Beholding considers the spatially situated encounter between artwork and spectator. It argues that artworks created for specific places or conditions structure a reciprocal encounter, which is completed by the presence of a beholder. These are works which demand the 'beholder's share', but not, as Ernst Gombrich famously claimed, to sustain an illusion. Rather, Beholding reconfigures Gombrich's notion of the beholder's share as a set of 'licensed' imaginative and cognitive projections. Each chapter frames a particular work of art from the remit of a complementary theoretical text. The book establishes a transhistorical notion of the spatially situated encounter, and considers the role of the architectural host in bringing the beholder's orientation into play. The book engages a diverse range of practices: from Renaissance painting and group portraiture to intermedia practices of installation and performance art. Written within the broad remit of reception aesthetics, the book proposes a phenomenological theory of beholding, argued through an in-depth examination of artworks and their spatial contexts, selected for their explanatory potential. These various encounters allocate different constitutive roles to the beholder, bringing not only spatial and temporal orientation into play, but also a repertoire of anticipated ideas and beliefs.

The art of Makoto Azuma uses flowers and plants as its starting point, but juxtaposes their timeless yet transient beauty with an incredibly diverse range of striking settings. In a series of sculptures, installations and interactive events, he delights in blurring the boundaries between nature and artifice. Azuma founded the floral atelier Jardins des Fleurs in 2002, taking commissions from private clients as well as brands and corporations, both in Japan and all over the world. His parallel career as an artist began in 2005 and involves creating and exhibiting artworks that turn flowers and plants into a medium for self-expression. In 2008, Azuma founded AMKK (Azuma Makoto Kaju Kenkyujo), a group specializing in experimental floral creation, with the aim of seeking new forms of botanical beauty and new ways to exhibit them. His works have travelled the globe, from barren deserts to frozen expanses, from thousands of feet below the sea to the very edge of space. Featuring more than sixty projects captured in breathtaking photography, this beautiful book is the most comprehensive showcase of Azuma's art ever published.

The work of the prize winning Peruvian American light artist Grimanesa Amoros is characterised by organic forms and an instinctive approach. The basis of her fascinating sculptures lies, however, in the natural sciences, social history and critical theory. Research and feeling establish a form of communication in her works. The expansive sculptures and video installations of Grimanesa Amoros have already been shown all over the world: from Mexico to Tel Aviv and from Beijing to Times Square in New York. She presented her latest works, "OCUPANTE" and "GOLDEN SECRET ROOM", In the Ludwig Museum Koblenz. The artist creat es playful light installations which are so enigmatic that they permit interpretations on different levels. Together with an overview of her work, this volume reproduces the works in large format illustrations, thereby reproducing their fluidity and luminosity.

The most recent installation by the internationally acclaimed artist Alicja Kwade (b. 1979), who comes from Katowice, explores the French physicist Leon Foucault's (1819-1868) proof that the world rotates and develops the experiment further. The present volume illustrates the playful exploration of space and time using recent pictures from the Schirn rotunda. The Berlin-based artist Alicja Kwade's scientificlooking experimental setups are reminiscent of surreal and phantasmagorical constellations and objects. The fascination of her work, which cannot be explained by reason alone, is rooted in the skilful superimposition and sometimes paradoxical nature of scientific and social realities. Things that are generally taken to be established facts are called into question and disproved. Here the artist explores the true movement of time, which will have an immediate effect on both space and the viewer.

Film and video create an illusory world, a reality elsewhere, and a material presence that both dramatizes and demystifies the magic trick of moving pictures. Beginning in the 1960s, artists have explored filmic and televisual phenomena in the controlled environments of galleries and museums, drawing on multiple antecedents in cinema, television, and the visual arts. This volume traces the lineage of moving-image installation through architecture, painting, sculpture, performance, expanded cinema, film history, and countercultural film and video from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Sound is given due attention, along with the shift from analogue to digital, issues of spectatorship, and the insights of cognitive science. Woven into this genealogy is a discussion of the procedural, political, theoretical, and ideological positions espoused by artists from the mid-twentieth century to the present. Historical constructs such as Peter Gidal's structural materialism, Maya Deren's notion of vertical and horizontal time, and identity politics are reconsidered in a contemporary context and intersect with more recent thinking on representation, subjectivity, and installation art. The book is written by a critic, curator, and practitioner who was a pioneer of British video and feminist art politics in the late 1970s. Elwes writes engagingly of her encounters with works by Anthony McCall, Gillian Wearing, David Hall, and Janet Cardiff, and her narrative is informed by exchanges with other practitioners. While the book addresses the key formal, theoretical, and historical parameters of moving-image installation, it ends with a question: "What's in it for the artist?"

