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.

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.

A magisterial study of celebrated photographer Walker Evans Walker Evans (1903-75) was a great American artist photographing people and places in the United States in unforgettable ways. He is known for his work for the Farm Security Administration, addressing the Great Depression, but what he actually saw was the diversity of people and the damage of the long Civil War. In Walker Evans, renowned art historian Svetlana Alpers explores how Evans made his distinctive photographs. Delving into a lavish selection of Evans's work, Alpers uncovers rich parallels between his creative approach and those of numerous literary and cultural figures, locating Evans within the wide context of a truly international circle. Alpers demonstrates that Evans's practice relied on his camera choices and willingness to edit multiple versions of a shot, as well as his keen eye and his distant straight-on view of visual objects. Illustrating the vital role of Evans's dual love of text and images, Alpers places his writings in conversation with his photographs. She brings his techniques into dialogue with the work of a global cast of important artists-from Flaubert and Baudelaire to Elizabeth Bishop and William Faulkner-underscoring how Evans's travels abroad in such places as France and Cuba, along with his expansive literary and artistic tastes, informed his quintessentially American photographic style. A magisterial account of a great twentieth-century artist, Walker Evans urges us to look anew at the act of seeing the world-to reconsider how Evans saw his subjects, how he saw his photographs, and how we can see his images as if for the first time.

This book is about the digital interface and its use in interactive new media art installations. It examines the aesthetic aspects of the interface through a theoretical exploration of new media artists, who create, and tactically deploy, digital interfaces in their work in order to question the socio-cultural stakes of a technology that shapes and reshapes relationships between humans and non-humans. In this way, it shows how use of the digital interface provides us with a critical framework for understanding our relationship with technology.

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.

This book explores how feminist artists continued to engage with kitchen culture and food practices in their work as women's art moved from the margins to the mainstream. In particular, this book examines the use of food in the art practices of six women artists and collectives working in Southern California-a hotbed of feminist art in the 1970s-in conjunction with the Women's Art Movement and broader feminist groups during the era of the Second Wave. Focused around particular articulations of food in culture, this book considers how feminist artists engage with issues of gender, labor, class, consumption, (re)production, domesticity, and sexuality in order to advocate for equality and social change. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, food studies, and gender and women's studies.

The Galapagos archipelago in the Pacific Ocean is a place of extraordinary biodiversity, home to species found nowhere else on Earth and synonymous with the discoveries of Charles Darwin. But it is also a place of competing interests: those of the rare animals and plants, the scientists who are trying to conserve them, the settlers from Ecuador seeking a way to support themselves, and the tourists who travel across the world to encounter the astonishing environment. Galapagos is the result of a five-year artists' residency programme set up by the Galapagos Conservation Trust, working with the Charles Darwin Foundation, as a unique way of highlighting some of the complex issues that relate to the islands. Twelve international artists were invited to engage with the Galapagos on their own terms, to mix with the local and the scientific communities, to find inspiration for original new work and eventually to share it with a wide audience. The artworks and essays in this book prompt comparisons with other places in the world that are beset by multiple demands. Artists: Jyll Bradley, Paulo Catrica, Filipa Cesar, Marcus Coates, Dorothy Cross (accompanied by Fiona Shaw), Alexis Deacon, Jeremy Deller, Tania Kovats, Kaffe Matthews, Semiconductor (Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt) and Alison Turnbull.

Pamela M. Lee s New Games revisits postmodernism in light of art history's more recent embrace of "the contemporary." What can the theories and practices associated with postmodernism tell us about the obsession with the contemporary in both the academy and the art world? In looking at work by Dara Birnbaum, yvind Fahlstr m and Richard Serra, among others, Lee returns to Jean-Francois Lyotard's canonical text The Postmodern Condition as a means to understand more recent art-critical interests in interactivity, collectivism and neo-liberalism. She reads Lyotard's well-known treatment of language games relative to the game theory associated with the Cold War and the rise of the information society. New Games asks readers to think critically about our recent past and the embattled state of our contemporary preoccupations.

With a critical introduction by Johanna Burton, New Games is the fourth and penultimate volume in Routledge s series of short books on the theories of modernism by leading art historians on twentieth-century art and art criticism.

Pamela M. Lee s New Games revisits postmodernism in light of art history's more recent embrace of "the contemporary." What can the theories and practices associated with postmodernism tell us about the obsession with the contemporary in both the academy and the art world? In looking at work by Dara Birnbaum, yvind Fahlstr m and Richard Serra, among others, Lee returns to Jean-Francois Lyotard's canonical text The Postmodern Condition as a means to understand more recent art-critical interests in interactivity, collectivism and neo-liberalism. She reads Lyotard's well-known treatment of language games relative to the game theory associated with the Cold War and the rise of the information society. New Games asks readers to think critically about our recent past and the embattled state of our contemporary preoccupations.

