"On Curating," Carolee Thea's second volume of interviews with ten of today's leading curators, explores the intellectual convictions and personal visions that lay the groundwork for the most prestigious and influential exhibitions in the world today. Among the aesthetic and theoretical issues raised are the relationship between artist and curator, globalism, post-colonialism, capitalism, the future of cultural tourism and the biennial as spectacle or utopian ideal. As Thea notes in her introduction, "the biennial or mega-exhibition--a laboratory for experimentation, investigation and aesthetic liberation--is where the curators' experience and knowledge are tested. As they negotiate venues for artistic expression, intellectual critiques and humanistic concerns in their own societies and others, they are challenged by the certainties and uncertainties of a constantly evolving future." Thea's interviewees are Joseph Backstein, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Okwui Enwezor, Charles Esche, Massimiliano Gioni, RoseLee Goldberg, Mary Jane Jacob, Pi Li, Virginia Perez-Ratton and Rirkrit Tiravanija. "On Curating" also includes 50 color illustrations of relevant works by (among others) Kutlug Ataman, Tamy Ben-Tor, John Bock, Cao Fei, Olafur Eliasson, Isaac Julien, Francois & Philippe Parreno, Yvonne Rainer, Michael Rakowitz, Doris Salcedo, Allan Sekula, Yinka Shonibare and Francesca Woodman.
Carolee Thea is a curator, critic, art historian and independent scholar. Her first book, "Foci: Interviews with Ten International Curators" was published in 2001. She is contributing editor at "ArtAsiaPacific" and "Sculpture" magazine and was the English editor of "Atlantica" 45. Her articles, reviews and interviews have been published in many arts journals, among them "Parkett, " Artforum.com, " The New Art Examiner, Modern Painters, " Artnet.com, "ZSijue 21 Beijing, Heresies, Tema Celeste, Parachute" and "ArtNews."

This book is an ethnographic study of the travelling art exhibition Indian Highway that presented Indian contemporary art in Europe and China between 2008 and 2012, a significant period for the art world that saw the rise and fall of the national exhibition format. It analyses art exhibition as a mobile "object" and promotes the idea of art as a transcultural product by using participant observation, in-depth interviews, and multi-media studies as research method. This work encompasses voices of curators, artists, audiences, and art critics spread over different cities, sites, and art institutions to bridge the distance between Europe and India based on vignettes along the Indian Highway. The discussion in the book focuses on power relations, the contested politics of representation, and dissonances and processes of negotiation in the field of global art. It also argues for rethinking analytical categories in anthropology to identify the social role of contemporary art practices in different cultural contexts and also examines urban art and the way national or cultural values are reinterpreted in response to ideas of difference and pluralism. Rich in empirical data, this book will be useful to scholars and researchers of modern and contemporary art, Indian art, art and visual culture, anthropology, art history, mobility, and transcultural studies.

Constructing Race on the Borders of Europe investigates the visual imagery of race construction in Scandinavia, Austro-Hungary, Germany, and Russia. It covers a period when historic disciplines of ethnography and anthropology were expanding and theorists of race were debating competing conceptions of biological, geographic, linguistic, and cultural determinants. Beginning in 1850 and extending into the early 21st century, this book explores how paintings, photographs, prints, and other artistic media engaged with these discourses and shaped visual representations of subordinate ethnic populations and material cultures in countries associated with theorizations of white identity. The chapters contribute to postcolonial research by documenting the colonial-style treatment of minority groups, by exploring the anomalies and complexities that emerge when binary systems are seen from the perspective of the fine and applied arts, and by representing the voices of those who produced images or objects that adopted, altered, or critiqued ethnographic and anthropological information. In doing so, Constructing Race on the Borders of Europe uncovers instances of unexpected connections, establishes the fabricated nature of ethnic identity, and challenges the certainties of racial categorization. It is essential reading for students and scholars of racial history and postcolonialism within visual culture and art history.

Working in 1970s Italy, a group of artists-namely Ugo La Pietra, Maurizio Nannucci, Francesco Somaini, Mauro Staccioli, Franco Summa, and Franco Vaccari-sought new spaces to create and exhibit art. Looking beyond the gallery, they generated sculptural, conceptual, and participatory interventions, called Arte Ambientale (Environmental Art), situated in the city streets. Their experiments emerged at a time of cultural crisis, when fierce domestic terrorism aggravated an already fragile political situation. To confront the malaise, these artists embraced a position of artistic autonomy and social critique, democratically connecting the city's inhabitants through direct art practices.

