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Art & Architecture

POP YOKAI

POP YOKAI

By: Yokai Art Museum
$45.00
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A delightful journey into Japanese popular culture through yokai art.

Yokai are strange, mysterious creatures that populate Japanese folklore and inspire contemporary art and entertainment, such as Pokémon and the Oscar-winning film Spirited Away. The Yokai Art Museum, which is situated on the idyllic island of Shodoshima in the Seto Inland Sea, is the only museum in Japan dedicated solely to contemporary yokai and boasts a collection of almost 1,000 artworks. Visitors are guided by the voice of one such creature as they discover the origins and history of yokai and explore the contemporary world through yokai-themed art.

This fascinating, one-of-a-kind museum is reproduced in the pages of this book. It includes material written by Dr. Masanobu Kagawa, the first accredited Japanese yokai scholar and the author of many yokai-related books, original works created for this publication by yokai artist and museum director, Chubei Yagyu, and yokai tales from Shodoshima and other parts of Kagawa.

PORTRAITS OF EARTH JUSTICE

PORTRAITS OF EARTH JUSTICE

By: Shetterly, Robert
$34.95
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Five compelling essays and fifty stunning portraits and profiles of American environmental activists

This second volume in the Americans Who Tell the Truth series features Robert Shetterly's magnificent color portraits and profiles of fifty environmental and climate activists--people who diagnose the truth of the greatest crisis humanity has ever confronted and take action. The book also features original essays by revered environmentalists Bill McKibben, Leah Penniman, Diane Wilson, Bill Bigelow, and Robin Wall Kimmerer, whose words illuminate the plight and its causes, and point a way forward.

Along with the genocide of Indigenous peoples and the institution of slavery, the third tragic and persistent mistake of the leaders of this country was to attempt to separate economic and political culture from the laws of nature--to operate on the basis that nature could be exploited endlessly for profit. The damage done to the Earth and to the future of life on the planet is incalculable. The people portrayed here have bought warnings, offered solutions, and organized movements to restore ecological sanity.

PRINT THE LEGEND

PRINT THE LEGEND

By: Sandweiss, Martha A
$25.00
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This prize-winning book tells the intertwined stories of photography and the American West-a new medium and a new place that came of age together in the nineteenth century. "Excellent . . . rewarding . . . a provocative look at the limits of photography as recorder of history-and its role in perpetuating myth."-Chris Vognar, Dallas Morning News "A sophisticated and engaging exploration of photography and the West . . . A really handsome work."-James McWilliams, Austin Chronicle "A wonderful book."-Vernon Peter, Sunday Oregonian "A deliciously intelligent new book . . . so engrossing you can't stop reading."-Michael More, Albuquerque Journal "Print the Legend belongs on that short shelf of essential books about the American West."-James P. Ronda, University of Tulsa
QUIRKY QWERTY

QUIRKY QWERTY

By: Lundmark, Torbjorn
$12.00
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An entertaining study of the keyboard describes the development of the modern typing system called Qwerty and discusses the history of each letter and symbol, the role of punctuation in the digital age, and other informative topics. Original.
REMBRANDT'S EYES

REMBRANDT'S EYES

By: Schama, Simon
$35.00
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This dazzling, unconventional biography shows us why, more than three centuries after his death, Rembrandt continues to exert such a hold on our imagination. Deeply familiar to us through his enigmatic self-portraits, few facts are known about the Leiden miller's son who tasted brief fame before facing financial ruin (he was even forced to sell his beloved wife Saskia's grave). The true biography of Rembrandt, as Simon Schama demonstrates, is to be discovered in his pictures. Interweaving of seventeenth-century Holland, Schama allows us to see Rembrandt in a completely fresh and original way.
ROTHKO

ROTHKO

By: Baal-Teshuva, Jacob
$20.00
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Resisting interpretation or classification, Mark Rothko (1903-1970) was a prominent advocate for the artist's consummate freedom of expression. Although identified as a key protagonist of the Abstract Expressionist movement, first formed in New York City, Rothko rejected the label and insisted instead on "a consummated experience between picture and onlooker."

