University of California Press 2004
240 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 0520238397
15 x 23 cm English text. Softcover
Some of the most innovative art of the past decade has been created far outside conventional galleries and museums. In a parking garage in Oakland, California; on a pleasure boat on the Lake of Zurich in Switzerland; at a public market in Chiang Mai, Thailand--artists operating at the intersection of art and cultural activism have been developing new forms of collaboration with diverse audiences and communities. Their projects have addressed such issues as political conflict in Northern Ireland, gang violence on Chicago's West Side, and the problems of sex workers in Switzerland. Provocative, accessible, and engaging, this book, one of the first full-length studies on the topic, situates these socially conscious projects historically, relates them to key issues in contemporary art and art theory, and offers a unique critical framework for understanding them.
Grant Kester discusses a disparate network of artists and collectives--including The Art of Change, Helen and Newton Harrison, Littoral, Suzanne Lacy, Stephen Willats, and WochenKlausur--united by a desire to create new forms of understanding through creative dialogue that crosses boundaries of race, religion, and culture. Kester traces the origins of these works in the conceptual art and feminist performance art of the 1960s and 1970s and draws from the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin, Jürgen Habermas, and others as he explores the ways in which these artists corroborate and challenge many of the key principles of avant-garde art and art theory. Price: £15.95
OUT OF STOCK
Rachmaninoff's 2004
41 pages ISBN 0954824008
15 x 21 cm English text. Softcover
'Book is great. Appalling on one level I suppose since I'll never get work again because of it.'
Matthew Collings Price: £5.95
Black Dog Publishing 2004
208 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 1904772056
19 x 25 cm Englsih text. Softcover
This book is the first to present in a single volume a complete guide to one of the most notorious and radical art movements of the 20th century, the Situationist International (SI). Comprising of a comprehensive history that includes an examination of the SI's far-reaching ideas about our 'society of the spectacle', this book also provides an insight into the Situationist legacy together with extensive visual material.
Tracing its development back to the European avant-garde and groups such as COBRA, Lettrism and the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus, Ford provides a comprehensive historical background to the 1957 foundation of the Situationist International under its self-proclaimed leader, the brilliant Guy Debord. Looking at painting, architecture and cinema, Ford includes detailed profiles of the main members such as the Asger Jorn, Constant, Pinot-Gallizio and Ralph Rumney. With its disintegration in 1972 the final chapter looks at how the SI's legacy can be traced within subsequent artistic and activist movements, from punk through to culture jamming and media activism. Price: £19.95
JRP/RINGIER / Les presses du reel 2004
240 pages ISBN 2940271224
An anthology of the artist's important essays, published between 1978 and today in the pages of Artforum, Flash Art and Lawson's own magazine Real Life.
This collection should prove an invaluable tool for understanding the rise of the "Picture Generation" and of the art market in the 80's.
More than any artist/writer of his generation, Thomas Lawson has the make up of a true journalist. He is an embedded correspondent, a polemical editorialist, sending his dispatches to a radically independent media that happens to be his own (or that he makes his own). Lawson always writes in the first person, from the vantage point of someone who is as much an artist, publisher, and occasional curator as he is a writer. Reacting to the ambient hegemony of late modernism and its avant-garde myths, Lawson nevertheless manages to uphold a real oppositional modus operandi, a determination to take sides, to make critical distinctions, attempting along the way to enunciate a progressive position from the very heart of an increasingly reactionary milieu.
This collection of essays focuses on the emergence of appropriationist practices, and includes such seminal texts as "Last Exit Painting." It also features Lawson’s relentless public assault on the then-dominant authorities of art world, be they famous artists such as Julian Schnabel, the influential conservative New York Times critic Hilton Kramer, or even Artforum, for which Lawson was working at the time. Mining for Gold provides a comprehensive narrative of some most trenchant ideological quarrels to have surfaced from within the art world of the 1980s.
