In this important book, the influential film-maker and writer Peter Gidal shows how Blow Job is a film about film, about time and also about mortality. Gidal places Blow Job within a history of works by artists, including Duchamp and Velázquez, that directly affect the viewer, enacting a pattern of recognition and loss that constitutes the experience of perception itself.

Ilya Kabakov's 1988 installation The Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment presents an isolated dreamer who develops an impossible project - to fly alone in outer space.

In Joan Jonas's 1976 video work I Want to Live in the Country (And Other Romances) the artist investigates a geography of displacement and irrefutable desires.

In 1971 Alighiero e Boetti commissioned Afghan embroiderers to create a map of the world, with each country bearing the colours and pattern of its flag. The commission grew into a beautifully crafted, large-scale series of maps produced over a period of twenty years in Kabul, Afghanistan and Peshawar, Pakistan.

In this book, Terry R. Myers takes on the challenge of reading this outwardly simple painting. Pretty in pink, and tenaciously painted black, Save the Last Dance for Me brings Heilmann's rigorous approach to painting and her attitude toward the personal expression of sorow and joy together to create an important and influential work, within painting and beyond.

Hollis Frampton's film (nostalgia), made in 1971, is a witty, hypnotic account of an artist's experiences as a photographer in New York City from 1959 to 1966.

In 1968, toward the end of a decade that witnessed civil rights protests, the escalation of the war in Vietnam and an expanded notion of artistic practice, Yvonne Rainer presented her evening-length work, The Mind is a Muscle, a multipart performance for seven dancers interspersed with film and text. Catherine Wood examines the political and media context in which Rainer chose to use the dance-theatre situation and analyses her radical approach to image-making in live form.

By rephotographing an image from a magazine to make his 1977 work Untitled (couple), Richard Prince extracted the uncanny from the generic.

The Way Things Go (Der Lauf der Dinge, 1987) is a thirty-minute film by Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss featuring a series of chain reactions involving ordinary objects.

Olivier Richon provides a detailed examination of Walker Evans’s now-iconic 1936 photograph Kitchen Corner; in doing so he reveals an unexpected set of visual and literary associations that lie beneath the surface.

Walker Evans’s Kitchen Corner, Tenant Farmhouse, Hale County, Alabama shows a painstakingly clean-swept corner in the house of a family of white sharecroppers.

An examination of a work that captures the spirit of the 1980s—commodification, seduction, and political inactivity.In Jeff Koons's One Ball Total Equilibrium Tank (1985), a Spalding basketball floats in the center of a glass tank that stands on a four-legged black metal structure. It has been called one of the defining works of the 1980s—