Following a repertoire of figurative works, Rothko developed his now iconic canvases of bold color blocks in red, yellow, ochre, maroon, black, or green. With these shimmering, pulsating color masses, Rothko stressed that he had not removed the human figure but rather put symbols or shapes in its place. These intense color forms contained all the tragedy of the human condition. At the same time, Rothko explicitly empowered the viewer in the expressive potential of his work. He believed "A picture lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer."

From his early development through to his most famous color fields, this book introduces the intellect and influence of Rothko's dramatic, intimate, and revolutionary work.

RUINS

RUINS

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A comprehensive examination of "ruins" of the modern era in contemporary art and cultural theory.

The "ruins" of the modern era are the landmarks of recent art's turn toward site and situation, history and memory. The abiding interest of artists in ruination and decay has led in particular to the concept of the modern ruin--an ambiguous site of artistic and architectural modernism, personal and collective memories, and the cultural afterlife of eras such as those of state communism and colonialism. Contemporary art's explorations of the ruin can evoke on the one hand diverse experiences of nostalgia and on the other a ceaselessly renewed encounter with catastrophes of the recent past and apprehensions of the future. For every relic of a harmonious era or utopian dream stands another recalling industrial decline, environmental disaster, and the depredations of war.

This anthology provides a comprehensive survey of the contemporary ruin in cultural discourse, aesthetics, and artistic practice. It examines the development of ruin aesthetics from the early modern era to the present; the ruin as a privileged emblem of modernity's decline; the relic as a portal onto the political history of the recent past; the destruction and decline of cities and landscapes, with the emergence of "non-places" and "drosscape"; the symbolism of the entropic and decayed in critical environmentalism; and the confusing temporalities of the ruin in recent art--its involution of timescales and perspectives as it addresses not just the past but the future.

SACRED INDIA

SACRED INDIA

$19.99
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India boasts the world's largest Islamic population, one of the world's oldest Jewish communities and is the birthplace of Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism and Jainism. From a humble postal worker performing puja for safe deliverance of a parcel to a former salesman who has renounced material life and set off on the path of self-realization, religion suffuses every aspect of life in India. This book explores the presence of the divine in the mundane, through photography and personal stories.
SECRET LIFE

SECRET LIFE

By: Dali, Salvador
$29.95
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Salvador Dali's first volume of autobiography, completed in 1941, comprises one of modern art's most revelatory -- and revolutionary -- literary documents. Encompassing Dala-'s birth, childhood and adolescence, during which we learn of the crucial events and influences which moulded his unique perspectives on life, art, sexuality and philosophy, THE SECRET LIFE goes on the record the artist's meteoric ascendency to global renown -- starting with the Surrealist movement in 1920s Paris, and culminating in his conquest of America in the 1930s.
This new edition of THE SECRET LIFE is updated, corrected and fully illustrated, with over 30 images in full colour and another 80 in black and white, including Dala-'s original line drawings. It also includes a chronology of the artist's life from 1904-1941.
SHAPE OF TIME: Remarks on the History of Things

SHAPE OF TIME: Remarks on the History of Things

By: Kubler, George
$17.00
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When it was first released in 1962, The Shape of Time presented a radically new approach to the study of art history. Drawing upon new insights in fields such as anthropology and linguistics, George Kubler replaced the notion of style as the basis for histories of art with the concept of historical sequence and continuous change across time. Kubler's classic work is now made available in a freshly designed edition.

"The Shape of Time is as relevant now as it was in 1962. This book, a sober, deeply introspective, and quietly thrilling meditation on the flow of time and space and the place of objects within a larger continuum, adumbrates so many of the critical and theoretical concerns of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. It is both appropriate and necessary that it re-appear in our consciousness at this time."--Edward J. Sullivan, New York University

This book will be of interest to all students of art history and to those concerned with the nature and theory of history in general. In a study of formal and symbolic durations the author presents a radically new approach to the problem of historical change. Using new ideas in anthropology and linguistics, he pursues such questions as the nature of time, the nature of change, and the meaning of invention. The result is a view of historical sequence aligned on continuous change more than upon the static notion of style--the usual basis for conventional histories of art.

