Treatments and subjects Books

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book SynopsisIn his noteworthy theoretical essay Experience, Ralph Waldo Emerson writes that humans by nature cannot fully grasp life as lived. If this is so, how capable are we of expressing our experiences in works of art? Despite this formidable challenge, for the past thirty years, scholarship in American art has assumed that works of art are coded and has analyzed them accordingly, often with constructive results. The fourth volume in the Terra Foundation Essays series, Experience considers the possibility of immediacy, or the idea that we can directly relate to the past by way of an artifact or work of art. Without discounting the matrix of codes involved in both the production and reception of art, contributors to Experience emphasize the sensibility of the interpreter; the techniques of art historical writing, including its affinity with fiction and its powers of description; the emotional charge the punctum that certain representations can deliver. These and other topics are examined through seven essays, addressing different periods in American art.

Read more less

Book Synopsis“As an art critic, [Hickey] doesn’t do what most people want from art criticism. He doesn’t provide his readers with a neat intellectual framework through which to view everything they see, like a Clement Greenberg or a Michael Fried, and he doesn’t really do beautiful description either ... Instead, Hickey gives you intricately structured argument and gorgeous prose ... Reading him you want to forget that the art market is a game of Hungry Hungry Hippos between Ukrainian oligarchs and Qatari princesses ... You want to be the thing you advocate; you want to ride the wave, mount the dais, and speak the truth.” – Los Angeles Review of Books Arguably one of the most astute critics working today, Dave Hickey's multi-decade career as a leading cultural commentator is characterised by his blend of high and mass culture and his fervent critique of the celebrity-driven culture of the 21st-century art world. Following his 2012 announcement of self-imposed exile from art criticism, this new body of essays once again questions and challenges the cultural status quo. With his trademark humour, Hickey has declared that: ‘I miss being an elitist and not having to talk to idiots’ in a field that, he believes, is defined by the commoditisation of art and the self-referential tendencies of criticism itself. This new body of shorter essays by the author of Air Guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy and The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty looks at more contemporary phenomena: super-collectors, the trope of the biennale and the loss of looking.

Read more less

Book SynopsisThis beautifully designed book is a celebration of one of the world's most creative, dynamic and fascinating cities: Tokyo. It spans 400 years, with highlights including Kano school paintings; the iconic woodblock prints of Hiroshige; Tokyo Pop Art posters; the photography of Moriyama Daido and Ninagawa Mika; manga; film; and contemporary art by Murakami Takashi and Aida Makoto. Visually bold and richly detailed, this publication looks at a city which has undergone constant destruction and renewal and it tells the stories of the people who have made Tokyo so famous with their insatiable appetite for the new and innovative - from the samurai to avantgarde artists today. Co-edited by Japanese art specialists and curators Lena Fritsch and Clare Pollard from Oxford University, this accessible volume features 28 texts by international experts of Japanese culture, as well as original statements by influential artists.Trade Review"A seductive encounter with past and present at the Olympic city shows that Tokyo practically invented modern art." -- Jonathan Jones, The Guardian;

Read more less

Book Synopsis'One of the very few necessary and inevitable utterances of the century.' William Morris, in the Preface. The Nature of Gothic started life as a chapter in Ruskin's masterwork, The Stones of Venice. Ruskin came to lament the 'Frankenstein monsters' of Victorian buildings with added Gothic which 'The Stones' inspired; but despite his misgivings the original moral purpose of his writing had not fallen on stony ground. The Nature of Gothic, the last chapter of the second volume, had marked his progression from art critic to social critic; in it he found the true seam of his thought, and it was quickly recognised for the revolutionary writing it was. As Morris himself put it, The Nature of Gothic 'pointed out a new road on which the world should travel'; and in its indictment of meaningless modern labour and its celebration of medieval architecture it could be called the foundation stone of Morris's aesthetic and purpose in life. 40 years after he first read it, Morris chose Ruskin's text for one of the first books to be published at his Kelmscott Press, using his own Golden type. It is one of the summits of his career, and one of the most beautiful books ever published. Few books can so completely sum up an era. The Kelmscott Nature of Gothic encapsulates the meeting of two remarkable minds and embodies their influence in word, image and design. But more than that, Ruskin's words are increasingly relevant for our times. In this facsimile edition, the first ever made of this rare book, the reader can fully appreciate their importance and their legacy, as understood by one of the most potent visual imaginations to have worked in Britain. In this enlarged edition, essays by leading scholars, Robert Hewison (who was one of Ruskin's successors as Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford University), Tony Pinkney (Senior Lecturer at Lancaster University) and Robert Brownell (lecturer, stained glass maker and author of Marriage of Inconvenience) explain the importance of this book for Ruskin, for Morris and for us today.

