Overview
- Explains the aesthetic and political affordances, functions, and affects of a range of artistic expressions that are marked by illegibility or semi-legibility
- Becomes the first book to map out a coherent theory of indistinct art, despite the abundance of examples of opaque images and sounds in our audiovisual culture
- Intervenes in current debates around regimes of visibility and surveillance by showing how indistinct aesthetics may offer a critique of the positivist impulse informing these regimes
- Demonstrates how the notion of ethical value is closely tied to opacity in art
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About this book
This is the first book to offer a systematic account of the concept of opacity in the aesthetic field. Engaging with works by Ernie Gehr, John Akomfrah, Matt Saunders, David Lynch, Trevor Paglen, Zach Blas, and Low, the study considers the cultural, epistemological, and ethical values of images and sounds that are fuzzy, indeterminate, distorted, degraded, or otherwise indistinct. Rethinking Art and Visual Culture shows how opaque forms of art address problems of mediation, knowledge, and information. It also intervenes in current debates about new systems of visibility and surveillance by explaining how indefinite art provides a critique of the positivist drive behind these regimes. A timely contribution to media theory, cinema studies, American studies, and aesthetics, the book presents a novel and extensive analysis of the politics of transparency.
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Keywords
Table of contents (9 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Asbjørn Skarsvåg Grønstad is a film scholar and professor of Visual Culture at the University of Bergen, Norway. He is founding director of the Nomadikon Center for Visual Culture and the author/editor of ten books, the most recent of which are Gestures of Seeing in Film, Video and Drawing (co-edited with Henrik Gustafsson & Øyvind Vågnes, 2016), Film and the Ethical Imagination (Palgrave 2016), and Invisibility in Visual and Material Culture (co-edited with Øyvind Vågnes, Palgrave 2019). Grønstad is also a founding editor of the journal Ekphrasis: Nordic Journal of Visual Culture.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Rethinking Art and Visual Culture
Book Subtitle: The Poetics of Opacity
Authors: Asbjørn Skarsvåg Grønstad
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46176-8
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-46175-1Published: 30 October 2020
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-46178-2Published: 30 October 2021
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-46176-8Published: 29 October 2020
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: IX, 196
Number of Illustrations: 1 b/w illustrations, 5 illustrations in colour
Topics: Audio-Visual Culture, Arts, Poetry and Poetics