Full Description
This title was first published in 2000. "Work and the Image", published in two volumes, addresses a critical theme in contemporary social and cultural debates whose place in visual representation has been neglected. Ranging from Greek pottery to contemporary performance, and exploring a breadth of geo-national perspectives including those of France, Britain, Hungary, Soviet Russia, the Ukraine, Siberia and Germany, the essays provide a challenging reconsideration of the image of work, the meaning of the work process, and the complex issues around artistic activity as itself a form of work even as it offers a representation of labour. Volume I includes interdisciplinary case studies which plot the changing definitions of work as labour, craft, social relations and a source of historical identity, while analyzing the role of visual representation in their formation and transformation. The diverse essays cover such topics as anti-slavery movements and enunciation of workers' rights, revolutionary politics, relations of class and gender, industrial masculinities and women's rural sociality, unemployment and subjectivity, Stalinist aesthetics and nationalist identities.
Contents
Introduction; 1: A Greek vase-painting: comments on the nature of craftsmanship?; 2: Aux armes et aux arts! Blacksmiths at the National Convention; 3: 'The cook, the thief, his wife and her lover': LaVille-Leroulx's Portrait de Négresse and the signs of misrecognition; 4: Death and the worker: Rethel in 1849; 5: Gender and the ideology of capitalism: William Bell Scott's Iron and Coal; 6: Time and work-discipline in Pissarro; 7: Mihály Biró's Népszava poster and the emergence of Tendenzkunst; 8: A re-vision of Ukrainian identity: images of labouring peasant women in Tatiana Yablonskaia's Corn , 1949; 9: Life and work in Silesia according to Kazimierz Kutz; 10: This time next year we'll be farting through silk: aspiration and experience
