The Art History and Architecture Collection is a vital resource for academic libraries, offering extensive insights into various themes such as art movements, single-artist studies, decolonising art, gender and masculinity, citizenship, architecture and design. This collection aims to broaden the scope of art history, addressing a diverse range of visual cultural forms from the early modern period to the present.
The collection encompasses theories and histories of materiality, exploring the intricate relationship between making and thinking, fashion and culture, production and consumption, textiles and industry.
| Key series |
| Rethinking Art’s Histories |
| Studies in Design and Material Culture |
| Collection year | Titles |
| 2025 titles | 17 |
| 2023/4 titles | 28 |
| 2013-2022 titles | 74 |
| Total collection | 128 |
| Keywords |
| Singleartist studies |
| Subcultures |
| Design |
| Architecture |
| Citizenship |
| Surrealism |
| Art movements |
| Decolonising art |
| Queer art |
| Gender – masculinity |
| Modernism |
| Postmodernism |
| Thema subject categories |
| Architecture |
| Avant-garde |
| Ceramics, mosaics and glass: artworks |
| Colonialism and imperialism |
| History of art |
| Material culture |
| Performance art |
| Theory of art |
SDG coverage
Art history and architecture collection
Chapter 6 returns to St Paul’s Cathedral, illustrating how a lack of regulation in acoustics led to an influx of speculative proposals to address the acoustics under the dome, and the beginnings of electro-acoustic intervention. This chapter is a snapshot of a time, just before the outbreak of World War II, when the field of architectural acoustics was changing rapidly and radically. New products were flooding the market, and consultancy was increasing. The necessity of acoustic consultancy was accepted, but it was not regulated. This provided very definite opportunities for marketing and speculation. Taking transience and opportunity as its theme, this chapter explores three buildings and their acoustic contributions in greater detail: Abbey Road Studios and contemporary ideas on the design of spaces for recording music; the opportunities posed by impermanence in Burnett, Lorne, and Tait’s concert hall for the Glasgow Empire Exhibition of 1935, and finally, the enduring question of how to understand the acoustic intricacies of St Paul’s Cathedral. Acoustic consultancy factored into each of these in the 1930s, and the approaches and experimentation embodied in each of these instances would have implications for acoustic work during and subsequent to World War II.
This essay considers the ways in which Silvia Kolbowski’s 2018 video, That Monster: An Allegory, addresses the psychical and political basis of Donald J. Trump’s appeal in the 2016 US election. The video is crafted out of a collection of fragments from James Whale’s 1935 The Bride of Frankenstein, which Kolbowski plays first with a score by Philip Glass and then in silence. This essay asks how such a format might illuminate resonances between certain psychoanalytic concepts and the postmodernist discourse of allegory as exemplified in the work of Paul de Man and Craig Owens. I argue that these theoretical frameworks help us to retain an open reading of Kolbowski’s allegory which shifts an interpretive focus from questions of identity to problems of repetition, refusal, and erasure.
In 1974, the American artist Allen Ruppersberg (b. 1944) copied the full text of Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) onto raw canvas that was later stretched to form twenty square panels. The finished piece is the product of a prolonged act of transcription, with Wilde’s tale of decadence and decay rendered in Ruppersberg’s looping handwriting. Due to space constraints at the Claire Copley Gallery in Los Angeles, the work was first exhibited with several canvases in a row and the others stacked. This arrangement, which was frequently repeated in subsequent showings, emphasises the tension between the absorptive narrative of the story and the canvases’ immutable status as objects. This essay explores how The Picture of Dorian Gray’s simple composition plays on the intertwined nature of reading and viewing, as well as the novel’s own preoccupation with time and doubling.
In spring 1964, the American poet Frank O’Hara and the Italian painter and draughtsman Mario Schifano, recently arrived in New York, worked together on a project of seventeen compositions on paper that became Words & Drawings. This represents the last known of O’Hara’s legendary contributions to collaborative practice operating between the ‘sister arts’ that also includes Stones with Larry Rivers (1960) and Poem-Paintings with Norman Bluhm (1960), and was unpublished until 2017. Words & Drawings drew on the collaborative ethos of the New York School by fusing literary citations and idiosyncratic first-person declarations to create a work that resisted straightforward models of authorship and authenticity. Operating on a dynamically reciprocal but largely imagined Rome–New York axis that played into debates around rivalries between national schools of art, the work critiqued the spectacle of national mourning in the wake of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. This essay is the first independent scholarly account of the collaboration, and provides a history and reading of the dynamic interplay between lexical sign and artistic gesture.
