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Books > Arts & Architecture > History of art / art & design styles
Falling Monuments, Reluctant Ruins: The Persistence of the Past in the Architecture of Apartheid interrogates how, in the era of decolonisation, post-apartheid South Africa reckons with its past in order to shape its future. Architects, historians, artists, social anthropologists and urban planners seek answers in this book to complex and unsettling questions around heritage, ruins and remembrance. What do we do with hollow memorials and political architectural remnants? Which should remain, which forgotten, and which dismantled? Are these vacant buildings, cemeteries, statues, and derelict grounds able to serve as inspiration in the fight against enduring racism and social neglect? Should they become exemplary as spaces for restitution and justice? The contributors examine the influence of public memory, planning and activism on such anguished places of oppression, resistance and defiance. Their focus on visible markers in the landscape to interrogate our past will make readers reconsider these spaces, looking at their landscape and history anew. Through a series of 14 empirically grounded chapters and 48 images, the contributors seek to understand how architecture contests or subverts these persistent conditions in order to promote social justice, land reclamation and urban rehabilitation. The decades following the dismantling of apartheid are surveyed in light of contemporary heritage projects, where building ruins and abandoned spaces are challenged and renegotiated across the country to become sites of protest, inspiration and anger. This ground-breaking collection is an important resource for professionals, academics and activists working in South Africa today.
In this ground-breaking collection of critical essays, 15 writers explore the experimental, interdisciplinary and radically transgressive field of contemporary live art in South Africa. Set against a contemporary South African society that is chronologically `post' apartheid, but one that continues to grapple with material redress, land redistribution and systemic racism, Acts of Transgression finds a representation of the complexity of this moment within the rich potential of a performative art form that transcends disciplinary boundaries and aesthetic conventions. The collection probes live art's intersection with crisis and socio-political turbulence, shifting notions of identity and belonging, embodied trauma and loss, questions of archive, memory and the troubling of colonial systems of knowing, an interrogation of narratives of the past and visions for the future.These diverse essays, analysing the work of more than 25 contemporary South African artists and accompanied by a striking visual record of more than 50 photographs, represent the first major critical study of contemporary live art in South Africa; a study that is as timeous as it is imperative.
Amid evictions, raids, killings, the drug trade, and fire, inner-city Johannesburg residents seek safety and a home. A grandmother struggles to keep her granddaughter as she is torn away from her. A mother seeks healing in the wake of her son’s murder. And displaced by a city’s drive for urban regeneration, a group of blind migrants try to carve out an existence. The Blinded City recounts the history of inner-city Johannesburg from 2010 to 2019, primarily from the perspectives of the unlawful occupiers of spaces known as hijacked buildings, bad buildings or dark buildings. Tens of thousands of residents, both South African and foreign national, live in these buildings in dire conditions. This book tells the story of these sites, and the court cases around them, ones that strike at the centre of who has the right to occupy the city. In February 2010, while Johannesburg prepared for the FIFA World Cup, the South Gauteng High Court ordered the eviction of the unlawful occupiers of an abandoned carpet factory on Saratoga Avenue and that the city’s Metropolitan Municipality provide temporary emergency accommodation for the evicted. The case, which became known as Blue Moonlight and went to the Constitutional Court, catalysed a decade of struggles over housing and eviction in Johannesburg. The Blinded City chronicles this case, among others, and the aftermath – a tumultuous period in the city characterised by recurrent dispossessions, police and immigration operations, outbursts of xenophobic violence, and political and legal change. All through the decade, there is the backdrop of successive mayors and their attempts to ‘clean up’ the city, and the struggles of residents and urban housing activists for homes and a better life. The interwoven narratives present a compelling mosaic of life in post-apartheid Johannesburg, one of the globe’s most infamous and vital cities.
