Book picks similar to
Materiality by Petra Lange-Berndt
art
uni
theory
non-fiction
Going South
Ella Yelich-O'Connor (Lorde) - 2021
It documents her experience visiting the continent of Antarctica in January 2019 with photos taken by New Zealand photographer Harriet Were. Lorde expressed an interest in exploring the region of Antarctica since she was old enough to read. In January 2019, she visited Scott Base and McMurdo Station, Antarctica, travelling as an Antarctic Ambassador. During her visit, she observed microscopic species in environmental laboratories and spoke with scientists. Lorde described the book as "sort of a perfect precursor" to her upcoming third studio album. It will feature over 100 pages of images taken by New Zealand photographer Harriet Were and writings from Lorde. All proceeds will be used to fund a postgraduate scholarship created by Antarctica New Zealand, a government agency.
Color and Meaning: Art, Science, and Symbolism
John Gage - 1999
His pioneering study is informed by the conviction that color is a contingent, historical occurrence whose meaning, like language, lies in the particular contexts in which it is experienced and interpreted.Gage covers topics as diverse as the optical mixing techniques implicit in mosaic; medieval color-symbolism; the equipment of the manuscript illuminator's workshop, the color languages and color practices of Latin America at the time of the Spanish Conquest; the earliest history of the prism; and the color ideas of Goethe and Runge, Blake and Turner, Seurat and Matisse.From the perspective of the history of science, Gage considers the bearing of Newton's optical discoveries on painting, the chemist Chevreul's contact with painters and the growing interest of experimental psychologists in the topic of color in the late nineteenth century, particularly in relation to synaesthesia. He includes an invaluable overview of the twentieth-century literature that bears on the historical interpretation of color in art. Gage's explorations further extend the concepts he addressed in his prize-winning book, Color and Culture.
Digital Photography: An Introduction
Tom Ang - 2002
The truly accessible guides inspire and instruct readers and deliver all the information one needs to know about the featured subject. Expertly written with helpful diagrams, full-color photographs and illustrations, these 2 new titles give readers even more reasons to K I S S inexperience goodbye. User-friendly explanations of technical terms and equipment, clear step-by-step instructions, and full-color photography make this the ideal guide to digital photography. Find the right camera and accessories; master digital tricks, lighting and composition, while demystifying buzzwords, from pixels and jpegs to cropping and cloning.
Joseph Cornell: Master of Dreams
Diane Waldman - 1977
Using the seemingly commonplace materials that he collected in five-and-dime stores and other shops in New York City - cordial glasses, mirrors, marbles, and maps among them - along with clippings from books and magazines, childhood games, and Victorian illustrations, Cornell beckons us into a world at once distantly magical and tantalizingly, nostalgically "home."" Diane Waldman first met Cornell in 1963, when she was writing her master of fine arts' thesis on the subject of his art, and their friendship continued until his death. Over the years, Waldman has written often about Cornell, adding to the analysis of his art her own personal knowledge gained from interviews with the artist and his family as well as Cornell's letters and papers. In this volume she probes Cornell's elusive imagery in his earliest Surrealist-inspired collages of the 1930s, his masterful box constructions of the 1940s and 1950s, his experimental films, and his final collages in his last years.
Andy Goldsworthy: A Collaboration with Nature
Andy Goldsworthy - 1990
Illustrates outdoor sculptures created with a range of natural materials, including snow, ice, leaves, rock, clay, stones, feathers, and twigs.
Portraiture
Shearer West - 2004
How has portraiture changed over the centuries? How have portraits represented their subjects, and how have they been interpreted? The book provides a clear, yet thorough overview of the history of portraiture in terms of social, political, economic, and psychological factors over a broad time span. Issues such as identity, modernity, and gender are considered within their cultural and historical contexts.Shearer West uncovers intriguing aspects of portraiture-a genre that has often been seen as purely representational, featuring examples from African tribes to Renaissance princes, and from stars such as David and Victoria Beckham to everyday people. West examines the many meanings and uses of portraits throughout the ages and includes a wide range of artists from Botticelli to Picasso, and Hans Holbein to Frida Kahlo. In the process, she reveals the faces of the past in an exciting new way. Beautifully illustrated throughout, this book is a unique and accessible introduction to the history of portraiture.
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.
Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper
Harriet Scott Chessman - 2001
The story is told by Mary’s sister Lydia, as she poses for five of her sister’s most unusual paintings, which are reproduced in, and form the focal point of each chapter. Ill with Bright’s disease and conscious of her approaching death, Lydia contemplates her world with courageous openness, and asks important questions about love and art’s capacity to remember.
Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things
Jane Bennett - 2010
Bennett argues that political theory needs to do a better job of recognizing the active participation of nonhuman forces in events. Toward that end, she theorizes a “vital materiality” that runs through and across bodies, both human and nonhuman. Bennett explores how political analyses of public events might change were we to acknowledge that agency always emerges as the effect of ad hoc configurations of human and nonhuman forces. She suggests that recognizing that agency is distributed this way, and is not solely the province of humans, might spur the cultivation of a more responsible, ecologically sound politics: a politics less devoted to blaming and condemning individuals than to discerning the web of forces affecting situations and events.Bennett examines the political and theoretical implications of vital materialism through extended discussions of commonplace things and physical phenomena including stem cells, fish oils, electricity, metal, and trash. She reflects on the vital power of material formations such as landfills, which generate lively streams of chemicals, and omega-3 fatty acids, which can transform brain chemistry and mood. Along the way, she engages with the concepts and claims of Spinoza, Nietzsche, Thoreau, Darwin, Adorno, and Deleuze, disclosing a long history of thinking about vibrant matter in Western philosophy, including attempts by Kant, Bergson, and the embryologist Hans Driesch to name the “vital force” inherent in material forms. Bennett concludes by sketching the contours of a “green materialist” ecophilosophy.
The Art of Color: The Subjective Experience and Objective Rationale of Color
Johannes Itten - 1961
Subjective feelings and objective color principles are described in detail and clarified by color reproductions.
Theory of Colours
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - 1810
To Goethe, the theory was the result of mistaking an incidental result for an elemental principle. Far from pretending to a knowledge of physics, he insisted that such knowledge was an actual hindrance to understanding. He based his conclusions exclusively upon exhaustive personal observation of the phenomena of color.Of his own theory, Goethe was supremely confident: "From the philosopher, we believe we merit thanks for having traced the phenomena of colours to their first sources, to the circumstances under which they appear and are, and beyond which no further explanation respecting them is possible."Goethe's scientific conclusions have, of course, long since been thoroughly demolished, but the intelligent reader of today may enjoy this work on quite different grounds: for the beauty and sweep of his conjectures regarding the connection between color and philosophical ideas; for an insight into early nineteenth-century beliefs and modes of thought; and for the flavor of life in Europe just after the American and French Revolutions.The work may also be read as an accurate guide to the study of color phenomena. Goethe's conclusions have been repudiated, but no one quarrels with his reporting of the facts to be observed. With simple objects -- vessels, prisms, lenses, and the like -- the reader will be led through a demonstration course not only in subjectively produced colors, but also in the observable physical phenomena of color. By closely following Goethe's explanations of the color phenomena, the reader may become so divorced from the wavelength theory -- Goethe never even mentions it -- that he may begin to think about color theory relatively unhampered by prejudice, ancient or modern.
The Writings of Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp - 1973
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the writings of Marcel Duchamp, who fashioned some of the more joyous and ingenious couplings and uncouplings in modern art. This collection beings together two essential interviews and two statements about his art that underscore the serious side of Duchamp. But most of the book is made up of his experimental writings, which he called ”Texticles,” the long and extraordinary notes he wrote for The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Eben (also known as The Large Glass), and the outrageous puns and alter-ego he constructed for his female self, Rrose Sélavy (”Eros, c’est la vie” or arouser la vie”drink it up”; celebrate life”). Wacky, perverse, deliberately frustrating, these entertaining notes are basic for understanding one of the twentieth century’s most provocative artists, a figure whose influence on the contemporary scene has never been stronger.
Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life
Allan Kaprow - 1993
His sustained inquiry into the paradoxical relationship of art to life and into the nature of meaning itself is brought into focus in this newly expanded collection of his most significant writings. A new preface and two new additional essays published in the 1990s bring this valuable collection up to date.
Just Looking: Essays on Art
John Updike - 2001
Originally published in 1989 and until now unavailable in any edition, Just Looking had become one of Updike's rarest and most sought-after titles. It collects the best of the novelist and critic's multifarious musings on art and artists, museums and popular culture, the lives behind the works and the ways in which these works have informed his own life. Included here are pieces on Vermeer, Erastus Field, Modigliani, the major Impressionists, New Yorker cartoonist Ralph Barton, children's book illustrations, Fairfield Porter, and Jean Ipousteguy, among others, as well as extensive reflections on John Singer Sargent and Andrew Wyeth, a critical examination of writers' art, and a long essay on his impressions of the Museum of Modern Art. Featuring a new introduction by the author, this edition of Just Looking -- the first ever in paperback -- brings back into print a key work of art criticism by one of the most respected and accomplished writers of our time and is the first in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston's new reprint series.
Mauve: How One Man Invented a Colour That Changed the World
Simon Garfield - 2000
In a "witty, erudite, and entertaining" (Esquire) style, Simon Garfield explains how the experimental mishap that produced an odd shade of purple revolutionized fashion, as well as industrial applications of chemistry research. Occasionally honored in certain colleges and chemistry clubs, Perkin until now has been a forgotten man.