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:  £8.50

Harvard University Press 2002

512 pages ISBN 0674008960

19 x 23 cm English text. Hardcover

Radical critic of a European civilization plunging into darkness, yet commemorator of the humane traditions of the old bourgeoisie - such was Walter Benjamin in the later 1930s. This volume, the third in a four-volume set, offers 27 pieces, 19 of which have never before been translated. The centrepiece, "A Berlin Childhood Around 1900", marks the first appearance in English of one of the greatest German works of the 20th century: a profound and beautiful account of the vanished world of Benjamin's privileged boyhood, recollected in exile. No less remarkable are the previously untranslated second version of Benjamin's most famous essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility", with its striking insights into the relations between technology and aeshetics, and "German Men and Women", a book in which Benjamin collects 26 letters by distinguished Germans from 1783 to 1883 in an effort to preserve what he called the "true humanity" of German tradition from the debasement of fascism. Volume 3 also offers extensively annotated translations of essays that are key to Benjamin's rewriting of the story of modernism and modernity - such as "The Storyteller" and "Paris, the Capital of the 19th Century" - as well as a fascinating diary from 1938 and penetrating studies of Bertolt Brecht, Franz Kafka, and Eduard Fuchs. A narrative chronology details Benjamin's life during these four harrowing years of his exile in France and Denmark. This is a valuable collection for anyone interested in his work.


Price:  £26.95

Yale University Press 2003

224 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 0300097751

18 x 24 cm English text. Softcover

Many museum professionals today believe that university-based art history focuses too much on theory and the social agency of art, neglecting the aesthetic dimensions of the art object. Conversely, many academics feel that museums have become preoccupied with the quest for money and audiences, making them an increasingly unlikely source of innovative scholarship. In this provocative book, seventeen eminent figures from both sides of the art world--museum professionals and university scholars--explore the questions underlying the often tense relationship between the two main branches of the discipline.

Charles W. Haxthausen is Faison-Pierson-Stoddard Professor of Art History and director of the Graduate Program in the History of Art, jointly sponsored by Williams College and the Clark Art Institute.

Contributions by Dawn Ades, Andreas Beyer, Richard R. Brettell, Stephen Deuchar, Sybille Ebert-Schifferer, Ivan Gaskell, Eckhard Gillen, Richard Kendall, John House, Patricia Mainardi, Griselda Pollock, Mark Rosenthal, Barbara M. Stafford, Gary Tinterow, William H. Truettner, Michael F. Zimmermann and Richard Brilliant


Price:  £17.50

Baltic 2003

96 pages ISBN 1903655137

13 x 20 cm English text. Softcover

The latest publication in the successful Producers series contains three conversations between leading contemporary curators selected by Susan Hiller, BALTIC Chair in Contemporary Art at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. The Producers brings together key practitioners in the curatorial arena to discuss their craft before an audience of artists, students and arts professionals. The resulting transcripts, published as part of BALTIC’s ongoing series B.READ, are essential reading for all those interested in the ongoing debate about the nature of contemporary curatorship.

Contributors: Sacha Craddock and Andrew Renton; Laura Godfrey-Isaacs and Jonathan Watkins; Barbara London and James Putnam


Price:  £3.99

Black Dog 2002

160 pages Colour and B&W. ISBN 1901033627

15 x 21 cm English/French text, Softcover

The Decadence of the Nude presents, in English and French, the work of French author and artist Pierre Klossowski (1905-2001), Balthus' estranged brother. Addressing the political and moral responsibilities of the artist, the interdependence of the sacred and the profane and the power of the imagination in modern societies which have witnessed the 'death of God'. Included in this volume are essays by Maurice Blanchot (1907 -), which examine Klossowski's fiction, accompanied by a critical introduction by Alyce Mahon, Lecturer in History of Art at Cambridge University.


Price:  £16.95

Continuum 2003

288 pages ISBN 0826460046

14.5 x 21.5 cm English text. Softcover

The new electronic age has seen a radical transition from book to screen, a development which has obscured the fact that it is not what we see which matters but how we see what we see. We live in a time when the visible needs to be retheorised.

Panorama presents a broad analysis of philosophies of the visible in art and culture, particularly in painting, film, photography, and literature. The work of key philosophers--Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Levinas, Barthes, Blanchot, Foucault, Bataille, Derrida, Lyotard and Deleuze--is examined in the context of visibility, expressivity, the representational and the postmodern.

Contributors: Zsuzsa Baross, Robert Burch, Alessandro Carrera, Dana Hollander, Lynne Huffer, Volker Kaiser, Reginald Lilly, Robert S. Leventhal, Janet Lungstrum, Ladelle McWhorter, Ludwig Nagl, Anne Tomiche, James R. Watson, Lisa Zucker


Price:  £19.99

The MIT Press 2003

192 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 0262600498

15 x 23 cm English text. Softcover

From the moment art historian Leo Steinberg championed his work in opposition to Clement Greenberg’s rigid formalism, Robert Rauschenberg has played a pivotal role in the development and understanding of postmodern art. Challenging nearly all the prevailing assumptions about the visual arts of his time, he pioneered the postwar revival of collage, photography, silkscreen, technology, and performance.

