Pocket Essentials 2006
158 pages ISBN 9781904048619
13 x 19 cm English text. Hardcover
Psychogeography. Increasingly this term is used to illustrate a bewildering array of ideas from key lines and the occult, to urban walking and political radicalism. But where does it come from and what exactly does it mean? This book examines the origins of Psychogeography in the Situationist Movement of the 1950s, exploring the theoretical background and its political applications as well as the work of early practitioners such as Guy Debord and Raoul Vaneigem. Elsewhere, psychogeographic ideas continue to find retrospective validation in much earlier traditions from the visionary writing of William Blake and Thomas De Quincey to the rise of the flaneur on the streets of 19th century Paris and on through the avant-garde experimentation of the Surrealists. These precursors to Psychogeography are discussed here alongside their modern counterparts, for today these ideas hold greater currency than ever through the popularity of writers and filmmakers such as Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd, Stewart Home and Patrick Keiller. From Urban Wandering to Cognitive Mapping, from the Derive to Detournement, "Psychogeography" provides us with new ways of apprehending our surroundings, transforming the familiar streets of our everyday experience into something new and unexpected. This guide conducts the reader through this process, offering both an explanation and definition of the terms involved, an analysis of the key figures and their work as well as practical information on Psychogeographical groups and organisations.
RRP 9.99
10% online price saviing Price: £8.99
Princeton Architectural Press 1992
390 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 1878271083
14.5 x 23cm English text. Softcover
Sexuality and Space's interdisciplinary essays address gender in relation to architectural discourse and critical theory, focusing on finding the close relationships between sexuality and space hidden within everyday practices. The contributors are Jennifer Bloomer, Victor Burgin, Beatriz Colomina, Elizabeth Grosz, Catherine Ingraham, Meaghan Morris, Laura Mulvey, Molly Nesbit, Alessandra Ponte, Lynn Spigel, Patricia White, and Mark Wigley. Price: £17.95
OUT OF STOCK
Baltic 2001
128 pages Colour and B&W reproductions.ISBN 190365503X
13 x 20 cm English text. Softcover
‘It’s interesting to be called a ‘producer’ in this context because I think there is a shortage of vocabulary for the sorts of things we are doing now. There are actually very few nominal roles you can get involved with if you’re dealing with art: artist, critic, curator and then you start to run out of terms. That’s something of a disadvantage because as curators or artists we are all working in rather different ways and with different objectives.’ Charles Esche
Who are the ‘producers’ in the field of art? Can the term be expanded to include – alongside artists – curators, gallerists, collectors, critics and audiences? Can those who live either for or from art legitimately be described as participants in the process of creating meaning and value for works of art? In recent years there had been an increasing tendency for the hitherto separate roles involved in this process to merge so that today, the term ‘curator’ can equally be applied to any of the agents involved in the production and display of an artwork.
This collection of conversations between leading practitioners in the curatorial arena is the second publication documenting an ongoing series of events at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, organised by artist and BALTIC Professor of Contemporary Art, Susan Hiller.
contributors: Gilane Tawadros & Hans Ulrich Obrist; Frances Morris & Charles Esche; Guy Brett & Deanna Petherbridge Price: £3.99
Art Issues Press 1999
224 pages ISBN 0963726455
14 x 20 cm English text. Softcover
"As enjoyable and provocative a book of criticism as anyone has published in years."
-Rolling Stone
"Dave Hickey's prose transports are like an eye attached to a butterfly attached to a rocketship-which is to say, lucidity uncannily yoked to both a deft lightness of touch and sheer gangbusters propulsion: the down-to-earth, time and again, taking off and taking flight. The generosity of the man's verve-the suppleness of its profusions-can get to be downright ravishing. On top of which, the guy's really funny."