"A carefully reasoned and brilliantly suggestive essay in defense of the view that the history of art can be the study of formal relationships, as against the view that it should concentrate on ideas of symbols or biography."--Harper's.

"It is a most important achievement, and I am sure that it will be studies for many years in many fields. I hope the book upsets people and makes them reformulate."--James Ackerman.

"In this brief and important essay, George Kubler questions the soundness of the stylistic basis of art historical studies. . . . The Shape of Time ably states a significant position on one of the most complex questions of modern art historical scholarship."--Virginia Quarterly Review.

SHODO: THE QUIET ART OF JAPANESE ZEN CALLIGRAPHY

SHODO: THE QUIET ART OF JAPANESE ZEN CALLIGRAPHY

By: Sato, Shozo
$34.95
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In this beautiful and extraordinary zen calligraphy book, Shozo Sato, an internationally recognized master of traditional Zen arts, teaches the art of Japanese calligraphy through the power and wisdom of Zen poetry.

Single-line Zen Buddhist koan aphorisms, or zengo, are one of the most common subjects for the traditional Japanese brush calligraphy known as shodo. Regarded as one of the key disciplines in fostering the focused, meditative state of mind so essential to Zen, shodo calligraphy is practiced regularly by all students of Zen Buddhism in Japan. After providing a brief history of Japanese calligraphy and its close relationship with the teachings of Zen Buddhism, Sato explains the necessary supplies and fundamental brushstroke skills that you'll need. He goes on to present thirty zengo, each featuring:

  • An example by a skilled Zen monk or master calligrapher
  • An explanation of the individual characters and the Zen koan as a whole
  • Step-by-step instructions on how to paint the phrase in a number of styles (Kaisho, Gyosho, Sosho)

  • A stunning volume on the intersection of Japanese aesthetics and Zen Buddhist thought, Shodo: The Quiet Art of Japanese Zen Calligraphy guides both beginning and advanced students to a deeper understanding of the unique brush painting art form of shodo calligraphy.

    Shodo calligraphy topics include:

  • The Art of Kanji
  • The Four Treasures of Shodo
  • Ideogram Zengo
  • Students of Shodo
  • SIGNS OF LIFE: Bio Art and Beyond

    SIGNS OF LIFE: Bio Art and Beyond

    $18.95
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    The theory and practice of bio art, a new art form that uses the materials and processes of biotechnology, with examples of work by such prominent artists as Eduardo Kac and Marc Quinn.

    Bio art is a new art form that has emerged from the cultural impact and increasing accessibility of contemporary biotechnology. Signs of Life is the first book to focus exclusively on art that uses biotechnology as its medium, defining and discussing the theoretical and historical implications of bio art and offering examples of work by prominent artists.

    Bio art manipulates the processes of life; in its most radical form, it invents or transforms living organisms. It is not representational; bio art is in vivo. (A celebrated example is Eduardo Kac's own GFP Bunny, centered on "Alba," the transgenic fluorescent green rabbit.) The creations of bio art become a part of evolution and, provided they are capable of reproduction, can last as long as life exists on earth. Thus, bio art raises unprecedented questions about the future of life, evolution, society, and art.

    The contributors to Signs of Life articulate the critical theory of bio art and document its fundamental works. The writers--who include such prominent scholars as Barbara Stafford, Eugene Thacker, and Dorothy Nelkin--consider the culture and aesthetics of biotechnology, the ethical and philosophical aspects of bio art, and biology in art history. The section devoted to artworks and artists includes George Gessert's Why I Breed Plants, Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr's Semi-Living Art, Marc Quinn's Genomic Portrait, and Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey's Chlorophyll.

