Overview

By offering a new way of thinking about the role of politically engaged art, Susan Best opens up a new aesthetic field: reparative aesthetics. The book identifies an innovative aesthetic on the part of women photographers from the southern hemisphere, who against the dominant modes of criticality in political art, look at how cultural production can be reparative. The winner of the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand best book award in 2017, Reparative Aesthetics contributes an entirely new theory to the interdisciplinary fields of aesthetics, affect studies, feminist theory, politics and photography. Conceptually innovative and fiercely original this book will move us beyond old political and cultural stalemates and into new terrain for analysis and reflection.

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9781472529787

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Reviews

This book begins with an extraordinary hypothesis: that art can function to mark, to remember and to heal social personal and collective shame. Rather than personal or historical expression, art can act as a form of reparative memory of what cannot be otherwise adequately represented. Reparative Aesthetics develops a new account of what photographic art by women art from the global south is able to accomplish through the acknowledgement and exposure of shame. Beautifully and hauntingly written, this book reminds us that art expresses what cannot be said. Elizabeth Grosz, Professor of Women's and Gender Studies, Rutgers University, USA

This book begins with an extraordinary hypothesis: that art can function to mark, to remember and to heal social personal and collective shame. Rather than personal or historical expression, art can act as a form of reparative memory of what cannot be otherwise adequately represented. Reparative Aesthetics develops a new account of what photographic art by women art from the global south is able to accomplish through the acknowledgement and exposure of shame. Beautifully and hauntingly written, this book reminds us that art expresses what cannot be said. Elizabeth Grosz, Professor of Women's and Gender Studies, Rutgers University, USA Susan Best's work trail blazes a compelling narrative through art and psychoanalysis, revealing how the work of four women artists who 'look closely at our dark side' inform contemporary debates on the politics of trauma and repair. Ann Stephen, Senior Curator, University Art Gallery and Art Collection, Department of Art History, University of Sydney, Australia

Author Information

Susan Best is Professor of Fine Art and Art Theory at Queensland College of Art, Griffith University, Australia. Recent publications include Visualizing Feeling: Affect and the Feminine Avant-garde (2011) which won the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand best book award in 2012.

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