Includes 100 blank pages. Hardbound with gray cloth veneer.

The Birmingham Art Book is a tribute to a unique city whose visionary scientists and inventors made it famous as a manufacturing powerhouse. From heavy metal industry - here is where the first steam trains were built- to heavy metal music - Black Sabbath made their mark here, this is a place with a proud heritage. Its handsome university is the original of the 'Redbrick' universities, founded by a farsighted mayor in 1900 as a civic place of learning, open to all, now with many world famous alumni and staff, 10 of whom have won Nobel prizes. Local artists convey the architectural glory of Victoria Square and the city centre Museum and Art Gallery (which holds a sumptuous collection of Pre-Raphaelite art). In their drawings, they echo the modern vibrancy of buildings such as the iconic Selfridges department store and the REP theatre. Collages and sketches depict a city buzzing with vitality -from the world-renowned Hippodrome theatre, to the shopping centres and legendary nightlife that are national attractions. Quirky nooks like the Jewellery Quarter, the Electric Cinema or the tranquil Botanic gardens hidden so close to the centre are reflected in this lovely book. The green city with 8000 acres of public parks and many miles of canal paths dating from its heyday in the Industrial Revolution is lovingly drawn and painted by its artists. The Birmingham Art Book is where local artists shine a light on the grand and the humdrum with equal affection. Their love for the modern city is evident and their pride in its heritage comes to the fore in this lovely book.

Defining over 400 terms and phrases that have recently entered discourse on the visual arts, this is the first reference book specializing in explaining and applying theoretical terminology in contemporary art. Since the early 1970s, the vocabulary used to discuss visual art has expanded radically, leaving many teachers, students, artists, and critics without the accurate definitions necessary for fruitful discourse on contemporary culture. This glossary not only serves as a dictionary but as a guide to current theory and criticism of visual art and culture. Terms can be accessed alphabetically or thematically; the significant cross referencing makes this an easy dictionary to use.

Many contemporary art terms have been borrowed from other disciplines or are traditionally employed in the visual arts but have been adapted for use in the contemporary art world and have therefore been assigned specific or specialized applications. These loan terms have increased the likelihood for confusion between old and new definitions, so where possible the authors have applied the terms to works of art or some aspect of visual culture. Most art glossaries and dictionaries concentrate primarily on artistic production in the visual arts--movements, styles, and names. As a complement to these types of works, this glossary of theoretical terms is essential for anyone studying contemporary visual arts and visual culture in general.

What is the role of the humanities at the start of 21st century? In the last few decades, the various disciplines of the humanities (history, linguistics, literary studies, art history, media studies) have encountered a broad range of challenges, related to the future of print culture, to shifts in funding strategies, and to the changing contours of culture and society. Several publications have addressed these challenges as well as potential responses on a theoretical level. This coedited volume opts for a different strategy and presents accessible case studies that demonstrate what humanities scholars contribute to concrete and pressing social debates about topics including adoption, dementia, hacking, and conservation. These "engaged" forms of humanities research reveal the continued importance of thinking and rethinking the nature of art, culture, and public life.

What makes a woman 'bad' is commonly linked to certain 'qualities' or behaviours seen as morally or socially corrosive, dirty and disgusting. In Bad Girls, Dirty Bodies, Gemma Commane critically explores the social, sexual and political significance of women who are labelled 'bad', sluts or dirty. Through a variety of case studies drawn from qualitative and original ethnographic research, she argues that 'Bad Girls' disrupt heterosexual normativity and contribute new embodied knowledge. From neo-burlesque, sex-positive and queer performance art, to explicit entertainment and areas of popular culture; Commane situates 'bad' women as sites of power, possibility and success. Through the combination of case studies (Ms T, Empress Stah and RubberDoll, Mouse and Doris La Trine), Gemma Commane offers a challenge to those who think that sexual, slutty, bad, and dirty women are not worth listening to. Significantly, she unpicks the issues generated by women who are complicit in the subjugation, policing and marginalization of 'other' women, both in popular culture and in sites of subcultural resistance.

Soon after 1900 in both North America and Europe the evolution from the tradition of Mediterranean and Gallic architectural styles to modernism began. This phenomenon was due, in part, to American industrial architecture and the work of Frank Lloyd Wright. Wright's building and architectural treatises of 1898-1908, with the additional help of Dutch propaganda on his behalf, significantly influenced European practitioners and theorists. European architecture within and outside of Holland reflects an adaptation of Wright's theories along with the structural determinism of American industrial buildings. With new evidence and fresh analysis culled from Dutch and American archives, personal correspondence, and professional material, this study examines the weight of Wright's works and words and those of the Dutchmen H.P. Berlage, Theo van Doesburg, Jan Wils, J.J.P. Oud, William Dudok, and Hendrik Theodor Wijdeveld.

