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Aesthetics at Large: Volume 1: Art, Ethics, Politics (Art, Ethics, Politics)
by Thierry de DuveImmanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment, Thierry de Duve argues in the first volume of Aesthetics at Large, is as relevant to the appreciation of art today as it was to the enjoyment of beautiful nature in 1790. Going against the grain of all aesthetic theories situated in the Hegelian tradition, this provocative thesis, which already guided de Duve’s groundbreaking book Kant After Duchamp (1996), is here pursued in order to demonstrate that far from confining aesthetics to a stifling formalism isolated from all worldly concerns, Kant’s guidance urgently opens the understanding of art onto ethics and politics. Central to de Duve’s re-reading of the Critique of Judgment is Kant’s idea of sensus communis, ultimately interpreted as the mere yet necessary idea that human beings are capable of living in peace with one another. De Duve pushes Kant’s skepticism to its limits by submitting the idea of sensus communis to various tests leading to questions such as: Do artists speak on behalf of all of us? Is art the transcendental ground of democracy? Or, Was Adorno right when he claimed that no poetry could be written after Auschwitz? Loaded with de Duve’s trademark blend of wit and erudition and written without jargon, these essays radically renew current approaches to some of the most burning issues raised by modern and contemporary art. They are indispensable reading for anyone with a deep interest in art, art history, or philosophical aesthetics.
Aesthetics beyond the Arts: New and Recent Essays
by Arnold BerleantTaking the view that aesthetics is a study grounded in perception, the essays in this volume exhibit many sides of the perceptual complex that is the aesthetic field and develop them in different ways. They reinvigorate our understanding of such arts as music and architecture; they range across the natural landscape to the urban one; they reassess the place of beauty in the modern environment and reassess the significance of the contributions to aesthetic theory of Kant and Dewey; and they broach the kinds of meanings and larger understanding that aesthetic engagement with the human environment can offer. Written over the past decade, these original and innovative essays lead to a fresh encounter with the possibilities of aesthetic experience, one which has constantly evolved, moving in recent years in the direction of what Berleant terms 'social aesthetics', which enhances human-environmental integration and sociality.
Aesthetics from Ancient China: Aspects of Fenggu (Key Concepts in Chinese Thought and Culture)
by Yonghao WangThis book presents the concept of Fenggu, one of the most important aesthetic categories of ancient China. As an inspiring aesthetic principle, it once encapsulated the particularities of various types of artistic creation and played an important role in traditional artistic creation and theoretic critique. The present volume aims to systematically elaborate on its etymological origin, connotations and generation, its great role in overcoming the tendency of creative stereotypes, its logical positioning in the ancient aesthetic system and its profound connection with traditional culture, via comprehensive analysis of a rich repository of original materials, in combination with calligraphy, painting, and poetry criticism. The theoretical character of traditional aesthetics has been derived from agglomeration of Fenggu with other several important categories of paradigm significance. Therefore, its investigation can offer insights into the organic rhythm of the development of ancient aesthetic thought and consequently lay a solid foundation for the construction of ancient art history and aesthetic history.
Aesthetics in Digital Photography
by Henri MaîtreAutomatically evaluating the aesthetic qualities of a photograph is a current challenge for artificial intelligence technologies, yet it is also an opportunity to open up new economic and social possibilities.Aesthetics in Digital Photography presents theories developed over the last 25 centuries by philosophers and art critics, who have sometimes been governed by the objectivity of perception, and other times, of course, by the subjectivity of human judgement. It explores the advances that have been made in neuro-aesthetics and their current limitations.In the field of photography, this book puts aesthetic hypotheses up against experimental verification, and then critically examines attempts to “scientifically” measure this beauty. Special attention is paid to artificial intelligence techniques, taking advantage of machine learning methods and large databases.
