The Liverpool Art Book is a tribute to one of the UK's most iconic cities. An impressive artistic collection taking the reader on a tour through the colourful spirit of Liverpool and its history: inspired by its vibrant, modern buildings and imposing symbols of commence, its statues of icons such as the Beatles and Cilla Black, and its majestic skyline, Liverpool's very own artists highlight its beauties in the most unique way.

Step right up for the Greatest Book on Earth! For more than 70 years, Clowns International--the oldest established clowning organization--has been painting the faces of its members on eggs. Each one is a record of a clown's unique identity, preserving the unwritten rule that no clown should copy another's look. This mesmerizing volume collects more than 150 of these portraits, from 1946 to the modern day, accompanied by short personal histories of many of the clowns. Here are Tricky Nicky, Taffy, Bobo, Sammy Sunshine, the legendary Emmett Kelly, and Jolly Jack, clowning since 1977 and still performing today with a penguin puppet named Biscuit. A treasure just like the eggs it enshrines, The Clown Egg Register is an extraordinary archive of images and lives of the men and women behind the make-up.

This handsome, full colour book celebrates forty years of the work of Ken Elias, from student op art/collage to current work made in response to poetry. As an artist Elias is something of a conundrum. Born and once again based in Glynneath, he draws extensively on his locale and on his childhood in the Fifties, in particular his extended family and his frequent cinema going. Yet he is almost unique in Wales in his continuing adherence to Pop Art and collage. Taught by John Selway, Terry Setch and Ernest Zobole at Newport Art College in the 1960s collage and photomontage remain at the centre of his work, including his paintings: flattening perspectives, unexpectedly contrasting images, producing social and political commentary, assimilating a modernist urban artform into a Valleys context. Elias' is an art which blurs the edges of reality in a similar fashion to cinema. It asks the viewer to look afresh at the familiar and the domestic, and to question their own reality. The book, which accompanies a touring exhibition, includes five essays by leading commentators in the field: Hugh Adams - 'Who are you to decide what reality is?' Anne Price-Owen - 'Ken Elias and the Hidden Persuaders' David Briers - 'Ken Elias and the Art of Photomontage' Jon Gower - 'Going to the Pictures' Ceri Thomas - 'Ken Elias: An Overview'

"I lived in a haunted apartment." Davisson opens this definitive work on Japan's ghosts, or yurei, with a personal tale about the spirit world. Shifting from anecdotes to deep research to translation of ancient ghost stories, he explores the persistence of yurei in modern Japan and their continued popularity throughout the West. Color images of yurei appear throughout the book.

Tony Conrad has significantly influenced cultural developments from minimalism to underground film, "concept art," postmodern appropriation, and the most sophisticated rock and roll. Creator of the "structural" film, The Flicker, collaborator on Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures and Normal Love, follower of Henry Flynt's radical anti-art, member of the Theatre of Eternal Music and the first incarnation of The Velvet Underground, and early associate of Mike Kelley, Tony Oursler, and Cindy Sherman, Conrad has eluded canonic histories. Yet Beyond the Dream Syndicate does not claim Conrad as a major but under-recognized figure. Neither monograph nor social history, the book takes Conrad's collaborative interactions as a guiding thread by which to investigate the contiguous networks and discursive interconnections in 1960s art. Such an approach simultaneously illuminates and estranges current understandings of the period, redrawing the map across medium and stylistic boundaries to reveal a constitutive hybridization at the base of the decade's artistic development. This exploration of Conrad and his milieu goes beyond the presentation of a relatively overlooked oeuvre to chart multiple, contestatory regimes of power simultaneously in play during the pivotal moment of the 1960s. From the sovereign authority invoked by Young's music, to the "paranoiac" politics of Flynt, to the immanent control modeled by Conrad's films, each avant-garde project examined reveals an investment within a particular structure of power and resistance, providing a glimpse into the diversity of the artistic and political stakes that continue to define our time.Branden W. Joseph is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University and an editor of the journal Grey Room (MIT Press). He is the author of Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-Avant-Garde (MIT Press, 2003.)

