Download or read book The Dream of the Moving Statue written by Kenneth Gross and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-24 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fantasy of a sculpture that moves, speaks;or responds, a statue that comes to life as an oracle, lover, avenger, mocker, or monster—few images are more familiar or seductive. The living statue appears in ancient creation narratives, the myths of Pygmalion and Don Juan, lyric poetry from the Greek Anthology to Rilke, and romantic fairy tales; it is a recurrent theme in ballet and opera, in philosophy, psychoanalysis, and film. What does it mean for the statue that stands immobile in gallery or square to step down from its pedestal or speak out of its silence? What is it in this fantasy that animates us? Kenneth Gross explores the implications of fictive statues in biblical and romantic narrative; in the poetry of Ovid, Michelangelo, Blake, Rilke, and Stevens; in the drama of Shakespeare; in the writings of Freud and Wittgenstein. He also considers their place in the poetry of such contemporaries as Richard Howard and the films of Charlie Chaplin, Frarn;ois Truffaut, and Peter Greenaway. In the motif of the moving statue, we can see how the reciprocal ambitions of writing and sculpture play off each other, often producing deeply paradoxical figures of life and voice, Stories of the living statue point to the uncertain ways in which our desires, fantasies, and memories are bound to the realm of unliving objects. Clarifying the sources of our fascination with real and imaginary statues, this book asks us to reconsider some of our most basic assumptions about the uses of fantasy and fiction. Eloquent and evocative, The Dream of the Moving Statue will capture and hold a wide audience.
Download or read book Screening Statues written by Steven Jacobs and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-30 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A dynamic, scholarly engagement with Susanne Bier's work
Download or read book Sporting Dystopias written by Ralph C. Wilcox and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reaching beyond the popular celebration of commercial gains often associated with the proliferation of stadiums, events, and teams in the city, Sporting Dystopias explores the role of sport in the process of community building. Scholars from various fields, including anthropology, cultural studies, history, marketing, media studies, and sociology, examine the cultural, economic, and political interplay of sport and the city. The book systematically challenges the overwhelming claims of sport's benefit to the city as it scrutinizes the various tensions inherent in the relationship. Grounded in economic means, racial and ethnic affiliation, and the contestation for space, sport is seen as precipitating a broad range of human challenges.
Download or read book David Smith written by Michael Brenson and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2022-10-04 with total page 579 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An essential account of America’s greatest sculptor . . . [A] magnum opus.” —Marjorie Perloff, The Times Literary Supplement The landmark biography of the inscrutable and brilliant David Smith, the greatest American sculptor of the twentieth century. David Smith, a pioneer of Abstract Expressionism, did more than any other sculptor of his era to bring the plastic arts to the forefront of the American scene. Central to his project of reimagining sculptural experience was challenging the stability of any identity or position—Smith sought out the unbounded, unbalanced, and unexpected, creating works of art that seem to undergo radical shifts as the spectator moves from one point of view to another. So groundbreaking and prolific were his contributions to American art that by the time Smith was just forty years old, Clement Greenberg was already calling him “the greatest sculptor this country has produced.” Michael Brenson’s David Smith: The Art and Life of a Transformational Sculptor is the first biography of this epochal figure. It follows Smith from his upbringing in the Midwest, to his heady early years in Manhattan, to his decision to establish a permanent studio in Bolton Landing in upstate New York, where he would create many of his most significant works—among them the Cubis, Tanktotems, and Zigs. It explores his at times tempestuous personal life, marked by marriages, divorces, and fallings-out as well as by deep friendships with fellow artists like Helen Frankenthaler and Robert Motherwell. His wife Jean Freas described him as “salty and bombastic, jumbo and featherlight, thin-skinned and Mack Truck. And many more things.” This enormous, contradictory vitality was true of his work as well. He was a bricoleur, a master welder, a painter, a photographer, and a writer, and he entranced critics and attracted admirers wherever he showed his work. With this book, Brenson has contextualized Smith for a new generation and confirmed his singular place in the history of American art.
