The ninth volume of the International Yearbook of Futurism Studies is dedicated to Russian Futurism and gathers ten studies that investigate the impact of F.T. Marinetti's visit to Russia in 1914; the neglected region of the Russian Far East; the artist and writers Velimir Khlebnikov, Vasily Kamensky, Maria Siniakova and Vladimir Mayakovsky; the artistic media of advertising, graphic arts, cinema and artists' books.

LAND ART IN THE U.S.A.

A new study of land art in America, featuring all of the well-known land artists from the 'golden age' of land art - the 1960s - to the present day.

Fully illustrated, with a bibliography.

EXTRACT FROM THE CHAPTER ON ROBERT SMITHSON

Robert Smithson is the key land artist, the premier artist in the world of land art. And he's been a big favourite with art critics since the early Seventies. Smithson was the chief mouthpiece of American earth/ site aesthetics, and is probably the most important artist among all land artists.

For Robert Smithson, Carl Andre, Walter de Maria, Michael Heizer, Dennis Oppenheim and Tony Smith were 'the more compelling artists today, concerned with 'Place' or 'Site''. Smithson was impressed by Tony Smith's vision of the mysterious aspects of a dark unfinished road and called Smith 'the agent of endlessness'. Smith's aesthetic became part of Smithson's view of art as a complete 'site', not simply an aesthetic of sculptural objects. Smithson was not inspired by ancient religious sculpture, by burial mounds, for example, so much as by decayed industrial sites. He visited some in the mid-1960s that were 'in some way disrupted or pulverized'. He said he was looking for a 'denaturalization rather than built up scenic beauty'.

Robert Smithson said he was concerned, like many land (and contemporary artists with the thing in itself, not its image, its effect, its critical significance: 'I am for an art that takes into account the direct effect of the elements as they exist from day to day apart from representation'. Smithson's theory of the 'non-site' was based on 'absence, a very ponderous, weighty absence'. Smithson proposed a theory of a dialectic between absence and presence, in which the 'non-site' and 'site' are both interacting. In the 'non-site' work, presence and absence are there simultaneously. 'The land or ground from the Site is placed in the art (Non-Site) rather than the art is placed on the ground. The Non-Site is a container within another container - the room'.

William Malpas has written books on Richard Long and land art, as well as three books on Andy Goldsworthy, including the forthcoming Andy Goldsworthy In America. Malpas's books on Richard Long and Andy Goldsworthy are the only full-length studies of these artists available.

George Stow was a Victorian man of many parts--poet, historian, ethnographer, artist, cartographer, and prolific writer. A geologist by profession, he became acquainted, through his work in the field, with the extraordinary wealth of rock paintings in the caves and shelters of the South African interior. Enchanted and absorbed by them, Stow set out to create a record of this creative work of the people who had tracked and marked the South African landscape decades and centuries before him.
"Unconquerable Spirit "reveals the scope and the beauty of his labors. Stow's paintings are more than just copies of what he found on the rocks. They are interpretations of the art of the San, informed by his own understanding of a particularly turbulent time in South African history and his sense of the tragic demise of the San way of life. This book celebrates his pioneering achievement and reminds us, too, of the richness of the imaginative universe of the San.

CONSTANTIN BRANCUSI

Constantin Brancusi is one of the greatest of all sculptors, and a key sculptor of the modern era, with Auguste Rodin and Pablo Picasso. Brancusi's influence can be seen in a wide range of Western sculptors, including Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Henry Moore, Jean Arp, Barbara Hepworth, Minimalists and land artists.

This new book studies the religious and mythical dimensions of Constantin Brancusi's distinctive scultpural forms, the 'eggs', 'fishes', 'heads' and 'columns'. His central quest was for the 'essence of things', which resulted in purifying a form until only the essence was left.

It was Constantin Brancusi's project to strip away the detritus that had accumulated around sculpture, Henry Moore said, and to offer the pure, simple shape. What Brancusi did was 'to concentrate on very simple shapes, to keep his sculpture, as it were, one-cylindered, to refine and polish a single shape to a degree almost too precious.'

As well as being a sculptor, Constantin Brancusi was also an accomplished photographer. Quite a few artists (not all of them sculptors) have expressed for Brancusi's photographs, and the way he would set up his sculptures inhis studio and photograph them at particular times of the day, when the lightingwas just right. They are early examples of installation art (and some of the best, too). Andy Goldsworthy said he admired how Brancusi created the right conditions in his studio so that his work 'comes alive at a particular time of the day as the light momentarily touches it'. For Goldsworthy, Brancusi's works were at their best when they were arranged by the sculptor in his studio and photographed. Somehow, it wasn't quite the same when they were displayed in modern art museums (such as the Pompidou Centre in Paris or the Museum of Modern Art in Gotham, which have important Brancusi pieces).

Fully illustrated, including many photos of Brancusi's studio in Paris, and the art of his contemporaries.

The importance of the leading British architect A. W. N. Pugin (1812-52) in the history of the Gothic Revival, the development of ecclesiology, the origins of the Arts and Crafts Movement, and in architectural theory is incontestable. His letters are vigorous, direct, often witty, and invaluable for architectural and religio-historical research. The second of five volumes.

Edmund de Waal is a world-famous ceramicist. Having spent thirty years making beautiful pots―which are then sold, collected, and handed on―he has a particular sense of the secret lives of objects. When he inherited a collection of 264 tiny Japanese wood and ivory carvings, called netsuke, he wanted to know who had touched and held them, and how the collection had managed to survive.

