History of art Books

19236 products


  • Deaccessioning and Its Discontents A Critical

    MIT Press Ltd Deaccessioning and Its Discontents A Critical

    10 in stock

    Book SynopsisThe first history of the deaccession of objects from museum collections that defends deaccession as an essential component of museum practice.Museums often stir controversy when they deaccession works—formally remove objects from permanent collections—with some critics accusing them of betraying civic virtue and the public trust. In fact, Martin Gammon argues in Deaccessioning and Its Discontents, deaccession has been an essential component of the museum experiment for centuries. Gammon offers the first critical history of deaccessioning by museums from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century, and exposes the hyperbolic extremes of “deaccession denial”—the assumption that deaccession is always wrong—and “deaccession apology”—when museums justify deaccession by finding some fault in the object—as symptoms of the same misunderstanding of the role of deaccessions in proper museum practice. He chronicles a ser

    10 in stock

    £34.85

  • Networking the Bloc Experimental Art in Eastern

    MIT Press Ltd Networking the Bloc Experimental Art in Eastern

    10 in stock

    Book SynopsisThe story of the experimental zeitgeist in Eastern European art, seen through personal encounters, pioneering dialogues, collaborative projects, and cultural exchanges.Throughout the 1970s, a network of artists emerged to bridge the East-West divide, and the no less rigid divides between the countries of the Eastern bloc. Originating with a series of creative initiatives by artists, art historians, and critics and centered in places like Budapest, Poznań, and Prague, this experimental dialogue involved Western participation but is today largely forgotten in the West. In Networking the Bloc, Klara Kemp-Welch vividly recaptures this lost chapter of art history, documenting an elaborate web of artistic connectivity that came about through a series of personal encounters, pioneering dialogues, collaborative projects, and cultural exchanges. Countering the conventional Cold War narrative of Eastern bloc isolation, Kemp-Welch shows how artistic ideas were relayed among

    10 in stock

    £38.25

  • Dissidence The Rise of Chinese Contemporary Art

    MIT Press Ltd Dissidence The Rise of Chinese Contemporary Art

    10 in stock

    Book SynopsisHow the valorization of artistic and political dissidence has contributed to the rise of Chinese contemporary art in the West.Interest in Chinese contemporary art increased dramatically in the West shortly after the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. Sparked by political sympathy and the mediatized response to the event, Western curators, critics, and art historians were quick to view the new art as an expression of dissident resistance to the Chinese regime.  In this book, Marie Leduc proposes that this attribution of political dissidence is not only the result of latent Cold War perceptions about China, but also indicative of the art world's demand for artistically and politically provocative work—a demand that mirrors the valorization of free expression in liberal democracies. Focusing on nine Chinese artists—Wang Du, Wang Keping, Huang Yong Ping, Yang Jiechang, Chen Zhen, Yan Pei-Ming, Shen Yuan, Ru Xiaofan, and Du Zhenjun—who mig

    10 in stock

    £25.50

  • Contact Warhol Photography Without End The MIT

    MIT Press Ltd Contact Warhol Photography Without End The MIT

    10 in stock

    Book SynopsisAndy Warhol's daily practice of photography during the last decade of his life, examined and documented for the first time.“A picture means I know where I was every minute. That's why I take pictures.”—Andy WarholFrom 1976 until his death in 1987, Andy Warhol was never without his camera. He snapped photos at discos, dinner parties, flea markets, and wrestling matches. Friends, boyfriends, business associates, socialites, celebrities, passers by: all captured Warhol's attention—at least for the moment he looked through the lens. In a way, Warhol's daily photography practice anticipated our current smart phone habits—our need to record our friends, our families, and our food. Warhol printed only about 17 percent of the 130,000 exposures he left on contact sheets. In 2014, Stanford's Cantor Center for the Arts acquired the 3,600 contact sheets from the Warhol Foundation. This book examines and documents for the first time these contact s

