An exploration of the visual culture of “race” through the work of five contemporary artists who came to prominence during the 1990s. Over the past two decades, artists James Luna, Fred Wilson, Amalia Mesa-Bains, Pepón Osorio, and Renée Green have had a profound impact on the meaning and practice of installation art in the United States. In Subject to Display, Jennifer González offers the first sustained analysis of their contribution, linking the history and legacy of race discourse to innovations in contemporary art. Race, writes González, is a social discourse that has a visual history. The collection and display of bodies, images, and artifacts in museums and elsewhere is a primary means by which a nation tells the story of its past and locates the cultures of its citizens in the present. All five of the American installation artists González considers have explored the practice of putting human subjects and their cultures on display by staging elaborate dioramas or site-specific interventions in galleries and museums; in doing so, they have created powerful social commentary of the politics of space and the power of display in settings that mimic the very spaces they critique. These artists' installations have not only contributed to the transformation of contemporary art and museum culture, but also linked Latino, African American, and Native American subjects to the broader spectrum of historical colonialism, race dominance, and visual culture. From Luna's museum installation of his own body and belongings as “artifacts” and Wilson's provocative juxtapositions of museum objects to Mesa-Bains's allegorical home altars, Osorio's condensed spaces (bedrooms, living rooms; barbershops, prison cells) and Green's genealogies of cultural contact, the theoretical and critical endeavors of these artists demonstrate how race discourse is grounded in a visual technology of display.

An exploration of the visual culture of “race” through the work of five contemporary artists who came to prominence during the 1990s. Over the past two decades, artists James Luna, Fred Wilson, Amalia Mesa-Bains, Pepón Osorio, and Renée Green have had a profound impact on the meaning and practice of installation art in the United States. In Subject to Display, Jennifer González offers the first sustained analysis of their contribution, linking the history and legacy of race discourse to innovations in contemporary art. Race, writes González, is a social discourse that has a visual history. The collection and display of bodies, images, and artifacts in museums and elsewhere is a primary means by which a nation tells the story of its past and locates the cultures of its citizens in the present. All five of the American installation artists González considers have explored the practice of putting human subjects and their cultures on display by staging elaborate dioramas or site-specific interventions in galleries and museums; in doing so, they have created powerful social commentary of the politics of space and the power of display in settings that mimic the very spaces they critique. These artists' installations have not only contributed to the transformation of contemporary art and museum culture, but also linked Latino, African American, and Native American subjects to the broader spectrum of historical colonialism, race dominance, and visual culture. From Luna's museum installation of his own body and belongings as “artifacts” and Wilson's provocative juxtapositions of museum objects to Mesa-Bains's allegorical home altars, Osorio's condensed spaces (bedrooms, living rooms; barbershops, prison cells) and Green's genealogies of cultural contact, the theoretical and critical endeavors of these artists demonstrate how race discourse is grounded in a visual technology of display.

A fly-on-the-wall account of the smart and strange subcultures that make, trade, curate, collect, and hype contemporary art. The art market has been booming. Museum attendance is surging. More people than ever call themselves artists. Contemporary art has become a mass entertainment, a luxury good, a job description, and, for some, a kind of alternative religion. In a series of beautifully paced narratives, Sarah Thornton investigates the drama of a Christie's auction, the workings in Takashi Murakami's studios, the elite at the Basel Art Fair, the eccentricities of Artforum magazine, the competition behind an important art prize, life in a notorious art-school seminar, and the wonderland of the Venice Biennale. She reveals the new dynamics of creativity, taste, status, money, and the search for meaning in life. A judicious and juicy account of the institutions that have the power to shape art history, based on hundreds of interviews with high-profile players, Thornton's entertaining ethnography will change the way you look at contemporary culture.

At the close of the twentieth century, black artists began to figure prominently in the mainstream American art world for the first time. Thanks to the social advances of the civil rights movement and the rise of multiculturalism, African American artists in the late 1980s and early ’90s enjoyed unprecedented access to established institutions of publicity and display. Yet in this moment of ostensible freedom, black cultural practitioners found themselves turning to the history of slavery. Bound to Appear focuses on four of these artists—Renée Green, Glenn Ligon, Lorna Simpson, and Fred Wilson—who have dominated and shaped the field of American art over the past two decades through large-scale installations that radically departed from prior conventions for representing the enslaved. Huey Copeland shows that their projects draw on strategies associated with minimalism, conceptualism, and institutional critique to position the slave as a vexed figure—both subject and object, property and person. They also engage the visual logic of race in modernity and the challenges negotiated by black subjects in the present. As such, Copeland argues, their work reframes strategies of representation and rethinks how blackness might be imagined and felt long after the end of the “peculiar institution.” The first book to examine in depth these artists’ engagements with slavery, Bound to Appear will leave an indelible mark on modern and contemporary art.

How does art influence us? In The Subject of Aesthetics, Tone Roald approaches aesthetics as a psychological discipline, showing how works of art challenge our habitual ways of perceiving the world. While aesthetics has traditionally been a philosophical discipline, Roald discusses how it is very much alive in the realm of psychology – a qualitative psychology of lived experience. But what actually constitutes an aesthetics of lived experience? The book answers that question by analyzing people’s own engagement with visual art. What emerges is that the object of aesthetics is indeed the subject.

This book analyzes the linguistic diversity of South America based on approaches deeply rooted in the tradition of formal grammar. The chapters brought together in this contributed volume consider native languages all kinds of languages used in the region, including sign languages, indigenous languages and the romance languages (Portuguese and Spanish) originally introduced by European colonizers which underwent processes of transformation giving rise to new, local grammars. One fourth of the language families of the world are located in South America, but the majority of languages in the region are still understudied and out of the radar of theoretical linguistics mostly because their grammars are not well-known by international researchers. This book aims to fill this gap by bringing together studies rooted in the formal grammar approach first developed by Noam Chomsky, which sees language not only as mere corpora attested in oral and written production, but also as expressions of systems of thought and language production which are essential parts of human cognition. The book is divided in three parts – sign languages, romance languages and indigenous languages –, and brings together studies of the following South American languages: Brazilian Sign Language (Libras - Língua Brasileira de Sinais) Argentinian Sign Language (LSA - Lengua de Señas Argentina) Peruvian Sign Language (LSP- Lengua de Señas Peruana) Brazilian Portuguese Chilean and Argentinian Spanish Quechua Paraguayan Guarani A’ingae Macro-Jê languages Formal Approaches to the Languages of South America will be an invaluable resource both for theoretical linguists and cognitive scientists by providing access to top quality research on understudied languages and enabling these languages to be incorporated into comparative studies that can contribute to advance the knowledge of general principles governing all human languages.