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.

Mark Dion (b.1961) is an American artist who, in making his art, metamorphoses into explorer, biochemist, detective and archaeologist. In his gallery installations around Europe and America since the 1980s, Dion has constructed the laboratories, experiments and museum caches of the great historical naturalists - following in their footsteps in his own adventurous, eco-inspired journeys to the tropics. His research and magical collections are presented in installational still lifes that combine taxidermic animals with lab equipment artefacts, like walk-through Wunderkammers and life-sized cabinets of curiosity. Lias Graziose Corrin, Director of the Williams College Museum of Art, surveys Dion's most significant works and his ongoing investigations into natural history's obsession with categorizing nature. Critic and theorist Miwon Kwon talks to the artist about the interface between ecology and culture and the phenomenon of site-specific art. Norman Bryson, Professor of Art History at the University of California, San Diego, makes an iconographical analysis of The Library for the Birds of Antwerp, an indoor sculpture Dion constructed for 18 live African finches in 1993. The artist has selected a text by novelist Jon Berger, one of the first post-war thinkers to analyze the position of animals in a capitalist society. The book also features Dion's own provocative, witty and often lyrical writing on nature and his role as an artist engaged in environmental issues.

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.

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.

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.

An exploration of public performance in everyday life, by the leading cultural and social thinker 'All the world's a stage' declares the melancholy Jacques in Shakespeare's As You Like It. Today that's an unhappy thought. A cluster of demagogues has recently dominated the public realm through their powers as actors; they are brilliant performers. More unsettling, the demagogue, the dancer, the musician all share the same non-verbal realm of bodily gestures, lighting and blocking, costuming, stage architecture. So too, the roles and rituals of everyday life and everyday acting can be malign or sublime, repressive or liberating. Performing constitutes one art - an ambiguous art. In this book, the acclaimed sociologist Richard Sennett explores uncomfortable connections between performances in life, art, and politics. He draws on his own early career as a professional cellist as well on histories both Western and non-Western. He is not a pessimist; at the end of his study, he shows how this ambiguous art might become more ethical.

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 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.

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 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.

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.

Bodily gesture. A Roman worshipper spins in a circle in front of a temple. Faced with death, a Roman woman tears her hair and beats her breasts. Enthusiastic spectators at a gladiatorial event gesticulate with thumbs. Examining the tantalizing glimpses of ancient bodies offered by surviving Roman sculptures, paintings, and literary texts, Anthony Corbeill analyzes the role of gesture in medical and religious ritual, in the gladiatorial arena, in mourning practice, in aristocratic competition of the late Republic, and in the court of the emperor Tiberius. Adopting approaches from anthropology, gender studies, and ecological theory, "Nature Embodied" offers both a series of case studies and an overarching narrative of the role and meanings of gesture in ancient Rome.

Arguing that bodily movement grew out of the relationship between Romans and their natural, social, and spiritual environment, the book explores the ways in which an originally harmonious relationship between nature and the body was manipulated as Rome became socially and politically complex. By the time that Tacitus was writing about the reign of Tiberius, the emergence of a new political order had prompted an increasingly inscrutable equation between truth and the body--and something vital in the once harmonizing relationship between bodies and the world beyond them had been lost.

"Nature Embodied" makes an important contribution to an expanding field of research by offering a new theoretical model for the study of gesture in classical times.

This is the vital story of the amateur theatre as it developed from the medieval guilds to the modern theatre of Ayckbourn and Pinter, with a few mishaps and missed cues along the way. Michael Coveney – a former member of Ilford's Renegades - tells this tale with a charm and wit that will have you shouting out for an encore. Between the two world wars, amateur theatre thrived across the UK, from Newcastle to Norwich, from Bolton to Birmingham and Bangor, championed by the likes of George Bernard Shaw, Sybil Thorndike, and J B Priestley. Often born out of a particular political cause or predicament, many of these theatres and companies continue to evolve, survive and even prosper today. This is the first account of its kind, packed with anecdote and previously unheard stories, and it shows how amateur theatre is more than a popular pastime: it has been endemic to the birth of the National Theatre, as well as a seedbed of talent and a fascinating barometer and product of the times in which we live. Some of the companies Coveney delves into – all taking centre stage in this entertaining and lively book - include the Questors and Tower Theatre in London; Birmingham's Crescent Theatre; The Little Theatre in Bolton, where Ian McKellen was a schoolboy participant; the Halifax Thespians; Lincolnshire's Broadbent Theatre, co-founded by Jim Broadbent's father and other conscientious objectors at the end of World War II; Crayford's Geoffrey Whitworth Theatre, where the careers of Michael Gambon and Diana Quick were launched; Anglesey's Theatr Fach, a crucible of Welsh language theatre; and Cornwall's stunning cliff-top Minack.

The art and science of audiovisual preservation and access has evolved at breakneck speed in the digital age. The Joint Technical Symposium (JTS) is organized by the Coordinating Council of Audiovisual Archives Associations and brings experts from around the world to learn of technologies and developments in the technical issues affecting the long-term survival and accessibility of audiovisual collections. This collection of essays is derived from presentations made at the 2016 JTS held in Singapore and presents an overview of the latest audiovisual preservation methods and techniques, archival best practices in media storage, as well as analog-to-digital conversion challenges and their solutions.

Appearing for the first time in paperback and illustrated with line drawings, diagrams, and 26 half-tone plates, this study of the iconographic aspect of Japanese Buddhist sculpture surveys the significance of eight principal and six secondary hand gestures (mudra), in addition to the postures (asana), such as the "lotus," and the symbolic attributes. A pictorial index helps the reader in identifying the gestures.

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.