What happens when the body becomes art in the age of biotechnological reproduction? In Chinese Surplus Ari Larissa Heinrich examines transnational Chinese aesthetic production to demonstrate how representations of the medically commodified body can illuminate the effects of biopolitical violence and postcolonialism in contemporary life. From the earliest appearance of Frankenstein in China to the more recent phenomenon of "cadaver art," he shows how vivid images of a blood transfusion as performance art or a plastinated corpse without its skin-however upsetting to witness-constitute the new "realism" of our times. Adapting Foucauldian biopolitics to better account for race, Heinrich provides a means to theorize the relationship between the development of new medical technologies and the representation of the human body as a site of annexation, extraction, art, and meaning-making.

In One and Five Ideas eminent critic, historian, and former member of the Art & Language collective Terry Smith explores the artistic, philosophical, political, and geographical dimensions of Conceptual Art and conceptualism. These four essays and a conversation with Mary Kelly-published between 1974 and 2012-contain Smith's most essential work on Conceptual Art and his argument that conceptualism was key to the historical transition from modern to contemporary art. Nothing less than a distinctive theory of Conceptual and contemporary art, One and Five Ideas showcases the critical voice of one of the major art theorists of our time.

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.

In the twenty-first century, we are continually confronted with the existential side of technology-the relationships between identity and the mechanizations that have become extensions of the self. Focusing on one of humanity's most ubiquitous machines, Automotive Prosthetic: Technological Mediation and the Car in Conceptual Art combines critical theory and new media theory to form the first philosophical analysis of the car within works of conceptual art. These works are broadly defined to encompass a wide range of creative expressions, particularly in car-based conceptual art by both older, established artists and younger, emerging artists, including Ed Ruscha, Martha Rosler, Richard Prince, Sylvie Fleury, Yael Bartana, Jeremy Deller, and Jonathan Schipper. At its core, the book offers an alternative formation of conceptual art understood according to technology, the body moving through space, and what art historian, curator, and artist Jack Burnham calls "relations." This thought-provoking study illuminates the ways in which the automobile becomes a naturalized extension of the human body, incarnating new forms of "car art" and spurring a technological reframing of conceptual art. Steeped in a sophisticated take on the image and semiotics of the car, the chapters probe the politics of materialism as well as high/low debates about taste, culture, and art. The result is a highly innovative approach to contemporary intersections of art and technology.

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.

Eric Cameron is a major contemporary Canadian artist. Born in 1935 in Leicester, England, he arrived in Canada in the 1970s and has taught at the University of Guelph, the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and at the University of Calgary. Over the years Cameron has also continued to work in his primary medium, painting, but moved from traditional figuration to a highly conceptual practice with both his process paintings and his ""thick"" paintings. He has also expanded into video and has written a great deal about his work. His inspired teaching and unusual art have been recognized with major awards, including the Victor Lynch-Staunton Award (1993), the Gershorn Iskowitz Prize (1994), and the Governor General's Award (2004).Despite Cameron's prominence, much of the writing about him to date, primarily essays in exhibition catalogues, is by the artist himself. Cover and Uncover thus makes a major contribution to the field as it explores in depth Eric Cameron's art and philosophy. The book is composed of four essays, each covering a different aspect of Cameron's art, starting with Peggy Gale's analysis of his writing, then turning to Ann Davis's consideration of his process paintings and his philosophy, moving to Diana Nemiroff's review of his videos, and concluding with Thierry de Duve's observations on his Thick Paintings and his blind rejection of chance. The essays, though written independently, resonate with each other so that the reader comes away with a full picture of a complex artist, his life, his thought, his art production, and how these elements inform each other and have evolved through time. The expert commentary here, richly illustrated with Cameron's works in multiple media, provides a vital and long overdue critical lens through which to view this important artist.

This book is for those of us who have failed at being doubt-free but whose passion for God remains steadfast. It's for those who have been confused by the world -- and perhaps even by their own desires -- and still long to connect with a loving God who forgives and embraces us. It's for those who wonder at how our personal failures and uncertainties can make our faith mature -- and yet who can believe that somehow these wrestlings also make our need for God complete. Combining incredibly candid reflections and insights from the author with rich reminders for every man and woman's spiritual journey, Deepest Thanks, Deeper Apologies springs from a deep desire not to explain mystery, or to remove doubt, but to encourage mystery and raise doubt -- for all who dare to be honest.