The artist Kubra Khademi (b. 1989) lives in Paris and focuses in her work on her life as a woman and a person with direct experience as a refugee. This makes it both political and highly topical. Multi-faceted themes pervade her art, including her function as mouthpiece and as an element in the fight for the fundamental rights of women, as well as artistic work in exile and in a Muslim society. In paintings and more recently with the use of photographic techniques and embroidery, Khademi presents tranquil nude female figures that – depending on the angle – can nonetheless be interpreted as provocative. They are juxtaposed with impressive performances that draw on the artist’s own physical experiences as a subject. Khademi focuses her attention on the male-dominated society in countries like her native Afghanistan and the socio-political situation there, linking together motifs from mythology, art history and politics. Kubra Khademi has received many awards for her work, and this overview publication presents her oeuvre in all its complexity.

The 1970s was a decade of style contrasts: every extreme of fashion was met by an equally trendy opposite reaction. Ankle-length maxi skirts vied for attention with super-short hot-pants. Outfits in vibrant prints and obviously man-made fabrics contrasted with subtly-coloured ensembles in wool jerseys and silky crepes. Delicate floral cottons, hand-knits and hand-tooled leather came up against boldly synthetic and plastic looks perched atop platform shoes - for men and women alike. More so than at any other time, fashion looked backwards in order to dress the future with quirkily ironic retro looks, while alternative street-style movements such as Punk used appearance to startle and challenge the establishment. In this book, Daniel Milford-Cottam uses colourful photographs to illustrate an eye-opening introduction to the bold fashions that still have such resonance today.

Martin's work is characterised by a unique freedom, expressed through the possibilities of her chosen canvas - a piece of paper or textile, a sculptural surface, wall or screen. She interrogates 'who we are at the core, as people', and since her beginnings with live performance drawing in the mega clubs of Tokyo she has navigated creative worlds to interrogate and play with the role of artist and viewer. This monograph charts her career and includes early pieces, larg-scale murals and commissions, and collaborations with museums, technical institutes, museums and fashion brands.

Shuvinai Ashoona (born 1961) is a third-generation Inuit artist based in Kinngait, Nunavut, Canada. Best known for her highly personal and imaginative iconography, Shuvinai's imagery ranges from closely observed naturalistic scenes of her Arctic home to monstrous and fantastical visions. Her drawings imagine the past and present fused into a prophetic future. Existing somewhere between dystopic and utopic, Shuvinai's brightly coloured drawings teem with life. Her earthly and extraterrestrial worlds exist within a kind intergalactic future. The book provides insight into Shuvinai's practice, with essays from Canadian and international authors, reflections on specific drawings, a select exhibition history and large-format illustrations, including installation images from The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto, Canada.

Scholarly considerations of Andy Warhol abound, including very fine catalogues raisonne, notable biographies, and essays in various exhibition catalogues and anthologies. But nowhere is there an in-depth scholarly examination of Warhol's oeuvre as a whole until now. Jonathan Flatley's Like Andy Warhol is a revelatory look at the artist's likeness-producing practices, not only reflected in his famous Campbell's soup cans and Marilyn Monroe silkscreens, but across Warhol's whole range of interests including movies, drag queens, boredom, and his sprawling collections. Flatley shows us that Warhol's art is an illustration of the artist's own talent for "liking." He argues that there is in Warhol's productions a utopian impulse, an attempt to imagine new, queer forms of emotional attachment and affiliation, and to transform the world into a place where these forms find a new home. Like Andy Warhol is not just the best full-length critical study of Warhol in print, it is also an instant classic of queer theory.

If New York City is a state of mind, then Jorge Colombo captures the metropolis' thoughts like no other. Colombo's beautiful illustrations of New York City have graced the cover of "The New Yorker" several times, brilliantly depicting icons such as silhouetted rooftop water towers, the illuminated Chrysler Building at night, Fifth Avenue in the snow, or the ubiquitous hot dog stand. All of the images were finger painted on location on an iPhone; to passerby walking by the artist, he simply appeared to be sending text messages or reading a very long email. This sophisticated volume presents one hundred of his best pieces in full colour, accompanied by his recollections and comentaries about each location. Every scene is unmistakably New York: familiar, grand, timeless, yet filtered by modern, cutting-edge technology. Immediately recognizable to native New Yorkers, but also perfect for anyone who admires the Big Apple, this is a monograph of an artist and of a city.

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.

