New Releases by Hal Foster

American photographer Bing Wright (born 1958) marries modernist and conceptual leanings, creating highly formal work that explores the many roles of the photograph--as window or magnifying glass, marker of time or space for illusion. Known for his wide-ranging philosophical investigations and the stripped-down purity of his imagery, Wright can be simultaneously figurative and gorgeously abstract in his work, often calling on the gray light and rainy climate of his native Pacific Northwest. For example, in the Wet Windows series, part of his first body of work begun in 1988, random patterns of raindrops appear to pockmark the photographic surfaces. Deeply engaged with the technological and aesthetic history of the medium, Wright frequently references the work of other photographers from Edward Steichen's roses to Man Ray's tears. Bing Wright: Everyday Pictures surveys the artist's work from 1989 to 2006 and includes a conversation between the artist and renowned art historian Hal Foster.

Reflexión sobre cómo imaginar un nuevo arte o arquitectura a través de artistas modernos clave.

Con una estructura clara año a año, los autores presentan más de un centenar de artículos que, centrados en un acontecimiento crucial –la creación de una obra seminal, la publicación de un texto importante o la inauguración de una exposición fundamental, por ejemplo– contienen un gran volumen de información sobre el arte desde 1900 hasta nuestros días. Se exploran en profundidad todos los puntos de inflexión y los avances clave de la modernidad y la posmodernidad, sin olvidar las frecuentes reacciones modernas que proponían visiones alternativas del arte y del mundo. Cada uno de los autores ha escrito una introducción en la que se ocupa de las metodologías en boga en la historia del arte, informando y aumentando el grado de comprensión del lector en lo tocante a su práctica actual. La estructura flexible y las numerosas referencias cruzadas permiten que éste trace su propio camino a lo largo del siglo y siga cualquiera de las muchas narraciones que se despliegan en el libro, ya sea la historia de un medio como la pintura, el desarrollo del arte en un país determinado, la influencia de un movimiento como el Surrealismo o la aparición de un corpus estilístico o conceptual como la abstracción o el Minimalismo. El texto está ilustrado con más de seiscientas obras canónicas (y anticanónicas) del siglo, la mayoría en color. Recuadros con información sobre acontecimientos, lugares y personajes clave, así como un glosario y una amplia bibliografía, completan este excepcional volumen. Además de las introducciones a sus enfoques teóricos, los autores también han tomado parte en dos mesas redondas –una situada a mediados de siglo, la otra al final del libro– en las que se discuten algunas de las cuestiones planteadas por las décadas precedentes, al tiempo que dirigen su mirada al arte del futuro. Destinada a convertirse en la referencia sobre la materia, «Arte desde 1900» es una lectura esencial para cualquier persona que quiera comprender las complejidades del arte en el mundo contemporáneo.

A landmark in art history and the most anticipated art publishing event of the new millennium. In this groundbreaking and original work of scholarship, four of the most influential and provocative art historians of our time have come together to provide a comprehensive history of art in the twentieth century, an age when artists in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere sought to overturn the traditions of the past and expectations of the present in order to invent new practices and forms. Adopting a unique year-by-year approach, Foster, Krauss, Bois, and Buchloh present more than 50 short essays, each focusing on a crucial event--the creation of a seminal work, the publication of an artistic manifesto, the opening of a major exhibition--to tell the story of the dazzling diversity of practice and interpretation that characterizes the art of the period. All the turning points and breakthroughs of modernism and postmodernism are explored in depth, as are the frequent and sustained antimodernist reactions that proposed alternative visions of art and the world. Illustrating the authors' texts are more than 300 of the most important works of the century, many reproduced in full color. The book's flexible structure and extensive cross-referencing allow readers to follow any one of the many narratives that unfold, whether that be the history of a medium such as photography or painting, the development of art in a particular country, the influence of a movement such as surrealism or feminism, or the emergence of a stylistic or conceptual category like abstraction or minimalism. Boxes give further background information on the important figures and issues. In their insightfulintroductions, the four authors explain the different methods of art history at work in the book, providing the reader with the conceptual tools for further study. A roundtable discussion at the close of the book considers the questions raised by the preceding decades and look ahead to the art of the future. A glossary of terms and concepts completes this extraordinary volume. 300 illustrations, 200 in color. This college edition also includes the Art 20 CD-ROM.

