Contemporary Thinkers Reframed – serie

Guattari Reframed presents a timely and urgent rehabilitation of one of the twentieth century's most engaged and engaging cultural philosophers. Best known as an activist and practising psychiatrist, Guattari's work is increasingly understood as both eerily prescient and vital in the context of contemporary culture. Employing the language of visual culture and concrete examples drawn from it, this book introduces and reassesses the major concepts developed throughout Guattari's writings and his call to transform the deadening homogeneity of contemporary existence into the 'universe of creative enchantments'. Paul Elliott asserts the significance of Guattari as a revolutionary philosopher and cultural theorist, and invites the reader to transform both their understanding of his work and their lives through his ideas.

He has been regarded with suspicion by some, as an anti-postmodernist who dared to write about unfashionable concepts such as truth and meaning. But in recent years, the philosopher Alain Badiou has risen in prominence, pioneering new ways to produce, conceptualise and discover art. Badiou Reframed is an original book about an original thinker which applies - for the first time - Badiou's philosophy to the visual arts. The six central concepts of this philosophy - 'being and appearing', 'event and subject' and 'truth and ethics' - are elucidated through detailed analysis of a range of visual artworks, including Marcel Duchamp's readymades, the abstract paintings of Kazimir Malevich and Mark Rothko, Banksy's contemporary street art, the sculpture of Alberto Giacometti, Stephane Mallarme's visual poetry and Victor Fleming's classic film The Wizard of Oz. In focusing on Badiou's critical relationship with the visual arts, Alex Ling reinterprets and represents not only the man, but art itself.

Legendary philosopher and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) developed concepts which are bywords within poststructuralist and new historicist literary criticism and philosophy yet have been under-utilised by artists, art historians and art critics. Deborah Haynes aims to adapt Bakhtin's concepts, particularly those developed in his later works, to an analysis of visual culture and art practices, addressing the integral relationship of art with life, the artist as creator, reception and the audience, and context/intertextuality. This provides both a new conceptual vocabulary for those engaged in visual culture - ideas such as answerability, unfinalizability, heteroglossia, chronotope and the carnivalesque (defined in the glossary) - and a new, practical approach to historical analysis of generic breakdown and narrative re-emergence in contemporary art. Haynes uses Bakhtinian concepts to interpret a range of art from religious icons to post-Impressionist painters and Russian modernists to demonstrate how the application of his thought to visual culture can generate significant new insights.Rehabilitating some of Bakhtin's neglected ideas and reframing him as a philosopher of aesthetics, Bakhtin Reframed will be essential reading for the huge community of Bakhtin scholars as well as students and practitioners of visual culture.

Are your students baffled by Baudrillard? Dazed by Deleuze? Confused by Kristeva? Other beginners' guides can feel as impenetrable as the original texts to students who 'think in images'. "Contemporary Thinkers Reframed" instead uses the language of the arts to explore the usefulness in practice of complex ideas. Short, contemporary and accessible, these lively books utilise actual examples of artworks, films, television shows, works of architecture, fashion and even computer games to explain and explore the work of the most commonly taught thinkers. Conceived specifically for the visually minded, the series will prove invaluable to students right across the visual arts.'Deconstruction' is touted in every visual area from architecture to fashion, yet few really understand what Derrida's notorious concept means, much less his elusive idea of 'differance'. In fact Derrida's work can seem almost impenetrable.This guide explains Derrida's key concepts through examples from across the whole spectrum of the arts, looking at the work of architects such as Bernard Tschumi and Daniel Libeskind, fashion designers such as Ann Demeulemeister and at the work of artists as varied as Kara Walker, Yinka Shonibare MBE, Rachel Whiteread and Jeff Wall. Showing what Derrida's work really 'means' in practice, this short guide makes this thinker's complex work accessible to a wider public.

Are your students baffled by Baudrillard? Dazed by Deleuze? Confused by Kristeva? Other beginners' guides can feel as impenetrable as the original texts to students who 'think in images'. "Contemporary Thinkers Reframed" instead uses the language of the arts to explore the usefulness in practice of complex ideas.Short, contemporary and accessible, these lively books utilise actual examples of artworks, films, television shows, works of architecture, fashion and even computer games to explain and explore the work of the most commonly taught thinkers. Conceived specifically for the visually minded, the series will prove invaluable to students right across the visual arts. Deleuze disdains easy answers. Yet easy answers to Deleuze are what students need. Without reducing Deleuze's complex body of thought to simplistic solutions, this very contemporary guide leads the reader into the world of Deleuze's spiralling thought through concrete examples from art, film, TV and even computer games.From 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind' and 'The Cell' to 'Pac Man' and 'Doom' and from the work of Matthew Barney and Helen Chadwick to 'Lost' and 'Doctor Who', this easily digestible introduction looks at the key ideas promoted by Deleuze, both in his own work and in his notoriously difficult collaborations with Felix Guattari, to make them both fresh and relevant to the visual arts today.