    SIMPLY ZEN: Interiors, Gardens

    SIMPLY ZEN: Interiors, Gardens

    By: Scott, David
    $30.00
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    By introducing Zen ideals of simplicity, restraint, and appreciation of nature into Western design, this book helps turn our homes and gardens into havens of peace.
    SO MUCH LONGING IN SO LITTLE SPACE: THE ART OF EDVARD MUNCH

    SO MUCH LONGING IN SO LITTLE SPACE: THE ART OF EDVARD MUNCH

    By: Knausgaard, Karl Ove
    $17.00
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    A brilliant and personal examination by sensational and bestselling author Karl Ove Knausgaard of his Norwegian compatriot Edvard Munch, the famed artist best known for his iconic painting The Scream

    In So Much Longing in So Little Space, Karl Ove Knausgaard sets out to understand the enduring and awesome power of Edvard Munch's work by training his gaze on the landscapes that inspired Munch and speaking firsthand with other contemporary artists, including Anselm Kiefer, for whom Munch's legacy looms large. Bringing together art history, biography, and memoir, Knausgaard tells a passionate, freewheeling, and pensive story about not just one of history's most significant painters, but the very meaning of choosing the artist's life, as he himself has done. Including reproductions of some of Munch's most emotionally and psychologically intense works, chosen by Knausgaard, this utterly original and ardent work of criticism will delight and educate both experts and novices of literature and the visual arts alike.

    SOUND WRITING

    SOUND WRITING

    By: Wilke, Tobias
    $35.00
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    Considers the avant-garde rethinking of poetic language in terms of physical speech production.

    Avant-garde writers and artists of the twentieth century radically reconceived poetic language, appropriating scientific theories and techniques as they turned their attention to the physical process of spoken language. This modernist "sound writing" focused on the bodily production of speech, which it rendered in poetic, legible, graphic form.

    Modernist sound writing aims to capture the acoustic phenomenon of vocal articulation by graphic means. Tobias Wilke considers sound writing from its inception in nineteenth-century disciplines like physiology and experimental phonetics, following its role in the aesthetic practices of the interwar avant-garde and through to its reemergence in the postwar period. These projects work with the possibility of crossing over from the audible to the visible, from speech to notation, from body to trace. Employing various techniques and concepts, this search for new possibilities played a central role in the transformation of poetry into a site of radical linguistic experimentation. Considering the works of writers and artists--including Raoul Hausmann, Kurt Schwitters, Viktor Shklovsky, Hugo Ball, Charles Olson, and Marshall McLuhan--Wilke offers a fresh look at the history of the twentieth-century avant-garde.

    SOUNDS

    SOUNDS

    By: Kandinsky, Wassily
    $30.00
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    Wassily Kandisnsky's Sounds (Klänge), a volume of poems written and illustrated by the Russian artist and pioneer of abstract painting, was originally published in a limited edition in Munich in 1912. Although it was highly regarded by such artists as Hugo Ball and Jean Arp and acclaimed by the Zurich Dadaists, it remains one of the least known of Kandinsky's major writings. This is the first complete English translation of Kandinsky's text.
    Sounds is one of the earliest, most beautiful examples of a twentieth-century livre d'artiste and a rare instance of a book in which text and illustrations are the work of a single artist. The poems, alternately narrative and expressive in quality, are witty, simple in structure and vocabulary, and often startling in content. They repeatedly treat questions of space, color, physical design, and the act of seeing in a world that offers multiple and often contradictory possibilities to the viewer. The woodcuts range from early Jugendstil-inspired, representational designs to vignettes that are purely abstract in form.
    Published in the same year as his Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Sounds sheds a different but equally significant light on Kandinsky's movement toward abstraction--a movement that was to exercise a profound influence on future directions in art. In addition to the 38 poems and 56 woodcuts, which are arranged as in the original edition, the volume includes an introduction, the German text of the poems, and the artist's chronology.
    SOUNDS

    SOUNDS

    By: Kandinsky, Wassily
    $25.00
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    A dazzling yet little-known artist's book that distills the painter's seminal interests in abstraction and the unity of the arts

    Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) was a Russian pioneer of abstract painting whose work has influenced generations of artists. His Sounds (Klänge) of 1912 is one of the earliest, most beautiful examples of a 20th-century artist's book. Its "sound poems" are alternately narrative and expressive, witty and simple in form. They treat questions of space, color, physical design, and the act of seeing in a world that offers multiple and often contradictory possibilities. The woodcut illustrations that accompany the poems range from representational designs to abstract vignettes. In its fusion of image and word, Sounds epitomizes the artist's move toward abstraction and his aspiration to a synthesis of the arts. This updated edition of Sounds includes all of the book's poems in English and German and its woodcuts, twelve of which appear in color for greater fidelity to the original. The translator's introduction offers close formal examination of the poems and situates Sounds in the context of Kandinsky's oeuvre. Although it was prized by prominent 20th-century artists, Sounds is one of the least known of Kandinsky's major writings, and this remains the most authoritative English version.

    SOVEREIGN SELF

    SOVEREIGN SELF

    By: Kester, Grant H
    $27.95
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    In The Sovereign Self, Grant H. Kester examines the evolving discourse of aesthetic autonomy from its origins in the Enlightenment through avant-garde projects and movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Kester traces the idea of aesthetic autonomy--the sense that art should be autonomous from social forces while retaining the ability to reflect back critically on society--through Kant, Schiller, Hegel, Marx, and Adorno. Kester critiques the use of aesthetic autonomy as the basis for understanding the nature of art and the shifting relationship between art and revolutionary praxis. He shows that dominant discourses of aesthetic autonomy reproduce the very forms of bourgeois liberalism that autonomy discourse itself claims to challenge. Analyzing avant-garde art and political movements in Russia, India, Latin America, and elsewhere, Kester retheorizes the aesthetic beyond autonomy. Ultimately, Kester demonstrates that the question of aesthetic autonomy has ramifications that extend beyond art to encompass the nature of political transformation and forms of anticolonial resistance that challenge the Eurocentric concept of "Man," upon which the aesthetic itself often depends.
    STAR TREK POP-UPS

    STAR TREK POP-UPS

    $29.95
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    Star Trek is one of the most enduring franchises in Hollywood entertainment history. Part of the public consciousness since 1966, it spans the worlds of television and the movies and counts millions of fans worldwide. Now Star Trek Pop-Ups delivers seven iconic Star Trek moments in a new way--popping off the page in three dimensions. From the original USS Enterprise in flight to the dreaded Borg cube from The Next Generation and beyond, here is an unforgettable series of alien encounters and thrilling action scenes, featuring memorable moments from Deep Space Nine, Voyager and Enterprise. Bursting with energy and ingenuity, Star Trek Pop-Ups will capture the imaginations of fans young and old.
    STORY OF ARCHITECTURE

    STORY OF ARCHITECTURE

    By: Rybczynski, Witold
    $40.00
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    An inviting exploration of architecture across cultures and centuries by one of the field's eminent authors

    "Rybczynski's expansive account traces the influence of social, technological, and economic shifts on architecture across centuries."--New York Times Book Review

    "The finest architectural writer in our language."--Mark Alan Hewitt, New Criterion

    In this sweeping history, from the Stone Age to the present day, Witold Rybczynski shows how architectural ideals have been affected by technological, economic, and social changes--and by changes in taste. The host of examples ranges from places of worship such as Hagia Sophia and Brunelleschi's Duomo to living spaces such as the Katsura Imperial Villa and the Alhambra, national icons such as the Lincoln Memorial and the Sydney Opera House, and skyscrapers such as the Seagram Building and Beijing's CCTV headquarters. Rybczynski's narrative emphasizes the ways that buildings across time and space are united by the human desire for order, meaning, and beauty.

    This is the story of architecture's physical manifestation of the universal aspiration to celebrate, honor, and commemorate, and an exploration of the ways that each building is a unique product of patrons, architects, and builders. Firm in opinion, even-handed, and rooted in scholarship, this book will delight anyone interested in understanding the buildings they use, visit, and pass by each day.

