Books in the Rethinking Art's Histories series

This book examines US gay and lesbian leather archives alongside contemporary artistic practices that reframe and renegotiate historical source material, creating a queer politics of the present. -- .

Transcultural things explores visual and material modes of vernacular self-expression in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, a confederate polity created in 1569 as the Polish, Ruthenian, Lithuanian and Prussian nobilities found themselves drawing closer together culturally. It examines how the process of becoming an interconnected political community was activated and legitimised by material culture such as maps, illustrated histories, costumes and carpets. These artefacts came to act as signifiers of localness and the Commonwealth's cultural distinctiveness, yet they were often from abroad, particularly the Ottoman Empire. Highlighting objects' mobility, adaptation and cultural reappropriation, this study points to the exogenous underpinnings of cultural self-identification and the allegedly local artefacts that mediated it. Transcultural things foreground the often-overlooked extrinsic aspect of nativism, positioning Poland-Lithuania as a useful methodological laboratory for challenging theories of national and societal cultural distinctiveness. The analysis reveals how a discourse of distinctiveness emerged in response to transcultural flows of people and artefacts as well as how, for Polish-Lithuanian elites, making sense of one's own world was fundamentally informed by other cultures - and was therefore, inevitably, embedded in a global context.

The first monographic study of the painter Agostino Brunias, this book offers a compelling, original analysis of his representation of race in the British colonial West Indies, reconsidering the way in which the artist's oeuvre has previously been understood. -- .

This volume features new research by an international group of scholars on Russia's historic relationship with Asia and the ways in which it was mediated and represented in the fine, decorative, and performing arts and architecture from the mid-eighteenth century to the first two decades of Soviet rule.

There is no soundtrack amplifies new and radical audio-visual relationships in experimental media art. It addresses the lack of diversity in the study of art, media and sound through careful audition of marginalised voices that speak of race, gender, sexuality, indigeneity, colonialism, nationalism, violence and the politics of space. -- .

Art + archive examines how and why the archive became a hot topic in the artworld at the turn of the twenty-first century. The book connects the artworld's interest in archival terminology to a number of broader historical, technological, academic and philosophical contexts. -- .

This book engages with the historical paradigm of 'contemporary art' by examining a programme initiated in Eastern Europe by the Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros in the 1990s. The Soros Centers for Contemporary Art played a leading role in popularising the norms and conventions of 'contemporary art' throughout the region. -- .

This lively anthology explores the impact of the art, images and ideas associated with Maoism on artistic practices around the world from 1945 to the present. It establishes that the chameleonic appearances of global Maoism deserve a more prominent place in the study of art history. -- .

This well-illustrated, accessibly written book examines how eighteenth-century prints and drawings of antique architecture operated as representations of thought. Combining original archival material with cultural theory, the book considers the idea of the past and the role of space and time in the visual ekphrasis or description of its architecture. -- .

A counter-touristic guide to one of the world's fastest developing megacities, this book intervenes in global contemporary art discourse by exploring the cross-cultural histories and creative conflicts buried beneath Shanghai's glamorous cosmopolitan facades. -- .

This book analyses how three artists - Adrian Piper, Nancy Spero and Mary Kelly - worked with the visual dimensions of language in the 1960s and 1970s.

Empires of light is a study of light, vision and power in colonial India. It examines the material cultures of light within imperial networks, drawing the colonial experience into contemporary debates on vision and optics to provide an art historical account of how a modern consciousness was forged amidst these dramatic transformations. -- .

Questioning what the term 'Chinese art' means in the era of global art, this book situates Chinese contemporary art in the matrix of global expositions and political transnationalisms. Its case studies explore the changing political concept of Chineseness by examining performative, body-oriented video and eco-feminist works. -- .

A comprehensive examination of the origins of Vancouver photo-conceptualism. The book employs discourse analysis, feminist critique and settler-colonial theory to analyse the landscapes of Jeff Wall, Ian Wallace, Marian Penner Bancroft, Liz Magor and others. -- .

This monograph provides novel methods for writing transnational South Asian art history outside of genealogy. -- .

Sheds light on artistic production and the emergence of contemporary art in Armenia from the ruins of the socialist utopian project and the failure to realise the romanticised consumerism of the capitalist West. -- .

This is the first comprehensive academic study of the history of performance art in Eastern Europe. It is a comparative study that covers twenty-one countries across the region, highlighting the unique contribution of these artists to the genre of performance art. -- .

Traces two intersecting trajectories in American art. It shows how rights-based 1960s politics and the identity politics of the 1970s influenced the development of Conceptual art (with a capital 'C') into the diverse set of practices generally characterised as conceptualist (with a lower-case 'c'). -- .

A strong and insightful work which argues that skin is not just any surface an artist can represent, but a highly overdetermined one. Focusing on five French painters - Fragonard, David, Girodet, Benoit and Ingres - it spans the fields of history of art and of medicine. -- .

Sheds new light on the relevance of the visual in medical and scientific cultures, and on the relationship between artistic and medical practices and imagery. -- .

Provides a deeply researched account of contemporary Asian art movements, focusing on the work of a select group of internationally renowned and politically engaged artists. -- .

Explores the groundbreaking representation of the body in experimental films of the 1960s and 1970s. Focusing on sexually explicit films by Andy Warhol, Barbara Rubin, Stan Brakhage, Carolee Schneemann, Yoko Ono and Paul Sharits. -- .

In closely-read case studies, we encounter artworks by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Ana Mendieta, Louise Bourgeois, Alina Szapocznikow, Anna Maria Maiolino, Vera Frenkel, Sarah Kofman and Chantal Akerman to explore trauma and bereavement, fatal illness, Holocaust experience, migration, exile and the encounter with political horror and atrocity. -- .

A theoretically astute overview of key developments in art and its contexts since the 1990s. -- .

What does an assemblage made out of crumpled newspaper have in common with an empty room in which the lights go on and off every five seconds? This book argues that they are both examples of a 'precarious' art that flourished from the late 1950s to the first decade of the twenty-first century, in light of a growing awareness of the individual's fragile existence in capitalist society. Focusing on comparative case studies drawn from European, North and South American practices, this study maps out a network of similar concerns and practices, while outlining its evolution from the 1960s to the beginning of the twenty-first century. This book will provide students and amateurs of contemporary art and culture with new insights into contemporary art practices and the critical issues that they raise concerning the material status of the art object, the role of the artist in society, and the relation between art and everyday life.

Examines how seventeenth-century English architectural theorists and designers rethought the domestic built environment.

This lively anthology explores the impact of the art, images and ideas associated with Maoism on artistic practices around the world from 1945 to the present. It establishes that the chameleonic appearances of global Maoism deserve a more prominent place in the study of art history. -- .

What happens when you touch or enter an artwork instead of looking at it? As artists since the 1950s have increasingly sought to involve viewers more actively in their artworks, this critical anthology sheds light on the nature of these new forms of participation and their historical, social and political significance. -- .