Joseph Cornell is well known for the oneiric quality of his art and films. Many have tried, often in vain, to put into words the strange power of his boxes--toy-like constructions whose playfulness and humor are anchored in a profound melancholy and loneliness. "Slot machines of visions," said Octavio Paz. Cornell himself is said to have enjoyed children's responses to his work; perhaps because nothing prepares one better for viewing a Cornell box than having an unbiased mind. Catherine Corman has combed through the voluminous diaries that Cornell kept throughout his life, now in the care of the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art, in search of the artist's own dreams. What she found are brief flashes of images, and short, enigmatic narratives of illumination--the verbal equivalent of Cornell boxes. In 1993, Mary Ann Caws edited a large portion of Cornell's diaries for publication by Thames & Hudson, an invaluable sourcebook for Cornell studies. This new, shorter volume is a poetic addition to that literature, equally indispensible to those interested in Cornell as it contains previously unpublished writings, but also because it is as intriguing and mysterious to the uninitiated as the magical boxes themselves.

At first glance, there may appear to be more to separate Michelangelo (1475-1564) and Bill Viola (b. 1951) than to unite them: one, the great master of the Italian Renaissance; the other, the creator of state-of-the-art immersive sound and video installations. And yet, when Martin Clayton showed Viola Her Majesty The Queen's unsurpassed collection of Michelangelo drawings at Windsor in 2006, parallels began to emerge. This book presents a new perspective on both artists' works. Stills and sequences from ten key video pieces by Viola are reproduced alongside fourteen of Michelangelo's presentation drawings, as well as the Taddei Tondo, the only Michelangelo marble sculpture in the UK and a treasure of the Royal Academy's collection. Texts by Martin Clayton examine how existential concerns - the preoccupation of many Renaissance artists, not least Michelangelo - are explored in Viola's often profoundly moving video installations, while Kira Perov provides insight into Viola's working processes.

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.

Delightful, oft-reprinted guide to the foliate heads so common in medieval sculpture. This was the first-ever monograph dedicated to the Green Man. The Green Man, the image of the foliate head or the head of a man sprouting leaves, is probably the most common of all motifs in medieval sculpture. Nevertheless, the significance of the image lay largely unregarded until KathleenBasford published this book - the first monograph of the Green Man in any language -and thereby earned the lasting gratitude of scholars in many fields, from art history and folklore to current environmental studies. This book has opened up new avenues of research, not only into medieval man's understanding of nature, and into conceptions of death, rebirth and resurrection in the middle ages, but also into our concern today with ecology and our relationship with the green world. It is therefore a work of living scholarship and its publication in paperback will be greatly and justly welcomed.

Surveying some 20 years of Swiss video art, this book includes works by Alexander Hahn, Klara Kuchta, Eric Lanz, Jean Otth, Pipilotti Rist, Alex Silber and Hannes Vogel, it reviews discussion surrounding the exhibiting of video art and the problems associated with long-term conservation.

A fresh approach to the construction of "Anglo-Saxon England" and its depiction in art and writing. This book explores the ways in which early medieval England was envisioned as an ideal, a placeless, and a conflicted geography in works of art and literature from the eighth to the eleventh century and in their modern scholarly and popular afterlives. It suggests that what came to be called "Anglo-Saxon England" has always been an imaginary place, an empty space into which ideas of what England was, or should have been, or should be, have been inserted from the arrival of peoples from the Continent in the fifth and sixth centuries to the arrival of the self-named "alt-right" in the twenty-first. It argues that the political and ideological violence that was a part of the origins of England as a place and the English as a people has never been fully acknowledged; instead, the island was reimagined as a chosen land home to a chosen people, the gens Anglorum. Unacknowledged violence, however, continued to haunt English history and culture. Through her examination here of the writings of Bede and King Alfred, the Franks Casket and the illuminated Wonders of the East, and the texts collected together to form the Beowulf manuscript, the author shows how this continues to haunt "Anglo-Saxon Studies" as a discipline and Anglo-Saxonism as an ideology, from the antiquarian studies of the sixteenth century through to the nationalistic and racist violence of today.

Engraved shell-cases, bullet-crucifixes, letter openers and cigarette lighters made of shrapnel and cartridges, miniature aeroplanes and tanks, talismanic jewellery, embroidery, objects carved from stone, bone and wood - all of these things are trench art, the misleading name given to the dazzling array of objects made from the waste of war, in particular the Great War of 1914-1918 and the inter-war years. And they are the subject of Nicholas Saunders's pioneering study which is now republished in a revised edition in paperback. He reveals the lost world of trench art, for every piece relates to the story of the momentous experience of its maker - whether front-line soldier, prisoner of war, or civilian refugee. The objects resonate with the alternating terror and boredom of war, and those created by the prisoners symbolize their struggle for survival in the camps. Many of these items were poignant souvenirs bought by battlefield pilgrims between 1919 and 1939 and kept brightly polished on mantelpieces, often for a lifetime. Nicholas Saunders investigates their origins and how they were made, exploring their personal meaning and cultural significance. He also offers an important categorization of types which will be a useful guide for collectors.

