"Theories of the Nonobject investigates the crisis of the sculptural and painterly object in the concrete, neoconcrete, and constructivist practices of artists in Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela, with case studies of specific movements, artists, and critics. Amor traces their role in the significant reconceptualization of the artwork that Brazilian critic and poet Ferreira Gullar heralded in 'Theory of the Nonobject' in 1959, with specific attention to a group of major art figures including Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica, and Gego, whose work proposed engaged forms of spectatorship that dismissed medium-based understandings of art. Exploring the philosophical, economic, and political underpinnings of geometric abstraction in post-World War II South America, Amor highlights the overlapping inquiries of artists and critics who, working on the periphery of European and US modernism, contributed to a sophisticated conversation about the nature of the art object"--Provided by publisher.

In premodern China, painters used imagery not to mirror the world, but to evoke unfathomable experience. Considering this art alongside the philosophical traditions that inform it, this book explores the 'nonobject', a notion exemplified by paintings that do not seek to represent observable surroundings.

First published in 2001. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Explores a new form of fiction that emerged in late-twentieth-century visual art across the Americas. With Non-literary Fiction, Esther Gabara examines how contemporary art produced across the Americas has reacted to the rising tide of neoliberal regimes, focusing on the crucial role of fiction in daily politics. Gabara argues that these fictions depart from familiar literary narrative structures and emerge in the new mediums and practices that have revolutionized contemporary art. Each chapter details how fiction is created through visual art forms—in performance and body art, posters, mail art, found objects, and installations. For Gabara, these fictions comprise a type of art that asks viewers to collaborate in the creation of the work and helps them to withstand the brutal restrictions imposed by dominant neoliberal regimes. During repressive regimes of the 1960s and 1970s and free trade agreements of the 1990s, artists and critics consistently said no to economic privatization, political deregulation, and reactionary social logic as they rejected inherited notions of visual, literary, and political representation. Through close analyses of artworks and writings by leading figures of these two generations, including Indigenous thinkers, Gabara shows how negation allows for the creation of fiction outside textual forms of literature.

"The 1950s and early 1960s in Brazil gave birth to a period of incredible optimism and economic development. In The Affinity of Neoconcretism, Mariola V. Alvarez argues that the neoconcretists--a group of artists and poets working together in Rio de Janeiro from 1959 to 1961--formed an important part of this national transformation. She maps the interactions of the neoconcretists and discusses how this network collaborated to challenge existing divides between high and low art and between fields such as fine art and dance. This book reveals the way in which art and intellectual work in Brazil emerged from and within a local political and social context, and out of the transnational movements of artists, artworks, published materials, and ideas"--

An analytical survey of the thought about painting and sculpture as it unfolded from the early 18th- to the mid-19th centuries. This was the period during which the intellectual foundations of our modern views on the arts was formed. Barasch traces for the reader the entire development of modernism in art and art theory. *Lightning Print On Demand Title

Moments of crisis and innovation in modernism's cross-cultural past, from the reception of modernist art in colonial India to the experience of African American artists in the New York art world of the 1950s. This first book in the Annotating Art's Histories series revisits the period in which modernist attitudes took shape, examining the ways in which a shared history of art and ideas was experienced in different nations and cultures. Original essays by leading art historians and curators trace the dynamic interplay of cultures across the story of modern art, looking at moments of crisis and innovation in modernism's cross-cultural past. An account of colonialism and nationalism in Indian art from the 1890s to the 1920s, for example, suggests that cultural identities are constantly modifying one another in the very moment of their encounter and points to primitivism as a counter-discourse to modernism. A collision between modernism and colonialism in the design of a Bauhaus model housing project reveals the volatile conditions of European modernism in the 1930s. Discussions of the abstract painting of Norman Lewis and the collages of Romare Bearden illustrate the conflicted experiences and multiple affiliations of African American artists in the New York art world of the 1940s and 1950s. The first English translation of an influential essay in the Brazilian neoconcrete movement of the 1950s takes up concerns similar to those of North American minimalism in the 1960s. These and the other journeys into modernism's past described in Cosmopolitan Modernisms return to our contemporary moment with questions about modern art and modernity that we are only beginning to ask. Copublished with inIVA/Institute of International Visual Arts, London.