The Return of the Real

The Return of the Real The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century - October Books

Paperback (31 Oct 1996)

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Publisher's Synopsis

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-gard, it concludes with an original reading of this contemporary situation-and what it portends for future practices of art and theory, culture and politics.

Book information

ISBN: 9780262561075
Publisher: The MIT Press
Imprint: The MIT Press
Pub date:
DEWEY: 701.1809045
DEWEY edition: 23
Language: English
Number of pages: 328
Weight: 596g
Height: 228mm
Width: 177mm
Spine width: 15mm