2005-02-01,Peter Knight and Jonathan Long,Fakes and Forgeries,Hardback,9781904303404,39.99,"The possibility that works of art and literature might be forged and that identity might be faked has haunted the cultural imagination for centuries. That spectre seems to have returned with a vengeance recently, with a series of celebrated hoaxes and scandals ranging from the Alan Sokal hoax article in Social Text to Binjamin Wilkomirski’s “fake” Holocaust memoir. But as well as creating anxiety, the possibility of “faking it” has now been turned into entertainment.
Traditionally these activities have been dismissed as dangerous and immoral, but more recently some scholars have begun to speculate, for example, that all forms of national identity rely on forged myths of origin. Recent cultural theory has likewise called into question traditional notions of authenticity and originality in both personal identity and in works of art. Despite critical pronouncements of the death of the author and the substitution of the simulacrum for the original, however, making a distinction between the genuine and the fake continues to play a major role in our everyday understanding and evaluation of culture, law and politics. Consider, for example, the fiasco surrounding the “forged” Hitler diaries, law suits against auction houses for failing to detect forgeries in the art market, or the problem of plagiarism at universities. It still seems to matter that we can spot the difference, especially in the historical moment when we are capable of making copies that are indistinguishable—perhaps even better than—the original.
This collection of essays considers the moral, aesthetic and political questions that are raised by the long history and current prevalence of fakes and forgeries. The international team of contributors consider the issues thrown up by a wide range of examples, drawn from fields ranging from literature to art history. These case studies include little-known subjects such as Eddie Burrup, the Australian aboriginal artist who turned out to be an 81-year-old white woman, as well as new interpretations of familiar cases such as faked holocaust memoirs. The strength of the collection is that it brings together not only a wide range of cultural examples of fakes and forgeries from different historical periods, but also offers a wide variety of theoretical takes that will form a useful introduction and casebook on this growing field of inquiry.",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2005-06-01,Daniel Meyer-Dinkgrafe,Biographical Plays About Famous Artists,Hardback,9781904303473,29.99,"Since the late 1970s, more than 200 biographical plays about famous artists (composers, fine artists, poets, actors etc.) were written and staged in the United Kingdom. The book analyses the range of these plays, arguing that the dramatists often place the main artist character(s) in an adverse situation, inward (e.g., mental illness) or outward (a personal enemy, or an anonymous power, such as war). Against the background of such adverse forces, the artist characters tend come across as flawed human beings. At the same time, most plays take care to provide good insights into the artists’ genius and their artistic integrity in the face of the adversity. The book also addresses the question why there have been so many biographical plays about famous artists over the past twenty-five years, providing answers in the context of theatre history and developments across academic disciplines and society as a whole.
",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2005-06-01,"David Cunningham, Andrew Fisher and Sas May",Photography and Literature in the Twentieth Century,Hardback,9781904303466,39.99,"Photography and Literature in the Twentieth-Century offers an accessible and fresh approach to an object of interdisciplinary research that is currently receiving increased international attention. Providing a broad historical schema, and examining pivotal moments within it, the collection brings together a range of writers and practitioners who help to guide the reader through a historical cross-section of current work in this area. Unlike most existing studies, this volume considers both key literary figures, from Proust to Sebald, and photographic practitioners, from Heartfield to Sekula, in order to give a commanding overview of its subject that is both well-informed and often ground-breaking. With original and accessible essays by acknowledged experts in the field, this is a book that should be of interest not only to students and teachers in departments of literature and photography, but also to those in cultural studies and art history, as well as photographic artists.
","Although in the 20th century the relation between literature and photography was arguably as significant as literature’s relation to painting in the 19th century, over the past generation the discussion of photography’s multiple intersections and interactions with writing and writers have tended to narrow to a few overly canonised works. This volume reverses this situation through the diversity and originality of the essays it gathers together: it has the potential to reawaken a field that for too long has been allowed to remain dormant.
Norman Bryson, Professor of Art History, Theory and Criticism, University of California, San Diego, and author of Looking at the Overlooked.
From Proust to Sebald, photography has occupied a significant place in literature, and visa versa. This book makes an important contribution to engaging with the relationship between the photograph and the text.
Steve Edwards, Open University, and author of The Making of English Photography.
Discussion of literature and photography still tends to languish in the realms of image and text, rather than in the literary strategizing of photographers, or in the recurrent placing of the effects of the photographic act in twentieth-century fiction. Photography and Literature in the Twentieth Century remedies this. One of the most significant outcomes of the conjunction it generates is the realisation of how much the two are interrelated in the formation of modernism and after. The collection brings together work by some of the best emerging scholars and artists in the field. I highly recommend it.
John Roberts, University of Wolverhampton, and author of The Art of Interruption: Realism, Photography and the Everyday.
",Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2006-06-01,Shlomo Giora Shoham,"Art, Myth and Deviance",Hardback,9781904303886,34.99,"Myths have long been considered the prime linkage between nature and culture, but we hold that they are more than this. The mythogene, which is our conceptualization of a connecting structure, links subject and object, history and transcendence, but above all is the blueprint for creativity. The volume deals, therefore, with the innovative conception of the author as to the process of creativity. Van Gogh had a revelation as to how the whirling cypresses and dancing stars would look at night. These structures, which contain a complementarity between his experiences and longings, are then ingrained in the artistic medium. Since his artistic efforts were authentic, his ecstatic (in the Greek sense) state of mind, extricated itself from diachronic history and soared onto synchronic eternity. This is how we perceive his work as fresh, exhilarating and meaningful as if painted today; it is the communication within eternity of authentic art from artist to audience. The volume also presents a classification of types of artists as related to their art and presents and innovative theory as to the link between madness and creativity.",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2006-09-01,Æsa Sigurjónsdóttir and Ólafur Páll Jónsson,"Art, Ethics and Environment: A Free Inquiry Into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature",Hardback,9781847180391,34.99,"Nature has been a recurrent theme in arts and philosophy for several decades. Nature is experienced in variety of contexts; artists have been enacting with nature as phenomena, material, space, environment, or simply as a place or an idea. In philosophy this is evidenced by an increasing interest in environmental ethics and aesthetics, as well as in philosophy of biology and metaphysics.
In the 1960s, new affinities between art and nature developed and became among the characteristics of contemporary art. Environmental approaches became essential and artists were engaging the public closely with social and physical spaces. Generating processes rather than creating objects, both in nature as well as in the urban landscape, artists reintroduced art into nature and nature into art and opened up new ways of engaging environment, creating non-permanent artworks which produced a new understanding of creativity that following generations are still exploring. The distinction between art and nature became increasingly blurred at the same time as the ancient dichotomy of culture and nature became controversial.
With the rise of environmental ethics in the 1970s, philosophers began discussing nature as an independent source of moral values, rather than a mere stage for moral life deriving its value from relations among humans. It has both been suggested that nature might have independent moral value, much like persons are thought to have such value, or that nature can be an active participant in a morally virtuous life.
Both aesthetics of nature and environmental ethics have become established fields in contemporary philosophy with their distinct bibliography to draw on. But even if distinct, and properly so, these two new fields might be more closely related than often suggested. The aim of this collection is to bring together different trends in thinking about nature and value that are distinctive of these changing moods in art and philosophy and to juxtapose them with some other ways of thinking about these issues, such as economics and religion. The authors include Holmes Rolston III, Antje von Graevenitz, Roger Pouivet, Eric Palazzo and Emily Brady. The essays and artworks in this volume derive from the conference Nature in the Kingdom of Ends held in Selfoss, Iceland, on June 11th and 12th 2005.",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2006-11-01,Gregory Minissale,Images of Thought: Visuality in Islamic India 1550-1750,Hardback,9781847180735,34.99,"Images of Thought is an entirely new approach to understanding non-Western art. Supported by a wide reading in anthropology, theology and philosophy, it provides an intellectual context for reading the visual language of Indian and Persian miniature art. By decoding artistic conventions, and with searching visual analyses, the book attempts to transform our understanding of art as an illustration of history to art as a reflection of the intellect.
Images of Thought should be of interest to the general reader, students and scholars of art and critical theory, as it shows that one of the world’s richest painting traditions can offer important insights into issues of visual perception and intellectual production generally.",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2006-12-01,Robert Sheardy Jr.,Searching for America: Essays on Art and Architecture,Hardback,9781847180810,34.99,"The fourteen essays in this collection were drawn from papers presented at the annual conference of the American Culture Association in April of 2006. The widely ranging topics and diverse points of view are typical of papers showcased by this organization of educators, writers, cultural critics and graduate students. These essays each consider the pedagogical parameters by which the art of the United States is defined and, as we are a nation of many voices, they further represent the multicultural identities of America and its citizens. From traditional art historical analysis to post-modernist deconstruction, the authors represented herein explore paintings, prints, sculpture, and architectural objects, in the context of history, philosophy, aesthetics, and political points of view. The writers themselves represent multidisciplinary viewpoints, from art history to literature to architecture and social work. Their papers reflect current scholarship, speaking from the most up to date of pedagogies, and in voices which are both critical and analytical. They further speak for the American Culture Association whose mission it is to explore ""all manifestations of the cultures of the Americas.""
","""This unconventional and highly stimulating anthology on historical and contemporary topics in American art and architecture presents a series of polemical, provocative, and refreshing essays by a lineup of authors ranging from emerging scholars to established academics, social activists, artists, and architects. The range of topics is equally diverse, extending from nineteenth-century print culture to contemporary urban space, but all of the essays address crucial issues of American identity, as filtered through the works of individual artists, stamped upon the metropolitan landscape, or refracted through searing images of terror and trauma. Erudite yet at the same time engagingly readable, these lively and thought-provoking pieces seek ""America"" in places both familiar and strange, while illuminating art's vital, if often troubling, presence in American spaces past and present.""
—Sarah Burns, Professor of Art History, Indiana University, Author of Painting the Darks Side: Art and the Gothic Imagination in Nineteenth Century America
""In his search for essays on American art, editor Robert Sheardy, Jr has produced a collection that, like the field of American art history itself, contains a variety of approaches, here taken up by an equally diverse group of scholars drawn from the ranks of art and architectural historians, artists, architects, literary scholars, curators, journalists, and political activists, who hail from the U.S., Panama, Iran, and Japan. Some exploit the insights of philosophy and literary theory, bringing together Georges Bataille and Ana Mendieta, Omar Khayyám and Elihu Vedder, and Don DeLillo and Andy Warhol. Others ground their investigations in the social history of art, revealing the visual narratives of social activism in Chicago, Philadelphia, Brooklyn, and New Orleans. Still others look to urban studies, visual studies, feminist studies, and critical race theory, tracing scars in the urban landscape, the artistic influence of mid-19th century women’s magazines and mid-20th century art magazines, and the boundaries of whiteness in early 20th century portraiture. Written by both seasoned veterans and newcomers to the field, these essays add yet further information to our discussions of well-known American artists and architects—Elihu Vedder, Robert Henri, George Luks, Christo, Louis Kahn—while also introducing us to lesser known figures—Morris Topchevsky—and providing us a window on the rapidly evolving and expanding field of American art history.""
—Frances K. Pohl, Professor of Art History, Pomona College, Author of Framing America: A Social History of American Art
",Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2006-12-01,Julia Werts,Visualizing Rituals: Critical Analysis of Art and Ritual Practice,Hardback,9781847180766,39.99,"Diverse aspects of art—from its inception to its eventual display—have continuously been connected to rituals and vice versa, whether formally or informally. As the field of critical theory has expanded over the past several decades, becoming increasingly relevant to art historical discourse, new methods of understanding art in relation to the individual and society have played a significant role in the conceptualization of ritual practices. In addition, psychoanalytic theories of identity formation as well as ideas of the fragmented, post-modern subject have opened up new avenues for considering the role of rituals in modern society. Thus, the relationship between art and ritual is wide and varied and has become a dynamic field of critical inquiry.
The essays presented in this compilation examine various ways in which emerging scholars are negotiating the relationship between art and ritual. Drawing from numerous aspects of art historical, anthropological and theoretical discourses, the papers seek to address some of the questions that arise from these complex relationships and open up the possibility for new ways of defining both art and ritual. The essays range in scope from the architectural forms of temples from Ancient Greece to the ritualistic return to “blackness” in the art of Kahinde Wiley. Visualizing Rituals is a crucial project that creatively develops new ways of navigating the nexus between art and ritual practices.",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2007-01-01,Susan Cochrane,Art and Life in Melanesia,Hardback,9781847180889,39.99,"What represents Melanesian art today? Is there modern Melanesian art? Who are the artists? What are the subjects of their art? Art and Life in Melanesia is timely in its exploration of Melanesian artists and their voices, providing an important juncture for many in the region and beyond to take stock of what is happening in Melanesian art.
The thirteen chapters are linked essays premised around major cultural themes including Kastom, Christianity, Indigenisation and Globalisation, Markets, Festivals, Diasporas, Urban Culture and Politics. Each theme focuses on ideas, issues and some specific arts practices, drawing examples from a few localities. Not every country is addressed under each theme, an approach that provides the reader with substantive country-specific information. Research for this book was supported by the University of Queensland.
""Melanesia gets a lot of attention in Australia on matters political, economic and social under the tag of ‘failed states’ but there has been very little focus on the cultural side of things. Susan has been an ardent supporter and campaigner for arts in Melanesia and a book by her is a worthy publication supporting some of the quality things that are happening in the region.""
Dr Michael Mel
University of Goroka, PNG
""Art and Life in Melanesia is based on many years of research in the area and will be an extremely welcome and timely addition to the publishing on this subject.
Susan’s research and writing is of the highest quality and she has earned the respect of the field through her consistent work on contemporary Pacific arts, and this book is enhanced by the fact that she has the cooperation of many key players who assisted her with putting it together.""
Stephanie Britton
Executive Editor
Artlink
""Susan Cochrane’s knowledge of her area is well recognized and highly esteemed among her colleagues, and she is also capable of presenting information in a way that is immediate and engaging with the broadest of audiences. Her combination of stringent academic skills, passion for her subject matter and a high level of communication offer a combination which promises to make a first rate publication for the broad public as well as the academic and art worlds.""
Ass. Prof. Pat Hoffie
Queensland College of Art
Griffith University
","""Cochrane's books has many positive qualities, including excellent writing, abundant photos, impressive scope and a worthy ethical vision. Rather than dwelling in the aesthetic past, Cochrane foregrounds the agency, biographies, and creativity of living men and women...the book is unquestionably informative, useful, timely and moral.""
Eric K. Silverman, Wheelock College, Boston in Pacific Affairs: Volume 82, No. 3 - Fall 2009
",Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2007-02-01,Susan Cochrane and Max Quanchi,"Hunting the Collectors: Pacific Collections in Australian Museums, Art Galleries and Archives",Hardback,9781847180841,34.99,"This volume investigates Pacific collections held in Australian museums, art galleries and archives, and the diverse group of 19th and 20th century collectors responsible for their acquisition. The nineteen essays reveal varied personal and institutional motivations that eventually led to the conservation, preservation and exhibition in Australia of a remarkable archive of Pacific Island material objects, art and crafts, photographs and documents. Hunting the Collectors benchmarks the importance of Pacific Collections in Australia and is a timely contribution to the worldwide renaissance of interest in Oceanic arts and cultures. The essays suggest that the custodial role is not fixed and immutable but fluctuates with the perceived importance of the collection, which in turn fluctuates with the level of national interest in the Pacific neighbourhood. This cyclical rise and fall of Australian interest in the Pacific Islands means many of the valuable early collections in state and later national repositories and institutions have been rarely exhibited or published. But, as the authors note, enthusiastic museum anthropologists, curators, collection managers and university-based scholars across Australia, and worldwide, have persisted with research on material collected in the Pacific.
This volume is a very important one for anyone studying the art and material culture of the Pacific. It focuses on collections now in Australia. Even those well versed in museum collections from the Pacific will learn about many important but little-known collectors as well as better-known figures like the anthropologists F. E. Williams and Thomas Farrell, the husband of Queen Emma. This will be a treat for students and specialist alike.
—Professor Robert L. Welsch, University of Dartmouth
","“The books contributes greatly to the scholarship on collecting . . . Many of the essays show evidence of thorough archival research. We read fascinating historical anecdotes, especially from Melanesia; the many black and white photos enhance the volume and often illustrate poignantly the colonial character of these collections . . . Scholars of the Pacific interested in objects will undoubtedly read the book with interest.”
—Eric Kline Silverman, Wheelock College, Boston, USA in Pacific Affairs: Volume 82, No. 1, Spring 2009
“A valuable addition to published material on collections in Australians institutions.”
—Geoffrey Gray, The Journal of Pacific History
",Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2007-03-01,Sally Bayley and William May,From Self to Shelf: The Artist Under Construction,Hardback,9781847181374,34.99,"""From Self to Shelf is a marvellously rich and various exploration of the interplay between biographical and aesthetic selves, ranging from the great self-inventions of the Romantic poets, through the complexities of revelation and impersonality that characterise twentieth century art, and down to the knowing dramas of reticence and display that distinguish the work of so many leading contemporaries. It includes essays in literary criticism, chapters in the history of painting and of music, biographical accounts, and studies in popular culture, as well as reflections by eminent practitioners. The editors have assembled an outstanding group of contributors, with names both new and familiar, to produce a volume at once absorbing and surprising, warmly alive to the human stories it tells while remaining theoretically up-to-date, and creating a book that is altogether as engaging and thought-provoking as the masterpieces it illuminates.""
Seamus Perry.
Fellow and Tutor in English, Balliol College, Oxford.
","'Dr. Bayley is a highly respected tutor of English Literature at Balliol College Oxford, and I believe that this collection, emeerging from a conference she organised this year, will offer a stimulating addition to interdisciplinary studies, especially in the field of the visual arts and twentieth-century modernist literature.'
Dr. Susan Jones
Fellow and Tutor in English,
Balliol College Oxford
",Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2007-03-01,Marc Decimo,Marcel Duchamp and Eroticism,Hardback,9781847181183,39.99,"The eye, designed to admire, can never really open wide enough.
Curiously, while Marcel Duchamp judged eroticism to be a vital dynamic in his creation, his work has never really been viewed through that particular spy hole. The need to convene researchers from all over the world, each with their own lorgnette, spyglass or whatever, has made itself keenly felt. The challenge was to ""lift the veil""- and these spectators eagerly accepted.
They went through the work with a fine tooth comb (at the risk of coming away with no more than a few hairs), put their ideas to the test of the chocolate-grinder… and came up with reflections on DADA, Surrealism and its asides, the latest developments in art and life…
More than enough to prove that Duchamp, Sélavy…
","""Marc Decimo's compilation includes twenty research papers on Duchamp by scholars, artists and curators from a wide variety of specialisms and backgrounds as well as new voices to the discipline.
Many of the other authors will be immediately recognizable to the Duchamp scholar in particular, and even to the art historian in general, though an encouraging aspect is the inclusion of early career academics. The quality of this collection of essays is generally high and a number of papers demonstrate an exceptional handling of the subject and are therefore particularly worthy of mention.
Catriona McAra, Surrealism as Epistemology,Association of Art Historians 2011
",Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2007-03-01,Michael Hayes (poems) and Jean Ryan Hakizimana (paintings),“Survivor” – Representations of the “New Irish”: Dúchas Dóchasach,Hardback,9781847181343,29.99,"This book is a window on a new aspect of the Irish experience. It is one small thread in the multicultural tapestry that is Ireland today. The Irish emigrant experience of old is a fading memory but as the poems and paintings in this volume attest to, the experiences that are exile and renewal remain as perennial as human nature itself. We, who were once shoeless, now search bewildered for the second and third pair - so that we can tap the new rhythm and dance the new dance. I ndeireadh na dála, níl ach cine amháin ann agus sin an cine daonna.
",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2007-07-01,Robert Wilkinson,New Essays in Comparative Aesthetics,Hardback,9781847182227,34.99,"Comparative aesthetics is the branch of philosophy which compares the aesthetic concepts and practices of different cultures. The way in which the various cultures of the world conceive of the aesthetic dimension of life in general and art in particular is revelatory of profound attitudes and beliefs which themselves make up an important part of the culture in question.
This anthology consists of entirely new essays by some of the leading, internationally recognised scholars in the field. The subjects addressed include the influence of Upanişadic thought on the classic Indian tradition in aesthetics and the way in which that tradition continues to have relevance to issues discussed today; how Buddhist thought in general and Zen in particular shape aesthetic attitudes in Japanese culture; how Confucianism affected not only the morality but also the classical aesthetics of China; how different ideas of the self and of human nature affect artistic training and practice in different cultures; how feminism can draw inspiration from classic non-European lines of thought in the area of aesthetics, and how different attitudes to nature underpin a whole range of aesthetic beliefs and attitudes in western and eastern thought.
These ideas reveal both deep differences and deep similarities between east and west. No-one seeking to understand the cultures discussed in these essays can ignore their aesthetic dimension, which often holds the key to understanding the deepest motives which have formed them.",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2007-08-01,Celina Jeffery and Gregory Minissale,Global and Local Art Histories,Hardback,9781847182524,39.99,"There are now many books on postcolonial theory, yet relatively few of them gather together sustained, dynamic and insightful analyses of visuality, art and art history outside of hegemonic Euro-American themes and concerns. Global and Local Art Histories explores what it means to have a global and local experience of art. The 15 essays published here suggest ways of interpreting works of art from a broad range of cultural perspectives, many of them transcultural.
Here are voices contesting concepts of history and culture, evaluating and exploring global and local identities in a changing world. Because of the variety of different approaches and cultural perspectives that Global and Local Art Histories brings together, the book presents a unique opportunity to question what we mean by that dangerously globalising category: “the work of art” and “art history” exploring “g-local” approaches that challenge such falsely universalising rubrics.",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2007-08-01,Luís Urbano Afonso and Vítor Serrão,Out of the Stream: Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Mural Painting,Hardback,9781847182494,34.99,"The subject of this book arises from recent developments in the inventory, preservation and study of mural paintings from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, particularly those from what can be considered the periphery of Europe. The aim of this book is to demonstrate the vitality that the study of wall painting in peripheral regions can bring to the discipline of Art History. The articles collected in this book are overwhelmingly about wall paintings that would be hard pressed to be considered part of the master narrative of Art History. They are studies regarding regions and themes that are rarely present in the mainstream of the discipline, but their common thread is their focus on the functional dimension of mural paintings and on the complex interrelation between image, audience, social context and everyday life. From Denmark to Portugal, from graffiti to secular painting, from the orthodox monasteries of Moldavia to the noble residences of Tirol, from Giotto to anonymous and sometimes almost amateur painters, the studies gathered in this book place very distinct artistic realities side by side offering complementary perspectives and insights.
