What is the place of materiality—the expression or condition of physical substance—in our visual age of rapidly changing materials and media? How is it fashioned in the arts or manifested in virtual forms? In Surface, cultural critic and theorist Giuliana Bruno deftly explores these questions, seeking to understand materiality in the contemporary world. Arguing that materiality is not a question of the materials themselves but rather the substance of material relations, Bruno investigates the space of those relations, examining how they appear on the surface of different media—on film and video screens, in gallery installations, or on the skins of buildings and people. The object of visual studies, she contends, goes well beyond the image and engages the surface as a place of contact between people and art objects. As Bruno threads through these surface encounters, she unveils the fabrics of the visual—the textural qualities of works of art, whether manifested on canvas, wall, or screen. Illuminating the modern surface condition, she notes how façades are becoming virtual screens and the art of projection is reinvented on gallery walls. She traverses the light spaces of artists Robert Irwin, James Turrell, Tacita Dean, and Anthony McCall; touches on the textured surfaces of Isaac Julien’s and Wong Kar-wai’s filmic screens; and travels across the surface materiality in the architectural practices of Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Herzog &amp; de Meuron to the art of Doris Salcedo and Rachel Whiteread, where the surface tension of media becomes concrete. In performing these critical operations on the surface, she articulates it as a site in which different forms of mediation, memory, and transformation can take place. Surveying object relations across art, architecture, fashion, design, film, and new media, Surface is a magisterial account of contemporary visual culture.

Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media

Arts & Photography

Bruno, Giuliana

History & Criticism

University of Chicago Press

Bringing together cultural history, visual studies, and media archaeology, Bruno considers the interrelations of projection, atmosphere, and environment. &nbsp; Projection has long been transforming space, from shadow plays to camera obscuras and magic lantern shows. Our fascination with projection is alive on the walls of museums and galleries and woven into our daily lives. Giuliana Bruno traces the histories of projection and atmosphere in visual culture, revealing their continued relevance in the work of contemporary artists who are reinventing the projective imagination of the past with atmospheric thinking that is invested in the use of elemental media. To explain our fascination with projection and atmosphere, Bruno traverses psychoanalysis, environmental philosophy, architecture, the history of science, visual art, and moving image culture to see how projective mechanisms and their environments have developed over time. She reveals how atmosphere is formed and mediated, how it can change, and what projection can do to modify a site. Bruno gives new life to the alchemic possibilities of projective atmospheres, showing how their "environmentality" produces sites of exchange and relationality. &nbsp;

Atmospheres of Projection: Environmentality in Art and Screen Media

An examination of architecture and art as a screen of vital cultural memory that considers museum culture, visual technology, and the border of public and private space.
In this thoughtful collection of essays on the relationship of architecture and the arts, Giuliana Bruno addresses the crucial role that architecture plays in the production of art and the making of public intimacy. As art melts into spatial construction and architecture mobilizes artistic vision, Bruno argues, a new moving space―a screen of vital cultural memory―has come to shape our visual culture. Taking on the central topic of museum culture, Bruno leads the reader on a series of architectural promenades from modernity to our times. Through these "museum walks," she demonstrates how artistic collection has become a culture of recollection, and examines the public space of the pavilion as reinvented in the moving-image art installation of Turner Prize nominees Jane and Louise Wilson. Investigating the intersection of science and art, Bruno looks at our cultural obsession with techniques of imaging and its effect on the privacy of bodies and space. She finds in the work of artist Rebecca Horn a notable combination of the artistic and the scientific that creates an architecture of public intimacy. Considering the role of architecture in contemporary art that refashions our "lived space"―and the work of contemporary artists including Rachel Whiteread, Mona Hatoum, and Guillermo Kuitca―Bruno argues that architecture is used to define the frame of memory, the border of public and private space, and the permeability of exterior and interior space. Architecture, Bruno contends, is not merely a matter of space, but an art of time.

Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts (Writing Architecture)

The MIT Press

This feminist anthology from Italy offers an enriching perspective on cinema studies. Focusing on women’s engagement with political theory and film-making, the book never loses sight of the female experience of cinema. It examines how women have chosen to represent themselves and how they have been represented, and how they deal with the cinematic apparatus, as subjects of production, objects of representation, and spectators. A variety of approaches are offered, ranging from psychoanalysis and semiology to history. With an exhaustive filmography, this anthology of chapters by eminent theorists demonstrates the central importance of recent developments in Italy for the whole spectrum of film and feminist studies.

