Visual Arts
Last Artist Standing
Living and Sustaining a Creative Life over 50
Last Artist Standing shares the essays of the lives of 31 artists over the age of 50 how they have sustained their creative lives what paths they have led showing who contemporary artists are today.
They are mentors to other artists having learned how to thrive and be creative through decades of life's travails. Sharon Louden wants to share these stories with the public so that their models can be replicated by all age groups both within and beyond the art world.
This collection addresses the ability of these artists to remain contemporary as they adapt through generational shifts the physical financial and professional challenges they have overcome to remain vibrant and sustaining artists and their role as inspirational models to others who may be turning to art late in their lives.
Artists as Writers
Part of the Living and Sustaining a Creative Life series Artists as Writers joins the tradition of writing books designed or intended to inspire would-be writers to write but distinguishes itself by offering succinct first-person narratives by writers of varied genres about the day-to-day life of writing for a living.
Artists as Writers offers accounts of the journeys that thirty three writers have taken to becoming a real writer what decisions were made which paths were taken rejected charted and why. It answers the question: What magic keeps a writer writing?
Writers from Ethiopia Guatemala Nigeria Palestine Poland and Sweden as well as several who live throughout the United States: California Colorado Georgia Louisiana Pennsylvania Texas and Washington contribute their stories. They each provide vividly detailed accounts of the circuitous roads that each individual took to earn the title “writer.” These are richly descriptive stories from writers who write consistently relating how they came to the writing life who helped them get there and what sustains them as writers.
Wild Renaissance
New Paradigms in Art, Ecology, and Philosophy
A Renaissance is underway. It can be seen as a response to environmental societal and ethical issues so acute that human survival is in question. Artistic philosophical and political it builds on the scientific revolutions of the last decades and positions itself in relation to technoscientific and transhumanist promises. Within this Wild Renaissance man no longer positions himself as master and owner imposing his will on a passive and purposeless nature. He makes ready to listen to a new partner: the world around him. He discovers the potential of its forces which he both harnesses and engages with joining them with his own. A new era is taking shape restoring man to his “wild” dignity and giving his existence meaning joy and ambition. An art is emerging that is redefining the paradigms of creation. Its work is in the vanguard of this societal project.
There is a major tendency in contemporary art and design and perhaps the most innovative one that is putting in place new ways of working and producing works which represent a significant break with the principles that have guided modernity up to the present. We are witnessing the beginnings of a renaissance that can be described as “wild.” Powerfully ambitious it stands as a response to the acute environmental societal and ethical questions raised in today’s world and at their heart the very survival of the human species as we enter the Anthropocene era. It bears witness to massive shifts in consciousness and echoes a call for a change that is becoming increasingly audible. Nature or more precisely a new way of being “wild” – that is to say of thinking and acting on the Earth is the key reference around which the contents of an alternative common destiny are being articulated. The “Wild Renaissance” is supplanting both the modernity that placed man at the center of the world assigning him the vocation of becoming the master and owner of nature and postmodernity which put an end to the great narratives and left only an absolute relativism incapable of supporting new sustainable models.
The word “renaissance” is not used lightly. It stems from a philosophical and ecological analysis of the turn of the 15th and 16th centuries in Italy. This upheaval did not come out of nowhere. Today as back then a period of some hundred and fifty yeas paved the way for its emergence. The proto-Wild Renaissance goes from the mid-19th century to the early 21st century. The evolution and convergence of art philosophy and the sciences of the environment can be observed there in relation to key historical and political moments that have repeatedly raised the question of the continuing habitability of the Earth.
The Wild Renaissance is articulated around a renewed vision of humankind and nature. Humankind no longer aspires to impose its will on a passive purposeless nature. Instead it is beginning to listen to a new partner: the world around it. Humanity is discovering the potential of these forces and entering into a relation with them allying them with its own. Humanity is going from from master to collaborator assuming an ecological responsibility that goes hand in hand with a revived dignity and an existence that is all the more exciting for all that. Already-established figures in contemporary art and design together with emerging creators are at the forefront of this new movement. The works and practices analyzed here are shown in a new light with a fresh understanding of their historical grounding conceptual underpinnings and significance for the present.
