James Cahill presents a review of a new exhibition by the renowned artist Francesco Clemente,(b.1952) exploring his first show in London for seven years. The monograph includes a conversation recorded with the artist in which he discusses the new paintings, and the ideas which grounded their development. Clemente embodies a binding of different cultures: the Western Italian Renaissance, Eastern philosophy of Buddhism and the Mandala; formed in a life divided between New York and India. The exhibition of fourteen works at Blain|Southern, Hanover Square, is entitled 'Mandala for Crusoe' and runs until 26th January 2013. Francesco Clemente (b. 1952, Naples, Italy) is a renowned artist from the Neo-Expressionist movement of the late 1970s and early 1980s. From 1970 he studied architecture at the University of Rome, and began to exhibit his drawings, photographs and conceptual works in Europe. From 1973, he travelled regularly to India, and in 1981 he moved to New York. He collaborated with close friends, notably the poets Allen Ginsberg and Robert Creeley, and reacting against a wave of anti-painting sentiment among critical circles, Clemente initiated a series of collaborative paintings with Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol. Since the mid-1980s, Clemente's work has been the subject of many international solo exhibitions, including; Nationalgalerie, Berlin (1984 - 5); Kunstmuseum Basel (1987); Philadelphia Museum of Art (1990); Royal Academy of Arts, London (1990); Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (1994 - 5); Guggenheim Museum, New York (1999 - 2000); Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2004); Museo MAXXI, Rome (2006); Museum MADRE, Naples (2009); and more recently at the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2011) and the Uffizi Gallery, Florence (2011). His works have also been included in notable group exhibitions including Documenta 7 in 1982 and the Venice Biennale in 1988 and 1995. Clemente is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. (Blain|Southern)

Celebrating the best drawings by contemporary artists! The celebrated Strokes of Genius series follows the beautiful, ongoing story of contemporary drawing through the work and words of some of today's top artists. Focusing on the theme "Creative Discoveries," this thoughtfully curated 9th edition features the artists' most compelling aha! moments. Triggers for these artistic epiphanies are wide ranging--from experiments with new materials, to private meanderings in a little notebook, to fleeting moments of magical light, and one particularly charismatic pelican. Artists and art lovers alike are sure to be inspired by the resulting energy and expressiveness showcased on these pages. 140 modern-day masterpieces in charcoal, pencil, pastel, colored pencil, scratchboard, pen and ink, and more A breathtaking diversity of styles and approaches Subject-themed chapters include animals, the human figure, still life, outdoor scenes, and portraits Comments from the artists offer fresh-from-the-studio advice, insights, and anecdotes not found anywhere else "The greatest creative discoveries are those that find you." --Carolyn Judson, p73

Would you believe that you could ask a full-grown man to hold a penny for you and then tell him to drop it and finds he can t, hard as he may try? In what is undoubtedly the most original magic book of our time, John Fisher shows the reader how, with minimal practice, he can use the marvels of the human body to entertain and mystify friends and family, small and large audiences. This book is first of all a delight to read because of the instant education it provides us with about the unknown powers we have in our hands, our eyes, our noses, and our incredible nervous system. In each case, Mr. Fisher shows the easy-to-grasp principle first and then how to put the principle to work in actual tricks. Most magic books require a great deal of study and dexterity. This one enables you to entertain people even before you have finished the book. Moreover, you never have to worry about being prepared, because you always have with you all the miraculous things you need your hands, your eyes, and the rest of your body."

Falling After 9/11 investigates the connections between violence, trauma, and aesthetics by exploring post 9/11 figures of falling in art and literature. From the perspective of trauma theory, Aimee Pozorski provides close readings of figures of falling in such exemplary American texts as Don DeLillo's novel, Falling Man, Diane Seuss's poem, "Falling Man," Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Frederic Briegbeder's Windows on the World, and Richard Drew's famous photograph of the man falling from the World Trade Center. Falling After 9/11 argues that the apparent failure of these texts to register fully the trauma of the day in fact points to a larger problem in the national tradition: the problem of reference-of how to refer to falling-in the 21st century and beyond.

Includes 100 blank pages. Hardbound with gray cloth veneer.

