The arts: general topics Books

Book SynopsisAre the visual arts really so central in our time that, as Doug Adams once said, "people under 60, raised on television remember by what they see. "[F]ilm and television are really the language of today"? (TE 2013) This central view on the visual arts can be contrasted with an opposing view by Camille Paglia, who wrote that "the visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism. Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images." (TE 2013a) Contrary to these opposing views (and other ones as will be discussed in the book), the visual arts (in relation to techniques and spirits) are neither possible (nor impossible) nor desirable (or undesirable) to the extent that the respective ideologues (on different sides) would like us to believe. Needless to say, this questioning of the opposing views on the visual arts does not mean that the study of techniques and spirits is useless, or that those fields (related to the visual arts) -- like drawing, cosmetics, manicure, painting, landscape, calligraphy, photography, digital art, computer technology, advertisement, graphic design, filmmaking, fashion, sculpture, architecture, and so on -- are unimportant. (WK 2013) Of course, neither of these extreme views is reasonable. Instead, this book offers an alternative (better) way to understand the future of the visual arts in regard to the dialectic relationship between techniques and spirits -- while learning from different approaches in the literature but without favoring any one of them (nor integrating them, since they are not necessarily compatible with each other). More specifically, this book offers a new theory (that is, the ephemeral theory of the visual arts) to go beyond the existing approaches in a novel way and is organized in four chapters. This seminal project will fundamentally change the way that we think about the visual arts in relation to techniques and spirits from the combined perspectives of the mind, nature, society, and culture, with enormous implications for the human future and what I originally called its "post-human" fate.

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Book SynopsisIn this intimate investigation of the artistic process, Lezli Rubin-Kunda explores the nuanced path of creative work and the way artists make sense of home and place within their art practice and their lives. Rubin-Kunda is a multidisciplinary artist who examines these issues in her own work. But in this book, she expands her horizons, travelling across Canada to talk to more than fifty practicing artists, including Amalie Atkins, Aganetha Dyck, Francois Morelli, Simon Frank, and Sharon Alward, about their work, their creative process, and the place of "home": in their work.What emerges from these thoughtful conversations are fascinating and unexpected orientations to place, ranging from deep connections to a specific childhood home, to more conscious adoptions of place, to somewhat fluid approaches in which the very concept of "home" seems to dissolve.Moving from physical landscapes to the geography of memories and recorded histories, from territories of emotion to social environments that condition and contribute to the idea of home, Rubin-Kunda touches on indigenous approaches to ancestral homelands, the land as physical place and emotional territory, the historic role of women in creating and taking care of "home," ideas of home disconnected from place, and liberating concepts of "homelessness." Woven through these encounters with other artists are Rubin-Kunda’s reflections on her own artistic path.Candid, empathetic, and insightful, At Home explores the creative process and the ways that artists find and create meaning within a fragmented contemporary landscape.Trade Review"At Home is a valuable work of curating and reflecting on a thoughtful, intergenerational selection of artists, and a reminder of the value of the artist-curator and the exploratory nature of the curatorial process." -- Marie-Paule Macdonald * RACAR *

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Book SynopsisArctic/Amazon: Networks of Global Indigeneity offers a conversation between Indigenous Peoples of two regions in this time of political and environmental upheaval. Both regions are environmentally sensitive areas that have become hot spots in the debates circling around climate change and have long been contact zones between Indigenous Peoples and outsiders — zones of meeting and clashing, of contradictions and entanglement. Opening with an Epistolary Exchange between the editors, Arctic/Amazon then widens to include essays by 12 Indigenous artists, curators, and knowledge-keepers about the integration of spirituality, ancestral respect, traditional knowledges, and political critique in artistic practice and more than 100 image reproductions and installation shots. The result is an extraordinary conversation about life, artistic practise, and geopolitical realities faced by Indigenous peoples in regions at risk.

