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      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        September 2016

        Watching the red dawn

        The American avant-garde and the Soviet Union

        by Barnaby Haran

        This book offers the first sustained examination of the cultural relations of the American and Soviet avant-gardes in a period of major transformation. From the formation of the USSR in 1922 until its recognition by the American government, American avant-garde artists, writers and designers watched the 'Red Dawn' with fascination, enthusiastically reporting on its post-revolutionary cultural developments in articles and books, and brought these works to an American audience in ground-breaking exhibitions. Americans also emulated and adapted aspects of Soviet culture, as in the case of the New Playwrights Theatre, a group that mixed Russian avant-garde theatrical techniques with jazz, vaudeville and slapstick comedy in plays about strikes and racial injustice. Figures discussed include Louis Lozowick, Jane Heap, Frederick Kiesler, Ralph Steiner, John dos Passos, Margaret Bourke-White and Langston Hughes. Watching the red dawn takes an innovative interdisciplinary approach, considering these developments in architecture, theatre, film, photography and literature, and will be invaluable for students and specialists in these subject areas. It provides a new perspective on American avant-garde culture of the inter-war years. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        November 2013

        Out of the ivory tower

        The Independent Group and popular culture

        by Anne Massey, Christopher Breward, Bill Sherman

        The Independent Group is now the subject of global scholarly interest, and this book, a sequel to The Independent Group: Modernism and mass culture in Britain, 1945-59, explores the Anglo-American phenomenon from a new perspective. The Group included fine artists Magda Cordell, Richard Hamilton, Nigel Henderson, Eduardo Paolozzi and William Turnbull; architects Alison and Peter Smithson, James Stirling and Colin St John Wilson; graphic designer Edward Wright; music producer Frank Cordell; and writers Lawrence Alloway, Reyner Banham, John McHale and Toni del Renzio. This radical collective met at the ICA in London during the early 1950s, and worked with and within the new world of both the avant-garde and popular culture. This sequel includes an in-depth discussion of the recent historiography of the Independent Group, and examines its history from an alternative perspective - that of popular culture. The themes of domestic space, Hollywood film, fashion, mass-circulation magazines, science-fiction and popular music are explored, broadening our general understanding. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Art & design styles: from c 1960
        May 2014

        Performative monuments

        The rematerialisation of public art

        by Mechtild Widrich

        This book answers one of the most puzzling questions in contemporary art: how did performance artists of the '60s and '70s, famous for their opposition both to lasting art and the political establishment, become the foremost monument builders of the '80s, '90s and today? Not by selling out, nor by making self-undermining monuments. This book argues that the centrality of performance to monuments and indeed public art in general rests not on its ephemerality or anti-authoritarian rhetoric, but on its power to build interpersonal bonds both personal and social. Specifically, the survival of body art in photographs that cross time and space to meet new audiences makes it literally into a monument. The argument of the book spans art in Austria, the former Yugoslavia, and Germany: Valie Export, Peter Weibel and the Viennese Actionists (working in Austria and abroad), Marina Abramovic, Sanja Ivecovic and Braco Dimitrijevic (working in Yugoslavia and abroad), and Joseph Beuys and Jochen Gerz (working in Germany and abroad). These artists began by critiquing monumentality in authoritarian public space, and expanded the models developed on the streets of Vienna, Munich, Rome, Belgrade and Zagreb to participatory monuments that delegate political authority to the audience. Readers interested in contemporary art, politics, photography and performance will find in this book new facts and arguments for their interconnection.

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        June 2017

        The synthetic proposition

        Conceptualism and the political referent in contemporary art

        by Amelia Jones, Marsha Meskimmon, Nizan Shaked

        The synthetic proposition examines the impact of Civil Rights, Black Power, the student, feminist and sexual-liberty movements on conceptualism and its legacies in the United States between the late 1960s and the 1990s. It focuses on the turn to political reference in practices originally concerned with abstract ideas, as articulated by Joseph Kosuth, and traces key strategies in contemporary art to the reciprocal influences of conceptualism and identity politics: movements that have so far been historicised as mutually exclusive. The book demonstrates that while identity-based strategies were particular, their impact spread far beyond the individuals or communities that originated them. It offers a study of Adrian Piper, David Hammons, Renée Green, Mary Kelly, Martha Rosler, Silvia Kolbowski, Daniel Joseph Martinez, Lorna Simpson, Hans Haacke, Andrea Fraser and Charles Gaines. By turning to social issues, these artists analysed the conventions of language, photography, moving image, installation and display.

