Daniel Neofetou

Last updated

Daniel Neofetou
Danielneofetou.jpg
Daniel Neofetou, May 2016
Born (1989-02-01) 1 February 1989 (age 34)
Leamington Spa, England
NationalityBritish
Alma mater Goldsmiths, University of London

Daniel Andreas Neofetou (born 1 February 1989) is a British writer and theorist. He is the author of the books Good Day Today: David Lynch Destabilises the Spectator (2012) and Rereading Abstract Expressionism, Clement Greenberg and the Cold War (2021). He is a regular contributor to The Wire , Art Monthly and Artforum , and has written for Mute , Complex , Flash Art and Le Phare, the journal of Le Centre culturel suisse. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] He has also published academic journal articles in Journal of Contemporary Painting, Quarterly Review of Film and Video , Arts , Getty Research Journal and Philosophy & Social Criticism. [6] [7] [8] [9] He is an associate lecturer at University of Northampton and Birkbeck, and a visiting lecturer at University of Edinburgh. [10]

Contents

Early life

Neofetou was born in Leamington Spa, England on 1 February 1989. He studied at University of Warwick, University of Edinburgh and Goldsmiths, University of London, at which he completed a PhD entitled Eyes in the Heat: The Question Concerning Abstract Expressionism, initially under the supervision of Mark Fisher, and subsequently under the supervision of Josephine Berry and Marina Vishmidt. [11]

Career

His first book, a monograph on David Lynch entitled Good Day Today: David Lynch Destabilises the Spectator (2012), was published by Zero Books. [12] [13] [14] In 2018, he curated Divine Cargo, an evening of performance art at South London Gallery. [15] In 2018, he contributed to ‘The Annotated Reader’, a publication and exhibition curated by Ryan Gander. In early 2019, he contributed a short essay to the King's College London project "Technologically Fabricated Intimacy." [16]

His second book, Rereading Abstract Expressionism, Clement Greenberg and the Cold War was published in October 2021 with Bloomsbury Publishing. [17] In a review in Leonardo, Jan Baetens writes that it is 'an important contribution to the study of abstract expressionism' which provides 'very stimulating new interpretations of the discourses that have “made” abstract expressionism what it was.' [18]

Bibliography

Books

Scholarly articles

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jackson Pollock</span> American abstract painter (1912–1956)

Paul Jackson Pollock was an American painter. A major figure in the abstract expressionist movement, Pollock was widely noticed for his "drip technique" of pouring or splashing liquid household paint onto a horizontal surface, enabling him to view and paint his canvases from all angles. It was called all-over painting and action painting, since he covered the entire canvas and used the force of his whole body to paint, often in a frenetic dancing style. This extreme form of abstraction divided the critics: some praised the immediacy of the creation, while others derided the random effects. In 2016, Pollock's painting titled Number 17A was reported to have fetched US$200 million in a private purchase.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Modernism</span> Philosophical and art movement

Modernism is a philosophical, religious, and arts movement that arose from broad transformations in Western society during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The movement reflected a desire for the creation of new forms of art, philosophy, and social organization which reflected the newly emerging industrial world, including features such as urbanization, architecture, new technologies, and war. Artists attempted to depart from traditional forms of art, which they considered outdated or obsolete. The poet Ezra Pound's 1934 injunction to "Make it New" was the touchstone of the movement's approach.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Minimalism</span> Movements in various forms of art and design

In visual arts, music and other media, minimalism is an art movement that began in post–World War II in Western art, most strongly with American visual arts in the 1960s and early 1970s. Prominent artists associated with minimalism include Donald Judd, Agnes Martin, Dan Flavin, Carl Andre, Robert Morris, Anne Truitt and Frank Stella. The movement is often interpreted as a reaction against abstract expressionism and modernism; it anticipated contemporary postminimal art practices, which extend or reflect on minimalism's original objectives.

Abstract expressionism is a post–World War II art movement in American painting, developed in New York City in the 1940s. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve international influence and put New York at the center of the Western art world, a role formerly filled by Paris.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Abstract impressionism</span> Art movement

Abstract Impressionism is an art movement that originated in New York City, in the 1940s. It involves the painting of a subject such as real-life scenes, objects, or people (portraits) in an Impressionist-style, but with an emphasis on varying measures of abstraction. The paintings are often painted en plein air, an artistic style involving painting outside with the landscape directly in front of the artist. The movement works delicately between the lines of pure abstraction and the allowance of an impression of reality in the painting.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Clement Greenberg</span> American essayist and visual art critic (1909–1994)

Clement Greenberg, occasionally writing under the pseudonym K. Hardesh, was an American essayist known mainly as an art critic closely associated with American modern art of the mid-20th century and a formalist aesthetician. He is best remembered for his association with the art movement abstract expressionism and the painter Jackson Pollock.