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Book Synopsis'A remarkable set of essays unlike anything else' - Kadish Morris, Guardian As in her fiction, the essays in Out of the Sun demonstrate Esi Edugyan's commitment to seeking out the stories of Black lives that history has failed to record. Written with the death of George Floyd and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement in the background, in five wide-ranging essays Edugyan reflects on her own identity and experiences as the daughter of Ghanaian immigrants. She delves into the history of Western Art and the truths about Black lives that it fails to reveal, and the ways contemporary Black artists are reclaiming and reimagining those lives. She explores and celebrates the legacy of Afrofuturism, the complex and problematic practice of racial passing, the place of ghosts and haunting in the imagination, and the fascinating relationship between Africa and Asia dating back to the 6th Century. With calm, piercing intelligence, and a refusal to think on anyone's terms but her own, Edugyan asks difficult questions about how we reckon with the past and imagine the future, and invites the reader to think alongside her in working out what the answers to these may be.Trade ReviewStunning ... Out of the Sun provides an enlightening, multifaceted and thoroughly engrossing look at what blackness means and has meant through the centuries. * Irish Times *A remarkable collection of essays on representation, race, identity and history. Not surprisingly, Out of the Sun is rich in stories, memory and the warmth of human experience ... gripping ... There are insights, ironies and nuances on every page: Edugyan must now be counted as one of the finest essayists of her generation, as well as one of the best novelists -- Matthew D'AnconaIn its breadth, beauty and candour, this is a beguiling collection. And if, after reading it you leave with more questions than you started - which might be a complaint in a lesser book - then I suspect it has achieved its aim -- Kuba Shand-Baptiste * Guardian *Praise for Esi Edugyan: Wondrous ... gripping ... vivid and captivating * Economist *Magnificent and strikingly visual prose * Financial Times *Exquisite * New York Magazine *Edugyan is a magical writer * Washington Post *A towering achievement . . . Edugyan is one of our sharpest and deepest writers * Entertainment Weekly *Strong, beautiful and beguiling * Observer *Poignant and political, Edugyan enjoys taking her readers where they are least expecting to go . . . shines a light on the present as well as the past. * Irish Independent *A pacey yet thoughtful exploration of freedom, and our moral compulsion to act * Spectator *

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Book SynopsisWhere and who do we want to be? How might we get there? What might happen if we stay on our current course?In The Future of Serious Art, Bidisha uses her personal journey through novels, TV and film to mirror the seismic changes that have occurred in culture and its industries in recent years.The digital revolution has brought all of TV, cinema and music into the palms of our hands. It’s easier than ever to bring stories to life, but what happens when artistic work is rebranded as 'content creation'? Where does this leave literary novelists and arthouse filmmakers? What about those auteur-directors who make mainstream but thoughtful films for the big screen? As a storyteller herself, and a woman of colour who isn't a millennial, Bidisha asks who is taken seriously as an artist, what is taken seriously as art now and how that might change over the next century.This brief but mighty book is one of five that comprise the first set of FUTURES essays. Each standalone book presents the author's original vision of a singular aspect of the future which inspires in them hope or reticence, optimism or fear. Read individually, these essays will inform, entertain and challenge. Together, they form a picture of what might lie ahead, and ask the reader to imagine how we might make the transition from here to there, from now to then.

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Book SynopsisAccompanies the exhibition at the National Gallery, London, 13 September 2023–7 January 2024. Céline Condorelli’s practice addresses the boundaries between public and private, art and function, labour and leisure, in order to reimagine what culture can be and the role of artists within it. As the National Gallery’s 2023 Artist in Residence, she was invited to respond to its collection and that of the Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Art Gallery, Exeter. Condorelli interrogates the role of museums as ‘machines for looking’ which guide audiences in how they perceive and value art. Using sculpture, architecture and installation, her art makes interventions in the ways people navigate space and highlights the act of exhibiting itself. This book presents a new body of work which focuses on the act of seeing, as well as pages created by Condorelli that document her research into the materials, spaces and history of the National Gallery. These are complemented by an essay by curator Priyesh Mistry and an interview with the artist by Lara Goodband.

