Criticism of contemporary art is split by an opposition between activism and the critical function of form. Yet the deeper, more subterranean terms of art-judgment are largely neglected on both sides. These essays combine a re-examination of the terms of judgement of contemporary art with critical interpretations of individual works and exhibitions by Luis Camnitzer, Marcel Duchamp, Matias Faldbakken, Anne Imhof and Cady Noland. The book moves from philosophical issues, via the lingering shadows of medium-specificity (in photography and art music), and the changing states of museums, to analyses of the peculiar ways that works of art relate to time.To give artistic form to crisis, it is suggested, one needs to understand contemporary art's own constitutive crisis of form.

Impeccably researched and richly detailed, this book addresses the issue of translation between visual arts and landscape design in the 50 more years career of Patricia Johanson, an important artist in the second half of the twentieth-century. Examining the artist's search for an "art of the real" as a member of the post-World War II New York art world, and how such pursuit has led her from painting and sculpture to public garden and environmental art, Xin Wu argues for the significance of the process of art creation, challenging the centrality of art objects. This book is an insightful study to confront a crucial question in the history of art through the work of a contemporary artist. It therefore converses with art historians and critics alike, as well as advanced readers of twentieth-century art. Following Johanson's artistic development, from its formation in the 1960s American art scene to the very present day, across the fields of art, architecture, garden, civil engineering and environmental aesthetics, it investigates the process of creation in a transdisciplinary perspective, and reveals a view of art as a domain of exploration of key issues for the contemporary world. The artist's concept of nature is highlighted, and particular impacts of Chinese aesthetics and thought unveiled. Based on extensive analysis of unpublished private archives, Xin Wu offers us the first ever comprehensive scholarly interpretation of Patricia Johanson's oeuvre, including drawings, paintings, sculptures, installations, garden proposals, and built and unbuilt projects in the United States, Brazil, Kenya, and Korea.

Presented here are 125 burlesque queens and belly dancing stars from the 1950s and 1960s portrayed in 8" x 10" glossy "booking photos." These attention-grabbing and sometimes startling photos are the publicity shots that dancers handed out to booking agents, managers, theaters, press, and fans. The stars include Crystal Blue, Toni Rose "The Glow Girl," Bella Dona, Marlo Brando, Sunny Day "The Butterfly Goddess," Dixie Evans "The Marilyn Monroe of Burlesque," Lala Jazir, and Dusty Summers "Las Vegas' Only Nude Magician." Learn a brief history of Burlesque and its performers in the transition from 1950s burlesque with live band, comic, and stripper scene to the 1960s go-go night clubs with scantily dressed dancers on pedestals and in cages.

This new in paperback edition of World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre covers the Americas, from Canada to Argentina, including the United States. Entries on twenty six countries are preceded by specialist introductions on Theatre in Post-Colonial Latin America, Theatres of North America, Puppet Theatre, Theatre for Young Audiences, Music Theatre and Dance Theatre. The essays follow the series format, allowing for cross-referring across subjects, both within the volume and between volumes. Each country entry is written by specialists in the particular country and the volume has its own teams of regional editors, overseen by the main editorial team based at the University of York in Canada headed by Don Rubin. Each entry covers all aspects of theatre genres, practitioners, writers, critics and styles, with bibliographies, over 200 black & white photographs and a substantial index. This Encyclopedia is indispensable for anyone interested in the cultures of the Americas or in modern theatre. It is also an invaluable reference tool for students and scholars of a wide range of disciplines including history, performance studies, anthropology and cultural studies.

First Published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Jasmin Vardimon's Dance Theatre offers an unusual, intimate insight into the devising and training processes of a choreographer in the midst of her practice. Libby Worth and Jasmin Vardimon take a collaborative approach to recording and exploring the working processes of Vardimon and her company, chronicling the development of specific productions rather than offering a single choreographic blueprint. Focusing on the techniques, strategies and creative activities necessitated by each project, Worth and Vardimon address: The initial 'triggers' which lead to research, expansion, and performance; The social, political and psychological content of Vardimon's work; The relationship between accessibility of content and complexity of ideas; Drawing on texts to enhance and shape a piece of dance work; The editing process, and its inherent messiness; The contribution of a company's different voices and viewpoints to the development of a production. Based on extended conversations and interviews, this highly illustrated, full -colour volume is a unique reflection on Jasmin Vardimon's vibrant, continually developing practice. It is a must-read for students and practitioners of dance and physical theatre.

