Art & Architecture

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.