    STORY OF ART WITHOUT MEN

    STORY OF ART WITHOUT MEN

    By: Hessel, Katy
    $45.00
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    How many women artists do you know? Who makes art history? Did women even work as artists before the twentieth century? And what is the Baroque anyway?

    Guided by Katy Hessel, art historian and founder of @thegreatwomenartists, discover the glittering paintings by Sofonisba Anguissola of the Renaissance, the radical work of Harriet Powers in the nineteenth-century United States and the artist who really invented the "readymade." Explore the Dutch Golden Age, the astonishing work of postwar artists in Latin America, and the women defining art in the 2020s. Have your sense of art history overturned and your eyes opened to many artforms often ignored or dismissed. From the Cornish coast to Manhattan, Nigeria to Japan, this is the history of art as it's never been told before.

    STORY OF BLACK

    STORY OF BLACK

    By: Harvey, John
    $24.00
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    As a color, black comes in no other shades: it is a single hue with no variation, one half of a dichotomy. But what it symbolizes envelops the entire spectrum of meaning--good and bad. The Story of Black travels back to the biblical and classical eras to explore the ambiguous relationship the world's cultures have had with this sometimes accursed color, examining how black has been used as a tool and a metaphor in a plethora of startling ways. John Harvey delves into the color's problematic association with race, observing how white Europeans exploited the negative associations people had with the color to enslave millions of black Africans. He then looks at the many figurative meanings of black--for instance, the Greek word melancholia, or black bile, which defines our dark moods, and the ancient Egyptians' use of black as the color of death, which led to it becoming the standard hue for funereal garb and the clothing of priests, churches, and cults. Considering the innate austerity and gravity of black, Harvey reveals how it also became the color of choice for the robes of merchants, lawyers, and monarchs before gaining popularity with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century dandies and with Goths and other subcultures today. Finally, he looks at how artists and designers have applied the color to their work, from the earliest cave paintings to Caravaggio, Rembrandt, and Rothko. Asking how a single color can at once embody death, evil, and glamour, The Story of Black unearths the secret behind black's continuing power to compel and divide us.
    STREET ART COOKBOOK: A GUIDE TO TECHNIQUES AND MATERIALS

    STREET ART COOKBOOK: A GUIDE TO TECHNIQUES AND MATERIALS

    By: Louie, Hop
    $19.95
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    The complete DIY bible of street art. Now in softcover. The Street Art Cookbook is a guide to the materials and techniques used within today's most creative and progressive art movement. In hundreds of pictures and illustrations and a dozen of interviews with some of the world's most famous artists, the authors show how street art is made. From stencils and stickers to laser tagging and guerrilla gardening, the Street Art Cookbook takes us on a trip around the world in the search of the tricks and trades of street artists. Posters, stickers, screen print, mosaic, sculptures. There is no limit to their imagination. Hundreds of books filled with pictures of street art have been published in the last few years, here, at last, is one that shows how the artists work. The Street Art Cookbook is filled with tips and examples of how to create your own stencil, sticker, poster or installation. These techniques can be used on all kinds of materials: textiles, glass, metal, concrete or wood and is suitable for everything from scrapbooking, designing clothes with motifs to outdoor use. The Street Art Cookbook gives a unique insight into the alternative art world and it's a rich source of inspiration for anyone interested in DIY yourself culture. Mark Jenkins, Swoon, Gould, WK Interact, Caper, Victor Marx, C215, Poch, Ron English and Knitta Please, are some of the artists featured in this book.
    SUBLIME

    SUBLIME

    $24.95
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    The continuing relevance and constant reinvention of the sublime--the transcendent, the awe- inspiring, the unpresentable--in art and culture since 1945.

