Can a sculpture be a river? Can contemporary art unite conflicting systems of belief? Do other species appreciate culture? And can public art revive communities and ecosystems? Cristina Iglesias’ horizontal fountains, submerged rooms and tropical mazes bring together language, architecture and botany to create immersive spaces of contemplation. In this publication an international roster of curators, art critics, philosophers, architects and scientists discuss the social and ecological potential of art in urban and rural space.

The contributors to Nervous Systems reassess contemporary artists' and critics' engagement with social, political, biological, and other systems as a set of complex and relational parts: an approach commonly known as systems thinking. Demonstrating the continuing relevance of systems aesthetics within contemporary art, the contributors highlight the ways that artists adopt systems thinking to address political, social, and ecological anxieties. They cover a wide range of artists and topics, from the performances of the Argentinian collective the Rosario Group and the grid drawings of Charles Gaines to the video art of Singaporean artist Charles Lim and the mapping of global logistics infrastructures by contemporary artists like Hito Steyerl and Christoph Buchel. Together, the essays offer an expanded understanding of systems aesthetics in ways that affirm its importance beyond technological applications detached from cultural contexts. Contributors. Cristina Albu, Amanda Boetzkes, Brianne Cohen, Kris Cohen, Jaimey Hamilton Faris, Christine Filippone, Johanna Gosse, Francis Halsall, Judith Rodenbeck, Dawna Schuld, Luke Skrebowski, Timothy Stott, John Tyson

With insightful essays and interviews, this volume examines how artists have experimented with the medium of video across different regions of Latin America since the 1960s. The emergence of video art in Latin America is marked by multiple points of development, across more than a dozen artistic centers, over a period of more than twenty-five years. When it was first introduced during the 1960s, video was seen as empowering: the portability of early equipment and the possibility of instant playback allowed artists to challenge and at times subvert the mainstream media. Video art in Latin America was--and still is--closely related to the desire for social change. Themes related to gender, ethnic, and racial identity as well as the consequences of social inequality and ecological disasters have been fundamental to many artists' practices. This compendium explores the history and current state of artistic experimentation with video throughout Latin America. Departing from the relatively small body of existing scholarship in English, much of which focuses on individual countries, this volume approaches the topic thematically, positioning video artworks from different periods and regions throughout Latin America in dialogue with each other. Organized in four broad sections--Encounters, Networks and Archives, Memory and Crisis, and Indigenous Perspectives--the book's essays and interviews encourage readers to examine the medium of video across varied chronologies and geographies.

In this readable and highly original book, John J. Curley presents the first synthetic account of global art during the Cold War. Through a careful examination of artworks drawn from America, Europe, Russia and Asia, he demonstrates the inextricable nature of art and politics in this contentious period. He dismantles the usual narrative of American abstract painting versus figurative Soviet Socialist Realism to reveal a much more nuanced, contradictory and ambivalent picture of art making, in which the objects themselves, like spies, dissembled, housed and managed ideological differences.

The singular paintings of British artist Gillian Carnegie (b.1971) have been exhibited and discussed extensively for nearly two decades but this is the first substantial publication on her work. Carnegie's work is explicitly analytical, systematic yet oblique in its reexamination of traditional painting genres such as still life, landscape, portraits, and the nude - all of them 'genres without a subject', as they have sometimes been called. Yet she makes clear that her impulse to resuscitate these categories is not simply an exercise in formalism, historicism, academic reverence, postmodern pastiche, or nostalgia. And far from being without a subject, far from having no story to tell, Carnegie's paintings insistently suggest that there is a subject, that there is a story, but that the painting exists not to communicate it but to conceal it, to hold it incommunicado. In contemporary painting Gillian Carnegie's work stands apart, quietly, calmly and insistently uncanny, with an emotional tenor unlike anything else in art today.

It has recently become apparent that criticism has fallen on hard times. Either commodification is deemed to have killed it off, or it has become institutionally routine. This book explores contemporary approaches which have sought to renew criticism's energies in the wake of a 'theatrical turn' in recent visual arts practice, and the emergence of a 'performative' arts writing over the past decade or so.

