The Widening Circle
The Widening Circle
£28.00
GBPIn this collection of critical essays, Barry Schwabsky re-examines the art produced since the 1960s, demonstrating how the achievements of 'high modernism' remain consequential to it, through tensions between representation, abstraction, and pictorial language. Offering close readings of works produced by several generations of European and American artists, he begins with an analysis of the late period of two Abstract Expressionists, Philip Guston and Mark Rothko, who saw their own success as a failure of reception and who came to question radically their own work. With the core of the book focused on Michelangelo Pistoletto and Mel Bochner, major figures of arte povera and conceptual art whose works in a variety of media demonstrate a continuing critical engagement with modernism, Schwabsky also studies the work of artists, such as L. C. Armstrong and Rainer Ganahl, who also continued to examine modernism's legacies.
- Features critical essays by a well-known critic on significant artists from Rothko and Guston to the present generation
- Contests notions of 'postmodernism' by focusing on ways modernism remains consequential for today's artists
- Explores tensions among representation, abstraction, and language in contemporary art
Reviews & endorsements
'An admirably clear writer, a good editor of his own texts, Schwabsky provides an engaging perspective on our era which, as he presents it, is in itself not uninteresting.' Burlington Magazine
Product details
August 1997Paperback
9780521565691
252 pages
229 × 152 × 15 mm
0.38kg
Available
Table of Contents
- Part I. Abstraction, Representation …:
- 1. The widening circle: abstraction and representation in contemporary art and criticism
- 2. 'The real situation': Philip Guston and Mark Rothko at the end of the 1960s
- 3. Norman Bluhm and the eternal feminine
- 4. Color field and Caro: mannerist modernism
- 5. Larry Poons: formalism in ruins
- 6. Gesture revisited: Mel Bochner, Howard Buchwald, Brice Marden
- 7. Mary Heilmann's ceramics and paintings: color as substance
- 8. Porfirio DiDonna: vision fulfilled
- 9. Moira Dryer: answering machines
- 10. The rustle of painting: Jacques Lacan, David Row, Brenda Zlamany
- Part II. Italian Interlude:
- 11. W. de Pisis
- 12. Rotellascope
- 13. Michelangelo Pistoletto: mirrors to monuments
- 14. The abstraction epidemic: a conversation with Demetrio Paparoni
- Part III ... and Inscription:
- 15. Thomas Chimes: concerning the surface
- 16. Cy Twombly: Et in Arcadia Ego?
- 17. Bruce Conner's inkblot drawings: documents for a secret tradition
- 18. Reverse continuity: the prints of Mel Bochner
- 19. Rubble: representing Mel Bochner's early work
- 20. Ross Bleckner: memories of light
- 21. L. C. Armstrong: written on the skin
- 22. Rainer Ganahl: windows on the word.
