If participation has been an ideal in politics since ancient democracy, in art it became central only with the avant-gardes emerging from WWI and the Russian Revolution. Politics and aesthetics are still catching up with each other. In the 21st century, since the revolutionary unrest of the 1960s, participation in art and architecture has lost its utopian glow and become the focus of a fierce debate: does 'participatory' art and architecture shape social reality, or is it shaped by it? Contemporary critics see in participation only technocratic control, while others embrace it as a viable politics in an era of global capitalism. This innovative book breaks the impasse by looking at how participants themselves exert power, rather than being victimized or liberated from it. From artists hijacking Google Earth to protesters setting up a museum of the revolution in Cairo, art, architecture and daily life are explored in their participatory dimension.

Over the past decade, German artist Michael Riedel has incorporated a wide range of media into his practice, including large-scale works on canvas, fabric works, film and video, audio recordings, installations, and events. A central focus of his work is the publishing and production of artist's books, catalogues, brochures, posters, and cards. In 2000, Riedel and Dennis Loesch launched a collaborative project in an abandoned building in Frankfurt. Using the building's address- Oskar-von-Miller Strasse 16-as the name for their new space, they created an experimental laboratory where they restaged cultural events held at other locations throughout the city, effectively duplicating them in space and time. Occasionally, these re-presented events-which included book readings, film screenings, art exhibitions, and music concerts-were hosted on the same night as the actual event elsewhere in the city, but mostly, they were presented days or weeks after the original activity took place. According to Riedel, "We presented one concept over and over again. To create a distance to some original that had been done at another place." With the call of "record, label, playback," a group of young artists reiterated the language of a city's cultural offerings, often without a full understanding of what they were reciting, but always with an acute aesthetic interest in the faults of transmission and transference.

To what extent have developments in global politics, artworld institutions and local cultures reshaped the critical directions of feminist art historians? The significant research gathered in Feminism and Art History Now engages with the rich inheritance of feminist historiography since around 1970, and considers how to maintain the forcefulness of its critique while addressing contemporary political struggles. Taking on subjects that reflect the museological, global and materialist trajectories of 21st-century art historical scholarship, the chapters address the themes of Invisibility, Temporality, Spatiality and Storytelling. They present new research on a diversity of topics that span political movements in Italy, urban gentrification in New York, community art projects in Scotland and Canada's contemporary indigenous culture. Case studies focus on the art of Lee Krasner, The Emily Davison Lodge, Zoe Leonard, Martha Rosler, Carla Lonzi and Womanhouse. Together with a synthesising introductory essay, these case studies provide readers with a view of feminist art histories of the past, present and future.

Ingo Gerken's monographic catalog literally opens a new chapter in his series of works Bibliosculptures. Images of open exhibition publications or art magazines become the object of investigation here. Seemingly randomly opened book pages create a play of forces or connections between text and image compositions. By depicting these views of books in the book, the medium itself is both the object and subject of analysis - typical of Gerken's artistic practice.

This long-awaited volume celebrates the work of Kerry James Marshall, one of America's greatest living painters. Born before the passage of the Civil Rights Act, in Birmingham, Alabama, and witness to the Watts riots in 1965, Marshall has long been an inspired and imaginative chronicler of the African American experience. Best known for large-scale interiors, landscapes, and portraits featuring powerful black figures, Marshall explores narratives of African American history from slave ships to the present and draws upon his deep knowledge of art history from the Renaissance to twentieth-century abstraction, as well as other sources such as the comic book and the muralist tradition. With luscious color and brushstrokes and highly detailed patterning, his direct and intimate scenes of black middle-class life conjure a wide range of emotions, resulting in powerful paintings that confront the position of African Americans throughout American history. Richly illustrated, this monumental book features essays by noted curators as well as the artist, and more than 100 paintings from throughout the artist's career arranged thematically by subject: history painting; beauty, as expressed through the nude, portraiture, and self-portraiture; landscape; religion; and the politics of black nationalism.

Neither authentic nor kitsch, readymade nor traditional craft, the works of Swiss artist Valentin Carron (born 1975) play with material ambiguity--fake wood, fake concrete, fake bronze--to unpack the iconography of power and authority. "Learning from Martigny" offers photographic source material intertwined with images of his sculptures and paintings.

Hermann Nitsch produced his first "poured" paintings around 1960. In this form of action painting, the artist is primarily concerned with the substance of the paint, which he investigates from one Painting Action to the next. This catalog illustrates the development of his painterly works from the early 1960s to the present day. The main focus of the content lies in the characteristics of the various work cycles. In addition to the first "splatter" paintings it shows floor "splatter" paintings from the Red Cycle (1995), works from the Six-Day Play (1989) or the yellow Resurrection Cycle (2002). While one colour dominates in the monochrome works, in others a real explosion of colours takes place. The paint is splattered or sprayed; it may be applied in liquid form or impasto. The artist may use a paintbrush or smear the paint with his hands. The focal point is the exploration of the state of the paint, which varies between liquid and solid.

Nobody doubts that the contemporary art of Turkey has `arrived' on the international stage: Hale Tenger's work has been bought by the Pompidou Centre; Fikret Atay features in Tate Modern's collection; Kutlug Ataman has been nominated for the Turner Prize; and collectors flock from around the world to pick up pieces by exceptionally talented Turkish artists. 'Unleashed' is the most comprehensive account yet of the recent storm of activity in Turkey's art scene. A sumptuously illustrated A-Z of over ninety of the most exciting Turkish contemporary artists, it contains many exclusive interviews with some of the biggest names in Turkish art, as well as such up-and-coming artists as Leyla Gediz, Emre Huner and Ali Kazmal and the Turkish diaspora. It also features interviews with and profiles of leading curators, gallerists, collectors, artist-run spaces and museums. The work of the featured artists is put into further context by three important essays written by leading curators and critics, which tackle the issues of identity, and the relationship of Turkish art to international artistic trends.