This book focuses on Rauschenberg’s work during the critical period of the 1950s and 1960s. It opens with a newly prefaced version of Leo Steinberg’s "Reflections on the State of Criticism," the first published version of his famous 1972 essay, "Other Criteria," which remains the single most important text on Rauschenberg. Rosalind Krauss’s "Rauschenberg and the Materialized Image" builds on Steinberg’s essay, arguing that Rauschenberg’s work represents a decisive shift in contemporary art. Douglas Crimp’s "On the Museum’s Ruins" examines Rauschenberg’s silkscreens in the context of the modern museum. Helen Molesworth’s "Before Bed" uses psychoanalytic and economic structures to examine the artist’s Black Paintings of the early 1950s. A second essay by Krauss, "Perpetual Inventory," revisits both her and Steinberg’s articles of nearly twenty-five years earlier. Finally, Branden Joseph’s "A Duplication Containing Duplications" views Rauschenberg’s silkscreens in relation to the artist’s interests in technology, particularly television.


Price:  £9.95

Semiotext(e) 1999

128pp English text. 1570270848

11.5 x 17.5 cm softcover

"All technical objects brought about accidents that were specific, local, and situated in time and space. Through the new communication technologies, we have created the possibility of an accident that is no longer local, but global, and that would occur everywhere at the same time. We are faced with an original phenomenon: the emergence of the accident of accidents."

Price:  £7.95

The MIT press 2002

394 pages. ISBN 0262122499

18 x 23 cm English text. Hardcover

According to media critic Geert Lovink, the Internet is being closed off by corporations and governments intent on creating a business and information environment free of dissent. Calling himself a radical media pragmatist, Lovink envisions an Internet culture that goes beyond the engineering culture that spawned it to bring humanities, user groups, social movements, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), artists, and cultural critics into the core of Internet development.

In Dark Fiber, Lovink combines aesthetic and ethical concerns and issues of navigation and usability without ever losing sight of the cultural and economic agendas of those who control hardware, software, content, design, and delivery. He examines the unwarranted faith of the cyber-libertarians in the ability of market forces to create a decentralized, accessible communication system. He studies the inner dynamics of hackers' groups, Internet activists, and artists, seeking to understand the social laws of online life. Finally, he calls for the injection of political and economic competence into the community of freedom-loving cyber-citizens, to wrest the Internet from corporate and state control.

The topics include the erosion of email, bandwidth for all, the rise and fall of dot-com mania, techno-mysticism, sustainable social networks, the fight for a public Internet time standard, the strategies of Internet activists, mailing list culture, and collaborative text filtering. Stressing the importance of intercultural collaboration, Lovink includes reports from Albania, where NGOs and artists use new media to combat the country's poverty and isolation; from Taiwan, where the September 1999 earthquake highlighted the cultural politics of the Internet; and from Delhi, where a new media center explores free software, public access, and Hindi interfaces.


Price:  £19.95

The MIT Press

232 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 026264049X

15 x 23 English text. Softcover

Eva Hesse's distinctive process-based art exerted a powerful influence on minimalist artists of the 1960s and continues to inspire artists today. Using industrial materials such as latex and fiberglass, she exploited their flexibility to produce works with an unsettling psychic and corporeal resonance. Hesse, who was born in Germany in 1936 and raised in New York City, died of cancer in New York in 1970.

'Eva Hesse' focuses on the body of criticism that has developed since the last major retrospective of Hesse's work, at the Yale University Art Gallery in 1992. The book's publication coincides with a major exhibition organized jointly by the San Francisco Museum of Art and the Wiesbaden Museum. Eva Hesse contains a 1970 interview by Cindy Nemser, a discussion between Mel Bochner and Joan Simon, and essays by Briony Fer, Rosalind Krauss, Mignon Nixon, and Anne M. Wagner.


Price:  £10.50

Universty of California Press 2003

316 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 0520221087

21.5 x 25.5 cm English text. Hardcover

Suzaan Boettger offers the first comprehensive history of the Earthworks movement in the United States, providing a fascinating and in-depth analysis of the monumental forms that initiated the broader genre of Land Art. Examining the art, the artists, their dealers and proponents, Boettger interprets Earthworks as a manifestation both of artists' personal stories and of the late 1960s social and political tumult.

Boettger overturns many commonly held notions of Earthworks' origins and intentions. She argues that Robert Smithson's work on the Dallas-Fort Worth airport stimulated his thinking and that his writing about it catalyzed the movement. The visionary environments that followed, often sculpted in expansive and remote western terrains, were idealized by Americans and Europeans alike as displays of cowboy bravado. Boettger identifies earthworkers Michael Heizer, Dennis Oppenheim, Robert Morris, Walter de Maria, and Stephen Kaltenbach as former Californians whose treatment of the landscape reflects a western spirit. Her international purview integrates early work by the Europeans Barry Flanagan, Jan Dibbets, Richard Long, and Pino Pascali as precedents and parallels. Her examination of Earthworks' relationship to the ecology movement perceptively corrects a popular misconception about the artists' goals while acknowledging the social and cultural complexities of the period.

Insightful discussions of Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt, and Claes Oldenburg--in addition to the artists mentioned above--are accompanied by many rare and new photographs of both the art and its creators. Witty, accessible, and scrupulously researched, Earthworks constructs day-to-day chronologies of the development of the artistic movement and its intersections with the larger public events of the time, including specific accounts of galleries, exhibitions, and criticism. Boettger's dynamic social history and psychological insights bring new meaning to this pivotal movement that both embodied and disrupted contemporary notions of art, nature, society, and their relationship to each other.


Price:  £35.00