Off Screen: Women and Film in Italy

Humor & Entertainment

Routledge& Kegan Paul

Streetwalking on a Ruined Map

Emphasizing the importance of cultural theory for film history, Giuliana Bruno enriches our understanding of early Italian film as she guides us on a series of "inferential walks" through Italian culture in the first decades of this century. This innovative approach---the interweaving of examples of cinema with architecture, art history, medical discourse, photography, and literature--addresses the challenge posed by feminism to film study while calling attention to marginalized artists. An object of this critical remapping is Elvira Notari (1875-1946), Italy's first and most prolific woman filmmaker, whose documentary-style work on street life in Naples, a forerunner of neorealism, was popularly acclaimed in Italy and the United States until its suppression during the Fascist regime. Since only fragments of Notari's films exist today, Bruno illuminates the filmmaker's contributions to early Italian cinematography by evoking the cultural terrain in which she operated. What emerges is an intertextual montage of urban film culture highlighting a woman's view on love, violence, poverty, desire, and death. This panorama ranges from the city's exteriors to the body's interiors. Reclaiming an alternative history of women's filmmaking and reception, Bruno draws a cultural history that persuasively argues for a spatial, corporal interpretation of film language.

Photography & Video

Princeton University Press

Emphasizing the importance of cultural theory for film history, Giuliana Bruno enriches our understanding of early Italian film as she guides us on a series of "inferential walks" through Italian culture in the first decades of this century. This innovative approach---the interweaving of examples of cinema with architecture, art history, medical discourse, photography, and literature--addresses the challenge posed by feminism to film study while calling attention to marginalized artists. An object of this critical remapping is Elvira Notari (1875-1946), Italy's first and most prolific woman filmmaker, whose documentary-style work on street life in Naples, a forerunner of neorealism, was popularly acclaimed in Italy and the United States until its suppression during the Fascist regime. Since only fragments of Notari's films exist today, Bruno illuminates the filmmaker's contributions to early Italian cinematography by evoking the cultural terrain in which she operated. What emerges is an intertextual montage of urban film culture highlighting a woman's view on love, violence, poverty, desire, and death. This panorama ranges from the city's exteriors to the body's interiors. Reclaiming an alternative history of women's filmmaking and reception, Bruno draws a cultural history that persuasively argues for a spatial, corporal interpretation of film language.

Book by Celant, Germano, Spector, Nancy, Bruno, Giuliana, Schmidt, Katharina

Rebecca Horn

SPECTOR, Nancy

Schmidt, Katharina

Celant, Germano

Guggenheim Museum Pubns

The "architectural imaginary" describes architecture in its broadest sense: images of cities drawn from collective experience and imagination. Hailing from 11 countries, each of the 14 artists who have contributed to Automatic Cities engage the psychological and sociopolitical aspects of architecture through their work, mapping the influence of the architectural imaginary on contemporary visual art. The book is organized into four thematic groupings. Matthew Buckingham, Ann Lislegaard and Paul Noble treat architecture's relationship to language; "Architecture and Memory" includes installations by Saskia Olde Wolbers, Hiraki Sawa and Rachel Whiteread; "Architecture as Model" encompasses installations by Michaël Borremans, Los Carpinteros, Catharina van Eetvelde and Katrin Sigurdardóttir; and the theme of surveillance is explored by Jakob Kolding, Sarah Oppenheimer, Julie Mehretu and Matthew Ritchie.

Automatic Cities: The Architectural Imaginary in Contemporary Art (MUSEUM OF CONTE)

Clark, Robin

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego

An award-winning cultural history of how we experience the world through art, film and architectureAtlas of Emotion is a highly original endeavor to map the cultural terrain of spatio-visual arts. In an evocative blend of words and pictures, Giuliana Bruno emphasizes the connections between “sight” and “site” and “motion” and “emotion.” In so doing, she touches on the art of Gerhard Richter and Louise Bourgeois, the filmmaking of Peter Greenaway and Michelangelo Antonioni, media archaeology and the origins of the museum, and her own journeys to her native Naples. Visually luscious and daring in conception, Bruno’s book opens new vistas and understandings at every turn.

Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film

Verso Books

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Bruno, Giuliana. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Bruno, Giuliana

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Bruno, Giuliana. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media

Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media

Atmospheres of Projection: Environmentality in Art and Screen Media

Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts (Writing Architecture)

Off Screen: Women and Film in Italy

Streetwalking on a Ruined Map

Streetwalking on a Ruined Map

Rebecca Horn

Automatic Cities: The Architectural Imaginary in Contemporary Art (MUSEUM OF CONTE)

Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film