DESIGN AND ART /ANGLAIS (DOCUMENTS OF CO)

Arts & Photography

Coles, Alex

History & Criticism

WHITECHAPEL GAL

An intimate history of the crooner in popular music from the 1950s to the present. &nbsp; In this book, Alex Coles explores the history of the crooner--someone who sings close to the mic in a soft style--in popular music from the 1950s to the present. Each chapter focuses on how one song by one artist contributes to the image of the crooner in the popular imagination. The book describes the rich diversity of crooners throughout music history, including artists in disco, rock, hip-hop, and more such as Frank Sinatra, Scott Walker, Barry White, David Bowie, Bryan Ferry, Tom Waits, Grace Jones, Ian McCulloch, Nick Cave, and Nas. Ultimately, Coles shows how the crooner continues to connect listeners with their hidden feelings.

Crooner: Singing from the Heart from Sinatra to Nas (Reverb)

Music

Reaktion Books

This beautifully illustrated guide to Walter Benjamin—the genius behind the famous essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction—traces his influence on modern aesthetics and cultural history as well as his particular focus on the tension between Marxism and Zionism, and between word and image in modern art.

Introducing Walter Benjamin: A Graphic Guide (Graphic Guides)

Politics & Social Sciences

Klimowski, Andrzej

Caygill, Howard

Philosophy

Icon Books

For well over a hundred years certain artists have blurred the distinction between 'art' and 'design', creating works for which Alex Coles has coined the term 'DesignArt'. In a pioneering study of this dynamic area of art-making, he traces its course from the early twentieth century to the present day, when such works have become a dominant feature of the contemporary art scene and are pervasive in key international exhibitions and biennials. From Matisse's plush interior for Rockefeller's town house to the playful contemporary environments created by Jorge Pardo; from the paintings of Bridget Riley appropriated by the fashion world in the 1960s to the fabric designs Takashi Murakami recently conceived with Marc Jacobs, Alex Coles has identified a major and previously uncharted strand in art history.

DesignArt

Reference

Tate

This unusual book presents the world of excavations as art and theatre. The majority of this slim volume presents images from Mark Dion's Tate Thames Dig on the Thames foreshore in 1999 accompanied by texts by archaeologists and artists, notably Colin Renfrew, Jonathan Cotton and Robert Williams, on the merit of science as art and Thames finds, among other subjects.

Archaeology

et.al.

Fontana, Emi

RENFREW,COLIN

Individual Artists

Black Dog Publishing Ltd

The role of blended musical genres and styles across jazz, rock, pop, funk, new wave, hip-hop, techno, and grime. Defined as the coming together of two or more distinct entities, fusion is essential to the vitality of modern and contemporary music. From music writer Alex Coles, Fusion! From Miles to Moor Motherexamines the origins and legacy of fusion in popular music, and the role of jazz in particular as a catalyst for fusion across rock, pop, funk, new wave, hip-hop, techno, and grime. All music may be a fusion of one sort or another, but for Coles, jazz has the unique ability to act like a translator, enabling the passage of one genre of music into another. Like translation, fusion is a process rather than a style or genre. When musicians are driven to adopt fusion, blending musical genres can fluidly open out into the fusion of cultures. This is the premise of Coles's examination of the influence of fusion on artists, including Miles Davis, Kimiko Kasai and Herbie Hancock, A Tribe Called Quest, Kendrick Lamar, and Moor Mother. Through chapters that each focus on a single track, Coles sketches the backdrop to the dialogues, collaborations, and communities underpinning these unique moments in music history.

Fusion!: From Alice Coltrane to Moor Mother

Sternberg Press

Clémence and Didier Krzentowski, the founders and directors of the leading contemporary design gallery Kreo (in Paris), have been collecting lights for 30 years. With an emphasis on Italian and French light design, their collection is the most important of its kind, comprising nearly 500 works of all kinds from the 1950s to the 1990s, and including significant groups of works by Paulin, Garrice, Castiglioni and Sarfatti. Conceived as a catalogue raisonné of this astounding collection, The Complete Designers’ Lights (1950–1990) provides an invaluable overview of light design and furniture history. It includes a discussion between Didier Krzentowski, Constance Rubini (curator of the Paris Musée des Arts Décoratifs) and design critic Pierre Doze, as well as an essay by the design and art critic Alex Coles that focuses on the relationship between light design and light art, through a comparison of Gino Sarfatti and Dan Flavin.

The Complete Designers’ Lights 1950-1990

Rubini, Constance

Doze, Pierre

Krzentowski, Didier

Architecture

JRP|Ringier

On the development of the twisted romantic ballad in contemporary popular song, from Serge Gainsbourg to Tyler, the Creator. Titled after Soft Cell's version of the original 1965 Gloria Jones track, Tainted Love is the first book-length inquiry into the subject of the twisted romantic ballad, giving a sense of both its history and contemporary currency. Sometimes extreme, this twist to the conventional romantic ballad spans across gender and generational boundaries to subvert our understanding of both the genre's function and its behavior. Each chapter of Tainted Love explores a single twisted ballad in depth, examining both its inner workings-lyrics, melody, and vocal approach-and its broader cultural resonance. The analysis developed in the chapters turns on the question- what compels songwriters to compose-and us to listen to-these warped songs? Perhaps the most extreme example of the twisted romantic ballad is Serge Gainsbourg's "Lemon Incest," sung as a duet in 1984 with thirteen-year-old daughter, Charlotte. Playing on the French use of the word zest and its proximity to the word incest, Gainsbourg, ever the provocateur, fashions the ultimate twisted romantic ballad to his daughter. The track's euro-pop eighties' synths provide a cushion for both Gainsbourg's louche rapping and his daughter's high-pitched warble. Close to three decades later, Lana Del Rey's "Off To The Races" pictures a dysfunctional relationship. Underpinned by cloud rap, the track showcases Del Rey's deep, mannered voice as she delivers the lyrics detailing the unusual economy of her romance. In the same period, Tyler, The Creator's "She" details a romantic relationship through the voyeuristic gaze of a previous partner, with the boom-bap beat propelling forward Tyler's rapped lyrics to deliver a further development in the ongoing trajectory of the romantic ballad.

Tainted Love: From Nina Simone to Kendrick Lamar

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Books by Coles, Alex