Previously published in French by Presses Universitaires de France (PUF).
Product Design, Technology, and Social Change
A Short Cultural History
This cultural history critically examines product design and its development from pre-industrial times to the present day considering major milestones in the mass production of goods and services aiming to incorporate a more inclusive worldview than traditional surveys of the topic.
The breadth and versatility of product design through history has been profound. Products have long supported the integration and interpretation of emerging technologies into our lives. These objects include everything from tools accessories furniture and clothing to types of transportation websites and mobile apps. Products provide singular or multiple functions are tangible and intangible and in many instances have impacted the quality of our lives by saving time or money or by increasing feelings of personal satisfaction. At the same time many products have negatively impacted people and the environment. For nearly every product that makes it into the hands of a consumer there is also a designer who created it and someone who laboured to make it.
Examines the relationship between products consumption sustainability politics and social movements. This "pocket history" surveys product design from the agricultural revolution and the birth of cities through industrialisation and a digital design revolution.
artmaking as embodied enquiry
entering the fold
What can a fold be? Virtually anything and everything.
For centuries folds and folding have captured the world’s imagination. Folds readily appear in revivals of the ancient craft of origami amid the simplest acts of pedestrian life within the philosophical turnings of the mind and in art design architecture performing arts and linguistics around the world. What awaits our understanding is how deeply the fold figures into embodiment into our very impulse to create.
This book is about folding as a vibrant stimulus for inter/trans/postdisciplinary artistic research whether for the performative for product realization or simply to enliven body mind and spirit. Destined for artmaking—for making any art—the f/old practice etches into the very fabric of embodiment. As such the f/old reaches outside the constraints of disciplinary silos into nice areas that embrace the unknown with all its underlying tensions and ambiguities. In conceiving of art made differently two seasoned facilitators Susan Sentler and Glenna Batson share the abundance of their decade-long collaboration in developing their approach to practice research in the fold. In addition to their insights they invite eight of their collaborators to contribute each a veteran artist of a diverse genre.
Featuring a wide variety of practice samples and images this book reflects on a current and unique somatic-oriented arts research practice and pedagogy with an intriguing blend of interdisciplinary concern and practice.
Global Culture after Gombrich
Art, Mind, World
Ernst Gombrich can be considered the most influential art historian of the 20th-century. Until now however the global impact of his work has been under-appreciated. Global Culture after Gombrich: Art Mind World presents essays by historians of art and culture - themselves students of Gombrich or associated with his scholarly home the Warburg Institute - from Asia the USA and Europe.
Subjects range from picture-making’s place in human evolution to the visual marginalia of the Renaissance and from nineteenth-century modernism to the implications of the latest neuroscience for cultural history. Other chapters treat fundamental issues such as the notion of connoisseurship the fate of the idea of ‘culture’ or the cultural specificity of modernism. They range from theoretical broadsides – notably a defence of the ‘intelligence’ of art - to intricate reflections – for example on caricature as a style.
In showing how Gombrich initiated enquiries that have spread in numerous – and global – directions Global Culture after Gombrich: Art Mind World makes a vital contribution to contemporary debates around the languages of art history and showcases the range of approaches and methods by which art history is and has yet to be written.
Critical Digital Art History
Interface and Data Politics in the Post-Digital Era
Digital Art History has often aligned itself with the practical concerns of digital technology and the responsibilities of art institutions and associated institutional roles such as collection managers information specialists curators and conservators. This emphasis on practicalities and implementation while undeniably important has often meant that there is little room for critical examination of the broader implications of digital technology and computational methodologies in art history.
This anthology seeks to address the dearth of critical reflection by approaching the use of digital technology in art history from a theoretical perspective and critically assessing specific case study examples. This book also considers the political dimensions associated with the large-scale digitization and the application of digital tools within museums and collection management.
A long-standing concern of the field—and also a major focal point of this book—is museum and collecting practices in the digital era. While there is a certain degree of continuity in the field there are some important shifts and changes too. One of the key changes is the widespread uptake of artificial intelligence tools and an increased attention to both the broader historical and societal aspects of the use of digital tools within museums and collection management.