This new insight on the effects of Wright's architectural theories and designs, coupled with an extensive guide for further research, will attract art and architecture scholars and historians on both sides of the Atlantic and will also be of interest to social historians, artists, and architects. Events and new theories, including the assertion that Hendrik Theodor Wijdeveld was the catalytic source behind Wright's Taliesin Fellowship established in 1932, are presented in clear accessible language. Tied to the text are numerous visual presentations of significant designs and buildings.

Deco dandy contests the supposedly exclusive feminine aspect of the style moderne (art deco) by exploring how alternative, parallel and overlapping experiences of decorative modernism, nationalism, gender and sexuality in the years surrounding World War I converge in the protean figure of the 'deco dandy'. The book suggests a broader view of art deco by claiming a greater place for the male body, masculinity and the dandy in this history than has been given to date. Important and productive moments in the history of the cultural life of Paris presented in the book provide insights into the changing role performed by consumerism, masculinity, design history and national identity. -- .

Falling After 9/11 investigates the connections between violence, trauma, and aesthetics by exploring post 9/11 figures of falling in art and literature. From the perspective of trauma theory, Aimee Pozorski provides close readings of figures of falling in such exemplary American texts as Don DeLillo's novel, Falling Man, Diane Seuss's poem, "Falling Man," Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Frederic Briegbeder's Windows on the World, and Richard Drew's famous photograph of the man falling from the World Trade Center. Falling After 9/11 argues that the apparent failure of these texts to register fully the trauma of the day in fact points to a larger problem in the national tradition: the problem of reference-of how to refer to falling-in the 21st century and beyond.

Throughout the mid-1970s until the early 1990s, video art as vehicles for social, cultural, and political analysis were prominent within global museum based contemporary art exhibitions. For many, video art during this period stood for contemporary art. Yet from the outset, video art's incorporation into art museums has brought about specific problems in relation to its acquisition and exhibition. This book analyses, discusses, and evaluates the problematic nature and form of video art within four major contemporary art museums--the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, the Georges Pompidou National Centre of Art and Culture in Paris, the Tate Gallery in London, and the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) in Sydney. In this book, the author discusses how museum structures were redefined over a twenty-two year period in specific relation to the impetus of video art and contends that analogue video art would be instrumental in the evolution of the contemporary art museum. By addressing some of the problems that analogue video art presented to those museums under discussion, this study penetratingly reveals how video art challenged institutional structures and had demanded more flexible viewing environments from those structures. It first defines the classical museum structure established by the Louvre Museum in Paris during the 19th century and then examines the transformation from this museum structure to the modern model through the initiatives of the New York Metropolitan Museum to MoMA in New York. MoMA was the first major museum to exhibit analogue video art in a concerted fashion, and this would establish a pattern of acquisition and exhibition that became influential for other global institutions to replicate. In this book, MoMA's exhibition and acquisition activities are analysed and contrasted with the Centre Pompidou, the Tate Gallery, and the AGNSW in order to define a lineage of development in relation to video art. Extremely well researched and well written, this book covers an exhaustive, substantive, and relevant range of issues. These issues include video art (its origin, significance, significant movements, institutional challenges, and relationship to television), the establishment of the museum (its patronage and curatorial strategy) from the Louvre to MoMA, the relationship of MoMA to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a comparative analysis of three museums in three countries on three continents, a close examination of video art exhibition, a closer look at three seminal video artists, and, finally, a critical overview of video art and its future exhibition. This unique book also covers an important period in the genesis of video art and its presentation within significant national and global cultural institutions. Those cultural institutions not only influence a meaningful part of the cultural life of four unique countries but also represent the cultural forces emerging in capital cities on three continents. By itself, this sort of geographic and institutional breadth challenges any previous study on the subject. This book successfully provides a historical explanation for the museum/gallery's relationship to video art from its emergence in the gallery to the beginnings of its acceptance as a global art phenomenon. Several prominent video artists are examined in relation to the challenges they would present to the institutionalised framework of the modern art museum and the discursive field surrounding their practice. In addition, the book contains a theoretical discussion of the problems related to video art imagery with the period of High Modernism; it examines the patterns of acquisition and exhibition, and presents an analysis of global exchange between four distinct major contemporary art institutions. The Problematic of Video Art in the Museum, 1968-1990 is an important book for all art history and museum collections.

