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A blistering, brilliant and utterly original explanation of the
Englishness of English pop culture in the twentieth century. An
ambitious mould-breaking book on Englishness which abandons the
false distinction between 'high' and 'low' culture in favour of a
borderless world where pop music and sculpture, literature and
film, TV and painting are all accorded the same respect, and are
part of the same vision. Here is the triumphant vindication of the
alienated suburban dandy. A cast of thousands, a gallery of
Britain's finest and lariest, including: the Pet Shop Boys, Evelyn
Waugh, the Fall, T-Rex, Larkin, EM Forster, Powell &
Pressburger, Pink Floyd, Dexy's, 2-Tone, the Jam, Virginia Woolf,
The Carry On Films, The Slits, Bowie, Kate Bush, Fun Boy Three,
Wyndham Lewis, The Human League, Rachel Whiteread, Buzzcocks,
Graham Greene, Alan Bennett, Sillitoe, X-Ray Spex, Mark Almond,
etc, etc.
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Equilibrium (Paperback, New edition)
Tonino Guerra; Translated by Eric Mosbacher; Introduction by Michael Bracewell; Notes by Michael Bracewell
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R306
R276
Discovery Miles 2 760
Save R30 (10%)
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Ships in 9 - 15 working days
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"I had just gotten away from it all, by which I mean all those
ordinary, boring things like skyscrapers, cigar-smoking
industrialists, linoleum, plastics, television, westerns and
marihuana. I had either seen or heard about them. Whether they are
good or bad is beside the point..." A nameless graphic designer is
haunted by the concentration camp in which he was once interned.
Obsessed with his past, as well as Italy's present 'economic
miracle' he retreats to a rural villa where he decorates the rooms
with "arrows, signs, advertisements"; invents a new, purposefully
incomprehensible typeface; and attempts to devise a marketing
campaign for stones. Upon finally returning to Milan life becomes
even more unbalanced. He loses his job and acquires a mistress whom
he soon confuses both with his wife and the memory of the young,
Czech woman he abandoned at the end of the war... Known primarily
as a screenwriter for Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini and
Andrei Tarkovsky among many others, Tonino Guerra also wrote poetry
and fiction. Reissued to mark the centenary of Guerra's birth, and
with a new introduction by acclaimed cultural critic Michael
Bracewell, Equilibrium remains a relevant, powerful, and intensely
visual account of a truly (post-)modern man.
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Punk's Dead (Hardcover)
Simon Barker, Michael Bracewell, Greil Marcus
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R905
Discovery Miles 9 050
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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From 1976 to 1978, the young photographer Simon Barker was a member
of the "Bromley Contingent"--a group of avid Sex Pistols fans who
comprised the group's inner circle at the height of the punk
movement. Many of them, such as Jordan and Siouxsie Sioux, were
notorious for their daredevil dress sense, and several--such as
Sioux, Steven Severin, Adam Ant, Poly Styrene, Billy Idol, Viv
Albertine and Ari Up--went on to form some of the most important
bands of the era. This compilation of previously unseen photographs
by Barker shows these founders of punk in their earliest
incarnations--in bedrooms and kitchens, at public gigs and private
parties--before media and commerce sunk their claws into punk's
iconoclastic look and class politics. Taken with the simplest and
cheapest pocket cameras, the photographs in this collection
constitute Barker's "family album for the years 1976 to 1978." In
the spirit of the Pistols' "God Save the Queen," the volume closes
with a photographic sequence taken by Barker during the 1976
Jubilee celebrations, which shows Romanian tyrant Nicolae Ceausescu
hobnobbing with the Queen of England in the royal procession.
A unique tribute from David Bowie's official photographer and
creative partner, Mick Rock, compiled in 2015, with Bowie's
blessing. In 1972, David Bowie released his groundbreaking album
The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. With
it landed Bowie's Stardust alter ego: a glitter-clad, mascara-eyed,
sexually ambiguous persona who kicked down the boundaries between
male and female, straight and gay, fact and fiction into one
shifting and sparkling phenomenon of '70s self-expression.
Together, Ziggy the album and Ziggy the stage spectacular propelled
the softly spoken Londoner into one of the world's biggest stars. A
key passenger on this glam trip into the stratosphere was fellow
Londoner and photographer Mick Rock. Rock bonded with Bowie
artistically and personally, immersed himself in the singer's inner
circle, and, between 1972 and 1973, worked as the singer's
photographer and videographer. This collection brings together
spectacular stage shots, iconic photo shoots, as well as intimate
backstage portraits. It celebrates Bowie's fearless experimentation
and reinvention, while offering privileged access to the many
facets of his personality and fame. Through the aloof and
approachable, the playful and serious, the candid and the
contrived, the result is a passionate tribute to a brilliant and
inspirational artist whose creative vision will never be forgotten.
A new edition as part of the Faber Greatest Hits - books that have
taken writing about music in new and exciting directions for the
twenty-first century. Re-make/Re-model tells the little known and
fascinating story of the individuals and circumstances which
combined to form the groundbreaking band Roxy Music -- how the art
school avant-garde of the 1960s met the sweat, luck and attitude of
chart-topping pop. Written with the co-operation of all of those
involved, including Bryan Ferry, Brian Eno, Andy Mackay and Phil
Manzanera, this is also the definitive account of a new pop vision
that would dominate the 1970s. From student digs and provincial
nightclubs to emerald-green eyeshadow and fake leopard skin,
Re-make/Re-model is about a band which invented an era.
UNFINISHED BUSINESS focuses on an ordinary suburban office worker,
fundamentally weak but always keeping his eyes fixed on some
horizon where a heightened, romantic, better world must surely
exist. Faced with the regular stuff of life - work, aspiration,
marriage, age, divorce, bereavement - his ordinary plight is
sharpened, becoming increasingly urgent. Having lived in a modern
condition, confusing pleasure with happiness, wanting the dream to
deliver, what do you do when you notice the shadows begin to
lengthen on the lawn?
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Joy Division (Hardcover)
Glenn Brown; Text written by Michael Bracewell, Lavinia Greenlaw
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R1,579
R1,455
Discovery Miles 14 550
Save R124 (8%)
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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In the special edition to celebrate the opening of the Gilbert
& George Centre in London, writer, novelist and cultural
commentator Michael Bracewell explores the paradise behind The
Paradisical Pictures; the thirty-five artworks made by Gilbert
& George in 2019. The special edition of The Paradisical
Pictures is created to celebrate the opening of the Gilbert &
George Centre in East London. It features 11 different metallic
foils on the cover and a pink foil edging around the book. Writer,
novelist and cultural commentator Michael Bracewell explores the
paradise behind The Paradisical Pictures; the thirty-five artworks
made by Gilbert & George in 2019. The artists’ work confounds
and rejects all art historical classification or affiliation to
other schools or movements in art. As affirmed by The Paradisical
Pictures, there is no formalist, aesthetic or conceptual precedent
to the ideology and vision they convey with such intensity. The
paintings are fantastical, allegorical, narrative,
representational, psychedelic, absurdist, modern yet archaic,
surrealist-grotesque, inflected with both tragedy and comedy,
filled with pathos, touchingly eloquent of human frailty, age and
exhaustion. The art of Gilbert & George is a visionary one
above all, which reports from a cosmic journey through life that
begins on the streets of London. The Paradisical Pictures suggest a
chapter in a story that has been unfolding before them and will
continue beyond them. This paradise is not a destination but a
stage on a longer journey. It is a dream of paradise and an
exploration of an archetype that is both secular and sacred. The
paradise of these Paradisical Pictures proposes a more ambivalent
view – a place of biomorphic mutation, exhaustion, watchfulness
and possession.
A book documenting Michael Craig-Martin's installation of twelve
new large-scale works in the gardens at Chatsworth House. Each work
is an immense, vibrantly coloured line drawing in space, fabricated
in steel. The book also documents a concurrent exhibition curated
by Craig-Martin at Chatsworth House, including sculptures from the
Devonshire Collection, in which Craig-Martin has swapped their
traditional bases for bright pink plinths and a visually arresting
selection of drawings from the Old Master Drawings Cabinet,
including drawings by Hans Holbein, Annibale Carracci, and
Ghirlandaio.
The novelist, writer, curator and cultural commentator Michael
Bracewell has written extensively for museums and galleries, along
with art publications as diverse as Frieze and The Burlington
Magazine, approaching visual art through its cultural context, the
lens of the recent past and prolonged looking. Bracewell's art
writing focuses on detailed descriptions of works of art, expanding
their interpretation to include media, politics, music, poetry and
other areas of cultural production. By exploring connections
between the visual arts, pop music, modern iconography and
subcultures, while appraising the vision and ideas of individual
artists, he relates their work to its broader cultural context.
This collection of texts reads like a history of British art (and
the UK itself) from the 1950s to the 2010s, featuring artists such
as Richard Hamilton, Bridget Riley, Gilbert & George, John
Stezaker, Wolfgang Tillmans, Leigh Bowery, Glenn Brown and Damien
Hirst. Each essay is accompanied by an illustration selected by
Bracewell, and the publication concludes with a body of
autobiographical writings.
The most comprehensive monograph to date on the British artist and
writer loved for his witty book-cover-inspired canvases, now
updated with forty of his latest works Harland Miller's creativity
as both artist and writer culminates in his iconic paintings of
battered book covers with cleverly invented titles. Initially
appropriating the classic Penguin paperback before devising his own
unique designs, Miller combines aspects of pop art, abstraction,
and figurative painting to create highly coveted artworks that have
won him a cult following. This monograph covers nearly twenty years
of his paintings, and features specially commissioned essays by
eminent art writers exploring different aspects of his practice and
has been updated with forty of his latest works.
Stripped of their typical narrative and commercial contexts, the
fragmented collages of this collection act as visually tantalizing
ciphers, reflecting the desires and imaginings of the beholder.' -
Jennie Waldow, Brooklyn Rail This beautifully illustrated catalogue
showcases works by British artist John Stezaker made between 1976
and 2017 and brought together in the 2018 show "Love" at The
Approach, London. Stezaker is celebrated for his distinctive
collage works: interruptions of, and interventions into, found
images dating mostly from the mid-20th century - products of
modernist culture such as film stills, press and publicity
photographs, magazines and postcards. His works engage with themes
such as psychological archetypes, fragmentation, identity, self and
other, desire, inscrutability and enigma, glamour, fantasy, dreams
and the gaze. A sense of romance pervades Stezaker's imagery. As
demonstrated most dramatically by the artist's 'Love' series
(2016), his work seduces and ensnares the viewer's gaze, arresting
their perceptual expectations. Disquieting, poetic, compelling,
glamorous and strange, the anatomies of love and desire comprising
'Love' resemble a visual encyclopaedia of human consciousness.
Featuring essays by Michael Bracewell and Craig Burnett.
Made across a 32-year span, the works in Tabula Rasa unite the
central themes in the art of celebrated British artist John
Stezaker, from the capacities of collage to the current flow in an
age of mass media. This volume brings silkscreens on canvas from
the early 1990s and film still collages from the 1990s and 2009
together for the first time. Accompanying full-colour illustrations
and a series of installation views of Stezaker's work at The
Approach, London, an essay by art critic and cultural commentator
Michael Bracewell looks at the connections within Stezaker's
practice, centering on notions of screens, voids and cut-outs.
With his memorably titled 1956 collage "Just What is it that Makes
Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing?," British artist Richard
Hamilton (born 1922) heralded the British Pop revolution; and with
his 1967 "Swingeing London" series of prints, which depicted the
arrest of Mick Jagger and Robert Fraser, Hamilton's art entered the
general public consciousness. But unlike so many Pop artists,
Hamilton was never an uncritical or ambivalent advocate of postwar
society, and he has often agitated directly against it, producing a
great deal of openly political, satirical work that assaults both
consumer culture at large and more immediate political events. This
monograph, published for Hamilton's 2010 exhibition at the
Serpentine Gallery in London (his first exhibition since 1992),
brings together Hamilton's famous "protest" paintings as well as
newer political works and features essays by Benjamin H.D. Buchloh
and Michael Bracewell.
