The eerily prescient work of a near-forgotten Japanese artist, whose 1960s and '70s sculptures anticipate contemporary ecological anxieties Contemplating Japanese artist Tetsumi Kudo's (1935-90) work in the 21st century provokes a sense of the uncanny on multiple levels: grotesquely beautiful on their own, his abject sculptures seem to foretell today's environmental concerns with their depictions of ecological decay. Born in Osaka, Kudo's life was greatly impacted by the aftermath of the atomic bomb in 1945; this trauma compounded by the Vietnam War's ever-present atmosphere of destruction led to a consistent focus on dystopia and decomposition in his work. Kudo's fluorescent birdcages and blacklight terrariums are furnished with an assortment of sculptures and found objects: melted plastic flowers, colorful phallic chrysalises and dismembered resin body parts come together to convey a distinctly modern anxiety in regard to our ailing world. Kudo's work does not intend to provide comfort in the midst of crisis; rather, his pieces urge viewers to reflect on how we may or may not continue to survive in a world that we ourselves have ruined through pollution and consumerism. As the artist's work reaches a peak of topicality, this volume presents a focused selection of Kudo's pieces from the 1960s and 1970s that demonstrate a postwar awareness of the atomic bomb's effect on reproduction and the environment.

Edited and with text by Doryun Chong. Text by Mike Kelley, Hiroko Kudo.

Catalog of an exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Nov. 18, 2012-Feb. 25, 2013.

Ground-breaking scientific research and new philosophical perspectives currently challenge our anthropocentric cultural assumptions of the vegetal world. As humanity begins to grapple with the urgency imposed by climate change, reconsidering human/plant relationships becomes essential to grant a sustainable future on this planet. It is in this context that a multifaceted approach to plant-life can reveal the importance of ecological interconnectedness and lead to a more nuanced consideration of the variety of living organisms and ecosystems with which we share the planet. In Botanical Speculations, researchers, artists, art historians, and activists collaboratively map the uncharted territories of new forms of botanical knowledge. This book emerges from a symposium held at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in September 2017, and capitalizes on contemporary art’s ability to productively unhinge scientific theories and certainties in order to help us reconsider unquestioned beliefs about this living world.

Since the 1990s, critics and curators have broadly accepted the notion that participatory art is the ultimate political art: that by encouraging an audience to take part an artist can promote new emancipatory social relations. Around the world, the champions of this form of expression are numerous, ranging from art historians such as Grant Kester, curators such as Nicolas Bourriaud and Nato Thompson, to performance theorists such as Shannon Jackson. Artificial Hells is the first historical and theoretical overview of socially engaged participatory art, known in the US as "social practice." Claire Bishop follows the trajectory of twentieth-century art and examines key moments in the development of a participatory aesthetic. This itinerary takes in Futurism and Dada; the Situationist International; Happenings in Eastern Europe, Argentina and Paris; the 1970s Community Arts Movement; and the Artists Placement Group. It concludes with a discussion of long-term educational projects by contemporary artists such as Thomas Hirschhorn, Tania Bruguera, Pawe? Althamer and Paul Chan. Since her controversial essay in Artforum in 2006, Claire Bishop has been one of the few to challenge the political and aesthetic ambitions of participatory art. In Artificial Hells, she not only scrutinizes the emancipatory claims made for these projects, but also provides an alternative to the ethical (rather than artistic) criteria invited by such artworks. Artificial Hells calls for a less prescriptive approach to art and politics, and for more compelling, troubling and bolder forms of participatory art and criticism.

