Download or read book Arts of the Possible Essays and Conversations written by Adrienne Rich and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2002-05-17 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Adrienne Rich's new prose collection could have been titled The Essential Rich."—Women's Review of Books These essays trace a distinguished writer's engagement with her time, her arguments with herself and others. "I am a poet who knows the social power of poetry, a United States citizen who knows herself irrevocably tangled in her society's hopes, arrogance, and despair," Adrienne Rich writes. The essays in Arts of the Possible search for possibilities beyond a compromised, degraded system, seeking to imagine something else. They call on the fluidity of the imagination, from poetic vision to social justice, from the badlands of political demoralization to an art that might wound, that may open scars when engaged in its work, but will finally suture and not tear apart. This volume collects Rich's essays from the last decade of the twentieth century, including four earlier essays, as well as several conversations that go further than the usual interview. Also included is her essay explaining her reasons for declining the National Medal for the Arts. "The work is inspired and inspiring."—Alicia Ostriker "[S]o clear and clean and thorough. I learn from her again and again."—Grace Paley

Download or read book Curating Live Arts written by Dena Davida and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2018-11-29 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Situated at the crossroads of performance practice, museology, and cultural studies, live arts curation has grown in recent years to become a vibrant interdisciplinary project and a genuine global phenomenon. Curating Live Arts brings together bold and innovative essays from an international group of theorist-practitioners to pose vital questions, propose future visions, and survey the landscape of this rapidly evolving discipline. Reflecting the field’s characteristic eclecticism, the writings assembled here offer practical and insightful investigations into the curation of theatre, dance, sound art, music, and other performance forms—not only in museums, but in community, site-specific, and time-based contexts, placing it at the forefront of contemporary dialogue and discourse.

Download or read book Forty one False Starts written by Janet Malcolm and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2013-05-07 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A National Book Critics Circle Finalist for Criticism A deeply Malcolmian volume on painters, photographers, writers, and critics. Janet Malcolm's In the Freud Archives and The Journalist and the Murderer, as well as her books about Sylvia Plath and Gertrude Stein, are canonical in the realm of nonfiction—as is the title essay of this collection, with its forty-one "false starts," or serial attempts to capture the essence of the painter David Salle, which becomes a dazzling portrait of an artist. Malcolm is "among the most intellectually provocative of authors," writes David Lehman in The Boston Globe, "able to turn epiphanies of perception into explosions of insight." Here, in Forty-one False Starts, Malcolm brings together essays published over the course of several decades (largely in The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books) that reflect her preoccupation with artists and their work. Her subjects are painters, photographers, writers, and critics. She explores Bloomsbury's obsessive desire to create things visual and literary; the "passionate collaborations" behind Edward Weston's nudes; and the character of the German art photographer Thomas Struth, who is "haunted by the Nazi past," yet whose photographs have "a lightness of spirit." In "The Woman Who Hated Women," Malcolm delves beneath the "onyx surface" of Edith Wharton's fiction, while in "Advanced Placement" she relishes the black comedy of the Gossip Girl novels of Cecily von Zeigesar. In "Salinger's Cigarettes," Malcolm writes that "the pettiness, vulgarity, banality, and vanity that few of us are free of, and thus can tolerate in others, are like ragweed for Salinger's helplessly uncontaminated heroes and heroines." "Over and over," as Ian Frazier writes in his introduction, "she has demonstrated that nonfiction—a book of reporting, an article in a magazine, something we see every day—can rise to the highest level of literature." One of Publishers Weekly's Best Nonfiction Books of 2013

Download or read book Conversations at the Castle written by Mary Jane Jacob and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses one of the most troubling questions of contemporary art theory and practice: Who is contemporary art for? Although the divide between contemporary art and the public has long been acknowledged, this is the first time that artists, critics, and the public have come together to debate the problem and to make artmaking, criticism, and public reaction part of the same process. Like the exhibitions, discussions, and seminars held at "The Castle" during the summer 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, this book is based on the premise that contemporary artists and the general public have something to say to each other. By positing the space of "conversation" as one in which artworks can be experienced as creative sites open to multilayered interpretations by changing audiences, the book provides an antidote to the modernist connoisseurial silence that has long been used to define quality. The book is divided into three sections. The first contains essays by project curator Mary Jane Jacob, critic and coeditor Michael Brenson, and cultural critic Homi K. Bhabha. Their essays describe fresh approaches to contemporary art and its audiences at a time of increased access through technology and decreased government funding. The second section contains essays by the six artists/collaborative teams involved in the project. Their works, aimed at public participation, included installation-performances, collaborations with Atlanta communities, cross-country tours, and the creation and presentation of food as a means to stimulate conversation and construct community. The artists are: artway of thinking (Italy), Ery Camara (Senegal/Mexico), Mauricio Dias and Walter Riedweg (Brazil/Switzerland), Regina Frank (Germany), IRWIN (Slovenia), and Maurice O'Connell (Ireland).The final section contains seven essays by the critics, curators, educators, administrators, and artists who led the "Conversations on Culture" at The Castle. The essays are by Jacquelynn Baas, Michael Brenson, Lisa Graziose Corrin, Amina Dickerson and Tricia Ward, Steven Durland, Susan Krane, and Susan Vogel.

