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Sculpted Ambiances in Africana Landscape centers on ambiance as it affects the expanded sculptural field, particularly filling a gap in aesthetics left by a lack of focus on sculptures and installations in the Africana world and elsewhere.
This book differentiates ambiance from other affective states and emotions and explores its production. It provides an introduction to the history of ambiance and vividly demonstrates, through immersive and experiential writing, how ambiance manifests in different artistic situations and social settings. The book considers the neglected and unique importance of sculptural ambiance to the history of Africana visual culture, and what these works mean in terms of their social, historical, cultural, political, and ecological imagination of space. The book is written in an episodic style and begins with a description of an image before presenting an analysis of the artist's style and staging for ambient experience.
This book will benefit college and university students; scholars of art, architecture, aesthetics, philosophy, geography, anthropology, and sociology; and curators and galleries.
List of contents
Introduction
1. Concentricity
2. Aura
3. Atmosphere
4. Ambiance
5. Space
6. Envelopment
7. Attunement
8. Sculpted Ambiances
9. Topology
10. Staging
11. Structure of the Book
Chapter One: Aurality
1. Aura
2. Atmosphere
3. Transcendence
4. Qualia
5. Audire
6. Sprit
Chapter Two: Mirageness
1. Freedom
2. History
3. Staging
4. Elemental
5. Materiality
6. Nature
7. Ambient Light
8. Memory
Chapter Three: Earthiness
1. Poetic Ambiance
2. Allure
3. Shadow
4. Assemblage
5. Cityscapes
6. "Sense"
7. Milieu
8. Storm
9. Openness
Chapter Four: Tactility
1. Something
2. Monument
3. Decoration
4. Domination
5. Moment
6. Design
Chapter Five: Vitality
1. Projection
2. Allure
3. Peace
4. Care
5. Anxiety
6. Embodiment
Chapter Six: Sacredness
1. Spiritual
2. Origins
3. Masks
4. Ambiance
5. Syncretism
Conclusion
About the author
George Joshua Orwel, a philosopher and writer, is on the adjunct faculty of Hunter College and City Tech, City University of New York. He is writing a book on David Driskell as a Sylvia and Eddie Brown research fellow at the David C. Driskell Center for the Study of Visual Arts & Culture of African Americans & the African Diaspora, University of Maryland, College Park, MD.
Summary
Sculpted Ambiances in Africana Landscape centers on ambiance as it affects the expanded sculptural field, particularly filling a gap in aesthetics left by a lack of focus on sculptures and installations in the Africana world and elsewhere.