The book will make a valuable contribution to the literature on Medieval and Renaissance mural painting, combining theoretical essays with others more descriptive. As the eighteen studies collected in this book deal with paintings from a range of European regions, from Denmark to Portugal and Romania, the book will find its way in Europe and abroad, both in the field of art history and that of Medieval and Early Modern history. The wealth of plates and figures will make the book also accessible to a broad audience interested in the history of painting, architecture and cultural heritage.",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2007-09-01,"Reid Cooper, Luke Nicholson and Jean-François Bélisle",Shifting Borders,Hardback,9781847182821,34.99,"Shifting Borders brings together new research on visual culture by scholars located across North America. This compilation of essays explores the notion of borders in a range of domains including art history, architecture, art theory, video games, performance art, artistic creation, and photography. The authors seek to address contemporary concerns affecting larger society through the lens of visual culture. The world is becoming increasingly globalized, as nations and multilateral organizations advocate freer international trade, the sharing of technological and political ideas, and multiculturalism. Yet, despite a rhetorical attachment to the message of lower national barriers, there has been a concomitant rise in veiled borders. These barriers promise to maintain cultural exclusion and economic hegemony.
The essays in this volume share a desire to re-examine inherited knowledge systems, to redefine the terms of debate, and create spaces that more accurately reflect a just reality. While this is not the unique purview of Postmodern ethics, what is novel here is the willingness of the authors of these essays, and the artists they investigate, to identify with, dwell in, and expand upon the margins of their particular subject matter. The essays presented in Shifting Borders have the force to open up new forms and understandings of cultural difference and initiate new perspectives in and beyond their respective domains.
",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2007-10-01,Tara Hamling and Richard L. Williams,Art Re-formed: Re-assessing the Impact of the Reformation on the Visual Arts,Hardback,9781847183118,49.99,"This book fundamentally reassesses traditional understandings of the impact of the Reformation on the visual arts in Britain. It answers the surprising lack of a standard art-historical volume on the subject by bringing together the work of leading authorities in the fields of art history, Reformation history and literary studies, together with ground-breaking research by younger scholars. Combining a range of interdisciplinary approaches and perspectives the book presents a survey of post-Reformation visual imagery in Britain from the period 1550-1640.
The book overturns long-held assumptions that the Protestant prohibition of devotional images in churches extended to religious imagery in all contexts, including private houses. It does this by shifting its focus from iconoclasm, to the theme of “re-forming” which examines the many ways in which the visual arts were reshaped and adapted to meet the changing demands of post-Reformation society. Some pre-Reformation images were refashioned or re-contextualised, and traditional religious iconography could be transformed through an interaction with texts or even through the choice of materials. This theme is examined in the book through case-studies drawn from a wide range of media; from prints and paintings to plasterwork and the ephemera of funeral pageantry. The significance of the location of imagery is also emphasised through examples drawn from the formal spaces of churches or a town hall to the private spaces of private houses belonging to courtiers and non-elite members of society. Developments in Britain are related to the wider European context with chapters on the impact of the Reformation on visual representation in Germany and Poland. What emerges from this is a radically different conception of the impact of the Reformation as not simply and exclusively destructive but also as a dynamic and creative process of cultural transformation.
The volume includes a wealth of illustrations, many in colour, of little-known or understudied material from Britain and Northern Europe. It cuts across traditional boundaries made between ‘fine’ arts and ‘decorative’ arts, and between objects created for the court elite and those further down the social scale. The book not only provides a fundamental source of reference for art-historians and scholars of the Reformation, it opens up new areas of enquiry for the future.
“I believe this book will become a fundamental source of reference for historians and art historians alike. It comprehensively overturns the orthodoxy that religious imagery had no place in English culture from the latter part of the sixteenth century onwards. The book is also of great significance for the ways in which it places developments in England in a European context, with important contributions on the impact of the Reformation on modes of representation in Germany and Poland. Its importance is further demonstrated by the ways in which it offers a series of stimulating reflections on post-Reformation representation in a variety of media, ranging from plasterwork to funeral pageantry, and addresses issues of imagery in relation to text as well as to particular locations. It both effectively surveys the period from 1550 to 1640 and opens up new areas of enquiry for the future.”
Dr Susan Foister, National Gallery, London
“Art-Reformed is a well-conceived and timely collection containing essays by some of the leading figures in art history, literature and history. A work that rethinks our understanding of art and the production of images in the sixteenth century has been necessary for many years and Tara Hamling and Richard Williams’ excellent book finally provides us with this. Until now it has been possible to argue that the Reformation brought in its wake a suspicion of images that led to the development of portrait painting as the only way of producing art works. Art-Reformed explodes this reductive myth, showing how images were redeployed and re-used, how popular images proliferated after the Reformation, and how art in public spaces differed from that in domestic interiors. Every scholar working on the sixteenth century ought to read this collection, not just art historians, as it shows how hesitantly and tentatively the Reformation advanced, and how a historically nuanced and informed reading of images transforms our understanding of the culture of the period. Art-Reformed is not simply a fine collection of essays, it conveys all the excitement that pioneering scholarship should provide.”
Professor Andrew Hadfield, Head of Department, English Department and Director of the Centre for Early Modern Studies, The University of Sussex
“This book fills a crucial gap in relating religious reform to the visual arts in early modern Britain. It engages with the enduring assumption that in Calvinist Europe the old religious subject matter of painting and the visual arts was proscribed, and that the second generation of reformers in Britain embraced an ‘iconophobia’ in which images connected with religion were generally avoided and repudiated.
The editors have assembled an excellent team of contributors, including some of the foremost established authorities in the field, such as Margaret Aston and Karen Hearn, and younger scholars with important things to say, such as Tara Hamling and Helen Pierce. This is perhaps the most important conclusion to emerge from an excellent collection of essays which will have a considerable impact on the fields of art history and Reformation studies.”
Dr Richard Cust, Reader in Early Modern History, Centre for Reformation and Early Modern Studies, University of Birmingham
","""Art Re-Formed makes a very important start to a re-evaluation of English sixteenth-century visual culture.
Overall Art Re-Formed offers a valuable corrective to prevailing historical and art-historical orthodoxies.
Kevin Sarpe, Reformed Arts?, Association of Art Historians 2010
",Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2007-10-01,Edward H. Huijbens and Ólafur Páll Jónsson,"Sensi/able Spaces: Space, Art and the Environment Proceedings of the SPARTEN conference, Reykjavík, June 1st and 2nd, 2006",Hardback,9781847183231,39.99,"The book SENSI/ABLE SPACES focuses on the ways in which space, art and the environment interlace and interact, dealing with the perception and conception of spaces in the built as well as natural environment. The book brings together a wide range of academics, from the physical sciences, social sciences and humanities, as well as artists who have an interest in the way space is sensed, understood and reconfigured.
Spaces today are continually being reconstituted and reformulated in various ways, often relying on notions of what is sensible, narrowly defined by groups with an ideological agenda of some kind or vested economic interests. These sensible factors often obscure and ignore notions of the sensable-that which people perceive through the senses while being-in spaces.
Space is a topic equally of various academic fields, such as geography, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, physics, bilology, and many more. But space is also the subject of - or a frame for - any artist, whose work is neither academic, in any standard sense of the term, and yet heavily theoretical or speculative.
",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2007-11-01,"Barbara Bolt, Felicity Colman, Graham Jones, Ashley Woodward","Sensorium: Aesthetics, Art, Life",Hardback,9781847183347,39.99,"This book presents a timely reconfiguration of the relations between art, philosophy, ethics, and aesthetics. Through connection with a range of contemporary social and philosophical issues and movements, this collection of essays highlights the imperative of sensorial aesthetics. The book focuses on the radical philosophical approach to aesthetics enabled by the works of Jean-François Lyotard and Gilles Deleuze. From these philosophers an older meaning of aesthetic has been recalled. Before it indicated primarily the theory of art and beauty, “aesthetic” referred to the sensibility, the capacity to receive sensations. In summoning this “sensorial” meaning of aesthetics in their respective works, Lyotard, Deleuze, and other recent thinkers turn the philosophical theory of aesthetics away from the dominance of cognitivist and reception theories, and towards a thinking of aesthetics through considerations of the movements of matter, affect, and sensation.
This vital transformation of aesthetics in turn allows a reconfiguration of the relationship between the domains of art, aesthetics, and philosophy. If aesthetics focuses on sensation, rather than cognition, then artists, musicians, and philosophers alike appear not only as phenomenological and empirical thinkers, but as experimenters with the parameters of the sensible, able to extend our perceptual interface with the world. Rather than artists deferring to philosophers in regard to the meaning of their works, this new understanding of aesthetics suggests that philosophers ought to defer to artists, who are understood as inventers in the realm of sensibility.
",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2007-11-01,Jirí Flajšar and Zénó Vernyik,Words into Pictures: E. E. Cummings’ Art Across Borders,Hardback,9781847183354,34.99,"Words Into Pictures: E. E. Cummings’ Art Across Borders is a collection of ten new essays on the American poet and artist E. E. Cummings (1894-1962). Bringing together the verbal and the visual, two forms of art traditionally considered to be distinct and separate, the volume invites the reader to examine fields in Cummings studies that have been neglected or under-researched.
An artist who vigorously pursued painting and writing throughout his life, Cummings may be called the William Blake of American Modernism, a PoetAndPainter whose habitual genre-crossing renders his oeuvre a unique choice for multidisciplinary critical studies. The essays of this volume address the limits of the visual, linguistic, spatial, and political vison of the artist.
Contributors to this volume include established as well as junior Cummings scholars from the U.S. and Europe, giving Words Into Pictures an international and authoritative flavour.
",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2007-12-01,Kelly A. Wacker,Baroque Tendencies in Contemporary Art ,Hardback,9781847183873,34.99,"Baroque Tendencies in Contemporary Art is a collection of essays by an international cadre of scholars addressing current trends within the field of contemporary art and how artists and architects reflect upon past traditions and fold them into the present. Often referred to as the Neo-Baroque, scholarship on this topic first emerged in the 1980s with the publication of several notable studies in France (but not translated into English until the 1990s); in addition, a number of recent exhibitions have focused on contemporary responses to the Baroque. The Baroque and the Neo-Baroque are frequently defined as having a propensity for instability, seriality, reflexivity, fluidity, and spectacle. This is perhaps partly why, in the millennial period, there is so much interest in the Baroque—we are seeking ways to find parallels between the art of then and the art of our own diverse, pluralistic culture. This book provides context for how contemporary artists meet and deal with the Baroque both formally and conceptually. Among others, it provides discussions of the work of American artists John Currin, Jeff Koons, Frank Stella, Lisa Yuskavage; American architect, Frank Gehry; European artists Lucian Freud, Jenny Saville, Emilio Vedova; Latin American artists Monica Castillo, Raphael Cauduro, Yishai Judisman; and New Zealand artists, Richard Reddaway and Joanna Langford.
","
",Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2007-12-01,Karen Frostig and Kathy A. Halamka,"Blaze: Discourse on Art, Women and Feminism",Hardback,9781847183767,39.99,"How has feminism matured over the years?
What are the pressing agendas for today’s feminists working in the arts?
Blaze: Discourse on Art, Women, and Feminism, emerges as a navigational text, celebrating past victories while charting new directions for today’s second wave and third wave feminists. A feminist anthology, Blaze is comprised of feminist artists, art historians, critics, journalists, curators, interdisciplinary artists, and arts administrators of diverse backgrounds, living across the United States. The book grows out of the 2006 Annual National Women’s Caucus for Art (WCA) conference, held in Boston, Massachusetts.
Blaze features 15 detailed and well-documented feminist histories that narrate a number of pertinent strands of activism regarding feminist art, scholarship, and organizational development while exploring current crossroads. Conversations occur between myriad groups of women: second wave to third wave; third wave to second wave; second wave to second wave; third wave to women who do not identify themselves as feminists. The book addresses a number of timely issues related to representation, work, collaboration, environmental interventions, and social justice platforms.
Blaze: Discourse on Art, Women, and Feminism captures feminists arts professionals working together across differences. In a world filled with strife, it is this form of engagement that inspires continued activism.
For further information, please also see www.blazediscourse.com
","“BLAZE is a work of love and commitment that chronicles the breadth and depth of American feminist creative practice across generations, as it speculates on the position of women in society and manifests in the making of art.”
Carol Becker
Dean of the School of the Arts, Columbia University
Her latest book: Surpassing the Spectacle: Global Transformations and the Changing Politics of Art
""A fascinating potpourri of essays ranging from a succinct account of how to start your own excellent museum to art criticism and blogging, from past history of the WCA to the return of the nude in recent art. Everyone will find something valuable in this collection, to which many of the smartest minds writing about women and art have contributed.""
Ann Sutherland Harris
Professor of the History of Art and Architecture, University of Pittsburgh
First President of the Women’s Caucus for Art (WCA)
BLAZE contains a provocative and piercing analysis of contemporary feminist art, spanning “35 years of passionate fury, sacrifice, and camaraderie between women.” Its informed and intelligent essays, written by a diversity of voices, are mandatory reading for anyone interested in tracking the impact of the revolution which demolished male domination in the art world. The book usefully contributes to a wide range of subjects: expansion of the canon; increased exhibition opportunities for women; the rise of eco-feminism and collaborative methodologies; public art projects; art education; and the history of a still thriving national Women’s Caucus for Art. It successfully maps the complexities of several generations of shifting feminist agendas, and makes a valuable contribution to where things might be headed now.
Suzi Gablik
Has Modernism Failed? And The Reenchantment of Art
For more than 30 years, feminist artists, curators, critics, organizations, and institutions have transformed the visual arts. BLAZE: Discourse on Art, Women, and Feminism is a dynamic anthology of articles by a stunning collection of second and third wave American feminist art world participants. This outstanding volume documents the recent history of feminist art in America, providing a fascinating array of perspectives that reveal the struggles and triumphs of women in the arts. Co-editors Karen Frostig and Kathy Halamka have provided readers with multiple visions from some of the most respected figures in recent American cultural history. Artists, scholars, journalists, arts administrators, and anyone interested in the state of the arts will find BLAZE compelling and essential-all the more so as women artists continue their righteous quest for full dignity and equality in all fields of human endeavor.
Paul Von Blum
African American Studies and Art History, UCLA
This book is a must to understand the Feminist Art Movement and the significant role it has played and still does play in shaping contemporary art ideas. It does double duty by documenting the day-to-day history of the Feminist Art Movement as seen through the eyes of participants in the Women's Caucus for Art, providing information on the participating women, on the exhibitions and events that brought the Feminist Art Movement to the public, its goals, and growing pains, and at the same time, by presenting the theoretical and intellectual issues that gave rise to the movement and that are key to its impact. Very few books intermix documentation and theory. In doing so, the editors and authors enlighten readers in a way that a book focused only on one or the other cannot. The book also enlarges the discourse around the movement. Many books document the artists involved, but few give information about the art historians, curators, administrators, and institutions that were key to giving the movement the visibility and support necessary for it to make an impact. The footnotes and bibliographies attached to each chapter are a valuable resource, providing direction for the reader to explore the feminist movement further. Until now, the Women's Caucus for Art has remained under-documented and under-appreciated for its role in furthering the Feminist Art Movement and ensuring its place in the cultural record. This book remedies that oversight.
Judith K. Brodsky
Third President of the Women's Caucus for Art and past President of College Art Association
Distinguished Professor Emerita, Department of Visual Arts, Rutgers University and Founding Director, The Brodsky Center for Innovative Multiples. With Dr. Ferris Olin, she is the Founding Director of the Rutgers Institute for Women and Art, and co-facilitator of The Feminist Art Project, a national program to celebrate the achievements of the Feminist Art Movement
The breadth of subjects in BLAZE that are of interest to women’s studies faculty and students is impressive, such as feminist generations, ecofeminism, attention to mother-daughter art, rituals, mentoring, and the role of personal history. BLAZE will also be welcomed by women’s studies faculty who teach “women in the arts” courses, for whom the entire book will be of value. Faculty who teach introduction to women’s studies from a humanities (or even more interdisciplinary) perspective will find it much easier to incorporate the arts into their courses by using this text… BLAZE will fill many niches and stimulate many minds.
Phyllis Holman Weisbard
Distinguished Academic Librarian, University of Wisconsin System Women’s Studies Librarian
Editor of Feminist Collections: A quarterly of women's studies resources
I admire both the scope and ambition of this volume of feminist essays. It ranges from a lively and accurate historical account of the formative period of the 70’s allowing the reader to relive the challenges and camaraderie of those early days, to new topics and preoccupations such as eco-feminism and feminism in the digital era of blogs and anonymity. Nevertheless, I am struck by certain enduring traits. Our desire to promote the proactive and the empathetic is a hallmark of feminism, and feminist organizations now as then. Whatever the tensions and differences between first, second and third wave feminisms, there is a dynamic mix of view points in this volume which will be of great value to all its readers.
Ruth Weisberg, Dean, Roski School of Fine Arts, University of Southern California
BLAZE offers a multitude of feminist voices in the arts - from individual artists, to women who work collaboratively, to women who participated in the very birth of the feminist art movement. For this reason and many others, Blaze belongs on the bookshelf of anyone teaching contemporary art, women's history, and the emergence of women's organizations. Blaze also reminds us how important the Women's Caucus for the Arts has been both to individual careers and to the creation of a whole new phase of art-making.
Shula Reinharz
Jacob Potofosky Professor of Sociology
Founding Director, Hadassah-Brandeis Institute and Founding Director, Women's Studies Research Center, Brandeis University
",Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2007-12-01,"Colin Ripley, with Marco Polo and Arthur Wrigglesworth",In the Place of Sound: Architecture | Music | Acoustics,Hardback,9781847183750,34.99,"In early June 2006, a group of over one hundred artists and researchers met for a three-day conference in the Architecture Building at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada, to discuss—from as many different viewpoints as possible—the varying relationships between sound and space. This conference was part of soundaXis, a city-wide festival involving most of Toronto’s new music community and organised by the Toronto Coalition of New Music Presenters. Out of the lively discussions at this conference, two primary themes emerged: the fraught condition of the relationship between sound as space, and the problematic role of representation and its twin, translation, in any discussion of this relationship.
This book presents thirteen essays taken from the conference which address one, or both, of these primary themes. In addition, seven graphic essays have been included which present projects in which architects explicitly take on sound as a generating material in their designs.
The resulting chapters in the book provide a diverse and, hopefully, provocative collection of ideas and images. They are meant not so much as a comprehensive study of the sound|space nexus—such a study may not actually be possible—but as a place to begin the discussion.
",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2008-01-01,Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe,"Consciousness, Theatre, Literature and the Arts 2007",Hardback,9781847184184,44.99,"The essays collected in this volume were initially presented at the Second International Conference on Consciousness, Theatre, Literature and the Arts, held at the University of Wales Aberystwyth, May 5-7, 2007. The conference was organised on the basis of the success of its predecessor in 2005, and on the basis of the success of the Rodopi book series Consciousness, Literature and the Arts, which has to date seen six volumes in print, with another twenty in press or in the process of being written. The conference also marked the launch of the second volume in the Intellect series Theatre and Consciousness with Michael Mangan’s Performing Dark Arts. The 2007 conference and the two book series highlight the continuing growth of interest within the interdisciplinary field of consciousness studies, and in the distinct disciplines of theatre studies, literary studies, film studies, fine arts and music in the relationship between the object of these disciplines and human consciousness.
",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2008-01-01,David Tuohy and Mícheál Ó hAodha,Postcolonial Artist: Johnny Doran and Irish Traveller Tradition,Hardback,9781847184412,24.99,"The postcolonial experience, as explored by the authors of this volume, focuses on the complex set of cultural and ethnographic processes and strategies of resistance that are the diasporic or migrant Irish experience. As a minority inhabiting the margins of society, Irish Travellers frequently found themselves excluded to the periphery of those unitary constructions of Irishness that accompanied the early decades of Irish independence. Straddling the Traveller/Settled divide, Johnny Doran, whose career reached its zenith in the 1940s, was one of the foremost Irish Traveller artists to have influenced the development of the Irish cultural and musical tradition. As a primarily non-literate group, Irish Travellers, have, in the postcolonial era at least, had very little input into the way in which they have been constructed or represented in the Irish cultural imaginary. This book is a small attempt to redress this imbalance. In exploring the Traveller historical experience through the musical oeuvre of one man, it outlines the importance of human agency, cultural hybridity and cross-cultural borrowing and appropriation within the context of the shifting power relations and images that defined postcolonial Ireland.
",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2008-01-01,Cynthia S. Colburn and Maura K. Heyn,Reading a Dynamic Canvas: Adornment in the Ancient Mediterranean World,Hardback,9781847184061,34.99,"Personal adornment, as an extension of the body, is a crucial component in social interaction. The active process of adorning the body can shape embodied identities, such as social status, ethnicity, gender, and age. As a result of its dynamic and performative nature, the body can often convey meaning more powerfully and convincingly than verbal communication. Yet adornment is not easily read and does not necessarily reflect actual lived experience. Rather, bodily adornment, and the performances that accompany it, can be manipulated to conceal or exaggerate reality, thus speaking more to identity discourse. The interpretation of such discourse must be grounded in an understanding of the context-specific and negotiable nature of adornment. The essays in this volume, which are united by their focus on material and visual evidence, cover a broad chronological and geographical span, from the ancient Near East to Roman Britain, and bring together innovative scholarly work on adornment by an international group of art historians and archaeologists. This attention to the archaeological evidence makes the volume a valuable resource, as those working with material or visual culture face unique methodological and theoretical challenges to the study of adornment.
