This book explores the multifaceted aspects of sculptor’s workshops from the Renaissance to the early nineteenth century. Contributors take a fresh look at the sculptor’s workshop as both a physical and discursive space. By studying some of the most prominent artists’ sculptural practices, the workshop appears as a multifaced, sociable and practical space. The book creates a narrative in which the sculptural workshop appears as a working laboratory where new measuring techniques, new materials and new instruments were tested and became part of the lived experience of the artist and central to the works coming into being. Artists covered include Donatello, Roubilliac, Thorvaldsen, Canova, and Christian Daniel Rauch. The book will be of interest to scholars studying art history, sculpture, artist workshops, and European studies.

“There they rest, inert, impertinent, in gallery space—those book forms either imitated or mutilated, replicas of reading matter or its vestiges. Strange, after its long and robust career, for the book to take early retirement in a museum, not as rare manuscript but as functionless sculpture. Readymade or constructed, such book shapes are canceled as text when deposited as gallery objects, shut off from their normal reading when not, in some yet more drastic way, dismembered or reassembled.” So begins Bookwork, which follows our passion for books to its logical extreme in artists who employ found or simulated books as a sculptural medium. Investigating the conceptual labor behind this proliferating international art practice, Garrett Stewart looks at hundreds of book-like objects, alone or as part of gallery installations, in this original account of works that force attention upon a book’s material identity and cultural resonance. Less an inquiry into the artist’s book than an exploration of the book form’s contemporary objecthood, Stewart’s interdisciplinary approach traces the lineage of these aggressive artifacts from the 1919 Unhappy Readymade of Marcel Duchamp down to the current crisis of paper-based media in the digital era. Bookwork surveys and illustrates a stunning variety of appropriated and fabricated books alike, ranging from hacksawed discards to the giant lead folios of Anselm Kiefer. The unreadable books Stewart engages with in this timely study are found, again and again, to generate graphic metaphors for the textual experience they preclude, becoming in this sense legible after all.

“Compelling case studies demonstrate how African workshops have long mediated collective expression and individual imagination.” —Allen F. Roberts, University of California, Los Angeles The role of the workshop in the creation of African art is the subject of this revelatory book. In the group setting of the workshop, innovation and imitation collide, artists share ideas and techniques, and creative expression flourishes. African Art and Agency in the Workshop examines the variety of workshops, from those which are politically driven or tourist oriented, to those based on historical patronage or allied to current artistic trends. Fifteen lively essays explore the impact of the workshop on the production of artists such as Zimbabwean stone sculptors, master potters from Cameroon, wood carvers from Nigeria, and others from across the continent. Contributions by Nicolas Argenti, Jessica Gershultz, Norma Wolff, Christine Scherer, Silvia Forni, Elizabeth Morton, Alexander Bortolot, Brenda Schmahmann, Chika Okeke-Agulu, Karen E. Milbourne and Namubiru Rose Kirumira “A closer examination of the workshop provides important insights into art histories and cultural politics. We may think we know what we mean when we use the term ‘workshop,’ but in fact the organization of groups of artists takes on vastly different forms and encourages the production of diverse styles of art within larger social structures and power dynamics.” —Victoria Rovine, University of Florida “Taken as a whole, the case studies provide a wide window into the very diverse structural and functional characteristics of workshops. They also clearly describe how African workshops have served both contemporary political and cultural needs and have responded to patronage, whether it be traditional or stimulated by tourism.” —African Studies Review

From Ferdinand Chevel's Palais Ideal (1879-1905) and Simon Rodia's Watts Towers (1921-1954) to Ant Farm's Cadillac Ranch (1974) and Richard Serra's Tilted Arc (1981), installation art has continually crossed boundaries, encompassing sculpture, architecture, performance, and visual art. Although unique in its power to transform both the site in which a work is constructed and the viewer's experience of being in a place, installation art has not received the critical attention accorded other art forms. In Space, Site, Intervention, some of today's most prominent art critics, curators, and artists view installation art as a diverse, multifaceted, and international art form that challenges institutional assumptions and narrow conceptual frameworks. The contributors discuss installation in relation to the genealogy of modern art, community and corporate space, multimedia cyberspace, public and private ritual, the gallery and the museum, public and private patronage, and political action. This ambitious volume focuses on issues of class, sexuality, cultural identity rase, and gender, and highlights a wide range of artists whose work is often marginalized by mainstream art history and criticism. Together, the essays in Space, Site, Intervention investigate how installation resonates within modern culture and society, as well as its ongoing influence on contemporary visual culture.