Adam Geczy - Böcker

Popular culture in the latter half of the twentieth century precipitated a decisive change in style and body image. Postwar film, television, radio shows, pulp fiction and comics placed heroic types firmly within public consciousness. This book concentrates on these heroic male types as they have evolved from the postwar era and their relationship to fashion to the present day. As well as demonstrating the role of male icons in contemporary society, this book’s originality also lies in showing the many gender slippages that these icons help to effect or expose. It is by exploring the somewhat inviolate types accorded to contemporary masculinity that we see the very fragility of a stable or rounded male identity.

Featuring chapters by a diverse range of leading international artists and theorists, this book suggests that contemporary art is increasingly characterized by the problem of where and when it is situated. While much advanced artistic speculation of the twentieth-century was aligned with the question “what is art?,” a key question for many artists and thinkers in the twenty-first century has become “where is art?” Contributors explore the challenge of meaningfully identifying and evaluating works located across multiple versions and locations in space and time. In doing so, they also seek to find appropriate language and criteria for evaluating forms of art that often straddle other realms of knowledge and activity. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, contemporary art, art criticism, and philosophy of art.

Nominated for the 2016 Art in Literature: Mary Lynn Kotz Award, Library of Virginia Owing to digitization, globalization and mass culture, what is deemed ‘desirable’ and ‘of the moment’ in art has increasingly followed the patterns of fashion. While in the past artistic styles were always inflected with signs of their modernity, today biennales and art markets are defined by the next big thing, the next sensation, the next new idea. But how do opinions of what is ‘good’, ‘progressive’ and ‘cutting edge’ guide styles? What is it that makes works of art fashionable and commercial?Fashionable Art critically explores the relationships between art, commerce, taste and cultural value. Each chapter covers a major style or movement, from Chinese and Aboriginal art, Cubism and Pop Art to alternative identity and outsider art, exploring how contemporary art has been shaped since the 1970s. Drawing upon a variety of theoretical frameworks, from Adorno and Bourdieu to Simmel and Zizek, expert visual cultural scholars Geczy and Millner engage with both historical and contemporary debates on this lively topic.Taking a complex view of the meaning of fashion as it relates to art, while also offering critiques of ‘art as fashion’, Fashionable Art is an original, key text that will be essential reading for students and scholars of art history, fashion studies and material culture.

Nominated for the 2016 Art in Literature: Mary Lynn Kotz Award, Library of Virginia Owing to digitization, globalization and mass culture, what is deemed ‘desirable’ and ‘of the moment’ in art has increasingly followed the patterns of fashion. While in the past artistic styles were always inflected with signs of their modernity, today biennales and art markets are defined by the next big thing, the next sensation, the next new idea. But how do opinions of what is ‘good’, ‘progressive’ and ‘cutting edge’ guide styles? What is it that makes works of art fashionable and commercial?Fashionable Art critically explores the relationships between art, commerce, taste and cultural value. Each chapter covers a major style or movement, from Chinese and Aboriginal art, Cubism and Pop Art to alternative identity and outsider art, exploring how contemporary art has been shaped since the 1970s. Drawing upon a variety of theoretical frameworks, from Adorno and Bourdieu to Simmel and Zizek, expert visual cultural scholars Geczy and Millner engage with both historical and contemporary debates on this lively topic.Taking a complex view of the meaning of fashion as it relates to art, while also offering critiques of ‘art as fashion’, Fashionable Art is an original, key text that will be essential reading for students and scholars of art history, fashion studies and material culture.

Mere clothing is transformed into desirable fashion by the way it is represented in imagery. Fashion's Double examines how meanings are projected onto garments through their representation, whether in painting, photography, cinema or online fashion film, conveying identity and status, eliciting fascination and desire.With in-depth case studies including the work of Nick Knight and Helmut Newton, film examples such as The Hunger Games, music video Girl Panic by Duran Duran, and much more, this book analyses the interrelationship between clothing, identity, embodiment, representation and self-representation.Written for students and scholars alike, Fashion's Double will appeal to anyone studying fashion, cultural studies, art theory and history, photography, sociology, and film.