Issues addressed include the 'performing' of art's histories; the consequences for criticism of embracing boredom, distraction and other 'queer' forms of (in)attention; and the importance of exploring writerly process in responding to aesthetic experience. Bringing together newly commissioned work from the fields of art history, performance studies, and visual culture with the writings of contemporary artists, "After Criticism" provides a set of experimental essays which demonstrate how 'the critical' might live on as a vital and efficacious force within contemporary culture.

An extensive monograph on this architect and designer's oeuvre Gianni Arnaudo is an architect and designer with a powerful creative drive. After graduating from the Polytechnic of Turin in 1971, he began his professional career by joining Studio 65, establishing himself as one of its first and main practitioners in the 1970s. Also dating from these years are his first radical architecture creations and his collaboration with Gufram. This led to the creation of Multiples, which gained international prominence following exhibitions such as New Domestic Italian Landscape at the New York MoMA: it was only one among many items destined to enter the permanent collections of some of the world's most important museums.

Since the 1980s, he has been collaborating with leading Italian and international brands, focusing on design and architecture. His long and eclectic career has earned him several awards. On account of the influence of his work in the fields of architecture and design, Gianni Arnaudo has been ranked among the personalities who have marked the most significant turns in the field of 20th-century art.

Languages: English and Italian

The beautiful companion volume to Lee Ufan's largest site-specific outdoor sculpture project in the U.S. In fall 2019, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden debuted 10 new specially commissioned outdoor sculptures from celebrated Korean artist Lee Ufan. This book accompanies the expansive installation, which features sculptures from the artist's signature and continuing "Relatum" series and marks the first exhibition of Lee's work in the nation's capital. For the first time in the Hirshhorn Museum's 44-year history, its 4.3-acre outdoor plaza will be devoted entirely to the work of a single artist, and this book is a beautiful commemoration or keepsake of that event. Lee is a founder of the late 1960s artistic movement Mono-ha, or "School of Things," so his artwork represents an encounter between the viewer, the materials, and the site. The sculptures in this installation and book reflect this: all of the sculptures respond to the museum's unique architecture and continue Lee's iconic practice of placing contrasting materials, such as stainless steel plates and boulders, in dialogue with one another to heighten awareness of the world. The book features more than 100 color illustrations, including preliminary sketches, photographs of the artist selecting materials for the work, images of the installation process, shots of installed sculptures, details of installed sculptures, and more. Accompanying these powerful images are a foreword, essays, artist interview, and short captions that highlight how the works are rooted in contemplation and sensation rather than static representation. Lee Ufan: Open Dimension offers readers an intimate look at the work, artistic process, and impact of one of the pioneering figures of postwar art.

Reconstructing modernity assesses the character of approaches to rebuilding British cities during the decades after the Second World War. It explores the strategies of spatial governance that sought to restructure society and looks at the cast of characters who shaped these processes. It challenges traditional views of urban modernism and sheds new light on the importance of the immediate post-war for the trajectory of planned urban renewal in twentieth century. It examines plans and policies designed to produce and govern lived spaces- shopping centers, housing estates, parks, schools and homes - and shows how and why they succeeded or failed. It demonstrates how the material space of the city and how people used and experienced it was crucial in understanding historical change in urban contexts. The book is aimed at those interested in urban modernism, the use of space in town planning, the urban histories of post-war Britain and of social housing. -- .

On the 70th anniversary of the State of Israel, Israeli artist Beverly Barkat (born 1966) presents her site-specific work, After the Tribes, at the Museo Boncompagni Ludovisi in Rome. The work is made up of a four-meter-high metal tower divided into twelve painted panels that represent the twelve tribes of Israel.

