In the first comprehensive study of the interactions between fashion, performance and performativity, a group of international experts explore fashion as the ideal ‘complex space’ – or, in other words, the ideal space where performance and performativity come together, according to the works of seminal theorists Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Andrew Parker. Bringing together western and non-western, historical and contemporary case studies and theories, the book explores the magazines, photography, exhibitions, global colonial divides, digital media, and more, which have become key markers of the fashion industry as we know it today. Using existing literature as a springboard and incorporating perspectives from fashion studies, art history, media studies and gender studies, as well as from artists and practitioners, Fashion, Performance, and Performativity is an innovative and essential work for students, scholars and practitioners across multiple disciplines.

This book considers arousal as a mode of theoretical and artistic inquiry to encourage new ways of staging and examining bodies in performance across artistic disciplines, modern history, and cultural contexts. Looking at traditional drama and theatre, but also visual arts, performance activism, and arts-based community engagement, this collection draws on the complicated relationship between arousing images and the frames of their representability to address what constitutes arousal in a variety of connotations. It examines arousal as a project of social, scientific, cultural, and artistic experimentation, and discusses how our perception of arousal has transformed over the last century. Probing “what arouses� in relation to the ethics of representation, the book investigates the connections between arousal and pleasures of voyeurism, underscores the political impact of aroused bodies, and explores how arousal can turn the body into a mediated object.

"The collection of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French silver at the J. Paul Getty Museum is of exceptional quality and state of preservation. Each piece is remarkable for its beauty, inventive form, skillful execution, illustrious provenance, and the renown of its maker. This volume is the first complete study of these exquisite objects, with more than 250 color photographs bringing into focus extraordinary details such as minuscule makers' marks, inscriptions, and heraldic armorials. The publication details the formation of the Museum's collection of French silver, several pieces of which were selected by J. Paul Getty himself, and discusses the regulations of the historic Parisian guild of gold- and silversmiths that set quality controls and consumer protections. Comprehensive entries catalogue a total of thirty-three pieces with descriptions, provenance, exhibition history, and technical information. The related commentaries shed light on the function of these objects and the roles they played in the daily lives of their prosperous owners. The book also includes maker biographies and a full bibliography. "

This important book offers a thematic collection of critical essays, ideal for undergraduate courses on modern British theatre, on Harold Pinter’s theatrical works, alongside new interviews with contemporary theatre practitioners. The life and works of Harold Pinter (1930–2008), a pivotal figure in twentieth- and twenty-first century British theatre, have been widely discussed, debated and celebrated internationally. For over five decades, Pinter’s work traversed and redefined various forms and genres, constantly in dialogue with, and often impacting the work of, other writers, artists and activists. He is today considered one of the most important British playwrights ever to have lived. Through combining a reconsideration of key Pinter scholarship with new contexts, voices and theoretical approaches, it opens up fresh insights into the author’s work, politics, collaborations and his enduring status as one of the world’s foremost twentieth-century dramatists. Divided into three parts, the book is compiled of a collection of chapters that re-contextualize Pinter as a cultural figure; explore and interrogate his influence on contemporary British playwriting; and offer a series of original interviews with theatre-makers engaging in the staging of Pinter’s work today. Reconsiderations of Pinter’s relationship to literary and theatrical movements such as Modernism and the Theatre of the Absurd; interrogations of the role of class, elitism and religious and cultural identity sit alongside chapters on Pinter’s personal politics, specifically in relation to the Middle East.

Peter Weibel, the long-standing CEO of the ZKM | Zentrum fur Kunst und Medien (Center for Art and Media) in Karlsruhe, and the recipient of the Lovis-Corinth-Preis in 2020, has influenced the international scene of media art as an artist as well as a theorist and curator. His artistic oeuvre comprises conceptual art, performance, experimental film, video, and computer art as well as his exploration of music. This publication offers insight into Weibel's diverse work. One main area consists of works in which the artist takes up core questions about Europe. For example, his computer-video installation Die Vertreibung der Vernunft (The Expulsion of Reason) of 1993 thematizes the forced emigration of artists and intellectuals from Austria between 1933 and 1945. In other works critical of the system, which always question the usual concept of art as well, Weibel addresses migration, expulsion, war, and terrorism as well as economic and ecological catastrophes. Languages: English and German

In late 19th century England, Oscar Wilde popularized aestheticism, also known as art-for-art’s-sake – the idea that art, that beauty, should not be a vehicle for morality or truth, but an end in-and-of-itself. Rothko and Jackson Pollock enthroned the idea, creating paintings that are barely graded panels of color or wild splashes. Today, pop culture is aestheticism’s true heir, from the perfect charismatic emptiness of Ocean’s Eleven to the hyper-choreographed essentially balletic movements in the best martial arts movies. But aestheticism has a dark core, one that Social Justice Activists are now gathering to combat, revealing the damaging ideology reflected in or concealed by our most beloved pop culture icons. Taking Bryan Fuller’s television version of Hannibal “The Cannibal� Lecter as its main text – and taking Žižek-style illustrative detours into Malcolm in the Middle, Dark Knight Rises, Harry Potter, Interview with a Vampire, Dexter and more – this book marshals Walter Pater, Camille Paglia, Nietzsche, the Marquis de Sade, Kant and Plato, as well as Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, Baudelaire, Beckett, Wallace Stevens and David Mamet to argue that Fuller’s show is a deceptively brilliant advance of aestheticism, both in form and content – one that investigates how deeply art-for-art’s-sake, and those of us who consciously or unconsciously worship at its teat, are necessarily entwined with evil.

