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The tears of things : melancholy and physical objects

By: Publication details: Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, ©2006.Description: xi, 200 pages : illustrations (some color) ; 23 cmISBN:
  • 0816646317
  • 9780816646319
  • 0816646309
  • 9780816646302
Subject(s): LOC classification:
  • B828.45
Contents:
Words and the murder of the thing -- Painting and the gaze of the object -- Sculpture and the broken tool -- Possessed objects -- Still life: a user's manual -- Museal -- The dream narratives of debris -- Last things.
Summary: We surround ourselves with material things that are invested with memories but can only stand for what we have lost. Physical objects—such as one’s own body—situate and define us; yet at the same time they are fundamentally indifferent to us. The melancholy of this rift is a rich source of inspiration for artists. Peter Schwenger deftly weaves together philosophical and psychoanalytical theory with artistic practice. Concerned in part with the act of collecting, The Tears of Things is itself a collection of exemplary art objects—literary and cultural attempts to control and possess things—including paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe and Rene; Magritte; sculpture by Louise Bourgeois and Marcel Duchamp; Joseph Cornell’s boxes; Edward Gorey’s graphic art; fiction by Virginia Woolf, Georges Perec, and Louise Erdrich; the hallucinatory encyclopedias of Jorge Luis Borges and Luigi Serafini; and the corpse photographs of Joel Peter Witkin. However, these representations of objects perpetually fall short of our aspirations. Schwenger examines what is left over—debris and waste—and asks what art can make of these. What emerges is not an art that reassembles but one that questions what it means to assemble in the first place. Contained in this catalog of waste is that ultimate still life, the cadaver, where the subject-object dichotomy receives its final ironic reconciliation.
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Item type Current library Collection Call number Status Date due Barcode
Book Book Whitecliffe Library General Shelves General B 828 SCH (Browse shelf(Opens below)) Issued 23/04/2024 0016742

Includes bibliographical references (pages 185-193) and index.

Words and the murder of the thing -- Painting and the gaze of the object -- Sculpture and the broken tool -- Possessed objects -- Still life: a user's manual -- Museal -- The dream narratives of debris -- Last things.

We surround ourselves with material things that are invested with memories but can only stand for what we have lost. Physical objects—such as one’s own body—situate and define us; yet at the same time they are fundamentally indifferent to us. The melancholy of this rift is a rich source of inspiration for artists.

Peter Schwenger deftly weaves together philosophical and psychoanalytical theory with artistic practice. Concerned in part with the act of collecting, The Tears of Things is itself a collection of exemplary art objects—literary and cultural attempts to control and possess things—including paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe and Rene; Magritte; sculpture by Louise Bourgeois and Marcel Duchamp; Joseph Cornell’s boxes; Edward Gorey’s graphic art; fiction by Virginia Woolf, Georges Perec, and Louise Erdrich; the hallucinatory encyclopedias of Jorge Luis Borges and Luigi Serafini; and the corpse photographs of Joel Peter Witkin.

However, these representations of objects perpetually fall short of our aspirations. Schwenger examines what is left over—debris and waste—and asks what art can make of these. What emerges is not an art that reassembles but one that questions what it means to assemble in the first place. Contained in this catalog of waste is that ultimate still life, the cadaver, where the subject-object dichotomy receives its final ironic reconciliation.

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