Decolonizing Islamic Art in Africa
New Approaches to Muslim Expressive Cultures
This collection explores the dynamic place of Muslim visual and expressive culture in processes of decolonization across the African continent. Presenting new methodologies for accentuating African agency and expression in the stories we tell about Islamic art it likewise contributes to recent widespread efforts to “decolonize” the art historical canon.
The contributors to this volume explore the dynamic place of Islamic art architecture and creative expression in processes of decolonization across the African continent in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Bringing together new work by leading specialists in the fields of African Islamic and modern arts and visual cultures the book directs unprecedented attention to the agency and contributions of African and Muslim artists in articulating modernities in local and international arenas. Interdisciplinary and transregional in scope it enriches the under-told story of Muslim experiences and expression on the African continent home to nearly half a million Muslims or a third of the global Muslim population.
Furthermore it elucidates the role of Islam and its expressive cultures in post-colonial articulations of modern identities and heritage as expressed by a diverse range of actors and communities based in Africa and its diaspora; as such the book counters notions of Islam as a retrograde or static societal phenomenon in Africa or elsewhere. Contributors propose new methodologies for accentuating human agency and experience over superficial disciplinary boundaries in the stories we tell about art-making and visual expression thus contributing to widespread efforts to decolonize scholarship on histories of modern expression.
The Human Shutter
Photographs, Stereoscopic Depth, and Moving Images
This transdisciplinary study offers a fresh perspective on the intersections of photography cinema and visual perception making it an essential addition to collections in art history film studies and photography.
Robert L. Bowen delves into the complex relationship between art binocular vision space and time across both early and modern histories of photography. Central to Bowen’s analysis is the concept of "the human shutter" a metaphor for binocular rivalry which he interprets as a form of proto-cinema—linking early photographic processes with the evolution of cinematic temporality.
The book provides a rich examination of the near-simultaneous emergence of still moving and stereoscopic depth media while challenging the gradualist view of visual technologies. Through a preliminary taxonomy of rare stereoviews Bowen draws connections between experimental film painting philosophy and perception theory opening new avenues for understanding the history of visual media.
Additionally Bowen traces the fascinating journey of early pioneers like Antoine Claudet and Giorgio Sommer whose work in motion and binocular vision plays a pivotal role in rethinking the origins of photographic cinema. Bowen bridges this history with contemporary innovations including the dissolution of time in photography with the advent of generative AI.
The volume also highlights the work of modern and contemporary artists and filmmakers such as Marcel Duchamp Robert Smithson Lucy Raven Ken Jacobs and OpenEndedGroup who have explored stereoscopic spaces and perceptions in innovative ways.
Key for undergraduate and postgraduate students studying art art history film photography and new media. It is also relevant to photographers photo historians experimental filmmakers video artists digital media artists painters and sculptors seeking fresh insights into their respective fields. Will resonate with readers interested in the history of 19th-century photography and the development of stereoscopic media.
Watch This Space
Exploring Cinematic Intersections Between the Body, Architecture, and the City
This book and its individual essays examine key emerging and evolving practices theories and methodologies that operate in the blurred boundary between spatial design disciplines such as architecture interior and urban design and film and moving image studies more broadly.
The collection is an exploration of the evolving interdisciplinary rhetoric connecting spatial design disciplines like architecture and urban design with film and moving image studies. It is premised on the argument that the understanding of ‘space’ in these areas continues to draw on each other’s fields of reference and that in recent times this has expanded further to the point in which it blurs with multiple other disciplines including media art cultural studies and art practice to name but three. The result of this evolving interdisciplinary understating of ‘space’ in design disciplines and moving image studies is an expanded field of haptic-visual practice and theory that can be investigated as both a material and an image-based construct.
It engages with this evolving set of ideas and underlines how each of its primary discipline areas now increasingly incorporate tools and methodologies from each other’s fields. For example architects routinely engage with cinematic practice as a means of exploring space cultural theorists inspect filmic space as a two-dimensional surrogate of the real media artists incorporate knowledge of spatial design in video installations and film makers create spaces on screen that are informed by architectural theory. This all follows what can be defined as a discursive turn in our view of spatial relationships across disciplines which by definition is complex eclectic occasionally contradictory and at times characterised by surprising confluences.
