This book is a timely and engaging introduction to the way that artists working in all media think about craft. Workmanship is key to today's visual arts, when high 'production values' are becoming increasingly commonplace. Yet craft's centrality to contemporary art has received little serious attention from critics and historians. Dispensing with clichéd arguments that craft is art, Adamson persuasively makes a case for defining craft in a more nuanced fashion. The interesting thing about craft, he argues, is that it is perceived to be 'inferior' to art. The book consists of an overview of various aspects of this second-class identity - supplementarity, sensuality, skill, the pastoral, and the amateur. It also provides historical case studies analysing craft's role in a variety of disciplines, including architecture, design, contemporary art, and the crafts themselves. Thinking Through Craft will be essential reading for anyone interested in craft or the broader visual arts.

Artist Eduardo Paolozzi (1924-2005) was a unique cultural figure. His varied yet instantly recognisable work chronicles the significant changes in British art from the austere 1950s to the post-post-modern late 1990s. This highly illustrated and visually exciting book provides the first comprehensive overview of the career of a major, prolific and complex artist, exploring Paolozzi's work from all periods and across all media: collage, sculpture, printmaking, ceramics, tapestry and film. An Italian Scot, Paolozzi studied first at Edinburgh College of Art, before moving on to the Ruskin Drawing School and the Slade. He was a founding member of the Independent Group in the early 1950s but steadfastly resisted the 'Pop' label, preferring instead to see his pioneering interdisciplinarity as an extension and an expansion of radical Surrealism. Dedicating a chapter to each facet of Paolozzi's wide-ranging practice - including, in turn, his bronze, aluminium and public sculptures, as well as his early collages and his innovative screenprints - this book offers the definitive, illustrated, art-historical appraisal of an artist whose work continues to fascinate and inspire.

Learning from Las Vegas created a healthy controversy on its appearance in 1972, calling for architects to be more receptive to the tastes and values of common people and less immodest in their erections of heroic, self-aggrandizing monuments. This revision includes the full texts of Part I of the original, on the Las Vegas strip, and Part II, Ugly and Ordinary Architecture, or the Decorated Shed, a generalization from the findings of the first part on symbolism in architecture and the iconography of urban sprawl. (The final part of the first edition, on the architectural work of the firm Venturi and Rauch, is not included in the revision.) The new paperback edition has a smaller format, fewer pictures, and a considerably lower price than the original. There are an added preface by Scott Brown and a bibliography of writings by the members of Venturi and Rauch and about the firm's work.

Provocative and enlightening, Richard Sennett's The Craftsman is an exploration of craftsmanship - the desire to do a job well for its own sake - as a template for living. Most of us have to work. But is work just a means to an end? In trying to make a living, have we lost touch with the idea of making things well? Pure competition, Sennett shows, will never produce good work. Instead, the values of the craftsman, whether in a Stradivari violin workshop or a modern laboratory, can enrich our lives and change the way we anchor ourselves in the world around us. The past lives of crafts and craftsmen show us ways of working - using tools, acquiring skills, thinking about materials - which provide rewarding alternative ways for people to utilise their talents. We need to recognize this if motivations are to be understood and lives made as fulfilling as possible. 'Lively, engaging and pertinent ... a lifetime's learning has gone into the writing of this book' Roger Scruton, Sunday Times 'An enchanting writer with important things to say' Fiona MacCarthy, Guardian 'Enthralling ... Sennett is keen to reconnect thinking with making, to revive the simple pleasure in the everyday object and the useful task. There is something here for all of us' Edwin Heathcote, Financial Times 'A masterpiece' Boyd Tonkin, Independent Richard Sennett's previous books include The Fall of Public Man, The Corrosion of Character, Flesh and Stone and Respect. He was founder director of the New York Institute for the Humanities, and is now University Professor at New York University and Academic Governor and Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics.

Casco Issues has been drafted around the concept of multiplicity - not so much in terms of quantity, but more as a condition, to denote a special phenomenon that according to urbanist Paul Virilio occurs as an `accident of accidents`. New communication technologies have created the possibilty of an accident that is no longer local, but global, and that would occur everywhere at the same time`. New technology, in particular digitalisation, has influenced the design and the appearance of images (objects, information) and at the same time, the way they are produced and distributed. The basic assumption of Multiplicity is that invisible ntechnological processes in particular, dictate our thinking and actions, even though we live in an extremely visually orientated society.

