Cindy Sherman by
Critical essays on Cindy Sherman and one of contemporary art's most innovative bodies of work. With her Untitled Film Stills of the 1970s, Cindy Sherman became one of the era's most important and influential artists. Since then, her metamorphosing self-portraits and appropriation of genres can be seen as a continuous investigation of representation and its complicated relationship to photography. Sherman and her work are often discussed in terms of postmodern theories and ideas that were coming to increasing prominence as her career began-- feminism, subjectivity, mass media, new forms of mechanical reproduction, and even trauma, among others. Yet her refusal to acknowledge any of these themes as particular concerns raises questions about the relationships between the meanings projected upon a work of art and those produced by it. Cindy Sherman's art fascinates us in part because of its capacity to suggest--while at the same time slipping away from--so many possible readings. The discussions in these illustrated essays span Sherman's almost three-decade-long career, from her striking debut in the black-and-white Untitled Film Stills through her color photographs using back-projection, prosthetic body parts, and the ever-ingenuous modes of disguise and self-fashioning seen in such later series as Centerfolds, Fairy Tales, and Disasters. The essays--by such well-known critics as Douglas Crimp, Hal Foster, and Rosalind Krauss--respond not only to Sherman's work but also to the arguments and postulations made about it, becoming part of the ongoing critical conversation about an artist of major significance.
Dangerous Border Crossers by 
Self/Image by
Including over 100 illustrations from mainstream film to independent film, video art, performance and the visual arts, this important and original book explores how technology has affected artists' abilities and forms to express themselves. From analogue photography to more recent artistic practices including digital imaging, performance robotics and video installations, Self/Image is one of the first full length studies to investigate the complex relations among these diverse artistic practices. This will make an excellent companion to studies of contemporary art history, and media and cultural studies in the post-1960 period.
Body Art by
An examination of the social and cultural significance of body art by a major new voice.The past few years have seen an explosion of interest in body art, in which the artist's body is integral to the work of art. With the revoking of NEA funding for such artists as Karen Finley, Tim Miller, and others, public awareness and media coverage of body-oriented performances have increased. Yet the roots of body art extend to the 1960s and before. In this definitive book, Amelia Jones explores body art projects from the 1960s and 1970s and relates their impact to the work of body artists active today, providing a new conceptual framework for defining postmodernism in the visual arts.Jones begins with a discussion of the shifting intellectual terrain of the 1950s and 1960s, focusing on the work of Ana Mendieta. Moving to an examination of the reception of Jackson Pollock's "performative" acts of painting, she argues that Pollock is a pivotal figure between modernism and postmodernism. The book continues with explorations of Vito Acconci and Hannah Wilke, whose practices exemplify a new kind of performance that arose in the late 1960s, one that represents a dramatic shift in the conception of the artistic subject. Jones then surveys the work of a younger generation of artists -- including Laurie Anderson, Orlan, Maureen Connor, Lyle Ashton Harris, Laura Aguilar, and Bob Flanagan -- whose recent work integrates technology and issues of identity to continue to expand the critique begun in earlier body art projects.Embracing an exhilarating mix of methodologies and perspectives (including feminism, queer theory, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and literary theory), this rigorous and elegantexamination of body art provides rich historical insight and essential context that rethinks the parameters of postmodern culture.
Ping Pong Conversations by
Storytelling and the use of color and black and white, staged and candid approaches, and personal and political issues are just a few of the many arguments that the American photographer Alec Soth discusses with critic Francesco Zanot, resulting in a combination of words and images that constitutes both a complex examination of Alec Soth's work and a manual on that reading of photography itself. Alec Sothis one of the most prominent artist of this time. He became a full member of Magnum in 2008. He is based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Photography critic and curatorFrancesco Zanothas been working for exhibitions and books with some of the most renowned Italian and international photographers.
Vile Bodies by
Published in cooperation with Channel Four Corporation in conjunction with the British television series of the same name, Vile Bodies is a collection of photographs and accompanying essays which penetrates the most urgent contemporary taboos concerning the human body and how we perceive it. The reader is confronted with disturbing images of death, disability, obesity, aging and the issue of child sexuality. The more than 20 photographers whose work is represented in this volume are among the most important and influential international artists working today - including Joel-Peter Witkin, John Coplans, Nan Goldin and Andres Serrano.
Vito Acconci by
Vito Acconci (b.1940) is a key late twentieth-century pioneer of performance, video, installation and the exploration of architectural space. His work has expanded art's boundaries, moving beyond the gallery or museum into shared public spaces. Initially a poet, Acconci began making Conceptual art and Body art in the late 1960s. He devised actions, enacted them and documented them with texts, photographs or video. In 1972 he produced the most famous performance installation of its time, Seedbed. In an empty gallery he built a low ramp, concealed beneath which he stimulated himself with sexual fantasies about viewers walking above, speaking his fantasies into a microphone linked to loudspeakers. Startled spectators found themselves implicated in an intimate power relationship between artist and viewer. Since the mid 1980s his work has turned towards experimental architectural projects. In 1988 he set up the architectural practice Acconci Studio, which has executed public commissions around the world and was featured at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2001. Acconci's work remains of vital importance not only to Conceptual art and performance, but to contemporary architectural theory and practice. In the Survey, art critic Frazer Ward chronicles the key moments in Acconci's thirty-year career, selecting emblematic works that illustrate the different media in which the artist has worked. In the interview the artist discusses with theorist Mark C. Taylor his concern for the human body as social, spatial and linguistic entity. In the Focus, architectural theorist Jennifer Bloomer analyzes one of the artist's recent architectural works, World in Your Bones (1998). For his Artist's Choice, the artist has selected Alain Robbe-Grillet's screenplay for Alain Resnais' film Last Year at Marienbad (1961). Noted also for his poetry and theoretical essays, the selection of Artist's Writings spans his early experimental poetry from the late 1960s to a cultural analysis of public art and architecture in the 1980s and 1990s.
Fugitive Images by
Fugitive Images gathers the most current debates about the image's complex relation to the things it seems to document, and its powerful ability to indicate or attest to what has been. Addressing the gap between the image and what it tries to represent, these essays reveal that acts of looking and thinking are more powerful than images themselves. The contributors include Herbert Blau, Edward Buscombe, Eduardo Cadava, Philippe Dubois, R gis Durand, Tom Gunning, Lynne Kirby, Patricia Mellencamp, Cine O'Brien, Patrice Petro, John Tagg, Linda Williams, and Charles Wolfe.
Hard Core by
In this now-classic study, Linda Williams moves beyond the impasse of the anti-porn/anti-censorship debate to analyze what hard-core film pornography is and does--as a genre with a history, as a specific cinematic form, and as part of contemporary discourse on sexuality. For the 1999 edition, Williams has written a new preface and a new epilogue, "On/scenities," illustrated with 25 photographs. She has also added a supplementary bibliography.
DTLFTSOTE by Consult your subject guide for recommended journals.
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