Download or read book Statues in Roman Society written by Peter Stewart and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2004-02-06 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Statues are among the most familiar remnants of classical art. Yet their prominence in ancient society is often ignored. In the Roman world statues were ubiquitous. Whether they were displayed as public honours or memorials, collected as works of art, dedicated to deities, venerated as gods, or violated as symbols of a defeated political regime, they were recognized individually and collectively as objects of enormous significance. By analysing ancient texts and images, Statues in Roman Society unravels the web of associations which surrounded Roman statues. Addressing all categories of statuary together for the first time, it illuminates them in ancient terms, explaining expectations of what statues were or ought to be and describing the Romans' uneasy relationship with 'the other population' in their midst.
Download or read book Not Forgetting written by Rosalyn Deutsche and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2022-12-21 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores contemporary art that challenges deadly desires for mastery and dominion. Amid times of emboldened cruelty and perpetual war, Rosalyn Deutsche links contemporary art to three practices that counter the prevailing destructiveness: psychoanalytic feminism, radical democracy, and war resistance. Deutsche considers how art joins these radical practices to challenge desires for mastery and dominion, which are encapsulated in the Eurocentric conception of the human that goes under the name “Man” and is driven by deadly inclinations that Deutsche calls masculinist. The masculinist subject—as an individual or a group—universalizes itself, claims to speak on behalf of humanity, and meets differences with conquest. Analyzing artworks by Christopher D’Arcangelo, Robert Filliou, Hans Haacke, Mary Kelly, Silvia Kolbowski, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Martha Rosler, James Welling, and Krzysztof Wodiczko, Deutsche illuminates the diverse ways in which they expose, question, and trouble the visual fantasies that express masculinist desire. Undermining the mastering subject, these artworks invite viewers to question the positions they assume in relation to others. Together, the essays in Not-Forgetting, written between 1999 and 2020, argue that this art offers a unique contribution to building a less cruel and violent society.
Download or read book Giving Ground written by Joan Copjec and published by Verso. This book was released on 1999 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume seeks to address a number of broad questions, including: what is the role and limit of urban space in the expression of group and individual rights and desires?; do democratic social relations require spatial propinquity?; and what are the characteristics of
Download or read book Martin Puryear written by John Elderfield and published by The Museum of Modern Art. This book was released on 2007 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the last 30 years, Martin Puryear has created a body of work that defies categorization, creating sculpture that looks at identity, culture & history. This book accompanies an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art that follows Puryear's development from his first solo show to works being presented for the first time.
Download or read book Two Hundred Years of Pushkin Alexander Pushkin myth and monument written by Joe Andrew and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2003 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Puskin's poetry, prose and drama frequently draw upon myths of classical antiquity, myths of modern European culture - grand narratives such as the Don Juan legend and Dante's Inferno - as well as uniquely Russian myths. The contributors to this volume explore these myths from a variety of critical viewpoints and highlight the specific ways in which Pushkin uses myth - among these his recurrent emphasis on the symbolism of monuments and statuary.
