History of art Books

Book SynopsisA novel exploration of the idea of nonlinear time and its place at the heart of modern art and architectureTrade Review“A fascinating and polyphonic group portrait, Untimely Moderns has repercussions for the historiography of architecture schools across the western world.”—Mari Lending, author of Plaster Monuments. Architecture and the Power of Reproduction

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Book SynopsisFor the first time, explore John Singer Sargent’s fascination with Spain as seen in stunning landscapes, architectural views, figure studies, and scenes of everyday lifeTrade Review“The show [Sargent and Spain] . . . and its lavish exhibition catalog examine for the first time this captivating aspect of the artist’s vast legacy, his profound engagement with the diverse historical panoply of Spain’s colorful people and their distinctive culture.”—Barrymore Laurence Scherer, Wall Street Journal

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Book SynopsisAn in-depth exploration of how the iconic artist created his works over the course of his full career

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Book SynopsisAn innovative analysis of 1960s abstract sculpture that draws on transgender studies and queer theoryTrade Review“Abstract Bodies is an extraordinarily imaginative book. It makes unexpected yet absolutely compelling links between artworks and transgender logics or ways of thinking that are easily overlooked or misperceived from traditional disciplinary approaches.”—Ramzi Fawaz, Transgender Studies Quarterly“David Getsy is a key voice among a new generation of art historians.”—Art in America“Highly recommended.”—Choice“In bringing to light a grossly neglected approach to the topic and action of gendering in art production and interpretation, Getsy’s book demonstrates that we are still processing the profound event that was 1960s abstraction, still reconciling ourselves to its categorical refusals, semiotic disruptions, and relational revisions.”—Art Journal “Getsy produces a daring and fascinating project” —Jenni Sorkin, Oxford Art Journal“This meticulously researched book, combining expert archival research, close analysis of less-researched artworks by canonical figures of American abstract sculpture in the 1960s, and a deliberate interdisciplinary analysis, catapults art-historical research [and] engages the rapidly growing scholarship on transgender studies into the twenty-first century.”—Natasha Adamou, Sculpture Journal“The contribution made by this book to both art history and to gender studies is incontrovertible.”—Gender ResearchRecommended by Elmgreen & Dragset as their pick for 2021 “The Best Art Books to Dive into This Summer—As Recommended by Artists” in the Art Newspaper“Abstract Bodies makes a remarkable intervention into art history, combining a rigorous attention to the history of sculpture with surprising and elaborate readings of the art of the 1960s. As a result of his disciplined attention to abstract forms rather than figural representations of the body, David Getsy has opened a new chapter in art history. This is a brilliant and original book and will change the way we think about the dynamics between art, embodiment, plasticity, and queer form.”—Jack Halberstam, University of Southern California“David Getsy’s Abstract Bodies represents a welcome convergence of the long established academic discipline of art history with the more recent interdisciplinary field of transgender studies. This book is not a history of transgender artists or transgender themes in art, but rather a path-breaking application of transgender studies as a heuristic lens. His deft coupling of subject matter and critical framework enables readers to grasp the profound extent to which the plasticity of shape and transformation of substance in reference to human being is a central feature of recent Western history.”—Susan Stryker, University of Arizona“Abstract Bodies more than bridges art history and gender studies—David Getsy demonstrates that these fields need each other. This book shows us how to see gender’s capacities in texture, light and form—loosened from the discourse of sex, gender becomes a material possibility. This is essential reading for anyone who wants to know how to write about sculpture, or who wants to know how queer art history can be.”—Jennifer Doyle, University of California at Riverside“The insights that emerge from David Getsy’s analyses of sculpture, reception, anecdote, historiography, and of the particular languages – and voices – of artists, are provocative and profound. In the process of locating transformational energies in these artists’ works, Getsy not only connects us more intimately to each artist but also redirects the field of postwar abstract sculpture.”—Michael Brenson, Bard College

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Book SynopsisA landmark publication on the drawings of one of the giants of the Italian RenaissanceTrade Review“In this authoritative catalog, Rinaldi makes several new attributions, including two exquisite head studies. . . . [Botticelli’s] line feels spring-loaded; his saints and angels seem ready for the dance floor; his paintings’ grace and vigor started with a pen.”—Jason Farago, New York Times, “Best Art Books of 2023”

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Book SynopsisA collection of dialogues, talks, and writings by Philip Guston (1913-1980), one of the most intellectually adventurous and poetically gifted of modern painters. It lets us hear Guston's voice - as the artist delivers a lecture on Renaissance painting, instructs students in a classroom setting, and discusses various artists and writers.Trade Review"Lovingly compiled" Artforum "This hefty volume is 344 pages of smart art takes (Clark Coolidge, ed.) by the largely self-taught painter who, with pal Jackson Pollock, got expelled from L.A.'s Manual Arts High School in 1929." -- Christopher Knight Los Angeles Times, Culture Watch Blog "This is a book of wisdom, not only for artists but for anyone seeking to learn something from art." The Nation "Expansive" San Francisco Bay Guardian "Until now his influence has been through his art rather than his words. This collection gathers together interviews and studio discussions and commits the artist's words to print. -- Alexander Adams Art Newspaper "[Guston's] voice at its effusive best." Jewish ExponentTable of ContentsPreface Acknowledgments Introduction by Dore Ashton Statement in Art News Annual (1944) Statement in Twelve Americans (1956) Notes on Bradley Walker Tomlin (1957) Interview with Sam Hunter (1957) From the Chicago Panel (1958) Statement in Nature in Abstraction (1958) Statement in It Is (1958) Statement in The New American Painting (1957–58/1959) Interview with David Sylvester (1960). From Panel at the Philadelphia Museum School of Art (1960) Conversation with Bill Berkson (1964) Interview with Joseph S. Trovato (1965) Piero della Francesca: The Impossibility of Painting (1965) Philip Guston’s Object: Conversation with Harold Rosenberg (1965) Faith, Hope, and Impossibility (1965/66) Conversation with Joseph Ablow (1966) Interview with Karl Fortess (1966) On Morton Feldman (1967) Conversation with Morton Feldman (1968) The Image (1969) On Piero della Francesca (1971) Talk at Yale Summer School of Music and Art (1972) Conversation with Louis Finkelstein (1972) Conversation with Clark Coolidge (1972) Talk at Yale Summer School of Music and Art (1973) On the Nixon Drawings (1973) Ten Drawings (1973) On Survival (1974) On Drawing (1974) Conversation with Harold Rosenberg (1974) Talk at “Art/Not Art?” Conference (1978) From Panel at “Art/Not Art?” Conference (1978) Interview with Jan Butterfield (1979) Interview with Mark Stevens (1980) Interview with Joanne Dickson (1980) Studio Notes (1970–78) Bibliography List of Illustrations Index

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Book SynopsisDemonstrates that the rapidly evolving creative processes and pictorial solutions Martin developed between 1940 and 1967 define all her subsequent art. This title offers descriptions of the networks of art, artists, and information that moved between New Mexico and the creative centers of New York and California in the postwar period.

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Book SynopsisTrade Review"...what in another writer’s hands might have been a dry academic treatise turns out to be a lively ramble through high and low culture, touching on the likes of Diderot, Goethe, David Foster Wallace, Susan Sontag, Sleeping Beauty, the Countess de Castiglione and Andy Warhol." * Wall Street Journal *"Reed seeds his profundities throughout Slow Art in example after example, weaving them into compelling histories that get you thinking about art in new ways." * The Santa Fe New Mexican *"It has an interesting point to make when it comes to the relationship between stillness and motion, layering and adding dimensions as well as approaching art from a “slow” angle instead of the artwork itself necessarily carrying such qualities. What seems to be a fad and neologism, is actually based on a concept that harks back to ancient times yet what is exemplified in the book is that it is inextricably with our current state of affairs and the future." * Scene Point Blank *Table of ContentsList of Illustrations List of Video Examples Acknowledgments Introduction: Marking Time PART I: DRAWING OUT SLOW ART 1. What Is Slow Art? (When Images Swell into Events and Events Condense into Images) 2. Living(?) Pictures PART II: EPISODES FROM A SHORT HISTORY OF SLOW LOOKING 3. Before Slow Art 4. Slow Art Emerges in Modernity I: Secularization from Diderot to Wilde 5. Slow Art Emerges in Modernity II: The Great Age of Speed PART III: SLOW ART NOW 6. Slow Fiction, Film, Video, Performance Art, 1960 to 2010 7. Slow Photography, Painting, Installation Art, Sculpture, 1960 to 2010 8. Angel and Devil of Slow Art Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisReading African art's impact on modernism as an international phenomenon, The Black Art Renaissance tracks a series of twentieth-century engagements with canonical African sculpture by European, African American, and sub-Saharan African artists and theorists. Notwithstanding its occurrence during the benighted colonial period, the Paris avant-garde discovery of African sculptureknown then as art nègre, or black arteventually came to affect nascent Afro-modernisms, whose artists and critics commandeered visual and rhetorical uses of the same sculptural canon and the same term. Within this trajectory, black art evolved as a framework for asserting control over appropriative practices introduced by Europeans, and it helped forge alliances by redefining concepts of humanism, race, and civilization. From the Fauves and Picasso to the Harlem Renaissance, and from the work of South African artist Ernest Mancoba to the imagery of Negritude and the École de Dakar, African sculpture's influence proved transcontinental in scope and significance. Through this extensively researched study, Joshua I. Cohen argues that art history's alleged centers and margins must be conceived as interconnected and mutually informing. The Black Art Renaissance reveals just how much modern art has owed to African art on a global scale.Table of ContentsPrologue Acknowledgments Note on Terms Introduction 1. Rethinking Fauve “Primitivism” 2. Picasso’s African Infl uences 3. Harlem Renaissance and Diaspora 4. Mancoba between Paradigms 5. Art Nègre and the École de Dakar Epilogue: Was Picasso “Black”? Archive Abbreviations Notes Selected Bibliography List of Illustrations Index

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Book SynopsisThe Image of the Black in Latin American and Caribbean Art is the first comprehensive survey of the visual representation of people of African descent in the region. This first volume spans four centuries, from European occupation in the fifteenth century through the establishment of slave colonies to the revolutionary emergence of independence.

