Virtuality, Feeling, and Abstraction: Susanne K. Langer and the Structure of Scale in Abstract Expressionism (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9798855812374)

A new account of Abstract Expressionism that uses Susanne K. Langer's philosophy of art to rethink abstraction, feeling, and scale.

Virtuality, Feeling, and Abstraction offers a new account of Susanne K. Langer's philosophy of art and its significance for the study of modern and contemporary art. Peter Windle returns to a fundamental problem in aesthetics and art history: how artworks hold together as meaningful appearances. Drawing on Langer's concept of virtual form and engaging in sustained encounters with individual artworks across a wide historical and geographical field--including Exekias and Guo Xi to Friedrich, Turner, Hilma af Klint, Kandinsky, Malevich, Picasso, Pollock, Rothko, Newman, and Clyfford Still--he argues that artworks are not merely things that depict, express, or acquire status, but are perceptible organizations through which feeling becomes publicly available as form. At the center of Windle's analysis is a new account of abstraction: not simply the abandonment of recognizable subject matter, but a reorganization of visible form through the ambiguity of scale. In doing so, he recovers Langer as a major theorist of visual art and shows why her account of virtual form matters for the history and criticism of abstraction.