What is steampunk and why are people across the globe eagerly embracing its neo-Victorian aesthetic? Old-fashioned eye goggles, lace corsets, leather vests, brass gears and gadgets, mechanical clocks, the look appears across popular culture, in movies, art, fashion, and literature. But steampunk is both an aesthetic program and a way-of-life and its underlying philosophy is the key to its broad appeal. Steampunk champions a new autonomy for the individual caught up in today’s technology-driven world. It expresses optimism for the future but it also delivers a note of caution about our human role in light of the ubiquitous machine. Thus, despite adopting an aesthetic and lifestyle straight out of the Victorian scientific romance, steampunk addresses significant twenty-first century concerns about what lies ahead for humankind. The movement recovers autonomy from prevailing trends even as it challenges us to ask what it is to be human today.

Encounters Beyond the Gallery challenges the terms of their exclusion, looking to relational art, Deleuze-Guattarean aesthetics and notions of perception, as well as anthropological theory for ways to create connections between seemingly disparate worlds. Embracing a unique and experimental format, the book imagines encounters between the art works and art worlds of Rirkrit Tiravanija, Tamil women, the Shipibo-Conibo of Eastern Peru and a fictional female contemporary artist named Rikki T, in order to rethink normative aesthetic and cultural categories. Its method reflects the message of the book, and embraces a plurality of voices and perspectives to steer critical attention towards the complexity of artistic life beyond the gallery.

A renowned art historian confronts the specific powers of painting, and the hold of the visual image on the viewer's imagination Why do we find ourselves returning to certain pictures time and again? What is it we are looking for? How does our understanding of an image change over time? In his latest book T. J. Clark addresses these questions-and many more-in ways that steer art writing into new territory. In early 2000 two extraordinary paintings by Poussin hung in the Getty Museum in a single room, Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake (National Gallery, London) and the Getty's own Landscape with a Calm. Clark found himself returning to the gallery to look at these paintings morning after morning, and almost involuntarily he began to record his shifting responses in a notebook. The result is a riveting analysis of the two landscapes and their different views of life and death, but more, a chronicle of an investigation into the very nature of visual complexity. Clark's meditations-sometimes directly personal, sometimes speaking to the wider politics of our present image-world-track the experience of viewing art through all its real-life twists and turns.

This guide provides an overview of the most significant issues and debates in Gothic studies.
Provides an overview of the most significant issues and debates in Gothic studies.
Explains the origins and development of the term Gothic.
Explores the evolution of the Gothic in both literary and non-literary forms, including art, architecture and film.
Features authoritative readings of key works, ranging from Horace Walpole's "The Castle of Otranto" to Bret Easton Ellis's "American Psycho."
Considers recurrent concerns of the Gothic such as persecution and paranoia, key motifs such as the haunted castle, and figures such as the vampire and the monster.
Includes a chronology of key Gothic texts, including fiction and film from the 1760s to the present day, and a comprehensive bibliography.

In this new and accessible book, Italy's best known feminist philosopher examines the moral and political significance of vertical posture in order to rethink subjectivity in terms of inclination. Contesting the classical figure of homo erectus or "upright man," Adriana Cavarero proposes an altruistic, open model of the subject—one who is inclined toward others. Contrasting the masculine upright with the feminine inclined, she references philosophical texts (by Plato, Thomas Hobbes, Immanuel Kant, Hannah Arendt, Elias Canetti, and others) as well as works of art (Barnett Newman, Leonardo da Vinci, Artemisia Gentileschi, and Alexander Rodchenko) and literature (Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf).

