Open Access Books - Arts - 2022

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Browsing Open Access Books - Arts - 2022 by Subject "Art & Art History"
  • Publication
    A Credible Utopia: Essays on Selected Films of Werner Schroeter
    ( 2022)
    Valente
    A Credible Utopia: Essays on Selected Films of Werner Schroeter offers unique and personal insights into Schroeter’s cinematic universe. Many of the films discussed in this book are those upon which Schroeter’s worldwide reputation rests: Der Bomberpilot, an absurdist comedy; The Death of Maria Malibran, a film about ecstatic redemption in death; Willow Springs, about the complex relationships between men and women; Day of the Idiots, a visually baroque, operatic and highly dramatic film about madness; The Kingdom of Naples, Schroeter’s visually stunning depiction of Italy in the post-war years; and Palermo or Wolfsburg, for which Schroeter won the Golden Bear, an epic film about love, violence, and cultural malaise. But Valente also addresses Schroeter's early experimental films that don't get as much attention, such as Aggression, Neurasia, and Argila, all of which are about the struggle between repression and desire, and Deux, a late work that Schroeter considered his masterpiece, a film about the double and the ways in which identity is formed by integrating the abject part of ourselves with the good. Valente concludes with an analysis of Nuit de Chien, Schroeter's final film, a powerful summation of a live devoted to art, music, literature, and film. When the Museum of Modern Art staged a retrospective of Schroeter's ouevre in 2012, there was hardly anything in English on his films and only one film available on DVD in the US, such that Schroeter's work as a director has remained largely invisible in the English-speaking world. A Credible Utopia repairs this lacuna in film history, and, in a detailed and intimate reading of Schroeter's queer ouevre, links all these films together through Schroeter's desire for a “credible utopia," despite our shared awareness of dis
  • Publication
    Articulating the Ḥijāba: Cultural Patronage and Political Legitimacy in al-Andalus: The ʿĀmirid Regency c. 970-1010 AD
    ( 2022)
    Mariam Rosser-Owen
    In Articulating the Ḥijāba, Mariam Rosser-Owen analyses for the first time the artistic and cultural patronage of the ‘Amirid regents of the last Cordoban Umayyad caliph, Hisham II, a period rarely covered in the historiography of al-Andalus.
  • Publication
    At the Edges of Sleep: Moving Images and Somnolent Spectators
    ( 2022)
    Ma, Jean
    Many recent works of contemporary art, performance, and film turn a spotlight on sleep, wresting it from the hidden, private spaces to which it is commonly relegated. At the Edges of Sleep considers sleep in film and moving image art as both a subject matter to explore onscreen and a state to induce in the audience. Far from negating action or meaning, sleep extends into new territories as it designates ways of existing in the world, in relation to people, places, and the past. Defined positively, sleep also expands our understanding of reception beyond the binary of concentration and distraction. These possibilities converge in the work of Thai filmmaker and artist Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who has explored the subject of sleep systematically throughout his career. In examining Apichatpong's work, Jean Ma brings together an array of interlocutors-from Freud to Proust, George Méliès to Tsai Ming-liang, Weegee to Warhol-to rethink moving images through the lens of sleep. Ma exposes an affinity between cinema, spectatorship, and sleep that dates to the earliest years of filmmaking, and sheds light upon the shifting cultural valences of sleep in the present moment.
  • Publication
    Between Dark & Light: The Light Art of Ruth McDermott & Ben Baxter
    ( 2022)
    Baxter, Ben ; McDermott, Ruth
    Over the past two decades, a quiet revolution has taken place in the world of light art and design with the introduction of LED technology. Sydney-based artists Ruth McDermott and Ben Baxter have been on the vanguard of this movement, creating innovative and award-winning installation artworks utilizing the capabilities of this new technology. A frequent highlight of the Vivid Sydney light art festival, their work has become known for creating site-specific narratives exploring the landscapes and histories of Sydney and its surrounds. This book surveys twelve years of their practice (2009-2021), as their work evolved in tandem with the technology, with a special focus on the technical aspects of creating, mounting, and displaying large-scale installations.Along with an essay on the history of light art, commentary from collaborators, and over 100 photographs documenting the conceptual life span of eighteen artworks, this book features the authors reflections on the unique relationship of artistic collaboration, and how this relationship has enhanced their practice and journey as artists.
