Continuum 2004
256 pages ISBN 0826461468
14.5 x 22.5 cm English text. Softcover
Alain Badiou is arguably the most important and original philosopher working in France today. Swimming against the tide of postmodern orthodoxy, Badiou’s thought revitalizes philosophy’s perennial attempt to provide a systematic theory of truth. This volume, assembled with the collaboration of the author, presents for the first time in English a comprehensive outline of Badiou’s ambitious system. Starting from the controversial assertion that ontology is mathematics, this volume sets out the theory of the emergence of truths from the singular relationship between a subject and an event.
Also included is a substantial excerpt from Badiou’s forthcoming work on the logics of appearance and the concept of world, presented here in advance of its French publication. Ranging from startling re-readings of canonical figures (Spinoza, Kant and Hegel) to decisive engagements with poetry, psychoanalysis and radical politics, Theoretical Writings is an indispensable introduction to one of the great thinkers of our time. The volume includes a preface by Alain Badiou, an extensive editor’s introduction, and a glossary of key terms.
Table of Contents
The Stellar Matheme: Editor¹s Introduction
Author¹s Preface
I. Mathematics is Ontology
1. The Question of Being Today
2. Philosophy and Mathematics
3. Platonism and the Philosophy of Mathematics
4. The Being of Number
5. One, Multiple, Multiplicity
Addendum A (Historical) Spinoza¹s Closed Ontology
Addendum B (Conditional) The Desire of the Matheme
II. The Subtraction of Truth
6. The Event as Trans-Being
7. On Subtraction
8. Truth: Forcing and the Unnameable
9. Eight Theses on the Universal
Addendum C (Historical) Kant¹s Subtractive Ontology
Addendum D (Conditional) Politics as a Truth Procedure
III. Logics of Appearance
10. Being and Appearance
11. Towards a Thought of Appearance
12. The Transcendental
Addendum E (Historical) Hegel and the Whole
Addendum F (Conditional) Language, Thought, Poetry
Glossary Price: £19.99
288 pages ISBN 0826459072
Slavoj Zizek is not alone in thinking that Alain Badiou’s recent work is “the event of contemporary philosophy.” Think Again, the first publication of its kind, goes a long way towards justifying his assessment. Badiou is nothing if not polemical and the most suitable way to approach his philosophy is precisely through the controversies it creates. This book, which opens with an introduction aimed at readers new to Badiou’s work, presents a range of essays which explore Badiou’s most contentious claims in the fields of ontology, politics, ethics and aesthetics.
Alain Badiou has devised perhaps the only truly inventive philosophy of the subject since Sartre. Almost alone among his peers, Badiou’s work promises a genuine renewal of philosophy, a subject he sees as conditioned by innovation in spheres ranging from radical politics to artistic experimentation to mathematical formalization. Price: £19.99
Revolver/e-flux 2004
92 pages ISBN 3936919054
21 x 26 cm English text. Hardcover
What would you do if you were asked to curate the next Documenta?
That was the question recently put to more than thirty internationally working artists, who were asked to reflect on their relationship to the profession of curating, and to assess the effects of the traditional division between artists and curators.
The result was The Next Documenta Should Be Curated By An Artist, an e-flux project curated by Jens Hoffmann, which endeavors to critically examine, from an artist's point-of-view, some of the parameters of large-scale international, contemporary art exhibitions in the wake of the growing number of artist critiques of curatorial practice in recent years and the central position taken by curators in the organization of exhibitions. Responses of the artists, in the form of statements and written proposalsare now available as a book of the same title.