As an underground art star, Andy Warhol (1928-1987) was the antidote to the prevalent abstract expressionist style of 1950s America. He introduced popular everyday subjects into his practice and openly acknowledged the wide-ranging influences on his work. Throughout his career, his forays into advertising, fashion, film, TV and music videos, marked a fascination with mainstream popular culture. This book will position Warhol at the vanguard of artistic experimentation. Looking at his background as an immigrant, ideas of death and religion, and his queer perspective, it will explore his limitless ambition to push the traditional boundaries of painting, sculpture, film and music, and reveal Warhol as an artist who both succeeded and failed in equal measure; an artist who embraced the establishment while cavorting with the underground. It will further highlight Warhol's knowing flirtation with the commercial world of celebrity alongside his socially engaged collaborations and advocacy of alternative lifestyles. Including his iconic depictions alongide lesser-known works, as well as an installation of his Silver Clouds, this fascinating book returns Warhol to his conceptual ambition and positions him within the shifting creative and political landscape in which he worked, permitting a broad view of how Warhol, and his work, marked a period of cultural transformation.

Every day we are inundated with faces. Images of celebrities, acquaintances, and friends--in the news, on social networking sites, on the street--are constantly changing. Portraits, on the other hand, slow us down. They capture the artist's carefully conceived approach to the subject, whether a friend, a loved one, or a self-portrait. For this book and exhibition, the second in an ongoing series, the National Portrait Gallery held an open competition, asking artists throughout the United States to submit likenesses of people close to them. From more than 3,300 entries from every state, a jury of experts chose forty-nine works of art in a variety of media, including painting, sculpture, drawing, video and new media, and photography. They are as diverse as America and represent many stylistic approaches. The grand prize winner--Dave Woody, for his photograph, Laura--received a $25,000 award and will be given a commission to create a portrait of a notable living American for the Portrait Gallery's permanent collection. --The artists shown here use portraiture or self-portraiture to explore complex issues of identity, while they also test the boundaries of figurative art. These faces compel our curiosity and document the dynamic relationship between artist and subject. Ranging from quietly pensive to wildly expressive, these creative approaches to the art of portraiture assert the power of human connections.

Working in 1970s Italy, a group of artists-namely Ugo La Pietra, Maurizio Nannucci, Francesco Somaini, Mauro Staccioli, Franco Summa, and Franco Vaccari-sought new spaces to create and exhibit art. Looking beyond the gallery, they generated sculptural, conceptual, and participatory interventions, called Arte Ambientale (Environmental Art), situated in the city streets. Their experiments emerged at a time of cultural crisis, when fierce domestic terrorism aggravated an already fragile political situation. To confront the malaise, these artists embraced a position of artistic autonomy and social critique, democratically connecting the city's inhabitants through direct art practices.

Since its founding in 1947, the legendary Magnum Photos agency has been telling its own story about photographers who were witnesses to history and artists on the hunt for decisive moments. Based on unprecedented archival research, The Decisive Network unravels Magnum's mythologies to offer a new history of what it meant to shoot, edit, and sell news images after World War II. Nadya Bair shows that between the 1940s and 1960s, Magnum expanded the human-interest story to global dimensions while bringing the aesthetic of news pictures into new markets. Working with a vast range of editorial and corporate clients, Magnum made photojournalism integral to postwar visual culture. But its photographers could not have done this alone. By unpacking the collaborative nature of photojournalism, this book shows how picture editors, sales agents, spouses, and publishers helped Magnum photographers succeed in their assignments and achieve fame. Bair concludes in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when changing market conditions led Magnum to consolidate its brand. In that moment, Magnum's photojournalists became artists and their assignments oeuvres. Bridging art history, media studies, cultural history, and the history of communication, The Decisive Network transforms our understanding of the photographic profession and the global circulation of images in the predigital world.