Mere clothing is transformed into desirable fashion by the way it is represented in imagery. Fashion's Double examines how meanings are projected onto garments through their representation, whether in painting, photography, cinema or online fashion film, conveying identity and status, eliciting fascination and desire.With in-depth case studies including the work of Nick Knight and Helmut Newton, film examples such as The Hunger Games, music video Girl Panic by Duran Duran, and much more, this book analyses the interrelationship between clothing, identity, embodiment, representation and self-representation.Written for students and scholars alike, Fashion's Double will appeal to anyone studying fashion, cultural studies, art theory and history, photography, sociology, and film.

Featuring chapters by a diverse range of leading international artists and theorists, this book suggests that contemporary art is increasingly characterized by the problem of where and when it is situated. While much advanced artistic speculation of the twentieth-century was aligned with the question “what is art?,” a key question for many artists and thinkers in the twenty-first century has become “where is art?” Contributors explore the challenge of meaningfully identifying and evaluating works located across multiple versions and locations in space and time. In doing so, they also seek to find appropriate language and criteria for evaluating forms of art that often straddle other realms of knowledge and activity. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, contemporary art, art criticism, and philosophy of art.

Popular culture in the latter half of the twentieth century precipitated a decisive change in style and body image. Postwar film, television, radio shows, pulp fiction and comics placed heroic types firmly within public consciousness. This book concentrates on these heroic male types as they have evolved from the postwar era and their relationship to fashion to the present day. As well as demonstrating the role of male icons in contemporary society, this book’s originality also lies in showing the many gender slippages that these icons help to effect or expose. It is by exploring the somewhat inviolate types accorded to contemporary masculinity that we see the very fragility of a stable or rounded male identity.

Gone are the days when fashion relied on a runway launch with coinciding press promotions to show a couturier’s new range. Today, design houses are thinking beyond traditional methods of display to stimulate interest in their collections, such as to the internet, fashion film and, more recently, fashion installations. This book offers a critical evaluation of the changing ways in which fashion has been exhibited, focusing specifically on the recent turn toward installation, whether in the form of static presentations, interactive performances or the more conventional curated designer exhibition. Connecting viewers – and consumers – on an immersive level, the fashion world has begun to appropriate installation methods traditionally associated with displays of experimental art, transcending the runway system and its constraints. This book turns to the designers who have pioneered fashion installations, such as Aitor Throup, Muccia Prada, Walter Van Beirendonck and Hussein Chalayan among others, and also looks back to the early influential fashion displays by designers such as Worth and Poiret to provide historical context. Divided into three parts, and covering a variety of installations from Vivienne Westwood’s fashioned ‘concept’ stores to Gareth Pugh’s immersive films, this ground-breaking book positions the designer as the curator and exhibition-maker and offers the first focused study of the pertinent concept of fashion installation.

Attitudes to fashion have changed radically in the twenty-first century. Dress is increasingly approached as a means of self-expression, rather than as a signifier of status or profession, and designers are increasingly treated as ‘artists’, as fashion moves towards art and enters the gallery, museum, and retail space. This book is the first to fully explore the causes and implications of this shift, examining the impact of technological innovation, globalization, and the growth of the internet.The End of Fashion focuses on the ways in which our understanding of fashion and the fashion system have transformed as mass mediation and digitization continue to broaden the way that contemporary fashion is perceived and consumed. Exploring everything from the rise of online shopping to the emergence of bloggers as power elites who have revolutionized the terrain of traditional fashion reportage, this volume anatomizes a world in which runway shows now compete with live-streaming, digital fashion films, Instagram, and Pinterest.Bringing together original, cutting-edge contributions from leading international scholars, this book is essential reading for students and scholars of fashion and cultural studies, as well as anyone interested in exploring the dramatic shifts that have shaken the fashion world this century – and what they might say about larger changes within an increasingly global and digital society.

