Penny Florence

"The past, present, and future of art and art culture collide in this interdisciplinary study that strives to find new, universal meaning in a diverse art world. Using examples from contemporary painting, sculpture, film, and the digital arts, Penny Florence examines the link between the “grand narratives” of modernism and today’s culture of difference. Laced throughout with humorous and brilliant insights, Sexed Universals in Contemporary Art clears new philosophical and aesthetic ground by embracing the new without discarding the old."

Sexed Universals in Contemporary Art

This study, first published in 1986, is an examination of the many facets of Mallarmés relationship to the visual arts. Dr Florence proceeds by analysing Mallarmés writing on painting and literature, and its bearing on specific paintings, lithographs, and poems. These analyses reveal and define important common structures and innovatory developments, the coherence of which is masked by conventional histories of art. A new relationship is revealed between the word and the image, which has significant implications for an understanding of the self and the world in these texts. The book is particularly original in two respects: first, it shows how developments in verbal and visual innovation are interdependent in Mallarmés work; second, it integrates hitherto discrete traditions of the avant-garde in painting to present a new perspective on the history of modernism.

Visual and Aural Signs and the Generation of Meaning

Mallarmé, Manet and Redon

This innovative book poses two, deceptively simple, questions: what is a sculpture garden, and what happens when you give equal weight to the main elements of landscape, planting and artwork? Its wide-ranging frame of reference, including the USA, Europe and Japan, is brought into focus through Tremenheere Sculpture Garden, Cornwall, with which the book begins and ends. Effectively less than 15 years old, and largely the work of one man, Tremenheere affords an opportunity to examine as work-in-progress the creation of a new kind of sculpture garden. Including a historical overview, the book traverses multiple ways of seeing and experiencing sculpture gardens, culminating in an exploration of their relevance as 'cultural ecology' in the context of globalisation, urbanisation and climate change. The thinking here is non-dualist and broadly aligned with New Materialisms and Material Feminisms to explore our place as humans in the non-human world on which we depend. Eminent contributors, including John Dixon Hunt, George Descombes, Bernard Lassus and David Leatherbarrow, approach these issues through practices and theories of landscape architecture; garden and art making; history and writing; and philosophy. Richly illustrated with over 100 images, including a colour plate section, the book will primarily appeal to those engaged in professional or academic research, along with sculpture garden visitors, who will find new and surprising ways of experiencing plants and art in natural and urban settings.

Art, Plant, Landscape

Thinking the Sculpture Garden

Dee Reynolds

Examines a range of media from paintings and family photography, through to opera, film and TV to novels and poetry, and challenges the traditional boundaries between the creative and the critical.

Penny Florence

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