Despite at times being dismissed as tourist "kitsch, " Tesuque's popular rain god figurines have been continuously produced for more than 120 years, making them the longest-lasting figurative art tradition in the Southwest. What began in the 1880s as souvenirs, emerged decades later as an innovative traditional art form. Featuring more than 400 figures from 74 museums, this book traces the history of rain god makers past and present. Author Duane Anderson, director of the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture (Museum of New Mexico) and an anthropologist, discusses how the figures emerged from the shadow of tourist art, to be recognized as traditional art and sought after by collectors and museums, dozens of which are reproduced here.

Clay figures were part of Pueblo ceremonial life before the Spanish Conquest, and rain gods reflect design motifs long seen in polychrome pottery of the Rio Grande -- just two of the many dimensions explored in this book.

Explores expressionlessness, inscrutability, and emotional withholding in Black cultural production Arguing that inexpression is a gesture that acquires distinctive meanings in concert with blackness, Deadpan tracks instances and meanings of deadpan—a vaudeville term meaning “dead face�—across literature, theater, visual and performance art, and the performance of self in everyday life. Tina Post reveals that the performance of purposeful withholding is a critical tool in the work of black culture makers, intervening in the persistent framing of African American aesthetics as colorful, loud, humorous, and excessive. Beginning with the expressionless faces of mid-twentieth-century documentary photography and proceeding to early twenty-first-century drama, this project examines performances of blackness’s deadpan aesthetic within and beyond black embodiments, including Young Jean Lee’s The Shipment and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Neighbors, as well as Buster Keaton’s signature character and Steve McQueen’s restitution of the former’s legacy within the continuum of Black cultural production. Through this varied archive, Post reveals how deadpan aesthetics function in and between opacity and fugitivity, minimalism and saturation, excess and insensibility.

Auguste Rodin, the most famous and influential sculptor of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is also widely considered to be the successor to Michelangelo, whose genius was a lifelong inspiration to him. Though the astonishingly lifelike quality of his sculpture was in defiance of current academic conventions, Rodin was spared the prolonged and bitter hostility meted out to the Impressionists who were his contemporaries, and in later life he became a famous and widely respected figure.

Bernard Champigneulle discusses Rodin's great significance as an innovator in sculpture. For Rodin created an entirely new form -- the detail considered as finished work -- and in doing so exercised a lasting influence on future sculptors, who were profoundly affected by his emotional expressiveness, his power of characterization, and his subtle modeling. This authoritative monograph combines a searching reappraisal of Rodin's achievement with revealing account of his personality and his troubled private life.

In 2018 the National Portrait Gallery, the National Gallery and the Royal Academy of Arts will host major exhibitions of the work of Tacita Dean. Each will provide a different encounter with her art. This book brings together new and existing works from all three exhibitions - LANDSCAPE, PORTRAIT, STILL LIFE - with texts offering a unique insight into Dean's work by leading writers including Alexandra Harris, Alan Hollinghurst and Ali Smith. Published at a particularly prolific period for Dean, this book provides a new and authoritative view of a hugely influential artist who has been at the forefront of British art for over twenty years. The volume is published with three different covers.

