Martin Patrick explores the ways in which contemporary artists across media continue to reinvent art that straddles both public and private spheres. Examining the impact of various art movements on notions of performance, authorship, and identity, Across the Art/Life Divide argues that the most defining feature of contemporary art is the ongoing interest of artists in the problematic relationship between art and life. Looking at underexamined forms, such as stand-up comedy and sketch shows, alongside more traditional artistic media, he situates the work of a wide range of contemporary artists to ask: To what extent are artists presenting themselves? And does the portrayal of the “self” in art necessarily constitute authenticity? By dissecting the meta-conditions and contexts surrounding the production of art, Across the Art/Life Divide examines how ordinary, everyday life is transformed into art.

Acting has traditionally been considered a form of pretending or falsehood, compared with the so-called reality or truth of everyday life. Yet in the postmodern era, a reversal has occurred—real life is revealed as something acted and acting is where people have begun to search for truth.

In Acting and its Refusal in Theatre and Film, Marian McCurdy considers the ethical desire of refusing to act—which results from blurred boundaries of acting and living—and examines how real life and performance are intertwined. Offering a number of in-depth case studies, the book contextualizes refusals of acting on stage and screen and engages in an analysis of fascist theatricality, sexual theatricality, and the refusal of theatricality altogether.

Driven by a powerful belief in the value of free expression, Sheryl Oring has for more than a decade been helping people across the United States voice concerns about public affairs through her “I Wish to Say” project. This book uses that project as the starting point for an exploration of a series of issues of public interest being addressed by artists today. It features essays by contributors ranging from art historians and practicing artists to scholars and creators working in literature, political science, and architecture. All the contributors offer a different approach, but they share a primary goal of sparking a dialogue not just among makers of art, but among viewers, readers, and the concerned public at large. The resulting volume will be an essential resource for politically engaged contemporary artists searching for innovative, cross-disciplinary ways of making and sharing art.
 

Film festivals are an ever-growing part of the film industry, but most considerations of them focus almost entirely on their role in the business of filmmaking.
This book breaks new ground by bringing scholars from a range of disciplines together with industry professionals to explore the concept of festivals as spaces through an activist lens, as spaces where the sociopolitical identities of communities and individuals are confronted and shaped. Tracing the growth of activist and human rights-focused films from the 1970s to the present, and using case studies from San Francisco, Brazil, Bristol, and elsewhere, the book addresses such contentious topics as whether activist films can achieve humanitarian aims or simply offer “cinema of suffering.” Ultimately, the contributors attack the question of just how effective festivals are at producing politically engaged spectators?
 

Acts of Dramaturgy is a critical frame for Michael Pinchbeck’s The Shakespeare Trilogy, a recent touring project comprising three performances—The Beginning, The Middle, and The End—that explored the role of the dramaturg. This book sets the playtexts in dialogue with reflexive essays and provocations on contemporary dramaturgy from a range of contributors. 

Weaving together different modes of writing, the volume reflects on the politics of dramaturgy, authorship, adaptation, performance, and the use of Shakespeare as a stimulus for making contemporary theater. The resulting work is as much a reflection on the entanglements of processes, lineages, and relations that have shaped the work and its reception as it is an exploration of ways of reflecting and being with practice now. A valuable new contribution to the study of contemporary dramaturgy, the book will be of interest to makers and scholars of theater and performance and anyone interested in practice research and creative critical writing.

Provides a new foundation for discussions about theater, film, and translations between the two mediums.

Adapting Performance Between Stage and Screen provides an introduction to adaptations between theater and film, establishing a framework for considering these as distinct from literary adaptation. The book places emphasis on performance and event, opening new avenues of exploration to include non-literary issues such as the treatment of space and place, mis en scène, acting styles, and star personas. The recent growth of digital theater is examined to foreground the “events” of theater and cinema—largely ignored in adaptation studies—with phenomena such as National Theatre Live analyzed for the different ways that “liveness” is adapted.

Drawing from case studies that explore distinct periods in British film and theater history, the volume looks at issues surrounding theatrical naturalism and cinematic realism and illustrates the principle that adaptations can't be divorced from the historical and cultural moment in which they are produced. Adapting Performance Between Stage and Screen explores how cultural values can be articulated in the act of translating between media, providing a new framework for the discussion of theater and film as dramatic works.

