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Art & Architecture
A powerful collection of quotations from iconic artist and activist Yoko Ono
Ono-isms is a collection of provocative and powerful quotations from influential artist, musician, songwriter, and peace activist Yoko Ono, providing a richer understanding of this important cultural icon. Since emerging on the international art scene in the early 1960s, Ono has made profound contributions to visual and performance art, filmmaking, and music in work that often radically questions the division between art and the everyday. In recent years she has embraced social media to communicate her artistic and activist messages to even broader audiences around the world. Gathered from interviews, books, song lyrics, social media, and other sources, this nuanced book sheds new light on a complex and multifaceted artist who has shaped our culture in countless ways. The quotations--close to 300 in all--are arranged by subject: art, life, creativity, nature and the environment, love, music, women in society, and peace and social justice. The book also features an introduction and a chronology of Ono's life and work.
The "death of painting" and its subsequent resurrection in transformed conditions is a leitmotif of the modern era. Painting's postconceptual resurgence at the start of the 1980s began a dramatic expansion of its field. If painting remains important today, it is because its contradictions have been acknowledged as artists have radically diversified the components of its production and presentation. This first anthology to focus on painting's multiple discourses over the last three decades brings together key statements, dialogues, and debates that have moved the conversation beyond the modern/postmodern dialectic while redefining the conditions necessary for an artwork to be described as "painting." The diversity of contemporary painting's meanings and practices encompasses the randomness and eclecticism associated with Web-based creation. Although for many the presence of paint endures, others have argued for painting to be classed not as a material but as a philosophical category. Compiled by a leading critic of painting who actively participated in these conversations while also teaching young artists in the studio classroom, this collection ranges widely, to reflect the diversity of ways in which painting continues to be investigated and evaluated in studios, exhibition spaces, and the marketplace of ideas. These writings, statements, and interviews reflect ongoing debates and reignite questions for an as yet unimagined future of painting.
Before reaching the tender age of 30, Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564) had already sculpted Pietà and David, two of the most famous sculptures in the entire history of art. As a sculptor, painter, draftsman, and architect, the achievements of this Italian master are unique--no artist before or after him has ever produced such a vast, multifaceted, and wide-ranging oeuvre.
This fresh TASCHEN edition traces Michelangelo's ascent to the cultural elite of the Renaissance. Ten richly illustrated chapters cover the artist's paintings, sculptures, and architecture, including a close analysis of the artist's tour de force frescoes in the Sistine Chapel.Full-page reproductions and enlarged details allow readers to appreciate the finest details in the artist's repertoire, while the book's biographical essay considers Michelangelo's more personal traits and circumstances, such as his solitary nature, his thirst for money and commissions, his immense wealth, and his skill as a property investor.
About the series
Bibliotheca Universalis -- Compact cultural companions celebrating the eclectic TASCHEN universe!
From the summer of 1870 to the spring of 1871, famously dubbed the "Terrible Year" by Victor Hugo, Paris and its people were besieged, starved, and forced into surrender by Germans--then imperiled again as radical republicans established a breakaway Commune, ultimately crushed by the French Army after bloody street battles and the burning of central Paris. As renowned art critic Sebastian Smee shows, it was against the backdrop of these tumultuous times that the Impressionist movement was born--in response to violence, civil war, and political intrigue.
In stirring and exceptionally vivid prose, Smee tells the story of those dramatic days through the eyes of great figures of Impressionism. Édouard Manet, Berthe Morisot, and Edgar Degas were trapped in Paris during the siege and deeply enmeshed in its politics. Others, including Pierre-August Renoir and Frédéric Bazille, joined regiments outside of the capital, while Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro fled the country just in time. In the aftermath, these artists developed a newfound sense of the fragility of life. That feeling for transience--reflected in Impressionism's emphasis on fugitive light, shifting seasons, glimpsed street scenes, and the impermanence of all things--became the movement's great contribution to the history of art.
At the heart of it all is a love story; that of Manet, by all accounts the father of Impressionism, and Morisot, the only woman to play a central role in the movement from the start. Smee poignantly depicts their complex relationship, their tangled effect on each other, and their great legacy, while bringing overdue attention to the woman at the heart of Impressionism.
Incisive and absorbing, Paris in Ruins captures the shifting passions and politics of the art world, revealing how the pressures of the siege and the chaos of the Commune had a profound impact on modern art, and how artistic genius can emerge from darkness and catastrophe.
Pearls on a String presents the arts of historical Islamic cultures by focusing on specific people and relationships among cultural tastemakers, especially painters, calligraphers, poets, and their patrons. Through a series of chapters, the book spotlights certain historical moments from across the Islamic world. Each chapter pivots around patrons and their social networks. These independent sections allow different voices and perspectives to emerge, enabling the reader to see that Islamic societies are not monolithic but made up of a tapestry of individuals with distinct and varying views. Pearls on a String pays particular attention to individuals from different sectors of society, giving voice to anonymous artists and translators, merchants, and women of the harem. Islamic historical sources reinforce the book's themes of writing in Islamic societies, artistic patronage, biographical traditions, and human connectivity.
Katherine E. Nash Gallery: September 13-December 10, 2022.
