Lying deep within the urban metropolis of Hong Kong, Happy Valley is one of the most iconic racecourses in the world. It is also the chief source of inspiration for a new body of work by American artist Marcel Dzama. Jockeys ride through waves and cathedrals, Chinese symbols pulled from racing paraphernalia adorn the edges of paper, and bats swoop, hunting for prey. Dzama's distinct visions of the racetrack come alive through a series of large-scale paintings and drawings, transposing imagery from his prolific oeuvre into this adrenaline-filled sporting arena. His new works reflect on the culture of horseracing and how the track has become not only a symbol of sport, but also of commerce, class, and wealth. This publication includes a conversation between Dzama and Laila Pedro. Published on the occasion of his solo exhibition at David Zwirner, Hong Kong, in 2019, Marcel Dzama: Crossing the Line is available in both English only and bilingual English/traditional Chinese editions.

"I've always looked upon cartooning as comedy's last frontier. I have done stand-up, sketches, movies, monologues, awards show introductions, sound bites, blurbs, talk show appearances, and tweets, but the idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me. I felt like, yeah, sometimes I'm funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny. You can understand that I was deeply suspicious of these people who are actually funny." So writes the multitalented comedian Steve Martin in his introduction to A Wealth of Pigeons: A Cartoon Collection. In order to venture into this lauded territory of cartooning, he partnered with the heralded New Yorker cartoonist Harry Bliss. Steve shared caption and cartoon ideas, Harry provided impeccable artwork, and together they created this collection of humorous cartoons and comic strips, with amusing commentary about their collaboration throughout. The result: this gorgeous, funny, singular book, perfect to give as a gift or to buy for yourself.

In this in-depth analysis, Peter Muir argues that Gordon Matta-Clark's Conical Intersect (1975) is emblematic of Henri Lefebvre's understanding of art's function in relation to urban space. By engaging with Lefebvre's theory in conjunction with the perspectives of other writers, such as Michel de Certeau, Jacques Derrida, and George Bataille, the book elicits a story that presents the artwork's significance, origins and legacies. Conical Intersect is a multi-media artwork, which involves the intersections of architecture, sculpture, film, and photography, as well as being a three-dimensional model that reflects aspects of urban, art, and architectural theory, along with a number of cultural and historiographic discourses which are still present and active. This book navigates these many complex narratives by using the central 'hole' of Conical Intersect as its focal point: this apparently vacuous circle around which the events, documents, and other historical or theoretical references surrounding Matta-Clark's project, are perpetually in circulation. Thus, Conical Intersect is imagined as an insatiable absence around which discourses continually form, dissipate and resolve. Muir argues that Conical Intersect is much more than an 'artistic hole.' Due to its location at Plateau Beaubourg in Paris, it is simultaneously an object of art and an instrument of social critique.

This book tells, for the first time, the story of the Situationist International's influence and afterlives in Britain, where its radical ideas have been rapturously welcomed and fiercely resisted. The Situationist International presented itself as the culmination of the twentieth century avant-garde tradition - as the true successor of Dada and Surrealism. Its grand ambition was not unfounded. Though it dissolved in 1972, generations of artists and writers, theorists and provocateurs, punks and psychogeographers have continued its effort to confront and contest the 'society of the spectacle.' This book constructs a long cultural history, beginning in the interwar period with the arrival of Surrealism to Britain, moving through the countercultures of the 1950s and 1960s, and finally surveying the directions in which Situationist theory and practice are being taken today. It combines agile historicism with close readings of a vast range of archival and newly excavated materials, including newspaper reports, underground pamphlets, Psychogeographical films, and experimental novels. It brings to light an overlooked but ferociously productive period of British avant-garde practice, and demonstrates how this subterranean activity helps us to understand postwar culture, late modernism, and the complex internationalization of the avant-garde. As popular and academic interest in the Situationists grows, this book offers an important contribution to the international history of the avant-garde and Surrealism. It will prove a valuable resource for researchers and students of English and Comparative Literature, Modernism and the Avant-Gardes, Twentieth Century and Contemporary History, Cultural Studies, Art History, and Political Aesthetics.

