In June 2016, a French policeman was stabbed to death in a Paris suburb. His assailant gained access to the victim's flat, where he murdered the policeman's partner in front of their three-year-old son. While negotiating with members of the special forces, the murderer posted live footage of himself and his victims on Facebook. Acting in the name of the so-called Islamic State, the perpetrator, who would later be shot and killed, single-handedly applied one of the fundamental tenets of modern terrorism: it is not the act of violence itself that counts, but the images of it that are brought into circulation. Once released, nothing and no one can eradicate these images and the visual battle that ensues knows no winners or ceasefire. With the expert eye of an art historian, Charlotte Klonk documents the visual machinery of terrorism from the late nineteenth century to the present day. She shows that the propaganda videos form the IS are nothing new. On the contrary, perpetrators of terror acts have always made use of images to spread their cause through the media - as have their enemy, the state. This is an indispensable book for understanding the background and dynamic of terror today. -- .

This is the first full-scale monograph of the life and work of the remarkable British artist Merlyn Evans (1910-73). Deeply affected by the poverty and violence that he witnessed in Glasgow during the depressed years of the late 1920s and early 1930s, Evans developed a highly personal abstract style, combining plant, crustacean and mechanical forms. His work was fundamentally shaped by his conviction that art should be an engagement with life, reflecting psychological, ethical and political concerns. Surrealism became a major influence, but Evans's subject matter became increasingly social and political, reflecting his growing concern over economic distress at home and political disaster in Europe. Living in South Africa at the end of the 1930s, he remained preoccupied by the European crisis, and his paintings made explicit reference to economic depression, atrocity and war. In London afterWorldWar II, he took up etching and aquatint and embarked on a distinguished printmaking career in parallel to his painting. He was deeply read in psychology, philosophy, politics, mechanics, optics, and the history and techniques of art, as well as in modernist literature and contemporary poetry. All these aspects of his thought found expression in his work as an artist and as a writer and teacher.

Fragmentation of the Photographic Image in the Digital Age challenges orthodoxies of photographic theory and practice. Beyond understanding the image as a static representation of reality, it shows photography as a linchpin of dynamic developments in augmented intelligence, neuroscience, critical theory, and cybernetic cultures. Through essays by leading philosophers, political theorists, software artists, media researchers, curators, and experimental programmers, photography emerges not as a mimetic or a recording device but simultaneously as a new type of critical discipline and a new art form that stands at the crossroads of visual art, contemporary philosophy, and digital technologies.

This richly illustrated book details the wide-ranging construction and urban planning projects launched across Germany after the Nazi Party seized power. Hagen and Ostergren show that it was far more than just an architectural and stylistic enterprise. Instead, it was a series of interrelated programs intended to thoroughly reorganize Germany’s economic, cultural, and political landscapes. The authors trace the specific roles of its component parts—the monumental redevelopment and cleansing of cities; the construction of new civic landscapes for educational, athletic, and leisure pursuits; the improvement of transportation, industrial, and military infrastructures; and the creation of networked landscapes of fear, slave labor, and genocide. Through distinctive examples, the book draws out the ways in which combinations of place, space, and architecture were utilized as a cumulative means of undergirding the regime and its ambitions. The authors consider how these reshaped spaces were actually experienced and perceived by ordinary Germans, and in some cases the world at large, as the regime intentionally built a new Nazi Germany.