Helga Zahn (1936-1985) was one of the leading jewellery artists in Britain during the 1960s and 1970s. The autodidact, who was raised in Schwarzenbach an der Saale, had a preference for silver and natural materials such as pebbles. Her one-off jewellery is made unique by the clarity of simple geometric forms, the lightness and simplicity of the combinations, and a reduced colour palette. With novel systematic thinking, in the mid 1960s she revolutionised the studio jewellery movement that was forming across the globe. With around a hundred jewellery objects, this comprehensive review invites you on a journey of rediscovery and reappraisal of this exceptional artist.

An old graveyard, writes Ruth Little, is a cultural encyclopedia--an invaluable source of insight and information about the families, traditions, and cultural connections that shape a community. But although graveyards and gravemarkers have long been recognized as vital elements of the material culture of New England, they have not received the same attention in the South. Sticks and Stones is the first book to consider the full spectrum of gravemarkers, both plain and fancy, in a southeastern state. From gravehouses to cedar boards to seashell mounds to tomb-tables to pierced soapstones to homemade concrete headstones, an incredibly rich collection of gravemarker types populates North Carolina's graveyards. Exploring the cultural, economic, and material differences that gave rise to such variation, Little traces three major parallel developments: a tradition of headstones crafted of native materials by country artisans; a series of marble monuments created by metropolitan stonecutters; and a largely twentieth-century legacy of wood and concrete markers made within the African American community. With more than 230 illustrations, including 120 stunning photographs by Tim Buchman, Sticks and Stones offers an illuminating look at an important facet of North Carolina's cultural heritage.

To err is human; to err in digital culture is design. In the glitches, inefficiencies, and errors that ergonomics and usability engineering strive to surmount, Peter Krapp identifies creative reservoirs of computer-mediated interaction. Throughout new media cultures, he traces a resistance to the heritage of motion studies, ergonomics, and efficiency; in doing so, he shows how creativity is stirred within the networks of digital culture.

"Noise Channels "offers a fresh look at hypertext and tactical media, tunes into laptop music, and situates the emergent forms of computer gaming and machinima in media history. Krapp analyzes text, image, sound, virtual spaces, and gestures in noisy channels of computer-mediated communication that seek to embrace--rather than overcome--the limitations and misfires of computing. Equally at home with online literature, the visual tactics of hacktivism, the recuperation of glitches in sound art, electronica, and videogames, or machinima as an emerging media practice, he explores distinctions between noise and information, and how games pivot on errors at the human-computer interface.

Grounding the digital humanities in the conditions of possibility of computing culture, Krapp puts forth his insight on the critical role of information in the creative process.

"Yellow Future" examines the emergence and popularity of techno-oriental representations in Hollywood cinema since the 1980s, focusing on the ways East Asian peoples and places have become linked with technology to produce a collective fantasy of East Asia as the future. Jane Chi Hyun Park demonstrates how this fantasy is sustained through imagery, iconography, and performance that conflate East Asia with technology, constituting what Park calls oriental style.
Park provides a genealogy of oriental style through contextualized readings of popular films-from the multicultural city in "Blade Runner "and the Japanese American mentor in "The Karate Kid" to the Afro-Asian reworking of the buddy genre in "Rush Hour "and the mixed-race hero in "The Matrix." Throughout these analyses Park shows how references to the Orient have marked important changes in American popular attitudes toward East Asia in the past thirty years, from abjection to celebration, invisibility to hypervisibility.
Unlike other investigations of racial imagery in Hollywood, "Yellow Future "centers on how the Asiatic is transformed into and performed as style in the backdrop of these movies and discusses the significance of this conditional visibility for representations of racial difference.

San Juan: Memoir of a City conducts readers through Puerto Rico's capital, guided by one of its most graceful and reflective writers, Edgardo Rodriguez Julia. No mere sightseeing tour, this is culture through immersion, a circuit of San Juan's historical and intellectual vistas as well as its architecture. In the allusive cityscape he recreates, Rodriguez Julia invokes the ghosts of his childhood, of San Juan's elder literati, and of characters from his own novels. On the most tangible level, the city is a place of cabarets and cockfighting clubs, flaneurs and beach bums, smoke-filled bars and honking automobiles. Poised between a colonial past and a commercial future, the San Juan he portrays feels at times perilously close to the pitfalls of modernization. Tenement houses and fading mansions yield to strip malls and Tastee Freezes; asphalt hems in jacarandas and palm trees. In Puerto Rico, he muses, life is not simply cruel, it is also busy erasing our tracks. Julia resists that erasure, thoughtfully etching a palimpsest that preserves images of the city where he grew up and rejoicing in the one where he still lives.

Sculptured figural motifs were an important component of many buildings in the Hellenistic world, and their frequent relegation to subsidiary status has, until now, left our knowledge of both Hellenistic architecture and sculpture incomplete. In Hellenistic Architectural Sculpture, Pamela A. Webb examines the full range of figural embellishment - from simple to complex, on large monuments as well as on more obscure ones, and in the major population centers as well as the smaller cities, sanctuaries, and isolated areas throughout western Anatolia and the Aegean islands. In this book, the first to focus specifically on the figural adornment of Hellenistic architecture, Webb provides extensive information about the chronology and interpretation of figural motifs adorning religious, civic, commercial, commemorative, and domestic constructions. She finds that figural sculptures adorn structures at every level from the ground to the roof, and display a wide variety of motifs on such architectural elements as columns, walls, entablatures, pediments, and cornices. 142 illustrations of Hellenistic monuments - temples, altars, cult buildings, heroa, theaters, bouleuteria, stoas, gymnasia, and houses - and their sculptured adornment complement the author's descriptions and analyses. The book features an extensive bibliography, citing resources from the early nineteenth century to the most recent publications.