Aesthetics of Absence: Texts on Theatre
by Heiner GoebbelsAesthetics of Absence presents a significant challenge to the many embedded assumptions and hierarchical structures that have become ‘naturalised’ in western theatre production. This is the first English translation of a new collection of writings and lectures by Heiner Goebbels, the renowned German theatre director, composer and teacher. These writings map Goebbels’ engagement with ‘Aesthetics of Absence’ through his own experience at the forefront of innovative music-theatre and performance making. In this volume, Goebbels reflects on works created over a period of more than 20 years staged throughout the world; introduces some of his key artistic influences, including Robert Wilson and Jean-Luc Godard; discusses the work of his students and ex-students, the collective Rimini Protokoll; and sets out the case for a radical rethinking of theatre and performance education. He gives us a rare insight into the rehearsal process of critically acclaimed works such as Eraritjaritjaka and Stifters Dinge, explaining in meticulous detail the way he weaves an eclectic range of references from fine art, theatre, literature, politics, anthropology, contemporary and classical music, jazz and folk, into his multi-textured music-theatre compositions. As an artist who is prepared to share his research and demystify the processes through which his own works come into being, as a teacher with a coherent pedagogical strategy for educating the next generation of theatre-makers, in this volume, Goebbels brings together practice, research and scholarship.
Aesthetics of Excess: The Art and Politics of Black and Latina Embodiment
by Jillian HernandezHeavy makeup, gaudy jewelry, dramatic hairstyles, and clothes that are considered cheap, fake, too short, too tight, or too masculine: working-class Black and Latina girls and women are often framed as embodying "excessive" styles that are presumed to indicate sexual deviance. In Aesthetics of Excess Jillian Hernandez examines how middle-class discourses of aesthetic value racialize the bodies of women and girls of color. At the same time, their style can be a source of cultural capital when appropriated by the contemporary art scene. Drawing on her community arts work with Black and Latina girls in Miami, Hernandez analyzes the art and self-image of these girls alongside works produced by contemporary artists and pop musicians such as Wangechi Mutu, Kara Walker, and Nicki Minaj. Through these relational readings, Hernandez shows how notions of high and low culture are complicated when women and girls of color engage in cultural production and how they challenge the policing of their bodies and sexualities through artistic authorship.
Aesthetics of Film Production: A Hands-On Guide to Authorial Voice
by James B. JoyceExploring aesthetic decision-making skills through active, critical interpretation of the screenplay, this book investigates the ways filmmakers translate a screenplay into a powerful film. Guiding the reader through the formal choices a filmmaker makes, this book encompasses all aspects of the filmmaking process, including directing, acting, cinematography, lighting, production design, sound, and editing. Author Joyce illustrates how to apply aesthetics in a way that encourages creative thinking and stylistic choices, while emphasizing the importance of active decision-making to foreground the screenplay in the filmmaking process. Focusing on how films should be crafted stylistically from beat to beat, the book provides tangible footholds to assist filmmakers with the aesthetic decision-making process, empowering filmmakers to create films to resonate emotionally and intellectually. Ideal for students of filmmaking and aspiring filmmakers looking to train their gut and hone their creative and aesthetic decision-making in the filmmaking process. Additional online screenplay samples show how one singular story can be told with different emphasis and narrative perspectives.
Aesthetics of Interaction in Digital Art
by Katja Kwastek Niamh WardeSince the 1960s, artworks that involve the participation of the spectator have received extensive scholarly attention. Yet interactive artworks using digital media still present a challenge for academic art history. In this book, Katja Kwastek argues that the particular aesthetic experience enabled by these new media works can open up new perspectives for our understanding of art and media alike. Kwastek, herself an art historian, offers a set of theoretical and methodological tools that are suitable for understanding and analyzing not only new media art but also other contemporary art forms. Addressing both the theoretician and the practitioner, Kwastek provides an introduction to the history and the terminology of interactive art, a theory of the aesthetics of interaction, and exemplary case studies of interactive media art. Kwastek lays the historical and theoretical groundwork with discussions of processual strategies of twentieth-century art and theories of aesthetic experience, process aesthetics, play, and performance. She then develops an aesthetics of interaction, discussing such aspects as real space and data space, temporal structures, instrumental and phenomenal perspectives, and the relationship between materiality and interpretability. Finally, she applies her theory to specific works of interactive media art, including narratives in virtual and real space, interactive installations, and performance -- with case studies of works by Olia Lialina, Susanne Berkenheger, Stefan Schemat, Teri Rueb, Lynn Hershman, Agnes Heged's, Tmema, David Rokeby, Sonia Cillari, and Blast Theory.
