Eros and Oneness / Tamara H. Schenkenberg -- Elective Affinities: Hannah Wilke's Ceramics in Context / Glenn Adamson -- Needed Erase Her? Don't. / Connie Butler -- Daughter/Mother / Catherine Opie -- Ha-Ha-Hannah / Jeanine Oleson -- Cycling Through Gestures to Strike a Pose / Nadia Myre -- Play and Care / Hayv Kahraman -- Cindy Nemser and Hannah Wilke in Conversation, 1975.

Hannah Wilke's artwork frames a heroic story about formal invention & social activism, personal loyalties & individual freedom, &, above all, breathtaking risk. A defining presence in the emerging community of women artists in the 1960s & 70s, Wilke developed a controversial visual language in response to her own & women's experience.

Widely debated in feminist, poststructuralist, and literary theory is the relationship between subjectivity and the body. Yet autobiographical criticism--an obvious place for testing this conceptual relationship--has lagged behind contemporary queries about the embodied self. In The Invading Body, Einat Avrahami corrects this deficiency by analyzing the genre of terminal illness autobiographies. These personal narratives challenge the world of self-writing in their power to question the assumption that autobiography--and the body--are products of cultural constructs and discursive practices. Their self-disclosures of symptoms, disabilities, and the physical and psychological pains of treatment, especially when combined with thoughts of further deterioration and imminent death, defy the theoretical formulations of identity and alter the definition of autobiography itself. Avrahami investigates an array of autobiographical testimonies of terminal illness ranging from Harold Brodkey's poignant account of his struggle with AIDS to Hannah Wilke's and Jo Spence's gripping self-portraits of cancer. By challenging the artificial and contrived skepticism that critics and theorists bring to their concepts of the self, the author argues, these illness narratives constitute an "invasion of the real," confronting the notions of self-representation and self-invention on which current autobiographical studies are based. The author's examinations of these moving memoirs and photographs will engage not only the growing field of disability studies, but also a more general readership interested in the transition that occurs when one's body suddenly falls out of step with one's mind.

How artists created an aesthetic of “positive barbarism” in a world devastated by World War II, the Holocaust, and the atomic bomb In Brutal Aesthetics, leading art historian Hal Foster explores how postwar artists and writers searched for a new foundation of culture after the massive devastation of World War II, the Holocaust, and the atomic bomb. Inspired by the notion that modernist art can teach us how to survive a civilization become barbaric, Foster examines the various ways that key figures from the early 1940s to the early 1960s sought to develop a “brutal aesthetics” adequate to the destruction around them. With a focus on the philosopher Georges Bataille, the painters Jean Dubuffet and Asger Jorn, and the sculptors Eduardo Paolozzi and Claes Oldenburg, Foster investigates a manifold move to strip art down, or to reveal it as already bare, in order to begin again. What does Bataille seek in the prehistoric cave paintings of Lascaux? How does Dubuffet imagine an art brut, an art unscathed by culture? Why does Jorn populate his paintings with “human animals”? What does Paolozzi see in his monstrous figures assembled from industrial debris? And why does Oldenburg remake everyday products from urban scrap? A study of artistic practices made desperate by a world in crisis, Brutal Aesthetics is an intriguing account of a difficult era in twentieth-century culture, one that has important implications for our own. Published in association with the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC Please note: All images in this ebook are presented in black and white and have been reduced in size.

Written entries on each artist offer key biographical and descriptive information and accompanying essays by leading critics, art historians, and scholars offer new perspectives on feminist art practice. The topics provide a broad social context for the artworks themselves.

"With great originality and scholarship, Amelia Jones maps out an extraordinary history of body art over the last three decades and embeds it in the theoretical terrain of postmoderism. The result is a wonderful and permissive space in which the viewer...can wander"...-Moira Roth, Trefethen professor of art history, Mills College.

Knafo, a feminist psychoanalyst and art critic, extends the discourse between feminism and art history, while revealing core psychological sensibilities involved in women's self-representation - the need for mirroring, the use of mask and masquerade, the drive for reparation, the presence of the uncanny, and the concept of female narcissism. --Publisher.

When it comes to viewing art, living in the information age is not necessarily a benefit. So argues Michael Findlay in this book that encourages a new way of looking at art. Much of this thinking involves stripping away what we have been taught and instead trusting our own instincts, opinions, and reactions. Including reproductions of works by Mark Rothko, Paul Klee, Joan Miró, Jacob Lawrence, and other modern and contemporary masters, this book takes readers on a journey through modern art. Chapters such as “What Is a Work of Art?”, “Can We Look and See at the Same Time?”, and “Real Connoisseurs Are Not Snobs,” not only give readers the confidence to form their own opinions, but also encourages them to make connections that spark curiosity, intellect, and imagination. “The most important thing for us to grasp,” writes Findlay, “is that the essence of a great work of art is inert until it is seen. Our engagement with the work of art liberates its essence.” After reading this book, even the most intimidated art viewer will enter a museum or gallery feeling more confident and leave it feeling enriched and inspired.