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book SynopsisThis unprecedented exhibition reintroduces three trailblazing Japanese American artists of the preWorld War II generations. Pictures of Belonging: Miki Hayakawa, Hisako Hibi, and Miné Okubo brings together over ninety works by three pioneering Japanese American artists from the preWorld War II era. Despite long careers and critical acclaim, Miki Hayakawa, Hisako Hibi, and Miné Okubo have largely been overlooked in traditional American art history. This groundbreaking exhibition reintroduces their work and explores their deep connections with each other for the first time. Through three chronological sections, the exhibition traces the careers of these artists from the 1920s to the 1990s. Faces & Communities presents preWorld War II portraiture and figurative works, while Belongings & (dis)Locations showcases landscapes and still lifes from the prewar and wartime periods. The final section, Explorations & Rediscoveries, features postwar abstractions. Pictures of Belonging foregro

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book Synopsis'A wonderful, vibrant account' Susie Dent'This is the real eighteenth century' Dan Snow'A secret history like no other' BBC History Magazine, Books of the Year 2024What if walls could talk? For historian Madeleine Pelling, they can - if you know where to lookAn aristocrat carves obscenities into a tavern window with his diamond ring. A shopkeeper's daughter sketches customers with a piece of coal. A desperate highwayman, condemned to death, scratches his initials into his prison cell door.Writing on the Wall goes in search of the hidden voices of Britain's most rebellious and transformative era - a time when anyone in possession of a sharp point and ready surface could find their voice and immortalise their message. Through the marks made by ordinary people, scratched into walls, doors, windows and more, Madeleine Pelling brings the lost stories of the past to life in all their unguarded glory.

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book SynopsisAt once historical and allegorical, Light in Dark Times is an illustrated ride crossing time, space, and place as the characters walk a difficult path while grasping a lifeline of hope on a journey through knowledge.Trade Review"Light in Dark Times contributes to our understanding of why the US is facing similar strategies of ‘conflating opinion with truth’ and the rise of ‘alternative facts’ that were used in Germany during the rise of the Nazi party. It also offers a number of important remedies to counter them: be introspective, avoid the trivial, participate in envisioning an alternative world, and engage in activities without exaggerated self-importance." -- Rachel Breunlin, University of New Orleans * Anthropology and Humanism *“Light in Dark Times is one of the few books, anthropological or otherwise, I would call transcendent. Rarely has a volume been timelier, more engaging, or more accessible.” -- Robert Myers, Alfred University * General Anthropology *"This is a unique, non-fiction graphic novel that focuses on what anthropology study can lend to society. The artwork is particularly illuminating." -- 2020 VLA Graphic Novel Diversity Award Committee“If I were teaching graduate students in anthropology about the alluring, messy complexities within and about the discipline, this book would be a fine introduction. If I were teaching qualitative research methods and other means of narrating experience, the format and content would undoubtedly expand the student’s repertoires of representation.” -- Sue E. Estroff, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill * Perspectives in Biology and Medicine Journal *Table of ContentsPreface A Note on Anthropology Characters Reflections On Being Introspective On Thinking in Dark Times On Truth, Lies, and the Danger of the Trivial On Envisioning an Alternative World A Lament To the Present To Posterity