Aesthetics of Interaction in Digital Art (The\mit Press Ser.)
by Katja KwastekAn art-historical perspective on interactive media art that provides theoretical and methodological tools for understanding and analyzing digital art.Since the 1960s, artworks that involve the participation of the spectator have received extensive scholarly attention. Yet interactive artworks using digital media still present a challenge for academic art history. In this book, Katja Kwastek argues that the particular aesthetic experience enabled by these new media works can open up new perspectives for our understanding of art and media alike. Kwastek, herself an art historian, offers a set of theoretical and methodological tools that are suitable for understanding and analyzing not only new media art but also other contemporary art forms. Addressing both the theoretician and the practitioner, Kwastek provides an introduction to the history and the terminology of interactive art, a theory of the aesthetics of interaction, and exemplary case studies of interactive media art.Kwastek lays the historical and theoretical groundwork and then develops an aesthetics of interaction, discussing such aspects as real space and data space, temporal structures, instrumental and phenomenal perspectives, and the relationship between materiality and interpretability. Finally, she applies her theory to specific works of interactive media art, including narratives in virtual and real space, interactive installations, and performance—with case studies of works by Olia Lialina, Susanne Berkenheger, Stefan Schemat, Teri Rueb, Lynn Hershman, Agnes Hegedüs, Tmema, David Rokeby, Sonia Cillari, and Blast Theory.
Aesthetics of Negativity: Blanchot, Adorno, and Autonomy (Perspectives in Continental Philosophy)
by William S. AllenMaurice Blanchot and Theodor W. Adorno are among the most difficult but also the most profound thinkers in twentieth-century aesthetics. While their methods and perspectives differ widely, they share a concern with the negativity of the artwork conceived in terms of either its experience and possibility or its critical expression. Such negativity is neither nihilistic nor pessimistic but concerns the status of the artwork and its autonomy in relation to its context or its experience. For both Blanchot and Adorno negativity is the key to understanding the status of the artwork in post-Kantian aesthetics and, although it indicates how art expresses critical possibilities, albeit negatively, it also shows that art bears an irreducible ambiguity such that its meaning can always negate itself. This ambiguity takes on an added material significance when considered in relation to language as the negativity of the work becomes aesthetic in the further sense of being both sensible and experimental, and in doing so the language of the literary work becomes a form of thinking that enables materiality to be thought in its ambiguity.In a series of rich and compelling readings, William S. Allen shows how an original and rigorous mode of thinking arises within Blanchot’s early writings and how Adorno’s aesthetics depends on a relation between language and materiality that has been widely overlooked. Furthermore, by reconsidering the problem of the autonomous work of art in terms of literature, a central issue in modernist aesthetics is given a greater critical and material relevance as a mode of thinking that is abstract and concrete, rigorous and ambiguous. While examples of this kind of writing can be found in the works of Blanchot and Beckett, the demands that such texts place on readers only confirm the challenges and the possibilities that literary autonomy poses to thought.
