Spiral City & Other Vicarious Pleasures

Spiral City & Other Vicarious Pleasures
Author: Melanie Smith
Publisher: Turner/A&r Press/Coleccion Jumex
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2006
Genre: Art
ISBN:

The English-born artist Melanie Smith has been involved in the Mexican art scene since the late 1980s, and Spiral City & Other Vicarious Pleasures is her first significant monograph--published in conjunction with the artist's 2006 retrospective exhibition at Mexico City's University Museum of Sciences and Arts, commonly known as MUCA. This volume also serves as an introduction to the various media that Smith has been exploring since her arrival in Mexico two decades ago. It includes video, photography, installation and painting. Spiral City is a supersaturated project that provides the reader with visual and written information without ever falling into the predictable patterns of a traditional retrospective catalogue. With texts by Dawn Ades, Cuauhtémoc Medina and Eduardo Abaroa, and a written conversation between David Batchelor and the artist.

Plastic Capitalism

Plastic Capitalism
Author: Amanda Boetzkes
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2019-03-19
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0262351196

An argument for the centrality of the visual culture of waste—as seen in works by international contemporary artists—to the study of our ecological condition. Ecological crisis has driven contemporary artists to engage with waste in its most non-biodegradable forms: plastics, e-waste, toxic waste, garbage hermetically sealed in landfills. In this provocative and original book, Amanda Boetzkes links the increasing visualization of waste in contemporary art to the rise of the global oil economy and the emergence of ecological thinking. Often, when art is analyzed in relation to the political, scientific, or ecological climate, it is considered merely illustrative. Boetzkes argues that art is constitutive of an ecological consciousness, not simply an extension of it. The visual culture of waste is central to the study of the ecological condition. Boetzkes examines a series of works by an international roster of celebrated artists, including Thomas Hirschhorn, Francis Alÿs, Song Dong, Tara Donovan, Agnès Varda, Gabriel Orozco, and Mel Chin, among others, mapping waste art from its modernist origins to the development of a new waste imaginary generated by contemporary artists. Boetzkes argues that these artists do not offer a predictable or facile critique of consumer culture. Bearing this in mind, she explores the ambivalent relationship between waste (both aestheticized and reviled) and a global economic regime that curbs energy expenditure while promoting profitable forms of resource consumption.

Ideal City, Invisible Cities

Ideal City, Invisible Cities
Author: Markus Richter
Publisher:
Total Pages: 330
Release: 2006
Genre: Art
ISBN:

Zamosc is an extraordinary treasure of late Renaissance architecture singular in its urban conception, located near the Polish-Ukrainian border, on route between Lublin and Lwow. The never destroyed city will host the works of contemporary artists from twelve European and six non-European countries amidst its traces of a once truly multicultural society, the former orthodox churches, the cathedral, the synagogue as well as the Armenian houses. Only few ideal cities were ever partially or completely built. In particular, the ideal city plannings that were closely tied to societal utopias usually remained unrealized. Zamosc, conceived by Count Jan Zamoyski and built between 1580 1605 by Italian architect Bernardo Morando, is one of the rare existing examples of an ideal city. Today Zamosc is included in the UNESCO list of World Heritage. The artists working site-specifically will react to the given architecture and insert their work in public spaces and buildings, hidden courtyards or squares. Lawrence Weiner enfolds the arcades at the main square with one of his word sculptures. Monika Sosnowska composed a fountain while Miroslaw Balka sculpture relates to wounds, deeply cut during the second World War. Daniela Brahm, Colin Ardley, Kai Schiemenz determine squares and public spaces anew, Franka Hoernschemeyer reflects with her installation the clear gridding of the citys layout and Lucas Lenglet drafted a columbarium for one of the courtyards. Les Schliesser sets up a museum for a fictive architect born in Zamosc, Jakob Kolding investigates functional city planning with a poster project and Craigie Horsfield introduces a sound installation. David Tremlett inserted pastel wall drawings into the cartouches of the Renaissance synagogue, while the structural works of Katarzyna Jozefowicz and Pedro Cabrita Reis dialogue across its naves and Sol Lewitt inhabits its courtyard temporarily. Tilman Wendlands installation in the historical museum will integrate documentation on ideal city plans of the moderns Le Corbusier, Niemeyer and Hansen and Jaroslaw Flicinski will conceive a large wall painting for the academy, in the gymnasium of which George Hadjimichalis will install his Workshop of Projects and Images in Crisis. In the casemates of the decorates fortress Zamosc, the photo, film and video works by Tarek Al-Ghoussein, Francis Alys, Tacita Dean and Rula Halawani address the issues of geometry, order, defence systems, resistance and alleged security. In the historical academy building, which today houses the towns high school, in the Historical Museum and at the Zamosc City Gallery 20 artists will be showing their works relating to the major themes of the exhibition including memory and the grid. The contemporary art works will engage in a challenging and substantial discourse with the historical city and the underlying invisible cities, hidden beyond or masked by time and history. All in short walking distance, the exhibition will cover the entire city of Zamosc from June 18, 2006 to August 22, 2006. In September and October, a freshly adapted version of the exhibition will be shown in the city of Potsdam, which was mainly planned and built during Baroque times.

