The Return of the Real: Art and Theory at the End of the CenturyIn 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. |
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The Return of the Real: Art and Theory at the End of the Century Hal Foster No preview available - 1996 |
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abstraction aesthetic allegorical Andy Warhol anthropology appropriation art argues art and theory artists autonomy avant-gardist Barthes Bataille Baudelaire Baudrillard Benjamin Buchloh body Broodthaers Bürger capitalism capitalist chapter commodity sculpture commodity-sign conceptual art contemporary art critical critique culture cynical reason deconstruction deferred action Derrida developed dialectic discourse distance Duchamp early ethnographic feminist fetishism Foucault Fredric Jameson Freud Fried gaze genealogy Greenberg Hal Foster historical avant-garde ideology image-screen Jameson Judd Koons Lacan late-modernist logic Marcel Broodthaers Marx McLuhan minimalism and pop minimalist modernism modernist modernist art museum neo-avant-garde neo-geo notion object paradigm political pop art position postmodernism postmodernist poststructuralism poststructuralist practice primitivist question readymade reification relation repetition representation Roland Barthes Rosalind Krauss serial shift signifier simulacral simulation painting site-specific social spectacle Steinbach structure superrealism surrealism surrealist textual tion trans transgressive trauma turn University Press viewer visual Walter Benjamin York