In his theory of the 'mirror stage', the psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Jacques Lacan argued that the female body is defined by its lack of male attributes. Within this framework, he described female sexuality primarily as an absence, and assumed female subordination to the male gaze. However, what happens if one follows Jean Baudrillard's advice to 'swallow the mirror' and go through the 'looking-glass' to explore the reflections and realities that we encounter in the cultural mirror, which reflects the culture in question: its norms, ideals and values? What if the beautiful is inverted and becomes ugly; and the ugly is considered beautiful or shape-shifts into something conventionally thought of as beautiful? These are the fundamental questions that Basia Sliwinska poses in this important new enquiry into gender identity and the politics of vision in contemporary women's art.Through an innovative discussion of the mirror as a metaphor, Sliwinska reveals how the post-1989 practices of woman artists from both sides of the former Iron Curtain - such as Joanna Rajkowska, Marina Abramovic, Boryana Rossa, Natalia LL and Anetta Mona Chisa and Lucia Tkacova - go beyond gender binaries and instead embrace otherness and difference by playing with visual tropes of femininity. Their provocative works offer alternative representations of the female body to those seen in the cultural mirror. Their art challenges and deconstructs patriarchal representations of the social and cultural 'other', associated with visual tropes of femininity such as Alice in Wonderland, Venus and Medusa. The Female Body in the Looking-Glass makes a refreshing, radical intervention into art theory and cultural studies by offering new theoretical concepts such as 'the mirror' and 'genderland' (inspired by Alice's adventures in Wonderland) as critical tools with which we can analyse and explain recent developments in women's art.

Definitive monograph on America's most challenging and influential artist Los-Angeles-based artist Paul McCarthy (b.1945) creates Disneyesque installations, sculptures of animal/vegetable/human hybrids and slapstick performances in a purge of a national subconscious. The psycho-sexual desires and anxieties induced by the media and the built environment of contemporary America emerge in his collisions of plastic prosthetic limbs and condiments that stand in for bodily fluids. These works have been variously deployed: through live actions, often documented on video, and more recently in outsized figures and artificial rural environments, combined in overtly sexual ways. McCarthy's work echoes that of European artists such as Joseph Beuys or the Viennese Aktionistes, but gives 'action art' a postmodern twist. This new revised and expanded edition includes contributions by luminaries such as Kristine Stiles, Ralph Rugoff, Massimiliano Gioni and Robert Storr.

Mapping Paradigms in Modern and Contemporary Art defines a new cartographic aesthetic, or what Simonetta Moro calls carto-aesthetics, as a key to interpreting specific phenomena in modern and contemporary art, through the concept of poetic cartography. The problem of mapping, although indebted to the "spatial turn" of poststructuralist philosophy, is reconstructed as hermeneutics, while exposing the nexus between topology, space-time, and memory. The book posits that the emergence of "mapping" as a ubiquitous theme in contemporary art can be attributed to the power of the cartographic model to constitute multiple worldviews that can be seen as paradigmatic of the post-modern and contemporary condition. This book will be of particular interest to scholars in art history, art theory, aesthetics, and cartography.

In the minds of many Americans, Islam is synonymous with the Middle East, Muslim men with violence, and Muslim women with oppression. A clash of civilizations appears to be increasingly manifest and the war on terror seems a struggle against Islam. These are all symptoms of Islamophobia. Meanwhile, the current surge in nativist bias reveals the racism of anti-Muslim sentiment. This book explores these anxieties through political cartoons and film--media with immediate and important impact. After providing a background on Islamic traditions and their history with America, it graphically shows how political cartoons and films reveal Americans' casual demeaning and demonizing of Muslims and Islam--a phenomenon common among both liberals and conservatives. Islamophobia and Anti-Muslim Sentiment offers both fascinating insights into our culture's ways of "picturing the enemy" as Muslim, and ways of moving beyond antagonism.

