But as art history itself is being reshaped by the culture of technology, his nuanced meditations from the 1950s on the intricate intersection of technology and art gain heightened value. The concrete objects that Francastel examines are for the most part from the architecture and design of the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century. Through them he engages his central problem: the abrupt historical collision between traditional symbol-making activities of human society and the appearance in the nineteenth century of unprecedented technological and industrial capabilities and forms.

6. Laziness and Civilization: Picturing Sites of Social Control -- Conclusion: Twentieth-Century Echoes -- Notes -- Index -- About the Author -- Back Cover

The author shows how museum culture offers a unique vantage point on the 19th and 20th centuries' preoccupation with history and subjectivity, and demonstrates how the constitution of the aesthetic provides insight into the realms of technology, industrial culture, architecture, and ethics.

The first comprehensive assemblage in the West of paintings on this subject, the Robert H. Ellsworth Collection comprises works in the classical Chinese medium of ink on paper and in the traditional formats of scrolls, album leaves, and fans."--BOOK JACKET.

This study analyzes the impact of color-making technologies on the visual culture of nineteenth-century France, from the early commercialization of synthetic dyes to the Lumière brothers’ perfection of the autochrome color photography process. Focusing on Impressionist art, Laura Anne Kalba examines the importance of dyes produced in the second half of the nineteenth century to the vision of artists such as Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Claude Monet. The proliferation of vibrant new colors in France during this time challenged popular understandings of realism, abstraction, and fantasy in the realms of fine art and popular culture. More than simply adding a touch of spectacle to everyday life, Kalba shows, these bright, varied colors came to define the development of a consumer culture increasingly based on the sensual appeal of color. Impressionism—emerging at a time when inexpensively produced color functioned as one of the principal means by and through which people understood modes of visual perception and signification—mirrored and mediated this change, shaping the ways in which people made sense of both modern life and modern art. Demonstrating the central importance of color history and technologies to the study of visuality, Color in the Age of Impressionism adds a dynamic new layer to our understanding of visual and material culture.

An investigation of artists' engagement with technical systems, tracing art historical lineages that connect works of different periods. “Machine art” is neither a movement nor a genre, but encompasses diverse ways in which artists engage with technical systems. In this book, Andreas Broeckmann examines a variety of twentieth- and early twenty-first-century artworks that articulate people's relationships with machines. In the course of his investigation, Broeckmann traces historical lineages that connect art of different periods, looking for continuities that link works from the end of the century to developments in the 1950s and 1960s and to works by avant-garde artists in the 1910s and 1920s. An art historical perspective, he argues, might change our views of recent works that seem to be driven by new media technologies but that in fact continue a century-old artistic exploration. Broeckmann investigates critical aspects of machine aesthetics that characterized machine art until the 1960s and then turns to specific domains of artistic engagement with technology: algorithms and machine autonomy, looking in particular at the work of the Canadian artist David Rokeby; vision and image, and the advent of technical imaging; and the human body, using the work of the Australian artist Stelarc as an entry point to art that couples the machine to the body, mechanically or cybernetically. Finally, Broeckmann argues that systems thinking and ecology have brought about a fundamental shift in the meaning of technology, which has brought with it a rethinking of human subjectivity. He examines a range of artworks, including those by the Japanese artist Seiko Mikami, whose work exemplifies the shift.

Illustrations created in France to celebrate the turn of the century, show scenes depicting the future of air travel, helicopters, undersea colonies, agriculture and the radio

Craft practice has a rich history and remains vibrant, sustaining communities while negotiating cultures within local or international contexts. More than two centuries of industrialization have not extinguished handmade goods; rather, the broader force of industrialization has redefined and continues to define the context of creation, deployment and use of craft objects. With object study at the core, this book brings together a collection of essays that address the past and present of craft production, its use and meaning within a range of community settings from the Huron Wendat of colonial Quebec to the Girls? Friendly Society of twentieth-century England. The making of handcrafted objects has and continues to flourish despite the powerful juggernaut of global industrialization, whether inspired by a calculated refutation of industrial sameness, an essential means to sustain a cultural community under threat, or a rejection of the imposed definitions by a dominant culture. The broader effects of urbanizing, imperial and globalizing projects shape the multiple contexts of interaction and resistance that can define craft ventures through place and time. By attending to the political histories of craft objects and their makers, over the last few centuries, these essays reveal the creative persistence of various hand mediums and the material debates they represented.

Since 1900, the connections between art and technology with nature have become increasingly inextricable. Through a selection of innovative readings by international scholars, this book presents the first investigation of the intersections between art, technology and nature in post-medieval times. Transdisciplinary in approach, this volume?s 14 essays explore art, technology and nature?s shifting constellations that are discernible at the micro level and as part of a larger chronological pattern. Included are subjects ranging from Renaissance wooden dolls, science in the Italian art academies, and artisanal epistemologies in the followers of Leonardo, to Surrealism and its precursors in Mannerist grotesques and the Wunderkammer, eighteenth-century plant printing, the climate and its artistic presentations from Constable to Olafur Eliasson, and the hermeneutics of bioart. In their comprehensive introduction, editors Camilla Skovbjerg Paldam and Jacob Wamberg trace the Kantian heritage of radically separating art and technology, and inserting both at a distance to nature, suggesting this was a transient chapter in history. Thus, they argue, the present renegotiation between art, technology and nature is reminiscent of the ancient and medieval periods, in which art and technology were categorized as aspects of a common area of cultivated products and their methods (the Latin ars, the Greek techne), an area moreover supposed to imitate the creative forces of nature.