Attitudes to fashion have changed radically in the twenty-first century. Dress is increasingly approached as a means of self-expression, rather than as a signifier of status or profession, and designers are increasingly treated as ‘artists’, as fashion moves towards art and enters the gallery, museum, and retail space. This book is the first to fully explore the causes and implications of this shift, examining the impact of technological innovation, globalization, and the growth of the internet.The End of Fashion focuses on the ways in which our understanding of fashion and the fashion system have transformed as mass mediation and digitization continue to broaden the way that contemporary fashion is perceived and consumed. Exploring everything from the rise of online shopping to the emergence of bloggers as power elites who have revolutionized the terrain of traditional fashion reportage, this volume anatomizes a world in which runway shows now compete with live-streaming, digital fashion films, Instagram, and Pinterest.Bringing together original, cutting-edge contributions from leading international scholars, this book is essential reading for students and scholars of fashion and cultural studies, as well as anyone interested in exploring the dramatic shifts that have shaken the fashion world this century – and what they might say about larger changes within an increasingly global and digital society.

Shortlisted for the Association of Dress Historians Book of the Year Award, 2021Libertine practices have long been associated with transgression and social deviance. This innovative book is the first to focus fully on the relationship between libertinism as a social phenomenon and as a form of fashion. Taking the reader from early modernity to the present day, Adam Geczy and Vicki Karaminas reveal how the connection between clothing and the taboo, the erotic, and the forbidden is at the heart of "libertine fashion". Moving from the decadent courts of Charles II and Louis XV to the catwalks of the 21st century, Libertine Fashion examines literary and sartorial figures ranging from the Marquis de Sade and Lord Byron to Oscar Wilde, Josephine Baker, Colette, and Madonna. Focusing on libertinism as a sartorial practice and identity, this book traces the genealogy of the concept through the proto feminists of the English Reformation, the hedonistic decadents of the fin de siècle, and the Flappers of the Roaring 20s. The historical arc traverses the 1970s era of punk and glam, the shapeshifting personae of David Bowie, and the “disciplinary regimes” of Jean-Paul Gaultier.Looking at libertine practices and appearances with fresh eyes, this bracing and original book affords many new insights into transgressive style, and of the relationship between sexuality and clothing. Accessible and thoroughly researched, Libertine Fashion uses a multidisciplinary approach that draws on historical literature, film, fashion, philosophy, and popular culture. Offering a historical and philosophical grounding in contemporary forms of identity and dress, it is essential reading for students and scholars of fashion, gender, sexuality, and cultural studies.

Combining transnationalism and exoticism, transorientalism is the new orientalism of the age of globalization. With its roots in earlier times, it is a term that emphasizes alteration, mutation, and exchange between cultures.While the familiar orientalisms persist, transorientalism is a term that covers notions like the adoption of a hat from a different country for Turkish nationalist dress, the fact that an Italian could be one of the most influential directors in recent Chinese cinema, that Muslim women artists explore Islamic womanhood in non-Islamic countries, that artists can embrace both indigenous and non-indigenous identity at the same time. This is more than nostalgia or bland nationalism. It is a reflection of the effect that communication and representation in recent decades have brought to the way in which national identity is crafted and constructed—yet this does not make it any less authentic. The diversity of race and culture, the manner in which they are expressed and transacted, are most evident in art, fashion, and film. This much-needed book offers a refreshing, informed, and incisive account of a paradigm shift in the ways in which identity and otherness is moulded, perceived, and portrayed.

Pop art has traditionally been the most visible visual art within popular culture because its main transgression is easy to understand: the infiltration of the “low” into the “high”. The same cannot be said of contemporary art of the 21st century, where the term “Gaga Aesthetics” characterizes the condition of popular culture being extensively imbricated in high culture, and vice-versa. Taking Adorno and Horkheimer’s "The Culture Industry" and Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory as key touchstones, this book explores the dialectic of high and low that forms the foundation of Adornian aesthetics and the extent to which it still applied, and the extent to which it has radically shifted, thereby ‘upending tradition’. In the tradition of philosophical aesthetics that Adorno began with Lukács, this explores the ever-urgent notion that high culture has become deeply enmeshed with popular culture. This is “Gaga Aesthetics”: aesthetics that no longer follows clear fields of activity, where “fine art” is but one area of critical activity. Indeed, Adorno’s concepts of alienation and the tragic, which inform his reading of the modernist experiment, are now no longer confined to art. Rather, stirring examples can be found in phenomena such as fashion and music video. In addition to dealing with Lady Gaga herself, this book traverses examples ranging from Madonna’s Madam X to Moschino and Vetements, to deliberate on the strategies of subversion in the culture industry.

