Michael Bracewell

Notorious for his continually subversive takes on classical dance, Michael Clark is without doubt one of the most important dancers and choreographers of our time. He has created some of contemporary dance’s finest productions, often using leftfield rock music (most famously in his fantastic collaboration with The Fall, I Am Kurious, Oranj). Situated at the heart of the British post-punk art scene, Clark is much admired for his judicious choice of collaborators, such as designers Bodymap and Hussein Chalayan, artists Cerith Wyn Evans, Leigh Bowery, Charles Atlas and Sarah Lucas, film director Peter Greenaway (Clark played Caliban in Prospero’s Books) and bands The Fall, Laibach and Wire. This monograph, the first on this major artist, celebrates the whole of Michael Clark’s career to date, from the late 1970s to the present. Rich in visual and archival material, it contains new essays on Clark’s work, reprints of key texts and journalism, photography by Nick Knight, David LaChappelle and others, plus interviews with many of Clark’s collaborators from the worlds of dance, art, fashion and music. A protegé of Richard Alston and Karol Armitage, Michael Clark set up his own dance company in 1984, at the age of 22. He immediately won the admiration of Rudolf Nureyev, who commissioned ballets from Clark for the repertoire at the Paris Opera. Clark has also been the subject of numerous films and documentaries, including the fictional biography Hail the New Puritans by Charles Atlas and The Late Michael Clark, directed by Sophie Fiennes. Michael Clark’s new ballet opens in June at the Biennale in Venice, and travels to Edinburgh, Stockholm, Paris and, in late October, to the Barbican in London.

Stezaker attended the Slade School of Art in London in his early teens, he graduated with a Higher Diploma in Fine Art in 1973. In the early 1970s, he was among the first wave of British conceptual artists to react against what was then the predominance of Pop art. Solo exhibitions for Stezaker were rare for some time, however, in the mid-2000s, his work was rediscovered by the art market; he is now collected by several international collectors and museums. Made across a 32-year span, the works in Tabula Rasa unite the central themes in the art of celebrated British artist John Stezaker, from the capacities of collage to the current flow in an age of mass media. This volume brings silkscreens on canvas from the early 1990s and film still collages from the 1990s and 2009 together for the first time. An essay by art critic and cultural commentator Michael Bracewell looks at the connections within Stezaker's practice, centering on notions of screens, voids and cut-outs.

An electrifying, trenchant meditation on England's pop sensibility, England Is Mine shows the novelist and critic Michael Bracewell on blistering form as he hops from Oscar Wilde to Paul Weller, Goldie to Graham Greene, in a dizzyingly erudite cultural history. Bracewell's eye is unswervingly democratic, as, for example, W. H. Auden ('grandfather of the robot dandys') is to be found sitting next to David Bowie ('a sort of Mod from Mars'). He is also intensely funny: who was it that '[covered] the territory of Angela Carter's Company of Wolves in the guise of a pre-Raphaelite raised on Jackie'? Kate Bush, of course. Through impassioned argument and an insight both hilarious and surgical (note Oasis's veneration of the Beatles as 'an example of England's nostalgia for Englishness as a kind of heritage pop') England Is Mine offers a genuinely unique and, more importantly, cogent take on England's pop history.

Written with the assistance, for the first time, of all of those involved, including Bryan Ferry, Brian Eno, Andy Mackay and Phil Manzanera; the fashion designer Antony Price, the founding guru of pop art, and Bryan Ferry's tutor, Richard Hamilton, and many more, Roxy is also the account of how pop art, the avant garde underground of the 1960s, and the heady slipstream of London in the sixties was transformed into the fashion cults of revivalism, nostalgia and pop futurism in the early 1970s.

On the occasion of the 33rd anniversary of the famed Benicassim/ Rock Werchter music festival, along with the upcoming exhibition in the Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels, this book explores the 'unknown' visual side of some of the most popular faces of rock and pop bands, giving an insight into the genesis of their music. Most of the bands have linked contemporary art in their lyrics and songwriting and have engaged in productive crossovers. The book compiles the artworks of bands and musicians from the 70's until today, musicians for whom visual art is yet another strung in their creative process. It features 20 artists including: Brian Eno, Yoko Ono, Laurie Anderson, Patti Smith, the Residents, The Kills, Devendra Banhart, Anthony and the Johnsons, Chicks on Speed, Miss Kitten, Fischerspooner, Nick Zinner (Yeah Yeah Yeahs), Pete Doherty, David Byrne...

Gilbert & George are a renowned collaborative art duo, consisting of Gilbert Prousch and George Passmore. They have been working together since 1967 and are known for their formal appearance and brightly coloured, graphic-style photo-based artworks. Their art often challenges social taboos and explores themes of modern life with a unique blend of formality and paradox. Published to coincide with a major exhibition at Tate Modern, it includes an illustrated chronology and bibliography designed by the artists and offers an affordable and comprehensive introduction to two of the most significant artists working today.

He's the only person to whom The Velvet Underground ever played as an audience of one, the first British writer to talk to Patti Smith after her seventeen-year hiatus from rock. One reviewer hailed his previous book England is Mine as "surely the strangest and most beautiful book on pop music ever written." Greil Marcus said that even the "merely superb" passages of that book read like "intellectual sunrises," calling the work "intoxicated and intoxicating." The author in question is Michael Bracewell, celebrated surveyor of the punk and rock scenes. Now, through funny, engaging, and occasionally devastating essays about his experience in the thick of the music scene of the 1990s, Bracewell tackles a decade where Greed became disguised as Attitude, where a "cozy, urban feelgood fable" replaced punk, and where the role of anxiety, so intrinsic to the culture and music of the 1980s, was swapped for a shallow "I feel your pain" sensibility. Read When Surface Was Depth and discover why Time Out has called Michael Bracewell, in a word, "terrific."