Ellen Gallagher (b.1965) is one of the most celebrated painters of her generation, coming to prominence in the mid-1990s in the wake of the so-called 'culture wars' and the art world's controversial embrace of identity-politics and multiculturalism. In this in-depth look at her oeuvre, Caoimhin Mac Giolla Leith unpacks the complexities of her richly layered paintings, examining themes such as identity, race, displacement and the ecological environment, which Gallagher has explored throughout her work. The author takes the reader from Gallagher's early years - looking at her formative influences - through her engagement, from the late 1990s on, with the inherited modernist forms of the monochrome and the grid and with the violence and division at the root of modernism itself. Also explored are her phantasmagoric explorations of oceanic life, which draw on the discoveries of natural science, the traumatic history of the Atlantic slave trade and the speculative fictions of Afrofuturism. For anyone interested in contemporary art and the ways particular artists are expanding its borders, in form and content, this is essential reading.

The Avant-Garde in Interwar England addresses modernism's ties to tradition, commerce, nationalism, and spirituality through an analysis of the assimilation of visual modernism in England between 1910 and 1939. During this period, a debate raged across the nation concerning the purpose of art in society. On one side were the aesthetic formalists, led by members of London's Bloomsbury Group, who thought art was autonomous from everyday life. On the other were England's so-called medieval modernists, many of them from the provincial North, who maintained that art had direct social functions and moral consequences. As Michael T. Saler demonstrates in this fascinating volume, the heated exchange between these two camps would ultimately set the terms for how modern art was perceived by the British public.
Histories of English modernism have usually emphasized the seminal role played by the Bloomsbury Group in introducing, celebrating, and defining modernism, but Saler's study instead argues that, during the watershed years between the World Wars, modern art was most often understood in the terms laid out by the medieval modernists. As the name implies, these artists and intellectuals closely associated modernism with the art of the Middle Ages, building on the ideas of John Ruskin, William Morris, and other nineteenth-century romantic medievalists. In their view, modernism was a spiritual, national, and economic movement, a new and different artistic sensibility that was destined to revitalize England's culture as well as its commercial exports when applied to advertising and industrial design.
This book, then, concerns the busy intersection of art, trade, and national identity in the early decades of twentieth-century England. Specifically, it explores the life and work of Frank Pick, managing director of the London Underground, whose famous patronage of modern artists, architects, and designers was guided by a desire to unite nineteenth-century arts and crafts with twentieth-century industry and mass culture. As one of the foremost adherents of medieval modernism, Pick converted London's primary public transportation system into the culminating project of the arts and crafts movement. But how should today's readers regard Pick's achievement? What can we say of the legacy of this visionary patron who sought to transform the whole of sprawling London into a post-impressionist work of art? And was medieval modernism itself a movement of pioneers or dreamers? In its bold engagement with such questions, The Avant-Garde in Interwar England will surely appeal to students of modernism, twentieth-century art, the cultural history of England, and urban history.

Designed to be tough, practical and good value for money, the Rough Guide maps aim to forge a new standard in city maps. Apart from travel information and the city's sites, monuments and attractions, the map shows every shop, restaurant, bar and hotel listed in the Rough Guide travel guide to Cuba, together with their opening times, and, in many cases, phone numbers. The map covers the main area of Cuba on one side and an enlarged downtown city-centre maps on the reverse.

Modernist debates about waste - both aesthetic and economic - often express biases against gender and sexual errancy. The Poetics of Waste looks at writers and artists who resist this ideology and respond by developing an excessive poetics.

In the footsteps of Andre Bazin, this anthology of 15 original essays argues that the photographic origin of twentieth-century cinema is anti-anthropocentric. Well aware that the twentieth century stands out as the only period in history with its own photographic film record for posterity, Angela Dalle Vacche has convened international scholars at The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, and asked them to rethink the history and theory of the cinema as a new model for the museum of the future. By exploring the art historical tropes of face and landscape, and key areas of film studies such as early cinema, Soviet film theory, documentary, the avant-garde and the newly-born genre of the museum film, this collection includes detailed discussions of installation art, and close analyses of media relations which range from dance to painting to performance art. Thanks to the title of Andre Malraux's famous project, Film, Art, New Media: Museum Without Walls? invites readers to reflect on the museum of the future, where twentieth-century cinema will play a pivotal role by interrogating the relation between art and science, technology and nature, from the side of photography in dialogue with digitalization.

Beginning in the late 1970s, a number of visual artists in downtown New York City returned to an exploration of the cinematic across mediums. Vera Dika considers their work within a greater cultural context and probes for a deeper understanding of the practice.