Slant Steps explores the vital role of the semi-periphery-artistic communities working between the provinces and the metropole. Premised on the collective fascination with the found object Slant Step, the book details a history of encounters among artists, filmmakers, critics, and others operating in and out of the Bay Area during the long 1960s. They revised the terms of the counterculture, the appeal of consumer goods, and the surfaces and materials of industrial design and contemporary sculpture. Whether extending to international exchanges or shrinking to local coteries, these circles helped develop process, funk, and conceptual art as they forged new directions for the art world and its members. Yet when these groups degraded their own works alongside those of their rivals, they made their political and aesthetic commitments difficult to decipher, reorganizing the ties between the visual arts and the New Left. Merging sociologies of art with the tradition of social art history, Jacob Stewart-Halevy uncovers the oblique perspectives and values of the semi-periphery, revealing its enduring impact upon contemporary art, above all in the field of pedagogy.

This book is a tribute to Dublin, an impressive artistic collection taking the reader on a tour through this most vibrant city. From historic Trinity College and the iconic Ha'penny Bridge to the lively pub scene and secret hidden corners, Dublin's artists highlight its beauties in the most unique way.

Ilya Kabakov (*1933) is one of the former Soviet Union's most important and influential international artists today. After the two-volume catalogue raisonne of paintings (2008) and 2017's catalogue raisonne of installations, we are now publishing a complete overview of Kabakov's recent paintings. Different ideas, phases, and styles unfold across the 350 works of art, but the artist's inimitable signature can always be recognised. Visual themes include, for example, the colour white, the relationship between complete and incomplete, and the combination of either various styles or of painting and photography. Still, all of the pieces have one thing in common: they all pursue a conceptual approach and make references to art history.

Realism has been held up to scorn for its perceived attachment to linguistic transparency - the sense that an image can reveal the full truth of the situation or object it depicts. This skepticism was extended in the late 20th century with the rise of conceptual art and the development of critiques that proposed that, in a world pervaded with spectacular images, the task of the artist should be to deconstruct the systems through which images flow and provide critical considerations of the ways images act upon us. Residue: The Persistence of the Real is comprised of work that draws upon a documentary impulse and pursues the real as something that cannot be entirely reduced to representation, while at the same time acknowledging the mediating character of the mechanisms that shape perception. The book presents recent work in a variety of media - including photography, video and installation - by nine artists from Vancouver and elsewhere.

Multitalented artist Philip Aguirre sees his prints as completed products. His drawings, however, serve a very different purpose within his work. He views these drawings as the start of a thought process, forming a consistent thread throughout what is, for him, a vitally important method of creation. In that process, it is not unusual to see historic heritage as a source of his inspiration. Thus, his work engages with reoccurring themes such as the spring and water in the world, immigration and refugees, and the story of Africa threading throughout his oeuvre. This book focuses on the broad palette of disciplines that Aguirre practices, reflecting on these important reoccurring themes that have been present throughout his career, as well as the role played by printmaking in his work. It also highlights the selection of prints and drawings from the rich oeuvre that he has built up over the last 40 years, which he recently donated to the collection of modern prints and drawings for the Plantin Moretus Museum print cabinet. Distributed for Mercatorfonds Exhibition Schedule: Plantin Moretus Museum, Antwerp, Belgium. The Print Cabinet. 27 0ctober 2022 - February 2023.

Since the late 1980s, Renee Green's multifaceted practice has imagined and expanded the ways in which art can surface and give form to underwritten histories, collective memory, and circuits of cultural exchange. Her writing, installations, films, digital media, and sound works continue to trace and interrogate the power of cultural institutions and their relationships to language, knowledge, and constitutions of selfhood, while at the same time, indicating other ways of being and becoming. Green's work came to prominence and circulated within the social and political flows between the world and the Americas, a concept that includes the United States, Central and South America, as well as the Caribbean. Her practice continues to investigate the distribution and relay of art and ideas, and how these are braided with histories of migration and legacies of displacement, and the aesthetic forms and poetics that stem from these. In one of most comprehensive catalogues of her work since 2010, Inevitable Distances presents recent writing on Green's work with some of Green's early texts and influences. Indicating the encounters and distances travelled in a life's journey, both this publication and the exhibition it catalogues puts her artistic production into a speculative and, at times, fictional constellation. This book is co-published by DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program, Berlin; Hatje Cantz; and KW Institute for Contemporary Art.