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book SynopsisWith Artist as Author, Christa Noel Robbins provides the first extended study of authorship in mid-20th century abstract painting in the US. Taking a close look at this influential period of art history, Robbins describes how artists and critics used the medium of painting to advance their own claims about the role that they believed authorship should play in dictating the value, significance, and social impact of the art object. Robbins tracks the subject across two definitive periods: the New York School as it was consolidated in the 1950s and Post Painterly Abstraction in the 1960s. Through many deep dives into key artist archives, Robbins brings to the page the minds and voices of painters Arshile Gorky, Jack Tworkov, Helen Frankenthaler, Kenneth Noland, Sam Gilliam, and Agnes Martin along with those of critics such as Harold Rosenberg and Rosalind Krauss. While these are all important characters in the polemical histories of American modernism, this is the first time they are placTrade Review"Robbins's penetrating analysis centers on mid-twentieth-century abstractionists of the New York School, diving deep into the closely argued definitions of individual 'action' put forward principally by Harold Rosenberg, and diversely exemplified by Jack Tworkov, Helen Frankenthaler, Sam Gilliam, and others." -- Nancy Princenthal * Art in America *“In this elegant book, Robbins makes a serious intervention in the field of post-war American art, paying careful attention both to abstract painting as it was conceived originally and as it continues to be written about today. Walking readers through the formation of a small group of key painters, she reveals various views among artists and critics on issues of authorship, agency, and the role of the painterly gesture.” -- Jo Applin, author of Lee Lozano: Not Working“Artist as Author presents a bracing new account of Abstract Expressionism and its wake. Rather than accepting as given the evaluations handed down in the art-historical literature, Robbins reveals how much seemingly opposed artists (and their critics and historians) have to say to each other; the result is both refreshing and astonishingly complex. This sophisticated discussion of the critical debates about artistic authorship makes the case that painters such as Helen Frankenthaler, Sam Gilliam, and Agnes Martin afford a new foundation from which to evaluate the stakes and impact of Modernist painting. This is a major intervention demanding a rethinking of received narratives.” -- David Getsy, author of Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of GenderTable of ContentsIntroduction. The Artist as AuthorPart I Chapter One. The Act-Painting Chapter Two. The Expressive Fallacy Chapter Three. Rhetoric of MotivesPart II Chapter Four. Self-Discipline Chapter Five. Event as Painting Chapter Six. Conclusion: Gridlocked Acknowledgments Notes Select Bibliography Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisTrade Review"Bourneuf’s magisterial, amazingly lucid commentary discusses Matthias Grünewald, whose Isenheim Altarpiece in Colmar, France, contains a figure resembling this angel. She also addresses debates between Benjamin and Scholem about Martin Buber’s philosophy, and the larger implications of Benjamin’s and Scholem’s questions about Jewish cultural identity." -- David Carrier * Hyperallergic *"Behind the Angel of History weaves a fascinating, multi-strand tapestry, a web of associations, filiations, and unexpected connections. The richness of the 'backstories' that Bourneuf sees intertwined through a sheet of black paper is nothing short of astonishing, and the glimpses into Klee’s and Benjamin’s worlds transform that hidden black sheet into an unexpected portal. The presentation’s deliberately non-linear structure is the book’s major strength . . . It is a wild ride." * Commonweal *"In her new book Behind the Angel of History: The 'Angelus Novus' and Its Interleaf, Bourneuf addresses the complicated questions of interpretation arising from this revelation. Bourneuf’s work brings us face-to-face with this mysterious, mute angel, in unexpected ways." * New Criterion *"Bourneuf’s remarkable study will interest students of modernist art, German intellectual history, and broader audiences interested in how a single artwork can be transformed by material framing, fastening, precedents, parodies, and philosophical recastings. No discussion of Klee’s artwork or the ninth thesis can avoid engaging its arguments. Even those who see the original will know that what lies behind the 'Angelus Novus' keeps it from being fully exposed." * Critical Inquiry *“A stunningly brilliant book. Behind the Angel of History reads like a detective story, tracing the dialectic undercurrents of a monoprint by Paul Klee, which Bourneuf illuminates with historical nuance, contextualizing Klee’s print in the political culture of its time. Bourneuf is to be commended for her prodigious, resourceful scholarship and singular contribution to furthering our understanding of Angelus novus.” -- Paul Mendes-Flohr, Dorothy Grant Maclear Professor Emeritus of Modern Jewish History and Thought, University of Chicago“Walter Benjamin turned a little picture by Paul Klee into the twentieth-century’s definitive ‘thought-image.’ Now Bourneuf has brought the picture’s hidden backstory to light. Benjamin himself would marvel at what she has uncovered.” -- Joseph Koerner, Victor S. Thomas Professor of the History of Art and Architecture and Senior Fellow, Society of Fellows, Harvard University“Behind the Angel of History is a revelation. Bourneuf peels back layers of interpretation, many of which had accrued as a result of the Angelus’s important connection to Walter Benjamin. In the process, she uncovers new dimensions of meaning, making visible aspects of the work, and even of Benjamin’s relationship to it, that had been previously obscured by its history. Angelus novus indeed.” -- Lisa Florman, author of Concerning the Spiritual—and the Concrete—in Kandinsky’s Art“Behind the Angel of History presents a stunning investigation of the fate of Klee’s Angelus novus, a key image. Bourneuf situates Klee’s drawing within layers of overlapping signification: in the reception history of the picture itself, in Benjamin’s work, in the iconographic traditions behind the two images, and finally in the theological politics of the early 1920s. This scrupulous reconstruction of the image and its contexts is nothing short of magisterial: it provides us with something like a definitive view of a central work of European modernity.” -- Michael W. Jennings, Class of 1900 Professor of Modern Languages, Emeritus, Princeton UniversityTable of ContentsChapter 1: 2015 Chapter 2: 1920 Chapter 3: 1922 Epilogue Acknowledgments Notes Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisTrade Review"[An] essential, revelatory examination of intermediality and politics in the 1960s. . . Erica Levin’s assured study of artists and experimental filmmakers confronts what she labels the ‘media politics’ of television." * Art History *"The Channeled Image offers keen insights into the artists in the 1960s and how they marshaled a variety of media to both engage with and challenge the norms of commercial and public television. Levin’s clear and forceful critique illuminates the intentions of these artists, their successes, and their failures, drawing attention to a number of works that have received relatively scant scholarly attention and placing those works in conversation with one another. This book will be a boon to the fields of art history and media studies alike." -- Gregory Zinman, author of Making Images Move: Handmade Cinema and the Other Arts"The Channeled Image boldly redraws the map of the 1960s, a time when television news mediated social upheaval and artists critically engaged the medium’s power and immediacy. In crisp and assured prose, Levin reveals the era to be messier and more complex than previous studies have allowed it to be. This is a brilliant and necessary book for understanding art’s entanglements with mass media, both then and now." -- Genevieve Yue, author of Girl Head: Feminism and Film MaterialityTable of ContentsIntroduction: Tuning In 1 Network Media/TV Nation 2 Movement Media/War on Television 3 We Interrupt this Program . . . 4 Public Television/Nervous System Conclusion: TV Now? Acknowledgments Notes Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisArgues that art, especially architecture, music, and painting, is born from the disruptive forces of sexual selection. This book approaches art as a form of erotic expression that connects sensory richness with primal desire. It argues that the meaning of art comes from the intensities and sensations it inspires, not just its intention.Trade ReviewThis wonderful and short book... continues her recent quest of recasting Darwinian biology within a Deleuzean and Nietzschean understanding of sexual difference. -- Arun Saldanha Environment and PlanningTable of ContentsAcknowledgments 1. Chaos. Cosmos, Territory, Architecture 2. Vibration. Animal, Sex, Music 3. Sensation. The Earth, a People, Art Notes Bibliography Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisElizabeth Grosz argues that art—especially architecture, music, and painting—is born from the disruptive forces of sexual selection. She approaches art as a form of erotic expression connecting sensory richness with primal desire, and finds that the meaning of art comes from the intensities and sensations it inspires.Trade ReviewThis wonderful and short book... continues her recent quest of recasting Darwinian biology within a Deleuzean and Nietzschean understanding of sexual difference. -- Arun Saldanha * Environment and Planning *Beautifully written. The sentences unfold and caress you like a plume of exhaled smoke, giving the book’s emphasis on sexual attraction and the eroticism of sensation a physical force. * Comparative Literature Studies *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments1. Chaos. Cosmos, Territory, Architecture2. Vibration. Animal, Sex, Music3. Sensation. The Earth, a People, ArtBibliographyIndex

