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A revealing look at the irrevocable change in art during the 1960s and its relationship to the modern culture of fact This refreshing and erudite book offers a new understanding of the transformation of photography and the visual arts around 1968. Author Joshua Shannon reveals an oddly stringent realism in the period, tracing artists’ rejection of essential truths in favor of surface appearances. Dubbing this tendency factualism, Shannon illuminates not only the Cold War’s preoccupation with data but also the rise of a pervasive culture of fact. Focusing on the United States and West Germany, where photodocumentary traditions intersected with 1960s politics, Shannon investigates a broad variety of art, ranging from conceptual photography and earthworks to photorealist painting and abstraction. He looks closely at art by Bernd and Hilla Becher, Robert Bechtle, Vija Celmins, Douglas Huebler, Gerhard Richter, and others. These artists explored fact’s role as a modern paradigm for talking, thinking, and knowing. Their art, Shannon concludes, helps to explain both the ambivalent anti-humanism of today’s avant-garde art and our own culture of fact.
This book is a practical guide for using the power of theatre to address issues of oppression in areas such as race, ethnicity, LGBTQ+, gender, and sexual harassment. Giving Voice charts a roadmap for the process of establishing a troupe, including auditioning members, utilizing authentic source material, directing rehearsals, guiding mindful growth among troupe members, and facilitating an inclusive forum environment. Rooted in Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Opressed and using the nationally recognized Missouri State University’s Giving Voice troupe as a model, this book provides guidance for customizing the program’s principles to meet the needs of your school, community, organization...
Several years ago, I saw a thirteen-year-old boy with the disease of Progeria, in which the aging process is accelerated in children, being interviewed on television. He looked like a little old man despite his tender years, yet he seemed to transcend his affliction. His voice had a musical, flute-like quality, and I had never seen anyone so full of joy and focused in the moment. I was later to learn that what emanated from that boy is typical of children with Progeria. I wondered what it must have been like in ancient times for such a child. Would he have been feared? Revered? Abandoned? Or put to death as evila devil child? Then, in an instant, I believe the Divine gave me the concept of a story that takes place in such ancient times with such a boy who becomes known as a great and wise healer at its center. The people think hes a little old man, but then its discovered hes really a twelve-year-old boy. The Forgiving Dream is the first book in The Forgiving Dream Trilogy.
Painful experiences, both physical and emotional, are one of the few things everyone in this hurting world has in common. Life simply cannot be lived without suffering, so what are we to do? To whom do we turn in hard times? Whether we realize it or not, all of our hearts cry out to love and be loved with one kind of love—love unconditional. Join Chloe and her newborn son as they learn what it means to be loved by strangers in a way she has never known. Through this tale of pain, joy, and surprises, there is one common theme—the unconditional love we receive from Jesus Christ and how that love flows through us to others, and through others to us. “We love because He first loved us.” (1 John 4:19)
"In this first book-length study of Robert Ryman, Suzanne Hudson traces the artist's production from his first paintings in the early 1950s, many of which have never been exhibited or reproduced, to his more recent gallery shows. Ryman's largely white-on-white paintings represent his careful working over of painting's conventions at their most radically reduced. Through close readings of the work, Hudson casts Ryman as a painter for whom painting was conducted as a continuous personal investigation. Ryman's method--an act of "learning by doing"--as well as his conception of painting as "used paint" set him apart from second-generation abstract expressionists, minimalists, or conceptualists. ...
Six years ago, she was framed by her wicked sister and was abandoned by her then husband while she was pregnant. Six years later, she started anew with a different identity. Oddly, the same man who abandoned her in the past had not stopped pestering her at her front door. “Miss Gibson, what’s your relationship with Mister Lynch?” She smiled and answered nonchalantly, “I don’t know him.” “But sources say that you were once married.” She answered as she tucked her hair, “Those are rumors. I’m not blind, you see.” That day, she was pinned on the wall the moment she stepped in her door. Her three babies cheered, “Daddy said mommy’s eyes are bad! Daddy says he’ll fix it for mommy!” She wailed, “Please let me go, darling!”
Claes Oldenburg, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Donald Juddall are iconic names in art history, and each is allowed a chapter's worth of exploration by Shannon (contemporary art history theory, Univ. of Maryland), who manages to surprise us into remembering that these people were grappling with their environment and working to understand the modern urban landscape. See, for example, the photo of Johns and Rauschenberg in Rauschenberg's home. They look like two young men camped out in a cheap flat somewhere in the present day, smoking, having a drink, and talking philosophy. Yet, they were making great strides in using their art, as Shannon argues, to understand how and why "all that was once directly lived has become mere representation," eventually revealing the "inadequacy of language itself." New York City was disappearing all around them, as faceless monoliths of modern glass and steel replaced treasured places where people had lived and died. Theirs was a time of rapid change, and these themes still persist today.Nadine Dalton, Speidel Cuyahoga Cty. P.L., Parma, OH Copyright Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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, lan...
This book offers a compelling perspective on the striking similarity of art and commerce in contemporary culture. Combining the history and theory of art with theories of contemporary culture and marketing, Maria A. Slowinska chooses three angles (space, object/experience, persona) to bridge present and past, aesthetic appearance and theoretical discourse, and traditional divisions between art and commerce. Beyond both pessimistic and celebratory rhetorics, »Art/Commerce« illuminates contemporary phenomena in which the aestheticization of commerce and the commercialization of aesthetics converge.
Bringing a poet’s perspective to an artist’s archive, this highly original book examines wordplay in the art and thought of American artist Gordon Matta-Clark (1943–1978). A pivotal figure in the postminimalist generation who was also the son of a prominent Surrealist, Matta-Clark was a leader in the downtown artists' community in New York in the 1970s, and is widely seen as a pioneer of what has come to be known as social practice art. He is celebrated for his “anarchitectural” environments and performances, and the films, photographs, drawings, and sculptural fragments with which his site-specific work was documented. In studies of his career, the artist’s provocative and vivid...