Edited by Ingrid Schaffner. Essays by Rhea Anastas, Pamela Lee, Ingrid Schaffner and Paul Virilio. Foreword by Claudia Gould.

Of the conceptual artists who began their careers in the 1960s and 1970s—Bruce Nauman, Chris Burden, Vito Acconci, and Mel Bochner among them—Barry Le Va may be the most elusive. As this first study of his work reveals, his rigorously planned art was instigated to mask its creator’s intentions and methods, presenting itself as an “aftermath” of modernism’s claim to permanency and civil society’s preferred mode of monumentalism. For Michael Maizels, Le Va’s work constitutes a particularly productive subject of inquiry because it clearly articulates the interconnection between the avant-garde’s distrust of autonomous art objects, two decades of social unrest, the emergence of information theory, and lingering notions of scientific objectivity. Barry Le Va: The Aesthetic Aftermath explores how Le Va used such materials as shattered glass, spent bullets, sound recordings, scattered flour, and meat cleavers embedded in a floor to challenge the interlocking assumptions behind blind faith in lasting beauty, just government, and perfectible knowledge. Taking inspiration from popular crime novels as well as contemporary art theory, Le Va charged his viewers to attempt, like detectives at a crime scene, to decipher an order underlying the apparent chaos. Le Va’s installations were designed to erode not simply the presumed autonomy of the art object but also the economic and political authority of the art establishment. In his concluding chapter, Maizels looks at the more fixed work of the past two decades in which Le Va turned to architectural themes and cast concrete to probe the limits of dynamism and the idea of permanence.

This is an English translation of the Splendid Vision sutra, a sixth-century Indian Mahayana Buddhist scripture.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Workshop on Robot Vision, RobVis 2001, held in Auckland, New Zealand in February 2001.The 17 revised full papers presented together with 17 posters were carefully reviewed and selected from 52 submissions. The papers and posters are organized in topical sections on active perception, computer vision, robotics and video, computational stereo, robotic vision, and image acquisition.

DIVWith a reader’s perspective and a master writer’s skill, critically acclaimed novelist Lynne Sharon Schwartz takes on the world at large/divDIV Communication, while essential, is almost impossible to maintain perfectly—a truism Lynne Sharon Schwartz demonstrates in this stunning essay collection. In one section, she discovers that one typo could completely derail a project while translating an Italian account of the Holocaust. In another essay, she deconstructs our dependence on the telephone. Most movingly, she details the ways that friendship can grow in the most unlikely places, and how difficult those bonds can be to maintain./divDIV /divDIVIn a previous collection of essays, Ruined by Reading, Schwartz took on the world of literature, writing, and books. Now, Schwartz extends her focus while continuing to explore her subject honestly and forcefully./div