Earth Sculpture

Selected by Nobel Laureate Louise Glück as Winner of the inaugural Bergman Prize, Rachel Mannheimer's debut, Earth Room, is a dazzling book-length narrative poem that explores with tenderness how art and love intersect to make one's life. Transporting the reader across decades and from the Moon to Mars by way of Alaska, Berlin, and the Hudson Valley, Earth Room considers a lineage of sculpture, performance, and land art--from Robert Smithson to Pina Bausch--with observations shaped by gender and environment, history and portents of apocalypse. With an urgent, direct, and unmistakably powerful voice, Mannheimer tests the line between nature and culture, ordinary life and performance. A work of sly wit and bracing sincerity, Earth Room is an original, unsparing book that Louise Glück calls "a lesson in how to make something of where we find ourselves."

From Egyptian wall paintings to the Venetian Renaissance, impressionism to digital images, Philip Ball tells the fascinating story of how art, chemistry, and technology have interacted throughout the ages to render the gorgeous hues we admire on our walls and in our museums. Finalist for the 2002 National Book Critics Circle Award.

Essays by Olga M. Viso, Guy Brett, Julia P. Herzberg, Chrissie Iles and Laura Roulet.

This book represents a research endeavour in the area of contemporary sculpture, describing an unexplored tendency in the development of the relationship between sculpture and the natural elements, referred to here as Elemental Sculpture. The studies included in this book reveal the context of locations where this kind of sculpture may be found – park, urban landscape, nature – and discuss the impact of these places on the development of sculpture. This book examines the tendency towards Elemental Sculpture as part of a new level of relationship between man and nature in arts and in general. It presents in-depth research of contemporary sculpture, the roots of Elemental Sculpture and its development in the works of such well-known sculptors as Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, Alexander Calder, George Rickey, and Susumu Shingu, among others. Sculptures created by the author in the area of Elemental Sculpture during 35 years of his professional career are included and described from theoretical and practical points of view.

"In The Ethics of Earth Art, Amanda Boetzkes analyzes the development of the earth art movement, arguing that such diverse artists as Robert Smithson, Ana Mendieta, James Turrell, Jackie Brookner, Olafur Eliasson, Basia Irland, and Ichi Ikeda are connected through their elucidation of the earth as a domain of ethical concern. Boetzkes contends that in basing their works' relationship to the natural world on receptivity rather than representation, earth artists take an ethical stance that counters both the instrumental view that seeks to master nature and the Romantic view that posits a return to a mythical state of unencumbered continuity with nature. By incorporating receptive surfaces into their work - film footage of glaring sunlight, an aperture in a chamber that opens to the sky, or a porous armature on which vegetation grows - earth artists articulate the dilemma of representation that nature presents."--pub. desc.

My photographs are made with the same sunlight that powers all the earth's living systems. --Martin Hill * Reminiscent of the internationally best-selling Earth from Above, Martin Hill's Earth to Earth transforms the beauty of everyday items found in nature and elevates them to ecological art. Ecology is a science that is entering its renaissance as issues of global warming, greenhouse emissions, and ozone depletion make their way from scientific debates and newspaper headlines to family breakfast tables. Environmental photographer Martin Hill and project collaborator Philippa Jones visit remote locations around the globe to create a stunning array of evocative photographs that represent a visual circle of life promoting ecological sustainability and responsibility. In addition to an eloquent introduction by Sir Edmund Hillary, ecologically minded quotes and facts appear throughout the collection: * Each day more solar energy falls to the earth than the total amount of energy the planet's six billion inhabitants would consume in 25 years. * What use is a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on? In Earth to Earth Hill presents more than 70 transcendent four-color photographs that capture images of natural items found in nature, which he then transforms into exquisitely intricate sculptural masterpieces. Prior to leaving each location--whether at the top of a snow-covered mountain or on the sand-blown shores of a windy beach--Hill ensures that each site is left exactly as it was found.

Stars are central to the cinema experience, and this collection offers a variety of fresh and informed perspectives on this important but sometimes neglected area of film studies.This book takes as its focus film stars from the past and present, from Hollywood, its margins and beyond and analyses them through a close consideration of their films and the variety of contexts in which they worked.The book spreads the net wide, looking at past stars from Rosalind Russell and Charlton Heston to present day stars including Sandra Bullock, Jackie Chan and Jim Carrey, as well as those figures who have earnt themselves a certain film star cachet such as Prince, and the martial artist Cynthia Rothrock.The collection will be essential reading for students and lecturers of film studies, as well as to those with a general interest in the cinema.