Traditionally used in Aboriginal funeral ceremonies, memorial poles have been transformed into compelling contemporary artworks. The memorial pole is made from the trunk of the Eucalyptus tetradonta, hollowed naturally by termites. When the bones of the deceased were placed inside, it signified the moment when the spirit had finally returned home-when they had left the "outside" world, and become one with the "inside" world of the ancestral realm. Today, these works of art have become a powerful symbol of Aboriginal culture's significance around the globe. The artists featured in the book-including John Mawurndjul, Djambawa Marawili, and Nyapanyapa Yunupingu-are some of Australia's most acclaimed contemporary artists. Taking their inspiration from ancient clan insignia, the designs on these poles are transformed in new and personal ways that offer a powerful reminder of the resilience and beauty of Aboriginal culture. This book features dazzling color images and impeccable scholarship and includes essays from some of the leading scholars in the field of Aboriginal art.

Colombia's contemporary art scene - one of the most vibrant in Latin America - nevertheless remains relatively undocumented outside that country. With profiles of 90 key players and four critical essays, Contemporary Art Colombia captures the renewed dynamism of the Colombian art world. Contemporary Art Colombia features the key figures, museums and spaces so integral to the booming Colombian art scene, including public institutions such as the Museo del Banco de la Republica in Bogota and the Medellin Museo de Arte Moderno; private initiatives such as Art Fair ArtBo; private institutions such as Flora and Fundacion Misol; commercial galleries such as Bogota-based Casas Riegner and Instituto de Vision; artists such as Doris Salcedo, Carlos Motta, Edinson Quinones, and Oscar Munoz; and well-established figures like Celia de Birbragher, the founder and editor of Latin America's leading art magazine, ArtNexus.

As a painter, filmmaker, and photographer, Ulrike Ottinger has created an entire artistic universe, a Cosmos Ottinger. Her transdisciplinary approach is groundbreaking today but Ottinger is also a pioneer of queer art, post-colonial criticism, and the confrontation with fascism and persecution. These questions are all still urgent today: How can we locate contemporary feminist, queer, and aesthetic debates historically? And how does one situate these debates in a museum setting? The catalogue, edited by the Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, documents this part of her work but also addresses these theoretical and art historical questions raised by Ottinger's searching and investigative approach.

The drawings of Israeli artist Eran Shakine may look carefree and casual, but their message is serious: Muslims, Christians, and Jews share a history. They are linked through Abraham's sons Ishmael, an ancestor of the Muslims, and Isaac, an ancestor of the Jews, as well as through Jesus, born a Jew. As Shakine demonstrates in this new collection of his work, Muslims, Christians, and Jews have a great deal in common. Eran Shakine: Knocking on Heaven's Door presents new large-format oilstick drawings depicting Muslims, Christians, and Jews as an indistinguishable trio involved in actions that are both profound and humorous. In doing so, he reveals both the diversity and the similarity of the three and offers his own highly individual view of these world religions. Shakine's work argues that though they may have many differences, they share one thought: when they knock at heaven's door, they all hope to find the love of God. The result is a moving, sometimes witty, and always powerful collection of drawings that speak to many conflicts in the world today.

British artist David Shrigley (b. 1968, Macclesfield) is best known for his humorous drawings that make witty and wry observations on everyday life. Currently based in Glasgow, he trained as a fine artist and his deliberately crude graphic style gives his work an immediate and accessible appeal, while simultaneously offering insightful commentary on the absurdities of human relationships. This book, published on the occasion of his first major survey show in London, will cover the full range of Shrigley's diverse practice which extends far beyond drawing to include photography, books, sculpture, digital animation, painting and music. It will also feature exciting new commissions and site specific installations. In addition to exhibiting internationally, he regularly contributes cartoons for the Guardian Weekend magazine and the New Statesman, and recently created an animation for the UK Save the Arts campaign.

