Environmental Sound Artists: In Their Own Words is an incisive and imaginative look at the international environmental sound art movement, which emerged in the late 1960s. The term environmental sound art is generally applied to the work of sound artists who incorporate processes in which the artist actively engages with the environment. While the field of environmental sound art is diverse and includes a variety of approaches, the art form diverges from traditional contemporary music by the conscious and strategic integration of environmental impulses and natural processes. This book presents a current perspective on the environmental sound art movement through a collection of personal writings by important environmental sound artists. Dismayed by the limitations and gradual breakdown of contemporary compositional strategies, environmental sound artists have sought alternate venues, genres, technologies, and delivery methods for their creative expression. Environmental sound art is especially relevant because it addresses political, social, economic, scientific, and aesthetic issues. As a result, it has attracted the participation of artists internationally. Awareness and concern for the environment has connected and unified artists across the globe and has achieved a solidarity and clarity of purpose that is singularly unique and optimistic. The environmental sound art movement is borderless and thriving.

In this dynamic collection a team of experts map the development of Live Art culturally, thematically and historically. Supported with examples from around the world, the text engages with a number of key practices, asking what these practices do and how they can be contextualized and understood.

In this pathbreaking study, the historical relationship between nineteenth-century spiritualism and twentieth-century surrealism is the basis for a general examination of conflicting movements in literature, art, philosophy, science, and other areas of social life. Because spiritualism delved into the world beyond humanity and surrealism was founded on the world within, the two provide a provocative frame for examining the struggles within modern culture. Cottom argues that we must conceive of interpretation in terms of urgency, desire, fierce contention, and impromptu deviation if we want to understand how things come to bear meaning for us. He demonstrates that even when Victorians holding seances and surrealists composing manifestoes were most foolish, they had much that was valuable to say about the life (and death) of reason.

Over the past two decades contemporary African art has taken its rightful place on the world stage. Today, African artists work outside the confines of limiting categories and outdated perceptions; they produce art that is as much a reflection of Africa's tumultuous past as it is a vision of its boundless future. African Art Now is an expansive overview featuring some of the most interesting and innovative artists working today. Far-reaching in its scope, this book celebrates the diversity and dynamism of the contemporary African art scene across the continent today. Featuring the work of Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Michael Armitage, Amoako Boafo, Cassi Namoda, Cinga Samson, Zina Saro-Wiwa and many more.

Explore the Dark Arts of the Harry Potter films, with more than a dozen collectible stickers, cards, patches, prints, and more! Open the sturdy portfolio to discover the secrets behind Voldemort, Death Eaters, Horcruxes, and more in this exclusive collection of over a dozen authentic prop facsimiles, artifacts, stickers, and stationery inspired by the Dark Arts. Filled with facts and photos, fans will learn about the dark side of the Wizarding World, relive moments from the films, and delve into the behind-the-scenes magic that brought Harry Potter to life on the big screen. AUTHENTIC COLLECTIBLES: More than a dozen exclusive, official Harry Potter collectibles inspired by the Dark Arts including a 16-page journal, stickers, and more! BEHIND-THE-SCENES MOVIE FACTS: Dark Arts-related facts, trivia, and stories from the set of the Harry Potter films. STUNNING ART AND IMAGES: Photos from the films and gorgeous illustrations bring the world of the Dark Arts to life! PERFECT GIFT: An ideal and unusual gift for the Harry Potter fan. COLLECT THEM ALL: Harry Potter: Dark Arts joins the of Artifacts of the Wizarding World series that includes Harry Potter: Wand Magic, Harry Potter: Travel Magic, Harry Potter: Gryffindor Magic, Harry Potter: Slytherin Magic, Harry Potter: Hufflepuff Magic and Harry Potter: Ravenclaw Magic

For two centuries, Gesamtkunstwerk-the ideal of the "total work of art"-has exerted a powerful influence over artistic discourse and practice, spurring new forms of collaboration and provoking debates over the political instrumentalization of art. Despite its popular conflation with the work of Richard Wagner, Gesamtkunstwerk's lineage and legacies extend well beyond German Romanticism, as this wide-ranging collection demonstrates. In eleven compact chapters, scholars from a variety of disciplines trace the idea's evolution in German-speaking Europe, from its foundations in the early nineteenth century to its manifold articulations and reimaginings in the twentieth century and beyond, providing an uncommonly broad perspective on a distinctly modern cultural form.