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Book SynopsisJuliane Noth shows how art and discussions about the future of ink painting were linked to the reshaping of the country, leading to the creation of a uniquely modern Chinese landscape imagery. Noth offers a new understanding of these experiments by studying them as transmedial practice, at once shaped by and integral to the modern global art world.Trade Review[An] important new volume…It will be necessary reading for all scholars of Republican China’s cultural politics. -- Craig Clunas * Journal of Chinese History *A comprehensive and insightful series of analyses on the problems of landscape painting and its practitioners at the junction of intermediation via photography, and on the need to proclaim and reinforce the continuity of ‘Chinese landscape painting’. Because of its detail and precise analysis this text will be an important reference for some time. -- John Clark * 21: Inquiries into Art, History, and the Visual *

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Book SynopsisTrade ReviewOne of Art World's Top Ten Art Books to Read during Thanksgiving, 2015 "This carefully reproduced facsimile edition of renowned visual artist Basquiat's eight notebooks provides us a glimpse into the mind of a visionary artist. On nearly every page, readers will ponder over why and how Basquiat chose to string together these specific word marks and often bizarre phrases. The notebooks function as a sort of incubator for Basquiat's artistic process as well as a finished product in their own right ... a vital part of Basquiat's legacy and an invaluable window into his ingenious and whimsical mind."--Publishers Weekly "Seeing and reading the pages in the gallery certainly make one want to spend more time with Basquiat's writing, and Princeton University Press's forthcoming facsimile of the notebooks provides this time for closer study... The book offers the intimate reading experience one expects when engaging with an artist's private musing."--Megan N. Liberty, Hyperallergic "The Notebooks by Jean-Michel Basquiat is one of the most interesting books published in recent memory... A book for all seasons--it is a text and an art object at once, adding a new dimension to our knowledge of Basquiat's thought. It brings us under the surface or behind the scenes, whichever metaphor you prefer, showing the artist at his most protean, and pure, stained with the life that rarely slows down long enough to capture it in words."--Stephan Delbos, BODY "This beautiful book ... Expands our understanding of what this artist created in the too-short time he spent at work."--Colin Rafferty, Key Reporter "The Notebooks gathers passages selected from Basquiat's eight notebooks in one fascinating volume that will reveal many lesser-known talents and quirks of SAMO to his ever-growing number of fans worldwide."--Lorena Munoz-Alonso, Artnet News

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Book SynopsisTrade Review"A hugely ambitious book."---Catharine Edwards, Times Literary Supplement"[This book] is an original and subtle treatment of classical art history, full of fresh ideas and new perspectives and is sure to provide a springboard for future advances."---Brian A. Sparkes, Classics for All Reviews"The political, cerebral, aesthetic, ludic and erotic strains within classical reception are all sounded out in this sophisticated and beautifully illustrated book."---Tom Stammers, Classical Art"This is a hugely ambitious book."---Catharine Edwards, Art History"Enlightening and thought-provoking . . . show how Classical Art . . . is – however we look at it – alive and well."---Roger Williams, Minerva"With its detailed notes, extensive bibliography, and appealing visuals, this book will speak to anyone interested in the formation and reception of classical visual traditions."---Michael Squire, Greece and Rome

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Book SynopsisTrade Review"Digital Design: A History is the first [book] to provide origin stories and analysis of how the genie out of the bottle has impacted the field and culture at large. . . . [Eskilson] takes a broad approach to the evolution of digital practice and outcomes, examining all the hot-button areas, including games, UX/UI, digital typography and prototyping. As the first book of its kind, it is the foundation for future study."---Steven Heller, Print

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Book SynopsisTrade Review"What Noë shows is how that essential act of ‘making’ art is more than just an act of pleasure. . . . What it really encompasses is a radical act of inquiry into our entanglement."---Adam Frank, Big Think"[A]rt is at the heart of philosophy and the fusion of the two with a range of subjects can help us better understand what makes us human. . . .Alva Noe has introduced his thesis that is bound to generate enough debate on the antidote supplied by art and philosophy that “makes us what we are”, a state where the people, surrounded by music, art, sculpture, poetry become creative enough to break out of the codified social organisation into a more liberated and an inspirationally fulfilling life infused with the aesthetic."---Shelley Walia, The Hindu

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Book SynopsisTrade Review"Winner of the PROSE Award in Biography & Autobiography, Association of American Publishers""A Publishers Weekly Top 10 Art, Architecture, & Photography Book of Fall 2020""One of The Sunday Times' Best Art Books of 2020""An impressive and scrupulous work of scholarship."---Michael Prodger, The Sunday Times"Goya: A Portrait of the Artist [is] a newly informed chance to reflect on an artist of enigmatic mind and permanent significance. . . . Tomlinson addresses, with refreshing clarity, a chronic question of just how independent, not to say subversive, Goya was of the powers that employed him. . . . She admirably keeps the mysteries of Goya’s character distinct from its self-serving machinations."---Peter Schjeldahl, New Yorker"[A] thorough and balanced biography. . . . Tomlinson is an excellent guide."---Robin Simon, Literary Review"According to Janis Tomlinson, the great Spanish painter and etcher was not, as legend has it, a man who turned in on himself and . . . depicted a horror-haunted inner world with demons and witches everywhere, but a social creature who took on the cultural and folkloric currents of his time. Her Goya is no recluse, but shifts alongside his rapidly changing political masters." * Sunday Times *"If ever there was a time that demanded a fuller understanding of Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, that time is now. Goya navigated the tempestuous shoals around being a court painter and an independent humanist during the brutal period of Spain’s Imperial unraveling. In the process he emerged as arguably the first modern artist…[A] superlative study."---Christopher Knight, LA Times"Tomlinson has produced an authoritative, reliable and thoroughly up-to-date biography that includes many insights into Goya’s social and political milieu during a time of unprecedented upheaval in Spain. . . . [The book offers] a detailed account of his life while simultaneously offering insights into the artist’s creative process and providing the reader with the opportunity to distinguish between the legends and the facts concerning many facets of Goya’s life and work."---Simon Lee, Burlington Magazine"In Goya: A Portrait of the Artist, [Janis Tomlinson shows that] the painter was not the loner that he is sometimes imagined to be. . . . One of the pleasures of Tomlinson’s book lies in encountering the unvarnished details of Goya’s life; her delineation of the artist’s remarkably flexible political allegiances is especially engrossing."---Andrew Martin, Harper's Magazine"[Tomlinson] is an expert, evenhanded guide and there is no question we are in the surest hands."---Maxwell Carter, Wall Street Journal"Tomlinson’s detailed account of this long and productive life is discriminating and trustworthy. . . . Tomlinson has supplied a cool and corrective scholarly chronicle."---Julian Bell, New York Review of Books"A passionate and well-researched biography. . . . Tomlinson refutes the common image of Goya as a dark, obsessive artist and attributes his success, instead, to his geniality and initiative. The writing is insightful, with Tomlinson’s pensive, philosophical tone mirroring her deep expertise and knack for critical thinking. This inspired, thoughtful work sheds new light on Goya and will enthrall any lover of fine art." * Publishers Weekly *"Tomlinson’s meticulous distillation of a voluminous number of parish records, drawings, notes, and letters is impressive, and her knowledge of and passion for Goya continually shine through in her writing, making for a fascinating and insightful reading experience. A top-notch biography." * Kirkus starred review *"This well-informed, comprehensive biography would make an excellent gift for an art lover. Tomlinson has fashioned a clear and informative biography that will appeal to Goya researchers and enthusiasts."---Alexander Adams, The Critic"This masterly biography now puts the work into context and breathes life into the legend of the morose recluse."---Bel Mooney, The Daily Mail"The 'portrait of the artist' painted by Tomlinson is that of a man able to adapt to an ever-changing political landscape. Her prose interweaves personal biography and major historical events with brief interludes of artistic description that whet the visual appetite. Reading it is like walking on a frozen lake, aware of the scholarly depth beneath but safe on top of the thick ice. Bite-size chap­ters transform the tome into a digestible and enjoyable read. . . . in a world brimming with books on Goya, this will surely stand as the definitive biography for years to come."---Isabelle Kent, Apollo"Goya [is] a lucid, meticulously researched, and nuanced account of the life of the perennially fascinating Spanish painter, Francisco de Goya…[Janis] Tomlinson’s book is both a meticulous scholarly contribution and a highly accessible biography for the non-specialist reader. . . . Tomlinson’s tour de force is a profoundly sensitive and masterful portrait of one of the towering artists of the modern era."---Catherine M. Jaffe, Dieciocho"Goya takes a fresh look at well-trodden misconceptions about the artist, exhuming details from parish records, court papers, newspapers, and other archives, and investigated how recent discoveries like an early sketchbook and new access to his letters provide insight into his six decades of art."---Allison C. Meier, Fine Books & Collections"Francisco de Goya is often thought of as the reclusive, deaf and delusional artist who depicted drowning dogs, mutilated bodies and Saturn devouring his son…In Goya, the American art historian Janis Tomlinson goes some way to dispelling this perception, scouring primary resources — including the Spaniard’s letters, court papers and sketchbooks — to provide a more nuanced depiction." * Christie's *"Janet Tomlinson’s new biography restores [Goya] to his own times. . . . The pragmatic portrait of the artist offered by Tomlinson is one that makes compelling sense of the surviving textual evidence. . . . Tomlinson has provided the most reliable life of the artist to date."---Tom Stammers, London Review of Books