With a critical introduction by Johanna Burton, New Games is the fourth and penultimate volume in Routledge s series of short books on the theories of modernism by leading art historians on twentieth-century art and art criticism.

The first major monograph on Zhang Xiaogang (b. 1958), a leading Chinese contemporary artist, world-renowned for his haunting, surrealist works. Both a retrospective of his paintings and a biography of his dramatic life, Zhang Xiaogang: Disquieting Memories is a key resource for academia and art enthusiasts alike. This book features all of the artist's iconic series - major works as well as lesser-hyphen;known drawings - and never-before-published letters dating from the early 1980s between the artist and his friends. These offer an inside view of everyday life in China, historic and political events, as well as invaluable insight into Zhang's artistic practice. With a chronology illustrated with personal photographs from the artist's archive, this is the most comprehensive account of the artist's life and work.

American artist Brice Marden has had a profound impact on painting today. While there has been a sea change in art movements, Marden has unwaveringly adhered to modernist principles of abstraction. From his early monochrome paintings to landscapes of China or the Greek island, Hydra, composed of vivid and calligraphice loops and webs, Marden's deeply personal work incorporates multiple art historical and cultural inspirations. This book explores his work.

Over 25 official crafting activities inspired by the Harry Potter films. Filled with imaginative projects, this official book of craft activities channels the magic of the Wizarding World into your home. Featuring over 25 crafts covering a range of skill levels, Crafting Wizardry includes clear, step-by-step, illustrated instructions so that the whole family can share in the magic. Inside you'll learn how to craft your very own wand, decorate your home to showcase your Hogwarts house pride, create your own pop-ups, and so much more. Sprinkled with fun facts and behind-the-scenes insights, this book also features film stills, original concept art, and blueprints from the making of the Harry Potter films to take you deeper into the Wizarding World and further inspire your creativity. So get ready, it's time for some crafting wizardry!

The first compendium on robotic art of its kind, this book explores the integration of robots into human society and our attitudes, fears and hopes in a world shared with autonomous machines. It raises questions about the benefits, risks and ethics of the transformative changes to society that are the consequence of robots taking on new roles alongside humans. It takes the reader on a journey into the world of the strange, the beautiful, the uncanny and the daring - and into the minds and works of some of the world's most prolific creators of robotic art. Offering an in-depth look at robotic art from the viewpoints of artists, engineers and scientists, it presents outstanding works of contemporary robotic art and brings together for the first time some of the most influential artists in this area in the last three decades. Starting from a historical review, this transdisciplinary work explores the nexus between robotic research and the arts and examines the diversity of robotic art, the encounter with robotic otherness, machine embodiment and human-robot interaction. Stories of difficulties, pitfalls and successes are recalled, characterising the multifaceted collaborations across the diverse disciplines required to create robotic art. Although the book is primarily targeted towards researchers, artists and students in robotics, computer science and the arts, its accessible style appeals to anyone intrigued by robots and the arts.

Popular culture in the 1990s often primarily reflected millennial catastrophic anxieties. The world was tightening, speeding up, and becoming more dangerous and dangerously connected. Surely it was only a matter of time before it all came crashing down. Pop Goes the Decade: The Nineties explains the American 1990s for all readers. The book strives to be widely representative of 1990s culture, including the more obvious nostalgic versions of the decade as well as focused discussions of representations of minority populations during the decade that are often overlooked. This book covers a wide variety of topics to show the decade in its richness: music, television, film, literature, sports, technology, and more. It includes an introductory timeline and background section, followed by a lengthy "Exploring Popular Culture" section, and concludes with a brief series of essays further contextualizing the controversial and influential aspects of the decade. This organization allows readers both a wide exposure to the variety of experiences from the decade as well as a more focused approach to aspects of the 1990s that are still resonant today.

This book is the first full-length assessment of the paintings of Tal R (b. 1967), an Israeli-born Danish artist whose enigmatic work offers intersections of personal experience and wider history through a visual jigsaw, finely balanced between representation and abstraction, of what the artist terms 'Kolbojnik', a Hebrew term for leftovers.

