Τέχνη

Rebellion always starts somewhere, and in the music world of the transgressive teen whether it be the 1960s of the 2020s, The Velvet Underground represent ground zero. Crystallizing the idea of the bohemian, urban, narcissistic art school gang, around a psychedelic rock and roll band - a stylistic idea that evolved in the rarefied environs of Andy Warhol's Factory - The Velvets were the first major American rock group with a mixed gender line-up; they never smiled in photographs, wore sunglasses indoors, and in the process invented the archetype. They were avant-garde nihilists, writing about drug abuse, prostitution, paranoia, and sado-masochistic sex at a time when the rest of the world was singing about peace and love.



Dylan Jones' definitive oral history of The Velvet Underground draws on contributions from remaining members, contemporaneous musicians, critics, film-makers, and the generation of artists who emerged in their wake, to celebrate not only their impact but their legacy, which burns brighter than ever into the 21st century.

Available in bookstores this week, the Athens and Epidaurus Festival photo book Marking Time. The Pandemic and the Festival Theatres is a unique photographic project that captures the Festival theatres in the time of the pandemic. Photographs of the Festival theatres by acclaimed photographer Michalis Kloukinas are placed in dialogue with selected excerpts from plays of the world canon that were originally scheduled for the 2020 programme but were cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. A collector’s edition showcasing beloved venues of the Athens and Epidaurus Festival (Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus, Little Theatre of Ancient Epidaurus, Odeon of Herodes Atticus, Peiraios 260) through a contemporary lens, in anticipation of a time when audiences and artists meet again, Marking Time is a palpable, invaluable testament to the absence of live performances, which we have been denied due to the pandemic. This special edition includes forewords by the Artistic Director of the Athens and Epidaurus Festival, Katerina Evangelatos, and photographer Michalis Kloukinas. Marking Time is available in both Greek and English.

"One of the most playful, innovative and eccentric artists of Postwar Europe,Takis (b.1925, Athens) was a catalysing figure in the artistic and literarycircles of Paris, London and New York from the 1950s onward. Pioneering a variety of sculpture, painting and musical structures, Takismade works that harness invisible natural forces. Perhaps best known arehis innovative `telemagnetic' works, begun in the late 1950s using everydaymetallic objects that float in space through the use of magnets.

Theseinvestigations and his fierce individualism won him the admiration of Beatwriters such as Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs and caused polemicswith his artistic contemporaries Yves Klein, Giacometti and Jean Tinguely. This publication will be the first English-language introduction to a keyfigure of Europe's post-war avant-garde and cultural underground. Througha combination of new essays and a key selection of primary sources, thispublication will foreground the artist's influence in contemporary art sincethe 1960s - and it's accessible and thematic approach will expand theaudience for this book far beyond the specialist."

Τhe Acropolis through its Museum is not simply a guidebook to the Acropolis Museum. By presenting the works of art exhibited in the museum, it endeavours to resynthesize the history of the Sacred Rock as part of the cultural and the wider historical process of Athens. The book follows the visitor’s tour of the museum, so that the reader can study and learn more about the antiquities he sees before him. However, it is written is such a way that through independent inquiry the reader is able to approach the subjects more deeply and to understand the preconditions – political, social, economic, ideological, artistic and technological – that led to the creation of the unique monuments on the Acropolis.

The book is lavishly illustrated with photographs, as well as numerous plans and reconstruction drawings, which enable the reader to understand each of the fragmentarily preserved works in its context. It also answers many of the questions raised in the discerning reader’s mind, such as what was the size and the population of ancient Athens, what is the meaning of the beasts represented on the large Archaic pediments, what do the Korai statues represent, why did the Erechtheion become so complex and what was the role of the Karyatids, why was the temple of Athena Nike built in the Ionic order, what led Pericles and his advisers to opt for the specific building programme and how were the major public works financed, why was it decided to place an Ionic frieze on the Doric Parthenon, what political messages were transmitted to Sparta through the sculptural decoration of the Parthenon, and so on.