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Book SynopsisTrade Review"Alpers’s interest in the ‘unique’ work of Walker Evans is an interest in the ‘making’ of the photographs rather than in their interpretation: her approach is slow, patient, fastidious, detail-oriented, appreciative and illuminating. . . . It is really Starting from Scratch that is a ‘unique’ work: a close reading of classic photographs by a discerning eye (Alpers’s) that conjoins the instructional with the intimate, the scholarship of the historian with the candour of the memoirist. . . . A brilliant and, indeed, thrilling final chapter . . . considers the phenomenon of ‘late style’ as it relates to artists other than Walker Evans"---Joyce Carol Oates, Times Literary Supplement"Warm and sympathetic . . . really a wonderful biography."---Joyce Carol Oates, Times Literary Supplement Podcast"[A] superb book."---Richard Meyer, Artforum"Starting From Scratch is well researched, and Alpers’s heavily quotational approach provides the reader a wealth of material from Evans’s letters, lectures, published texts, and personal writings."---Rahel Aima, The Nation"Svetlana Alpers’s biography takes a chronological approach to the life of an artist. . . . But before the text explores Walker’s aspirations, tastes, travels, career highs and love of the written word, the reader is presented with an uninterrupted 143 full-page reproductions of Evans’s photographs—an invitation to appraise the work before engaging with the man." * Christie's *"[A] brilliant scholar of Dutch painting’s take on an artist whose work has moved and inspired me for years."---Ayad Akhtar, Elle.com"A fresh consideration of Evans’s pictures. . . . Engaging."---Brian Sholis, Aperture"A fresh, scholarly look—complete with more than 200 images—at the seminal American photographer, this time through the lens of fine art and literature. In a lavishly illustrated narrative bolstered by impassioned research, art historian Alpers reintroduces readers to Walker Evans (1903-1975), one of America’s great artistic observers . . . Alpers convincingly presents him as a new kind of poet. . . . Great American photography in a welcome new frame." * Kirkus Reviews *"A comprehensive study. . . . Alpers shows how Evans’s approach differed both from that of other photographers and from conventional assumptions about photography. . . . Intriguing interpretations of Evans’s photos and work process, for both specialists and general readers." * Library Journal *"An entire semester in one volume. . . . [Alpers's] analysis of Evans’ artistic life will not disappoint. . . . This biography affectionately reads like a lecture series, with professor Alpers nudging students to close-read the 143 black/white Evans photos conveniently placed at the book’s beginning."---Jean Bundy, Anchorage Press"In Walker Evans: Starting from Scratch, art historian Svetlana Alpers explores the prominent 20th century documentary photographer’s work and creative process. Though one might usually consider photography to be a graphic art like painting, Alpers examines Evans’ love of text and the relationship between his images and works by writers including Flaubert, Baudelaire, and Faulkner, making the compelling case that literature is at the heart of his work. The book features 170 of Evans’s photos, but the main reason to get Starting from Scratch is to learn more about the artist’s way of seeing the world and rediscover his work with fresh eyes." * Photo Life Magazine *"[Alpers] takes a vivid, fresh look at the remarkable photographer whose well-known work on cities and on American rural poverty resonates today. But there is much more to see, and say. Many of the 143 plates will not be familiar, and Alpers interprets them in the context of international literature and art, inviting 'those who don’t know Evans [to] discover his greatness,' and ranking photographic achievement with literature and painting of the highest quality." * Harvard Magazine *"[Walker Evans] is finely tuned and thoroughly researched, carving out a unique space by focusing on Evans's lifelong emphasis on the art of seeing. . . . Highlighting groundbreaking cultural events, artists, and historical moments, including both world wars, the 1960s, and multiple cultural renaissances throughout Europe and the US, Alpers energetically writes about the people, places, and events that were continuous sources of influence and inspiration for Evans. . . . Highly recommended." * Choice *"This 213-page book provides depth and breadth about Evans’ work. Readers . . . who are curious about what drove Walker Evans to create, and to learn about what influenced him and what distinguishes him from other 20th Century photographers as it evolved will no doubt enjoy Walker Evans: Starting from Scratch. "---Caryn Hoffman, Picture this Post"In this extensive and detailed biography . . . the reader is presented with a new perspective on Walker Evans’s work, rendering the presumed familiar unfamiliar in a decidedly nuanced and enjoyable way." * ARLIS/NA Reviews *"[A] learned, suggestive, and handsome work. Alpers studies Evans’s work employing the techniques used to critique paintings: by assessing how he framed his scenes, in the light of his printed statements and off-the-cuff remarks. Her most illuminating is the theme of detail. She focuses on what Evans focused on."---Allen D. Boyer, Key Reporter"Insightful."---Stuart Mitchner, Town Topics"Alpers’ book on Walker Evans begins, after a half title page, with reproductions of 143 of Evans’ photographs . . . a silently eloquent way to say: the pictures come first. . . . Alpers focuses on [Evans’s] profound connection to French culture, literary in the first place . . . and then photographic . . . to show how 'Evans always viewed his country as if from the outside and often with an ironic eye.'"---Barry Schwabsky, Tourniquereview.com"This is a rich and thoughtful study of Evans’s life and his “furtive, passionate looking”. . . . A wonderfully insightful discussion of Evans’s key role in the creation of a distinctively American photography and the way great photographs can change how we see the world."---PD Smith, The Guardian

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Book SynopsisTrade Review"Rarities of these Lands is a rich reflection on the gap between the enchanting facade we call the Dutch Golden Age, on display...in every exhibition of 17th-century Dutch painting, and the riches, rarities and loot in the warehouse behind."---Timothy Brook, Times Literary Supplement"Claudia Swan’s masterful study explores the Dutch taste for consumption, and the means by which distant lands were reached and foreign goods accessed, first by seizing and plundering Portuguese and Spanish cargoes, then by engaging in war and conquest. . . . Rarities of these Lands provides a rich narrative about the circulation of exotic material culture and the history of collecting in the seventeenth century."---Annemarie Jordan Gschwend, Journal of the History of Collections"The early modern phenomenon of the kunstcamer or rariteytencamer (cabinets of curiosities) is a recurrent theme for Swan, and indeed each chapter might be likened to its own self-contained kunstcamer, packed with amazing images and a wide array of intriguing anecdotes. . .All of these wonders and more await the reader in lavishly illustrated pages."---Ellsworth Hamann, CAA Reviews"Rarities of these Lands is a magnificent achievement. . . . [It] integrate[s] art historical and historical perspectives on the history of a single country into a compelling tale of global connections and entanglements."---Maarten Prak, Early Modern Low Countries ​​​​​​​"Rarities of these Lands not only makes important claims about the founding of the Dutch Republic but also speaks to the interdependence of commerce, art, and political self-fashioning among populations across the early modern world. . . . Rich in formal analysis, the passages describing individual works of art are beautifully articulated. . . . An essential work."---Dawn Odell, Historians of Netherlandish Art Reviews"Swan’s prose brings to life encounters in the Dutch Republic and overseas, as she introduces foreign visitors, travelers, and diplomats who were captured in text and images as they exchanged the types of goods discussed and depicted in this richly illustrated volume.—Marsely Kehoe, Renaissance Quarterly"

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Book SynopsisTrade Review"'Iceland was the only place I went without cause, just to be there,' the New York-based artist Roni Horn writes in Island Zombie, her attempt to explain her powerful affinity for the country. Pieced together from decades of essays, interviews, poetry and photographs, Horn's latest book is a reflection on the complex beauty of a place that she continues to return to "with migratory insistence and regularity."---Chris Allnutt, Financial Times"A wonderful, beguiling read in which Roni takes us deep into her experience of Iceland."---Ben Luke, The Art Newspaper, A Brush With . . ."Island Zombie is a distillation of vignettes and essays on the natural and built environment (swimming pools are as much of a presence here as waterfalls), illustrated with the artist’s photographs. Often occupying no more than half a page, these fragmentary glimpses and reflections are indeed like “soil samples”, archived in an elegantly uncluttered volume that evokes Iceland’s forlorn emptiness as much as its places and people."---Nancy Campbell, Times Literary Supplement"Brilliant. . . . Prosaic and profound, [Island Zombie] felt like standing before art again."---Bridget Quinn, Hyperallergic"Sensually arresting . . . eloquent. . . . The first sections of the book will stoke the desire for a more in-depth study of Iceland; the others will interest veteran Iceland-watchers." * Kirkus Reviews *"Island Zombie is a thoughtful reflection on isolation, resilience, natural wonder, and living in the moment. Written by the contemporary artist Roni Horn, it’s the sort of book you find yourself returning to often — to ponder, to explore, and to be inspired. In fact, this book is more like an art project that you want to page through at random than a straightforward “travelogue.” Not only does it venture deep into the author’s obsession with Iceland, but it has something unique to say about why humans love to travel in the first place."---Steve Bramucci, UPROXX"At times quiet and at times chaotic, Island Zombie captures the incorporeality of a nation that embodies the evanescence of the northern lights and the ephemerality of fumarole vapor... The book is an artistic tribute to... the diminishing nowhereness of which Iceland, indistinct in its bleak high latitudes, so definitively represents."---Brendan Curtinrich, Split Rock Review"Roni Horn’s Island Zombie turns boredom into an asset…a chance to recharge and reflect."---Jean Bundy, Anchorage Press

