Full Description
This edited volume explores the notion of "artifice" in modern visual culture, ranging from the eighteenth century to the present, in countries around the globe.
Artifice has been regarded as a primarily Western phenomenon, playing as it does a central role in European art theory since the Renaissance. This volume proposes that artifice is better understood as a transcultural artistic phenomenon and requires far broader conceptualization across international contexts. It acquaints readers with works of art, visual modes of communication, and concepts originating in France, Germany, the United States, Japan, and China, and includes painting, sculpture, drawings, prints, photographs, film, and virtual reality/augmented reality (VR/AR) objects. Contributors demonstrate how practices of artifice function as both symbol and form, in parallel and divergent ways, in multiple cultural settings.
The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual culture, and material culture.
Contents
Part 1 Artifice and Spectatorship 1. Fractured Perception: Drawings, Prints, and Verres Casses 2. Rococo Aesthetics and the Problem of Trompe l'Oeil 3. Degas's "Histories" and the Foreshadowing Artifice of Self-Candaulism Part 2 Haptic Illusions 4. Suggestive Surfaces: The Self-Referential Texture of Woodgrain in Japanese Woodblock Prints 5. Reconsidering the Origins of Yongzheng Guwantu: From the Aniconic Period to Vimalakīrtinirdeśa Sūtra 6. Fooling Art History: John F. Peto and William Harnett Part 3 Alternative Realities 7. First Nations' Wampum Belts: A Colonial Vision of Artifice in Eighteenth-Century New France 8. "An Opportunity to Grapple with the Picture Plane...": The Stereo-Illusion's History of Frustration 9. Self-Reference and Medium-Reference in Virtual Reality and Trompe l'Oeil