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        June 2017

        The synthetic proposition

        Conceptualism and the political referent in contemporary art

        by Amelia Jones, Marsha Meskimmon, Nizan Shaked

        The synthetic proposition examines the impact of Civil Rights, Black Power, the student, feminist and sexual-liberty movements on conceptualism and its legacies in the United States between the late 1960s and the 1990s. It focuses on the turn to political reference in practices originally concerned with abstract ideas, as articulated by Joseph Kosuth, and traces key strategies in contemporary art to the reciprocal influences of conceptualism and identity politics: movements that have so far been historicised as mutually exclusive. The book demonstrates that while identity-based strategies were particular, their impact spread far beyond the individuals or communities that originated them. It offers a study of Adrian Piper, David Hammons, Renée Green, Mary Kelly, Martha Rosler, Silvia Kolbowski, Daniel Joseph Martinez, Lorna Simpson, Hans Haacke, Andrea Fraser and Charles Gaines. By turning to social issues, these artists analysed the conventions of language, photography, moving image, installation and display.

      • Trusted Partner
        Lifestyle, Sport & Leisure
        February 2018

        Sport and modernism in the visual arts in Europe, c. 1909–39

        by Bernard Vere

        This book highlights sport as one of the key inspirations for an international range of modernist artists. Sport emerged as a corollary of the industrial revolution and developed into a prominent facet of modernity as it spread across Europe at the turn of the twentieth century. It was celebrated by modernists both for its spectacle and for the suggestive ways in which society could be remodelled on dynamic, active and rational lines. Artists included sport themes in a wide variety of media and frequently referenced it in their own writings. Sport was also political, most notably under fascist and Soviet regimes, but also in democratic countries, and the works produced by modernists engage with various ideologies. This book provides new readings of aspects of a number of avant-garde movements, including Italian futurism, cubism, German expressionism, Le Corbusier's architecture, Soviet constructivism, Italian rationalism and the Bauhaus.

      • Trusted Partner
        Lifestyle, Sport & Leisure
        February 2018

        Sport and modernism in the visual arts in Europe, c. 1909–39

        by Bernard Vere

        This book highlights sport as one of the key inspirations for an international range of modernist artists. Sport emerged as a corollary of the industrial revolution and developed into a prominent facet of modernity as it spread across Europe at the turn of the twentieth century. It was celebrated by modernists both for its spectacle and for the suggestive ways in which society could be remodelled on dynamic, active and rational lines. Artists included sport themes in a wide variety of media and frequently referenced it in their own writings. Sport was also political, most notably under fascist and Soviet regimes, but also in democratic countries, and the works produced by modernists engage with various ideologies. This book provides new readings of aspects of a number of avant-garde movements, including Italian futurism, cubism, German expressionism, Le Corbusier's architecture, Soviet constructivism, Italian rationalism and the Bauhaus.

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        August 2010

        Women artists between the Wars

        'A fair field and no favour'

        by Katy Deepwell

        Starting with a critique of existing methodologies and histories of the period, this book examines the production of women artists, looking at different areas and aspects of their activities, and particularly contrasting the lives of different generations of women artists. Many of these women's names or their works are not familiar in art histories of the twentieth century. The book analyses how women artists' presence which was consistently one third of the artists in many major exhibiting groups became less than 10% of the museum purchases and in art historical texts for this period. Comparisons are made between the opportunities presented to women artists and those of their male peers in the light of considerable change and restructuring within the art world in Britain during this period, principally due to the growing influence of modernism in the art market. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        February 2017