Download or read book Essential Essays Culture Politics and the Art of Poetry written by Adrienne Rich and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2018-08-28 with total page 490 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Critics’ Pick A career-spanning selection of the lucid, courageous, and boldly political prose of National Book Award winner Adrienne Rich. Demonstrating the lasting brilliance of her voice and her prophetic vision, Essential Essays showcases Adrienne Rich’s singular ability to unite the political, personal, and poetical. The essays selected here by feminist scholar Sandra M. Gilbert range from the 1960s to 2006, emphasizing Rich’s lifelong intellectual engagement and fearless prose exploration of feminism, social justice, poetry, race, homosexuality, and identity.

Download or read book Art and Posthumanism written by Cary Wolfe and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2022-02-15 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A sustained engagement between contemporary art and philosophy relating to our place in, and responsibility to, the nonhuman world How do contemporary art and theory contemplate the problem of the “bio” of biopolitics and bioart? How do they understand the question of “life” that binds human and nonhuman worlds in their shared travail? In Art and Posthumanism, Cary Wolfe argues for the reconceptualization of nature in art and theory to turn the idea of the relationship between the human and the planet upside down. Wolfe explores a wide range of contemporary artworks—from Sue Coe’s illustrations of animals in factory farms and Eduardo Kac’s bioart to the famous performance pieces of Joseph Bueys and the video installations of Eija-Liisa Ahtila, among others—examining how posthumanist theory can illuminate, and be illuminated by, artists’ engagement with the more-than-human world. Looking at biological and social systems, the question of the animal, and biopolitics, Art and Posthumanism explores how contemporary art rivets our attention on the empirically thick, emotionally charged questions of “life” and the “living” amid ecological catastrophe. One of the foremost theorists of posthumanism, Wolfe pushes that philosophy out of the realm of the purely theoretical to show how a posthumanist engagement with particular works and their conceptual underpinnings help to develop more potent ethical and political commitments.

Download or read book Freedom and the Arts written by Charles Rosen and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012-05-21 with total page 647 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is there a moment in history when a work receives its ideal interpretation? Or is negotiation always required to preserve the past and accommodate the present? The freedom of interpretation, Charles Rosen suggests in these sparkling explorations of music and literature, exists in a delicate balance with fidelity to the identity of the original work. Rosen cautions us to avoid doctrinaire extremes when approaching art of the past. To understand Shakespeare only as an Elizabethan or Jacobean theatergoer would understand him, or to modernize his plays with no sense of what they bring from his age, deforms the work, making it less ambiguous and inherently less interesting. For a work to remain alive, it must change character over time while preserving a valid witness to its earliest state. When twentieth-century scholars transformed Mozart's bland, idealized nineteenth-century image into that of a modern revolutionary expressionist, they paradoxically restored the reputation he had among his eighteenth-century contemporaries. Mozart became once again a complex innovator, challenging to perform and to understand. Drawing on a variety of critical methods, Rosen maintains that listening or reading with intensity-for pleasure-is the one activity indispensable for full appreciation. It allows us to experience multiple possibilities in literature and music, and to avoid recognizing only the revolutionary elements of artistic production. By reviving the sense that works of art have intrinsic merits that bring pleasure, we justify their continuing existence.