In the Guangdong province in southeastern China lies Dafen, a village that houses thousands of workers who paint Van Goghs, Da Vincis, Warhols, and other Western masterpieces, producing an astonishing five million paintings a year. To write about life and work in Dafen, Winnie Wong infiltrated this world, investigating the claims of conceptual artists who made projects there; working as a dealer; apprenticing as a painter; surveying merchants in Europe, Asia, and America; establishing relationships with local leaders; and organizing a conceptual art show for the Shanghai World Expo. The result is Van Gogh on Demand, a fascinating book about a little-known aspect of the global art world - one that sheds surprising light on our understandings of art, artists, and individual genius. Confronting difficult questions about the definition of art, the ownership of an image, and the meaning of imitation and appropriation, Wong shows how a plethora of artistic practices joins Chinese migrant workers, propaganda makers, and international artists together in a global supply chain of art and creativity. She examines how Berlin-based conceptual artist Christian Jankowski, who collaborated with Dafen's painters to reimagine the Dafen Art Museum, unwittingly appropriated a photojournalist's intellectual property. She explores how Zhang Huan, a radical performance artist from Beijing's East Village, prompted propaganda makers to heroize the female artists of Dafen village. Through these cases, Wong shows how Dafen's workers force us to reexamine our expectations about the cultural function of creativity and imitation, and the role of Chinese workers in redefining global art. Providing a valuable account of art practices in a period of profound global cultural shifts and an ascendant China, Van Gogh on Demand is a rich and detailed look at the implications of a world that can offer countless copies of everything that has ever been called "art."

This text offers a comprehensive survey of a rich and important period of photographic history, from the 1960s to the 21st century. Arranged thematically, it presents works by the most significant international artists who have explored and extended the boundaries of photography.

Scholars and artists revisit a hugely influential essay by Rosalind Krauss and map the interactions between art and architecture over the last thirty-five years. Expansion, convergence, adjacency, projection, rapport, and intersection are a few of the terms used to redraw the boundaries between art and architecture during the last thirty-five years. If modernists invented the model of an ostensible "synthesis of the arts," their postmodern progeny promoted the semblance of pluralist fusion. In 1979, reacting against contemporary art's transformation of modernist medium-specificity into postmodernist medium multiplicity, the art historian Rosalind Krauss published an essay, "Sculpture in the Expanded Field," that laid out in a precise diagram the structural parameters of sculpture, architecture, and landscape art. Krauss tried to clarify what these art practices were, what they were not, and what they could become if logically combined. The essay soon assumed a canonical status and affected subsequent developments in all three fields. Retracing the Expanded Field revisits Krauss's hugely influential text and maps the ensuing interactions between art and architecture. Responding to Krauss and revisiting the milieu from which her text emerged, artists, architects, and art historians of different generations offer their perspectives on the legacy of "Sculpture in the Expanded Field." Krauss herself takes part in a roundtable discussion (moderated by Hal Foster). A selection of historical documents, including Krauss's essay, presented as it appeared in October, accompany the main text. Neither eulogy nor hagiography, Retracing the Expanded Field documents the groundbreaking nature of Krauss's authoritative text and reveals the complex interchanges between art and architecture that increasingly shape both fields. Contributors Stan Allen, George Baker, Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin Buchloh, Beatriz Colomina, Penelope Curtis, Sam Durant, Edward Eigen, Kurt W. Forster, Hal Foster, Kenneth Frampton, Branden W. Joseph, Rosalind Krauss, Miwon Kwon, Sylvia Lavin, Sandro Marpillero, Josiah McElheny, Eve Meltzer, Michael Meredith, Mary Miss, Sarah Oppenheimer, Matthew Ritchie, Julia Robinson, Joe Scanlan, Emily Eliza Scott, Irene Small, Philip Ursprung, Anthony Vidler

In Creativity and Taoism, Chang Chung-yuan makes the elusive principle of Tao available to the western mind with objectivity, warmth, and depth of insight. It is an important contribution to the task of making the Taoist wisdom accessible to the western intellect' - Ira Progoff 'No one can read Chang's book without experiencing a broadening of his mental horizons' - John C. H. Wu, Philosophy East and West 'His interpretation of the Taoist roots of Ch'an has been presented with taste and learning that help to clear up many questions that must have occurred to anyone familiar with his subject. "The Spirit of the Valley" dwells in this quiet and gentle man who, as so rarely happens, actually embodies some of the philosophic traits of which he writes' - Gerald Sykes 'If the end of reading is the enhancement of life, the enlargement of experience and understanding, then this book becomes an important step in that direction. Dr. Chang writes in a style both lucid and felicitous. He displays with becoming modesty a mastery of the field, its development and its ideas... There is hardly a page which does not give pleasure' - Robert R. Kirsh, Los Angeles Times 'Professor Chang's study, a brilliant exposition and analysis, is concerned with the relevance and applicability of the Taoist view in Chinese artistic and intellectual creativity. Few other works facilitate so sensitive an understanding of creative impulse and expression in Chinese culture' - Hyman Kublin, Library Journal Simultaneously accessible and scholarly, this classic book considers the underlying philosophy and the aesthetics of Chinese art and poetry, the expression of the Taoist approach to existence. Chapters cover everything from the potential of creativity to the way tranquillity is reflected in Chinese poems and painting. Chung-yuan Chang's deceptively simple and always lucid narrative explores the relationship between the Tao and the creative arts, introducing classic paintings and poems to bring Taoism to life.