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Book SynopsisTrade Review"Winner of the Spiro Kostof Book Award, Society of Architectural Historians""Shortlisted for the Wallace K. Ferguson Prize, Canadian Historical Association""Azure Magazine's Gift Guide: Seven Books for Distanced Design Lovers""Drawing from a staggering trove of archival letters, maps, plans and diaries, Stratigakos’s Hitler’s Northern Utopia gracefully juxtaposes the oppressor’s dream with Norway’s brutal reality as she examines the country’s occupation and the labor force that worked on building the Nazi fantasy state that never was."---Lucy Tiven, Washington Post"As well as being a fascinating account of an unfamiliar but important aspect of the Second World War, this book is an exemplary model of scholarship. . . . It is a remarkable achievement, compelling in its originality and fascination, and a vital addition to the huge literature on the most horrific war in modern history."---Simon Heffer, The Telegraph"A fascinating archival study, Hitler’s Northern Utopia is the result of meticulous sleuthing through newspapers and old documents written in three different languages."---Johanne Elster Hanson, Times Literary Supplement"Among a younger generation of scholars unafraid to confront such once-taboo material, none has surpassed Despina Stratigakos. . . . In her latest book, Hitler’s Northern Utopia: Building the New Order in Occupied Norway, Stratigakos . . . demonstrates a keen understanding of how Hitler’s perversion of architecture reflected that thwarted master builder’s ideological values, even beyond the German fatherland. Not the least of the surprises in this admirable but unsettling new study is that among the twenty or so countries subjugated in whole or in part by the Nazis, Norway was unique because Germany spent more on development there than it extracted in booty."---Martin Filler, New York Review of Books"If you thought (as I did) that, 75 years on from Hitler's death, there could surely be nothing new to learn about him, then this book by U.S. architectural historian Despina Stratigakos is an eye-opener."---Tony Rennell, Daily Mail"Unusual and provocative. . . . A special strength of the book is Stratigakos's attention to the fate of POWs—some Serbian, but mostly Russian. . . . Norwegian historians are coming to terms with both the occupation and their country's response in the 1950s and 60s. Hitler's Northern Utopia should be high on their must-read list. Nor will non-specialist readers be disappointed in it."---Jonathan Beard, Michigan War Studies Review"Architectural historian Despina Stratigakos mines a little-known chapter in 20th century history with insight, clarity and encyclopedic rigour. From the vision to re-fashion Trondheim into a new cultural capital to the scheme for an imposing super-highway linking the new city to Berlin, the book chronicles a darkly fascinating saga. It’s a chilling vision of the world as it could have been — and a reminder of architecture’s role in creating it." * Azure Magazine *"The reader gets an enormous amount of information about Norway in this beautiful and well-written book. Professor Stratigakos deserves much gratitude for a book which combines clear-headed precision and richness of detail with an understanding for the human cost of history."---Lars Baerentzen, Krigshistorisk Tidsskrift"Despina Stratigakos’s book compellingly engages with a lesser-known aspect of Nazi planning and spatial logistics – the occupation of Norway. . . . With skilful narration Stratigakos propels the reader from Hitler’s 1934 visit to the Norwegian fjords towards the 1940 German invasion. . . . The book is an accessible yet multidimensional assessment of space and ideology, wrapped up in a rich narrative of archival materials. Despina Stratigakos undoubtedly contributes to studies of landscape and memory."---Tereza E. Valny, History: Journal of the Historical Association"[A] fascinating new study. ... Highly recommended."" * Choice *"We all remember the image: a would-be Viking 'shaman' clad in horns, fur, feathers, and Norse tattoos storming the U.S. Capitol on 6 January 2021. Hundreds of White supremacists waving Confederate flags and brandishing Nazi insignia joined him in attempting to hunt down legislators in an effort to halt the certification of the results of the 2020 presidential election. In her riveting new study Hitler’s Northern Utopia, Despina Stratigakos takes us beyond the noxious theatrics of the Capitol insurrection to the horrifying reality of policies and plans imagined and partly realized by the regime of Adolf Hitler as it too indulged fantasies of connection to the Nordic past."---Barbara McCloskey, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians"“Hitler’s Northern Utopia provides an original and fascinating perspective on a lesser-known aspect of the Third Reich’s vision to create a thousand-year empire during the Second World War. Lavishly illustrated with black-and-white photos that effectively accompany its lively prose, Hitler’s Northern Utopia presents a unique view of Germany’s attempt to incorporate a neighbor with which it shared deep-rooted racial and social ties. The book’s accessibility and unique perspective from an architectural historian will no doubt be of interest to students of World War II, the Third Reich, the history of its occupied countries, and the use of art and architecture as instruments of the state.”"---Mark Montesclaros, H-Net"Well-written, assiduously researched. . . . A fascinating case study, based on original documents." * Journal of Modern History *"Thorough and informed."---Alexander Adams, Alexander Adams Art

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Book SynopsisTrade Review"A sumptuous new art book."---Shawn Ghassemitari, Hypebeast"Fans are now granted the chance to cherish [Arsham’s] work even more. With the release of his aptly named Sketchbook, the artist’s eclectic array of influences takes center stage."---Yoni Yardeni, HiConsumption

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Book SynopsisTrade Review"A fascinating history of art and representation debates . . . [from] the founding of the Louvre . . . to modern controversies over repatriation and representation."---Shanti Escalante-De Mattei, ARTnews"[In Art’s Properties], David Joselit moves beyond the proprietary tendencies of the modern artist to advocate for an ethos of freedom and commonality. . . . Provocative."---Alex Kitnick, 4Columns"Joselit takes on often-debated topics like artistic cultural appropriation and the repatriation of artworks, grounding them in current understanding ofthe legacy of colonialism, slavery, and white supremacy. Art’s Properties is an excellentfollow-up to the author’s After Art." * Choice *

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Book SynopsisTrade Review"Ewa Lajer-Burcharth’s book changes our sensibilities for eighteenth-century French art; it makes obscure images accessible and allows us to see familiar paintings afresh. While historically contextualized and psychoanalytically informed, this book seriously foregrounds the painter’s touch and the materiality of images. It is positively driven by an art historical narrative, and its discussions of the object don’t need the underpinning of topical anthropological thing theories. This beautifully produced and generously illustrated book, with close-up images supporting the thick descriptions, is a pleasure to read and to handle. And one wouldn’t use these terms lightly after having savored the lessons of The Painter’s Touch."---Mechthild Frend, Art Bulletin"Magisterially written . . . this book is a tour de force of interpretative analysis. Beautifully produced and generously illustrated, it offers a thoroughgoing, radical and at times controversial reassessment of the lives and careers of three of the eighteenth century’s greatest painters."---Colin B. Bailey, Burlington Magazine"Ewa Lajer-Burcharth has written one of the first books that elevates eighteenth-century genre painting to the level of artistic and philosophical complexity that it truly deserves. One could say that it is a lesson in taking the art on its own terms. The result of close to a decade of sustained thought and research, the book is simply stunning. . . . It is Lajer-Burcharth’s singular achievement to give us a very different eighteenth century, a ‘luminous elsewhere’ that’s also right here with us. And radically ordinary."---Kevin Chua, Nonsite"Ewa Lajer-Burcharth’s new work continues her radical and original accounts of eighteenth-century French painting. . . . The theories and ideas invoked belong both to eighteenth-century contexts and to unexpected modern inclusions, such as the psychoanalytic philosophy of Andre´ Green. The reader is involved in a vigorous and at times provocative debate, vital to our understanding of the origins of modernity."---Richard Hobbs, French Studies: A Quarterly Review"Provocative and unsettling. . . . [The Painter's Touch] will surely provide the starting point of new thinking about eighteenth-century French art for decades to come."---Katie Scott, Art History

