An Important and Groundbreaking Book

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	• Discrepant Abstraction (Annotating Art's Histories: Cross-Cultural Perspectives in the Visual Arts) The MIT Press, 2006 - 232 pages average customer review:based on 1 review view larger image
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An Important and Groundbreaking Book

Kobena Mercer has long been an important figure in the world of cultural theory and identity politics. He has more recently turned his attention to the fine art object itself. In this groundbreaking book Mercer and a range of other art historians and scholars examine the place of the black artist in the fine art arena. Contrary to art history artists of the African diaspora have played an ongoing and important role in advancing the high art paradigm of painting. Abstraction does not only mean Jackson Pollock! Here Mercer and his critical cohorts examine the role that black artists have played and continue to play in making painting and abstraction an engaging and meaningful conceptual practice.

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For anyone who thinks the question of abstract art is settled, this book will come as a surprise. Discrepant abstraction is hybrid and partial, elusive and repetitive, obstinate and strange. It includes almost everything that does not neatly fit into the institutional narrative of abstract art as a monolithic quest for artistic purity. Exploring cross-cultural scenarios in twentieth-century art, this second volume in the Annotating Art's Histories series alters our understanding of abstract art as a signifier of modernity by revealing the multiple directions it has taken in wide-ranging international contexts.

Impure, imperfect, and incomplete, the version of abstraction that emerges from this global journey--from Hong Kong and Islamic regions to Canada, Australia, Europe, and the United States--shows how the formal ingenuity of abstract art has been cross-fertilized, from abstract expressionism onwards, by creative discrepancies that arise when disparate visual languages are brought into dialogue. Discrepant Abstraction is essential reading for students, practitioners and anyone curious about cross-cultural interaction in the visual arts.

Copublished with inIVA/Institute of International Visual Arts, London

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