    In the contemporary world, where technology, spectacle, and excess seem to eclipse nature, the individual, and society, what might be the characteristics of a contemporary sublime? If there is any consensus, it is in the idea that the sublime represents a testing of limits to the point at which fixities begin to fragment. This anthology examines how contemporary artists and theorists explore ideas of the sublime, in relation to the unpresentable, transcendence, terror, nature, technology, the uncanny, and altered states. Providing a philosophical and cultural context for discourse around the sublime in recent art, the book surveys the diverse and sometimes conflicting interpretations of the term as it has evolved from the writings of Longinus, Burke, and Kant to present-day writers and artists. The sublime underlies the nobility of Classicism, the awe of Romantic nature, and the terror of the Gothic. In the last half-century, the sublime has haunted postwar abstraction, returned from the repression of theoretical formalism, and has become a key term in critical discussions of human otherness and posthuman realms of nature and technology.

    Artists surveyed include
    Marina Abramovic[, Joseph Beuys, Tacita Dean, Walter De Maria, A K Dolven, Olafur Eliasson, Andreas Gursky, Jitka Hanzlová, Gary Hill, Susan Hiller, Shirazeh Houshiary, Anish Kapoor, Mike Kelley, Anselm Kiefer, Yves Klein, Richard Long, Barnett Newman, Tony Oursler, Cornelia Parker, Gerhard Richter, Doris Salcedo, Lorna Simpson, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Fred Tomaselli, James Turrell, Luc Tuymans, Bill Viola, Zhang HuanWriters include Marco Belpoliti, John Berger, Paul Crowther, Jacques Derrida, Okwui Enwezor, Jean Fisher, Barbara Claire Freeman, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Doreet LeVitte-Harten, Eleanor Hartney, Lynn M. Herbert, Luce Irigaray, Fredric Jameson, Lee Joon, Julia Kristeva, Jean-François Lyotard, Thomas McEvilley, Vijay Mishra, David Morgan, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Rancière, Gene Ray, Robert Rosenblum, Philip Shaw, Paul Virilio, Marina Warner, Thomas Weiskel, Slavoj Zizek

    SUZUKI SEIJUN AND POSTWAR JAPANESE CINEMA

    SUZUKI SEIJUN AND POSTWAR JAPANESE CINEMA

    By: Carroll, William
    $35.00
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    In 1968, Suzuki Seijun--a low-budget genre filmmaker known for movies including Branded to Kill, Tokyo Drifter, and Youth of the Beast--was unceremoniously fired by Nikkatsu Studios. Soon to be known as the "Suzuki Seijun Incident," his dismissal became a cause for leftist student protestors and a burgeoning group of cinephiles to rally around. His films rapidly emerged as central to debates over politics and aesthetics in Japanese cinema.

    William Carroll offers a new account of Suzuki's career that highlights the intersections of film theory, film production, cinephile culture, and politics in 1960s Japan. Carroll places Suzuki's work between two factions that claimed him as one of their own after 1968: the New Left and its politicized theoretical practice on one hand, and the apparently apolitical cinephiles and their formalist criticism on the other. He considers how both of these strands of film theory shed light on the distinctive qualities of Suzuki's films, and he explores how both Suzuki's works and unheralded Japanese film theorists offer new ways of understanding world cinema.

    This book presents both a major reinterpretation of Suzuki's work--which influenced directors such as John Woo, Jim Jarmusch, and Quentin Tarantino--and a new lens on postwar Japanese film culture and industry. Suzuki Seijun and Postwar Japanese Cinema also includes a complete production history of Suzuki's filmography along with never-before-discussed information about his unfinished film projects.

    TALES OF DAYS GONE BY: Woodcuts

    TALES OF DAYS GONE BY: Woodcuts

    $34.95
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    Tales of Days Gone by is a selection of 17 stories from Konjaku monogatari-shu, a 12th century collection of more than 1000 tales. The stories in this selection are divided into three categories: tales of women, tales of wonder and tales of Buddhism. They were chosen and visualized in dynamic woodcuts by Naoko Matsubara.
    TAROT AND DIVINATION CARDS: A VISUAL HISTORY

    TAROT AND DIVINATION CARDS: A VISUAL HISTORY

    By: Barbier, Laetitia
    $40.00
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    Laetitia Barbier's Tarot and Divination Cards is a stunning visual history of tarot.

