Search results for ""Author Allen S. Weiss""

People collect to connect with the past, personal and historic, to exercise some small and perfect degree of control over a carefully chosen portion of the world. The Grain of the Clay is Allen S. Weiss's engaging exploration of the meaning and practice of collecting through his relationship with Japanese ceramics. Weiss unfolds their world of materiality and pleasure and the culture and knowledge that extends out of their forms and uses.Japanese ceramics are celebrated for their profound material poetry, especially in relation to the natural world, and they maintain a unique place in the history of the arts and in the lives of those who collect and use them. The Grain of the Clay deepens our appreciation of ceramics while providing a critical meditation on collecting. Weiss examines the vast stylistic range of ceramics, investigating the reasons for viewing, using and collecting them. He explores ceramic objects' relationship with cuisine as an art and as a part of everyday life. Ceramics are increasingly finding their rightful place in museums and Weiss shows how this newfound engagement with finely wrought natural materials might foster an increased ecological sensitivity.The Grain of the Clay will appeal to the collector in every one of us.

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The alienation of the self, the annihilation of the body, the fracturing, dispersal, and reconstruction of the disembodied voice: the themes of modernism, even of modern consciousness, occur as a matter of course in the phantasmic realm of radio. In this original work of cultural criticism, Allen S. Weiss explores the meaning of radio to the modern imagination. Weaving together cultural and technological history, aesthetic analysis, and epistemological reflection, his investigation reveals how radiophony transforms expression and, in doing so, calls into question assumptions about language and being, body and voice.Phantasmic Radio presents a new perspective on the avant-garde radio experiments of Antonin Artaud and John Cage, and brings to light fascinating, lesser-known work by, among others, Valère Novarina, Gregory Whitehead, and Christof Migone. Weiss shows how Artaud’s "body without organs" establishes the closure of the flesh after the death of God; how Cage’s "imaginary landscapes" proffer the indissociability of techne and psyche; how Novarina reinvents the body through the word in his "theater of the ears." Going beyond the art historical context of these experiments, Weiss describes how, with their emphasis on montage and networks of transmission, they marked out the coordinates of modernism and prefigured what we now recognize as the postmodern.

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When his twenty-four-hour film The Clock was awarded the Golden Lion at the fifty-fourth Venice Biennale in 2011, his hour had struck. Yet as an artist, performer, and pioneer of turntablism, the Swiss-American Christian Marclay (*1955) has been famous for his complex oeuvre for more than thirty years. Since then he has translated sounds and music into visible forms in his performances, installations, collages, sculptures, and photographs, revealing sensory experiences in them that his viewers had never dared to experience. Comic books and mangas are the source material for Marclay’s most recent works, whose listening experience yet again opens up new dimensions. The extensive monograph not only does justice to the entire spectrum of the artist’s multimedia and synaesthetic oeuvre; it also brings previously little known works home to our eyes and our ears. Exhibition: Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau, 30.8.2015 – 15.11.2015

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