Thomas Lawson is an artist and a writer based in Los Angeles. He is the Dean of the School of Art at CalArts, Valencia, California, and an editor of Afterall. Price: £11.00
The MIT Press 2005
216 pages ISBN 156435030X
10.95
Set in post-9/11 New York City, Reena Spaulings was written by a large collective of writers and artists that bills itself as The Bernadette Corporation. Like most contemporary fiction, Reena Spaulings is about a female twenty-something. Reena is discovered while working as a museum guard and becomes a rich international supermodel. Meanwhile, a bout of terrible weather seizes New York, leaving in its wake a strange form of civil disobedience that stirs its citizens to mount a musical song-and-dance riot called "Battle on Broadway." Fashioned in the old Hollywood manner by a legion of professional and amateur writers striving to achieve the ultimate blockbuster, the musical ends up being about a nobody who could be anybody becoming a somebody for everybody. The result is generic and perfect -- not unlike Reena Spaulings itself, whose many authors create a story in which New York itself strives to become the ultimate collective experiment in which the only thing shared is the lack of uniqueness.
The artist-collective Bernadette Corporation was founded in a night club in 1994. In the beginning the group organized spontaneous, purposeless events in public space. In 1995 they morphed into a fashion label, then a self-publishing company that from 1999 to 2001 published an art magazine called Made in USA. Bernadette Corporation has also produced films, including Hell Frozen Over (2000), and Get Rid of Yourself (2003), as well as exhibits at art galleries and museums throughout the world. Price: £10.95
Columbia University Press 2005
282 pages ISBN 0231134045
18.5 x 26 cm English text. Hardcover
"I define the Neutral as that which outplays the paradigm, or rather I call Neutral everything that baffles paradigm." With these words, Roland Barthes describes a concept that profoundly shaped his work and was the subject of a landmark series of lectures delivered in 1978 at the College de France, just two years before his death. Not published in France until 2002, and appearing in English for the first time, these creative and engaging lectures deepen our understanding of Roland Barthes's intellectual itinerary and reveal his distinctive style as lecturer and teacher. The Neutral (le neutre), as Barthes describes it, escapes or undoes the paradigmatic binary oppositions that structure Western thought and discourse. These binaries are found in all aspects of human society ranging from language to sexuality to politics. For Barthes, the attempt to deconstruct or escape from these binaries has profound ethical, philosophical, and linguistic implications. Barthes centers his lectures around twenty-three "figures," also referred to as "traits" or "twinklings," that are possible embodiments of the Neutral (sleep, silence, tact, etc.) or of the anti-Neutral (anger, arrogance, conflict, His lectures draw on a diverse set of authors and intellectual traditions, including Lao-Tzu, Tolstoy, German mysticism, Classical philosophy, Rousseau, Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin, and John Cage. Barthes's idiosyncratic approach gives the lectures a playful and even joyous quality that enhances his rich insights. In addition to his reflections on a variety of literary and scholarly works, Barthes's personal convictions and the events of his life profoundly influenced the course and content of the lectures. Most prominently, the recent death of his mother and the idea of mourning shape several of his lectures. Price: £19.50
d.a.p./C T Editions 1974/ reprinted 2005
336 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 0954707117
15.5 x 22.5 cm English text. Softcover
The original edition of Amos Vogel's seminal book "Film as a Subversive Art" was first published in 1974. According to Vogel the book details the "accelerating worldwide trend toward a more liberated cinema, in which subjects and forms hitherto considered unthinkable or forbidden are boldly explored." So ahead of his time was Vogel that the ideas he penned some thirty years ago are still relevant today, and now readily accessible in this fascimile reprint edition, alongside a new preface by Vogel and foreword by historian Scott MacDonald. Accompanied by over 300 rare film stills, "Film as a Subversive Art" analyzes how aesthetic, sexual, and ideological subversives use one of the most powerful art forms of our day to exchange or manipulate our conscious and unconscious, demystify visual taboos, destroy dated cinematic forms, and undermine existing value systems and institutions. This subversion of form, as well as of content, is placed within the context of the contemporary world view of science, philosophy, and modern art, and is illuminated by a detailed examination of over 500 films, including many banned, rarely seen, or never released works. Price: £16.95
Steidl 2005
680 pages 2 Vols Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 3865211461
22 x 30 cm English/German text. Hardcover
On the occasion of the 50th anniversary, the Kunsthalle Fridericianum is staging a major jubilee exhibition on the multifaceted history of the documenta. The exhibition 50 Jahre / Years documenta 1955 – 2005, curated by Michael Glasmeier, addresses this sometimes contradictory and erratic history from a present-day perspective, choosing a range of approaches and materials. In an endeavour to present as many aspects as possible, the exhibition is divided into five intersecting and complementary sections: an archival chapter, an art history chapter, a site-specific chapter, a film chapter, and a scholarly chapter. It is not a recollective exhibition. It is about dealing productively with an institution that has the task of reflecting each current present.