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Book SynopsisFinancial intrigue and debacle, government-sponsored spying, preemptive war, and more: an endless stream of news underscores the manipulation of power and resources with consequences for us all. The news headlines that have intrigued and horrified us of late have become, not surprisingly, inspiration for many contemporary artists worldwide. Whether exposing the complexity or folly of conspiracy theory, or analyzing money trails and their surprising beneficiaries, all of the artists featured are essentially questioning control. Who controls whom? Who controls what? Where does it leave the rest of us? Despite the heavily-politicized subject matter, the book presents an objective point of view on the power of control as a construct within our society. Under Control includes works created within the past 10 years in a variety of media by artists from Austria, Brazil, Germany, South Korea, Spain, and the United StatesTable of ContentsIntroduction and acknowledgments Control conrolled controlling Everything is under control Artists and works in the exhibition Instances of use of United States armed forces abroad

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Book SynopsisMaureen Scott, the revolutionary artist whose work opened Tate's acclaimed Women in Revolt! exhibition, was the driving force behind The League of Socialist Artists. Through her art and visionary writings, she offers a powerful call to reimagine our lives and unite in the fight for meaningful change.

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Book SynopsisSituated in a dress circle position on the slopes of the village of Les Avants, overlooking Lake Geneva in Switzerland, Chalet Monet is the magnificent home of Dame Joan Sutherland OM AC DBE and her husband, Maestro Richard Bonynge AC CBE. In his charming, eloquent, conversational style, Richard Bonynge takes us inside the home he has shared with Dame Joan, and in so doing provides rare insight into the lives of two of the greatest international cultural icons in opera of all time. The Chalet was introduced to Dame Joan and Richard by their close friend Noël Coward who resided in the neighbouring property. The opulence of each of the distinctive rooms over the four floors and vistas from the Chalet is artfully captured in stunning photography. Paintings and objets dart line the walls and fill the cabinets, each with their own provenance; presented by royalty or celebrities, embroided by Dame Joan or collected by Richard. Through the stories of these artefacts, told by Richard in eloquent conversational style, we learn about the life and times of two of the most formidable figures associated with opera in the 20th century. "For those fortunate enough to have discovered and experienced the thrill of opera and all the larger than life characters associated with it, to enter Chalet Monet is somewhat of a fairy tale experience that could be taken right out of a Cinderella story ... Chalet Monet is a house with a thousand stories. It is living history, theatrical, a beautiful home with enormous spirit like its owners. It radiates grandeur yet intimacy with places to sit and contemplate, views to linger over, books to be read, paintings to admire and music to listen to. It is a treasure trove for the senses where many a story has been told orbegun. Only its walls and its owners remember the decades of music making here and possibly the oddneighbour and the cows on the grassy slopes ... Thank you, Richard for allowing us to enter your private and colourful world." From the Preface by Fiona Janes, Artistic Director/General Manager Joan Sutherland & Richard Bonynge Foundation. This sumptuously produced coffee table book captures the essence of the fairy tale that is Chalet Monet.

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Book SynopsisWird die Verbindung von Materie und Form, Begrifflichkeit und Sinnlichkeit, von Sinnlichem und Unsinnlichem zum Problem, so geistert in der Geschichte der Philosophie seit der Antike der Begriff des Schemas herum und ist auch heutzutage etwa in Theorien der Verkörperung zentral. Während Kant das Schema als Bedingung der Bedeutungsentstehung versteht und in kritischer Absicht von Bildern, Zeichen und Symbolen abgrenzt, ordnen Maimon, Hamann, Herder, Hegel und später Plessner dem Schematismus sinnliche und sprachliche Prozesse einer Morphogenese zu. Diese Revisionen geben Anlass zu einer neuen Theorie des Schematismus, in welcher der Versinnlichung der Status einer transzendentalen Bedingung der Verkörperung zukommt. So verstanden hat Versinnlichung als systematischer Kern der aktuellen Sprach- und Erkenntnistheorie zu gelten.

