1st Edition

Found Sculpture and Photography from Surrealism to Contemporary Art

Edited By Anna Dezeuze, Julia Kelly Copyright 2013
    216 Pages
    by Routledge

    216 Pages
    by Routledge

    Taking its departure point from the 1933 surrealist photographs of ’involuntary sculptures’ by Brassaï and Dalí, Found Sculpture and Photography from Surrealism to Contemporary Art offers fresh perspectives on the sculptural object by relating it to both surrealist concerns with chance and the crucial role of photography in framing the everyday. This collection of essays questions the nature of sculptural practice, looking to forms of production and reproduction that blur the boundaries between things that are made and things that are found. One of the book’s central themes is the interplay of presence and absence in sculpture, as it is highlighted, disrupted, or multiplied through photography’s indexical nature. The essays examine the surrealist three-dimensional object, its relation to and transformation through photographs, as well as the enduring legacies of such concerns for the artwork’s materiality and temporality in performance and conceptual practices from the 1960s through the present. Found Sculpture and Photography sheds new light on the shifts in status of the art object, challenging the specificity of visual practices, pursuing a radical interrogation of agency in modern and contemporary practices, and exploring the boundaries between art and everyday life.

    Contents: Introduction: involuntary sculpture: process, photography and the ephemeral object, Anna Dezeuze and Julia Kelly; Voluntary and involuntary sculpture, Steven Harris; The found, the made and the functional: surrealism, objects and sculpture, Julia Kelly; Close-up on the object: attending to the films of Man Ray, Samantha Lackey; Kaprow’s vector, Martha Buskirk; Richard Wentworth’s Making Do, Getting By and the elusive everyday, Anna Dezeuze; In formation: on Terry Fox’s Children’s Tapes, Carrie Lambert-Beatty; Documents, dreams and fantasies: passages through the involuntary from photography to sculpture in the work of Mike Kelley, John C. Welchman; Chance/lens (subversive translation), Simon Baker; Involuntary photography, Margaret Iversen; Bibliography; Index.

    Biography

    Anna Dezeuze is Lecturer in Art History at the Ecole Supérieure d’Art et de Design Marseille-Méditerranée in Marseilles, France.

    Julia Kelly is a researcher at the University of Hull, UK.

    '... this nuanced and thoughtful collection offers an engaging account of surrealism as a rich and important vein of twentieth-century photographic and sculptural practice.' Modernism-Modernity