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.

This book is a unique, fully illustrated, and fascinating study of all the known carved reliefs decorating official inscriptions in classical and Hellenistic Athens. The author's new and illuminating work on the iconography of these reliefs shows how the gods, heroes, and other personifications were not simply decorative, but integral to the overall political message.

Issue 9 of of Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari's accessible image-based artists' magazine that challenges the limits of the contemporary art economy Toilet Paper is an artists' magazine created and produced by Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari, born out of a passion or obsession they both cultivate: images. The magazine contains no text; each picture springs from an idea, often simple, and through a complex orchestration of people it becomes the materialization of the artists' mental outbursts. Since the first issue, in June 2010, Toilet Paper has created a world that displays ambiguous narratives and a troubling imagination. It combines the vernacular of commercial photography with twisted narrative tableaux and surrealistic imagery. The result is a publication that is itself a work of art which, through its accessible form as a magazine, and through its wide distribution, challenges the limits of the contemporary art economy.

The texture of memory and the ability of art and film to bear witness to traumatic events are delicately approached in this book-length essay by a Mekas cinephile.  For years, filmmaker Peter Delpeut has had Jonas Mekas's Movie Journal within easy reach of his desk. Since his student days, he has been a great admirer of the Lithuanian-American ‘Godfather of avant-garde cinema’. Until he was startled in June 2018 by an article in The New York Review of Books. Historian Michael Casper claimed that Mekas had deliberately forgotten or misrepresented certain events during World War II. Seeded by this controversy over Mekas’s memories of his Lithuanian youth and Mekas’s pain over his subsequent exile, Delpeut’s essayistic and self-reflective book flowers into an inquiry about memory and forgetting; the moral compass of the future that cannot find its bearing in the past; the abilities of art to witness; and the roles we all must play in writing the adequate history of events too traumatic for a just accounting.  Although there is little doubt that Mekas himself never participated in the horrors of the Holocaust in Lithuania, his silence about the fate of his Jewish countrymen and neighbors could be said to enable a rewriting of history, at the sacrifice of witness testimonies. As Delpeut follows Mekas through films, diaries, his public performances, his speeches, and finally his testimony given to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), he encounters an impasse for which he was not prepared.

Richard Wilson was born in London in 1953. Descended on one side from a line of builders and on the other of artists, his work often comes closer to engineering or even architecture than it does to traditional sculpture. Typically he transforms the viewer's environment into something unsettling and strange by the interventions he makes, whether in the internal space of a gallery, the structure of a building or in one of the ships with which he has a particular affinity. Perhaps his best-known work is 20:50, currently on show at, and probably the most popular exhibit in, the Saatchi Gallery in London. For 20:50, Wilson flooded a gallery space with oil, which has a highly reflective surface. Into the oil is built a kind of narrow pier or promenade down which one person at a time can walk, the oil perilously close to their body. So reflective is the oil that the room induces a strong sense of disorientation. Further along the River Thames, next to the Millennium Dome, is another Wilson piece that provides an unexpected sight. The skeletal ship A Slice of Reality, its sides removed and with the tides moving freely through it, is both a startling sculptural object in its own right and a comment on the vanished shipping industry that was once a mainstay of the river community. In Los Angeles, Wilson was inspired by one of the most ubiquitous symbols of Californian life, the swimming pool, suspending a fibreglass pool shell from a sixty foot-long pipe in MOCA's subterranean gallery (Deep End). In addition to and often in conjunction with these large-scale projects, Wilson makes films and sculpture, takes photographs and stages performance events and has been a formative influence on a generation of British artists. This lavishly illustrated career survey includes a new interview with Wilson and examines six key works in depth.

This study provides an in-depth examination of the art and meaning of the ivory-carved Cloisters Cross. Created in a 12-century English workshop, the Cross is widely recognized as a masterpiece of English Romanesque art. This book seeks to provide information on questions of its origins and stylistic connections, its complex iconographical programme and its inscriptions. The authors seek to give a new perspective to the cultural and intellectual background against which artistic patronage in England was exercised and the theological and liturgical considerations which influenced the execution of the Cross. The book also aims to make a significant contribution to the literature on medieval history.

This definitive edition collects all of Kilian Eng's otherworldly landscapes and retro-futuristic illustrations in one massive volume, including previously unpublished works. Each dreamlike image immerses the viewer in a unique environment, full of engrossing detail and surreal beauty.