And so begins The Hare with Amber Eyes, this extraordinarily moving memoir and detective story as de Waal discovers both the story of the netsuke and of his family, the Ephrussis, over five generations.

A nineteenth-century banking dynasty in Paris and Vienna, the Ephrussis were as rich and respected as the Rothchilds. Yet by the end of the World War II, when the netsuke were hidden from the Nazis in Vienna, this collection of very small carvings was all that remained of their vast empire.

In the 1930s, the exciting urban environment of Montreal provided the perfect venue for a varied group of people who came together to form a kind of “salon� in the turmoil of the Great Depression. For ten years, these friends and acquaintances met each week at the home of the artist John Lyman. They saw themselves as “modern,� a part of the avant-garde that was then busily changing the world. These Canadian modernists supported left-wing causes, advocated a more stable social order, and heralded a more inclusive culture. More than anything, they searched for a way in which their lives wouldhave meaning. In The Last Ulysseans, Molly Pulver Ungar describes this dynamic group’s private and public activities of the group from the beginning of the Great Depression through the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War to the final years of the 1930s. In face of the ominous certainty of another war in Europe, these individuals reached a new understanding of what it meant to live a modern, meaningful life. Their conscious pursuit of new directions in outlook, attitude, and lifestyle influenced many of the changes in post-war North American society.

Malice Aforethought is the story of murder-one-the premeditated, cold-blooded killing and obliteration of the name and life-story of the world's greatest writing genius, William Shakespeare. This shameful tale has finally been unraveled, slowly but inexorably, piece by dramatic piece, during the last century. Whom did Shakespeare offend so grievously that he had to be eradicated forever from the rolls of life? Or was he only embroiled in high-stakes drama and malevolence by ill-fortune? Using well-known sleuthing techniques, the Great Shakespeare Hoax has been solved, the true genius identified and the diabolical perpetrators revealed. Their disgraceful deception, coerced on a gullible world, has been eminently successful for four centuries but no longer. The dastardly deed of filching and squelching Shakespeare's name, the immediate jewel of his soul, was a wanton act of assassination with malice aforethought, malum in se, malevolent by its very nature. The despicable act was motivated solely for reasons of endless appetite for power and wealth by individuals at the highest level of English government. Remarkably, a cover-up of the truth still continues today in the United States and England.

The Nature of Revolution provides the first account of art and politics under the brutal Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. James A. Tyner repositions Khmer Rouge artworks within their proper political and economic context: the materialization of a political organization in an era of anticolonial and decolonization movements. Consequently, both the organization's policies and practices?including the production of poetry, music, and photography?were incontrovertibly shaped by and created to further the Khmer Rouge's agenda.Theoretically informed and empirically grounded, Tyner's work examines the social dimensions of the Khmer Rouge, while contributing broadly to a growing literature on the intersection of art and politics. Building on the foundational works of theorists such as Jacques Ranciere, Theodor Adorno, and Walter Benjamin, Tyner explores the insights of Leon Trotsky and his descriptions of the politics of aesthetics specific to socialist revolutions. Ultimately, Tyner reveals a fundamental tension between individuality and bureaucratic control and its impact on artistic creativity and freedom.

Well Worth a Shindy tells the story of the Old Well, beloved symbol of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the United States' first public university. The Old Well is a Greco-Roman garden temple built in 1897 over an old water well on the campus. The facts concerning the Old Well's beginnings serve to introduce an historical study of the round temple from Mycenaean tholos tombs and treasuries to eighteenth-century English garden follies. The reasons that the Old Well was built, according to its commissioner, Edwin Alderman, the sixth president of the University of North Carolina, are repetitious of those that directed such as Alexander the Great, Augustus Caesar, and Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain to build round temples to be symbols of their territorial and dynastic desires. the designer of the Old Well, Eugene Lewis Harris, used to construct the temple were not new but were ancient guides filtered through Medieval and Renaissance prisms. A catalog of over 100 round structures in 14 countries is provided.

Based on two international conferences held at Cornell University and the Freie Universitat of Berlin in 2010 and 2015, this volume is the first ever to explicitly address the destruction of plaster cast collections of ancient Mediterranean and Western sculpture. Focusing on Europe, the Americas, and Japan, art historians, archaeologists and a literary scholar discuss how different museum and academic traditions - national as well as disciplinary -, notions of value and authenticity, or colonialism impacted the fate of collections. The texts offer detailed documentation of degrees of destruction by spectacular acts of defacement, demolition, discarding, or neglect. They also shed light on the accompanying discourses regarding aesthetic ideals, political ideologies, educational and scholarly practices, or race. With destruction being understood as a critical part of reception, the histories of cast collections defy the traditional, homogenous narrative of rise and decline. Their diverse histories provide critical evidence for rethinking the use and display of plaster cast collections in the contemporary moment.

This book spotlights the role that contemporary art will play in Saudi Arabia's new push for cultural diplomacy as well as sweeping reform in the country. As the Kingdom mobilises its vast resources behind the economic and social priorities of its Vision 2030 strategy and seeks new terms of engagement with the international community, art is set to take centre stage. Rooted in Saudi Arabia's own traditions and contemporary practices, a barrage of planned events, installations, public projects, biennales and museum openings are beginning to draw in many from the international art community. This book looks at both the historic and contemporary contexts for this recent state-led focus on art in the Kingdom; at how its planned events and programmes stand apart, in resource, scale and ambition, from seemingly similar initiatives coming from that region; and at both the opportunities and pitfalls, not just for the burgeoning art world of Saudi Arabia, but for practitioners and professionals around the world.