Earth Work, originally staged at the National Museum Art Gallery in 1980 by Singapore artist Tang Da Wu, was one of the earliest exhibitions of land art in Singapore. Key works from the exhibition included Gully Curtains, Product of the Sun and Me and Product of the Rain and Me. Earth Work 1979 is a restaging of selected works from the seminal 1980 exhibition. This catalogue delves deeper into Tang’s practice, the circumstances of the creation of his earth works and the environment of Singapore in the 1970s and 1980s through essays, interviews, newspaper articles and never-before-seen photo documentation.
Her examination of Earthworks relationship to the ecology movement perceptively corrects a popular misconception about the artists goals while acknowledging the social and cultural complexities of the period."
A constellation of thoughts by 25 established and emerging scholars who plot the indices of modernity and locate new coordinates within the shifting landscape of art. These newly commissioned essays are accompanied by close to 200 full-colour image plates.
Among the most socially and personally vocal archaeological remains on the North American continent are the massive and often complexly designed earthen architecture of Hopewellian peoples of two thousand years ago, their elaborately embellished works of art made of glistening metals and stones from faraway places, and their highly formalized mortuaries. In this book, twenty-one researchers in interwoven efforts immerse themselves and the reader in this vibrant archaeological record in order to richly reconstruct the societies, rituals, and ritual interactions of Hopewellian peoples. By finding the faces, actions, and motivations of Hopewellian peoples as individuals who constructed knowable social roles, the authors explore, in a personalized and locally contextualized manner, the details of Hopewellian life: leadership, its sacred and secular power bases, recruitment, and formalization over time; systems of social ranking and prestige; animal-totemic clan organization, kinship structures, and sodalities; gender roles, prestige, work load, and health; community organization in its tri-scalar residential, symbolic, and demographic forms; intercommunity alliances and changes in their strategies and expanses over time; and interregional travels for power questing, pilgrimage, healing, tutelage, and acquiring ritual knowledge. This book is useful to scholars, graduate students, and advanced undergraduates interested in the workings and development of social complexity at local and interregional scales, recent theoretical developments in the anthropology of the topics listed above, the prehistory of eastern North America, its history of intellectual development, and Native American ritual, symbolism, and belief.