This new publication explores the whole career of Winifred Nicholson with a special emphasis on her theories of colour. Using specific paintings to examine her ideas and writings about colour the book includes her late 'prismatic' pictures which have never been properly explained. Throughout her life Winifred Nicholson was interested in prisms and rainbows, but when she was given some prisms by a physicist friend in the mid 1970s her painting took on a new direction. Looking through a prism she saw objects with a rim of prismatic colour, and explored and developed these ideas, often painting pictures that verged on the abstract. Nicholson's 'prismatic' pictures were a culmination of her life's search to find "form's secret and rhythmic law". She painted them in Greece in 1979, at her home in Cumbria, and during her last painting trip to the Island of Eigg in the Hebrides in 1980, where she had an inspired period of painting and made some of her best loved pictures. Published on the occasion of the exhibition 'Liberation of Colour' at mima, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern art, the book illustrates many previously unseen paintings from private collections, as well as some of Nicholson's best known works, and draws on new research, including previously unseen archival material.

The 2021 Capitol Hill Riot marked a watershed moment when the 'old world' of factbased systems of representation was briefly overwhelmed by the emerging hyper-individual politics of aestheticized emotion. In The Trump Effect in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture, Kit Messham-Muir and Uros Cvoro analyse the aesthetics that have emerged at the core of 21st-century politics, and which erupted at the US Capitol in January 2021. Looking at this event's aesthetic dimensions through such aspects as QAnon, white resentment and strongman authoritarianism, they examine the world-wide historical trends towards ethno-nationalism and populism that emerged following the end of the Cold War in 1989 and the dawning of the current post-ideological age. Building on their ground-breaking research into how trauma, emotion and empathy have become well-worn tropes in contemporary art informed by conflict, Messham-Muir and Cvoro go further by highlighting the ways in which art can actively disrupt an underlying drift in society towards white supremacism and ultranationalism. Utilising their outsiders' perspective on a so-called American phenomenon, and rejecting American exceptionalism, their theorising of the 'Trump Effect' rejects the idea of Trump as a political aberration, but as a symptom of deeper and longer-term philosophical shifts in global politics and society. As theorists of contemporary art and visual culture, Messham-Muir and Cvoro explore the ways in which these features of the Trump Effect operate through aesthetics, in the intersection of politics and contemporary art, and provide valuable insight into the current political context.

This hardcover collection celebrates the incredible art of Popeye illustrated by scores of artists over the years with a special focus on the Popeye's Cartoon Club by King Features Syndicate. Also included are highlights from The National Cartoonists Society's celebration of Popeye's 90th year, and a collection of rare cover illustrations by popular counter-culture artists done for IDW comics.

Kurt Jackson's Botanical Landscape is a new collection of poems, paintings, drawings, sculptures and printmaking by the artist and staunch environmentalist: responses to his engagement with and rich experience within the natural world of flora. From day-to-day plants - weeds, the flowers in the hedge, familiar trees and the vegetable garden - to the more unusual, twisted forms and strange fruit of the undergrowth, Jackson's works celebrate the staggering diversity of the plant kingdom. For the art enthusiast, the naturalist, the gardener and the armchair horticulturist, Kurt Jackson's Botanical Landscape maps a particularly expressive communion with nature and offers a unique and beguiling interpretation of the natural world.

This title is a commemorative volume celebrating the life and work of the architect and architectural historian Alan Colquhoun, who died in December 2012.

A survey of 21 contemporary artists who specialise in painting gardens. The artists come from the United Kingdom as well as Europe and the United States. They work in a wide range of media including watercolour, acrylics, oils and tempera. For each artist, there is a brief biographical thumbnail sketch, reproductions of a variety of their work, and comments from the artists on their painting styles and working practices. The result is a intriguing look at this fascinating subject. A beautiful book with a foreword by Sir Roy Strong.

Born in 1942, Narcissus Quagliata studied painting and graphics in Rome and completed his studies at the Art Institute of San Francisco. Very early on, he discovered glass as the most suitable material with which to express himself artistically, focussing in particular on the phenomenon of light and its interplay with coloured glass. In cooperation with industry, Quagliata experimented at an early stage with the development of new forms and applications of glass. Today Narcissus Quagliata is considered one of the most significant glass artists, drawing worldwide attention through his spectacular works in public spaces, such as the Taiwan Dome of Light, the largest illuminated glass ceiling in the world, which forms the roof of the subway station in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. The construction stretches across an approximately 30-metre-wide space. His glass dome in the Santa Maria degli Angeli church, built by Michelangelo within the Baths of Diocletian in Rome, is equally well-known. It provides colourful illumination for the famous entry rotunda of the basilica.

