Verso 2003
120 pages ISBN 1859844480
10 x 21 cm English text. Softcover
"In dealing all the cards to itself, the system forced the Other to change the rules of the game. And the new rules are ferocious, because the game is ferocious."
We have seen many world events, and recent years have been filled with any number of violent ones, from wars to genocides. But until September 11 we had had no symbolic event on a world scale that marked a setback for globalization itself. With the terrorist attacks we are confronted, says Baudrillard, with the pure event that concentrates in itself all the events which have never taken place. And we had all dreamt of this event because it was impossible not to dream of the destruction of American monopolistic power.
Continuing an analysis developed over many years, Baudrillard sees the power of the terrorists as lying in the symbolism of this slaughter. Not merely the reality of death, but a sacrificial death that challenges the whole system. Where the past revolutionary sought to conduct a struggle of real forces in the context of ideology and politics, the new terrorist mounts a powerful symbolic challenge, which, when combined with high-tech resources, constitutes an unprecedented assault on an over-sophisticated, vulnerable West.
"There is," writes Baudrillard, "no solution to this extreme situation." As a response to it, conventional warfare is a nonstarter, a non-event. It is merely "the continuation of an absence of politics by other means."
"First prize for cerebral cold-bloodedness goes to French philosopher Jean Baudrillard.” — New York Times Price: £8.00
The MIT Press 2003
208 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 0262611783
18 x 23 cm English text. Softcover
The work of artist Mike Kelley (b. 1954) embraces performance, installation, drawing, painting, video, and sculpture. Drawing distinctively on high art and vernacular traditions, including historical research, popular culture, and psychology, Kelley came to prominence in the 1980s with a series of sculptures composed of craft materials. His recent work offers dialogues with architecture and with repressed memory syndrome, and a sustained inquiry into his own aesthetic and social history. The subjects on which Kelley has written are as varied as his artistic media. They include the work of fellow artists, sound, caricature, the uncanny, UFOlogy, and gender-bending.
This book offers a diverse collection of Kelley's writings from the last twenty-five years. It contains major critical texts on art, film, and the wider culture, including his piece on the aesthetic he calls "urban Gothic." It also contains essays, mostly commissioned for exhibition catalogs and journals, on the artists and groups David Askevold, Öyvind Fahlström, Douglas Huebler, John Miller, Survival Research Laboratories, and Paul Thek, among others. Kelley's voices are passionate, analytic, and ironic, and his critical intelligence is leavened with touches of whimsy. Price: £16.50
336 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 0262042150
18 x 23 cm English text. Hardcover
In this classic of French cultural studies, Georges Didi-Huberman traces the intimate and reciprocal relationship between the disciplines of psychiatry and photography in the late nineteenth century. Focusing on the immense photographic output of the Salpêtrière hospital, the notorious Parisian asylum for insane and incurable women, Didi-Huberman shows the crucial role played by photography in the invention of the category of hysteria. Under the direction of the medical teacher and clinician Jean-Martin Charcot, the inmates of Salpêtrière identified as hysterics were methodically photographed, providing skeptical colleagues with visual proof of hysteria's specific form. These images, many of which appear in this book, provided the materials for the multivolume album Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière.
As Didi-Huberman shows, these photographs were far from simply objective documentation. The subjects were required to portray their hysterical "type"--they performed their own hysteria. Bribed by the special status they enjoyed in the purgatory of experimentation and threatened with transfer back to the inferno of the incurables, the women patiently posed for the photographs and submitted to presentations of hysterical attacks before the crowds that gathered for Charcot's "Tuesday Lectures."
Charcot did not stop at voyeuristic observation. Through techniques such as hypnosis, electroshock therapy, and genital manipulation, he instigated the hysterical symptoms in his patients, eventually giving rise to hatred and resistance on their part. Didi-Huberman follows this path from complicity to antipathy in one of Charcot's favorite "cases," that of Augustine, whose image crops up again and again in the Iconographie. Augustine's virtuosic performance of hysteria ultimately became one of self-sacrifice, seen in pictures of ecstasy, crucifixion, and silent cries. Price: £23.50
A K Press 2003
240 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 1902593731
20 x 21 cm English text. Hardcover
Guy Debord (1931-1994) was the most influential member of the Situationist International, the avant-garde group that triggered the May 1968 revolt in France. His book The Society of the Spectacle is by some considered the most important theoretical book of the twentieth century.