Aesthetics of Repair: Indigenous Art and the Form of Reconciliation
by Eugenia KisinAesthetics of Repair analyses how the belongings called “art” are mobilized by Indigenous artists and cultural activists in British Columbia, Canada. Drawing on contemporary imaginaries of repair, the book asks how diverse forms of collective reckoning with settler-colonial harm resonate with urgent conversations about aesthetics of care in art. The discussion moves across urban and remote spaces of display for Northwest Coast–style Indigenous art, including galleries and museums, pipeline protests, digital exhibitions, an Indigenous-run art school, and a totem pole repatriation site. The book focuses on the practices around art and artworks as forms of critical Indigenous philosophy, arguing that art’s efficacies in this moment draw on Indigenous protocols for enacting justice between persons, things, and territories. Featuring examples of belongings that embody these social relations – a bentwood box made to house material memories, a totem pole whose return replenishes fish stocks, and a copper broken on the steps of the federal capital – each chapter shows how art is made to matter. Ultimately, Aesthetics of Repair illuminates the collision of contemporary art with extractive economies and contested practices of “resetting” settler-Indigenous relations.
Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics: Wild Art Explained
by David Carrier Joachim Pissarro"Wild Art" refers to work that exists outside the established, rarified world of art galleries and cultural channels. It encompasses uncatalogued, uncommodified art not often recognized as such, from graffiti to performance, self-adornment, and beyond. Picking up from their breakthrough book on the subject, Wild Art, David Carrier and Joachim Pissarro here delve into the ideas driving these forms of art, inquire how it came to be marginalized, and advocate for a definition of "taste," one in which each expression is acknowledged as being different while deserving equal merit.Arguing that both the "art world" and "wild art" have the same capacity to produce aesthetic joy, Carrier and Pissarro contend that watching skateboarders perform Christ Air, for example, produces the same sublime experience in one audience that another enjoys while taking in a ballet; therefore, both mediums deserve careful reconsideration. In making their case, the two provide a history of the institutionalization of "taste" in Western thought, point to missed opportunities for its democratization in the past, and demonstrate how the recognition and acceptance of "wild art" in the present will radically transform our understanding of contemporary visual art in the future.Provocative and optimistic, Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics rejects the concept of "kitsch" and the high/low art binary, ultimately challenging the art world to become a larger and more inclusive place.
Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics: Wild Art Explained
by David Carrier Joachim Pissarro“Wild Art” refers to work that exists outside the established, rarified world of art galleries and cultural channels. It encompasses uncatalogued, uncommodified art not often recognized as such, from graffiti to performance, self-adornment, and beyond. Picking up from their breakthrough book on the subject, Wild Art, David Carrier and Joachim Pissarro here delve into the ideas driving these forms of art, inquire how it came to be marginalized, and advocate for a definition of “taste,” one in which each expression is acknowledged as being different while deserving equal merit.Arguing that both the “art world” and “wild art” have the same capacity to produce aesthetic joy, Carrier and Pissarro contend that watching skateboarders perform Christ Air, for example, produces the same sublime experience in one audience that another enjoys while taking in a ballet; therefore, both mediums deserve careful reconsideration. In making their case, the two provide a history of the institutionalization of “taste” in Western thought, point to missed opportunities for its democratization in the past, and demonstrate how the recognition and acceptance of “wild art” in the present will radically transform our understanding of contemporary visual art in the future.Provocative and optimistic, Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics rejects the concept of “kitsch” and the high/low art binary, ultimately challenging the art world to become a larger and more inclusive place.
Aesthetics, Gender, and Disability in Interactive Digital Art and Performance Art (Routledge Advances in Art and Visual Studies)
by Phaedra ShanbaumThis book explores the tensions between aesthetics, gender, and disability in contemporary digital media installations and performance art. Notions of agency and subjectivity are connected to four contemporary political issues (artificial intelligence, migration and political violence, contemporary medical technologies and practices, and the Anthropocene) and analyzed against a Western legacy of utopian and dystopian ideas and desires that have shaped, and continue to shape, what it means to be human. The book’s main argument is that agency and subjectivity are not universal attributes; rather they are socio-material entanglements and contextually bound enactments that are strategically negotiated by the subject. Thus, they involve conflict, struggle, and other forms of resistance.The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, media and cultural studies, disability studies, and gender studies.
