Rethinking decoration : pleasure & ideology in the visual arts
"This book offers theoretical and practical reinterpretations of the decorative by addressing a neglected topic: the significance of decoration. Concerned with the central problem of taste, David Brett asks how individual pleasure and social function suffuse one another, drawing examples from architecture, fashion, textiles, ceramics, and the whole domain of visual and plastic arts. Using theoretical propositions derived from a critical approach to the concept of aesthetic experience, and from study of perceptual psychology and psychoanalytic theory, Brett focuses on historical instances of decoration and ornament significant to the development of a "visual ideology." He considers a variety of attempts at the rejection of decorative value, and proposes a "poetics of workmanship," which deals with the metaphorical power of material processes."--Jacket
xi, 290 pages : illustrations ; 26 cm
9780521836760, 052183676X
55878012
Introduction
1. Discourse & experience
2. Touching & seeing. Some topics to consider: Edge, Shape/objects, Surface/Texture, Colour/space, Stability ; Decoration and Gestalt: Figure/Ground relations, Directionality, Simplicity, Unity or "closure", Proportion ; Touch and sight ; Some general reflections
3. Thresholds & transitions
4. Sociability & pleasure. The vicissitudes of nature: natural philosophy and science in nineteenth century surface pattern ; Ornament, colour and surface in the Alhambra: Drawing, Colour and light, Tactility, Language and script, Nature, Visual ideology ; Orientalism, the Alhambra, and colour in the nineteenth-century architecture: a digression ; The politics of display: ornament and emblem in Tudor England: Drawing, Colour, Language, Nature, Visual ideology
5. The refusal
6. Towards a poetics of workmanship. Warp and weft: the text-tile tectonic ; Stacking, masonry and the decorated mass ; The hearth, the oven and the forge ; The post, the beam, and the joint
7. The task of rethinking: an afterword