Enzo Mari was an inventor of languages, a constructor of grammars - intended as methods or sets of rules -, deeming these instruments necessary to “communicate knowledge with improved quality and efficiency�.It is impossible to define his discipline or his profession: he is an artist, an industrial designer, a graphic designer, an architect, but also a theorist, a pedagogue, an intellectual, possibly a philosopher, certainly a utopian who knew how to programme quiet revolutions which are, even today, often misunderstood when not totally unknown; these are some of the many facets of a complex and revolutionary personality. The root of his design methodology, which characterises the process of all the studies he later conducted, originates in his initial research into the field of visual arts, i.e. the research into the perceptual ambiguity of three-dimensional space that he undertook in the early 1950s, when he was still a scenography student at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts. What characterises Mari’s design process is a “scientific� method made up of codes, theorems, theses, the construction of tools and instruments, tests, the comparison of models and the transcription of results deriving from his observations. This volume intend to return to the public a mnemonic atlas, a mapping system that can be used to explore and understand the complex nuances of the research conducted by Mari. Semantic research and verifications that have resulted in the programming of art, and which constitute the basis of the method that defines a process common to all the research, disciplines and utopias he pursued. Text in English and Italian.

Based on original archival research, Early Cinema, Modernity and Visual Culture: The Imaginary of the Balkans is the first study on early cinema in the region from a transnational and cross-cultural perspective. It investigates how the unique geopolitical positioning of the Balkan space and its multiculturality influenced and shaped visual culture and cinema. Countering Eurocentric modernity paradigms and reframing hierarchical relations between centres and peripheries, this book adopts an alternative methodology for interstitial spaces. By deploying the notion of the haptic, it establishes new connections between moving image artefacts and print media, early film practitioners, the socio-political context and cultural responses to the new visual medium.

Wood Gaylor was a prime mover in the modern art world of New York City and Ogunquit, Maine, from the teens to the thirties, but has not received the attention either his role or his work merits. Wood Gaylor and American Modernism, 1913-1936, accompanying a traveling exhibition organized by the Fleming Museum of Art at the University of Vermont, is the first book-length work focused on this artist's contributions to American modernism in the early twentieth century. Gaylor's paintings, teeming with color and action, depict the spirited gatherings of modern artists and arts promoters. As Gaylor's images document important events in the art world of the 1910s, '20s, and '30s, so too does his technique provide insight into the factors impacting the evolution of a distinctly American modern style. With contributions by Fleming museum curator Andrea P. Rosen, independent art historian Dr. Christine Isabelle Oaklander, and an interview with the artist's son Wynn Gaylor, this ground-breaking catalogue paints a vivid picture of the heady and vibrant post-Armory Show American art world. Illustrated in colour and black & white.

The Stebbins Collection - the private collection of Dr. Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., the esteemed historian of American art and foremost expert on Martin Johnson Heade, and his wife, Susan Cragg Stebbins, successful author and art historian - consists of 70 American paintings, sculpture, and works on paper by 53 artists. Recently donated to The Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art, Florida, this incredible collection includes remarkable works by American masters ranging from Martin Johnson Heade and Thomas Eakins to Fidelia Bridges and John La Farge, well-known artists Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran and little-known figures like Arthur I. Keller and Walter Granville-Smith. Publication in October 2021 will not only highlight the significance of this private collection built over a lifetime by the Stebbinses, but it is also a valuable contribution to the field of 19th and early-20th-century American art, and to the history of collections and collecting.

America is haunted. Ghosts from its violent history-the genocide of Indigenous peoples, slavery, the threat of nuclear annihilation, and traumatic wars-are an inescapable and unsettled part of the nation's heritage. Not merely in the realm of metaphor but present and tangible, urgently calling for contact, these otherworldly visitors have been central to our national identity. Through times of mourning and trauma, artists have been integral to visualizing ghosts, whether national or personal, and in doing so have embraced the uncanny and the inexplicable. This stunning catalog, accompanying the first major exhibition to assess the spectral in American art, explores the numerous ways American artists have made sense of their own experiences of the paranormal and the supernatural, developing a rich visual culture of the intangible. Featuring artists from James McNeill Whistler and Kerry James Marshall to artist/mediums who made images with spirits during seances, this catalog covers more than two hundred years of the supernatural in American art. Here we find works that explore haunting, UFO sightings, and a broad range of experiential responses to other worldly contact.

