Anti-fascist Aesthetics from Weimar to MoMA

Anti-fascist Aesthetics from Weimar to MoMA
Author: Maxximilian Seijo
Publisher:
Total Pages: 75
Release: 2019
Genre: Abstraction
ISBN:

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This thesis re-examines the life's work of German-American critical theorist, Siegfried Kracauer, to recover abstraction from tacit historical associations with modern fascism. Evoked in critical theory more generally, the abstraction-to-fascism-teleology imagines 20th century fascism as the dialectical fulfillment of modern alienation. Rooting such alienation in the flawed Liberal and Marxist conceptions of monetary relations, critical theorists conduct their aesthetic analyses via ambivalent condemnations of abstractions assumed primordial alienation. In the thesis, I critique the abstraction-to-fascism-teleology through an affirmation of neochartalist political economys conception of moneys essential publicness and abundance. Drawing from this abstract legal mediation, I trace Kracauers various condemnations of abstraction along the terms of his embodied contradiction among the WWII and Cold War fiscal mobilizations to illuminate repressed pleas for abstract mediation within his work and midcentury aesthetic realism broadly. Further, I move from the midcentury moment to the Weimar moment in order to locate potential in Kracauers early affirmation of abstraction as a communal medium. I find such affirmations neglected in the Liberal and Marxist responses to the unemployment crises of the Great Depression in Germany. By looking to Kracauers Weimar essays on architecture and photography, as well as a reading of Fritz Langs Metropolis (1927), I pinpoint historical and contemporary promise in their commitment to the inclusive potential of abstractions (no)thing- ness, a commitment that was mirrored in the proposed monetary issuance of the WTB public works plan of 1932, which was ultimately rejected by the Social Democratic Party of Germany in the lead up to their defeat in the parliamentary elections of 1933 and the Nazis rise to power.

The Unmaking of Fascist Aesthetics

The Unmaking of Fascist Aesthetics
Author: Kriss Ravetto
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 310
Release: 2001
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9780816637430

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In works by filmmakers from Bertolucci to Spielberg, debauched images of nazi and fascist eroticism, symbols of violence and immorality, often bear an uncanny resemblance to the images and symbols once used by the fascists themselves to demarcate racial, sexual, and political others. This book exposes the "madness" inherent in such a course, which attests to the impossibility of disengaging visual and rhetorical constructions from political, ideological, and moral codes. Kriss Ravetto argues that contemporary discourses using such devices actually continue unacknowledged rhetorical, moral, and visual analogies of the past. Against postwar fictional and historical accounts of World War II in which generic images of evil characterize the nazi and the fascist, Ravetto sets the more complex approach of such filmmakers as Pier Paolo Pasolini, Liliana Cavani, and Lina Wertmuller. Her book asks us to think deeply about what it means to say that we have conquered fascism, when the aesthetics of fascism still describe and determine how we look at political figures and global events. Book jacket.

Antifascism in American Art

Antifascism in American Art
Author: Cécile Whiting
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 262
Release: 1989-01-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780300042597

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Whiting examines the various manifestations of antifacist art, showing how each negotiated the competing demands of artistic conventions, aesthetic and political theories, and historical developments.

Re-envisioning the Contemporary Art Canon

Re-envisioning the Contemporary Art Canon
Author: Ruth E Iskin
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 311
Release: 2016-12-08
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1317275047

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Re-envisioning the Contemporary Art Canon: Perspectives in a Global World seeks to dissect and interrogate the nature of the present-day art field, which has experienced dramatic shifts in the past 50 years. In discussions of the canon of art history, the notion of ‘inclusiveness’, both at the level of rhetoric and as a desired practice is on the rise and gradually replacing talk of ‘exclusion’, which dominated critiques of the canon up until two decades ago. The art field has dramatically, if insufficiently, changed in the half-century since the first protests and critiques of the exclusion of ‘others’ from the art canon. With increased globalization and shifting geopolitics, the art field is expanding beyond its Euro-American focus, as is particularly evident in the large-scale international biennales now held all over the globe. Are canons and counter-canons still relevant? Can they be re-envisioned rather than merely revised? Following an introduction that discusses these issues, thirteen newly commissioned essays present case studies of consecration in the contemporary art field, and three commissioned discussions present diverse positions on issues of the canon and consecration processes today. This volume will be of interest to instructors and students of contemporary art, art history, and museum and curatorial studies.

Shaping the Superman

Shaping the Superman
Author: J. A. Mangan
Publisher: Taylor & Francis US
Total Pages: 236
Release: 1999
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780714680132

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This is a study of masculinity as a metaphor and especially of the muscular male body as a moral symbol. It explores the Nazi's preoccupation with the male body as an icon of political power, and the ideology and theories which propelled it.

Modernist Aesthetics in Transition

Modernist Aesthetics in Transition
Author: Deborah Ascher Barnstone
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2024
Genre: Art and society
ISBN: 9781350442566

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"Offering a fresh perspective on the cultural transition between Weimar- and National Socialist-era Germany, this interdisciplinary volume explores the fate of modernism following the censorship of the Nazi years. Presenting essays on architecture, painting, cabaret, typography, and commercial design, the volume explores how modern styles like New Vision photography, Dada, and Neue Sachlichkeit coexisted with established artistic modes and generated a productive tension that persisted during the Nazi era. Bridging photography, moving image, and painting, Aesthetics in Transition provides a deeper understanding of the complex interplay between tradition and modernity in early-20th-century Germany"--

The Photomontages of Hannah Höch

The Photomontages of Hannah Höch
Author: Hannah Höch
Publisher:
Total Pages: 238
Release: 1996
Genre: Photography
ISBN:

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Here, in the first comprehensive survey of her work by an American museum, authors Peter Boswell, Maria Makela, and Carolyn Lanchner survey the full scope of Hoch's half-century of experimentation in photomontage - from her politically charged early works and intimate psychological portraits of the Weimar era to her later forays into surrealism and abstraction.

Modern Art Despite Modernism

Modern Art Despite Modernism
Author: Robert Storr
Publisher:
Total Pages: 247
Release: 2000
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780870700316

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Essay by Robert Storr. Foreword by Glenn D. Lowry.

Kandinsky Compositions

Kandinsky Compositions
Author: Magdalena Dabrowski
Publisher:
Total Pages: 134
Release: 1995
Genre: Art
ISBN:

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Essay by Magdalena Dabrowski. Foreword by Richard E. Oldenburg.