Ebook: Visions of the human: art, World War I and the modernist subject

"In what ways do the artistic avant-garde's representations of the human body reflect the catastrophe of World War I? The European modernists were inspired by developments in the nineteenth-century, yielding new forms of knowledge about the nature of reality and repositioning the human body as the new 'object' of knowledge. New 'visions' of the human subject were created within this transformation. However, modernity's reactionary political climate - for which World War I provided a catalyst - transformed a once liberal ideal between humanity, environment, and technology, into a tool of disciplinary rationalisation. Visions of the Human considers the consequences of this historical moment for the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It explores the ways in which the 'technologies of the self' that inspired the avant-garde were increasingly instrumentalised by conservative politics, urbanism, consumer capitalism and the society of 'the spectacle'. This is an engaging and powerful study which challenges prior ideas and explores new ways of thinking about modern visual culture."--;List of Illustrations -- Introduction [4319] 6 -- Chapter One: New Visions of the Human [24974] -- Introduction 21 -- Vision and Knowledge 26 -- Cultural Encoding 33 -- The 'Crisis of the Subject' 43 -- Cubist Perceptions 50 -- The Bionomic of Body and Environment 71 -- Cubism, Phenomena and Intersubjectivity 77 -- Chapter Two: The Simultaneous Subject [20862] -- Introduction 90 -- Colour, Form, and Memory 99 -- Simultaneous Materiality 104 -- La Prose du Transsibérien 110 -- Vision and the Fourth Dimension 113 -- La Robe Simultanée 130 -- Chapter Three: Rationalised Existence [16555] -- Introduction: Cubism After the War 142 -- The Cubist Rhizome 145 -- The European Avant-Garde 152 -- Oskar Schlemmer and Rationalised Cubism 155 -- Schlemmer's Bodies 161 -- Man in Space 168 -- The Figure of Reactionary Modernism 174 -- The Monumental Body 185 -- Chapter Four: Modernity's Vitruvian Bodies [9638] -- Introduction: Vitruvian Men 190 -- Rudolph Laban's Icosahedron 197 -- The Kinesphere 203 -- Cybernetic Bodies 209 -- Le Corbusier, the Body, and the 'Mass Ornament' 215 -- The Geometry of Utopia 220 -- Le Modulor 235 -- Conclusion: From n-Dimensional Imagination to One Dimensional Man [9294] -- 239 -- [Total approx. 85000 words ?́" exc. Bibliography & endnotes] -- Endnotes 264 -- Bibliography 289