The Pulse of Modernism: Physiological Aesthetics in Fin-de-Si

by Robert Michael Brain

Overview

Robert Brain traces the origins of artistic modernism to specific technologies of perception developed in late-nineteenth-century laboratories. Brain argues that the thriving fin-de-si cle field of physiological aesthetics, which sought physiological explanations for the capacity to appreciate beauty and art, changed the way poets, artists, and musicians worked and brought a dramatic transformation to the idea of art itself.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780295805788
Publisher:	University of Washington Press
Publication date:	05/01/2015
Series:	In Vivo
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	384
File size:	17 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Robert Michael Brain is associate professor of history at the University of British Columbia.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

IntroductionPart 1: Experimentalizing Life1. Representation on the Line2. The Vibratory Organism3. Visible Speech

Part 2: Experimentalizing Art4. Algorithms of Pleasure5. Liberating Verse6. Sensory Fusion7. Art for Life s SakeConclusion

Notes BibliographyIndex

What People are Saying About This

John Tresch

This terrific book brings forward new research on techniques of science, art, politics and philosophy, finding hidden connections between these only seemingly disparate worlds and providing a fresh and inspiring reconceptualization of European modernism.

Interviews

Historians of the arts have often described modernism as what art looks like when it turns its back on nature and similarly emancipates itself from the literary and linguistic. Physiological Aesthetics: Experimentalizing Life and Art in Fin-de-Siècle Europe contends that, on the contrary, modernism was what the arts looked like when they were made from human nature, amplified through specific technologies of perception developed in late nineteenth-century physiology laboratories. Physiological Aesthetics shows how several key paths to modernism passed through the fin-de-siècle field of "physiological aesthetics," a thriving sub-discipline concerned to "elucidate physiologically the nature of our Aesthetic Feelings" and "to exhibit the purely physical origin of the sense of beauty, and its relativity to our nervous organization." Painters, poets, and composers encountered physiological aesthetics through various channels, either working directly in physiology laboratories or taking their lessons from critics, aestheticians, and other intermediaries. Beginning in the 1880s artists adopted ideas, instruments, and techniques from experimental physiology to reconfigure the human sensorium and devise new formal languages of art, including notions of rhythm, automatism, abstraction, empathy, and montage. By the eve of the First World War the artists' experiments with physiological aesthetics brought a dramatic transformation in the very idea of art itself. Physiological Aesthetics examines the networks of European scientists, aestheticians, critics, and artists who developed the physiological approach to the arts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, creating some of the key vanguard "artworlds" of early modernism.

Editorial Reviews

[A] highly creative endeavour in the cultural history of science and aesthetics which provides a compelling account of the inspiration which various early practitioners of the modernist movement drew from the physiological laboratories of the nineteenth century. For historians working at the intersection between science and art it is essential reading, whilst historians of science, technology and medicine more medicine more generally can draw inspiration from this approach just as artists in the late nineteenth century looked outside the conventional boundaries of their practice to inform new directions of experimentation in the studio.

The British Journal for the History of Science - James F. Stark