IN THE BOOKSHOP: THE RETURN OF THE REAL by Hal Foster (1996) In The Return of the Real Hal Foster discusses the development of art and theory since 1960, and reorders the relation between prewar and postwar avant-gardes. Opposed to the assumption that contemporary art is somehow belated, he argues that the avant-garde returns to us from the future, repositioned by innovative practice in the present. And he poses this retroactive model of art and theory against the reactionary undoing of progressive culture that is pervasive today.After the models of art-as-text in the 1970s and art-as-simulacrum in the 1980s, Foster suggests that we are now witness to a return to the real — to art and theory grounded in the materiality of actual bodies and social sites. If The Return of the Real begins with a new narrative of the historical avant-garde, it concludes with an original reading of this contemporary situation — and what it portends for future practices of art and theory, culture and politics. Includes the work of David Hammons, Robert Gober, Mike Kelley, Marcel Duchamp, Alexander Rodchenko, Vladimir Tatlin, Dan Flavin, Carl Andre, Jasper Johns, Daniel Buren, Marcel Broodthaers, Michael Asher, Hans Haacke, Fred Wilson, Silvia Kolbowski, Larry Bell, Sol Lewitt, Richard Serra, Eva Hesse, Donald Judd, Tony Smith, Robert Morris, Robert Smithson, Jeff Koons, Haim Steinbach, Peter Halley, Ashley Bickerton, Ross Bleckner, Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine, Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman, Gordon Matta-Clark, Frank Stella, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Allan McCollum, Gerhard Richter, Richard Estes, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, Kiki Smith, John Miller, Zoe Leonard, Gran Fury, Renée Green, Dan Graham, Martha Rosler, Allan Sekula, Mary Kelly, Silvia Kolbowski, Lothar Baumgarten, Fred Wilson, Jimmie Durham, and many more. Available in the bookshop and via our website. #worldfoodbooks #jimmiedurham #halfoster #octoberbooks #themitpress (at WORLD FOOD BOOKS)