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Book SynopsisGavin Butt tells the story of the post-punk scene in the northern English city of Leeds, showing how bands ranging from Gang of Four, Soft Cell, and Delta 5 to Mekons, Scritti Politti, and Fad Gadget drew on their university art school education to push the boundaries of pop music.Trade Review"A fascinating, informed and highly readable account. . . ." -- Rupert Loydell * International Times *"This is an important book. . . . It reminds us of—and perhaps implicitly yearns for—a time when a university art school education was free, open, inclusive, and multidisciplinary, where theory was able to re-energise practice and offered new paths out of the cul-de-sacs of art practice, where a local scene that was largely self-supporting and independent could be local without ever being parochial, where contemporary debates arising out of feminism, race, and left-wing politics could be acted out in an exciting form of ‘praxis’ and where competition between educational institutions could be collapsed, where a small city like Leeds could host a self-supporting creative eco-system where students were able to freely cross-pollinate." -- Aidan Winterburn * Tribune Magazine *“No Machos or Pop Stars is an account of the plethora of post-punk bands that emerged out of the ‘Leeds experiment.’ . . . The range and richness of Butt’s research is evident throughout.” -- Peter Suchin * Art Monthly *"As a history of educational ideas and systems this book is excellent. As a work of cultural history it is superb. . . this is also a book about music and musicians and it is full to the brim with insightful anecdotes and recollections from those who were active participants within this pre-figurative artistic community. It is a deft piece of writing and structural organisation, and there is no shortage of visual materials either. . . . No Machos or Pop Stars is extremely thorough and thoroughly readable." -- Richard Thomas * The Wire *"More powerful than [Butt's] scholarship, and his own voluminous interviewing of those in the scene, is his clear passion. He writes as someone moved by the music, weird, wonderful, and varied, that Leeds spawned, groups like Delta 5, Gang of Four, Soft Cell, Scritti Politti, Fad Gadget, and the Mekons." -- George Yatchisin * California Review of Books *"Written with both scholarly precision and an evident fan's enthusiasm, the book is a serious history of popular modernism in West Yorkshire, as well as a social sketch of artists and young people reacting to a collapsing society with a rarely matched intellectual, aesthetic and social application. . . . A welcome feature of No Machos—which is sadly unusual in many books related to punk and post-punk—is a contextualisation of the environment that created these scenes." -- Marcus Barnett * Corridor 8 *Table of ContentsPreface: Class Acts ix Acknowledgments xv Introduction: The Art School Dance Goes On 1 Part I. Avant-Garde and Punk 1. Beginning at a Dead End 23 2. Anarchy at the Poly 56 Part II. Forming a Band 3. Punk Bohemians 75 4. Debating Society 105 5. Why Theory? 126 6. “No Machos or Pop-Stars Please” 146 7. Electric Shock 171 8. Rehearsals for the Mutant Disco 198 Epilogue: The Limits of Experiment—1981 and After 225 Notes 245 Discography 267 Bibliography 271 Index 283

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Book SynopsisIn A Time of One’s Own Catherine Grant examines how contemporary feminist artists are turning to broad histories of feminism ranging from political organizing and artworks from the 1970s to queer art and activism in the 1990s. Exploring artworks from 2002 to 2017 by artists including Sharon Hayes, Mary Kelly, Allyson Mitchell, Deirdre Logue, Lubaina Himid, Pauline Boudry, and Renate Lorenz, Grant maps a revival of feminism that takes up the creative and political implications of forging feminist communities across time and space. Grant characterizes these artists’ engagement with feminism as a fannish, autodidactic, and collective form of learning from history. This fandom of feminism allows artists to build relationships with previous feminist ideas, artworks, and communities that reject a generational model and embrace aspects of feminism that might be seen as embarrassing, queer, or anachronistic. Accounting for the growing interest in feminist art, politics, and Trade Review"Grant’s evocative writing delineates the affective contours of collective art participation, and she vividly transports the reader with her on various expeditions – to an outdoor group performance in a wintry Trafalgar Square, to cacophonous choral readings of feminist texts or sitting alone on the last quiet days of a gallery exhibition. One of the true pleasures of the volume is its deep attentiveness to the textures, materials and experience of works of art, interwoven with the author’s compelling account of how cultural encounters strengthened her feminist consciousness." -- Victoria Horne * Burlington Contemporary *"Grant’s writing opens avenues for imagining possible feminist pasts, presents, and futures." -- Julia Alting * Trigger *“An original, associative and compelling account of archival fever and fandom in feminist practice … An exemplar for the ways we can, and should, learn together.” -- Susannah Thompson * Art History *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction. Anachronizing Feminism 1 1. Fans of Feminism 21 2. Killjoy’s Kastle in London 47 3. A Time of One’s Own 67 4. A Feminist Chorus 87 5. Conversations and Constellations 109 Conclusion. Rooms of Our Own 133 Notes 151 Bibliography 179 Index 205

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Book SynopsisIn Probing Arts and Emergent Forms of Life Michael M. J. Fischer calls for a new anthropology of the arts that attends to the materialities and technologies of the world as it exists today. Fischer examines the work of key Southeast and East Asian artists within the crucibles of unequal access, geopolitics, reverberating past traumas, and emergent socialities. He outlines the work of artist-theorists---including Entang Wiharso, Sally Smart, Charles Lim, Zai Kuning, and Kiran Kumar---who speculate about changing the world in ways that are attuned to its cultivation, repair, and rethinking in the Anthropocene. Their artistic vocabulary not only undoes Western art models and categories; it probes the unfolding future, addresses past trauma, and creates contested, vibrant, and flourishing spaces. Throughout Indonesia, Korea, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam---and from Kumar’s experimental dance to Kuning’s rattan and beeswax ghost ships to Lim’s videography of SingTrade Review"[A] dynamic ethnography of prominent works by contemporary artists in Asia ... Probing Arts and Emergent Forms of Life goes far beyond introducing innovative artists and describing their artworks. It situates contemporary Asian art within ethnographic and geo-political contexts." -- Robin Visser * Journal of Contemporary Asia *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1. Challenging Art as Cultural Systems 12 2. Synthetic Realism: Postcinema in the Anthropocene 31 3. Feminage, Warang, and the Nervous System (Hauntology and Curation) 71 4. Nomadic Video in Turbulent Sea States: How Art Becomes Critique 100 5. Water Notes on Rattan Strings 132 6. Raw Moves and Layered Communication across the Archipelago Seas 165 Epilogue. Probing Art and Emerging Forms of Life 197 Appendix. The Year 2020 and the Camouflage Painting Series: Conversations with Entang Wiharso 215 Notes 221 References 253 Index 281

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Book SynopsisIn Biennial Boom, Paloma Checa-Gismero traces an archeology of contemporary art biennials to uncover the processes that prompted these exhibitions to become the global art world’s defining events at the end of the twentieth century. Returning to the early post-Cold War years, Checa-Gismero examines the early iterations of three well-known biennials at the borders of North Atlantic liberalism: the Bienal de La Habana, inSITE, and Manifesta. She draws on archival and oral history fieldwork in Cuba, Mexico, the US/Mexico borderlands, and the Netherlands, showing how these biennials reflected a post-Cold War optimism for a pacified world by which artistic and knowledge production would help mend social, political, and cultural divisions. Checa-Gismero argues that, in reflecting this optimism, biennials facilitated the conversion of subaltern aesthetic genealogies into forms that were legible to a nascent cosmopolitan global elite—all under the pretense of cultural exchan

