Abstract Art Against Autonomy: Infection, Resistance, And Cure Since The 60S
Cambridge University Press
Edition: Reprint, 4/21/2014
EAN 9781107693982, ISBN10: 1107693985
Paperback, 192 pages, 25.4 x 17.8 x 1.1 cm
Language: English
In Abstract Art Against Autonomy, Mark Cheetham provides a revolutionary account of abstraction in the visual arts since the decline of the formalist paradigms in the 1960s. He claims that abstract work remains a vital contributor to contemporary visual culture, but that it performs in a way that is different from its predecessors of the early and mid-twentieth century and cannot adequately be assessed without new models of understanding. Cheetham posits that abstraction has reacted to paradigms of purity with practices of impurity. By examining abstract art since the 1960s within a narrative of infection, resistance and cure, Cheetham provides an opportunity to rethink paradigmatic genres - the monochrome and the mirror - and to link in new ways the work of artists whose work extends and complicates the tradition of abstract art, including Yves Klein, Robert Rauschenberg, James Turrell, Gerhard Richter, Peter Halley, General Idea and Taras Polataiko.
1. Past to present
a diagnosis of recent abstraction
2. White mischief
monochromes
3. Mirror digressions
stages
4. Possible futures
abstraction as infection and cure.