But while Debord’s written work is some of the most notorious in the world of political and cultural radicality, deemed "the cornerstone cliché of postmodernism," his films have until now remained tantalizingly inaccessible.
After being withdrawn from circulation for nearly two decades (by Debord himself, to call attention to the 1984 assassination of the producer of the films, Gerard Lebovici), all six films were featured in a special "Guy Debord Retrospective" at the 2001 Venice Film Festival and re-released in France in 2002.
The most famous of the films is Debord's cinematic adaptation of his own book, The Society of the Spectacle. As passages from the book are read in voiceover the text is illuminated, via direct illustration or various types of ironic contrast, by clips from Russian and Hollywood features (Potemkin, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Johnny Guitar, etc.), TV commercials, softcore porn, newsreels, and documentary footage.
Some of the other films evoke Debord's adventures in the bohemian underworld of Paris during the 1950s, and in others Debord attacks the film medium itself, directly challenging the viewer by critiquing the traditional separation of spectacle and spectator.
Ken Knabb's translation of Debord's Complete Cinematic Works accompanies the long-awaited English versions of these films, which will be coming to the United States in 2003.The scripts are illustrated with 62 stills, and Debord's own annotations help elucidate the subtleties of these astonishing works, which are like nothing else in cinema history. Price: £29.00
inIVA 2003
288 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 1899846263
18 x 23.5 cm English text. Softcover
Resisting orthodox discourse, this collection of writings by Jean Fisher traces the author's journey through the political and intellectual turbulence of the past twenty years and its impact on both artistic practice and the writing of art. Through her close study of Anglo/Irish and US/Native American colonial and contemporary relations, Fisher explores the effectiveness of artistic practice in the construction of political and subjective agency. Each essay in the first part of the publication maps a possible terrain for approaching the work of a single artist - among them, James Coleman, Jimmie Durham, Susan Hiller, Gabriel Orozco and Adrian Piper - while the texts in the second part reflect upon artistic practice in relation to questions of subjectivity, postcoloniality and multiculturalism. The author's interdisciplinary approach to writing provides richly varied insights into the relationship between the practices of visual art and theory and has been highly influential to a generation of international scholars, artists and curators. Price: £14.99
OUT OF STOCK
Continuum 2003
176 pages ISBN 0826479308
13 x 20 cm English text. Hardcover
"A path breaking work on the aesthetics of sensation, the philosophy of colour, on form, and on painting in general, Francis Bacon is one of the most important, if not the most crucial, of all of Deleuze's writings."
Tom Conley, Harvard University
Gilles Deleuze was one of the most influential and revolutionary philosophers of the Twentieth Century. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation is his long-awaited work on Bacon, widely regarded as one of the most radical painters of the Twentieth Century.
The book presents a deep engagement with Bacon's work and the nature of art. Deleuze analyses the distinctive innovations that came to mark Bacon's style: the isolation of the figure, the violent deformations of the flesh, the complex use of colour, the method of chance, and the use of the triptych form. Along the way, Deleuze introduces a number of his own famous concepts, such as the "body without organs" and the "diagram", and contrasts his own approach to painting with that of both the phenomenological and the art historical traditions.
Deleuze links Bacon's work to Cézanne's notion of a "logic" of sensation, which reaches its summit in colour and the "colouring sensation." Investigating this logic, Deleuze explores Bacon's crucial relation to past painters such as Velasquez, Cézanne, and Soutine, as well as Bacon's rejection of expressionism and abstract painting.
Long awaited in translation, Francis Bacon is destined to become a classic philosophical reflection on the nature of painting. Price: £8.99
Continuum 2005
240 pages ISBN 0826479340
13 x 20 cm English text. Softcover
Desert Screen is a vision of future war, in which Paul Virilio identifies the Gulf War as a turning point in history, the last industrial and the first information war. Price: £7.99
Timezone 8 2002
288 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 9628638823
16 x 21 English text. Softcover
On The Mid Ground is a selection of writing by internationally renowned Paris based Chinese Art critic Hou Hanru. Hou Hanru is known for ground breaking exhibitions such as Cities on the Move (curated with Hans Ulrich Obrist), Out of the Centre, Parisien(ne)s and this year will be cocurating the Kwangju Biennale in Korea. For the first time editor Yu Hsiao Hwei (Paris based art writer and journalist) has put together a selection of Hou's writings and interviews exploring his thoughts on international contemporary art and curatorship.
