Petro-modernity is a local phenomenon essential to the history of Kuwait, while also a global experience and one of the prime sources of climate change. The book investigates petroleum's role in the visual culture of Kuwait to understand the intersecting ideologies of modernization, political representation, and oil. The notion of iridescence, the ambiguous yet mesmerizing effect of a rainbowlike color play, serves as analytical-aesthetic concept to discuss petroleum's ambiguous contribution to modernity: both promise of prosperity and destructive force of socio-cultural and ecological environments. Covering a broad spectrum of historical material from aerial and color photography, visual arts, postage stamps, and master plans to architecture and also contemporary art from the Gulf, it dismantles petro- modernity's visual legacy.

Examines the intersection of Samuel Beckett's thirty-second playlet Breath with the visual arts Samuel Beckett, one of the most prominent playwrights of the twentieth century, wrote a thirty-second playlet for the stage that does not include actors, text, characters or drama but only stage directions. Breath (1969) is the focus and the only theatrical text examined in this study, which demonstrates how the piece became emblematic of the interdisciplinary exchanges that occur in Beckett's later writings, and of the cross-fertilisation of the theatre with the visual arts. The book attends to fifty breath-related artworks (including sculpture, painting, new media, sound art, performance art) and contextualises Beckett's Breath within the intermedial and high-modernist discourse thereby contributing to the expanding field of intermedial Beckett criticism. Key Features Examines Beckett's ultimate venture to define the borders between a theatrical performance and purely visual representation Juxtaposes Beckett's Breath with breath-related artworks by prominent visual artists who investigate the far-reaching potential of the representation of respiration by challenging modernist essentialism The focus on this primary human physiological function and its relation to arts and culture is highly pertinent to studies of human performance, the nature of embodiment and its relation to cultural expression Facilitates new intermedial discourses around the nature and aesthetic possibilities of breath, the minimum condition of existence, at the interface between the visual arts and performance practices and their relation to questions of spectacle, objecthood and materiality

This book provides high school and undergraduate students, and other interested readers, with a comprehensive survey of science fiction history and numerous essays addressing major science fiction topics, authors, works, and subgenres written by a distinguished scholar. This encyclopedia deals with written science fiction in all of its forms, not only novels and short stories but also mediums often ignored in other reference books, such as plays, poems, comic books, and graphic novels. Some science fiction films, television programs, and video games are also mentioned, particularly when they are relevant to written texts. Its focus is on science fiction in the English language, though due attention is given to international authors whose works have been frequently translated into English. Since science fiction became a recognized genre and greatly expanded in the 20th century, works published in the 20th and 21st centuries are most frequently discussed, though important earlier works are not neglected. The texts are designed to be helpful to numerous readers, ranging from students first encountering science fiction to experienced scholars in the field. Provides readers with information about written science fiction in all its forms-novels, stories, plays, poems, comic books, and graphic novels Includes original interviews with major writers like Ted Chiang, Samuel R. Delany, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Connie Willis that are not available elsewhere Features numerous sidebars with additional data about various subjects and key passages from several classic works Includes hundreds of bibliographies of sources that provide additional information on various specific topics and the genre of science fiction as a whole

When everything is lost, imagination is the only place of true freedom. The New Art Studio, co-founded in 2014 by art psychotherapist Tania Kaczynksi, is a unique space in London set up as a lifeline for refugees and asylum seekers so they can experience art therapy in a relaxed, informal atmosphere. Who Am I? is a poignant look at the state of the dispossessed, and at how creating art can provide a last bastion of hope for those who have lost everything. Alongside the unique and touching artwork of the studio's members are their true stories of bravery, loss and redemption.