  • Publication
    Colonial Objects in Early Modern Sweden and Beyond: From the Kunstkammer to the Current Museum Crisis
    ( 2022)
    Snickare, Mårten
    An elaborately crafted and decorated tomahawk from somewhere along the north American east coast: how did it end up in the royal collections in Stockholm in the late seventeenth century? What does it say about the Swedish kingdom’s colonial ambitions and desires? What questions does it raise from its present place in a display cabinet in the Museum of Ethnography in Stockholm? This book is about the tomahawk and other objects like it, acquired in colonial contact zones and displayed by Swedish elites in the seventeenth century. Its first part situates the objects in two distinct but related spaces: the expanding space of the colonial world, and the exclusive space of the Kunstkammer. The second part traces the objects’ physical and epistemological transfer from the Kunstkammer to the modern museum system. In the final part, colonial objects are considered at the centre of a heated debate over the present state of museums, and their possible futures.
  • Publication
    Craft Sciences
    ( 2022)
    Westerlund, Tina ; Almevik, Gunnar ; Groth, Camilla
    The field of ‘Craft Sciences’ refers to research conducted across and within different craft subjects and academic contexts. This anthology aims to expose the breadth of topics, source material, methods, perspectives, and results that reside in this field, and to explore what unites the research in such diverse contexts as, for example, the arts, conservation, or vocational craft education. The common thread between each of the chapters in the present book is the augmented attention given to methods—the craft research methods—and to the relationship between the field of inquiry and the field of practice. A common feature is that practice plays an instrumental role in the research found within the chapters, and that the researchers in this publication are also practitioners. The authors are researchers but they are also potters, waiters, carpenters, gardeners, textile artists, boat builders, smiths, building conservators, painting restorers, furniture designers, illustrators, and media designers. The researchers contribute from different research fields, like craft education, meal sciences, and conservation crafts, and from particular craft subjects, like boat-building and weaving. The main contribution of this book is that it collects together a number of related case studies and presents a reflection on concepts, perspectives, and methods in the general fields of craft research from the point of view of craft practitioners. It adds to the existing academic discussion of crafts through its wider acknowledgement of craftsmanship and extends its borders and its discourse outside the arts and crafts context. This book provides a platform from which to develop context-appropriate research strategies and to associate with the Craft Sciences beyond the borders of faculties and disciplines.
  • Publication
    Interpreting Art
    ( 2022)
    Rose, Sam
    How do people make sense of works of art? And how do they write to make others see the same way? There are many guides to looking at art, histories of art history and art criticism, and accounts of various 'theories' and 'methods', but this book offers something very unlike the normal search for difference and division: it examines the general and largely unspoken norms shared by interpreters of many kinds. Ranging widely, though taking writing within the Western tradition of art history as its primary focus, Interpreting Art highlights the norms, premises, and patterns that tend to guide interpretation along the way. Why, for example, is the concept of artistic 'intention' at once so reviled and yet so hard to let go of? What does it really involve when an interpretation appeals to an artwork's 'reception'? How can 'context' be used by some to keep things under control and by others to make the interpretation of art seem limitless? And how is it that artworks only seem to grow in complexity over time? Interpreting Art reveals subtle features of art writing central to the often unnoticed interpretative practices through which we understand works of art. In doing so, the book also sheds light on possible alternatives, pointing to how writers on art might choose to operate differently in the future.
  • Publication
    Islamic Glass in the Making: Chronological and Geographical Dimensions
    ( 2022)
    Schibille, Nadine
    The ancient glass industry changed dramatically towards the end of the first millennium. The Roman glassmaking tradition of mineral soda glass was increasingly supplanted by the use of plant ash as the main fluxing agent at the turn of the ninth century CE. Defining primary production groups of plant ash glass has been a challenge due to the high variability of raw materials and the smaller scale of production. Islamic Glass in the Making advocates a large-scale archaeometric approach to the history of Islamic glassmaking to trace the developments in the production, trade and consumption of vitreous materials between the eighth and twelfth centuries and to separate the norm from the exception. It proposes compositional discriminants to distinguish regional production groups, and provides insights into the organisation of the glass industry and commerce during the early Islamic period. The interdisciplinary approach leads to a holistic understanding of the development of Islamic glass; assemblages from the early Islamic period in Mesopotamia, Central Asia, Egypt, Greater Syria and Iberia are evaluated, and placed in the larger geopolitical context. In doing so, this book fills a gap in the present literature and advances a large-scale approach to the history of Islamic glass.