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Book SynopsisA novel account of the relationship between postindustrial capitalism and postmodern culture, this book looks at American poetry and art of the last fifty years in light of the massive changes in people's working lives. Over the last few decades, we have seen the shift from an economy based on the production of goods to one based on the provision of services, the entry of large numbers of women into the workforce, and the emergence of new digital technologies that have transformed the way people work. The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization argues that art and literature not only reflected the transformation of the workplace but anticipated and may have contributed to it as well, providing some of the terms through which resistance to labor was expressed. As firms continue to tout creativity and to reorganize in response to this resistance, they increasingly rely on models of labor that derive from values and ideas found in the experimental poetry and conceptual art of decades past.Trade Review"The originality of this study of postwar literature and capitalism lies not just in its focus on production as opposed to consumption, or on the effects that transformations of labor have had on what kind of art was made, by whom, and how. It lies also in its rigorous attention to the effects that aesthetic concepts have exerted on the transformation of labor, and to how art responds when wage labor is recast in explicitly aesthetic terms. Bernes's book goes beyond reflectionist arguments and elective affinities. Sobering and optimistic at once, it gives us new tools to think about the relation between art and labor, even as the two seem to be converging irreversibly." -- Sianne Ngai * Stanford University *"Far from wanting to tout any hoary theory of the artist-as-prophet, Bernes is working with a remarkably sophisticated and resilient new critical model which will doubtless have a lot of traction in the years ahead." -- Julian Murphet * Affirmations: Of the Modern *"Bernes poses the question of whether the quintessentially unproductive, workless realm of poetry may be instructive for what our precarious and workless capitalist future holds. The result is an intellectually rich, dynamic and lucidly written book...The theses Bernes puts forward concerning poetry's instrumentalization by capitalism will be of interest to all scholars of modern literature, not merely those interested in the postwar American poets and artists studied in detail here."––Benjamin Pickford, Literature & History"Developments in poetry and art, Bernes argues, also feed reciprocally into...transformations in the workplace, as 'aspects of the artistic critique, such as the critique of work from the standpoint of participation, became essential parts of the restructuring undertaken by capitalists to improve profitability'....[With] acute sensitivity to poetic form and [a] profound grasp of historical capitalism as filtered through their chosen sites of the gendered body and the workplace...Bernes [avoids] reductively optimistic or pessimistic claims about either poetry's total immunity or its total complicity." -- Walt Hunter * American Literary History *Table of ContentsContents and Abstracts0Introduction chapter abstractAn overview of the argument of the book, the Introduction discusses postwar literature and art in light of the transformation of advanced capitalist economies, in particular the shift from the production of goods to the provision of services and the expansion of white-collar and in-person service work. Through an examination of some key examples, Bernes argues that the neo-avant-garde language of "participation," aiming to overcome the hierarchical relationship between writer and reader, artist and audience, anticipated and contributed to a shift in management theory toward new horizontal forms of corporate structure, undertaken in response to the widespread rebellion against the "anachronistic authoritarianism" of the postwar workplace. Bernes summarizes the main chapters of the book as well as its conclusions and finishes with a general discussion of periodization and historicization, elucidating his unique methodology in light of Marxist debates about historical causality. 1Lyric and the Service Sector: Frank O'Hara at Work chapter abstractO'Hara's "I do this, I do that" poems detail the poet's movements through the city during periods of leisure. In this chapter, Bernes argues that such leisure periods are usually, implicitly or explicitly, circumscribed by periods of work. This is especially true in Lunch Poems, where the conceit of the book is that many of the poems were written during his "lunch hour." O'Hara's lunch-hour pastorals are not so much opposed to the workday and its unfree time of getting things done as they are a space for an alternative kind of work. This chapter proposes that we see O'Hara as poet of service work as much as poet of consumption, reorienting ourselves to the presence of labor (his own and others') within the poems. In particular, Bernes argues, O'Hara adapts the resources of the lyric poem to the transactional space of service work. 2John Ashbery's Free Indirect Labor chapter abstractThe early poems of John Ashbery must be read as a meditation on the plight of labor, particularly white-collar labor, in the postwar United States. Beginning with an early poem, "The Instruction Manual" (1956), and its exploration of the ambiguous class position of white-collar workers, this chapter tracks themes of both labor and management in Ashbery's experimental second book, The Tennis Court Oath. In this book the standpoint of the earlier poem gives way to an explosion of shifting voices as Ashbery's distinctive use of free indirect discourse and other techniques of point of view registers the contemporary breakdown in labor relations and the crisis for established modes of management. In Ashbery's mature style of the 1970s, this chaotic play of voices yields to a comparatively measured technology of point of view, which reflects the new modes of management that followed the crises of the 1960s and 1970s. 3The Poetry of Feedback chapter abstractEmerging from the military-industrial research programs of World War II, cybernetics presents an image of social self-regulation based on reciprocal, horizontal, and participatory relations rather than explicit hierarchies. This is appealing both to firms looking for a way to cut administrative bloat and trim costs and to artists and writers interested in developing a "participatory" practice, one that undoes the division of labor between reader and writer, spectator and art maker. Cybernetics promises a mode of collaboration and collectivity that liberates art from the narrow confines of artists. This chapter examines Hannah Weiner's Code Poems alongside Dan Graham's Works for Magazine Pages, both of which sit at the interstices of experimental poetry and conceptual art and both of which put cybernetic discourse to work to model alternative social relations. In each case, the laboratory of social relations takes postwar labor as its subject. 4The Feminization of Speedup chapter abstractEngaging debates around the status of unpaid reproductive labor, this chapter investigates Bernadette Mayer's multifarious project Memory, which is simultaneously a performance, a conceptual work, an installation, and an epic poem. In attempting to document, down to the smallest detail, every aspect of her life for thirty days—using photographs, audio recordings, and written notation—Mayer effectively demonstrates the subsumption of the entirety of life by the protocols and routines of work as well as the transformation of the relationship between unpaid reproductive work and feminized wage labor. Mayer's "total" artwork, which merges different technologies into a single apparatus, prefigures the reorganization of office work around the personal computer, a technology that has probably done more than anything else to ensure that work and home life are unified by enabling white-collar workers to accomplish tasks from home and, in that sense, never leave work. 5Art, Work, and Endlessness in the 2000s chapter abstractThis chapter skips forward several decades, to the 2000s, and looks at the legacy of the transformations discussed in the preceding chapters. Bernes examines the debates that followed the emergence of "Flarf" and "conceptual poetry," both movements that foregrounded their relationship to contemporary office work. He focuses in particular on the relationship between Flarf poetry, with its rebellious use of work time, work machinery, and work jargon, and the increase in interworker aggression, which he attributes to the inability of workers to find outlets for resistance. Bernes links this horizontalized aggression with the phenomenon of the "Internet troll," who responds to the emasculation that male workers feel as a consequence of the restructuring of labor. By the 2000s, firms had so thoroughly neutralized the aesthetic critique of labor mobilized by preceding generations of artists that it persisted only in various forms of minor rebellion and acting out. 6Epilogue: Overflow chapter abstractThe Epilogue considers the possible fate of the artistic critique of labor in the decades to come. As demand for labor weakens because of ongoing structural transformations, the link between art and labor will likewise weaken, Bernes argues. Thus, artists would do well to revive older traditions linking the poet to wagelessness. The Epilogue examines these traditions, beginning with the Renaissance ballad and continuing through the Romantic poetry of vagrancy and the African American fugitive lyric, linking this poetic history to a theoretical investigation of what Karl Marx calls "surplus populations." The long history of the poetics of wagelessness gives some indication of the aesthetic outlines of the coming era. In closing, Bernes looks at two contemporary poets, Fred Moten and Wendy Trevino, who engage this long tradition and mobilize it to meet the specific conditions of twenty-first-century capitalism.

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Book SynopsisOver the last three decades, a new generation of conceptual artists has come to the fore in the Arab Middle East. As wars, peace treaties, sanctions, and large-scale economic developments have reshaped the region, this cohort of cultural producers has also found themselves at the center of intergenerational debates on the role of art in society. Central to these cultural debates is a steady stream of support from North American and European funding organizations—resources that only increased with the start of the Arab uprisings in the early 2010s. The Politics of Art offers an unprecedented look into the entanglement of art and international politics in Beirut, Ramallah, and Amman to understand the aesthetics of material production within liberal economies. Hanan Toukan outlines the political and social functions of transnationally connected and internationally funded arts organizations and initiatives, and reveals how the production of art within global frameworks can contribute to hegemonic structures even as it is critiquing them—or how it can be counterhegemonic even when it first appears not to be. In so doing, Toukan proposes not only a new way of reading contemporary art practices as they situate themselves globally, but also a new way of reading the domestic politics of the region from the vantage point of art.Trade Review"There are few books out there that bring together a deep, critical knowledge of the arts in the Middle East with theoretical sophistication and shimmering ethnographic observations. Hanan Toukan's The Politics of Art does this abundantly, and it does so in beautiful, absorbing prose, with great care and tenderness."—Laleh Khalili, Queen Mary University of London"The Politics of Art is a game changer. Hanan Toukan brilliantly reveals a critical, often hidden component of art-making in the Middle East: how powerful political and economic interests have shaped what kinds of art are even possible. A brave intervention and required reading for anyone working in the fields of cultural politics and diplomacy."—Jessica Winegar, Northwestern University"In a detailed, revealing, and thought-provoking sociological account, Hanan Toukan explores how a contemporary art scene in Amman, Beirut, and Ramallah grew under the patronage of Western-funded NGOs alongside rising inequality. In these circumstances, might an idealistic commitment to diversity and decolonization produce a new form of homogeneity and domination?"—Julian Stallabrass, Courtauld Institute of Art"The Politics of Art is a dissonant account of how art, without recognition of its ties with power, upholds the very structures it claims to critique."—Ophelia Lai, ArtAsiaPacific"The Politics of Art is beautifully written and engages the relevant literatures from mainstream debates to more critical thinkers from the Frankfurt School to Rancière and Foucault. Written without jargon, the book is both theoretically sophisticated and accessible.... The book will be of interest not only to larger debates not only on cultural production but also on the diverse effects of neoliberalism, political dissent, the politics of urban space, and foreign development aid."—Jillian Schwedler, Perspectives on Politics"Overall, the book moves with a mocking spirit that tickles the funny bone at the same time that it hurts. As a Palestinian reader, one identifies with many things the author addresses, and one even smiles sometimes when reading specific sentences that make perfect sense, however painful."—Maysoon Shibi, Critical Inquiry"By rendering the implicit explicit, Toukan's text speaks to the quiet anxieties of both artists and academics who navigate international funding regimes, offering an important and highly interdisciplinary contribution to understandings of soft power and the politics of cultural production."—Melissa Scott, H-AMCA"The Politics of Art is, in short, a path-clearing work that should point the way for a new generation of art, performance, and music researchers to propose other formulations of the political by which to read, appreciate, and be in conversation with their performing and multidisciplinary artist contemporaries in the Mashriq."—Rayya El Zein, International Journal of Middle East StudiesTable of ContentsIntroduction: n/a 1. Cultural Wars and the Politics of Diplomacy 2. "An Artist Who Cannot Speak English Is No Artist" 3. The Dissonance of Dissent: Art and Artists after 1990 4. Beirut: The Rise and Rise of Postwar Art 5. Amman: Uneasy Lie the Arts 6. Ramallah: The Paintbrush Is Mightier than the M16 Conclusion: n/a