Aesthetics, Industry, and Science: Hermann von Helmholtz and the Berlin Physical Society
by M. Norton WiseOn January 5, 1845, the Prussian cultural minister received a request by a group of six young men to form a new Physical Society in Berlin. In fields from thermodynamics, mechanics, and electromagnetism to animal electricity, ophthalmology, and psychophysics, members of this small but growing group—which soon included Emil Du Bois-Reymond, Ernst Brücke, Werner Siemens, and Hermann von Helmholtz—established leading positions in what only thirty years later had become a new landscape of natural science. How was this possible? How could a bunch of twenty-somethings succeed in seizing the future? In Aesthetics, Industry, and Science M. Norton Wise answers these questions not simply from a technical perspective of theories and practices but with a broader cultural view of what was happening in Berlin at the time. He emphasizes in particular how rapid industrial development, military modernization, and the neoclassical aesthetics of contemporary art informed the ways in which these young men thought. Wise argues that aesthetic sensibility and material aspiration in this period were intimately linked, and he uses these two themes for a final reappraisal of Helmholtz’s early work. Anyone interested in modern German cultural history, or the history of nineteenth-century German science, will be drawn to this landmark book.
Aesthetics, Well-being and Health: Essays within Architecture and Environmental Aesthetics (Routledge Library Editions: Ethnoscapes)
by Birgit ColdIn everyday life, most people do not reflect seriously on the impacts of architecture and environmental aesthetics on their well-being and health. Originally published in 2001 as part of the Ethnoscapes: Current Challenges in the Environmental Social Sciences series, reissued now with a new series introduction, Aesthetics, Well-being and Health: Essays within Architecture and Environmental Aesthetics, is an intriguing volume bringing together professionals working in architecture, planning, urban design and social policy with academics from both humanities and social sciences to provide a broad-based and insightful discussion on how aesthetics affect us emotionally and physically. The essays help us understand our cultural and individual preferences related to the quality of the environment and challenge the common belief that environmental beauty is a matter of personal taste. A wide range of concepts are discussed such as place identity, multi-sensuous and emotional processes, geometrical order and controlled space, architectural plasticity, aesthetically real and virtual values, participative design processes, ethics in architecture, and beauty and happiness. The book highlights the importance for today's society to engage more in aesthetic ethics and to understand the significance of creating aesthetically pleasing environments.
Aesthetics: A Beginner's Guide (Beginner's Guides)
by Charles TaliaferroWhat is art? Why do we find some things beautiful but not others? Is it wrong to share mp3s? These are just some of the questions explored by aesthetics, the philosophy of art. In this sweeping introduction, Charles Taliaferro skilfully guides us through notions of art and beauty around the world, tackling lively debates such as who owns art and how art and morality collide. From Plato on poetry to Ringo Starr on the drums, this is a perfect introductory text for anyone interested in the intriguing questions art can raise. Charles Taliaferro is Professor of Philosophy at St. Olaf College, Minnesota. He is the author of over twenty books on philosophy and lectures on Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Religion.
Aesthetics: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions Ser.)
by Bence NanayAesthetics is a branch of philosophy that explores the nature of art, beauty, and taste. It doesn't just consider traditional artistic experiences such as artworks in a museum or an opera performance, but also everyday experiences such as autumn leaves in the park, or even just the light ofthe setting sun falling on the kitchen table. It is also about your experience when you choose the shirt you're going to wear today or when you wonder whether you should put more pepper in the soup. Aesthetics is everywhere. It is one of the most important aspects of our life.In this Very Short Introduction Bence Nanay introduces the field of aesthetics, considering both Western and non-Western aesthetic traditions, and exploring why it is sometimes misunderstood or considered to be too elitist - by artists, musicians, and even philosophers. As Nanay shows, so-called"high art" has no more claims on aesthetics than sitcoms, tattoos, or punk rock. In fact, the scope of aesthetics extends far wider than that of art, high or low, including much of what we care about in life. It is not the job of aesthetics to tell you which artworks are good and which ones are bad.It is not the job of aesthetics to tell you what experiences are worth having. If an experience is worth having for you, it thereby becomes the subject of aesthetics. This realisation is important, because thinking about aesthetics in this inclusive way opens up new ways of understanding oldquestions about the social aspect of our aesthetic engagements, and the importance of aesthetic values for our own self.