Have you ever watched Douglas Gordon cook? Do you know Harun Farocki’s favourite dal? Would you like to nibble straight from the pot with Keren Cytter or recreate Agnieszka Polska’s pirogi with trumpets of death? Cookbooks are a dime a dozen. And there’s even a certain tradition of artists’ cookbooks. But there is only the one Videoart at Midnight Artists’ Cookbook: 80 of the most renown video artists of our time reveal their favourite recipes. Some simple, others elaborate, yet all to be recreated. And the best thing about this book is that each and every single recipe tells its own personal story. Artists Monira Al Qadiri, Ulf Aminde, Julieta Aranda, Marc Aschenbrenner, Ed Atkins, Yael Bartana, Lucy Beech, Bigert & Bergström, John Bock, Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz, Erik Bünger, Martin Brand, Ulu Braun, Klaus vom Bruch, Filipa César, Creischer & Siekmann, Keren Cytter, Chto Delat, Christoph Draeger, Antje Engelmann, Shahram Entekhabi, Köken Ergun, Theo Eshetu, Simon Faithfull, Christian Falsnaes, Harun Farocki, Omer Fast, Fischer & el Sani, Dani Gal, Delia Gonzalez, Douglas Gordon, Andy Graydon, Assaf Gruber, Mathilde ter Heijne, Isabell Heimerdinger, Benjamin Heisenberg, Kerstin Honeit, Christian Jankowski, Anja Kirschner, Knut Klaßen, Korpys/Löffler, Zhenhua Li, Joep van Liefland, Melissa Logan, Dafna Maimon, Antje Majewski, Melanie Manchot, Lynne Marsh, Bjørn Melhus, Almagul Menlibayeva, Ari Benjamin Meyers, Eléonore de Montesquiou, Matthias Müller, Bettina Nürnberg & Dirk Peuker, Marcel Odenbach, Stefan Panhans, Mario Pfeifer, Agnieszka Polska, Ulrich Polster, Mario Rizzi, Julian Rosefeldt, Willem de Rooij, Safy Sniper, Anri Sala, Erik Schmidt, Sandra Schäfer, Amie Siegel, Pola Sieverding, Martin Skauen, Jan-Peter E.R. Sonntag, Vibeke Tandberg, Rebecca Ann Tess, Guido van der Werve, Gernot Wieland, Ming Wong, Ina Wudtke, Shingo Yoshida, Katarina Zdjelar, Stefan Zeyen, Tobias Zielony

A retrospective monograph of Alistair MacLennan’s performance art practice, its influence on the Belfast art scene, and its relationships with wider art histories. This new book is the most comprehensive and complete legacy monograph about Alastair MacLennan’s extensive performance practice Alastair MacLennan is emeritus professor of fine art, School of Art and Design, Ulster University in Belfast. He is one of Britain’s major practitioners in live art, and travels extensively in Eastern and Western Europe, also America and Canada, presenting ‘Actuations’ (his term for performance/installations).  MacLennan is a founding member of Belfast's Art and Research Exchange, of Belfast's Bbeyond performance collective and is a member of the performance art entity Black Market International. He has represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale (1997) and is an honorary associate of the National Review of Live Art, Glasgow, Scotland. There is a wide variety of approach in the essays, ranging from descriptive to interpretive. Some set the work in historical context and others provide pertinent biography. This variety is appropriate – and perhaps even necessary – in looking at the work of a living artist whose work is particularly complex. The selection of essays presents a complex body of work in an understandable way, with each writer allowed to address the art in their own terms. Placing the work in historical context is important but presenting MacLennan as an influential teacher is also important. Includes a significant contribution from Adrian Heathfield (professor of performance and visual culture at Roehampton, UK) who has written an extended essay on MacLennan’s oeuvre, focusing on its use of materials and its creation of sculptural environments. Discussing the artist’s deployment of slow-time action and contemplative space, Heathfield sees MacLennan’s work as activating sustained contact with the elemental and locates MacLennan’s work as a significant intervention in performance art history globally and discusses the politics of its engagement with local history, violence, social conflict and memory. The primary readership will be academics, researchers and scholars working in performance art and contemporary art in general. Also valuable to students in performance art, visual arts and related practices. Of relevance to academics and artists in the interrelated fields of performance art, art and philosophy, critical theory, conflict studies and Zen philosophy.

In Brave Birds, cut-paper artist and writer Maude White presents an entirely new collection of sixty-five stunning cut-paper birds. As a source of inspiration, each bird is paired with an original message of kindness and strength associated with its particular traits to encourage bravery and perseverance. Inside, you'll find birds for experiencing Joy, Creativity, Patience, Kindness, Resilience, Communication, Strength, Awareness, Action, and Transformation, and each composition, beautifully photographed by Laura Glazer, reflects thousands of intricate cuts, lending an astounding level of texture to these delicate and ethereal creatures. Appealing to any bird lover or collector of bird art, Brave Birds is a beautiful resource for those wishing to practice a life of kindness and empathy.

