An edited collection of essays exploring the work and legacy of the academic and theatre-maker Clive Barker. Together, the essays trace the development of his work from his early years as an actor with Joan Littlewood's company, Theatre Workshop, via his career as an academic and teacher, through the publication of his seminal book, Theatre Games (Methuen Drama). The book looks beyond Barker's death in 2005 at the enduring influence of his work upon contemporary theatre training and theatre-making. Each writer featured in the collection responds to a specific aspect of Barker's work, focusing primarily on his early and formative career experiences with Theatre Workshop and his hugely influential development of Theatre Games. The collection as a whole thereby seeks to situate Clive Barker's work and influence in an international and multi-disciplinary context, by examining not only his origins as an actor, director, teacher and academic, but also the broad influence he has had on generations of theatre-makers.

Renowned artist Damien Hirst (b.1965) is reviewed in an exhibition of works spanning twenty years, held at Tate Modern from April to September 2012.The review explores the development of his art from the potent animal vitrines and butterfly composites to the series of extensive spot paintings, where the artist engaged in a complex invigilation of the coded systems that govern daily existence. The exhibition at Tate Modern features 'For The Love of God', the celebrated diamond studded skull, to be centred in the vast Turbine Hall of the converted power station at Bankside.

"The Landscape Series" of 2002 to 2006 was made in quantities of thirty to one hundred 1' square panels, each of the thirty sets generally taking three weeks to complete. The panels were worked on flat, painting eighteen at a time in fifteen minute bursts. They were laid out on an old framed 6' x 3' piece which also served as a container for the pools of colour washed over the textured surface. Two inch square wooden cubes were used to stack the paintings in small towers to dry out. Various factors steered the series development: there was reference to an initial colour plan, thoughts about the load-bearing pressures on a place, tracks and crossing points, airflow, water, spaces and intervals, the nature of settlement in the land. For a city: light and shadows on buildings, streets, side alleys and hidden courtyards, people, stores, traffic, noise, incidents and interruptions. Titles were assigned later to photographs of the line of production. The identity of a place was achieved not by literal description but as an equivalent found by coincidence in the passage of an abstract process.

A special harback editon limited to one hundred copies, Interviews-Artists brings together artists active in the fields of painting, drawing, photography, print and sculpture. Recorded conversations explore work in progress and the development of their practice. Patterns of personal experience link with a broader continuum of progressive ideas and show how their imaginative interventions bear on the world. The collection of interviews with artists developed in three phases; first researched from 1988-92 and published in the quarterly review, Cv Journal of Art & Crafts. Then gathered in an anthology, Interviews with the Artists: Elements of Discourse, (editions in 1993/1996/2001/2007). The second phase was researched from January to July 2010; the third from October 2010 to July 2011. Sixty eight interviews from the collection are published this volume.

Developed as an exploratory study of artworks by artists of Singapore and Malaysia, Retrospective attempts to account for contemporary artworks that engage with history. These are artworks that reference past events or narratives, of the nation and its art. Through the examination of a selection of artworks produced between 1990 and 2012, Retrospective is both an attribution and an analysis of a historiographical aesthetic within contemporary art practice. It considers that, by their method and in their assembly, these artworks perform more than a representation of a historical past. Instead, they confront history and its production, laying bare the nature and designs of the historical project via their aesthetic project. Positing an interdisciplinary approach as necessary for understanding the historiographical as aesthetic, Retrospective considers not only historical and aesthetic perspectives, but also the philosophical, by way of ontology, in order to broaden its exposition beyond the convention of historical and contextual interpretation of art. Yet, in associating these artworks with a historiographical aesthetic, this exposition may be regarded as a historiographical exercise in itself, affirming the significance of these artworks for the history of Singapore and Malaysia. In short, which history rarely is, Retrospective is about the art of historicisation and the historicisation of art.

Considering how culturally indispensable digital technology is today, it is ironic that computer-generated art was attacked when it burst onto the scene in the early 1960s. In fact, no other twentieth-century art form has elicited such a negative and hostile response. When the Machine Made Art examines the cultural and critical response to computer art, or what we refer to today as digital art. Tracing the heated debates between art and science, the societal anxiety over nascent computer technology, and the myths and philosophies surrounding digital computation, Taylor is able to identify the destabilizing forces that shape and eventually fragment the computer art movement.

Rejecting broad-brush definitions of post-revolutionary art, What People Do with Images provides a nuanced account of artistic practice in Iran and its diaspora during the first part of the twenty-first century. Careful attention is paid to the effects of shifts in internal Iranian politics; the influence of US elections, travel bans and sanctions; and global media sensationalism and Islamophobia. Drawing widely on critical theory from both cultural studies and anthropology, Mazyar Lotfalian details an ecosystem for artistic production, covering a range of media, from performance to installations and video art to films. Museum curators, it is suggested, have mistakenly struggled to fit these works into their traditional-modern-contemporary schema, and political commentators have mistakenly struggled to position them as resistance, opposition or counterculture to Islam or the Islamic Republic. Instead, the author argues that creative artworks neutralize such dichotomies, working around them, and playing a sophisticated game of testing and slowly shifting the boundaries of what is acceptable. They do so in part by neutralizing the boundaries of what is inside and outside the nation-state, travelling across the transnational circuits in which the domestic and diasporic arenas reshape each other. While this book offers the valuable opportunity to gain an understanding of the Iranian art scene, it also has a wider significance in asking more generally how identity politics is mediated by creative acts and images within transnational socio-political spheres.