The Psychology Of Contemporary Art

This book examines how contemporary artworks can affect our psychology, producing immersive experiences.

Examines how contemporary artworks can affect our psychology, producing immersive experiences.

The Art of Experience provides an interdisciplinary analysis of selected plays from Ireland’s premier female playwright, Marina Carr. Dagmara Gizło explores the transformative impact of a theatrical experience in which interdisciplinary boundaries must be crossed. This book demonstrates that theatre is therapeutic and therapy is theatrical. The role of emotions, cognitions, and empathy in the theatrical experience is investigated throughout. Dagmara Gizło utilises the methodological tools stemming from modern empirically grounded psychology (such as cognitive-behavioural therapy or CBT) to the study of theatre’s transformative potential. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of theatre, performance, and literature, and will be a fascinating read for those at the intersection of cognitive studies and the humanities.

This ground-breaking book provides a unique insight into artistic creativity that lays the foundation for a new theory. Through a review of documents such as essays, published interviews, lecture notes, and more, the book uses case studies of six contemporary artists to provide a detailed phenomenological study of artistic creativity. The book offers a narrative account of six contemporary artists and their ways of approaching art-making. Through comprehensive accounts based on the individual artist's descriptions, the book reveals an existential dimension of art-making that explores the inspirational moment, the state of mind during creativity, how creativity can originate in a spontaneous stream of consciousness and how emotions play a major role in the creative process. The book sets out a unique understanding of artistic creativity as an alternative to the prevailing cognitive conceptions within psychology. Offering novel insights into how art is created and can influence the human psyche, the book will primarily appeal to academics, scholars, and post-graduate students within the area of creativity research, psychological aesthetics, and the psychology of art, as well as those with an interest in art and artistic work.

The history of modern art is often told through aesthetic breakthroughs that sync well with cultural and political change. From Courbet to Picasso, from Malevich to Warhol, it is accepted that art tracks the disruptions of industrialization, fascism, revolution, and war. Yet filtering the history of modern art only through catastrophic events cannot account for the subtle developments that lead to the profound confusion at the heart of contemporary art. In Industry and Intelligence, the artist Liam Gillick writes a nuanced genealogy to help us appreciate contemporary art's engagement with history even when it seems apathetic or blind to current events. Taking a broad view of artistic creation from 1820 to today, Gillick follows the response of artists to incremental developments in science, politics, and technology. The great innovations and dislocations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have their place in this timeline, but their traces are alternately amplified and diminished as Gillick moves through artistic reactions to liberalism, mass manufacturing, psychology, nuclear physics, automobiles, and a host of other advances. He intimately ties the origins of contemporary art to the social and technological adjustments of modern life, which artists struggled to incorporate truthfully into their works.

In hyperdrawing: beyond the lines of contemporary art, authors and artists come together to explore the potential of what drawing in contemporary art theory and practice might become. In this follow-up to 2007's drawing now: between the lines of contemporary art, Phil Sawdon and Russell Marshall, two of the current directors of TRACEY, curate contemporary drawing within fine art practice from 2006 through to 2010. Four essays and images from 33 international artists collectively explore the boundaries of the hyperdrawing space, investigating in essence what lies beyond drawing - images that use traditional materials or subjects whilst also pushing beyond the traditional, employing sound, light, time, space and technology. Over and above traditional views and practices, the authors and artists in this book recognise and embrace the opportunities inherent in the essential ambiguity of drawing. Practitioners of hyperreal works, 2D3D4D pieces and installations that push beyond photorealism all find their place within this new conception of hyperdrawing as techne, a productive space no longer limited by spatial boundaries.Artists including Catherine Bertola, Layla Curtis, Garrett Phelan, Suzanne Treister and Ulrich Vogl alongside the essays of Emma Cocker, Siun Hanrahan and Marsha Meskimmon provide a contemporary view in both visual and written form of how ambiguity can be used as a strategic approach in drawing research and practice. A gallery in book form, hyperdrawing takes drawing beyond the interaction of pencil and paper and traces contemporary adventures in multiple dimensions and alternate realities.

Igor Zabel (1958–2005) was a Slovenian curator, writer, and cultural theorist. This important translation of his writings will enrich the international critical field through Zabel's extraordinary analytical and emphatic thinking and writing.As well as texts dealing with international issues, his writings can serve as a methodology model for research into Eastern European art practices, which often share common stand points and problems.The selected texts are divided into four chapters: East-West and Between (dialogue and perception of the Other in the context of the complex relations established after the fall of the Wall in 1989), Strategies and Spaces of Art (strategies of representation and theories of display, the role of the curator, and the new understanding of the white cube), Ad Personam (individual artists and art from Socialist Realism and conceptualism to postmodernism and contextual art, particularly in Slovenia and South-Eastern Europe), and Extras (selected columns on arts and culture).

Time, Duration and Change in Contemporary Art presents a major study of time as a key aesthetic dimension of recent art practices. This book explores different aspects of time across a broad range of artistic media and draws on recent movements in philosophy, science, and technology to show how artists generate temporal experiences that resist the standardized time of modernity: Olafur Eliasson?s melting icebergs produce fragile temporal ecologies; Marina Abramovi??s performances test the durations of the human body; Christian Marclay?s The Clock conflates past and present chronologies. This book examines alternative frameworks of time, duration, and change in prominent philosophical, scientific, and technological traditions, including physics, psychology, phenomenology, neuroscience, media theory, and selected environmental sciences. It suggests that art makes a crucial contribution to these discourses not by?visualizing? time, but by entangling viewers in different sensory, material, and imaginary temporalities.