148 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 1901033473
16 x 20 cm English text. Hardcover
City Racing 1988-98, ten years of an artist run gallery in London. How five artists (John Burgess, Pete Owen, Keith Coventry, Paul Noble and Matt Hale) developed a squat into a locally and internationally known gallery giving artists access to an independently run but publicly funded project space. City Racing 1988-98 provides a reflection and overview of the period through collective history, personal recollection, visual and written documentation. Sarah Lucas, Matt Collishaw, Graham Gussin, Fiona Banner, Adam Chodzko are amongst the many artists featured in the book. Price: £16.95
Institute of Cultural Inquiry 2001
136 pages ISBN 1889917044
19 x 23 cm English text. Softcover
Benjamin's Blind Spot: Walter Benjamin and the Premature Death of Aura & ICI Field Notes 5: The Manual of Lost Ideas is the fifth book in a series that explores the methodologies of culture. This volume focuses on Walter Benjamin's concept of auraas it is applied to a wide range of topics. Subjects range from Benjamin's use of hashish to an analysis of Woody Allen's Zelig,from Wallace Stevens to the early recordings of Elvis Presley, and from the dark epiphanies behind Jackson Pollock's work to the question of whether Benjamin's model is even relevant to contemporary issues. In the same volume, presented in the text's margins, is the Manual of Lost Ideas,a massive manuscript that arrived at the Institute of Cultural Inquiry via an anonymous bequest in 1955. Speculated to be thousands of years old, this is the first time the Manual has been published in over two centuries.
Contributors include: Vance Bell, Martin Gantman, David Gross, Erich Hertz, Petra Kuppers, Arturo Ott, Rajeev S. Patke, Lise Patt, Colin Rhodes, Gerhard Richter, Marq Smith, Carsten Strathausen, The Associates of the Institute of Cultural Inquiry. Price: £16.95
Berg 2002
288 pages ISBN 185973538X
13 x 22 cm English text. Softcover
What were Socialist Spaces? The Eastern Bloc produced distinctive spaces, some of which were fashioned into ideological templates, such as the monumental parade grounds and Red Squares where communist leaders could receive tributes, or new factory cities with towering chimneys and glittering palaces of culture. But what of the grimy toilet in the communal apartment or the forlorn ruins left after the Second World War? This book explores the representation, meanings and uses of space in the socialist countries of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union between 1947 and 1991. The essays - written from different disciplinary perspectives - investigate the extent to which actual spaces conformed to the dominant political order in the region. Should, for instance, the creation of private spaces, such as the Russian dacha and the Czech chata, be understood as acts of appropriation in which lives were fashioned against the collective or, alternatively, as "gifts" given by the State in return for quiescence? Whilst monuments and public spaces were designed to relay official ideology, one of the most notable features of the events that marked the end of the Bloc was the way that they became sites of dissent. Examining the myriad ways in which space was used and conceived within socialist society, this book makes a contribution to Eastern European and Soviet Studies and provides a significant new angle on the factors that underpinned socialism's eventual downfall. Price: £14.99
256 pages ISBN 1859735592
13 x 23 cm English text. Softcover
Material culture has finally earned a central place within anthropology. This reader brings together seminal articles that have helped shape the anthropological study of material culture. With topics ranging from the anthropology of art to architecture, landscape studies, archaeology, consumption studies and Heritage management, this text reflects the breadth of material culture studies today. The authors, who discuss field sites as distant as Vanuatu, New Ireland, Trinidad and Soviet Russia, show how material culture provides a new lens for viewing the world around us and effectively bridges the gap between theory and data. Providing a synthesis of these ground-breaking essays in an easily accessible volume, this book should serve as a comprehensive introduction to the subject and a valuable reference guide for anyone interested in material culture, anthropology, art and museum studies. Price: £15.99
Verso 2002
486 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 1859848028
English text. Hardcover
Traversing a varied and enchanting landscape with forays into the fields of geography, art, architecture, design, cartography and film, Giuliana Bruno's Atlas of Emotion is a highly original endeavor to map a cultural history of spatio-visual arts. Throughout these pages Bruno insists on the inseparability of seeing and travelling. In an evocative montage of words and pictures she emphasizes that the voyeur must also be the voyageur, that "sight" and "site" are irrevocably connected. In so doing, she touches on the art of Gerhard Richter and Annette Messagem; the film-making of Peter Greenaway and Michaelangelo Antonioni; the origins of the movie palace and its precursors, the camera obscura, the curiosity cabinet, the tableaux vivant; and on her own journeys to her native Naples. Visually luscious and daring in conception, the journey for which Bruno is our cicerone opens new vistas and understandings at every turn.