Are your students baffled by Baudrillard? Dazed by Deleuze? Confused by Kristeva? Other beginners' guides can feel as impenetrable as the original texts to students who 'think in images'. "Contemporary Thinkers Reframed" instead uses the language of the arts to explore the usefulness in practice of complex ideas. Short, contemporary and accessible, these lively books utilise actual examples of artworks, films, television shows, works of architecture, fashion and even computer games to explain and explore the work of the most commonly taught thinkers. Conceived specifically for the visually minded, the series will prove invaluable to students right across the visual arts. Single-handedly responsible for the influential and ominous notion of 'the gaze', quoted by everybody yet fully understood by few, Lacan's work can be difficult to grasp. Going back to basics, this introduction guides the reader through Lacan's key concepts by looking at art from the Mona Lisa through to Bridget Riley's paintings, and by looking afresh at key works discussed by Lacan himself, from Holbein's famous 'The Ambassadors' to Velazquez's 'Las Meninas'.Making sense of Lacan's sometimes convoluted style, this highly readable introduction to one of the most frequently quoted thinkers also explores the reasons why human beings make - and look at - art.

For Kristeva, in a world immersed in readymade images, art or aesthetic experience is a practice that constitutes both a subject (a sense of self) and an object that is able to transform meaning and consciousness. 'Kristeva Reframed' examines key ideas in Kristeva's work to show how they are most relevant to artists, and how they can be applied in interpreting artworks. With examples from the paintings of Van Gogh and Picasso, the work of contemporary feminist painters, the photography of Bill Henson and the film and animation work of Van Sowerine, Estelle Barrett demonstrates how Kristeva can illuminate the relationships between artist and art object, between artists, artworks and audiences, and between art and knowledge. Through these relationships she explores what Kristeva's work reveals about the role and function of art in society and offers a smooth passage through Kristeva's ideas and her relevance to visual culture.

Jean Baudrillard has been a unique intellectual voice in many of the key debates and issues facing an increasingly globalised, media-driven world. Baudrillard Reframed offers the arts student and others working with Baudrillard's ideas an accessible overview of his better known arguments, as well as extending beyond them to critically engage with his radical notions of illusion, singularity and the fatal. Kim Toffoletti surveys the ideas of this influential - often provocative - French thinker as they relate to todayis image-saturated environment. She demonstrates their relevance to analysing contemporary visual phenomena such as advertising, photography, reality TV, fashion, art, pornography and virtual reality. Baudrillard's key themes and arguments are illustrated through a range of visual works, from the graffiti art of Banksy and Katherine Hamnett's protest t-shirts, to Sophie Calle's photography.

It is frequently commented that Heidegger writes impenetrable texts that are difficult to read and comprehend, but he also, as Barbara Bolt demonstrates in this clear, original guide to his oeuvre, provides an "artists' guide to the world". 'Heidegger Reframed' grounds Heidegger's writings in the critical questions confronting contemporary visual artists and students of art. Barbara Bolt takes the most relevant of his texts, including his most famous work, 'Being and Time', and sets out ways of thinking about art in a post-medium, digital, technocratic and post-human age. She does so through the frame of works by international artists, including Sophie Calle, Anish Kapoor and Anselm Keifer. A glossary of terms completes this full and clear companion to Heidegger.

Lyotard's claims concerning the postmodern have often been misunderstood or misrepresented. Lyotard Reframed provides an analysis of Lyotard's most influential writings on the postmodern alongside a detailed commentary on his broader philosophy, demonstrating and clarifying his work's ongoing relevance to creative endeavour and debates concerning the value and significance of the visual arts. It also situates Lyotard's discussion of the postmodern within the context of his other key concepts: the figural, the libidinal and the sublime. Accessible in style and approach, Lyotard Reframed employs numerous examples drawn from the arts to critically examine and evaluate the nature, history and significance of these important concepts and explore their respective links with phenomenology, Marxism, structuralism, psychoanalysis and deconstruction.