From former editor of New York magazine Adam Moss, a collection of illuminating conversations examining the very personal, rigorous, complex, and elusive work of making art. What is the work of art? In this guided tour inside the artist’s head, Adam Moss traces the evolution of transcendent novels, paintings, jokes, movies, songs, and more. Weaving conversations with some of the most accomplished artists of our time together with the journal entries, napkin doodles, and sketches that were their tools, Moss breaks down the work—the tortuous paths and artistic decisions—that led to great art. From first glimmers to second thoughts, roads not taken, crises, breakthroughs, on to one triumphant finish after another. Featuring: Kara Walker, Tony Kushner, Roz Chast, Michael Cunningham, Moses Sumney, Sofia Coppola, Stephen Sondheim, Susan Meiselas, Louise Glück, Maria de Los Angeles, Nico Muhly, Thomas Bartlett, Twyla Tharp, John Derian, Barbara Kruger, David Mandel, Gregory Crewdson, Marie Howe, Gay Talese, Cheryl Pope, Samin Nosrat, Joanna Quinn & Les Mills, Wesley Morris, Amy Sillman, Andrew Jarecki, Rostam, Ira Glass, Simphiwe Ndzube, Dean Baquet & Tom Bodkin, Max Porter, Elizabeth Diller, Ian Adelman / Calvin Seibert, Tyler Hobbs, Marc Jacobs, Grady West (Dina Martina), Will Shortz, Sheila Heti, Gerald Lovell, Jody Williams & Rita Sodi, Taylor Mac & Machine Dazzle, David Simon, George Saunders, Suzan-Lori Parks
Samuel Daniell can be described as one of the most accomplished yet least-known artists from the era of British exploration. He travelled around southern Africa between 1800 and 1803, and lived in Ceylon until his death in 1811. His vivid sketches, drawings and watercolours are individuated and accomplished art works. Daniell’s representations of people of colour are remarkable for their perceptiveness and are perhaps unmatched in their sensitivity in the colonial era. He also produced many drawings and paintings of animals that are noteworthy for their accuracy. His biography is a fascinating example of how art contributed to the accumulation of scientific knowledge and the extension of British imperial power. Daniell’s drawings are widely scattered, and mostly unpublished. This biography reconstructs his life and travels by bringing together his known works from collections across the world.
Typically regarded as reflecting on a culture in social, political, or psychological crisis, the arts in fin-de-siecle Vienna had another side: they were means by which creative individuals imagined better futures and perfected worlds dawning with the turn of the twentieth century. As author Kevin C. Karnes reveals, much of this utopian discourse drew inspiration from the work of Richard Wagner, whose writings and music stood for both a deluded past and an ideal future yet to come. Illuminating this neglected dimension of Vienna's creative culture, this book ranges widely across music, philosophy, and the visual arts. Uncovering artworks long forgotten and providing new perspectives on some of the most celebrated achievements in the Western canon, Karnes considers music by Mahler, Schoenberg, and Alexander Zemlinsky, paintings, sculptures, and graphic art by Klimt, Max Klinger, and members of the Vienna Secession, and philosophical writings by Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Maurice Maeterlinck. Through analyses of artworks and the cultural dynamics that surrounded their creation and reception, this study reveals a powerful current of millennial optimism running counter and parallel to the cultural pessimism widely associated with the period. It discloses a utopian discourse that is at once beautiful, moving, and deeply disturbing, as visions of perfection gave rise to ecstatic artworks and dystopian social and political realities.
Once the center of agricultural prosperity in Alabama, the rich soil of the Black Belt still features beautiful homes that stand as a testimony to the region's proud heritage. Join author Jennifer Hale as she explores the history of seventeen of the finest plantation homes in Alabama's Black Belt. This book chronicles the original owners and slaves of the homes and traces their descendants, who have continued to call these plantations home throughout the past two centuries. Discover why the families of an Indian chief and a chief justice feuded for over a century about the land on which Belvoir stands. Follow Gaineswood's progress as it grew from a humble log cabin into an opulent mansion. Learn how the original builder and subsequent owners of the Kirkwood Mansion are linked by a legacy of exceptional and dedicated preservation. "Historic Plantations of Alabama's Black Belt" recounts the elegant past and hopeful future of a well-loved region of the South.