Reimagines black and brown sensuality to develop new modes of knowledge production In Sensual Excess, Amber Jamilla Musser imagines epistemologies of sensuality that emerge from fleshiness. To do so, she works against the framing of black and brown bodies as sexualized, objectified, and abject, and offers multiple ways of thinking with and through sensation and aesthetics. Each chapter draws our attention to particular aspects of pornotropic capture that black and brown bodies must always negotiate. Though these technologies differ according to the nature of their encounters with white supremacy, together they add to our understanding of the ways that structures of domination produce violence and work to contain bodies and pleasures within certain legible parameters. To do so, Sensual Excess analyzes moments of brown jouissance that exceed these constraints. These ruptures illuminate multiple epistemologies of selfhood and sensuality that offer frameworks for minoritarian knowledge production which is designed to enable one to sit with uncertainty. Through examinations of installations and performances like Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party, Kara Walker's A Subtlety, Patty Chang's In Love and Nao Bustamante's Neapolitan, Musser unpacks the relationships between racialized sexuality and consumption to interrogate foundational concepts in psychoanalytic theory, critical race studies, feminism, and queer theory. In so doing, Sensual Excess offers a project of knowledge production focused not on mastery, but on sensing and imagining otherwise, whatever and wherever that might be.

Paper has been irreplaceable for centuries in the communication and transmission of knowledge. In spite of the digital revolution, paper remains an essential vehicle for the production of art, whether in drawings, painting, the creation of objects, or in the context of site-specific installations. In the urgent need to give material substance to our ideas and experiences, we capture them on paper. In the artistic treatment of this medium, our cultural practices are transcribed onto the paper along with the intended messages. Sur Papier. Su Carta explores paper as a unifying element in the encounter and confrontation of artistic practices with different cultural origins. It opens up a dialogue in which hybrid identities and the cultural spaces between East and West are negotiated, as illustrated by working processes and works on and with paper by Sivan Eldar (USA), Mingjun Luo (Switzerland/China), Francine Mury (Switzerland), and Jiang Zuqing (China).

The publication The Architecture of Deception / Confinement / Transformation accompanies the eponymously titled exhibition trilogy at BNKR - current reflections on art and architecture in Munich and showcases 18 diverse artistic standpoints at the intersection of art and architecture. Each chapter directly corresponds to the evolving history of the exhibition space, which was originally constructed as a camouflaged air-raid bunker during the Second World War, then used as a postwar internment camp, and finally transformed into its current state as a mixed-use residential and office building. The Architecture of Deception explores notions of illusion and deception, the creation of new realities, truth versus fiction; Confinement explores notions of shelters and safety, captivity and freedom, 'outside' versus 'inside'; Transformation explores notions of gentrification, decay and definition of living spaces. With contributions by the editors, David Adjaye and Nikolaus Hirsch, Isabelle Doucet, and Madeleine Freund. Artists: The Architecture of Deception: Hans Op de Beeck, Emmanuelle Laine, Bettina Pousttchi, Gregor Sailer, Cortis & Sonderegger, The Swan Collective; The Architecture of Confinement: Ramzi Ben Sliman, Mona Hatoum, Nadia Kaabi-Linke, Annika Kahrs, OEzgur Kar, Joanna Piotrovska; The Architecture of Transformation: Dana Awartani, Olivier Goethals, Eva Nielsen, Jeremy Shaw, Hannah Weinberger, Andrea Zittel.

The volume offers a historical-critical study on the entire career of Marco Tirelli (Rome,1956). His production - surprising and enigmatic - includes works on paper, works on canvas or wood, sculptures, installations, whose subjects always appear poised between recognisability and abstraction: the figures and scenes represented are made up of a densification of microscopic particles of colours that from a distance seem well defined, but which, when viewed from a short distance, break down. A subtle, intellectual painting, therefore, the result of an introspective investigation carried out with dedication. The same tension between illusion and reality, between light and shadow, also characterises the sculptures and installations, as documented in these pages. The volume includes a historical-critical essay by Antonella Soldaini, a conversation with the artist, a biographical note and a documentary summary. Text in English and Italian.

1961, three years after meeting Jeanne-Claude in Paris, Christo made a study of a mammoth project that would wrap one of the city's most emblematic monuments. 60 years, 25,000 square meters of recyclable fabric, and 3,000 meters of rope later, the artists' vision finally came true. Discover their posthumous installation with this book gathering photography, drawings, and a history of the project's making. Like most of Christo and Jeanne-Claude's work, L'Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped is temporary and runs for 16 days from Saturday, September 18 to Sunday, October 3, 2021. Carried out in close collaboration with the Centre des Monuments Nationaux, the historic structure is wrapped in recyclable polypropylene fabric in silvery blue and recyclable red rope. The project is the posthumous realisation of a long-held dream for Christo and Jeanne-Claude, who first drew up plans to wrap the Arc de Triomphe in 1961 while renting a small room near the monument. Published as a tribute to the late artists and their lifelong partnership, the book includes original sketches, technical data, and exclusive photography, creating a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at the genesis of this prodigious artwork.