Once upon a time – the 1980s – in a galaxy not really all that far away – New York – Michael Gingold started a collection of newspaper advertisements for the science fiction, fantasy, and horror releases that stoked his passion as a genre fan. Eventually, he would grow up to become editor-in-chief of the horror magazine Fangoria, plus a writer for numerous other genre publications, a screenwriter, respected author, and all-around expert for films frightful and fanstastical. As the years went by, Michael held on to this collection of weird and wonderful art, eventually publishing the best-selling, horror-themed Ad Nauseam: Newsprint Nightmares from the 1980s and its sequel, Ad Nauseam II: Newsprint Nightmares from the 1990s and 2000s. And now he presents Ad Astra: 20 Years of Newspaper Ads for Sci-Fi & Fantasy Films, a year-by-year look at the movies that shaped many a childhood in the '80s and '90s. Inside this 270-page book, you'll find Star Trek to Starship Troopers, The Dark Crystal to Dark City, Blade Runner to The Running Man, RoboCop to Robot Jox, The Empire Strikes Back to Back to the Future, and many, many more. See alternate artwork for your favorite films, learn the fascinating behind-the-scenes stories of their marketing campaigns, and read the most entertaining and unexpected quotes from reviewers at the time all carefully curated by Michael. So throw on your jetpack as we travel back in time to when print was king and movie marketing was an art form for the ages! Also available: Ad Nauseam: Newsprint Nightmares from the '70s and '80s and Ad Nauseam II: Newsprint Nightmares from the 1990s and 2000s.

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.

Rock Songs starts as a walk of a few miles between the valley of the river Tywi/Towy and the heights of Y Mynydd Du/Black Mountain in Wales. It takes millions of years, meeting along the way the rocks and water that have formed the land, together with the trees, red kites and otters who pass through. Humans crowd in as well – saints, drovers, Romans, bikers and tourists. The great zen monk, D�gen, is also walking and learns that mountains themselves walk, if you know how to look. Rock Songs began as a one-man movement performance of a river by Nick Sales and has become a book of poetry, reflection, ecology and zen reflection. It's illustrated with extensive photography by Steve Hopkins and beautifully designed by Christopher Binding.

For nearly seven decades the ebullient art of Joan Miro (1893-1983), Spanish painter, sculptor, ceramist and mythmaker, has intrigued and enchanted art lovers worldwide. This collection of his writings presents a portrait of the artist in his own words. Miro's notebooks, letters, and interviews reveal the work and life of a brilliant artist revered for his uncanny expression of the subconscious. "Joan Miro" centres on Paris during the vibrant era between the wars, when Miro became the intimate of almost everyone in that scene - boxing with young Hemingway, working with Max Ernst on the Ballets Russes, drinking, painting and arguing with Picasso, Braque, Dubuffet, Matisse, Breton and many others. Miro engagingly recounts all of this, as well as stories of his exile during World War II. Miro's virtuosity encompassed drawing, painting, sculpture, ceramics, poetry, stage sets, costumes, murals and tapestries; he vividly describes the creation of these artworks in these pages.

Frédéric Zaavy's brilliant career as a master jeweller shone like a meteor but flamed out far too soon. Zaavy considered himself heir to the legacy of Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, gem dealer to Louis XIV, and was chosen as the exclusive jeweller for the 21st century revival of Fabergé. Zaavy's artistic genius lay in painting with precious stones and in engineering remarkable settings to hold those stones almost invisibly. His works achieved a preëminence in the thousand-year evolution of French jewellery. The influences on his life and work were myriad. Nature, quantum physics, art, music, spirituality, poetry, literature, and even science fiction all shaped his extraordinary world view and taste. He was a philosopher jeweller. Stardust encapsulates the last year of his life, from the moment he learned he would soon die, right through to the end, with his life still at full throttle. With a text by acclaimed French philosophical writer Gilles Hertzog and a stunning visual narrative by celebrated photographers John Bigelow Taylor and Dianne Dubler, Zaavy's work and life are presented in a portrait of what was and of what might have been. Text in English and Simplified Chinese.

In 2019 a group of book-lovers began to turn from their usual diet of contemporary novels to read classics of the ‘English eerie’ like Arthur Machen’s 'The Great God Pan'. The documents recovered, (edited by Phil Smith of 'Mythogeography'), and published here as 'Living In The Magical Mode', describe the subsequently inspired attempts of these readers – in a time of virus and social and climate catastrophe –– to live anew, with ‘magic-as-ordinary’, to do magic as if it were the washing up. At first, the readers fall on new ways of remaking their everyday lives in the magical mode, but the mode soon find ways to remake the readers. Challenging assumptions, magic turns lives upside down and shakes out mysteries. The documents of 'Living In The Magical Mode' describe a pulling back of veils, until all veils but one are exhausted; then the book-lovers put their hands upon the veil inside themselves.... 'Living In The Magical World' crosses dream wastelands, racecourses, motorway cafes, edgeland quarries and suburban valleys, in an adventure of encounters with ‘others’. It brings its readers to an occulted realm of unbounded desires that once unfolded refuses to recede. The surviving documents of the book club, reprinted here, describe the final frantic efforts of what remains of its members to understand a collision of many worlds and make novel webs of reconciliation.