Perspective: Selected Essays on Space in Art and Design

Edited by Sarina Miller, Temple University

'Perspective: Selected Essays on Space in Art and Design' explores the ways in which visual and physical space have been designed and experienced in different cultures. This book amplifies the significance of space as a design element by examining its implications in various contexts through a global perspective of art and design.

Media, Practice and Theory: Tracking emergent thresholds of experience

Edited by Nicole De Brabandere, McGill University

This volume gathers research at the intersection of art and the interdisciplinary humanities to develop an understanding of media assemblages that insist on the generativity of their situatedness within ecologies of practice. These contributions propose media assemblages that enlarge the time and space for co-compositions between media and bodies that reshape subjective, perceptual, and affective registers of experience. Media assemblages include photography, performance, criticism, curation, installation, animation, collage, video and VR, as well as archival and somatic practices. Research as a form of practice is a key orientation in this volume since it offers a means of engaging the world-making proposition offered by Isabelle Stengers that practices are specified through irreducible entanglements that cause one to think, feel, and hesitate. The generative linkages between different disciplinary approaches for engaging research practice across the arts and humanities are favoured over disciplinary and media-based exclusivity. When practice is not posed as an intervention or counterpoint to scholarly research or in opposition to the discursive, differences emerge, not based on convention but through the situatedness of emergent insight. The goal is thus not to forward a reproducible formula for knowledge creation but to weave the conditions for utterances both within and in excess of discipline, convention, and establishment. How can research engender the making of communities between, across, and in excess of institutional frameworks through the emergent affinities, postures, and formats of evolving and inclusive forms of research? This volume is a valuable reference for researchers/practitioners within the arts and humanities as it exemplifies both critical and situated methods for developing interdisciplinary research as a means of transforming the terms of research itself.

Art and its Observers

Patricia Emison, University of New Hampshire

What ties western art together? This extended essay attempts to distill some of the basic ideas with which artists and observers of their art have grappled, ideas worthy of ongoing consideration and debate. The fostering of visual creativity as it has morphed from ancient Greece to the present day, the political and economic forces underpinning the commissioning and displacement of art, and the ways in which contemporary art relates to past periods of art history (and in particular, the Renaissance), are among the topics broached. Architecture, drawings, prints, films, painting, sculpture, and decorative arts from Europe and the US are considered and examined, often including nonstandard examples, occasionally including ones from the immediate surroundings of the author (who is based in New England). Although this book is primarily geared to those who would like a brief introduction to some basic aspects of a visual tradition spanning thousands of years, students of aesthetics might also discover useful benchmarks in this concise overview. The author places the emphasis on how art has been used and loved (or sometimes despised or ignored) more than on which works should be most famous.

Art and its Observers

Patricia Emison, University of New Hampshire

What ties western art together? This extended essay attempts to distill some of the basic ideas with which artists and observers of their art have grappled, ideas worthy of ongoing consideration and debate. The fostering of visual creativity as it has morphed from ancient Greece to the present day, the political and economic forces underpinning the commissioning and displacement of art, and the ways in which contemporary art relates to past periods of art history (and in particular, the Renaissance), are among the topics broached. Architecture, drawings, prints, films, painting, sculpture, and decorative arts from Europe and the US are considered and examined, often including nonstandard examples, occasionally including ones from the immediate surroundings of the author (who is based in New England). Although this book is primarily geared to those who would like a brief introduction to some basic aspects of a visual tradition spanning thousands of years, students of aesthetics might also discover useful benchmarks in this concise overview. The author places the emphasis on how art has been used and loved (or sometimes despised or ignored) more than on which works should be most famous.

Socially Engaged Public Art in East Asia

Space, Place, and Community in Action

Edited by Meiqin Wang, California State University, Northridge

This anthology elucidates the historical, global, and regional connections, as well as current manifestations, of socially engaged public art (SEPA) in East Asia. It covers case studies and theoretical inquiries on artistic practices from Hong Kong, Japan, mainland China, South Korea, and Taiwan with a focus on the period since the 2000s. It examines how public art has been employed by artists, curators, ordinary citizens, and grassroots organizations in the region to raise awareness of prevailing social problems, foster collaborations among people of varying backgrounds, establish alternative value systems and social relations, and stimulate action to advance changes in real life situations. It argues that through the endeavors of critically-minded art professionals, public art has become artivism as it ventures into an expanded field of transdisciplinary practices, a site of new possibilities where disparate domains such as aesthetics, sustainability, placemaking, social justice, and politics interact and where people work together to activate space, place, and community in a way that impacts the everyday lives of ordinary people. As the first book-length anthology on the thriving yet disparate scenes of SEPA in East Asia, it consists of eight chapters by eight authors who have well-grounded knowledge of a specific locality or localities in East Asia. In their analyses of ideas and actions, emerging from varying geographical, sociopolitical, and cultural circumstances in the region, most authors also engage with concepts and key publications from scholars which examine artistic practices striving for social intervention and public participation in different parts of the world. Although grounded in the realities of SEPA from East Asia, this book contributes to global conversations and debates concerning the evolving relationship between public art, civic politics, and society at large.