The Art of Mechanical Reproduction: Technology and Aesthetics from Duchamp to the Digital (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780226131191)

The Art of Mechanical Reproduction presents a striking new approach to how traditional art mediums--painting, sculpture, and drawing--changed in the twentieth century in response to photography, film, and other technologies. Countering the modernist view that the medium provides advanced art with "resistance" against technological pressures, Tamara Trodd argues that we should view art and its practices as imaginatively responding to the potential that artists glimpsed in mechanical reproduction, putting art into dialogue with the commercial cultures of its time.

The Art of Mechanical Reproduction weaves a rich history of the experimental networks in which artists as diverse as Paul Klee, Hans Bellmer, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Smithson, Gerhard Richter, Chris Marker, and Tacita Dean have worked, and it shows for the first time how extensively technological innovations of the moment have affected their work. Original and broad-ranging, The Art of Mechanical Reproduction challenges some of the most respected and entrenched criticism of the past several decades--and allows us to think about these artists anew.

Author: Tamara Trodd
ISBN-10: 022613119X
ISBN-13: 9780226131191
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Language: English
Published: 09/25/2015
Pages: 368
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 3.15lbs
Size: 10.10h x 8.70w x 1.10d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 04/01/2016