"In an exhilarating ride, the reader is transported across this vast hidden landscape to reach a whole new understanding of spatial experience." — Mark Wigley, Professor of Architecture, Columbia University
"A hugely ambitious mapping of the com-plex intertwinings of film, architecture, and the body. We think of film as a predominantly visual medium, but Bruno insists that it is as much about the positioning and movement of the body in space... This adventurous book will be of interest to anyone concerned with what we might call 'mobility studies': the attempt to understand cultural performances not as the manifestation of fixed structures but as the expression of restless energies." — Stephen Greenblatt, Harvard University
Giuliana Bruno is Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University. Her most recent book, Streetwalking on a Ruined Map, was awarded the 1993 Katherine Kovacs prize for the best book in film studies. Price: £35.00
OUT OF STOCK
Semiotext(e) 2002
128 pages ISBN 1584350164
11.5 x 18 cm English text. Softcover
In The Empire of Disorder, Alain Joxe offers the first truly comprehensive analysis of the new world disorder of the twenty-first century. The contemporary world, claims Joxe, is dominated by the American empire but not ordered by it. This "leadership through chaos," based on maintaining a "creeping peace," is at the root of the present organization of violence and barbary on a global scale. At the same time, national governments--including that of the United States--are declining in influence as the imperial system fosters transnational mafias, corporations, and markets. Price: £6.50
The New Press 2002
288 pages ISBN 15847652
19 x 23 cm English text. Hardcover
In his most provocative writing yet, the radical urban theorist Mike Davis explores the combat zone that is contemporary urban America, the site of a perpetual battle waged within cities and against nature. Davis examines themes of urban life today - white flight, housing and job segregation and discrimination - and looks at areas he calls "national sacrifice zones", military landscapes that simulated warfare and arms production have rendered uninhabitable. Davis begins his apocalyptically inflected tour with a trip to New York's Ground Zero and to the diabolic miracle of Las Vegas. Price: £16.95
Routledge 2002
352 pages English text. ISBN 0415228697
23.5 x 15.5 cm English text. Softcover
What is art history? The answer depends on who asks the question. Artists, museum professionals, academics, art critics, collectors and connoisseurs, dealers and auctioneers all share in the goals, achievements, methods and history of art history. Tied to and sustained by a host of competing institutions, art history remains a many-headed field of study.
Art History and Its Institutions focuses on the institutional discourses that shaped and continue to shape the field from its foundation in the nineteenth century. From museums and universities to law courts, labour organisations and photography studios, contributors examine a range of institutions considering their impact on movements such as modernism, their role in conveying or denying legitimacy, and their impact of defining the parameters of the discipline. Price: £16.99
176 pages ISBN 2940271119
17 x 24 cm English text. Softcover Price: £15.95
224 pages ISBN 1859844618
cm English text. Softcover
More than 130 years from Matthew Arnold's pronouncement that human beings "must be compelled to relish the sublime," education in the humanities still relies on the ideal of culture as the means of intellectual development. In this distinctive and original work, Martin Ryle and Kate Soper explore the growing tensions and contradictions between this and the contemporary world of work, pleasure, and consumption.
While critical of the hypocrisies and elitism that can attach to notions of cultural self-realisation, the authors nonetheless defend its overall educational and social value. Their wide-ranging discussion takes in critiques of philosophers from Kant and Schiller to Nietzsche and Marx, and includes historically contextualized readings of novels by Wollstonecraft, Hardy, Gissing, London, and Woolf.
In their sustained defence of a conception of personal worth and self-fulfillment for its own sake, Ryle and Soper not only offer a powerful critique of the continuing dominance of work in contemporary society, but also provide a compelling alternative to the standard postmodern scepticism about the relevance of high culture. Price: £18.00
96 pages ISBN 1859844162
10 x 21 cm English text. Softcover
How would it be if what we take for human advance were simply a technological progress that literally leaves us out of its equations? What if Progress is not humanity striking out bravely towards the future, but an ultimately destructive force?
In a remarkable tour d’horizon, Paul Virilio paints a bleak picture of current scientific, cultural, social and political values. Art has succumbed to the techniques of advertising and in politics, the battle for hearts and minds has become a mere convergence of opinion. TV ratings have triumphed over universal suffrage. The events of September 11 reflect both the manipulation of a global sub-proletariat and the delusions of an élite of rich students and technicians who resemble the ‘suicidal members of the Heaven’s Gate cybersect’. And, in this post-humanist dystopia, we are morally rudderless before the threat of biological manipulations as yet undreamt.
Paul Virilio was made director of the École spéciale d’architecture in Paris in 1975. He has written sixteen books including The Strategy of Deception, War and Cinema, Open Sky, and The Information Bomb. Price: £8.00
152 pages 1859844219
In the months after September 11, titles like "The End of the Age of Irony" abound in our media. Liberals and conservatives proclaim the end of the American holiday from history. Now the easy games are over; one should take sides.
Zizek argues that this is precisely the temptation to be resisted. In such moments of apparently clear choices, the real alternatives are most hidden. Welcome to the Desert of the Real steps back, complicating the choices imposed on us. It proposes that global capitalism is fundamentalist and that America was complicit in the rise of Muslim fundamentalism. It points to our dreaming about the catastrophe in numerous disaster movies before it happened, and explores the irony that the tragedy has been used to legitimize torture. Last but not least it analyses the fiasco of the predominant leftist response to the events.
Slavoj Zizek is Senior Researcher at the Institute for Social Studies in Ljubljana. His books include The Sublime Object of Ideology, The Plague of Fantasies and The Ticklish Subject. Price: £8.00
Generali Foundation 2002
200 pages B&W reproductions ISBN 3883755648
16.5 x 23 cm English/German text. Softcover
contributions by Gerd Arntz, Linda Bilda, Katja Eydel, Das Freie Fach, Gérard Fromager, Global Dustbowl Ballads, Grupo de Arte Callejero, Thomas Kilpper, Ulrike Müller, Charlotte Posenenske, Yvonne Rainer, Patricia Reschenbach, Christoph Schäfer, Dierk Schmidt, Seth Tobocman, Ultra-red, Klaus Weber
This catalogue has been published alongside an exhibition of the same name at the Generali Foundation, Vienna in 2002. It brings together 20 art works from the USA, Argentina and Europe and focuses on the issues of violence and militancy and their relationship to artistic practices. Includes interviews. Price: £18.00
