Employing an interdisciplinary approach, this book breaks new ground by considering how Robert Motherwell's abstract expressionist art is indebted to Alfred North Whitehead's highly original process metaphysics. Motherwell first encountered Whitehead and his work as a philosophy graduate student at Harvard University, and he continued to espouse Whitehead's processist theories as germane to his art throughout his life. This book examines how Whitehead's process philosophy-inspired by quantum theory and focusing on the ongoing ingenuity of dynamic forces of energy rather than traditional views of inert substances-set the stage for Motherwell's future art. This book will be of interest to scholars in twentieth-century modern art, philosophy of art and aesthetics, and art history.

From its foundation in 1957 to its self-dissolution in 1972, the Situationist International established itself as one of the most radical revolutionary organisations of the twentieth century. This book brings together leading researchers on the SI to provide a comprehensive critical analysis of the group's key concepts and contexts, from its relationship to earlier artistic avant-gardes, romanticism, Hegelianism, the history of the workers' movement and May '68 to the concepts and practices of 'spectacle', 'constructed situations', 'everyday life' and 'detournement'. The volume also considers historically underexamined areas of the SI, including the situation of women in the group and its opposition to colonialism and racism. With contributions from a broad range of thinkers including Anselm Jappe and Michael Loewy, this account takes a fresh look at the complex workings of a group that has come to define radical politics and culture in the post-war period.

In The Artist-Philosopher and New Philosophy, Smith argues that Western Metaphysics has indeed come to what Heidegger describes as "an end." That is hardly to say philosophy as such is over or soon to disappear; rather, its purpose as a medium of cultural change and as a generator of history has run its course. He thus calls for a New Philosophy, conceptualized by the artist-philosopher who "makes" or "poeticizes" New Philosophy, spanning literary and theoretical discourses and operating across art in all its forms and across culture in all its locations. To this end, Smith proposes the establishment of schools and social networks that advance the training and development of artist-philosophers, as well as global digital networks that are themselves designed toward this "ever-becoming community."

A detailed and inventive study of the thinking at work in modern painting, drawing on a formidable body of scholarly evidence to challenge modernist and phenomenological readings of art history, The Brain-Eye presents a series of interlinked 'case studies' in which philosophical thought encounters the hallucinatory sensations unleashed by 'painter-researchers.' Rather than outlining a new 'philosophy of art,' The Brain-Eye details the singular problems pursued by each of its protagonists. Striking readings of the oeuvres of Delacroix, Seurat, Manet, Gauguin, and Cezanne recount the plural histories of artists who worked to free the differential forces of colour, discovered by Goethe in his Colour Theory, in the name of a "true hallucination" and of a logic proper to the Visual. A rigorous renewal of the philosophical thinking of visual art, The Brain-Eye explores the complex relations between concept and sensation, theory and practice, the discursive and the visual, and draws out the political and philosophical stakes of the aesthetic revolution in modern painting.

This volume reframes the development of US-American avant-garde art of the long 1960s—from minimal and pop art to land art, conceptual art, site-specific practices, and feminist art—in the context of contemporary architectural discourses. Susanneh Bieber analyzes the work of seven major artists, Donald Judd, Robert Grosvenor, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Smithson, Lawrence Weiner, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Mary Miss, who were closely associated with the formal-aesthetic innovations of the period. While these individual artists came to represent diverse movements, Bieber argues that all of them were attracted to the field of architecture—the work of architects, engineers, preservationists, landscape designers, and urban planners—because they believed these practices more directly shaped the social and material spaces of everyday life. This book’s contribution to the field of art history is thus twofold. First, it shows that the avant-garde of the long 1960s did not simply develop according to an internal logic of art but also as part of broader sociocultural discourses about buildings and cities. Second, it exemplifies a methodological synthesis between social art history and poststructural formalism that is foundational to understanding the role of art in the construction of a more just and egalitarian society. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, architecture, urbanism, and environmental humanism.

Artistic labour was exemplary for Utopian Socialist theories of 'attractive labour', and Marxist theories of 'nonalienated labour', but the rise of the anti-work movement and current theories of 'fully automated luxury communism' have seen art topple from its privileged place within the left's political imaginary as the artist has been reconceived as a prototype of the precarious 24/7 worker. Art and Postcapitalism argues that art remains essential for thinking about the intersection of labour, capitalism and postcapitalism not insofar as it merges work and pleasure but as an example of noncapitalist production. Reassessing the contemporary politics of work by revisiting debates about art, technology and in the nineteenth and twentieth century, Dave Beech challenges the aesthetics of labour in John Ruskin, William Morris and Oscar Wilde with a value theory of the supersession of capitalism that sheds light on the anti-work theory by Silvia Federici, Andre Gorz, Kathi Weeks and Maurizio Lazzarato, as well as the technological Cockayne of Srnicek and Williams and Paul Mason. Formulating a critique of contemporary postcapitalism, and developing a new understanding of art and labour within the political project of the supersession of value production, this book is essential for activists, scholars and anyone interested in the real and imagined escape routes from capitalism.

Digital artist Zheng Wei Gu (AKA Guweiz) shares his anime-inspired world in this beautifully produced and insightful book, leading you through his fantasy world with a portfolio packed with gritty detail and a surreal vibe. Guweiz began drawing when he was 17, inspired by an anime art tutorial on YouTube. Discovering a natural talent, he carried on drawing and quickly amassed a fan-base for his edgy illustration style. Throughout this book, readers will discover his artistic journey from the very beginning, with behind-the-scenes details about how some of his most popular pieces were created. He reveals his secrets for turning influences into truly original digital art, including that all-important narrative that takes drawing and painting beyond the purely visual. Step-by-step tutorials share techniques and tips to help you create these sorts of effects in your art, resulting in images with the depth of detail and intrigue that Guweiz has made his trademark. The artist's unique urban take on the popular manga/anime style is gripping right from the first page, from the surreal take on Japanese lifestyle to the urban fantasy he creates.

'World Cinema and the Visual Arts' combines two subjects of ongoing research in the field of humanities: cinema and the visual arts. The films analysed encompass a wide geographical base, and have been drawn from a diverse array of cultural traditions.

This volume examines the relationship between occultism and Surrealism, specifically exploring the reception and appropriation of occult thought, motifs, tropes and techniques by Surrealist artists and writers in Europe and the Americas, from the 1920s through the 1960s. Its central focus is the specific use of occultism as a site of political and social resistance, ideological contestation, subversion and revolution. Additional focus is placed on the ways occultism was implicated in Surrealist discourses on identity, gender, sexuality, utopianism and radicalism.

A detailed and inventive study of the thinking at work in modern painting, drawing on a formidable body of scholarly evidence to challenge modernist and phenomenological readings of art history, The Brain-Eye presents a series of interlinked 'case studies' in which philosophical thought encounters the hallucinatory sensations unleashed by 'painter-researchers.' Rather than outlining a new 'philosophy of art,' The Brain-Eye details the singular problems pursued by each of its protagonists. Striking readings of the oeuvres of Delacroix, Seurat, Manet, Gauguin, and Cezanne recount the plural histories of artists who worked to free the differential forces of colour, discovered by Goethe in his Colour Theory, in the name of a "true hallucination" and of a logic proper to the Visual. A rigorous renewal of the philosophical thinking of visual art, The Brain-Eye explores the complex relations between concept and sensation, theory and practice, the discursive and the visual, and draws out the political and philosophical stakes of the aesthetic revolution in modern painting.

The Re-enchantment of the World is a philosophical exploration of the role of art and religion as sources of meaning in an increasingly material world dominated by science. Gordon Graham takes as his starting point Max Weber's idea that contemporary Western culture is marked by a "disenchantment of the world"--the loss of spiritual value in the wake of religion's decline and the triumph of the physical and biological sciences. Relating themes in Hegel, Nietzsche, Schleiermacher, Schopenhauer, and Gadamer to topics in contemporary philosophy of the arts, Graham explores the idea that art, now freed from its previous service to religion, has the potential to re-enchant the world. In so doing, he develops an argument that draws on the strengths of both "analytical" and "continental" traditions of philosophical reflection.
The opening chapter examines ways in which human lives can be made meaningful as a background to the debates surrounding secularization and secularism. Subsequent chapters are devoted to painting, literature, music, architecture, and festival with special attention given to Surrealism, 19th-century fiction, James Joyce, the music of J. S. Bach and the operas of Wagner. Graham concludes that that only religion properly so called can "enchant the world," and that modern art's ambition to do so fails.

The Routledge Companion to Expressionism in a Transnational Context is a challenging exploration of the transnational formation, dissemination, and transformation of expressionism outside of the German-speaking world, in regions such as Central and Eastern Europe, the Baltics and Scandinavia, Western and Southern Europe, North and Latin America, and South Africa, in the first half of the twentieth century. Comprising a series of essays by an international group of scholars in the fields of art history and literary and cultural studies, the volume addresses the intellectual discussions and artistic developments arising in the context of the expressionist movement in the various art centers and cultural regions. The authors also examine the implications of expressionism in artistic practice and its influence on modern and contemporary cultural production. Essential for an in-depth understanding and discussion of expressionism, this volume opens up new perspectives on developments in the visual arts of this period and challenges the traditional narratives that have predominantly focused on artistic styles and national movements.

Both an exploration of the ways in which we fashion our public identity and a manual of modern sociability, this lively and readable book explores the techniques we use to present ourselves to the world: body language, tone of voice, manners, demeanor, "personality" and personal style. Drawing on historical commentators from Castiglione to Machiavelli, and from Marcel Mauss to Roland Barthes, Joanne Finkelstein also looks to popular visual culture, including Hollywood film and makeover TV, to show how it provides blueprints for the successful construction of "persona." Finkelstein's interest here is not in the veracity of the self - recently dissected by critical theory - but rather in the ways in which we style this "self," in the enduring appeal of the "new you" and in our fascination with deception, fraudulent personalities and impostors. She also discusses the role of fashion and of status symbols and how advertising sells these to us in our never ending quest for social mobility.

Photography was invented between the publication of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations and Karl Marx and Frederick Engels's The Communist Manifesto. Taking the intertwined development of capitalism and the camera as their starting point, the essays in Capitalism and the Camera investigate the relationship between capitalist accumulation and the photographic image, and ask whether photography might allow us to refuse capitalism's violence-and if so, how? Drawn together in productive disagreement, the essays in this collection explore the relationship of photography to resource extraction and capital accumulation, from 1492 to the postcolonial; the camera's potential to make visible critical understandings of capitalist production and society, especially economies of class and desire; and propose ways that the camera and the image can be used to build cultural and political counterpublics from which a democratic struggle against capitalism might emerge. With essays by Ariella Aisha Azoulay, Siobhan Angus, Kajri Jain, Walter Benn Michaels, T. J. Clark, John Paul Ricco, Blake Stimson, Chris Stolarski, Tong Lam, and Jacob Emery.

This book investigates the notion of beauty in participatory art, an interdisciplinary form that necessitates the audience's agential participation and that is often seen in interactive art and technology-driven media installations. After considering established theories of beauty, for example, Plato, Alison, Hume, Kant, Gadamer and Santayana through to McMahon and Sartwell, Heinrich argues that the experience of beauty in participatory art demands a revised notion of beauty; a conception that accounts for the performative and ludic turn within various art forms and which is, in a broader sense, a notion of beauty suited to a participatory and technology-saturated culture. Through case studies of participatory art, he provides an art-theoretical approach to the concept of performative beauty; an approach that is then applied to the wider context of media and design artefacts.

This book examines folk theatres of North India as a unique performative structure, a counter stream to the postulations of Sanskrit and Western realistic theatre. In focusing on their historical, social and cultural imprints, it explores how these theatres challenge the linearity of cultural history and subvert cultural hegemony. The book looks at diverse forms of theatre such as svangs, nautanki, tamasha, all with conventions like open performative space, free mingling of spectators and actors, flexibility in roles and genres, etc. It discusses the genesis, history and the independent trajectory of folk theatres; folk theatre and Sanskrit dramaturgy; cinematic legacy; and theatrical space as performance besides investigating causes, inter-relations within socio-cultural factors, and the performance principles underlying them. It shows how these theatres effectively contest delimitation of human creative impulses (as revealed in classical Sanskrit theatre) from structuring as also of normative impulses of religion and culture, while amalgamating influences from Western theatre, newly-rising religious reform movements of 19th century India, tantra and Bhakti. It further highlights their ability to adapt and reinvent themselves in accordance with spatial and temporal transformations to constitute an important anthropological layer of Indian society. Comprehensive and empirically rich, this book will be an essential read for scholars and researchers of cultural studies, theatre, film and performance studies, sociology, political studies, popular culture, and South Asian studies.

Surfaces are often held to be of lesser consequence than 'deeper' or more 'substantive' aspects of artworks and objects. Yet it is also possible to conceive of the surface in more positive terms: as a site where complex forces meet. Surfaces can be theorized as membranes, protective shells, sensitive skins, even thicknesses in their own right. The surface is not so much a barrier to content as an opportunity for encounter: in new objects, the surface is the site of qualities of finish, texture, the site of tactile interaction, the last point of contact between object and maker, and the first point of contact between object and user. Surface tensions includes sixteen essays that explore this theoretically uncharted terrain. The subjects range widely: domestic maintenance; avant-garde fashion; the faking of antiques; postmodern architecture and design; contemporary film costume. Of particular emphasis within the volume are textiles, which are among the most complex and culturally rich materialisations of surface. As a whole, the book provides insights into the whole lifecycle of objects, not just their condition when new. -- .

Space is a formative factor in the production of sculpture. Phenomenological thought interprets sculptural work in relation to the immersive experience of the viewer, situating it within its environment. But what possibilities lie beyond this unitary position? What is the political potential of a sculptural object? How can its spatial relations and movements be reconfigured beyond its immediate environment? Spatial Politics of the Sculptural investigates the concept of space and its role in the production of the sculptural form from a multidimensional perspective. Engaging with the work of Krauss, Fried, Merleau-Pony, Deleuze and Guattari, and using case studies of urban development in Paris, New York and Seoul it reinterprets and dislocates the sculptural form in terms of the political dynamism of space proposing a new methodology for reading, producing and expanding sculptural practice. Drawing on David Harvey's theory of capital, it scrutinizes the idea of the spatial in the process of urbanization. It examines the interrelationship between capital flow and accumulation, and explores the production and destruction of space in relation to the creation of three-dimensional works of art. In doing so, it expands the idea of the sculptural object in relation to the urban environment.

In this innovative new book, Alison Bancroft re-examines significant moments in twentieth century fashion history through the focal lens of psychoanalytic theory. Her discussion centres on studies of fashion photography, haute couture, queer dressing, and fashion/art in an attempt to shed new light on these key issues. According to Bancroft, problems of subjectivity are played out through fashion, in the public arena, and not just in the dark, unknowable unconscious mind. The question of what can be said, and what can only be experienced, and how these two issues may be reconciled, become questions that fashion addresses on an almost daily basis. By interpreting fashion within a psychoanalytic frame, Bancroft illustrates how fashion articulates some of the essential, and sometimes frightening, truths about the body, femininity and the self.

This book traces the ideal of total environmental control through the intellectual and geographic journey of Knud Loenberg- Holm, a forgotten Danish architect who promoted a unique systemic, cybernetic, and ecological vision of architecture in the 1930s. A pioneering figure of the new objectivity and international constructivism in Germany in 1922 and a celebrated peer of radical figures in De Stijl, the Bauhaus, and Russian constructivism, when he emigrated to Detroit in 1923 he introduced the vanguard theory of productivism through his photography, essays, designs, and pedagogy. By following Loenberg- Holm's ongoing matrix of relations until the postwar era with the European vanguards in CIAM and former members of the Structural Study Associates (SSA), especially Fuller, Frederick Kiesler, and C. Theodore Larson, this study shows how their definition of building as a form of environmental control anticipated the contemporary disciplines of industrial ecology, industrial metabolism, and energy accounting.

This book provides a critical reappraisal of Barbara Creed's ground-breaking work of feminist psychoanalytic film scholarship, The Monstrous-Feminine, which was first published in 1993. The Monstrous-Feminine married psychoanalytic thinking with film analysis in radically new ways to provide an invaluable corrective to conventional approaches to the study of women in horror films, with their narrow emphasis on woman's victimhood. This volume, which will mark 25 years since the publication of The Monstrous-Feminine, brings together essays by international scholars working across a variety of disciplines who take up Creed's ideas in new ways and fresh contexts or, more broadly, explore possible futures for feminist and/or psychoanalytically informed art history and film theory.

Space is a formative factor in the production of sculpture. Phenomenological thought interprets sculptural work in relation to the immersive experience of the viewer, situating it within its environment. But what possibilities lie beyond this unitary position? What is the political potential of a sculptural object? How can its spatial relations and movements be reconfigured beyond its immediate environment? Spatial Politics of the Sculptural investigates the concept of space and its role in the production of the sculptural form from a multidimensional perspective. Engaging with the work of Krauss, Fried, Merleau-Pony, Deleuze and Guattari, and using case studies of urban development in Paris, New York and Seoul it reinterprets and dislocates the sculptural form in terms of the political dynamism of space proposing a new methodology for reading, producing and expanding sculptural practice. Drawing on David Harvey's theory of capital, it scrutinizes the idea of the spatial in the process of urbanization. It examines the interrelationship between capital flow and accumulation, and explores the production and destruction of space in relation to the creation of three-dimensional works of art. In doing so, it expands the idea of the sculptural object in relation to the urban environment.