Book picks similar to
Out of Order, Out of Sight, Vol. 2: Selected Writings in Art Criticism, 1967-1992 by Adrian Piper
art-books
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The View From The Studio Door: How Artists Find Their Way In An Uncertain World
Ted Orland - 2006
Now, in The View From The Studio Door, Orland turns his attention to broader issues that stand to either side of that artistic moment of truth.In a text marked by grace, brevity and humor, Orland argues that when it comes to art making, theory and practice are always intertwined. There are timeless philosophical questions (How do we make sense of the world?) that address the very nature of art making, as well as gritty real-world questions (Is there art after graduation?) that artists encounter the moment they’re off the starting blocks and producing work on a regular basis.Simply put, this is a book of practical philosophy. As a teacher and working artist himself, Orland brings authentic insight and encouragement to all those who face the challenge of making art in an uncertain world. The breadth of material covered is reflected in chapters that include Making Sense of the World, Art & Society, The Education of the Artist, Surviving Graduation, Making Art That Matters, The Artistic Community, and more.The View From The Studio Door is the perfect companion piece to Art & Fear, and will appeal to a similar (and already-established) audience of students, working artists, teachers and professionals. For students’ benefit, The View is also modestly priced, with wide page margins for easy note-taking and annotation.
Traditional Oil Painting: Advanced Techniques and Concepts from the Renaissance to the Present
Virgil Elliott - 2007
How did the Old Masters create their masterpieces? What kind of education allowed these great artists to create such beautiful work, and how can an artist learn these lessons today? Traditional Oil Painting answers those questions and many more. This comprehensive sourcebook explores the most advanced levels of oil painting, with full information on the latest scientific discoveries. Author and distinguished artist Virgil Elliott examines the many elements that let artists take the next step in their work: mental attitude, aesthetic considerations, the importance of drawing, principles of visual reality, materials, techniques, portraiture, photographic images versus visual reality, and color. Traditional Oil Painting helps artists master the secrets of realistic painting to create work that will rival that of the masters.
The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader
Amelia Jones - 2002
It explores how issues of race, class, nationality and sexuality, enter into debates about feminism, and includes work by feminist critics, artists and activists. Articles are grouped into six thematic sections:* representation* difference* disciplines/strategies* mass culture/media interventions* the body* technology.A valuable reference for students of visual culture and gender studies, this is both a framework within which to understand the shifts in feminist thinking in visual studies and an overview of the most significant feminist theories in this area.
Fuck You Heroes: Glen E. Friedman Photographs, 1976-1991
Glen E. Friedman - 1994
Friedman's uncompromising look at the radicals of youth culture in the extreme worlds of skateboarding, punk and rap. From day one behind his camera, Friedman has had an unerring ability to be in the right place ahead of everybody else. He was a teenaged photographer for 'Thrasher' and 'Skateboarder' magazines, he created the seminal one-hit punk fanzine 'My Rules', worked with Black Flag and Suicidal Tendencies in their early days, wrote for Maximum Rock & Roll, did street promotion for Def Jam's west coast office and shot sleeve photos for everyone from Minor Threat to Public Enemy. This book presents the photographic distillation of Glen's ethic: it's about the perfect shots of the people who live by the touchstones of intensity and integrity.
The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form
Kenneth Clark - 1956
From the art of the Greeks to that of Renoir and Moore, this work surveys the ever-changing fashions in what has constituted the ideal nude as a basis of humanist form.
Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists' Writings
Kristine Stiles - 1995
These influential essays, interviews, and critical and theoretical comments provide bold and fertile insights into the construction of visual knowledge. Featuring a wide range of leading and emerging artists since 1945, the collection—while comprehensive and authoritative—offers the reader some eclectic surprises as well.Included here are texts that have become pivotal documents in contemporary art, along with writings that cover unfamiliar ground. Some are newly translated, others have never before been published. Together they address visual literacy, cultural studies, and the theoretical debates regarding modernism and postmodernism. The full panoply of visual media is represented, from painting and sculpture to environments, installations, performance, conceptual art, video, photography, and virtual reality. Thematic concerns range from figuration and process to popular culture, art and technology, and politics and the media. Contemporary issues of gender, race, class, and sexuality are also addressed.Kristine Stiles's general introduction is a succinct overview of artists' theories in the evolution of contemporary discourse around art. Introductions to each chapter provide synopses of the cultural contexts in which the texts originated and brief biographies of individual artists. The text is augmented by outstanding photographs, many of artists in their studios, and vivid, contemporary art images.Reflecting the editors' shared belief that artists' own theories provide unparalleled access to visual knowledge, this book, like its distinguished predecessors, Hershel Chipp's Theories of Modern Art (with Peter Selz and Joshua Taylor) and Joshua Taylor's Nineteenth-Century Theories of Art, will be an invaluable resource for anyone interested in contemporary art."In New York in 1915 I bought at a hardware store a snow shovel on which I wrote 'in advance of the broken arm.' It was around that time that the word 'readymade' came to mind to designate this form of manifestation."—Marcel Duchamp (1961)"Women have always collected things and saved and recycled them because leftovers yielded nourishment in new forms. The decorative functional objects women made often spoke in a secret language, bore a covert imagery. When we read these images in needlework, in paintings, in quilts, rugs and scrapbooks, we sometimes find a cry for help, sometimes an allusion to a secret political alignment, sometimes a moving symbol about the relationships between men and women."—Miriam Schapiro and Melissa Meyer (1978)"I want to create a fusion of art and life, Asia and America, Duchampiana modernism and Levi-Straussian savagism, cool form and hot video, dealing with all of those complex problems, spanning the tribal memory of the Nomadic Asians who crossed over the Bering Strait over 10,000 years ago."—Shigeko Kubota (1976)"Black for me is a lot more peaceful and gentle than white. White marble may be very beautiful, but you can't read anything on it. I wanted something that would be soft on the eyes, and turn into a mirror if you polished it. The point is to see yourself reflected in the names. Also the mirror image doubles and triples the space."—Maya Lin (1983)"Artists often depend on the manipulation of symbols to present ideas and associations not always apparent in such symbols. If all such ideas and associations were evident there would be little need for artists to give expression to them. In short, there would be no need to make art."—Andres Serrano (1989)
S, M, L, XL
Rem Koolhaas - 1995
This almost overwhelming accumulation of words and images illuminates the condition of architecture today--its splendors and miseries--exploring and revealing the corrosive effects of politics, context, the economy, and globalization. In some ways, this is the "Medium is the Message" of 1990s architectural discourse: guaranteed to be hugely influential in the coming decades, but grossly misunderstood by those who have not read it. The core arguments it makes about metropolitan architecture--accepting complexity and lack of centralized control--are similar to those of Kevin Kelly's Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World. Very highly recommended.
The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art
Don Thompson - 2008
5, 1948 sell for $140 million? Intriguing and entertaining, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark is a Freakonomics approach to the economics and psychology of the contemporary art world. Why were record prices achieved at auction for works by 131 contemporary artists in 2006 alone, with astonishing new heights reached in 2007? Don Thompson explores the money, lust, and self-aggrandizement of the art world in an attempt to determine what makes a particular work valuable while others are ignored. This book is the first to look at the economics and the marketing strategies that enable the modern art market to generate such astronomical prices. Drawing on interviews with both past and present executives of auction houses and art dealerships, artists, and the buyers who move the market, Thompson launches the reader on a journey of discovery through the peculiar world of modern art. Surprising, passionate, gossipy, revelatory, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark reveals a great deal that even experienced auction purchasers do not know.
