Overview

Touch suggests a broad range of physical, intellectual, and emotional connections that serve to undermine the dominance of vision in histories of modernism. By exploding notions of the very nature of art, the artists considered in this beautifully illustrated monograph introduced fundamentally new conceptions of subjectivity and engagement for the modernist era. While offering an entertaining and engaging history of dada and surrealism, Please Touch presents a persuasive argument highlighting the role of tactility, which it defines as a decentralized, fragmented, and intimate form of knowing. In this compelling volume, Janine Mileaf offers the first full-length consideration of Marcel Duchamp's readymades and their profound legacy in the transatlantic context of dada and surrealism. This book embraces a broad range of art objects: consumer items such as the urinal and bottlerack that Duchamp sneaked into art exhibits; flea-market assemblages fabricated by his interwar avant-garde successors Man Ray, Andre Breton, Salvador Dali, Meret Oppenheim, and others; and the bricolage boxes of American surrealist Joseph Cornell. Please Touch is an intriguing exploration of some of the twentieth century's most important art and artists that will appeal to a broad range of art historians and interdisciplinary scholars.

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9781584658825

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Mileaf gives accounts of the varieties of tactility in its art-historical and philosophical variations, and her thoughtfully contextualised and imaginative analyses of the objects are an important contribution to current thinking about them, inflecting the familiar with the unfamiliar. --Oxford Art Journal

Oxford Art Journal Mileaf gives accounts of the varieties of tactility in its art-historical and philosophical variations, and her thoughtfully contextualised and imaginative analyses of the objects are an important contribution to current thinking about them, inflecting the familiar with the unfamiliar. Oxford Art Journal

Author Information

JANINE MILEAF is an associate professor of art history at Swarthmore College.

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