Main entry:
Nagel, Alexander, author.
Title & Author:
Medieval modern : art out of time / Alexander Nagel.
Publication:
New York : Thames & Hudson, 2012.
Description:
312 pages : illustrations (some color) ; 25 cm
Notes:
Includes bibliographical references (pages 279-304) and index.
Not a longer history, a different history -- Learning to live without artistic periods -- If you go far back enough, the West is not "Europe" -- Airplanes and altarpieces -- Works become environments and environments become works -- The history of the museum is the history of modern art -- Painting as second-order observation -- The debate over idolatry persists -- Topographical instability -- Non-site-specificity -- The Mannerist inhuman -- The year 1962: Mosaic resonance -- The year 1962: "Aux frontières de l'illimité et de l'avenir" -- Environments, flatbeds, and other forms of receivership -- Inside and out -- Limits of the diaphane -- Relics and reproducibles -- Cathedral thinking -- Instead of cathedrals, machines for living -- Cathedral of Erotic Suffering -- The entropy of medievalism.
Machine generated contents note: ch. 1 Not a longer history, a different history -- The eighteenth century is still effectively the horizon of accounts of modern art -- The modern/postmodern divide is less relevant than it once was -- Developments within medieval and Renaissance studies have released earlier material from old historiographic models -- Recent assemblages of the medieval and the modern -- Before the emergence of the picture gallery in the eighteenth century, installation art was the norm -- The twentieth-century preference for the index over the icon is a revival of medieval practice, as was the championing of seriality and replication -- Collage was a primary modality of medieval art -- Conceptual art as one episode in a long history of Christian debates over idolatry -- ch. 2 Learning to live without artistic periods -- Eisenstein's premodern montages -- Comparisons between medieval and modern will bring out differences more than affinities -- Cases where there is active recourse to medieval models will be accompanied by staged collisions between the two -- "Medieval" in this book really means premodern, ranging from the advent of Christianity through Bernini -- What makes twentieth-century medievalism different from nineteenth-century medievalizing movements, such as the pre-Raphaelites and the Nazarenes? -- Why it is impossible for this book to follow a chronological presentation -- ch. 3 If you go far back enough, the West is not "Europe" -- A set of cultural practices preceding a Eurocentric world view -- Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon incorporates African and Oceanic references, but its organizing structure derives from altarpieces -- Emergence of a notion of Europe in the sixteenth century -- To inhabit the Western Middle Ages is to inhabit a decentered and decentralized culture -- Orientations of Christian medieval art -- The framework proposed here destabilizes the terms "Western art" and "modernism" -- ch. 4 Airplanes and altarpieces -- "Who could do anything better than this propeller?" -- Apollinaire compares Bleriot's airplane to a celebrated Madonna by Cimabue -- Panels before framed pictures -- Cimabue's Louvre altarpiece as a spaceship -- "Jesus is my air plane" -- Breton compares Les Demoiselles d'Avignon to Cimabue's "sacred image" -- ch. 5 Works become environments and environments become works -- The opposition between the framed picture and the site-specific work is a modernist myth -- Late medieval art reveals instead a pattern of commutation between objects and their environments -- The history of the modern museum is only one episode in this larger pattern -- Museums as chapels and chapels as museums -- Marinetti and Kandinsky on the museum -- Pictures were not detached from multimedia environments so much as they internalized them -- ch. 6 The history of the museum is the history of modern art -- The material and conceptual boundaries of the easel picture turn out never to have been very stable -- The critique of the museum originated with its inception -- Quatremere de Quincy and the artistic "ensemble" -- How Quatremere's polemic is caught up in the logic he is protesting -- Art under the conditions of "speculation" -- Anticipations of modernist and postmodernist critiques -- Works of art as relics -- ch. 7 Painting as second-order observation -- Re-entry of work of art and environment -- Painting as the master medium of re-entry -- Gentile da Fabriano's