The study of Roman sculpture has been an essential part of the disciplines of Art History and Classics since the eighteenth century. From formal concerns such as Kopienkritic (copy criticism) to social readings of plebeian and patrician art and beyond, scholars have returned to Roman sculpture to answer a variety of questions about Roman art, society, and history. Indeed, the field of Roman sculptural studies encompasses not only the full chronological range of the Roman world but also its expansive geography, and a variety of artistic media, formats, sizes, and functions. Exciting new theories, methods, and approaches have transformed the specialized literature on the subject in recent decades. Rather than creating another chronological ARCH15OXH of representative examples of various periods, genres, and settings, The Oxford Handbook of Roman Sculpture synthesizes current best practices for studying this central medium of Roman art, situating it within the larger fields of art history, classical archaeology, and Roman studies. This volume fills the gap between introductory textbooks-which hide the critical apparatus from the reader-and the highly focused professional literature. The handbook conveniently presents new technical, scientific, literary, and theoretical approaches to the study of Roman sculpture in one reference volume and complements textbooks and other publications that present well-known works in the corpus. Chronologically, the volume addresses material from the Early Republican period through Late Antiquity. The Oxford Handbook of Roman Sculpture not only contributes to the field of classical art and archaeology but also provides a useful reference for classicists and historians of the ancient world.
In Renaissance Rome, ancient ruins were preserved as often as they
were mined for their materials. Although the question of what to
preserve and how continued to be subject to debate, preservation
acquired renewed force and urgency in the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries as the new papal capital rose upon the ruins of the
ancient city. Preservation practices became more focused and
effective in Renaissance Rome than ever before.
Movie houses first started popping up around Toronto in the 1910s and '20s, in an era without television and before radio had permeated every household. Dozens of these grand structures were built and soon became an important part of the cultural and architectural fabric of the city. A century later the surviving, defunct, and reinvented movie houses of Toronto's past are filled with captivating stories. Explore fifty historic Toronto movie houses and theaters, and discover their roles as repositories of memories for a city that continues to grow its cinema legacy. Features stunning historic photography.
From the US Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial and the 9/11 Memorial Museum, classical forms and ideas have been central to an American nationalist aesthetic. Beginning with an understanding of this centrality of the classical tradition to the construction of American national identity and the projection of American power, Empire of Ruin describes a mode of black classicism that has been integral to the larger critique of American politics, aesthetics, and historiography that African American cultural production has more generally advanced. While the classical tradition has provided a repository of ideas and images that have allowed white American elites to conceive of the nation as an ideal Republic and the vanguard of the idea of civilization, African American writers, artists, and activists have characterized this dominant mode of classical appropriation as emblematic of a national commitment to an economy of enslavement and a geopolitical project of empire. If the dominant forms of American classicism and monumental culture have asserted the ascendancy of what Thomas Jefferson called an "empire for liberty," for African American writers and artists it has suggested that the nation is nothing exceptional, but rather another iteration of what the radical abolitionist Henry Highland Garnet identified as an "empire of slavery," inexorably devolving into an "empire of ruin."
Lament seems to have been universal in the ancient world. As such, it is an excellent touchstone for the comparative study of attitudes towards death and the afterlife, human relations to the divine, views of the cosmos, and the constitution of the fabric of society in different times and places. This collection of essays offers the first ever comparative approach to ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern traditions of lament. Beginning with the Sumerian and Hittite traditions, the volume moves on to examine Bronze Age iconographic representations of lamentation, Homeric lament, depictions of lament in Greek tragedy and parodic comedy, and finally lament in ancient Rome. The list of contributors includes such noted scholars as Richard Martin, Ian Rutherford, and Alison Keith. Lament comes at a time when the conclusions of the first wave of the study of lament-especially Greek lament-have received widespread acceptance, including the notions that lament is a female genre; that men risked feminization if they lamented; that there were efforts to control female lamentation; and that a lamenting woman was a powerful figure and a threat to the orderly functioning of the male public sphere. Lament revisits these issues by reexamining what kinds of functions the term lament can include, and by expanding the study of lament to other genres of literature, cultures, and periods in the ancient world. The studies included here reflect the variety of critical issues raised over the past 25 years, and as such, provide an overview of the history of critical thinking on the subject.