Penned by contributors from a range of disciplines, including art history, sociology, and media and cultural studies, the essays that constitute Advertising as Culture offer an informed and critical overview of approaches to the study of advertising. These in-depth contributions explore such topics as the conceptual relationship between advertising and culture; the development of advertising through the industrial period; the nature of advertising production and reception; the relationship of advertising to a range of cultural fields such as art, fashion, and music; and developments in digital media practice.

Addressing a growing area of focus in contemporary art, Aesthetic Journalism investigates why contemporary art exhibitions often consist of interviews, documentaries, and reportage. Art theorist and critic Alfredo Cramerotti traces the shift in the production of truth from the domain of the news media to that of art and aestheticism—a change that questions the very foundations of journalism and the nature of art. This volume challenges the way we understand art and journalism in contemporary culture and suggests future developments of this new relationship.

A photo-collage of past and present street visuals in Asia, Aestheticizing Public Space explores the domestic, regional, and global nexus of East Asian cities through their graffiti, street art, and other visual forms in public space. Attempting to unfold the complex positions of these images in the urban spatial politics of their respective regions, Lu Pan explores how graffiti in East Asia reflects the relationship between aesthetics and politics. The book situates itself in a contested dynamic relationship among human bodies, visual modernity, social or moral norms, styles, and historical experiences and narratives. On a broader level, this book aims to shed light on how aesthetics and politics are mobilized in different contested spaces and media forms, in which the producer and the spectator change and exchange their identities.

Moving far beyond predominant views of Africa as a place to be “saved,” and even more recent celebratory formulations of it as “rising,” African Luxury: Aesthetics and Politics highlights and critically interrogates the visual and material cultures of lavish and luxurious consumption already present on the continent. Methodologically, conceptually, and analytically, this collection dismantles taken-for-granted ideas that the West is the source and focus of high-end and hyper-desirable material cultures. It explores what the culture of consumption means in Africa in both historical and contemporary contexts, studying diverse luxury phenomena including fashion advertising, reality television, retail, gendered consumption, and gardening to re-center the discussion on existing contemporary luxury cultures across the continent.
 

African Theatre for Development acts as a forum for investigating how African Theatre works and what its place is in this postmodern society. It provides the subject with a degree of detail unmatched in previous books, reflecting a new approach to the study of the performing arts in this region. The collection:

• reveals the dynamic position of the arts and culture in post-independent countries as well as changes in influences and audiences,
• shows African theatre to be about aesthetics and rituals, the sociological and the political, the anthropological and the historical,
• examines theatre's role as a performing art throughout the continent, representing ethnic identities and defining intercultural relationships,
• investigates African theatre's capacity to combine contemporary cultural issues into the whole artistic fabric of performing arts, and
• considers the variety of voices, forms and practices through which contemporary African intellectual circles are negotiating the forces of tradition and modernity.

The book provides an opportunity to discover contemporary material from experts, critics and artists from across the world. The contributions are in a language and style that allow them to be read either as aids to formal study or as elements of discussion to interest the general reader.

Filmed in1966 and ’67, but kept from release for twenty years, The Commissar is unquestionably one of the most important and compelling films of the Soviet era. Based on a short story by Vasily Grossman, it tells of a female Red Army commissar who is forced to stay with a Jewish family near the frontlines of the battle between the Red and White Armies as she waits to give birth. The film drew the ire of censors for its frank portrayal of the violence faced by Russian Jews in the wake of the revolution.
            This book is the first companion to the film in any language. It recounts the film’s plot and turbulent production history, and it also offers a close analysis of the artistic vision of its director, Aleksandr Askoldov, and the ways that viewers can trace in the film not only his complex aesthetics, but also the personal crises he endured in the years leading up to the film. The result is an indispensable companion to an unforgettable film.

Released in 2002, Russian Ark drew astonished praise for its technique: shot with a Steadicam  in one ninety-six-minute take, it presented a dazzling whirl of movement as it followed the Marquis de Custine as he wandered through the vast Winter Palace in St. Petersburg—and through three hundred years of Russian history.
            This companion to Russian Ark addresses all key aspects of the film, beginning with a comprehensive synopsis, an in-depth analysis, and an account of the production history. Birgit Beumers goes on from there to discuss the work that went into the now-legendary Steadicam shot—which required two thousand actors and three orchestras—and she also offers an account of the film’s critical and public reception, showing how it helped to establish director Aleksandr Sokurov as perhaps the leading filmmaker in Russia today.
 

