MIT Press

This volume collects essential texts on the work of Bruce Nauman (b. 1941), an artist of exceptional range whose work continues to probe the fundamentals of both life and art. These critical writings, scholarly essays, and an interview span five decades of Nauman's career,...

How postwar abstract modernist paintings came to be seen as metaphorical embodiments of masculine selfhood; an examination of the critical discourse surrounding the work of Matisse, de Kooning, Pollock, and the post-painterly Abstractionists. In the era of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit...

The second book of the RIC Books series co-published by the MIT Press and The Image Centre at Toronto Metropolitan University, explores the interaction of aesthetics and politics in Bertolt Brecht's “photoepigrams.” From 1938 to 1955, Bertolt Brecht created montages of images and text, filling...

Rare & Collectible In Event-Cities 4 Tschumi introduces the "concept-form": a concept generating a form, or a form generating a concept.  The book documents recently built and theoretical projects in the context of his evolving views on architecture, urbanism, and design. This volume takes...

How some design appears to be something that it is not - by beautifying, amusing, substituting, or deceiving. Pretense design pretends to be something that it is not. Pretense design includes all kinds of designed objects: a pair of glasses that looks like a...

The first in-depth study of a group of artists known for their irony, their theoretical impulses, and their market success in the 1980s. Emerging from New York's East Village art scene of the 1980s, the so-called neo-geo artists were a loosely associated group that...

This book looks at how product design criticism has rescued some products from the trash and consigned others to the landfill. Product design criticism operates at the very brink of the landfill site, salvaging some products with praise but consigning others to its depths...

John Cage (1912-1992) defined a radical practice of composition that changed the course of modern music and shaped a new conceptual horizon for postwar art. Famous for his use of chance and silence in musical works, a pioneer in electronic music and the nonstandard...

Critical texts and interviews that explore the drawings, animations, and theatrical work of the South African artist William Kentridge. Since the 1970s, the South African artist William Kentridge has charted the turbulent terrain of his homeland in both personal and political terms. With erudition,...

The most comprehensive collection on Lichtenstein, from the earliest reviews to recent reassessments, including several hard-to-find and previously unpublished pieces. Roy Lichtenstein's popular appeal—and his influence on pop culture, seen in everything from greeting cards to sitcoms—at times overshadows his importance to contemporary art....

From the moment art historian Leo Steinberg championed his work in opposition to Clement Greenberg's rigid formalism, Robert Rauschenberg has played a pivotal role in the development and understanding of postmodern art. Challenging nearly all the prevailing assumptions about the visual arts of his...

As an original member of the legendary Independent Group in London in the 1950s, Richard Hamilton organised or participated in groundbreaking exhibitions associated with the group - in particular This Is Tomorrow (1956), for which his celebrated collage Just what is it that makes...

Writings about Andy Warhol by critics, artists, cultural theorists, and Factory associates together with archival material, interviews, and texts by Warhol himself. The impact of Andy Warhol on contemporary culture is incalculable. Painter, sculptor, printmaker, filmmaker, publisher, TV personality, socialite, diarist, graphic artist, collector,...

Twentieth-century artist Joseph Beuys (1921-1986) - legendary and self-mythologising, enigmatic and controversial - remains an important influence on artists today. Beuys embraced radically democratic artistic and political ideas, proclaiming "Everyone is an artist," and advocating direct democracy through referenda. He famously worked with such...

Critical texts that span almost fifty years, mapping Haacke's progression from engagement with biological systems to interrogation of the social and economic underpinnings of art. For five decades, the artist Hans Haacke (b. 1936) has created works that explore the social, political, and economic...

In Hall of Mirrors, Graham Bader traces the development of Roy Lichtenstein's art into, through, and beyond his classic pop oeuvre of the 1960s. Bader charts the trajectory of Lichtenstein's practice from his student days in the late 1940s to his mirror paintings of the...