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Book SynopsisThe End of Diversity in Art Historical Writing is the most globally informed book on world art history, drawing on research in 76 countries. In addition some chapters have been crowd sourced: posted on the internet for comments, which have been incorporated into the text. It covers the principal accounts of Eurocentrism, center and margins, circulations and atlases of art, decolonial theory, incommensurate cultures, the origins and dissemination of the "October" model, problems of access to resources, models of multiple modernisms, and the emergence of English as the de facto lingua franca of art writing.

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Book SynopsisThe concepts of artification and sustainability are now both at the heart of luxury brand marketing strategies; artification as an ongoing process of transformation in the world of art and sustainability as an indispensable response to the issues of our times. The Future of Luxury Brands examines three interrelated luxury-marketing segments—the art world, fashion and fine wines including　hospitality services—through the dual lenses of sustainability and artification. From safeguarding human and natural resources to upholding labor rights and protecting the environment, sustainability has taken center stage in consumer consciousness, embodying both moral authority and sound business practices. At the same time, artification—the process by which non-art is reconceived as art—applies the cachet of art to business, affording commercial products the sacred status accorded to works of art. When commercial products enter the realm of aesthetic creation, artification and consumer engagement inevitably increases. This pioneering book examining artification and sustainability as strategic pillars of marketing strategies in the luxury industry will be essential reading for practitioners working in luxury product companies, as also students of luxury brand marketing.Table of ContentsIntroduction The introduction provides an overview of the book’s themes of artification and sustainability in relation to luxury brands, including brief discussions of each of our four focal industries: the art world, fashion, fine wines, and hospitality. The introduction sets out the book’s organizational structure, and the multiple ways in which each chapter reflects the overall agenda. Part 1 1. The Art World: An introduction to the art world, encompassing the art market, art auctions, and issues relating to artists of color and their representation in art galleries and museums. The pressing need for implementing diversity in the employees and trustees of museums in the western world is discussed. Who decides who is deserving of exhibitions, and who meets the definition of ‘artist’? Social sustainability is most relevant to the art world and market. [one of the curators of the Museum of anthropology, UBC Vancouver.] 2. Works of Art Vs. Luxury Goods: This chapter investigates the ever-increasing overlap between art and luxury goods: both reflect artisanship and an artist’s or designer’s personal vision; both confer a sense of personal refinement and status; and both offer ongoing aesthetic pleasure. Additionally, there is a discussion of the meaning of connection through art with the artist, and with fellow purchasers of that artist’s work, as well as the elevated sense of self derived from entering an exclusive ‘club’, in a sense, of those who enjoy such a connection. [Russ Belk] 3. Partnerships Between Luxury Brands and Artists: This chapter considers the often-lucrative partnerships between artists and luxury brands, to the benefit of both parties [e.g., Elsa Peretti and Tiffany, who have enjoyed an ongoing arrangement since the early 1970s, in which Peretti-branded products are sold exclusively through Tiffany). [M. Masi] 4. Burning Man and Art: This chapter discusses the implications of the Burning Man festival for the art world: what is the meaning of art designed specifically to be ephemeral (i.e., the massive effigy that is ritually sacrificed in flames at the close of the gathering), and of art as a means of human bonding, in which individuals find community in isolation from normative culture through the medium of art. The chapter further raises the inherent unsustainability of a form of art based on fire, which releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. [John Sherry] 5. Artists as Brands: When an artist becomes celebrated worldwide, often through their alliances with luxury brands, their name can itself transform into a brand, as has occurred with such celebrity artists as Warhol, Murakami, Koons and Kaws. An artists name becomes its own logo, serving as an imprimatur of value and quality. [Jonathan Schroeder] PART 2 Discussion of luxury brands that incorporate sustainability principles into their brand narrative and manufacturing processes and supply chains; and of the artification process, through which non-art objects become art. 6. The Artification of Luxury Brand Product Lines: This chapter considers the case of Louis Vuitton and the incorporation of art within its core identity, and charts its deliberate strategy of displaying actual works of art alongside its own luxury goods, resulting in the artification of the latter, aided by museum-level displays and adroitly theatrical use of lighting and other retail atmospherics. [Dion] 7. Street wear and Street Art: This chapter focuses on the artification process that formally began with graffiti emerging as an art movement and which now spans both the art world and luxury fashion. [Stefania Borghini and Luca Visconti] 8. Diamonds As Signifiers of Eco-Consciousness: This chapter examines sustainability in the diamond industry, as embodied by Canadian diamonds, which are mined and used in jewellery manufacture via sustainable methods from mine to store. [Linda Armano and Joy] 9. The Consumer Perspective on Sustainable Luxury: An investigation of consumer appreciation of sustainable luxury brands, including discussion of sustainability as a new and key element of luxury. [Antonella Caru or Julien Cayla) Part 3 Luxury Hospitality Services: This short introduction considers luxury hospitality services, including hotels, resorts, and the like, that employ both sustainability and artification as marketing strategies, an essential component of their brands, and as an affirmation of a truly luxurious lifestyle. 10. Artification in Hospitality: The role of art as being emblematic of the brand in hospitality services, with discussion of this new trend in hotels and resorts appealing to guests with sophisticated interests. [Kathy La Tour] PART 4 Fine Wines, Sustainably Produced: This section discusses fine wines, focused on sustainability throughout the discrete stages of production, from vine to store [ 11. Terroir and Sustainability in the Wine Industries of Bordeaux and Burgundy: This chapter considers Terroir (the separate geographical elements of specific locations that in combination result in a wine’s specific flavors, such as soil, shade, climate, and sunlight) and sustainability in the fine wines of Bordeaux and Burgundy. [Steve Charters, Dijon University and or/de Mossier] 12. Art and Architecture in Wineries: This chapter assesses how wineries set the tone for their atmospherics through exterior and interior design, the impact of those atmospherics on visitors, and the commercial power of art on wine labels over time. [Joy] 13. Unesco Heritage sites and Terroir: A consideration of Unesco World Heritage sites and fine wines, including discussion of Unesco’s role in underscoring the impact of terroir on a wine’s desirability and premium price. [Gabriele Troilo and Joy]

