I am interested in your personal hang-ups: Not your lifetime neuroses but your (ideal) hat, coat and/or clothes tree or hanger, wall hooks, free standing pole, rack, stand or small wall system. With this invitation Gail M. Brown, an independent curator, challenged artists to create inventive forms for an exhibition at The Center for Art in Wood in Philadelphia. The resulting sculptures by 38 artists ranged from a straightforward coat rack to a four-foot apartment house riding on a fish, from a scepter-like paean to Joan Miro to a four eyes nun-backed chair, and from a bird house to a wall-mounted seat and desktop. The artists used a wide range of woods, from the ordinary to the exotic, as well as rubber, steel, and gold-plated brass. The works project grace, intelligence, whimsy, humor, and serious craft.

A collection of essays by art historians, anthropologists and commentators on contemporary visual culture on the theme of 'Location'.
Explores the theme of 'Location', including transatlantic exchanges and global connections, and the nature of hospitality that arises in acknowledging migration and diaspora
Questions how important location is in producing, understanding and curating art.
Contributors consider such topics as site-specificity, examinations of the trans-national/trans-cultural, how images/visual forms migrate, and the repositioning of ownership

Since the release of his first monograph, Vincent Van Duysen has consolidated his reputation for buildings of exceptional spatial mastery and highly refined detailing, and built a growing international following. This beautiful companion volume presents thirty of the Belgian architect's most recent works produced over the past decade, much of which has been exquisitely captured by renowned photographers Helene Binet and Francois Halard. The buildings featured from this latest period include an array of elegant residences in Europe, New York, Paris and The Hamptons, as well as larger-scale commercial and public projects. Product and furniture designs, microcosms of the architect's rigorous attention to detail, are also featured, including yacht interiors and objets decoratifs. With a foreword by close friend and Academy Award-winning actor Julianne Moore, the broader context of Van Duysen's contribution to contemporary architecture is provided by architect Nicola di Battista and architecture critic Marc Dubois. An illustrated chronology provides a complete overview of the architect's recent projects. Van Duysen has established a reputation as one of the world's most refined and artful architects. This major new publication will further cement his uncompromising commitment to creating timeless places and spaces.

Examining the geometry of pattern, repetition and colour within her surroundings, British artist Tess Jaray has explored painterly perspective since the 1960s. This comprehensive and richly illustrated volume was produced in celebration of a 2014 exhibition of paintings and prints by Jaray. Although her work is resolutely abstract, Jaray's two-dimensional work and public art - both of which celebrate the vitality inherent within archetypal rhythms and patterns - have been informed by her interest in the spaces of Italian Renaissance art and architecture, along with more contemporary influences. Jaray focuses on producing the illusion of space, using perspective to create a field of spatial paradox that equates to distance and closeness in the mind. In many of her works the area of pattern - whether polygons, waves or rectangles - is contained by a strong, grounding background colour, thereby controlling the movement of the forms. From Italian architecture and Islamic mosaics to Kazimir Malevich and Lucio Fontana, this volume situates the artist within the tradition of abstract painting and the history of art. Featuring texts by fellow artists, alongside illustrations of a large group of Jaray's paintings, this first monograph explores her contemporary influence.

Writings on human life and the refugee crisis by the most important political artist of our time Ai Weiwei (b. 1957) is widely known as an artist across media: sculpture, installation, photography, performance, and architecture. He is also one of the world's most important artist-activists and a powerful documentary filmmaker. His work and art call attention to attacks on democracy and free speech, abuses of human rights, and human displacement--often on an epic, international scale. This collection of quotations demonstrates the range of Ai Weiwei's thinking on humanity and mass migration, issues that have occupied him for decades. Selected from articles, interviews, and conversations, Ai Weiwei's words speak to the profound urgency of the global refugee crisis, the resilience and vulnerability of the human condition, and the role of art in providing a voice for the voiceless. Select quotations from the book: "This problem has such a long history, a human history. We are all refugees somehow, somewhere, and at some moment." "Allowing borders to determine your thinking is incompatible with the modern era." "Art is about aesthetics, about morals, about our beliefs in humanity. Without that there is simply no art." "I don't care what all people think. My work belongs to the people who have no voice."