        The political aesthetics of the Armenian avant-garde

        The journey of the ‘painterly real', 1987–2004

        by Amelia Jones, Marsha Meskimmon, Angela Harutyunyan

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        February 2017

        The political aesthetics of the Armenian avant-garde

        The journey of the ‘painterly real', 1987–2004

        by Amelia Jones, Marsha Meskimmon, Angela Harutyunyan

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        April 2007

        Visual culture in Spain and Mexico

        by Anny Brooksbank-Jones, Chantal Hamil

        Visual culture in Spain and Mexico analyses films, paintings and museum exhibitions to show how aspects of hispanic visual culture 'manage' or 'mediate' risk, as articulated stylistically and ideologically in the visual artefact. The book is divided into six chapters plus an Introduction. The first three chapters deal with Mexico or more accurately aspects of life in Mexico City; the other three with Spain or more precisely with the Basque Country and aspects of cultural appropriation which include but also exceed Basque cultural politics. The book is at one and the same time a fine set of specific, detailed essays on visual cultural artefacts and their histories/modes of consumption and reception, and a broader meditation on the role of visual culture in an age increasingly characterised by doom-laden analyses of global panics, pandemics and jihads. The study also reflects the continuing hybridization of Hispanic Studies into the eclecticism of Cultural and Visual Studies, and the re-siting of well known cultural objects and institutions - such as the Guggenheim and Picasso's Guernica - into new frames of reference, generating new approaches, ideas and modes of understanding. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        November 2013

        After Dada

        Marta Hegemann and the Cologne avant-garde

        by Dorothy Rowe

        What happened in 1920s Cologne 'after Dada'? Whilst most standard accounts of Cologne Dada simply stop with Max Ernst's departure from the city for a new life as a surrealist in Paris, this book reveals the untold stories of the Cologne avant-garde that prospered after Dada but whose legacies have been largely forgotten or neglected. It focuses on the little-known Magical Realist painter Marta Hegemann (1894-1970). By re-inserting her into the histories of avant-garde modernism, a fuller picture of the gendered networks of artistic and cultural exchange within Weimar Germany can be revealed. This book embeds her activities as an artist within a gendered network of artistic exchange and influence in which Ernst continues to play a vital role amongst many others including his first wife, art critic Lou Straus-Ernst; photographers August Sander and Hannes Flach; artists Angelika Fick, Heinrich Hoerle, Willy Fick and the Cologne Progressives and visitors such as Kurt Schwitters and Katherine Dreier. The book offers a significant addition to research on Weimar visual culture and will be invaluable to students and specialists in the field. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        February 2014

        Maternal bodies in the visual arts

        by Rosemary Betterton

        Maternal bodies in the visual arts brings images of the maternal and pregnant body into the centre of art historical enquiry. By exploring religious, secular and scientific traditions as well as contemporary art practices, it shows the power of visual imagery in framing our understanding of maternal bodies and affirming or contesting prevailing maternal ideals. This book reassesses these historical models and, in drawing on original case studies, shows how visual practices by artists may offer the means of reconfiguring the maternal. This book will appeal to students, academics and researchers in art history, gender studies and cultural studies, as well as to any readers with interests in the maternal and visual culture. It is based on visual case studies drawn from the UK, USA and Europe, which make it very attractive to an international readership. Maternal bodies in the visual arts is ideally placed to capture a growing post- and undergraduate market in maternal studies, which is beginning to emerge as a field of study in the UK and USA with courses in a wide range of social science and humanities disciplines now including the maternal as a key theme. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        June 2017

        The synthetic proposition

        Conceptualism and the political referent in contemporary art

        by Amelia Jones, Marsha Meskimmon, Nizan Shaked

        The synthetic proposition examines the impact of Civil Rights, Black Power, the student, feminist and sexual-liberty movements on conceptualism and its legacies in the United States between the late 1960s and the 1990s. It focuses on the turn to political reference in practices originally concerned with abstract ideas, as articulated by Joseph Kosuth, and traces key strategies in contemporary art to the reciprocal influences of conceptualism and identity politics: movements that have so far been historicised as mutually exclusive. The book demonstrates that while identity-based strategies were particular, their impact spread far beyond the individuals or communities that originated them. It offers a study of Adrian Piper, David Hammons, Renée Green, Mary Kelly, Martha Rosler, Silvia Kolbowski, Daniel Joseph Martinez, Lorna Simpson, Hans Haacke, Andrea Fraser and Charles Gaines. By turning to social issues, these artists analysed the conventions of language, photography, moving image, installation and display.

