The Aesthetics of Boredom. Lithuanian Photography 1980 - 1990 - Softcover

Agne Narusyte

9789955854968: The Aesthetics of Boredom. Lithuanian Photography 1980 - 1990

Softcover

ISBN 10: 9955854960 ISBN 13: 9789955854968

Publisher: Vilniaus dailes akademija, 2010

This book discusses boredom as an aesthetic category that helps to explain a tendency in late 20th c. art to focus on everyday things, avoid definite meaning or create nothing . The aesthetics of boredom result from a paradoxical situation when aesthetic experiences are created from banality the very phenomenon that artists try to escape from. Such an attitude of indifferent detachment from Soviet reality formed into a strong artistic statement in Lithuanian photography of the 1980s when photographers not only represented the boring existence in the USSR, but also emphasised the banality of environment and emptiness of space through visual monotony. They replaced the decisive moment with chance and tried to slow the time of the photograph thus focusing on the value of the eventless present moment.

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About the Author:

Agne Narusyte, PhD, is an art historian, critic and curator. She has been writing articles, essays and exhibition reviews since 1995, publishing papers in peer-reviewed journals and books on photography. She worked as a curator at the Lithuanian Art Museum, taught at Edinburgh Napier University, UK, edited the foreign culture page for the cultural weekly 7 meno dienos, Vilnius, and created programmes on culture for the Lithuanian National Television. Agne Narusyte has published a monograph on the aesthetics of boredom in Lithuanian photography: Nuobodulio estetika Lietuvos fotografijoje (2008). Currently she is the head of the Art History and Theory Department at the Vilnius Academy of Arts, and divides her time between teaching the theory of visual culture and research into contemporary photography and its relationship to the experience of space, identity and history.

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