Since Tate Modern opened, the Turbine Hall has hosted some of the most memorable and acclaimed site-specific art installations of the twenty-first century, reaching an audience of millions. This book is published to accompany the inaugaral Hyundai Commission, the first in a new series of annual exhibitions that will give renowned international contemporary artists an opportunity to create new work for one of the world's most iconic museum spaces. Abraham Cruzvillegas (b.1968), one of the key figures to have emerged in Mexico among a new wave of conceptual artists, is best known for his sculptural works made from local found objects and materials. He has titled this body of work autoconstruccion or 'self-construction'. This term usually refers to the way Mexicans of his parents' generation, arriving in the capital from rural areas in the 1960s, self-built their houses in stages, improvising with whatever materials they could source. His approach to sculpture continues the principles of autoconstruccion, recycling locally found objects and improvising new ways to build, design and create. As an artist he is also concerned with how a strong community spirit and hope can be maintained in precarious economic and political conditions. These ideas have led to projects staged in Glasgow, Paris, Oxford, Gwangju, Kassel and many other places. During a residency at Cove Park in Scotland, Cruzvillegas gathered discarded materials such as wool, fencing, a rubber buoy and bits of wood to create a dynamic installation of sculptures. In Glasgow he created a modified bicycle which he pedalled through the city while playing music created in collaboration with local bands. In recent years his work has been exhibited at Haus der Kunst, Munich (2014); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2013); Modern Art Oxford (2011) and The New Museum, New York (2011). Created in close collaboration with the artist, the book will feature a fully illustrated survey of Cruzvillegas's life and work and an in-depth interview with curator Mark Godfrey. Exploring in fascinating detail the artistic processes involved in creating this monumental new work, it will include stunning photographs of the awe-inspiring installation to be revealed in the Turbine Hall in October 2015.

In October 2018 Cornelia Parker's Transitional Object (PsychoBarn) lands in the courtyard of the Royal Academy of Arts, London. This meticulous and unsettling installation - first shown on the roof of The Metropolitan Museum of Art against the skyline of New York's Central Park - is half stage set, half sculpture. The work, which draws on archetypal images of American culture such as the red barn and the infamous Bates motel from Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, will now be seen against a backdrop of Burlington House's neoclassical buildings. Cornelia Parker was elected a Royal Academician in 2009. She has since had solo shows at the Whitworth Gallery, Manchester, and the Frith Street Gallery, London. She is well known for her installations, including Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View (1991), a reconstruction of an exploded shed, which now forms part of Tate's collection. Generously illustrated with supporting imagery and installation shots, this book comprises a conversation with the artist and a text on the work's installation in London. Transitional Object (PsychoBarn) will be on display in the courtyard of the Royal Academy of Arts, London, from October 2018 to March 2019.

When this book first appeared in 1982, it introduced readers to Robert Irwin, the Los Angeles artist 'who one day got hooked on his own curiosity and decided to live it'. Now expanded to include six additional chapters and twenty-four pages of color plates, "Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees" chronicles three decades of conversation between Lawrence Weschler and light and space master Irwin. It surveys many of Irwin's site-conditioned projects - in particular the Central Gardens at the Getty Museum (the subject of an epic battle with the site's principal architect, Richard Meier) and the design that transformed an abandoned Hudson Valley factory into Dia's new Beacon campus - enhancing what many had already considered the best book ever on an artist.

Film and video create an illusory world, a reality elsewhere, and a material presence that both dramatizes and demystifies the magic trick of moving pictures. Beginning in the 1960s, artists have explored filmic and televisual phenomena in the controlled environments of galleries and museums, drawing on multiple antecedents in cinema, television, and the visual arts. This volume traces the lineage of moving-image installation through architecture, painting, sculpture, performance, expanded cinema, film history, and countercultural film and video from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Sound is given due attention, along with the shift from analogue to digital, issues of spectatorship, and the insights of cognitive science. Woven into this genealogy is a discussion of the procedural, political, theoretical, and ideological positions espoused by artists from the mid-twentieth century to the present. Historical constructs such as Peter Gidal's structural materialism, Maya Deren's notion of vertical and horizontal time, and identity politics are reconsidered in a contemporary context and intersect with more recent thinking on representation, subjectivity, and installation art. The book is written by a critic, curator, and practitioner who was a pioneer of British video and feminist art politics in the late 1970s. Elwes writes engagingly of her encounters with works by Anthony McCall, Gillian Wearing, David Hall, and Janet Cardiff, and her narrative is informed by exchanges with other practitioners. While the book addresses the key formal, theoretical, and historical parameters of moving-image installation, it ends with a question: "What's in it for the artist?"

