Search results for ""Author Allen Weiss""

The essential elements of a dry Japanese garden are few: rocks, gravel, moss. Simultaneously a sensual matrix, a symbolic form and a memory theatre, these gardens exhibit beautiful miniaturization and precise craftsmanship. However, their apparent minimalism belies a deeper complexity. In Zen Landscapes, Allen S. Weiss takes readers on a journey through these exquisite sites, explaining how Japanese gardens must be approached according to the play of scale, surroundings and seasons, as well as in relation to other arts, thus revealing them as living landscapes rather than abstract designs. These gardens are inspired by the Zen aesthetics of the tea ceremony, manifested in poetry, painting, calligraphy, architecture, cuisine and ceramics. Japanese art favours suggestion and allusion, valuing the threshold between the distinct and the inchoate, between figuration and abstraction, and Weiss argues that ceramics play a crucial role here, relating as much to the site-specificity of landscape as to the ritualized codes of the tea ceremony and the everyday gestures of the culinary table. With more than 100 stunning colour photographs, Zen Landscapes is the first in-depth study in the West to examine the correspondences between gardens and ceramics. A fascinating look at landscape art and its relation to the customs and craftsmanship of the Japanese arts, it will appeal to readers interested in landscape design and Japan's art and culture.

Read more less

Today's customers want brands, not products. In The Brand Benefits Playbook, two of the world's leading experts on branding provide a strategic perspective on brand benefit positioning and execution - and explain how focusing on brand benefits can transform organizations and help them win in the marketplace.

Read more less

At first glance, The Puppet Show seems a flip title. Organized by Philadelphia ICA Senior Curator Ingrid Schaffner and Carin Kuoni, this exhibition catalogue focuses--with both humor and gravity--on the surprisingly prodigious amount of puppet imagery in contemporary art. It takes as its historic point of departure one of the first episodes of avant-garde art history: Alfred Jarry's 1896 puppet play Ubu Roi, which the South African artist William Kentridge, in collaboration with the Handspring Puppet Company, has adapted into an allegory of apartheid. Other puppets are featured in works from more than 30 well-established, international artists, including Anne Chu, Terence Gower, Pierre Huyghe, Christian Jankowski, Laurie Simmons, Kiki Smith and Kara Walker. This volume also looks at puppets in Modern art and popular culture--from Sophie Tauber Arp’s Dada marionettes to the Internet phenomenon of the “sockpuppet”--a well-known person’s fake online persona, created in order to boost public opinion.

Read more less