Focusing on the later work of the American photographer Francesca Woodman (1958-1981), Claire Raymond takes up the question of the disintegrative condition of the art she produced in the last year of her life. Departing from the techniques of her earlier compositions, Woodman worked in the diazotype process for many of these late pieces, most importantly the monumental Blueprint for a Temple. Raymond shows that through her use of diazotype, a medium that breaks down when exposed to light, Woodman created art that is both supremely evocative aesthetically and inherently unstable physically. Woodman, Raymond contends, was imaginatively responding to the end of the durable image, a historical reality acknowledged in the way her work plays the ephemeral and evanescent against the monumental and enduring. Raymond focuses on the theoretical and the curatorial issues surrounding Woodman's diazotypes, a thematic and practical distress that haunts much of her later art, especially the artist's book and photo series Some Disordered Interior Geometries and Portrait of a Reputation. Rather than conceiving of Woodman herself as fragile, an artist chronicling and seeming to yearn for her own disappearance, Raymond juxtaposes Woodman's career-spanning documentation of her own image against other post-war witnesses of trauma - an artist standing in the museum ruins where she emerges most distinctly as a figure of postmodernity.

This fully revised and updated third edition offers students and artists valuable insights into traditional color theory and its practical application using today's cutting-edge technology. The text is lavishly illustrated, stressing issues of contemporary color use and examining how today's artists and designers are using color in a multitude of mediums in their work. It is the only book that has parity between the male and female artists and designers represented, while containing more multicultural and global examples of art and design than any other text. This book begins with how we see color and its biological basis, progressing to the various theories about color and delving into the psychological meaning of color and its use. There are individual chapters on color use in art and design, as well as global and multicultural color use. One chapter investigates cross cultural life events such as marriages and funerals, while examining the six major religions' conceptual and psychological underpinnings of color use. The final chapter explores the future of color. Contemporary Color is the ideal text for color theory courses, but also for beginning art and design students, no matter what their future major discipline or emphasis may be. It provides the foundation on which to build their career and develop their own personal artistic voice and vision.

Plastics have now been our most used materials for over fifty years. This book adopts a new approach, exploring plastics' contribution from two perspectives: as a medium for making and their value in societal use. The first approach examines the multivalent nature of plastics materiality and their impact on creativity through the work of artists, designers and manufacturers. The second perspective explores attitudes to plastics and the different value systems applied to them through current research undertaken by design, materials and socio-cultural historians. The book addresses the environmental impact of plastics and elucidates the ways in which they can and must be part of the solution. The individual viewpoints are provocative and controversial but together they present a balanced and scholarly un-picking of the debate that surrounds this ubiquitous group of materials. The book is essential reading for a wide academic readership interested in the Arts and Humanities, especially Design and Design History; Anthropology; and Cultural, Material and Social Histories.

Art and the Form of Life takes a classic theme-philosophy as the art of living-and gives it a contemporary twist. The book examines a series of watershed moments in artistic practice alongside philosophers' most enduring questions about the way we live. Coupling Tino Sehgal with Wittgenstein, cave art with Foucault, Stanley Kubrick with Nietzsche, and the Bauhaus with Walter Benjamin, the book animates the idea that life is literally ours to make. It reflects on universal themes that connect the long histories of art and philosophy, and it does so using a contemporary approach. Drawing on great philosophical works, it argues that life practiced as an art form affords an experience of meaning, in the sense that it is engaging, creative, and participatory. It thus effects a fundamental renewal of experience.

This book explores the work of artists based in the global south whose practices and methods interrogate and explore the residue of Empire. In doing so, it highlights the way that contemporary art can assist in the un-forgetting of colonial violence and oppression that has been systemically minimized. The research draws from various fields including memory studies; postcolonial and decolonial strategies of resistance; activism; theories of the global south; the intersection between colonialism and the Anthropocene, as well as practice-led research methodologies in the visual arts. Told through the author's own perspective as an artist and examining the work of Julie Gough, Yuki Kihara, Megan Cope, Yhonnie Scarce, Lisa Reihana and Karla Dickens, the book develops a number of unique theories for configuring the relationship between art and a troubled past.

Engagement in the City: How Arts and Culture Impact Development in Urban Areas provides readers with numerous examples of ways that the arts can contribute to community development. Through the diverse backgrounds of its contributing authors - representing artists, art educators, and public administration scholars - the role of arts is explored as a contributing factor in strengthening communities. The book shows that the arts have the potential to positively impact a wide variety of development interests, including economic, education, health, social capital, and of cultural. The book provides strategies and techniques for implementing successful arts-based projects, whether it be through public art initiatives, service-learning opportunities, or the development or cultural districts. Cross-sectoral collaboration is a key in many of these projects, making the book beneficial for artists and community leaders who seek ways to work together to improve their cities.