'Hou Hanru is undoubtedly one of the most dynamic and innovative curators and critics on the contemporary art scene today. This excellent selection, edited by the critic and writer Yu Hsiao-Hwei, brings together for the first time some of Hou Hanru's most important texts that address questions of globalisation, identity and contemporary art practice beyond geographical and regional boundaries'.
- Gilane Tawadros, Director, Institute of International Visual Arts (inIVA) Price: £18.50
Hatje Cantz 2003
336 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 3775790780
16.5 x 23 cm English text. Softcover
What constitutes an urban imaginary? According to the thesis of this project, drawn from the working papers, statistical analysis, and research of a team of urbanists, social historians, anthropologists led by Armando Silva in Bogotá, Colombia, an urban imaginary is born precisely at the point where living in the city no longer denotes the condition of being urban. The urban in the context of this book explodes from the instrumentalization of categories of relationships whereby the urban in question is not only the collectivization of lived and imagined possibilities in a complex network of space and time, it also draws out a new dimension of possible civic reterritorializations worked out of a temporal flux. According to the logic which Silva and his collaborators impute to this reterritorialized phenomenon of urbanity in Latin American cities, the imagined city is most vivid to those who encounter it in the zone where a new urban paradigm writes over the old physical stain of the planned city. Thus the use of imaginaries presupposes not only the plurality of effects and patterns of urbanity, but also a group of dissimilar experiences that point towards common effects. Working from this logic, the urban imaginaries of this book stem from the specificity of 13 Latin American cities but are not necessarily circumscribed or determined by their physical geography. Naturally Urban Imaginaries from Latin America does not evoke a singular, totalized idea of urban culture from the South American continent, but rather sets the variety of cultures in dynamic relationship to each other through texts, statistics, postcards, television and other popular media, portraits, and urban maps. Price: £22.95
Thames & Hudson 2003
224 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 0500203679
15 x 21 cm English text. Softcover
Digital technology has revolutionized the way we produce and experience art. Not only have traditional forms of art such as printing, painting, photography and sculpture been transformed by digital techniques and media, but entirely new forms such as net art, software art, digital installations and virtual reality have emerged as recognized artistic practices, collected by major museums, institutions and private collectors the world over.
Christiane Paul surveys the developments in digital art from its appearance in the 1980s up to the present day, and looks ahead to what the future may hold. Drawing a distinction between work that uses digital technology as a tool to produce traditional forms and work that uses it as a medium to create new types of art, she dicusses the key artists and works.
The book explores themes raised and addressed by the art, such as viewer interaction, artificial life and intelligence, political and social activism, networks and telepresence, as well as issues such as the collection, presentation and preservation of digital art. Price: £8.95
Museum of Modern Art, New York 2003
336 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 0870703552
15 x 22.5 cm English text. Softcover
Gerhard Richter is widely recognized as one of the most significant painters working today, and he is certainly among the most influential. He has worked in a wide range of media since the early 1960s, producing abstractions, landscapes, images derived from the mass media and from other photographs, and more. Seen together, these works call into question such widely held assumptions as the importance of stylistic consistency, individual artistic sensibility and spontaneous creativity. They also explore the impact of technology and media imagery on the traditional methods and formats of painting. The Museum of Modern Art has published two important books on Richter, both written by Robert Storr: one covering forty years of his work, and published to accompany the Museum's large retrospective of his work in 2002, and one focusing on a single crucial series, October 18, 1977. This book brings together the essays and recent interviews from both of those books in a single volume - ideal for the student who wants both texts to hand at a relatively low price. Price: £15.00
University of California Press 1993/2003 (paperback)
258 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 0520205626
15 x 19 cm English text. Softcover
As the creator of "Happenings" and "Environments," Allan Kaprow is the prince and prophet of all we call performance art today. He is also known for having written some of the most thoughtful, provocative, and influential essays of his generation. From "The Legacy of Jackson Pollock" in 1958 to "The Meaning of Life" in 1990, Kaprow has conducted a sustained philosophical inquiry into the paradoxical relationship of art to life, and thus into the nature of meaning itself. With the publication of this book, twenty-three of Kaprow's most significant essays are brought together in one volume for the first time.