","
The volume is well conceived, and the essays are of high quality. The issue of bodily adornment as markers of status and identity is timely. The marketing of edited volumes of essays is often a problem, but in this case I feel that the general coherence of the issues raised by the essays and the geographical and temporal spread will make the book attractive to classicists, anthropologists, and also scholars involved in women’s studies (the latter because, not surprisingly, a large number of ornaments, both jewelry and those on clothing appear on representations of or in graves or other contexts associated with women.) I can imagine that some faculty will use this volume, among other sources, in undergraduate and graduate courses.
- Prof. Susan Downey, UCLA
",Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2008-01-01,Christina Nielsen,To Inspire and Instruct: A History of Medieval Art in Midwestern Museums,Hardback,9781847183316,34.99,"This collection of essays, which derive from a symposium held at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2005, tells the story of how medieval art was collected by both individuals and institutions in the American Midwest. This book will appeal to both medievalists and scholars of nineteenth- and twentieth century American history. In addition, it will also appeal to scholars who are interested in museum studies and the history of collecting.
The essays in the first section, “Collecting and Displaying Medieval Art,” consider the formation of medieval art collections at influential cultural institutions in three of the most important centers of industry and culture in the Midwest: Chicago, Detroit and Cleveland. The second section, “Medieval Art as Inspiration and Education,” examines the motives of both private donors and museum professionals in forming collections and establishing period rooms and cloistered spaces at museums in Toledo, Kansas City, and St. Louis, among others. At the opposite end of the spectrum was a new trend in curatorial practice, beginning in the 1930s, that favored the dismantling of period rooms and espoused displaying historical works of art in more distinctly modern settings, a theme that pervades section three, “Medieval Art and Modernism.”
An essay on medieval art in Midwestern university art museums and another one that considers the impact of works from medieval collections in special exhibitions serve as a remarkable coda to the rest of the volume. Two appendices follow this, one that provides an overview of medieval art collections in Midwestern university museums and another which provides a biographical sketch of prominent dealers of medieval art from 1900-1950.
",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2008-02-01,"Kelly Donahue-Wallace, Laetitia La Follette and Andrea Pappas",Teaching Art History with New Technologies: Reflections and Case Studies,Hardback,9781847184542,24.99,"Digital images, Internet resources, presentation and social software, interactive animation, and other new technologies offer a host of new possibilities for art history instruction. Teaching Art History with New Technologies: Reflections and Case Studies assists faculty in negotiating the digital teaching terrain. The text documents the history of computer-mediated art history instruction in the last decade and provides an analysis of the increasing number of tools now at the disposal of art historians. It presents a series of reflections and case-studies by early adopters who have not just replaced older materials with new, but who have advanced the discipline's pedagogy in doing so. The essays illustrate how new technologies are changing the way art history is taught, summarize lessons learned, and identify challenges that remain. Given the transitional state of the field, with faculty ranging from the computer-phobic to the computer-savvy, these case studies represent a broad spectrum, from those that focus on the thoughtful integration of new technologies into traditional teaching to others that look beyond the familiar art history lecture or seminar format. They provide both practical suggestions and theoretical models for historians of art and visual culture interested in what computer-mediated applications have been successful in art history teaching and where such new approaches may be leading us.
","This collection of essays describes both current thinking and a series of recent, ambitious endeavors in the field of art history pedagogy. While individual essays on the topic of teaching art history with digital images and/or computer based technologies have been published over the last several years, this book is one of (if not the first) to take on the topic in an explicit and sustained manner.
Strengths of the volume are:
The collection explores substantial practices, ideas and anxieties in the field of art historical pedagogy that are understudied.
The case studies come from a wide range of institutions, tackle very real – and widespread – pedagogical dilemmas and are frank about both their successes and failures.
Questions about resources and funding are treated explicitly throughout.
Several different philosophical positions on art pedagogy are expressed; this diversity represents a good perspective into the field.
The volume successfully describes complex projects in accessible language; it will therefore reach readers who are technologically-savvy as well as those who are technologically-reticent.
In summary, because of its theme, approach and timeliness, this book has the potential to become a model for other work in the field.
Dana Leibsohn
Associate Professor, Art Department, Smith College, MA
",Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2008-05-01,Andrew Graciano,"Visualising the Unseen, Imagining the Unknown, Perfecting the Natural: Art and Science in the 18th and 19th Centuries",Hardback,9781847185426,34.99,"Throughout history, both art and science have been employed to visualise things unseen and to image/imagine things unknown as part of the quest to understand nature. In light of this, perhaps our contemporary tendency to see art and science as completely divergent, mutually exclusive fields of study with similarly distinct methodologies may be profitably re-examined. This volume brings together recent work by both junior and senior scholars treating the art/science connection in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art. The essays are individual case studies dealing with historical interconnections between drawing, painting, sculpture and book illustration and such diverse fields of science as botany, physics, geology, and evolutionary biology. As a whole, the book invites readers to question more generally: What is art's relationship to science and vice versa? At what points do the two disciplines intersect and/or complement one another? Can science directly inform artistic subjects? Is art a useful tool to focus a scientific lens on the past, to validate or challenge scientific theory, to inspire and encourage scientific inquiry? Can it be employed successfully as a means to visualise scientific ends? Do artists have the potential to create images and objects whose meanings surpass the laws of science and outlast its theories, whose functions are similarly universal and arguably more immediately accessible (legible) to the public? If art, like text and data charts, has the power to create, organise and disseminate information (knowledge), then why do we continue to privilege scientific research over artistic investigation? Would it not be more fruitful and humane to see them as more equitable modes of inquiry?
","“This volume brings together a remarkable group of essays addressing the connections between art and science in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and its content augurs well for the future development of this comparatively understudied discipline....These richly varied essays will undoubtedly be of great interest to art historians, historians of science and indeed to anyone seriously interested in the visualisation of the natural world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.”
-- Brian Allen, Director of the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
“This enlightening volume is a welcome step forward in investigating the complex intersections between art and science and ways in which both fields construct the natural through varying modes of knowledge production. By highlighting two key themes--the use of Linnean classification in botany in the eighteenth century and the impact of Darwinism around the turn of the twentieth century--this text takes the permeable and at least in terms of the “period eye” sometimes indistinguishable boundaries between art and science one step further. It offers case studies of how the specifics of political moments, cultural transitions, and artistic agendas affected ways in which individual artists and scientists both drew upon and reshaped the visual culture of science.”
--Barbara Larson, University of West Florida
",Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2008-06-01,Craig Greenman,Expression and Survival: An Aesthetic Approach to the Problem of Suicide,Hardback,9781847185969,24.99,"Philosophers know suicide primarily as an ethical problem. But in Expression and Survival, Craig Greenman argues that, when it comes to suicide, the standard ethical approach may do more harm than good. He develops instead an aesthetic approach, arguing that art–making it or experiencing it–can help a suicidal person survive.
Drawing on the work of philosophers and artists, as well as his own experiences, Greenman guides the reader through the landscape to which many suicidal people feel condemned. He traces the problem back to antagonism–we harm others and they harm us–and argues that art, broadly construed, can help us survive it. The result will be of interest to ethicists, aestheticians, social and political philosophers, therapists, and anyone who has ever struggled with suicide.
Also included in this volume are two essays, “Writing and Ambivalence” and “What Is Philosophy?”
","“This book is difficult, but also necessary: a sober reflection on how and why we cope with contingency, and how some of us cannot cope. It is no exaggeration to say that Greenman engages in a life or death struggle on every page. This is a moving work, and it adds to the possibilities of living on.”
Bill Martin, DePaul University, Author of Avant Rock: Experimental Music from the Beatles to Bjork
“Rejecting a conventional emphasis on the ethics of suicide, Greenman's Expression and Survival insists on an aesthetic approach. This deeply engaging book has a literary richness that cloaks a direct, clear, indeed piercing voice–always original, always interesting, and always challenging.”
Margaret Pabst Battin, University of Utah, Author of Ending Life: Ethics and the Way We Die
",Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2008-09-01,"David Cunningham, Andrew Fisher and Sas May",Photography and Literature in the Twentieth Century,Paperback,9781847187697,14.99,"Photography and Literature in the Twentieth-Century offers an accessible and fresh approach to an object of interdisciplinary research that is currently receiving increased international attention. Providing a broad historical schema, and examining pivotal moments within it, the collection brings together a range of writers and practitioners who help to guide the reader through a historical cross-section of current work in this area. Unlike most existing studies, this volume considers both key literary figures, from Proust to Sebald, and photographic practitioners, from Heartfield to Sekula, in order to give a commanding overview of its subject that is both well-informed and often ground-breaking. With original and accessible essays by acknowledged experts in the field, this is a book that should be of interest not only to students and teachers in departments of literature and photography, but also to those in cultural studies and art history, as well as photographic artists.
","Although in the 20th century the relation between literature and photography was arguably as significant as literature’s relation to painting in the 19th century, over the past generation the discussion of photography’s multiple intersections and interactions with writing and writers have tended to narrow to a few overly canonised works. This volume reverses this situation through the diversity and originality of the essays it gathers together: it has the potential to reawaken a field that for too long has been allowed to remain dormant.
—Norman Bryson, Professor of Art History, Theory and Criticism, University of California, San Diego, and author of Looking at the Overlooked.
From Proust to Sebald, photography has occupied a significant place in literature, and visa versa. This book makes an important contribution to engaging with the relationship between the photograph and the text.
—Steve Edwards, Open University, and author of The Making of English Photography.
Discussion of literature and photography still tends to languish in the realms of image and text, rather than in the literary strategizing of photographers, or in the recurrent placing of the effects of the photographic act in twentieth-century fiction. Photography and Literature in the Twentieth Century remedies this. One of the most significant outcomes of the conjunction it generates is the realisation of how much the two are interrelated in the formation of modernism and after. The collection brings together work by some of the best emerging scholars and artists in the field. I highly recommend it.
—John Roberts, University of Wolverhampton, and author of The Art of Interruption: Realism, Photography and the Everyday.
",Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2008-11-01,"Pieter M.A. Desmet, Jeroen van Erp and MariAnne Karlsson",Design and Emotion Moves,Hardback,978-1-4438-0016-7,39.99,"Design & Emotion Moves is an edited collection of papers presented at the 5th international Design and Emotion Conference in Gothenburg, Sweden. In spite of the wide variety of angles and approaches, all authors share the basic proposition that in order to understand users (or consumers) and their behaviour, one must understand the affective responses that are involved in the processes of buying, using, and owning products. The book should appeal to anyone interested in understanding emotions involved in human-product relationships, and in techniques that can help utilising these insights in design practice.
",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2008-11-01,Janet T. Marquardt,From Martyr to Monument: The Abbey of Cluny as Cultural Patrimony,Paperback,978-1-4438-0004-4,14.99,"After the French Revolution and the dissolution of the monastic orders, the great Abbey of Cluny in France was closed and the buildings were sold for materials. This process went on for nearly thirty years, just as a romantic appreciation of the medieval past was gaining popularity. Although the government was unable to halt most of the demolition work, one transept arm with a large and small tower was saved from ruin, along with a few small Gothic buildings and the eighteenth-century cloister. Efforts to preserve, repair, and reuse the remains waxed and waned for a century while historians wrote with regret about the abbey’s demise. In 1927, Kenneth Conant came from Harvard to excavate the site with American funding in order to prepare full-scale reconstructive drawings of the abbey. Conant’s vision of medieval Cluny entered the art-historical canon and placed Cluny at the center of debates about Romanesque architecture and sculptural decoration in Europe. This study follows the discursive history of the site while investigating the role of memory in the construction of the past and the development of the conception of heritage and patrimony in France.
FOREWORD BY GILES CONSTABLE AND AVANT-PROPOS D'ERIC PALAZZO
","""Marquardt’s account of the modern resurrections of medieval Cluny is a riveting one.""
""...her research urges a rethinking of the modern conceptual structures that guide our study and interpretation of medieval art and culture.""
""Marquardt meditat[es] on the complex ideas, histories, events, and touristic activities (including the performance of pageants) that contributed to the fashioning of Cluny as a “memory site.”
Kathryn L. Brush, University of Western Ontario (Canada)
""This book is a welcome addition to the growing corpus of scholarship on the modern reception of the medieval past in France and offers medievalists and modern historians alike considerable insight into the evocative after-life of the monastery of Cluny in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.""
Scott G. Bruce, University of Colorado at Boulder in EHR, cxxv.513; April 2010
",Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2008-11-01,Julia Werts,Visualizing Rituals: Critical Analysis of Art and Ritual Practice,Paperback,9781847189905,16.99,"Diverse aspects of art—from its inception to its eventual display—have continuously been connected to rituals and vice versa, whether formally or informally. As the field of critical theory has expanded over the past several decades, becoming increasingly relevant to art historical discourse, new methods of understanding art in relation to the individual and society have played a significant role in the conceptualization of ritual practices. In addition, psychoanalytic theories of identity formation as well as ideas of the fragmented, post-modern subject have opened up new avenues for considering the role of rituals in modern society. Thus, the relationship between art and ritual is wide and varied and has become a dynamic field of critical inquiry.
The essays presented in this compilation examine various ways in which emerging scholars are negotiating the relationship between art and ritual. Drawing from numerous aspects of art historical, anthropological and theoretical discourses, the papers seek to address some of the questions that arise from these complex relationships and open up the possibility for new ways of defining both art and ritual. The essays range in scope from the architectural forms of temples from Ancient Greece to the ritualistic return to “blackness” in the art of Kahinde Wiley. Visualizing Rituals is a crucial project that creatively develops new ways of navigating the nexus between art and ritual practices.
",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2009-01-01,J. D. Ragsdale,American Museums and the Persuasive Impulse: Architectural Form and Space as Social Influence,Hardback,978-1-4438-0130-0,34.99,"In American Museums and the Persuasive Impulse, Professor Ragsdale assesses American museums as means of visual persuasion. He demonstrates that museums, their contents, and their manners of display are as capable of influencing visitors as speeches or advertisements and that an awareness of their social influence provides an insight into the cultural roles of museums.
The book considers a diverse array of museums ranging from such national cultural icons as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Art Institute to such city museums as the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Los Angeles Country Museum of Art, and includes separate chapters on museums devoted to modern and contemporary art and to the specialized collections of individual connoisseurs. In addition to these primarily art museums, Professor Ragsdale assesses museums devoted to collections, such as the National Air and Space Museum, and to commemoration and remembrance, such as the National World War II Museum and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
American Museums and the Persuasive Impulse makes an important contribution to the theory of persuasion and to visual communication, art history, and museology. It utilizes a theory of visual signs based on the semiotic theory of C. S. Peirce. In so doing, it demonstrates that museum buildings, the art and other objects contained within them, and the spaces used for display may all be thought of in terms of means of social influence.
","""Ragsdale's study of museums does what many books on visual rhetoric have been unable to accomplish. It develops a rationale, a coherent method and a vocabulary for the study of visual rhetoric. The book is rich in information, anecdote and insight. Finally, the book is brilliantly and fluently written. ""
—Dr. Andrew A King, Professor of Communication Studies at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, LA.
",Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2009-01-01,Shirley Haines-Cooke,Frederick Kiesler: Lost in History; Art of This Century and The Modern Art Gallery,Hardback,978-1-4438-0126-3,39.99,"The material for this book has been taken from the 2006 thesis, Frederick Kiesler’s Art of This Century in New York, (1942-1947), in the Context of the Twentieth Century Art Museum.
The prime objective was to establish why so few people remember Art of This Century, which Kiesler designed for Peggy Guggenheim in 1942, and she ruthlessly closed in 1947.
A second aim was to investigate why there has been so research carried out on the Gallery, when it was acknowledged as a work of art in its own right at the time of opening. Indeed, in 2004 Thomas Krens, the Guggenheim Foundation’s director expressed concern that due to the lack of research it might slip into oblivion.
Such a statement raises questions as to why it has taken the Guggenheim Foundation over half a century to resurrect Art of This Century, in the form of two exhibitions held in Frankfurt and Venice, or instigate its own research.
The book opens with an historical account of the development of the modern art museum, as well as an overview of Kiesler’s life and multidisciplinary oeuvre. His association with selected, contemporary architectural theorists, and architects is looked at to establish whether they had any influence on his eclectic thinking. This is followed by a summary of Kiesler’s manifesto, On Correalism and Biotechnique: A Definition of a New Approach to Building Design, 1937-1939.
The main body of the work is a detailed description of Art of This Century. The notion that Kiesler’s innovative theories and designs might be better understood in a twenty-first century architectural context is finally explored.
""This book finally restores Frederick Kiesler to his rightful place in the history of twentieth century art and architecture. By a careful analysis of his sometimes fraught collaboration with the mercurial Peggy Guggenheim, Haines-Cooke uncovers the fascinating story of Kiesler’s ground-breaking new vision for the display of abstract art – rendered all the more poignant by its significant yet largely subliminal influence on much of the best in recent museum and gallery architecture.""
—Dr Jonathan Hale, University of Nottingham
","'This book successfully illuminates the endeavours of Frederick Kiesler - his life, manifestos and designs - and critically repositions him as an influential figure of the twentieth century. Through insightful exploration of 'Art of This Century', Haines-Cooke reveals his undoubted originality and almost prescient imagination.'
Dr Laura Hanks, Associate Professor, Institute of Architecture, University of Nottingham
",Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2009-01-01,Janet T. Marquardt and Alyce A. Jordan,Medieval Art and Architecture after the Middle Ages,Hardback,978-1-4438-0057-0,39.99,"Medieval Art and Architecture after the Middle Ages explores the endurance of and nostalgia for medieval monuments through their reception in later periods, specifically illuminating the myriad ways in which tangible and imaginary artifacts of the Middle Ages have served to articulate contemporary aspirations and anxieties. The essays in this interdisciplinary collection examine the afterlife of medieval works through their preservation, restoration, appropriation, and commodification in America, Great Britain, and across Europe from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. From the evocation of metaphors and tropes, to monumental projects of restoration and recreation—medieval visual culture has had a tremendous purchase in the construction of political, religious, and cultural practices of the Modern era. The authors assembled here engage a diverse spectrum of works, from Irish ruins and a former Florentine prison to French churches and American department stores, and an equally diverse array of media ranging from architecture and manuscripts to embroidery, monumental sculpture, and metalwork. With applications not only to the study of art and architecture, but also encompassing such varied fields as commerce, city planning, education, literature, collecting and exhibition design, this copiously illustrated anthology comprises a significant contribution to the study of medieval art and medievalism.
",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2009-02-01,"Birger Stichelbaut, Jean Bourgeois, Nicholas Saunders and Piet Chielens",Images of Conflict: Military Aerial Photography and Archaeology,Hardback,978-1-4438-0171-3,44.99,"Striking aerial views of war, and of the scarred landscapes of its aftermath are the focus of this unique and multidisciplinary book. For the first time, the history, significance, and technology of military aerial photography are brought together and explored by military historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists. This new approach opens the door to a modern reassessment of military aerial imagery, reveals the concepts and philosophies that guided their production and interpretation, and illustrates the complex interaction between humans and technology in creating and understanding the landscapes of conflict.
",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2009-02-01,Irena Avsenik Nabergoj with Jason Blake and Alenka Blake (translators),"Longing, Weakness and Temptation: From Myth to Artistic Creations",Hardback,978-1-4438-0185-0,44.99,"The themes of longing, weakness and temptation are relevant to every human and are interwoven with all fundamental ideals and values of the created, rational being. Temptation is all the more dramatic, the broader the perspective of recognition, the power of human longing and the sense of the difference between good and evil. This book is a summary of a study which compares and contrasts Slovenian and European literary works created under the influence of biblical source texts (Adam and Eve, Joseph from Egypt, Samson and Dalilah, etc.) and the works of other known and unknown origins (Homer’s Iliad, Goethe’s Faust, various versions of the myth of the Fair Vida, etc.). The ascribing of a text to a genre provides the interpreter of the text with a key intertextual framework and with a system of references to other books, other texts, other literary statements. The intertextual approach is obviously appropriate to the study of contents, symbols and forms of literary works. It shows how the source text continues to speak through the new work and how the new work forces new meanings from the source text. Later writers use important themes with a historical sense, when aiming toward a better understanding of authenticity of human existence.
","“This book is a first intertextual presentation of central texts of world literature containing the motif of longing, weakness and temptation. With a wealth of illuminating examples showing mutual interdependence between the Bible, folk literature and culture this volume is a major contribution to culture studies and will prove invaluable for any student of literature and culture.”
—Seizo Sekine, Professor of Biblical Studies & Ethics, Tokyo University, Japan
""This long-awaited study is a powerfully persuasive reading of most popular tales that appear in the Bible and folklore of many peoples and cultures, in many different eras, including ancient Egypt, Classical Greece, post-Biblical Jewish literature and Koran. The author touches on varying constructions of male-female relationships and explores interrelationships between longing, weakness and temptation of broad relevance in later European and especially in Mediterranean cultural area. Irena Avsenik Nabergoj has made a major contribution in helping us to understand the structures, genres, and formal strategies of widely scattered texts and to bring diverse and complex units into a meaningful whole. ""
—Jože Krašovec, Professor of Biblical Studies, University of Ljubljana, Slovenian and European Academies of Sciences and Arts
",Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2009-02-01,Birgit Mersmann and Alexandra Schneider,Transmission Image: Visual Translation and Cultural Agency,Hardback,978-1-4438-0005-1,34.99,"Transmission Image: Visual Translation and Cultural Agency offers a challenging survey of the burgeoning debate about visual culture in a global perspective.
Bringing together scholarly perspectives on places ranging from China and India to Nigeria, and from the Philippines and Syria to Germany, this volume proposes a truly global outlook on the study of visual culture in both a contemporary and an historical perspective. Addressing key theoretical issues, the contributors cover a wide range of art forms and visual media, highlighting the complex cultural codification of images and its impact on the study of visual culture and globalization.
","""In the enormous literature on worldwide practices of art, it can often seem that the greatest challenges are in describing the distances between visual cultures. But there is also a large distance between Anglo-American and German-language scholarship. The English-language project of postcolonial studies is not as developed in German, and conversely the careful, technical discussion of image reception is not as often found in Anglo-American writing. This book is a very welcome bridge, combining attention to the precise construction of images with discussion of identity, gender, and ethnicity.""
