The postsocialist contemporary

In place of linear historicism, this book offers a new approach to architecture by examining the matter of the miracle in relation to baroque architecture through an interrogation of the relationship between architecture and the sacred in the economy of the relic. It considers the Treasury Chapel as the interaction of movement and sanctity in relation to matter and affect, particularly the transport of salvation. The rituals of the Treasury Chapel made visible the new cartographies and choreographies of spiritual authority that fed it and that it espoused and generated. The book focuses on the miracle of San Gennaro, the blood that courses through the chapel and its telling. It focuses on the Renaissance Succorpo chapel below the main altar of Naples Cathedral as the principal precursor to the Treasury Chapel. The book explores how the enclosed aristocratic convent of Santa Patrizia used its relics of St Patricia to vault its enclosure walls and to intervene in the Treasury Chapel, quite beyond its own confines, to secure and extend its own spiritual authority in Naples. It investigates the relationships between silver and salvation activated and opened by the Treasury Chapel's many splendid reliquaries. The book examines the implications of the wider politics of silver from its mining to its sustenance of Spanish monarchy and Spanish rule in Naples to its surfacing in those reliquaries. It addresses the question of how and why silver affords a peculiarly Neapolitan bridge between the brutality of the mines and the saints' whispers in heaven.

This book represents the first attempt to write a comprehensive account of performance art in Eastern Europe - the former communist, socialist and Soviet countries of Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe - since the 1960s. It demonstrates performance art, which encompasses a range of genres, among them body art, happenings, actions and performance. In exploring the manifestations and meanings of performance art, the book highlights the diversity of artistic practice, moments and ways in which performance emerged, and its relationship to each country's sociopolitical climate. The book discusses 21 countries and over 250 artists, exploring the manner in which performance art developed concurrently with the genre in the West. It examines how artists used their bodies in performance to navigate the degrees of state control over artistic production and cultivate personalised forms of individual integration and self-expression of body, gender, politics, identity, and institutional critique. A comparative analysis of examples of performance art addressing gender-related issues from across the socialist and post-socialist East is then presented. The themes addressed provide local cultural and historical references in works concerning beauty, women's sexuality and traditional notions of gender. Artists' efforts to cope with the communist environment, the period of transition and the complexities of life in the post-communist era are highlighted. Artists during the communist period adopted performance art as a free-form, open-ended means of expression to give voice to concepts, relationships and actions that otherwise would not have been possible in the official realm of art.

This book is a wide-ranging introductory academic book for students and teachers interested in studying comedy on film, television and radio (and for anyone else with an analytic interest in these media). It discusses key issues around comedy through analysis of significant and revealing comedy texts from these media. The first part of the book looks at how comedy works. In order to do this, it considers the nature of comedy as manifested in specific media forms, from the exploitation of the non-visual in radio to the familiar, domesticated settings suited to television's small screen. It examines the historical, industrial and cultural contexts in which British and American comedy in film, radio and television developed (in that order). The book also deals with gender, sexuality and comedy, ranging from the depictions of femininity and masculinity in romantic comedy film to the representations offered of gay and lesbian characters across our chosen media. Studies of low British comedy and American gross-out comedy underpin work on specific examples which directly challenge standards of taste and cultural taboos. Whatever the nature and effect of racial and ethnic humour, it is clear that there have been some significant shifts in the ways in which radio, television and film comedy have presented or inflected it over time. The book deals with broad case studies of British and American culture.