Wonder has an established link to the history and philosophy of science. However, there is little acknowledgement of the relationship between the visual arts and wonder. This book presents a new perspective on this overlooked connection, allowing a unique insight into the role of wonder in contemporary visual practice. Artists, curators and art theorists give accounts of their approach to wonder through the use of materials, objects and ways of exhibiting. These accounts not only raise issues of a particular relevance to the way in which we encounter our reality today but ask to what extent artists utilize the function of wonder purposely in their work.

This book focuses on the artistic process, creativity and collaboration, and personal approaches to creation and ideation, in making digital and electronic technology-based art. Less interested in the outcome itself - the artefact, artwork or performance - contributors instead highlight the emotional, intellectual, intuitive, instinctive and step-by-step creation dimensions. They aim to shine a light on digital and electronic art practice, involving coding, electronic gadgetry and technology mixed with other forms of more established media, to uncover the practice-as-research processes required, as well as the collaborative aspects of art and technology practice.

Contemporary Art and Digital Culture analyses the impact of the internet and digital technologies upon art today. Art over the last fifteen years has been deeply inflected by the rise of the internet as a mass cultural and socio-political medium, while also responding to urgent economic and political events, from the financial crisis of 2008 to the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East. This book looks at how contemporary art addresses digitality, circulation, privacy, and globalisation, and suggests how feminism and gender binaries have been shifted by new mediations of identity. It situates current artistic practice both in canonical art history and in technological predecessors such as cybernetics and net.art, and takes stock of how the art-world infrastructure has reacted to the internet's promises of democratisation. An invaluable resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students of contemporary art - especially those studying history of art and art practice and theory - as well as those working in film, media, curation, or art education. Melissa Gronlund is a writer and lecturer on contemporary art, specialising in the moving image. From 2007-2015, she was co-editor of the journal Afterall, and her writing has appeared there and in Artforum, e-flux journal, frieze, the NewYorker.com, and many other places.

Re-envisioning the Contemporary Art Canon: Perspectives in a Global World seeks to dissect and interrogate the nature of the present-day art field, which has experienced dramatic shifts in the past 50 years. In discussions of the canon of art history, the notion of 'inclusiveness', both at the level of rhetoric and as a desired practice is on the rise and gradually replacing talk of 'exclusion', which dominated critiques of the canon up until two decades ago. The art field has dramatically, if insufficiently, changed in the half-century since the first protests and critiques of the exclusion of 'others' from the art canon. With increased globalization and shifting geopolitics, the art field is expanding beyond its Euro-American focus, as is particularly evident in the large-scale international biennales now held all over the globe. Are canons and counter-canons still relevant? Can they be re-envisioned rather than merely revised? Following an introduction that discusses these issues, thirteen newly commissioned essays present case studies of consecration in the contemporary art field, and three commissioned discussions present diverse positions on issues of the canon and consecration processes today. This volume will be of interest to instructors and students of contemporary art, art history, and museum and curatorial studies.

Contemporary Art and Digital Culture analyses the impact of the internet and digital technologies upon art today. Art over the last fifteen years has been deeply inflected by the rise of the internet as a mass cultural and socio-political medium, while also responding to urgent economic and political events, from the financial crisis of 2008 to the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East. This book looks at how contemporary art addresses digitality, circulation, privacy, and globalisation, and suggests how feminism and gender binaries have been shifted by new mediations of identity. It situates current artistic practice both in canonical art history and in technological predecessors such as cybernetics and net.art, and takes stock of how the art-world infrastructure has reacted to the internet's promises of democratisation. An invaluable resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students of contemporary art - especially those studying history of art and art practice and theory - as well as those working in film, media, curation, or art education. Melissa Gronlund is a writer and lecturer on contemporary art, specialising in the moving image. From 2007-2015, she was co-editor of the journal Afterall, and her writing has appeared there and in Artforum, e-flux journal, frieze, the NewYorker.com, and many other places.

What does an assemblage made out of crumpled newspaper have in common with an empty room in which the lights go on and off every five seconds? This book argues that they are both examples of a 'precarious' art that flourished from the late 1950s to the first decade of the twenty-first century, in light of a growing awareness of the individual's fragile existence in capitalist society. Focusing on comparative case studies drawn from European, North and South American practices, this study maps out a network of similar concerns and practices, while outlining its evolution from the 1960s to the beginning of the twenty-first century. This book will provide students and amateurs of contemporary art and culture with new insights into contemporary art practices and the critical issues that they raise concerning the material status of the art object, the role of the artist in society, and the relation between art and everyday life. -- .