Contributors include: Marina Abramovic, Pawel Althamer, John Baldessari, Ricardo Basbaum, Laura Belém, Dara Birnbaum, Daniel Buren, AA Bronson, Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset, Morgan Fisher, Liam Gillick, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Carl Michael von Hauswolff, Federico Herrero, Isabell Heimerdinger, Alfredo Jaar, Tim Lee, Ken Lum, Dorit Margreiter, John Miller, Jonathan Monk, Florian Pumhösl, Martha Rosler, Julia Scher, Markus Schinwald, Tino Sehgal, Lawrence Weiner and a selection from an open forum. Price: £14.99
ARTicle Press 2004
832 pages ISBN 1873352883
11 x 18 cm English text. Softcover
£9.99
Featuring texts by a variety of artists and writers from America and Europe. Contributors include: Dennis Cooper, Killian Killian, Dodie Bellamy, Trinnie Dalton, Benjamin Weissman, Paul McCarthy, Jesse Brandsford, Sue de Beer, Casey McKinney, Banks Violette, Adam Putman, Matthew Greene, Rachel Lowther, Gean Moreno, Dan Torop, Rachel Howe, Joanne Tatham/ Tom O'Sullivan, Paulina Olowska, Mark Beasley, John Cussans, Dave Martin, Simon Bill, Bonny Camplin, Dan Fox, John Beagles, Glen Hefland, Clara Ursitti, Pierre Guyotat, Jacques Henric, Fernando Guerreiro, Eugene Savitzkaya, Mireille Andres, Georges Bataille, Kathy Acker and Paul Buck. Price: £9.99
OUT OF STOCK
Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series 2004
328 pages ISBN 1584350180
15 x 23 cm English text. Softcover
"One day, perhaps, this century will be Deleuzian," Michel Foucault once wrote. This book anthologizes 40 texts and interviews written over 20 years by renowned French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who died in 1995. The early texts, from 1953-1966 (on Rousseau, Kafka, Jarry, etc.), belong to literary criticism and announce Deleuze's last book, Critique and Clinic (1993). But philosophy clearly predominates in the rest of the book, with sharp appraisals of the thinkers he always felt indebted to: Spinoza, Bergson. More surprising is his acknowledgement of Jean-Paul Sartre as his master. "The new themes, a certain new style, a new aggressive and polemical way of raising questions," he wrote, "come from Sartre." But the figure of Nietzsche remains by far the most seminal, and the presence throughout of his friends and close collaborators, Felix Guattari and Michel Foucault. The book stops shortly after the publication of Anti-Oedipus, and presents a kind of genealogy of Deleuze's thought as well as his attempt to leave philosophy and connect it to the outside -- but, he cautions, as a philosopher.
Price: £11.95
The MIT Press May 2004
452 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 0262072513
21.5 x 28 cm English text. Hardcover
As a new movement that arose in the 1950s and 1960s, Minimalism challenged traditional ideas about art-making and the art object. A Minimal Future? Art As Object 1958-1968, which accompanies a major exhibition at The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, offers a redefinition of Minimalism by situating it in the context of the concurrent aesthetics of modernist abstraction, pop art, and nascent ideas of conceptual art. Minimalism is presented as a range of strategies that propelled new definitions of the structure, form, material, image, and production of the art object and renegotiated its relationship to space and to the spectator.
Focusing on the years 1958-1968, A Minimal Future? presents key works within the framework of a scholarly re-examination of minimal art's emergence and historical context. It reflects the early transitional period that begins in the late 1950s, through the so-called "canonization" of Minimalism by 1968, with an emphasis on work produced in the mid-to-late 1960s.
The book includes works from the late 1950s through the late 1960s by 40 artists, including Carl Andre, Richard Artschwager, Jo Baer, Larry Bell, Mel Bochner, Judy Chicago, Dan Flavin, Robert Grosvenor, Eva Hesse, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Agnes Martin, John McCracken, Robert Ryman, Frank Stella, Anne Truitt, and Lawrence Weiner that reflect the shifting object status of painting and sculpture.