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Book SynopsisThe role played by artistic, literary, historical and theological representations in the establishment of the European Reformation has attracted scholarly attention over the years. While they were generally regarded as a significant means of conveying the evangelical message, particularly in a society with a low average literacy rate, this scholarly consensus was then seriously challenged by objecting that their meaning must have remained opaque to those who couldnâ t read and interpret their sometimes multilayered imagery and their verbal and figurative messages. This volume, which publishes some of the papers delivered at the Fourth Reformation Research Consortium Conference held in Bologna, May 15thâ 17th, 2014, is an attempt to examine the visual intelligibility of the European Reformation by a comparative, multiconfessional and multidisciplinary analysis of examples taken from both the Catholic and the Protestant world in the Early Modern and Modern Era, with particular reference to the figurative arts, but also to history and theology. All the case studies included here examine their peculiar subjects with regard to their religious and artistic contexts, in order to understand their historical significance in a new fashion, combining approaches from political history, history of arts, historiography, anthropology, philosophy and theology. Thus, the volume offers a very rich outline of how visual culture and representation through arts was embodied in very different cultural portraits and images.

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Book SynopsisThe Egyptian revolution of 2011 has significantly changed the relationship between citizens, public space, and visual expression. "Cairo: Images of Transition" traces these developments and their effects on political communication, urban space, and cultural production. The book is the first publication to offer a deep view on the relationship between aesthetics and politics in the wake of the Egyptian revolution 2011. Renowned Egyptian and international writers, artists and activists trace the shifting status of the image as a communicative tool, a witness to history, and an active agent for change.Trade Review"This edited volume provides a unique look at theEgyptian revolution by granting agency to activists anddescribing how art continually serves as a language ofcontestation. The book, however, lacks a solid theo-retical basis that situates this specific case study in thewider literature on social movements and feminist lit-erature on gender and nationalism." Anwar Mhajne, H-Net-Reviews, 3 (2016) "These texts are at once inspiring, critical and reflexive." Wasafiri Issue, 81 (2015) "Sehr zu empfehlen." Sebastian Gerth, MEDIENwissenschaft, 2 (2015) "[The book] provides an innovative and nuanced account of the significance of images during this exceptional period. Rather than a monument to a past moment, [the book] should be seen as an effort to sustain this revolutionary opening in its various iterations, thus harnessing the generativity of these exceptional events." Mark R. Westmoreland, Journal of the Society for Contemporary Thought and the Islamicate World, 4 (2015)