A unique insight into the ways in which one of today's leading artists is inspired by great works of the past. In 16 emphatically modern new paintings, renowned artist, Alison Watt, responds to the remarkable delicacy of the female portraits by eighteenth-century Scottish portraitist, Allan Ramsay. Watt's new works are particularly inspired by Ramsay's much-loved portrait of his wife, along with less familiar portraits and drawings. Watt shines a light on enigmatic details in Ramsay's work and has created paintings which hover between the genres of still life and portraiture. In conversation with curator Julie Lawson, Watt discusses how painters look at paintings, explains why Ramsay inspired her, and provides unique insight into her own creative process. Andrew O'Hagan responds to Watt's paintings with a new work of short fiction and art historian Tom Normand's commentary explores further layers of depth to our understanding of both artists.

Kris Fierens (born 1957) uses the character of a preliminary study or a sketch as an enduring thing. Or, in their possibility they imitate the character of a preliminary study. Reality and emotion reach a virtual zero point. The gestures that he makes simply become the 'objets trouves'. The object 'on his own' is never present. It's the included matter that enables him to save his dream. Traces of something that still needs to happen. Of which a disappearing memory can already behold. Text in English and Dutch.

Earl Krentzin (1929-2021) was a virtuoso silversmith who poured his considerable talents into figurative sculpture, creating whimsical theatrical settings in silver with a wry humour. He was an anomaly in the world of modern craft, having more in common with the 16th-century goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini than with his 20th-century peers. This first full scale monograph on the artist offers the breadth of Krentzin's engaging creations, which he based on his love of toys, movement, and the mechanical arts. Readers will find humour and pathos in his theatrical settings and verisimilitude in every tiny detail, set amidst the burgeoning crafts scene in Detroit. All will discover a modern master who used amusements and daydreams to unlock the imagination.

In 1957 the UK Design Centre launched the first annual Designs of the Year Awards to identify and promote the very best of British design. For the next 30 years, the awards celebrated designed objects in all forms, from the domestic - cutlery, glassware, textiles and furniture - to the communal - street lights, signage and public seating - and everything in between, including fitted kitchens, schooners, bicycles and electronics. This beautifully designed book introduces and illustrates the quirky breadth of the awards. Iconic objects by Robin and Lucienne Day, Kenneth Grange and David Mellor sit alongside such retro classics as the Barbican basin, the ZX81 personal computer and Globoot wellies.

This book provides an in-depth and thematic analysis of socially engaged art in Mainland China, exploring its critical responses to and creative interventions in China's top-down, pro-urban, and profit-oriented socioeconomic transformations. It focuses on the socially conscious practices of eight art professionals who assume the role of artist, critic, curator, educator, cultural entrepreneur, and social activist, among others, as they strive to expose the injustice and inequality many Chinese people have suffered, raise public awareness of pressing social and environmental problems, and invent new ways and infrastructures to support various underprivileged social groups.

An urban history of modern Britain, and how the built environment shaped the nation's politics Foundations is a history of twentieth-century Britain told through the rise, fall, and reinvention of six different types of urban space: the industrial estate, shopping precinct, council estate, private flats, shopping mall, and suburban office park. Sam Wetherell shows how these spaces transformed Britain's politics, economy, and society, helping forge a midcentury developmental state and shaping the rise of neoliberalism after 1980. From the mid-twentieth century, spectacular new types of urban space were created in order to help remake Britain's economy and society. Government-financed industrial estates laid down infrastructure to entice footloose capitalists to move to depressed regions of the country. Shopping precincts allowed politicians to plan precisely for postwar consumer demand. Public housing modernized domestic life and attempted to create new communities out of erstwhile strangers. In the latter part of the twentieth century many of these spaces were privatized and reimagined as their developmental aims were abandoned. Industrial estates became suburban business parks. State-owned shopping precincts became private shopping malls. The council estate was securitized and enclosed. New types of urban space were imported from American suburbia, and planners and politicians became increasingly skeptical that the built environment could remake society. With the midcentury built environment becoming obsolete, British neoliberalism emerged in tense negotiation with the awkward remains of built spaces that had to be navigated and remade. Taking readers to almost every major British city as well as to places in the United States and Britain's empire, Foundations highlights how some of the major transformations of twentieth-century British history were forged in the everyday spaces where people lived, worked, and shopped.

Hack Wit is a playful and complex body of work developed between 2013 and 2015, using cliches or proverbs and watercolor. For each work, the artist made two watercolors of a different proverb, cut them apart and then combined them into one. The Canadian poet Anne Carson wrote the text Hack Gloss in response to the "Hack Wit" drawings.

The first comprehensive monograph on Mickalene Thomas, a key figure in 21st-century contemporary art Over the past two decades, Mickalene Thomas's critically acclaimed and extensive body of work has spanned painting, collage, photography, video, and the immersive installations that have become her signature. With influences ranging from nineteenth-century painting to popular culture, Thomas's art articulates a complex and empowering vision of aspiration and self-image through gender and race while expanding on and subverting common definitions of beauty, sexuality, and celebrity. This book, made in close collaboration with Thomas, is the first to survey the breadth of her extraordinary career. Publication coincides with the opening of Mickalene Thomas's first global exhibition, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, at Levy Gorvy galleries in New York, London, Paris, Hong Kong, and Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris.