A pioneering artist continues his visionary inquiry into hyperspace In this insightful book, which is a revisionist math history as well as a revisionist art history, Tony Robbin, well known for his innovative computer visualizations of hyperspace, investigates different models of the fourth dimension and how these are applied in art and physics. Robbin explores the distinction between the slicing, or Flatland, model and the projection, or shadow, model. He compares the history of these two models and their uses and misuses in popular discussions. Robbin breaks new ground with his original argument that Picasso used the projection model to invent cubism, and that Minkowski had four-dimensional projective geometry in mind when he structured special relativity. The discussion is brought to the present with an exposition of the projection model in the most creative ideas about space in contemporary mathematics such as twisters, quasicrystals, and quantum topology. Robbin clarifies these esoteric concepts with understandable drawings and diagrams. Robbin proposes that the powerful role of projective geometry in the development of current mathematical ideas has been long overlooked and that our attachment to the slicing model is essentially a conceptual block that hinders progress in understanding contemporary models of spacetime. He offers a fascinating review of how projective ideas are the source of some of today's most exciting developments in art, math, physics, and computer visualization.

Art/Commons is the first book to theorise the commons from the perspectives of contemporary art history and anthropology, focusing on the ongoing tensions between art and capitalism. This study is grounded in an analysis of contemporary artistic and curatorial practices, which the author describes as practices of commoning, based on co-production, participation, mutualism and the valorization of reproductive labour. Mollona proposes a novel theoretical approach to current debates on the commons, and shows that art can provide both a language of anti-capitalist and post-colonial critique as well as a distinctive set of skills and practices of commoning.

This book argues for a renewed understanding of the fundamentally uncanny quality of the medium of photography. It especially makes the case for the capacity of certain photographs-precisely through their uncanniness-to contest structures of political and social dominance. The uncanny as a quality that unsettles the perception of home emerges as a symptom of modern and contemporary society and also as an aesthetic apparatus by which some key photographs critique the hegemony of capitalist and industrialist domains. The book's historical scope is large, beginning with William Henry Fox Talbot and closing with contemporary indigenous photographer Bear Allison and contemporary African American photographer Devin Allen. Through close readings, exegesis, of individual photographs and careful deployment of contemporary political and aesthetic theory, The Photographic Uncanny argues for a re-envisioning of the political capacity of photography to expose the haunted, homeless, condition of modernity.

In recent years, neuroscientists have made ambitious attempts to explain artistic processes and spectatorship through brain imaging techniques. But can brain science really unravel the workings of art? Is the brain in fact the site of aesthetic appreciation? Embodying Art recasts the relationship between neuroscience and aesthetics and calls for shifting the focus of inquiry from the brain itself to personal experience in the world. Chiara Cappelletto presents close readings of neuroscientific and philosophical scholarship as well as artworks and art criticism, identifying their epistemological premises and theoretical consequences. She critiques neuroaesthetic reductionism and its assumptions about a mind/body divide, arguing that the brain is embodied and embedded in affective, cultural, and historical milieus. Cappelletto considers understandings of the human brain encompassing scientific, philosophical, and visual and performance arts discourses. She examines how neuroaesthetics has constructed its field of study, exploring the ways digital renderings and scientific data have been used to produce the brain as a cultural and visual object. Tracing the intertwined histories of brain science and aesthetic theory, Embodying Art offers a strikingly original and profound philosophical account of the human brain as a living artifact.

This book takes a creative approach in examining one of the biggest crises of our time: that of mental suffering, distress and anxiety. By bringing together essays and dialogues from thinkers and artists across a range of disciplines, it re-imagines approaches to crisis, support, and care. Amid growing recognition that mental health is not only the province of psychiatry and the health sector, but a concern for the whole community, the book opens up critical new ways of thinking about our internal lives and the forces that affect them. The book significantly advances the way we think about cultural responses to mental health and the understanding of the struggles of inner life. Featuring both theoretical and practical examples of the value of using imagination in response to trauma, anxiety, and depression, The Big Anxiety shows how creativity is not a luxury, but a means of survival.

Disgust is among the strongest of aversions, characterized by involuntary physical recoil and even nausea. Yet paradoxically, disgusting objects can sometimes exert a grisly allure, and this emotion can constitute a positive, appreciative aesthetic response when exploited by works of art -- a phenomenon labelled here "aesthetic disgust." While the reactive, visceral quality of disgust contributes to its misleading reputation as a relatively "primitive" response mechanism, it is this feature that also gives it a particular aesthetic power when manifest in art.
Most treatments of disgust mistakenly interpret it as only an extreme response, thereby neglecting the many subtle ways that it operates aesthetically. This study calls attention to the diversity and depth of its uses, analyzing the emotion in detail and considering the enormous variety of aesthetic forms it can assume in works of art and --unexpectedly-- even in foods.
In the process of articulating a positive role for disgust, this book examines the nature of aesthetic apprehension and argues for the distinctive mode of cognition that disgust affords -- an intimate apprehension of physical mortality. Despite some commonalities attached to the meaning of disgust, this emotion assumes many aesthetic forms: it can be funny, profound, witty, ironic, unsettling, sorrowful, or gross. To demonstrate this diversity, several chapters review examples of disgust as it is aroused by art. The book ends by investigating to what extent disgust can be discovered in art that is also considered beautiful.

"The Colour Bible is one to return to again and again." - Elephant "This definitive guide...will no doubt inform many future colour choices." - House & Garden An essential source for graphic designers, artists, interior designers, fashion designers, illustrators and creatives of any kind who work with colour. Colour is intrinsic to the human experience; it guides us with subconscious visual cues throughout our lives. Get it right in your design or art and you can enhance mood and atmosphere, and create a desired psychological or even physiological effect. The Colour Bible is a contemporary handbook for navigating this fascinating world of colour. It dives into 100 profiles of significant colours and tracks them through their genesis, historical usage in art and design, and contemporary connotations and uses. - A potted history of each colour - Key colour associations from around the world - Contemporary connotations and brand design - Practical advice on how to use and combine colours in your work

The attempt to demarcate things somehow always seems to go wrong. Boundaries, no matter how carefully drawn, are leaky. Things (concepts, languages, cells, symptoms, objects, values, people, and other species) are identified, multiply, circulate, and disappear again. The transdisciplinary anthology Fake Hybrid Sites Palimpsest. Essays on Leakages is dedicated to a series of productive leakages and permeabilities, focusing attention on composite systems, attachments, infestations, and perturbations. The essays - composed of words and images - navigate between disciplines and practices and address a variety of objects and structures: blood, species, viruses, and archives; networks of laws, ideologies, languages, and labor; imaginaries of bodies, fashion, art, copy, and poetry.

Art History: A critical introduction to its methods provides a lively and stimulating introduction to methodological debates within art history. Offering a lucid account of approaches from Hegel to post-colonialism, the book provides a sense of art history's own history as a discipline from its emergence in the late-eighteenth century to contemporary debates. By explaining the underlying philosophical and political assumptions behind each method, along with clear examples of how these are brought to bear on visual and historical analysis, the authors show that an adherence to a certain method is, in effect, a commitment to a set of beliefs and values. The book makes a strong case for the vitality of the discipline and its methodological centrality to new fields such as visual culture. This book will be of enormous value to undergraduate and graduate students, and also makes its own contributions to ongoing scholarly debates about theory and method. -- .

The reader Art and its global histories represents an invaluable teaching tool, offering content ranging from academic essays and excerpts, new translations, interviews with curators and artists, to art criticism. The introduction sets out the state of art history today as it undergoes the profound shift of a 'global turn'. Particular focus is given to British India, which represents a shift from the usual attention paid to Orientalism and French art in this period. The sources and debates on this topic have never before been brought together in a satisfactory way and this book will represent a particularly significant and valuable contribution for postgraduate and undergraduate art history teaching. -- .

How does the avant-garde create spaces in everyday life that subvert regimes of economic and political control? How do art, aesthetics and activism inform one another? And how do strategic spaces of creativity become the basis for new forms of production and governance? The Composition of Movements to Come reconsiders the history and the practices of the avant-garde, from the Situationists to the Art Strike, revolutionary Constructivism to Laibach and Neue Slowenische Kunst, through an autonomist Marxist framework. Moving the framework beyond an overly narrow class analysis, the book explores broader questions of the changing nature of cultural labor and forms of resistance around this labor. It examines a doubly articulated process of refusal: the refusal of separating art from daily life and the re-fusing of these antagonistic energies by capitalist production and governance. This relationship opens up a new terrain for strategic thought in relation to everyday politics, where the history of the avant-garde is no longer separated from broader questions of political economy or movement, but becomes a point around which to reorient these considerations.

The novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch and the painter Harry Weinberger engaged in over twenty years of close friendship and intellectual discourse, centred on sustained discussion of the practice, teaching and morality of art. This book presents a reappraisal of Murdoch's novels - chiefly, three mature novels, The Sea, The Sea (1978), Nuns and Soldiers (1980) and The Good Apprentice (1985), and two enigmatic late novels, The Green Knight (1993) and Jackson's Dilemma (1995) - which are perceived through the prism of her discourse with Weinberger. It draws on a run of almost 400 letters from Murdoch to Weinberger, and on Murdoch's philosophical writings, Weinberger's private writings, the remarks of both artists in interviews, and other material relating to their views on art and art history, much of which is unpublished and has received no previous critical attention. Scrutiny of their shared values, methods and the imagistic dialogue that takes place in their art provides original perspectives on Murdoch's creativity, and new ways of understanding her experimentation with the visual arts. This book offers a new line of enquiry into Murdoch's novels, and into the relationship between literature and the visual arts.

Walled Gardens: Autonomy, Automation, and Art After the Internet is the study of a young generation of artists characterised by their engagement with new Internet technologies that have come to reorganize life and labour online, from mobile Internet and social media to Cloud Computing. Often grouped around the much-contested term 'post-Internet art', these artists work across a range of genre - including sculpture, performance, and moving image - in order to confront the relationship between technology and society in the twenty first century. Focusing on art works produced between 2008 and 2016 in Europe and the US, this book situates the emergence of the field in a historical context of global economic downturn and climate catastrophe, positing that new Internet technologies were developed in a mutually co-constitutive relationship with crisis. Characterised by ease of use, portability, and accessibility, such technologies are the reason why the Internet has become an ever-increasing part of daily life. Yet they are also examples of 'walled gardens': proprietary formats in which one's control over functionality or content is highly restricted. Strikingly, many artists have chosen to work with rather than against these technologies and, in so doing, perform complicity with the very structures that they seek to interrogate. Walled Gardens asks how might we make sense of this assimilation with proprietary technologies, and argues that what these artworks reveal is a model of subjectivity conditioned by a dynamic between autonomy and automation.

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.

The Fundacion Cisneros' Conversaciones/Conversations series is dedicated to preserving firsthand testimonies of leading artists and intellectuals from Latin America. Argentinian artist Liliana Porter has lived and worked in New York since 1964; her work has been exhibited internationally and is represented in many public and private collections. Using a wide range of media--including sculpture, printmaking, works on canvas, photography, video and installation--Porter playfully mixes the absurd with the philosophical to create extraordinary portrayals of everyday scenes and plights. In this, the seventh volume of the Conversaciones series, Porter is in dialogue with art historian and critic Ines Katzenstein. She describes with simplicity and humor the ways in which her work blends the real with the representational, often in hypothetical yet convincing mini-dramas using mass-produced, kitsch objects that elicit both our compassion and laughter."

This volume brings philosophers, art historians, intellectual historians, and literary scholars together to argue for the philosophical significance of Michael Fried's art history and criticism. It demonstrates that Fried's work on modernism, artistic intention, the ontology of art, theatricality, and anti-theatricality can throw new light on problems in and beyond philosophical aesthetics. Featuring an essay by Fried and articles from world-leading scholars, this collection engages with philosophical themes from Fried's texts, and clarifies the relevance to his work of philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell, Morris Weitz, Elizabeth Anscombe, Arthur Danto, George Dickie, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schiller, G. W. F. Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Denis Diderot, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Roland Barthes, Jacques Ranciere, and Soren Kierkegaard. As it makes a case for the importance of Fried for philosophy, this volume contributes to current debates in analytic and continental aesthetics, philosophy of action, philosophy of history, political philosophy, modernism studies, literary studies, and art theory.