The Crippled and the Sick Cured at the Tomb of Saint Nicholas as an anthropological picture -- Painting is well suited to the task of blending places and times -- Kinaesthetic experiences of artistic ensembles came into conceptual focus as an effect of pictorial visualizations -- ch. 8 The debate over idolatry persists -- In Michelangelo's Medici Chapel, the space of altarpieces Is retranslated, into three dimensions, which is thus a space of art -- Comparison to Minimalist installations by Flavin and Morris -- The work includes the beholder -- In the thick of an ancient dispute over idolatry and iconoclasm -- Both Fried and his opponents believed they were offering an answer to idolatry -- The Medici Chapel as a post-pictorial reaction -- Installation art and painting as phases of one another -- ch. 9 Topographical instability -- Why Heiner Friedrich found inspiration for the Dia Art Foundation in Giotto's Arena Chapel -- What is a Christian chapel? -- How Jerusalem can take place in Rome -- Topographical destabilization reveals space and time to be malleable -- Buildings on holy sites are not merely commemoration, but proof that these were never merely historical sites -- Striated and smooth space -- Premodern ecclesiastical environments are difficult to recover after the clean-up of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation -- Relics and their containers -- Soil as a formless reliquary -- How the Jerusalem Chapel went from being a spatio-temporal wrinkle to a sited space -- ch. 10 Non-site-specificity -- Smithson brings Franklin, New jersey, to New York -- Christian topographical reliquaries -- "The distance between the Site and the Non-site could be called anti-travel" -- "How can you be in two places at once when you are nowhere at all?": the art gallery as de-territorialized site -- The Non-site as a tool for thinking about Christian chapels -- Smithson applies the logic of the Non-site to the Holy Land and then withdraws from the idea -- ch. 11 The Mannerist inhuman -- Smithson on Worringer and Hulme -- Mannerism crystallizes an alternative to anthropomorphism -- Mannerist polyhedrons -- Smithson on Brecht on Brueghel -- "Cool" Smithson versus "hot" Smithson -- Ice seething with activity -- Smithson on Parmigianino -- Sculpture in the expanded field placed in a theological framework -- ch. 12 The year 1962: Mosaic resonance -- Three medievalists -- Eco, Steinberg, and McLuhan -- intervene in contemporary culture -- The Gutenberg Galaxy informs its readers that we are entering a new Middle Ages -- Why mosaic is the modality of the electronic media -- McLuhan photographed in "acoustic space" -- The link between Bauhaus and McLuhan passes through medieval tactility -- Photography as the medium of its own expansion -- ch. 13 The year 1962: "Aux frontieres de l'illimite et de l'avenir" -- The hinge between Eco's Opera aperta and his Sviluppo dell'estetica medievale -- Joyce and the Summa of chaos -- The embrace of chance and indeterminacy in the "open work" are connected to the search for a world-involving integration -- Eco throws up barriers between the open work and medieval modalities of multiple reading, but they are dismantled by Battisti -- Cage's Fontana Mix -- ch. 14 Environments, flatbeds, and other forms of receivership -- Kaprow announces that Pollock leaves us at the threshold of the Middle Ages -- Steinberg on Johns as the "end of the line" -- "Let the world in again" -- Art before the easel picture is the unstated term in Steinberg's schema -- Altarpieces as flatbeds -- Why Caravaggio is Johns's historical alter ego -- ch. 15 Inside and out -- Various versions of the three-era model of medievalism, whereby an intervening period is put to an end by contemporary developments that bring into relevance the earlier, medieval art -- Ways of throwing this model into question -- Prints offered a new plane for the circulation and reception of images, well before the gallery picture and the museum -- Watteau makes a sign for the outside of the picture shop -- Royal-sacred art sold and crated -- The commodity is both object and phantasm -- The old paintings prefigure their eventual use -- Watteau's Enseigne and Johns's Flag -- ch. 16 Limits of the diaphane -- The index resurfaces in twentieth-century art -- The twentieth century pits the index against the optical image, whereas in medieval art icon and index are not so easily separated, as Duchamp understood -- Camillo and painting as one phase of the distributed body -- Pound explains Cavalcanti to the age of the lightbulb