-Lawrence Weschler, critic, The New Yorker
Air Guitar is Dave Hickey's "memoir without tears"-a journey through the vernacular cultural landscape of the United States in the second half of the twentieth century. Looking back from the vantage-point of his adopted hometown of Las Vegas, Hickey speculates on everything from jazz and rock-and-roll to basketball and professional wrestling-from magic and psychedelia to gambling and the culture of "little stores"-from automotive design to series television to Saturday-morning cartoons. The emphasis in these 23 essays is on the way the arts function in the drift of everyday life, outside the venues of official culture, and on singular "lives in the arts," lived outside those venues, with meditations on the careers of Liberace, Hank Williams, Chet Baker, Andy Warhol, Johnny Mercer, Norman Rockwell, magicians Siegfried & Roy, and wrestler Lady Godiva. Underlying Hickey's writing is an abiding belief that cultural life in a democracy can (and occasionally does) function in a democratic manner, sustained by the whims of affection and the commerce of opinion. Price: £16.95
University of Minnesota Press 2001
296 pages ISBN 0816635048
16 x 23.5 cm English text. Hardcover
A major work by one of the twentieth century's most important philosophers.
A deft reconstruction of what Georges Bataille envisioned as a continuation of his work La Somme Athéologique, this volume brings together the writings of one of the foremost French thinkers of the twentieth century on the central topic of his oeuvre. Gathering Bataille's most intimate writings, these essays, aphorisms, notes, and lectures on nonknowledge, sovereignty, and sacrifice clarify and extend Bataille's radical theology, his philosophy of history, and his ecstatic method of meditation.
Following Bataille's lead, as laid out in his notebooks, editor Stuart Kendall assembles the fragments that Bataille anticipated collecting for his summa. Kendall's introduction offers a clear picture of the author's overall project, its historical and biographical context, and the place of these works within it. The "system" that emerges from these articles, notes, and lectures is "atheology," understood as a study of the effects of nonknowledge.
At the other side of realism, Bataille's writing in La Somme pushes language to its silent end. And yet, writing toward the ruin of language, in search of words that slip from their meanings, Bataille uses language-and the discourses of theology, philosophy, and literature-against itself to return us to ourselves, endlessly. The system against systems is in fact systematic, using systems and depending on discourses to achieve its own ends-the end of systematic thought. Price: £33.00
les presses du reel
126pp English text. ISBN 2840660601
15 x 21cm softcover
Nicolas Bourriaud attempts to renew our approach toward contemporary art by getting as close as possible to the artists' work, and by revealing the principles that structure their thoughts: an aesthetic of the inter-human, of the encounter; of proximity, of resisting social formatting.
Bourriaud's objective is to produce the tools to enable an understanding of the evelution of contemporary art. Price: £10.95
Semiotext(e) 2002
252 pages ISBN 1584350121
15 x 23 cm English text. Softcover
'I looked through your magazine and I was repelled by the title, Semiotext(e). It's so dry, you just want to throw it in the trash, which I did. Listen: Hatred of Capitalism would be a much better title. It's stunning. The world is starving for thoughts. If you can think of something, the language will fall into place, but the thought is what is going to do it.' Jack Smith
Jean Baudrillard meets Cookie Mueller in this gathering of French theory and new American fiction published in the Foreign Agents and Native Agents series over the last fifteen years. Texts by Kathy Acker, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Shulamith Firestone, Eileen Myles, Tony Negri, Michelle Tea, Paul Virillio, and others attack questions of madness and capitalism, speed and subjectivity, global flows, and hyperreality. Price: £11.50
Publish on Demand Ltd 2003
268 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 0954570200
14 x 21 cm English text. Softcover
Small and malignant...slots into the pocket as snugly as a gunslinger's Bible, or, appropriately, a packet of cigarettes.
Keith Miller, The Times Literary Supplement, 9 June 2000 Price: £20.00
Wexner Center for the Arts/The MIT Press 2001
280 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 0262011832
21 x 23.5 cm English text. Hardcover
As Painting, which accompanies an exhibition of the same name at the Wexner Center for the Arts, offers thought- provoking new perspectives on the evolution of painting in the United States and Europe since the mid-1960s. It illuminates the flexible boundaries of what can be seen or interpreted "as painting" and that medium's interrelationships with sculpture, photography, and installation, highlighting points of convergence and divergence.