    10 in stock

    £28.80

  • Gyorgy Kepes The MIT Press Undreaming the Bauhaus

    MIT Press Ltd Gyorgy Kepes The MIT Press Undreaming the Bauhaus

    10 in stock

    Book SynopsisHow Gyorgy Kepes, the last disciple of Bauhaus modernism, became the single most significant artist within a network of scientific experts and elites.Gyorgy Kepes (1906-2001) was the last disciple of Bauhaus modernism, an acolyte of László Moholy-Nagy and a self-styled revolutionary artist. But by midcentury, transplanted to America, Kepes found he was trapped in the military-industrial-aesthetic complex. In this first book-length study of Kepes, John Blakinger argues that Kepes, by opening the research laboratory to the arts, established a new paradigm for creative practice: the artist as technocrat. First at Chicago's New Bauhaus and then for many years at MIT, Kepes pioneered interdisciplinary collaboration between the arts and sciences—what he termed “interthinking” and “interseeing.” Kepes and his colleagues—ranging from metallurgists to mathematicians—became part of an important but little-explored constellation: the C

    10 in stock

    £40.00

  • Public Knowledge

    MIT Press Ltd Public Knowledge

    10 in stock

    Book Synopsis

    10 in stock

    £22.95

  • MIT Press Radical Virtuosity Ana Mendieta and the Black

    Out of stock

    Book SynopsisReclaiming the artist Ana Mendieta as a formally innovative maker of performative art who forged connections to the marginalized around the world.The artist Ana Mendieta (1948-1985) is remembered as the creator of powerful works expressing a vibrant and unflinching second-wave feminist sensibility. In Radical Virtuosity, art historian Genevieve Hyacinthe offers a new view of Mendieta, connecting her innovative artwork to the art, cultural aesthetics and concerns, feminisms, and sociopolitical messages of the black Atlantic. Mendieta left Cuba as a preteen, fleeing the Castro regime, and spent years in U.S. foster care. Her sense of exile, Hyacinthe argues, colors her work. Hyacinthe examines the development of Mendieta's performative artworks—particularly the Silueta series (1973-1985), which documented the silhouette of her body in the earth over time (a series “without end,” Mendieta said)—and argues that these works were shaped

    Out of stock

    £999.99

  • Marcel Duchamp and the Art of Life The MIT Press

    MIT Press Ltd Marcel Duchamp and the Art of Life The MIT Press

    10 in stock

    Book SynopsisA groundbreaking reading of Duchamp's work as informed by Asian “esoterism, ” energetic spiritual practices identifying creative energy with the erotic impulse.Considered by many to be the most important artist of the twentieth century, the object of intensive critical scrutiny and extensive theorizing, Marcel Duchamp remains an enigma. He may be the most intellectual artist of all time; and yet, toward the end of his life, he said, “If you wish, my art would be that of living: each second, each breath is a work which is inscribed nowhere, which is neither visual or cerebral.” In Marcel Duchamp and the Art of Life, Jacquelynn Baas offers a groundbreaking new reading of Duchamp, arguing in particular that his work may have been informed by Asian “esoterism, ” energetic spiritual practices that identify creative energy with the erotic impulse. Duchamp drew on a wide range of sources for his art, from science and mathematics to a

    10 in stock

    £38.25

  • The Architectural Model The MIT Press Histories

    MIT Press Ltd The Architectural Model The MIT Press Histories

    10 in stock

    Book SynopsisAn investigation of different uses for the architectural model through history—as sign, souvenir, funerary object, didactic tool, medium for design, and architect's muse.For more than five hundred years, architects have employed three-dimensional models as tools to test, refine, and illustrate their ideas. But, as Matthew Mindrup shows, the uses of physical architectural models extend beyond mere representation. An architectural model can also simulate, instruct, inspire, and generate architectural designs. It can be, among other things, sign, souvenir, toy, funerary object, didactic tool, medium, or muse. In this book, Mindrup surveys the history of architectural models by investigating their uses, both theoretical and practical.Tracing the architectural model's development from antiquity to the present, Mindrup also offers an interpretive framework for understanding each of its applications in the context of time and place. He first examines models meant to por

