To the Actor


Michael Chekhov - 1953
    Chekhov's simple and practical method - successfully used by professional actors all over the world - trains the actor's imagination and body to fulfil its potential. This handbook for actors (and directors) has been revised and expanded by Mala Powers. It includes: a previously unpublished chapter on 'Psychological Gesture', translated into English by the celebrated director Andrei Malaev - Babel; a new biographical overview by Mala Powers; and a foreword by Simon Callow

The Dissertation Journey: A Practical and Comprehensive Guide to Planning, Writing, and Defending Your Dissertation


Carol M. Roberts - 2004
    To overcome the practical, social, and psychological obstacles along the way, you need a knowledgeable guide and the right tools. This comprehensive how-to guide to developing and writing a quality dissertation provides: Expanded and updated coverage of crucial topics such as conducting a literature review, dissertation support groups, and harnessing technology to conduct research Progress tracking tools, sample forms, resource lists, and other user-friendly elements Thoroughly updated and revised chapters with the most current need-to-know information

What Is Art?


Leo Tolstoy - 1898
    These culminated in What is Art?, published in 1898. Although Tolstoy perceived the question of art to be a religious one, he considered & rejected the idea that art reveals & reinvents through beauty. The works of Dante, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Beethoven, Baudelaire & even his own novels are condemned in the course of Tolstoy's impassioned & iconoclastic redefinition of art as a force for good, for the improvement of humankind.

Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972


Lucy R. Lippard - 1972
    Lippard documents the chaotic network of ideas that has been labeled conceptual art. The book is arranged as an annotated chronology into which is woven a rich collection of original documents—including texts by and taped discussions among and with the artists involved and by Lippard, who has also provided a new preface for this edition. The result is a book with the character of a lively contemporary forum that offers an invaluable record of the thinking of the artists—a historical survey and essential reference book for the period.

The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture


Hal FosterEdward W. Said - 1983
    In The Anti-Aesthetic, preeminent critics such as Jean Baudrillard, Rosalind Krauss, Fredric Jameson, and Edward Said consider the full range of postmodern cultural production, from the writing of John Cage, to Cindy Sherman's film stills, to Barbara Kruger's collages. With a redesigned cover and a new afterword that situates the book in relation to contemporary criticism, The Anti-Aesthetic provides a strong introduction for newcomers and a point of reference for those already engaged in discussions of postmodern art, culture, and criticism. Includes a new afterword by Hal Foster and 12 black and white photographs.

The Empty Space: A Book About the Theatre: Deadly, Holy, Rough, Immediate


Peter Brook - 1968
    As relevant as when it was first published in 1968, groundbreaking director and cofounder of the Royal Shakespeare Company Peter Brook draws on a life in love with the stage to explore the issues facing a theatrical performance—of any scale. He describes important developments in theatre from the last century, as well as smaller scale events, from productions by Stanislavsky to the rise of Method Acting, from Brecht’s revolutionary alienation technique to the free form happenings of the 1960s, and from the different styles of such great Shakespearean actors as John Gielgud and Paul Scofield to a joyous impromptu performance in the burnt-out shell of the Hamburg Opera just after the war. Passionate, unconventional, and fascinating, this book shows how theatre defies rules, builds and shatters illusions, and creates lasting memories for its audiences.

Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity


Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick - 2002
    In essays that show how her groundbreaking work in queer theory has developed into a deep interest in affect, Sedgwick offers what she calls "tools and techniques for nondualistic thought," in the process touching and transforming such theoretical discourses as psychoanalysis, speech-act theory, Western Buddhism, and the Foucauldian "hermeneutics of suspicion." In prose sometimes somber, often high-spirited, and always accessible and moving, Touching Feeling interrogates—through virtuoso readings of works by Henry James, J. L. Austin, Judith Butler, the psychologist Silvan Tomkins and others—emotion in many forms. What links the work of teaching to the experience of illness? How can shame become an engine for queer politics, performance, and pleasure? Is sexuality more like an affect or a drive? Is paranoia the only realistic epistemology for modern intellectuals? Ultimately, Sedgwick's unfashionable commitment to the truth of happiness propels a book as open-hearted as it is intellectually daring.

Heads, Features and Faces


George B. Bridgman - 1936
    This volume, prepared by an expert in the field, is devoted exclusively to just that. With its clear, concise text, its almost 200 excellent illustrations, and its overall life-drawing approach, the book provides valuable guidelines on how best to portray faces, features, and heads. There is probably no better instructor to turn to than George B. Bridgman. He brings to the subject both his expertise as an artist and his fifty years' experience as lecturer and teacher at the Art Students League of New York. Throughout the book, he places as much emphasis on perspective and planes as on anatomy. In this way, you'll develop a more precise understanding of each feature, the head and face in general, the relationship between features, and the relationship between a specific feature and the face or head. Mr. Bridgman's consideration of the head includes such topics as the head at eye level and below eye level; planes of the head; and round and square forms. Four features — eye, nose, mouth, ear — are dealt with in detail. Sections on light and shade, comparative measurements, and principles of cube and oval construction further enhance the scope of the book. The finely executed drawings complement the textual material, illustrating all important concepts.  Of special value is the author's inclusion of the work of famous portrait artists. Vermeer, Hals, Rembrandt, Reynolds, Louise Elisabeth LeBrun — these are the people who made portraiture a master art; and you'll be able to study, up close and at your leisure, the qualities that let their work achieve the status it did.