  • Publication
    Jesuit Art: Brill's Research Perspectives in Jesuit Studies
    ( 2022)
    Mia M. Mochizuki
    Mia Mochizuki draws upon masterpieces and material culture from around the world to show how the pre-suppression Society of Jesus (1540–1773) pioneered structural innovations in the history of the image.
  • Publication
    Lockdown Cultures: The arts and humanities in the year of the pandemic, 2020-21
    ( 2022)
    Caleb, Sam ; Wiltshire, Harvey
    Lockdown Cultures is both a cultural response to our extraordinary times and a manifesto for the arts and humanities and their role in our post-pandemic society. This book offers a unique response to the question of how the humanities commented on and were impacted by one of the dominant crises of our times: the Covid-19 pandemic. While the role of engineers, epidemiologists and, of course, medics is assumed, Lockdown Cultures illustrates some of the ways in which the humanities understood and analysed 2020-21, the year of lockdown and plague. Though the impulse behind the book was topical, underpinning the richly varied and individual essays is a lasting concern with the value of the humanities in the twenty-first century. Each contributor approaches this differently but there are two dominant strands: how art and culture can help us understand the Covid crisis; and how the value of the humanities can be demonstrated by engaging with cultural products from the past. The result is a book that serves as testament to the humanities' reinvigorated and reforged sense of identity, from the perspective of UCL and one of the leading arts and humanities faculties in the world. It bears witness to a globally impactful event while showcasing interdisciplinary thinking and examining how the pandemic has changed how we read, watch, write and educate. More than thirty individual contributions collectively reassert the importance of the arts and humanities for contemporary society.
  • Publication
    Northeastern Asia and the Northern Rockies: Treasures from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Daryl S. Paulson Collection
    ( 2022)
    Larkin ; Little
    The philosophical ties between Northeastern Asia and the Northern Rockies as represented in a selection of fine art — including Daoist nature deities and immortals, Confucian scholar brushes and inkstones, and Buddhist guardian kings and compassionate bodhisattvas — have never been explicated. This catalog lays the groundwork for a serious discussion of trans-Pacific acculturation: first by explaining the fundamentals of Daoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism in reference to rare works of art produced in China, Korea, and Japan between the Tang Dynasty and the Qing Dynasty, and second, by assessing the prevalence of these philosophies as indicated by photographs of temples, shrines, deities, and rituals recreated in Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado between the Civil War and World War I. Drawing from the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Daryl S. Paulson Collection in Bozeman, Montana, Asian art curator Stephen Little offers three brief essays that distinguish the philosophies of Daoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism according to their founding values, each followed by several object case studies that illustrate, elaborate, and develop those ideals. Mining the photographs of the state historical societies of Boise, Helena, Cheyenne, and Denver, Euro-American art professor T. Lawrence Larkin offers a long essay that compares religious values and artistic forms on both sides of the Pacific illustrated by objects that highlight migrant and settler culture in the Inner West. Profusely illustrated with new color and rarely seen black-and-white images, and containing useful maps, chronologies, and an index, Northeastern Asia and the Northern Rockies is an invaluable reference for the general reader and an important resource for the regional scholar.
  • Publication
    Prometheus and the Liver through Art and Medicine
    ( 2022)
    van Gulik, Merel ; van Gulik, Thomas ; van Rosmalen, Julia ; van Rosmalen, Belle
    Prometheus was punished by the supreme god Zeus for giving to mankind the Olympic fire with which they learned to think and feel. He was chained to a cliff in the Caucasus, where, to make matters worse, he was visited daily by an eagle who ate part of his liver. At night, however, his liver grew back. We now know that the liver can regenerate, but were the ancient Greeks aware of this quality? The myth of Prometheus has been a source of inspiration for many visual artists over the centuries. In this book, the medical history of the liver is traced through the ages through an examination of historical texts on the organ’s functions and properties, parallel to the art movements in which the fascinating iconography of Prometheus is reviewed. The book offers a surprising interplay of art and medicine, placing emphasis on the unique morphology of the liver.