    10 in stock

    £34.85

  • Propaganda Art in the 21st Century

    MIT Press Propaganda Art in the 21st Century

    10 in stock

    Book Synopsis

    10 in stock

    £22.95

  • The Barbarian Invasions

    MIT Press Ltd The Barbarian Invasions

    10 in stock

    Book Synopsis

    10 in stock

    £27.20

  • Prospecting Ocean The MIT Press

    MIT Press Ltd Prospecting Ocean The MIT Press

    10 in stock

    Book SynopsisInvestigating the entanglement of industry, politics, culture, and economics at the frontier of ocean excavations through an innovative union of art and science.The oceans are crucial to the planet's well-being. They help regulate the global carbon cycle, support the resilience of ecosystems, and provide livelihoods for communities. The oceans as guardians of planetary health are threatened by many forces, including growing extractivist practices. Through the innovative lens of artistic research, Prospecting Ocean investigates the entanglement of industry, politics, culture, and economics at the frontier of ocean excavation. The result is a richly illustrated study that unites science and art to examine the ecological, cultural, philosophical, and aesthetic reverberations of this current threat to the oceans.Prospecting Oceans takes as its starting point an exhibition by the photographer and filmmaker Armin Linke, which was commissioned by TBA21-Academy, London,

    10 in stock

    £22.95

  • CoIllusion  Dispatches from the End of

    MIT Press Ltd CoIllusion Dispatches from the End of

    10 in stock

    Book SynopsisReports from America's political crisis, exposing a new “iconopolitics,” in which words and images lose their connection to reality.The political crisis that sneaked up on America—the rise of Trump and Trumpism—has revealed the rot at the core of American exceptionalism. Recent changes in the way words and images are produced and received have made the current surreality possible; communication through social media, by design, maximizes attention and minimizes scrutiny. In Co-Illusion, the noted writer on art, photography, and politics David Levi Strauss bears witness to the new “iconopolitics” in which words and images lose their connection to reality. The collusion that fueled Trump's rise was the secret agreement of voters and media consumers—their “co-illusion”—to set aside the social contract. Strauss offers dispatches from the epicenter of our constitutional earthquake, writing first from the 2016

    10 in stock

    £28.80

  • Art and Tradition in a Time of Uprisings The MIT

    MIT Press Ltd Art and Tradition in a Time of Uprisings The MIT

    10 in stock

    Book SynopsisExamining radical reinventions of traditional practices, ranging from a queer reclamation of the Jewish festival of Purim to an Indigenous remixing of musical traditions.Supposedly outmoded modes of doing and making—from music and religious rituals to crafting and cooking—are flourishing, both artistically and politically, in the digital age. In this book, Gabriel Levine examines collective projects that reclaim and reinvent tradition in contemporary North America, both within and beyond the frames of art. Levine argues that, in a time of political reaction and mass uprisings, the subversion of the traditional is galvanizing artists, activists, musicians, and people in everyday life. He shows that this takes place in strikingly different ways for Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in settler colonies. Paradoxically, experimenting with practices that have been abandoned or suppressed can offer powerful resources for creation and struggle in the present.Lev

    10 in stock

    £30.60

  • Saturation

    MIT Press Ltd Saturation

    10 in stock

    Book Synopsis

    10 in stock

    £36.00

  • Heritage and Debt Art in Globalization October

    MIT Press Ltd Heritage and Debt Art in Globalization October

    10 in stock

    Book SynopsisHow global contemporary art reanimates the past as a resource for the present, combating modern art's legacy of Eurocentrism.If European modernism was premised on the new—on surpassing the past, often by assigning it to the “traditional” societies of the Global South—global contemporary art reanimates the past as a resource for the present. In this account of what globalization means for contemporary art, David Joselit argues that the creative use of tradition by artists from around the world serves as a means of combatting modern art's legacy of Eurocentrism. Modernism claimed to live in the future and relegated the rest of the world to the past. Global contemporary art shatters this myth by reactivating various forms of heritage—from literati ink painting in China to Aboriginal painting in Australia—in order to propose new and different futures. Joselit analyzes not only how heritage becomes contemporary through the practice of individual

    10 in stock

    £30.60

  • The Long Front of Culture The Independent Group

    MIT Press Ltd The Long Front of Culture The Independent Group

    10 in stock

    Book SynopsisHow a group of artists and theorists turned to exhibition design as the only medium capable of synthesizing high and low in postwar culture.In 1950s London, a cadre of young artists, theorists, and popular culture aficionados known as the Independent Group (IG) came together for a series of pressing meetings. Their humble goal: to reimagine the structure of postwar culture by situating art in the midst of military-industrial technologies and pop pleasures. In this book, Kevin Lotery argues that the IG turned to the cross-disciplinary form of exhibition design as the only medium capable of getting the measure of these forces, the only technique that could integrate high and low, aesthetic and scientific, and redesign them in turn. At the heart of this story are the IG's most unruly members, including artists Richard Hamilton, Nigel Henderson, and Eduardo Paolozzi; architects Alison and Peter Smithson; and critics Lawrence Alloway and Reyner Banham. To these upstarts, art w

