The Aesthetic Exception: Essays on Art, Theatre, and Politics (Hardback)
  • The Aesthetic Exception: Essays on Art, Theatre, and Politics (Hardback)
zoom

The Aesthetic Exception: Essays on Art, Theatre, and Politics (Hardback)

(author)
£85.00
Hardback 288 Pages
Published: 13/06/2023
  • In stock
  • Free UK delivery

Usually dispatched within 1-2 working days

  • This item has been added to your basket

The aesthetic exception theorises anew the relation between art and politics. It challenges critical trends that discount the role of aesthetic autonomy, to impulsively reassert art as an effective form of social engagement. But it equally challenges those on the flipside of the efficacy debate, who insist that art’s politics is limited to a recondite space of ‘autonomous resistance’. The book shows how each side of the efficacy debate overlooks art’s exceptional status and its social mediations. Mobilising philosophy and cultural theory, and employing examples from visual art, performance, and theatre, it proposes four alternative tests to ‘effect’ to offer a nuanced account of art’s political character. Those tests examine how art relates to politics as a practice that articulates its historical conjuncture, and how it prefigures the ‘new’ through simulations capable of activating the political life of the spectator.

Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9781526170163
Number of pages: 288
Weight: 581 g
Dimensions: 234 x 156 x 17 mm


MEDIA REVIEWS

'Fisher is meticulous in discussing and describing the categories thatconstitute political art in the twentieth century: state, government, revolution,and power.'The European Journal of Theatre and Performance'Starting with a seemingly simple question ‘Can art be political?’, this book opens a Pandora’s box that reveals the paradoxical nature of the relationship between art and life, the impossibility of taxonomy of political theatre, on the one hand, and its potential as a hermeneutical tool, on the other, and when it comes to postdramatic theatre and theory – nothing is anymore as it seemed before … The depth of analysis is impressive, whenever we feel we have reached a conceptual stable ground, Fisher probes further and invites us to question deeper!'Silvija Jestrovic, University of Warwick'Fisher is a joy to read! He writes with clarity and urgency but without oversimplification and gratuitous polemic. He draws on the whole toolkit of interdisciplinary thought and covers a vast terrain in contemporary theatre, but he never relies on jargon and avoids any form of superficiality … with cautious optimism, [he] takes the lead of key artists and heads out towards new horizons of possibility, en route, he has revitalized our understanding of both politics and aesthetics.'Nikos Papastergiadis, University of Melbourne - .

You may also be interested in...

New Monologues for Women
Added to basket
Building a Character
Added to basket
Freeing the Natural Voice
Added to basket
The Empty Space
Added to basket
£9.99
Paperback
Diane Samuels' Kindertransport
Added to basket
Actions: The Actors' Thesaurus
Added to basket
Shakespeare Monologues for Women
Added to basket
True and False
Added to basket
£10.99
Paperback
Finding Your Voice
Added to basket
The Complete Stanislavsky Toolkit
Added to basket
Contemporary Monologues for Men
Added to basket
Acting
Added to basket
£10.95   £2.98
Paperback
Different Every Night
Added to basket
The Crafty Art of Playmaking
Added to basket
Sophocles: Philoctetes
Added to basket
£25.99
Paperback
Contemporary Monologues for Women
Added to basket

Please sign in to write a review

Your review has been submitted successfully.