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Souvenir (Hardcover)
Michael Bracewell
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R457
R369
Discovery Miles 3 690
Save R88 (19%)
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Ships in 9 - 15 working days
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'The best evocation I've read of London in the '80s' Neil Tennant
'I loved Souvenir . . . it rescued some things for me - a certain
aesthetic, a philosophical engagement with time and poignant beauty
and lived history that I have found myself looking for, and not
finding, elsewhere in recent years . . . the book gave me new hope'
John Burnside 'A suspended act of retrieval, a partisan recall; a
sustained, subtle summary of our recent past, and an epitaph for a
future we never had' Philip Hoare 'Michael Bracewell proves himself
to be nothing less than the poet laureate of late capitalism'
Jonathan Coe A vivid eulogy for London of the late 1970s and early
80s - the last years prior to the rise of the digital city. An
elliptical, wildly atmospheric remembrance of the sites and
soundtrack, at once aggressively modern and strangely elegiac, that
accompanied the twilight of one era and the dawn of another.
Haunted bedsits, post-punk entrepreneurs in the Soho Brasserie,
occultists in Fitzrovia, Docklands before Canary Wharf, frozen
suburbs in the winter of 1980...
In answering the question posed by its title, and drawing on his
twenty year relationship with the artists, Michael Bracewell is the
first writer to engage directly with Gilbert & George to
understand why they have devoted their lives exclusively and
continuously - to the vision of art they conceived within months of
first meeting. What emerges piece by piece is a portrait of Gilbert
& George as two men who are infinitely more intense, strange,
determined and alone than their longstanding public image suggests.
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Bridget Riley (Paperback)
Bridget Riley, Robert Kudielka, Eric De Chassey, David Sylvester, Michael Bracewell, …
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R1,158
R902
Discovery Miles 9 020
Save R256 (22%)
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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This landmark book reflects on almost 70 years of works by Bridget
Riley (b.1931), from some of her earliest to very recent projects,
providing a unique record of the work of an artist still very much
at the height of her powers. Essays from leading scholars and
commentators on Riley's work will make this title the authority on
Riley's practice. In the last decade, Riley has continued to push
her practice considerably, producing several large-scale
site-specific wall paintings as well as continuing to develop new
paintings. This book will explore these recent developments. It
will also examine the notable influence that other artists such as
Georges Seurat and Piet Mondrian have had on Riley's work.
Written with the assistance, for the first time, of all of those
involved, including Bryan Ferry, Brian Eno, Andy Mackay and Phil
Manzanera; the fashion designer Antony Price, the founding guru of
pop art, and Bryan Ferry's tutor, Richard Hamilton, and many more,
Roxy is also the account of how pop art, the avant garde
underground of the 1960s, and the heady slipstream of London in the
sixties was transformed into the fashion cults of revivalism,
nostalgia and pop futurism in the early 1970s.
He's the only person to whom The Velvet Underground ever played as
an audience of one, the first British writer to talk to Patti Smith
after her seventeen-year hiatus from rock. One reviewer hailed his
previous book "England is Mine" as "surely the strangest and most
beautiful book on pop music ever written." Greil Marcus said that
even the "merely superb" passages of that book read like
"intellectual sunrises," calling the work "intoxicated and
intoxicating." The author in question is Michael Bracewell,
celebrated surveyor of the punk and rock scenes. Now, through
funny, engaging, and occasionally devastating essays about his
experience in the thick of the music scene of the 1990s, Bracewell
tackles a decade where Greed became disguised as Attitude, where a
"cozy, urban feelgood fable" replaced punk, and where the role of
anxiety, so intrinsic to the culture and music of the 1980s, was
swapped for a shallow "I feel your pain" sensibility. Read "When
Surface Was Depth" and discover why "Time Out" has called Michael
Bracewell, in a word, "terrific."
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David Noonan (Paperback)
David Noonan; Edited by Lionel Bovier; Text written by Michael Bracewell, Jennifer Higgie, Dominic Molon
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R834
Discovery Miles 8 340
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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Australian artist David Noonan (born 1969) uses found imagery as
the basis for his screenprinted canvases and sculptures. Enigmatic
figures, printed in grainy black and white or sepia, pose in these
elaborate artworks, invoking covert and futuristic rituals. This
monograph will be the first comprehensive overview of Noonan's
work.
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Nadine Gordimer
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(2)
R398
R330
Discovery Miles 3 300
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