Pictures Of Nothing

Download or read book Pictures of Nothing written by Kirk Varnedoe and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2006-10-29 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: He delivered the lectures, edited and reproduced here with their illustrations, to overflowing crowds at the National Gallery of Art in Washington in the spring of 2003, just months before his death. With brilliance, passion, and humor, Varnedoe addresses the skeptical attitudes and misunderstandings that we often bring to our experience of abstract art. Resisting grand generalizations, he makes a deliberate and scholarly case for abstraction--showing us that more than just pure looking is necessary to understand the self-made symbolic language of abstract art. Proceeding decade by decade, he brings alive the history and biography that inform the art while also challenging the received wisdom about distinctions between abstraction and representation, modernism and postmodernism, and minimalism and pop.

Download or read book Nothing in MoMA written by Abraham Adams and published by punctum books. This book was released on 2018-09-22 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nothing in MoMA is a series of photographs captured in areas of Manhattan museums in which there are no artworks, written words, or people. Addressing the "grammar that organizes and secures our scene of looking," in the words of art historian David Joselit's introduction, the book imagines a composite empty museum or a narrative of marginal attention. Originally displayed in partial prototype as a children's board book at Artists Space in 2015, Nothing in MoMA is here collected for the first time in the series' entirety. Evoking the history of indeterminacy as much as that of institutional critique, the deadpan composition of Adams's photographs likewise recalls François Jullien's theory of bland aesthetics, in a playful reductio of socio-institutional space to a bare literality. Both a visual essay on museum phenomenology and a performance document, Nothing in MoMA describes a choreography of avoidance, in which a conceptual constraint becomes a means of seeing and navigating concrete space.

Download or read book Nothing Happens in This Book written by Judy Ann Sadler and published by Kids Can Press Ltd. This book was released on 2018-05-01 with total page 47 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reader, don’t waste your time with this book. You might as well stick this book back on the shelf. Or toss it under your bed. You don’t need to read it because nothing happens. Or, wait, is that something? It’s a trumpet without a trumpeter. And there’s a tiny car without a driver. And a baton without a twirler. Maybe if you keep turning the pages, you’ll find out who is missing these items. Maybe they are all together, about to do something surprising. Maybe something does happen after all — something amazing! Kids will be hooked as they embark on a quest to find this (seemingly) missing story!

Download or read book Do Something for Nothing: Seeing Beneath the Surface of Homelessness, through the Simple Act of a Haircut written by Joshua Coombes and published by Akashic Books. This book was released on 2021-05-18 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through the simple act of a haircut, readers are taken on a geographical and emotional journey into the lives of humans experiencing homelessness in different cities across the world. “In this uplifting book, Coombes deftly illustrates how reaching out and listening can break down barriers in an often indifferent world.” —Booklist Online “Joshua’s stories show the power that empathy and compassion have to turn a common, everyday act into something transformative. They are the revelations of connection.” —Michael Sheen, actor and activist When you're on the fringes of society, being noticed can mean everything. In 2015, while working at a London hair salon, Joshua Coombes took to the streets with his scissors to build relationships with people sleeping rough in the capital. This inspired him to begin posting transformative images on social media to amplify their voices. These stories resonated and thousands of people got involved in their own way. #DoSomethingForNothing was born--a movement that encourages people to connect their skills and time to those who need it. Via the simple act of a haircut, readers are taken on a geographical and emotional journey into the lives of humans experiencing homelessness in different cities across the world. Featuring never-before-seen photographs and all-new writing, Do Something for Nothing explores themes of love, acceptance, shame, and perseverance, while inviting us to see ourselves in one another and dissolve the negative stigmas surrounding homelessness. Additionally, a portion of the proceeds from this book will be donated to organizations dedicated to assisting unsheltered people.

Download or read book What Do Pictures Want? written by W. J. T. Mitchell and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-12-23 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do we have such extraordinarily powerful responses toward the images and pictures we see in everyday life? Why do we behave as if pictures were alive, possessing the power to influence us, to demand things from us, to persuade us, seduce us, or even lead us astray? According to W. J. T. Mitchell, we need to reckon with images not just as inert objects that convey meaning but as animated beings with desires, needs, appetites, demands, and drives of their own. What Do Pictures Want? explores this idea and highlights Mitchell's innovative and profoundly influential thinking on picture theory and the lives and loves of images. Ranging across the visual arts, literature, and mass media, Mitchell applies characteristically brilliant and wry analyses to Byzantine icons and cyberpunk films, racial stereotypes and public monuments, ancient idols and modern clones, offensive images and found objects, American photography and aboriginal painting. Opening new vistas in iconology and the emergent field of visual culture, he also considers the importance of Dolly the Sheep—who, as a clone, fulfills the ancient dream of creating a living image—and the destruction of the World Trade Center on 9/11, which, among other things, signifies a new and virulent form of iconoclasm. What Do Pictures Want? offers an immensely rich and suggestive account of the interplay between the visible and the readable. A work by one of our leading theorists of visual representation, it will be a touchstone for art historians, literary critics, anthropologists, and philosophers alike. “A treasury of episodes—generally overlooked by art history and visual studies—that turn on images that ‘walk by themselves’ and exert their own power over the living.”—Norman Bryson, Artforum

Download or read book The Art of Nothing written by Patrick McDonnell and published by Abrams. This book was released on 2019-10-15 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Timed for the 25th anniversary of the comic strip Mutts, The Art of Nothing celebrates the work of author and illustrator Patrick McDonnell Mooch, the curious cat, and Earl, the ever-trusting dog, are just two of the characters who inhabit the world of Mutts. In The Art of Nothing: 25 Years of Mutts and the Art of Patrick McDonnell, the award-winning author and illustrator’s beloved comic strip is celebrated as well as his bestselling children’s classics, including Me . . . Jane, The Gift of Nothing, South, Just Like Heaven, Hug Time, and Wag!, all shot from the original art. Also included are rare and never-before-seen artwork, proposals, outtakes, and developmental work, along with autobiographical commentary, a brand-new, career-spanning interview conducted by artist Lynda Barry, and an introduction by Eckhart Tolle (The Power of Now and A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose).

Download or read book Pictures and Tears written by James Elkins and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2005-08-02 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This deeply personal account of emotion and vulnerability draws upon anecdotes related to individual works of art to present a chronicle of how people have shown emotion before works of art in the past.