THE ART OF RICHARD LONG The central fact and act of Richard Long's art is walking. His work is founded on the art of walking, the act of walking, the actuality of walking, and on walking as art, as act, as experience. His walks become 'artwalks', artwalks which become artworks. Richard Long is a British land artist and sculptor who works with and in the natural world, but also with and within the highly sophisticated, artificial and humanmade world of art and culture. 'I too wanted to make nature the subject of my work, ' Long explained of his early work, 'but in new ways. I started working outside using natural materials like grass and water, and this evolved into the idea of making a sculpture by walking'. Richard Long is sometimes termed a 'Romantic' sculptor, and part of this book relates his art to British Romanticism, as found in the literature of William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats and others, and the British landscape tradition, as in J.M.W. Turner, John Constable, Thomas Girtin and other landscape painters. Aspects of British Romantic culture in 20th century and 21st century art also considered (such as the 'New Ruralists', 'New Romantics', 'New Arcadians' and 'Neo-Romantics'). Malpas also explore some of the aspects of Romantic culture in Europe as well as Britain. In the course of this book William Malpas references many of Richard Long's contemporary British sculptors (Tony Cragg, Bill Woodrow, David Nash, Barry Flanagan, Alison Wilding, Shirazeh Houshiary, Hamish Fulton, Anthony Caro, Anish Kapoor and Anthony Gormley). Further chapters include: one on women, feminist, body art and performance sculptors, as a comparison with Richard Long's art, which has a strong component of performance (even if it's nearly always private). In the chapter on Minimal, Conceptual, Process and other 1960s and post-1960s art and artists, I'm interested in the artists (primarily European and American) who have most in common with Long's art: the great Minimal and land artists, such as Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Dennis Oppenheim and James Turrell, and the important Conceptual artists, such as Bruce Nauman, Yves Klein and Lawrence Weiner. Fully illustrated, with a newly revised text. Bibliography and notes. www.crmoon.com AUTHOR'S NOTE: This is a revised edition of a book first published back in 1994. It includes information of the more recent exhibitions and artworks of Richard Long. The book has involved a good deal of research into Long's art over the years, which has been updated in further editions. I hope that readers will gain some new insights into the artist's work and that of his contemporaries. REVIEW ON AMAZON: Very satisfied with this book. It includes not only detailed information about Long's work, but also discusses other related artists, such as Barnett Newman, and other related topics, including sculpture, installation and text in art. All in all a very interesting book.

Ellen Gallagher (b.1965) is one of the most celebrated painters of her generation, coming to prominence in the mid-1990s in the wake of the so-called 'culture wars' and the art world's controversial embrace of identity-politics and multiculturalism. In this in-depth look at her oeuvre, Caoimhin Mac Giolla Leith unpacks the complexities of her richly layered paintings, examining themes such as identity, race, displacement and the ecological environment, which Gallagher has explored throughout her work. The author takes the reader from Gallagher's early years - looking at her formative influences - through her engagement, from the late 1990s on, with the inherited modernist forms of the monochrome and the grid and with the violence and division at the root of modernism itself. Also explored are her phantasmagoric explorations of oceanic life, which draw on the discoveries of natural science, the traumatic history of the Atlantic slave trade and the speculative fictions of Afrofuturism. For anyone interested in contemporary art and the ways particular artists are expanding its borders, in form and content, this is essential reading.

Throughout the mid-1970s until the early 1990s, video art as vehicles for social, cultural, and political analysis were prominent within global museum based contemporary art exhibitions. For many, video art during this period stood for contemporary art. Yet from the outset, video art's incorporation into art museums has brought about specific problems in relation to its acquisition and exhibition. This book analyses, discusses, and evaluates the problematic nature and form of video art within four major contemporary art museums--the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, the Georges Pompidou National Centre of Art and Culture in Paris, the Tate Gallery in London, and the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) in Sydney. In this book, the author discusses how museum structures were redefined over a twenty-two year period in specific relation to the impetus of video art and contends that analogue video art would be instrumental in the evolution of the contemporary art museum. By addressing some of the problems that analogue video art presented to those museums under discussion, this study penetratingly reveals how video art challenged institutional structures and had demanded more flexible viewing environments from those structures. It first defines the classical museum structure established by the Louvre Museum in Paris during the 19th century and then examines the transformation from this museum structure to the modern model through the initiatives of the New York Metropolitan Museum to MoMA in New York. MoMA was the first major museum to exhibit analogue video art in a concerted fashion, and this would establish a pattern of acquisition and exhibition that became influential for other global institutions to replicate. In this book, MoMA's exhibition and acquisition activities are analysed and contrasted with the Centre Pompidou, the Tate Gallery, and the AGNSW in order to define a lineage of development in relation to video art. Extremely well researched and well written, this book covers an exhaustive, substantive, and relevant range of issues. These issues include video art (its origin, significance, significant movements, institutional challenges, and relationship to television), the establishment of the museum (its patronage and curatorial strategy) from the Louvre to MoMA, the relationship of MoMA to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a comparative analysis of three museums in three countries on three continents, a close examination of video art exhibition, a closer look at three seminal video artists, and, finally, a critical overview of video art and its future exhibition. This unique book also covers an important period in the genesis of video art and its presentation within significant national and global cultural institutions. Those cultural institutions not only influence a meaningful part of the cultural life of four unique countries but also represent the cultural forces emerging in capital cities on three continents. By itself, this sort of geographic and institutional breadth challenges any previous study on the subject. This book successfully provides a historical explanation for the museum/gallery's relationship to video art from its emergence in the gallery to the beginnings of its acceptance as a global art phenomenon. Several prominent video artists are examined in relation to the challenges they would present to the institutionalised framework of the modern art museum and the discursive field surrounding their practice. In addition, the book contains a theoretical discussion of the problems related to video art imagery with the period of High Modernism; it examines the patterns of acquisition and exhibition, and presents an analysis of global exchange between four distinct major contemporary art institutions. The Problematic of Video Art in the Museum, 1968-1990 is an important book for all art history and museum collections.