Alois Riegl's art history has influenced thinkers as diverse as Erwin Panofsky, Georg Lukacs, Walter Benjamin, Paul Feyerabend, Gilles Deteuze, and Felix Guattari. One of the founders of the modern discipline of art history, Riegl is best known for his theories of representation. Yet his inquiries into the role of temporality in artistic production - including his argument that art conveys a culture's consciousness of time - show him to be a more wide-ranging and influential commentator on historiographical issues than has been previously acknowledged. In ""Time's Visible Surface"", Michael Gubser presents Riegl's work as a sustained examination of the categories of temporality and history in art. Supported by a rich exploration of Riegl's writings, Gubser argues that Riegl viewed artworks as registering historical time visibly in artistic forms. Gubser's discussion of Riegl's academic milieu also challenges the widespread belief that Austrian modernism adopted a self-consciously a historical worldview. By analyzing the works of Riegl's professors and colleagues at the University of Vienna, Gubser shows that Riegl's interest in temporality, from his early articles on calendar art through later volumes on the Roman art industry and Dutch portraiture, fit into a broad discourse on time, history, and empiricism that engaged Viennese thinkers such as the philosopher Franz Brentano, the historian Theodor von Sickel, and the art historian Franz Wickhoff. By expanding our understanding of Riegl and his intellectual context, ""Time's Visible Surface"" demonstrates that Riegl is a pivotal figure in cultural theory and that fin-de-siecle Vienna holds continued relevance for today's cultural and philosophical debates.

Based on John Dewey's lectures on esthetics, delivered as the first William James Lecturer at Harvard in 1932, "Art as Experience" has grown to be considered internationally as the most distinguished work ever written by an American on the formal structure and characteristic effects of all the arts: architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and literature.

This book explores the persona of the artist in Archaic and Classical Greek art and literature. Guy Hedreen argues that artistic subjectivity, first expressed in Athenian vase-painting of the sixth century BCE and intensively explored by Euphronios, developed alongside a self-consciously constructed persona of the poet. He explains how poets like Archilochos and Hipponax identified with the wily Homeric character of Odysseus as a prototype of the successful narrator, and how the lame yet resourceful artist-god Hephaistos is emulated by Archaic vase-painters such as Kleitias. In lyric poetry and pictorial art, Hedreen traces a widespread conception of the artist or poet as socially marginal, and sometimes physically imperfect, but rhetorically clever, technically peerless, and a master of fiction. Bringing together in a sustained analysis the roots of subjectivity across media, this book offers a new way of studying the relationship between poetry and art in ancient Greece.

Maggie Nelson has established herself as one of our foremost cultural critics in this landmark work about representations of violence in art. An important and frequently surprising book . . . could be read as the foundation for a post-avant-garde aesthetics. ?. . . Nelson, who is also a poet, is such a graceful writer that ?I . . . just sat back and enjoyed the show. Laura Kipnis, New York Times Book Review, front-page review Nelson s] critiques of individual artists are delightfully fierce without being mean spirited. . . . Fascinating and bracingly intelligent. . . . The Art of Cruelty s prose is often gorgeous. Troy Jollimore, Boston Globe A lean-forward experience, and in its most transcendent moments, reading it can feel like having the best conversation of your life. Rachel Syme, NPR Books I hope that critics, and aspiring critics, and those who are interested in the relationship between art and ethics, read The Art of Cruelty]. Susie Linfield, New Republic/The Book"

There is no soundtrack is a study of how sound and image produce meaning in contemporary experimental media art by artists ranging from Chantal Akerman to Nam June Paik to Tanya Tagaq. It contextualises these works and artists through key ideas in sound studies: voice, noise, listening, the soundscape and more. The book argues that experimental media art produces radical and new audio-visual relationships challenging the visually dominated discourses in art, media and the human sciences. In addition to directly addressing what Jonathan Sterne calls 'visual hegemony', it also explores the lack of diversity within sound studies by focusing on practitioners from transnational and diverse backgrounds. As such, it contributes to a growing interdisciplinary scholarship, building new, more complex and reverberating frameworks to collectively sonify the study of culture. -- .

How to Enjoy Art: A Guide for Everyone provides the tools to understand and enjoy works of art. Debunking the pervasive idea that specialist knowledge is required to understand and appreciate art, instead How to Enjoy Art focuses on experience and pleasure, demonstrating how anyone can find value and enjoyment in art. Examples from around the world and throughout art history-from works by Fra Angelico and Berthe Morisot to Kazuo Shiraga and Kara Walker-are used to demonstrate how a handful of core strategies and skills can help enhance the experience of viewing art works. With these skills, anyone can encounter any work of art-regardless of media, artist, or period-and find some resonance with their own experiences. How to Enjoy Art encourages us to rediscover the fundamental pleasure in viewing art.