Aesthetics: Volume I
by Dietrich Von HildebrandWritten in the early 1970s during the last years of his life, as if harvesting a lifetime of reflection, Aesthetics is Dietrich von Hildebrand’s comprehensive two-volume study and defense of beauty and art. With the publication of Aesthetics, Hildebrand becomes a contemporary spokesman and defender of the importance of beauty at a time when many think that beauty is relative and art unnecessary. Aesthetics: Volume I is Dietrich von Hildebrand's comprehensive work on beauty translated by Brian McNeil.
Aesthetics: Volume II
by Dietrich Von HildebrandWritten in the early 1970s during the last years of his life, as if harvesting a lifetime of reflection, Dietrich von Hildebrand's Aesthetics is a uniquely encompassing work.The first volume develops an original theory of the beautiful, and the second applies that theory with tremendous breadth and attention to the various types of artwork and to many of the world's most beloved works of art. <P><P> It is a testament to the work's broad significance that two of the most respected voices in contemporary aesthetics have joined together to offer forewords to each volume: Dana Gioia to Volume I, and Sir Roger Scruton to Volume II. <P><P> Sir Roger Scruton writes on Volume II: "In this second volume of his treatise on the subject Hildebrand assembles the results of a lifetime's thought about the arts, and expresses his devotion to beauty in terms that the reader will find immediately engaging." <P><P> He continues: "Most philosophers of aesthetics content themselves with a few examples from the realm of art, and make no attempt to explore the distinct disciplines or to catalogue all the parts that contribute to the overall aesthetic effect. One purpose of this second volume, however, is to show the completeness of the artistic enterprise, and the way in which it penetrates human life in its entirety, so that the idea of beauty enters our practical activity at every point." <P><P> Dietrich von Hildebrand's Aesthetics occupies a place in the great philosophical aesthetic tradition of Plato, Kant, and Hegel, while incorporating the fresh and fundamental insights of phenomenology. With this publication of the first English translation, Dietrich von Hildebrand becomes a contemporary spokesman and defender of the importance of beauty and aesthetic values at a time when many think that beauty is relative and art unnecessary.
Affairs of the Art: Love, loss and power in the art world
by Katrina StricklandThe reputations of artists are curious things, influenced by factors beyond the quality of the work. Affairs of the Art explores the role those left behind play in burnishing an artist's reputation after he or she dies. Through interviews with those handling the estates of artists including Fred Williams, Brett Whiteley, John Brack, Howard Arkley, Bronwyn Oliver, George Baldessin and Albert Tucker, as well as a raft of art dealers, academics, curators and auctioneers, Strickland traverses the strange alleyways of the art market, where power resides with those who hold the best stock, and highlights the sometimes heart-wrenching way emotion and duty intersect in the making of decisions by those left behind.
Affect and Belonging in Political Uses of the Past
by David Farrell-BanksAffect and Belonging in Political Uses of the Past examines key political events of the past decade, to analyse the relationship between the representation of certain pasts in ‘official’ heritage settings and the use of the same pasts in political discourse. Drawing on data gathered from museums, heritage sites, news articles, political speeches, manifestos, and through digital media such as Twitter, Farrell-Banks demonstrates how a connection with a shared past can move people emotionally and give them the confidence to engage in political action. The book considers how heritage and the past moves in time and space, examining how it shapes political beliefs and action in the present. The work is a timely intervention, calling attention to the political responsibilities that come with heritage work, when these same languages of heritage are adopted to promote a politics of division. Introducing the concept of the ‘moving moment’, a framework by which to research and understand uses of the past, the book demonstrates how the past becomes a potent political tool. Combining critical heritage studies, critical discourse, memory studies and political theory, the book demonstrates new approaches to interdisciplinary studies within heritage. Affect and Belonging in Political Uses of the Past will thus be essential reading for academics and students engaged in the study of heritage, memory, politics, history and media.