Writings on human life and the refugee crisis by the most important political artist of our time Ai Weiwei (b. 1957) is widely known as an artist across media: sculpture, installation, photography, performance, and architecture. He is also one of the world's most important artist-activists and a powerful documentary filmmaker. His work and art call attention to attacks on democracy and free speech, abuses of human rights, and human displacement--often on an epic, international scale. This collection of quotations demonstrates the range of Ai Weiwei's thinking on humanity and mass migration, issues that have occupied him for decades. Selected from articles, interviews, and conversations, Ai Weiwei's words speak to the profound urgency of the global refugee crisis, the resilience and vulnerability of the human condition, and the role of art in providing a voice for the voiceless. Select quotations from the book: "This problem has such a long history, a human history. We are all refugees somehow, somewhere, and at some moment." "Allowing borders to determine your thinking is incompatible with the modern era." "Art is about aesthetics, about morals, about our beliefs in humanity. Without that there is simply no art." "I don't care what all people think. My work belongs to the people who have no voice."

This book analyses the relationship between comics and cultural memory. By focussing on a range of landmark comics from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the discussion draws attention to the ongoing role of visual culture in framing testimony, particularly in relation to underprivileged subjects such as migrants and refugees, individuals dealing with war and oppressive regimes and individuals living with particular health conditions. The discussion is influenced by literary and cultural debates on the intersections between ethics, testimony, trauma, and human rights, reflected in its three overarching questions: 'How do comics usually complicate the production of cultural memory in local contents and global mediascapes?', 'How do comics engage with, and generate, new forms of testimonial address?', and 'How do the comics function as mnemonic structures?' The author highlights that the power of comics is that they allow both creators and readers to visualise the fracturing power of violence and oppression - at the level of the individual, domestic, communal, national and international - in powerful and creative ways. Comics do not stand outside of literature, cinema, or any of the other arts, but rather enliven the reciprocal relationship between the verbal and the visual language that informs all of these media. As such, the discussion demonstrates how fields such as graphic medicine, graphic justice, and comics journalism contribute to existing theoretical and analytics debates, including critical visual theory, trauma and memory studies, by offering a broad ranging, yet cohesive, analysis of cultural memory and its representation in print and digital comics.

An original and breathtakingly beautiful perspective on how art developed through the ages, this book reveals how new materials and techniques inspired artists to create their greatest works. The Story of Painting will completely transform your understanding and enjoyment of art. Covering a comprehensive array of topics, from the first pigments and frescos to linear perspective in Renaissance paintings, the influence of photography, Impressionism, and the birth of modern art, it follows each step in the evolution of painting over the last 25,000 years, from the first cave paintings to the abstract works of the last 100 years. Packed with lavish colour reproductions of paintings and photographs of artists at work and the materials they used, it delves into the key paintings from each period to analyse the techniques and secrets of the great masters in detail. Immerse yourself in the pages of this stunning book and find yourself dazzled by new colours; marvel at the magic of perspective; wonder at glowing depictions of fabric and flesh; understand cubism; and embrace abstraction. You will look at paintings in a whole new light.

Following the success of Writings on Art 1980-2005, HENI presents the highly anticipated final volume to complete a two-volume collection of writings on art by Robert Storr, one of the world's leading art critics and curators. Featuring the best of Storr's criticism - reviews, essays, articles, many of which previously unpublished - from 2006 to the present day, the book includes his texts on artists such as Gego, Carrie Mae Weems, David Hammons, Jenny Holzer, Jasper Johns, Gerhard Richter, El Anatsui and Francesco Clemente. Written with his signature intellect and wit, his writings range from essays on performances of femininity in Cindy Sherman's photographic oeuvre to dialectics of race in the work of Kara Walker. Expertly curated from his prolific output, and illustrated with 175 images to accompany 51 texts, Writings on Art is the definitive collection of Storr's multi-faceted writing with his finger on the pulse of contemporary art - a must-read for curators and students, artists, exhibition-goers and all those interested in the art and culture of today.