Interior stylist Bea Mombaers is passionate about vintage and design; she's always on the lookout for special finds and unique objects. Over time she developed a distinctive signature style. This book presents Bea's work and universe as seen through the lenses of different photographers. The photos show interiors arranged by Bea, but also intriguing details, beautiful still lifes and objects with a story Bea feels inspired by. The photos are presented according to the key moments in a day: waking up, breakfast, break, lunch, coffee, apero, dinner and party. Bea is a source of inspiration and interior dreams, and a personal view on Bea Mombaers's world and her favourite projects up to now.

This unique book proposes a re-reading of the relationship between artists and the contemporary museum. In Australia in particular, the museum has played a significant role in the colonial project and this has generally been considered as the predominant mode of artists' engagement with such institutions and collections. Australian Artists in the Contemporary Museum expands the post-colonial frame of reference used to interpret this work, to demonstrate the broader implications of the relationship between artists and the museum, and thus to offer an alternative way of understanding recent contemporary practices. The authors' central argument is that artists' engagement with the museum has shifted from politically motivated critique taking place in museums of fine art, towards interventions taking place in non-art museums that focus on the creation of knowledge more broadly. Such interventions assume a number of forms, including the artist acting as curator, art works that highlight the use of taxonomic modes of display and categorization, and the re-consideration of the aesthetics of collections to suggest different ways of interpreting objects and their history. Central to these interventions is the challenge to better connect the museum and its public. The book will be essential reading for scholars, professionals and students in the fields of contemporary art and museum studies, art history, and in the museum sector. These include artists, curators, museum and gallery professionals, postgraduate researchers, art historians, designers and design scholars, art and museum educators, and students of visual art, art history, and museum studies. This project has been assisted by the Australian government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body.

Visually stunning, informative, and broad in scope, this comprehensive overview gathers the works of renowned still-life painter Scott Fraser. Beautiful full color images of his body of work are accompanied by companion drawings and detailed close-ups, demonstrating the artist's approach to painting. A summary of his work, an interview of Fraser by artist Robert C. Jackson, and an extensive chronology of works allow the reader to explore the path of growth and development that took him from a landscape painter in the 1980s to the nationally renowned still-life painter that Fraser is today. His intense scrutiny of objects is revealed in full-page details of several important works. The over 200 drawings and paintings included here also reveal how Fraser's passion for art history is a strongly recurring theme, often demonstrating itself in surprising ways. This book offers valuable insights for collectors, museums, students, academics, artists, and everyone interested in contemporary still life painting.

There is nothing like Keith Vaughan's Journals. They represent one of the greatest pieces of confessional writing of the twentieth-century. Keith Vaughan was a painter and belonged to the Neo-Romantic group, other members including Graham Sutherland, John Minton, Michael Ayrton, Ceri Richards, John Piper and John Craxton. He was also gay and much troubled by his sexuality. 'Faced at the age of 27 with what then seemed the likelihood of imminent extinction before I had properly got started', he began the Journals in 1939 and only finished them at the very moment of his suicide in 1977.

The Journals are edited by Alan Ross, and in his words they are 'a self-portrait of astonishing honesty: devoid of disguise in any shape or form, or hypocrisy. It is difficult to think of anything in literature they resemble.' The earlier Journals, covering his war and his period of greatest creativity in the late 1940s and 1950s, 'are revealing for the light they shed on a painter's character and, to a lesser extent, working methods.' The last Journals chronicle 'a descent into hell . . . redeemed by their frankness, spleen and dry humour.'

First published in 1966 and then reissued in amplified form in 1989, it is the latter version Faber Finds is reissuing. The fuller edition itself has been out of print for a long time, so its renewed availability will be welcome.