This book examines the complex relationships that exist between anarchist theory and film. No longer hidden in obscure corners of cinematic culture, anarchy is a theme that has traversed arthouse, underground, and popular film. In The Anarchist Cinema, James Newton explores the notion that cinema is an inherently subversive space, establishes criteria for deeming a film anarchic, and examines the place of underground and DIY filmmaking within the wider context of the category. The author identifies subversive undercurrents in cinema and uses anarchist political theory as an interpretive framework to analyze filmmakers, genres, and the notion of cinema as an anarchic space.

Widely considered one of the most innovative voices in Hungarian theater, András Visky has enjoyed growing audiences and increased critical acclaim over the last fifteen years. Nonetheless, his plays have yet to reach an English-language audience. This volume, edited by Jozefina Komporaly, begins to correct this by bringing together a translated collection of Visky’s work.

The book includes the first English-language anthology of Visky’s best known plays—Juliet, I Killed My Mother, and Porn—as well as critical analysis and an exploration of Visky’s “Barrack Dramaturgy,” a dramaturgical theory in which he considers the theater as a space for exploring feelings of cultural and personal captivity. Inspired by personal experience of the oppressive communist regime in Romania, Visky’s work explores the themes of gender, justice, and trauma, encouraging shared moments of remembrance and collective memory. This collection makes use of scripts and director’s notes, as well as interviews with creative teams behind the productions, to reveal a holistic, insider’s view of Visky’s artistic vision. Scholars and practitioners alike will benefit from this rare, English-language collection of Visky’s work and dramaturgy.

Thought of most often in the context of the Olympics or other sporting events, national anthems are a significant way for a nation and its citizens to express their identity and unity. Despite their prevalence, anthems as an expression of national self-image and culture have rarely been examined—until now. Anthem Quality analyzes the lyrics of many anthems in order to explore their historical and contemporary context. Christopher Kelen’s research reveals how many of the world’s most famous and best-known national anthems, including “The Marseillaise,” “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and “God Save the Queen” deal with such topics as authority, religion, and political devotion.

 

A companion to Intellect’s award-winning Applied Theatre: International Case Studies and Challenges for Practice, Applied Drama fulfills the need for an introductory handbook for facilitators and teaching artists working in community settings through dramatic process, drawing on the best practices to transfer into the diverse settings within which applied drama projects occur. Crafted for use in schools, classrooms, community groups, healthcare organizations, and all manner of social institutions, this book aids practitioners to develop and hone the skills needed to best serve the needs of these diverse communities.

Six years after its initial publication, Applied Theatre returns with a second edition. As the first book to assist practitioners and students to develop critical frameworks for implementing their own theatrical projects, it served as a vital addition to this area of growing international interest, winning the Distinguished Book of the Year award from the American Alliance for Theatre and Education.

Editors Monica Prendergast and Juliana Saxton have updated the book to reflect shifts in practice over the last few years in the world of applied theater. With their background in drama education and pedagogy, the contributors offer introductory chapters and dozens of case studies on applied theater projects around the globe. This new edition of Applied Theatre will encourage students and practitioners to acquire a deeper, more concrete understanding of the field and its best practice.

Architecture and the Virtual is a study of architecture as it is reflected in the work of seven contemporary artists, working with the tools of our post-digital age. The book maps the convergence of virtual space and contemporary conceptual art and is an anthropological exploration of artists who deal with transformable space and work through analog means of image production. Marta Jecu builds her inquiry around interviews with artists and curators in order to explore how these works create the experience of the virtual in architecture. Performativity and neo-conceptualism play important roles in this process and in the efficiency with which these works act in the social space.

Architecture Filmmaking investigates how the field of architecture utilizes the practice of filmmaking in research, teaching, and practice, and explores the consequences of this interdisciplinary exchange. While architecture and filmmaking have clearly distinct disciplinary outputs, and filmmaking is a much younger art than architecture, the intersection between them is less defined. This book investigates the ways in which architectural researchers, teachers of architecture, their students and practicing architects, filmmakers and artists are using filmmaking uniquely in their practice. The authors’ adept analysis presents a contribution to the debates surrounding interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, and transdisciplinary methodologies in the emerging field of architecture filmmaking research.