The Routledge Companion to Art and Activism in the Twenty-First Century brings together a wide range of geographical, cultural, historical, and conceptual perspectives in a single volume of new essays that facilitate a deeper understanding of the field of art activism as it stands today and as it looks towards the future. The book is a resource for multiple fields, including art activism, socially engaged art, and contemporary art, that represent the depth and breadth of contemporary activist art worldwide. Contributors highlight predominant lines of inquiry, uncover challenges faced by scholars and practitioners of activist art, and facilitate dialogue that might lead to new directions for research and practice. The editors hope that the volume will incite further conversation and collaboration among the various participants, practitioners, and researchers concerned with the relationship between art and activism. The audience includes scholars and professors of modern and contemporary art, students in both graduate and upper-level undergraduate programs, as well as artists, curators, and museum professionals. Each chapter can stand on its own, making the companion a flexible resource for students and educators working in art history, museum studies, community practice/socially engaged art, political science, sociology, and ethnic and cultural studies.

As a response to the ubiquity of drawing in contemporary consciousness and a corresponding dearth of critical engagement with the medium, these collected essays provide original interpretations of artists' drawing today. Questions of process, politics, scale, and community raised in the work of the diverse group of artists are situated within the historic discourse on drawing and demonstrate the extent to which contemporary practice challenges previous definitions of the medium. From the room-encompassing drawings of Monika Grzymala and Barbara Bernstein or Sophie Calle's expansive exploration of the Jerusalem eruv to Andrea Bowers's graphite renditions of protest to Ellsworth Kelly's proposal for a memorial to September 11, the essays explore the implications of drawings' departure from the confines of a sheet of paper. Essential reading for both the academic and general audience, this book provides in-depth discussions of artists and projects that have never been treated in a sustained, analytical way; each essay will interest the wider contemporary art audience, as well as students of drawing. Taken as a whole, the volume represents a pertinent and stimulating engagement with issues of paramount importance to our understanding of contemporary art and its place in museums, galleries, and the public sphere.

Anton van Dalen: Community of Many chronicles the historic artist Anton van Dalen's lifelong visual investigation informed by the influences of war, religion and migration, his devotion to nature, and his dedication to documenting the technological and cultural evolutions within our society across a variety of mediums, from drawing and sculpture to collage and painting. Born in the Netherlands in 1938 to a conservative Calvinist family, Anton witnessed first-hand the terrors of both technological and human destruction during the Second World War. Since he immigrated to New York in 1966 and settled in the East Village, Anton has served as witness, storyteller and documentarian of the dramatic cultural shifts in the neighbourhood through his masterfully honed and singular iconography. Featuring critical essays by John Yau and Tiernan Morgan, this heavily illustrated publication is the first comprehensive monograph on Anton van Dalen's work that provides a language by which to discuss the consequences of human brutality towards nature and our entanglement with technology. Anton has been included in group exhibitions at notable institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; New Museum, New York; Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati; and the New-York Historical Society. He has also been the subject of solo exhibitions at Temple Contemporary, Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University, Philadelphia; University Museum of Contemporary Art, University of Massachusetts, Amherst; and Exit Art, New York. His Avenue A Cut-Out Theatre has toured since 1995 both nationally and internationally and has been shown at numerous institutions including The Drawing Center, the Museum of Modern Art, and The New-York Historical Society.

A survey of modern art from the Impressionists to the present, with a new chapter on the art of the seventies and eighties, and corrections and revisions in the text.

Rather than one overarching theme, the 56th International Art Exhibition of the Biennale is informed by a layer of intersecting filters. These filters are a constellation of parameters that circumscribe multiple ideas which will be touched upon to imagine and realize a diversity of practices. All the World's Futures employs as a filter the historical trajectory that the Biennale itself, over the course of its one hundred and twenty years existence has run over. A filter through which to reflect on both the current 'state of things' and the 'appearance of things.' At its core is the notion of the exhibition as a stage, where historical and counter-historical projects are explored. Within this framework the main aspects of the 56th Biennale Exhibition solicit and privilege new proposals and works conceived specifically by invited artists, filmmakers, choreographers, performers, composers, and writers.