Between the 1890s and the 1930s, movie going became an established feature of everyday life across America. Movies constituted an enormous visual data bank and changed the way artist and public alike interpreted images. This book explores modern painting as a response to, and an appropriation of, the aesthetic possibilities pried open by cinema from its invention until the outbreak of World War II, when both the art world and the film industry changed substantially. Artists were watching movies, filmmakers studied fine arts; the membrane between media was porous, allowing for fluid exchange. Each chapter focuses on a suite of films and paintings, broken down into facets and then reassembled to elucidate the distinctive art-film nexus at successive historic moments.

The publication Zusammen / Together is a comprehensive recollection of the exhibition highlights of the years 2015 to 2022 at Museum Haus Konstruktiv and brings together what is separated in space and time. A series of insightful conversations with the artists Etel Adnan, Claudia Comte, Elisabeth Goldring-Piene, Brigitte Kowanz, Alicja Kwade, Dora Maurer, Amalia Pica, Tomas Saraceno, as well as in-depth texts on Imi Knoebel and William Kentridge are accompanied by numerous exhibition views. Many of the conversations and exhibition views have not been published before; some of the texts reprinted here in slightly modified form are taken from books that have long been out of print today and are given their well-deserved new visibility.

Embodying the entire system of Robert Henri's teaching, The Art Spirit contains much valuable advice, critical comment, and inspiration to every student of the arts.

Darwin famously proposed that sexual competition and courtship is (or at least was) the driving force of "art" production not only in animals, but also in humans. The present book is the first to reveal that Darwin's hypothesis, rather than amounting to a full-blown antidote to the humanist tradition, is actually strongly informed both by classical rhetoric and by English and German philosophical aesthetics, thereby Darwin's theory far richer and more interesting for the understanding of poetry and song. The book also discusses how the three most discussed hypothetical functions of the human arts--competition for attention and (loving) acceptance, social cooperation, and self-enhancement--are not mutually exclusive, but can well be conceived of as different aspects of the same processes of producing and responding to the arts. Finally, reviewing the current state of archeological findings, the book advocates a new hypothesis on the multiple origins of the human arts, posing that they arose as new variants of human behavior, when three ancient and largely independent adaptions--sensory and sexual selection-driven biases regarding visual and auditory beauty, play behavior, and technology--joined forces with, and were transformed by, the human capacities for symbolic cognition and language.

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.

Part manifesto, part artistic joke, Fillippo Marinetti's Futurist Cookbook is a provocative work about art disguised as an easy-to-read cookbook. Here are recipes for ice cream on the moon; candied atmospheric electricities; nocturnal love feasts; sculpted meats. Marinetti also sets out his argument for abolishing pasta as ill-suited to modernity, and advocates a style of cuisine that will increase creativity. Although at times betraying its author's nationalistic sympathies, The Futurist Cookbook is funny, provocative, whimsical, disdainful of sluggish traditions and delighted by the velocity and promise of modernity. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti was born in 1876 to Italian parents and grew up in Alexandria, Egypt. He studied in Paris and obtained a law degree in Italy before turning to literature. In 1909 he wrote the infamous Futurist Manifesto, which championed violence, speed and war, and proclaimed the unity of art and life. Marinetti's life was fraught with controversy: he fought a duel with a hostile critic, was subject to an obscenity trial, and was a staunch supporter of Italian Fascism. Alongside his literary activities, he was a war correspondent during the Italo-Turkish War and served on the Eastern Front in World War II, despite being in his sixties. He died in 1944. Lesley Chamberlain is a novelist and historian of ideas. Her thirteen books include Nietzsche in Turin, The Secret Artist: A Close Reading of Sigmund Freud and The Food and Cooking of Russia. Suzanne Brill is an art historian and writer. She has translated several books for Italian art historians including Caro Pedretti's Leonardo: Architect, which was nominated for the John Florio prize. 'A paean to sensual freedom, optimism and childlike, amoral innocence ... it has only once been answered, by Aldous Huxley's Brave New World' Lesley Chamberlain

Available for the first time in English, "An Introduction to Iconography" explains the ways that artists use references and allusions to create meaning. The book presents the historical, theoretical, and practical aspects of iconography and ICONCLASS, the comprehensive iconographical indexing system developed by Henri van de Waal. It gives particular emphasis to the history of iconography, personification, allegory, and symbols, and the literary sources that inform iconographic readings, and includes annotated bibliographies of books and journal articles from around the world that are associated with iconographic research.
The author of numerous articles and a four-volume reference work on Italian prints, Roelof van Straten is currently working on an iconographic index covering the prints of Goltzius and his school.