    10 in stock

    £32.80

  • Visionary New England The MIT Press

    MIT Press Ltd Visionary New England The MIT Press

    10 in stock

    Book SynopsisConnecting New England's historical spiritualist and utopian traditions—from Brook Farm to Harvard's LSD research—to work by contemporary artists with regional ties.New England has a rich history of spiritual, mystical, and utopian strivers. Their visionary schemes range from nineteenth-century Transcendentalist experiments in communal living at Brook Farm and Fruitlands to the Harvard Project's LSD research, led by Timothy Leary, in the mid-twentieth century. The search for alternative ways of life often overlapped with the search for the Divine or expanded modes of consciousness and creativity. Visionary New England, which accompanies an exhibition at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, connects these traditions to the work of ten contemporary artists with New England ties. Generously illustrated, with ninety color images, the book interweaves analysis and imagery of New England's visionary traditions with reproductions of paintings, photographs, vid

    10 in stock

    £28.80

  • The Story of Contemporary Art

    MIT Press Ltd The Story of Contemporary Art

    10 in stock

    Book Synopsis

    10 in stock

    £33.96

  • On Photographs

    MIT Press Ltd On Photographs

    1 in stock

    Book SynopsisAn exploration of photography in 120 photographs.In On Photographs, curator and writer David Campany presents an exploration of photography in 120 photographs. Proceeding not by chronology or genre or photographer, Campany's eclectic selection unfolds according to its own logic. We see work by Henri Cartier-Bresson, William Eggleston, Helen Levitt, Garry Winogrand, Yves Louise Lawler, Andreas Gursky, and Rineke Dijkstra. There is fashion photography by William Klein, one of Vivian Maier's contact sheets, and a carefully staged scene by Gregory Crewdson, as well as images culled from magazines and advertisements. Each of the 120 photographs is accompanied by Campany's lucid and incisive commentary, considering the history of that image and its creator, interpreting its content and meaning, and connecting and contextualizing it with visual culture. Image by image, we absorb and appreciate Campany's complex yet playful take on photography and its history.The title,

    1 in stock

    £29.71

  • Sensorium Embodied Experience Technology and

    MIT Press Ltd Sensorium Embodied Experience Technology and

    10 in stock

    Book SynopsisArtists and writers reconsider the relationship between the body and electronic technology in the twenty-first century through essays, artworks, and an encyclopedic Abecedarius of the New Sensorium.The relationship between the body and electronic technology, extensively theorized through the 1980s and 1990s, has reached a new technosensual comfort zone in the early twenty-first century. In Sensorium, contemporary artists and writers explore the implications of the techno-human interface. Ten artists, chosen by an international team of curators, offer their own edgy investigations of embodied technology and the technologized body. These range from Matthieu Briand's experiment in controlled schizophrenia and Janet Cardiff and Georges Bures Miller's uneasy psychological soundscapes to Bruce Nauman's uncanny night visions and François Roche's destabilized architecture. The art in Sensorium—which accompanies an exhibition at the MIT List Visual Arts Center

    10 in stock

    £34.40

  • New Realisms 19571962 Object Strategies Between

    MIT Press Ltd New Realisms 19571962 Object Strategies Between

    10 in stock

    Book SynopsisWorks by a pre-Pop, post-abstract expressionist generation of artists who rejected painterly expression and embraced the object.As the 1950s became the 1960s, a new generation of artists around the globe rejected direct painterly expression and returned decisively to the object. Moving away from abstract expressionism and toward the sensibility that would become Pop, these artists—among them Raymond Hains, Martial Raysse, Yves Klein, Daniel Spoerri, Jean Tinguely, and Robert Rauschenberg—effectively established a new set of artistic paradigms that would influence the decade ahead. New Realisms: 1957-1962 maps this international field of artistic practice, showcasing more than 200 works by artists of the period. The title echoes the name of the French movement of the 1960s “Nouveau Réalisme.” Indeed, the work of the Nouveaux Réalistes group anchors the book (and the exhibition it accompanies), but at the same time, New Realisms r

