Published in 1966, "Paul Klee on Modern Art has an introduction by Herbert Read.

Life reform and progressive education developed various utopias and projected new ways of cultural, social, religious and political living. This book studies how these utopias lived on until World War II, how they still affect present life in Austria and Hungary, and it examines continuities and differences within the political, educational and cultural movements of both countries. The main focus lies on interrelations between educational utopias and strategies and the development of a collective identity in times of radical political and social changes. Lebensreform und Reformpadagogik entwarfen Utopien fur das kulturelle, soziale und religioese Leben. Dieses Buch untersucht das Weiterleben dieser Utopien bis zum Beginn des zweiten Weltkrieges, ihre Wirkungen bis in die Gegenwart in OEsterreich und Ungarn und beleuchtet Kontinuitaten und Differenzen innerhalb der (bildungs-)politischen und kulturellen Stroemungen beider Lander. Im Zentrum steht die Frage nach Zusammenhangen zwischen padagogischen Utopien und Strategien und den Entwicklungen von kollektiver Identitat in Zeiten politischer und gesellschaftlicher Umbruche und Verunsicherungen.

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."

Is Landscape . . . ? surveys multiple and myriad definitions of landscape. Rather than seeking a singular or essential understanding of the term, the collection postulates that landscape might be better read in relation to its cognate terms across expanded disciplinary and professional fields. The publication pursues the potential of multiple provisional working definitions of landscape to both disturb and develop received understandings of landscape architecture. These definitions distinguish between landscape as representational medium, academic discipline, and professional identity. Beginning with an inquiry into the origins of the term itself, Is Landscape . . . .? features essays by a dozen leading voices shaping the contemporary reading of landscape as architecture and beyond.

This interdisciplinary collection of essays brings together scholars in the fields of art history, theatre, visual culture, and literature to explore intersections between the European avant-garde (c. 1880–1945) and themes of health and hygiene, such as illness, contagion, cleanliness, and contamination. Examining the artistic oeuvres of some of the canonical names of modern art – including Edgar Degas, Edvard Munch, Pablo Picasso, George Orwell, Marcel Duchamp, and Antonin Artaud – this book investigates instances where the heightened political, social, and cultural currencies embedded within issues of hygiene and contagion have been mobilised, and subversively exploited, to fuel the critical strategy at play. This edited volume promotes an interdisciplinary and socio-historically contextualised understanding of the criticality of the avant-garde gesture and cultivates scholarship that moves beyond the limits of traditional academic subjects to produce innovative and thought-provoking connections and interrelations across various fields. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, literature, theatre, cultural studies, modern history, medical humanities, and visual culture.

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 Critical Imagination is a study of metaphor, imaginativeness, and criticism of the arts. Since the eighteenth century, many philosophers have argued that appreciating art is rewarding because it involves responding imaginatively to a work. Literary works can be interpreted in many ways; architecture can be seen as stately, meditative, or forbidding; and sensitive descriptions of art are often colourful metaphors: music can 'shimmer', prose can be 'perfumed', and a painter's colouring can be 'effervescent'. Engaging with art, like creating it, seems to offer great scope for imagination. Hume, Kant, Oscar Wilde, Roger Scruton, and others have defended variations on this attractive idea. In this book, James Grant critically examines it. The first half explains the role imaginativeness plays in criticism. To do this, Grant answers three questions that are of interest in their own right. First, what are the aims of criticism? Is the point of criticizing a work to evaluate it, to explain it, to modify our response to it, or something else? Second, what is it to appreciate art? Third, what is imaginativeness? He gives new answers to all three questions, and uses them to explain the role of imaginativeness in criticism. The book's second half focuses on metaphor. Why are some metaphors so effective? How do we understand metaphors? Are some thoughts expressible only in metaphor? Grant's answers to these questions go against much current thinking in the philosophy of language. He uses these answers to explain why imaginative metaphors are so common in art criticism. The result is a rigorous and original theory of metaphor, criticism, imaginativeness, and their interrelations.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Routledge Companion to Biology in Art and Architecture collects thirty essays from a transdisciplinary array of experts on biology in art and architecture. The book presents a diversity of hybrid art-and-science thinking, revealing how science and culture are interwoven. The book situates bioart and bioarchitecture within an expanded field of biology in art, architecture, and design. It proposes an emergent field of biocreativity and outlines its historical and theoretical foundations from the perspective of artists, architects, designers, scientists, historians, and theoreticians. Includes over 150 black and white images.

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.

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.

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. -- .

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 brings a practitioner's insight to bear on socially situated art practice through a first-hand glimpse into the development, organisation and delivery of art projects with social agendas. Issues examined include the artist's role in building creative frameworks, the relationship of collaboration to participation, management of collective input, and wider repercussions of the ways that projects are instigated, negotiated and funded. The book contributes to ongoing debates on ethics/aesthetics for art initiatives where process, product and social relations are integral to the mix, and addresses issues of practical functionality in relation to social outcome.