On the leading edge of trauma and archival studies, this timely book engages with the recent growth in visual projects that respond to the archive, focusing in particular on installation art. It traces a line of argument from practitioners who explicitly depict the archive (Samuel Beckett, Christian Boltanski, Art & Language, Walid Raad) to those whose materials and practices are archival (Mirosław Bałka, Jean-Luc Godard, Silvia Kolbowski, Boltanski, Atom Egoyan). Jones considers in particular the widespread nostalgia for ‘archival’ media such as analogue photographs and film. He analyses the innovative strategies by which such artefacts are incorporated, examining five distinct types of archival practice: the intermedial, testimonial, personal, relational and monumentalist.

This book focuses on the artistic process, creativity and collaboration, and personal approaches to creation and ideation, in making digital and electronic technology-based art. Less interested in the outcome itself – the artefact, artwork or performance – contributors instead highlight the emotional, intellectual, intuitive, instinctive and step-by-step creation dimensions. They aim to shine a light on digital and electronic art practice, involving coding, electronic gadgetry and technology mixed with other forms of more established media, to uncover the practice-as-research processes required, as well as the collaborative aspects of art and technology practice.

Wonder has an established link to the history and philosophy of science. However, there is little acknowledgement of the relationship between the visual arts and wonder. This book presents a new perspective on this overlooked connection, allowing a unique insight into the role of wonder in contemporary visual practice. Artists, curators and art theorists give accounts of their approach to wonder through the use of materials, objects and ways of exhibiting. These accounts not only raise issues of a particular relevance to the way in which we encounter our reality today but ask to what extent artists utilize the function of wonder purposely in their work.

Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- List of Figures -- List of Color Plates -- Acknowledgments -- 1 Relational Ethics and Aesthetics -- Being and Thinking with Art and Animals -- Between Presence and Absence -- An Ethical Art History -- 2 Dogged Flesh: Rembrandt's Presentation in the Temple, c. 1640 -- Real and Represented Dogs -- Rembrandt's Three R's: Radical, Reflective, Revelatory -- The Rhetoric of Etching -- Fleshly Experience -- Past Made Present -- 3 Glances with Wolves: Encounters with Little John and Joseph Beuys -- Entangled Encounters -- Seeing and Being with Little John -- Presencing Other Worlds -- Imaginative Empathy -- Gathering Together in the Gap -- 4 Glimpse into the Unknown: Contemporary Taxidermy and Photography -- Spaces Between: Yellow and Taza -- Respecting Unknowns -- Dominance, Submission, and Freedom: Inert and Progression of Regression -- Death and the Object (Ars longa vita brevis est) -- From Hierarchy to Horizontality -- 5 "We Are All Connected": Experiencing Art and Nature at Horseshoe Canyon -- Guided by Dogs and Children -- "We Are All Connected"--Dwelling with Dogs and Earth -- Accessing Histories with Attentive Care -- Art and Earth as Places of Emergence -- 6 Caring for Art and Animals -- Bibliography -- Index

Contemporary art biennials are sites of prestige, innovation and experimentation, where the category of art is meant to be in perpetual motion, rearranged and redefined, opening itself to the world and its contradictions. They are sites of a seemingly peaceful cohabitation between the elitist and the popular, where the likes of Jeff Koons encounter the likes of Guy Debord, where Angela Davis and Frantz Fanon share the same ground with neoliberal cultural policy makers and creative entrepreneurs. Building on the legacy of events that conjoin art, critical theory and counterculture, from Nova Convention to documenta X, the new biennial blends the modalities of protest with a neoliberal politics of creativity. This book examines a strained period for these high art institutions, a period when their politics are brought into question and often boycotted in the context of austerity, crisis and the rise of Occupy cultures. Using the 3rd Athens Biennale and the 7th Berlin Biennale as its main case studies, it looks at how the in-built tensions between the domains of art and politics take shape when spectacular displays attempt to operate as immediate activist sites. Drawing on ethnographic research and contemporary cultural theory, this book argues that biennials both denunciate the aesthetic as bourgeois category and simultaneously replicate and diffuse an exclusive sociability across social landscapes.

Drawings and paintings are made, and the process of making creates unique meanings that transform our perception of space-time and our sense of finitude. By using a phenomenological approach, the understanding of art practice and its relation to particular historical and cultural contexts can be significantly enhanced.

Collaboration in the arts is no longer a conscious choice to make a deliberate artistic statement, but instead a necessity of artistic survival. In today’s hybrid world of virtual mobility, collaboration decentralizes creative strategies, enabling artists to carve new territories and maintain practice-based autonomy in an increasingly commercial and saturated art world. Collaboration now transforms not only artistic practices but also the development of cultural institutions, communities and personal lifestyles. This book explores why collaboration has become so integrated into a greater understanding of creative artistic practice. It draws on an emerging generation of contributors—from the arts, art history, sociology, political science, and philosophy—to engage directly with the diverse and interdisciplinary nature of collaborative practice of the future.

W.J.T. Mitchell – one of the founders of visual studies – has been at the forefront of many disciplines such as iconology, art history and media studies. His concept of the pictorial turn is known worldwide for having set new philosophical paradigms in dealing with our vernacular visual world. This book will help both students and seasoned scholars to understand key terms in visual studies – pictorial turn, metapictures, literary iconology, image/text, biopictures or living pictures, among many others – while systematically presenting the work of Mitchell as one of the discipline's founders and most prominent figures. As a special feature, the book includes three comprehensive, authoritative and theoretically relevant interviews with Mitchell that focus on different stages of development of visual studies and critical iconology.

The first book of its kind, Gestures of Seeing in Film, Video and Drawing engages broadly with the often too neglected yet significant questions of gesture in visual culture. In our turbulent mediasphere where images – as lenses bearing on their own circumstances – are constantly mobilized to enact symbolic forms of warfare and where they get entangled in all kinds of cultural conflicts and controversies, a turn to the gestural life of images seems to promise a particularly pertinent avenue of intellectual inquiry. The complex gestures of the artwork remain an under-explored theoretical topos in contemporary visual culture studies. In visual art, the gestural appears to be that which intervenes between form and content, materiality and meaning. But as a conceptual force it also impinges upon the very process of seeing itself. As a critical and heuristic trope, the gestural galvanizes many of the most pertinent areas of inquiry in contemporary debates and scholarship in visual culture and related disciplines: ethics (images and their values and affects), aesthetics (from visual essentialism to transesthetics and synesthesia), ecology (iconoclastic gestures and spaces of conflict), and epistemology (questions of the archive, memory and documentation). Offering fresh perspectives on many of these areas, Gestures of Seeing in Film, Video and Drawing will be intensely awaited by readers from and across several disciplines, such as anthropology, linguistics, performance, theater, film and visual studies.

In the course of its long and tumultuous history the sublime has alternated between spatial and temporal definitions, from its conceptualization in terms of the grandeur and infinity of Nature (spatial), to its postmodern redefinition as an "event" (temporal), from its conceptualization in terms of our failure to "cognitively map" the decentered global network of capital or the rhizomatic structure of the postmetropolis (spatial), to its neurophenomenological redefinition in terms of the new temporality of presence produced by network/real time (temporal). This volume explores the place of the sublime in contemporary culture and the aesthetic, cultural, and political values coded in it. It offers a map of the contemporary sublime in terms of the limits—cinematic, cognitive, neurophysiological, technological, or environmental—of representation.