Read more less

Book SynopsisA step-by-step guide to successful writing.Trade ReviewThe authors, both exceptionally talented writers and teachers, present the material at the right level of detail, organize it well, and engage their readers. The book is an invaluable resource for anyone serious about writing well. -- Peter Markie, University of MissouriTable of ContentsForeword by Mary Ann Caws Acknowledgments Introduction Part I: Strategies Part II: Passages Conclusion Epilogue About the Authors Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisHeather Houser explores the ways contemporary art manages environmental knowledge in the age of climate crisis and informational overload. She argues that the infowhelm—a state of abundant yet contested scientific information—is an unexpectedly resonant resource for environmental artists seeking to go beyond communicating stories about crises.Trade ReviewInfowhelm offers a terrific and timely interdisciplinary method, bridging environmental and digital humanities. Houser asks deep, consequential questions about how data comes to matter, and more specifically how the arts (across media) can bring the data of climate change into affective presence, individual action, and community conversation. -- Stephanie LeMenager, Moore Professor of English and Professor of Environmental Studies, University of OregonIn prose that eschews jargon, Houser calls for a détente between science/technology and humanistic and narrative ways of understanding the world. She shows how data and science narratives interweave with literature, visual arts, and media arts to create new modes of thinking about the world that depend as much on feeling as ratiocination. Along the way she discusses "entangled epistemologies of the Infowhelm": how the arts help us to visualize hyperobjects and massive shifts in environment that seem beyond our understanding when couched only in scientific data. This book is a polished and mature work of scholarship that adds wonderful new ideas to the discussion of how science and the arts mutually influence one another. -- Amy J. Elias, author of Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s FictionAmidst the swirl of data and other forms of information about the environment that saturate the contemporary world, Heather Houser finds a refuge of sorts in the work of artists who, making art of “scientific information,” help us make sense of it. In this remarkably creative and entrancing work, she shows how an aesthetic engagement with this information exposes the nature of the knowledge it produces not to reject it, but to allow for a profound grappling with it. With her magnificent prose and elegant analyses, Houser conveys the pleasure as well as the insights these artistic experiments produce, as we work to make sense of the “infowhelm” of the contemporary moment. This book is a must-read for anyone who has experienced that phenomenon, which is to say for us all. -- Priscilla Wald, author of Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak NarrativeIt would be nice if the accumulated ill effects of the positivist scientific mindset on the natural environment could be cancelled out by a simple turn to more innocent modes of thought. Heather Houser models an approach to the intertwined problems of quantification, scientific representation, and ecological consciousness at once more realistic and more imaginative than that. Assembling a fascinating constellation of artworks that conjure the perplexities of the contemporary informational condition in exciting new ways, she makes a strong case for rethinking the relation between aesthetic experience and epistemology from the ground up. This book will be of interest to a vast range of scholars working on contemporary culture and the environmental humanities. -- Mark McGurl, author of The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative WritingHouser uncovers how artists alchemize scientific information into aesthetic material in contemporary environmental art. Her writing method reveals that wonder is the essence of inquiry . . . [Infowhelm’s] synthesis of multiple artistic—literary and visual—works not only offers new ways of seeing environmental change, but also challenges traditional types of knowledge. * Orion Magazine *An ambitious and dazzling scholarly work . . . Infowhelm pushes environmental humanities scholarship forward by leaps and bounds. * ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment *A virtuosic reappraisal of art and information, during our era of ecological catastrophe . . . Infowhelm is ambitious, timely, and dynamic. It should take its place alongside the most consequential recent studies in ecocriticism, Environmental Humanities, and contemporary literature. * American Literary History *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Environmental Art in the InfowhelmPart I. Cultural Climate KnowledgePreface1. Making Data Experiential2. Coming-of- Mind in Climate NarrativesPart II. The New Natural HistoryPreface3. Classifictions4. Visualizing Loss for a “Fragmented Survival”Part III. Aerial EnvironmentalismsPreface5. Environmental Aftermaths from the Sky6. The Afterlives of Information in Speculative FictionEpilogue: Can Thinking Make It So?AcknowledgmentsNotesWorks CitedIndex

