Site-Writing

The Architecture of Art Criticism

Jane Rendell author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

Published:11th Jan '11

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Site-Writing cover

Shows what happens when discussions concerning situatedness and site-specificity enter the writing of art criticism. This title explores the sites such as the material, emotional, political and conceptual settings of the artwork's construction, exhibition and documentation, as well as those remembered, dreamed and imagined.

The prominent cultural critic Mieke Bal defines the new discipline of 'art writing' as a fresh mode of criticism, which aims to 'put the art first'. Following this definition, "Site-Writing: The Architecture of Art Criticism" puts the sites of the critic's engagement with art first. The book puts into shape what happens when discussions concerning situatedness and site-specificity enter the writing of art criticism. The sites explored are the material, emotional, political and conceptual settings of the artwork's construction, exhibition and documentation, as well as those remembered, dreamed and imagined. Through five different spatial configurations - both psychic and architectural - "Site-Writing" explores artworks by artists as diverse as Jananne Al-Ani, Elina Brotherus, Nathan Coley, Tracey Emin, Christina Iglesias and Do-Ho Suh, aiming to adapt such psychoanalytic ways of working as free association and conjectural interpretation to art criticism.

'A timely and highly significant contribution to academic and professional fields of contemporary art, Rendell's Site-Writing offers the first substantial exploration of the situatedness of engagement with art. Here Rendell combines exemplary academic argument with immersive critical analysis of contemporary works. It is this distinctive voice which sets Rendell apart from her contemporaries and makes Site-Writing an essential volume for anyone interested in the specificity of viewing and engaging with, producing and writing about art.' - Claire Doherty, Director, Situations, University of the West of England, Bristol; 'Jane Rendell is a nomadic theorist and a theoretical nomad, whose formidable intellect has produced books on the interstitial relationship between space and feminism, place and psyche, city and citizen, architecture and art. Asking, where does biography end and theory begin?A" Rendell's architectonics of criticism performs a praxis that negotiates the personal and the universal. This discloses the critic in all of us, who, in facing the creative work, is confronted with the other (both distant and near), compelling us to reconstruct our own world and therefore the very space we occupy.' - Professor Dorita Hannah, Spatial Design, Massey University College of Creative Arts

ISBN: 9781845119997

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 463g

328 pages