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Books > Promotion > Bloomsbury > Arts & Architecture
Exploring key issues for the anthropology of art and art theory, this fascinating text provides the first in-depth study of community art from an anthropological perspective.The book focuses on the forty year history of Free Form Arts Trust, an arts group that played a major part in the 1970s struggle to carve out a space for community arts in Britain. Turning their back on the world of gallery art, the fine-artist founders of Free Form were determined to use their visual expertise to connect, through collaborative art projects, with the working-class people excluded by the established art world. In seeking to give the residents of poor communities a greater role in shaping their built environment, the artists' aesthetic practice would be transformed."Community Art" examines this process of aesthetic transformation and its rejection of the individualized practice of the gallery artist. The Free Form story calls into question common understandings of the categories of "art," "expertise," and "community," and makes this story relevant beyond late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century Britain.
It is often suggested that there are 'secrets' to comedy or that it is 'lightning in a bottle', but the craft of comedy writing can be taught. While comedic tastes change, over time and from person to person, the core underpinning still depends on the comedic geniuses that have paved the way. Great comedy is built upon a strong foundation. In Writing the Comedy Movie, Marc Blake lays out - in an entertainingly readable style - the nuts and bolts of comedy screenwriting. His objective is to clarify the 'rules' of comedy: to contextualize comedy staples such as the double act, slapstick, gross-out, rom com, screwball, satire and parody and to introduce new ones such as the bromance or stoner comedy. He explains the underlying principles of comedy and comedy writing for the screen, along with providing analysis of leading examples of each subgenre.
This collection of articles and essays from magazines, newspapers, books, and academic journals is designed to expand the reader's awareness and understanding of the role dress plays in cultures and subcultures across the globe. The text, which represents the very best thinking and writing on the subject today, explores essential topics such as dress and sociology, cultural studies, gender, religion, modesty, and technological changes. The Meanings of Dress, 3rd Edition is newly revised to reflect the current cultural landscape and includes more theory than previous editions, as well as an increased emphasis on the male perspective. The book provides design and merchandising students with insight into how - and why - consumers buy clothing and other products related to dress, and helps them to hone their trend forecasting skills. Instructors, contact your Sales Representative for access to Instructor's Materials.
Theodor Adorno (1903-69) was undoubtedly the foremost thinker of the Frankfurt School, the influential group of German thinkers that fled to the US in the 1930s, including such thinkers as Herbert Marcuse and Max Horkheimer. His work has proved enormously influential in sociology, philosophy and cultural theory. Aesthetic Theory is Adorno's posthumous magnum opus and the culmination of a lifetime's investigation. Analysing the sublime, the ugly and the beautiful, Adorno shows how such concepts frame and distil human experience and that it is human experience that ultimately underlies aesthetics. In Adorno's formulation 'art is the sedimented history of human misery'.
Design is inescapably part of our lives--from the alarm clocks we wake up to and the cups we use for our morning coffee, to the chairs we sit in, the cars we drive, and the houses and cities we live in. In 63 engaged and engaging essays, Caplan explores how we use design, language, and instinct in our everyday world to relate to others, maintain traditions, and advance our causes. He probes our relation to the things that both comfort and disorient us from pasta to corporate culture and shows how we are shaped by our own artifacts and our attitudes toward them. Our sense of place and regional diversity are also examined as are the shock of the new, the persistence of the old, and the expectation of a future. In this age of global sensibilities and "tourism as a lifestyle," we're continually recycling as we create. Previously published in forums such as The New York Times, I.D., Print, and Interior Design, Caplan (author of the popular classic By Design) is sharp, thoughtful, charming,
Funny, lively and unpredictable, stand-up comedy is above all a medium to be enjoyed. Popular as a good night out and packing the TV schedules, stand-up permeates British society and culture. Ubiquitous though it is, we are generally reluctant to consider comedy's social consequences. When comedians offend we seem ready to consider the potential for stand-up to do some wider harm, yet we rarely consider the good that it might do. This book looks at the social and political impact of stand-up comedy in both its positive and negative forms. Drawing on exclusive interviews with comedians such as Stewart Lee, Josie Long, Joe Wilkinson and Mark Thomas, and examples of comic material on everything from revolution, terrorism and homosexuality, to knitting and the inefficiency of the home shower, it explores comedy's role in determining our attitudes and opinions. While revealing the conventions comics use to manage audience response, Sophie Quirk demonstrates how comedy audiences allow themselves to be manipulated, and the potential harm - and real benefits - that may arise from 'just' being funny.