The post-1989 period has seen artists in Central and Eastern Europe embrace socially engaged practices. Reclaiming public life from the ideologies of both communist regimes and neoliberalism, their projects have harnessed the politically subversive potential of social relations based on trust, reciprocity and solidarity. Drawing on archival material and exclusive interviews, in this book Izabel Galliera traces the development of socially engaged art from the early 1990s to the present in Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania. She demonstrates that, in the early 1990s, projects were primarily created for exhibitions organized and funded by the Soros Centers for Contemporary Art. In the early 2000s, prior to Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania entering into the European Union, EU institutions likewise funded socially-conscious public art in the region. Today, socially engaged art is characterised by the proliferation of independent and often self-funded artists' initiatives in cities such as Sofia, Bucharest and Budapest. Focusing on the relationships between art, social capital and civil society, Galliera employs sociological and political theories to reveal that, while social capital is generally considered a mechanism of exclusion in the West, in post-socialist contexts it has been leveraged by artists and curators as a vital means of communication and action.

A collection of materials and essays contextualizing a performance by Christiansen and Nørgaard in homage to Joseph Beuys. Joseph Beuys performed one of his most radical pieces, the action Manressa, on December 15, 1966, at the Galerie Schmela in Düsseldorf. He was accompanied by the Danish artists Henning Christiansen and Bjørn Nørgaard, who, in 1994, created Manresa Hauptbahnhof (Manresa, Central Station), a new performance in homage to the original. The performance was carried out in Manresa, the city that both gave the name to the original action and was where Saint Ignatius Loyola had the revelations that led him to write his Spiritual Exercises, which Beuys considered essential reading. This book brings together all the material related to the 1994 performance—including images, scripts, and preparatory drawings—as well as a selection of critical texts that situate the action within its European context. In one essay, Friedhelm Mennekes analyses the action by delving into its spiritual meaning, exploring the symbolism of the objects employed. In another, Pilar Parcerias uses the metaphor of the central station to discover the city of reference and redraw the map of Europe with unexpected connections between Manresa and Copenhagen. In the final essay, Peter van der Meijden contextualizes the two performances, which represented a meeting place for different artistic personalities working on the cutting edge in creating a new form of art.    

Federico Solmi: Escape Into The Metaverse examines the work of Federico Solmi, a leading practitioner in the genre of new media art. As a narrative and figurative artist, Solmi utilises lurid colours and satire to portray a dystopian vision of contemporary society, highlighting the contradictions and fallibilities that characterise our time. Employing video, painting, drawing, sculpture, sound and digital game design, he creates a carnivalesque virtual reality with historical and present-day world leaders - animated by computer script and motion capture performance - in a critique of Western society's obsession with power. Inspired by real events and fabricated myths, Solmi explores, re-interprets and concocts celebrated moments in history. As reconfigured narratives, these social and political commentaries disrupt the mythologies that underpin Western society, revealing its ties to nationalism, colonialism, religion and consumerism. The book documents Solmi's unique process of melding traditional art practices and digital technologies in a case study of his most ambitious video-painting to date, The Bathhouse (2020). Pioneering new modes of cultural production and art experience afforded by the metaverse, Solmi's absurd rewriting of past and present merge dark humor and a sense of the grotesque in a virtual world that indicts our own reality. Solmi was born in 1973 to a working-class family in Bologna, Italy. He is self-trained and self-educated. In 1999, he moved to Brooklyn, New York, to pursue his career. His perspective reflects his outlook as a cultural voyeur, questioning the nationalistic and revisionist American mythologies that are often presented as fact. In 2003, Solmi began to experiment with the tools of video game design, fascinated by the parallel universe made possible by 3D graphics, which he saw as a structure to create narrative video sequences using drawings and paintings. Every visual texture is painted and scanned on the computer up to three times to achieve the intentional flickering effect. The art of Paolo Uccello, Giorgio Morandi and Giorgio di Chirico serve as references for his visual compositions, while the writings of Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky and Oriana Fallaci serve as inspiration for his social and political commentary.

The momentary beauty of Sage Vaughn s butterflies is palpable. These impossibly lovely, delicate creatures appear to have magically landed or violently crashed, oozing their colorful pigment like blood-stained marks across the canvas. The dichotomy of these delicate and ephemeral creatures co-existing over images of gritty urban life creates a contrast that is layered, mysterious, and up for interpretation. Vaughn s butterflies appear as choreographed naturet their drips echoing his early beginnings as a graffiti artist. Sometimes juxtaposed against the likes of mundane interiors, forests, or the Russian punk band Pussy Riot, Vaughn s distinctive paintings create provocative relationships between the built and natural environment. The effect is dreamlike and almost hypnotic, as swarms of butterflies concurrently live and die in graceful formations that are at once heart-breakingly beautiful and sublimely melancholy.
Sage Vaughn is an LA-based painter and illustrator who is best recognized for his wildlife series. Moustachioed, eccentric, and consistent, Vaughn works in his studio from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. and has been quoted as an artist with a blue-collar work ethic. As a child, Vaughn and his father, who was also a painter, would spend hours on end at the LA Zoo sketching animals all day. As a teenager, growing up in the San Fernando Valley in the late 70s and early 80s, Vaughn was greatly influenced by the punk movement and graffiti art. Vaughn s current Wildlives paintings focus on the juxtaposition and coexistence of humans and animals, drawing comparisons between their inherent liberty, freedom, and survival skills. He has had widely acclaimed solo shows in New York, Geneva, and London and has been featured in a group show at MOCA in LA, curated by the Beastie Boys Mike D."

