1,720,969 research outputs found
Coffeehouse Orientalism
No full textBook synopsis: The Viennese café was a key site of urban modernity around 1900. In the rapidly growing city it functioned simultaneously as home and workplace, affording opportunities for both leisure and intellectual exchange. This volume explores the nature and function of the coffee house in the social, cultural, and political world of fin-de-siècle Vienna. Just as the café served as a creative meeting place within the city, so this volume initiates conversations between different disciplines focusing on Vienna 1900. Contributions are drawn from the fields of social and cultural history, literary studies, Jewish studies and art, and architectural and design history. A fresh perspective is also provided by a selection of comparative articles exploring coffeehouse culture elsewhere in Eastern Europe
Josef Frank's 'Aralia': from houseplant to 'djungel'
No full textConstructed space is defined by its shape, by the materials with which it is enclosed and by the objects that are placed within or decorate its exterior or interior. The interaction of these crafted objects or decorated surfaces with space provides viewers or inhabitants with visual clues about the environment as well as visual cues about decorum: viewers can know what kind of behaviour is expected and what the space means. Furnishings and dress, textile panels and clay pots, stained glass and gesso panels, all defined as craft or decorative art, give architectural space, defined as high art, its character: without craft, architecture is empty and devoid of meaning.
This engaging collection of essays presents the first sustained exploration of the relationship of craft to architectural spaces. The book unravels the complex ways in which craft controls, manipulates, organises and defines space, to highlight how the relationship between craft and space can be understood as a form of communication between related parts that combine to form a unified whole
On the scent of Art Deco
No full textBook synopsis: The definitive book on Art Deco: an elegant large-format hardcover with hundreds of museum-quality color reproductions featuring exquisite examples of Art Deco jewellery, ceramics, laquer, fashion, textiles, graphic design and art work
Modern Taste: Art Deco in Paris, 1910-1935 offers readers an opportunity to appreciate, examine, assess and enjoy an artistic movement that defies easy definition but which has been described as "the last of the total styles": Art Deco.
Comprehensive and beautifully designed, Modern Taste includes nearly 400 works in a wide array of media: painting, sculpture, furniture, fashion design, jewelry, film, architecture, glassware and ceramics are all represented, alongside the photography, drawings and advertisements that helped create "the modern taste."
The book aims to question the almost total absence of Art Deco from the history of modern art and from curatorial practice, and to vindicate--as some exemplary cases did in the wake of the Deco revival from the 1970s onwards--not only the evident beauty of Art Deco but also the fascination exerted by this singularly modern phenomenon with all its cultural and artistic complexity.
What we know as Art Deco was an alternative style to the avant-garde. It stood for a modernity that was pragmatic and ornamental rather than utopian and functional, and it became the great shaper of modern desire and taste, leaving its characteristic stamp on Western society in the early decades of the 20th century.
An elegant and stylish addition to any design library
Through the vitrine: artistic identities and the sphere of commerce
No full textBook synopsis: Vitrines and glass cabinets are familiar apparatuses that have in large part defined modern modes of display and visibility, both within and beyond the museum. They separate objects from their contexts, group them with other objects, both similar and dissimilar, and often serve to reinforce their intrinsic or aesthetic values. The vitrine has much in common with the picture frame, the plinth and the gallery, but it has not yet received the kind of detailed art historical and theoretical discussion that has been brought to these other modes of formal display.