This book, first published in 1987, was the first major survey of the links between the visual arts and pop music over the last thirty years. It brings to light the ideas, styles and people who have influenced both the look of pop and the shape of art. It examines how pop uses art movements like Dada, Futurism and Surrealism in everything from the design of album covers to the creation of a group's look, stage act and video; how art uses pop, as a subject for painting, sculpture and design; the vital role of the British art school connection; and collaborations and cross-overs - between the visual arts and groups, musicians and movements.

The first global history of comics from 1968 through to the present day, arranged chronologically and richly illustrated with prime examples of the artists, styles and movements being discussed. The authors contextualize the crucial modern period within the art form's broader history and offer a description of the more fluid, international and digital scene that is the medium's likely future. They supply examples from around the world - including the US and UK, France, Spain, Belgium, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Argentina, Japan, South Korea and New Zealand - and from a range of renowned and lesser-known artists.

A leading female sculptor and figure in Chinese contemporary art, Yin Xiuzhen (b. 1963, Beijing, China) began her career in the early 1990s following her graduation from Capital Normal University in Beijing where she received a B.A. from the Fine Arts Department in 1989. Best known for her works that incorporate second-hand objects, Yin uses her artwork to explore modern issues of globalization and homogenization. By utilizing recycled materials such as sculptural documents of memory, she seeks to personalize objects and allude to the lives of specific individuals, which are often neglected in the drive toward excessive urbanization, rapid modern development and the growing global economy. The artist explains, "In a rapidly changing China, 'memory' seems to vanish more quickly than everything else. That's why preserving memory has become an alternative way of life."

An in-depth history of the Stalinist skyscraper In the early years of the Cold War, the skyline of Moscow was forever transformed by a citywide skyscraper building project. As the steel girders of the monumental towers went up, the centuries-old metropolis was reinvented to embody the greatness of Stalinist society. Moscow Monumental explores how the quintessential architectural works of the late Stalin era fundamentally reshaped daily life in the Soviet capital. Drawing on a wealth of original archival research, Katherine Zubovich examines the decisions and actions of Soviet elites-from top leaders to master architects-and describes the experiences of ordinary Muscovites who found their lives uprooted by the ambitious skyscraper project. She shows how the Stalin-era quest for monumentalism was rooted in the Soviet Union's engagement with Western trends in architecture and planning, and how the skyscrapers required the creation of a vast and complex infrastructure. As laborers flooded into the city, authorities evicted and rehoused tens of thousands of city residents living on the plots selected for development. When completed in the mid-1950s, these seven ornate neoclassical buildings served as elite apartment complexes, luxury hotels, and ministry and university headquarters. Moscow Monumental tells a story that is both local and broadly transnational, taking readers from the streets of interwar Moscow and New York to the marble-clad halls of the bombastic postwar structures that continue to define the Russian capital today.

Wonder has an established link to the history and philosophy of science. However, there is little acknowledgement of the relationship between the visual arts and wonder. This book presents a new perspective on this overlooked connection, allowing a unique insight into the role of wonder in contemporary visual practice. Artists, curators and art theorists give accounts of their approach to wonder through the use of materials, objects and ways of exhibiting. These accounts not only raise issues of a particular relevance to the way in which we encounter our reality today but ask to what extent artists utilize the function of wonder purposely in their work.

Contemporary Art and Digital Culture analyses the impact of the internet and digital technologies upon art today. Art over the last fifteen years has been deeply inflected by the rise of the internet as a mass cultural and socio-political medium, while also responding to urgent economic and political events, from the financial crisis of 2008 to the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East. This book looks at how contemporary art addresses digitality, circulation, privacy, and globalisation, and suggests how feminism and gender binaries have been shifted by new mediations of identity. It situates current artistic practice both in canonical art history and in technological predecessors such as cybernetics and net.art, and takes stock of how the art-world infrastructure has reacted to the internet's promises of democratisation. An invaluable resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students of contemporary art - especially those studying history of art and art practice and theory - as well as those working in film, media, curation, or art education. Melissa Gronlund is a writer and lecturer on contemporary art, specialising in the moving image. From 2007-2015, she was co-editor of the journal Afterall, and her writing has appeared there and in Artforum, e-flux journal, frieze, the NewYorker.com, and many other places.

