A noted British cultural critic takes on some of the strangest works of art from the 20th century and dissects our fascination with the unsettling in popular music, film, and writing What exactly are the Weird and the Eerie? Two closely related but distinct modes, and each possesses its own distinct properties. Both have often been associated with Horror, but this genre alone does not fully encapsulate the pull of the outside and the unknown.

Despite Freud's enormous influence on twentieth-century interpretations of the humanities, there has never before been in English a complete collection of his writings on art and literature. These fourteen essays cover the entire range of his work on these subjects, including "The Uncanny."

As the 20th century draws to a close, there is a Gothic theme penetrating much of contemporary art and culture. In the 1990s, American and European artists have moved increasingly towards the dark and uncanny side of the human psyche - the theatrical and grotesque, the violent and destructive.

Installation is one of the most popular and widespread forms of contemporary art. Installation Art provides the first clear account of the rise of installation as a form while revisiting and, in some cases, reassessing many well-known names of post-1960 art. This lavishly produced volume also introduces the reader to a wider spectrum of younger artists yet to receive serious critical attention.

Oskar Schlemmer (1888 - 1943) was one of the most versatile all-rounders of the last century and as unusual as a painter as he was as a sculptor, draughtsman, graphic artist, stage designer, wall designer, creator of epochal dance projects, and author. The catalog accompanying the first comprehensive Schlemmer retrospective for almost forty years presents over 250 high-quality works, in particular, the seven original costumes of the Triadisches Ballett (Triadic Ballet) together with rare documents of the time.

The life-size, adolescent-girl dolls created by German artist Hans Bellmer in the 1930s are the subject of Therese Lichtenstein's highly original book. Disturbing and controversial, Bellmer's dolls--with their uncanny, fragmented bodies and eroticized poses--were just as shocking during Bellmer's time as they are today. Lichtenstein interprets Bellmer's complex expressions of eroticism as a protest against the Nazis and also against his father, a cold and repressive Nazi sympathizer. At the same time, she says, by hyperbolically flaunting a passive femininity in a theatrical manner, Bellmer's images allow us to consider how cultural representations can affect the formation of identity and alternative possibilities.

Exploring new works by the provocative and irreverent American multimedia artist Jordan Wolfson. Jordan Wolfson is known for his thought-provoking works in a wide range of media, including video, sculpture, installation, photography, and performance.Produced in partnership with the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, this book focuses on two major new works: Colored Sculpture and Female Figure. Operating somewhere between sculpture and interactive installation, these pieces rely on Wolfson's contradictory relationship with technology to create an unsettling tension between the figure and the spectacle.

The influence of Oskar Kokoschka's three year long affair with Alma Mahler on his paintings, prints, and fans is the focus of this book. The works discussed reflect his love and desire, and explore the depths of his despair.

Written in 1920, premiered in Prague in 1921, and first performed in New York in 1922—garnered worldwide acclaim for its author and popularized the word "robot." Mass-produced as efficient laborers to serve man, Capek’s Robots are an android product—they remember everything but think of nothing new.

Film and video create an illusory world, a reality elsewhere, and a material presence that both dramatizes and demystifies the magic trick of moving pictures. Beginning in the 1960s, artists have explored filmic and televisual phenomena in the controlled environments of galleries and museums, drawing on multiple antecedents in cinema, television, and the visual arts. This volume traces the lineage of moving-image installation through architecture, painting, sculpture, performance, expanded cinema, film history, and countercultural film and video from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Sound is given due attention, along with the shift from analogue to digital, issues of spectatorship, and the insights of cognitive science.

The Taste for Beauty is a collection of essays by the film-maker and critic Eric Rohmer which were originally written for the French Film review Cahiers du Cinema between 1948-1979. Rohmer, one of the founding members of the French 'New Wave' cinema, was also one of the journal's original critics and served as its editor. Divided into four sections, the essays deal with fundamental and theoretical questions of film-making from a single theoretical viewpoint.

This is a book about video art, and about sound art. The thesis is that sound first entered the gallery via the video art of the 1960s and in so doing, created an unexpected noise. The early part of the book looks at this formative period and the key figures within it - then jumps to the mid-1990s, when video art has become such a major part of contemporary art production, it no longer seems an autonomous form. Connecting them all are the twinned ideas of intermedia and synaesthesia. Hegarty offers close readings of video works, as influenced by their sound, while also considering the institutional and material contexts.

This is a richly illustrated catalogue of a major traveling exhibition of acclaimed South African artist William Kentridge. Kentridge's oeuvre revolves around how our identities are shaped through shifting ideas of history and place: it is an elegiac art that asks for the possibility of visual poetry in contemporary society - and provides a vicious satirical commentary on that society. It presents life as process rather than as fact, and constantly questions the impact of art.

In his early work, Swiss artist Daniel Spoerri (born 1930) explored humanity's fascination with food, as seen as an interface between art and daily life. This volume presents his kinetic multiples, tableaux-pi ges, sculptures and research into the graphics of recipes and menus.

Denounced as a charlatan and fêted as a mystic, French artist Yves Klein (1928-62) scandalized the art world with his enthusiastic embrace of postwar mass culture and his exploitation of controversial publicity tactics. Today, we know Yves Klein not only as one of the most radical artists of the postwar period, but also as an iconic role model for contemporary practices--he reinvented abstract painting, conceived new horizons for performance art, and was a trailblazer in the realm of land, body, and conceptual art. In this new critical biography, Nuit Banai examines the relationship between Klein's brief life and his wide repertoire of artistic practices.

Edited by Germano Celant, this volume spans the artistic career of assemblage artist Arman (1928-2005) from his first group exhibition in France in the 1950s to 1974, when the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art in California organized its landmark retrospective.