Michael Archer – författare

The definitive survey of Keith Tyson's thirty-year career. British Turner Prize-winning artist Keith Tyson is known for a distinctive and diverse body of work including drawing, painting, installation and sculpture. Showing a wide range of influences, from mathematics and science through to poetry and mythology, he is interested in how art emerges from the combination of information systems and physical processes that surround us every day.For over thirty years, Tyson has probed, dissected, explored and questioned reality. Not fixed to one artistic style, Tyson sets out to challenge himself and the audience, whilst working with diverse materials – paint, clay, metal, resin – to question our knowledge of the world we perceive as real, and art’s role in representing it.With newly commissioned texts from an internationally diverse array of writers, and including a previously unpublished interview with the artist, this is the definitive survey of one of the most restless and adventurous creators working today.

This accessible overview is invaluable for the way in which it makes coherent sense of the often-bewildering diversity of styles, forms, media, techniques, and agendas that proliferate in contemporary art. Extensively revised and expanded since it was first published, Michael Archer’s acclaimed book is brought fully up to date in this new edition through the addition of a new chapter on developments in contemporary art since 2000. Art Since 1960 remains an indispensable source of information on the evolution of art over the past five-and-a-half decades.

Mona Hatoum creates events, videos, sculptures and installations that relate to the body, to language and to the condition of exile. Her most famous work Corps Etranger, first shown at the Tate Gallery when she was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1995, takes the viewer on a journey through the inner passages of the artist's body.Her audience is thrown into a dimension in which anything is possible, as in The Light at the End, which lures viewers down a long tunnel towards a light that will literally burn them. While her video work is often visceral and emotive, her sculptures and environments are ultra cool and minimal in their aesthetic. They often mimic domestic or institutional furniture, yet their designs and materials have a threatening edge. Exquisitely beautiful, Hatoum's works are at the same time powerful evocations of statelessness, anxiety, denial and otherness.Since Hatoum was exiled to London, where she has lived and worked since the 1970s, she has exhibited her work around the world, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Venice Biennale. This book surveys all her work, ranging from early performances, through to her videos, objects and full-scale environments.The distinguished art critic Guy Brett, author of Through Our Own Eyes: Popular Art and Modern History (1986), explores key themes around a sense of place, the body and communication that emerge from Hatoum's range of work. The artist describes a chronology of practice in conversation with Michael Archer, writer, curator and co-founder of London's Audio Arts sound archive. Director of the Kanaal Art Foundation Catherine de Zegher makes a complex and provocative analysis of Recollection, a work she commissioned for a sixteenth-century beguinage. Hatoum has chosen a text by the influential Palestinian author Edward Said as well as a statement from the noted Italian post-war sculptor and performance artist Piero Manzoni. The book also includes Hatoum's own notes, statements and interviews.

A revised and expanded edition of one the most popular titles in the Contemporary Artists SeriesBorn in Lebanon, Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum was exiled to London, where she has lived and worked since the mid-1970s. Through performance, video, sculpture, and installation, she creates architectonic spaces that relate to the body, language, and the condition of exile as well as transforming everyday, domestic objects into things foreign, threatening, and dangerous. Often exquisitely beautiful, Hatoum’s works combine states of emotion and longing with the formal simplicity of Minimalism, creating powerful evocations of displacement, denial, and otherness.

From kangaroos and koalas to the giant Diprotodon and bizarre "thingodontans," prehistoric mammals evolved within the changing and sometimes harsh environments of Australia. As part of Gondwana, Australia was the first landmass to be isolated from the supercontinent Pangaea. In Prehistoric Mammals of Australia and New Guinea, four respected paleontologists present a history of the development of modern mammals from the unique evolutionary environment of Australia and New Guinea. The authors describe both what is known about prehistoric Australian mammals and what can be reconstructed from the fossil evidence about their appearance and behaviors. This accessible reference work offers facts about how each mammal got its name and provides a description of how the fossil mammal resembles its modern descendants. Over 200 four-color illustrations enhance the text, which describes the age, diet, and habitat of these extinct mammals. The authors also detail how each mammal evolved and is now classified. Diagrams showing skeletal features and tooth structure and a glossary of technical terms are also included.

The rules of composition have changed. Discover the new ideas that shape the art we make today. Art has changed beyond recognition since the principles of harmonious composition were established in classical times. From the invention of photography to the digital revolution, technological and social advances have transformed the way we see the world. This new vision, influenced by changing attitudes not least towards gender roles and the West's colonial history, is reflected in the art we make.From the rejection of Western compositional orthodoxy by artists such as Édouard Manet, Vincent van Gogh and Mary Cassatt to the revolutionary practices of Jean- Michel Basquiat, Tania Bruguera, Meleko Mokgosi and many others, acclaimed art critic and writer Michael Archer reveals the ideas and intentions behind a thrillingly diverse selection of artworks, giving readers a new set of tools for understanding art today.