In a speech given in Prague in 1935, Andre Breton asked, 'Is there, properly speaking, a left-wing art capable of defending itself?'. But despite his conviction that surrealism did indeed offer such an art, Breton always struggled to make a theoretical connection between the surrealists' commitment to the cause of revolutionary socialism and the form that surrealist art and literature took. Obscure Objects of Desire explores ways in which such a connection might be drawn, addressing the possibility of surrealist works as political in themselves and drawing on ways in which they have been considered as such by Marxists such as Benjamin and Adorno and by recent cultural critics. Encompassing Breton's and Aragon's textual accounts of the object, as well as paintings and the various kinds of objet surrealiste produced from the end of the 1920s, Malt mobilises the concept of the fetish in order to consider such works as meeting points of surrealism's psychoanalytic and revolutionary preoccupations. Reading surrealist works of art and literature as political is by no means the same thing as knowing the surrealist movement to have been a politically motivated one. The revolutionary character of the surrealist work itself, in isolation from the polemical positions taken up by Breton and others on its behalf, is not always evident; indeed, the works themselves often seem to express a rather different set of concerns. As well as offering a new perspective on familiar works such as the paintings of Salvador Dali, and relatively neglected ones like Breton's poemes-objets, this book recuperates the gap between theory and practice as a productive space in which it is possible to recontextualize surrealist practice as an engagement with political questions on its own terms.

Visual Culture in Shanghai, 1850s-1930s is a study of formal and informal meanings of Haipai ("Shanghai School" or "Shanghai Style"), as seen through the paintings of the Shanghai school as well as other media of visual representation. The book provides us a point of entry into the nexus of relationships that structured the encounter between China and the West as experienced by the treaty-port Chinese in their everyday life. Exploring such relationships gives us a better sense of the ultimate significance of Shanghai's rise as China's dominant metropolitan center. This book will appeal not only to art historians, but also to students of history, gender studies, women's studies, and culture studies who are interested in modern China as well as questions of art patronage, nationalism, colonialism, visual culture, and representation of women. "This book constitutes a significant contribution to the literature about a period and a city that were pivotal to the emergence of modern China." -Richard K. Kent, Franklin & Marshall College. "This book navigates the complexity of Chinese modernity.. It bridges, conceptually and visually, the China of the past to present-day Shanghai, the symbol of the urban economy of 21st-century China." -Chao-Hui Jenny Liu, New York University. "Shanghai was the rising and dynamic metropolis, where many aspects of modernity were embraced with enthusiasm. Pictorial art was no longer the domain of the elite, but professionalization, commercialization, popularization, and Westernization contributed to the dissemination of images to a larger and diverse audience." -Minna Torma, University of Helsinki.

Deborah Solomon's biography sets Jackson Pollock in his time and portrays him as a shy, often withdrawn person, full of insecurities and self-doubts, and frequently unable to express himself about his art or its meaning. Solomon interviewed two hundred people who knew Pollock and his work and she has drawn extensively on Pollock's own writings and other personal papers. She examines the artist's relationships with his family; his wife and fellow artist Lee Krasner; art patron Peggy Guggenheim; the painters Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, and many more.

In this collection of essays, a range of scholars from different disciplines look through the prism of technology at the much-debated notion of cultural memory, analyzing how the past is shaped or unsettled by cultural texts including visual art, literature, cinema, photographs and souvenirs.

Memory Art in the Contemporary World deals with the ever-expanding field of transnational memory art, which has emerged from a political need to come to terms with traumatic historical pasts, from the Holocaust to apartheid, colonialism, state terror and civil war. The book focuses on the work of several contemporary artists from beyond the Northern Transatlantic, including William Kentridge, Vivan Sundaram, Doris Salcedo, Nalini Malani and Guillermo Kuitca, all of whom reflect on historical situations specific to their own countries but in work which has been shown to have a transnational reach. Andreas Huyssen considers their dual investment in memories of state violence and memories of modernism as central to the affective power of their work. This thought-provoking and highly relevant book reflects on the various forms and critical potential of memory art in a contemporary world which both obsesses about the past, in the building of monuments and museums and an emphasis on retro and nostalgia in popular culture, and simultaneously fosters historical amnesia in increasingly flattened notions of temporality encouraged by the internet and social media.

