In this ambitious theoretical encounter with five imaginary artists from the 1980s, John Roberts produces a set of richly constructed artistic thought experiments. But in creating the work on the page these thought experiments are not thereby novelistic fictions. On the contrary, the fictiveness of each artist's work and biography is formed from Roberts's critical engagement with the historical and theoretical determinates of the work he has created - artwork and its theoretical engagement forming an interdependent whole.

This new title reproduces two complete sets (1916 and 1936) of official Admiralty plans .

The destruction of the HMS Hood by the Bismarck in 1941 was one of the most shocking episodes in the history of the Royal Navy. Built during World War I, the Hood was the largest, fastest and one of the most handsome capital ships in the world. For the first time, this volume in the renowned Anatomy of a Ship series is available in paperback, and features a detailed description of every aspect of the beloved battlecruiser. In addition to analysing the genesis of its design and contemporary significance, this exceptional study provides the finest documentation of the Hood, with a complete...

Launched in 1906, HMS Dreadnought was the first 'all-big-gun' battleship and as such revolutionised battleship design for more than a generation. She was built at Portsmouth in 14 months, a record which has never been equalled, and when she was launched she was superior in both firepower and speed to anything then afloat. Perhaps even more radical than her design was the proposal to adopt Parsons turbines, which at the time had been hardly tested. Though she saw little action during her career, her influence was profound and she gave her name to a class of ship that dominated the high...

Across a powerfully wide-ranging set of themes, theoretical registers and historical examples, John Roberts analyses the key problems that continue to confront art after conceptual art, in the light of art’s longstanding relationship to market and institution the commodity and mass culture: namely, artistic labour and technology, modernity and the ‘new’, art and negation, identity and subjectivity, agency and audience, form and value. In these terms, the book provides a rigorous and ambitious, examination of the limits and possibilities of art’s contribution to emancipatory discourse...