«Hoy día uno no necesita ser asquerosamente rico para proyectarse no sólo como diseñador sino como diseñado, sea el producto en cuestión la casa de uno o su negocio, sus mejillas caídas (cirugía estética) o su personalidad retraída (drogas de diseño), su memoria histórica (museos de diseño) o su futuro ADN (niños de diseño). ¿Podría ser este «sujeto diseñado» el resultado no deseado del tan cacareado «sujeto construido» de la cultura posmoderna? Una cosa parece clara: en el preciso momento en que se pensaba que el lazo consumista no podía estrecharse más en su lógica narcisista, lo hizo: el diseño es cómplice de un circuito casi perfecto de producción y consumo, sin mucho ?margen de maniobra? para nada más.» Del marketing cultural a las relaciones históricas entre el arte contemporáneo y el museo moderno, pasando por la arquitectura espectáculo, el auge de las ciudades globales o las vicisitudes conceptuales de la historia del arte y los estudios visuales, «Diseño y delito» ofrece, con su estilo polémico, una serie de reflexiones que permitan iluminar las condiciones de la cultura crítica en nuestros días.

How to imagine not only a new art or architecture but a new self or subject equal to them? In Prosthetic Gods, Hal Foster explores this question through the works and writings of such key modernists as Gauguin and Picasso, F. T. Marinetti and Wyndham Lewis, Adolf Loos and Max Ernst. These diverse figures were all fascinated by fictions of origin, either primordial and tribal or futuristic and technological. In this way, Foster argues, two forms came to dominate modernist art above all others: the primitive and the machine. Foster begins with the primitivist fantasies of Gauguin and Picasso, which he examines through the Freudian lens of the primal scene. He then turns to the purist obsessions of the Viennese architect Loos, who abhorred all things primitive. Next Foster considers the technophilic subjects propounded by the futurist Marinetti and the vorticist Lewis. These "new egos" are further contrasted with the "bachelor machines" proposed by the dadaist Ernst. Foster also explores extrapolations from the art of the mentally ill in the aesthetic models of Ernst, Paul Klee, and Jean Dubuffet, as well as manipulations of the female body in the surrealist photography of Brassai, Man Ray, and Hans Bellmer. Finally, he examines the impulse to dissolve the conventions of art altogether in the drip paintings of Jackson Pollock, the scatter pieces of Robert Morris, and the earthworks of Robert Smithson, and traces the evocation of lost objects of desire in sculptural work from Marcel Duchamp and Alberto Giacometti to Robert Gober. Although its title is drawn from Freud, Prosthetic Godsdoes not impose psychoanalytic theory on modernist art; rather, it sets the two into critical relation and scans the greater historical field that they share.

In The Return of the Real Hal Foster discusses the development of art and theory since 1960, and reorders the relation between prewar and postwar avant-gardes. Opposed to the assumption that contemporary art is somehow belated, he argues that the avant-garde returns to us from the future, repositioned by innovative practice in the present. And he poses this retroactive model of art and theory against the reactionary undoing of progressive culture that is pervasive today. After the models of art-as-text in the 1970s and art-as-simulacrum in the 1980s, Foster suggests that we are now witness to a return to the real—to art and theory grounded in the materiality of actual bodies and social sites. If The Return of the Real begins with a new narrative of the historical avant-gard, it concludes with an original reading of this contemporary situation—and what it portends for future practices of art and theory, culture and politics.

A Village Voice Best Book, a "lucid and provocative work...that allows us to glimpse the stirrings and upheavals in the hothouse of modern art". Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.