The Return of the Real – The Avant–Garde at the End of the Century - Hardcover

Foster, Hal

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0262061872 ISBN 13: 9780262061872

Publisher: MIT Press, 1996

Synopsis

After the dominant models of art-as-text in the 1970s and are now witness to a "return to the real" - to art and theory that seek to be grounded in bodies and sites, identities and communities. Foster's concise analysis of art practices over the past three decades traces important models at work in art and theory, with special attention to the controversial connections between the two during this period. It also focuses on the relation between prewar and postwar avant-gardes: how does the return of a past practice affect the development of a present one? The result is a genealogy of art and theory from minimalism and pop to the present. Chapters can be read independently, although Foster interrelates practices of sometimes disparate time periods and methodologies. Foster disputes the common assumption that contemporary art is only redundant, belated or condemned to pastiche. On the contrary, he suggests that the avant-garde always returns to us "from the future", repositioned by innovative practice in the present. And he poses this retroactive mode of art and theory against the reactionary undoing of progressive culture that is so pervasive today. If "The Return of the Real" begins with a narrative of the historical avant-garde, it concludes with a reading of our contemporary situation - and what it portends for future practices of art and theory, culture and politics.

About this title

Review

-- Howard Singerman, Department of Art History, University of Virginia

" "The Return of the Real" is one of the most cogent and theoretically self-aware readings of contemprary art I have seen." -- Howard Singerman, Department of Art History, University of Virginia

& quot; The Return of the Real is one of the most cogent and theoretically self-aware readings of contemprary art I have seen.& quot; -- Howard Singerman, Department of Art History, University of Virginia

"

""The Return of the Real" is one of the most cogent and theoretically self-aware readings of contemprary art I have seen."--Howard Singerman, Department of Art History, University of Virginia

From the Back Cover

'As the twentieth century lurches to its end, the rhetoric of 'post' has been increasingly supplanted by an awareness of uncanny repetition. No one has more skillfully mapped the resulting spatial displacements and temporal heterogeneities than Hal Foster. Lively and accessible in style, theoretically astute and politically engaged, The Return of the Real is a model of cultural criticism at its most incisive.' Martin Jay, Professor, Dept. of History, University of California, Berkley

'Hal Foster's essays have time and again defined the point where theoretical imagination converges with urgent questions in the practice of art, and he offers a guiding intelligence for anyone who wants to know why contemporary art matters in the wider debates about the shape and direction of American culture.' Thomas Crow, Robert Lehman Professor of the History of Art, Yale University

'The compelling analyses in The Return of the Real make clear that Hal Foster is one of the few contemporary critics who consistently asks and thinks through the most probing questions about the turbulent intersection of late twentieth-century art, cultural theory, and global capitalism, and who keenly knows that the answers to them can never be reassuring or fashionable affirmations but rather new and disquieting questions.' Jonathan Crary, Columbia University

Edition details

• Publisher: MIT Press
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0262061872
• ISBN 13: 9780262061872
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 322