Read more less

Book SynopsisHeather Houser explores the ways contemporary art manages environmental knowledge in the age of climate crisis and informational overload. She argues that the infowhelm—a state of abundant yet contested scientific information—is an unexpectedly resonant resource for environmental artists seeking to go beyond communicating stories about crises.Trade ReviewInfowhelm offers a terrific and timely interdisciplinary method, bridging environmental and digital humanities. Houser asks deep, consequential questions about how data comes to matter, and more specifically how the arts (across media) can bring the data of climate change into affective presence, individual action, and community conversation. -- Stephanie LeMenager, Moore Professor of English and Professor of Environmental Studies, University of OregonIn prose that eschews jargon, Houser calls for a détente between science/technology and humanistic and narrative ways of understanding the world. She shows how data and science narratives interweave with literature, visual arts, and media arts to create new modes of thinking about the world that depend as much on feeling as ratiocination. Along the way she discusses "entangled epistemologies of the Infowhelm": how the arts help us to visualize hyperobjects and massive shifts in environment that seem beyond our understanding when couched only in scientific data. This book is a polished and mature work of scholarship that adds wonderful new ideas to the discussion of how science and the arts mutually influence one another. -- Amy J. Elias, author of Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s FictionAmidst the swirl of data and other forms of information about the environment that saturate the contemporary world, Heather Houser finds a refuge of sorts in the work of artists who, making art of “scientific information,” help us make sense of it. In this remarkably creative and entrancing work, she shows how an aesthetic engagement with this information exposes the nature of the knowledge it produces not to reject it, but to allow for a profound grappling with it. With her magnificent prose and elegant analyses, Houser conveys the pleasure as well as the insights these artistic experiments produce, as we work to make sense of the “infowhelm” of the contemporary moment. This book is a must-read for anyone who has experienced that phenomenon, which is to say for us all. -- Priscilla Wald, author of Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak NarrativeIt would be nice if the accumulated ill effects of the positivist scientific mindset on the natural environment could be cancelled out by a simple turn to more innocent modes of thought. Heather Houser models an approach to the intertwined problems of quantification, scientific representation, and ecological consciousness at once more realistic and more imaginative than that. Assembling a fascinating constellation of artworks that conjure the perplexities of the contemporary informational condition in exciting new ways, she makes a strong case for rethinking the relation between aesthetic experience and epistemology from the ground up. This book will be of interest to a vast range of scholars working on contemporary culture and the environmental humanities. -- Mark McGurl, author of The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative WritingHouser uncovers how artists alchemize scientific information into aesthetic material in contemporary environmental art. Her writing method reveals that wonder is the essence of inquiry . . . [Infowhelm’s] synthesis of multiple artistic—literary and visual—works not only offers new ways of seeing environmental change, but also challenges traditional types of knowledge. * Orion Magazine *An ambitious and dazzling scholarly work . . . Infowhelm pushes environmental humanities scholarship forward by leaps and bounds. * ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment *A virtuosic reappraisal of art and information, during our era of ecological catastrophe . . . Infowhelm is ambitious, timely, and dynamic. It should take its place alongside the most consequential recent studies in ecocriticism, Environmental Humanities, and contemporary literature. * American Literary History *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Environmental Art in the InfowhelmPart I. Cultural Climate KnowledgePreface1. Making Data Experiential2. Coming-of- Mind in Climate NarrativesPart II. The New Natural HistoryPreface3. Classifictions4. Visualizing Loss for a “Fragmented Survival”Part III. Aerial EnvironmentalismsPreface5. Environmental Aftermaths from the Sky6. The Afterlives of Information in Speculative FictionEpilogue: Can Thinking Make It So?AcknowledgmentsNotesWorks CitedIndex

Read more less

Book SynopsisWith over 200 full-color photographs of traditional pottery around the world, Global Clay is sure to become a classic for all who love art and pottery and all who are intrigued by the human commonalities revealed through art.Trade ReviewWhile researchers and educators may find individual chapters useful for discussions about pottery's relationship to people, communities, animals, religion, and the afterlife, the text as a whole is an enjoyable and quick read, with numerous beautiful illustrations that a general audience would also appreciate. * The Journal of American Folklore *Ambitious in scope and successful in describing the central role that works of clay have played preserving common cultural narratives . . . Essential. All readers. * Choice Reviews *Table of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. International Folk Pottery: A Brief Primer2. Monuments to Clay: Public Markers of Craft Identity3. The Human Image: Face Jugs and Other People-Pots4. The Sincerest Form of Flattery: Cross-Cultural Imitations5. A Clay Menagerie: The Animal World in Ceramics6. Idols with Feet of Clay: Ceramics and World Religions7. Returning to Clay: Death and the Afterlife8. The Last Folk Potters?: Prognosis for the FutureSuggested ReadingIndex