For hundreds of years consumers and scholars have acknowledged that food is affected by the same rapid shifts in taste and consumption as clothing. Trends in fashion and in food are increasingly being marketed in tandem and sold as fashionable commodities to reinforce capitalist power. Yet despite this, the reciprocal relationship between fashion and food has not been fully explored – until now.Gastrofashion from Haute Cuisine to Haute Couture examines the relationship between food and fashion in clothing, style, and dress in all its manifestations, from the restaurant to the catwalk, to cookbooks, diet fads, slow food, fast fashion, celebrity chefs, artists, and musical performers. It traces the relationship between food and fashion back to the Middle Ages, to the rise of social refinements in manners, speech, clothing, and taste, when behaviours and appearances reflected social status and propriety and where the social display of wealth and privilege were inseparable from food and clothing. Nowadays, designer eateries such as Pasticceria Prada and Armani Ristorante and the display of food on fashion catwalks are the precursors of the restaurants of pre-Revolutionary France and the spectacles of world fairs and exhibitions.This much-needed book offers a substantive and incisive discussion for all those interested in the complex interrelationship between food and fashion – scholars, students, and general readers alike.

Combining transnationalism and exoticism, transorientalism is the new orientalism of the age of globalization. With its roots in earlier times, it is a term that emphasizes alteration, mutation, and exchange between cultures.While the familiar orientalisms persist, transorientalism is a term that covers notions like the adoption of a hat from a different country for Turkish nationalist dress, the fact that an Italian could be one of the most influential directors in recent Chinese cinema, that Muslim women artists explore Islamic womanhood in non-Islamic countries, that artists can embrace both indigenous and non-indigenous identity at the same time. This is more than nostalgia or bland nationalism. It is a reflection of the effect that communication and representation in recent decades have brought to the way in which national identity is crafted and constructed—yet this does not make it any less authentic. The diversity of race and culture, the manner in which they are expressed and transacted, are most evident in art, fashion, and film. This much-needed book offers a refreshing, informed, and incisive account of a paradigm shift in the ways in which identity and otherness is moulded, perceived, and portrayed.

Orientalism is a central factor within the fashion system, both subtle and overt. In this groundbreaking book, the author shows the extent of the influence that the Orient had, and continues to have, on fashion. Our concept of Western fashion is unthinkable without it, whether in terms of the growth of the cotton industry or of garments we take for granted, such as the dressing gown. From pre-modern to contemporary times, this book demonstrates that, in the realms of fashion, the Orient is not simply a construction or a fascination of the imperial West with its eastern other. Rather, it reveals the extent of cross-pollination, exchange and multiple translation that has taken place between East and West for the last 500 years.Exploring topics including Chinoiserie, masquerade, bohemianism, Japonisme, the "de-Orientalization" of the Orient, perfume and the birth of couture, Fashion and Orientalism is an essential read for students and scholars of fashion, cultural studies and history.

Pop art has traditionally been the most visible visual art within popular culture because its main transgression is easy to understand: the infiltration of the “low” into the “high”. The same cannot be said of contemporary art of the 21st century, where the term “Gaga Aesthetics” characterizes the condition of popular culture being extensively imbricated in high culture, and vice-versa. Taking Adorno and Horkheimer’s "The Culture Industry" and Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory as key touchstones, this book explores the dialectic of high and low that forms the foundation of Adornian aesthetics and the extent to which it still applied, and the extent to which it has radically shifted, thereby ‘upending tradition’. In the tradition of philosophical aesthetics that Adorno began with Lukács, this explores the ever-urgent notion that high culture has become deeply enmeshed with popular culture. This is “Gaga Aesthetics”: aesthetics that no longer follows clear fields of activity, where “fine art” is but one area of critical activity. Indeed, Adorno’s concepts of alienation and the tragic, which inform his reading of the modernist experiment, are now no longer confined to art. Rather, stirring examples can be found in phenomena such as fashion and music video. In addition to dealing with Lady Gaga herself, this book traverses examples ranging from Madonna’s Madam X to Moschino and Vetements, to deliberate on the strategies of subversion in the culture industry.

