In this ground-breaking collection of critical essays, 15 writers explore the experimental, interdisciplinary and radically transgressive field of contemporary live art in South Africa.

Set against a contemporary South African society that is chronologically `post' apartheid, but one that continues to grapple with material redress, land redistribution and systemic racism, Acts of Transgression finds a representation of the complexity of this moment within the rich potential of a performative art form that transcends disciplinary boundaries and aesthetic conventions. The collection probes live art's intersection with crisis and socio-political turbulence, shifting notions of identity and belonging, embodied trauma and loss, questions of archive, memory and the troubling of colonial systems of knowing,

an interrogation of narratives of the past and visions for the future.These diverse essays, analysing the work of more than 25 contemporary South African artists and accompanied by a striking visual record of more than 50 photographs, represent the first major critical study of contemporary live art in South Africa; a study that is as timeous as it is imperative.

Visual representations are an essential but highly contested means of understanding and remembering the Holocaust. Photographs taken in the camps in early 1945 provided proof of and visceral access to the atrocities. Later visual representations such as films, paintings, and art installations attempted to represent this extreme trauma. While photographs from the camps and later aesthetic reconstructions differ in origin, they share goals and have raised similar concerns: the former are questioned not as to veracity but due to their potential inadequacy in portraying the magnitude of events; the latter are criticized on the grounds that the mediation they entail is unacceptable. Some have even questioned any attempt to represent the Holocaust as inappropriate and dangerous to historical understanding. This book explores the taboos that structure the production and reception of Holocaust images and the possibilities that result from the transgression of those taboos. Essays consider the uses of various visual media, aesthetic styles, and genres in representations of the Holocaust; the uses of perpetrator photography; the role of trauma in memory; aesthetic problems of mimesis and memory in the work of Lanzmann, Celan, and others; and questions about mass-cultural representations of the Holocaust. David Bathrick is Emeritus Professor of German at Cornell University, Brad Prager is Associate Professor of German at the University of Missouri, and Michael D. Richardson is Associate Professor of German at Ithaca College.

The media technologies that surround and suffuse our everyday life profoundly affect our relation to reality. Philosophers since Plato and Aristotle have sought to understand the complex influence of apparently simple tools of expression on our understanding and experience of the world, time, space, materiality and energy. The Digital Image and Reality takes up this crucial philosophical task for our digital era. This rich yet accessible work argues that when new visual technologies arrive to represent and simulate reality, they give rise to nothing less than a radically different sensual image of the world. Through engaging with post-cinematic content and the new digital formats in which it appears, Strutt uncovers and explores how digital image-making is integral to emergent modes of metaphysical reflection - to speculative futurism, optimistic nihilism, and ethical plasticity. Ultimately, he prompts the reader to ask whether the impact of digital image processes might go even beyond our subjective consciousness of reality, towards the synthesis of objective actuality itself.

Sandra Blow (1925-2006) is among the most important British artists of the later twentieth century. During a time of rapid change in the art world, her commitment to abstract painting resulted in a large and diverse body of work of distinctive power and subtlety. Michael Bird's fascinating survey of Sandra Blow's life and art is now available for the first time in a handsome paperback edition. Compiled in collaboration with the artist during the last years of her life, it provides a definitive overview of her career. The book is lavishly illustrated throughout with a fully representative selection of Blow's work. In this highly readable account, Michael Bird looks in depth at Blow's evolving studio practice and the personal nature of her abstract vision. He places Blow's achievement firmly within the wider context of British and international art movements of the post-war period and late twentieth century. He also casts new light on the role played in her life by Alberto Burri and Roger Hilton, two influences she acknowledged to be crucial to her art. Through close attention to Blow's working methods, this book provides a unique insight into her creative process. It reveals the intensity of emotional engagement and technical experimentation that lie behind the apparent spontaneity of her vivid handling of materials, colour and form.