'Art is theft,' Picasso once proclaimed, and much of the best and most 'original' new art involves an act or two of unequivocal, overt theft. Paradoxically, the law relating to artistic borrowing has grown more restrictive. 'The plagiarism and copyright trials of the twenty-first century are what the obscenity trials were to the twentieth century', Kenneth Goldsmith, has observed. 'These are really the issues of our time.' Beg, Steal and Borrow offers a comprehensive and provocative survey of a complex subject that is destined to grow in relevance and importance. It traces an artistic lineage of appropriation from Michelangelo to Jeff Koons, and examines the history of its legality from the sixteenth century to now.

Edward Chell investigates motorway landscapes, linking these with eighteenth century ideas of the Picturesque which were formed at a time when commerce and tourism drove the development of roads and laid the foundations of today's network. Soft Estate features art works by Chell which explore the interface between history, ecology and speed, alongside essays giving new perspectives on how roads and travel have shaped both what we see and how we look at it.

A loosely formed autobiography by Andy Warhol, told with his trademark blend of irony and detachment

In "The Philosophy of Andy Warhol"--which, with the subtitle "(From A to B and Back Again)," is less a memoir than a collection of riffs and reflections--he talks about love, sex, food, beauty, fame, work, money, and success; about New York, America, and his childhood in McKeesport, Pennsylvania; about his good times and bad in New York, the explosion of his career in the sixties, and his life among celebrities.

This almanac of overlooked vintage subject matter has an emphasis on art, design, photography and culture. With an extensive array of rare images, Outr Journal presents a curated compendium of the unusual that takes its cues from cabinets of curiosities and journals of miscellany such as The Saturday Book of old. The focus on underground topics and pop culture extends across time and continents to include highlights such as: religious architecture in the Space Age, found photos and images of masked people, Satan, pop culture and many more.

The NODE.London Reader projects a critical context around the Season of Media Arts in London March 2006 and provides another discursive dimension to the events of October 2005's Open Season. It engages debates in FLOSS (Free/Libre and Open Source Software), media arts and activism, collaborative practices and the political economy of cultural production in the present day. It includes essays and artist projects from Sabeth Buchmann, Toni Prug, Armin Medosch, Simon Yuill, Chad McCail, Critical Art Ensemble, Jo Walsh, Richard Barbrook, Michael Corris, Harwood, Kate Rich, Agnese Trocchi, Matthew Fuller, Rasmus Fleischer and Palle Torsson, Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter, Matteo Pasquinelli and Francis McKee.

*A National Bestseller* From the internationally bestselling artist Kerby Rosanes, an extraordinary coloring book celebrating some of the incredible animals and landscapes that are disappearing around the globe Fragile World is a coloring book to savor, exploring fifty-six endangered, vulnerable, and threatened animals and landscapes-from the Tapanuli orangutan to the hawksbill turtle, from Philippine bat caves to the Baltic Sea. The illustrations are intricate, detailed, and unforgettable, both magisterial and whimsical. And the result is a stunning tribute to Mother Nature. Fragile World is a coloring experience that is at once vintage Kerby and unlike any other.

Remember radicalism? A time when the Toronto art scene was in formation - and destruction? When there were no models and anything was possible? The late 1970s was a key period when Toronto thought itself Canada's most important art centre, but history has shown that the nascent downtown art community - not the established uptown scene of commercial galleries - was where it was happening. It was a political period. Beyond the art politics, art itself was politicised in its contents and context. Art's political dimension was continually polemically posed - or postured - by artists in these years. Beyond politics, posturing, in fact, was a constant presence as the community invented itself. It was also a period rich in invention of new forms of art. Punk, semiotics, and fashion were equally influential, not to mention transgressive sexuality. It was the beginning of the photo-blowup allied to the deconstructed languages of advertising. Video and performance aligned in simulations of television production as the "underground" mimicked the models of the mainstream for its own satiric, critical purposes. With no dominant art form and the influence of New York in decline, there were no models and anything was possible: even the invention of the idea of an art community as a fictional creation. Is Toronto Burning? takes you on a journey through this period rich in invention of new forms of art. It brings together artworks by Susan Britton, David Buchan, Colin Campbell, Elizabeth Chitty, Carole Conde and Karl Beveridge, Judith Doyle, General Idea, Isobel Harry, Ross McLaren, Missing Associates (Peter Dudar & Lily Eng), Clive Robertson, Tom Sherman, and Rodney Werden alongside archival documents. The artworks were all shown at the exhibition of the same name at the end of 2014 at The Art Gallery of York University, curated by Director Philip Monk. In partnership with The Art Gallery of York University.

