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Over the past two decades, the Chinese conceptual artist, activist and exile Ai Weiwei has created art that addresses complex and sensitive themes of political, ethical, and social urgency. His artworks, which call upon both Western and Chinese cultural traditions, are deeply engaged with the history of art, drawing particularly on conceptualism and minimalism. From the start of his multifaceted career in the late 1970s, Ai has envisioned artistic practice as a deeply human, moral, and political endeavour. This volume presents the artist's work in dialogue with theoretical texts by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben and the German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt alongside interpretive essays that illuminate the artist's work on human rights, his engagement with historical Chinese artifacts, and his critical consideration of the effects of globalisation.
[Grid Matrix] is the first publication in the Screen Arts and New Media Aesthetics series, a series of exhibitions and publications that explore the interpenetration of different screens of representation in contemporary culture--from the canvas to the computer terminal, the cinema to the television set, the video monitor to the museum wall, the book page to the cell phone display. This series probes the aesthetic uses and historical dimensions of contemporary screen culture and sheds light on how different artists make use of newer media and technologies, how the rise of the digital impacts dominant codes of art, culture, and experience, and how today's screens open alternate windows on the...
Between the end of World War I and the Nazi assumption of power, Germany's Weimar Republic (1919-1933) functioned as a thriving laboratory of art and culture. As the country experienced unprecedented and often tumultuous social, economic and political upheaval, many artists rejected Expressionism in favour of a new realism to capture this emerging society. Dubbed Neue Sachlichkeit - New Objectivity - its adherents turned a cold eye on the new Germany: its desperate prostitutes and crippled war veterans, its alienated urban landscapes, its decadent underworld where anything was available for a price. Showcasing 150 works by more than 50 artists, this book reflects the full diversity and strat...
This provocative study asks why we have held on to vivid images of the Nazis’ total control of the visual and performing arts, even though research has shown that many artists and their works thrived under Hitler. To answer this question, Pamela M. Potter investigates how historians since 1945 have written about music, art, architecture, theater, film, and dance in Nazi Germany and how their accounts have been colored by politics of the Cold War, the fall of communism, and the wish to preserve the idea that true art and politics cannot mix. Potter maintains that although the persecution of Jewish artists and other “enemies of the state” was a high priority for the Third Reich, removing them from German cultural life did not eradicate their artistic legacies. Art of Suppression examines the cultural histories of Nazi Germany to help us understand how the circumstances of exile, the Allied occupation, the Cold War, and the complex meanings of modernism have sustained a distorted and problematic characterization of cultural life during the Third Reich.
A definitive overview of postwar German art examines the work of artists in both East and West Germany to reveal how they depicted the diverse political realities of the era through both abstraction and realism, with profiles of Georg Baselitz, Willi Baumeister, Joseph Beuys, Hannah Hch, Gerhard Richter, and many others.
Thaddeus Strode's vibrant large-scale paintings are universes unto themselves: wild mash-ups of California surf and skateboard culture, Zen philosophy, rock music, literature, film, and comic books. Absolutes and Nothings marks the artist's first major museum show, presented as part of the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum's Contemporary Projects series. Strode's images draw on a wealth of motifs inspired by a broad range of sources in popular culture, freely combined with the artist's own creations. The strength and visual pleasure of Strode's aesthetic come from his self-reflexive combination of painterly styles and incongruous elements, in which enigmatic texts, phantoms, monsters, and castaways play off one another to produce cryptic--and captivating--fantasies. Including over two dozen full-color images of works from 2001 to the present, as well as essays by Sabine Eckmann, Meredith Malone, and Benjamin Weissman, Absolutes and Nothings is a fascinating premier monograph from one of our most vital and exciting contemporary visual artists.
Elizabeth Peyton (born 1965 in Danbury, Connecticut) has worked with a range of print techniques since the 1990s, including monotypes, lithographs, woodcuts, and etchings. She also uses a variety of handmade papers, as well as various coloured and monochromatic inks. Featuring more than 70 of her prints in colour, this monograph is the first in-depth exploration of the artist as a critical printmaker.
Published in conjunction with the exhibition held at Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri, January 31-April 20, 2014.
Traces the lives & work of 23 well known artists exiled from Germany, including Heartfield, Schwitters, Kokoschka & Beckmann.
With the success of Martin Scorsese’s Hugo (2011) and Michel Hazanavicius’s The Artist (2011) nothing seems more contemporary in recent film than the styles, forms, and histories of early and silent cinemas. This collection considers the latest return to silent film alongside the larger historical field of visual repetitions and affective currents that wind their way through 20th and 21st century visual cultures. Contributors bring together several fields of research, including early and silent cinema studies, experimental and new media, historiography and archive theory, and studies of media ontology and epistemology. Chapters link the methods, concerns, and concepts of early and silent film studies as they have flourished over the last quarter century to the most recent developments in digital culture—from YouTube to 3D—recasting this contemporary phenomenon in popular culture and new media against key debates and concepts in silent film scholarship. An interview with acclaimed Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin closes out the collection.