- Prof. James Elkins, Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism Department of Visual and Critical Studies School of the Art Institute of Chicago, USA
",Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2009-03-01,Karen Frostig and Kathy A. Halamka,"Blaze: Discourse on Art, Women and Feminism",Paperback,978-1-4438-0239-0,19.99,"How has feminism matured over the years?
What are the pressing agendas for today’s feminists working in the arts?
Blaze: Discourse on Art, Women, and Feminism, emerges as a navigational text, celebrating past victories while charting new directions for today’s second wave and third wave feminists. A feminist anthology, Blaze is comprised of feminist artists, art historians, critics, journalists, curators, interdisciplinary artists, and arts administrators of diverse backgrounds, living across the United States. The book grows out of the 2006 Annual National Women’s Caucus for Art (WCA) conference, held in Boston, Massachusetts.
Blaze features 15 detailed and well-documented feminist histories that narrate a number of pertinent strands of activism regarding feminist art, scholarship, and organizational development while exploring current crossroads. Conversations occur between myriad groups of women: second wave to third wave; third wave to second wave; second wave to second wave; third wave to women who do not identify themselves as feminists. The book addresses a number of timely issues related to representation, work, collaboration, environmental interventions, and social justice platforms.
Blaze: Discourse on Art, Women, and Feminism captures feminists arts professionals working together across differences. In a world filled with strife, it is this form of engagement that inspires continued activism.
For further information, please also see www.blazediscourse.com
","“BLAZE is a work of love and commitment that chronicles the breadth and depth of American feminist creative practice across generations, as it speculates on the position of women in society and manifests in the making of art.”
Carol Becker
Dean of the School of the Arts, Columbia University
Her latest book: Surpassing the Spectacle: Global Transformations and the Changing Politics of Art
""A fascinating potpourri of essays ranging from a succinct account of how to start your own excellent museum to art criticism and blogging, from past history of the WCA to the return of the nude in recent art. Everyone will find something valuable in this collection, to which many of the smartest minds writing about women and art have contributed.""
Ann Sutherland Harris
Professor of the History of Art and Architecture, University of Pittsburgh
First President of the Women’s Caucus for Art (WCA)
BLAZE contains a provocative and piercing analysis of contemporary feminist art, spanning “35 years of passionate fury, sacrifice, and camaraderie between women.” Its informed and intelligent essays, written by a diversity of voices, are mandatory reading for anyone interested in tracking the impact of the revolution which demolished male domination in the art world. The book usefully contributes to a wide range of subjects: expansion of the canon; increased exhibition opportunities for women; the rise of eco-feminism and collaborative methodologies; public art projects; art education; and the history of a still thriving national Women’s Caucus for Art. It successfully maps the complexities of several generations of shifting feminist agendas, and makes a valuable contribution to where things might be headed now.
Suzi Gablik
Has Modernism Failed? And The Reenchantment of Art
For more than 30 years, feminist artists, curators, critics, organizations, and institutions have transformed the visual arts. BLAZE: Discourse on Art, Women, and Feminism is a dynamic anthology of articles by a stunning collection of second and third wave American feminist art world participants. This outstanding volume documents the recent history of feminist art in America, providing a fascinating array of perspectives that reveal the struggles and triumphs of women in the arts. Co-editors Karen Frostig and Kathy Halamka have provided readers with multiple visions from some of the most respected figures in recent American cultural history. Artists, scholars, journalists, arts administrators, and anyone interested in the state of the arts will find BLAZE compelling and essential-all the more so as women artists continue their righteous quest for full dignity and equality in all fields of human endeavor.
Paul Von Blum
African American Studies and Art History, UCLA
This book is a must to understand the Feminist Art Movement and the significant role it has played and still does play in shaping contemporary art ideas. It does double duty by documenting the day-to-day history of the Feminist Art Movement as seen through the eyes of participants in the Women's Caucus for Art, providing information on the participating women, on the exhibitions and events that brought the Feminist Art Movement to the public, its goals, and growing pains, and at the same time, by presenting the theoretical and intellectual issues that gave rise to the movement and that are key to its impact. Very few books intermix documentation and theory. In doing so, the editors and authors enlighten readers in a way that a book focused only on one or the other cannot. The book also enlarges the discourse around the movement. Many books document the artists involved, but few give information about the art historians, curators, administrators, and institutions that were key to giving the movement the visibility and support necessary for it to make an impact. The footnotes and bibliographies attached to each chapter are a valuable resource, providing direction for the reader to explore the feminist movement further. Until now, the Women's Caucus for Art has remained under-documented and under-appreciated for its role in furthering the Feminist Art Movement and ensuring its place in the cultural record. This book remedies that oversight.
Judith K. Brodsky
Third President of the Women's Caucus for Art and past President of College Art Association
Distinguished Professor Emerita, Department of Visual Arts, Rutgers University and Founding Director, The Brodsky Center for Innovative Multiples. With Dr. Ferris Olin, she is the Founding Director of the Rutgers Institute for Women and Art, and co-facilitator of The Feminist Art Project, a national program to celebrate the achievements of the Feminist Art Movement
The breadth of subjects in BLAZE that are of interest to women’s studies faculty and students is impressive, such as feminist generations, ecofeminism, attention to mother-daughter art, rituals, mentoring, and the role of personal history. BLAZE will also be welcomed by women’s studies faculty who teach “women in the arts” courses, for whom the entire book will be of value. Faculty who teach introduction to women’s studies from a humanities (or even more interdisciplinary) perspective will find it much easier to incorporate the arts into their courses by using this text… BLAZE will fill many niches and stimulate many minds.
Phyllis Holman Weisbard
Distinguished Academic Librarian, University of Wisconsin System Women’s Studies Librarian
Editor of Feminist Collections: A quarterly of women's studies resources
I admire both the scope and ambition of this volume of feminist essays. It ranges from a lively and accurate historical account of the formative period of the 70’s allowing the reader to relive the challenges and camaraderie of those early days, to new topics and preoccupations such as eco-feminism and feminism in the digital era of blogs and anonymity. Nevertheless, I am struck by certain enduring traits. Our desire to promote the proactive and the empathetic is a hallmark of feminism, and feminist organizations now as then. Whatever the tensions and differences between first, second and third wave feminisms, there is a dynamic mix of view points in this volume which will be of great value to all its readers.
Ruth Weisberg, Dean, Roski School of Fine Arts, University of Southern California
BLAZE offers a multitude of feminist voices in the arts - from individual artists, to women who work collaboratively, to women who participated in the very birth of the feminist art movement. For this reason and many others, Blaze belongs on the bookshelf of anyone teaching contemporary art, women's history, and the emergence of women's organizations. Blaze also reminds us how important the Women's Caucus for the Arts has been both to individual careers and to the creation of a whole new phase of art-making.
Shula Reinharz
Jacob Potofosky Professor of Sociology
Founding Director, Hadassah-Brandeis Institute and Founding Director, Women's Studies Research Center, Brandeis University
",Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2009-03-01,Kathy Luethje,Healing with Art and Soul: Engaging One’s Self through Art Modalities,Hardback,978-1-4438-0209-3,49.99,"This fascinating collection of essays contains a variety of perspectives about the use of expressive arts for facilitating physical and emotional healing. Each author within brings a fresh approach and unique experiences to their writing.
Within these pages, you will find many ideas for the use of the arts and can learn how to engage the inner layers of the self that allow natural healing processes of the body and soul to flourish. When we fully engage an art modality, we find ourselves in a place in our consciousness that could be called 'healingspace,' where we feel ourselves whole and re-member ourselves as well.
From psychic trauma to physical illness, dis-ease of many kinds may be addressed through the various techniques discussed here. The tools offered by some authors are population specific and age appropriate, while several authors have given us the philosophical underpinnings for it all. While the authors within represent the grassroots voices of this new and rapidly expanding field, several of them have developed their own methods for using the arts, and have thriving practices.
Our approach is wholistic. Music, visual arts, movement, dance, and poetry are discussed as separate modalities and in combination with one another in a process or flow. The reader will engage in our experiences with these modalities as they have been lived. The complementary CD that accompanies this book will allows the listener to have a full sound experience of toning.
If a rationale is needed for establishing arts programs in medical centers or other health facilities, it can be found here. The book offers tools for self development and for group facilitation. Those wanting to expand their healing practice through the use of the arts will find the book to be a faithful guide. Anyone wishing for a fuller understanding of how the arts may work to facilitate healing will find much food for thought within these pages.
","""This collection offers a true contribution to the field of expressive arts. It represents an ambitious effort to showcase a wide array of practitioners who use creativity, imagination and the arts for healing, well-being and spiritual growth. Through essays, clinical vignettes and personal stories, many inspiring transformative experiecnes are shared. This book is an example of how the expressive arts are flowing into many diverse arenas of human care.""
-Sally Atkins, Ed.D., REAT, REACE, is Professor of Human Development and Psychological Counseling and Coordinator of Expressive Arts Therapy at Appalachian State University
""The book Healing with Art and Soul is a sumptuous collection of cutting edge thoughts on the idea that art participation in general is ‘healing,’ in and of itself, and that the process of ‘just doing it’ can bring us close to our ‘soul’ ..or as we might ..make us more soulful......Bravo and Brava!!
The editor, Rev. Luethje, is very passionate about what she has discovered in her own search and she has collected a large group of scholars, artist, and body centered artists who present their own very personal stories about this ancient idea which has seen a wonderful and needed rebirth since the 70’s.
I am very enthusiastic about what she is presenting in this engaging collection of essays, in that I also have personally experienced this ‘quality of healing,’ through our non-profit company Music For People, which offers all humans a chance to rediscover and accept our natural abilities to participate in the joy and celebration of music making without the modern calamity of negativity and exclusivity.
Music does heal! We all know this of course as ‘Listeners’ and by the fact that we all take part in daily rituals that are always accompanied by music. What our opportunity can be in this modern time is to accept that those of us who participate in creating ‘sound’ or ‘music’ increase the chance of a much deeper experience of what is infinite about our consciousness; these feelings and processes seem to lift us from our daily chore of life, and seem to create a certain kind of ‘Spirit’ if not ‘Spirituality’ that inspires our daily moment for ourselves and those who are in touch with our lives.""
-David Darling is the creator and founder of Music for People, and is known for his innovative performance style and his unconventional teaching methods. He is a prolific recording artist who has also collaborated with some of the most renowned musicians, dancers, and filmmakers of our time.
",Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2009-03-01,Gregory Minissale,Images of Thought: Visuality in Islamic India 1550-1750,Paperback,978-1-4438-0341-0,14.99,"With many illustrations and diagrams, Images of Thought provides easy to follow ways in which to read Indian, Persian and European paintings in terms of composition, proportion, colour symbolism and references to myth. Yet it also provides the intellectual contexts of Islamic cultures which inform our perceptions of how this visual language works. The author uses salient aspects of critical theory, anthropology and theology to sensitise viewers to the diversity and difference of cultural readings but never loses sight of the primacy of the visual and formal characteristics, gestures, geometrical structures and their cooperation with myths and theologemes. The book provides access to one of the world’s major visual traditions whose characteristics continue to inform and elucidate Indian and Islamic contemporary thought today. Images of Thought is a major, scholarly and provocative contribution not only to our understanding of cultural individuality but it offers important examples of how to engage in transcultural understanding and ways of seeing.
","“Images of Thought, centrally focused on Islamic art, is an integrated study of visuality in the art of India, Persia and Europe [...] Minissale's systematic interpretation of the visual language and subject matter of a Mughal miniature adds to our knowledge. His methodical description of the constituents of composition explained by the demarcated lines delineated on the figures reflects his remarkable understanding of the visual arts. Minissale has endeavoured to read the whole aesthetic experience of Persian and Mughal painting […] In explaining the visual language of the Mughal miniatures accommodating European signs and symbols Minissale goes further than the analyses of Richard Ettinghausen, Robert Skelton and Ebba Koch.”
—Som Prakash Verma, Journal of Islamic Studies, May 2008; Vol. 19, No. 2
",Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2009-05-01,V.G. Julie Rajan and Sanja Bahun-Radunović,From Word to Canvas: Appropriations of Myth in Women’s Aesthetic Production,Hardback,978-1-4438-0537-7,34.99,"From Word to Canvas: Appropriations of Myth in Women’s Aesthetic Production is an innovative collection of essays on female aesthetic production and myth, examining the ways in which women artists and writers utilize myth to negotiate their perceptions of feminine identity and feminine representation in an increasingly complex and culturally hybrid world. The featured essays and artistic contributions address a variety of contemporary female productions, including literature, performance, and visual art, in a markedly global scope. Representing a wide range of cultures, languages, geographic locales, and social contexts—from Jewish-Hindu and Kenyan-German, through Irish, Italian, American, to Vietnamese folktales—this diversified selection underscores the agency of “the feminine gaze” across a historical and geopolitical span, a gaze through which myths from various cultures and different cultural amalgams speak to us with force and with significance. The potency of this gaze is linked to the potential of myth simultaneously to encompass and compress history, and to offer the result as a backdrop against which the move from word to canvas—or from a mythic tale to its aesthetic appropriation—is performed in female aesthetic production.
","Definitions of myth that are period- and culture-specific argue that myths are eternal and unchanging, and such definitions often result in patriarchal epistemic violence being done to women. This volume of essays, which ranges across a number of world cultures, argues rather for a definition of myth that allows for poetic reinvention and transvaluation of mythic narratives in new generations and cultural imaginaries. Focusing on the contemporary feminist transformation of the mythic narratives of Cassandra, Medusa, Persephone and Demeter, Orpheus and Eurydice, the story of Beatrice Cenci, and Vietnamese traditional folk tales, the essays in this anthology demonstrate beautifully how contemporary women artists, in art, performance, and narrative, reconfigure mythic subtexts and challenge the structures of control inherent in them, to provide a feminist reflective gaze on the “landscape of myth.”
—Professor Janet A. Walker, Rutgers University
""Rajan and Bahun assemble a series of new explorations of the roles of women as actors in, interpreters for and rewriters of mythology. From Word to Canvas: Appropriations of Myth in Women’s Aesthetic Production presents explorations in writing and art that interrogate the power relationships between the female archetypes that are represented in both traditional and rewritten texts and the readers, observers and consumers of those mythic representations. Addressing a diverse range of mythical systems and cross-pollinated engagements, this anthology gives voice to some of the most urgent and current interpretations.""
—Dr. Helen Asquine Fazio, HA Fazio Associates
",Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2009-06-01,Sabina de Cavi,Architecture and Royal Presence: Domenico and Giulio Cesare Fontana in Spanish Naples (1592-1627),Hardback,978-1-4438-0180-5,59.99,"This book offers the first interpretation of Spanish architectural patronage in Naples during the reigns of Philip II and Philip III of Spain. The principal architecutral protagonists are Domenico Fontana (1543-1607) and his son Giulio Cesare (1580-1627), whose projects in Naples and Spain are set within the context of the cultural politics of the Monarquia Hispánica. Rather than being seen as resistant to habsburg imperialism, Naples (""the most loyal city"") actually participated, on a number of different levels, in the imperial program of the monarchy. While focusing on engineering and secular architecture, this book also takes related projects into account, such as commissions for major public sculptures and one fresco cycle, as well as the restoration and reuse of existing monuments and spaces. In this book, Sabina de Cavi discusses the evolution of Neapolitan architecture in ca. 1600 in relation to Rome, Palermo and Madrid, and in doing so casts light on the local process behind public commissions, and suggests a tentative explanation for the delayed flowering of Baroque architecture in Naples.
","""This is a provocative new study of Spanish architectural patronage in seventeenth century Naples. Focusing especially on the reign of Philip III and the Spanish Royal Palace, the book is as much about the rich historical context and political motives behind the building projects as it is about the buildings and architects themselves. It is almost certain to stir up some productive controversy among art historians and historians alike about the cultural legacy of Spanish influence in Naples and Italy more broadly.""
- Thomas Dandelet, Associate Professor of History, University of California, Berkeley
“Sabina de Cavi’s Architecture and Royal Presence: Domenico and Giulio Cesare Fontana in Spanish Naples (1592-1627) is an exemplary interdisciplinary study of the relationship between politics and art history. No finer or more vivid investigation exists of the role of the Spanish viceroyalty in Neapolitan architecture during its formative years. It offers an unparalleled examination of the viceregal claims to legitimacy, casts brilliant light on the relationship between architecture, etiquette and ceremonial, and makes clear the critical role played in these developments by the remarkable architecture of Domenico and Giulio Cesare Fontana.”
– David Freedberg, Pierre Matisse Professor of the History of Art, Columbia University
“The book offers the means for reflection on the role of Naples as a capital city. The subject of the research is not only the architecture and public spaces of Spanish Naples, but also the complex relationships between the Spanish court, vice-regal power and symbolic manifestations of sovereignty. Architectural space is determined by ceremonial exigencies and aims to project the image of a court desirous to celebrate its royal character.”
- Giovanni Muto, Università degli Studi FEderico II, Naples
“Sabina de Cavi’s examination of Neapolitan architecture in a viceregal context offers a fine consideration of cultural and political exchange between Spain and Italy. Her interpretation of Neapolitan monuments as state architecture rather than the projects of individual patrons is especially commendable, as it contributes to an evolving view of Spanish Habsburg imperial policy.”
- Jesús Escobar, Associate Professor, Department of Art History, Northwestern University, USA
""Architecture and Royal Presence examines in depth the history of Renaissance Naples under Habsburg rule. During the reign of Philip II and his Spanish Viceroys, Naples became a thriving city only second to Paris. This book offers a unique, lively view of Habsburg patronage, architecture and culture in Naples between 1560 and 1627.""
- Annemarie Jordan Gschwend, Independent Research Scholar
",Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2009-07-01,Amanda du Preez,Taking a Hard Look: Gender and Visual Culture,Hardback,978-1-4438-0982-5,39.99,"It is the aim of this edited volume to take a hard look at gender and visual culture. Gender and visual culture traverse in quite unique and often fascinating ways. On the one hand, gender functions as an interdisciplinary approach and critical tool to analyse and investigate several subject fields. As such, gender contributes to establishing a much-needed theoretical and functional platform spanning across many fields of enquiry from where gender practices can effectively be critiqued and ideally changed. On the other hand, the growing popularity and ubiquity of visual culture in a global context create the increasing need to reflect on and interrogate this phenomenon in an academic manner. Although Visual Culture Studies is an established subject at many Northern institutions, it is fairly new and relatively under-theorised in the South. In response to the growing need to investigate issues dealing with gender and visual culture and particularly how they creatively intersect, this selection of chapters (first presented as papers at the Taking a Hard Look: Gender and Visual Culture international conference, 20-21 June 2007, Institute for Gender and Women’s Studies, University of Pretoria, South Africa) are collected here in the hope to make a purposeful contribution to the burgeoning discourse. However, by addressing the creative intersection between gender and visual culture this edited volume is no novelty. In fact, the topic of gender and visual culture has been addressed over the past decade in several edited volumes. It is in this proud tradition that this book aims to take its place and to create a dialogue with international theory on gender and visual culture studies from a South perspective.
Key questions that are explored in the volume: What type of gendered visual culture is being presented and created in the South particularly (but not exclusively)? How is visual culture gendered? Can one refer to a move beyond gender in terms of a trans-gendered visual culture or are we still caught up in the same debilitating role models? How does one address the ever-increasing alienation between gender studies and the younger generation of students and scholars moving into higher education? What is the role of gender as interdisciplinary tool in the academic analysis of visual culture as it spans across several subjects, such as science, social work, technology, psychology, medicine, philosophy, sociology, engineering, communication, economics, religious studies, business management, anthropology, geography, historical studies, cultural and media studies, visual studies, art history and literature studies?
",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2009-08-01,John W. Maerhofer,"Rethinking the Vanguard: Aesthetic and Political Positions in the Modernist Debate, 1917-1962",Hardback,978-1-4438-1135-4,39.99,"How has political revolution figured into the development of avant-garde cultural production? Is the vanguard an antiquated concept or does its influence still resonate in the 21st century? Focusing closely on the convergence of aesthetics and politics that materialized in the early part of the twentieth century, this study offers a re-interpretation of the historical avant-garde from 1917 to 1962, a turbulent period in intellectual history which marked the apex, crisis, and decline of vanguardist authority. Moving from the impact of the Bolshevik Revolution to the anti-imperialist and decolonizing movements in the Third World, to the emergence of neo-vanguardism in the wake of postmodernity, this study opens the way for understanding the transformation of vanguardist cultural paradigms from a global perspective, the implications of which also reveal its relevance and application to the contemporary period.
","“With a strong and convincing political sense, Maerhofer presents the most interesting angles of the intertwining of avant-garde literary practice and events in the wider world.”
—Mary Ann Caws, Distnguished Professor of English, French, and Comparative Literature, Graduate School,CUNY
",Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2009-09-01,Tyrus Miller,"Time Images: Alternative Temporalities in Twentieth-Century Theory, Literature, and Art",Hardback,978-1-4438-1258-0,39.99,"The concept of “time-image,” this book argues, holds broad potential for the historical interpretation of cultural and aesthetic works. Many works that would not ordinarily be thought to be historical artifacts reveal their intrinsic historical character in light of this innovative interpretative concept.
The book’s first section,“Time-Images as Theory and Historiography,” considers alternative temporalities underlying historicizing theories and specific practices of history. Examples treated here include the notion of “retro-avantgardism,” works by the Frankfurt School on the interrelations of images and history, and Mass Observation’s dream documentation project.
The second section, “Time-Images in Modernist and Postmodernist Literature,” considers literary instances in which alternative notions of historical time are engaged. These include discussions of Wyndham Lewis and “cultural revolution,” Theodor Adorno’s reading of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s use of Antonio Gramsci in the practice of poetry and philology.
The third section, “Moving Images of Time,” discusses questions of cinema including children’s experience in films depicting traumatic historical events, the Quay Brothers’ animated adaptation of Bruno Schulz’s “Street of Crocodiles,” and Sergei Eisenstein’s and Charles Olson’s engagements in Mexico with pictographic representation, etymology, and archeological time.