This book offers a new perspective on a long-debated issue: the role of the occult in surrealism, in particular under the leadership of French writer Andre Breton. Based on thorough source analysis, this study details how our understanding of occultism and esotericism, as well as of their function in Bretonian surrealism, changed significantly over time from the early 1920s to the late 1950s.

Tracing the relationship between Abstract Expressionist artists and contemporary intellectuals, particularly the French existentialists, Nancy Jachec here offers a new interpretation of the success of America's first internationally recognized avant-garde art form. She argues that Abstract Expressionism was promoted by the United States government because of its radical character, which was considered to appeal to a Western European populace perceived by the State Department as inclined toward Socialism.

In this latest addition to Oxford's Modernist Literature & Culture series, renowned modernist scholar Michael North poses fundamental questions about the relationship between modernity and comic form in film, animation, the visual arts, and literature. Machine-Age Comedy vividly constructs a cultural history that spans the entire twentieth century, showing how changes wrought by industrialization have forever altered the comic mode. With keen analyses, North examines the work of a wide range of artists - including Charlie Chaplin, Walt Disney, Marcel Duchamp, Samuel Beckett, and David Foster Wallace - to show the creative and unconventional ways the routinization of industrial society has been explored in a broad array of cultural forms. Throughout, North argues that modern writers and artists found something inherently comic in new experiences of repetition associated with, enforced by, and made inevitable by the machine age. Ultimately, this rich, tightly focused study offers a new lens for understanding the devlopment of comedic structures during periods of massive social, political, and cultural change to reveal how the original promise of modern life can be extracted from its practical disappointment.

The paintings are grouped under various headings to take the reader through specific visual experiences beginning with some of the artist's tools, colour palettes and showing the development of texture. Seascapes and shorelines are the first stop, going through to the moors,hills and beyond.

"Art+ NYC" is anart-lover s guide to New York City that combines a crash course in 20th- and 21st-centuryarthistory with in-depth bios of nine celebrated New York City artists: Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Cindy Sherman, Yoko Ono, Mark Rothko, Jeff Koons, Donald Judd, Roy Lichtenstein, and Robert Rauschenberg. Each segment is written by a leading art writer from publications such as "Art in America," "Flaunt," and the "New York Times." Filled with useful information for both locals and tourists, "Art + NYC" includes comprehensive neighborhood-by-neighborhood gallery and museum listings, along with studios and other artsy places of interest. In addition, sidebars include the hotels and restaurants that are steeped with history artist hangouts, residences, and events of infamy. Also included is an extensive index of paintings, sculptures, and public art by New York City artists; detailed maps for 13 neighborhoods; a Q&A with a curator, gallerist, or artist for each NYC neighborhood; and a museum, gallery, and studio directory."

The Quest for Gold is an edited version of writings by visionary Andrew Fekete - a painter, architect, poet and writer, who died in 1986 from an Aids-related illness. Andrew, flaneur, walked the city; he was a man whose writings, to adapt the words of Baudelaire, serve as a mirror as vast as the crowd itself. This anthology, collated by his brother Peter, comprises key works from Andrew Fekete's opus, and deals with his development as an artist, his visions and his experiment in Jungian alchemy - the intentional creation of visionary experiences to manifest unconscious archetypes to consciousness. The title is taken from an autobiographical novella that Andrew wrote in 1982, with extracts from his diaries also provided. The culmination of the anthology is the poem Punishment for the Transgressors in which Andrew confronts his impending death, thereby illustrating the connection between art and life. The work, which is open to multiple interpretations, is witty and entertaining, dramatic and engaging, full of deep sentiment and self-reflection. We journey with Andrew in his Quest for Gold that occurs against the background of his sexuality and his membership of the gay community. We see into the mind of a man undertaking an experiment in the exploration of what Jung calls the contents of the collective unconscious in an attempt at self-healing and expansion of consciousness. You can find out more about Andrew Fekete at www.andrewfekete.net and see a retroscpective of his work at the Victoria Gallery and Museum, Liverpool until April 2017.