The Comics of Joe Sacco addresses the range of his award-winning work, from his early comics stories as well as his groundbreaking journalism Palestine (1993) and Safe Area to Gorazde (2000), to Footnotes in Gaza (2009) and his most recent book The Great War (2013), a graphic history of World War I. First in the new series, Critical Approaches to Comics Artists, this edited volume explores Sacco's comics journalism, and features established and emerging scholars from comics studies, cultural studies, geography, literary studies, political science, and communication studies. Sacco's work has already found a place in some of the foundational scholarship in comics studies, and this book solidifies his role as one of the most important comics artists today. Sections focus on how Sacco's comics journalism critiques and employs the ""standard of objectivity"" in mainstream reporting, what aesthetic principles and approaches to lived experience can be found in his comics, how Sacco employs the space of the comics page to map history and war, and the ways that his comics function in the classroom and as human rights activism. The Comics of Joe Sacco offers definitive, exciting approaches to some of the most important--and necessary--comics today, by one of the most acclaimed journalist-artists of our time.

Through the example of Central Pacific Railroad executives, Manufacturing the Modern Patron in Victorian California redirects attention from the usual art historical protagonists - artistic producers - and rewrites narratives of American art from the unfamiliar vantage of patrons and collectors. Neither denouncing, nor lionizing, nor dismissing its subjects, it demonstrates the benefits of taking art consumers seriously as active contributors to the cultural meanings of artwork. It explores the critical role of art patronage in the articulation of a new and distinctly modern elite class identity for newly ascendant corporate executives and financiers. These economic elites also sought to legitimate trends in industrial capitalism, such as mechanization, incorporation, and proletarianization, through their consumption of a diverse array of elite culture, including regional landscapes, panoramic and stop-motion photography, history paintings of the California Gold Rush, the architecture of Stanford University, and the design of domestic galleries. This book addresses not only readers in the art history and visual and material cultures of the United States, but also scholars of patronage studies, American Studies, and the sociology of culture. It tells a story still relevant to this new Gilded Age of the early 21st century, in which wealthy collectors dramatically shape contemporary art markets and institutions.

In the twenty years that preceded the publication of this book in 1988, David Rabe was in the vanguard of playwrights who shaped American theatre. As the first full-length work on Rabe, this book laid the groundwork for later critical and biographical studies. The first part consists of an essay that covers three sections: a short biography, a summary and evaluation of his formative journalism for the New Haven Register, and a detailed and cohesive stage history of his work. The second part presents the most comprehensive and authoritative primary bibliography of Rabe to date, with the third section containing a secondary bibliography - including a section on biographical studies.

Driven by a powerful belief in the value of free expression, Sheryl Oring has for more than a decade been helping people across the United States voice concerns about public affairs through her 'I Wish to Say' project. This book uses that project as the starting point for an exploration of a series of issues of public interest being addressed by artists today. It features essays by contributors ranging from art historians and practicing artists to scholars and creators working in literature, political science and architecture. All the contributors offer a different approach, but they share a primary goal of sparking a dialogue not just among makers of art, but among viewers, readers and the concerned public at large. The resulting volume will be an essential resource for politically engaged contemporary artists searching for innovative, cross-disciplinary ways of making and sharing art.

The Riviera in the 1950s and 1960s was culturally rich with modernist icons such as Matisse and Picasso in residence, but also a burgeoning tourist culture, that established the Cote d'Azur as a center of indigenous artists associated with Nouveau Realisme, Fluxus, and Supports/Surfaces, emerged under the mantle of the "Ecole de Nice." Drawing on the primary sources and little known publications generated during the period from museum archives, collections in the region, and privately owned archives, this study integrates material published in monographic studies of individuals and art movements, to offer the first in-depth study of this important movement in twentieth-century art. The author situates the work of the Ecole de Nice within the broader social currents that are so important in contextualizing this phenomenon within this internal region of France, and underscores why this work was so significant at this historical moment within the context of the broader European art scene, and contemporary American art, with which it shared affinities. Despite their stylistic differences, and associations with groups that are generally considered distinct, O'Neill discloses that these artists shared conceptual affinities"theatrical modes of presentation based on appropriation, use of the ready-made, and a determination to counter style-driven painting associated with the postwar Ecole de Paris. Art and Visual Culture on the Riviera, 1956-1971 suggests that the emergence of an Ecole de Nice internally eroded the dominance of Paris as the national standard at this moment of French decentralization efforts, and that these artists fostered a model of aesthetic pluralism that remained locally distinct yet fully engaged with international vanguard trends of the 1960s.