Minos and the Moderns considers three mythological complexes that
enjoyed a unique surge of interest in early twentieth-century
European art and literature: Europa and the bull, the minotaur and
the labyrinth, and Daedalus and Icarus. All three are situated on
the island of Crete and are linked by the figure of King Minos.
Drawing examples from fiction, poetry, drama, painting, sculpture,
opera, and ballet, Minos and the Moderns is the first book of its
kind to treat the role of the Cretan myths in the modern
imagination.
What does modern British and Irish literature have to do with
French impressionist painting? And what does Henry James have to do
with the legal dispute between John Ruskin and J.M.W. Whistler?
What links Walter Pater with Conrad's portrait of a genocidal
maniac in Heart of Darkness? Or George Moore with Irish
nationalism, Virginia Woolf with modern distraction, and Ford Madox
Ford with the Great Depression?
The sudden and spectacular growth in Dante's popularity in England at the end of the eighteenth century was immensely influential for English writers of the period. But the impact of Dante on English writers has rarely been analysed and its history has been little understood. Byron, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Blake, and Wordsworth all wrote and painted while Dante's work - its style, project, and achievement - commanded their attention and provoked their disagreement. The Circle of Our Vision discusses each of these writers in detail, assessing the nature of their engagement with the Divine Comedy and the consequences for their own writing. It explores how these Romantic poets understood Dante, what they valued in his poetry and why, setting them in the context of contemporary commentators, translators, and illustrators, (including Fuseli, Flaxman, and Reynolds) both in England and Europe. Romantic readings of the Divine Comedy are shown to disturb our own ideas about Dante, which are based on Victorian and Modernist assumptions. Pite also presents a reconsideration of the concept of 'influence' in general, using the example of Dante's presence in Romantic poetry to challenge Harold Bloom's belief that the relations between poets are invariably a fight to the death.
Since 1994 South Africa has undergone a steady erosion of its indigenous built environment, with a concomitant loss of indigenous building technology and its specialised terminology. This glossary is based on the premise that you cannot understand the culture of a people unless you have a grasp of the nuances and hidden meanings of their language and brings together in one single volume the terminologies that are used by southern Africa's rural builders. It covers the terminology used by indigenous builders as well as subsequent colonial white settlers including buildings of the so-called Cape Dutch, English Georgian, Victorian and Indian Traditions. The text is set out in alphabetical order. It comprises of each term in its original language, its translation where appropriate into isiZulu, and its definition in English and isiZulu. One of the strengths of this book is its visual component of accompanying sketches that expertly illustrate the terms. This book is designed not only to assist in the teaching of architecture, but also to aid others who are interested in the field. Researchers and practitioners in disciplines such as anthropology, archaeology, culture studies and building science will find it a valuable addition to their libraries.
Sandra Blow (1925-2006) is among the most important British artists of the later twentieth century. During a time of rapid change in the art world, her commitment to abstract painting resulted in a large and diverse body of work of distinctive power and subtlety. Michael Bird's fascinating survey of Sandra Blow's life and art is now available for the first time in a handsome paperback edition. Compiled in collaboration with the artist during the last years of her life, it provides a definitive overview of her career. The book is lavishly illustrated throughout with a fully representative selection of Blow's work. In this highly readable account, Michael Bird looks in depth at Blow's evolving studio practice and the personal nature of her abstract vision. He places Blow's achievement firmly within the wider context of British and international art movements of the post-war period and late twentieth century. He also casts new light on the role played in her life by Alberto Burri and Roger Hilton, two influences she acknowledged to be crucial to her art. Through close attention to Blow's working methods, this book provides a unique insight into her creative process. It reveals the intensity of emotional engagement and technical experimentation that lie behind the apparent spontaneity of her vivid handling of materials, colour and form.
In the early 20th century, there was no better example of a classic American downtown than Los Angeles. Since World War II, Los Angeles's Historic Core has been "passively preserved," with most of its historic buildings left intact. Recent renovations of the area for residential use and the construction of Disney Hall and the Staples Center are shining a new spotlight on its many pre-1930s Beaux Arts, Art Deco, and Spanish Baroque buildings. |
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