From the abundance of material available in the documenta Archive of the City of Kassel, a selection has been made for the chapter archive in motion, casting light on historical knowledge about past documenta-exhibitions, presented in eleven separate “chambers”. To stress the living nature of the archive, this selection is backed by works of contemporary artists, offering a broader view of history and demonstrating a creative approach to the archive. Price: £29.95
Chisenhale Gallery 2005
128 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 9163151324
15 x 18.5 cm English text. Softcover
I am a Curator was a major project that empowered the viewer, giving Chisenhale Gallery's visitors the chance to be a curator for one day.
Over the course of six weeks, prospective curators booked a one-day slot at Chisenhale, and each individual was given the opportunity to curate their own exhibition during the course of the day.
Each curator selected artworks housed and indexed in Support Structure, an environment designed by architect Celine Condorelli and artist-curator Gavin Wade. Support Structure operated as a facilitating system for the show that also adjusted Chisenhale's industrial space.
Within Support Structure there was a large and diverse pool of work available to each curator: sculpture, video, ephemeral works, sound pieces, painting, performance proposals, drawing, social intervention and action descriptions. Support Structure was augmented by artist Scott Rigby’s card system that enabled daily curators to plan the selection of their exhibition.
The result of I am a Curator was 30 separately curated exhibitions, each being documented and presented on this section of the gallery's website.
I am a Curator was an ambitious experiment in democratising the curatorial process. For Huttner, democracy comes with great responsibility, and his project sought to encourage a dialogue about the complexity of the curatorial process. It also aimed to engage the visitor in a debate about the limits of interpretation of an artwork. The project began with the question: what are the intentions of the artist, and are those intentions more truthful than the interpretation of the visitor? Price: £10.00
Semiotext(e) 2005
248 pages ISBN 1584350288
15 x 22 cm English text. Softcover
The images from Abu Ghraib are as murderous for America as those of the World Trade Center in flames. The whole West is contained in the burst of sadistic laughter of the American soldiers, as it is behind the construction of the Israeli wall. This is where the truth of these images lies. Truth, but not veracity. As virtual as the war itself, their specific violence adds to the specific violence of the war.
In The Conspiracy of Art, Baudrillard questions the privilege attached to art by its practitioners. Art has lost all desire for illusion: feeding back endlessly into itself, it has turned its own vanishment into an art unto itself. Far from lamenting the "end of art," Baudrillard celebrates art's new function within the process of insider-trading. Spiraling from aesthetic nullity to commercial frenzy, art has become transaesthetic, like society as a whole.
Conceived and edited by life-long Baudrillard collaborator Sylvère Lotringer, The Conspiracy of Art presents Baudrillard's writings on art in a complicitous dance with politics, economics, and media. Culminating with "War Porn," a scathing analysis of the spectacular images from Abu Ghraib prison as a new genre of reality TV, the book folds back on itself to question the very nature of radical thought.
Born in Reims in 1929 to a family of French peasants, French theorist Jean Baudrillard has challenged all existing theories and visions of contemporary society with radical humor and great precision. An outsider within the French intellectual establishment, Baudrillard is internationally renowned as a twenty-first century visionary, reporter, and provocateur. Price: £9.95
120 pages ISBN 1584350202
There is a catastrophe within contemporary art. What I call the "optically correct" is at stake. The vision machine and the motor have triggered it, but the visual arts haven't learned from it. Instead, they've masked this failure with commercial success. This "accident" is provoking a reversal of values. In my view, this is positive: the accident reveals something important we would not otherwise know how to perceive.
-- Paul Virilio, The Accident of Art
Urbanist and technological theorist Paul Virilio trained as a painter, studying under Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, Bazaine and de Stael. In The Accident of Art, his third extended conversation with Sylvère Lotringer, Virilio addresses the situation of art within technological society for the first time. This book completes a collaborative trilogy the two began in 1982 with Pure War and continued with Crepuscular Dawn, their 2002 work on architecture and biotechnology.
