Synopses & Reviews
Inspired by the Sheldon Museum of Artand#8217;s holdings in geometric abstraction, this book introduces adventurous new thinking about a visual approach that has captivated both artists and viewers for more than a century. Four richly illustrated essays explore the European genesis of geometric abstraction, its translation into an American context, and its current direction, charting the styleand#8217;s aesthetic, intellectual, and social implications.
Sharon L. Kennedyand#8217;s essay draws on the Sheldonand#8217;s collection to trace the styleand#8217;s beginnings and its various transformations by twentieth-century American artists. Peter Halley invokes contemporary theory in rethinking how postmodern artists engage with geometry while challenging its most basic presumptions. Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe delves into the work of four contemporary artists who are taking geometry inand#160;new directions, and Jorge Daniel Veneciano reveals the persistent manner in which theorists and defenders of geometric abstraction have obscured aspects of its history and contributed to the esoteric aura of modern art.
Featured throughout are full-color reproductions of art from both the Sheldon and private collections, including paintings, sculptures, and works on paper by diverse artists such as Ilya Bolotowsky, Carmen Herrera, Donald Judd, Agnes Martin, Piet Mondrian, Odili Donald Odita, Frank Stella, and Charmion von Wiegand.
Review
"The Geometric Unconscious is an excellent addition to the literature about abstract art."and#8212;Craig Adock,and#160; Great Plains Quarterly
Synopsis
Art and technology have been converging rapidly in the past few years; an important example of this convergence is the alliance of neuroscience with aesthetics, which has produced the new field of neuroaesthetics.
Irving Massey examines this alliance, in large part to allay the fears of artists and audiences alike that brain science may explain away the arts. The first part of the book shows how neuroscience can enhance our understanding of certain features of art. The second part of the book illustrates a humanistic approach to the arts; it is written entirely without recourse to neuroscience, in order to show the differences in methodology between the two approaches. The humanistic style is marked particularly by immersion in the individual work and by evaluation, rather than by detachment in the search for generalizations. In the final section Massey argues that, despite these differences, once the reality of imagination is accepted neuroscience can be seen as the collaborator, not the inquisitor, of the arts.
About the Author
Jorge Daniel Veneciano is the director of the Sheldon Museum of Art. He is the coeditor of Fabulous Harlequin: ORLAN and the Patchwork Self (Nebraska, 2010) and the editor of Neo-Constructivism: Art, Architecture, and Activism and Playand#8217;s the Thing: Reading the Art of Jun Kaneko.