Basics Landscape Architecture 02: Ecological Design provides an overview of ecological design and planning for landscape architects. It explores the concepts and themes important to the contemporary practice of ecological design and planning in a highly accessible and richly illustrated format. Focusing primarily on urban environments, this book examines the relationships between ecological design theory and design methods. It describes and illustrates the basic structures and functions of natural and human systems through landscape ecology principles and the dynamics of landscape processes.
Documentary has never attracted such audiences, never been produced with such ease from so many corners of the globe, never embraced such variety of expression. The very distinctions between the filmed, the filmer and the spectator are being dissolved. The Act of Documenting addresses what this means for documentary's 21st century position as a genus in the "class" cinema; for its foundations as, primarily, a scientistic, eurocentric and patriarchal discourse; for its future in a world where assumptions of photographic image integrity cannot be sustained. Unpacked are distinctions between performance and performativy and between different levels of interaction, linearity and hypertextuality, engagement and impact, ethics and conditions of reception. Winston, Vanstone and Wang Chi explore and celebrate documentary's potentials in the digital age.
Gilles Deleuze was one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century philosophy, well known for his works on the philosophy of art and for his master-works, Difference and Repetition and - with Felix Guattari - A Thousand Plateaus and Anti-Oedipus. Cinema I is the first volume of Deleuze's revolutionary work on the theory of cinema (concluded in Cinema II, also available in the Bloomsbury Revelations series). Drawing on the philosophy of Henri Bergson, Deleuze identified his work as "a logic of the cinema", setting out to "isolate certain cinematographic concepts" philosophically. To do this, he brings together diverse examples from a variety of major filmmakers, including Ingmar Bergman, Charlie Chaplin, Sergei Eisenstein and Alfred Hitchcock, among many others.
Paul Virilio is one of contemporary Continental thought's most original and provocative critical voices. His vision of the impact of modern technology on the contemporary global condition is powerful and disturbing, ranging over art, science, politics and warfare. In Art and Fear, Paul Virilio traces the twin development of art and science over the twentieth century. In his provocative and challenging vision, art and science vie with each other for the destruction of the human form as we know it. He traces the connections between the way early twentieth century avant-garde artists twisted and tortured the human form before making it vanish in abstraction, and the blasting to bits of men who were no more than cannon fodder i nthe trenches of the Great War; and between the German Expressionists' hate-filled portraits of the damned, and the 'medical' experiments of the Nazi eugenicists; and between the mangled messages of global advertising, and the organisation of global terrorism. Now, at the start of the twenty-first century, science has finally left art behind, as genetic engineers prepare to turn themselves into the worst of expressionists, with the human being the raw material for new and monstrous forms of life. Art and Fear is essential reading for anyone wondering where art has gone and where science is taking us.
As students prepare to enter the world of work, there are many decisions that they need to make about what type of career they want: Freelancing? Working in a design agency? Setting up their own business? They also need the practical advice about how to work with clients, how to organize themselves, billing, etc. Through interviews with people at all levels of design, the author provides down to earth and straight forward information that is relevant to today's students looking to start a career in design.
By moving beyond traditional aesthetic categories (beauty, the sublime, the religious), Eco-Aesthetics takes an inter-disciplinary approach bridging the arts, humanities and social sciences and explores what aesthetics might mean in the 21st century. It is one in a series of new, radical aesthetics promoting debate, confronting convention and formulating alternative ways of thinking about art practice. There is no doubt that the social and environmental spheres are interconnected but can art and artists really make a difference to the global environmental crisis? Can art practice meaningfully contribute to the development of sustainable lifestyles? Malcolm Miles explores the strands of eco-art, eco-aesthetics and contemporary aesthetic theories, offering timely critiques of consumerism and globalisation and, ultimately, offers a possible formulation of an engaged eco-aesthetic for the early 21st century.
Madame Jenkins couldn't carry a tune in a bucket: despite that, in 1944 at the age of 76, she played Carnegie Hall to a capacity audience and had celebrity fans by the score. Her infamous 1940s recordings are still highly-prized today. In his well-researched and thoroughly entertaining biography, Darryl W. Bullock tells of Florence Foster Jenkins meteoric rise to success and the man who stood beside her, through every sharp note. Florence was ridiculed for her poor control of timing, pitch, and tone, and terrible pronunciation of foreign lyrics, but the sheer entertainment value of her caterwauling packed out theatres around the United States, with the 'singer' firmly convinced of her own talent, partly thanks to the devoted attention from her husband and manager St Clair Bayfield. Her story is one of triumph in the face of adversity, of courage, conviction and of the belief that with dedication and commitment a true artist can achieve anything. Now a major Hollywood movie starring Meryl Streep and Hugh Grant, the genius of Florence Foster Jenkins is about to be discovered by a whole new audience.