In The Accident of Art, Virilio and Lotringer argue that a direct relation exists between war trauma and art. Why has art failed to reinvent itself in the face of technology, unlike performing art? Why has art simply retreated into painting, or surrendered to digital technology? Accidents, Virilio claims, can free us from speed's inertia. As technological catastrophes, accidents are inventions in their own right.
Sylvère Lotringer is Professor of French Literature at Columbia University. He is the coauthor, with Jean Baudrillard, of Forget Foucault (1987) and coeditor, with Chris Kraus, of Hatred of Capitalism: A Semiotext(e) Reader (2001). He frequently lectures on art.
Paul Virilio is considered the most important theorist of technology since Heidegger. Beginning with Speed and Politics (1977), his books have transformed our understanding of the nature of velocity, politics, relativity, space, and time. Price: £9.95
JRP Ringier 2006
280 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 3905701006
This publication reunites Mike Kelley's major interviews with artists and cultural figures such as AA Bronson, Larry Clark, Kim Gordon, Thurston Moore, Jutta Koether, Harmony Korine, Tony Oursler, Richard Prince, Jim Shaw, Michael Smith, Jeffrey Sconce, and John Waters, outlining, in the same manner as his critical essays, an artistic genealogy that draws its references from American popular culture, scientific and historical research, and the inhibitions of Western society.
The volume is introduced by a new interview between the editor, John C. Welchman, and Mike Kelley. Price: £10.00
Berg 2004
240 pages ISBN 1859738281
15.5 x 23.5 cm English text. Softcover
Vision is typically treated as the defining sense organ of the modern era and a powerful vehicle for colonial and postcolonial domination. In this it stands in marked contrast to the almost total absence of accounts of hearing in larger cultural processes.
Hearing Cultures is a timely examination of the elusive, often evocative, and sometimes cacophonous auditory sense – from the intersection of sound and modernity through to the relationship between audio-technological advances and issues of personal and urban space. As cultures and communities grapple with the massive changes wrought by modernization and globalization, Hearing Cultures presents an important new approach to understanding our world. Price: £15.99
Verso 2004
240 pages ISBN 1844670015
14 x 19 .5 cm English text. Hardcover
In order to render the strange logic of dreams, Freud quoted the old joke about the borrowed kettle: (1) I never borrowed a kettle from you, (2) I returned it to you unbroken, (3) the kettle was already broken when I got it from you. Such an enumeration of inconsistent arguments, of course, confirms exactly what it endeavors to deny—that I returned a broken kettle to you …
That same inconsistency, Zizek argues, characterized the justification of the attack on Iraq, whereby a link between Saddam’s regime and al-Qaeda was transformed into the threat posed by the regime to the region, which was then further transformed into the threat posed to everyone (but the US and Britain especially) by weapons of mass destruction. When no significant weapons were found, we were treated to the same bizarre logic: OK, the two labs we found don’t really prove anything, but even if there are no WMD in Iraq, there are other good reasons to topple a tyrant like Saddam . . .
Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle analyzes the background that such inconsistent argumentation conceals and, simultaneously, cannot help but highlight: what were the actual ideological and political stakes of the attack on Iraq? In classic Zizekian style, it spares nothing and nobody, neither pathetically impotent pacifism nor hypocritical sympathy with the suffering of the Iraqi people. Price: £16.00
Zone Books 2004
250 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 1890951439
16 x 23.5 cm English text. Hardcover
Imagine a world without things. There would be nothing to describe, nothing to explain, remark, interpret, or complain about. Without things, we would stop speaking; we would become as mute as things are alleged to be. In nine original essays, internationally renowned historians of art and of science seek to understand how objects become charged with significance without losing their gritty materiality. True to the particularity of things, each of the essays singles out one object for close attention: a Bosch drawing, the freestanding column, a Prussian island, soap bubbles, early photographs, glass flowers, Rorschach blots, newspaper clippings, paintings by Jackson Pollock. Each is revealed to be a node around which meanings accrete thickly. But not just any meanings: what these things are made of and how they are made shape what they can mean. Neither the pure texts of semiotics nor the brute objects of positivism, these things are saturated with cultural significance. Things become talkative when they fuse matter and meaning; they lapse into speechlessness when their matter and meanings no longer mesh.
