Born in New York in 1936, Joan Jonas has been a towering figure in postwar Conceptual and experimental Performance art since the 1960s, when she began her pioneering exploration of gender and identity through a combination of myth, choreography and new media. In 2007, she was a visiting professor at the world-famous Ratti Foundation in Como, Italy. While there, she turned to a text by art historian Aby Warburg (whose writings on Hopi imagery and ritual inspired Jonas' 2005 performance "The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things") to create "The Hand Reverts to Its Own Movement," a solo performance centered on the act of drawing. This substantial new monograph spans 40 years of the artist's groundbreaking output and introduces her new performance on the occasion of its world premiere in Como.
A career-spanning monograph of the multimedia pioneer Joan Jonas (1936- ) that covers more than 40 years of performances, films, videos, installations, texts and video sculptures
Nobel laureate Halldór Laxness’s Under the Glacier is a one-of-a-kind masterpiece, a wryly provocative novel at once earthy and otherworldly. At its outset, the Bishop of Iceland dispatches a young emissary to investigate certain charges against the pastor at Snæfells Glacier, who, among other things, appears to have given up burying the dead. But once he arrives, the emissary finds that this dereliction counts only as a mild eccentricity in a community that regards itself as the center of the world and where Creation itself is a work in progress. What is the emissary to make, for example, of the boarded-up church? What about the mysterious building that has sprung up alongside it? Or the fact that Pastor Primus spends most of his time shoeing horses? Or that his wife, Ua (pronounced “ooh-a,” which is what men invariably sputter upon seeing her), is rumored never to have bathed, eaten, or slept? Piling improbability on top of improbability, Under the Glacier overflows with comedy both wild and deadpan as it conjures a phantasmagoria as beguiling as it is profound.
Joan Jonas emerged in a rich and experimental 1960s New York art scene that included such luminaries as Richard Serra, Gordon Matta-Clark, John Cage, Philip Glass, and Merce Cunningham. Since that time Jonas has gained a peerless status as a pioneer of performance and video. Jonas's work typically encompasses video, performance, installation, sound, text, and drawing. Defying easy categorization, it engages with complex ideas of ritual, myth, and storytelling. In recent years Jonas has also become increasingly engaged with environmental issues, focusing on the animal world and the vulnerability of our planet. This new publication includes an introduction to Jonas's practice and brings together selected conversations from the last fourteen years, in which the artist talks about her interdisciplinary approach as well as the influences and impulses she has absorbed from literature, music, traditional Japanese Noh theater, and the rituals of foreign cultures.
From wicked queens, beautiful princesses, elves, monsters, and goblins, to giants, glass slippers, poisoned apples, magic keys, and mirrors, the characters and images of fairy tales have cast a spell over readers and audiences, both adults and children, for centuries. These fantastic stories have travelled across cultural borders, and been passed on from generation to generation, ever-changing, renewed with each re-telling. Few forms of literature have greater power to enchant us and rekindle our imagination than a fairy tale. But what is a fairy tale? Where do they come from and what do they mean? What do they try and communicate to us about morality, sexuality, and society? The range of fairy tales stretches across great distances and time; their history is entangled with folklore and myth, and their inspiration draws on ideas about nature and the supernatural, imagination and fantasy, psychoanalysis, and feminism. In this Very Short Introduction, Marina Warner digs into a rich hoard of fairy tales in all their brilliant and fantastical variations, in order to define a genre and evaluate a literary form that keeps shifting through time and history. Drawing on a glittering array of examples, from classics such as Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, and The Sleeping Beauty, the Grimm Brothers' Hansel and Gretel, and Hans Andersen's The Little Mermaid, to modern-day realizations including Walt Disney's Snow White, Warner forms a persuasive case for fairy tale as a crucial repository of human understanding and culture. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
Through 140 drawings, thought experiments, recipes, activist instructions, gardening ideas, insurgences and personal revolutions, artists who spend their lives thinking outside the box guide you to a new worldview; where you and the planet are one. Everything here is new. We invite you to rip out pages, to hang them up at home, to draw and scribble, to cook, to meditate, to take the book to your nearest green space. Featuring Olafur Eliasson, Etel Adnan, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Jane Fonda & Swoon, Judy Chicago, Black Quantum Futurism Collective, Vivienne Westwood, Cauleen Smith, Marina Abramovic, Karrabing Film Collective, and many more.
The CCA Wattis Institute in San Francisco dedicates year long seasons of discussions and public events to a single artist. In 2014-15, Joan Jonas (born 1936) was "on our mind." This book brings together essays from writers, curators, art historians and artists that focus on a single work, from Jonas' earliest films through her installation for the US Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale. The book also contains excerpts from readings and public lectures, and images by some of the other artists whose work was evoked in public and private conversation. Contributors include Jacqueline Francis, Renée Green, Quinn Latimer, Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer, Patricia Maloney, Elizabeth Mangini, Judith Rodenbeck and Lynne Tillman.
The sequel to Pendleton's acclaimed Black Dada Reader, compiling an anti-canon of radical experimentation and thought In 2011, artist Adam Pendleton (born 1984) assembled Black Dada Reader, a compendium of texts, documents and positions that elucidated a practice and ethos of Black Dada. Resembling a school course reader, the book was a spiral-bound series of photocopies and collages, originally intended only for personal reference, and eventually distributed informally to friends and colleagues. The contents--an unlikely mix of Hugo Ball, W.E.B. Du Bois, Adrian Piper, Gertrude Stein, Sun Ra, Stokely Carmichael, Gilles Deleuze--formed a kind of experimental canon, realized through what Pendleton calls radical juxtaposition. In 2017, Koenig Books published the Reader in a hardcover edition, with newly commissioned essays and additional writings by the artist. A decade later, Pendleton has composed another reader, building upon the constellation of writers, artists, filmmakers, philosophers and critics that emerged in the first volume. Contributors include: Thomas Hirschhorn, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Lorraine O'Grady and Joan Retallack. Source texts by Toni Cade Bambara, Gilles Deleuze, Julius Eastman, Henri Lefebvre, Clarice Lispector, Achille Mbembe, Charles Mingus, Piet Mondrian, Juliana Spahr, Malcolm X and others.