First published in 2013, Queer Style was ahead of its time. It was the first book to address the cultural, political, and material histories of clothes as signs and markers of gender and sexual identity, and remains key reading for scholars and students across fashion studies and the humanities more broadly. Now, 10 years later, the authors have revisited their classic work and updated it to examine the function of subcultural dress within queer communities and the mannerisms and messages that are used as signifiers of identity.

First published in 2013, Queer Style was ahead of its time. It was the first book to address the cultural, political, and material histories of clothes as signs and markers of gender and sexual identity, and remains key reading for scholars and students across fashion studies and the humanities more broadly. Now, 10 years later, the authors have revisited their classic work and updated it to examine the function of subcultural dress within queer communities and the mannerisms and messages that are used as signifiers of identity.

What is the position of art in contemporary culture, where it is threatened by an ever-greater diversity of media, discourses, practices, genres and forms? Contemporary Art and Other Obstructions sets out to answer this through exploring art and social agency, communication, the problem of Biennales and other major events, and the shadow of postcolonialism as it hangs over art and indigeneity.Produced over the last two decades, the material gathered together here, and previously published only to a largely Australasian and Southeast Asian audience, is the product of a close collaboration between author Adam Geczy and editor Alan Cruickshank. With a new preface by the author and introduction by the editor, they have been adapted for an international audience, and re-edited for a critical engagement in the uneven and elusive notion that is contemporary art.

Analyzing the different modes of appearance and application of the most ubiquitous medium in art and ritual, this book examines the aesthetics, anthropology, ethnography and history of paint. The result is a clearly articulated account of both the materiality and phenomenology of paint, as substance and idea.Beginning with paint as ritual in prehistoric and ancient times, it discusses the provenance, politics and chemistry of pigments, the role of concealment and beautification as paint is applied to bodies, the stories and practices of hiding paint by artists, and efforts to isolate paint as an essential quantity, ending on the philosophical question as to whether paint is separable from colour.A phenomenology of paint is in many respects an ontology of the ways we seek to represent and mediate our existence: it is the medium for both covering (house paint, make-up) to revealing (art). By exploring paint in a multitude of roles, from bodily substances to chemical engineering, this study provides a fresh understanding of ritual and representation through this medium that reveals through covering.

Analyzing the different modes of appearance and application of the most ubiquitous medium in art and ritual, this book examines the aesthetics, anthropology, ethnography and history of paint. The result is a clearly articulated account of both the materiality and phenomenology of paint, as substance and idea.Beginning with paint as ritual in prehistoric and ancient times, it discusses the provenance, politics and chemistry of pigments, the role of concealment and beautification as paint is applied to bodies, the stories and practices of hiding paint by artists, and efforts to isolate paint as an essential quantity, ending on the philosophical question as to whether paint is separable from colour.A phenomenology of paint is in many respects an ontology of the ways we seek to represent and mediate our existence: it is the medium for both covering (house paint, make-up) to revealing (art). By exploring paint in a multitude of roles, from bodily substances to chemical engineering, this study provides a fresh understanding of ritual and representation through this medium that reveals through covering.

The first study to make use of Lukàcs’s theory of realism to understand contemporary cultural phenomena more broadly and in the fields of art and television in particular.Adam Geczy focuses on contemporary cultural trends and problems to demonstrate the continuing relevance of Georg Lukács’ philosophy. The Marxist critic Lukács wrote in defence of realism in art, and especially in literature. Geczy shows why there is a growing need to return to realism in both theory and practice, given the predominance of cultural practices that rely on representative and narrative devices, ones that speak directly to the conditions of the present.Geczy applies Lukács’ philosophical aesthetics to examples in contemporary film, television and graphic literature. We see that realism for Lukács has a profoundly ethical caste. From it emerge issues such as the moral duty of the author, the aptness of the work of art, and its capacity to bring knowledge and insight to the life-world in which it is read or received. Approached from this aesthetic standpoint, Geczy presents the many cultural wars waged in the new millennium as between what is real and authentic as opposed to the mendacious and abstruse.In rethinking realism with Lukács, Geczy brings earlier theories up to date and provides a compelling new way of looking at how and why we engage in today's cultural practices.