Kaprow charts his own evolution as an artist and also comments on contemporaneous developments in the arts. From the modernist avant-garde of the fifties to the current postmodern fin de siècle, Kaprow has written about--and from within--the shifting, blurring boundaries of genre, media, culture, and experience. Edited and introduced by critic Jeff Kelley, these essays bring into crisp focus the thinking of one of the most influential figures in the varied landscape of American art since the late 1950s. Price: £12.95
192 pages ISBN 1859844421
19 x 18 cm English text. Softcover
Baudrillard’s work of the last two decades has downplayed the position of the critical subject and gone over to the standpoint of the object. Nowhere is this objective (non-)critique which results so clearly played out as in the Cool Memories series. Here again, in this fourth collection of fragments and sketches, Baudrillard’s stance is less that of the interventionist intellectual analysing the world as critical subject than of the barely participant observer—an object among objects, an “internal exile,” watching the world “world itself” with such fierce insistence, yet registering with acuity our general deficit of reality and meaning.
“The most important French thinker of the past twenty years.” — J.G. Ballard
“First prize for cerebral coldblooded-ness goes to French philosopher Jean Baudrillard.” — New York Times on The Spirit of Terrorism
“He uses Disneyland as a central metaphor. The whole of society is now as artificial as the home of Mickey and Minnie.” — Independent on Sunday Price: £13.00
NAi 2003
192 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 9056623109
16 x 23 cm English text. Softcover
The archive has proven to be a powerful metaphor in many contemporary concepts. History is viewed as an archive of facts which you can draw from at will. Our bodies have become a genetic archive since being opened up digitally in the Human Genome project. Our language is an archive of meanings that can be unlocked using philological tools. The unconscious is an archive of the traumatic experiences that mould our identity. More and more artists - individuals and groups - and architects are developing (software) systems in which data is automatically organized into complex knowledge systems, a process in which the user is only one of the determining factors. Databases, software and archives increasingly form the inspiration for artistic interventions. This book considers the artistic potential of these couplings. Information is Alive is being published on the occasion of the DEAF03 festival, which brings together various strands of research into the phenomenon of 'living archives' in interactive installations, performances and a symposium. Information is Alive presents a selection of essays, interviews and projects by the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, philosopher Brian Massumi, writer Sadie Plant, paleontologist Simon Conway Morris, the artists Margarete Jahrmann, Lev Manovich, Michael Saup, Jeffrey Shaw, Stahl Stenslie and others. Price: £18.95
408 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 0262182270
Robert Smithson (1938–1973) produced his best-known work during the 1960s and early 1970s, a period in which the boundaries of the art world and the objectives of art-making were questioned perhaps more consistently and thoroughly than any time before or since. In Robert Smithson, Ann Reynolds elucidates the complexity of Smithson’s work and thought by placing them in their historical context, a context greatly enhanced by the vast archival materials that Smithson’s widow, Nancy Holt, donated to the Archives of American Art in 1987. The archive provides Reynolds with the remnants of Smithson’s working life--magazines, postcards from other artists, notebooks, and perhaps most important, his library--from which she reconstructs the physical and conceptual world that Smithson inhabited. Reynolds explores the relation of Smithson’s art-making, thinking about art-making, writing, and interaction with other artists to the articulated ideology and discreet assumptions that determined the parameters of artistic practice of the time.