    10 in stock

    £36.55

  • The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art

    MIT Press Ltd The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art

    10 in stock

    Book SynopsisMapping the new geography of the visual arts, from the explosion of biennials to the emerging art markets in Asia and the Middle East.The geography of the visual arts changed with the end of the Cold War. Contemporary art was no longer defined, exhibited, interpreted, and acquired according to a blueprint drawn up in New York, London, Paris, or Berlin. The art world distributed itself into art worlds. With the emergence of new art scenes in Asia and the Middle East and the explosion of biennials, the visual arts have become globalized as surely as the world economy has. This book offers a new map of contemporary art's new worlds.The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art Worlds documents the globalization of the visual arts and the rise of the contemporary over the last twenty years. Lavishly illustrated, with color throughout, it tracks developments ranging from exhibition histories and the rise of new art spaces to art's branding in such emerging markets

    10 in stock

    £42.50

  • A Handbook of California Design 19301965

    MIT Press Ltd A Handbook of California Design 19301965

    10 in stock

    Book SynopsisMore than 140 illustrated biographical profiles map the innovative modern California design community.Mid-twentieth-century California offered fertile ground for design innovations. The state's reputation as a land of unlimited opportunity, its many institutions of higher learning, and its perpetually booming population created conditions that allowed designers and craftspeople to flourish. They found an eager market among educated and newly affluent Californians, and their products shaped the material culture of the entire nation. This book, a companion to the popular 2011 MIT Press/LACMA publication California Design, 1930-1965: “Living in a Modern Way,” reveals the complex web of influences, collaborations, institutional affiliations, and social networks that fueled the California design economy.This book offers more than 140 illustrated biographical profiles of the most significant mid-century California designers, including such famous names as

    10 in stock

    £28.00

  • The Market

    MIT Press Ltd The Market

    10 in stock

    Book Synopsis

    10 in stock

    £16.95

  • Arthur Dove A Retrospective The MIT Press

    MIT Press Ltd Arthur Dove A Retrospective The MIT Press

    10 in stock

    Book SynopsisIn collaboration with William C. Agee and Elizabeth Hutton Turner The American artist Arthur Dove (1880-1946), purportedly the first artist to have produced an abstract painting, has always occupied a central place in writings on early American modernism. This book accompanies the first major exhibition on Dove since 1974. The exhibition, organized by the Addison Gallery of American Art and the Phillips Collection, covers the period from 1908, the year after Dove took up painting, through 1946, the year of his death. It is comprised of approximately eighty paintings, collages, pastels, and charcoal drawings. Along with Georgia O'Keeffe and John Marin, Dove was touted for more than three decades by photographer and dealer Alfred Stieglitz as an American original, one whose work was prescient in its opposition to the materialism of a newly industrialized America. Essays by Balken, Agee, and Turner discuss Dove's interactions with Stieglitz and others in his circle, including O'Keeffe, Ma

    10 in stock

    £17.09

  • Global Activism

    MIT Press Ltd Global Activism

    10 in stock

    Book Synopsis

    10 in stock

    £42.50

  • The Magazine

    MIT Press Ltd The Magazine

    10 in stock

    Book Synopsis

    10 in stock

    £16.95

  • Information

    MIT Press Ltd Information

    10 in stock

    Book Synopsis

    10 in stock

    £16.95

  • Animals

    MIT Press Ltd Animals

    10 in stock

    Book Synopsis

    10 in stock

    £16.95

  • The Culture of Curating and the Curating of

    MIT Press Ltd The Culture of Curating and the Curating of

    10 in stock

    Book SynopsisHow curating has changed art and how art has changed curating: an examination of the emergence contemporary curatorship.Once considered a mere caretaker for collections, the curator is now widely viewed as a globally connected auteur. Over the last twenty-five years, as international group exhibitions and biennials have become the dominant mode of presenting contemporary art to the public, curatorship has begun to be perceived as a constellation of creative activities not unlike artistic praxis. The curator has gone from being a behind-the-scenes organizer and selector to a visible, centrally important cultural producer. In The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s), Paul O'Neill examines the emergence of independent curatorship and the discourse that helped to establish it.O'Neill describes how, by the 1980s, curated group exhibitions—large-scale, temporary projects with artworks cast as illustrative fragments—came to be understood as th

