Critical Cartography of Art and Visuality in the Global Age poses fundamental questions and pinpoints topical discussions central to the field of contemporary art studies in the global age. Resulting from a series of conversations that took place at the international conference ""Critical Cartography of Art and Visuality in the Global Age"" (Barcelona 2013), the volume brings together current debates in cultural and identity-based art histories as a means of expanding the territory of contempor...

Stereotypes often cast communism as a defunct, bankrupt ideology and a relic of the distant past. However, recent political movements like Europe's anti-austerity protests, the Arab Spring, and Occupy Wall Street suggest that communism is still very much relevant and may even hold the key to a new, idealized future. In The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures, contributors trace the legacies of communist ideology in visual culture, from buildings and monuments, murals and sculpture, to recycling campaigns and wall newspapers, all of which work to make communism's ideas and values material. Contributors work to resist the widespread demonization of communism, demystifying its ideals and suggesting that it has visually shaped the modern world in undeniable and complex ways. Together, contributors answer curcial questions like: What can be salvaged and reused from past communist experiments? How has communism impacted the cultures of late capitalism? And how have histories of communism left behind visual traces of potential utopias? An interdisciplinary look at the cultural currency of communism today, The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures demonstrates the value of revisiting the practices of the past to form a better vision of the future.

A Companion to Modern Art presents a series of original essays by international and interdisciplinary authors who offer a comprehensive overview of the origins and evolution of artistic works, movements, approaches, influences, and legacies of Modern Art. Presents a contemporary debate and dialogue rather than a seamless consensus on Modern Art Aims for reader accessibility by highlighting a plurality of approaches and voices in the field Presents Modern Art’s foundational philosophic ideas and practices, as well as the complexities of key artists such as Cezanne and Picasso, and those who straddled the modern and contemporary Looks at the historical reception of Modern Art, in addition to the latest insights of art historians, curators, and critics to artists, educators, and more

This volume situates and problematizes the points of tension implicated in diverse historical and theoretical conceptualizations of the body through a visual studies framework. By proposing materiality and power as two polarities through which the body is mobilized, it highlights the interstitial function of the body as a mediator between materiality and politics beyond the body/soul-mind dichotomy. Specifically, the book brings together complex analytical approaches to representations of the body in diverse media, such as the visual arts, television, film, literature, architecture, dance, and theatre, among others. As a result, and to highlight the interdisciplinary dimension of this collection of essays, Body between Power and Materiality includes texts by scholars in a wide range of fields, from art historians, media studies experts, and sociologists to literary theorists.

When we talk about the geographical, ecological, ethnographic, historical, documentary, and cosmopolitan “turns” in relation to the work of practitioners of contempory art, what exactly do we mean? Are we talking about a “reading strategy”? About an interpretive model, as would be derived from the linguistic turn of the 1970s, or rather about a stratigraphic structure that could be read across multiple cultural practices? Do we wish to read one system by means of another system, in a way that one nurtures the other so that it can open us up to other forms of being? Or is it rather about a generative movement in which a new horizon emerges in the process, leaving behind the practice that was its point of departure? The recurrence of “turn” in place of “style”, “-ism”, or “tendency” would ultimately respond to a clear urgency of the contemporary global world: a movement characterised by aesthetic pluralism, by the simultaneousness of various modi operandi, and by a great multiplicity of languages that constantly change their state while having many features in common. And “turn” would also allow within the space of the contemporary — of here and now —, a great diversity of stories from all around the world that should be confronted simultaneously in an intellectual outlook that is continuous and disjunctive, essential to understanding the present as a whole.

This volume is distinctive for its extraordinarily interdisciplinary investigations into a little discussed topic, the spatial imagination. It probes the exercise of the spatial imagination in pre-modern China across five general areas: pictorial representation, literary description, cartographic mappings, and the intertwining of heavenly and earthly space. It recommends that the spatial imagination in the pre-modern world cannot adequately be captured using a linear, militarily framed conceptualization. The scope and varying perspectives on the spatial imagination analyzed in the volume’s essays reveal a complex range of aspects that informs how space was designed and utilized. Due to the complexity and advanced scholarly level of the papers, the primary readership will be other scholars and advanced graduate students in history, history of science, geography, art history, religious studies, literature, and, broadly, sinology.

This volume addresses questions that are crucial to approaching art, visuality, and cultural policies from the perspective of global transformations and the rise of new social, political and cultural paradigms. The concept of territory is the theoretical underpinning off three sections of the volume: "The Geoasthetic Hypothesis: Constructing and Deconstructing Territories"; "Creativity and Dissent: The Future as a Contested Territory"; and "Value, Labour and Gender: Spaces of (Un)Recognition". Obviously, in this case, territory is not viewed as a two-dimensional space that can be abstracted into a map; it rather emerges as a multidimensional place of proximity and difference, of consensus and conflict, of hegemonies and dissent. It expands from the private space of domestic labour to the public field of politics; rather than treating them as separate fields, they are viewed as a complex continuum, where the narratives of displacement, dissent and utopia are being interwoven. In order to understand its multiple dimensions and problematics (cultural, political, social), the volume adopts an approach that extends beyond art theory and aesthetics, into the realm of economics, geography and political theory.