The rise of proxy wars, the Space Race, and cybernetics during the Cold War marked science and technology as vital sites of social and political power. Women artists, historically excluded from these domains, responded critically, while simultaneously redeploying the products of "Technological Society" into works that promoted ideals of progress and alternative concepts of human community. In this innovative book, author Christine Filippone offers the first focused examination of the conceptual use of science and technology by women artists during and just after the women's movement. She argues that artists Alice Aycock, Agnes Denes, Martha Rosler and Carolee Schneemann used science and technology to mount a critique on Cold War American society as they saw it-conservative and constricting. Motivated by the contemporary American Women's Movement, these artists transformed science and technology into new modes of artmaking that transgressed modernist, heroic, painterly styles and subverted the traditional economic structures of the gallery, the museum and the dealer. At the same time, the artists also embraced these domains of knowledge and practice as expressions of hope for a better future. Many found inspiration in the scientific theory of open systems, which investigated "problems of wholeness, dynamic interaction and organization", enabling consideration of the porous boundaries between human bodies and their social, political and nonhuman environments. Filippone also establishes that the theory of open systems not only informed feminist art, but also continued to influence women artists' practice of reclamation and ecological art through the twenty-first century.

An in-depth history of the Stalinist skyscraper In the early years of the Cold War, the skyline of Moscow was forever transformed by a citywide skyscraper building project. As the steel girders of the monumental towers went up, the centuries-old metropolis was reinvented to embody the greatness of Stalinist society. Moscow Monumental explores how the quintessential architectural works of the late Stalin era fundamentally reshaped daily life in the Soviet capital. Drawing on a wealth of original archival research, Katherine Zubovich examines the decisions and actions of Soviet elites-from top leaders to master architects-and describes the experiences of ordinary Muscovites who found their lives uprooted by the ambitious skyscraper project. She shows how the Stalin-era quest for monumentalism was rooted in the Soviet Union's engagement with Western trends in architecture and planning, and how the skyscrapers required the creation of a vast and complex infrastructure. As laborers flooded into the city, authorities evicted and rehoused tens of thousands of city residents living on the plots selected for development. When completed in the mid-1950s, these seven ornate neoclassical buildings served as elite apartment complexes, luxury hotels, and ministry and university headquarters. Moscow Monumental tells a story that is both local and broadly transnational, taking readers from the streets of interwar Moscow and New York to the marble-clad halls of the bombastic postwar structures that continue to define the Russian capital today.

An investigation of the outsized influence of the Mod subculture on key figures of the 1960s London art scene Bonding over matters of taste and style, the 'Mods' of late 1950s London recognised in one another shared affinities for Italian-style suits, tidy haircuts, espresso bars, Vespa scooters and the latest American jazz. In this groundbreaking book, leading art historian Thomas Crow argues that the figure of the Mod exerted an influence beyond its assumed social boundaries by exemplifying the postwar metropolis in all of its excitement and complexity. Crow examines the works of key figures in the London art scene of the 1960s, including Robyn Denny, David Hockney, Pauline Boty, Bridget Riley and Bruce McLean, who shared and heightened aspects of this new and youthful urbanity. The triumphant arrival of the international counterculture forced both young Mods and established artists to reassess and regroup in novel, revealing formations. Understanding the London Mod brings with it a needed, up-to-date reckoning with the legacies of Situationism, Social Art History and Cultural Studies. Distributed for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Anna Halprin traces the life's work of this radical dance-maker, documenting her early career as a modern dancer in the 1940s through to the development of her groundbreaking approach to dance as an accessible and life-enhancing art form. Now revised and reissued, this book: sketches the evolution of the San Francisco Dancers' Workshop, exploring Halprin's connections with the avant-garde theatre, music, visual art and architecture of the 1950s and 60s offers a detailed analysis of Halprin's work from this period provides an important historical guide to a time when dance was first explored beyond the confines of the theatre and considered as a healing art for individuals and communities. As a first step towards critical understanding, and an initial exploration before going on to further, primary research, Routledge Performance Practitioners offer unbeatable value for today's student.