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Book Synopsis"After the Storm" traces the cultural and political responses to Hurricane Katrina. Ever since Katrina hit the Gulf coast in 2005, its devastating consequences for the region, for New Orleans, and the United States have been negotiated in a growing number of cultural productions - among them Spike Lee's documentary film "When the Levees Broke", David Simon and Eric Overmyer's TV series "Treme", or Natasha Trethewey's poetry collection "Beyond Katrina". This book provides interdisciplinary perspectives on these and other approaches to Hurricane Katrina and puts special emphasis on the intersections of the categories race and class.

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Book SynopsisHow to account for the peculiar attraction of certain photos? How to deal with the specific use of images in particular contexts? Monika Schwärzler presents a variety of photographic case studies exploring visual phenomena from the point of view of media analysis as well as from sociological, aesthetic, and psychoanalytic perspectives. The topics range from a new reading of Thomas Struth's street photographs to CERN photos with their charged rhetoric, from the assault of photographic close-ups to speculations on an anonymous slide collection featuring a woman with an ever-present white handbag. The book is intended for an audience receptive to the analytical appeal of images, prepared to go beyond what can be taken at face value.

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Book Synopsis"Roman Charity" investigates the iconography of the breastfeeding daughter from the perspective of queer sexuality and erotic maternity. The volume explores the popularity of a topic that appealed to early modern observers for its eroticizing shock value, its ironic take on the concept of Catholic "charity", and its implied critique of patriarchal power structures. It analyses why early modern viewers found an incestuous, adult breastfeeding scene "good to think with" and aims at expanding and queering our notions of early modern sexuality. Jutta Gisela Sperling discusses the different visual contexts in which "Roman Charity" flourished and reconstructs contemporary horizons of expectation by reference to literary sources, medical practice, and legal culture.Trade Review"Sperlings book is a useful addition to scholarly conversations in several fields and disciplines - art history and early modern gender studies in particular. Though not a text for an introductory course, it provides more advanced students and researchers with thoughtful and creative tools for analyzing the transmission of images through time as well as about the ways in which we engage the meaning and reception of those images." Peter Carlson, Comitatus, 48 (2017)

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Book SynopsisUntil recently still a blank spot on the world map of art, China today occupies one of the top positions in the rankings of the global art market and has moved into the center of the speculations and the covetousness of its protagonists. But what is really happening on the spot, beyond the ethnocentric distortions of the Western viewpoint? What social representations and uses of art can be identified? A research team from the University of St. Gallen has taken up such questions in an ethnographical field research project which enables the actors in this emergent and nonetheless already market-dominated art field to have their say.

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Book SynopsisIn recent years, the term global art has become a catchphrase in contemporary art discourses. Going beyond additive notions of canon expansion, this volume encourages a differentiated inquiry into the complex aesthetic, cultural, historical, political, epistemological and socio-economic implications of both the term global art itself and the practices it subsumes. Focusing on diverse examples of art, curating, historiography and criticism, the contributions not only take into account (new) hegemonies and exclusions but also the shifting conditions of transcultural art production, circulation and reception.

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Book SynopsisMichael Lent asks what role art has in colonisation and subsequent dissolution. He proposes a practice informed by the fatal strategies and 'raw' phenomenology of Jean Baudrillard as a challenge to a system of disappearance. Focusing on the otherness of space to prevent its ultimate dissolution, Lent promotes a spatial practice of radical alterity. Examining ideas of disappearance put forth by Baudrillard and Paul Virilio, he utilises art as a means for investigating loss of potentiality and experience through the representation of space, shifting their ideas - originally ascribed to objects - into a new emphasis. This book ultimately attempts to break a cyclical system that causes everything to disappear into representation and equivalency.