","""In Time Images, Tyrus Miller concentrates upon a topic of major significance for contemporary philosophy, art theory, aesthetics and cultural and visual studies . . . . He promotes a novel form of historiography, in which the phenomenological conflation of imagination and the fullness of lived experience is recognized as a pivotal feature of mental and material events.""
--Aleš Erjavec, Institute of Philosophy, Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Art
In Time Images, Tyrus Miller extends his investigations of artistic modernism into both the hinterlands and the underworld of the movement. He surveys the responses to modernism in Eastern and Central Europe and the phenomena of the “retro-avant garde,” analyzes the dialectic between temporality and historicity in Benjamin and Adorno, excavates the dreamworld of totalitarian regimes, and establishes the complex relations obtaining between art and politics in such liminal characters as Wyndham Lewis, Bruno Schulz, and Samuel Beckett. Miller knows what he is talking about, but he avoids “precocious narcissistic closure” in the treatments of his subjects. This is an important contribution to the current revisionist tendency in modernist studies, both well-informed and cool.
—Hayden White, Emeritus, University Professor of Historical Studies, University of California
",Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2009-09-01,"Micheal Ó'hAodha, with Paul Harrison ",Traveller Friends,Hardback,978-1-4438-1257-3,39.99,"Long considered as “outsiders” or “strangers” in their own country, the Travellers depicted in this book were essential agents in their own depiction; they were the drivers for these cultural representations of their own community. Paul Harrison’s photos are beautiful because they are arresting. They show us a “hidden Ireland”, one that is often relegated to the societal margins. They haunt the viewer. They interrogate the notion of what it means to be human.
The late-twentieth century has witnessed a particular prominence assigned to the discourses of “difference” and “Otherness”, discourses which subvert hegemonically-defined representations and demystify what was once simple domination and reification. Representations of cultural minorities, whether literary or visual, play a profound role in how groups such as Irish Travellers are defined and treated by the non-Traveller community. Essentialist notions of migrants and other traditionally-nomadic peoples have a long and complex history. The history of Irish Traveller is no different. For hundreds of years they have en-numerated the projective function of the “Othering” process, a form of rejection and marginalisation that was the institutionalization of ideas and images.
",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2009-10-01,Luke White and Claire Pajaczkowska ,The Sublime Now,Hardback,978-1-4438-1302-0,49.99,"The Sublime has been considered an archaic concept the relevance of which was limited to eighteenth-century discourses on art, literary criticism and aesthetics. But it is becoming obvious that contemporary culture requires of us a response that is at once emotional, critical, powerful and meaningful, and recently the issue of the sublime has found its way back onto the critical agenda. This book asks a series of critical questions about this resurgence: What is the legacy of the discourse of the sublime for us today? In what ways has it acquired an added urgency in our new millennium? To what extent is this concept a useful or dangerous tool for the understanding of contemporary culture and history? How does the Sublime follow the Post Modern? To what uses can and should it be put? Why the Sublime now?
The editors have collected writings from many contemporary thinkers who bring the critical concept of the sublime into their discussions of contemporary cultures. Spanning philosophy, religion, ecology, politics, literature, avant-garde art, popular cinema, comic books, humour and digital cultures these essays consider the relevance of the sublime now. The authors make provocative readings of the original writings on the sublime, from Longinus, Burke, Kant and Nietzsche, to Freud, Lyotard, Derrida, Kristeva and others whilst bringing these writings to bear on today’s cultural issues.
",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2009-11-01,Natalie Adamson and Toby Norris,"Academics, Pompiers, Official Artists and the Arrière-garde: Defining Modern and Traditional in France, 1900-1960",Hardback,978-1-4438-1361-7,39.99,"Academics, Pompiers, Official Artists and the Arrière-garde: Defining Modern and Traditional in France, 1900-1960 is a collection of eight essays and a scholarly introduction by established and emerging scholars that challenges the continuing modernist slant of twentieth-century art history. The intention is not to perpetuate the vulgar opposition between avant-garde and reactionary art that characterized early-twentieth-century discourse and has marked much subsequent historical writing, but rather to investigate the complex relationship that both innovative and conservative artists had to the concept of tradition. How did artists and art critics conceive of tradition in relation to modernity? What was the role of an artist’s institutional positioning in determining expectations for his or her art? What light is thrown on the structure of the French art world by considering artists from abroad who worked in Paris? How did the war alter modernist and avant-garde paradigms and force crucial changes upon art production in the postwar period to 1960?
Particular attention is paid to the terms academic, pompier, official, and arrière-garde, originally used to situate the more conservative artists and works as second-rate or as the negative foil to the assumed radicalism of the avant-garde. By re-evaluating the work of artists pushed to the historical margins by such polemical descriptors, and by proposing alternative understandings of the aesthetic, economic, institutional and political factors that drive our ideas of avant-gardism and the modernist narrative in France, this collection of essays offers new routes to explore the terrain of twentieth-century art in France.
","“The dazzling torch bearers and trail blazers of 20th-century French art have so successfully monopolised the interest of historians, curators and critics that much of the broader intellectual, political and artistic topography of the period has been neglected. This fine collection of essays sets out to realign perceptions and open new perspectives by reaching beyond habitual lines of art-historical enquiry, reassessing the constantly shifting relationship between academic conventions and modernist innovation and focussing on the firefighters as well as the firestarters. This book counters reductive narratives and dismissive value systems in order to allow a more inclusive and holistic understanding of modern French art and artists and their operational environment.”
—Professor Peter Read, School of European Culture and Languages, University of Kent
",Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2009-11-01,Johan Callens,Crossings: David Mamet’s Work in Different Genres and Media,Hardback,978-1-4438-1355-6,39.99,"In a career spanning forty years the Chicago-born David Mamet (°1947) not only left his imprint on American drama with stage classics like American Buffalo, Glengarry Glen Ross and Oleanna, he systematically ventured into different genres and media as a way of experimenting, honing his craft, and broadening his audiences. The international scholars assembled in the present volume assess Mamet's career to date, focussing particularly on his forays into film, television, the novel and adaptation/translation, as well as on how his work fared in the hands of other artists, whether with serious or comic intentions. By measuring his works' diverse incarnations against each other, his more apodictic theorizings and essays, in the light of formal, institutional and historical determinants, this volume also contributes to a more general reflection on the intermedial and interdisciplinary practice of contemporary artists.
","""These essays bring the reader into a new space. Holding plays against their film adaptations renews one's understanding of genres in the process. As essayists collide with each other, they allow one to re-evaluate the interaction of Mamet, his plays, movies and television work—opening a challenging dialogue on writer and media.""
—David Kennedy Sauer, President of the David Mamet Society, author of David Mamet 's Oleanna (Continuum, 2008) and co-author with Janice A. Sauer of David Mamet: A Research and Production Sourcebook (Praeger, 2003).
""Crossings includes first-rate work by many of the best Mamet critics and scholars. Working to demonstrate the ever-changing terrain of this multi-talented and tireless artist, this collection is rich and often provocative, a valuable capsule of the career of Mamet to this point.""
—William W. Demastes, Louisiana State University, author of Spalding Gray's America (Limelight Editions, 2008)
",Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2009-12-01,Dena Shottenkirk,"Cover Up the Dirty Parts! Arts Funding, Fighting, and the First Amendment",Hardback,978-1-4438-1416-4,44.99,"Cover Up the Dirty Parts! takes on directly not only questions regarding the relationship between government funding for the arts and political censorship, but also deeper philosophical questions regarding liberty, the definition of art, the role of vague terms in language and law, and the epistemological role of both free expression and art itself. The issue of arts funding sits in the terrain of overlap between aesthetics and political philosophy and thus elicits aesthetic questions regarding the purpose of art and how art is defined, political questions regarding the nature of freedom and the role of government, and epistemological questions regarding the sources of knowledge and how it is we acquire it. As both an analytic philosopher and a practicing artist, Shottenkirk has incorporated the insights and sensitivities of both worlds in this analysis of why art is important and why freedom of expression within cultural development must be respected if we are to embrace a society able to provide the maximum degree of stimulation and safety for all its members. In this context, art is viewed as valuable both as a tool for knowledge acquisition for the individual and as a source of consensus building for the culture. As a device for consensus building, art has the role of practicing respect for differing opinions and balancing competing points of view as well as serving as self-expression for the individual.
Interviews with two artists, the first of whom is an American central to the funding debates of the last few decades and the second of whom is a contemporary Iranian writer imprisoned for her writing, combine with both narrative and philosophical analysis to give a complete picture of the issues and what is at stake for all of us who care not only about art but about freedom as well. While the distinction between censorship and non-funding is explored, also analyzed is the need for tolerance in the face of offense as well as respect for others’ rights and cultural differences.
",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2009-12-01,Gloria Casey,Eye View,Paperback,978-1-4438-1389-1,29.99,"Turn the camera on, point and click. So what has changed with regard to photography - everything or nothing? Contemporary commentators have suggested that due to the development of sophisticated technology and the digitization of the photographic image the ease with which it can now be manipulated, gives rise to a certain amount of distrust in the truthfulness of the images we see.
If we accept that the image has always had the capacity to be manipulated in some way, then should it not depend on the context in which the image is seen to determine whether the truthfulness of the representation is important or not? For example, if the image is to be used only in an artistic context, should it matter whether the image has been manipulated if it improves the overall aesthetic?
Could it be said that regardless of what medium is used - whether painting, print, or photography – that we have always had a desire to manipulate the image in some way? There has always been and there still exists a need to satisfy the demand for the “idealised” image. Painters and photographers have always recognised this and have sought ways in which to portray their subject or object in the best possible manner.
This was often achieved by the clever manipulation of a scene prior to or following the completion of an artwork. To satisfy the demand for the idealized image, reality could be manipulated by the artist to the extent that the image became a representation of an alternate or staged reality - if that was how the artist has chosen to work. The purpose of using some of the images selected for this work is to demonstrate and discuss how various artists may have manipulated the scene prior to, or following, the execution of the work.
The author’s method of working depends on what she wants to say with the photographic image she wishes to produce. If it’s an installation piece, she has taken some of the objects into a studio, removing them from their everyday context and photographing them against a white background. The objective here is to focus specifically on the object in question and to eliminate the ‘noise’ that sometimes intrudes into an image. To a certain extent this approach continues with the landscape/seascape photographs where the images are the result of zooming in on what is being photographed in an effort to capture the essence of the scene and allow it to create its own narrative. The resulting images act as a reminder of the things we tend to overlook in our busy lives or as an encouragement to look again or more closely at the world around us. An important point to note in this work is that irrespective of technology and its capacity for manipulation, a photograph is always waiting to be taken just outside your door; all you have to do is open it.
",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2009-12-01,Stuart Richmond and Celeste Snowber,Landscapes of Aesthetic Education,Hardback,978-1-4438-1396-9,39.99,"This book brings together two experienced educators from the fields of teacher education and arts education. The authors Richmond, a photographer, and Snowber, a dancer and poet, see aesthetic education as aiming to extend creativity, appreciation of the arts and nature, and the sensuous qualities of everyday life, to gain a more intimate understanding of the self and the world. They include poetic, narrative, philosophical, and artistic ways of writing to support a more embodied and holistic aesthetics. Landscapes of Aesthetic Education has significance for educators, scholars, students, and artists, and for all who would like to explore the connections between the arts, aesthetics, and transformation.
","“A stirring and important addition to the literature on the complexity of ‘appreciation’ and its relation to mentoring. This book opens windows on unexplored modes of creative collaboration with implications for art experiences and for lives in many classrooms.”
—Maxine Greene, Professor of Philosophy and Education Emeritus, Teachers College, Columbia University
“Let go and see, feel, move, and breathe as you encounter this remarkable book by two internationally known Canadian artist-educators: Stuart Richmond and Celeste Snowber. As a photographer and a dancer, they capture words, gestures, images and ideas in engaging, imaginative and deeply aesthetic ways in their book entitled Landscapes of Aesthetic Education. This book provides educators, artists, and students with numerous examples of personal narratives woven through theoretical engagements that create vast landscapes for learning through, with, about and for aesthetic education.”
—Rita L. Irwin, Associate Dean, Teacher Education, Professor, Art Education and Curriculum Studies, Faculty of Education, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC
“Reenchantment. That is what is wanted in education today, and that is what Snowber and Richmond’s book, Landscapes of Aesthetic Education, presents. This book is a beautifully conceived and written antidote to all that is disenchanting in contemporary education and is brimming with new ideas about making education an engaging, aesthetic experience for both students and teachers.”
—Peter London, Chancellor Professor Emeritus, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, Distinguished Fellow, NAEA
“Engaging and nuanced. This is a dream catcher of a book that casts and weaves a sensuous and lyrical spell for the reader and brings the aesthetic to the centre of educational feeling and knowing.”
—Carl Bagley PhD FRSA, Professor of Educational Sociology, Durham University, UK
“What sets this book apart from other books on aesthetics is a questioning, intuitive approach to the information that one suspects is also a deeply ingrained part of their teaching.”
—Sally Armstrong Gradle, Southern Illinois University in the International Journal of Education and the Arts, Vol. 10, Review 4 (April 2010)
",Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2009-12-01,J. Donald Ragsdale,"Western European Museums and Visual Persuasion: Art, Edifice, and Social Influence",Hardback,978-1-4438-1414-0,39.99,"Western European Museums and Visual Persuasion is an assessment of the visual persuasiveness of art museums. It demonstrates that museums are as capable of influence as speeches or advertisements are and that an awareness of this influence provides an insight into museums’ cultural roles.
The book considers a diverse array of institutions ranging from such national cultural icons as the Louvre, the British Museum, and the Prado to museums of partisan advocacy such as the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Tate Modern, and the Museo Nacional Centro Arte de Reina Sofia. The museums’ architectural significance, the importance of their collections, and the persuasiveness of their exhibition designs are the bases for assessment.
Western European Museums and Visual Persuasion is an important extension of theories of persuasion and visual communication to art, art history, and museology. It utilizes a theory of visual signs based on the semiotics of C. S. Peirce to demonstrate that museum buildings, the art within them, and the spaces used for display all may be thought as ways of influencing society.
",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2010-01-01,Ignacio López-Calvo,One World Periphery Reads the Other: Knowing the “Oriental” in the Americas and the Iberian Peninsula,Hardback,978-1-4438-1657-1,49.99,"While Said focused on the perceptions and stereotypes of the Near East “Oriental” in England, France and the United States, most of these essays study the decentering interplay between “peripheral” areas of the Third World, “semiperipheral” areas (Spain and Portugal since the second part of the seventeenth century), and marginalized social groups of the globe (Chicanos, African Americans, and Filipino Americans). They explore, for example, how China and the Far East in general are imagined and represented in Latin America and the Caribbean, or how ethnic minorities in the United States, such as Chicanos and African Americans, incorporate Filipino characters in their novels or creolize their music with Chinese influences. As the title of this book suggests, sometimes these “peripheral” areas and social groups talk back to the metropolitan centers of the former empires or look for their mediation, while others they avoid the interference of the First World or of hegemonic social groups altogether in order to address other “peripheral” peoples directly, thus creating rich “South-South” cross-cultural flows and exchanges.
The main difference between the imperialistic orientalism studied by Said and this other type of global cultural interaction is that while, in their engagement with the “Orient,” they may be reproducing certain imperialistic fantasies and mental structures, typically there is not an ethnocentric process of self-idealization or an attempt to demonstrate cultural, ontological, or racial superiority in “South-South” intellectual and cultural exchanges. This way to de-center or to “provincialize” Europe—pace Dipesh Chakrabarty—disrupts the traditional center-periphery dichotomy, bringing about multiple and interchangeable centers and peripheries, whose cultures interact with one another without the mediation of the European and North American metropolitan centers.
",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2010-01-01,Barbara Harbach and Diane Touliatos-Miles,"Women in the Arts: Eccentric Essays in Music, Visual Arts and Literature",Hardback,978-1-4438-1672-4,39.99,"Women in the Arts: Eccentric Essays in Music, Visual Arts, and Literature is a multi-disciplined celebration of past and present women creators. It marks a new departure in women’s studies, for it presents an interdisciplinary emphasis on the long-neglected area of women’s contributions to the various genres of the arts. Because of its unique historical approach, this pioneering collection of essays is useful in the areas of humanities and women’s studies as scholarly or pleasure readings.
Many “firsts” are included in this anthology. There are chapters by three prominent award-winning living composers that discuss the plight of women in this male-dominated field and the pioneering contemporary innovations to the discipline of musical composition that women have contributed. Another chapter brings to light pioneering research on the names and musical compositions of the earliest women composers. Another gives historical evidence of the earliest documented women’s conservatory and its performers in the United States located in the Moravian Young Ladies’ Seminary in Antebellum Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. The chapter on the MacDowell Colony reveals the history of how Marian MacDowell and her network of women’s music clubs helped to build the MacDowell Colony, a haven for artists that has continued through the twenty-first century. In the visual arts, one essay brings forth visual representations of women’s subjugation; another analyzes the photographic innovations and historical work of the woman pioneer, Nellie Ladd; the artistic contributions of two women of color, Josephine Baker and Frida Kahlo, are contrasted in a historical perspective; and a fascinating historical analyses of women and tattoos is presented. In the area of literature, the “Potters” are celebrated for pioneering the first serial hand-made magazine in 1904; another writer, discusses how she represents the role of motherhood in her female characters; and arguments are presented of how women poets give voice to spiritual feminism.
The thirteen diverse essays present original contributions to the disciplines of music, visual arts, and literature. By bringing forth this collection, it is hoped that there will be greater appreciation for the great diversity and range of women creators and the obstacles that they had to overcome. It is hoped that the essays will provide a historical documentation of the artistic voice of women that have until now been neglected.
",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2010-03-01,Françoise Besson,Mountains Figured and Disfigured in the English-Speaking World,Hardback,978-1-4438-1858-2,64.99,"The essays in this book, written by poets, novelists, mountain-climbers and academics from all over the world, evoke the representation of mountains in the English-speaking world as artists, writers, philosophers or mountain-climbers have represented them from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries.
From the Alps to the Pyrenees, from Mount Fuji to Mount Shasta, from the Himalayas to the Scottish Highlands, from Ikere in Nigeria to Devil's Tower in the United States, from Uluru in Australia to the most northern mountain of the Arctic, the shapes of the world speak the same language and tell the world its own story.
This interdisciplinary book, weaving together mountaineering, literature, philosophy, painting, cinema, ecology, history, palaeontology, geography, geopolitics, toponymy, law, religion and myth, invites people to an innovative reading of mountains: it reveals the close relationship existing between the shapes of the world and all forms of writing and, at the same time, it shows how the representations of the imagination may be instrumental in protecting the natural world.
The story told by the landscape inscribes a broken line in the shapes of the world, tearing the landscape like a fragile page whenever historical and political events (wars, mining or deforestation) leave scars in the landscape; but writers' and artists' representations of mountains constitute a path to awareness as they are not only a painting of beauty, but an image of our link to nature and a warning as well.
For centuries the image of the mountain has conveyed a symbolism telling the story of human thought, and this book shows to what extent literature and art play an essential part in our awareness of nature.
",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2010-03-01,Matthew Leone,"Shapes of Openness: Bakhtin, Lawrence, Laughter",Hardback,978-1-4438-1845-2,34.99,"Bakhtin and Lawrence share remarkable affinities. Bakhtinian dialogism is effectively a philosophy of potentiality, and Lawrence, or at least the Lawrence who authored Women in Love, may well be its High Priest. Both thinkers address questions of unity, newness, and the creative process. In this study they enter into complementary, genuinely Bakhinian dialogue, one in which “The word in language is half someone else’s.” One surprising result of this comparative examination is that some prevalent, deeply damaging biases about Lawrence are undermined: Is he a misogynist, or is he essentially, as he seems evidently to fear in Women in Love and rather consistently elsewhere, an over-compensating momma’s boy?
Here Bakhtinian theory is used as a means of testing pertinent criticism of Lawrence, and it provides a detailed conceptual basis for the readings of his fiction that follow. Is Women in Love a Bakhtinian ""open totality""? How is dialogic openness (as opposed to modernist indeterminacy) a ""form-shaping ideology"" of comic interrogation? Is Women in Love not only open-ended and unresolved, but also about its open-endedness or unfinalizability? In methods and meanings, in forming depths and explicit surfaces, this study explores the sum and substance of the novel’s dialogicality, and finds that the shape of its dialogic openness is interrogative.
Indeed, in Women in Love characters are identified by the self-shaping questions they ask: “’How much do you love me?’” asks Gudrun of Gerald, whose “’What do women want, at the bottom?’” like Ursula’s “’Do you really love me?’” have surprisingly revelatory depths. Birkin’s ludicrously encompassing and apocalyptic “Is our day of creative life finished?” not only expresses a fundamental authorial narrative intention, it simultaneously and self-correctively mocks itself for so doing, and does so in ways that may well suggest intuitive insights into the nature of Bakhtinian carnival laughter. In large measure, “character” in the Bakhtinian framework appropriated by this study is essentially a question personified, one that is made to walk and talk, so to speak, within the intersecting chronotopes or “time-space” zones of the novel. Such ambulatory interrogations then either connect or fail to do so with other characters-as-questions in “living conversation.”
Women in Love achieves a polyphonic or dialogic openness, one that Lawrence in his later fictions cannot always sustain. Subsequent to it, univocal, simplifying organizations in his work supervene. In his later fictions, dialogic process collapses into a stenographic report upon completed dialogue, over which the travel writer, the poet or the messianic martyr preside. There are, nevertheless, even in his later works, happy exceptions to this diminution of dialogic vitality. Lawrence’s consummate, dialogic openness of thought and expression can be discerned in the ambivalent laughter of The Captain's Doll, of St. Mawr, and of ""The Man Who Loved Islands."" In these retrospective variations on earlier themes, laughing openness of vision takes new, ""unfinalizable"" or “open” shapes.
","""Matthew Leone’s work is imaginative and original, an ambitious undertaking carried out with scholarly resourcefulness, critical energy, and tact. It is not only an intelligent and appropriate exercise but also obviously a very personal inquiry that is presented as a cogent intellectual experiment.""
