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

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.