1st Edition
The Routledge Companion to Marxisms in Art History
This companion is an essential contribution to the study of historical materialism in general and the social history of art in particular.
Each chapter in the collection focuses on a key figure, concept or historical epoch. Increasingly, scholars adopt an array of Marxist methods intertwined with a host of other theoretical practices, particularly the historiography of key issues regarding hegemony, ideology and identity. Ideological issues of connoisseurship, patronage and analyses of the artwork as a form of labor and leisure are essential to the practice of Marxisms in art history. This collection spotlights a plurality of Marxian theories in which the ideas of such figures as Walter Benjamin, Guy Debord, T.J. Clark and many others are debated and developed through analyses of the socio-historical conditions that impact how art is produced, circulated and received. This ultimately underscores that the historical contextualization of artworks and their "markets" within a class-based society is crucial for writing socially engaged art history.
The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual studies, visual sociology, communication studies, and the sociology of art.
Introduction
Tijen Tunali and Brian Winkenweder
PART 1 Key Figures
1. Karl Marx’s 1857 “Introduction” to the Grundrisse and the Social History of Art
Dominic Rahtz
2. Arnold Hauser: The Social History of Art and Beyond
Jim Berryman
3. Ugly and Out of Sight: Reconsidering the Irrational in Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Allegory
Julian Adoff
4. Meyer Schapiro and the Value of Modern Art
Jody Patterson
5. Georg Lukács: Marxism and Politics of Form
Alexander Potts
6. Henri Lefebvre and Marxist Art History
Paul B. Jaskot
7. Herbert Marcuse’s “Repressive Desublimation” and Richard Hamilton’s “Healthy Vigor"
Brian Winkenweder
8. Guy Debord and Marxist Art History
Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen
9. Different Marxist Histories of Art Post-1968: T.J. Clark and O.K. Werckmeister
Warren Carter
PART 2 Key Terms
10. Concepts of Labor in Marxist Art History
Dave Beech
11. “Time’s Carcass”: Art History, Capitalism and Temporality
Steve Edwards
12. Artistic Use Value: Art, Aesthetics, Culture and the Commons
Pascal Gielen
13. Deskilling
Kim Charnley
14. Romantic Anticapitalism
Andrew Hemingway
15. Marxism, Feminism and Art History
Angela Dimitrakaki
16. Do It Yourself: Objective Form, Territory of Critical Struggle
Luiz Renato Martins
PART 3 Marxisms Applied
17. Magritte, Marxism, Modern Art
Sandra Zalman
18. “No Environment” Modernism: Harold Rosenberg’s Theory of Uneven and Combined Development
E.C. Feiss
19. Bureaucracy and Charisma: Chris Burden and the Figure of the University Artist
Allison Myers
20. Equipo Comunicacion: Marxism, Avant-garde and a Collective Publishing Venture for Late Francoism to the Spanish Transition (1969-1979)
Paula Barreiro López and Juan Albarrán Diego
21. Affect, Attachment, and Loss: The Material Objects of Art History and Psychoanalysis
Lynn M. Somers
22. Of Rocks and Phantasmatic Hard Places: Art Criticism in the 1970s and 1980s
Craig Peariso
23. Soviet Thaw-era Marxism: Revision of Stalin-era Discourse on Aesthetics and Art History
Krista Kodres
24. Bogdanov, Prolekult, and Working-Class Culture in Revolutionary Russia
Grant Kester
25. Realism and the Politics of Emancipation in the 1920s and 1930s Yugoslavia
Bojana Videkanic
26. How to Follow Marx with Class? Transformation and Marxist Analysis of Post-Communist Art in a Post-Communist Europe
Magdalena Radomska
27. Invisible Art Work, or Until When Will We Reproduce the Exploitation of Labor in the Arts?
Katja Praznik
28. Contemporary Art and the Neoliberal Global Art World: The People’s Republic of China and Palestine as Exemplars
Jonathan Harris
29. Museums After Value-Form Theory
Nizan Shaked
30. The Vision and Practice of Zapatismo and the Zapatista Murals in Chiapas
Tijen Tunali
PART 4 Marxist Methods in the Digital Age
31. The Courbet Conundrum, and the Phantom Archive of Activist Art
Gregory Sholette
32. Intermediality in Action: Tracing Invisible Processes in Socio-Critical Video Art
Helen Westgeest
33. The Visual Culture of Gaming
Jamie Woodcock
34. Speculation
Andrew Murray
Biography
Tijen Tunali is a research fellow at the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies at Aarhus University.
Brian Winkenweder is Professor of Art History and Chair of the Art Department at Linfield University.