- Professor David Hensley, Department of English, McGill University, Montreal, CA
",Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2010-04-01,Harry Eiss,Christ of the Coal Yards: A Critical Biography of Vincent van Gogh,Hardback,978-1-4438-1950-3,44.99,"No one heard the shot. No one ever found the gun.
It was Sunday, July 27, 1890. Vincent had recently finished Wheatfield with Crows, thought to be his final painting, one that he described as representing “vast fields of wheat beneath troubled skies,” one where he said in a letter he meant to send to Theo “I did not need to go out of my way to try to express cheerlessness and extreme loneliness.” The letter never got sent, but was found stuffed in his smock.
That morning, as usual, he walked out into the wheat fields with his easel, brushes, tubes of color and folding stool, perhaps hoping to reach his destination before the gang of local boys and girls were up and able to tease him and throw tomatoes. Le Crau, a wide plain of ripe grain, fields of citron, yellow, tan, and ochre, spread out beneath the bright Provencal sun. It’s safe to assume he heard the cicadas singing loudly, the swiping swishes of the farmers’ scythes already cutting through the rich wheat stalks, the gusts of wind whispering through the olive branches.
Driven and filled with energy for months, he had been quickly, with an assurance that overcame and perhaps even came from his doubts and struggles, putting his own dramatic visions on canvas after canvas. But today he did not go into the fields to paint, or, perhaps, in the beginning he did, perhaps in the morning that was his intention. No one will ever know.
He said he brought the revolver to frighten off the crows. Possibly that was his original intention when he included it with his lunch of bread and milk. In the end it‘s probably not relevant, except for the endless attempts to analyze him, to dig into his complex psyche, at once brilliant and yet impelled to self-destruction.
The Ravoux family were sitting on the terrace of their café when he returned, a bit concerned because he was late, but not overly so. When he finally appeared, his walk was more uneven than usual, and he held his hand over his stomach. “Monsieur Vincent,” Mrs. Ravoux said, “we were worried, we are glad to see you come. Has anything bad happened?”
“No, but I . . .” he left his reply unfinished as he passed inside.
Mr. Ravoux followed him upstairs, where he found him sitting on his bed, facing the wall.
“I wanted to kill myself.”
This book is a critical examination of Vincent van Gogh that offers insights into his life, his religious beliefs, his relationships with women, and, of course, his paintings. It includes discussions of his letters, and responds to many of the previous works about him, dispelling some of the myths that have no foundation and pointing out how many of the claims made about him and many of the popular beliefs that have grown up around him are at best guesswork. It explores psychological, neurological, theological, philosophical, aesthetic, and historical paradigms for comprehending his enigmatic and enticing personality.
",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2010-04-01,Outi Remes and Pam Skelton,Conspiracy Dwellings: Surveillance in Contemporary Art,Hardback,978-1-4438-1905-3,34.99,"Conspiracy Dwellings: Surveillance in Contemporary Art brings together nine illustrated essays of theorists and art practitioners about artworks made in the midst of conflict or from the position of commentary and critique in topics that span from the ‘70s to the present day. The contributors Anthony Downey, Christine Eyene, Liam Kelly, Verena Kyselka, Robert Knifton, Outi Remes, Maciej Ożóg, Paula Roush, Matthew Shaul and Pam Skelton consider the practical and theoretical status of surveillance from a variety of positions that include surveillance and its impact on urban space, architecture, citizenship and civil liberties. These essays also provide the opportunity to consider artworks that address conflict and resistance as a lived experience alongside strategies of counter-surveillance that propose new spectatorial positions, individual empowerment and entertainment. Today, in post 9/11 times of economic difficulties, political uncertainty and suspicion, the subject of patriotism, freedom and democratic rights are once again high on the agenda, raising questions such as where do we draw the line—how far does surveillance have to go before it worries us—and at what point is the citizen regarded as a threat to the state?
",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2010-05-01,Rosamaria Loretelli and Frank O’Gorman,Britain and Italy in the Long Eighteenth Century: Literary and Art Theories,Hardback,978-1-4438-1973-2,39.99,"The essays in this collection range across literature, aesthetics, music and art, and explore such themes as the dynamics of change in eighteenth-century aesthetics; time, modernity and the picturesque; the function of graphic ornaments in eighteenth-century texts; imaginary voyages as a literary genre; the genesis of children’s literature; the Italian opera and musical theory in Frances Burney’s novels; Italian and British art theories; and patterns of cultural transfers and of book circulation between Britain and Italy in the eighteenth century. Collectively they epitomise the concerns and approaches of scholars working on the long eighteenth century at this challenging and exciting time. In the absence of universally agreed, overarching interpretations of the cultural history of the long eighteenth century, these papers pave the way for the ultimate emergence of such explanations.
Authors discussed here include Margaret Cavendish, David Russen, Francis Hutcheson, Reverend Gilpin, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, Dugald Stewart, Dorothy Kilner, Frances Burney, Anna Gordon Brown, Saverio Bettinelli, Henry Ince Blundell, Francesco Algarotti, Ugo Foscolo and Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi.
",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2010-05-01,Susanne Anderson-Riedel,Creativity and Reproduction: Nineteenth Century Engraving and the Academy,Hardback,978-1-4438-1961-9,39.99,"The study investigates the engravers’ rise within the French academic system and demonstrates their success in transforming a reproductive medium into a creative and original art genre. In the nineteenth century, graphic artists developed an artistic language that was independent and on par with the original model that they reproduced.
The Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture welcomed graphic artists into its ranks in 1655. As talented reproductive artists were able to disseminate works of art produced at the Academy, engravers rose to occupy administrative positions at the compagnie in the eighteenth century. Their success notwithstanding, graphic artists remained unable to overcome the perception of being reproductive artisans rather than creative and original fine artists. The proof of their predicament was the continuous refusal of advanced artistic training for graphic artists within the French academic system.
The Section de Gravure at the Institut de France, established in 1803, was the first academic institution that distinguished between imitative and creative artistic execution in the reproductive graphic arts. Through patronage, the supervision of competitions, and the administration of the Prix de Rome program for graphic artists, the Engraving Department established specific guidelines for artistic reproduction and encouraged the formulation of an independent, artistic language in the reproductive arts. Finally, it defined the characteristics of fine engraving as a creative art medium.
The Prix de Rome for engraving was crucial in consolidating the new understanding of engraving as an original art form. The engravers’ participation in the Grand Prix competition transformed their artisanal training practice in the master’s workshop into an artistic and academic education of graphic artists in the engraving ateliers. Furthermore, their sojourn at the French Academy in Rome encouraged the collegial collaboration between painters, sculptors, and engravers, leading engravers to develop a free and graphic interpretation of their model. The reproductive engraver was now able to rival painters and sculptors and, consequently, he emerged as a creative and original artist.
","“Susanne Anderson-Riedel’s book, based on meticulous scholarship and incisive historical interpretation, is a major contribution to the field of art history ... Informed by a critical awareness of contemporary debates and art-historical approaches, the book moves from the particular—the tracing of familial lineages, identification of work, and distribution of engravings—to the general—the debates over the status of engraving, the often complex relations between engravers (and engraving) and painters and sculptors. Dr. Anderson-Riedel’s understanding of these relations, in the context of the wider discussion of the ‘copy’ and the ‘reproduction,’ makes this work an invaluable addition to our understanding of the general status of representation in the modern period.”
—Anthony Vidler, Dipl. Arch, PhD, Dean and Professor
“Dr. Anderson-Riedel demonstrates convincingly that the debates traced in this study are crucial for the development of art. By challenging the notions of copy and originality, she lays the foundation for the artistic movements of Romanticism and of modern art in general, notably the print as an original work of art.”
—Michel Melot, ancien directeur du Département des estampes et de la photographie à la Bibliothèque nationale de France
",Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2010-05-01,Dianne Ottley,Grace Crowley’s Contribution to Australian Modernism and Geometric Abstraction,Hardback,978-1-4438-1977-0,39.99,"Grace Crowley has been recognized as a product of European modernism and was one of the leading innovators of geometric abstraction in Australia. Having studied in Paris in the 1920s with one of the leading art teachers, writers and theorists, André Lhote, she returned to Australia having mastered the complex mathematics and geometry of the golden section and dynamic symmetry, that had become a framework for modernism. Through her teaching of these compositional techniques at the most progressive modern art school in Sydney in the 1930s, she became a crucial influence on the group of artists now recognized as the historical forerunners to American colour-field painting introduced to Australia in the 1960s, and Australian abstraction.
Through her close friendship with Anne Dangar, who played a critical role in the success of Albert Gleizes’ utopian art colony in rural France, Crowley maintained contact with mainstream European modernism and links to the Abstraction-Creation Group in Paris. During the 1940s and 1950s, Crowley worked with fellow-artist Ralph Balson, and together they developed their own style of geometric abstract art which reflected the spiritual dimensions of Kandinsky and Mondrian. Although undervalued in her own time, the sincerity and uncompromising quality of her work that transcends national boundaries, makes her one of the most important Australian women artists of her generation.
","“Dianne Ottley has presented a vivid and sensitive picture of Grace Crowley and her work, and has usefully assessed the history of writing and criticism surrounding the artist and her circle. She contributes significantly to the developments of Australian art history, and to the contribution of women who have often been short-changed by historians.
Ottley demonstrates thorough knowledge of the literature in her field and brings confident analysis of the literature to her discussion. She has not only researched primary documents in the Crowley archive, but also contributed to the future of Crowley research by organizing the material for others.
One of the strengths of the work is the innovative visual analysis Ottley brings to Crowley’s work, especially to Painting 1950 (NGV), and with her discussion and visualization of hidden geometries. Her theory of the significance of the triangle in the 1950 work, to Crowley’s personal perception of her isolation as an artist, is engaging and original.”
—Dr. Ann Elias, Associate Professor, Theoretical Enquiry, Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney
",Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2010-09-01,Janelle A. Schwartz and Nhora Lucía Serrano,"Curious Collectors, Collected Curiosities: An Interdisciplinary Study",Hardback,978-1-4438-2325-8,34.99,"Curious Collectors, Collected Curiosities: An Interdisciplinary Study asks its readers to enter into an investigation of the nature of collecting as an aesthetic exercise. Spanning the sixteenth century through today, this book gathers together the work of current scholars to re-envision the task of collectors and their collections in broad strokes. Each chapter appropriates the idea of a cabinet of curiosity in order to expand its boundaries of meaning and to complicate our understanding of the acts of display and observation. These chapters also demonstrate that collecting is a universal trope which nevertheless depends on time and place for its particular expressions. Whether the collection is made up of literary texts and criticism, visual art, including mechanical reproductions, taxidermy and photography, historical travelogues, museum exhibitions, blockbuster films, or airline in-flight briefing cards, it conveys an urgent relevance to our consumer age, in which information is abundant and attention is a commodity.
","“These erudite and evocative essays effectively dislodge the Cabinet of Curiosities from its assigned place in the prehistory of the modern museum. In today’s heterotopic, globalizing contexts, where mobility and juxtaposition are the norm, an old form takes on new life.”
—James Clifford, author of Routes: Travel and Translation in the late 20th Century
“Curious Collectors, Collected Curiosities is an ambitious study that surprises and delights as it turns from Leonardo da Vinci to taxidermy to modern air travel. The collection constructs an architecture of curiosity by inhabiting the very form it is scrutinizing. It is a compelling catalogue of the productive energies and weird slippages that occur at the junctures of order and wonder.”
—Tina May Hall, author of The Physics of Imaginary Objects (Pitt Drue Heinz Lit Prize)
“Itself a veritable cabinet of curiosities, this volume takes the reader on an immensely gratifying tour of the world, from The Arabian Nights to taxidermic displays, from Renaissance museums to Eadweard Muybridge’s innovative images of animal motion.”
—Christoph Irmscher, Indiana University Bloomington
",Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2010-09-01,Malin Hedlin Hayden and Jessica Sjöholm Skrubbe,Feminisms is Still Our Name: Seven Essays on Historiography and Curatorial Practices,Hardback,978-1-4438-2331-9,39.99,"Feminisms have played a crucial part in art, art history and curatorial practices over the last forty years. Hence, it is by now imperative to scrutinize the history of feminist theories and methods within both fields. Feminisms is Still Our Name is an anthology that critically debates the current status of feminisms in visual art and its relation to past art histories and possible feminist futures. It brings together essays by leading scholars in order to meet the urgent need both for a critical historiography and for re-vitalizations of feminist practices within written as well as visual narratives of modern and contemporary art.
From a variety of perspectives, the editors and contributors to this book initiate a much-needed debate about possible strategies for a renewal of feminisms in art history and curating. At the same time, it demonstrates the necessity of further explorations and research into the diversity of feminist pasts. Indeed, this volume provides strong arguments that historiographical critique is an inevitable part of any future feminism(s).
In providing fresh approaches to such important fields as feminist art history and feminist curating, the essays assembled in Feminisms is Still Our Name will provoke fruitful discussion about the relation between academic and curatorial feminist practices.
Contributors: Renee Baert, Malin Hedlin Hayden, Lolita Jablonskiene, Amelia Jones, Mary Kelly, Griselda Pollock, and Jessica Sjöholm Skrubbe.
",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2010-09-01,Mick Broderick and Antonio Traverso,"Trauma, Media, Art: New Perspectives",Hardback,978-1-4438-2283-1,39.99,"During the past one hundred years or so, the depiction of traumatic historical events and experiences has been a recurrent theme in the work of artists and media professionals—including those in literature, theatre, visual art, architecture, cinema, and television—among other forms of cultural expression and social communication.
The essays collected in this book follow a contemporary critical trend in the field of trauma studies that reflects comparatively on artistic and media representations of traumatic histories and experiences from countries around the world. Focusing on a diversity of art and media forms—including memorials, literature, visual and installation art, music, video, film, and journalism—they both apply dominant theories of trauma and explore the former’s limitations while bearing in mind other possible methodologies.
Trauma, Media, Art: New Perspectives contributes to a critical trauma studies, a field that reinvigorates itself in the twenty-first century through its constant reassessment of the relationship between theory, representation, and global histories of violence and suffering.
",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2010-10-01,Gavin Keeney,"Art as ""Night"": An Art-Theological Treatise",Hardback,978-1-4438-2401-9,39.99,"Art as “Night” proposes a type of a-historical dark knowledge (a-theology and theology, at once) crossing painting since Velázquez, but reaching back to the Renaissance, especially Titian and Caravaggio. As a form of formalism, this “night” is also closely allied with forms of intellection that come to reside in art as pure visual agency or material knowledge while invoking moral agency, a function of art more or less bracketed in modern art for ethical and/or political agency.
Not a theory of meta-painting, Art as “Night” restores coordinates arguably lost in painting since the separation of natural and moral philosophy in the Baroque era. It is with Velázquez that we see a turning point, an emphasis on the specific resources of painting as a form of speculative intellect, while it is with contemporary works by Gerhard Richter and Anselm Kiefer that we see the return of the same after the collapse of modernism, and after subsequent postmodern maneuvers to make art discursive yet without the austerities of the formal means present in Art as Art. Art as “Night” argues for a non-discursive form of intellection fully embodied in the work of art – and, foremost, painting.
A synoptic and intentionally elusive and allusive survey of painting, through the collapse of the art market in late 2007, Art as “Night” suggests by way of this critique of an elective “night” crossing painting that the art world is an endlessly deferred version of pleroma (Hegel’s Absolute Knowledge), a fully synthetic world given to an exploration and appropriation of the given through classical mimesis and epistemology and its complete incorporation and transfiguration in a theory of knowledge and art as pure speculative agency. In effect, Art as “Night” is an incarnational theory of art as absolute knowledge.
",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2010-10-01,Outi Remes and Pam Skelton,Conspiracy Dwellings: Surveillance in Contemporary Art,Paperback,978-1-4438-2403-3,19.99,"Conspiracy Dwellings: Surveillance in Contemporary Art brings together nine illustrated essays by theorists and art practitioners about artworks made in the midst of conflict or from the position of commentary and critique in topics that span from the 70s to the present day. The authors Anthony Downey, Christine Eyene, Liam Kelly, Verena Kyselka, Robert Knifton, Maciej Ożóg, Outi Remes, Paula Roush, Matthew Shaul and Pam Skelton consider the practical and theoretical status of surveillance: its impact on urban space, ethics, citizenship, civic liberties, conflict and resistance as well as strategies of counter-surveillance that propose new spectatorial positions, individual empowerment, increased interactivity and social networking.
Artists discussed include John Aiken, Willie Doherty, Gavin Jantjes, Verena Kyselka, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Jill Magid, Gundula Schulze-Eldowy and Artur Zmijewski, representing international issues and perspectives from England, Germany, Mexico, Northern Ireland, Poland and South Africa.
Today, in post 9/11 times of economic difficulties and political uncertainly, the subject of patriotism, freedom and democratic rights are once again high on the agenda, raising questions such as where do we draw the line—how far does surveillance have to go before it worries us—and at what point is the citizen regarded as a threat to the state?
","“Conspiracy Dwellings: Surveillance in Contemporary Art is essential reading for today’s citizen. This important collection attends to the issues raised by surveillance from the 1970s, to 9/11 and its aftermath, through to the present day. A significant and timely collection.”
—Joanne Morra, Founding Principal Editor of the Journal of Visual Culture, and Reader in Art History and Theory at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London
",Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2010-10-01,"Brigid Cherry, Peter Howell and Caroline Ruddell",Twenty-First-Century Gothic,Hardback,978-1-4438-2389-0,34.99,"The essays in this volume reinterpret and contest the Gothic cultural inheritance, each from a specifically twenty-first century perspective. Most are based on papers delivered at a conference held, appropriately, in Horace Walpoleʼs Gothic mansion at Strawberry Hill in West London, which is usually seen as the geographical origin of the first, but not the last, of the many Gothic revivals of the past 300 years. In a contemporary context, the Gothic sensibility could be seen as a mode particularly applicable to the frightening instability of the world in which we find ourselves at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
The truth is probably less epochal: that Gothic never went away (when were we ever without fear?), or at least has persisted since its resurgence in the late nineteenth century. Gothic is at least as modern as it is ancient, and each essay in this collection contributes to current scholarship on the Gothic by exploring a particular aspect of Gothic’s contemporaneity. The volume contains papers on horror novels and cinema, poetry, popular music and fan cultures.
","""The vast spectrum of cultural nodes encompassed here is clearly a reflection of the multi-disciplinary interests of the editors Brigid Cherry, Peter Howell, and Caroline Ruddell.
The essays are impressive in their efforts at anchoring an evolving Gothic mode into tangible and scholastically useful contemporary cultural examples. Generally well argued and contained within their own right, as a collection they establish an especially useful base upon which future Gothic scholarship can build.
On the whole, this collection supplies a solid scholastic foundation and invites further discussion and debate for academics as well as fans. Catherine Spooner concludes her preface to the collection calling for a focus on what twenty-first-century Gothic does, rather than attempting to establish a generic purity of what it is.
Neal Kirk, University of Lancaster, in The Gothic Imagination
",Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2010-11-01,"Klisala Harrison, Elizabeth Mackinlay and Svanibor Pettan",Applied Ethnomusicology: Historical and Contemporary Approaches,Hardback,978-1-4438-2425-5,39.99,"Applied ethnomusicology is an approach guided by principles of social responsibility, which extends the usual academic goal of broadening and deepening knowledge and understanding toward solving concrete problems and toward working both inside and beyond typical academic contexts (International Council for Traditional Music 2007). This edited volume is based on the first symposium of the ICTM’s Study Group on Applied Ethnomusicology in Ljubljana, Slovenia in 2008 that brought together more than thirty specialists from sixteen countries worldwide. It contains a Preface, an extensive Introduction, and twelve selected peer-reviewed articles by authors from Australia, Austria, Canada, Germany, Slovenia, Serbia, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America, divided into four thematic groups. These groups encompass: diverse perspectives on the growing field of applied ethnomusicology in various geographical and problem-solving contexts; research and teaching-related connotations; the potential in contributing to sustainable music cultures; and the use of music in conflict resolution situations.
The edited volume Applied Ethnomusicology: Historical and Contemporary Approaches brings together previously dispersed knowledge and perspectives, and offers new insights to various disciplines within the humanities and social sciences. Rooted in diverse scholarly traditions, it addresses a variety of challenges in today’s world and aims to benefit the quality of human existence.
",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2010-11-01,Judith Crispin,Olivier Messiaen: The Centenary Papers,Hardback,978-1-4438-2498-9,44.99,"In 2008 musicians and scholars world-wide celebrated the centenary of Olivier Messiaen’s birth. One of the most influential composers in living memory, Messiaen is remembered as a great nature poet—a mystic whose music had a profound effect on the Twentieth-century avant-garde.
This volume of essays, marking the occasion of Messiaen’s centenary, was authored by musicologists, performers, composers, ornithologists and researchers from Australia, Germany, France, North America, Japan, New Zealand, Serbia and England. The writers, internationally acclaimed experts as well as emerging scholars, span three generations—living testimony to the diverse and lasting sphere of Messiaen’s legacy.
",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2010-11-01,Ondřej Dadejík and Jakub Stejskal,The Aesthetic Dimension of Visual Culture,Hardback,978-1-4438-2428-6,34.99,"How can aesthetic enquiry contribute to the study of visual culture? There seems to be little doubt that aesthetic theory ought to be of interest to the study of visual culture. For one thing, aesthetic vocabulary has far from vanished from contemporary debates on the nature of our visual experiences and its various shapes, a fact especially pertinent where dissatisfaction with vulgar value relativism prevails. Besides, the very question—ubiquitous in the debates on visual culture—of what is natural and what is acquired in our visual experiences has been a topic in aesthetics at least since the Enlightenment. And last but not least, despite attempts to study visual culture without employing the concept of art, there is no prospect of this central subject of aesthetic theory ebbing away from visual studies.
The essays compiled in this volume show a variety of points of intersection and involvement between aesthetics and visual studies; some consider the future of visual art, some the conditions and characteristics of contemporary visual aesthetic experience, while others take on the difficult question of the relation between visual representation and reality. What unites them is their authors’ willingness to think about contemporary visual culture in the conceptual frame of aesthetics. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of philosophical aesthetics, art history, and cultural studies.