Although Film Studies has successfully (re)turned attention to matters of style and interpretation, its sibling discipline has left the territory uncharted - until now. The question of how television operates on a stylistic level has been critically underexplored, despite being fundamental to our viewing experience. This significant new work redresses a vital gap in Television Studies by engaging with the stylistic dynamics of TV; exploring the aesthetic properties and values of both the medium and particular types of output (specific programmes); and raising important questions about the way we judge television as both cultural artifact and art form. Global Television: Aesthetics and Style provides a unique and vital intervention in the field, raising key questions about television's artistic properties and possibilities. Through a series of case-studies by internationally renowned scholars, the collection takes a radical step forward in understanding TV's stylistic achievements.
What is a moving image, and how does it move us? In Thinking In Film, celebrated theorist Mieke Bal engages in an exploration - part dialogue, part voyage - with the video installations of Finnish artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila to understand movement as artistic practice and as affect. Through fifteen years of Ahtila's practice, including such seminal works as The Annunciation, Where Is Where? and The House, Bal searches for the places where theoretical and artistic practices intersect, to create radical spaces in which genuinely democratic acts are performed. Bringing together different understandings of 'figure' from form to character, Bal examines the syntax of the exhibition and its ability to bring together installations, the work itself, the physical and ontological thresholds of the installation space and the use of narrative and genre. The double meaning of 'movement', in Bal's unique thought, catalyses anunderstanding of video installation work as inherently plural, heterogenous and possessed of revolutionary political potential. The video image as an art form illuminates the question of what an image is, and the installation binds viewers to their own interactions with the space. In this context Bal argues that the intersection between movement and space creates an openness to difference and doubt. By 'thinking in' art, we find ideas not illustrated by but actualized in artworks. Bal practices this theory in action to demonstrate how the video installation can move us to think beyond ordinary boundaries and venture into new spaces. There is no act more radical than figuring a vision of the 'other' as film allows artto do. Thinking In Film is Mieke Bal ather incisive, innovative best as she opens up the miraculous political potential of the condensed art of the moving image.
Retro interiors have come to the fore in recent years as a highly desirable and valuable branch of interior design. The emergence of a need for decorative objects and vintage furniture has resurrected retro style and placed it firmly as a key trend of contemporary design. "Retro Style: Class, Gender and Design in the Home" is the first book to explore the modern position of retro by asking important questions around the emergence of the trend, its impact on production and consumption and how it manifests itself in the contemporary interior. Examining themes ranging from design, taste and the aestheticisation of everyday life to the bohemianisation of popular culture, the book provides a fascinating insight into how retro has shaped modern interior design. Using original ethnographic research from retro retailers, enthusiasts, designers and media professionals Retro Style explores the positive and negative side of the style, ultimately providing an original and thought-provoking perspective on the history and trajectory of how retro has become what it now is and its bearing on the future of designed interiors.
Bridging theory and practice, this accessible text provides an introduction to fashion from both cultural studies and fashion studies perspectives, and addresses the growing interaction between the two fields. Cultural studies relies on fashion to exemplify change as well as continuity, examine identity and difference, agency and structure, and production and consumption. Fashion, meanwhile, benefits from the interpretative lens of cultural studies; its key concepts, contextual flexibility, and attention to bridging 'high' and 'popular' culture, contemporary and historical perspectives, and diverse identity issues and methodologies. Organised thematically, the book uses a wide range of cross-cultural case studies to explore ethnicity, class, gender and nation through fashion, and explains the ways in which these notions interact and overlap. Drawing on intersectionality theory in feminist theory and cultural studies, Fashion and Cultural Studies is essential reading for students and scholars.