Affect and Embodied Meaning in Animation: Becoming-Animated (Routledge Advances in Film Studies)
by Sylvie BissonnetteThis book combines insights from the humanities and modern neuroscience to explore the contribution of affect and embodiment on meaning-making in case studies from animation, video games, and virtual worlds. As we interact more and more with animated characters and avatars in everyday media consumption, it has become vital to investigate the ways that animated environments influence our perception of the liberal humanist subject. This book is the first to apply recent research on the application of the embodied mind thesis to our understanding of embodied engagement with nonhumans and cyborgs in animated media, analyzing works by Émile Cohl, Hayao Miyazaki, Tim Burton, Norman McLaren, the Quay Brothers, Pixar, and many others. Drawing on the breakthroughs of modern brain science to argue that animated media broadens the viewer’s perceptual reach, this title offers a welcome contribution to the growing literature at the intersection of cognitive studies and film studies, with a perspective on animation that is new and original. ‘Affect and Embodied Meaning in Animation’ will be essential reading for researchers of Animation Studies, Film and Media Theory, Posthumanism, Video Games, and Digital Culture, and will provide a key insight into animation for both undergraduate and graduate students. Because of the increasing importance of visual effect cinema and video games, the book will also be of keen interest within Film Studies and Media Studies, as well as to general readers interested in scholarship in animated media.
Affect in Artistic Creativity: Painting to Feel (Art, Creativity, and Psychoanalysis Book Series)
by Jussi SaarinenWhy do painters paint? Obviously, there are numerous possible reasons. They paint to create images for others’ enjoyment, to solve visual problems, to convey ideas, and to contribute to a rich artistic tradition. This book argues that there is yet another, crucially important but often overlooked reason. Painters paint to feel. They paint because it enables them to experience special feelings, such as being absorbed in creative play and connected to something vitally significant. Painting may even transform the painter’s whole sense of being. Thus, painting is not only about producing art, communicating content, and so on, but also about setting up and inhabiting an experiential space wherein highly valued feelings are interactively enabled and supported. This book investigates how and why this happens by combining psychoanalytical theorization on creativity with philosophical thinking on affectivity. It focuses on creative experience itself, and illuminates the psychological mechanisms and dynamics that underlie the affects at stake. Painters’ own descriptions of how they feel at work are used throughout to give an accurate, true-to-life portrayal of the experience of painting. The strength of the book lies in its open-minded yet critical integration of contemporary psychoanalytic and philosophical thinking, and in its truthfulness to painters’ experiential descriptions of the painterly process. On the whole, it enriches our understanding of artistic creativity and sheds more light on how and why we come to feel the things we do. As such, the book will appeal to philosophers, psychoanalysts, and art researchers alike.
Affect, Animals, and Autists: Feeling Around the Edges of the Human in Performance
by Marla CarlsonWhen theater and related forms of live performance explore the borderlands labeled animal and autism, they both reflect and affect their audiences’ understanding of what it means to be human. Affect, Animals, and Autists maps connections across performances that question the borders of the human whose neurodiverse experiences have been shaped by the diagnostic label of autism, and animal-human performance relationships that dispute and blur anthropocentric edges. By analyzing specific structures of affect with the vocabulary of emotions, Marla Carlson builds upon the conception of affect articulated by psychologist Silvan Tomkins. The book treats a diverse selection of live performance and archival video and analyzes the ways in which they affect their audiences. The range of performances includes commercially successful productions such as The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, War Horse, and The Lion King as well as to the more avant-garde and experimental theater created by Robert Wilson and Christopher Knowles, Back to Back Theatre, Elevator Repair Service, Pig Iron Theatre, and performance artist Deke Weaver.