In the tradition of Thomas Demand, acclaimed German photographer Frank Kunert (born 1963) spends weeks constructing highly detailed, convincingly realistic models, then photographs them to exacting technical standards to create vibrant images rife with subtle visual puns. Far from being simply satirical or charming, Kunert's miniatures often contain disquieting non-sequiturs: for example, an image of a multistory apartment-building interior seems to exude a kind of petit-bourgeois tristesse with its carpeted balcony railings, a lone flower box and deck chair, but on closer inspection the doors lead nowhere and the balconies cannot be accessed. This volume, first published in 2008 and long out of print, reveals Kunert's enigmatic world.
Working slowing, consciously perceiving, precisely observing; in our increasingly fast-paced and abstract world, this type of working method seems to be more and more rare. Still, we know that the exception proves the rule. If Frank Kunert (*1963 in Frankfurt am Main) did not have the patience and calm he exhibits in creating his miniature, stage settings?immortalized in photographs made with a large-format analog camera?his ?small worlds? would lose the charm we?ve grown so fond of through his previous publications, Verkehrte Welt (Inverted world) and Wunderland. Here, the ordinary quickly reaches its limits and traverses beyond ad absurdum, while tragedy veers into comedy, and wit becomes debatable. Kunert?s works exist between the poles of grotesque and metaphysics. His new book, Lifestyle, adds twenty-four miniatures to these philosophically based stories of everyday life.
Natural science buffs, graphics professionals, and anyone interested in the visual expression of ideas will be fascinated by this tribute to Fritz Kahn, the German infographics pioneer who excelled in the demystification of complex scientific ideas and whose inspired creative concepts have influenced generations of artists and communicators...
This insightful volumes the use of imitation and the modern cult of originality through a consideration of the disparate fates of two Venetian painters - the canonised master Titian and his artistic heir, the little-known Padovanino.
With more than 250 images, new information on international cinema—especially Polish, Chinese, Russian, Canadian, and Iranian filmmakers—an expanded section on African-American filmmakers, updated discussions of new works by major American directors, and a new section on the rise of comic book movies and computer generated special effects, this is the most up to date resource for film history courses in the twenty-first century.
"Something strange is going on in the photographs by Frank Kunert: the table set for two has been so cleverly built around a corner that neither of the diners has to see the other, yet they can both watch their own television. Or a desk has a built-in bed for the much-desired office nap. And the outdoor toilet is located further away than one might hope for in an emergency - namely, on the moon. Kunert, a model builder and photographer, creates images of this kind in weeks of painstaking attention to detail, lending expression to the grotesque outgrowths of civilized life that is as humorous and exhilirating as it is profound. The ambivalence between tragedy and humour piques the artist time and again and permeates his surreal-looking visual worlds in an inexhaustible variety of ways. Melancholy and skewed wit are closely related in this wonderland of absurdities." -- back cover.
Nonhuman figures are ubiquitous in the work of Franz Kafka, from his early stories down to his very last one. Despite their prominence throughout his oeuvre, Kafka’s animal representations have been considered first and foremost as mere allegories of intrahuman matters. In recent years, the allegorization of Kafka’s animals has been poetically dismissed by Kafka’s commentators and politically rejected by posthumanist scholars. Such critique, however, has yet to inspire either an overarching or an interdiscursive account. This book aims to fill this lacuna. Positing animal stories as a distinct and significant corpus within Kafka’s entire poetics, and closely examining them in dialogue with both literary and posthumanist analysis, Kafka’s Zoopoetics critically revisits animality, interspecies relations, and the very human-animal contradistinction in the writings of Franz Kafka. Kafka’s animals typically stand at the threshold between humanity and animality, fusing together human and nonhuman features. Among his liminal creatures we find a human transformed into vermin (in “The Metamorphosis”), an ape turned into a human being (in “A Report to an Academy”), talking jackals (in “Jackals and Arabs”), a philosophical dog (in “Researches of a Dog”), a contemplative mole-like creature (in “The Burrow”), and indiscernible beings (in “Josefine, the Singer or the Mouse People”). Depicting species boundaries as mutable and obscure, Kafka creates a fluid human-animal space, which can be described as “humanimal.” The constitution of a humanimal space radically undermines the stark barrier between human and other animals, dictated by the anthropocentric paradigm. Through denying animalistic elements in humans, and disavowing the agency of nonhuman animals, excluding them from social life, and neutralizing compassion for them, this barrier has been designed to regularize both humanity and animality. The contextualization of Kafka's animals within posthumanist theory engenders a post-anthropocentric arena, which is simultaneously both imagined and very real.