The avant garde is dead, or so the story goes for many leftists and capitalists alike. But in an era of neoliberal austerity, neocolonial militarism and ecological crisis, this postmodern view seems increasingly outmoded. Rejecting 'end of ideology' post-politics, Vanguardia delves into the changing praxis of socially engaged art and theory in the age of the Capitalocene. Covering the major events of the last decade, from anti-globalisation protests, Occupy Wall Street, the Maple Spring, Strike Debt and the Anthropocene, to the Black Lives Matter and MeToo campaigns, Vanguardia puts forward a radical leftist commitment to the revolutionary consciousness of avant-garde art and politics. -- .

In "Common Skin," the first volume of the series "Context Without Walls," the work of Myriam Mihindou (born 1964) is explicated by philosopher Liesbeth Levy and author/curator Daphne Pappers. Levy and Pappers delve into Mihindou's multilayered sculptural photographs and videos from philosophical and practical standpoints.

Indispensable reading for both art lovers and students, "Art Theory, 2nd Edition" explores Western thought about art from ancient times to the post-modern period. Wide-ranging and exceptionally balanced in its analysis, "Art History" relates theory to the practice as well as to the intellectual and cultural-historical currents of each period.
This new edition expands the original to include more indepth coverage of contemporary art.
Newly updated bibliography and suggestions for further reading
Six chapters covering the major periods of Western art history: Antiquity and the Middle Ages, the early modern period (Renaissance and Baroque), the Enlightenment, the nineteenth century, early twentieth-century modernism, and postmodernism.
Geared to the needs of the general reader and beginning students

This book offers an analysis of archaeological imagery based on new materialist approaches. Reassessing the representational paradigm of archaeological image analysis, it argues for the importance of ontology, redefining images as material processes or events that draw together differing aspects of the world. The book is divided into three sections: 'Emergent images', which focuses on practices of making; 'Images as process', which examines the making and role of images in prehistoric societies; and 'Unfolding images', which focuses on how images change as they are made and circulated. Featuring contributions from archaeologists, Egyptologists, anthropologists and artists, it highlights the multiple role of images in prehistoric and historic societies, while demonstrating that scholars need to recognise their dynamic and changeable character. -- .

Imaginarium: The Process Behind the Pictures is a compendium of practical advice and information covering the photographic process--from idea cultivation through execution. The guidance in this book is written with an understanding of the nature of artists at their core and explores the science of how ideas are born, the conditions that facilitate the productive creation of art, and the elements necessary to make creative work. This compendium is applicable across genres, for individual artists and for those working in a commercial capacity. It brings together strategies and tools to help readers generate compelling ideas and create unique images. From the simplest idea to the most fantastical, you will learn brainstorming, concept development, pre-visualization, pre-production, problem solving, and execution steps in the creative process, including practical tools and ideas for overcoming obstacles and achieving success along the way. Contributors: Beth Taubner Mercurylab Alessia Glaviano Vogue Italia Rebecca Manson The Post Office Interviews with: Maggie Steber, Roger Ballen, Sara Lando, Gabriela Iancu, Robin Schwartz, and Eleanor Macnair *** Imaginarium: The Process Behind the Pictures Table of Contents 1: ON ART The Purpose of Art Strong Images Development of an Artist Goals for Making Work Chapter Wrap-Up 2: ARTISTIC LIFESTYLE The Foundation Curation of Experiences Tapping into the Unconscious Creative Psychology Health Nurturing Creativity Community of Artists Chapter Wrap-Up 3: TIME MANAGEMENT Motion Versus Progress Productivity Motivation Work That Fits into Your Life Chapter Wrap-Up 4: PREVISUALIZATION Concept Generation Triggers Divergent Thinking Free Association Brainstorming Mind Mapping Mood Boards Previsualization Concept Development Chapter Wrap-Up 5: PRODUCTION Pre-Production Resources and Research Building a Team Plan B, C, and D On Set Checklist Best Practices Editing Post-Production Chapter Wrap-Up 6: THE VIEWER EXPERIENCE The Viewer Experience Presentation Considerations Critique and Feedback Series and Long-Term Projects Assignments/Commissions Body of Work: What We Leave Behind Chapter Wrap-Up Conclusion Artist Interviews