A central focus of Reynolds’s analysis is Smithson’s fascination with the blind spots at the center of established ways of seeing and thinking about culture. For Smithson, New Jersey was such a blind spot, and he returned there again and again--alone and with fellow artists--to make art that, through its location alone, undermined assumptions about what and, more important, where, art should be. For those who guarded the integrity of the established art world, New Jersey was "elsewhere"; but for Smithson, "elsewheres" were the defining, if often forgotten, locations on the map of contemporary culture. Price: £26.95
Pluto Press 2003
192 pages ISBN 0745321275
12.5 x 17.5 cm English text. Softcover
First published in 1972 in Paris, The Real Split in the International is regarded as one of Guy Debord's finest works. Exploding as politically revolutionary at the heart of the Paris 1968 uprisings, the Situationist International has proved a tenaciously compelling radical movement in terms of asthetics and political theory. This crucially important book is not only a philosophical landmark, it is also a cult classic that has has established the Situationist movement -- of which Debord was the key member -- as one of the most influential of the twentieth century. This new translation by John McHale is the first officially authorised in English. The book has previously been available only in underground or online formats, so McHale's work promises to bring the work of the Situationists to an even wider audience. The Real Split in the International sees Debord not only evaluate the movement as a whole, but also signal the end of it. For him, it had become clear that the Situationist's success had produced -- within its own ranks as well as outside them -- a host of fans and 'onlookers' who amounted to little more than consumers of a radicality that had become fashionable. In this way the movement had begun to encompass the very 'society of the spectacle' that the Situationists had challenged. There was a danger that Situationist theory could turn into ideology -- Debord's reaction was to break up the movement. Essential to an understanding of the revolutionary thought that inspired May 1968, this book is also an indispensable guide to all that is at stake in the 'society of the spectacle'. Price: £10.99
92 pages ISBN 1859844634
21 x 21 cm English text. Softcover
In his analysis of the deep social trends rooted in production, consumption, and the symbolic, Jean Baudrillard touches the very heart of the concerns of the generation currently rebelling against the framework of the consumer society. With the ever-greater mediatization of society, Baudrillard argues that we are witnessing the virtualization of our world, a disappearance of reality itself, and perhaps the impossibility of any exchange at all. This disenchanted perspective has become the rallying point for all those who reject the traditional sociological and philosophical paradigms of our age.
Passwords, in the spirit of Gilles Deleuze’s Abécédaire, offers us twelve accessible and enjoyable entry points into Baudrillard’s thought by way of the concepts he uses throughout his work: the object, seduction, value, impossible exchange, the obscene, the virtual, symbolic exchange, the transparency of evil, the perfect crime, destiny, duality, and thought. Price: £13.00
Yale University Press 2003
320 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 0300095082
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.
Nothing seemed off limits in the radical new art of the 1970s. Far from remaining satisfied with the old hierarchy of media, young artists emerged with a host of heretical alternatives in mind, including film, video, performance, raw documentation, photography and texts. Suddenly everything seemed possible. Art became anything that the artist wanted it to be. Some, like Richard Long and Dennis Oppenheim, decided that the entire natural world could now be regarded as their working territory. Others, including Gilbert & George and Klaus Rinke, treated themselves as embodiments of living sculpture. Daniel Burren displayed his uncompromising work on a billboard in the street, while Bernd and Hilla Becher photographed the ‘anonymous sculpture’ of industrial structures. Dan Graham’s interests ranged from architecture to social interaction on video, and Hans Haacke investigated the relationship between art and politics. Women artists like Susan Hiller and the intensely controversial Mary Kelly explored territory hitherto uncharted by their male counterparts, while the possibilities of performance art were tested by groups as exuberant as Coum or Nice Style. Price: £12.95
The New Press 2003
96 pages ISBN 1565847385
14 x 21 cm English text. Softcover
Pierre Bourdieu, described by The Nation as “worthy of the militant mantle of Sartre and Foucault,” here continues the themes advanced so successfully in his previous book Acts of Resistance. Firing Back is an eloquent dissection of globalization’s intellectual and cultural role throughout the world, and a discussion of the ways in which effective opposition to it can be mounted.
Bourdieu examines Europe’s potential as a counterweight to America’s globalizing policy and discusses how intellectuals and those working in the cultural sphere can create meaningful alternatives. He also raises challenging questions about the depoliticization of the aca-demic world, arguing that scholars can no longer maintain that their research is objective or value-free.
In a preface written for this edition, Bourdieu directly addresses readers about the role they can play in the burgeoning anti-globalization movement.
Pierre Bourdieu, who died in January 2002, was a professor of sociology at the Collège de France and the director of studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. Price: £12.99
