Step into the world of Cacaform Birds - a world that exists a half-pace to one side of our own, at the confluence of imagination, art and reality. Within these pages we meet the 'Glowerspite' (often dozes in a supine position; converts its tail to a head when startled) and the 'Mare-away' (who carries a small black troll on its back and rouses dreamers from night terrors), along with many more: a fantastical aviary brought to life by Zhu Yingchun's art. The book contains three parts, the first containing doctored photographs that show these birds interacting with sepia cityscapes, alternately goggled at and overlooked by the passers-by. The second introduces us to each individual species through poetic verse, while the third section must be carefully unsealed by the reader in order to reveal how the Cacaform Birds came into being. A blend of bestiary, spotter's guide and poetic anthology, this book demonstrates that art and amusement can be found everywhere, if you only care to look.

In Art & Language International Robert Bailey reconstructs the history of the conceptual art collective Art & Language, situating it in a geographical context to rethink its implications for the broader histories of contemporary art. Focusing on its international collaborations with dozens of artists and critics in and outside the collective between 1969 and 1977, Bailey positions Art & Language at the center of a historical shift from Euro-American modernism to a global contemporary art. He documents the collective's growth and reach, from transatlantic discussions on the nature of conceptual art and the establishment of distinct working groups in New York and England to the collective's later work in Australia, New Zealand, and Yugoslavia. Bailey also details its publications, associations with political organizations, and the internal power struggles that precipitated its breakdown. Analyzing a wide range of artworks, texts, music, and films, he reveals how Art & Language navigated between art worlds to shape the international profile of conceptual art. Above all, Bailey underscores how the group's rigorous and interdisciplinary work provides a gateway to understanding how conceptual art operates as a mode of thinking that exceeds the visual to shape the philosophical, historical, and political.

Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) has entered mainstream culture as one of the founding fathers of modern art. Despite his popularity, books on Duchamp often shroud his work in theoretical and critical writing. Here, instead, is a book exploring the artist's life and work in a thoroughly new and engaging manner, with short, alphabetical dictionary entries written in lively, jargon- free prose that at last allow Duchamp's work and influence to be accessible and enjoyable for a wide audience. The book features more than 200 entries on the most interesting and important artworks, relationships, people and ideas in Duchamp's life, from chess, puns, the fourth dimension, love and genius, to the Bicycle Wheel and Fountain, Walter and Louise Arensberg, Peggy Guggenheim, Katherine S. Dreier and Arturo Schwarz. A contextual introduction shows how the dictionary form has been an inspiration to artists and writers from Flaubert to the Surrealists. Underpinned by the latest scholarship and research, Thomas Girst's texts show how, in the words of contemporary artist Thomas Hirschhorn, Duchamp was 'the most intelligent mind of his time'.

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.

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 artistic tradition that emerged as a form of cultural resistance in the 1970s changed during the transition from socialism to capitalism. This volume presents the evolution of the Moscow-based conceptual artist group called Collective Actions, proposing it as a case-study for understanding the transformations that took place in Eastern European art after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Esanu introduces Moscow Conceptualism by performing a close examination of the Collective Actions group's ten-volume publication Journeys Outside the City and of the Dictionary of Moscow Conceptualism. He analyzes above all the evolution of Collective Actions through ten consecutive phases, discussing changes that occur in each new volume of the Journeys. Compares the part of the Journeys produced in the Soviet period with those volumes assembled after the dissolution of the USSR. The concept of "transition" and the activities of Soros Centers for Contemporary Art are also analyzed.

Combining place and fiction in an imaginative interpretation of ten sites in the city of London, CJ Lim and Ed Liu take well-known institutions, epochs and lifestyles in the British capital and renders them fantastic in a string of architectural short stories.

The medium is an intersection of paper assemblages with short stories. The stories have been exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts and the Victoria and Albert Museum but are collected for the first time in a single volume, laid out as they were designed to be seen as one phantasmogoric city vision.

Painstakingly constructed, the stories assemble a sequence of improbable marriages between architecture and story, encompassing a retelling of the Three Little Pigs at Smithfield, a dating agency at Battersea, and a ringed transport system manifesting as a celestial river over the great metropolis. Drawing on a wealth of literary symbolism from Carroll s Alice in Wonderland to Dickens s A Tale of Two Cities and imbued with humour and irony, the book builds on London s rich mix of extravagance and fictive tradition.

Enthralling, inspirational and entertaining, this cabinet of curiosity and wonder depicts a vision of the city that is immoral, anarchic, and unscientific, and at the same time, glorious, ravishing and a pleasure to behold."

The synthetic proposition examines the impact of Civil Rights, Black Power, the student, feminist and sexual-liberty movements on conceptualism and its legacies in the United States between the late 1960s and the 1990s. It focuses on the turn to political reference in practices originally concerned with abstract ideas, as articulated by Joseph Kosuth, and traces key strategies in contemporary art to the reciprocal influences of conceptualism and identity politics: movements that have so far been historicised as mutually exclusive. The book demonstrates that while identity-based strategies were particular, their impact spread far beyond the individuals or communities that originated them. It offers a study of Adrian Piper, David Hammons, Renee Green, Mary Kelly, Martha Rosler, Silvia Kolbowski, Daniel Joseph Martinez, Lorna Simpson, Hans Haacke, Andrea Fraser and Charles Gaines. By turning to social issues, these artists analysed the conventions of language, photography, moving image, installation and display. -- .