Giosetta Fioroni is considered one of the most important figures in Italian painting of the postwar era. Her work is commonly associated with the Scuola di Piazza del Popolo group in Rome - which also included Mario Schifano, Tano Festa and Franco Angeli, among others - as well as with the advent of Pop art in Italy. Yet Fioroni's practice differs from those of her immediate contemporaries and from the overarching notion of Pop as it came to be understood in the English-speaking world. The divergences are most clearly pronounced in her persistent exploration of femininity, rooted in both her personal experiences and her interpretation of the category in popular culture. 'I have worked a lot, not on feminism but on femininity', Fioroni once explained. 'I would like to maintain a distinction. In a period of lively feminism, I was interested in the look, in the atmosphere tied to femininity.' Giosetta Fioroni: Alter Ego is the first publication to focus on feminist perspectives in the work of Fioroni. It includes an exclusive interview with the artist conducted by Hans Ulrich Obrist and a scholarly essay by Anna Dumont on the subject of gendered looking in Fioroni's portraits of women.

Well before Andy Warhol's rise to the pinnacle of Pop Art, he created and exhibited seductive drawings celebrating male beauty. Andy Warhol Love, Sex, & Desire: Drawings 1950-1962 features over three hundred drawings rendered primarily in ink on paper portraying young men, many of them nude, some sexually charged, and occasionally adorned with whimsical black hearts and delightful embellishments. They lounge or preen, proud of or even bored by their beauty, while the artist sketches them, rapt. They rarely engage with their keen observer, and likewise Warhol's focus is on their form, their erotic qualities, and unbridled sexuality. If his subjects are content to revel in their attractiveness, so too is Warhol. His confident hand illustrates a multitude of colorful characters, yet also reveals much about this enigmatic artist. Warhol was already a booming commercial illustrator when he exhibited studies from this body of work at the Bodley Gallery on New York's Upper East Side in 1956.He mistakenly saw these illustrations as his way of breaking into the New York art scene, underestimating the pervading homophobia of the time. While he never saw through his plan to publish the drawings as a monograph, he did produce more than a thousand elegant, seemingly effortless drawings from life. This volume finally brings his project to fruition by gathering his most striking images, published here for the first time in a comprehensive book and chosen by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Edited and featuring an introduction by the Foundation's Michael Dayton Hermann, and essays by Warhol biographer Blake Gopnik and art critic Drew Zeiba. The inclusion of poems by James Baldwin, Thom Gunn, Harold Norse, Essex Hemphill and Allen Ginsberg create moments of introspection, which expand on the themes and moods present in the drawings. In style, the drawings evoke the sketches of Jean Cocteau and even Matisse: highly distilled and sure of line, yet loose. The sly voyeurism, meanwhile, is entirely Warhol's own, and even the most risque drawings contain a kind of droll humor-a sense of ironic detachment-that would become a Warhol trademark. His confident hand illustrates a multitude of colorful characters, yet also reveals much about this enigmatic artist.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Charles Dana Gibson's pen-and-ink drawings of the "American Girl" -- now remembered as the Gibson Girl -- became the national ideal of femininity. This collection of his images of youthful, dynamic women offers an informative and amusing reflection of the era's social life. Sentimental, humorous, and often gently satirical, these images portray the Gibson Girl at the theater, in the drawing room, flirting and courting, vacationing at the beach, and engaging in other genteel pursuits. Several of Gibson's "common man" illustrations provide a contrast, along with a section devoted to one of the artist's best-known and most beloved characters, the curmudgeonly Mr. Pipp.
This gallery features more than a hundred carefully selected images from vintage editions. A rich source of royalty-free art, it offers graphic artists, fashion designers, social historians, and nostalgia lovers a lovely and accurate chronicle of a bygone era.