The text features original essays by prominent art historians and scholars. Diedrich Diedrichsen addresses the relationship between minimal art and music; Jonathan Flatley focuses on Donald Judd and Andy Warhol; Timothy Martin considers perfomance in relation to minimal art; James Meyer examines East and West Coast practices of Minimalism; and Anne Rorimer discusses the relationship of minimal to conceptual art. Exhibition curator Ann Goldstein contributes an introduction. Also included are individual entries on each of the artists, an extensive bibliography, and an exhibition chronology. The 400-page book includes 300 images, most in color. Price: £32.95
Scalo 2003
48 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 3908247772
15.5 x 21.5 cm Englsih text. Softcover
In this accessible and eloquent book-length essay, Urs Stahel, writer, curator and co-founder of Fotomuseum Winterthur, muses on the very nature of photography. The introduction outlines the unique tension defining photography--that it shows a segment of the world and simultaneously expresses a subject's particular view of this world. This tension is the source of the medium's unique creative potential and its complex relation to truth. Stahel provides a philosophical perspective on these issues by placing them in an epistemological, social, and historical context. Chapters on industrial photography, staged and conceptual photography, and the current crisis of photojournalism provide a panoramic overview of the possibilities and challenges of photography in all of its variety, from the casual snapshot to art and commercial photography. This profound and readable essay, one of the few daring enough to address the nature of photography, is destined to become a standard work, a must read for anyone interested in thinking about photography. [...] the answer to the question, "What is photography?" is actually quite simple at first sight. Photography is a device to record light, invented in the 19th century, that allows us to fix the perspective perception of the world in the manner constructed since the Renaissance. Optics and chemistry go hand in hand to create a very effective means of perception.~Despite the apparent simplicity of this first definition, there are few comparable cases in which a seemingly clearly and easily delimited field--here's the viewer, there's the world; here's the instrument, there's the image of the world--has created so much confusion. --Urs Stahel. Price: £7.95
Liverpool University Press/Tate Liverpool 2004
272 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 0853239584
17.5 x 22 cm English text. Softcover
The Tate Liverpool Critical Forum series was established to present papers given at annual academic conferences organised jointly by Tate Liverpool and the University of Liverpool, and related to a current exhibition in the gallery.
This collection of essays, with contributions from several contemporary artists, examines and assesses the current status of painting within global contemporary art. The meaning and value of ‘painting’ as both a category and a set of practices is analysed by internationally renowned art critics, historians, and theorists including Griselda Pollock and Alison Rowley, Katya Garcia Anton, David Green and Jonathan Harris. Concerned with the internationalisation of contemporary art as a feature of globalisation, Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Painting sheds new light on fine art understood as a facet of a global culture and society dominated by northern and European-US power and history. What kinds of resistance to this hegemony might be possible for artists located in the ‘third world’ yet inescapably implicated in the big business of the ‘art world’? Price: £27.50
Autonomedia 2003
742 pages ISBN 1570271224
From its auspicious beginnings in the summer of 1966 to the present, the Chicago Surrealist Group -- and the Surrealist Movement in the United States, which grew out of it -- have continued to foment an exhilarating whirlwind of revolt while playfully igniting the sparks of Poetry, Freedom and Love in the crucible of the Unfettered Imagination. In so doing, it has brightly illuminated the pathways of absolute divergence that define the intrinsically anarchist trajectory of the surrealist adventure. Drawing on the full range of U.S. surrealist publications, from the original journal Arsenal/Surrealist Subversion to the very latest millennial communiques from the front lines of the ongoing battle against miserabilism, this volume contains over 200 texts (many appearing here for the first time) by more than fifty participants in the Surrealist Movement, making this the most comprehensive, diverse and lavishly illustrated compilation of American surrealist writings ever to be assembled. Price: £19.95
The MIT press 2003
520 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 0262042169
20 x 23 cm English text. Hardcover
Impossible Histories is the first critical survey of the extraordinary experiments in the arts that took place in the former Yugoslavia from the country's founding in 1918 to its breakup in 1991. The combination of Austro-Hungarian, French, German, Italian, and Turkish influences gave Yugoslavia's avant-gardes a distinct character unlike those of other Eastern and Central European avant-gardes. Censorship and suppression kept much of the work far from the eyes and ears of the Yugoslav people, while language barriers and the inaccessibility of archives caused it to remain largely unknown to Western scholars. Even at this late stage in the scholarly investigation of the avant-garde, few Westerners have heard of the movements Belgrade surrealism, signalism, Yugo-Dada, and zenitism; the groups Alfa, Exat 51, Gorgona, OHO, and Scipion Nasice Sisters Theater; or the magazines Danas, Red Pilot, Tank, Vecnost, and Zvrk.