Library is a collection of paintings by two of Canada s most influential contemporary artists, Michael Dumontier and Neil Farber. From the simple premise of the book title comes a series of images that are laugh-out-loud funny. A collection of book covers adorned with titles painted in simple handwritten fonts are displayed on brightly coloured hardboard. Each book forms part of an ongoing series Dumontier and Farber started in 2009. In Dumontier and Farber s Library, titles like I Lost the Human Race, Change Your Relationship to Your Unchangeable Past, and I Have a Medical Condition That Makes It So I Don t Have to Talk to You offer surprising and astute observations, all in the duo s characteristic deadpan style. The simplicity of the shapes and text evokes an immediate but lasting profundity, with each piece causing one to wonder about the thoughts that roam their consciousness, and the books that take up residence on their and our shelves. Dumontier and Farber are founding members of the influential art collective the Royal Art Lodge, and have been collaborating on art projects for more than fifteen years, exhibiting internationally. Library is playful and insightful as it pokes and prods at the human condition.

New York-based Todd James (born 1969) pioneered a distinct cartoon-based graffiti style in New York in the 1980s, working under the name REAS and gaining the respect of both a street-culture audience and the art and design market. He has since produced work for the Beastie Boys, Eminem and Iggy Pop, among others. This unique artist's book is the first publication by James in half a decade, and collects 60 of his drawings, all created exclusively for this volume. Bearing close resemblance to his best-known graffiti work, each drawing is complete unto itself yet also represents a potential painting for the future. "Yield to Temptation" is of a piece with James' broader concerns: American excess as represented by the forms and fictions of sexuality and the ravages of war. James invites his audience to glamorize these issues, even as he undercuts any assumptions about them. His drawings have the expressive, minimal intensity of a cartoon Franz Kline and evoke the Day-Glo era of 1970s print culture, where "Schoolhouse Rock" crosses over into "Playboy" cartoons. "Yield to Temptation" is being published on the occasion of James' solo exhibition in Tokyo.

A new collection of never-before-published paintings by renowned artist Pablo Amaringo
- With written contributions by Graham Hancock, Jeremy Narby, Robert Venosa, Dennis McKenna, Stephan Beyer, and Jan Kounen
- Contains 47 color plates of Amaringo's latest works, with detailed narratives of the rich Amazonian mythology underlying each painting
- Shares Amaringo's personal stories behind the artistic visions
Recognized as one of the world's great visionary artists, Pablo Amaringo was renowned for his intricate, colorful paintings inspired by his shamanic visions. A master communicator of the ayahuasca experience--where snakes, jaguars, subterranean beings, celestial palaces, aliens, and spacecraft all converge--Amaringo's art presents a doorway to the transcendent worlds of ayahuasca intended for contemplation, meditation, and inspiration.
Illustrating the evolution of his intricate and colorful art, this book contains 47 full-color reproductions of Amaringo's latest works with detailed explorations of the rich Amazonian mythology underlying each painting. Through their longstanding relationship with Amaringo, coauthors Charing and Cloudsley are able to share the personal stories behind his visions and experiences with Amazonian people and folklore, capturing Amaringo's powerful ecological and spiritual message through his art and words. With contributions by Graham Hancock, Jeremy Narby, Robert Venosa, Dennis McKenna, Stephan Beyer, and Jan Kounen, this book brings the ayahuasca experience to life as we travel on Amaringo's visionary brush and palette.

What do new technologies taste like? A growing number of contemporary artists are working with food, live materials and scientific processes, in order to explore and challenge the ways in which manipulation of biological materials informs our cooking and eating. 'Bioart', or biological art, uses biotech methods to manipulate living systems, from tissues to ecologies. While most critiques of bioart emphasise the influences of new media, digital media and genetics, this book takes a bold, alternative approach. Bioart Kitchen explores a wide spectrum of seemingly unconnected subjects, which, when brought together, offer a more inclusive, expansive history of bioart, namely: home economics; the feminist art of the 1970s; tissue culture methodologies; domestic computing; and contemporary artistic engagements with biotechnology.