Conceived as a form of mapping of these confluences and contradictions this book collects varied essays that in their own unique ways explore the diversity of how we today define understand and engage with notions of the body in architectural-urban space. It does so through a triadic structure that progresses from haptic relationships of the body in architectural space through film readings of represented space in mainstream cinema and concludes with ‘experimental spatial’ projects inspired by film and the moving image. This tripartite structure specifically encourages a look across disciplines broadening architectural urbanist media and cinematic concerns through insightful case studies that engage with their subjects by means of novel techniques i.e. employing graphic software for an analysis of pre-digital films deconstructing cinematography in modernist classics or researching urban edgelands via collaging and montage etc.
Dissens and Sensibility
Why Art Matters
The book is motivated by the author's long-lasting interest in the role of art in society in general and education in particular and is a contribution to arts-based approaches to education. An introduction to pedagogy of dissensus: a pedagogy informed by the dissensual characteristics of art. The book includes both theoretical foundations and examples of how the theory is unfolded in different contexts ranging from educational practice to own arts-based research. This publication is a unique opportunity to launch the relevance of the pedagogy of dissensus in an international context.
The author invites readers to encounter dissensus as an educational strategy through examples from her own research and teaching. Referencing philosophers and theorists such as Rancière Gert Biesta and Dennis Atkinson she demonstrates art’s ability to create necessary disturbance and resistance in art education. Putting art at the centre of education and democracy the author shows what an art education focusing on concepts and issue-based art rather than form colours and composition can contribute as a contrast to the dominating practice in art.
Queer Contemporary Art of Southwest Asia North Africa
Presents new perspectives on queer visual culture in the Southwest Asia North Africa region from queer artists as well as scholars who work on queer themes. With contributions from both scholars and artists this volume demonstrates that queer visual culture in the SWANA region is not only extant but is also entering an era of exciting growth in terms of its versatility and consciousness. The volume focuses on artworks produced in the contemporary era while recognizing historical and contextual connections to Islamic art and culture within
localities and regions from the pre-modern and modern eras.
By framing this volume as unambiguously located within queer studies the editors challenge existing literature that merely includes some examples of queer studies or queer representation but does not necessarily use queer studies as a lens through which to engage with visual culture and/or with the SWANA region. Through four interrelated sections - Gender and Normativity Trans* Articulations Intersectional Sexuality and Queer SWANA - this volume probes several previously unexplored academic areas namely the intersections of queer studies with other fields.
Part of the Critical Studies in Architecture of the Middle East series.
The Architect's Dream
Form and Philosophy in Architectural Imagination
Sean Pickersgill demonstrates that the goal of creating meaningful architecture can take a variety of critical and philosophical paths. The importance of architecture as an expression of broad complex social drivers is complemented by the equally popular idea that architecture as an intellectual pursuit retains its own autonomy as a self-referential culture. This book uniquely places the emphasis for innovation in architecture within the domain of critical thinking generally and a specific understanding of the semantics of built form.
The book draws on a broad range of subject areas from film to philosophy to anthropology to mathematics and economics to show that the path to meaningful creative practice is always based in an understanding of the principal drivers for change and meaning in society.
It is not a simple recipe book or workshop manual for others to reproduce. It requires the engaged reader to employ their own creative abilities to find what potential lies in each of the propositions and it will encourage the scholastic architect to continue to mine the rich veins of intellectual culture to demonstrate the latent purposiveness inherent in all meaningful architecture.
Contemporary Absurdities, Existential Crises, and Visual Art
Some have called this an age of absurdity and as such Contemporary Absurdities Existential Crises and Visual Art presents the contributions of artists theorists and scholars whose words and works investigate the absurd as a condition of a tactic for and a subject in the contemporary.
The absurd is a lens on the disturbances of our moment and a challenge to the propositions about and solutions for the world. The absurd shakes off the paralysis that what we know must be the only thing we (re)produce. Those willing to recognize that and confront it rather than flee from it are thereby introduced to the political writ large.