This volume is both a companion to the editors' Greek Historical Inscriptions, 404-323 BC, and a successor to the later part of the Selection of Greek Historical Inscriptions to the End of the Fifth Century BC, edited by Russell Meiggs and David M. Lewis and published in 1969. As with the editors' earlier collection, it seeks to make a selection of historically significant inscribed texts accessible to scholars and students of fifth-century Greek history. Since the publication of Meiggs and Lewis' collection, a number of significant new inscriptions and fragments have been unearthed and new interpretations of previously known examples developed. As well as updating the scholarly corpus, this volume aims to broaden the thematic range of inscriptions discussed and to include a greater selection of material from outside Athens, while still adhering to the intention of presenting texts which are important not just as typical of their genre but in their own right. In doing so, it offers an entry point to all aspects of fifth-century history, from political and institutional, to social, economic, and religious, and in order to make the material as accessible as possible for a broad readership concerned with the study of these areas, the Greek texts are presented here alongside both English translations and incisive commentaries, which will be of utility both to the specialist academic and to those less familiar with the areas in question. The inclusion of photographs depicting inscribed stones and bronzes complements discussion of the inscriptions themselves and enables parallel consideration of their nature, appearance, and transmission history, resulting in a work of thoroughly comprehensive, cutting-edge scholarship and an invaluable reference text for the study of fifth-century Greek history.

En todas las areas, las personas con voluntad de cambio y desarrollo social utilizan las formas artisticas y la creatividad para conmover la esfera publica, atraer la atencion, tomar poder sobre los espacios urbanos y generar nuevos lenguajes y voces sociales. El activismo artistico involucra a personalidades creadoras de todas las culturas, se enraiza en ideas politicas esenciales, moviliza ideas de cambio e igualdad social e interesa a las generaciones mas jovenes, en un espiritu que rompe las barreras academicas y las distinciones profesionales. La creatividad activista con frecuencia ha sido percibida como proxima a la categoria del outsider art que engloba el arte producido por no artistas donde el contexto especifico seria la protesta politica y/o la experimentacion social. El artivismo tiene sus raices en las vanguardias artisticas (dada, futurismo, surrealismo, etc.) y el posterior desarrollo y auge en la decada de los anos sesenta y setenta del pasado siglo (performance, happening, body art, land art, video art o arte conceptual), que, muchas veces, nace de una especie de desmaterializacion del objeto artistico. Este libro se centra en practicas de creatividad activista de Espana, Chile, Peru, Reino Unido, Colombia, etc. que tienen que ver con los actuales fenomenos de crisis discursiva, ideologica, politica, economica, financiera. Entender el artivismo, un concepto que, nada mas pronunciarlo, despierta un amplio abanico de sensaciones.

This spectacular collection of nearly 200 jewelled weapons and priceless accoutrements from the Indian subcontinent was assembled over many decades by Sheikh Nasser and Sheikha Hussah al-Sabah for The al-Sabah Collection, Kuwait. Produced for aristocratic patrons who valued the arts, these richly decorated edged weapons and other princely objects bear witness to the legendary opulence and refinement of the Indian courts during the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Many incorporate decorative features originating in Central Asia, the Iranian world, China, and even Renaissance Europe, testifying to centuries of trade, travel and warfare. At the same time, these ornate and uniquely Indian weapons are masterpieces of a long and unparalleled tradition of artistic craftsmanship on the subcontinent, displaying distinctive techniques of gemstone setting, hardstone carving, enamelling and blade damascening.

In diesem Buch prasentieren elf Autoren die Geschehnisse auf dem Gebiet der bildenden Kunst in den letzten siebzig Jahren in den skandinavischen Landern Schweden, Norwegen, Danemark, Finnland und Island mittels UEberblicksdarstellungen und unter verschiedenen Aspekten. Dabei zeigen sich viele Gemeinsamkeiten, aber auch immer wieder Abweichungen der Lander untereinander. Ebenso werden die unumstrittene Verbundenheit und der Austausch mit der Kunst einiger Lander Kontinentaleuropas und den USA erlautert.

Celebrated goldsmith and sculptor of the Italian Renaissance, Benvenuto Cellini (1500-71) fits the conventional image of a Renaissance man: a skillful virtuoso and courtier; an artist who worked in marble, bronze, and gold; a writer and poet. However, in his life and literary oeuvre, the notorious artist aligned himself with the transgressive and oppositional voices of his day. This book, the first biographical study of Cellini available in English, uses the methodologies of New Historicism, social history, and gender and sexuality studies to situate the artist and his works in relation to a series of early modern cultural discourses and practices, including sodomy, law, honor, magic, and masculinity.

This work is the only autobiography of a Renaissance artist. It vividly describes the artist's life at the Papal Court in Rome and at the Royal Court of France, including and eyewitness account of the Sack of Rome in 1527. Cellini also gives us intimate details of his career as a Renaissance sculptor and goldsmith.

This clear, thorough, and reliable survey of American painting and sculpture from colonial times to the present day covers the major artists and their works, outlines the social and cultural backgrounds of each period, and includes 409 illustrations integrated with the text. The book begins with a discussion of seventeenth-century art along the eastern seaboard and ends with sections on current realistic process and technological art. The eight chapters are arranged chronologically and each generally follows the same organizational sequence. From time to time the author suggests continuities of themes, ideas, and images; and contrasts or comparisons are made between artists of the same or different centuries to show continuities or discontinuities. Some determining factors in American art are considered, but Baigell views the rich and diverse achievements of American art as the result of the efforts and talents of pluralistic society rather than as fitting into a particular mold. This edition includes corrections and revisions to the text, an updated bibliography, and thirteen new illustrations.