Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.31 (711 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 082235313X |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 232 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2013-05-19 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
Throughout, she gives readers welcoming points of entry into artworks that they may at first find off-putting or confrontational. They deploy the complexity of emotion to measure the weight of history, and to deepen our sense of where and how politics happens in contemporary art. Discussing performance art, painting, and photography, Doyle provides new perspectives on artists including Ron Athey, Aliza Shvarts, Thomas Eakins, James Luna, Carrie Mae Weems, and David Wojnarowicz. Confronting the challenge of writing about difficult works of art, she shows how these artists work with feelings as a means to question our assumptions about identity, intimacy, and expression. In Hold It Against Me, Jennifer Doyle explores the relationship between difficulty and emotion in contemporary art, treating emotion as an artist's medium. Doyle offers new insight into how the discourse of controversy serves to shut down discussion about this side of contemporary art practice, and counters with a critical language that allows the reader to accept emotional intensity in order to learn from it.. She encourages readers to examine the ways in which works of art challenge how we experience not only the artist's feelings, but our own. Doyle expl
Very interesting account of difficult art This is a very engagingly written book. The topic of difficulty in contemporary art is a really important topic to address and hopefully this will open up this topic for further discussion. The main focus is difficult American performance art (with particular attention to queer art) and how it is treated in art criticism or rather how it hasn't been treated. Emotion is only touched on, the main issue is tackling difficulty.. "Why IS this art so difficult?" And why is it more difficult than other work with which it has lot in common?An engaging, descriptive examination of the question by someone who's spent a lot of time thinking about it.. danielle said Really useful and engaging. This book has a lot of insight and is written in a pretty down to earth style for an academic book.
Jennifer Doyle thinks about difficult art in a way that refreshes its historical impact; she also revitalizes what criticism can do to extend the event that its objects have been to new ethical, political, and aesthetic domains.". "Hold It Against Me is forceful and memorable