Product Description: Athletic contests are nearly as old as human society itself. They have grown and flourished across the millennia and around the world, and today form the basis of a global industry worth in excess of six hundred billion dollars. And such games are not just for the players: audiences' fascination with sports also make them a productive sphere through which to consider questions of spectatorship, tribalism and belonging...read more

Product Description: Though most often thought of in prosaic terms--a spilled drink, a fender bender, a slip on an icy street--the accident is a concept with a long and complex philosophical pedigree. From Aristotle to Paul Virilio, the accident--from the Latin, meaning to "fall out"--is something that comes as a surprise, yet must also be planned for and strategically avoided...read more

Product Description: The cultural, social and scientific management of death--how to postpone it, how to prepare for it, what to do with remains, how to remember the deceased--forms the rarely acknowledged framework for the formation of society. Community is only possible if its members avow and disavow, the fact that every one of them will die...read more

Product Description: Two hundred works, including a giant installation of a black widow’s spiderweb that was developed with spider researchers and astrophysicists.

Product Description: When the current cycle of the Maya Long Count calendar concludes on 21 December 2012, the world will end. And so Cabinet offers doomed readers a guide to the brief time that remains. This oversized, beautifully produced wall calendar, featuring artworks by Swedish artists Bigert & Bergström illustrating 12 methods of divination, ignores the familiar holidays in favor of more than 60 significant dates in the history of apocalyptic prophecy...read more

Product Description: Invisible but indispensable, infrastructure is the unsung hero of modernity. A term originally coined in the early twentieth century to refer to the combination of logistics and material necessary for any military operation, the word has come to encompass all the various physical and organizational systems necessary to maintain urban environments, transportation and communication networks, and global commerce...read more

Product Description: As Roland Barthes observed of Abbé Pierre's "zero" haircut, even the most neutral of hairstyles offers a forest of signs. The capacity of hair to attract and radiate meaning permeates not just the history of hairstyles--from the Pharaonic beard of the Egyptians to the ironic mullet of the hipster--but also the rituals, technologies and products that define the world of hair...read more

Product Description: The seclusion of islands has long made them ideal screens for our fantasies and terrors, choice locations for military and scientific assays, and perfect settings for escapes, incarcerations and battles for survival. In consideration of these dynamics, Cabinet 38 features Julia Wolcott discussing islands in science fiction; Jeffrey Kastner on being marooned; Janet Connelly on West Berlin as an island; Simon Rezak on island penal colonies; the story of the "Chinese Princess" Der Ling, a onetime student of Isadora Duncan who set up court on a Mexican island in the 1920s; and an artist project by Jeremy Drummond...read more

Product Description: The traditional landscape genre was radically transformed in the 1960s when many artists stopped merely representing the land and made their mark directly in the environment. Drawn by vast, uncultivated spaces of desert and mountain as well as by post-industrial wastelands, artists such as Michael Heizer, Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson moved earth to create colossal primal symbols...read more

Product Description: This book fully documents the 1960s Land Art movement as well as surveying later examples of environmental art to the present day. Earthworks, environments, performances and actions by artists ranging from Ana Mendieta, Robert Smithson or Walter de Maria in the 1970s-80s to Peter Fend and Mierle Laderman Ukeles in the 1990s are all illustrated with breathtaking photographs, sketches and project notes...read more

Product Description: In the summer of 1973, artist Gordon Matta-Clark discovered that the city of New York occasionally auctioned improbably tiny and frequently inaccessible parcels of land created by zoning eccentricities. Fascinated by these spaces, he bought 15 of them (14 in Queens, and one in Staten Island) for between $25 and $75 each, photographed them and collated the photographs with the appropriate deeds and maps...read more

Product Description: The work of four emerging artists using video, hi- tech plastic resins and DVD are showcased through- out this book. The materials they use are as natural to them as paint and brushes were to earlier generations.