Picturing the True Form investigates the long-neglected visual culture of Daoism, China's primary indigenous religion, from the tenth through thirteenth centuries with references to both earlier and later times. In this richly illustrated book, Shih-Shan Susan Huang provides a comprehensive mapping of Daoist images in various media, including Dunhuang manuscripts, funerary artifacts, and paintings, as well as other charts, illustrations, and talismans preserved in the fifteenth-century Daoist Canon. True form (zhenxing), the key concept behind Daoist visuality, is not static, but entails an active journey of seeing underlying and secret phenomena.
This book's structure mirrors the two-part Daoist journey from inner to outer. Part I focuses on inner images associated with meditation and visualization practices for self-cultivation and longevity. Part II investigates the visual and material dimensions of Daoist ritual. Interwoven through these discussions is the idea that the inner and outer mirror each other and the boundary demarcating the two is fluid. Huang also reveals three central modes of Daoist symbolism--aniconic, immaterial, and ephemeral--and shows how Daoist image-making goes beyond the traditional dichotomy of text and image to incorporate writings in image design. It is these particular features that distinguish Daoist visual culture from its Buddhist counterpart.
Rick Fröberg was an accomplished artist and musician born in Southern California who spent most of his early creative years in San Diego before moving to New York, and then back to San Diego toward the end of his life. While juggling both of his creative outlets, he established a meaningful, urgent, vital, and powerful platform. Plenty for All: The Art of Rick Fröberg represents the many chapters and layers of his visual art practice. All of the different bodies of work he made are examined in detail--presenting the viewer with a well-rounded survey of his life's work, mostly in chronological order.
One of the most compelling and fascinating aspects of this volume is the physical progression of Fröberg's line work and brushstroke, and his eventual adaptation to digital means. His artwork was often featured on the record covers of his own bands, as well as other groups he met on the road, and much of his early work also appeared on posters, flyers, ads, skateboard graphics, logos, and T-shirt designs, before eventually progressing to illustrations in magazines, books, and newspapers. Fröberg's paintings, drawings, etchings, and prints were also shown at art exhibitions throughout his career.
Plenty for All is the first look at his visual artwork in book form. It will be of great interest across the globe to his many fans (he played in a range of popular bands, including Pitchfork, Drive like Jehu, Hot Snakes, and Obits). Fröberg's work has become very influential, and an inspiration to quite a large group of people in both the art and music worlds. He is sadly missed and mourned, but this volume will no doubt further his creative legacy. It includes short essays by curator Rich Jacobs and musician/artist Sohrab Habibion.
The rebel hero of Abstract Expressionism, Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) careened through his life like a firework across the American art landscape. Channeling ideas from sources as diverse as Picasso and Mexican surrealism, he rejected convention to develop his own way of seeing, interpreting, and expressing.
Pollock's most famous works are his drip paintings, where he dripped and poured household enamel paint over the canvas with a variety of instruments, from sticks to syringes, hardened brushes to broken bits of glass. The splattered results pulsate with energy, replacing the refinement of easel and brush with something altogether more immediate, vivid, and physical. To evade the viewer's search for figurative elements in his paintings, Pollock abandoned titles and identified each work with a neutral number only.
Notoriously reclusive and volatile, struggling with alcoholism, married to fellow Abstract Expressionist Lee Krasner, and killed in a car crash aged just 44, Pollock is as much a compelling celebrity icon as an artistic pioneer. This essential artist introduction explores both his work and his fame to shed light on masterpieces of the modernist story, and the making of a cultural icon.
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.
During the '30s and '40s, Hollywood produced a genre of madcap comedies that emphasized reuniting the central couple after divorce or separation. Their female protagonists were strong, independent, and sophisticated. Here, Stanley Cavell names this new genre of American film--"the comedy of remarriage"--and examines seven classic movies for their cinematic techniques and for such varied themes as feminism, liberty, and interdependence.
Included are Adam's Rib, The Awful Truth, Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday, It Happened One Night, The Lady Eve, and The Philadelphia Story.
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.
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.
The book about the transcendent cinema of Darren Aronofsky takes the reader on a journey through the selected filmography of this outstanding American director. A monograph devoted entirely to his extraordinary work, which among film experts and film audiences has both a group of devoted admirers and critics. A strong, even anarchist accent falls here on the type of film hero presented, living on the margins of society and consciously rejecting its normative structures. The films, as well as the literature to which the book refers, are an expression of a critical attitude towards symbolic violence and the imposition of creatively limiting cultural norms on the individual, requiring such ordering such and no other understanding and experiencing the surrounding world. An astute observer of Darren Aronofsky's work will notice the existence of metaphysical problems in it, sometimes directly directed towards religious issues. We can call this kind of cinema transcendent. This cinema is only seemingly pessimistic in its meaning. It is worth looking for mythical stories to try to hear and understand what they have to offer us. It is worth turning to transcendence and trying to express the inexpressible, also in the art of film, as does Darren Aronofsky, who wants to be a trustee of great mythical narratives. These features, so characteristic of the director, can be seen, to a greater or lesser extent, in all his films, especially those referred to in this monograph. It will be interesting for the reader who expects from contemporary cinema something more than unsophisticated entertainment and wants to go beyond its ludic dimension.
Published in conjunction with Lodz University Press.
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.
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:
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.