Beholding: Situated Art and the Aesthetics of Reception
- Submitting institution
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University of the Arts, London
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 92
- Type
- A - Authored book
- DOI
-
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- Publisher
- Bloomsbury
- ISBN
- 978-1-3500-8840-5
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- May
- Year of publication
- 2020
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- Yes
- Double-weighted statement
- This 120,600 word monograph, which includes 9 colour plates and 66 black and white images, is a philosophically informed analysis of the beholding of situated art and the distinctive phenomenal encounter situated art affords. Within the broad remit of the aesthetics of reception, the book proposes a phenomenological theory of beholding situated art and is the first monograph to apply reception aesthetics beyond painting, encompassing modernist abstraction and contemporary intermedial art. It is structured around twelve artworks and twelve theorists – philosophers, art historians and critics – such that each chapter constructs an extended dialogue between artwork and text.
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This 120,600-word monograph, entitled Beholding: Situated Art and the Aesthetics of Reception, is an interdisciplinary analysis of the beholding of situated art. Written within the broad remit of the aesthetics of reception, the book proposes a phenomenological theory of beholding situated art and, as such, is the first comprehensive monograph to apply reception aesthetics beyond painting, encompassing modernist abstraction and contemporary intermedial art.
The book constructs a philosophically informed transhistorical theory of the distinctive phenomenal encounter afforded by situated or in situ art, and the beholder’s constitutive role therein. Here, beholding is considered as a process, and one of the book’s key contentions is that situated works perform a locative function, in terms of providing indexical cues as to the position the beholder must adopt in order to place herself in the requisite experiential connection to the work’s meaning. Here, the beholder is allocated a role, namely, to complete the incomplete in works that are ‘transitive’ as opposed to ‘intransitive’ (i.e. are completed by the anticipated presence of the spectator). This brings the beholder’s ideational and imaginative capacities into play, often in terms of problematising the beholder position. Collectively, the in situ and situated artworks considered are juxtaposed to the Greenbergian notion of the artwork as a self-sufficient, autonomous whole. The book is structured around 12 artworks and 12 theorists — philosophers, art historians and critics — such that each chapter constructs an extended dialogue between artwork and text. The chapters are thematically grouped into four parts: ‘Sacred Imagery’; ‘Group Portraiture’; ‘Abstraction’; ‘Intermedia’. The chapters engage works by, respectively, Masaccio, Titian, Holbein, Rembrandt, Velázquez, Goya, El Lissitzky, Anthony Caro, Agnes Martin, Yoko Ono, Mary Miss and Bruce Nauman. Published by Bloomsbury, the book includes nine colour plates and 66 black and white images.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -