This intelligently argued overview is invaluable for the way in which it reveals and makes coherent sense of the often-bewildering diversity of styles, forms, media, techniques, and agendas that proliferate in contemporary art. Extensively revised and expanded since it was first published, Michael Archer s acclaimed book is brought fully up to date in this third edition. A completely new section maps the developments in contemporary art since 2000, ensuring that the book remains an indispensable source of information on the evolution of art over the past five-and-a-half decades."

The definitive survey of Keith Tyson's thirty-year career. British Turner Prize-winning artist Keith Tyson is known for a distinctive and diverse body of work including drawing, painting, installation and sculpture. Showing a wide range of influences, from mathematics and science through to poetry and mythology, he is interested in how art emerges from the combination of information systems and physical processes that surround us every day. For over thirty years, Tyson has probed, dissected, explored and questioned reality. Not fixed to one artistic style, Tyson sets out to challenge himself and the audience, whilst working with diverse materials - paint, clay, metal, resin - to question our knowledge of the world we perceive as real, and art's role in representing it. With newly commissioned texts from an internationally diverse array of writers, and including a previously unpublished interview with the artist, this is the definitive survey of one of the most restless and adventurous creators working today.

A revised and expanded edition of one the most popular titles in the Contemporary Artists Series Born in Lebanon, Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum was exiled to London, where she has lived and worked since the mid-1970s. Through performance, video, sculpture, and installation, she creates architectonic spaces that relate to the body, language, and the condition of exile as well as transforming everyday, domestic objects into things foreign, threatening, and dangerous. Often exquisitely beautiful, Hatoum's works combine states of emotion and longing with the formal simplicity of Minimalism, creating powerful evocations of displacement, denial, and otherness.

The rules of composition have changed. Discover the new ideas that shape the art we make today. Art has changed beyond recognition since the principles of harmonious composition were established in classical times. From the invention of photography to the digital revolution, technological and social advances have transformed the way we see the world. This new vision, influenced by changing attitudes not least towards gender roles and the West's colonial history, is reflected in the art we make. From the rejection of Western compositional orthodoxy by artists such as Édouard Manet, Vincent van Gogh and Mary Cassatt to the revolutionary practices of Jean- Michel Basquiat, Tania Bruguera, Meleko Mokgosi and many others, acclaimed art critic and writer Michael Archer reveals the ideas and intentions behind a thrillingly diverse selection of artworks, giving readers a new set of tools for understanding art today.

This work uncovers a culture of courtly surveillance, secrecy, and espionage in an era generally regarded, since Foucault, as characterised by the association of sovereignty with public display. Examining the centrality of espionage in the careers and works of Michel de Montaigne, Sir Philip Sidney, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, and Sir Francis Bacon, it demonstrates the association of surveillance with sovereignty before surveillance became the characteristic mode of discipline in the modern, abstract state. The author substantially revises our understanding of the relationship between power and knowledge in the rise of the modern state while subtly illuminating the inscription of that relationship within Renaissance texts.

Mona Hatoum creates events, videos, sculptures and installations that relate to the body, to language and to the condition of exile. Her most famous work Corps Etranger, first shown at the Tate Gallery when she was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1995, takes the viewer on a journey through the inner passages of the artist's body. Her audience is thrown into a dimension in which anything is possible, as in The Light at the End, which lures viewers down a long tunnel towards a light that will literally burn them. While her video work is often visceral and emotive, her sculptures and environments are ultra cool and minimal in their aesthetic. They often mimic domestic or institutional furniture, yet their designs and materials have a threatening edge. Exquisitely beautiful, Hatoum's works are at the same time powerful evocations of statelessness, anxiety, denial and otherness. Since Hatoum was exiled to London, where she has lived and worked since the 1970s, she has exhibited her work around the world, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Venice Biennale. This book surveys all her work, ranging from early performances, through to her videos, objects and full-scale environments. The distinguished art critic Guy Brett, author of Through Our Own Eyes: Popular Art and Modern History (1986), explores key themes around a sense of place, the body and communication that emerge from Hatoum's range of work. The artist describes a chronology of practice in conversation with Michael Archer, writer, curator and co-founder of London's Audio Arts sound archive. Director of the Kanaal Art Foundation Catherine de Zegher makes a complex and provocative analysis of Recollection, a work she commissioned for a sixteenth-century beguinage. Hatoum has chosen a text by the influential Palestinian author Edward Said as well as a statement from the noted Italian post-war sculptor and performance artist Piero Manzoni. The book also includes Hatoum's own notes, statements and interviews.

Nightmares and horrific visions haunt Adelmo. He must now start an investigation into his past to uncover the secrets that his family so desperately tried to shield from him when he was young. The discovery of old journals, belonging to Adelmo's ancestors takes him on a journey to his home country of Romania where his grandfather and the explanation he has been searching for, awaits him. Adelmo will do whatever it takes to survive.

This intelligently argued, critical overview is invaluable for the way in which it reveals and makes coherent sense of the often bewildering diversity of styles, forms, media, techniques and agendas that proliferate in contemporary art. Now revised and expanded, Michael Archer's acclaimed book is brought right up to date with discussions about the comprehensive globalization of art since the 1990s, which has been reflected in the growth of the exhibition calendar and the number of new museums opening around the world. With over thirty new illustrations and an updated timeline and bibliography, Art Since 1960 provides an indispensable survey and source of information on the evolution of art over the past four decades.

Although much attention has been paid to early modern European travel to the New World, attention is just beginning to be paid to the travels in the Old World, even though they speak to contemporary concerns with categories like civilization, race, and nation as much as, sometimes more than, the New World explorations.
This book aligns travel narratives and historical surveys of parts of the Old World--Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, and Russia--with texts by Shakespeare, Milton, and Dryden that contributed to English ideas about those regions. Addressing the current interest in Europe's relationship with its neighbors and near-neighbors in the Old World, the author introduces the term "paracolonial" to describe Europe's attitude toward those areas where its colonial reach was intermittent or nonexistent.
The book begins by matching ancient and early modern accounts of Egypt and Ethiopia with Shakespeare's "Antony and Cleopatra," showing how antiquity's veneration of Egyptian values was tainted in Shakespeare's time by anxieties of racial and sexual degeneration. The next chapter, centered on Milton's "Paradise Lost," relates degeneration to the epic cycle of imperial rise and fall attributed to Southwest Asia and its monumental ruins by European historians and travelers. The Elizabethan and Jacobean fascination with Russia is the topic of the third chapter, which argues that Herodotus' Scythia and early modern slavery were the dual origins of the barbarous Russia glimpsed in Shakespeare's "Love's Labour's Lost" and Milton's "Muscovia." In the process, the author offers a novel explanation for the puzzling link between Russia and racial "blackness" in the English Renaissance. The book concludes with India, where degeneration, cyclic empire, and bodily images of racial and sexual difference were combined in geographical writings and sensationally staged in Dryden's "Aureng-Zebe."
Tracing the overlap between Graeco-Roman geography and the itineraries of Renaissance travelers and traders, "Old Worlds" brings together a rich array of texts that rewrite European traditions about a plural antiquity from an early modern English perspective.