With the birth of film came the birth of a revolutionary visual language. This new, unique vocabulary—the cut, the fade, the dissolve, the pan, and a new idea of movement gave not only artists but also architects a completely new way to think about and describe the visual. The Architecture of the Screen examines the interrelations between the visual language of film and the onscreen perception of space and architectural design, revealing how film’s visual vocabulary influenced architecture in the twentieth century and continues to influence it today. Graham Cairns draws on film reviews, architectural plans, and theoretical texts to illustrate the unusual and fascinating relationship between the worlds of filmmaking and architecture.

The new practice of art-based research uses art making as a primary mode of enquiry rather than continuing to borrow research methodologies from other disciplines to study artistic processes. Drawing on contributions from arts therapies, education, history, organizational studies, and philosophy, the essays critically examine unique challenges that include the personal and sometimes intimate nature of artistic enquiry and the complexities of the partnership with social science which has dominated applied arts research; how artistic discoveries are apt to emerge spontaneously, even contrary to plans and what we think we know; how truth can be examined through both fact and fiction as well as the interplay of objective and subjective experience; and ways of generating artistic evidence and communicating outcomes. Offering examples from all of the arts this volume will be welcomed by researchers and students in many fields.

The Art of Defiance is an ethnographic portrait of how graffiti writers see their city and, in turn, how their city sees them. It explores how becoming a graffiti writer helps disenfranchised urban citizens negotiate their cultural identities, build their social capital, and gain a voice within an urban environment that would prefer they remain quiet, passive, and anonymous.
 
In order to both demystify and complicate our understanding of the practice of graffiti writing, this book pushes past the narrative that links the origins of graffiti to criminal gangs and instead offers a detailed portrait of graffiti as a rich urban culture with its own rules and practices. To do so, it examines the cultural history of graffiti in Philadelphia from the early 1970s onward and explores what it is like to be a graffiti writer in the city today. Ultimately, Tyson Mitman aims to humanize graffiti writers and to show that what they do is not merely destructive or puerile, but, rather, adds something important to the urban experience that is a conscious and deliberate act on the part of its practitioners.

Known for his work as a performer and songwriter with the Birthday Party, the Bad Seeds and Grinderman, Australian artist Nick Cave has also pursued a variety of other projects, including writing and acting. Covering the full range of Cave’s creative endeavors, this collection of critical essays provides a comprehensive overview of his multifaceted career.

 

 The contributors, who hail from an array of disciplines, consider Cave’s work from many different angles, drawing on historical, psychological, pedagogical, and generic perspectives. Illuminating the remarkable scope of Cave’s achievements, they explore his career as a composer of film scores, scriptwriter, and performer, most strikingly in Ghosts of the Civil Dead; his work in theater; and his literary output, which includes the novels And the Ass Saw the Angel and The Death of Bunny Munro, as well as two collections of prose. Together, the resulting essays provide a lucid overview of Nick Cave’s work that will orient students and fans while offering fresh insights sure to deepen even expert perspectives.

A well-known advocate and proponent of art in Chicago, Paul Klein is a longtime gallerist whose friendships with artists, dealers, collectors, and curators have afforded him a rare vantage point on the vagaries and victories of the art world. Since closing his gallery in 2004, he has parlayed his insider knowledge into a cottage industry that addresses the imbalance between visual artists’ gifts for creation and their frequent unfamiliarity with the work of managing successful careers. Advising artists as they navigate the commercial aspects of their work, Klein teaches courses and seminars that explore what museum curators are looking for in contemporary artists, how galleries select their artists, how to sell to corporate art consultants, how to price art, and many other subjects.
Based on his many years in both the art world as a gallery owner and educator, The Art Rules is a practical, operational guide for visual artists that demystifies the art world and empowers practitioners to find success on their own terms. Bringing together the personal experiences of hundreds of major art world leaders, Klein chronicles their success, their staying power, their interests, and their passions. Filling a major void, The Art Rules gives practitioners the tools they need to realize their potential. Ultimately, Klein shows, success is not particularly complicated, but it is rarely taught, shared, or demonstrated for the visual artist. This book does precisely that.