264 wood and ivory carvings, none of them larger than a matchbox: potter Edmund de Waal was entranced when he first encountered the collection in the Tokyo apartment of his great uncle Iggie. Later, when Edmund inherited the \'netsuke\', they unlocked a story far larger than he could ever have imagined...The Ephrussis came from Odessa, and at one time were the largest grain exporters in the world; in the 1870s, Charles Ephrussi was part of a wealthy new generation settling in Paris. Marcel Proust was briefly his secretary and used Charles as the model for the aesthete Swann in Remembrance of Things Past. Charles\' passion was collecting; the netsuke, bought when Japanese objects were all the rage in the salons, were sent as a wedding present to his banker cousin in Vienna. Later, three children - including a young Ignace - would play with the netsuke as history reverberated around them. The Anschluss and Second World War swept the Ephrussis to the brink of oblivion. Almost all that remained of their vast empire was the netsuke collection, smuggled out of the huge Viennese palace (then occupied by Hitler\'s theorist on the \'Jewish Question\'), one piece at a time, in the pocket of a loyal maid - and hidden in a straw mattress. In this stunningly original memoir, Edmund de Waal travels the world to stand in the great buildings his forebears once inhabited. He traces the network of a remarkable family against the backdrop of a tumultuous century. And, in prose as elegant and precise as the netsuke themselves, he tells the story of a unique collection which passed from hand to hand - and which, in a twist of fate, found its way home to Japan.

Tattooing is an ancient practice with profound religious and cultural significance. While western tattooing centres on three main traditions - Polynesian, Japanese and Euro-American -- it has been recorded more or less everywhere. Beginning with the birth of the tattoo, John Miller explores this unique expression of personal, cultural and national identity, the tension between tattoo's status as a fashion item and its roots in subculture, and the relevance of magic -- a crucial part of tattooing's origins -- in contemporary society. As the inherent shock factor of tattoos decreases, tattoos are becoming more extensive, public and challenging in response, prompting an upsurge in avant-garde tattoo projects and 'extreme' tattooing. The Philosophy of Tattoos investigates the innate human desire to mark the skin, and what tattooing might tell us about that obsessively asked question: what does it mean to be human?

The quest is to document in an artist-book a work-in-project that combines image and text. This book describes how a visual artist and composer who spends her free time in dance schools and keeps record of the dancers’ movements keeps reprocessing the same material again and again as technology advances. She learns how to write as she collects and combines ‘writing exercises’ (ètudes), switching between arts, in the same way as one who is led to explain something while ‘lost in translation’ among every possible expression or memory, and ultimately succeeds in developing definitions.

The 25th anniversary of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child is a good reason to put the topic emphatically into the public focus. UNICEF Germany and GEO - with the support of the world's best photographers and Edition Lammerhuber - do exactly that in this joint pro-bono project. In 40 photographic reports from 15 years, a selection of particularly striking pictures from the UNICEF Photo of the Year competition forms a fervent appeal to respect the rights of the child and to guarantee every girl and boy in the world a childhood in dignity. The volume is edited by Jurgen Heraeus, the Chairman of the German Committee of UNICEF, and Peter-Matthias Gaede, long-serving Editor-in-Chief of GEO. We the Children draws attention to the suffering and hardships, but also to the wishes and dreams of today's children. We the Children is a book full of hope for a child-oriented world."

'Art is not a luxury. Art is a basic social need to which everyone has a right'.This extraordinary collection of 100 artists' manifestos from across the globe over the last 100 years brings together activists, post-colonialists, surrealists, socialists, nihilists and a host of other voices. From the Negritude movement in Africa and Martinique to Brazil's Mud/Meat Sewer Manifesto, from Iraqi modernism to Australia's Cyberfeminist Manifesto, they are by turns personal, political, utopian, angry, sublime and revolutionary. Some have not been published in English before; some were written in climates of censorship and brutality; some contain visions of a future still on the horizon. What unites them is the belief that art can change the world.