Keith Haring (1958 -1990) is widely recognised for his colourful paintings, drawings, sculptures and murals. Haring exploded onto the early 1980s New York art scene with his vivid graffiti-inspired drawings, many of which found exposure in the public realm, such as the Times Square billboard broadcast of his famous Radiant Child in 1982. Haring's instantly recognisable `cartoon-like' imagery not only drew on the iconography of contemporary pop and club culture but also looked back to the patterns and rhythms of Islamic and Japanese art, and primitive wall-paintings,. Furthermore his work also reflected a profound commitment to social justice and activism, and raised numerous issues that remain relevant today, including the AIDS crisis, the Cold War and fear of nuclear attack, racism, the excesses of capitalism and environmental degradation. Featuring around fifty works supported by rarely seen photography, film and archival documents from the Keith Haring Foundation, this accessible book will not only introduce Haring to a new audience but also throw fresh light on an artist whose work remains symptomatic of the subcultural and creative energy of 1980s New York. Three short texts exploring various aspects of Haring's practice will be interspersed with illustrations of his works and a rolling time-line featuring key social and political events of the 1980s (from the election of Reagan in 1980 and the explosion of hip hop from underground movement to global phenomenon to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989) and Haring's responses to them. The publication also aims to include select and unpublished reminiscences from those who collaborated and interacted with Haring, including performers such as Madonna and Grace Jones and artists Jenny Holzer and Yoko Ono.

The exhibition You Are my Biggest Inspiration in the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris is the first comprehensive solo show of the early work of the radical artist duo EVA & ADELE. In addition to their very first joint work, the video installation HELLAS, the publication shows for the first time early key works which focus attention on the Gesamtkunstwerk EVA & ADELE. EVA & ADELE come from the future. They started their joint work in 1989 with the 7-channel/video HELLAS, which symbolises the finding and fusing of the two solo artists to created an artistic identity. Since their `Hochzeit Metropolis' in 1991 the couple strolls with the same costumes and theatrical appearance as a permanent, life-long and worldwide performance at the principal events of the art world such as the documenta in Kassel, the Biennale in Venice and the major art fairs. The books shows examples from their early painting, drawing, sculpture and video.

In an atmosphere of growing authoritarianism, how can we draw attention to performance as a transaction of sensorial agency - the right to be seen, heard, recognized - the right to be palpable? Improvised Futures attempts to frame performance as doing, as fraught negotiations of agency and identity. As it considers the performative effect of a range of ideas, actions and situations that have shaped society and defined cultural expression since the 1990s, it frames the body as a site of radical imagination. The volume comprises texts and artworks by artists, academics and activists, placing these works in conversation with each other in order to elicit new meanings and connections.

No other art movement has so profoundly influenced radical politics as the Situationist International. But beyond the clichés about its purported leader Guy Debord, the "society of the spectacle," détournement and dérive, lies a more complex story about key historical shifts in the composition of capital, work, labor, art, and revolutionary theory during the 1950s and 60s. With and Against reframes the history of the Situationist International as a struggle to come to terms with the then-emerging ideologies of cybernetics and automation. Through each of the book's four chapters, Dominique Routhier dissects Situationist pamphlets, documents, artworks, and objects that refract elements of a "cybernetic hypothesis": the theoretically hyperbolic belief that technological progress, computers and automation make class struggle and the idea of revolution obsolete. With equal attention to aesthetic detail and to the broader contours of political economy, this book serves as a critical intervention in art history as well a call to reconsider, more broadly, the contemporary lessons of the most political of all artistic avantgardes.

Bringing a poet's perspective to an artist's archive, this highly original book examines wordplay in the art and thought of American artist Gordon Matta-Clark (1943-1978). A pivotal figure in the postminimalist generation who was also the son of a prominent Surrealist, Matta-Clark was a leader in the downtown artists' community in New York in the 1970s, and is widely seen as a pioneer of what has come to be known as social practice art. He is celebrated for his "anarchitectural" environments and performances, and the films, photographs, drawings, and sculptural fragments with which his site-specific work was documented. In studies of his career, the artist's provocative and vivid language is referenced constantly. Yet the verbal aspect of his practice has not previously been examined in its own right. Blending close readings of Matta-Clark's visual and verbal creations with reception history and critical biography, this extensively researched study engages with the linguistic and semiotic forms in Matta-Clark's art, forms that activate what he called the "poetics of psycho-locus" and "total (semiotic) system." Examining notes, statements, titles, letters, and interviews in light of what they reveal about his work at large, Frances Richard unearths archival, biographical, and historical information, linking Matta-Clark to Conceptualist peers and Surrealist and Dada forebears. Gordon Matta-Clark: Physical Poetics explores the paradoxical durability of Matta-Clark's language, and its role in an aggressively physical oeuvre whose major works have been destroyed.