Download or read book The Statues that Walked written by Terry Hunt and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2011-06-21 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The monumental statues of Easter Island, both so magisterial and so forlorn, gazing out in their imposing rows over the island’s barren landscape, have been the source of great mystery ever since the island was first discovered by Europeans on Easter Sunday 1722. How could the ancient people who inhabited this tiny speck of land, the most remote in the vast expanse of the Pacific islands, have built such monumental works? No such astonishing numbers of massive statues are found anywhere else in the Pacific. How could the islanders possibly have moved so many multi-ton monoliths from the quarry inland, where they were carved, to their posts along the coastline? And most intriguing and vexing of all, if the island once boasted a culture developed and sophisticated enough to have produced such marvelous edifices, what happened to that culture? Why was the island the Europeans encountered a sparsely populated wasteland? The prevailing accounts of the island’s history tell a story of self-inflicted devastation: a glaring case of eco-suicide. The island was dominated by a powerful chiefdom that promulgated a cult of statue making, exercising a ruthless hold on the island’s people and rapaciously destroying the environment, cutting down a lush palm forest that once blanketed the island in order to construct contraptions for moving more and more statues, which grew larger and larger. As the population swelled in order to sustain the statue cult, growing well beyond the island’s agricultural capacity, a vicious cycle of warfare broke out between opposing groups, and the culture ultimately suffered a dramatic collapse. When Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo began carrying out archaeological studies on the island in 2001, they fully expected to find evidence supporting these accounts. Instead, revelation after revelation uncovered a very different truth. In this lively and fascinating account of Hunt and Lipo’s definitive solution to the mystery of what really happened on the island, they introduce the striking series of archaeological discoveries they made, and the path-breaking findings of others, which led them to compelling new answers to the most perplexing questions about the history of the island. Far from irresponsible environmental destroyers, they show, the Easter Islanders were remarkably inventive environmental stewards, devising ingenious methods to enhance the island’s agricultural capacity. They did not devastate the palm forest, and the culture did not descend into brutal violence. Perhaps most surprising of all, the making and moving of their enormous statutes did not require a bloated population or tax their precious resources; their statue building was actually integral to their ability to achieve a delicate balance of sustainability. The Easter Islanders, it turns out, offer us an impressive record of masterful environmental management rich with lessons for confronting the daunting environmental challenges of our own time. Shattering the conventional wisdom, Hunt and Lipo’s ironclad case for a radically different understanding of the story of this most mysterious place is scientific discovery at its very best.
Download or read book Early Modern Corpse and Shakespeare s Theatre written by Susan Zimmerman and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-08 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Within a theoretical framework that makes use of history, psychoanalysis and anthropology, The Early Modern Corpse and Shakespeare's Theatre explores the relationship of the public theatre to the question of what constituted the 'dead' in early modern English culture.Susan Zimmerman argues that concepts of the corpse as a semi-animate, generative and indeterminate entity were deeply rooted in medieval religious culture. Such concepts ran counter to early modern discourses that sought to harden categorical distinctions between body/spirit, animate/inanimate - in particular, the attacks of Reformists on the materiality of 'dead' idols, and the rationale of the new anatomy for publicly dissecting 'dead' bodies. Zimmerman contends that within this context, theatrical representations of the corpse or corpse/revenant - as seen here in the tragedies of Shakespeare and his contemporaries - uniquely showcased the theatre's own ideological and performative agency. Features*Original in its conjunction of critical theory (Bataille, Kristeva, Lacan, Benjamin) with an historical account of the shifting status of the corpse in late medieval and early modern England.*The first study to demonstrate connections between the meanings attached to the material body in early modern Protestantism, the practice of anatomical dissection, and the English public theatre.*Strong market appeal to scholars and graduate students with interests in the theatre of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, early modern religion and science, and literary theory. *Relevant to advanced undergraduates taking widely taught courses in Shakespeare and in Renaissance drama.
Download or read book Bucky on Parade written by Madison Sports Organization & Uw Madison and published by Kci Sports Publishing. This book was released on 2018-09-25 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Puppet written by Kenneth Gross and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2011-09-01 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The puppet creates delight and fear. It may evoke the innocent play of childhood, or become a tool of ritual magic, able to negotiate with ghosts and gods. Puppets can be creepy things, secretive, inanimate while also full of spirit, alive with gesture and voice. In this eloquent book, Kenneth Gross contemplates the fascination of these unsettling objects—objects that are also actors and images of life. The poetry of the puppet is central here, whether in its blunt grotesquery or symbolic simplicity, and always in its talent for metamorphosis. On a meditative journey to seek the idiosyncratic shapes of puppets on stage, Gross looks at the anarchic Punch and Judy show, the sacred shadow theater of Bali, and experimental theaters in Europe and the United States, where puppets enact everything from Baroque opera and Shakespearean tragedy to Beckettian farce. Throughout, he interweaves accounts of the myriad faces of the puppet in literature—Collodi’s cruel, wooden Pinocchio, puppetlike characters in Kafka and Dickens, Rilke’s puppet-angels, the dark puppeteering of Philip Roth’s Micky Sabbath—as well as in the work of artists Joseph Cornell and Paul Klee. The puppet emerges here as a hungry creature, seducer and destroyer, demon and clown. It is a test of our experience of things, of the human and inhuman. A book about reseeing what we know, or what we think we know, Puppet evokes the startling power of puppets as mirrors of the uncanny in life and art.