"The work of the sculptor Rachel Harrison is both the zeitgeist and the least digestible in contemporary art. It may also be the most important, owing to an originality that breaks a prevalent spell in an art world of recycled genres, styles, and ideas."--Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker In her sculptures, room-sized installations, drawings, photographs, and artist's books, Rachel Harrison (b. 1966) delves into themes of celebrity culture, pop psychology, history, and politics. This publication, created in close collaboration with the artist, explores twenty-five years of her practice and is the first comprehensive monograph on Harrison in nearly a decade. Its centerpiece is an in-depth plate section, which doubles as a chronology of Harrison's major works, series, and exhibitions. Objects are illustrated with multiple views and details, and accompanied by short texts. This thorough approach elucidates Harrison's complicated, eclectic oeuvre--in which she integrates found materials with handmade sculptural elements, upends traditions of museum display, and injects quotidian objects with a sense of strangeness. Six accompanying essays cover Harrison's earliest works to her most recent output. The book also includes a handful of photo-collages that the artist created specifically for this project. Published here for the first time, these pieces superimpose found images with reproductions of Harrison's own past work.

Contemporary Art and Digital Culture analyses the impact of the internet and digital technologies upon art today. Art over the last fifteen years has been deeply inflected by the rise of the internet as a mass cultural and socio-political medium, while also responding to urgent economic and political events, from the financial crisis of 2008 to the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East. This book looks at how contemporary art addresses digitality, circulation, privacy, and globalisation, and suggests how feminism and gender binaries have been shifted by new mediations of identity. It situates current artistic practice both in canonical art history and in technological predecessors such as cybernetics and net.art, and takes stock of how the art-world infrastructure has reacted to the internet’s promises of democratisation. An invaluable resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students of contemporary art – especially those studying history of art and art practice and theory – as well as those working in film, media, curation, or art education. Melissa Gronlund is a writer and lecturer on contemporary art, specialising in the moving image. From 2007–2015, she was co-editor of the journal Afterall, and her writing has appeared there and in Artforum, e-flux journal, frieze, the NewYorker.com, and many other places.

This collection of contemporary art, created by Giuseppe Panza di Biumo in over forty-five years of collecting is one of the most important collections of art from the last decades of the twentieth century. This fully illustrated book gives an account of the history of the collection, of loans to important museums and of exhibitions of the works from it at contemporary art museums around the world.

An authoritative and comprehensive survey of the life and work of the visionary and influential painter Philip Guston. Driven and consumed by art, Philip Guston painted and drew compulsively. This book takes the reader from his early social realist murals and easel paintings of the 1930s and 1940s, to the Abstract Expressionist works of the 1950s and early 1960s, and finally to the powerful new language of figurative painting, which he developed in the late 1960s and 1970s. Drawing on more than thirty years of his own research, the critic and curator, Robert Storr, maps Guston's entire career in one definitive volume, providing a subtantial, accessible, and revealing analysis of his work. With more than 800 images, the book illustrates Guston's key works and includes many unpublished paintings and drawings. An extensive chronology, illustrated with photographs, letters, articles, publications, and other ephemera drawn from the artist's archives and other sources, contextualizes Guston's life and provides in-depth coverage of his life at home, his work in the studio, his relationship with fellow artists and his many exhibitions. Guston was able to speak about art with unrivalled passion and fluency. In celebration of this, the book features Guston's own thoughts on his drawings and his great heroes of the Italian Renaissance.

The two-volume set LNCS 8547 and 8548 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Computers Helping People with Special Needs, ICCHP 2014, held in Paris, France, in July 2014. The 132 revised full papers and 55 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 362 submissions. The papers included in the first volume are organized in the following topical sections: accessible media; digital content and media accessibility; 25 years of the Web: weaving accessibility; towards e-inclusion for people with intellectual disabilities; the impact of PDF/UA on accessible PDF; accessibility of non-verbal communication; emotions for accessibility (E4A), games and entertainment software; accessibility and therapy; implementation and take-up of e-accessibility; accessibility and usability of mobile platforms for people with disabilities and elderly persons; portable and mobile platforms for people with disabilities and elderly persons; people with cognitive disabilities: At, ICT and AAC; autism: ICT and AT; access to mathematics, science and music and blind and visually impaired people: AT, HCI and accessibility.