- Presents the first career retrospective of Peter Goin's work, with contextualized close readings of images and rare insight into the artist's intent, decisions, and evolution - Written by a renowned literary ecocritic to provide broad, interdisciplinary appeal across subjects such as photography, ecocriticism and environmental humanities - Beautifully illustrated with 200 colour and black and white photographs

Dance Studies in China is a collection of articles selected from issues of the Journal of Beijing Dance Academy, translated for an English-speaking audience. Beijing Dance Academy is a full-time institution of higher learning with commitment to developing excellent professional dancers, choreographers and dance researchers. This collection includes an interview with Shen Wei, the Chinese-American choreographer, painter and director living in New York City, USA. Founded in 1954, the former Beijing Dance School was the first professional dance school ever established since the founding of People's Republic of China. Beijing Dance Academy (BDA) officially established in 1978, it provides BA and MA degrees and has become the only institution of higher learning for professional dance education in China, as well as the largest prestigious dance school with comprehensive concentrations in the world. In recent years, BDA has committed to develop its research profile specialising in dance, the Journal of Beijing Dance Academy is one of such outcomes. The Academy is also actively engaging with international collaboration. The Intellect China Library is a series of new English translations of the latest scholarship in Chinese that have not previously been available. Subjects covered include visual arts, performing arts, popular culture, media and the broader creative industries. The series aims to foster intellectual debate and to promote closer cross-cultural knowledge exchange by introducing unique Chinese scholarship and ideas to our readers.

Many modernist and avant-garde artists and authors were fascinated by the occult movements of their day. This volume explores how Occultism came to shape modernist art, literature, and film. Individual chapters examine the presence and role of Occultism in the work of such modernist luminaries as Rainer Maria Rilke, August Strindberg, W.B. Yeats, Josephin Peladan and the artist Jan Svankmaier, as well as in avant-garde film, post-war Greek Surrealism, and Scandinavian Retrogardism. Combining the theoretical and methodological foundations of the field of Esotericism Studies with those of Literary Studies, Art History, and Cinema Studies, this volume provides in-depth and nuanced perspectives upon the relationship between Occultism and Modernism in the Western arts from the nineteenth century to the present day.

This book focuses on important mathematical considerations in describing the synthesis of original mechanisms for generating curves. The synthesis is manual and not based on the use of computer tools. Kinematics is applied to confirm the drawing of the curves, and the closed loop method, and in some cases the distances method, is applied in this phase. The book provides all the notions of structure and kinematics that are necessary to calculate the mechanisms and also analyzes other kinematic possibilities of the created mechanisms. Offering a concise, yet self-contained guide to the mathematical fundamentals for mechanisms of curve generation, together with a useful collection of mechanisms exercises, the book is intended for students learning about mechanism kinematics, as well as engineers dealing with mechanism design and analysis. It is based on the authors' many years of research, which has been published in different books and journals, mainly, but not exclusively, in Romanian.

Drawing upon theories from visual studies, critical visual culture studies, and cognitive psychology, and with a special focus on gender and ethnicity, this book gives students a theoretical foundation for future work as visual communicators. The book takes a closer look at the interwoven character of perception and reception that is present in everyday visual encounters. Chapters present a wide variety of visual examples from art history, digital media, and the images we encounter and use in our daily lives. With the tools to understand how images and text make meaning, students are thus prepared to better communicate through visual media. This book serves as a main or supplementary text for visual communication or visual culture courses.

A comprehensive survey of eleven different woods, this book is a vivid account of the flora and fauna that comprise the various habitats of our large and small woods. More than a survey though, this book looks beyond the individual stories of the trees, plants, animals and insects and constitutes a readable account of the inter-dependence of species so vital for the preservation of biodiversity. In her lively and candid style, this timely publication taps immediately into one of the major challenges faced by the environment today. Stunning photography and absorbing text combine with authoritative surveys to make this book both informative and enchanting. Invaluable reference and a visual treat.

