Performance in the Museum charts the main stages of the inclusion of performance in the museum from the 1970s to the present day. While performance emerged in the late 1960s as an anti-institutional form of art, it has recently gained an extraordinary visibility in contemporary art museums. This book focuses on three specific areas affecting museums: how to display performance art; conservation of performance art; and acquisition. What emerges from this study is that the museum, although rarely anticipating the specific issues raised by performance, has assumed a unique position in devising curatorial strategies adapted to this medium. Through close analysis of a selection of exhibitions and curatorial practices from many different parts of the world, and from specific periods from the past fifty years, this book identifies key moments of the integration of performance in the museum, thus filling a crucial gap both in the history of performance and curatorial studies. Despite the recent surge of exhibitions on performance and the part played by museums in this phenomenon, the history of the display, the conservation and the acquisition of live performance remains largely uncharted. This book offers a thought-provoking and highly readable assessment of some fundamental questions in contemporary curatorial practice.

This important book presents the work of the fascinating and singular artist Luigi Pericle (1916–2001). Pericle was a painter, illustrator and scholar, as well as a leading figure in the story of art in the second half of the twentieth century. The artist initially found fame as an illustrator, gaining widespread renown in the 1950s as the inventor of the character Max the Marmot. But his intense, enigmatic and multi-layered paintings increasingly drew the attention of the art world, with works that reflect his personal, metaphysical take on post-war abstraction exhibited at numerous venues in Britain during the 1960s. Pericle then abruptly retreated from the art system, and for the rest of his life continued to paint, write and to study esoteric philosophy in the secluded house he shared with his wife Orsolina on Monte Verit  in the Ticino region of Switzerland. The artist’s work was dramatically rediscovered in 2016 when the contents of his former residence were revealed. The process of restoring, cataloguing and researching his vast oeuvre is ongoing, and is overseen by Ascona’s Archivio Luigi Pericle, with which the exhibition has been organised. This beautifully illustrated publication, which accompanies an exhibition at the Estorick Collection, London, includes a full catalogue of the works, as well as essays by noted scholars.

Renowned artist Damien Hirst (b.1965) is reviewed in an exhibition of works spanning twenty years, held at Tate Modern from April to September 2012.The review explores the development of his art from the potent animal vitrines and butterfly composites to the series of extensive spot paintings, where the artist engaged in a complex invigilation of the coded systems that govern daily existence. The exhibition at Tate Modern features 'For The Love of God', the celebrated diamond studded skull, to be centred in the vast Turbine Hall of the converted power station at Bankside.

"The Landscape Series" of 2002 to 2006 was made in quantities of thirty to one hundred 1' square panels, each of the thirty sets generally taking three weeks to complete. The panels were worked on flat, painting eighteen at a time in fifteen minute bursts. They were laid out on an old framed 6' x 3' piece which also served as a container for the pools of colour washed over the textured surface. Two inch square wooden cubes were used to stack the paintings in small towers to dry out. Various factors steered the series development: there was reference to an initial colour plan, thoughts about the load-bearing pressures on a place, tracks and crossing points, airflow, water, spaces and intervals, the nature of settlement in the land. For a city: light and shadows on buildings, streets, side alleys and hidden courtyards, people, stores, traffic, noise, incidents and interruptions. Titles were assigned later to photographs of the line of production. The identity of a place was achieved not by literal description but as an equivalent found by coincidence in the passage of an abstract process.

While highlighting the prevailing role of television in Western societies, Art vs. TV maps and condenses a comprehensive history of the relationships of art and television. With a particular focus on the link between reality and representation, Francesco Spampinato analyzes video art works, installations, performances, interventions and television programs made by contemporary artists as forms of resistance to and appropriation and parody of mainstream television. The artists discussed belong to different generations: those that emerged in the 1960s in association with art movements such as Pop Art, Fluxus and Happening; and those appearing on the scene in the 1980s, whose work aimed at deconstructing media representation in line with postmodernist theories; to those arriving in the 2000s, an era in which, through reality shows and the Internet, anybody could potentially become a media personality; and finally those active in the 2010s, whose work reflects on how old media like television has definitively vaporized through the electronic highways of cyberspace. These works and phenomena elicit a tension between art and television, exposing an incongruence; an impossibility not only to converge but at the very least to open up a dialogical exchange.

Etel Adnan (1925-2021) was a Lebanese-American poet, essayist and visual artist. This is the first book to present a full account of Adnan's fascinating life and work, using the drama of her biography, the complexity of her identity, and the cosmopolitan nature of her experience to illuminate the many layers and dimensions of her paintings and their progress over several crucial decades. Adnan came relatively late to painting - her first images were created in the late-1950s in response to the Californian landscape. Her vocabulary of lines, shapes and colours changed little over time, and yet there are huge variations in mood, texture, composition and material. Similarly, there is a balance between understanding her paintings as pure abstractions, emulating the shape of thought, and seeing them for the actual landscapes of the many places Adnan loved, embraced and responded to. Tackling the complexities of her subject with skill and insight, Kaelen Wilson-Goldie unpacks Adnan's multi-layered career to capture the full scope of her artistic endeavours and impressive achievements.

A special harback editon limited to one hundred copies, Interviews-Artists brings together artists active in the fields of painting, drawing, photography, print and sculpture. Recorded conversations explore work in progress and the development of their practice. Patterns of personal experience link with a broader continuum of progressive ideas and show how their imaginative interventions bear on the world. The collection of interviews with artists developed in three phases; first researched from 1988-92 and published in the quarterly review, Cv Journal of Art & Crafts. Then gathered in an anthology, Interviews with the Artists: Elements of Discourse, (editions in 1993/1996/2001/2007). The second phase was researched from January to July 2010; the third from October 2010 to July 2011. Sixty eight interviews from the collection are published this volume.