Visions of the Human

In what ways do the artistic avant-garde's representations of the human body reflect the catastrophe of World War I? The European modernists were inspired by developments in the nineteenth-century, yielding new forms of knowledge about the nature of reality and repositioning the human body as the new 'object' of knowledge. New 'visions' of the human subject were created within this transformation. However, modernity's reactionary political climate - for which World War I provided a catalyst - transformed a once liberal ideal between humanity, environment, and technology, into a tool of disciplinary rationalisation. Visions of the Human considers the consequences of this historical moment for the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It explores the ways in which the 'technologies of the self' that inspired the avant-garde were increasingly instrumentalised by conservative politics, urbanism, consumer capitalism and the society of 'the spectacle'. This is an engaging and powerful study which challenges prior ideas and explores new ways of thinking about modern visual culture.

Tom Slevin is Critical Theory Programme Leader and Lecturer in Cultural and Contextual Studies at the University of Creative Arts, Kent, UK. He is also Lecturer in Photography at Southampton Solent University.

List of Illustrations
Introduction [4319] 6
Chapter One: New Visions of the Human [24974]
Introduction 21
Vision and Knowledge 26
Cultural Encoding 33
The 'Crisis of the Subject' 43
Cubist Perceptions 50
The Bionomic of Body and Environment 71
Cubism, Phenomena and Intersubjectivity 77
Chapter Two: The Simultaneous Subject [20862]
Introduction 90
Colour, Form, and Memory 99
Simultaneous Materiality 104
La Prose du Transsibérien 110
Vision and the Fourth Dimension 113
La Robe Simultanée 130
Chapter Three: Rationalised Existence [16555]
Introduction: Cubism After the War 142
The Cubist Rhizome 145
The European Avant-Garde 152
Oskar Schlemmer and Rationalised Cubism 155
Schlemmer's Bodies 161
Man in Space 168
The Figure of Reactionary Modernism 174
The Monumental Body 185
Chapter Four: Modernity's Vitruvian Bodies [9638]
Introduction: Vitruvian Men 190
Rudolph Laban's Icosahedron 197
The Kinesphere 203
Cybernetic Bodies 209
Le Corbusier, the Body, and the 'Mass Ornament' 215
The Geometry of Utopia 220
Le Modulor 235
Conclusion: From n-Dimensional Imagination to One Dimensional Man [9294] 239
[Total approx. 85000 words - exc. Bibliography & endnotes]
Endnotes 264
Bibliography 289