W. J. T. Mitchell Livres

Antony Gormley occupies an unusual position as a highly popular sculptor - known chiefly for his Angel of the North (1998), a national landmark in the UK - who is also widely regarded as one of the most intellectually challenging artists working internationally. He is grounded in archaeology and anthropology, and looks to Asian and Buddhist traditions as much as to Western sculptural history, which he believes reached a punctuation point with Rodin. This is the first book to focus on Gormley's thoughts on sculpture, positioning his career and artistic philosophy in relation to its history. The book is structured thematically over four chapters: the first explores Gormley's thoughts on the body, time and space in relation to major works including European Field (1993) and 'Still Standing' (2011), Gormley's rehang of the classical rooms at the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg. The second chapter, 'Sculptors', was first delivered as a series of five lectures for the BBC; in each, Gormley discusses a sculpture he considers to be of huge creative importance: Epstein's The Rock Drill (1913-15), Brancusi's The Endless Column (1935-38), Giacometti's La Place (1948-49), Joseph Beuys's Plight (1985) and Richard Serra's The Matter of Time (2005). In the third chapter, Gormley outlines the influence of Buddhist and Jain sculpture on his work and ideas, and the fourth showcases the artist's most recent sculptures.

Image Science gathers Mitchell's most recent essays on media aesthetics, visual culture, and artistic symbolism. The chapters delve into such topics as the physics and biology of images, digital photography and realism, architecture and new media, and the occupation of space in contemporary popular uprisings.

The phrase 'War on Terror' has quietly been retired from official usage, but it persists in the American psyche, and our understanding of it is hardly complete. Exploring the role of verbal and visual images in the War on Terror, the author finds a conflict whose shaky metaphoric and imaginary conception has created its own reality.

Features three essays that engage the extraordinary Occupy movement that has swept across the world, examining everything from self-immolations in the Middle East to the G8 crackdown in Chicago to the many protest signs still visible worldwide.

This is a book about the things people say about images. It is not primarily concerned with specific pictures and the things people say about them, but rather with the way we talk about the idea of imagery, and all its related notions of picturing, imagining, perceiving, likening, and imitating. It is a book about images, therefore, that has no illustrations except for a few schematic diagrams, a book about vision written as if by a blind author for a blind reader. If it contains any insight into real, material pictures, it is the sort that might come to a blind listener, overhearing the conversation the sighted speakers talking about images. My hypothesis is that such a listener might see patterns in these conversations that would be invisible to the sighted participant.

According to Mitchell, a color-blind post-racial world is neither achievable nor desirable. Against claims that race is an outmoded construct, he contends that race is not simply something to be seen but is a fundamental medium through which we experience human otherness. Race also makes racism visible and is thus our best weapon against it.

"W. J. T. Mitchell's son Gabriel was diagnosed with schizophrenia at the age of nineteen and died by suicide at the age of 38, leaping from his apartment high in Chicago's Marina City towers. Gabe left behind a remarkable archive of creative work and a father determined to learn from, and bear witness to, Gabe's journey. What is a father to do when caught between his skepticism about psychiatry and the reality of a son suffering from mental illness? How to see madness clearly from within the daily challenges of loving his gifted but delusional child? Gabe's story holds many lessons-for parents and caregivers of the mentally ill, for those interested in mental illness as a social and political identity, for those interested in the question of the outsider artist. Gabe himself had a larger, "macrocosmic" ambition beyond the story of his own condition. He wanted to make a film that would show madness from inside and out, as media stereotype and spectacle, as minority status and stigma, as a form of disability that is an extreme form of a subjective experience we all endure at some point. He would explore all possible images of madness, from the monster to the magician, the clown to the kook and crank, the mad scientist to the mad sovereign. His ambition was to "transform schizophrenia from a death sentence to a learning experience." This book challenges us to learn from Gabe's attempt to find redemption inside his madness. It is also a moving story of a father's love and a family's resilience"-- Provided by publisher

Why do we have such extraordinarily powerful responses toward the images and pictures we see in everyday life? Why do we behave as if pictures were alive, possessing the power to influence us, to demand things from us, to persuade us, seduce us, or even lead us astray? According to W. J. T. Mitchell, we need to reckon with images not just as inert objects that convey meaning but as animated beings with desires, needs, appetites, demands, and drives of their own. What Do Pictures Want? explores this idea and highlights Mitchell's innovative and profoundly influential thinking on picture theory and the lives and loves of images. Ranging across the visual arts, literature, and mass media, Mitchell applies characteristically brilliant and wry analyses to Byzantine icons and cyberpunk films, racial stereotypes and public monuments, ancient idols and modern clones, offensive images and found objects, American photography and aboriginal painting. Opening new vistas in iconology and the emergent field of visual culture, he also considers the importance of Dolly the Sheep--who, as a clone, fulfills the ancient dream of creating a living image--and the destruction of the World Trade Center on 9/11, which, among other things, signifies a new and virulent form of iconoclasm. What Do Pictures Want? offers an immensely rich and suggestive account of the interplay between the visible and the readable. A work by one of our leading theorists of visual representation, it will be a touchstone for art historians, literary critics, anthropologists, and philosophers alike

Join the driver and fireman on the footplate of a locomotive. Stand behind a range of levers in a signal box or be one of a gang working on the permanent way sweating in the summer heat or shivering after heavy snow. This book brings us memories of the lost days of railway life and Bill Mitchell treats the reader to stories gathered over the years