The pieces in this collection offer comparative and interpretive accounts of the avant-gardes in the former Yugoslavian countries of Croatia, Serbia, and Slovenia. The book is divided into four sections: Art and Politics; Literature; Visual Art and Architecture; and Art in Motion (covering theater, dance, music, film, and video). All of the contributors live in the region and many of them participated in the movements discussed. The book also reprints a selection of the most important manifestos generated by all phases of Yugoslav avant-garde activity. Price: £28.95
The MIT Press 2003
600 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 0262692864
20 x 28 cm English text. Softcover
Throughout the history of cinema, a radical avant-garde has existed on the fringes of the film industry. A great deal of research has focused on the pre- and early history of cinema, but there has been little speculation about a future cinema incorporating new electronic media. Electronic media have not only fundamentally transformed cinema but have altered its role as a witness to reality by rendering "realities" not necessarily linked to documentation, by engineering environments that incorporate audiences as participants, and by creating event-worlds that mix realities and narratives in forms not possible in traditional cinema. This hybrid cinema melds montage, traditional cinema, experimental literature, television, video, and the net. The new cinematic forms suggest that traditional cinema no longer has the capacity to represent events that are themselves complex configurations of experience, interpretation, and interaction.
This book, which accompanies an exhibition organized by the ZKM Institute for Visual Media, explores the history and significance of pre-cinema and of early experimental cinema, as well as the development of the unique theaters in which "immersion" evolved. Drawing on a broad range of scholarship, it examines the shift from monolithic Hollywood spectacles to works probing the possibilities of interactive, performative, and net-based cinemas. The post-cinematic condition, the book shows, has long roots in artistic practice and influences every channel of communication. Price: £25.95
Hatje Cantz 2004
464 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 3775791485
17 x 24 cm English text. Softcover
An indispensable handbook on art in the public sphere - with profoundly thoughtful texts by curators, artists, and art historians.
Few topics in the visual arts have created such controversy recently as the debate surrounding the significance and potential of public art. In response to this, Public Art was published in a bilingual edition and quickly sold out. The book is now being republished in separate language editions. In this handbook, over fifty authors take a critical look at this theme: the result is a fascinating compendium of opinions and statements, experiences and reports. The wide-ranging material by curators, art historians, and artists is divided into Art and the City, Art and Architecture, Art and History, Art and Society, Art and the Exhibition, and Art and the Public. Enlightening contributions are provided by Vito Acconci, Daniel Buren, Dan Graham, Walter Grasskamp, Hans Haacke, Ilya Kabakov, Kasper König, Joseph Kosuth, Florian Matzner, Ulrich Rückriem, Lawrence Weiner among many others. Price: £17.99
Black Dog Publishing 2003
352 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 1901033937
19 x 26 cm English text. Softcover
In recent years, landscape has become increasingly recognised as a topic of central importance to a wide variety of disciplines. To a large degree this recognition has been based upon an expanding appreciation of the political aspects of landscape, its ideological character and effects.
