Beholding

Situated Art and the Aesthetics of Reception

Ken Wilder

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Hardback

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English

Bloomsbury Visual Arts
14 May 2020

Theory of art; History of Art & Design Styles; Installation art

Beholding considers the spatially situated encounter between artwork and spectator. It argues that artworks created for specific places or conditions structure a reciprocal encounter, which is completed by the presence of a beholder. These are works which demand the 'beholder's share', but not, as Ernst Gombrich famously claimed, to sustain an illusion. Rather, Beholding reconfigures Gombrich's notion of the beholder's share as a set of 'licensed' imaginative and cognitive projections.

Each chapter frames a particular work of art from the remit of a complementary theoretical text. The book establishes a transhistorical notion of the spatially situated encounter, and considers the role of the architectural host in bringing the beholder’s orientation into play. The book engages a diverse range of practices: from Renaissance painting and group portraiture to intermedia practices of installation and performance art. Written within the broad remit of reception aesthetics, the book proposes a phenomenological theory of beholding, argued through an in-depth examination of artworks and their spatial contexts, selected for their explanatory potential. These various encounters allocate different constitutive roles to the beholder, bringing not only spatial and temporal orientation into play, but also a repertoire of anticipated ideas and beliefs.

By: Ken Wilder
Imprint: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 234mm, Width: 156mm,
Weight: 680g
ISBN: 9781350088405
ISBN 10: 1350088404
Pages: 336
Publication Date: 14 May 2020
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

List of Plates List of Figures Preface Acknowledgments Introduction Part I: Sacred Imagery Chapter 1: The Beholder As Witness Chapter 2: Of Clouds and Terrestrial Beholders Chapter 3: The Melancholic Beholder Part II: Group Portraiture Chapter 4: The Artist as Beholder Chapter 5: Two Modes of Beholding Chapter 6: Theatricality and the Beholder PART III: Abstraction Chapter Seven: Beholding a ‘Reversible’ Space Chapter Eight: Virtual Space and the ‘Literal’ Beholder Chapter Nine: On Repetition and Beholding PART IV: Intermedia Chapter Ten: The Complicit Beholder Chapter Eleven: The Beholder in the Expanded Field Chapter Twelve: The Dislocated Beholder Bibliography Notes

Ken Wilder is Reader in Spatial Design at the Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London, UK

Reviews for Beholding: Situated Art and the Aesthetics of Reception

A beautifully-written interdisciplinary book that acknowledges the permeability of the once strong divisions that separated art, architecture, the cinema and design. Artist and theorist Ken Wilder explains, through his theory of beholding, how the audience's viewing conditions can shape their understanding of an art work. -- Stephen Farthing, artist, UK