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Book SynopsisAccording to Walter Benjamin, the past that is not recognized by the present threatens to disappear irretrievably. As a consequence, photographs cannot save the moment from oblivion by pure depiction alone, but only by keeping the depicted moment actual at every present moment. Instead of counting on the documentary quality of photography that speaks in the past tense of "what has been", Silke Helmerdig suggests a different approach to photography: an extension of a future subjunctive (photographic) tense speaking of "what could be, if", allowing one to think possible futures instead of harking back to the past.

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Book SynopsisOver the last decades, studies on cultural memory have taken a "spectral turn" and have explored the potential of haunting metaphors for addressing past instances of violence that affect present cultural realities. This book contributes to the discussions on haunting by enquiring into its culturally and historically located modality: the emergence of the figure of the Jewish ghost in contemporary Polish popular culture, literature and critical art. Gathering contributions from an interdisciplinary group of scholars, it locates this new interest in Jewish ghosts on the map of other Polish (and Jewish) ghostologies and seeks to explore their cultural and political functions in the Polish post-Holocaust imaginaire.Table of ContentsIntroduction: Haunting in the Land of the Untraumatized; On Behalf of the Dead: Mediumistic Writing on the Holocaust in Polish Literature; Scratch, Groove, the Imprint of (Non)presence: On the Spectrologies of the Holocaust; Sites That Haunt: Affects and Non-sites of Memory; Healing by Haunting: On Jewish Ghosts, Symbolic Exorcism and Traumatic Surrealism; Of Ghosts'(In)ability to Haunt: Polish Dybbuks; Not Your House, not Your Flat: Jewish Ghosts in Poland and the Stolen Jewish Proprieties; Philosemitic Violence; Authors.

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Book SynopsisDuring the uprisings of the Arab Spring between 2010 and 2012, oppositional movements used political humor to criticize political leaders or to expose the absurdities of the socio-political conditions. These humorous expressions in various art forms such as poetry, stand-up comedy, street art, music, caricatures, cartoons, comics and puppet shows were further distributed in the social media. This first comprehensive study of political humor in the uprisings explores the varieties and functions of political humor as a creative tool for resistance. It analyzes humorous forms of cultural expression and their impact on socio-political developments in different countries of the Middle East and North Africa with a special focus on the changing modes of humor.

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Book SynopsisCollective Actions is one of the most significant artistic practices to emerge from Moscow Conceptualism. The group's enigmatic idea of 'Empty action' is the focal point for Marina Gerber's exploration of this practice in relation to labour in the late Soviet Union. Based on interviews with members of the group (Monastyrski, Panitkov, Alexeev, Makarevich, Elagina, Romashko, Hänsgen and Kiesewalter) she exposes the relation between their jobs, their individual art practices and their contribution to the collective in the context of post-Stalinist debates on labour and free time. Departing from the mundane fact that Collective Actions' practice took place in free time from work for the Soviet State, Gerber identifies Empty action as a form of 'art after work'.

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Book SynopsisThe proliferation of digital technology has changed our visual perception and the way we interpret terms such as 'representation', 'immersion', and 'virtuality'. Kresimir Purgar examines some of the topics fundamental to an understanding of the contemporary culture of images. The principal thesis of this volume is that we are witnessing the transitional period of images as not-representation-anymore and not-yet-immersion. Instead of just asking what images mean, we should ask ourselves what images are, how they appear, and what they do to us. The author proposes the comprehensive concept of "pictorial appearing" that takes into account phenomenological, semiotic, and art-historical perspectives on both old and new images.

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Book SynopsisAnalysing recent documentary films dealing with undocumented migration at the Schengen Area's fringes and against the backdrop of what has been termed the `European refugee crisis', Jan Kühnemund investigates the interface between migration discourses and image discourses. As an analytical framework, he conceptualises `Borderland Schengen' as a visual-political transnational space emerging from the interplay of migration movements and border policies. Putting the spaces and iconologies of `illegal' migration under scrutiny and aiming at establishing their protagonists as subjects, Kühnemund in this regard reads the films as attempts at discursive participation as an aesthetic political practice.

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