Deterritorialisations...Revisioning Landscapes and Politics is an innovative cross-disciplinary volume of new writing which brings together, in a strategic and productive encounter, a broad variety of critical work currently being done in this field. With 28 papers and five photo essays Deterritorialisations... presents material by scholars and practitioners from anthropology, archaeology, architecture, art history, cultural studies, English and American literature, film studies, fine art, geography, history, landscape architecture, philosophy, political science, and religious studies. As an important marker of current methodologies, research and practice across these different disciplinary areas Deterritorialisations... is an invaluable resource. It will be of interest to all those concerned with current discourses and debates on landscape and its representation. Price: £19.95
Edizione Charta 2003
1000 pages ISBN 888158431X
14 x 18 cm English text. Softcover
If "peripatetic" is the word most overused to describe Hans-Ulrich Obrist, it is not inappropriate. The Swiss-born curator and head of the Programme Migrateurs at the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris has an unstoppable wanderlust and a related symptom; his penchant for interviewing anyone and everyone who piques his curiosity, be they artist, scientist, writer, curator, composer, architect, thinker. Since 1993, Obrist has conducted more than 300 interviews, about 80 of which are collected here in a selection that respects the cultural and professional diversity of the interviewees. Each interview is introduced by a short text outlining the biography of the interviewee and giving some contextual information on the recording of the interview. Price: £39.95
ARTicle Press 2003
800 pages ISBN 1873352689
10.5 x 18 cm English text. Softcover
Frozen Tears is a collection of short stories and texts by British Artists exploring the genres of horror, pornography and science fiction. The book also contains relevant archive material selected by the editor and Martin McGeown. The texts are both entertaining and crude and intense and bewildering, and at times the writing is shameful or malevolent. The writing in Frozen Tears reflects the editor's and artists' interest in the tradition of Avant Garde literature and pulp fiction. Humour and laughter erupt in many of the texts but the laughter is not always ironic or joyous. In keeping with the book's concern for a ' Sacred Sociology', first identified by renegade surrealists, the humour and tales in Frozen Tears is often degenerate, cruel and without a trace of sentiment. Rather than adopt the cool and critical approaches employed by much contemporary artists who produce texts or who are identified as conceptual artists, the authors of the stories in Frozen Tears pose the question about the possibilities of expression and expressive forms of writing.
Jake Chapman has turned Kafka's 'Metamorphosis' on its head. In his story' 'The Involution' an insect has wakes up to find he has been transformed into a human over night. Art & Language re-work pornographic through the application of word games. Lucy McKenzie writes of herself as a murderess and Clara Ursitti describes her experience of giving birth to a giant slug. David Burrows tells the story of a journalist driven to distraction and hysteria by a super model who can manifest death and destruction at will and Andrew Williamson has written a pulp fiction thriller in which high and low culture motifs are back to front and out of place. The book also includes texts by artist's group Inventory, John Cussans, Dave Beech, Fabienne Audeoud and Sue Golding. Price: £9.99
Yale University Press 2003
200 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 0300095112
12.5 x 19.5 cm English text. Softcover
Richard Cork is one of the most serious, most influential, and best-informed art critics in Britain today. These four volumes contain a selection of his articles from the seventies, eighties, nineties, and the year 2000. The result is a fascinating chronicle and invaluable record of a turbulent period that gives an overview and survey of British art and its reception over the past thirty years which is wholly unprecedented in its scope.
Despite gloomy predictions, the year 2000 turned out to be overwhelmingly positive for art. The opening of Tate Modern was a triumph, but it was only the most spectacular of the new buildings opening across the nation, part of the biggest museum expansion that Britain has ever witnessed. In London alone, new additions to the National Portrait Gallery, the Imperial War Museum, the Wallace Collection, Dulwich Picture Gallery, the British Museum and Somerset House were all unveiled in this annus mirabilis.
An exceptionally ambitious new gallery opened in Walsall, and regional cities will want to follow the inspirational example of Baltic at Gateshead, furnishing themselves with buildings that escape from the old, depressing stereotype of the municipal art gallery.
