Miranda July S Intermedial Art

This first in-depth study of Miranda July's work reveals some of its major motives and consequently provides fascinating insights into the lifestyle of the contemporary white Californian middle class. Through an analysis of July's award-winning intermedial work, the author lays open how July takes individualism and self-help as constitutive for the creative class. Although a member of the creative class herself, July's voice oscillates between irony and approval. July thus paints a fascinating portrait of neurotic hipsterism, which triggers self-reflection in the general reader and critical thinking in the cultural analyst.

Filmmaker. Author. Performer. Shopkeeper. Miranda July--the most impressive cross-disciplinary artist of her generation--is brought into focus in this career-spanning retrospective. Regardless of the medium, July's daring, urgent, and idiosyncratic voice finds unexpectedly accessible forms that reflect the poignancy and strangeness of the human plight. In film, fiction, performance, public art, commerce, and even a smartphone app, July deftly explores themes of inclusivity, desire, fear, and fantasy. This chronological survey spans the artist's entire career to date, including her early plays and fanzines, participatory works, and personal projects which illuminate the multidimensionality and timeliness of her work. Miranda July is brought to life in an introductory interview with Julia Bryan-Wilson and candid recollections by friends, collaborators, curators, assistants, and audience members: Carrie Brownstein, David Byrne, Spike Jonze, Sheila Heti, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and July herself. This revealing, insightful commentary provides an intimate perspective on the artist's ever-evolving process. July may be impossible to categorize, but the enduring importance of her work and her status as an essential cultural icon is irrefutable.

This edited book inserts postfeminism (PF) as a critical concept into understandings of work and organization. While the notion of PF has been extensively investigated in cultural and media studies, it has yet to emerge within organization studies - remaining marginal to understandings of work based experiences and subjectivities. Understanding PF as a discursive cultural context not only draws on an established epistemological orientation to organizations as discursively constructed and reproduced but allows us to highlight how PF may underpin and be underpinned by other discursive regimes This book, as the first in the field, draws on key international authors to explore: the contextual ‘backdrop’ of PF and its links with neo-liberalism, transnational feminism and other hegemonic discourses; the different ways in which this backdrop has infiltrated organizational values and practice through the primacy attached to choice, merit and individual agency as well as through the widespread perception that gender disadvantage has been ‘solved’; and the implications for organizational subjectivity and for how inequality is experienced and perceived. This book introduces postfeminism as a critical concept with contemporary importance for the study of organizations, arguing for its explanatory potential when: Exploring women’s and men’s experience of managing and organizing; Investigating the gendered aspects of organizational life; Analysing the contemporary validation of the feminine and the associated feminization of management/leadership and organizations; Tracing the emergence of new femininities and masculinities within organizational contexts. The book is ideal reading for researchers working in the area of Gender and Organization Studies but is also of interest to researchers in the areas of Cultural Studies, Media Studies, Women’s Studies and Sociology.

"Space Oddities: Difference and Identity in the American City" approaches a space (and place) central to the American imagination-the city. In particular, this volume discusses the paradoxes of American cities and American urban life. In this way, the book critically engages with the paradoxes of the American identity, embodied by cultural practices in, and cultural representations of, urban life in the United States. (Series: American Studies in Austria, Vol. 16) [Subject: Sociology, American Studies, Cultural Studies, Urban Studies]

This collection of essays gathers innovative and compelling research on intermedial forms of life writing by an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars. Among their subjects of scrutiny are biographies, memoirs, graphic novels, performances, paratheatricals, musicals, silent films, movies, documentary films, and social media. The volume covers a time frame ranging from the nineteenth century to the immediate present. In addition to a shared focus on theories of intermediality and life writing, the authors apply to their subjects both firmly established and cutting-edge theoretical approaches from Cultural Narratology, Cultural History, Biographical Studies, Social Media Studies, Performance Studies, and Visual Culture Studies. The collection also features interviews with practitioners in biography who have produced monographs, films, and novels.

Opening with an account of print portraiture facilitating Franz Liszt's celebrity status and concluding with Riot Grrrl's noisy politics of feminism and performance, this interdisciplinary anthology charts the relationship between music and the visual arts from late Romanticism and the birth of modernism to 'postmodernism', while crossing from Western art to the Middle East. Focused on music as a central experience of art and life, these essays scrutinize 'the musicalisation of art' focusing on the visual and performing arts and detailing significant instances of intra-art relations between c. 1840 and the present day. Essays reflect on the aesthetic relationships of music to painting, performance and installation, sound-and- silence, time-and-space. The insistent influence of Wagner is considered as well as the work and ideas of Manet, Satie and Cage, Thomas Wilfred, La Monte Young and Eliasson. What distinguishes these studies are the convictions that music is never alone and that a full understanding of the “isms” of the last two hundred years is best achieved when music's influential presence in the visual arts is acknowledged and interrogated.

In the summer of 2009, Miranda July was struggling to finish writing the screenplay for her much-anticipated second film. During her increasingly long lunch breaks, she began to obsessively read the "PennySaver," the iconic classifieds booklet that reached everywhere and seemed to come from nowhere. Who was the person selling the "Large leather Jacket, $10"? It seemed important to find out--or at least it was a great distraction from the screenplay. Accompanied by photographer Brigitte Sire, July crisscrossed Los Angeles to meet a random selection of "PennySaver" sellers, glimpsing thirteen surprisingly moving and profoundly specific realities, along the way shaping her film, and herself, in unexpected ways. Elegantly blending narrative, interviews, and photographs with July's off-kilter honesty and deadpan humor, this is a story of procrastination and inspiration, isolation and connection, and grabbing hold of the invisible world.

The definitive reference text on curation both inside and outside the museum A Companion to Curation is the first collection of its kind, assembling the knowledge and experience of prominent curators, artists, art historians, scholars, and theorists in one comprehensive volume. Part of the Blackwell Companion series, this much-needed book provides up-to-date information and valuable insights on the field of curatorial studies and curation in the visual arts. Accessible and engaging chapters cover diverse, contemporary methods of curation, its origin and history, current and emerging approaches within the profession, and more. This timely publication fills a significant gap in literature on the role of the curator, the art and science of curating, and the historical arc of the field from the 17th century to the present. The Companion explores topics such as global developments in contemporary indigenous art, Asian and Chinese art since the 1980s, feminist and queer feminist curatorial practices, and new curatorial strategies beyond the museum. This unique volume: Offers readers a wide range of perspectives on curating in both theory and practice Includes coverage of curation outside of the Eurocentric and Anglosphere art worlds Presents clear and comprehensible information valuable for specialists and novices alike Discusses the movements, models, people and politics of curating Provides guidance on curating in a globalized world Broad in scope and detailed in content, A Companion to Curation is an essential text for professionals engaged in varied forms of curation, teachers and students of museum studies, and readers interested in the workings of the art world, museums, benefactors, and curators.