    10 in stock

    £24.30

  • Destruction

    MIT Press Ltd Destruction

    10 in stock

    Book Synopsis

    10 in stock

    £17.05

  • Russian Dada 19141924

    MIT Press Ltd Russian Dada 19141924

    10 in stock

    Book SynopsisA lavishly illustrated volume that views Russian avant-garde art through the lens of Dada.This is the first book to approach Russian avant-garde art from the perspective of the anti-art canons associated with the international Dada movement. The works described and documented in Russian Dada were produced at the height of Dada's flourishing, between World War I and the death of Vladimir Lenin—who, incidentally, was a frequent visitor to Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, the founding site of Dada. Like the Dadaists, the Russian avant-gardists whose works appear in this volume strove for internationalism, fused the verbal and visual, and engaged in eccentric practices and pacifist actions, including outrageous performances and anti-war campaigns.The works featured in this lavishly illustrated volume thrive on negation, irony, and absurdity, with the goal of constructing a new aesthetic paradigm that is an alternative to both positivist and rationalist Constructivi

    10 in stock

    £36.00

  • The Fourth Dimension and NonEuclidean Geometry in

    MIT Press Ltd The Fourth Dimension and NonEuclidean Geometry in

    1 in stock

    Book SynopsisThe long-awaited new edition of a groundbreaking work on the impact of alternative concepts of space on modern art.In this groundbreaking study, first published in 1983 and unavailable for over a decade, Linda Dalrymple Henderson demonstrates that two concepts of space beyond immediate perception—the curved spaces of non-Euclidean geometry and, most important, a higher, fourth dimension of space—were central to the development of modern art. The possibility of a spatial fourth dimension suggested that our world might be merely a shadow or section of a higher dimensional existence. That iconoclastic idea encouraged radical innovation by a variety of early twentieth-century artists, ranging from French Cubists, Italian Futurists, and Marcel Duchamp, to Max Weber, Kazimir Malevich, and the artists of De Stijl and Surrealism. In an extensive new Reintroduction, Henderson surveys the impact of interest in higher dimensions of space in art and culture from the 19

    1 in stock

    £45.60

  • Written Matter The MIT Press

    MIT Press Ltd Written Matter The MIT Press

    1 in stock

    Book SynopsisSelections from Gabriel Orozco's notebooks: sketches, photographs, and texts that offer a rare look inside his art-making process.Written Matter presents selections from the notebooks of the prolific and celebrated artist Gabriel Orozco. These texts, sketches, and images from notebooks spanning 1992 to 2012 offer insights into Orozco's artmaking process, revealing his thinking, methods, and rationales. The texts, translated from the original handwritten Spanish, offer personal truisms, compelling insights, observations, and notes on process and method, forming a subterranean stream that runs parallel to his artwork. “Art is the opposite of spectacle,” he writes. “Art does not try to convince anyone, that's why it's shocking.” The notebooks are fundamental to Orozco's work, serving as a travelogue and personal dictionary that, when consulted, allow him to resume the trajectory of his thought anywhere. Because Orozco chooses not to work in a studi

    1 in stock

    £32.40

  • Health

    MIT Press Ltd Health

    10 in stock

    Book Synopsis

    10 in stock

    £21.21

  • Snapshot Photography

    MIT Press Ltd Snapshot Photography

    Out of stock

    Book SynopsisAn examination of the contradictions within a form of expression that is both public and private, specific and abstract, conventional and countercultural.Snapshots capture everyday occasions. Taken by amateur photographers with simple point-and-shoot cameras, snapshots often commemorate something that is private and personal; yet they also reflect widely held cultural conventions. The poses may be formulaic, but a photograph of loved ones can evoke a deep affective response. In Snapshot Photography, Catherine Zuromskis examines the development of a form of visual expression that is both public and private.  Scholars of art and culture tend to discount snapshot photography; it is too ubiquitous, too unremarkable, too personal. Zuromskis argues for its significance. Snapshot photographers, she contends, are not so much creating spontaneous records of their lives as they are participating in a prescriptive cultural ritual. A snapshot is not only a r