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

"So perspicuous was Battcock's choice of articles in "Minimal Art that his book has proved to be an exceptionally telling index of the critical discourse of its time. This is the key primary source book--for that matter it remains the key book--on the subject of Minimal Art, a movement that has lately, newly become a topic of consuming interest to many modern art historians, critics, curators and artists."--Anna C. Chave, author of "Mark Rothko: Subjects in Abstraction

"Good criticism of contemporary art movements is both rare and scattered, and readers with access to a wide range of periodicals and catalogue introductions are few. . . Minimal Art is so obviously the most important movement of the 1960s, and equally certainly will continue to be so in the early 1970s, that this anthology will be a valuable compilation of statements by artists and assessments by critics."--David Irwin, "Apollo

How artists' magazines, in all their ephemerality, materiality, and temporary intensity, challenged mainstream art criticism and the gallery system. During the 1960s and 1970s, magazines became an important new site of artistic practice, functioning as an alternative exhibition space for the dematerialized practices of conceptual art. Artists created works expressly for these mass-produced, hand-editioned pages, using the ephemerality and the materiality of the magazine to challenge the conventions of both artistic medium and gallery. In Artists' Magazines, Gwen Allen looks at the most important of these magazines in their heyday (the 1960s to the 1980s) and compiles a comprehensive, illustrated directory of hundreds of others. Among the magazines Allen examines are Aspen (1965-1971), a multimedia magazine in a box-issues included Super-8 films, flexi-disc records, critical writings, artists' postage stamps, and collectible chapbooks; Avalanche (1970-1976), which expressed the countercultural character of the emerging SoHo art community through its interviews and artist-designed contributions; and Real Life (1979-1994), published by Thomas Lawson and Susan Morgan as a forum for the Pictures generation. These and the other magazines Allen examines expressed their differences from mainstream media in both form and content: they cast their homemade, do-it-yourself quality against the slickness of an Artforum, and they created work that defied the formalist orthodoxy of the day. Artists' Magazines, featuring abundant color illustrations of magazine covers and content, offers an essential guide to a little-explored medium.

The first book-length study of this influential artist's work, focusing on the participatory role of the human subject rather than the art object. Michael Asher doesn't make typical installations. Instead, he extracts his art from the institutions in which it is shown, culling it from collections, histories, or museums' own walls. Since the late 1960s, Asher has been creating situations that have not only taught us about the conditions and contexts of contemporary art, but have worked to define it. In Situation Aesthetics, Kirsi Peltomaki examines Asher's practice by analyzing the social situations that the artist constructs in his work for viewers, participants, and institutional representatives (including gallery directors, curators, and other museum staff members). Drawing on art criticism, the reports of viewers and participants in Asher's projects, and the artist's own archives, Peltomaki offers a comprehensive account of Asher's work over the past four decades. Because of the intensely site-specific nature of this work, as well as the artist's refusal to reconstruct past works or mount retrospectives, many of the projects Peltomaki discusses are described here for the first time. By emphasizing the social and psychological sites of art rather than the production of autonomous art objects, Peltomaki argues, Asher constructs experientially complex situations that profoundly affect those who encounter them, bringing about both personal and institutional transformation.

An exploration of walking and mapping as both form and content in art projects using old and new technologies, shoe leather and GPS. From Guy Debord in the early 1950s to Richard Long, Janet Cardiff, and Esther Polak more recently, contemporary artists have returned again and again to the walking motif. Today, the convergence of global networks, online databases, and new tools for mobile mapping coincides with a resurgence of interest in walking as an art form. In Walking and Mapping, Karen O'Rourke explores a series of walking/mapping projects by contemporary artists. She offers close readings of these projects-many of which she was able to experience firsthand-and situates them in relation to landmark works from the past half-century. Together, they form a new entity, a dynamic whole greater than the sum of its parts. By alternating close study of selected projects with a broader view of their place in a bigger picture, Walking and Mapping itself maps a complex phenomenon.

This book presents an analysis of how the processes described in Conceptual Blending Theory can be applied in practice, on the basis of Michal Batory's posters designed for artistic events. Therefore, it begins with an introduction of the origins of Conceptual Blending Theory, the very nature and elements of conceptual blending as a linguistic and mental phenomenon. It also provides an overview of the models and types of integration networks, which is followed by an analysis of vital relations that accompany the blending process. Importantly, the principles constraining Conceptual Blending Theory, together with the criticism levelled at Fauconnier and Turner's approach are put forward. The book then moves on to analyse Michal Batory's posters in terms of conceptual blending processes. The blended space is meticulously discussed and illustrated to show explicitly how two distinct notions are combined to create a new meaning that is non-computable from the two input spaces. The interaction that occurs between the inscriptions and images is very distinct in every single poster. The analysis highlights how Batory's artefacts influence people and convey the hidden message, with the use of strong visual and verbal elements that accompany the blending process.