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Book Cover
E-book
Author Dohoney, Ryan, author.

Title Saving abstraction : Morton Feldman, the de Menils, and the Rothko Chapel / Ryan Dohoney
Published New York : Oxford University Press, [2019]
©2019

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Description 1 online resource : illustrations, portraits, music
Contents Pursuing anxiety -- The de Menils's reality -- Shaken into seeig and hearing -- Abstract ecumenism
Summary Saving Abstraction takes up the conflicted history of Morton Feldman's most important collaboration--his work with Dominique and John de Menil on music for the Rothko Chapel in Houston. These collaborators struggled over fundamental questions about the emotional efficacy of artistic practice and its potential translation into religious feeling. At the center of this study is the question of ecumenism--that is, in what terms can religious encounters be staged for fruitful dialog to take place? And how might abstraction (both visual and musical) be useful to achieving it? This was a dilemma for Feldman, whose music sought to produce sublime "abstract experience," as well as for the de Menils, who envisioned the Rothko Chapel as a space for spiritual intervention into late modernity. Saving Abstraction develops two central concepts: "abstract ecumenism" and "agonistic universalism." The former characterizes a broad spiritual orientation within postwar musical modernism and experimentalism that aspired to altered states of ego-loss. This emerged as a renewed religious sensibility in late modernist experimentalism. The latter concept describes the particular religious form that Feldman's music achieves within Rothko Chapel--an ascetic mode of existence that endures hopefully the aporia of postwar modernization's destructiveness and modernism's failure to effectively counter it. -- publisher's description
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes Online resource; title from book description page (Oxford Academic, viewed November 28, 2022)
Subject Feldman, Morton, 1926-1987. Rothko Chapel.
Menil, Dominique de.
Menil, John de.
SUBJECT Menil, Dominique de fast
Menil, John de fast
Subject Rothko Chapel (Houston, Tex.)
SUBJECT Rothko Chapel (Houston, Tex.) fast
Rothko Chapel (Feldman, Morton) fast
Subject Art, Abstract.
Installations (Art) -- 20th century
Art and music.
Art, Abstract
Art and music
Installations (Art)
Form Electronic book
ISBN 0190948604
9780190948603
9780190948580
0190948582
9780190948597
0190948590