Each of the nine evocative objects examined in this book had its historical moment, when the match of this thing to that thought seemed irresistible. At these junctures, certain things become objects of fascination, association, and endless consideration; they begin to talk. Things that talk fleetingly realize the dream of a perfect language, in which words and world merge. Price: £22.95
Continuum 2004
256 pages ISBN 082646940X
14.5 x 22.5 cm English text. Softcover
Luce Irigaray is one of the world’s most influential theorists. From her early ground-breaking work on linguistics to her later revolutionary work on the ethics of sexual difference, Irigaray has positioned herself as one of the essential thinkers of our time. This collection of key writings, selected by Luce Irigaray herself, presents a complete picture of her work to date across the fields of Philosophy, Linguistics, Spirituality, Art and Politics. An indispensable work for students of philosophy, literary theory, feminist theory, linguistics and cultural studies.
Table of Contents
Part I PHILOSOPHY
1. You will never be mine
2. The wedding between the body & language
3. Approaching the other as other
4. The intimate requires separate dwellings
Part II LINGUISTICS
5. Toward a grammar of enunciation for hysterics
6. Being two outside tomorrow
7. Beyond all judgement, you are
8. Towards a Sharing of Speech
Part III SPIRITUALITY
9. The redemption of women
10. The age of breath
11. Spiritual Tasks for our Age
12. On Old & New Tablets
Part IV ART
13. A future horizon for art
14. The colours of flesh
15. How can we live together in a lasting way
16. Before and beyond any word
Part V POLITICS
17. Civil rights & responsibilities for the two sexes
18. How can you speak together in socialism's horizon
19. How to manage the transition
20. Politics and happiness
Bibliography Price: £19.99
Semiotext(e) 2004
160 pages ISBN 1584350229
15.5 x 23 cm English text. Softcover
Video Green examines the explosion of late 1990s Los Angeles art driven by high-profile graduate programs. Probing the surface of art-critical buzzwords, Chris Kraus brilliantly chronicles how the City of Angels has suddenly become the epicentre of the international art world and a microcosm of the larger culture. Why is Los Angeles so completely divorced from other realities of the city? Shrewd, analytic and witty, Video Green is to the Los Angeles art world what Roland Barthes' Mythologies were to the society of the spectacle: the live autopsy of a ghost city.
"It is a nondescript day, all emptiness and breathless heat, and I'm driving through Fontana, east along the 10. There are a lot of billboards, Smelly Credit? Pssst, I'm at Flesh. The Spearmint Rhino ad girl gazes straight ahead, all ivory and pink and I'm wondering how her face achieves its state of pornographic blankness. Unlike the blankness of contemporary art, which references the futility of gesture, her vacancy is a verb and the viewer its direct object. Her face says, Come all over me."
--from Video Green
"More anthropologist than art historian, Chris Kraus skewers the received ideas of LA neo-conceptualism: beauty, ambiguity, and the yawning vacancy of the technological sublime."
--Charlie Finch, Artnet
Chris Kraus is the author of I Love Dick and Aliens & Anorexia, and co-editor of Hatred of Capitalism: A Semiotext(e) Reader. Index called her "one of the most subversive voices in American fiction." Her work has been praised for its damning intelligence, vulnerability and dazzling speed. Price: £9.95
Chiba Museum of Art, Chiba 2003
306 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 4925022172
18x26cm English text. Softcover
A full retrospective of Graham's forty year history, including over 35 of his major works ranging from his early pictures and performances to his most recent installations. Many of the works are discussed in detail and pictured from various angles. Graham himself contributed an interview and worked closely with the curators to put together this exhibition; this associated catalogue printed on mat white and grey paper. The shiny mirror cover reflects correctly the writing printed backwards on the inside of the dust jacket. Price: £33.00
Thames and Hudson 2004
294 pages ISBN 0500976449
Dan Flavin (1933-1996) was one of the most significant and influential artists of his generation. His radical use of fluorescent light during and beyond the 1960s forever changed the definitions and boundaries of sculptural practice. Flavin stood alone in art practice; he was neither a painter nor a sculptor, but occupied a place somewhere between sculpture and installation. It Is What It Is fills a timely gap on reading available on Dan Flavin. Paula Feldman and Karsten Schubert have pieced together a chronological anthology spanning four decades. It contains 59 essays and reviews, a number of which are published here for the first time in English, charting the gradual evolution of a consensus about the meaning of Flavin's art. The authors include some of the most influential art historians, critics and artists of today. This comprehensive volume uncovers the formidable challenge posed to these authors of writing about an artist and an artform for which they had no pre-rehearsed discourse to rely on. It is an indispensable anthology on one of the central figures of Minimalism. Price: £15.95