Tal R's paintings are exceptionally idiosyncratic yet informed by an expansive view of the history of painting, with a diverse range of references including Fauvism, Symbolism and folk art. To the casual observer, his works depict amalgams of people, places and things. But deeper scrutiny reveals them as complex conceptual playgrounds where these seemingly simple categories are exploded and examined as 'construction' sites of both literal material (including collage, photography and sculpture) and meaning. For all students and lovers of painting, Tal R's works, like those of Chris Ofili or Laura Owens, have cleared a pathway for painting to continue after modernism and postmodernism without apology, beyond the worn out 'death of painting' mantra.

Terry R. Myers text offers an authoritative account of the twists and turns that path has taken so far.

World-renowned visionary artist John Harris' unique concept paintings capture the Universe on a massive scale, featuring everything from epic landscapes and towering cities to out-of-this-world science fiction vistas.
This collection focuses on his wide variety of futuristic art, as well as his striking covers for a variety of esteemed SF authors, including Arthur C Clarke, John Scalzi, Ben Bova, Hal Clement, Jack McDevitt, Frederik Pohl, Orson Scott Card's Enders books and many more.

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.

documenta fifteen is no ordinary art exhibition. Envisioned under the guiding concept of lumbung, the Indonesian collective ruangrupa is less concerned with individual works than with models of collaborative practice. The Handbook offers insights and orientation to the processes that evolved in the creation of the exhibition. A comprehensive resource both for visitors of documenta in Kassel as well as people interested in collective practices, this Handbook presents all documenta fifteen collectives and artists through profiles by international authors familiar with their different artistic practices and cultural contexts. Using the pivotal question of "what is lumbung?" as a vantage point, the book is an introduction to the mindset and cultural background of documenta fifteen, featuring numerous documents and photographs that trace the collectives' working process. A chapter gathering all of the show's locations and venues in Kassel as well as a large fold-out city map and an introduction to the exhibition's "Public Program" will prove to be especially useful for all visitors.

This book explores the effects of the Instagram platform on the making and viewing of art. Authors Lachlan MacDowall and Kylie Budge critically analyse the ways Instagram has influenced artists, art spaces, art institutions and art audiences, and ultimately contemporary aesthetic experience. The book argues that more than simply being a container for digital photography, the architecture of Instagram represents a new relationship to the image and to visual experience, a way of shaping ocular habits and social relations. Following a detailed analysis of the structure of Instagram - the tactile world of affiliation ('follows'), aesthetics ('likes') and attention ('comments') - the book examines how art spaces, audiences and aesthetics are key to understanding its rise. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, design, digital culture, cultural studies, sociology, education, business, media and communication studies.

Craig Richardson here addresses key areas of cultural politics and identity in a way that not only illuminates the development of Scottish art, but teases out another strand of the plurality of developments which led to the success of artists throughout the UK in the 1990s. It is of the highest relevance whether one's perspective is that of the development of the Scottish art, British art or European art of this period. The book adds significantly to our knowledge of the art of this period in a way that will aid not only our historical understanding but our understanding of the dynamics of art practice today. Providing an analysis and including discussion (interviewing artists, curators and critics and accessing non-catalogued personal archives) towards a new chronology, Richardson here examines and proposes a sequence of precisely denoted 'exemplary' works which outlines a self-conscious definition of the interrogative term 'Scottish art.' Among the artists whose work is discussed are John Latham, Simon Starling, Alan Johnston, Roderick Buchanan, Glen Onwin, Christine Borland, William Johnstone, Joan Eardley, Alexander Moffat, Douglas Gordon, Alan Smith, Graeme Fagen, Ross Sinclair and many others. The discussion culminates in a critically original demonstration of the scope for further research and practice within the subject, facilitating national cultural debate on the character of Scottish-national visual art.

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.

A groundbreaking and essential survey of the art of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, offering an in-depth discussion of the development of the artist and positioning her work within a wider history of portraiture. Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Fly In League With The Night celebrates the work of one of the most significant and acclaimed figurative painters of her generation. Fact and fiction fuse in Yiadom-Boakye's paintings: they appear to be portraits, yet the people she depicts are not real but invented. Created from a composite of found images and her own imagination, her characters seem to exist outside of a specific time or place: they feel at once familiar yet mysterious. This ambiguity resonates again in the enigmatic titles she gives to her artworks. The artist is also a writer of poetry and prose, and for her, the two forms of creativity complement each other: 'The things I can't paint, I write, and the things I can't write, I paint.' This perceptive and engaging publication provides a comprehensive account of Yiadom-Boakye's practice over the past two decades. With contributions by the celebrated poet Elizabeth Alexander and curators Andrea Schlieker and Isabella Maidment, alongside new writing by Yiadom-Boakye, Fly In League With The Night reflects the dual aspects of the artist's career as both a painter and a writer and offers an intimate insight into her creative process.