Each of the eight chapters takes a period of up to forty years and examines the medium through the lenses of art, science, social science, travel, war, fashion, the mass media and individual practitioners.-Back Cover.

Presents a collection of essays, manifestos, and illustrations that provide an overview of the Dada movement in art, describing its convictions, antics, and spirit, through the words and art of its principal practitioners.

From the pencil to the puppet to the drone—the humanities and the social sciences continue to ride a wave of interest in material culture and the world of things. How should we understand the force and figure of that wave as it shapes different disciplines? Other Things explores this question by considering a wide assortment of objects—from beach glass to cell phones, sneakers to skyscrapers—that have fascinated a range of writers and artists, including Virginia Woolf, Man Ray, Spike Lee, and Don DeLillo. The book ranges across the literary, visual, and plastic arts to depict the curious lives of things. Beginning with Achilles’s Shield, then tracking the object/thing distinction as it appears in the work of Martin Heidegger and Jacques Lacan, Bill Brown ultimately focuses on the thingness disclosed by specific literary and artistic works. Combining history and literature, criticism and theory, Other Things provides a new way of understanding the inanimate object world and the place of the human within it, encouraging us to think anew about what we mean by materiality itself.

Material Modernity explores creative innovation in German art, design, and architecture during the Weimar Republic, charting both the rise of new media and the re-fashioning of old media. Weimar became famous for the explosion of creative ingenuity across the arts in Germany, due to experiments with new techniques (including the move towards abstraction in painting and sculpture) and inventive work in such new media as paper and plastic, which utilized both new and old methods of art production. Individual chapters in this book consider inventions such as the camera and materials like celluloid, examine the role of new materials including concrete composites in opening up fresh avenues in the plastic arts, and relate advances in the understanding of color perception and psychology to an increased interest in visual perception and the latent potential of color as both architectural ornament and carrier of emotional force in space. While art historians usually argue that experimentation in the Weimar Republic was the result of an intentional rejection of traditional modes of expression in the conscious attempt to invent a modern art and architecture unshackled from historic media and methods, this volume shows that the drivers for innovation were often far more complex and nuanced. It first of all describes how the material shortages precipitated by the First World War, along with the devastation to industrial infrastructure and disruption of historic trade routes, affected art, as did a spirit of experimentation that permeated interwar German culture. It then analyzes new challenges in the 1920s to artistic conventions in traditional art modes like painting, sculpture, drawing, architecture, textiles, and print-making and simultaneously probes the likely causes of innovative new methods of artistic production that appeared, such as photomontage, assemblage, mechanical art, and multi-media art. In doing so, Material Modernity fills a significant gap in Weimar scholarship and art history literature.

"Presents some seventy works-- books, collages, drawings, films, paintings, photographs, photomontages, prints, readymades, reliefs-- in large-scale reproductions and accompanying them with in-depth essays by an interdepartmental group of the Museum's curators."--Front jacket flap.

The American artist Man Ray was one of the most influential figures of the historical avant-garde, contributing significantly to the development of both Dadaism and Surrealism. Whilst his pioneering work in photography assured him international acclaim, his activity in other areas, notably film, is to this day both unknown and undervalued. During the 1920s Man Ray made four short experimental films and collaborated on a host of other projects with people such as Marcel Duchamp, Fernand Léger, René Clair and Hans Richter. These works, along with a series of cinematic essays and home movies made during the 1920s and 1930s, represent the most important contribution to the development of an alternative mode of filmmaking in the early twentieth century. This book explores Man Ray's cinematic interactions from the perspective of his interdisciplinary artistic sensibility, creating links between film, photography, painting, poetry, music, architecture, dance and sculpture. By exposing his preoccupation with form, and his ambiguous relationship with the politics and aesthetics of the Dada and Surrealist movements, the author paints an intimate and complex portrait of Man Ray the filmmaker.

...he is an expert at intellectual and moral triage, sorting patiently through the tangle of mixed motives that make for art, admiring the candor, admonishing the perversion.