Re-envisioning the Contemporary Art Canon: Perspectives in a Global World seeks to dissect and interrogate the nature of the present-day art field, which has experienced dramatic shifts in the past 50 years. In discussions of the canon of art history, the notion of 'inclusiveness', both at the level of rhetoric and as a desired practice is on the rise and gradually replacing talk of 'exclusion', which dominated critiques of the canon up until two decades ago. The art field has dramatically, if insufficiently, changed in the half-century since the first protests and critiques of the exclusion of 'others' from the art canon. With increased globalization and shifting geopolitics, the art field is expanding beyond its Euro-American focus, as is particularly evident in the large-scale international biennales now held all over the globe. Are canons and counter-canons still relevant? Can they be re-envisioned rather than merely revised? Following an introduction that discusses these issues, thirteen newly commissioned essays present case studies of consecration in the contemporary art field, and three commissioned discussions present diverse positions on issues of the canon and consecration processes today. This volume will be of interest to instructors and students of contemporary art, art history, and museum and curatorial studies.

Contemporary Art and Digital Culture analyses the impact of the internet and digital technologies upon art today. Art over the last fifteen years has been deeply inflected by the rise of the internet as a mass cultural and socio-political medium, while also responding to urgent economic and political events, from the financial crisis of 2008 to the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East. This book looks at how contemporary art addresses digitality, circulation, privacy, and globalisation, and suggests how feminism and gender binaries have been shifted by new mediations of identity. It situates current artistic practice both in canonical art history and in technological predecessors such as cybernetics and net.art, and takes stock of how the art-world infrastructure has reacted to the internet's promises of democratisation. An invaluable resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students of contemporary art - especially those studying history of art and art practice and theory - as well as those working in film, media, curation, or art education. Melissa Gronlund is a writer and lecturer on contemporary art, specialising in the moving image. From 2007-2015, she was co-editor of the journal Afterall, and her writing has appeared there and in Artforum, e-flux journal, frieze, the NewYorker.com, and many other places.

What does an assemblage made out of crumpled newspaper have in common with an empty room in which the lights go on and off every five seconds? This book argues that they are both examples of a 'precarious' art that flourished from the late 1950s to the first decade of the twenty-first century, in light of a growing awareness of the individual's fragile existence in capitalist society. Focusing on comparative case studies drawn from European, North and South American practices, this study maps out a network of similar concerns and practices, while outlining its evolution from the 1960s to the beginning of the twenty-first century. This book will provide students and amateurs of contemporary art and culture with new insights into contemporary art practices and the critical issues that they raise concerning the material status of the art object, the role of the artist in society, and the relation between art and everyday life. -- .

The Comics of Joe Sacco addresses the range of his award-winning work, from his early comics stories as well as his groundbreaking journalism Palestine (1993) and Safe Area to Gorazde (2000), to Footnotes in Gaza (2009) and his most recent book The Great War (2013), a graphic history of World War I. First in the new series, Critical Approaches to Comics Artists, this edited volume explores Sacco's comics journalism, and features established and emerging scholars from comics studies, cultural studies, geography, literary studies, political science, and communication studies. Sacco's work has already found a place in some of the foundational scholarship in comics studies, and this book solidifies his role as one of the most important comics artists today. Sections focus on how Sacco's comics journalism critiques and employs the ""standard of objectivity"" in mainstream reporting, what aesthetic principles and approaches to lived experience can be found in his comics, how Sacco employs the space of the comics page to map history and war, and the ways that his comics function in the classroom and as human rights activism. The Comics of Joe Sacco offers definitive, exciting approaches to some of the most important--and necessary--comics today, by one of the most acclaimed journalist-artists of our time.