The featured artists include such major figures as Daniel Buren, Donald Judd, Imi Knoebel, Sherrie Levine, Agnes Martin, Gerhard Richter, Robert Ryman, and Robert Smithson, as well as artists who are much less known, at least in the United States. Pivotal to the discussion is the work of a number of significant but relatively unfamiliar French painters, including Martin Barré, Christian Bonnefoi, Simon Hantaï, Michel Parmentier, and François Rouan. The book serves as an introduction to their work while providing fresh interpretations of the more familiar artists. Also highlighted are several artists not usually thought of as "painters," among them Polly Apfelbaum, Mel Bochner, Judd, Smithson, Anne Truitt, and James Welling.
The book features two extended essays, detailed commentaries on each of the twenty-six artists in the exhibition, and fourteen additional essays by artists and commentators noted for their engagement with the issues raised here. These include a commentary on Simon Hantaï by Alfred Pacquement, Director of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris; original essays by French critics Catherine Millet and Christian Prigent; interviews with artists Martin Barré and Mel Bochner; and a little-known set of notes by Jacques Lacan on the painting of François. Price: £29.95
Baltic/University of Newcastle 2001
120 pages ISBN 1903655056
The expansion and evolution in the curator's role that has occurred during the last decade is increasingly mirrored in the terminology used to define that role.
There are almost as many words to describe the various activities of the art mediator as there are approaches to the making of exhibitions. 'Selectors', 'programmers', 'facilitators', 'commissioners', 'organisers' and 'producers' are all variations on the curatorial theme, and in some cases these terms are interchangeable.
Whilst the aims of practitioners within this ever-expanding field are essentially the same - to create the best possible context in which to experience art - their perceptions of what this means in practical terms may be very different. 'The Producers' is the title of a series of events at the University of Newcastle in which leading figures in the curatorial arena discuss their craft before an audience of artists, students and exhibition makers.
Organised by BALTIC Professor of Contemporary Art, Susan Hiller, 'The Producers' makes a unique and significant contribution to the ongoing debate about the nature of contemporary curatorship.
The discussions presented here, in Part 3 of the series of publications documenting these events, are as follows: Sharon Kivland & Adam Szymczyk Ralph Rugoff & Richard Grayson Lisa Corrin & Jon Bewley Price: £3.99
Sage 2001
220 pages ISBN 0761968601
15.5 x 23 cm English text. Softcover
Edited by one of the leading Virilio authorities this book offers the reader a guide through Virilio's work. Using the interview form, Virilio speaks incisively and at length about a vast assortment of cultural and theoretical topics, including architecture and `speed-space', `chronopolitics', art and technoculture, modernism, postmodernism and `hypermodernism', the time of the trajectory and the `information bomb'. His thoughts on Foucault, Baudrillard, Deleuze and Guattari, the performance artist Stelarc, the Persian War and the Kosovo War, are also gathered together. Price: £17.99
PEER 2000
184 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 095397720
23.5 x 30 cm English text. Softcover
A large format and graphically bold publication that goes to the very heart of contemporary debate about the responsibility and function of the arts and of artists in society today.
This book explores the subject in a variety of ways, ranging between political, philosophical and analytical texts, fiction, verse and images.
Some of the central questions asked include:- What are the basic principles of state patronage of the arts? What are the tensions between politicians and artists, between public sector cultural practice and between modern democracy and high culture?
Contemporary art practice is usually regarded as a way of pushing boundaries, breaking rules, taking risks, and sometimes, (necessarily) making mistakes. How does this square with the notion of contemporary art as having a social, community and educational role? Is art good for you? Should art be for everyone even for those who don't want it?