Download or read book Why I Write written by George Orwell and published by Renard Press Ltd. This book was released on 2021-01-01 with total page 15 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: George Orwell set out ‘to make political writing into an art’, and to a wide extent this aim shaped the future of English literature – his descriptions of authoritarian regimes helped to form a new vocabulary that is fundamental to understanding totalitarianism. While 1984 and Animal Farm are amongst the most popular classic novels in the English language, this new series of Orwell’s essays seeks to bring a wider selection of his writing on politics and literature to a new readership. In Why I Write, the first in the Orwell’s Essays series, Orwell describes his journey to becoming a writer, and his movement from writing poems to short stories to the essays, fiction and non-fiction we remember him for. He also discusses what he sees as the ‘four great motives for writing’ – ‘sheer egoism’, ‘aesthetic enthusiasm’, ‘historical impulse’ and ‘political purpose’ – and considers the importance of keeping these in balance. Why I Write is a unique opportunity to look into Orwell’s mind, and it grants the reader an entirely different vantage point from which to consider the rest of the great writer’s oeuvre. 'A writer who can – and must – be rediscovered with every age.' — Irish Times

Download or read book Art on My Mind written by bell hooks and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2025-05-27 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The canonical work of cultural criticism by the “profoundly influential critic” (Artnet), in a beautiful thirtieth-anniversary edition, featuring a new foreword by esteemed visual artist Mickalene Thomas Called “one of the country’s most influential feminist thinkers” by Artforum, bell hooks and her work have enjoyed a huge resurgence of popularity since her passing in 2021. Her 2018 book All About Love has sold upwards of 700,000 copies, and posthumous tributes have credited her with being “instrumental in cracking open the white, western canon for Black artists” (Artnet). To celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of her groundbreaking essay collection Art on My Mind, The New Press will publish a handsome, celebratory edition, featuring a new foreword by Tony-nominated producer and all-around creative phenom Mickalene Thomas and a new cover featuring original photos of bell hooks shot by African American photojournalist Eli Reed. This classic work, which, as the New York Times wrote, “examines the way race, sex and class shape who makes art, how it sells and who values it,” includes what Artforum calls “incisive essays” on the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Isaac Julien, Carrie Mae Weems, and Romare Bearden, among others. Her essays on Black vernacular architecture, representation of the Black male body, and the creative process of women artists, are complemented by conversations with Carrie Mae Weems, Emma Amos, Margo Humphrey, and LaVerne Wells-Bowie, which Kirkus Reviews calls “excellent indeed,” and “a real contribution to our understanding of the situation of black women artists.”

Download or read book Of Woman Born Motherhood as Experience and Institution written by Adrienne Rich and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2021-04-27 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The pathbreaking investigation into motherhood and womanhood from an influential and enduring feminist voice, now for a new generation. In Of Woman Born, originally published in 1976, influential poet and feminist Adrienne Rich examines the patriarchic systems and political institutions that define motherhood. Exploring her own experience—as a woman, a poet, a feminist, and a mother—she finds the act of mothering to be both determined by and distinct from the institution of motherhood as it is imposed on all women everywhere. A “powerful blend of research, theory, and self-reflection” (Sandra M. Gilbert, Paris Review), Of Woman Born revolutionized how women thought about motherhood and their own liberation. With a stirring new foreword from National Book Critics Circle Award–winning writer Eula Biss, the book resounds with as much wisdom and insight today as when it was first written.

Download or read book What We Made written by Tom Finkelpearl and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2013-01-15 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In What We Made, Tom Finkelpearl examines the activist, participatory, coauthored aesthetic experiences being created in contemporary art. He suggests social cooperation as a meaningful way to think about this work and provides a framework for understanding its emergence and acceptance. In a series of fifteen conversations, artists comment on their experiences working cooperatively, joined at times by colleagues from related fields, including social policy, architecture, art history, urban planning, and new media. Issues discussed include the experiences of working in public and of working with museums and libraries, opportunities for social change, the lines between education and art, spirituality, collaborative opportunities made available by new media, and the elusive criteria for evaluating cooperative art. Finkelpearl engages the art historians Grant Kester and Claire Bishop in conversation on the challenges of writing critically about this work and the aesthetic status of the dialogical encounter. He also interviews the often overlooked co-creators of cooperative art, "expert participants" who have worked with artists. In his conclusion, Finkelpearl argues that pragmatism offers a useful critical platform for understanding the experiential nature of social cooperation, and he brings pragmatism to bear in a discussion of Houston's Project Row Houses. Interviewees. Naomi Beckwith, Claire Bishop, Tania Bruguera, Brett Cook, Teddy Cruz, Jay Dykeman, Wendy Ewald, Sondra Farganis, Harrell Fletcher, David Henry, Gregg Horowitz, Grant Kester, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Pedro Lasch, Rick Lowe, Daniel Martinez, Lee Mingwei, Jonah Peretti, Ernesto Pujol, Evan Roth, Ethan Seltzer, and Mark Stern