    Out of stock

    £29.93

  • Kara Walker October Files 28

    MIT Press Ltd Kara Walker October Files 28

    10 in stock

    Book SynopsisSelected texts that survey the full range of Kara Walker’s artistic practice, emphasizing the work itself rather than the debates and controversies around it.Kara Walker’s work and its borrowings from an iconography linked to the fantasized and travestied history of American chattel slavery has been theorized and critiqued in countless texts throughout her career. Exegeses of her work have been shaped by the numerous debates on the very debates it generated. How, then, do we approach a work that has been covered by such “thick theoretical layers”? This collection is unique in emphasizing Walker’s work itself rather than the controversies surrounding it. These essays and interviews survey Walker’s artistic practice from her early works in the 1990s through her most recent ones, from her famous silhouette projects to her lesser-known drawings and lantern shows. The texts, by art historians, curators, critics, scholars, and w

    10 in stock

    £19.55

  • Subject Matter

    MIT Press Ltd Subject Matter

    10 in stock

    Book SynopsisA theorization of habit that emphasizes its excessive and unsettling qualities rather than its mediating, adaptive, and stabilizing functions.Subject Matter offers a bold counterpoint to prevalent conceptions of habit characterized by bodily fluidity and ease, as the stabilizing foundation of an emerging subjectivity, or, more negatively, as a numbing and deadening force. Instead of facilitating the coordination of action with goal and self with environment, habit appears as a disruptively recursive operation with extreme ontological implications that are often more quotidian than exceptional. Vinegar theorizes habit’s more perturbing aspects, from repetition compulsion to kenosis to breakdown, through an encounter between Hegel’s philosophy (of habit), psychoanalytic dimensions of repetition, Tom McCarthy’s novel Remainder, and Omer Fast’s feature-length film interpretation of the novel.Vinegar starts with the premise that habit is an “unhappy mediator,” a disturbance of the very medium and milieu that is constitutive of the subject. Subject Matter pays close attention to those aspects of habit that are usually considered deviations from, or potential threats to, habit proper and that generate a logic of breakdown: automaticity, mechanization, thingness, inertia, and fixity. By plotting a topology of habit’s unbearability through detailed accounts of its manifestation in writing, art, aesthetics, and visuality—and through an attentiveness to the unbalanced nonrelations between mediation and immediacy, being and having, fixity and fluidity, vanishing and overflowing, abbreviation and excess, beginning and ending—Vinegar exposes habit’s failure to mediate and inhabit. In doing so, he offers new and counterintuitive insights into how habit generates the unruly grounds it is supposed to settle, thus allowing us to ask how we might break down differently.

    10 in stock

    £22.95

  • Walking

    MIT Press Walking

    10 in stock

    Book Synopsis

    10 in stock

    £19.62

  • Virtual Art From Illusion to Immersion Leonardo

    MIT Press Virtual Art From Illusion to Immersion Leonardo

    10 in stock

    Book SynopsisAn overview of the art historical antecedents to virtual reality and the impact of virtual reality on contemporary conceptions of art.Although many people view virtual reality as a totally new phenomenon, it has its foundations in an unrecognized history of immersive images. Indeed, the search for illusionary visual space can be traced back to antiquity. In this book, Oliver Grau shows how virtual art fits into the art history of illusion and immersion. He describes the metamorphosis of the concepts of art and the image and relates those concepts to interactive art, interface design, agents, telepresence, and image evolution. Grau retells art history as media history, helping us to understand the phenomenon of virtual reality beyond the hype.Grau shows how each epoch used the technical means available to produce maximum illusion. He discusses frescoes such as those in the Villa dei Misteri in Pompeii and the gardens of the Villa Livia near Primaporta, Renaissance and B