The twelve contributions to this volume examine some of the points of origin of the vitrine and the various relations it brokers with sculpture, first in the Wunderkammer and cabinet of curiosities and then in dialog with the development of glazed architecture beginning with Paxton's Crystal Palace (1851). The collection offers close discussions of the role of the vitrine and shop window in the rise of commodity culture and their apposition with Constructivist design in the work of Frederick Kiesler; as well as original readings of the use of vitrines in Surrealism and Fluxus, and in work by Joseph Beuys, Paul Thek, Claes Oldenburg and his collaborators, Jeff Koons, Mike Kelley, Dan Graham, Vito Acconci, Damien Hirst and Josephine Meckseper, among others. Sculpture and the Vitrine also raises key questions about the nature and implications of vitrinous space, including its fronts onto desire and the spectacle; transparency and legibility; and onto ideas and practices associated with the archive: collecting, preserving and ordering
Simon Starling: crafting the modern
No full textSimon Starling's work often engages with iconic works of modernist design, drawing on an international range of objects executed in the decades from the 1920s through to the 1960s. These have included well-known designs by figures such as Josef Frank, Paul Henningsen and Charles Eames. Focussing in detail on Starling's large-scale installation Blue, Red, Green, Yellow, Djungel (2002), based on the Austrian architect Josef Frank's Aralia textile design of 1928, this article addresses the complex ways in which Starling deploys notions of craft in his carefully staged encounters with modernist practice. Starling's displays of craft process establish intricate dialogues between past and present, between his own work and that of others, thus facilitating a poetic, but at the same time politicized, meditation on questions of consumption and sustainability. Starling offers an enhanced understanding of modernism as well as a powerful demonstration of craft's potential to function both as critique and as a means of delineating new utopian visions
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Cité d'illusion: staging modernity at the 1925 Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes
No full textSituated in the heart of Paris, the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes was criticised at the time for its overtly temporary and artificial architecture--for being a 'cité d'illusion' and a 'décor de théâtré' as opposed to a 'cité réelle'. The Exhibition's emphasis on ostentatious and luxurious display was also widely attacked ; the architect Le Corbusier was one of many critics who claimed that the Exhibition was a failure in terms of displaying a truly modern art décoratif, let alone an architecture suitable to the needs of modern urban living. More recent Modernist art and design histories have largely sustained such assessments of the Exhibition. This dissertation focuses on the significance of notions of the Exhibition as illusory city and stage set and attempts to reveal something of what was (and is ) at stake in Modernist accusations of illusion and theatricality.
The Exhibition re-presented multiple (and conflicting) versions of the modern city, and in particular of Paris as ville lumiére. On the one hand, with exhibits such as the Rue des Boutiques on the pant Alexandre III , the Exhibition evoked Paris as the city par excellence of shopping and of entertainment; on the other (with Le Corbusier's Pavillon de L'Esprit Nouveau) the city was presented as reformed according to the precepts of town -planning. The luxury boutique, a prominent and important display device in the French section of the Exhibition, is examined both as publicité and as architectural facade. Sonia Delaunay's exhibit, the Boutique Simultanée with its displays of luxurious fashions and textiles, is studied in detail as symptomatic of the Exhibition's representation of Paris as a 'woman's city.' Only when considered as an attempt to refute this feminised city does it become clear how Le Corbusier's version of urbanisme (as embodied by the Pavillon de L'Esprit Nouveau) constituted yet another cité d'illusion
Through the Vitrine: Damien Hirst’s "For the Love of God"
No full textBook synopsis: Vitrines and glass cabinets are familiar apparatuses that have in large part defined modern modes of display and visibility, both within and beyond the museum. They separate objects from their contexts, group them with other objects, both similar and dissimilar, and often serve to reinforce their intrinsic or aesthetic values. The vitrine has much in common with the picture frame, the plinth and the gallery, but it has not yet received the kind of detailed art historical and theoretical discussion that has been brought to these other modes of formal display.
The twelve contributions to this volume examine some of the points of origin of the vitrine and the various relations it brokers with sculpture, first in the wunderkammer and cabinet of curiosities and then in dialogue with the development of glazed architecture beginning with Paxton's Crystal Palace (1851). The collection offers close discussions of the role of the vitrine and shop window in the rise of commodity culture and their apposition with Constructivist design in the work of Frederick Kiesler; as well as original readings of the use of vitrines in Surrealism and Fluxus, and in work by Joseph Beuys, Paul Thek, Claes Oldenburg and his collaborators, Jeff Koons, Mike Kelley, Dan Graham, Vito Acconci, Damien Hirst and Josephine Meckseper, among others. Sculpture and the Vitrine also raises key questions about the nature and implications of vitrinous space, including its fronts onto desire and the spectacle; transparency and legibility; and onto the ideas and practices caught up in ordering, collecting, preserving and the archive
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