Provides clear distinctions between the subjective and objective dimensions of architecture and the arts Arguments are reinforced by the analysis of seminal architectural examples Bullet points at the end of each chapter summarise the arguments and provide further guidance to the reader

In American visual culture, the 1930s and 1940s were a key transitional period shaped by the era of modernism and the global confrontation of World War II. Christof Decker demonstrates that the war and its iconography of destruction challenged visual artists to find new ways of representing its consequences. Dealing with trauma and war crimes led to the emergence of complex aesthetic forms and media crossovers. Decker shows that the 1940s were a pivotal period for the creation of horrific yet also innovative representations that boosted American visual modernism and set the stage for debates about the ethics of visual culture in the post-9/11 era.

Art in Theory (1648-1815) provides a wide-ranging and comprehensive collection of documents on the theory of art from the founding of the French Academy until the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Like its highly successful companion volumes, Art in Theory (1815-1900) and Art in Theory (1900-1990), its' primary aim is to provide students and teachers with the documentary material for informed and up-to-date study. Its' 240 texts, clear principles of organization and considerable editorial content offer a vivid and indispensable introduction to the art of the early modern period.
Harrison, Wood and Gaiger have collected writing by artists, critics, philosophers, literary figures and administrators of the arts, some reprinted in their entirety, others excerpted from longer works. A wealth of material from French, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch and Latin sources is also provided, including many new translations.
Among the major themes treated are early arguments over the relative merits of ancient and modern art, debates between the advocates of form and color, the beginnings of modern art criticism in reviews of the Salon, art and politics during the French Revolution, the rise of landscape painting, and the artistic theories of Romanticism and Neo-classicism.
Each section is prefaced by an essay that situates the ideas of the period in their historical context, while relating theoretical concerns and debates to developments in the practice of art. Each individual text is also accompanied by a short introduction. An extensive bibliography and full index are provided.
For more details of our book and journal list in Art, visit http: //www.blackwellpublishing.com/arttheory

The first book of its kind, Gestures of Seeing in Film, Video and Drawing engages broadly with the often too neglected yet significant questions of gesture in visual culture. In our turbulent mediasphere where images - as lenses bearing on their own circumstances - are constantly mobilized to enact symbolic forms of warfare and where they get entangled in all kinds of cultural conflicts and controversies, a turn to the gestural life of images seems to promise a particularly pertinent avenue of intellectual inquiry. The complex gestures of the artwork remain an under-explored theoretical topos in contemporary visual culture studies. In visual art, the gestural appears to be that which intervenes between form and content, materiality and meaning. But as a conceptual force it also impinges upon the very process of seeing itself. As a critical and heuristic trope, the gestural galvanizes many of the most pertinent areas of inquiry in contemporary debates and scholarship in visual culture and related disciplines: ethics (images and their values and affects), aesthetics (from visual essentialism to transesthetics and synesthesia), ecology (iconoclastic gestures and spaces of conflict), and epistemology (questions of the archive, memory and documentation). Offering fresh perspectives on many of these areas, Gestures of Seeing in Film, Video and Drawing will be intensely awaited by readers from and across several disciplines, such as anthropology, linguistics, performance, theater, film and visual studies.

How can archaeologists interpret ancient art and images if they do not treat them as symbols or signifiers of identity? Traditional approaches to the archaeology of art have borrowed from the history of art and the anthropology of art by focusing on iconography, meaning, communication and identity. This puts the archaeology of art at a disadvantage as an understanding of iconography and meaning requires a detailed knowledge of historical or ethnographic context unavailable to many archaeologists. Rather than playing to archaeology's weaknesses, the authors argue that an archaeology of art should instead play to archaeology's strength: the material character of archaeological evidence. Using case studies - examining rock art, figurines, beadwork, murals, coffin decorations, sculpture and architecture from Europe, the Americas, Asia, Australia, and north Africa -the authors develop an understanding of the affective and effective nature of ancient art and imagery. An analysis of a series of material-based practices, from gesture and improvisation to miniaturisation and gigantism, assembly and disassembly and the use of distinctions in colour enable key concepts, such as style and meaning, to be re-imagined as affective practices. Recasting the archaeology of art as the study of affects offers a new prospectus for the study of ancient art and imagery.