This is the first anthology to address Design History as an established discipline, a field of study which is developing a contextualised understanding of the role of design and designed objects within social and cultural history. Extracts range from the 18th Century, when design and manufacture separated, to the present day. Drawn from scholarly and polemical books, research articles, exhibition catalogues, and magazines, the extracts are placed in themed sections, with each section separately introduced and each concluded with an annotated guide to further reading. Covering both primary texts (such as the writings of designers and design reformers) and secondary texts (in the form of key works of design history), the reader provides an essential resource for understanding the history of design, the development of the discipline, and contemporary issues in design history and practice. Selected authors: Judy Attfield, Jeremy Aynsley, Reyner Banham, Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Walter Benjamin, Pierre Bourdieu, Christopher Breward, Denise Scott Brown, Ruth Schwartz Cowan, Clive Dilnot, Buckminster Fuller, Paul Greenhalgh, Dick Hebdige, Steven Heller, John Heskett, Pat Kirkham, Adolf Loos, Victor Margolin, Karl Marx, Jeffrey Meikle, William Morris, Gillian Naylor, Victor Papanek, Nikolaus Pevsner, John Ruskin, Adam Smith, Penny Sparke, John Styles, Nancy Troy, Thorstein Veblen, Robert Venturi, John Walker, Frank Lloyd Wright.
This is the third book in the new 'Basics of Sculpture' series, and is in the same clear and informative step-by-step layout. Very much aimed at beginners, there are six projects of increasing difficulty, aiming to teach people how to sculpt in wire from the most basic starting point up through to soldering. The projects start off by learning about wire and using simply pliers, and then how to incorporate other materials such as tin, feathers and wool. Finally the last project includes the use of some simple silver soldering. Clear step-by-step images show the processes involved in every project. Images of fantastic sculptures in wire by contemporary artists are scattered throughout, showing everything from life-size figures to sheep, elephants and even hats.
- Introduction to Home Furnishings
A History of Video Art is a revised and expanded edition of the 2006 original, which extends the scope of the first edition, incorporating a wider range of artists and works from across the globe and explores and examines developments in the genre of artists' video from the mid 1990s up to the present day. In addition, the new edition expands and updates the discussion of theoretical concepts and ideas which underpin contemporary artists' video. Tracking the changing forms of video art in relation to the revolution in electronic and digital imaging that has taken place during the last 50 years, A History of Video Art orients video art in the wider art historical context, with particular reference to the shift from the structuralism of the late 1960s and early 1970s to the post-modernist concerns of the 1980s and early 1990s. The new edition also explores the implications of the internationalisation of artists' video in the period leading up to the new millennium and its concerns and preoccupations including post-colonialism, the post-medium condition and the impact and influence of the internet.
This book offers a systematic and comprehensive review of the fundamental literary aspects of biblical narrative, investigating the characteristics and points of view of the narrator, the shaping of characters, the structure of the plot, time and space, and finally the style. Many examples are provided to clarify the issues discussed as well as to shed fresh light on the narratives.
What were Socialist Spaces? The Eastern Bloc produced distinctive
spaces, some of which were fashioned from ideological templates,
such as the monumental parade grounds and Red Squares where
communist leaders could receive tributes, or new factory cities
with towering chimneys and glittering palaces of culture. But what
of the grimy toilet in the communal apartment or the forlorn ruins
left after the Second World War?
Skepticism Films: Knowing and Doubting the World in Contemporary Cinema introduces skepticism films as updated configurations of skepticist thought experiments which exemplify the pervasiveness of philosophical ideas in popular culture. Philipp Schmerheim defends a pluralistic film-philosophical position according to which films can be, but need not be, expressions of philosophical thought in their own right. It critically investigates the influence of ideas of skepticism on film-philosophical theories and develops a typology of skepticism films by analyzing The Truman Show, Inception, The Matrix, Vanilla Sky, The Thirteenth Floor, Moon and other contemporary skepticism films. With its focus on skepticism as one of the most significant philosophical problems, Skepticism Films provides a better understanding of the dynamic interplay between film, theories of film and philosophy.
Applied Theatre: Facilitation is the first publication that directly explores the facilitator's role within a range of socially engaged theatre and community theatre settings. The book offers a new theoretical framework for understanding critical facilitation in contemporary dilemmatic spaces and features a range of writings and provocations by international practitioners and experienced facilitators working in the field. Part One offers an introduction to the concept, role and practice of facilitation and its applications in different contexts and cultural locations. It offers a conceptual framework through which to understand the idea of critical facilitation: a political practice that that involves a critical (and self-critical) approach to pedagogies, practices (doing and performing), and resilience in dilemmatic spaces. Part Two illuminates the diversity in the field of facilitation in applied theatre through offering multiple voices, case studies, theoretical positions and contexts. These are drawn from Australia, Serbia, Kyrgyzstan, India, Israel/Palestine, Rwanda, the United Kingdom and North America, and they apply a range of aesthetic forms: performance, process drama, forum, clowning and playmaking. Each chapter presents the challenge of facilitation in a range of cultural contexts with communities whose complex histories and experiences have led them to be disenfranchised socially, culturally and/or economically. |
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