The Experimental Plays of Harold Pinter offers a fresh approach to the plays of Nobel Prize laureate Harold Pinter. He is highlighted as an experimental playwright who attempted to free the theatre from the legacy of realism, causality, and motivation. His plays are read in relation to the avant-garde movements in the visual arts and music that flourished in the twentieth century. Scolnicov's new interdisciplinary perspective sets Pinter s dramatic works against a background of the other arts and yields new insights into the themes and structure of the plays, underlining their evolving innovativeness. Such an approach has not been attempted to date, and Pinter s plays are usually discussed in the context of their contemporary drama and theatre. This shift of interpretive focus requires a radical change in the acting technique called for by Pinter s plays. The intermedial reading offered in the book also carries wider implications for the development of theatre studies. Twentieth-century dramatic criticism has lagged behind art criticism and has not been quick enough to develop adequate tools for the analysis of Pinter s experiments with theatrical form. Scolnicov borrows from the ideas of different contemporary art movements, such as hyperrealism, surrealism, abstract expressionism, minimalism, conceptual art, and abstract art to better understand his work. Pinter also adapted techniques from music, film, and literature, constantly re-defining the limits of dramatic art and theatre in his plays."

Art is big business, with some artists able to command huge sums of money for their works, while the vast majority are ignored or dismissed by critics. This book shows that these marginalized artists, the
"dark matter" of the art world, are essential to the survival of the mainstream and that they frequently organize in opposition to it.
Gregory Sholette, a politically engaged artist, argues that imagination and creativity in the art world originate thrive in the non-commercial sector shut off from prestigious galleries and champagne receptions. This broader creative culture feeds the mainstream with new forms and styles that can be commodified and used to sustain the few artists admitted into the elite.
This dependency, and the advent of inexpensive communication, audio and video technology, has allowed this "dark matter" of the alternative art world to increasingly subvert the mainstream and intervene politically as both new and old forms of non-capitalist, public art. This book is essential for anyone interested in interventionist art, collectivism, and the political economy of the art world.

This book maps key moments in the history of postwar art from a global perspective. The reader is introduced to a new globally oriented approach to art, artists, museums and movements of the postwar era (1945-70). Specifically, this book bridges the gap between historical artistic centers, such as Paris and New York, and peripheral loci. Through case studies, previously unknown networks, circulations, divides and controversies are brought to light. From the development of Ethiopian modernism, to the showcase of Brazilian modernity, this book provides readers with a new set of coordinates and a reassessment of well-trodden art historical narratives around modernism. This book will be of interest to scholars in art historiography, art history, exhibition and curatorial studies, modern art and globalization.

The artist Humphrey Ocean RA has painted portraits of Sir Paul McCartney and Philip Larkin, among many others. But alongside these prestigious commissions, he has always returned to drawing the simpler things in life: our 'alluringly unnatural world', as he puts it. The result is this idiosyncratic and charming collection of birds, all rendered in Ocean's unique style. With a species to discover on every page, this book is the perfect gift for any keen ornithologist, aspiring twitcher or dedicated listener to Tweet of the Day. As well as birdwatching around his home and studio in South London, Ocean regularly visits his sister, who is a nun in Nairobi and has loved birds all her life. There, he paints Kenyan birds such as the Eurasian bee-eater, the Bulbul and the Flycatcher that are 'local, a bit like our garden birds so nothing overly exotic, but of course to me they are'. They join the familiar gulls, thrushes and tits of the gardens, parks and hedgerows of the UK in this beautifully produced collection.