A fresh perspective on the influential critic, offering new ways of understanding the art of the Harlem Renaissance Alain Locke (1885-1954), leading theorist of the Harlem Renaissance, maintained a lifelong commitment to the visual arts. Offering an in-depth study of Locke's writings and art world interventions, Kobena Mercer focuses on the importance of cross-cultural entanglement. This distinctive approach reveals Locke's vision of modern art as a dynamic space where images and ideas generate new forms under the fluid conditions of diaspora. Positioning the philosopher as an advocate for an Afromodern aesthetic that drew from both formal experiments in Europe and the iconic legacy of the African past, Mercer shows how Aaron Douglas, Lois Mailou Jones, and other New Negro artists acknowledged the diaspora's rupture with the ancestral past as a prelude to the rebirth of identity. In his 1940 picture book, The Negro in Art, Locke also explored the different ways black and white artists approached the black image. Mercer's reading highlights the global mobility of black images as they travel across national and ethnic frontiers. Finally, Mercer examines how Locke's investment in art was shaped by gay male aestheticism. Black male nudes, including works by Richmond Barthe and Carl Van Vechten, thus reveal the significance of queer practices in modernism's cross-cultural genesis. Published in association with the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, Harvard University

Art is produced, circulated, consumed and disseminated within an economic system - it depends on money for its creation, for the livelihood of its makers, and for its distribution. In this sense, art can be understood as an enterprising activity. However, profit-making is rarely the primary goal of artists, and indeed the entanglement of art with enterprise generates significant aesthetic, conceptual, philosophical and ethical challenges for contemporary art practice. Social enterprise has emerged from this complex terrain with the promise of an alternative model of economic organisation in the arts. Grace McQuilten and Anthony White argue that artists can, and have, engaged critically in the commercial market, by way of this model. Art as Enterprise brings a fresh perspective to the debate about the roles of contemporary art in consumer capitalist society.

Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) is best known as a media theorist-many consider him the founder of media studies-but he was also an important theorist of art. Though a near-household name for decades due to magazine interviews and TV specials, McLuhan remains an underappreciated yet fascinating figure in art history. His connections with the art of his own time were largely unexplored, until now. In Distant Early Warning, art historian Alex Kitnick delves into these rich connections and argues both that McLuhan was influenced by art and artists and, more surprisingly, that McLuhan's work directly influenced the art and artists of his time. Kitnick builds the story of McLuhan's entanglement with artists by carefully drawing out the connections among McLuhan, his theories, and the artists themselves. The story is packed with big names: Marcel Duchamp, Niki de Saint Phalle, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Nam June Paik, and others. Kitnick masterfully weaves this history with McLuhan's own words and his provocative ideas about what art is and what artists should do, revealing McLuhan's influence on the avant-garde through the confluence of art and theory. The illuminating result sheds light on new aspects of McLuhan, showing him not just as a theorist, or an influencer, but as a richly multifaceted figure who, among his many other accolades, affected multiple generations of artists and their works. The book finishes with Kitnick overlaying McLuhan's ethos onto the state of contemporary and post-internet art. This final channeling of McLuhan is a swift and beautiful analysis, with a personal touch, of art's recent transgressions and what its future may hold.

In his fourth and final book in an acclaimed series on contemporary art, Irving Sandler, a leading authority on the subject, critiques art and artists of the last 25 years. Sandler discusses major and minor artists and their works, movements, ideas, attitudes, and styles, and places them in the social and cultural context of the period. An essential reference for understanding the art of this period. 8 color and 200 b&w photos.

The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany presents a new interpretation of National Socialism, arguing that art in the Third Reich was not simply an instrument of the regime, but actually became a source of the racist politics upon which its ideology was founded. Through the myth of the "Aryan race," a race pronounced superior because it alone creates culture, Nazism asserted art as the sole raison d'etre of a regime defined by Hitler as the "dictatorship of genius." Michaud shows the important link between the religious nature of Nazi art and the political movement, revealing that in Nazi Germany art was considered to be less a witness of history than a force capable of producing future, the actor capable of accelerating the coming of a reality immanent to art itself.