In recent years, the museum and gallery have increasingly become self-reflexive spaces, in which the relationship between art, its display, its creators, and its audience is subverted and democratized. One effect of this has been a growing place for artists as curators, and in The Artist as Curator Celina Jeffery brings together a group of scholars and artists to explore the many ways that artists have introduced new curatorial ways of thinking and talking about artistic culture. Taking a deliberately multidisciplinary and cross-cultural focus, The Artist as Curator will fill a gap in museum and curatorial studies, offering a thorough and diverse treatment of various approaches to the historical and changing role of the artist as curator that should appeal to scholars, curators, and artists alike.

The rapid growth of doctoral-level art education challenges traditional ways of thinking about academic knowledge and, yet, as Danny Butt argues in this book, the creative arts may also represent a positive blueprint for the future of the university. Synthesizing institutional history with aesthetic theory, Artistic Research in the Future Academy reconceptualizes the contemporary crisis in university education toward a valuable renewal of creative research.
 

Arts Integration in Education is an insightful, even inspiring investigation into the enormous possibilities for change that are offered by the application of arts integration in education. Presenting research from a range of settings, from preschool to university, and featuring contributions from scholars and theorists, educational psychologists, teachers, and teaching artists, the book offers a comprehensive exploration and varying perspectives on theory, impact, and practices for arts-based training and arts-integrated instruction across the curriculum.

The Audience Experience identifies a momentous change in what it means to be part of an audience for a live arts performance. Together, new communication technologies and new kinds of audiences and audience research have transformed the expectations of performance, and The Audience Experience explores key trends in the contemporary presentation of performing arts for audiences, among them convergence marketing and cocreation, children and young people as audiences, and the screening of live performance. The book also presents case studies of audience engagement and methodology, reviewing both conventional and innovative ways of collecting and using audience feedback data. Directed to performing arts companies, sponsors, stakeholders, and scholars, this collection of essays moves beyond the conventional arts marketing paradigm to build new knowledge about how audiences encounter, value and experience quality in the performing arts.

 

The first part of a planned three-volume work devoted to mapping the transnational history of Australian film studies, AustralianFilm Theory and Criticism, Volume 1 provides an overview of the period between 1975 and 1990, during which the discipline first became established in the academy.

 

Tracing critical positions, personnel, and institutions across this formative period, Noel King, Constantine Verevis, and Deane Williams examine a multitude of books and journal articles published in Australia and distributed internationally though such processes as publication in overseas journals, translation, and reprinting. At the same time, they offer important insights about the origins of Australian film theory and its relationship to such related disciplines as English, and cultural studies. Ultimately, Australian Film Theory and Criticism, Volume 1 delineates the historical implications—and reveals the future possibilities—of establishing new directions of inquiry for film studies in Australia and internationally.

A three-volume project tracing key critical positions, people, and institutions in Australian film, Australian Film Theory and Criticism interrogates not only the origins of Australian film theory but also its relationships to adjacent disciplines and institutions. The second volume in the series, this book gathers interviews with national and international film theorists and critics to chart the development of different discourses in Australian film studies through the decades. Seeking to examine the position of film theorists and their relationship to film industry practitioners and policy makers, this volume succeeds mightily in reasserting Australian film’s place on the international scholarly agenda.

The third part of a three-volume work devoted to mapping the transnational history of Australian film studies, Volume 3: Documents concludes the project by gathering together the documents that were produced during the rise of film studies in Australian academia from 1975–85. Through these sources we see the development of the particularities of Australian film theory and criticism, its relationship to its international counterparts, and the establishment of key positions and the directions in which they develop. Editors Deane Williams and Constantine Verevis here collect key articles, including the works of Paul Willemen, Sam Rohdie, Ross Gibson, and Meaghan Morris, among many others, in order to conclude this pioneering historiographic account of Australian film studies.

Australian TV News explores the important role of entertainment in Australian television news over the past decade. Through the use of textual analysis, industry interviews, and audience research, it argues that “infotainment” and satire are increasingly becoming significant methods of informing audiences about serious news issues. The work examines the changing relationships between television news, politics, and everyday people, finding that these often humorous programs are used by audiences as sources of political information and fact, and this book challenges traditional assumptions about what form TV news should take and what functions it ought to serve.

This book gives a critical account of four of the most significant avant-garde Chinese art groups and associations of the late 1970s and ’80s. It is made up largely of conversations conducted by the author with members of these organizations that provide insight into the circumstances of artistic production during the decade leading up to the Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989. The conversations are supported by an extended introduction and other comprehensive notes that give a detailed overview of the historical circumstances under which the groups and associations developed.