Surface

What is the place of materiality - the expression or condition of a physical substance - in our visual age of rapidly changing materials and media? How is it fashioned in the arts or manifested in technology? In Surface, cultural critic and theorist Giuliana Bruno deftly explores these questions, seeking to understand materiality in the contemporary world. Arguing that materiality is not a question of the materials themselves but rather the substance of material relations, Bruno investigates the space of those relations, examining how they appear on the surface of different media - for example, on movie, television, or computer screens or on the skin of buildings and people. The object of visual studies, she insists, goes well beyond the image, and she contends that the contact between people and objects occurs on the surface. Through this tangible contact, we apprehend the art object and space of art. As such, Bruno threads through the surfaces of images, emphasizing the actual fabrics of the visual - the surface condition, the textural manifestation, the support of a work, and the way in which it is sited, whether on a canvas, a wall, or a screen. In performing these critical operations on the surface, she articulates it as a site in which different forms of mediation and transformation can take place. Surveying object relations across art, architecture, fashion, design, film, and new media, Surface is a magisterial account of contemporary visual culture.

被誉为“加拿大文学女王”的玛格丽特•阿特伍德是一位勤奋多产的作家，也是二十世纪加拿大文坛为数不多享有国际声誉的诗人。现居多伦多。 自上世纪六十年代中期起，阿特伍德便以持久旺盛的创作力不给评论界任何淡忘她的机会。她获得过除诺贝尔文学奖之外的大多数重量级国际文学奖，并被多伦多大学等十多所院校授予荣誉博士学位。她的作品已被译成三十多种文字。2017年，阿特伍德获卡夫卡奖和德国书业和平奖。2019年，阿特伍德凭借《证言》再度问鼎布克奖。