The Return of the Real

Art and Theory at the End of the Century

Hal Foster (Princeton University)

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English

Massachusetts Inst of Tec
25 September 1996

Art & Architecture; Theory of art; History of art & design styles: from c 1900 -

Series: October Books

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.

By: Hal Foster (Princeton University)
Imprint: Massachusetts Inst of Tec
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 178mm, Spine: 14mm
Weight: 635g
ISBN: 9780262561075
ISBN 10: 0262561077
Series: October Books
Pages: 321
Publication Date: 25 September 1996
Recommended Age: From 18
Audience: College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , Professional & Vocational , A / AS level , Further / Higher Education
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Who's afraid of the neo-avant-garde?; the crux of minimalism; the passion of the sign; the art of cynical reason; the return of the real; the artist as ethnographer; whatever happened to postmodernism?

Hal Foster is Townsend Martin '17 Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. He is the author of Compulsive Beauty (1993), The Return of the Real: Art and Theory at the End of the Century (1996), and Prosthetic Gods (2004), all published by the MIT Press, and other books.

Reviews for The Return of the Real: Art and Theory at the End of the Century

The Return of the Real is one of the most cogent and theoretically self-aware readings of contemprary art I have seen. --Howard Singerman, Department of Art History, University of Virginia