A Companion to Modern Art presents a series of original essays by international and interdisciplinary authors who offer a comprehensive overview of the origins and evolution of artistic works, movements, approaches, influences, and legacies of Modern Art. * Presents a contemporary debate and dialogue rather than a seamless consensus on Modern Art * Aims for reader accessibility by highlighting a plurality of approaches and voices in the field * Presents Modern Art s foundational philosophic ideas and practices, as well as the complexities of key artists such as Cezanne and Picasso, and those who straddled the modern and contemporary * Looks at the historical reception of Modern Art, in addition to the latest insights of art historians, curators, and critics to artists, educators, and more

This book is the first inter-disciplinary engagement with the work of Maqbool Fida Husain, arguably India's most iconic contemporary artist today, whose life and work are intimately entangled with the career of independent India as a democratic, secular and multi-ethnic nation. For more than half a century, and across thousands of canvases, Husain has painted individuals and objects, events and incidents that offer an astonishing visual chronicle of India through the ages. The 13 articles in this volume - written by distinguished artists, curators, anthropologists, historians, art historians and critics, sociologists and scholars of post-colonial literature and religion - critically examine the artistic statement that Husain has presented on the self, community and nation through his oeuvre. It engages with the controversies that have erupted around and about Husain's work, and situates them in debates around the freedom of the artist versus the sentiments of the community, between 'virtue' and 'obscenity', between an 'elite' of intellectuals and the 'common man', and between a 'work of art' and a 'religious icon'. Correspondingly it considers how India has responded to Husain: with affection, admiration and adulation on the one hand, and hostility and rejection on the other. This book is more relevant than ever before in light of the debates that have arisen over Husain's self-imposed exile for the last few years following a spate of violent attacks on his home and exhibitions in India, and his recent decision to forfeit his Indian citizenship. It will be of interest to those studying art history, sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, and politics, as well as to a wide spectrum of readers interested in contemporary issues of identity and nationhood.

This practical resource will help educators teach about current art and integrate its philosophy and methods into the K-12 classroom. The authors provide a framework that looks at art through the lens of nine themes-everyday life, work, power, earth, space and place, self and others, change and time, inheritance, and visual culture-highlighting the conceptual aspects of art and connecting disparate forms of expression. They also provide guidelines and examples for how to use contemporary art to change the dynamics of a classroom, apply inventive non-linear lenses to topics, broaden and update the art "canon," and spur creative and critical thinking. Young people will find the selected artwork accessible and relevant to their lives, diverse and expansive, probing, serious and funny. Challenging conventional notions of what should be considered art and how it should be created, this book offers a sampling of what is out there to inspire educators and students to explore the limitless world of new art.Book Features: Indicators and lenses that make contemporary art more familiar, accessible, understandable, and useable for teachers. Easy-to-reference descriptions and images from a variety of contemporary artists. Strategies for integrating art thinking across the curriculum. Suggestions to help teachers find contemporary art to fit their curriculum and school settings. Concrete examples of art-based projects from both art and general classrooms. Guidance for developing curriculum, including how to create guiding questions to spur student thinking.

Mysterious and mathematical at once, the magical visual world of Dutch artist M.C. Escher (1898-1972) has captivated scientists and scholars and made its mark on popular culture, inspiring book covers, album art, films, posters, and puzzles. This set puts Escher's tessellated wonders right at your fingertips with 17 easy-to-assemble paper sculptures. Folding along the score lines, you can transform the artist's richly geometric designs into three-dimensional polyhedra with forming and reforming patterns, including genius arrangements of flowers, butterflies, lizards, and seashells. The book includes a review of the geometric principles and artistic invention underlying Escher's optical marvels as well as concise instructions.