","“In the eighties some historians of art started to designate the object of their research to be the normatively neutral syntagm ‘visual culture.’ At that time philosophical aesthetics dwelled on issues far removed from the novel and exciting topics of visuality, the image and vision. If in the eyes of aestheticians, who increasingly focused on art as their main or even only topic, a ‘weak’ type of art started to replace the previous high art of modernism, then in the eyes of some visual theorists the absence of qualitative designations in their subject-matter was soon transformed from a privileged characteristic into an epistemological deficiency. Visual ‘culture’ helped bridge the abyss between the two realms—at the same time narrowing the gap between aesthetics and theories of visual culture. The present international collection takes the described situation as its starting point, thereby reflecting in an original, challenging and productive way upon a shared territory of aesthetics and of a crucial realm of contemporary culture.”
—Aleš Erjavec, Research Director in the Institute of Philosophy, Scientific Research Center of the Slovenian Academy of Fine Arts; Editor of Postmodernism and the Postsocialist Condition: Politicized Art under Late Socialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003)
",Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2010-12-01,Gevork Hartoonian,The Mental Life of the Architectural Historian: Re-opening the Early Historiography of Modern Architecture,Hardback,978-1-4438-2561-0,39.99,"Starting with the question concerning the discursive formation of architectural history, the chapters compiled in this book attempt to re-read the historiography of early modern architecture from the point of view of the theoretical work produced since the post-war era. Central to the objectives of the argument are the ways in which, firstly, architectural history differs from the traditions of art history, and, secondly, that the historical narrative works its autonomy through theoretical representation, the discursive flow of which is interrupted by the historian’s urge to support arguments with references to buildings, texts, drawings, and historical events.
The historians discussed in this volume are those regularly addressed by most critics revisiting modern architectural history. Individual chapters are dedicated to N. Pevsner, H. R. Hitchcock, and S. Giedion, an economy of selection that is formative for a critical understanding of the canon established by these historians. Themes such as periodization, autonomy, and time are discussed, and the coda of the final chapter expands on the scope of “critical historiography” popularised by Kenneth Frampton and Manfredo Tafuri.
",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2011-03-01,Maria Emília Fonseca,Touching Art: The Poetics and the Politics of Exhibiting the Tree of Life,Hardback,978-1-4438-2712-6,34.99,"This study focusses on the exhibition of the Tree of Life, a sculpture made in Mozambique of decommissioned, dismantled weapons, created to celebrate peace and commissioned by the British Museum, chosen to be the symbol of the “Africa 2005” season of cultural events and exhibited in its Great Court between February and October 2005. This artwork was first exhibited in Maputo before being dispatched to Britain and it is presently on display at the Sainsbury African Galleries of the British Museum, in London.
This dissertation moves along two converging routes: the articulation of the meaning(s) produced within the exhibition and the role of exhibitionary institutions in the creation of social knowledge. A central topic of discussion is the different practices and sites of exhibition of the Tree of Life sculpture in Britain and in Mozambique, in an endeavour to illustrate/establish the differences which determine and/or condition the specific approaches used in the two distinct cultural contexts within which it was exhibited.
The discussion evolves towards exploring how a new discourse on the exhibition of contemporary African art questions and challenges both curatorial practices and cultural concepts of collecting, displaying and interpreting art objects and negotiating meaning.
","“The Tree of Life is an important symbol in many cultures and has different ways of being perceived and represented according to time. Until recently, there were no cultural approaches to the symbol and the present work deals with various ways of decoding the representation not only in its specific African environment but also in the context of a museum – the British Museum. The selected perspectives include also ways of theorizing the interdisciplinary dimensions of the work as well as the various ways of displaying it. This book will appeal to anyone interested and doing research in Cultural Studies and Museum Studies, as well as in Contemporary African Art.”
—Professor Teresa Malafaia, Academic Coordinator: Culture Studies, Media and Culture Studies, Alameda da Universidade
",Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2011-04-01,Jürgen Lawrenz,Art and the Platonic Matrix,Hardback,978-1-4438-2853-6,39.99,"For two millennia philosophy has restlessly stalked a fundamental problem—the answer to the question “what is art, really?” Aesthetic discourse, focused on the Platonic Matrix of truth and beauty, arthood and object, imitation and representation, form and idea, has not delivered on its promise, leaving us in bewilderment over principles that are either ignored or contradicted by the arts themselves. In this searching critique, some astonishing faux pas are brought to light. Notably that aesthetics makes do without a knower, the heuristics of art, and the dynamics of self-exploration that are central to the aesthetic experience.
What this book seeks to accomplish is a thorough reformulation of the terms of reference, based on the actual “form of life” that is art. This amounts to a framework for a wholly new philosophy of art. It demonstrates that art is quintessentially involved in the meaning of life, and through its heuristic dimension serves our impulse for self-knowledge and an understanding of the human condition.
The book is in the first instance a philosophical treatise and therefore suitable for academic study in all grades, though perhaps with greatest benefit at post-graduate level. But it has been written in an approachable style to encourage a wider audience to engage with its tenets: accordingly it seeks also to address art aficionados, whether professional or dilettante, as well as general readers with an interest in these ever perplexing and profoundly intriguing issues of our human estate.
","“To read this book you will have to play with possibilities that you have not considered before.”
—Joaquin Kuhn, Professor of English, University of Toronto
“Lawrenz’s book tells a prodigious and enchanting story about the ‘myth of the given.’ . . . In this intellectually engaging and demanding enterprise, he exhibits an erudite knowledge, which sometimes verges on brilliancy.”
—Bozidar Kante, Professor of Aesthetics, University of Maribor
“Lawrenz’s arguments are subtle and demanding. Many disposable books have been written on aesthetics and art criticism which merely reflect passing fads and fashion. This work is essential reading . . .”
—Geoffrey Klempner, Director of Studies, International Society for Philosophers
",Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2011-05-01,Courtney Lee Weida,"Artistic Ambivalence in Clay: Portraits of Pottery, Ceramics, and Gender",Hardback,978-1-4438-2872-7,34.99,"This book is a collection of glimpses into the lives and works of fifteen prominent women artists in contemporary ceramics. Spanning multiple genres, generations, and geographies, these potters and ceramic sculptors describe nuances, contradictions, and tensions surrounding their artworks, artistic processes, and professional lives. Within this text, artistic ambivalences are questioned and analyzed in terms of myriad gender issues. Featured ceramicists include: Maureen Burns-Bowie, Esta Carnahan, Ellen Day, Cara Gay Driscoll, Dolores Dunning, Heidi Fahrenbacher, DeBorah Goletz, Lynn Goodman, Joan Hardin, Beth Heit, Tsehai Johnson, Kate Malone, Norma Messing, Elspeth Owen, and Mary Trainor.
The qualitative research summarized within this book draws influence from feminist methodologies and the visual arts methodology of portraiture. Artists, art historians, and art educators interested in ceramics and gender will find detailed discussion of unexpected persistence of gendered associations within ceramic technology, social binaries of gender identity in symbols and traditions of clay, and subtle sexism surrounding ceramics in education. At the same time, this text celebrates women’s work in ceramics as an often neglected set of perspectives, highlighting the intricate complexities of artistic ambivalences and lived experiences of art within a dynamic dialogue.
",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2011-05-01,Janet T. Marquardt and Alyce A. Jordan,Medieval Art and Architecture after the Middle Ages,Paperback,978-1-4438-2888-8,19.99,"Medieval Art and Architecture after the Middle Ages explores the endurance of and nostalgia for medieval monuments through their reception in later periods, specifically illuminating the myriad ways in which tangible and imaginary artifacts of the Middle Ages have served to articulate contemporary aspirations and anxieties. The essays in this interdisciplinary collection examine the afterlife of medieval works through their preservation, restoration, appropriation, and commodification in America, Great Britain, and across Europe from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. From the evocation of metaphors and tropes, to monumental projects of restoration and recreation—medieval visual culture has had a tremendous purchase in the construction of political, religious, and cultural practices of the Modern era. The authors assembled here engage a diverse spectrum of works, from Irish ruins and a former Florentine prison to French churches and American department stores, and an equally diverse array of media ranging from architecture and manuscripts to embroidery, monumental sculpture, and metalwork. With applications not only to the study of art and architecture, but also encompassing such varied fields as commerce, city planning, education, literature, collecting and exhibition design, this copiously illustrated anthology comprises a significant contribution to the study of medieval art and medievalism.
",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2011-06-01,"Janette McWilliam, Sonia Puttock, Tom Stevenson and Rashna Taraporewalla",The Statue of Zeus at Olympia: New Approaches,Hardback,978-1-4438-2921-2,39.99,"This book began to take shape following a conference on the Statue of Zeus at Olympia held at the University of Queensland in July 2008. In line with the main themes of the conference, the book has two fundamental aims: the first is to recognise the unsurpassed reputation of the Zeus in antiquity, to move beyond the framework provided by the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, and to treat the famous statue in depth, as befits its unique importance in ancient times; the second aim is to employ a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives in the hope of capturing more accurately than before something of that unique importance.
The book is aimed at academic specialists in a variety of disciplines (such as art, archaeology, history, literature, and cultural poetics), though it is also intended to be accessible to undergraduates and certainly to research students. The audience will primarily be one interested in classical antiquity, but there are chapters which trace the story and influence of the Zeus through the Byzantine, Renaissance, and early modern periods, and into more recent centuries in both the northern and southern hemispheres.
",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2011-08-01,Herbert Schutz,"Romanesque Art and Craftsmanship in Central Europe, 900-1300: Artistic Aspects of the Style",Hardback,978-1-4438-2991-5,49.99,"As a sequel to the analysis of Romanesque church architecture as the Heavenly Jerusalem on earth, this book reviews the embellishing cloister arts during the Romanesque period in Central Europe. This book discusses the work in textiles, ivory, wood, precious metals, bronze, and illuminated manuscripts. Pertinent illustrations stress the themes common to those media, suggesting that the craftsmen knew one another’s work. Some may have worked in more than one medium.
Circumstances tended to preserve religious works. The book rests on the extensive use of detailed illustrative objects and images in their historical, spiritual and intellectual contexts.
The surviving wealth of Romanesque artifacts and images is so extensive, that only an eclectic treatment is possible. The artistry is of such high quality that one readily considers these objects of art as symbols of ethereal value. Thematically, many of the images are linked with underlying texts in typological and Christological relationships, clarifying the Scriptures as texts by other means.
Owing to their perishable, organic nature, some of the media, such as textiles and wood were more vulnerable to decay. Others have survived the centuries despite neglect and abuse. The work in precious metals, amplified by gem encrustation has suffered, as some objects were melted down to provide the raw material for new works, and as semi-precious stones, gems and pearls were looted. In later times of need, the confiscation of these treasures was a convenient means to replenish the coffers of the state, while bronzes helped satisfy the need for armaments.
",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2011-09-01,Stuart Richmond and Celeste Snowber,Landscapes of Aesthetic Education,Paperback,978-1-4438-3192-5,19.99,"This book brings together two experienced educators from the fields of teacher education and arts education. The authors Richmond, a photographer, and Snowber, a dancer and poet, see aesthetic education as aiming to extend creativity, appreciation of the arts and nature, and the sensuous qualities of everyday life, to gain a more intimate understanding of the self and the world. They include poetic, narrative, philosophical, and artistic ways of writing to support a more embodied and holistic aesthetics. Landscapes of Aesthetic Education has significance for educators, scholars, students, and artists, and for all who would like to explore the connections between the arts, aesthetics, and transformation.
","“A stirring and important addition to the literature on the complexity of ‘appreciation’ and its relation to mentoring. This book opens windows on unexplored modes of creative collaboration with implications for art experiences and for lives in many classrooms.”
—Maxine Greene, Professor of Philosophy and Education Emeritus, Teachers College, Columbia University
“Let go and see, feel, move, and breathe as you encounter this remarkable book by two internationally known Canadian artist-educators: Stuart Richmond and Celeste Snowber. As a photographer and a dancer, they capture words, gestures, images and ideas in engaging, imaginative and deeply aesthetic ways in their book entitled Landscapes of Aesthetic Education. This book provides educators, artists, and students with numerous examples of personal narratives woven through theoretical engagements that create vast landscapes for learning through, with, about and for aesthetic education.”
—Rita L. Irwin, Associate Dean, Teacher Education, Professor, Art Education and Curriculum Studies, Faculty of Education, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC
“Reenchantment. That is what is wanted in education today, and that is what Snowber and Richmond’s book, Landscapes of Aesthetic Education, presents. This book is a beautifully conceived and written antidote to all that is disenchanting in contemporary education and is brimming with new ideas about making education an engaging, aesthetic experience for both students and teachers.”
—Peter London, Chancellor Professor Emeritus, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, Distinguished Fellow, NAEA
“Engaging and nuanced. This is a dream catcher of a book that casts and weaves a sensuous and lyrical spell for the reader and brings the aesthetic to the centre of educational feeling and knowing.”
—Carl Bagley PhD FRSA, Professor of Educational Sociology, Durham University, UK
“What sets this book apart from other books on aesthetics is a questioning, intuitive approach to the information that one suspects is also a deeply ingrained part of their teaching.”
—Sally Armstrong Gradle, Southern Illinois University in the International Journal of Education and the Arts, Vol. 10, Review 4 (April 2010)
",Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2011-09-01,Paul Fox and Gil Pasternak,Visual Conflicts: On the Formation of Political Memory in the History of Art and Visual Cultures,Hardback,978-1-4438-3172-7,39.99,"This collection of essays explores ways in which visual cultures have engaged with armed conflict and politically-motivated acts of violence of all types. It works out of analytical frameworks developed in the fields of Art History and Visual Culture in order to address the politics of representing conflict within and beyond these disciplines. The contributors seek to extend perceived well-established academic approaches to thinking about visual production in the context of war, conflict, and militarism through a study of various themes, including historiography, subjectivity, biography, narrative construction, commemoration, identity, and memory formation. Each author considers how visual representations of conflict shape the meanings of politically significant events, of specific social formations, of subject positions and enacted roles. The volume investigates a set of representational regimes in visual media, including print-making, painting, photography and digital imaging, and the use to which they have been put to generate as well as mediate realities of conflict.
",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2011-10-01,Michelle Ying Ling Huang,Beyond Boundaries: East and West Cross-Cultural Encounters,Hardback,978-1-4438-3294-6,39.99,"Beyond Boundaries: East and West Cross-Cultural Encounters is a collection of essays which span several countries, centuries and disciplines in their exploration of East-West cultural exchanges and interactions. The chapters are arranged in chronological and thematic order, and encompass the cutting edge research of a diverse group of international scholars. The subjects range from archaeology, art history and photography, to conservation, sociology and cultural studies, with cross-disciplinary examples of classical, modern and contemporary periods. The book seeks to inspire new ideas and stimulate further scholarly debate on the convergence, dissimilarities and mutual influences of the visual arts and material culture of Asia, the Middle East, Europe and the United States.
The volume will be of interest to scholars and students working in the fields of art and cultural history as well as intercultural studies. It will be equally useful to collectors, artists and curators of global art and world cultures.
","“This is a fascinating theme, of growing interest to readers world-wide. Hitherto certain aspects of it have been fairly thoroughly explored . . . but the papers in this volume range far more widely, and open up topics in the East-West dialogue that are quite unfamiliar to anyone not in that particular field of study . . .”
– Prof. Michael Sullivan, Emeritus Fellow of St Catherine’s College, University of Oxford
“With its broad chronological, geographical and material scope, this book will be essential reading for all who are interested in the role of cross-cultural activity in artistic production and interpretation, as well as the critical discourses of interconnectivity which are becoming such an important part of cultural studies the world over.”
– Dr Stacey Pierson, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
",Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2011-10-01,J. Donald Ragsdale,Compelling Form: Architecture as Visual Persuasion,Hardback,978-1-4438-3286-1,44.99,"Compelling Form: Architecture as Visual Persuasion is an assessment of the visual persuasiveness of buildings. It demonstrates that architecture is as capable of social influence as speeches or advertisements are and that an awareness of this influence provides an insight into buildings’ cultural roles. The book considers a diverse array of structures ranging from museums, to performance halls, to universities, to cathedrals, to governmental buildings, to palaces, and to skyscrapers.
Compelling Form is an important extension of theories of persuasion and visual communication to architecture and engineering. The book bases its assessments on the elements of visual literacy and then on the elements of architectural design to demonstrate that buildings, monuments, and even such means of commerce as bridges affect the viewer in such a way as to have social impact.
",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2011-10-01,Michael Tawa,Theorising the Project: A Thematic Approach to Architectural Design,Hardback,978-1-4438-3296-0,39.99,"Theorising the Project aims to explore a thematic approach to architectural design. It conceptualises the design process in a general sense through seven key phases: developing a thematic framework and a line of inquiry to situate the project; investigating the project brief and mapping the project site to unravel potential themes and questions; situating technology as a formative condition for design; analysing precedents from the arts, literature and architecture to elaborate implications for design and considering representation as equally constitutive of the design undertaking. Key themes which are unpacked using extensive etymologies and metaphorical associations include theory, mapping, the makeshift, potentiality and agency. The concepts of assemblage and emergence are developed to contextualise the design process and architectural settings as enabling infrastructures for thinking and practice. The book contends that design is a matter of setting up strategic and productive thematic assemblages that are not directed to the translation or formal expression of meaning, but to the framing of strategic and enabling conditions for emergent sense realised within the existential and material conditions of architecture. Succinct analyses of precedents across several disciplines are used to foreground tectonic and compositional characteristics with adaptational capacity for space, time, materiality and architectural narrative. The thematic framework of the book engages theoretical material by Giorgio Agamben, Gilles Deleuze, Martin Heidegger, Francois Jullien, Manuel De Landa and Jean-Luc Nancy. Illustrated with drawings and photographs by the author, the book will be of interest to practitioners and students of art, design and the built environment who wish to expand the foundational premises for design, widen the creative scope of their practice and exploit the thematic and metaphorical capacities of their project work.
","“Michael Tawa’s scholarly theorising sweeps you along in a rush of text and thrills with its seat-of-the-pants ride. It is as if you are tapping the keyboard alongside him, no, inside him, experiencing the writing as it happens, a duet of differences, similarities and resonances that somehow tolerably adheres. Michael asserts that the book gained its voice phenomenologically, only through the circumstances of writing it, just as he argues for theorising.
I have heard Michael speak many times, and I can hear him now, passionately, sensitively, insistently, even stridently at times, his words and thoughts swelling the page. While I am persuaded that this project has its own voice, it is Michael’s poietic practice, his making and producing of sense, that audibilises it. Certainly all that is dangerous, disconcerting, edgy, precipitant, incipient, insouciant, abstract and enigmatic in his theorising pervades the work’s revealings as, no doubt, is bound to happen in its multiple interpolations.
There is intent here, but only to alert and prepare for future-possibles, not to telescope outcomes. Some might not at first fully engage the intensity of what is offered. No matter, time is patient. Like the best fiction, and even better non-fiction, not even at the last page does the ride stop. Almost callously, its momentum continues, prompting questions, ponderings, reflections. At least that happened for me, tensing my years of reading and teaching.
Of course this is what Michael wants to eventually happen for everyone who tackles a project, and what he believes should happen. No preconceptions, linearities, singularities, normatives, clichés, just comprehensive preparation for multivalent themes, registers and states of mind to handle-when-ready the already-to-hand. And he helps this along by vast arrays of words and ideas, etymologies, examples, linkages, demonstrations and illuminating questions.
While this book is mainly about architectural theorising, it suffuses projects of every kind. It is a great read on its own account, as much as about energising projects, and will be invaluable in teaching. For most benefit, Theorising the Project should be attended while strategically negotiating the distortions to its fabric likely caused by one’s inner and outer ruptions. The rare articulation, confidence, assurance and potency of Michael Tawa’s skill with words greatly assists such a working through.”
—Dr Paul-Alan Johnson, Senior Visiting Fellow
Faculty of the Built Environment, The University of New South Wales
“Michael Tawa's Theorising the Project suggests ""considering architecture as a provisional and enabling infrastructure"", and offers a place for readership which nurtures reflection and thereby enables transformational thinking. This book is about how we build our relations to the world, and about how we discover and forge the terms with which we can describe, inscribe and prescribe those relations. Driven by a ""lexical fascination"" where words are valued for their phonic impact as much as their knotty etymologies, Tawa's work moves us and lets us move across an assemblage of densely interwoven chapters. It opens up immensely useful perspectives to anyone interested in the links between theory and practice, between conceptualisation and fabrication, whilst steering refreshingly clear of such dichotomies to entertain the subtler connections borne by sensuous experience and action. Equally refreshing is Tawa's discernment between thematic and programmatic complexity, his view of the place to be accorded to constant interrogations in the design process that are driven by yearnings and learnings, concepts and contexts, consilent and resilient approaches.
If ""what I am is what I can bring to a project"", the proposed project of readership is wrought to host its subjects with all of their richly idiosyncratic concerns and leanings. Place as a ""conjugation of people and space"" is also the place of the page, where a specific confluence of different kinds of experience is here generously made accessible, and verbally meshed to others, through haunting evocations of geographical sites, scholarly citations, and incipient student visions. The perambulations and displacements, the ""conjugated discrepancies"" and ""scrambled expectations"" that condition insightful ways of approaching space and time, of being and/ in motion, are foregrounded by the quest to ""enable the emergent to show itself"", and to ""develop strategies to elaborate and articulate its implications"", as a new paradigm for design. Theorising the Project is a quietly, yet exuberantly extra-ordinary aide-mémoire, a mnemonic and perceptive instrument, for those of us seeking re-assurance from a fellow traveller as we design our own wayfaring through the materials and ideas of which our lives are made.”
—Sally Jane Norman, Professor of Performance Technologies, Director, Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts, University of Sussex, United Kingdom
“Consider Michael Tawa’s content and range, his framing and re-framing and we soon realise that we default to theory and other not-so-small acts of self justification whenever the going gets tough in architecture. Tawa has fashioned a carefully sequenced narrative. This is a re-writing book, a re-thinking volume. Not in the crass way of setting things straight, once again recalling the naivety of insight that catches us all off guard. Instead, Tawa invites us to test the very nature of ‘framing’ itself, whether via words, whorls or worlds.