In Hitler in the Movies: Finding Der Fuhrer on Film, a Shakespearean and a sociologist explore the fascination our popular culture has with Adolf Hitler. What made him ... Hitler? Do our explanations tell us more about the perceiver than the actual historical figure? We ask such question by viewing the Hitler character in the movies. How have directors, actors, film critics, and audiences accounted for this monster in a medium that reflects public tastes and opinions? The book first looks at comedic films, such as Chaplain's The Great Dictator or Ernst Lubitsch's To Be or Not to Be (1942), along with the Mel Brooks's 1983 version. Then, there is the Hitler of fantasy, from trash films like The Saved Hitler's Brain to a serious work like The Boys from Brazil where Hitler is cloned. Psychological portraits include Anthony Hopkins's The Bunker, the surreal The Empty Mirror, and Max, a portrait of Hitler in his days in Vienna as a would-be artist. Documentaries and docudramas range from Leni Reinfenstahl's iconic The Triumph of the Will or The Hidden Fuhrer, to the controversial Hitler: A Film from Germany and Quentin Tarantino's fanciful Inglourious Basterds. Hitler in the Movies also considers the ways Der Fuhrer remains today, as a ghostly presence, if not an actual character. Why is he still with us in everything from political smears to video games to merchandise? In trying to explain this and the man himself, what might we learn about ourselves and our society?

In this remarkable, inspiring collection of essays, acclaimed writer and critic Olivia Laing makes a brilliant case for why art matters, especially in the turbulent political weather of the twenty-first century. Funny Weather brings together a career's worth of Laing's writing about art and culture, examining their role in our political and emotional lives. She profiles Jean-Michel Basquiat and Georgia O'Keeffe, reads Maggie Nelson and Sally Rooney, writes love letters to David Bowie and Freddie Mercury, and explores loneliness and technology, women and alcohol, sex and the body. With characteristic originality and compassion, she celebrates art as a force of resistance and repair, an antidote to a frightening political time. We're often told that art can't change anything. Laing argues that it can. Art changes how we see the world. It makes plain inequalities and it offers fertile new ways of living.

In Artistic Reconfigurations of Rome Kaspar Thormod examines how visions of Rome manifest themselves in artworks produced by international artists who have stayed at the city's foreign academies. Structured as an alternative guide to Rome, the book represents an interdisciplinary approach to creating a dynamic visual history that brings into view facets of the city's diverse contemporary character. Thormod demonstrates that when artists successfully reconfigure Rome they provide us with visions that, being anchored in a present, undermine the connotations of permanence and immovability that cling to the 'Eternal City' epithet. Looking at the work of these artists, the reader is invited to engage critically with the question: what is Rome today? - or perhaps better: what can Rome be?

A new understanding of Francis Bacon’s art and motivations.

The second in a series of books that seeks to illuminate Francis Bacon’s art and motivations, and to open up fresh and stimulating ways of understanding his paintings.

Francis Bacon is one of the most important artists of the 20th century. His works continue to puzzle and unnerve viewers, raising complex questions about their meaning. Over recent decades, two theoretical approaches to Bacon’s work have come to hold sway: firstly, that Bacon is an existentialist painter, depicting an absurd and godless world; and secondly, that he is an anti-representational painter, whose primary aim is to bring his work directly onto the spectator’s ‘nervous system’.

Francis Bacon: Painting, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis brings together some of today’s leading philosophers and psychoanalytic critics to go beyond established readings of Bacon and to open up radically new ways of thinking about his art. The essays bring Bacon into dialogue with figures such as Aristotle, Hegel, Freud, Lacan, Adorno and Heidegger, as well as situating his work in the broader contexts of modernism and modernity. The result is a timely and thought-provoking collection that will be essential reading for anyone interested in Bacon, modern art and contemporary aesthetics.

