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Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the end of the Century

Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the end of the Century
Library Shelf Location 05.FOST
Publication Date 1996
Description In The Return of the Real Hal Foster discusses the development of art and theory since 1960, and reorders the relation between prewar and postwar avant-gardes. Opposed to the assumption that contemporary art is somehow belated, he argues that the avant-garde returns to us from the future, repositioned by innovative practice in the present. And he poses this retroactive model of art and theory against the reactionary undoing of progressive culture that is pervasive today. After the models of art-as-text in the 1970s and art-as-simulacrum in the 1980s; Foster suggests that we are now witness to a return to the real -- to art and theory grounded in the materiality of actual bodies and social sites: If The Return of the Real begins with a new narrative of the historical avant-garde; it concludes with an original reading of this contemporary situation -- and what it portends for future practices of art and theory, culture and politics. Hal Foster is Townsend Martin '17 Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. He is the author of The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century and Compulsive Beauty (both MIT Press).
ISBN 0262561077
Quantity 1
Pages 299
Author Hal Foster
Format Paperback
Publisher MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.
Category Theory
Keywords Ethnography, Minimalism, Postmodernism, Avant-garde
Language English

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