Tomboy Style: Beyond the Boundaries of Fashion
Lizzie Garrett Mettler - 2012
They are bold, brazen, fierce—and sexy. They aren’t known for following rules, they are known for doing—and wearing—whatever they want. Tomboy captures the tomboy’s style, her je ne sais quoi, her wardrobe, and most importantly, her spirit. Throughout the twentieth century, the mass marketing of gender stereotypes meant tomboys cropped up against the odds, trends, and ads. As menswear-inspired fashions for women have exploded into the mainstream under the helm of designers and stylists ranging from J.Crew to Rag & Bone to Boy by Band of Outsiders, acceptance of both the word tomboy and the women associated with its edge has been set into play. But a tomboy is not just about style—tomboys are measured in equal parts wardrobe and spirit.A visual history that chronicles the past eighty years of women who blur the line between masculinity and femininity, Tomboy explores the evolution of the style and its icons. Vivid commentary illuminates the tomboy’s history and captures a diversity of women who are bound together by their inherent ability to seamlessly blend a rugged sensibility with classic, understated elegance.
Jamie Hewlett
Julius Wiedemann - 2017
With influences ranging from hip hop to zombie slasher movies, Hewlett emerged in the mid 1990s as cocreator of the zeitgeist-defining Tank Girl comic. With then-roommate, Blur frontman Damon Albarn, he went on to create the unique cartoon band Gorillaz, a virtual pop group of animated characters, which recorded four studio albums and mounted breathtaking live spectacles. Since then, Hewlett has continued to collaborate with Albarn on projects including an elaborate staging of the Chinese novel Monkey: Journey to the West by Wu Cheng en, complete with circus acrobats, Shaolin monks, and Chinese singers. In 2006, he was named Designer of the Year by the Design Museum in London, and in 2009, Hewlett and Albarn won a Bafta for their Monkey animated sequence for the Beijing Olympic Games. More recently, an exhibition of prints at the Saatchi Gallery in London demonstrated an exciting new direction in Hewlett s practice. This new TASCHEN edition, Hewlett s first major monograph, illustrates this thrilling creative journey with over 400 artworks from the Tank Girl era through Gorillaz and up to the present day. Through stories, characters, strips, and sketches, we trace Hewlett s exceptional capacity for invention and celebrate a polymath artist who refuses to rest on his laurels, or to be pigeonholed into a particular practice.Text in English, French, and German"
The Age of Earthquakes: A Guide to the Extreme Present
Douglas Coupland - 2015
THE AGE OF EARTHQUAKES is a quick-fire paperback, harnessing the images, language and perceptions of our unfurling digital lives. The authors offer five characteristics of the Extreme Present (see below); invent a glossary of new words to describe how we are truly feeling today; and ‘mindsource’ images and illustrations from over 30 contemporary artists. Wayne Daly’s striking graphic design imports the surreal, juxtaposed, mashed mannerisms of screen to page. It’s like a culturally prescient, all-knowing email to the reader: possibly the best email they will ever read. Welcome to THE AGE OF EARTHQUAKES, a paper portrait of Now, where the Internet hasn’t just changed the structure of our brains these past few years, it’s also changing the structure of the planet. This is a new history of the world that fits perfectly in your back pocket. 30+ artists contributions: With contributions from Farah Al Qasimi, Ed Atkins, Alessandro Bavo, Gabriele Basilico, Josh Bitelli, James Bridle, Cao Fei, Alex Mackin Dolan, Thomas Dozol, Constant Dullaart, Cecile B Evans, Rami Farook, Hans-Peter Feldmann, GCC, K-Hole, Liam Gillick, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Eloise Hawser, Camille Henrot, Hu Fang, K-Hole, Koo Jeong-A, Katja Novitskova, Lara Ogel, Trevor Paglen, Yuri Patterson, Jon Rafman, Bunny Rogers, Bogosi Sekhukhuni, Taryn Simon, Hito Steyerl, Michael Stipe, Rosemarie Trockel, Amalia Ulman, David Weir, Trevor Yeung.
Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature
Alva Noë - 2015
But what if the objects themselves are not what matter? In Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature, the philosopher and cognitive scientist Alva Noë argues that our obsession with works of art has gotten in the way of understanding how art works on us.For Noë, art isn’t a phenomenon in need of an explanation but a mode of research, a method of investigating what makes us human—a strange tool. Art isn’t just something to look at or listen to—it is a challenge, a dare to try to make sense of what it is all about. Art aims not for satisfaction but for confrontation, intervention, and subversion. Through diverse and provocative examples from the history of art-making, Noë reveals the transformative power of artistic production. By staging a dance, choreographers cast light on the way bodily movement organizes us. Painting goes beyond depiction and representation to call into question the role of pictures in our lives. Accordingly, we cannot reduce art to some natural aesthetic sense or trigger; recent efforts to frame questions of art in terms of neurobiology and evolutionary theory alone are doomed to fail.By engaging with art, we are able to study ourselves in profoundly novel ways. In fact, art and philosophy have much more in common than you might think. Reframing the conversation around artists and their craft, Strange Tools is a daring and stimulating intervention in contemporary thought.
One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity
Miwon Kwon - 2002
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, as site-specific art intersected with land art, process art, performance art, conceptual art, installation art, institutional critique, community-based art, and public art, its creators insisted on the inseparability of the work and its context. In recent years, however, the presumption of unrepeatability and immobility encapsulated in Richard Serra's famous dictum to remove the work is to destroy the work is being challenged by new models of site specificity and changes in institutional and market forces. One Place after Another offers a critical history of site-specific art since the late 1960s and a theoretical framework for examining the rhetoric of aesthetic vanguardism and political progressivism associated with its many permutations. Informed by urban theory, postmodernist criticism in art and architecture, and debates concerning identity politics and the public sphere, the book addresses the siting of art as more than an artistic problem. It examines site specificity as a complex cipher of the unstable relationship between location and identity in the era of late capitalism. The book addresses the work of, among others, John Ahearn, Mark Dion, Andrea Fraser, Donald Judd, Renee Green, Suzanne Lacy, Inigo Manglano-Ovalle, Richard Serra, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, and Fred Wilson.
Street Logos
Tristan Manco - 2004
Fresh coats of paint and newly pasted posters appear overnight in cities across the world. New artists, new ideas, and new tactics displace faded images in a perpetual process of renewal and metamorphosis. From Los Angeles to Barcelona, Stockholm to Tokyo, Melbourne to Milan, wall spaces are a breeding ground for graphic and typographic forms as artists unleash their daily creations.Current graffiti art is reflective of the world around it. Using new materials and techniques, its innovators are creating a language of forms and images infused with contemporary graphic design and illustration. Fluent in branding and graphic imagery, they have been replacing tags with more personal logos and shifting from typographic to iconographic forms of communication.Street Logos is a worldwide celebration of these new developments in twenty-first-century graffiti, an essential sourcebook for all art and design professionals, and a delight to everyone excited by the vitality of the street.
A Frame for Life: The Designs of StudioIlse
Ilse Crawford - 2014
Studioilse, the award-winning design studio founded by Ilse Crawford, bridges the worlds of interior design, architecture, and product design with the philosophy of putting the human being at the center. Fascinated by what drives us and makes us feel alive, Crawford says: "When I look at making spaces, I don’t just look at the visual. I’m much more interested in the sensory thing, in thinking about it from the human context, the primal perspective, the thing that touches you." Featuring Studioilse’s work to date, from private residences to hotels, restaurants, and retail projects, this book illustrates the effectiveness of design grounded in human needs and desires. Layering materials and textures, combined with her understanding of human behavior, Crawford’s designs are sensual and accessible. A forerunner of the holistic design movement a decade ago, her humanistic approach has now become the norm. This volume illustrates why Crawford’s design philosophy is so seminal—her work has influenced not only a generation of Dutch and European designers, but also Americans due to her acclaimed Soho House New York. With new photography and essays by Crawford and design critic Edwin Heatcote, this inspirational volume is sure to be one of the most important design books of the year.