      • Trusted Partner
        Lifestyle, Sport & Leisure
        February 2018

        Sport and modernism in the visual arts in Europe, c. 1909–39

        by Bernard Vere

        This book highlights sport as one of the key inspirations for an international range of modernist artists. Sport emerged as a corollary of the industrial revolution and developed into a prominent facet of modernity as it spread across Europe at the turn of the twentieth century. It was celebrated by modernists both for its spectacle and for the suggestive ways in which society could be remodelled on dynamic, active and rational lines. Artists included sport themes in a wide variety of media and frequently referenced it in their own writings. Sport was also political, most notably under fascist and Soviet regimes, but also in democratic countries, and the works produced by modernists engage with various ideologies. This book provides new readings of aspects of a number of avant-garde movements, including Italian futurism, cubism, German expressionism, Le Corbusier's architecture, Soviet constructivism, Italian rationalism and the Bauhaus.

      • Trusted Partner
        History of art & design styles: from c 1900 -
        August 2013

        After-affects | after-images

        Trauma and aesthetic transformation in the virtual feminist museum

        by Griselda Pollock

        Do artists travel away from or towards trauma? Is trauma encrypted or inscribed in art? Or can aesthetic practices (after-images) bring about transformation of trauma, personal trauma or historical traumas? Can they do this in a way that does not imply cure or resolution of the traces (after-affects) of trauma? How do artists themselves process these traces as participants in and sensors for our life-worlds and histories, and how does the viewer, coming belatedly or from elsewhere, encounter works bearing such traces or seeking forms through which to touch and transform them? These are some of the questions posed by major feminist art historian and cultural analyst, Griselda Pollock, in her latest installation of the virtual feminist museum. In closely-read case studies, we encounter artworks by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Ana Mendieta, Louise Bourgeois, Alina Szapocznikow, Anna Maria Maiolino, Vera Frenkel, Sarah Kofman and Chantal Akerman to explore trauma and bereavement, fatal illness, first- and second-generation Holocaust experience, migration, exile and the encounter with political horror and atrocity. Offering a specifically-feminist contribution to trauma studies, and a feminist psychoanalytical contribution to the study of contemporary art, this volume continues the conceptual innovations that have been the hall-mark of Pollock's dedicated exploration of feminist interventions in art's histories.

      • Trusted Partner
        History of art & design styles: from c 1900 -
        August 2013

        After-affects | after-images

        Trauma and aesthetic transformation in the virtual feminist museum

        by Griselda Pollock

        Do artists travel away from or towards trauma? Is trauma encrypted or inscribed in art? Or can aesthetic practices (after-images) bring about transformation of trauma, personal trauma or historical traumas? Can they do this in a way that does not imply cure or resolution of the traces (after-affects) of trauma? How do artists themselves process these traces as participants in and sensors for our life-worlds and histories, and how does the viewer, coming belatedly or from elsewhere, encounter works bearing such traces or seeking forms through which to touch and transform them? These are some of the questions posed by major feminist art historian and cultural analyst, Griselda Pollock, in her latest installation of the virtual feminist museum. In closely-read case studies, we encounter artworks by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Ana Mendieta, Louise Bourgeois, Alina Szapocznikow, Anna Maria Maiolino, Vera Frenkel, Sarah Kofman and Chantal Akerman to explore trauma and bereavement, fatal illness, first- and second-generation Holocaust experience, migration, exile and the encounter with political horror and atrocity. Offering a specifically-feminist contribution to trauma studies, and a feminist psychoanalytical contribution to the study of contemporary art, this volume continues the conceptual innovations that have been the hall-mark of Pollock's dedicated exploration of feminist interventions in art's histories.

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        September 2012

        Kitsch!

        Cultural politics and taste

        by Ruth Holliday, Tracey Potts

        From bottle gardens, the bachelor pad and Batman to designer gnomes and monogamy spray, this book uses a diverse range of objects to explore the changing significance of kitsch. With its unique approach to its subject, Kitsch! Cultural politics and taste promises to advance debates in cultural studies and sociology around taste, while providing an invaluable introduction for students and interested readers. Kitsch! examines how the idea of kitsch is mobilised - progressively, as bad taste, as camp and as cool - to inform notions of identity and sensibility. Where most studies proceed from the kitsch object, this book takes the moment of aesthetic judgement as its starting point and attempts to identify the ideological work performed by the category itself. The book poses the strongest challenge to those who argue that taste is democratised in contemporary culture, offering ample evidence that judgements of taste have shifted ground rather than relaxed. ;

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