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Book SynopsisIn 2010, the world's wealthiest art institution, the J. Paul Getty Museum, found itself confronted by a century-old genocide. The Armenian Church was suing for the return of eight pages from the Zeytun Gospels, a manuscript illuminated by the greatest medieval Armenian artist, Toros Roslin. Protected for centuries in a remote church, the holy manuscript had followed the waves of displaced people exterminated during the Armenian genocide. Passed from hand to hand, caught in the confusion and brutality of the First World War, it was cleaved in two. Decades later, the manuscript found its way to the Republic of Armenia, while its missing eight pages came to the Getty. The Missing Pages is the biography of a manuscript that is at once art, sacred object, and cultural heritage. Its tale mirrors the story of its scattered community as Armenians have struggled to redefine themselves after genocide and in the absence of a homeland. Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh follows in the manuscript's footsteps through seven centuries, from medieval Armenia to the killing fields of 1915 Anatolia, the refugee camps of Aleppo, Ellis Island, and Soviet Armenia, and ultimately to a Los Angeles courtroom. Reconstructing the path of the pages, Watenpaugh uncovers the rich tapestry of an extraordinary artwork and the people touched by it. At once a story of genocide and survival, of unimaginable loss and resilience, The Missing Pages captures the human costs of war and persuasively makes the case for a human right to art.Trade Review"In this compelling and original work, Heghnar Watenpaugh traces the dramatic and epic journey of a sacred work of art. The Missing Pages brings together an understanding of the deeper layers of culture and history with the ethical issues surrounding art, identity, and ownership."—Peter Balakian, author of The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response"Heghnar Watenpaugh is a superb scholar and rare sleuth. But what makes The Missing Pages truly remarkable is her gift of storytelling. This is a book with the soul of language—moving, affirming, illuminating."—Mark Arax, author of The Dreamt Land: Chasing Dust and Water Across California"Heghnar Watenpaugh writes with colorful prose and deep historical texture. The Missing Pages adds much to how we understand the written word in medieval Armenia, as well as the tragic events surrounding the Genocide itself."—Eric Bogosian, author of Operation Nemesis: The Assassination Plot that Avenged the Armenian Genocide"In the fracturing of the Zeytun Gospels, Heghnar Watenpaugh captures the everlasting violence of genocide as it shears and slices into human lives across time and place. Written with both erudition and passion, The Missing Pages is a labor of love and a must-read for anyone concerned with the human right to art."—Fatma Müge Göçek, author of Denial of Violence: Ottoman Past, Turkish Present, and Collective Violence against the Armenians, 1789-2009"The Missing Pages is a well-told tale of the history of the Armenian people. Heghnar Watenpaugh takes us on a wondrous and terrifically engrossing journey of this sacred religious object and priceless work of art."—Michael Bazyler, author of Holocaust Justice: The Battle for Restitution in America's Courts"In The Missing Pages, Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh tells the gripping story of the Zeytun Gospels, a 'survivor object' that bears the traces of centuries of Armenian history and culture. Moving across eras and national borders, Watenpaugh's powerful narrative offers a unique perspective on the fate of cultural heritage in the face of genocide and denial. An essential book for all who are concerned with art, human rights, and post-traumatic resilience."—Michael Rothberg, author of Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization"[Watenpaugh's] book alerts us to the urgent moral and political questions still to be addressed even in the rarefied world of the museum and the library: she forces us to attend to the human agonies, cultural calamities, and moral ambiguities that lie behind many apparently tranquil museum exhibits."—Eamon Duffy, The New York Review of Books"[A] gripping, and at times unsettling, history of what is known as the Zeytun Gospels, a lavishly illuminated Armenian book that miraculously survived centuries of war, conquest and dispossession.In addition to supplying an important account of a celebrated object, Ms. Watenpaugh has written an impassioned polemic. She invites us to consider how the 'power of curation,' as well as the publicity and wealth attendant upon modern museum culture, can transform an object of specific liturgical use into a highly valued work of art, and what that might mean for all involved."—Ernest Hilbert, The Wall Street Journal"The Missing Pages is a work that only Watenpaugh could write with her mastery of Arabic, Turkish, and especially Western Armenian....[She] is certain to attract the attention of scholars outside her field promising to usher forth a conversation about the relationship between cultural heritage and human rights."—Elyse Semerdjian, Critical Inquiry"The Missing Pages... takes up issues of both more recent and long-standing art historical concern and, insofar as it is a narrative that unfolds between legal charges and settlement, as a whole adds real substance and nuance to debates on provenance and repatriation."—Lisa Mahoney, Manuscript Studies"The history of the [Zeytun Gospels] manuscript, which spans the better part of a millennium, represents a compelling example of why provenance research can also serve the cause of historical justice... [Watenpaugh] further discusses the need for museums to come to terms with the complicated and often controversial trajectories by which the objects they enshrine as art made their ways to their institutional homes, and how they also therefore speak with very human voices not only of terrible tragedy but also of the inseparable links between memory and material relics."—Jeffrey F. Hamburger, West 86th"It is hoped that The Missing Pages will contribute to and inform the ongoing debate over survivor objects and the positionality of the contemporary scholar with regard to contested pasts."—Sergio La Porta, The American Historical Review"Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh has achieved the nearly impossible in this book. The volume is the fruit of extensive and profound scholarship, covering a variety of historical periods and geographical milieux... But the scholarship and historical expertise are worn lightly; and the author has succeeded in presenting the rather entangled history of a manuscript with clarity and passion. The result is accessible, highly readable, and may be enjoyed by the general reader as well as those with more specialised interests."—Haig Utidjian, Clavibus UnitisTable of Contents1. Survivor Objects. Artifacts of Genocide 2. Hromkla. The God-Protected Castle of Priests and Artists 3. Zeytun. The Lost World of Ottoman Armenians 4. Marash. The Holy Book Bears Witness 5. Aleppo. Survivors Reclaim Their Heritage 6. New York. The Zeytun Gospels Enters Art History 7. Yerevan. Toros Roslin, Artist of the Armenian Nation 8. Los Angeles. The Contest over Art

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Book SynopsisA radical proposal for how a tiny organism can transform our understanding of human relations Serving as both a guide and companion publication to the conceptual art project of the same name, The Lichen Museum explores how the physiological characteristics of lichens provide a valuable template for reimagining human relations in an age of ecological and social precarity. Channeling between the personal, the scientific, the philosophical, and the poetic, A. Laurie Palmer employs a cross-disciplinary framework that artfully mirrors the collective relations of lichens, imploring us to envision alternative ways of living based on interdependence rather than individualism and competition.Lichens are composite organisms made up of a fungus and an alga or cyanobacteria thriving in a mutually beneficial relationship. The Lichen Museum looks to these complex organisms, remarkable for their symbiosis, diversity, longevity, and adaptability, as models for relations rooted in collaboration and nonhierarchical structures. In their resistance to fast-paced growth and commodification, lichens also offer possibilities for humans to reconfigure their relationship to time and attention outside of the accelerated pace of capitalist accumulation.Drawing together a diverse set of voices, including personal encounters with lichenologists and lichens themselves, Palmer both imagines and embodies a radical new approach to human interconnection. Using this tiny organism as an emblem through which to navigate environmental and social concerns, this work narrows the gap between the human and natural worlds, emphasizing the notion of mutual dependence as a necessary means of survival and prosperity.Trade Review "The Lichen Museum is a deeply engaging, provocative, humorous, and moving account of why we should pay more attention to lichens. As lichens can be found anywhere, the entire surface of the earth becomes the lichen museum. A. Laurie Palmer weaves together personal anecdotes, theoretical interventions, photography, and detailed research to draw attention to how lichens can offer new ways to think through questions of relationality, life and death, and our mutual obligations to each other."—Heather Davis, author of Plastic Matter "Meditative and inquisitive, The Lichen Museum is an interdisciplinary work about learning from the most unassuming of species."—Foreword "Reading this work feels like taking a series of walks with a particularly curious and sensitive companion, consistently attentive to otherwise neglected facets of the actual environment. "—e-flux "As an environmentally engaged artist, Palmer introduces readers to lichens through personal observations, extensive research, and critical evaluation of past and current scientific study of this complex living organism and offers her musings on the potential philosophical and poetic implications of these symbiotic organisms."—CHOICE

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Book SynopsisA radical proposal for how a tiny organism can transform our understanding of human relations Serving as both a guide and companion publication to the conceptual art project of the same name, The Lichen Museum explores how the physiological characteristics of lichens provide a valuable template for reimagining human relations in an age of ecological and social precarity. Channeling between the personal, the scientific, the philosophical, and the poetic, A. Laurie Palmer employs a cross-disciplinary framework that artfully mirrors the collective relations of lichens, imploring us to envision alternative ways of living based on interdependence rather than individualism and competition.Lichens are composite organisms made up of a fungus and an alga or cyanobacteria thriving in a mutually beneficial relationship. The Lichen Museum looks to these complex organisms, remarkable for their symbiosis, diversity, longevity, and adaptability, as models for relations rooted in collaboration and nonhierarchical structures. In their resistance to fast-paced growth and commodification, lichens also offer possibilities for humans to reconfigure their relationship to time and attention outside of the accelerated pace of capitalist accumulation.Drawing together a diverse set of voices, including personal encounters with lichenologists and lichens themselves, Palmer both imagines and embodies a radical new approach to human interconnection. Using this tiny organism as an emblem through which to navigate environmental and social concerns, this work narrows the gap between the human and natural worlds, emphasizing the notion of mutual dependence as a necessary means of survival and prosperity.Trade Review "The Lichen Museum is a deeply engaging, provocative, humorous, and moving account of why we should pay more attention to lichens. As lichens can be found anywhere, the entire surface of the earth becomes the lichen museum. A. Laurie Palmer weaves together personal anecdotes, theoretical interventions, photography, and detailed research to draw attention to how lichens can offer new ways to think through questions of relationality, life and death, and our mutual obligations to each other."—Heather Davis, author of Plastic Matter "Meditative and inquisitive, The Lichen Museum is an interdisciplinary work about learning from the most unassuming of species."—Foreword "Reading this work feels like taking a series of walks with a particularly curious and sensitive companion, consistently attentive to otherwise neglected facets of the actual environment. "—e-flux "As an environmentally engaged artist, Palmer introduces readers to lichens through personal observations, extensive research, and critical evaluation of past and current scientific study of this complex living organism and offers her musings on the potential philosophical and poetic implications of these symbiotic organisms."—CHOICE