Artificial bodies constructed in human likeness, from uncanny automatons to mechanical dolls, have long played a complex and subtle role in human identity and culture. This book takes a range of these bodies, from antiquity to the present day, to explore how we seek out echoes, caricatures and replications of ourselves in order to make sense of the complex world in which we live. Packed with case studies, from the commedia del’arte to Hans Bellmer and the 1980s supermodel, this volume explores the divide between the “real” and the constructed. Arguing that the body “other” plays a crucial role in the formation of the self physically and psychologically, leading scholar Adam Geczy contends that the “natural” body has been replaced by a series of imaginary archetypes in our post-modern world, central to which is the figure of the doll. The Artificial Body in Fashion and Art provides a much-needed synthesis of constructed bodies across time and place, drawing on fashion theory, theatre studies and material culture, to explore what the body means in the realms of identity, gender, performance and art.

There is a new form of design practice within the contemporary fashion industry which is active in complex forms of social commentary and critique. While fashion in the modernist era has shown signs of criticism and subversion, these were either in the form of subcultures or perversions, such as punk or BDSM styling. Today, however, these genres have been absorbed into the fashion industry itself, meaning that “critical fashion” is now far from limited to the subcultures from which it came. This book explores this new space for criticism within the popular fashion sphere to demonstrate how designers are disrupting conventions, challenging beliefs and stirring change from within the system itself.Critical Fashion Practice considers a range of contemporary designers across the globe, from the US to Japan, whose conceptual designs embody this critical language, including case studies such as Rei Kawakubo’s deconstructive silhouettes for Comme des Garçons and Walter Van Beirendonck’s sadomasochistic menswear collections, amongst other key players such as Miuccia Prada, Vivienne Westwood and Viktor & Rolf. Arguing that the rise of critical fashion coincides with a noticeable decline in the criticality of art, Geczy and Karaminas go beyond slotting fashion into previously established art theories. Conceiving a new cultural role for fashion that affords insight into identity, class, race, sexuality and gender, this book shows how fashion can not only reflect and comment on, but can also be a part of social change.

There is a new form of design practice within the contemporary fashion industry which is active in complex forms of social commentary and critique. While fashion in the modernist era has shown signs of criticism and subversion, these were either in the form of subcultures or perversions, such as punk or BDSM styling. Today, however, these genres have been absorbed into the fashion industry itself, meaning that “critical fashion” is now far from limited to the subcultures from which it came. This book explores this new space for criticism within the popular fashion sphere to demonstrate how designers are disrupting conventions, challenging beliefs and stirring change from within the system itself.Critical Fashion Practice considers a range of contemporary designers across the globe, from the US to Japan, whose conceptual designs embody this critical language, including case studies such as Rei Kawakubo’s deconstructive silhouettes for Comme des Garçons and Walter Van Beirendonck’s sadomasochistic menswear collections, amongst other key players such as Miuccia Prada, Vivienne Westwood and Viktor & Rolf. Arguing that the rise of critical fashion coincides with a noticeable decline in the criticality of art, Geczy and Karaminas go beyond slotting fashion into previously established art theories. Conceiving a new cultural role for fashion that affords insight into identity, class, race, sexuality and gender, this book shows how fashion can not only reflect and comment on, but can also be a part of social change.

Flixcomix: Comics Aesthetics in Film reorients the longstanding conversation between comics and cinema by examining film through the lens of comics studies. Rather than relying on film theory to define comics, Adam Geczy and Jonathan McBurnie flip the script—showing how comics’ visual language, timing, and expression have shaped film aesthetics from the silent era to the blockbuster age. While comics and film share graphic and sequential qualities, they also share a common cultural and technological lineage. From early cinema to today’s highly stylized adaptations, Flixcomix explores how comics’ storytelling methods—once thought to "adulterate" the filmic experience—actually deepen psychological nuance, expand temporal structures, and transform visual expression. Organized in a lively, accessible format, Flixcomix draws connections across time and media, examining beloved and polarizing creators, characters, and styles from Aeon Flux to Zack Snyder. A must-read for scholars, fans, and critics alike, this book uncovers the hybrid visual language that continues to define how we see and feel moving images.