100 Works of Art That Will Define Our Age


Kelly Grovier - 2013
    The global cast includes Marina Abramovic , Matthew Barney, Christian Boltanski, Louise Bourgeois, Maurizio Cattelan, Marlene Dumas, Olafur Eliasson, Andreas Gursky, Cristina Iglesias, On Kawara, Jeff Koons, Ernesto Neto, Gerhard Richter, Pipilotti Rist, Kara Walker, and Ai Weiwei. Many of the pieces reflect the cultural upheavals of recent times, from the collapse of the Berlin Wall to the blossoming of the Arab Spring.A daring yet convincing analysis of which artworks best capture the zeitgeist of our time, Grovier’s list also provides a much-needed map through the landscape of contemporary art. Illustrations of key works are supplemented by comparative images, and short texts offer a biography of each artwork, tracing its inception and impact, and offering a view not only into the imagination of the artist but into the age in which we live.

Handbook of Inaesthetics


Alain Badiou - 2002
    What characterizes the century that has just come to a close is that, while it underwent the saturation of these three schemata, it failed to introduce a new one. Today, this predicament tends to produce a kind of unknotting of terms, a desperate dis-relation between art and philosophy, together with the pure and simple collapse of what circulated between them: the theme of education.Whence the thesis of which this book is nothing but a series of variations: faced with such a situation of saturation and closure, we must attempt to propose a new schema, a fourth type of knot between philosophy and art.Among these “inaesthetic” variations, the reader will encounter a sustained debate with contemporary philosophical uses of the poem, bold articulations of the specificity and prospects of theater, cinema, and dance, along with subtle and provocative readings of Fernando Pessoa, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Samuel Beckett.

Art and Feminism


Helena Reckitt - 2001
    Widely acknowledged as both beautiful and intelligent, a sourcebook of art informed by feminism from the 1960s to the start of the 21st century, now available in paperback.

The Shock of the New


Robert Hughes - 1980
    More than 250 color photos.

Anatomy for the Artist


Sarah Simblet - 2001
    This superb drawing guide helps you unravel its complexity and capture its aesthetic on paper. Packed with instructive illustrations and specially-commissioned photographs of male and female models, Anatomy for the Artist unveils the extraordinary construction of the human body and celebrates its continuing prominence in Western Art today. Through her detailed sketches, acclaimed artist Sarah Simblet shows you how to look inside the human frame to map its muscle groups, skeletal strength, balance, poise, and grace.Selected drawings superimposed over photographs reveal fascinating relationships between external appearance and internal structure. Six drawing classes guide you through human anatomy afresh, offering techniques for observing and drawing the skeleton, including the head, ribcage, pelvis, hands, and feet. By investigating a series of masterworks juxtaposed against photographs of real-life models, Dr. Simblet also traces the visions of different artists across time, from Holbein's Christ Entombed to Edward Hopper's Hotel Room.For any artist, learning about the human body is always a palpable delight. This imaginative reference guide will enhance your anatomical drawing and painting techniques at every level.

The Fundamentals of Illustration


Lawrence Zeegen - 2005
    Pub Date: 2006 Pages: 176 Publisher: Ava Publishing. SA Click on the Google Preview image above to the read some pages of this book! Creating great illustration work the requires specialist skills and knowledge. and in addition to practical applications. this text teaches a comprehension of basic communication theory and creative strategies. Contents: IntroductionContentsp. 4How to Get the Most from this Bookp. 6Forewordp. 8Introductionp. 10Communicating IdeasThe Blank Sheet of Paperp. 18Why ??Ideasp. 20The iefingp. 24Investigation of the Subject Matterp. 26Gathering Inspirationp . 30ainstormingp. 34Explaining the Visualp. 38Longevityp. 44The Medium is the MessageThe Power of the Pencilp. 50Material Worldp. 55Art School Ethosp. 60Illustration as a Disciplinep. 65A Demanding Lifep. 70Mixing Mediap. 72The Digital Dividep. 74The New Wave of Illustratorsp. 80From Outc...

The Optical Unconscious


Rosalind E. Krauss - 1993
    The account of modernism presented here challenges the vaunted principle of vision itself. And it is a very different story than we have ever read, not only because its insurgent plot and characters rise from below the calm surface of the known and law-like field of modernist painting, but because the voice is unlike anything we have heard before. Just as the artists of the optical unconscious assaulted the idea of autonomy and visual mastery, Rosalind Krauss abandons the historian's voice of objective detachment and forges a new style of writing in this book: art history that insinuates diary and art theory, and that has the gait and tone of fiction.The Optical Unconscious will be deeply vexing to modernism's standard-bearers, and to readers who have accepted the foundational principles on which their aesthetic is based. Krauss also gives us the story that Alfred Barr, Meyer Shapiro, and Clement Greenberg repressed, the story of a small, disparate group of artists who defied modernism's most cherished self-descriptions, giving rise to an unruly, disruptive force that persistently haunted the field of modernism from the 1920s to the 1950s and continues to disrupt it today.In order to understand why modernism had to repress the optical unconscious, Krauss eavesdrops on Roger Fry in the salons of Bloomsbury, and spies on the toddler John Ruskin as he amuses himself with the patterns of a rug; we find her in the living room of Clement Greenberg as he complains about smart Jewish girls with their typewriters in the 1960s, and in colloquy with Michael Fried about Frank Stella's love of baseball. Along the way, there are also narrative encounters with Freud, Jacques Lacan, Georges Bataille, Roger Caillois, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean-Fran�ois Lyotard.To embody this optical unconscious, Krauss turns to the pages of Max Ernst's collage novels, to Marcel Duchamp's hypnotic Rotoreliefs, to Eva Hesse's luminous sculptures, and to Cy Twombly's, Andy Warhol's, and Robert Morris's scandalous decoding of Jackson Pollock's drip pictures as Anti-Form. These artists introduced a new set of values into the field of twentieth-century art, offering ready-made images of obsessional fantasy in place of modernism's intentionality and unexamined compulsions.