The Japanese artist Koho Mori-Newton is a master when it comes to handling silk, which he places in an exciting dialogue with architecture. In this way he creates cult-like spaces which interact with light in a fasci nating way. In addition to the works in silk, this volume also shows various graphic work groups from the last 35 years as well as the Path of Silk, created especially for no intention. Koho Mori-Newton (*1951) is a master of intentional lack of intention. His works appear simple, but the aesthetic which lies behind them is complex. Time and again he investigates the basis of art itself, questions the concept of the originality of the artistic creative process and explores the boundaries of artworks. His oeuvre lures us into a world that exists beyond the obvious. Path of Silk, a labyrinthine installation of room-high panels of silk, worked in China ink by Mori-Newton, presents a fragile interplay of space and light, of heaviness and lightness. Further areas of focus in his creative work are repetition and copy, from which his graphic works derive their own special charm.

This ultimate picture book packed with wonderful, quirky, amusing and delightful images from the British Museum. There is no text at all: the pictures, and combinations of pictures, speak for themselves. This makes the book accessible to all ages. Quite young children will enjoy examining and talking about the pictures; even adult visitors familiar with the museums galleries will find much to surprise and entertain them. Every reader is likely to be surprised at the breadth and variety of images, all of which come from the British Museum.

Following the success of his first novel The Marriage of Reason and Squalor, artist Jake Chapman now focuses his malice on the calloused underbelly of literature itself. In Memoirs of MyWriter's Block, Chapman haunts the shady world of the professional ghostwriter, posing as fragile amateur scribbler Christabel Ludd whose broken attempts at completing her first novel are frustrated by an unshakable writer's block. In desperation she commissions a ragged collection of self-proclaimed professionals to transform the rudimentary tale into a compelling page-turner - with breathtaking results. The book follows the crushing and often bizarre process of having to get your novel written by someone else. The author, wracked with creative energy, resorts to poetry in a desperate attempt to relieve the tension built up over months of waiting for other - apparently more accomplished - writers to finish her story.

Isaac played a pivotal role in that significant moment in the black diaspora arts, when gay sexuality, masculinity and race exploded into the same visual frame. -Stuart Hall Riot is an intellectual biography of artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien (born 1960), looking at key moments in his career and discussing the influences that shaped them. Julien's trail-blazing career has moved across film and art, documentary, biography, narrative film and multi-screen installation, and has drawn on influences as disparate as silent cinema, cultural studies, Chinese myth and pirate radio culture. Riot is the first career-long overview on Julien, situating his work in the context of his personal and intellectual development: the friendships, mentors, night clubs, films, politics, records and the artworks that informed his practice. The backdrop to Julien's own story is a collage of some of the most important political and cultural events of the past 30 years: Thatcherism and the rise of neo-liberalism, the AIDS epidemic, punk rock, social riots, the globalization of the art market and the movement of filmmakers into the gallery.

Life in Death is the most comprehensive collection to date of work by artist Rebecca Louise Law. The book documents the evolution of Law's unique artistic practice, the use of flowers as preserved sculptural material. A journey through the earliest experiments, to her best known immersive installations, via a series of beautifully documented photographs. It also provides a unique insight into the life and influences of the artist, including an introduction written by Law. The title culminates with exclusive imagery of Life in Death, Law's forthcoming exhibition showcasing a sculptural installation at the heart of Kew's Shirley Sherwood Gallery, which pays homage to the expertise in preservation presented throughout Kew's collections and represents a symbol of natural durability which is central to Law's practice. Life in Death runs from 7 October 2017 - 11 March 2018 in the Shirley Sherwood Gallery of Botanical Art, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

"I couldn't think of a better place to have a dialogue about art today and what it can be" - Jeff Koons Curated by Koons himself, together with guest curator Norman Rosenthal, this show features seventeen important works, fourteen of which have never been exhibited in the UK before. They span the artist's entire career and his most well-known series, including Equilibrium, Statuary, Banality, Antiquity and his recent Gazing Ball sculptures and paintings. This exhibition will provoke a conversation between his creations and the history of art and ideas with which his work engages. Jeff Koons burst onto the contemporary art scene in the 1980s. He has been described as the most famous, important, subversive, controversial and expensive artist in the world. From his earliest works Koons has explored the 'ready-made' and 'appropriated image', using unadulterated found objects and creating painstaking replicas of ancient sculptures and Old Master paintings which almost defy belief in their craftsmanship and precision. Throughout his career Koons has pushed at the boundaries of contemporary art practice, stretching the limits of what is possible. This publication accompanies an exhibiton, running from February to June, 2019 at the Ashmolean. Koons will be in conversation with Martin Kemp at the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford, in May 2019. Contents: Director's Foreword; interview with Jeff Koons (by Xa Sturgis); Jeff Koons and the Sheen and Shine of Time (Sir Norman Rosenthal); catalogue entries; Jeff Koon biography.