Beginning in the late 1970s, a number of visual artists in downtown New York City returned to an exploration of the cinematic across mediums. Vera Dika considers their work within a greater cultural context and probes for a deeper understanding of the practice.

This first definitive retrospective of the Easy-Bake(r) Oven celebrates its journey from children's toy to pop culture icon. The book explores the innovation, history, economics, commerce, advertising, and marketing behind the toy's 50 year histor

This unique book presents works that until now have only rarely been seen, even in private collections. Paintings, drawings and sculptures by well known outsider artists and new discoveries, all of which express deeply personal interpretations of sexual desire and activity. With texts by the world's leading academic experts in this field, Raw Erotica presents an essential element in the rich and varied world of outsider and self-taught art. With texts and contributions from: * Colin Rhodes, Univ of Sydney, author of Outsider Art: Spontanious Alternatives * Roger Cardinal, author of the original book Outsider Art * Jenifer Borum, New York based authority on self-taught art * Michale Bonesteel, Chicago based writer and author of Henry Darger * Thomas Roske, Curator, The Prinzhorn Collection, Heidelberg * Laurent Danchin, Paris author and French authority on Art Brut * Francois Monin, editor of Artension magazine, France.

Designed to be tough, practical and good value for money, the Rough Guide maps aim to forge a new standard in city maps. Apart from travel information and the city's sites, monuments and attractions, the map shows every shop, restaurant, bar and hotel listed in the Rough Guide travel guide to Cuba, together with their opening times, and, in many cases, phone numbers. The map covers the main area of Cuba on one side and an enlarged downtown city-centre maps on the reverse.

Modernist debates about waste - both aesthetic and economic - often express biases against gender and sexual errancy. The Poetics of Waste looks at writers and artists who resist this ideology and respond by developing an excessive poetics.

With mental health increasingly in the spotlight, this book offers a new perspective on anxiety. The focus of this book is on the application of psychological alchemical practice to address, explore and examine the nature and cause of anxiety in order to tackle and overcome it. It has never been more relevant to illustrate the reality that scientific, artistic and spiritual understanding, together with practical application, has the capacity to eliminate anxiety and gain personal control, liberation and fulfilment. The first half of the book identifies the issues to be considered and the second half explains and illustrates the alchemical practices with which to approach them. While the book puts a slight emphasis on musical performance, it is made clear at the outset that performance concerns everyone and the contents, therefore, apply universally. Music is simply a very clear example. The book is designed as a personal development book rather than a scholarly work and, although it is relevant to all ages (depending on timing), it was written with 18 - 30 year olds being the main inspiration through apparent and ever increasing necessity. It is a source book that can be dipped into anywhere or launch further investigation into any of the various disciplines and practices covered. Alchemy has the capacity to bind it all together and the alchemy of performance can become a way of life for anyone.

In this remarkable, inspiring collection of essays, acclaimed writer and critic Olivia Laing makes a brilliant case for why art matters, especially in the turbulent political weather of the twenty-first century. Funny Weather brings together a career's worth of Laing's writing about art and culture, examining their role in our political and emotional lives. She profiles Jean-Michel Basquiat and Georgia O'Keeffe, reads Maggie Nelson and Sally Rooney, writes love letters to David Bowie and Freddie Mercury, and explores loneliness and technology, women and alcohol, sex and the body. With characteristic originality and compassion, she celebrates art as a force of resistance and repair, an antidote to a frightening political time. We're often told that art can't change anything. Laing argues that it can. Art changes how we see the world. It makes plain inequalities and it offers fertile new ways of living.