    10 in stock

    £35.00

  • The Situationist City The MIT Press

    MIT Press The Situationist City The MIT Press

    10 in stock

    Book SynopsisSimon Sadler searches for the Situationist City among the detritus of tracts, manifestos, and works of art that the Situationist International left behind. From 1957 to 1972 the artistic and political movement known as the Situationist International (SI) worked aggressively to subvert the conservative ideology of the Western world. The movement's broadside attack on establishment institutions and values left its mark upon the libertarian left, the counterculture, the revolutionary events of 1968, and more recent phenomena from punk to postmodernism. But over time it tended to obscure Situationism's own founding principles. In this book, Simon Sadler investigates the artistic, architectural, and cultural theories that were once the foundations of Situationist thought, particularly as they applied to the form of the modern city.According to the Situationists, the benign professionalism of architecture and design had led to a sterilization of the world that threatened to

    10 in stock

    £40.32

  • Christian Krohgs Naturalism

    University of Washington Press Christian Krohgs Naturalism

    15 in stock

    Book SynopsisTable of ContentsList of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Christian Krohg, the Radical Naturalist 2. Naturalism, the Dark Side of Realism 3. The Heroism of the Scientist 4. Hippolyte Taine and the Modern Breakthrough in Scandinavia 5. Christian Krohg in Skagen: Painting according to Taine 6. Naturalism and the Beholder: Sympathy and Theatricality 7. Naturalist Paragone: Literature and Painting 8. Albertine in the Police Doctor’s Waiting Room: Panopticon, Spectacle, Speculum 9. Modern Pessimism: From Naturalism to Symbolism Epilogue: Naturalism Is Dead, Long Live Naturalism!

    15 in stock

    £39.00

  • Taking to the Air An Illustrated History of

    University of Washington Press Taking to the Air An Illustrated History of

    Book SynopsisTrade Review"For many, flight has become a mundane, even actively unpleasant experience. . . . The great joy of this book is to be reminded what a romantic idea it is." * Telegraph *

    £19.79

  • Art of the Northwest Coast

    University of Washington Press Art of the Northwest Coast

    Book SynopsisTrade Review"A masterfully written, superbly illustrated, welcome addition to any collection." * Choice *

    £23.39

  • University of Washington Press Hiroshige

    £43.20

  • University of Washington Press Contemporary Public Art in China A Photographic

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    Book SynopsisYoung (art, U. of Washington), a sculptor, traveled in China in 1995 photographing public art and trying to understand its context through conversations with local artists. Here he presents 83 statues and monuments sited in plazas, squares, and traffic circles. His photos and commentary on settings

    Out of stock

    £999.99

  • The Prints of Isoda Koryusai

    University of Washington Press The Prints of Isoda Koryusai

    Out of stock

    Book SynopsisIdentifies more than 2,500 designs of various formats and themes and demonstrates that Isoda Koryusai broadened the treatment of traditional print subjects. This book assesses Koryusai's significance from the perspective of consumer culture. It is intended for scholars as well as general readers.Trade Review"Allen Hockley's long-awaited monograph on Isoda Korysai (1835-90) is a welcome addition to the literature on Japan's eighteenth-century print culture." * CAA Reviews *"Much more than an attempt to construct a place in the canon for a neglected artist. Thinking outside the box, Hockley shows how old paradigms have blinded us to other kinds of information that can be teased from print culture. Hockley admits that he has raised more questions than he can answer. In doing so, he has stimulated readers' intellect, offered a new model for scholarship, and given us a window on a world heretofore unchartered. What more could one ask?" * Journal of Asian Studies *"Splendid . . . . This impressive and stimulating book has forever altered how we look at ukiyo-e." * Andon 75 *"Allen Hockley is not a timid scholar. What he sets out in this book, using Isoda Koryusai (1735-1790) as a case study, is nothing less than a new methodology for the study of ukiyo-e..Used with skill and nuance, his new interpretive paradigm offers possibilities for thinking in ways that productively complicate and elucidate the recovery of meaning in Japanese prints, both past and present." * Artibus Asiae *Table of Contents1. Rationale and Approach 2. Early Ukiyo-e Histories and the Marginalization of Koryusai 3. Koryusai's Prints in Series 4. Courtesan Prints and the Hinagata Series 5. A Survey of Koryusai's Career Appendixes 1. Prints in Series 2. Hinagata wakana no hatsu moyo 3. Hashira-e 4. Ichimai-e 5. Shunga Notes Bibliography Index

    Out of stock

    £999.99

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