An art movement is a tendency or style in art with a specific common philosophy or goal, followed by a group of artists during a specific period of time, or, at least, with the heyday of the movement defined within a number of years. Art movements were especially important in modern art, when each consecutive movement was considered a new avant-garde movement. Western art had been, from the Renaissance up to the middle of the 19th century, underpinned by the logic of perspective and an attempt to reproduce an illusion of visible reality. By the end of the 19th century many artists felt a need to create a new style which would encompass the fundamental changes taking place in technology, science and philosophy.

Action painting, sometimes called "gestural abstraction", is a style of painting in which paint is spontaneously dribbled, splashed or smeared onto the canvas, rather than being carefully applied. The resulting work often emphasizes the physical act of painting itself as an essential aspect of the finished work or concern of its artist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Color field</span> Art movement

Color field painting is a style of abstract painting that emerged in New York City during the 1940s and 1950s. It was inspired by European modernism and closely related to abstract expressionism, while many of its notable early proponents were among the pioneering abstract expressionists. Color field is characterized primarily by large fields of flat, solid color spread across or stained into the canvas creating areas of unbroken surface and a flat picture plane. The movement places less emphasis on gesture, brushstrokes and action in favor of an overall consistency of form and process. In color field painting "color is freed from objective context and becomes the subject in itself."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Art criticism</span> Discussion or evaluation of visual art

Art criticism is the discussion or evaluation of visual art. Art critics usually criticize art in the context of aesthetics or the theory of beauty. A goal of art criticism is the pursuit of a rational basis for art appreciation but it is questionable whether such criticism can transcend prevailing socio-political circumstances.

Leo Steinberg was an American art critic and art historian.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">9th Street Art Exhibition</span> 1951 art show in New York City, USA; debut of the abstract expressionist art movement

The 9th Street Art Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture is the official title artist Franz Kline hand-lettered onto the poster he designed for the Ninth Street Show. Now considered historic, the artist-led exhibition marked the formal debut of Abstract Expressionism, and the first American art movement with international influence. The School of Paris, long the headquarters of the global art market, typically launched new movements, so there was both financial and cultural fall-out when all the excitement was suddenly emanating from New York. The post-war New York avant-garde, artists like Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock, would soon become "art stars," commanding large sums and international attention. The Ninth Street Show marked their "stepping-out," and that of nearly 75 other artists, including Harry Jackson, Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, Grace Hartigan, Robert De Niro Sr., Philip Guston, Elaine de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Franz Kline, Ad Reinhardt, David Smith, Milton Resnick, Joop Sanders, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman and many others who were then mostly unknown to an art establishment that ignored experimental art without a ready market.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Barbara Rose</span> American art historian and academic (1936–2020)

Barbara Ellen Rose was an American art historian, art critic, curator and college professor. Rose's criticism focused on 20th-century American art, particularly minimalism and abstract expressionism, as well as Spanish art. "ABC Art", her influential 1965 essay, defined and outlined the historical basis of minimalist art. She also wrote a widely used textbook, American Art Since 1900: A Critical History.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Western painting</span> Art produced in the Western world

The history of Western painting represents a continuous, though disrupted, tradition from antiquity until the present time. Until the mid-19th century it was primarily concerned with representational and Classical modes of production, after which time more modern, abstract and conceptual forms gained favor.

In the visual arts, late modernism encompasses the overall production of most recent art made between the aftermath of World War II and the early years of the 21st century. The terminology often points to similarities between late modernism and post-modernism although there are differences. The predominant term for art produced since the 1950s is contemporary art. Not all art labelled as contemporary art is modernist or post-modern, and the broader term encompasses both artists who continue to work in modern and late modernist traditions, as well as artists who reject modernism for post-modernism or other reasons. Arthur Danto argues explicitly in After the End of Art that contemporaneity was the broader term, and that postmodern objects represent a subsector of the contemporary movement which replaced modernity and modernism, while other notable critics: Hilton Kramer, Robert C. Morgan, Kirk Varnedoe, Jean-François Lyotard and others have argued that postmodern objects are at best relative to modernist works.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">New York Figurative Expressionism</span>

New York Figurative Expressionism is a visual arts movement and a branch of American Figurative Expressionism. Though the movement dates to the 1930s, it was not formally classified as "figurative expressionism" until the term arose as a counter-distinction to the New York-based postwar movement known as Abstract Expressionism.

