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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.

If Dutch cinema is examined in academic studies, the focus is usually on pre-war films or on documentaries, but the post-war fiction film has been sporadically addressed. Many popular box-office successes have been steeped in jokes on parochial conflicts, vulgar behavior and/or on sexual display, towards which Dutch people have often felt ambivalent. At the same time, something like a 'Hollandse school', a term first coined in the 1980s, has manifested itself more firmly, with the work of Alex van Warmerdam, pervaded in deadpan irony as its biggest eye-catcher. Using seminal theories of humor and irony as an angle, this study scrutinizes a great number of Dutch films on the basis of categories such as low-class comedies; neurotic romances; deliberate camp; cosmic irony, or grotesque satire. Hence, Humour and Irony in Dutch Post-war Fiction Film makes surprising connections between films from various decades: Flodder and New Kids Turbo; Spetters and Simon; Rent a Friend and Ober;

Kinesthetic empathy describes the ability to experience empathy by observing another human being's movements. Kinesthetic Empathy in Creative and Cultural Practices offers innovative and critical perspectives on a variety of topics, encouraging readers to sidestep the methodological and disciplinary boundaries associated with the arts and sciences.

In light of their tremendous gains in the political and professional sphere, and their ever expanding options, why do most contemporary American films aimed at women still focus almost exclusively on their pursuit of a heterosexual romantic relationship? American Postfeminist Cinema explores this question and is the first book to examine the symbiotic relationship between heterosexual romance and postfeminist culture. The book argues that since 1980, postfeminism's most salient tensions and anxieties have been reflected in the American romance film. Case studies of a broad range of Hollywood and independent films reveal how the postfeminist romance cycle is intertwined with contemporary women's ambivalence and broader cultural anxieties about women's changing social and political status. Key Features: Offers a new perspective on both popular American romance films and postfeminist cultural criticism by examining the symbiotic relationship between romance and postfeminism. Analyses the recurring narrative and discursive patterns of postfeminist cinema. Includes 13 case studies of popular postfeminist films and other media texts, including television programmes. Continues the tradition of feminist analysis of romance as a significant media genre for women.

The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts is a major collection of new writings on research in the creative and performing arts by leading authorities from around the world. It provides theoretical and practical approaches to identifying, structuring and resolving some of the key issues in the debate about the nature of research in the arts which have surfaced during the establishment of this subject over the last decade. Contributions are located in the contemporary intellectual environment of research in the arts, and more widely in the universities, in the strategic and political environment of national research funding, and in the international environment of trans-national cooperation and communication. The book is divided into three principal sections - Foundations, Voices and Contexts - each with an introduction from the editors highlighting the main issues, agreements and debates in each section. The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts addresses a wide variety of concepts and issues, including: the diversity of views on what constitutes arts-based research and scholarship, what it should be, and its potential contribution the trans-national communication difficulties arising from terminological and ontological differences in arts-based research traditional and non-traditional concepts of knowledge, their relationship to professional practice, and their outcomes and audiences a consideration of the role of written, spoken and artefact-based languages in the formation and communication of understandings. This comprehensive collection makes an original and significant contribution to the field of arts-based research by setting down a framework for addressing these, and other, topical issues. It will be essential reading for research managers and policy-makers in research councils and universities, as well as individual researchers, research supervisors and doctoral candidates.

Surveying the Avant-Garde examines the art and literature of the Americas in the early twentieth century through the lens of the questionnaire, a genre as central as the manifesto to the history of the avant-garde. Questions such as \"How do you imagine Latin America?\" and \"What should American art be?\" issued by avant-garde magazines like Imán, a Latin American periodical based in Paris, and Cuba's Revista de Avance demonstrate how editors, writers, and readers all grappled with the concept of \"America,\" particularly in relationship to Europe, and how the questionnaire became a structuring device for reflecting on their national and aesthetic identities in print. Through an analysis of these questionnaires and their responses, Lori Cole reveals how ideas like \"American art,\" as well as \"modernism\" and \"avant-garde,\" were debated at the very moment of their development and consolidation. Unlike a manifesto, whose signatories align with a single polemical text, the questionnaire produces a patchwork of responses, providing a composite and sometimes fractured portrait of a community. Such responses yield a self-reflexive history of the era as told by its protagonists, which include figures such as Gertrude Stein, Alfred Stieglitz, Jean Toomer, F. T. Marinetti, Diego Rivera, and Jorge Luis Borges. The book traces a genealogy of the genre from the Renaissance paragone, or \"comparison of the arts,\" through the rise of enquêtes in the late nineteenth century, up to the contemporary questionnaire, which proliferates in art magazines today. By analyzing a selection of surveys issued across the Atlantic, Cole indicates how they helped shape artists' and writers' understanding of themselves and their place in the world. Based on extensive archival research, this book reorients our understanding of modernism as both hemispheric and transatlantic by narrating how the artists and writers of the period engaged in aesthetic debates that informed and propelled print communities in Europe, the United States, and Latin America. Scholars of modernism and the avant-garde will welcome Cole's original and compellingly crafted work.