  • Publication
    Shrines in a Fluid Space: The Shaping of New Holy Sites in the Ionian Islands, the Peloponnese and Crete under Venetian Rule (14th-16th Centuries)
    ( 2022)
    Argyri Dermitzaki
    In Shrines in a Fluid Space, Argyri Dermitzaki offers a study of the cultic phenomena and sites visited by late medieval pilgrims in the Ionian Sea, the Peloponnese and Crete.
  • Publication
    Sirens of Modernity: World Cinema via Bombay
    ( 2022)
    Sunya, Samhita
    A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. By the 1960s, Hindi-language films from Bombay were in high demand not only for domestic and diasporic audiences but also for sizable non-diasporic audiences across Eastern Europe, Central Asia, the Middle East, and the Indian Ocean world. Often confounding critics who painted the song-dance films as noisy and nonsensical. if not dangerously seductive and utterly vulgar, Bombay films attracted fervent worldwide viewers precisely for their elements of romance, music, and spectacle. In this richly documented history of Hindi cinema during the long 1960s, Samhita Sunya historicizes the emergence of world cinema as a category of cinematic diplomacy that formed in the crucible of the Cold War. Interwoven with this history is an account of the prolific transnational circuits of popular Hindi films alongside the efflorescence of European art cinema and Cold War-era forays of Hollywood abroad. By following archival leads and threads of argumentation within commercial Hindi films that seem to be odd cases-flops, remakes, low-budget comedies, and prestige productions-this book offers a novel map for excavating the historical and ethical stakes of world cinema and world-making via Bombay.
  • Publication
    Television before TV: New Media and Exhibition Culture in Europe and the USA, 1928-1939
    ( 2022)
    Weber, Anne-Katrin
    Television before TV rethinks the history of interwar television by exploring the medium’s numerous demonstrations organized at national fairs and international exhibitions in the late 1920s and 1930s. Building upon extensive archival research in Britain, Germany, and the United States, Anne-Katrin Weber analyses the sites where the new medium met its first audiences. She argues that public displays were central to television’s social construction; for the historian, the exhibitions therefore constitute crucial events to understand not only the medium’s pre-war emergence, but also its subsequent domestication in the post-war years. Designed as a transnational study, her book highlights the multiple circulations of artefacts and ideas across borders of democratic and totalitarian regimes alike. Richly illustrated with 100 photographs, Weber finally emphasizes that even without regular programmes, interwar television was widely seen.
  • Publication
    The Perpetuation of Site-Specific Installation Artworks in Museums: Staging Contemporary Art
    ( 2022)
    Scholte, Tatja
    Site-specific installations are created for specific locations and are usually intended as temporary artworks. The Perpetuation of Site-Specific Installation Artworks in Museums: Staging Contemporary Art shows that these artworks consist of more than a singular manifestation and that their lifespan is often extended. In this book, Tatja Scholte offers an in-depth account of the artistic production of the last forty years. With a wealth of case studies the author illuminates the diversity of site-specific art in both form and content, as well as in the conservation strategies applied. A conceptual framework is provided for scholars and museum professionals to better understand how site-specific installations gain new meanings during successive stages of their biographies and may become agents for change in professional routines.
  • Publication
    Video Game Art Reader: Volume 4
    ( 2022)
    Funk, Tiffany
    In computing, overclocking refers to the common practice of increasing the clock rate of a computer to exceed that certified by the manufacturer. The concept is seductive but overclocking may destroy your motherboard or system memory, even irreparably corrupt the hard drive. Volume 4 of the Video Game Art Reader (VGAR) proposes overclocking as a metaphor for how games are produced and experienced today, and the temporal compressions and expansions of the many historical lineages that have shaped game art and culture. Contributors reflect on the many ways in which overclocking can be read as a means of oppression but also a strategy to raise awareness of how inequities have shaped video games.