Between the 1890s and the 1930s, movie going became an established feature of everyday life across America. Movies constituted an enormous visual data bank and changed the way artist and public alike interpreted images. This book explores modern painting as a response to, and an appropriation of, the aesthetic possibilities pried open by cinema from its invention until the outbreak of World War II, when both the art world and the film industry changed substantially. Artists were watching movies, filmmakers studied fine arts; the membrane between media was porous, allowing for fluid exchange. Each chapter focuses on a suite of films and paintings, broken down into facets and then reassembled to elucidate the distinctive art-film nexus at successive historic moments.

Honorable Mention, 2021 Latinx Studies Section Outstanding Book Award, given by the Latin American Studies Association Winner, 2020 Latino Book Awards in the LGBTQ+ Themed Section Finalist, 2019 Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Studies Critically reimagines Chicanx art, unmasking its queer afterlife Emboldened by the boom in art, fashion, music, and retail culture in 1980s Los Angeles, the iconoclasts of queer Aztlán—as Robb Hernández terms the group of artists who emerged from East LA, Orange County, and other parts of Southern California during this period—developed a new vernacular with which to read the city in bloom. Tracing this important but understudied body of work, Archiving an Epidemic catalogs a queer retelling of the Chicana and Chicano art movement, from its origins in the 1960s, to the AIDS crisis and the destruction it wrought in the 1980s, and onto the remnants and legacies of these artists in the current moment. Hernández offers a vocabulary for this multi-modal avant-garde—one that contests the heteromasculinity and ocular surveillance visited upon it by the larger Chicanx community, as well as the formally straight conditions of traditional archive-building, museum institutions, and the art world writ large. With a focus on works by Mundo Meza (1955–85), Teddy Sandoval (1949–1995), and Joey Terrill (1955– ), and with appearances by Laura Aguilar, David Hockney, Robert Mapplethorpe, and even Eddie Murphy, Archiving an Epidemic composes a complex picture of queer Chicanx avant-gardisms. With over sixty images—many of which are published here for the first time—Hernández’s work excavates this archive to question not what Chicanx art is, but what it could have been.

The beginning of the 20th century saw literary scholars from Russia positing a new definition for the nature of literature. Within the framework of Russian Formalism, the term 'literariness' was coined. The driving force behind this theoretical inquiry was the desire to identify literature-and art in general-as a way of revitalizing human perception, which had been numbed by the automatization of everyday life. The transformative power of 'literariness' is made manifest in many media artworks by renowned artists such as Chantal Akerman, Mona Hatoum, Gary Hill, Jenny Holzer, William Kentridge, Nalini Malani, Bruce Nauman, Martha Rosler, and Lawrence Weiner. The authors use literariness as a tool to analyze the aesthetics of spoken or written language within experimental film, video performance, moving image installations, and other media-based art forms. This volume uses as its foundation the Russian Formalist school of literary theory, with the goal of extending these theories to include contemporary concepts in film and media studies, such as Neoformalism, intermediality, remediation, and postdrama.

During the prosperous, forward-thinking era after the Second World War, a growing number of men, women, and children across the United States were wearing fashions that evoked the Old West. Westernwear: Postwar American Fashion and Culture examines why a sartorial style with origins in 19th-century agrarian traditions continued to be worn at a time when American culture sought balance between technocratic confidence in science and technology on one side, and fear and anxiety over global annihilation on the other. By analysing well-known and rarely considered western manufacturers, Westernwear revises the common perception that fashionable innovation came from the East coast and places western youth cultures squarely back in the picture. The book connects the history of American working class dress with broader fashionable trends and discusses how and why Native American designs and representations of Native American people were incorporated broadly and inconsistently into the western visual vocabulary. Setting westernwear firmly in context, Sonya Abrego addresses the incorporation of this iconic style into postwar wardrobes and popular culture, and charts the evolution of westernwear into a modern fashion phenomenon.