Irvin argues that rules are the key to understanding what's going on in contemporary art. Contemporary art can seem chaotic: it may be made of toilet paper, candies you can eat, or meat that is thrown out after each exhibition. Some works fill a room with obsessively fabricated objects, while others purport to include only concepts, thoughts, or language. Immaterial argues that, despite these unruly appearances, making rules is a key part of what many contemporary artists do when they make their works, and these rules can explain disparate developments in installation art, conceptual art, time-based media art, and participatory art. Sherri Irvin shows how rules are now an artistic medium: they are part of the work's structure and shape what it expresses. Rules are meaningful in themselves and help to activate the meanings of non-art materials and found objects, so audiences need to know about the rules to get the most out of their art experiences. Loss of information about the rules, like loss of a chunk of marble, can seriously damage the work, and preserving rules as well as objects is reshaping how museums maintain their collections. Where rules collide with real-world circumstances, they may be broken maliciously, mistakenly, or for good reasons, threatening the work's meanings and sometimes its very existence. Should we celebrate the prominence of rules in contemporary art? Irvin argues that, while rules aren't always used well, they can be used to create distinctive meanings and provide powerful immersive experiences not achievable through any other means.

A sweeping overview of the work of a prominent Belgian visual artist This handsome volume traces the work and career of Belgian visual artist Johan Muyle (b. 1956) from his early assemblages of found materials to his monumental paintings and recent motorized sculptures. Considered one of the most significant Belgian artists of his generation, Muyle's work has been exhibited internationally since the 1980s. In this book, a series of thematic chapters situate Muyle's oeuvre within the political and artistic context of the past thirty years and analyze the prolific artist's critical responses to concerns including religious extremism and the disappearance of collective utopias. Distributed for Mercatorfonds Exhibition Schedule: MAC's Grand Hornu, MONS, Belgium November 29, 2020-April 18, 2021

Twenty-five leading artist duos and collectives give insight into how and why to work collaboratively Art history is traditionally presented as the individual's struggle for self-expression, yet over the past fifty years, the number of artists working collaboratively has grown exponentially. Co-Art: Artists on Creative Collaboration explores this phenomenon through conversations with twenty-five leading art-world pairs and groups, who offer insight that is relevant beyond the art world, making this book vital for all who seek to work creatively and effectively with others. Artists featured: Allora & Calzadilla, Assemble, Auguste Orts, ayr, Biggs & Collings, Broomberg & Chanarin, ChimPom, Claire Fontaine, DAS INSTITUT, DIS, Elmgreen & Dragset, Eva & Franco Mattes, GCC, Gelitin, Guerrilla Girls, Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, Jane and Louise Wilson, John Wood and Paul Harrison, LaBeouf, Roenkkoe & Turner, Lizzie Fitch/Ryan Trecartin, Los Carpinteros, Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz, Raqs Media Collective, SUPERFLEX

In and Out of View models an expansion in how censorship is discursively framed. Contributors from diverse backgrounds, including artists, art historians, museum specialists, and students, address controversial instances of art production and reception from the mid-20th century to the present in the Americas, Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. Their essays, interviews, and statements invite consideration of the shifting contexts, values, and needs through which artwork moves in and out of view. At issue are governmental restrictions and discursive effects, including erasure and distortion resulting from institutional policies, canonical processes, and interpretive methods. Crucial considerations concerning death/violence, authoritarianism, (neo)colonialism, global capitalism, immigration, race, religion, sexuality, activism/social justice, disability, campus speech, and cultural destruction are highlighted. The anthology-a thought-provoking resource for students and scholars in art history, museum and cultural studies, and creative practices-represents a timely and significant contribution to the literature on censorship.