Keep on Onnin'

Keep on Onnin'
Author: Tate Britain (Gallery)
Publisher:
Total Pages: 168
Release: 2007
Genre: Art
ISBN:

Art Now at Tate Britain provides an important platform for contemporary art, giving vital exposure to artists at an early stage of their career. The wide-ranging programme responds to developments in contemporary practice by British artists, and artists living and working in Britain. Documenting over two years of Art Now projects, this book offers fully-illustrated texts on twenty-seven of the most interesting artists working in Britain today. A round-table discussion between critics, curators and artists contextualises the programme alongside developments within the art world, offering a unique guide to current practice.

Pleasure of Ruins

Pleasure of Ruins
Author: Rose Macaulay
Publisher: Andesite Press
Total Pages: 536
Release: 2017-08-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781376200300

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Galaxy

Galaxy
Author: James Geach
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2014-10-15
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1780233965

Each night, we are able to gaze up at the night sky and look at the thousands of stars that stretch to the end of our individual horizons. But the stars we see are only those that make up our own Milky Way galaxy—but one of hundreds of billions in the whole of the universe, each separated by inconceivably huge tracts of empty space. In this book, astronomer James Geach tells the rich stories of both the evolution of galaxies and our ability to observe them, offering a fascinating history of how we’ve come to realize humanity’s tiny place in the vast universe. Taking us on a compelling tour of the state-of-the-art science involved in mapping the infinite, Geach offers a first-hand account of both the science itself and how it is done, describing what we currently know as well as that which we still do not. He goes back one hundred years to when scientists first proved the existence of other galaxies, tracking our continued improvement in the ability to collect and interpret the light that stars in faraway galaxies have emitted through space and time. He discusses examples of this rapidly accelerating research, from the initial discovery that the faint “spiral nebulae” were actually separate star systems located far beyond the Milky Way to the latest observations of the nature of galaxies and how they have evolved. He also delves into the theoretical framework and simulations that describe our current “world model” of the universe. With one hundred superb color illustrations, Galaxy is an illuminating guide to the choreography of the cosmos and how we came to know our place within it that will appeal to any stargazer who has wondered what was beyond their sight.

Alcoholics Anonymous

Alcoholics Anonymous
Author: Bill W.
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 418
Release: 2014-09-04
Genre: Self-Help
ISBN: 0698176936

A 75th anniversary e-book version of the most important and practical self-help book ever written, Alcoholics Anonymous. Here is a special deluxe edition of a book that has changed millions of lives and launched the modern recovery movement: Alcoholics Anonymous. This edition not only reproduces the original 1939 text of Alcoholics Anonymous, but as a special bonus features the complete 1941 Saturday Evening Post article “Alcoholics Anonymous” by journalist Jack Alexander, which, at the time, did as much as the book itself to introduce millions of seekers to AA’s program. Alcoholics Anonymous has touched and transformed myriad lives, and finally appears in a volume that honors its posterity and impact.