and the "current hidden in air and in wire" -- The diaphane of Cavalcanti and Dante in Pound and Joyce -- Duchamp's Large Glass as a diaphane -- An element of medieval anachronism made Pound and Duchamp contemporary to each other in the 1920s -- ch. 17 Relics and reproducibles -- And yet the boundary between index and icon is at issue in Christian art -- Grounds of the religious image -- The technological reproducibility of the icon -- The revival of the idea of the multiple in modernism -- Images as relic: another prototype of the work of art -- The logic of the sample -- Devotion and the abject -- Consecration of the ordinary -- Why the relic is not the same as the readymade and yet is necessary to understanding it -- The afterlife of the relic in twentieth-century art -- The readymade beyond institutional critique -- ch. 18 Cathedral thinking -- The Gothic cathedral as Bauhaus emblem -- Collective production and distributed display in the "new building of the future" -- Behne and the return of art to the spiritual integration of the Middle Ages -- Pervasiveness of spiritual rhetoric in avant-garde writings of the 1910s -- Glass architecture -- Feininger's fractal structures connect image, user, and environment -- ch. 19 Instead of cathedrals, machines for living -- "Turn away from Utopia" -- Worringer declares Expressionism dead -- Behne: from Heiligenbild to Kunst to Gestaltung -- El Lissitzky against the "painted coffin for our living bodies" -- Stained glass and dynamic color construction -- "The static god will become a dynamic god" -- Pinder and medieval kinaesthetic proprioception -- "What we used to call art begins at a distance of two meters from the body" -- The medieval roots of Benjamin's concept of receptivity in a state of distraction -- ch. 20 Cathedral of Erotic Suffering -- Schwitters from collage to Merzarchitektur -- "Cathedrals are made out of wood."
Note continued: "The absorption in art comes very close to the divine liturgy" -- An archeology of display practices from a post-museum future -- Neither museum nor cathedral but a dismantling of both -- We are only now beginning to apply the lessons of the Merzbau.
Summary:
"This groundbreaking study offers a radical new reading of art since the Middle Ages. Moving across the familiar period lines set out in conventional histories, Alexander Nagel explores the deep connections between modern and premodern art to reveal the underlying patterns and ideas traversing centuries of artistic practice. In a series of episodic chapters, he reconsiders from an innovative double perspective a number of key issues in the history of art, from iconoclasm and idolatry to installation and the museum as institution. He shows how the central tenets of modernism--serial production, site-specificity, collage, the readymade, and the questioning of the nature of art and authorship--were all features of earlier times before modernity, revived by recent generations. Nagel examines, among other things, the importance of medieval cathedrals to the 1920s Bauhaus movement; the parallels between Renaissance altarpieces and modern preoccupations with surface and structure; the relevance of Byzantine models to Minimalist artists; the affinities between ancient holy sites and early earthworks; and the similarities between the sacred relic and the modern readymade. Alongside the work of leading twentieth-century medievalist writers such as Walter Benjamin, Marshall McLuhan, Leo Steinberg, and Umberto Eco, Nagel considers a wide range of celebrated artists, from Giotto, Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Caravaggio to Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters, Robert Smithson, and Damien Hirst. The effect of these encounters goes in two directions at once: each age offers new insights into the other, deepening our understanding of both past and present, and providing a new set of reference points that reframe the history of art itself."--Front jacket flap.
"Moving across the familiar period lines set out in conventional histories, Alexander Nagel explores the deep connections between modern and premodern art to reveal patterns and ideas traversing centuries of artistic practice."--Front jacket flap.
ISBN:
9780500238974 (hardcover)
0500238979 (hardcover)
Subject:
Art, Medieval.
Art History.
Art médiéval.
Art Histoire.
art history.
Art and Design.
Art
Kunst
Rezeption
Form/genre:
illustrated books.
Illustrated works
History
Ouvrages illustrés.
Holdings:
Location: Library main 282727
Call No.: BIB 220430
Status: Available