In the midst of all this forward-looking architecture, the prevailing emphasis in major exhibitions, in Paris as well as London and New York, rested on reassessing the past. The National Gallery’s most well-attended show was devoted to images of Christ, while the Metropolitan Museum staged a survey of Tilman Riemenschneider’s sculpture. But the Royal Academy, as well as looking back at art in 1900, attempted to explore a millennial theme with its controversial Apocalypse exhibition. Contemporary work at its most powerful enlivened some outstanding solo shows and the continuing urge to work outside galleries also bore fruit in Artagnel projects as well as the temporary sculpture installed on Trafalgar Square’s empty plinth. Price: £12.95
Pluto Press 2003
304 pages ISBN 0745318495
13.5 x 21.5 cm English text. Softcover
The uneasy crossover between art and celebrity has been much discussed in recent years. Artists as celebrities is hardly a new phenomenon, but the growing cult of celebrity in contemporary culture is throwing up paradoxical ideas about the contradictions between 'high' art and mass appeal and blurring the already unstable boundaries between art, commodity and popular culture. This is a lively and accessible study of the phenomenon--the glitzy world where art and celebrity meet--informed by a fundamentally serious look at what happens when the 'serious' world of art collides with celebrity. Global culture is now dominated by celebrities, some of whom--like Madonna and Stallone--are art collectors and some--like Dennis Hopper and David Bowie--are spare-time artists. Walker explains how artists such as Warhol, Gavin Turk, Jeff Koons, Elizabeth Peyton and Alison Jackson contribute to, but also critique, the cult of celebrity by depicting film celebrities, rock stars and royalty in paintings and statues. Celebritisation has overtaken the art world too: Walker surveys 14 art stars of the twentieth century from Dali to Tracey Emin. He also reviews alternatives: the leftwing pantheon of figures such as Mao, Che Guevara and Rosa Luxemburg, and pictorial celebrations of the people. Finally, Walker considers the pros and cons of celebrityhood for artists and its effects on current art, and discusses the return of the hero in the wake of 11 September 2001. John A. Walker is the author of several Pluto titles. Until 1999, he was Reader in Art & Design History at Middlesex University. He continues to research, write and publish as a freelance art critic and art historian. Price: £14.99
Book Works 2003
A visual and textual discourse of 'fictions' that propose to raise the most abject objects, categorized as ordurous, to the level of art (the dictionary definition of ordure: 1. excrement; dung. 2. obscenity: filth; foul language). Introducing a cast of characters such as R Y Sirb (Brisley's alter ego and the Curator of The Collection of Ordure) this book is concerned with the human body, material waste, and the divide between east and west, featuring the Berlin Wall playing a critical role in symbolizing the point of utter toxicity between two ideologies.
Price: £10.95
190 pages ISBN 0262740257
14 x 20 cm English text. Softcover
Slavoj Zizek has been called "an academic rock star" and "the wild man of theory"; his writing mixes astonishing erudition and references to pop culture in order to dissect current intellectual pieties. In The Puppet and the Dwarf he offers a close reading of today's religious constellation from the viewpoint of Lacanian psychoanalysis. He critically confronts both predominant versions of today's spirituality--New Age gnosticism and deconstructionist-Levinasian Judaism--and then tries to redeem the "materialist" kernel of Christianity. His reading of Christianity is explicitly political, discerning in the Pauline community of believers the first version of a revolutionary collective. Since today even advocates of Enlightenment like Jurgen Habermas acknowledge that a religious vision is needed to ground our ethical and political stance in a "postsecular" age, this book--with a stance that is clearly materialist and at the same time indebted to the core of the Christian legacy--is certain to stir controversy. Price: £10.95
Hatje Cantz 2003
260 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 3775790845
16.5 x 23 cm English text. Softcover
Increased and accelerated processes of cultural syncretism have produced new configurations of identity for which theories of hybridity, métissage and cosmopolitanism have been deployed and reworked in order to capture the polycentric and polysemic aspects of a new political philosophy of the Other. Under pressure from localized resistances, these terms no longer provide adequate frameworks for articulating the critical issues of difference and the asymmetry of evolving contemporary cultures. Beginning as a full-fledged literary movement in the late 1980s in the French Caribbean, Créolité ventured into the "chaos" produced by history to reclaim nationalist Creole identities. As a hypothesis of cultural production, the subsequent process of creolization reaches far beyond the plantation cultures of the Caribbean, towards a conceptualization of a non-totalitarian consciousness of preserved diversity that has its contested terrain within language, identity, politics, religion, and culture. Transcending still entrenched postcolonial and imperialist narratives of domination and resistance, center and periphery, creolization as a theory of creative disorder analyses active urban contest and contact zones in flux. It expresses a need for particularization that, by embedding Creole dynamics into sociopolitical and sociolinguistic histories, reformulates territories of art, architecture, dance, film, music, poetry, cuisine, oral literature, magic, and carnival Price: £22.95
