Hinman's absurdist constructions
    • 13. Alfred Jensen: systems mystagogue
    • 14. Wolfgang Laib's mystical revolution
    • 15. Carlo Maria Mariani: the re-enactment of beauty
    • 16. Robert Mapplethorpe: aestheticising the perverse. 17
    • Jackson Pollock: late works, 1952–1955
    • 18. Voluptuous technology: Keith Sonnier's painterly sculpture
    • 19. Jorge Tacla's irreality
    • 20. The Psychopolitical Automatism of Antoni Tapies
    • 21. William Tucker: the fated return of the body
    • 22. Bill Viola: the mystical defense against the feeling of being mad
    • 23. Cooling excitement: eros and self in Paul Waldman's art
    • Part III. Speculations:
    • 24. The great divide
    • 25. Art: sublimated expression of transitional experience? The examples of Van Gogh and Mondrian
    • 26. The expressive gaze
    • 27. Philosophy and art: elective affinities in an arranged marriage
    • 28. In search of the visionary image
    • 29. Envy and gratitude: the ambivalence of psychoanalysis to art
    • 30. The avant-garde complex and the postmodern perplex
    • 31. Mystic and maid.
      Author
    • Donald Burton Kuspit , State University of New York, Stony Brook