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Written with beautiful clarity, Art in Consumer Culture: Mis-Design asks the contemporary art world to be honest about the pervasive effects of commodification and the difficulty of staging critique. The book examines the collusion of 'art' and 'design' in contemporary artistic practices in order to find avenues of critique in a commercially driven cultural landscape. Grace McQuilten focuses on the work of Takashi Murakami, Andrea Zittel, Adam Kalkin and Vito Acconci, four contemporary artists who claim to be working in the field of design rather than the traditional art world. McQuilten argues that Zittel, Acconci and Kalkin engage with 'design' only to reactivate the critical practice of art in a more direct engagement with capital - and conceives of and affirms a future for art, outside of the art world, as a parasite in the complex beast of late capitalism. This book is an important and timely provocation to a cynical and apathetic consumer culture, and a call to arms for creative freedom and critical thought.
How do students develop a personal style from their instruction in a visual arts program? Women Artists on the Leading Edge explores this question as it describes the emergence of an important group of young women artists from an innovative post-war visual arts program at Douglass College. The women who studied with avant-garde artists at Douglas were among the first students in the nation to be introduced to performance art, conceptual art, Fluxus, and Pop Art. These young artists were among the first to experience new approaches to artmaking that rejected the predominant style of the 1950s: Abstract Expressionism. The New Art espoused by faculty including Robert Watts, Allan Kaprow, Roy Li...
A compelling history, a manifesto, and a manual for change.
Inspired by Richard Wagner’s idea of the total artwork, European modernist artists began to pursue multimedia projects that mixed colors, sounds, and shapes. Polina Dimova’s At the Crossroads of the Senses traces this new sensory experience of synaesthesia—the physiological or figurative blending of senses—as a modernist phenomenon from its scientific description in the late nineteenth century to its prevalence in the early twentieth. Structured around twenty theses on synaesthesia, this book explores the integral relationship between modernist art, science, and technology, tracing not only how modernist artists perceptually internalized and absorbed technology and its effects but al...
In Politics Unseen, Ellen Macfarlane radically reframes the "pure photographs" of California art photography society Group f.64, known for depicting Western landscapes, fruits and vegetables, flowers, and faces. By foregrounding f.64 members' and their prints' alliances across commercial, political, and artistic domains, the book shatters entrenched understandings of the group as disinterested in contemporary events and unseats conceptions of its prints as icons of modernist purity. Instead, Politics Unseen argues the politics of f.64's photographs become visible when interwar ideas about "purity" in the areas of eugenics, racial essence, nutrition, colonialism, and horticulture are interrogated. Ultimately, Politics Unseen alters perceptions not only of f.64, but also of what constituted a political image in 1930s America.
This book discusses text and image relationships in the history of art from ancient times to the contemporary period across a diversity of cultures and geographic areas. Focusing on the use of words in art and words as art forms, thematic chapters include "Pictures in Words/Words in Pictures," "Word/Picture Puzzles," "Picture/Word Puzzles," "Words as Images," "The Power of the Word," and "Monumental and Moving Words." Chapter subsections further explore cross-cultural themes. Examining text and image relationships from the obvious to the elusive, the puzzling to the profound, the minor to the major, the book demonstrates the diverse ways in which images and writing have been combined through the ages, and explores the interplay between visual and written communication in a wide range of thought-provoking examples. A color insert is included. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.
An examination of the continuities and differences between American Impressionism and Realism. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.
This groundbreaking book provides the first detailed account of the materials and techniques of perhaps the most radical—and until now, least studied—major American Abstract Expressionist. Among the most radical of the great American Abstract Expressionist painters, Clyfford Still has also long been among the least studied. Still severed ties with the commercial art world in the early 1950s, and his estate at the time of his death in 1980 comprised some 3,125 artworks—including more than 800 paintings—that were all but unknown to the art world. Susan F. Lake and Barbara A. Ramsay were granted access to this collection by the estate and by the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver, which ho...
Lieven Gevaert Series 7Does photography have a hybrid or chameleonic character because it can be part of entirely different mixed-media works of art? Photography as a medium is faced with the challenge of escaping from its too-frequent use as rather noncommittal and "poetic" visual imagery. How best might photographers proceed to maintain the integrity of their art? A distinguished group of art historians, art theorists, and specialists in contemporary photography address these issues in Photography between Poetry and Politics. They suggest that by raising a critical debate on the internal workings of the artistic system itself or on broader social problems, photographers might be able to transcend both political and aesthetic concerns, and so revitalize their art form and regain its autonomy.
In an age where art history’s questions are now expected to receive answers, Richard Shiff presents a challenging alternative - embracing doubt as a critical tool and asking how particular histories of art have come to be.