The subject of this chapter is the citation-saturated work of Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers (1924–76). In particular, its focus is Broodthaers’s artist’s book Magie: art et politique (1973), in which the artist distinguished himself from the aestheticised politics of his German contemporary Joseph Beuys. This he did by constructing an allegorical critique on the basis of several cited figures. This essay concentrates specifically on, firstly, how Broodthaers aptly uses the composer Richard Wagner and his essay ‘Art and Revolution’ (1849) to evoke Beuys’s utopian and mythic politics, and on, secondly, his citation of the French author Stendhal and his novel The Red and the Black (1830). The latter, as the second half of this essay details, highlights the fictional and enunciative dimensions of Broodthaers’s own work as well as its riposte and alternative to Beuysian or Wagnerian claims to authenticity and truth.
The performance photograph is a historicizing tool: neither the commodification nor the legitimation of the fugitive act, it is a window on the past of performance, indispensable to the contemporary practice of restaging classic events. In the photographic section, detailed performance content is juxtaposed time and again with audience reactions, indeed mostly with what we would call 'uninformed' audiences. The author thinks the indeterminacy of the audience, which is in a strong sense the subject addressed, makes this form of monument ambiguous. Let us remember the text Corpus More Geometrico, and in particular its claim that EXPORT's 'bodywriting is always also sociography and cultural history'. The body as part of cultural history becomes 'writing', a document that can bring to a reading audience an image of the 'environment body', not the actual environment body, sociography rather than society with all its visible bodies and invisible valuations.
Presence', in its dual significance of immediacy and of being in a particular place at a particular time, has become the major theme in recent performance practice and theory. The intense interest in the status of the documentation of performances - be they photographs or films - set in motion a search for new means of immediacy, but also a scepticism concerning the existence of authentic presence. Performance scholars focus on the document more self-consciously to trace performance art back to object-based art practices, such as action painting, and the polemics of a post-Second World War art world discursively severed from the classic European avant-garde. Documentation has been the 'faithful' companion of performance since the grainy image of Hugo Ball reciting his poetry in Marcel Janko's cardboard costume and it has turned up in gallery exhibitions as well as on the art market since the 1960s.
This chapter investigates key moments in the artistic practice and the concepts of agency in public space that inform them, showing how the monument, seen as an authoritarian obstacle to action, turns into the performative monument, an object or site that contractually binds its audience in self-aware acts of commemoration. In the decades since the Hamburg memorial, performative monuments have entered the mainstream. In fact, the 1980s and 1990s can retrospectively be characterized as obsessed with memory and memorials. Despite wartime efforts of architects to re-establish monumentality within a functioning communal life - in contrast to the monumentality of fascism and Stalinism - notably those of Sigfried Giedion, for decades after the war the monument haunted public discourse as the symbol of authoritarian politics. The innovation of 1980s countermonuments was to recognize and codify this audience reaction as part of what the monument itself sought to achieve.
What is crucial to the performative monument cannot be impermanence as such, but the temporal interaction with an audience that itself is no eternal public, but a succession of interacting subjects. Ephemerality of objects is one strategy among others in making concrete this temporality of the work. Theoretically, the task is to understand the combination of political needs and aesthetic solutions proposed for them that comprise the performative monument. Performative monuments work to establish a political relation to a history that the performer has not personally experienced. The attitude to the past of the spectator of a performative monument is conventionalized and made public, and thus becomes an object of public inquiry. The book connects performance with history through the recent phenomenon of re-performance, reconstructing the different temporal layers of the audience of one act. It turns to the Austrian avant-garde since the 1960s, whose contradictory, elaborate staging of visceral acts. The book examines art in the former Yugoslavia. It starts with early works by Marina Abramović wherein she politically marks the city through acts of erasure and projection. The book begins with the Venice Biennale of 1976, remarkable for contributions by Joseph Beuys, Jochen Gerz, and Reiner Ruthenbeck that circle around the monument as metaphor for national identity. Gerz's 1986 Monument against Fascism, a column that visitors signed as a protest against fascism and that was lowered into the ground when enough signatures had accumulated, is key to this development.