NAi 2004
222 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 9056623826
18.5 x 23.5 cm English text. Softcover
There is a yearning for security in today's public domain. The individual and the community are increasingly demanding protection from and control over the space, themselves and others. A society of control is looming, but one lacking a clear idea about the nature and the origin of its underlying fears. This cahier examines the consequences of the current preoccupation with security for the public space and the visual arts. What are the implications for the functioning of the public domain, for its arrangement,
design and experience? And how does this influence the task and perception of art? From art, architecture, philosophy and politics come theoretical and practical scenarios, proposals and visions that expose something of today's security paradigm, advocate alternative (conceptual) models or offer insights into the current ethics and aesthetics of security.Gijs van Oenen subjects the 'new securityscape' to a critical analysis. Lieven De Cauter digs into the various strata of the new fear. Sean Snyder presents images from his Temporary Occupation project. Thomas Y. Levin looks at how artists deal with surveillance in the public space. Sven Lütticken reflects on the concept of a 'human park' in philosophy, art and media. Harm Tilman focuses on architecture in a society of control. Mark Wigley analyses the issue of security in relation to the World Trade Center buildings in New York. Hans Boutellier wishes art would apply the brakes to the security Utopia. Jouke Kleerebezem calls for vigilance in the information society. Willem van Weelden discusses the <re-start> project in Kanaleneiland, Utrecht. Q.S. Serafijn shows multiple dimensions of the interactive D-Tower in Doetinchem. Mark Wigley dissects the abode of the Unabomber. Price: £15.95
National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University 2004
220 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 0974638307
18.5 x 23.5 cm Englsih text. Softcover
Whether it's copyright issues such as digital copying and file-sharing, shifting social sensitivities or shrinking cultural endowments, the battle lines over free expression in the arts seem to be redrawn on a weekly basis. In response, the National Arts Journalism Program in November 2002 convened "The New Gatekeepers: A Conference on Free Expression in the Arts" at Columbia University. The event explored a significant yet subtle shift in American culture, which has reconfigured the ranks of those who decide what the public gets to see, read and hear.
Traditionally, debates about free expression in the arts have been political and legal in nature, sparked by government and special-interest groups wielding legislation, prosecution or other means, to control artists' output-with the First Amendment often coming to the rescue. Today, many cases tend to be less stark, more nuanced and considerably more confusing for everyone involved. The essays in this volume-by artists, scholars, journalists, lawyers and art advocates, as well as foundation, museum and entertainment industry executives-expand upon the ideas introduced at The New Gatekeepers conference. They consider how recent social, political, legal, economic and technological developments are placing fresh constraints on the way art is created and distributed to the public.
contributing writers include: Amy Adler, Peggy Ahwesh', Maxwell L. Anderson, Carol Becker, Roberto Bedoya, Misha Berson, Michael Brenson, Timothy Cahill, Olivia Cohen-Cutler, Jeffrey Day, Todd Gitlin, Marian A. Godfrey, Rochelle Gurstein, Marjorie Heins, Beryl Howell, Allan M. Jalon, Henry Jenkins, Lawrence Lessig, David Lowenthal, Charles C. Mann, Richard Masur , Louis Menand, Casey Nelson Blake, Roger K. Newman, Mary Jo Palumbo, Shira Perlmutter, Saralyn Reece Hardy, Breck Rice, Mark Schapiro, Betty Shamieh, Elda Silva, Gigi Sohn, Cass R. Sunstein, Steven J. Tepper, Jenny Toomey, Siva Vaidhyanathan , Hollis Walker, Jon Wiener and Douglas Wolk Price: £16.95
Episode Publishers 2003
160 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 905973002X
15 x 22 cm English text.Hardcover
This publication is based on a thesis that studies global mobility and territories in dispersion. Based in Rotterdam, Diego Barajas concentrates his research on the urban dispersals shaped by migration, looking first at the Cape Verdean Diaspora and its territorial structure, and then focused on the case of the 'belhuis' - 'call-house'.