Read more less

Book SynopsisArtists as voyagers who leave their studios to make art, including Nancy Holt, Vito Acconci, Sophie Calle, and Richard Long.Wanderlust highlights artists as voyagers who leave their studios to make art. This book (and the exhibition it accompanies) is the first comprehensive survey of the artist's need to roam and the work that emerges from this need. Wanderlust presents the work of under-recognized yet pioneering artists alongside their well-known counterparts, and represents works that vary in process, with some artists working as solitary figures implanting themselves physically on the landscape while others perform and create movements in a collaborative manner or in public.Many of the earlier works use what were at the time nontraditional methods of art making. In Trail Markers (1969), for example, Nancy Holt spent time in the English countryside, where she documented the painted orange trail markers she found dotting the landscape. Vito

Read more less

Book SynopsisAn elaborately illustrated A to Z of the face, from historical mugshots to Instagram posts.By turns alarming and awe-inspiring, Face offers up an elaborately illustrated A to Z—from the didactic anthropometry of the late-nineteenth century to the selfie-obsessed zeitgeist of the twenty-first.Jessica Helfand looks at the cultural significance of the face through a critical lens, both as social currency and as palimpsest of history. Investigating everything from historical mugshots to Instagram posts, she examines how the face has been perceived and represented over time; how it has been instrumentalized by others; and how we have reclaimed it for our own purposes. From vintage advertisements for a “nose adjuster” to contemporary artists who reconsider the visual construction of race, Face delivers an intimate yet kaleidoscopic adventure while posing universal questions about identity.

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book SynopsisAn innovative history of heartbeats, pulse, and technoscience in the works of a wide international array of artists and composers.Heartbeat Art is the first study of how artists have engaged with heartbeats from the 1960s to the present, creating sophisticated and technological works that project in unique ways the circulatory processes of the body beyond its physical limits. Drawing on a long history of scientific and artistic experimentation, Claudia Arozqueta offers detailed case studies of heartbeat works by a wide range of international artists working at the interconnections of our bodies, art, and science and technology, including Yoko Ono, Pauline Oliveros, Heinz Mark, Brian O?Doherty, Teresa Burga, and many others.Technoscientific advances in monitoring heartbeats and pulses in the nineteenth century?such as René Laennec?s stethoscope, Étienne-Jules Marey?s sphygmograph and chronophotograph, and Willem Einthoven?s electrocardiograph?transformed the movements of the heart into audible and visual representations. Artists saw in the language of these scientific technologies a way of mingling the inner with the outer, the physical with the technological, and data with flesh. Using archival research, interviews, and correspondence, Arozqueta describes significant works in detail, discusses their contexts and development, and examines the larger classes and contours of this neglected area of artistic activity. Other artists in the volume include Éliane Radigue, Jean Dupuy, Linda Montano, Catherine Richards, Diana Domingues, Mona Hatoum, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, and Christian Boltanski.

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe contributors of this volume examine beauty and aesthetic theory in nature and human society, in the humanities and science.Trade Review“In 2012, the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study (NDIAS) sponsored “The Many Faces of Beauty” conference, which offered a deep dive into the debate on beauty and aesthetic theory. This collection of 16 essays from prominent artists, scientists, mathematicians and critics features three Notre Dame scholars: The Huisking Professor of Theology Cyril O’Regan, the Rev. Joyce Professor of German Language and Literature Mark Roche, and J. Dudley Andrew ’67.” —Notre Dame Magazine

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book SynopsisIn this compelling publication, two masters come face-to-face when the works of Edvard Munch are juxtaposed against Gustave Flaubert's groundbreaking novel Madame Bovary. Munch's art is presented in stills taken from an elaborate video installation, Madame B (2014), created by Michelle Williams Gamaker and the internationally acclaimed cultural theorist, video artist, and curator Mieke Bal. Emma andEdvard Looking Sideways: Loneliness and the Cinematic explores the filmic aspect of Munch's art by combining contemporary art theory with Bal's own idiosyncratic way of looking at art directly and closely. The reader can reflect upon how we view each other in social situations and question what happens when we are denied visual dialogue. Distributed for MercatorfondsExhibition Schedule:Munch Museum, Oslo (02/04/1704/17/17)

Read more less

Book SynopsisAn exploration of the art and writing of Louise Bourgeois through the lens of her relationship with Freudian psychoanalysis

Read more less

Book SynopsisA tribute to the impressive roster of women artists who have graduated from Yale University

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less