How do artists and writers engage with environmental knowledge in the face of overwhelming information about catastrophe? What kinds of knowledge do the arts produce when addressing climate change, extinction, and other environmental emergencies? What happens to scientific data when it becomes art? In Infowhelm, Heather Houser explores the ways contemporary art manages environmental knowledge in an age of climate crisis and information overload. Houser argues that the infowhelm-a state of abundant yet contested scientific information-is an unexpectedly resonant resource for environmental artists seeking to go beyond communicating stories about crises. Infowhelm analyzes how artists transform the techniques of the sciences into aesthetic material, repurposing data on everything from butterfly migration to oil spills and experimenting with data collection, classification, and remote sensing. Houser traces how artists ranging from novelist Barbara Kingsolver to digital memorialist Maya Lin rework knowledge traditions native to the sciences, entangling data with embodiment, quantification with speculation, precision with ambiguity, and observation with feeling. Their works provide new ways of understanding environmental change while also questioning traditional distinctions between types of knowledge. Bridging the environmental humanities, digital media studies, and science and technology studies, this timely book reveals the importance of artistic medium and form to understanding environmental issues and challenges our assumptions about how people arrive at and respond to environmental knowledge.

From antiquity to the Enlightenment, astrology, magic, and alchemy have always been considered important tools in unravelling the mysteries of nature and human destiny. As a result of the West's exposure to the astrological beliefs of Arab philosophers and the mystical writings of late antiquity, these occult traditions became rich sources of inspiration for Western artists.This latest volume in the "Guide to Imagery" series, presents an intelligent analysis of occult iconography in many of the great masterpieces of Western art - from the astrological symbols that decorated churches and illuminated manuscripts, through the work of a wide range of Renaissance artists, including Bosch, Brueghel, Durer and Caravaggio, to the visionary works of nineteenth-century artists, such as Fuseli and Blake, as well as in the creative output of the Surrealists during the twentieth century.

'There's something about the Whiteknights area that makes people stay here.' - From the Foreword by Fiona Talkington, BBC Radio 3 Presenter and long-term resident Two hundred years ago, the aptly named 'Southern Hill' that rises steeply from the edge of the river plain south of Reading was part of Whitley and largely farmland. However, its vistas, fresh air and proximity to the town led prominent Victorians to invest in and develop the area and their contributions have shaped it into the 'village within a town' that it is today. Schools, the University, hotels and a care home now occupy many of the sites originally owned by the town's famous industrialists and their elegant homes have been co-opted for community use which gives the area its unique aura of egalitarian refinement. Celebrated in the annual walking tour of artists' studios, the creative heart of the district beats stronger than ever and this book brings together 28 artists to respond in their own way and their own medium to the place we call 'Whiteknights'. And to give context to the artwork, local historians paint a fascinating picture of the Whiteknights estate that became the University campus, the buildings, the streets and the people who lived here. This joint venture from the Whiteknights Studio Trail, celebrating 20 years, and Two Rivers Press, publishing in the area for 25 years, pays tribute to the heritage we are privileged to be part of.

Swiss artist HR Giger (1940-2014) is most famous for his creation of the space monster in Ridley Scott's 1979 horror sci-fi film Alien, which earned him an Oscar. In retrospect, this was just one of the most popular expressions of Giger's biomechanical arsenal of creatures, which consistently merged hybrids of human and machine into images of haunting power and dark psychedelia. The visions drew on demons of the past, harking back as far as Giger's earliest childhood fears as well as evoking mythologies for the future. Above all, they gave expression to the collective fears and fantasies of his age: fear of the atom, of pollution and wasted resources, and of a future in which our bodies depend on machines for survival. From surrealist dream landscapes created with a spray gun and stencils to album cover designs, from guillotine-like sculptures to self-designed bars, Giger personally guides us through his multi-faceted universe in this definitive introduction to a master of horror. Detailed reproductions and designs and a foreword by Timothy Leary complement Giger's intimate autobiographical texts. About the series Born back in 1985, the Basic Art Series has evolved into the best-selling art book collection ever published. Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Art series features: a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the artist, covering his or her cultural and historical importance a concise biography approximately 100 illustrations with explanatory captions

From his series of definitive works on religious art in medieval France, and later in Italy, Spain, Flanders, and Germany, as well, the author has chosen those passages most significant and interesting for the general reader and arranged them, providing transitional passages where necessary, in this compact and useful volume. Again available in paperback, and including improved illustrations, the book presents a summation that eloquently conveys an intimate picture of the French Middle Ages and the grandeur of the artistic renaissance that accompanied the Counter Reformation.