Irving Sandler was an American art critic, art historian, and educator. He provided numerous first hand accounts of American art, beginning with abstract expressionism in the 1950s. He also managed the Tanager Gallery downtown and co-ordinated the New York Artists Club of the New York School from 1955 to its demise in 1962 as well as documenting numerous conversations at the Cedar Street Tavern and other art venues. Al Held named him, "Our Boswell of the New York scene," and Frank O'Hara immortalized him as the "balayeur des artistes" because of Sandler's constant presence and habit of taking notes at art world events. Sandler saw himself as an impartial observer of this period, as opposed to polemical advocates such as Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">American Figurative Expressionism</span> American art movement

American Figurative Expressionism is a 20th-century visual art style or movement that first took hold in Boston, and later spread throughout the United States. Critics dating back to the origins of Expressionism have often found it hard to define. One description, however, classifies it as a Humanist philosophy, since it's human-centered and rationalist. Its formal approach to the handling of paint and space is often considered a defining feature, too, as is its radical, rather than reactionary, commitment to the figure.

Post-painterly abstraction is a term created by art critic Clement Greenberg as the title for an exhibit he curated for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1964, which subsequently travelled to the Walker Art Center and the Art Gallery of Toronto.

It is. A Magazine for Abstract Art was an influential limited edition fine arts magazine that only published six issues in its seven years of existence. Founded by the abstract expressionist sculptor Philip Pavia, the magazine's contributors included a who's who of some of the 20th century's most important artists. Although it primarily focused on painters and sculptors like Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Helen Frankenthaler, Jackson Pollock and Isamu Noguchi, it also published artists of other kinds, like musician John Cage and poet Allen Ginsberg. Collectively, the magazines served to catalyze, and catalogue, the contemporaneous life cycle of abstract expressionist thought, from creation to mature expression. Reference to the magazine appears in the archives of Picasso, Motherwell and André Breton, as well as collector Peggy Guggenheim, critic Clement Greenberg and nearly two dozen others.

References

  1. Krogh Groth, Sanne; Schulz, Holger. The Bloomsbury Handbook of Sound Art. NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. ISBN   978-1-5013-3881-6
  2. Neofetou, Daniel. "Art Investigation". Art Monthly , 17 June 2018. Retrieved 26 July 2020
  3. Clark, Tom. "Consistency (or indexicality)" Research.tomclrk.com, 2018. Retrieved 26 July 2020
  4. Neofetou, Daniel. "Brief and Wholly Concrete Moments". Mute , 28 October 2015. Retrieved 26 July 2020
  5. Neofetou, Daniel. "Damn Good Coffee: David Lynch Adverts Up There With Twin Peaks?". Complex UK, 8 October 2014. Retrieved 25 July 2020
  6. A world for us: On the prefiguration of reconciliation in Barnett Newman’s painting. Ingenta Connect. Retrieved 25 July 2020
  7. "Laughing and Crying and Dancing: The Limits of Human Behavior in Swing Time (1936)". Taylor & Francis online, 30 January 2014. Retrieved 25 July 2020
  8. Neofetou, Daniel (2020). "Political Art Criticism and the Need for Theory". Arts. 10: 1. doi: 10.3390/arts10010001 .
  9. Neofetou, Daniel (2021). "Greenberg's Marxism: Clement Greenberg's Unfinished Essay Draft on André Breton's "Political Position of Surrealism" (1935)". Getty Research Journal. 14: 205–219. doi:10.1086/716587. S2CID   236916972.
  10. "Dr Daniel Neofetou — Birkbeck, University of London".
  11. "Eyes in the Heat: The Question Concerning Abstract Expressionism". Goldsmiths, University of London. Retrieved 25 July 2020
  12. "Good Day Today: Synopsis, Reviews". John Hunt Publishing. Retrieved 25 July 2020
  13. Buckland, Warren. "David Lynch swerves: uncertainty from Lost Highway to Inland Empire". Taylor & Francis online, 30 January 2014. Retrieved 25 July 2020
  14. "Good Day Today: David Lynch Destabilises the Spectator". Google Scholar. Retrieved 25 July 2020
  15. "Divine Cargo, Sat 11 AUG 2018, 6PM". South London Gallery, 2018. Retrieved 25 July 2020
  16. "Technologically Fabricated Intimacy". King’s Cultural Community. Retrieved 26 July 2020
  17. "Rereading Abstract Expressionism, Clement Greenberg and the Cold War". Google Books. Retrieved 26 July 2020
  18. "Rereading Abstract Expressionism: Clement Greenberg and the Cold War". March 2022.