Still Modernism offers a critique of the modernist imperative to embrace motion, speed, and mobility. In the context of the rise of kinetic technologies and the invention of motion pictures, it claims that stillness is nonetheless an essential tactic of modernist innovation. More specifically, the book looks at the ways in which photographic stillness emerges as a counterpoint to motion and to film, asserting its own clear visibility against the blur of kinesis. Photographic stillness becomes a means to resist the ephemerality of motion and to get at and articulate something real or essential by way of its fixed limits. Combining art history, film studies and literary studies, Louise Hornby reveals how photographers, filmmakers, and writers, even at their most kinetic, did not surrender attention to points of stillness. Rather, the still image, understood through photography, establishes itself as a mode of resistance and provides a formal response to various modernist efforts to see better, to attend more closely, and to remove the fetters of subjectivity and experience. Still Modernism brings together a series of canonical texts, films and photographs, the selection of which reinforces the central claim that stillness does not lurk at the margins of modernism, but was constitutive of its very foundations. In a series of comparisons drawing from literary and visual objects, Hornby argues that still photography allows film to access its own diffuse images of motion; photography's duplicative form provides a serial structure for modernist efforts to represent the face; its iterative structure articulates the jerky rhythms of experimental narrative as perambulation; and its processes of development allow for the world to emerge independent of the human observer. Casting new light on the relationship between photography and film, Hornby situates the struggle between the still and the kinetic at the center of modernist culture.

Michael Allred stands out for his blend of spiritual and philosophical approaches with an art style reminiscent of 1960s era superhero comics, which creates a mixture of both postmodernism and nostalgia. His childhood came during an era where pop art and camp embraced elements of kitsch and pastiche and introduced them into the lexicon of popular culture. Allred's use of both in his work as a cartoonist on his signature comic book Madman in the early 1990s offset the veiled autobiography of his own spiritual journey through Mormonism and struggles with existentialism. Thematically, Allred's work deals heavily with the afterlife as his creations struggle with the grander questions--whether his modern Frankenstein hero Madman, cosmic rock 'n' roller Red Rocket 7, the undead heroine of iZombie (co-created with writer Chris Roberson), or the cast of superhero team book The Atomics. Allred also enjoys a position in the creator-driven generation that informs the current batch of independent cartoonists and has experienced his own brush with a major Hollywood studio's aborted film adaptation of Madman. Allred's other brushes with Hollywood include an independent adaptation of his comic book The G-Men from Hell, an appearance as himself in Kevin Smith's romantic comedy Chasing Amy (where he provided illustrations for a fictitious comic book), the television adaptation of iZombie, and an ongoing relationship with director Robert Rodriguez on a future Madman film. Michael Allred: Conversations features several interviews with the cartoonist from the early days of Madman's success through to his current mainstream work for Marvel Comics. To read them is to not only witness the ever-changing state of the comic book industry, but also to document Allred's growth as a creative genius.

Mary Fedden (1915-2012) is one of Britain's most popular artists. The focus of this acclaimed book, newly available in paperback in celebration of her life's achievement, is the artist's creative process in various different media - oil, gouache, pencil and collage.While Fedden is often considered almost exclusively a still-life painter, still life was far from being her only preoccupation, as this book shows. Fantasy and imagination always also played a strong part, as is particularly evident in her small gouaches. A quietly surreal, enigmatic streak runs through much of her work.Fedden's collages are a witty and affectionate homage to the work of her husband, Julian Trevelyan. They lived, worked and travelled together from 1949 to 1988. The book re-emphasises her debt to him, but also her independence, even during their early life together when he stimulated her move into Modernism. In an engaging text, which draws on numerous conversations with the artist during her final years, Christopher Andreae considers why Fedden has always had such a popular following, looks at the English quality of her work, and talks about the commercialisation of her art and her attitudes to the art market. Fedden is shown to be an original, serious and prolific artist, a draftsman of unusual sensitivity and prowess, and a colourist of power and subtlety.Profusely illustrated with works from private and public collections, this is a book for Mary Fedden's existing devotees as well as newcomers to her work.