Here is the key book on the key materials in art, design and shaping the environment in the 21st century. Building on the cult success of Techno Textiles, this book, newly available in paperback, features developments over the past decade. Highlighting advanced textiles in production and available to the designer, artist, architect and consumer today, it will be required reading for professionals, fashion and design aficionados and anyone prepared to be stimulated by and informed about the environment in which we now live.

This small text book contains 37 provocative graphic design assignments from the famed Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. By focusing only on the assignments, but not the results, it asks questions and gives answers at the same time. With listings of reference material like books, websites and articles on related subjects.

Given the widespread blurring of boundaries between media caused by the interdisciplinary inclinations of many of today’s painters, the one thing held in common by the diverse array of artists gathered together in Vitamin P is, in the editor’s bluntly literal view, the simple fact that “all of them share, at some stage, the process of covering a surface with pigments.” Faced with this decidedly plural take on the current state of the medium, one might be forgiven for imagining that any attempt to discern distinct tendencies in serious painting today must automatically be doomed to failure. Vitamin P is not, however, the only stocktaking exercise of this nature to have been undertaken in recent years. Far from it. Recent medium specific issues devoted to painting by art magazines such as Flash Art and Contemporary merely echo an existing curatorial trend. In light of the significant spate of large-scale museum surveys of contemporary painting over the past five years, it is instructive to note how frequently certain names recur and certain enabling predecessors are invoked, and how quickly certain patterns in form, content and affiliation have become established.

Can techniques traditionally thought to be outside the scope of literature, including word processing, databasing, identity ciphering, and intensive programming, inspire the reinvention of writing? The Internet and the digital environment present writers with new challenges and opportunities to reconceive creativity, authorship, and their relationship to language. Confronted with an unprecedented amount of texts and language, writers have the opportunity to move beyond the creation of new texts and manage, parse, appropriate, and reconstruct those that already exist. In addition to explaining his concept of uncreative writing, which is also the name of his popular course at the University of Pennsylvania, Goldsmith reads the work of writers who have taken up this challenge. Examining a wide range of texts and techniques, including the use of Google searches to create poetry, the appropriation of courtroom testimony, and the possibility of robo-poetics, Goldsmith joins this recent work to practices that date back to the early twentieth century. Writers and artists such as Walter Benjamin, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and Andy Warhol embodied an ethos in which the construction or conception of a text was just as important as the resultant text itself. By extending this tradition into the digital realm, uncreative writing offers new ways of thinking about identity and the making of meaning.

The author's intention in compiling this work was to show by practical examples the history of the development of dress. This is the most reliable and authentic account of the subject, for the author took pains to base his study on actual pieces of clothing that have survived, only turning to paintings, statues and other reproductions in cases where originals no longer existed.

Hans Ulrich Obrist and Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson have known each other for many years, and have worked together intimately--on exhibitions, book projects, performances and more. Their legendary conversations, gathered here, are revealing, challenging, philosophical--and essential to both oeuvres.

Move. Choreographing You explores the interaction between visual art and dance since the 1960s. This beautifully illustrated book, published in connection with a major exhibition, focuses on visual artists and choreographers who create sculptures and installations that direct the movements of audiences—making them dancers and active participants. Move shows that choreography is not merely about the notation of movement on paper or in film but about the ways the body inhabits sculpture and installations.The book documents some of the diverse but interconnected ways that visual art and choreography have come together over the past fifty years. Among the artists whose work helped to forge the art-dance connection are Allan Kaprow, Robert Morris, Lygia Clark, Bruce Nauman, Trisha Brown, Simone Forti, Franz West, Mike Kelley, Isaac Julien, and William Forsythe. Artists from a younger generation who helped to bring the worlds of art and dance together are also looked at—Trisha Donnelly, Christian Jankowski, and Tino Sehgal among them. Move also features new commissions by leading international artists and reconstructions of important works from the past as well as an illustrated contextual archive and timeline. Design, contemporary art, and the crafts themselves. Thinking Through Craft will be essential reading for anyone interested in craft or the broader visual arts.