On Pictures and the Words that Fail Them PDF Download

Author: James Elkins
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521624992
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
In this innovative, interdisciplinary study, James Elkins argues against the assumption that images can be adequately described in words. In his view, words must always fail because pictures possess a residue of 'meaningless' marks that cannot be apprehended as signs. On Pictures and the Words that Fail Them is a 1998 text which provides detailed, incisive critiques of fundamental notions about pictures: their allegedly semiotic structures; the 'rational' nature of realism; and the ubiquity of the figure-ground relation. Elkins then opens the concept of images to non-Western and prehistoric ideas, exploring Chinese concepts of magic, Mesopotamian practices of counting and sculpture, religious ideas about hypostasis, philosophical discussions concerning invisibility and blindness, and questions on the limits of the destruction of meaning.

Author: James Elkins
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113595013X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
This deeply personal account of emotion and vulnerability draws upon anecdotes related to individual works of art to present a chronicle of how people have shown emotion before works of art in the past.

Author: James Elkins
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415970532
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
This deeply personal account of emotion and vulnerability draws upon anecdotes related to individual works of art to present a chronicle of how people have shown emotion before works of art in the past.

Author: James Elkins
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415969888
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 154

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Book Description
Can contemporary art say anything about spirituality? Answering this question and more, On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art explores the curious disconnection between spirituality and current art.

Author: Vivian Sobchack
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520241282
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
A group of sophisticated essays on how we experience film with all fives senses--and our sense of history .

Author: Robert Williams
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351558374
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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Book Description
'The most important art historian of his generation? is how some scholars have described the late Michael Baxandall (1933-2007), Professor of the Classical Tradition at the Warburg Institute, University of London, and of the History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley. Baxandall?s work had a transformative effect on the study of European Renaissance and eighteenth-century art, and contributed to a complex transition in the aims and methods of art history in general during the 1970s, ?80s and ?90s. While influential, he was also an especially subtle and independent thinker - occasionally a controversial one - and many of the implications of his work have yet to be fully understood and assimilated. This collection of 10 essays endeavors to assess the nature of Baxandall?s achievement, and in particular to address the issue of the challenges it offers to the practice of art history today. This volume provides the most comprehensive assessment of Baxandall?s work to date, while drawing upon the archive of Baxandall papers recently deposited at the Cambridge University Library and the Warburg Institute.

Author: James M. Decker
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1628921250
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Scholarly responses to Henry Miller's works have never been numerous and for many years Miller was not a fashionable writer for literary studies. In fact, there exist only three collections of essays concerning Henry Miller's oeuvre. Since these books appeared, a new generation of international Miller scholars has emerged, one that is re-energizing critical readings of this important American Modernist. Henry Miller: New Perspectives presents new essays on carefully chosen themes within Miller and his intellectual heritage to form the most authoritative collection ever published on this author.

Author: Rosemary Betterton
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0857717669
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Women's painting is undergoing a vibrant revival, yet has been little explored in writing or modern visual culture. "Unframed" is an examination of women's contemporary painting. It presents writing with practitioners who engage with theory and critical theorists who deal directly with contemporary practice. All contributors reflect on their own practice and that of other women painters and theorists, whose common aim is to develop innovative ways of thinking about, and through, painting by women. The book focuses on current debates on gender, subjectivity, spectatorship and painting, and moves them forward into the second millennium. It should appeal to a range of readers, including scholars, students, artists and gallery visitors.

Author: Anders Hansen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317621379
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 179

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Book Description
In 2008, the editors published a well-cited journal paper arguing that while scholarly work on media representations of environmental issues had made substantial progress in textual analysis there had been much less work on visual representations. This is surprising given the increasingly visual nature of media and communication, and in light of emerging evidence that the environment is visualized through the use of increasingly symbolic and iconic images. Addressing these matters, this volume marks out the present state of the field and contains chapters that represent fresh and exciting high quality scholarly work now emerging on visual environmental communication. These include a range of fascinating and often alarming topics which draw on a variety of methods and forms of visual communication. The book demonstrates that research needs to think much more widely about what we mean by the ‘visual’ which plays a massive yet under-researched role in the politics and ideology of public understanding and misunderstanding of and the environment and environmental problems. The book is of relevance to students and researchers in media and communication studies, cultural studies, film and visual studies, geography, sociology, politics and other disciplines with an interest in the politics of visual environmental communication. This book was published as a special issue of Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture.

Author: James Elkins
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135963576
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
With bracing clarity, James Elkins explores why images are taken to be more intricate and hard to describe in the twentieth century than they had been in any previous century. Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles? uses three models to understand the kinds of complex meaning that pictures are thought to possess: the affinity between the meanings of paintings and jigsaw-puzzles; the contemporary interest in ambiguity and 'levels of meaning'; and the penchant many have to interpret pictures by finding images hidden within them. Elkins explores a wide variety of examples, from the figures hidden in Renaissance paintings to Salvador Dali's paranoiac meditations on Millet's Angelus, from Persian miniature paintings to jigsaw-puzzles. He also examines some of the most vexed works in history, including Watteau's "meaningless" paintings, Michelangelo's Sistine Ceiling, and Leonardo's Last Supper.