Molly Bang's brilliant, insightful, and accessible treatise is now revised and expanded for its 25th anniversary. Bang's powerful ideas remain unparalleled in their simplicity and genius: Explore the intricate and thought-provoking ideas that Bang brings to Picture This including thoughts about how the visual composition of images works to engage the emotions, and how the elements of an artwork can give it the power to tell a story. Why are diagonals dramatic? Why are curves calming? Why does red feel hot and blue feel cold? She asks the right questions to get your wheels turning while the illustrations and thoughtful designs bring the words to life. * Explores the mix of geometrical abstraction and emotional expressions, plus how a few clear principles can be used to build powerful visual statements. * Encourages you to answer the question, "How does the structure of a picture-or any visual art form-affect our emotional response?" * Includes powerful imagery and beautiful illustrations to help readers feel connected to the text. First published in 1991, Picture This has changed the way artists, illustrators, reviewers, critics, and readers look at and understand art. Molly Bang has authored and illustrated more than three dozen books and has won three Caldecott Honors, a Kate Greenaway Honor, and a Charlotte Zolotow Award, among other accolades, in her long career as a writer and artist. Picture This makes an imaginative and inspiring gift for any artist or loved one who is interested in design.

Allan Kaprow's 'happenings' and 'environments' were the precursors to contemporary performance art, and his essays are some of the most thoughtful, provocative, and influential of his generation. His sustained inquiry into the paradoxical relationship of art to life and into the nature of meaning itself is brought into focus in this newly expanded collection of his most significant writings. A new preface and two new additional essays published in the 1990s bring this valuable collection up to date.

To the eye of some viewers, Renoir's "Great Bathers" are the very picture of female sensuality and beauty. To others, they embody a whole tradition of masculine mastery and feminine display. Yet others find in the bathers a feminine fantasy of bodily liberation. The points of view are many, various, occasionally startling--and through them, Linda Nochlin explores the contradictions and dissonances that mark experience as well as art. Her book--about art, the body, beauty, and ways of viewing--confronts the issues posed in representations particularly of the female body in the art of impressionists, modern masters, and contemporary realists and post-modernists.

Nochlin begins by focusing on the painterly preoccupation with bathing, whether at the beach, in lakes and rivers, in public swimming pools, or in bathtubs. In discussions of Renoir, Manet, Cezanne, Bonnard, and Picasso, of late-twentieth-century and contemporary artists such as Philip Pearlstein, Alice Neel, and Jenny Saville, of grotesque imagery, the concept of beauty, and the body in realism, she develops an interpretive collage incorporating the readings of differing, strong-willed, female viewpoints. Among these is, of course, Nochlin's own, a vantage point subtly charted here through a longtime engagement with art, art history, and artists.

In many ways a personal book, "Bathers, Bodies, Beauty" brings to bear a lifetime of looking at, teaching, talking about, wrestling with, loving, and hating art to reveal and complicate the lived and felt--the visceral--experience of art.