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Book SynopsisDelves deep into the archives that keep the history and work of AIDS activism alive Serving as a vital supplement to the existing scholarship on AIDS activism of the 1980s and 1990s, ViralCultures is the first book to critically examine the archives that have helped preserve and create the legacy of those radical activities. Marika Cifor charts the efforts activists, archivists, and curators have made to document the work of AIDS activism in the United States and the infrastructure developed to maintain it, safeguarding the material for future generations to remember these social movements and to revitalize the epidemic’s past in order to remake the present and future of AIDS. Drawing on large institutional archives such as the New York Public Library, as well as those developed by small, community-based organizations, this work of archival ethnography details how contemporary activists, artists, and curators use these records to build on the cultural legacy of AIDS activism to challenge the conditions of injustice that continue to undergird current AIDS crises. Cifor analyzes the various power structures through which these archives are mediated, demonstrating how ideology shapes the nature of archival material and how it is accessed and used. Positioning vital nostalgia as both a critical faculty and a generative practice, this book explores the act of saving this activist past and reanimating it in the digital age. While many books, popular films, and major exhibitions have contributed to a necessary awareness of HIV and AIDS activism, Viral Cultures provides a crucial missing link by highlighting the powerful role of archives in making those cultural moments possible. Trade Review "This is a timely, important project that adds to the conversations happening now about the early days of AIDS and AIDS activism in the United States and how we remember and document that period in the present and for the future. As we live through another pandemic, the questions Marika Cifor raises about how we document and archive illness and illness politics are especially urgent and necessary."—Lisa Diedrich, author of Indirect Action: Schizophrenia, Epilepsy, AIDS, and the Course of Health Activism "It may be that AIDS activism’s greatest legacy will have been its archival documentation. Marika Cifor runs with that legacy by offering the first full-length study of collections that now exist in institutional repositories. Through her provocative concept of ‘vital nostalgia,’ she explores the affective importance of AIDS activist archives for her queer generation. Viral Cultures itself is an act of curatorial caretaking that keeps HIV/AIDS archival activism alive to do its work in the present."—Ann Cvetkovich, director, Pauline Jewett Institute of Women’s and Gender Studies, Carleton University "We all have the lethal constraints of a human body; Cifor offers us a pathway to ensure that our most important work, the messy work of living, cannot so easily be erased."—The Atlantic "A particularly salient analysis, given the inequity exposed by COVID-19—and the systemic structures that made both [the AIDS and COVID-19] pandemics worse."—Fast Company "Viral Cultures honors the efforts of activist archivists and artists who built and continue to build archives as forms of respite, healing, and resistance for marginalized communities, even as it critiques the power dynamics and inequalities reflected within the AIDS activist movement and its documentation efforts."—The American Archivist "Cifor deftly demonstrates how activist archival and curatorial practices create a space from within which artists, activists, scholars, and others may productively resist the triumphalist impulse that undergirds so much contemporary AIDS coverage."—H-Net Review Table of ContentsIntroduction. For the Record: AIDS, Archives, and Vital Nostalgia1. “Your Nostalgia Is Killing Me!” ACT UP Nostalgia and the Meaning of HIV/AIDS2. How to ACT UP: AIDS Archival Temporalities and the (Anti-)Institutionalization of the ACT UP/New York Records3. An Archival Cure: Remedy, Care, and Curation with the Visual AIDS Archive4. Status = Undetectable: Liminality and Archival Exhibitions in the Age of Survivability5. Going Viral: Mobilizing AIDS Archives in Digital CulturesEpilogue: How to Survive Another PlagueAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisPortraits, an inherently personal subject, provide an engaging entry point to an exploration of the politics, patronage, and power in Renaissance Florence The Medici family ruled Florence without interruption between 1434 and 1494, but following their return to power in 1512, Cosimo I de’ Medici demonstrated an unprecedented ability to wield culture as a political tool. His rule transformed Florence into a dynastic duchy and give Florentine art the central position it has held ever since. As Florence underwent these dramatic political transformations in the sixteenth century, portraits became an essential means of recording a likeness and conveying a sitter’s character, social position, and cultural ambitions. This fascinating book explores the ways that painters (including Jacopo Pontormo, Agnolo Bronzino, and Francesco Salviati), sculptors (such as Benvenuto Cellini), and artists in other media endowed their works with an erudite and self-consciously stylish character that distinguished Florentine portraiture. Featuring more than ninety remarkable paintings, sculptures, works on paper, and medals, this volume is written by a team of leading international authors and presents a sweeping, penetrating exploration of a crucial and vibrant period in Italian art. Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Distributed by Yale University Press Exhibition Schedule: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (June 26–October 11, 2021)Trade Review“Cogent and illuminating.”—Washington Post“The exhibit is exciting to move through and to enjoy firsthand, but the original research and commentary in the catalogue will open up this world of Cinquecento Florence after your museum experience.”—Anne Holler, The Florentine“Excellent.”—Apollo“The catalogue is beautifully designed with more than two hundred colour reproductions. . . . Merely turning the pages . . . provides a vivid sense of Florence under the Medici, and the essays and entries are intellectually intriguing for art historians while still accessible for students and the larger interested public.”—Jacqueline Marie Musacchio, Renaissance and Reformation “A superb catalogue.”—Robert B. Simon, Burlington Magazine“Consists of intricate scholarly stories of patronage, ambition and ruthless skulduggery.”—Michael Glover, The Tablet

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Book SynopsisThe first book to study Vincent van Gogh’s fascination with cypresses, the “tall and dark trees” that feature in some of his most iconic pictures Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) immortalized the cypress tree in signature images that have become synonymous with his fiercely original power of expression. This richly illustrated publication illuminates the backstory of his invention for the first time, from his initial investigations of the motif in benchmark drawings from Arles to his realization of their full evocative potential in such iconic canvases as The Starry Night and Wheat Field with Cypresses, painted at the asylum in Saint-Rémy. Susan Alyson Stein retraces the Dutch artist’s inspired response to the flamelike evergreens as they gained ground in his works and artistic thinking over the course of his sojourn in the South of France. The volume provides further insight into Van Gogh’s creative process through a technical study focused on two celebrated works from the artist’s epic painting campaign of June 1889. The visual and literary heritage of the cypresses is featured in a compilation of images and excerpts from nineteenth-century poetry, novels, and travel writing—many translated into English for the first time. Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Distributed by Yale University Press Exhibition Schedule:The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (May 22–August 27, 2023)

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Book SynopsisThe Livre des faits de Jacques de Lalaing (Book of the Deeds of Jacques de Lalaing), a famous Flemish illuminated manuscript, relays the audacious life of Jacques de Lalaing (1421-1453), a story that reads more like a fast-paced adventure novel. Produced in the tradition of chivalric biography, a genre developed in the mid-fifteenth century to celebrate the great personalities of the day, the manuscript's text and illuminations begin with a magnificent frontispiece by the most acclaimed Flemish illuminator of the sixteenth century, Simon Bening. A Knight for the Ages: Jacques de Lalaing and the Art of Chivalry presents a kaleidoscopic view of the manuscript with essays written by the world's leading medievalists, adding rich texture and providing a greater understanding of the many aspects of the manuscript's background, creation, and reception, revealing for the first time the full complexity of this illuminated romance. The texts are accompanied by stunning reproductions of all of the manuscripts' miniatures-never before published in colour-as well as a plot summary and translations, allowing the reader to follow Jacques de Lalaing on his knightly journeys and experience the thrilling triumphs of his legendary tournaments and battles.Table of ContentsForeword by Tim Potts Acknowledgments by Elizabeth Morrison Introduction by Elizabeth Morrison Timeline of the Life of Jacques de Lalaing by Alexandra Kaczenski Part 1: Text and Miniatures Plot Summary by Zrinka Stahuljak Illuminations and Translation (trans. by Zrinka Stahuljak) Part 2: Essays 1) Wim Blockmans: Jacques de Lalaing: The Vitality of the Chivalric Ideal in the Burgundian Netherlands 2) Rosalind Brown-Grant Jacques de Lalaing and Chivalric Biography 3) Zrinka Stahuljak The Long Middle Ages of Jacques de Lalaing: Medieval Genres and the Writing of History 4) Elizabeth Morrison Creating the Ideal Knight through Illumination: The Artists of the Getty Lalaing 5) Hanno Wijsman The Visual Tradition of the Livre des faits de Jacques de Lalaing 6) Margaret Scott Clad in Crimson and Gold: Dress in the Livre des faits de Jacques de Lalaing 7) Tobias Capwell Armor, Weapons and Combat in Getty Ms. 114 8) Anne-Marie Legare A Family Text: The Livre des faits de Jacques de Lalaing Appendix 1: Description of the Manuscript by Elizabeth Morrison Appendix 2: TK Appendix 3: Genealogy of the Lalaing Family Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisIlluminated manuscripts and illustrated or decorated books - like today's museums - preserve a rich array of information about how premodern peoples conceived of and perceived the world, its many cultures and everyone's place in it. Often a Eurocentric field of study, manuscripts are prisms through which we can glimpse the interconnected global history of humanity. 'Toward a Global Middle Ages: Encountering the World through Illuminated Manuscripts' is the first publication to examine decorated books produced across the globe during the period traditionally known as medieval. Through essays and case studies, the volume's multidisciplinary contributors expand the historiography, chronology, and geography of manuscript studies to embrace a diversity of objects, individuals, narratives and materials from Africa, Asia, Australasia and the Americas - an approach that both engages with and contributes to the emerging field of scholarly inquiry known as the Global Middle Ages. Featuring over 160 colour illustrations, this wide-ranging and provocative collection is intended for all who are interested in engaging in a dialogue about how books and other textual objects contributed to world-making strategies from about 400 to 1600.

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