This edited collection adopts ideas and practices associated with the absurd to explain how the contemporary moment is absurd and how absurdity is a useful potentially radical tool within the contemporary.
Critical art allows the absurd a space within which audiences can observe their own tendencies and assumptions. The absurd in art reveals our inculcation into hegemonic belief structures and the necessity to question the systems to which we subscribe. Today we see the absurd in memes performative politics and art expressing the
confusion and disorientation wrought by the endless emerging crises of our 24/7 relations.
Entangled Histories of Art and Migration
Theories, Sites and Research Methods
Dedicated to the stories of migrants refugees asylum seekers and exiles this collection asks how these stories are interwoven with art art practices activism reception and (re-)presentation. It explores the complex entanglements of art and aesthetic practices with migration flight and other forms of enforced dislocation and border/border crossings in global contexts - the latter significant phenomena of social transformation in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
These complex entanglements take centre stage when migration shapes forms and aesthetics (and vice versa) when actors employ image politics and visualisation strategies in and about migration at different times and places or when materialities sites and spaces gain importance for decision-making processes. Taking an art and cultural studies perspective the book questions the significance of spatial changes for artistic practice in migration and elaborates on new or different theory-formation.
Interweaves histories of modernism and exile in different urban environments and focuses on historical dislocations in the first half of the twentieth century when artistic and urban movements constituted themselves in global exchange. Although this book takes a historical perspective it is written with an awareness of current flight movements and will make a significant contribution to the theory and methodology of research on exile.
The knowledge of previous historical exile experiences is important for the understanding of contemporary flight movements: after all these are not singular phenomena. For migration movements in the first half of the 20th century and for those of today it is equally possible to speak of urban centres of attraction for refugees: Today Berlin is a European metropolis of exile; in the 1930s and 1940s Paris Prague London New York Istanbul and Shanghai were destinations for refugees.
Entangled Histories of Art and Migration
Theories, Sites and Research Methods
Dedicated to the stories of migrants refugees asylum seekers and exiles this collection asks how these stories are interwoven with art art practices activism reception and (re-)presentation. It explores the complex entanglements of art and aesthetic practices with migration flight and other forms of enforced dislocation and border/border crossings in global contexts - the latter significant phenomena of social transformation in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
These entanglements take centre stage when migration shapes forms and aesthetics (and vice versa) when actors employ image politics and visualisation strategies in and about migration at different times and places or when materialities sites and spaces gain importance for decision-making processes.
Giving space to these stories of art and migration and its power of pluriverse knowledge production the book takes an art and cultural studies perspective and questions the significance of spatial changes for artistic practice in migration and elaborates on new or different theory formation. Bringing together its case studies and theoretical approaches the argumentation unfolds over the five sections of the book Visibilities | Invisibilities Sites | Spaces Materiality | Materialisation Racism | Resistance and Practices | Performativity.
The Physical and the Digital City
Invisible Forces, Data, and Manifestations
The Physical and the Digital City is a unique collection of projects where researchers and designers show how the theories of technology underpinning the digital urban environment are applied in practical and spatial terms. The authors are experts in their respective fields who pursue cutting edge solutions for city-making and consider the theoretical premise critically. It is designed to be a self-contained and interdisciplinary reference text to introduce students designers and scholars to the idea of physical/digital and its urban application.
The book will help students and designers to develop a clear understanding of the physical and digital principles underpinning urban assemblages and a solid set of references to start working within this topic with confidence. Of interest to all students and scholars interested in urban studies (geography planning urban design social sciences and humanities) and human-computer interaction (media studies computer science social sciences cognitive sciences anthropology and psychology). The book will clarify the role of digital technologies within the city along with its possible implications for people and communities.
It is oriented to the academic and professional communities interested in architectural urban and digital design from different angles. This includes those interested in computational architecture for example eCAADe Education and Research in Computer Aided Architectural Design in Europe ACADIA Association of Computer Aided Design in Architecture CAADRIA Computer Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia SIGraDi Sociedad Iberoamericana de Grafica Digital CAAD Futures Foundation as well as those interested in the human-computer interaction.
