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Hot Art, Cold War – Western and Northern European Writing on American Art 1945-1990
Hot Art, Cold War – Northern and Western European Writing on American Art 1945-1990 is one of two text anthologies that trace the reception of American art in Europe during the Cold War era through primary sources. With the exception of those originally published in English, the majority of these texts are translated into English for the first time from eight languages, and are introduced by scholarly essays. They offer a representative selection of the diverse responses to American art in Great Britain, Ireland, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, West Germany (FRG), Austria, Switzerland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland. There was no single European discourse, as attitudes to American ...
Pretty
Film culture often rejects visually rich images, valuing simplicity, austerity, or even ugliness as more provocative, political, and truly cinematic. Although cinema challenges traditional ideas of art, this opposition to the decorative continues a long-standing aesthetic antipathy to feminine cosmetics, Oriental effeminacy, and primitive ornament. Inheriting this patriarchal and colonial perspective along with the preference for fine over decorative art, filmmakers, critics, and theorists tend to denigrate cinema's colorful, picturesque, and richly patterned visions. Condemning this exclusion of the "pretty" from masculine film culture, Rosalind Galt reevaluates received ideas about the dec...
Japan and the West
In Western art, Minimalism is characterised by the rejection of figurative representation in favour of reduction and simple geometric configurations. In Japanese culture, emptiness and simplicity have long been the central principles of design, and are allied closely to Zen Buddhism. This fascinating book explores Western Minimalism and the concept of 'm̀eaningful emptiness' in Zen art, examining their differences and similarities. Examples of traditional Japanese craftsmanship are juxtaposed with works of Western art. Japan and the West poses fundamental questions about artistic production and the reception of twentieth-century art, and highlights significant influences on art forms throughout the ages.
The Figure of Knowledge
It is a major challenge to write the history of post-WWII architectural theory without boiling it down to a few defining paradigms. An impressive anthologising effort during the 1990s charted architectural theory mostly via the various theoretical frameworks employed, such as critical theory, critical regionalism, deconstructivism, and pragmatism. Yet the intellectual contours of what constitutes architectural theory have been constantly in flux. It is therefore paramount to ask what kind of knowledge has become important in the recent history of architectural theory and how the resulting figure of knowledge sets the conditions for the actual arguments made. The contributions in this volume focus on institutional, geographical, rhetorical, and other conditioning factors. They thus screen the unspoken rules of engagement that postwar architectural theory ascribed to.
Virtual Art
An overview of the art historical antecedents to virtual reality and the impact of virtual reality on contemporary conceptions of art. Although many people view virtual reality as a totally new phenomenon, it has its foundations in an unrecognized history of immersive images. Indeed, the search for illusionary visual space can be traced back to antiquity. In this book, Oliver Grau shows how virtual art fits into the art history of illusion and immersion. He describes the metamorphosis of the concepts of art and the image and relates those concepts to interactive art, interface design, agents, telepresence, and image evolution. Grau retells art history as media history, helping us to understa...
Precision and Madness
At last, the broader movements of twentieth-century Swiss art--and the individual artists behind them--are tracked through the present day in one standard-setting publication. Swiss Made: Precision and Madness sets the famous Swiss tendency toward precision and order alongside the tendency toward obstinacy and chaos, pairing canonical works with pieces made within the past 40 years. Provocative pairs include Max Bill and John Armleder, Ferdinand Hodler and Urs Lüthi, Alberto Giacometti and Rémy Zaugg, Louis Soutter and Martin Disler, Robert Müller and Sylvie Fleury, Paul Klee and Silvia Bächli, Adolph Wölfli and Ugo Rondinone. Tensions emerge between the focused and the expansive, over everyday life in the Swiss state, and naturally over the mountains. Swiss Made: Precision and Madness is of interest on its own analytic terms, and as an excellent overview of the country's art since 1850.
Art as a Social System
This is the definitive analysis of art as a social and perceptual system by Germany's leading social theorist of the late 20th century. It combines three decades of research in the social sciences, phenomenology, evolutionary biology, cybernetics, and information theory with an intimate knowledge of art history, literature, aesthetics, and contemporary literary theory.
American Abstract Expressionism
The question of what kind of city we are trying to have is an urgent one as the world continues its dramatic urbanization. Urban Visions presumes that an understanding of our urban experience is a prerequisite for envisioning what the city could be. In assembling work by distinguished authors from different disciplines and countries, Urban Visions offers a patient examination of what urban experience is and of the city’s necessity, with explicit and implicit propositions about what it could be. The book is illustrated in full color.
Saturday Night
"Time and again, we read shocking newspaper reports about people who have lain dead in their homes for months, or even years, without any of their neighbors taking notice of them. These events are symptomatic of the increasing isolation of human beings - and not just senior citizens - in our society. In large cities, the risk of falling into complete anonymity is particularly acute." "In her works, In Sook Kim examines how people confront the threat of isolation. Her elaborate, psychologically persuasive settings show how we use television, computers, sex, alcohol, psychotropics, or illegal drugs in our futile attempts to fill the agonizing void, to drown out the terrible silence and painful awareness of our loneliness. Kim's work, Saturday Night, condenses all of these escapes into one image: the illuminated windows of a high-rise provide an unobstructed view into the abyss of human existence." --Book Jacket.
Flash Art
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