"The world's most famous and celebrated contemporary art critic." -GQ "One of the most powerful art critics today." -Time Out "Senior art critic and columnist for New York magazine, Jerry Saltz is as influential as they come. He demystifies the art world in refreshing plain speak and his latest book, focusing on the two decades since 9/11, promises to be another must-listen." - Irish Times From the Pulitzer Prize winner and bestselling author of How to Be an Artist, a deliciously readable survey of the art world in turbulent times. Jerry Saltz is one of our most-watched writers about art and artists, and a passionate champion of the importance of art in our shared cultural life. Since the 1990s he has been an indispensable cultural voice: witty and provocative, he has attracted contemporary readers to fine art as few critics have. Now, in Art Is Life, Jerry Saltz draws on two decades of work to offer a real-time survey of contemporary art as a barometer of our times. Chronicling a period punctuated by dramatic turning points - from the cultural reset of 9/11 to the rolling social crises of today - Saltz traces how visionary artists have both documented and challenged the culture. Art Is Life offers Saltz's eye-opening appraisals of trailblazers like Kara Walker, Hilma af Klint and Jasper Johns; provocateurs like Jeff Koons, Richard Prince and Marina Abramovic; and visionaries like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. With his signature blend of candour and conviction, Jerry Saltz argues in Art Is Life for the importance of the fearless artist. The result is an openhearted and irresistibly readable appraisal by one of our most important cultural observers. Praise for How to Be an Artist: "I wish I had read these rules forty years ago and carried them around like a bible. They are the generous, loving, enthusiastic, bullshit-free advice of a master communicator, just reading them makes me want to charge back into the studio" - Grayson Perry "Being an artist is a lonely pursuit - twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for the rest of your life. Most of the time it hurts. This book will help the pain" - Tracey Emin "Joy is palpable in these pages. We need such thinking right now" - Apollo Magazine

On the trail of air, wind, and breath Wind moves - both things and human thought. The wind is also a harbinger both of new beginnings and of decay, of control and chaos, and the destructive force of the wind is central to the debate on climate change. The book Wenn der Wind weht / When the Wind Blows is being published in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name at KUNST HAUS WIEN, in cooperation with the University of Applied Arts Vienna. It presents more than twenty artistic projects that render the unseen elements air, wind, and breath visible in different ways. Ernst Strouhal traces (cultural) stories of the wind in his text "Flying Robert and His Kin," while curators Verena Kaspar-Eisert and Liddy Scheffknecht look at air as a medium in contemporary art. Publication to accompany the exhibition at KUNST HAUS WIEN (12/03-28/08/2022) Works by Hoda Afshar, Olafur Eliasson, Ulay / Marina Abramovic, and others With a conversation between historian/author Philipp Blom and climate researcher Helga Kromp-Kolb

How are we to think of works of art? Rather than treat art as an expression of individual genius, market forces, or aesthetic principles, Michael Jackson focuses on how art effects transformations in our lives. Art opens up transitional, ritual, or utopian spaces that enable us to reconcile inward imperatives and outward constraints, thereby making our lives more manageable and meaningful. Art allows us to strike a balance between being actors and being acted upon. Drawing on his ethnographic fieldwork in Aboriginal Australia and West Africa, as well as insights from psychoanalysis, religious studies, literature, and the philosophy of art, Jackson deploys an extraordinary range of references-from Bruegel to Beuys, Paleolithic art to performance art, Michelangelo to Munch-to explore the symbolic labor whereby human beings make themselves, both individually and socially, out of the environmental, biographical, and physical materials that affect them: a process that connects art with gestation, storytelling, and dreaming and illuminates the elementary forms of religious life.

Francis La Flesche (1857-1932) lived between two worlds: as an Umonhon (Omaha), he fought for their rights, and as a scholar he researched his own culture. He is regarded as the first indigenous ethnologist of North America and stands representatively for the many indigenous protagonists without whom ethnological collections would never have come into being. We are no longer familiar with most of these individuals, since the focus until today has been on European and North American collectors. Francis La Flesche is an exception: his work provides insights into indigenous agency and their resistance to racism and colonialism as well as their active participation in the trade with objects. The book presents La Flesche's records of the objects, the collection of which he contributed to what is today the Ethnological Museum in Berlin in 1894-an impressive testimony to his successful efforts to preserve the culture of the Omaha for future generations.