Since the late 1970s, Allan McCollum (born 1944) has addressed the anthropology of art: its distribution, acquisition, display and interpretation. From his first "Surrogate Paintings" (1978-82) to his "Individual Works" (1987-89) or recent "Shapes Project"(since 2005), through his famous series of "Plaster Surrogates" (begun in 1982), "Perpetual Photos" (since 1981) and "Perfect Vehicles" (since 1986), McCollum has revealed art's mechanisms as a status-generating economy. In the 1990s, his "art objects" were replaced by found objects belonging to a situated context and community, in an effort to explore local micro-politics and to develop projects with specific milieus. His use of multiples, of museums and display aesthetics as compositional elements, all stem from this displacement of context. Working with regional museums, heterogeneous audiences, and references going from paleontology to mineralogy, McCollum today has built a truly unique and intriguing body of work that receives its first comprehensive overview in this monograph.

Photography After Conceptual Art presents a series of original essays that address substantive theoretical, historical, and aesthetic issues raised by post-1960s photography as a mainstream artistic medium * Selected by Choice as an Outstanding Academic Title for 2011 * Appeals to people interested in artist's use of photography and in contemporary art * Tracks the efflorescence of photography as one of the most important mediums for contemporary art * Explores the relation between recent art, theory and aesthetics, for which photography serves as an important test case * Includes a number of the essays with previously unpublished photographs * Artists discussed include Ed Ruscha, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Douglas Huebler, Mel Bochner, Sherrie Levine, Roni Horn, Thomas Demand, and Jeff Wall

"The book is an impressive work of scholarship" - Studio International "Richard set about to produce a study of distribution networks, and achieved this through immaculate and thorough research. It is no criticism of the book to say that there are many questions left unexplored ... As scholars of the future think through these and other questions, they will remain grateful to Richard's extraordinary and meticulous scholarship." - Mark Godfrey, Frieze Emerging in the late 1960s, conceptual art was spurred by a network of artists, dealers, curators and critics. These little-known connections are detailed for the first time in this highly significant volume. By focusing on 15 artists - including Marcel Broodthaers, Richard Long, Lawrence Weiner, Hanne Darboven and Daniel Buren - and a specific network of dealer-galleries, private and public institutions and collectors around them, author Sophie Richard documents the role of art dealers in the development of conceptual art - which ultimately led to the structure of today's art world. We learn how conceptual artworks entered private collections and public institutions, how value was conferred to them, and the distribution networks that drove these artists' success. A detailed account of artistic activity in the decade 1967-77 is accompanied by extensive and previously unpublished data, charting the exhibitions and sales of conceptual works. The relationships, support structures and strategies of dealer-galleries - such as Konrad Fischer, Wide White Space and Lisson Gallery - are revealed and make fascinating reading. Including numerous interviews with key figures of the period, 'Unconcealed' exposes the new dealing, curatorial, collecting and teaching methods formed in this decade that continue to be critical to today's art world.

Parkett # 66 features collaborations with Angela Bulloch (Canada), Daniel Buren (France), and Pierre Huyghe (France). Huyghe reassesses conceptual art concerns by reinterpreting familiar films and themes in popular culture; he also draws on disregarded aspects of everyday life, such as time and alienation, and brings them back into our awareness. Bulloch's participatory sculptures explore the physical and psychological aspects of space by using simple light and sound effects that require the viewer's active participation. In the 1960s, Buren began producing works by using the striped cloth he calls "a seeing tool, " seeking a new way to make art exist outside the museum and gallery spaces that delimited its socializing capacity. Since then he has continued his striped works and remains one of France's most important and cherished living artists.

Expert colorist Teruko Sakurai takes you to the end of the rainbow--and beyond--in this inspiring color dictionary! Over 2,750 traditional Japanese color combinations are presented, organized into 100 different themes associated with the seasons, landscapes and artistic heritage of Japan. Whether it's a shower of pink cherry blossoms, the flutter of a carp flap or the austere and cool tones of Mt. Fuji, flipping the pages of this color dictionary is like taking a stroll through the sensual delights of Japanese culture in all its dazzling tones, hues and palettes. Each two-page section in this richly-illustrated book presents a different theme with the following information: An introduction to the color scheme and a description of how it can be used A number-coded nine-color palette board showing the range of shades and hues that complement and comprise the scheme CMYK, RGB and HEX (the color code used in Japan) references for all nine colors 26 examples including two- and three-color combinations with photos and illustrations This is an indispensable guide for graphic designers, illustrators, decorators, artists and publishing professionals. It will also be enjoyable and inspiring for readers planning their own home design or art projects.

This is the fourth book by the award-winning science-fiction and fantasy artist Stephan Martiniere. Following his previous books, "Quantum Dreams," "Quantumscapes" and "Velocity," "Trajectory"showcases Stephan's phenomenal artistic range and skills in a stunning new visionary collection of sci-fi book covers, theme park and animation concepts, video game designs and never-before-seen artwork.