What is the relation of art and history? What is art today? Why does art affect us? In Field Notes on the Visual Arts, 75 scholars, curators and artists traverse chronology and geography to reveal the meanings and dilemmas of art. The eight topic headings - Anthropomorphism, Appropriation, Contingency, Detail, Materiality, Mimesis, Time and Tradition - are written by historians of art, literature, culture and science, archaeologists, anthropologists, philosophers, curators and artists, and consider an astonishing range of artefacts. Poised somewhere between Neil MacGregor's A History of the World in 100 Objects and an academic volume of essays on art, Field Notes brings together voices generally separated inside and outside the academy. Its open approach to knowledge is commensurate with the work of art, aiming to make clear that the work of art is both meaningful and resistant to meaning.

Karen Lang is Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Oxford (2019-20)

The index covers all chapters and illustrations but not the reading list. Illustrations numbers are printed in bold.

Abramovic, Marina, 57

Addison, Joseph, pleasures of imagination and mimetic arts, 222

Adorno, Theodor W., on Enlightenment, 9 (see also Enlightenment; Horkheimer); on individual's liquidation, 147; on Kierkegaard's bourgeois flâneur, 193

agency

and technological devices (cars, computers, robots), 23

and the subjectivization of technology and art, 166-70

artistic, 16-19, 20-23, 51

in cognitive psychology, 22

sacred artistic and material, 166-70

See also Gell; Mitchell

Alberti, Leon Battista, 192

Alÿs, Francis, 55

animism, 24

anthropocentrism, 32-35

Anthropomorphism

and aesthetics of empathy (Einfühlung), 16, 24

and anthropology, 17-18

and architecture, 16 (see also Le Corbusier), 205

and cave art, 8-11

and iconoclasm, 17, 21

and physiognomics (see Mimesis: physiognomics)

and sculpture, 2-7, 32-35

as a form of fetishism, 17, 21

critique to (see Enlightenment)

idolatry associated with, 17, 20-21

in aniconic and monotheistic faiths, 20-21

in Japanese feminine aesthetics (see Japan: feminine aesthetics)

in Moche ceramics (Peru), 9, 25-27

anthrozoomorphism, 24. See animism

anti-mimetic. See Mimesis: and the anti-mimetic

Appropriation

and mechanical reproducibility of artworks, 58-61 (see also under Benjamin)

and memory, 43-48, 63-65

and mimicry (Ahmung), 44, 45, 47

and print culture, 65

as allusion (Lehnung), 44, 45, 47

as an aspect of influence, 51-52

as a threaten to originality, 75

as conversation between original and copy, 74

as cultural interaction, 75

as identity theft, 71

as repetition, 56-62

as translation from one medium to another, 78

ethics of, 71-74

in Medieval sculpture, 49-52 (see also Autun; Cluny)

in Nazarene Art, 63-67

in postcolonial art, 71-74, 75-76

of a jargon, 68-70

See also Bataille: on appropriation

Aquinas. See Thomas Aquinas

Arasse, Daniel, on beholder's attention to details, 140; on details extracted from paintings, 133

Aristotle, 209. See also Mimesis: Aristotle

Arnold, Matthew, on tradition, 299

art and propaganda in socialist China, 39, 40, 125-28 (see also Fu Baoshi; Guan Shanyue; Pan Tianshou)

Artist in residence programme. See terminally ill people and art

artworks, scaled to emphasize art's social and political implications, 125-28; their transience, 99-102. See also agency

Auerbach, Erich, on mimesis, 120, 121, 231, 236. See also Dante

Augustine of Hippo, Saint, on time, 274

Australian Aboriginal art, 71-74

Autun (France), medieval sculpture in, 50-52

Bacon, Francis, 234

bandits' jargon, in Dijon, 68-70

Barry, Fabio, 112

Barthes, Roland

Camera lucida, 257, 305

concept of punctum, 148

on color, 159

on photography and truth, 85

semiology of the images as opposed to Panofsky's iconology, 295-96

Baselitz, Georg, 16, 42-48, 71

Basquiat, Jean-Michel, 74

Bataille, Georges, on appropriation, 49-50; on Duchamp's Dust Breeding, 183. See also materials: dust

Batchelor, Davis, on color, 159

Baudelaire, Charles, on details, 139; on the concept of modernity as contingent, 99

Baxandall, Michael, on influence, 60, 62n13; on visual arts and social experience, 123

Belting, Hans, 162; on the tangibility of images, 165

Bemelmans, Ludwig: Madeline, 113, 304

Benjamin, Walter

and mechanical reproducibility of artworks, 57

on details, 116

on mimesis, 224

on nineteenth-century French interiors (Arcades Project), 182, 193, 194, 195

on photographs as repositories of truth, 85, 86

paean to Karl Blossfeldt, 148

Bennett, Gordon, 26, 71, 74

Bergson, Henri, notion of dureé, 274

Berthollet, Claude-Louis, 101

Beuys, Joseph, refiguration of dust, 73, 184. See also materials: dust

Biel, Joe: Veil, 44, 134-35, 137-38

Bijin (beautiful woman). See Japan

Binswanger, Ludwig, on Aby Warburg's interest in details, 130-31

black-and-white, documentary films, 94; keys in music (see Debussy)

Blake, William, 99

Blanc, Charles, 84, 205

Blondel, Jacques-François, 83

blood. See materials: blood

Bloom, Harold, The Anxiety of Influence, 63, 284, 298. See also Eliot

Blossfeldt, Karl, 49, 148

Borges, Jorge Luis, 13, 143

Bose, Nandalal. See colors

Botticelli, 140; Warburg's dissertation on, 131

Boyer, Pascal, terminology of anthropomorphism, 25-26

Brosses, Charles de, 17-18

Brown, Bill, 164

Brunelleschi, Filippo, 121

Burr, Tom 11, 34-35

Buskirk, Martha, 99

Butler, Judith, 86

Butler, Samuel, 129

Büttner, David Sigmund, 47

Byung-Chul Han, concept of repetition (Shanzai), 56, 61n3

cadavre exquis. See Surrealism

Callahan, Harry, 84

Carlyle, Thomas, 129

Carstens, Asmus Jakob, 23, 24, 65-66

Cézanne, Paul, 148, 201

Chakrabarty, Dipesh, provincialization of Europe, 312

Chardin, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon, 148

Chinese art, contemporary. See art and propaganda

cinema, 8-11

Clark, Timothy James, 146

Cluny (France), medieval sculpture in, 49-51

Cole, Michael, 112

colors (sacred), in postcolonial South Asia, 158-61, 161n9

Conceptualism in art, and the dematerialization of the art object, 154, 166; as a critique of modernism's concept of style (subjectivity), 71

Connor, Linda, 27

Constable, John, 201

Contingency

and electronic devices capturing catastrophic events, 90-92

and global information, 93-95

and photography, 83-84, 85-86, 90-92, 94, 96-98

as creativity, 83

as unexpected and unforeseen, 91…