This book illuminates the interconnections between politics and religion through the lens of artistic production, exploring how art inspired by religion functioned as a form of resistance, directed against both Romanian national communism (1960-1989) and, latterly, consumerist society and its global market. It investigates the critical, tactical and subversive employments of religious motifs and themes in contemporary art pieces that confront the religious 'affair' in post-communist Romania. In doing so, it addresses a key gap in previous scholarship, which has paid little attention to the relationship between religious art and political resistance in communist Central and South-East Europe.

Liz Wells is a leading figure in the field and this collection brings together otherwise difficult to find works for the first time. There is a great depth and range of essays in this collection, both in terms of geographical coverage and artistic styles, and addressing the work of well-known and lesser-known artists. These essays draw on the key focal points of the author’s scholarly expertise. The collection opens with a conversation with Martha Langford, providing an excellent introduction to Wells’ thought and reflection and contextualization about each of the themes and the pieces and their contemporary relevance. Section introductions by Wells provide further context and tie older essays to current concerns in the field.

There have been major advances in therapeutic photography since Del's first book in 2013, and the recent lockdowns have accelerated the field further.

This book examines the complexities of the hipster through the lens of art history and cultural theory, from Charles Baudelaire's flaneur to the contemporary "creative" borne from creative industries policies. It claims that the recent ubiquity of hipster culture has led many artists to confront their own significance, responding to the mass artification of contemporary life by de-emphasising the formal and textual deconstructions so central to the legacies of modern and postmodern art. In the era of creative digital technologies, long held characteristics of art such as individual expression, innovation, and alternative lifestyle are now features of a flooded and fast-paced global marketplace. Against the idea that artists, like hipsters, are the "foot soldiers of capitalism", the institutionalized networks that make up the contemporary art world are working to portray a view of art that is less a discerning exercise in innovative form-making than a social platform-a forum for populist aesthetic pleasures or socio-political causes. It is in this sense that the concept of the hipster is caught up in age-old debates about the relation between ethics and aesthetics, examined here in terms of the dynamics of global contemporary art.

This is the first English-language account of the modern history of China's art market that explains the radical transformations from the end of the Cultural Revolution, when a market for art and artifacts did not exist, to today. The book is divided into three sections: Part I examines how the art market in China was suspended during the Cultural Revolution, restarted, grew, and expanded into its current scale. Part II analyzes the distinctive value system of the Chinese art market where the state-run art system including academies, artist associations and museums co-exist with an independent market-oriented system; and traverses the most significant policies that drive decision making and market structure. Part III explores the driving force of art creation by telling the stories of five contemporary artists across three generations. Arts and culture professionals, scholars, and students interested in Chinese art, global art markets, Chinese government policy, and China will find this to be a valuable resource.

This book analyses the intersections between contemporary art and environmental activism in Indonesia. Exploring how the arts have promoted ecological awareness from the late 1960s to the early 2020s, the book shows how the arts have contributed to societal change and public and political responses to environmental crises. This period covers Indonesia's rapid urban development under the totalitarian New Order regime (1967-1998) as well as the enhanced freedom of expression, alternative development models, and environmental problems under the democratic governments since 1998. The book applies the concept of 'artivism' to refer to the vital role of art in activism. It seeks to identify and contextualise both the potential and limits of environmental artivism in Indonesia, a country whose vibrant art scenes and monumental social transformations provide a productive laboratory for exploring the power of creativity as a social and political change agent. It provides a comprehensive overview of contemporary art from Indonesia, with an in-depth analysis of artivists who seek to address and find solutions for some of the most pressing environmental issues of our times. With its detailed, empirical approach to environmental art from Southeast Asia, this project fills in an important gap in the literature on art and activism. It is aimed at academics, students, artists, curators, policymakers, activists, and general readers with an interest in the environment, art history, and Indonesian culture, society, and politics.

This book explores the historical and cultural significance of comics in languages other than English, examining the geographic and linguistic spheres which these comics inhabit and their contributions to comic studies and academia. The volume brings together texts across a wide range of genres, styles and geographic locations including the Netherlands, Latin America, Greece, Sweden, Poland, Finland, Portugal, Ireland, the Czech Republic, among others. These works have remained out of reach for speakers of languages other than the original and do not receive the scholarly attention they deserve due to their lack of English translations. This book highlights the richness and diversity these works add to the corpus of comic art and comic studies that Anglophone comics scholars can access to broaden the collective perspective of the field and forge links across regions, genres and comic traditions. Part of the Global Perspectives in Comics Studies series, this volume spans many continents and languages. It will be of interest to researchers and students of comics studies, literature, cultural studies, popular culture, art and design, illustration, history, film studies and sociology.