Download or read book Aphrodite and Venus in Myth and Mimesis written by Nora Clark and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2015-04-01 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aphrodite and Venus in Myth and Mimesis is a broad, flexible source book of comparative literature and cultural studies. It promotes the wide-ranging presence and impact of prominent idiosyncratic personalities in fabled goddess mythology and its emphatic notions of endearment and allure. The book brings together seven hundred acknowledged sources drawn from successive historical, global and literary eras, including principal commentaries, along with factual information and important renditions in art, prose and verse, within and beyond mainstream western culture. A lengthy, detailed introduction presents a copious documented preview of the viable adaptation and mimesis of ‘divine’ characterization and its respective centrality from the long distant past to the present day. Myth, rarely latent, demonstrates varied modes of expression and open-ended flexibility throughout the six comprehensive chapters which illuminate and probe, in turn, aspects of the ideological presence, sensibilities, trials and triumphs and interventions of the goddess, whether sacred or profane. Particular literary extracts and episodes range across ancient cultures alongside quite recent expressions of hermeneutics, blending myth with the contemporary in the multi-layered reception or admonishment of the goddess, whether by one designation or the other. As such, this book is wholly relevant to all stages of the evolution and expansion of a dynamic European literary culture and its leading authors and personalities.
Download or read book Vision in Text and Image written by Herman Willem Hoen and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Nowadays there is little impetus to analyse literary texts and works of visual art per se, as was much more the case in the 1960s and 1970s. So, more attention has been paid to the ties between text/image and the surrounding contemporary culture. Furthermore, the study of arts is no longer considered as totally separate from the study of non-artistic images and texts, either methodologically or ideologically. It is the aim of this volume to reveal the shifts in divisions of labour within the study of arts. Through their practical approach to research, and in some cases also by way of theoretical reflection, they illustrate the dynamics and interchange that characterise the relationship between text/image and culture."--Jacket.
Download or read book Statue of Limitations written by Kate Collins and published by Kensington Cozies. This book was released on 2020-01-28 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this delightful new series by the New York Times bestselling author of the Flower Shop Mysteries, Athena Spencer comes back home to work with her crazy big Greek family at their garden center. But she never expected a return to her roots would mean protecting her family from murder . . . After her divorce, Athena has returned to coastal Michigan to work in her family’s garden center and raise her son, while also caring for a mischievous wild raccoon and fending off her family’s annoying talent for nagging. Working alone at the garden center one night, Athena is startled by a handsome stranger who claims to be the rightful owner of a valuable statue her grandfather purchased at a recent estate sale. But she has even bigger problems on her plate. The powerful Talbot family from whom her pappoús bought the statue is threatening to raze the shops on Greene Street’s “Little Greece” to make way for a condo. The recent death of the family’s patriarch already seemed suspicious, but now it’s clear that a murderer is in their midst. Athena will have to live up to her warrior goddess namesake to protect her family from a killer and save their community from ruin . . . “Kate Collins delivers an entertaining, amusing, and deliciously suspenseful mystery.” —Cleo Coyle, New York Times bestselling author
Download or read book Lady Liberty written by Doreen Rappaport and published by Candlewick Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 46 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers the true story about the work that was done by so many on both sides of the ocean to create this enduring symbol of freedom and the fundraisers held by everyday people to build her the pedestal on which she would forever stand in the Hudson Harbor. 40,000 first printing.