Remix -- or the practice of recombining preexisting content -- has proliferated across media both digital and analog. Fans celebrate it as a revolutionary new creative practice; critics characterize it as a lazy and cheap (and often illegal) recycling of other people's work. In Of Remixology, David Gunkel argues that to understand remix, we need to change the terms of the debate. The two sides of the remix controversy, Gunkel contends, share certain underlying values -- originality, innovation, artistic integrity. And each side seeks to protect these values from the threat that is represented by the other. In reevaluating these shared philosophical assumptions, Gunkel not only provides a new way to understand remix, he also offers an innovative theory of moral and aesthetic value for the twenty-first century.In a section called quot;Premix,quot; Gunkel examines the terminology of remix (including quot;collage,quot; quot;sample,quot; quot;bootleg,quot; and quot;mashupquot;) and its material preconditions, the technology of recording. In quot;Remix,quot; he takes on the distinction between original and copy; makes a case for repetition; and considers the question of authorship in a world of seemingly endless recompiled and repurposed content. Finally, in quot;Postmix,quot; Gunkel outlines a new theory of moral and aesthetic value that can accommodate remix and its cultural significance, remixing -- or reconfiguring and recombining -- traditional philosophical approaches in the process.

InAutomatic for the Masses, Petre M. Petrov offers a novel, theoretically informed account of the transition from modernism to Socialist Realism, tracing their connections through Modernist notions of agency and authorship.

What was cinema in modern China? It was, this book tells us, a dynamic entity, not strictly tied to one media technology, one mode of operation, or one system of aesthetic code. It was, in Weihong Bao's term, an affective medium, a distinct notion of the medium as mediating environment with the power to stir passions, frame perception, and mold experience. InFiery Cinema,Bao traces the permutations of this affective medium from the early through the mid-twentieth century, exploring its role in aesthetics, politics, and social institutions. Mapping the changing identity of cinema in China in relation to Republican-era print media, theatrical performance, radio broadcasting, television, and architecture, Bao has created an archaeology of Chinese media culture. Within this context, she grounds the question of spectatorial affect and media technology in China's experience of mechanized warfare, colonial modernity, and the shaping of the public into consumers, national citizens, and a revolutionary collective subject. Carrying on a close conversation with transnational media theory and history, she teases out the tension and affinity between vernacular, political modernist, and propagandistic articulations of mass culture in China's varied participation in modernity. Fiery Cinemaadvances a radical rethinking of affect and medium as a key insight into the relationship of cinema to the public sphere and the making of the masses. By centering media politics in her inquiry of the forgotten future of cinema, Bao makes a major intervention into the theory and history of media.

Super Black places the appearance of black superheroes alongside broad and sweeping cultural trends in American politics and pop culture, which reveals how black superheroes are not disposable pop products, but rather a fascinating racial phenomenon through which futuristic expressions and fantastic visions of black racial identity and symbolic political meaning are presented. Adilifu Nama sees the value-and finds new avenues for exploring racial identity-in black superheroes who are often dismissed as sidekicks, imitators of established white heroes, or are accused of having no role outside of blaxploitation film contexts.Nama examines seminal black comic book superheroes such as Black Panther, Black Lightning, Storm, Luke Cage, Blade, the Falcon, Nubia, and others, some of whom also appear on the small and large screens, as well as how the imaginary black superhero has come to life in the image of President Barack Obama. Super Black explores how black superheroes are a powerful source of racial meaning, narrative, and imagination in American society that express a myriad of racial assumptions, political perspectives, and fantastic (re)imaginings of black identity. The book also demonstrates how these figures overtly represent or implicitly signify social discourse and accepted wisdom concerning notions of racial reciprocity, equality, forgiveness, and ultimately, racial justice.