By 'territories in dispersion', Barajas refers to social habitats that are no longer physically contained in geographically continuous areas, but have been spread out and re-articulated by artificial means. The de-territorialized condition created by increased mobility - particularly by migration - had led to an urbanism of artificial re-territorializaton. This is a functional urbanism - as based on mental constructions but tangible - that is manifested in the city as fragments, micro environments of global circuits, each of which establishes its own identity, time, rules and aesthetics - its own atmospheres. Price: £15.00
After two successful debates FeedBack team is proud to present the first illustrated publication funded from the Research Fund, Department of Visual Arts, Goldsmiths College. FeedBack O-1 first issue includes the results of the FeedBack 0 and Feedback 1 projects, which took place at the Whitechapel March 2003 - March 2004, and the material (articles, short essays, visuals, ideas etc) sent to FeedBack as a response to an open call for the publication. The publication analyses the acknowledged responses and includes various material relative to the project. FeedBack 0-1 publication concentrates on two main areas on which the audience was invited to comment openly and contribute ideas or its experience (either as curator, artist or spectator). The areas were:
Equation/relationship between curator, artist and audience
Process based projects and Participatory projects
Articles include:Tactful Curating, Gair Boase, Question: Who's Afraid of Definition, Answer: Curators, Julienne Lorz, Relational Desire: The "Real" Symptom. A Lacanian Treatment on Spectatorship, Sotiris Bahtsetzis, Art Labour and Art Work: Notes on the Status of Labour in Art, Zuky Serper, A Black Box on Ground Zero: Does Enwezor's Ground Zero signal the end of curatorial authority?, Konstantinos Stafilakis, Home Galleries in Crisis, Kostis Velonis, Rewiring Waiting: Housing Benefit, Static Utopia and Real Bureaucracy, Andy Weir Price: £3.50
272 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. |SBN 0500285071
18.5 x 25.5 cm English text. Softcover
Enduring Creation is a startlingly original book. The representation of pain is among the most pervasive in Western art, yet one that has been almost entirely shunned by critics and historians. Nigel Spivey investigates the theme in a perceptive and eloquent exposition that ranges from the Christian martyrs to Munch’s seminal The Scream and the horrors of the Holocaust.
Enduring Creation triggers and explores in depth a host of complicated questions surrounding the motivations of artists and the psychology of our response. Can pain be beautiful? Do we always pity suffering?
The result is a brilliantly innovative work of cultural history, and one of those rare books that makes the past come alive by creating a persistent sense that it is of pressing relevance today. Price: £16.95
The MIT Press 2004
336 pages ISBN 026212260X
21 x 23.5 cm English text. Hardcover
In the 1960s art fell out of time; both artists and critics lost their temporal bearings in response to what E. M. Cioran called "not being entitled to time." This anxiety and uneasiness about time, which Pamela Lee calls "chronophobia," cut across movements, media, and genres, and was figured in works ranging from kinetic sculptures to Andy Warhol films. Despite its pervasiveness, the subject of time and 1960s art has gone largely unexamined in historical accounts of the period. Chronophobia is the first critical attempt to define this obsession and analyse it in relation to art and technology.
Lee discusses the chronophobia of art relative to the emergence of the Information Age in post-war culture. The accompanying rapid technological transformations, including the advent of computers and automation processes, produced for many an acute sense of historical unknowing; the seemingly accelerated pace of life began to outstrip any attempts to make sense of the present. Lee sees the attitude of 1960s art to time as a historical prelude to our current fixation on time and speed within digital culture. Reflecting upon the 1960s cultural anxiety about temporality, she argues, helps us historicize our current relation to technology and time.
After an introductory framing of terms, Lee discusses such topics as "presentness" with respect to the interest in systems theory in 1960s art; kinetic sculpture and new forms of global media; the temporality of the body and the spatialization of the visual image in the paintings of Bridget Riley and the performance art of Carolee Schneemann; Robert Smithson's interest in seriality and futurity, considered in light of his reading of George Kubler's important work The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things and Norbert Wiener's discussion of cybernetics; and the endless belaboring of the present in sixties art, as seen in Warhol's Empire and the work of On Kawara. Price: £22.95
160 pages B&W reproductions.ISBN 0826469922
17 x 23.5 cm English text. Softcover
Hélène Cixous is one of the most brilliant and radical of contemporary theorists. This is the first publication in any language of Cixous’ own Notebooks, illustrating the concept of “écriture féminine” and offering new insights into Cixous’ theoretical insistence on writing and her own practice as a writer.