    Used for self-exploration or divination, tarot has, for more than 500 years, been the most popular and accessible of all esoteric tools, looming large in today's mainstream culture. Why? Because the cards are inexpensive and easy to carry--a perfect traveling companion and, therefore, an invitation to a journey inward and out.

    Humans are drawn to playing games and feel driven to find meaning in the chaos of paradoxical signs. The vivid iconography of the "Arcanas" speak to us like no other language, moving us to the core, weaving through each card a universal story, a metaphorical pathway of transformation.

    This 400-page book presents--for the first time--a close look at 500 years of figurative card decks created or used for fortune telling, divinations, and oracle purposes, and explores, one card at the time, their iconographic roots at the crossroads of the medieval imaginarium, Western esoteric wisdom, folklore, and also contemporary art and pop culture. With hundreds of images drawn from more than 100 decks, rarely published and often forgotten in library archives, this book offers the first visual history of tarot.

    TEKSTURA: Russian Essays on Visual Culture

    TEKSTURA: Russian Essays on Visual Culture

    $12.95
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    Fascinated by the myth of the Russian avant-garde and scornful of official art, the West has been selective in its engagement with Russian visual culture. Yet how do contemporary Russian scholars and critics themselves approach the history of visual culture in the former Soviet Union?

    Taking its title from a Russian word that can refer to the 'texture" of life, painting, or writing, this anthology assembles thirteen key essays in art history and cultural theory by Russian-language writers. The essays erase boundaries between high and low, official and dissident, avant-garde and socialist realism, art and everyday life. Everything visual is deemed worthy of analysis, whether painting or propaganda banners, architecture or candy wrappers, mass celebrations or urban refuse.

    Most of the essays appear here in English for the first time. The editors have selected works of the past twenty years by philosophers, literary critics, film scholars, and art historians. Also included are influential earlier essays by Mikhail Bakhtin, V. N. Voloshinov, and Sergei Eisenstein. Compiled for general readers and specialists alike, "Tekstura" is a valuable resource for anyone interested in Russian and Soviet cultural history or in new theoretical approaches to the visual.

    TEMPUS FUGIT: Time Flies

    TEMPUS FUGIT: Time Flies

    By: Schall, Jane
    $49.95
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    Tempus Fugit: Time Flies examines time as both natural phenomenon and cultural construct, as manifested in works of art dating from 900 BCE to the present. Essays by 23 scholars explore the relativity of time.

    One section of the book looks closely at time as a dominant concern in 20th-century art. From Einsteinian spacetime, Bergsonian subjective duration, and Freudian non-linear dreamtime, with their respective impacts upon art of the early century, to late-century involvements with critical theory and time-based art (performance, video, and electronic intermedia), this century's reinvention of time and altered notions of history are considered.

    A second section explores the meanings of time embodied in works of art from 12 world cultures. Assyrian eternal time, Medieval European apocalyptic time, Indian cosmic, cyclical time, African ancestral time, Native American episodic temporality, and the complex calendrics of the Maya are among the subjects explored.

    The final section addresses time from the perspective of those charged with rescuing and protecting works of art from the ravages of time: art conservators. Both the creative time of the artist and the patina of time acquired by the art object are documented.

    TENRYUJI: LIFE AND SPIRIT OF A KYOTO GARDEN

    TENRYUJI: LIFE AND SPIRIT OF A KYOTO GARDEN

    By: Johnson, Norris Brock
    $39.95
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    This illustrated study of Tenryuji, ranked number one among the five great Zen temples of Kyoto and a major destination for tourism and worship, weaves together history, design, culture, and personal reflection to reveal the inner workings of a great spiritual institution. Looking at Tenryuji's present as a mirror to its past, and detailing the famous pond and rockwork composition by renowned designer Muso Soseki, Norris Brock Johnson presents the first full-length "biography" of a Zen temple garden.

    Norris Brock Johnson is a professor of anthropology at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and has been teaching and writing about Japanese temple gardens for over twenty years.