Writing the critical project has often become blurred with building the critical project and Tawa indicates why. Theorising the project has thus never been easy and is likely to be less so as we progress in a world of double-take which looks back at scaffolded theories and supporting histories that have operated – often unchallenged - for many decades in the architectural profession. Here, Tawa takes us through source and resource, in their widest sense. By loosening the formative thinking from which architectural design draws out its meaning, alibis and allegiances are thereby tested.
Allegiances have always been questionable, of course, but elegantly disguised. Tawa shows how our first irritant must be the way we justify an architectural assembly, gesture or choice of material. Only then passing through this fatigue, these alibis, the reader – student, scholar or architect – is invited to understand how much of the critical support and writing in architecture over the last few decades has brilliantly missed the point of the actual use and abuse of theory. We frame, we re-frame; we source, we re-source; we theorise and we read deeply or then superficially, sometimes to fall fatigued.
The helter skelter of semantics and semiotics that once held the last century to hostage become devices so common to us in offering projections of worlds we have already made and agreed with inside ourselves. Tawa debates this; he turns up the tarot card that reads – you have a future. Then he asks us to feel the edge, to read across life and architecture until we accept our own responsibility. What is theory for? Words, whorls, worlds? How many times has this question remained unasked whilst being written about extensively? The being in question is architecture itself. Tawa, in contest and elegance, takes us inside.”
Professor Roger Connah, Associate Director Graduate Studies, Carleton university, Ottawa
",Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2011-11-01,Gavin Keeney,"“Else-where”: Essays in Art, Architecture, and Cultural Production 2002-2011",Hardback,978-1-4438-3359-2,44.99,"“Else-where”: Essays in Art, Architecture, and Cultural Production 2002–2011 is a synoptic survey of the representational values given to art, architecture, and cultural production at the closing of the twentieth century and the opening of the twenty-first. Written primarily as a critique of what is suppressed in architecture and what is disclosed in art, the essays are informed by the passage out of post-structuralism and its disciplinary analogues toward the Real (denoted over the course of the studies as the “Real-Irreal,” or “Else-where”). The essays collected in “Else-where” cross various disciplines (inclusive of landscape architecture, architecture, and visual art) to develop a nuanced critique of a renascent formal regard and elective exit from nihilism in art and architecture that is also an invocation of the highest coordinates given to the arts – that is, formal ontology as speculative intelligence itself, or the return of the universal as utopian thought “here-and-now.”
",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2011-11-01,"Vanessa Guignery, Catherine Pesso-Miquel and François Specq",Hybridity: Forms and Figures in Literature and the Visual Arts,Hardback,978-1-4438-3346-2,44.99,"Over the last two decades, the unstable notion of hybridity has been the focus of a number of debates in cultural and literary studies, and has been discussed in connection with such notions as métissage, creolization, syncretism, diaspora, transculturation and in-betweeness. The aim of this volume is to form a critical assessment of the scope, significance and role of the notion in literature and the visual arts from the eighteenth century to the present day. The contributors propose to examine the development and various manifestations of the concept as a principle held in contempt by the partisans of racial purity, a process enthusiastically promoted by adepts of mixing and syncretism, but also a notion viewed with suspicion by those who decry its multifarious and triumphalist dimensions and its lack of political roots. The notion of hybridity is analysed in relation to the concepts of identity, nationhood, language and culture, drawing from the theories of Mikhail Bakhtin, Homi Bhabha, Robert Young, Paul Gilroy and Edouard Glissant, among others. Contributors examine forms of hybridity in the work of such canonical writers as Daniel Defoe, Robert Louis Stevenson, Thomas De Quincey and Victor Hugo, as well as in contemporary American and British fiction, Neo-Victorian and postcolonial literature.
",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2012-02-01,Barie Fez-Barringten,Architecture: The Making of Metaphors,Hardback,978-1-4438-3517-6,39.99,"The authors writings are based on his lecture series presented in 1968 at Yale University called “Architecture: The Making of Metaphors” which was then published in part in Main Currents in Modern Thought, then in many other journals including research into the works of Paul Weiss, Andrew Ortony, David Zarefsky and W. J. J. Gordon.
",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2012-02-01,Emilie Sitzia,"Art in Literature, Literature in Art in 19th Century France",Hardback,978-1-4438-3565-7,44.99,"The traditional relationship between painting and literature underwent a profound change in nineteenth-century France. Painting progressively asserted its independence from literature as it liberated itself from narrative obligations whilst interrogating the concept of subject matter itself. Simultaneously the influence of art on the writing styles of authors increased and the character of the artist established itself as a recurring motif in French literature.
This book offers a panoramic review of the relationship between art and literature in nineteenth-century France. By means of a series of case studies chosen from key moments throughout the nineteenth century, the aim of this study is to provide a focused analysis of specific examples of this relationship, revealing both its multifaceted nature as well as offering a panorama of the development of this on-going and increasingly complex cultural relationship. From Jacques Louis David’s irreverence for classical texts to Victor Hugo’s graphic works, from Edouard Manet’s illustrations to Vincent Van Gogh’s paintings of books, from Honoré de Balzac’s Unknown Masterpiece to Joris-Karl Huysmans’s A Rebours, this interdisciplinary investigation of the links between literature and art in France throws new light on both fields of creative endeavour during a critical phase of France’s cultural history.
","“This book offers a thorough and precise study of the links between literature and art. In this very rich and stimulating period in terms of creation and of rethinking the mores of literature, painting offered a mirror in which literature could gaze at itself and vice-versa. Such masters as Manet, for instance, a forefather of modernity, triggered literary creation but was also inspired by it (Baudelaire, Mallarmé). Emilie Sitzia follows the complex relationships between milieux, individual choices and private quest, through the prism of intermedial relationships: illustration, the integration of text within image and the workings of image-in-text. Doing so she hits on one of the main subjects of nineteenth century literature. Not only does E. Sitiza scrupulously examine the different workings and interactions between art and literature but she also renders unto theory what theory gave her. Thus she adds one more stone to the building of intermedial criticism.”
—Professor Liliane Louvel, Poitiers University, France
""This genuinely interdisciplinary book provides a clearly organized introduction to the visual arts and literature of the French nineteenth century for humanities students and, for specialists, a stimulating critical engagement with the rich dialogue between image and text. The author combines methodological breadth with detailed case studies so as to map the development of ut poesis pictura.""
—Professor Marilyn Brown specialist of 19th century French Art at the University of Colorado Boulder
",Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2012-02-01,DJ Dycus,Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan: Honing the Hybridity of the Graphic Novel,Hardback,978-1-4438-3527-5,39.99,"Without a doubt Chris Ware is one of the preeminent creators of comics today. He is a brilliant figure in a generation of extraordinarily talented people. Granted, there are a lot of innovators in the field right now, but no one else in the last seventy years has explored the capabilities of the genre to the same extent as has Ware. His genius, in part, comes from his interest in and understanding of the past accomplishments of figures such as George Herriman and Winsor McCay. One might even say that much of his work is somewhat archaeological in nature: he is interested in a reclamation of the past. Rather than merely excavating the achievements of past masters for the sake of history, however, Ware is also fortifying, expanding, and enriching comics so that it might flourish in the present.
This work begins with a broad examination of the nature of comics. First by briefly discussing the cognitive operations involved in processing this hybrid medium, then by surveying the generic branches of comics, and then by offering an historic examination of its contemporary development, which goes back as far as the sixteenth century. Next is an analysis of comics in relation to literature, film, and the visual arts. Comics utilizes elements from all of these, but it also offers a unique narrative experience.
This book primarily focuses upon Ware’s magnum opus to date, Jimmy Corrigan. It contextualizes his work within developments in comics over the last fifty years, as well as comparing him to other prominent figures such as Will Eisner, Art Spiegelman, Daniel Clowes, Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Lynda Barry, and Frank Miller.
",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2012-02-01,Maria Emília Fonseca,Touching Art: The Poetics and the Politics of Exhibiting the Tree of Life,Paperback,978-1-4438-3522-0,24.99,"This study focusses on the exhibition of the Tree of Life, a sculpture made in Mozambique of decommissioned, dismantled weapons, created to celebrate peace and commissioned by the British Museum, chosen to be the symbol of the “Africa 2005” season of cultural events and exhibited in its Great Court between February and October 2005. This artwork was first exhibited in Maputo before being dispatched to Britain and it is presently on display at the Sainsbury African Galleries of the British Museum, in London.
This dissertation moves along two converging routes: the articulation of the meaning(s) produced within the exhibition and the role of exhibitionary institutions in the creation of social knowledge. A central topic of discussion is the different practices and sites of exhibition of the Tree of Life sculpture in Britain and in Mozambique, in an endeavour to illustrate/establish the differences which determine and/or condition the specific approaches used in the two distinct cultural contexts within which it was exhibited.
The discussion evolves towards exploring how a new discourse on the exhibition of contemporary African art questions and challenges both curatorial practices and cultural concepts of collecting, displaying and interpreting art objects and negotiating meaning.
","“The Tree of Life is an important symbol in many cultures and has different ways of being perceived and represented according to time. Until recently, there were no cultural approaches to the symbol and the present work deals with various ways of decoding the representation not only in its specific African environment but also in the context of a museum – the British Museum. The selected perspectives include also ways of theorizing the interdisciplinary dimensions of the work as well as the various ways of displaying it. This book will appeal to anyone interested and doing research in Cultural Studies and Museum Studies, as well as in Contemporary African Art.”
—Professor Teresa Malafaia, Academic Coordinator: Culture Studies, Media and Culture Studies, Alameda da Universidade
",Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2012-03-01,"Sandra Cardarelli, Emily Jane Anderson and John Richards","Art and Identity: Visual Culture, Politics and Religion in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance",Hardback,978-1-4438-3628-9,44.99,"This book provides a fully contextualised overview on aspects of visual culture, and how this was the product of patronage, politics, and religion in some European countries between the 13th and 17th centuries. The research that is showcased here offers new perspectives on the conception, production and reception of artworks as a means of projecting core values, ideals, and traditions of individuals, groups, and communities. This volume features contributions from established scholars and new researchers in the field, and examines how art contributed to the construction of identities by means of new archival research and a thorough interdisciplinary approach. The authors suggest that the use of conventions in style and iconography allowed the local and wider community to take part in rituals and devotional practices where these works were widely recognized symbols. However, alongside established traditions, new, ad-hoc developments in style and iconography were devised to suit individual requirements, and these are fully discussed in relevant case-studies. This book also contributes to a new understanding of the interaction between artists, patrons, and viewers in Medieval and Renaissance times.
","“Art and Identity offers a thought-provoking study of ways in which art contributed to the construction of a variety of identities in Europe between the mid thirteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Drawing on recent and innovative research by both established and early career scholars, it provides an illuminating demonstration of the complexity inherent in the process of defining the many different and overlapping identities within medieval and renaissance society and reveals the multiple uses to which art was put in order to convey, embody and affirm these. In so doing, it exemplifies the value of an interdisciplinary approach to the subject, paying proper attention to the relevance of the specific political, social and religious contexts in which, and for which, particular works of art were made. A further strength of this collection is that it encompasses a variety of artistic media and addresses works of art produced not only in Italy – long recognised as a major centre of art production – but also in other parts of northern and central Europe. The essays in Art and Identity can be warmly recommended to historians, art historians, and the general reader with an interest in the art, social practices and rituals of medieval and renaissance society.”
– Diana Norman, Professor Emeritus of Art History, The Open University, UK
“This very well-organised collection brings together some exciting new work on questions of artistic and cultural identity between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries. The essay contributions, based on an excellent postgraduate conference held at the University of Aberdeen in the summer of 2008, build a varied and rich picture of the role of visual art in the formation of cultural identity in a period of great change and diversity. The organisation of the essays into three sections dealing successively with questions of political and family identity, individual and communal patronage and finally specific issues of iconography and style, gives the collection a broad thematic unity, even as individual contributions [throw] new light on a wide range of specific topics and images. Another kind of unity is provided by the contextual methodology employed by all the contributors, which insistently places the visual image at the heart of the cultural process of identity formation. The volume will form a welcome addition to the burgeoning art historical literature examining the central and formative role of art in the formation of cultural identity in what was a key period in European history.”
– Dr Tom Nichols, Senior Lecturer in the History of Art, University of Aberdeen
",Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2012-03-01,Ofra Amihay and Lauren Walsh,The Future of Text and Image: Collected Essays on Literary and Visual Conjunctures,Hardback,978-1-4438-3640-1,44.99,"The question of the relation between the visual and the textual in literature is at the heart of an increasing number of scholarly projects, and in turn, the investigation of evolving visual-verbal dynamics is becoming an independent discipline. This volume explores these profound literary shifts through the work of twelve talented, and in some cases, emerging scholars who study text and image relations in diverse forms and contexts.
The inter-medial conjunctures investigated in this book play with and against the traditional roles of the visual and the verbal. The Future of Text and Image presents explorations of the incorporation of visual elements into works of literature, of visual writing modes, and of the textuality and literariness of images. It focuses on the special potential literature offers for the combination of these two functions. Alongside examinations of major forms and genres such as memoirs, novels, and poetry, this volume expands the discussion of text and image relations into more marginal forms, for instance, collage books, the PostSecret collections of anonymous postcards, and digital poetry. In other words, while exploring the destiny of text and image as an independent discipline, this volume simultaneously looks at the very literal future of text and image forms in an ever-changing technological reality. The essays in this book will help to define the emergent practices and politics of this growing field of study, and at the same time, reflect the tremendous significance of the visual in today’s image culture.
","“The imagetext … is a principle of thought, feeling, and meaning as fundamental to human beings as distinctions (and the accompanying indistinctions) of gender and sexuality. … Of course, some will say that we have transcended all these binary oppositions in the digital age, when images have all been absorbed into the flow of information. They forget that the dense, sensuous world of the analog doesn’t disappear in the field of ones and zeros: it re-surfaces in the eye and ear ravished by new forms of music and spectacle, and in the hand itself, where digits are literalized in the keyboard interface and game controller. Hardly surprising then, that the imagetext can play such a productive role in the range of essays included in this volume, embracing poetry and photography, painting and typography, blogs and comics.”
– W. J. T. Mitchell, University of Chicago
“The lexicon collectively developed here does more than mark a moment of frustration with writing as medium. By stitching terms together to account for image/text conjunctures, it gestures to a pedagogy and a politics as well: a pedagogy toward dealing with the difficulties and discomforts created by new forms and a politics that might emerge from the practice of looking and reading relationally, connectively, contrapuntally. And from doing so with an eye to the future.”
– Marianne Hirsch, Columbia University
",Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2012-04-01,Marja Vuorinen,Enemy Images in War Propaganda,Hardback,978-1-4438-3641-8,34.99,"In the post 9/11 world the emotionally charged concepts of identity and ideology, enmity and political aggression have once again become household words. Contrary to the serene assumptions of the early 1990s, the history did not end. Civilisations are busy clashing against one another, and the self-proclaimed pacified humanity is showing its barbaric roots. Religion mixes with politics to produce governments that abuse even their own citizens, and victorious insurgents too often fail to carry out the promised reforms. Terrorists blow up unsuspecting pedestrians and allegedly democratic nations threaten to bomb allegedly less democratic ones back to the Stone Age. Mass demonstrations materialise like flash mobs out of nowhere, usually prepared to hold their ground until the bitter end.
Where does all this passionate intensity come from? To better understand how ideological enmity of today is moulded, spread and managed, this book investigates the propaganda operations of the past. Its topics range from the ruthless portrayal of female enemy soldiers in an early 20th century civil war setting to the multiple enemy images cherished by Adolf Hitler, and onwards to the WW II Soviet Russians as a subtype of a more ancient notion of the Eastern Hordes. Of the more recent events the book covers the Rwandan genocide of 1994 and the still ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict. The closing chapter on cyber warfare introduces the reader to the invisible enemies of the future
",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2012-04-01,Maddalena Mazzocut-Mis,"How Far Can We Go? Pain, Excess and the Obscene",Hardback,978-1-4438-3643-2,34.99,"The public does not desire horror, yet enjoys it in art and suffers it in life. When we deal with the monstrous marriage of the abject and the sublime, the consequent thrill of enjoyment is never appeased, always problematic, often unresolved and finally borders on physiological if not pathological narcissism. The public is well acquainted with this ‘rhetoric of effects’; rhetoric of extreme effects, which transforms the spectator into voyeur or victim, into an apathetic torturer, whenever cruelty is shown without respite. A look of horror greets the enjoyment of extremes and enjoyment to the extreme as well; the Eighteenth Century teaches us that lesson. The century of good taste elaborates a sense of the limits, since representing horror means choosing not so much to domesticate it as to render it more enjoyable. It is a game of limits that are not limits anymore, as we can allude to an infinity that often shows the features of the sublime.
",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2012-05-01,Laura Cleaver and Ayla Lepine,Gothic Legacies: Four Centuries of Tradition and Innovation in Art and Architecture,Hardback,978-1-4438-3740-8,44.99,"As this exciting contribution to interdisciplinary studies in the arts shows, the art and architecture of the Middle Ages were reworked, reframed and reinterpreted in diverse ways from as early as the sixteenth century. In addition, the definition of “Gothic” art and architecture was used, questioned, and challenged in a range of literature from the Renaissance onwards. The diverse essays in Gothic Legacies: Four Centuries of Tradition and Innovation in Art and Architecture demonstrate that the Gothic spirit manifested itself in many visual forms, including furniture, set design, cathedrals, book illustration, and urban architecture. Edited by Laura Cleaver and Ayla Lepine, Gothic Legacies showcases new research by scholars who are united by an interest what “Gothic” could mean in particular contexts, and how it was used across different periods, cultures, and media.
The book’s twelve essays are divided into thematic sections, which identify recurring themes in discussions of the “Gothic”. The authors explore debates around the understanding and use of spolia and ideas about heritage, the relationships between “Gothic” art and literature, and the invocation of concepts of the “Gothic” in opposition to other categorisations (notably Classicism and Modernism). In doing so they shed light on rich dialogues between the present and the past (real or imagined). Featuring interdisciplinary and international contributions from medieval and modern period scholars with fresh academic perspectives, this volume constitutes a valuable resource for anyone with an interest in how and why the art of the Middle Ages was to play such an important role in forming and revising personal, national, and international identities in subsequent works of art and architecture.
",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2012-05-01,Luciana Galliano,The Music of Jōji Yuasa,Hardback,978-1-4438-3763-7,39.99,"Over the last fifty years, the music of Jōji Yuasa has attained the zenith of international musical standards. A study of this great Japanese composer is long overdue. Persuasive and captivating, less “easy” than that of his lifetime friend Tōru Takemitsu, Yuasa’s music has also been a model for many young composers, both from Japan and further afield, thanks to the long period he spent teaching composition at the University of California, San Diego (1981–1994).
This book serves to illuminate aspects of Yuasa’s work, intricately linked to deep, native roots which tend to be more opaque for western (and other) ears. It focusses on various aspects of Yuasa’s music as well as on the social, anthropological, aesthetic and critical contexts that have informed his compositional practice in the context of the postwar Japanese musical world. In a continual interior dialogue which includes Jean-Paul Sartre and Daisetzu T. Suzuki, Matsuo Bashō and William Faulkner, Henry Miller and Motokiyo Zeami, Yuasa’s avant-garde aesthetic project, western in conception, encounters the productive thought of an unambiguously Japanese aesthetic, i.e. that of Zen.
An analysis of Yuasa’s main works will illustrate and complete the picture of Yuasa’s world. Yuasa’s works are placed at the centre of the most original of creative forces in the contemporary music world – a place where, for Yuasa, “in the same idea of creativity, there has to be an avant-garde component”.
",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2012-07-01,Andrew Graciano,"Joseph Wright, Esq. Painter and Gentleman",Hardback,978-1-4438-3914-3,34.99,"Andrew Graciano's thorough study is a re-evaluation of Joseph Wright's career and social status that demonstrates how his later landscapes, portraits and historical pictures are connected to a broader historical context, including contemporary science, industry and economics. In doing so, Graciano reinforces the idea that Wright was an intellectual painter, very much engaged with current ideas in these realms, as well as a gentleman of means beyond his artistic income, which gave him a social standing that has often been ignored by previous scholars
",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2012-07-01,Robert Adam,"The Globalisation of Modern Architecture: The Impact of Politics, Economics and Social Change on Architecture and Urban Design since 1990",Hardback,978-1-4438-3905-1,44.99,"Taking the break-up of the Soviet Union and the entry of Russia, China and India into the global market as the start of a new era of globalisation, Robert Adam compares new developments in architecture and urban design with major shifts in the balance of power since 1990.
Based on the principle that design unavoidably follows social change, politics and economics, this analysis casts a new light on recent architecture. Starting with the lead up to events in the 1990s, links are established between the global dominance of the North Atlantic economies, architectural style and a dramatic increase in international architectural practice. The widely-observed homogeneity of the global consumer economy is examined in relation to branding, tourism and international competition between cities, and parallels are drawn with universal architectural and urban types, iconic architecture and the rise of the star architect. Contrasting pressures to maintain differences are identified in the break-up of nation states, identity politics, targeted marketing and environmentalism, and these are related to attempts to reinforce local identity through architecture and urban design.
Using social, political and economic change as a guide to new directions in architecture and urban design, the book ends by tracing the changes in global power revealed by the 2008 Western financial crash and its immediate impact on the built environment. By comparing past patterns of cultural influence, the book speculates on how architecture and urban design may come to reflect wider global trends.
",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2012-08-01,"Emily-Jan Anderson, Jill Farquhar and John Richards",Visible Exports / Imports: New Research on Medieval and Renaissance European Art and Culture,Hardback,978-1-4438-3997-6,49.99,,,Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2012-08-01,John Harry North,Winckelmann’s “Philosophy of Art”: A Prelude to German Classicism,Hardback,978-1-4438-4004-0,44.99,,,Cambridge Scholars Publishing