An essential sourcebook of prints from a key fashion decade. The 1950s was the decade when an analytical approach to design, with a lightness and freshness, combined with whimsical imagery and idiosyncratic subject matter. Showcasing hundreds of print designs, this book celebrates the heyday of postwar fashion design. From Lucienne Day and Robert Stewart to Maija Isola of Marimekko, the designs and influences of the print icons of the time are all covered. In addition to finished prints, the book contains exclusive illustrations and original artworks. The major themes of the period are explored, including: narrative and novelty; abstraction, exploring the distorted and attenuated forms used in print; artistic licence and the influence of contemporary art on fashion print; and finally kinetic prints that capture the influence of the era’s ‘mobiles, doodles and spasms’. Each short chapter introduction is followed by a range of illustrations with captions to give provenance and relevance, making this a unique sourcebook for contemporary designers and students.

Covering the 1960s and 1970s, this volume explores new ways of investigating, comparing and interpreting the different domains of design culture across the Nordic countries. Challenging the traditional narrative, this volume argues that the roots of the most prominent features of Nordic design's contemporary significance are not to be found amongst the objects for the home collectively branded as 'Scandinavian Design' to great acclaim in the 1950s, but in the discourses, institutions and practices formed in the aftermath of that oft-told success story, during the turbulent period between 1960 and 1980. This is achieved by employing multidisciplinary approaches to connect the domains of industrial production, marketing, consumption, public institutions, design educations, trade journals as well as public debates and civic initiatives forming a design culture. This book makes a significant contribution to current, international agendas of historiographical critique focusing on transnational relations and the deconstruction of national design histories. This book will be of interest to scholars in design, design history and Scandinavian studies. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

The first in a two-volume survey, readers are invited to reexamine the history of the West and its art through a multifaceted modern lens. More than 40 artists are included who reflect the tremendous diversity, depth, and breadth of a field steeped in history. While some follow the traditions established by Remington and Russell, others seek to break from tradition, busting myths and bringing new insights and artistic styles to the genre. They come from both sides of the Mississippi and have pedigrees that range from bona fide cowboy or Native American credentials to careers in commercial illustration. The unifying theme is a common concern for and commitment to their art and the West itself. In this volume, contemporary artists are featured whose work revolves around the American cowboy. Within these pages, many different artists, some of whom have been cowboys themselves, exhibit their rendition of the wonderful world of the West.

This book analyses the intermeshing of state power and art history in Europe since 1945 and up to the present from a critical, de-centered perspective. Devoting special attention to European peripheries and to under-researched transnational cultural political initiatives related to the arts implemented after the end of the Second World War, the contributors explore the ways in which this relationship crystallised in specific moments, places, discourses and practices. They make the historic hegemonic centres of the discipline converse with Europe's Southern and Eastern peripheries, from Portugal to Estonia to Greece. By stressing the margins' point of view this volume rethinks the ideological grounds on which art history and the European Union have been constructed as well as the role played by art and culture in the very concept of 'Europe.'

This book examines how African-American writers and visual artists interweave icon and inscription in order to re-present the black female body, traditionally rendered alien and inarticulate within Western discursive and visual systems. Brown considers how the writings of Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, Paule Marshall, Edwidge Danticat, Jamaica Kincaid, Andrea Lee, Gloria Naylor, and Martha Southgate are bound to such contemporary, postmodern visual artists as Lorna Simpson, Carrie Mae Weems, Kara Walker, Betye Saar, and Faith Ringgold. While the artists and authors rely on radically different media-photos, collage, video, and assembled objects, as opposed to words and rhythm-both sets of intellectual activists insist on the primacy of the black aesthetic. Both assert artistic agency and cultural continuity in the face of the oppression, social transformation, and cultural multiplicity of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This book examines how African-American performative practices mediate the tension between the ostensibly de-racialized body politic and the hyper-racialized black, female body, reimagining the cultural and political ground that guides various articulations of American national belonging. Brown shows how and why black women writers and artists matter as agents of change, how and why the form and content of their works must be recognized and reconsidered in the increasingly frenzied arena of cultural production and political debate.