This book examines the legacy of international interwar modernism as a case of cultural transfer through the travels of a central motif: the square. The square was the most emblematic and widely known form/motif of the international avant-garde in the interwar years. It originated from the Russian artist Kazimir Malevich who painted The Black Square on White Ground in 1915 and was then picked up by another Russian artist El Lissitzky and the Dutch artist Theo van Doesburg. It came to be understood as a symbol of a new internationalism and modernity and while Forgács uses it as part of her overall narrative, she focuses on it and its journey across borders to follow its significance, how it was used by the above key artists and how its meaning became modified in Western Europe. It is unusual to discuss interwar modernism and its postwar survival, but this book’s chapters work together to argue that the interwar developments signified a turning point in twentieth-century art that led to much creativity and innovation. Forgács supports her theory with newly found and newly interpreted documents that prove how this exciting legacy was shaped by three major agents: Malevich, Lissitzsky and van Doesburg. She offers a wider interpretation of modernism that examines its postwar significance, reception and history up until the emergence of the New Left in 1956 and the seismic events of 1968.

How can archaeologists interpret ancient art and images if they do not treat them as symbols or signifiers of identity? Traditional approaches to the archaeology of art have borrowed from the history of art and the anthropology of art by focusing on iconography, meaning, communication and identity. This puts the archaeology of art at a disadvantage as an understanding of iconography and meaning requires a detailed knowledge of historical or ethnographic context unavailable to many archaeologists. Rather than playing to archaeology's weaknesses, the authors argue that an archaeology of art should instead play to archaeology's strength: the material character of archaeological evidence. Using case studies - examining rock art, figurines, beadwork, murals, coffin decorations, sculpture and architecture from Europe, the Americas, Asia, Australia, and north Africa -the authors develop an understanding of the affective and effective nature of ancient art and imagery. An analysis of a series of material-based practices, from gesture and improvisation to miniaturisation and gigantism, assembly and disassembly and the use of distinctions in colour enable key concepts, such as style and meaning, to be re-imagined as affective practices. Recasting the archaeology of art as the study of affects offers a new prospectus for the study of ancient art and imagery.

In an era when ease of travel is greater than ever, it is also easy to overlook the degree to which voyages of the body - and mind - have generated an outpouring of artistry and creativity throughout the ages. Exploration of new lands and sensations is a fundamental human experience. This volume in turn provides a stimulating and adventurous exploration of the theme of travel from an art-historical perspective. Topical regions are covered ranging from the Grand Tour and colonialism to the travels of Hadrian in ancient times and Georgia O'Keeffe's journey to the Andes; from Vasari's Neoplatonic voyages to photographing nineteenth-century Japan. The scholars assembled consider both imaginary travel, as well as factual or embellished documentation of voyages. The essays are far-reaching spatially and temporally, but all relate to how art has documented the theme of travel in varying media across time and as illustrated and described by writers, artists, and illustrators. The scope of this volume is far-reaching both chronologically and conceptually, thereby appropriately documenting the universality of the theme to human experience.

Art as Organism shows that the digital image was a rich and expansive artistic medium of modernism. Linking its emergence to the dispersion of biocentric aesthetic philosophies developed by Bauhaus pedagogue Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, from 1920s Berlin to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1970s, Charissa Terranova uncovers seminal but overlooked references to biology, the organism, feedback loops, emotions, and the Gestalt, along with an intricate genealogy of related thinkers across disciplines. Unearthing a forgotten narrative of modernism, one which charts the influence that biology, General Systems Theory, and cybernetics had on modern art, Terranova interprets new major art movements such as the Bauhaus, Op Art, and Experiments in Art and Technology by referencing contemporary insights from architects, embryologists, electrical engineers, and computer scientists. From kinetic and interactive art to early computer art and installations spanning an entire city, this book charts complex connections between visual culture, science and technology that comprise the deep history of 20th-century art.