Unseparate - (Sensing Media: Aesthetics, Philosophy, and Cultures of Media) by Steven Henry Madoff

About the Book

"For more than a century, European modernist art has been written about as a profound expression of fragmentation-of an alienated world in pieces. In this book, critic and curator Steven Henry Madoff proposes that there was always another artistic intention present among the modernists that offered visions of wholeness in the face of anomie brought on by wars and new technologies. From the mid-nineteenth century, when Richard Wagner championed his idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk (the total work of art), to the rise of the Bauhaus out of the ruins of World War I as the most influential art school of the twentieth century, the urge to connect different art forms into single, unified works points toward our own omnipresent culture of networks and has given rise, over the last sixty years, to such artistic practices as installation and performance art that also combine many kinds of art into one-dreams of interconnectivity binding disparate elements together. Using the contemporary lens of network aesthetics to rethink the artworks of some of the towering figures of European modernism, including Paul Câezanne, Marcel Duchamp, Hugo Ball, and Walter Gropius, this book revises standard readings of this historical art, providing not only a way to more deeply understand the art of the present, but also as a way to look at and reimagine our own society in a time of increasingly divisive turmoil"--

Book Synopsis

Art historian and critic Steven Henry Madoff offers a contemporary reframing of modernist art and the way it presages installation and performance art

For more than a century, European modernist art has been written about as a profound expression of fragmentation--of an alienated world in pieces. In Unseparate, Steven Henry Madoff proposes that there was always another artistic intention present among the modernists, offering visions of wholeness in the face of the instability and alienation brought on by war and new technologies.

Blending history, philosophy, and media theory, Madoff argues that from the mid-nineteenth century--when Richard Wagner championed his idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk (the total work of art)--to the rise of the Bauhaus, the urge to connect different art forms into single, unified works anticipates our contemporary networked culture.

Madoff revisits the artworks and projects of such leading figures of European modernism as Paul Cézanne, Marcel Duchamp, Hugo Ball, and Walter Gropius, proposing that their various ambitions for totality were both aesthetically beneficent and politically dangerous. This striking contemporary rethinking gives readers a way to understand modernism's complex history more fully. Modernism, seen through the lens of network aesthetics and its emphasis on interconnectivity, presages many different forms of contemporary art, including installation and performance art. Further, as Madoff reveals, the modernist drive for wholeness and unity can give us a way to look at our own increasingly divisive society.

About the Author

Steven Henry Madoff is the founding chair of the Masters in Curatorial Practice program at the School of Visual Arts in New York and a former senior critic at Yale University's School of Art. His writing has been translated into many languages and he lectures internationally on contemporary art and education.