Cixous’ Notebooks exemplify how writing creates unique possibilities for circumventing the mistruths that shape us as subjects and which organize our relations with the world.
The Writing Notebooks opens with an introduction which outlines the central points of Cixous’ notion of writing. The main body of the work is comprised of 60 photographic extracts from the Notebooks, each extract accompanied by editorial annotation and a translation into English. The book concludes with a new interview with Cixous on the value of the Notebooks, the process of writing and her own fiction.
Cixous’ Notebooks will be invaluable to students of literature, psychoanalysis, philosophy and feminism. Price: £14.99
Blackwell Publishing 2004
480 pages ISBN 0631228675
17 x 24.5 cm English text. Softcover
“This is a much-needed primer on the role of critical thought in the art of the last twenty years. At a time when some have mourned – or alternatively celebrated – the death of art theory, this valuable anthology traces its viability – indeed, its necessity – for understanding recent aesthetic practice.” Pamela Lee
Theory in Contemporary Art since 1985 is a groundbreaking anthology that captures the essence and the edge of the contemporary art scene. It provides the first truly comprehensive and international anthology of theory in contemporary art of the last two decades and brings together a broad selection of important contributions to the fields of contemporary art, theory, and culture from established and emergent art voices, including scholars, curators, critics, and artists from around the globe.
Theory in Contemporary Art since 1985 focuses on key theoretical and aesthetic issues in contemporary art, such as cultural/multicultural theory, identity politics, AIDS, post-colonialism, globalisation, and spectatorship. Price: £18.99
Witte de With 2004
164 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 9073362571
Contemporary Arab Representations is a long-term project which includes seminars, publications, performances and presentations of works by various authors - visual artists, architects, writers and poets, filmmakers and intellectuals. This second issue of Tamáss focuses on the contemporary situation in Cairo and in Egypt, with its deep-rooted geographical, social and historical traditions. It explores contemporary cultural situations in the Middle East through essays, fiction, drawings and illustration by leading contemporary cultural practitioners.
Works by Randa Shaath, Golo, Gema Martin Munoz, Asef Bayat, Hassan Khan, Mona Zakaria, Mohamed Abla, Anna Boghiguian, Mustafa Dhikri, Ala’Khaled, Hala Nammar, Khawla el-Hadid, Abdul Aziz el-Sebaay, Sherif el-Azma, Safaa Fathy, Hani Rashed Price: £20.00
inIVA 2004
264 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 1899846344
18 x 23.5 cm English text. Softcover
A distinctive voice in art criticism since the 1960s, Guy Brett has followed an independent path in mapping and interpreting contemporary art. Always informed by a trans-national perspective and positioning himself as an open-minded observer rather than a theorist, he sees art as a liberating force within contemporary life and thought. Instrumental in making the work of Latin American artists accessible to a wider public, Brett includes seminal essays on key Latin American practitioners, as well as texts that explore the cross-cultural and experimental diversity of the London art scene since the 1960s. Linked to these individual studies are wide-ranging and imaginative writings on the nature of decorative art, the figure of the angel in Latin American 'colonial' painting, art as sanctuary, and the question of British identity.The relationship between art and life and the inadequacy of dualistic thinking are two of the recurrent themes that link the multitude of individual voices, senses of beauty, strategies and investigations presented in this anthology. Carnival of Perception traces the outlines of a collective reality, expressed in a play of wit and spirit, full of paradox and reversal.Guy Brett has written extensively for the art press and has organised a number of notable international exhibitions.
Featured artists: Rasheed Araeen, Derek Boshier, Lygia Clark, Juan Davila, Eugenio Dittborn, John Dugger, Rose Finn-Kelcey, Mona Hatoum, Susan Hiller, Tina Keane, David Medalla, Hélio Oiticica, Gabriel Orozco, Hannah O’Shea, Cornelia Parker, João Penalva, Carlyle Reedy and Takis. Price: £14.99