Download or read book Conversations with Artists written by Heidi Zuckerman and published by . This book was released on 2022-01-21 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Negative Space written by Lilly Dancyger and published by Santa Fe Writers Project. This book was released on 2021-05-01 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite her parents' struggles with addiction, Lilly Dancyger always thought of her childhood as a happy one. But what happens when a journalist interrogates her own rosy memories to reveal the instability around the edges? Dancyger's father, Joe Schactman, was part of the iconic 1980s East Village art scene. He created provocative sculptures out of found materials like animal bones, human hair, and broken glass, and brought his young daughter into his gritty, iconoclastic world. She idolized him—despite the escalating heroin addiction that sometimes overshadowed his creative passion. When Schactman died suddenly, just as Dancyger was entering adolescence, she went into her own self-destructive spiral, raging against a world that had taken her father away. As an adult, Dancyger began to question the mythology she'd created about her father—the brilliant artist, struck down in his prime. Using his sculptures, paintings, and prints as a guide, Dancyger sought out the characters from his world who could help her decode the language of her father's work to find the truth of who he really was.

Download or read book What is Art written by Joseph Beuys and published by CLAIRVIEW BOOKS. This book was released on 2012-12-10 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Joseph Beuys’s work continues to influence and inspire practitioners and thinkers all over the world, in areas from organizational learning, direct democracy and new money forms to new art pedagogies and ecological art practices. Here, in dialogue with Volker Harlan - a close colleague, whose own work also revolves around understandings of substance and sacrament that are central to Beuys - the deeper motivations and insights underlying ‘social sculpture’, Beuys’s expanded conception of art, are illuminated. His profound reflections, complemented with insightful essays by Volker Harlan, give a sense of the interconnectedness between all life forms, and the foundations of a path towards an ecologically sustainable future. This volume features over 40 b/w illustrations.

Download or read book Subduction written by Kristen Millares Young and published by Red Hen Press. This book was released on 2020-04-14 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Utterly unique . . . examines themes of love, intrusion, loss, community and trust against a backdrop of a Makah reservation in the Pacific Northwest.” —Ms. Magazine Selected as a Staff Pick by The Paris Review Silver Medal winner in the Independent Publisher Book Awards in Multicultural Fiction Fleeing the shattered remains of her marriage and treachery by her sister, a Latina anthropologist named Claudia takes refuge in Neah Bay, a Native whaling village on the jagged Pacific coast. Claudia yearns to lose herself to the songs of the tribe and the secrets of a spirited hoarder named Maggie. Instead, she stumbles into Maggie’s prodigal son Peter, who, spurred by his mother’s failing memory, has returned seeking answers to his father’s murder. Claudia helps Peter’s family convey a legacy delayed for decades by that death, but her presence, echoing centuries of fraught contact with indigenous peoples, brings lasting change and real damage. Through the ardent collision of Peter and Claudia, Subduction portrays not only their strange allegiance after grievous losses but also their shared hope of finding solace and community on the Makah Indian Reservation. An intimate tale of stunning betrayals, Subduction bears witness to the power of stories to disrupt—and to heal. “Young beautifully and vividly renders the Pacific Northwest, particularly the unique world of Neah Bay. Subduction is at once a thought-provoking meditation on the geography and geology of the natural world and a generous exploration of the natural shifts and movements that shape her characters.” —Jonathan Evison, New York Times-bestselling author of Legends of the North Cascades

Download or read book Conversations with Angels written by J. Raymond and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-08-09 with total page 647 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on refractions of earlier beliefs, modern angels - at once terrible and comforting, frighteningly other and reassuringly beneficent - have acquired a powerful symbolic value. This interdisciplinary study looks at how humans conversed with angels in medieval and early modern Europe, and how they explained and represented these conversations.

Download or read book All the Colors We Will See written by Patrice Gopo and published by Thomas Nelson. This book was released on 2018-08-07 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Patrice Gopo grew up in Anchorage, Alaska, the child of Jamaican immigrants who had little experience being black in America. From her white Sunday school classes as a child, to her early days of marriage in South Africa, to a new home in the American South with a husband from another land, Patrice’s life is a testament to the challenges and beauty of the world we each live in, a world in which cultures overlap every day. In All the Colors We Will See, Patrice seamlessly moves across borders of space and time to create vivid portraits of how the reality of being different affects her quest to belong. In this poetic and often courageous collection of essays, Patrice examines the complexities of identity in our turbulent yet hopeful time of intersecting heritages. As she digs beneath the layers of immigration questions and race relations, Patrice also turns her voice to themes such as marriage and divorce, the societal beauty standards we hold, and the intricacies of living out our faith. With an eloquence born of pain and longing, Patrice’s reflections guide us as we consider our own journeys toward belonging, challenging us to wonder if the very differences dividing us might bring us together after all.