Contributions by: Kingsley Amis, Art in Ruins, Terry Atkinson, BANK, Tony Banks, David Bartholomew, David Batchelor, Big Sister, Melvyn Bragg, Ian Breakwell, Andrew Brighton, Adam Chodzk, Roger Cook, Sacha Craddock, Martin Creed, Penelope Curtis, Jeremy Deller, Terry Dicks, Lord Eccles, Jes Fernie, Jean Fisher, Valerian Freyberg, William Furlong, Ben Gibson, Lord Gibson, Gilbert and George, Rene Gimpel, Antony Gormley, Helen Gould, Richard Grayson, David Heathcoat-Amory, Graham Higgin, Matthew Higgs, Stewart Home, Joan Key, Lord Keynes, Jennie Lee, Wyndham Lewis, Michael Madden, Christopher Mansell, Francois Matarasso, Lord McIntosh, Roland Miller, Geoff Mulgan, Nicholas Murray, Richard Noble, Janette Parris, John Pick, Gerry Robinson, Lord Rees-Mogg, Mark Ryan, Alex Sainsbury, Stella Santacatterina, Charles Saumarez Smith, Arthur Scargill, Brian Sedgemore, Chris Smith, Bob and Roberta Smith, Ingrid Swenson, Nick Trench, George Walden, Mark Wallinger, Mary Warnock, Raymond Williams, Ken Worpole Price: £18.00
ARTicle Press 2003
144 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 1873352832
15 x 21 cm English text. Hardcover
What stories do you think about whilst looking at art? And whose voice is speaking?
This is a book of new fiction written in response to contemporary visual art set alongside transcripts and images of work by the artists who inspired it. It is an exploration of relationships between visual and written fictions, full of tangents and digressions, and of biographies imagined, embroidered and real. This book celebrates consonances between art writing and practice, and the pleasures of the fallible.
Writers: Lisa Appignanesi, Nicholas Blincoe, Jon Cairns, Julia Darling, Maureen Freely, Tony Halliday, Mary Madden, Duncan McLaren, Fabian Peake, Adrian Rifkin, Ronnie Smith, Rob Stone
Artists: Linda Aloysius, Artlab, Jordan Baseman, L'Ecole de Burrows et Bob Smith, Volker Eichelmann/Roland Rust, Mark Fairnington, Paul Flannery, Tony Halliday, Nicky Hirst, Brigitte Jurack, Ian Kiaer, Sara Mackillop, João Penalva, Annika Sundvik, Eve Sussman, Roxy Walsh, Ralph Wolf Price: £7.99
The MIT Press 2001
500 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 0262024543
19 x 23.5 cm English text. Hardcover
Some critics view the postwar avant-garde as the empty recycling of forms and strategies from the first two decades of the twentieth century. Others view it, more positively, as a new articulation of the specific conditions of cultural production in the postwar period. Benjamin Buchloh, one of the most insightful art critics and theoreticians of recent decades, argues for a dialectical approach to these positions.
This collection contains eighteen essays written by Buchloh over the last twenty years. Each looks at a single artist within the framework of specific theoretical and historical questions. The art movements covered include Nouveau Réalisme in France (Arman, Yves Klein, Jacques de la Villeglé), art in postwar Germany (Joseph Beuys, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter), American Fluxus and pop art (Robert Watts and Andy Warhol), minimalism and postminimal art (Michael Asher and Richard Serra), and European and American conceptual art (Daniel Buren, Dan Graham). Buchloh addresses some artists in terms of their oppositional approaches to language and painting, for example, Nancy Spero and Lawrence Weiner. About others, he asks more general questions concerning the development of models of institutional critique (Hans Haacke) and the theorization of the museum (Marcel Broodthaers); or he addresses the formation of historical memory in postconceptual art (James Coleman).
One of the book's strengths is its systematic, interconnected account of the key issues of American and European artistic practice during two decades of postwar art. Another is Buchlohs method, which integrates formalist and socio-historical approaches specific to each subject. Price: £34.95
