The MIT Press 2002
320 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 0262112655
18 x 23 cm English text. Softcover
Site-specific art emerged in the late 1960s in reaction to the growing commodification of art and the prevailing ideals of art's autonomy and universality. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, as site-specific art intersected with land art, process art, performance art, conceptual art, installation art, institutional critique, community-based art, and public art, its creators insisted on the inseparability of the work and its context. In recent years, however, the presumption of unrepeatability and immobility encapsulated in Richard Serra's famous dictum "to remove the work is to destroy the work" is being challenged by new models of site specificity and changes in institutional and market forces.
One Place after Another offers a critical history of site-specific art since the late 1960s and a theoretical framework for examining the rhetoric of aesthetic vanguardism and political progressivism associated with its many permutations. Informed by urban theory, postmodernist criticism in art and architecture, and debates concerning identity politics and the public sphere, the book addresses the siting of art as more than an artistic problem. It examines site specificity as a complex cipher of the unstable relationship between location and identity in the era of late capitalism. The book addresses the work of, among others, John Ahearn, Mark Dion, Andrea Fraser, Donald Judd, Renée Green, Suzanne Lacy, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Richard Serra, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, and Fred Wilson. Price: £21.95
Alberta Press 2002
104 pages ISBN 3883756490
12 x 18 cm English text. Softcover
25 writers recall 100 exceptional exhibitions over the last fifteen years since the late 1980s.
Including reviews by Kate Bush, Marc Gisbourne, Matthew Higgs, Alex Coles, Tommaso Corvi-Morva, Max Wigram and others
Price: £12.80
OUT OF STOCK
Baltic 2002
200 pages ISBN 1903655064
13 x 20 cm English text. Softcover
contributors: Tamas Banovich, Sarah Cook, Vuk Cosic, Matthew Gansallo, Karen Guthrie & Nina Pope, Iliyana Nedkova, Sune Nordgren, Julian Stallabrass, Jon Thomson, Alison Craighead, Mark Tribe
An edited transcript of the third BALTIC international seminar, Curating New Media focuses on the relationship of new media art to the institution. Curators, artists and academics share their perspectives on the curating, collecting, commissioning and presenting of computer-based art in one of the first books to be published specifically on this subject. This publication is the sixth title in BALTIC’s B.READ series. Price: £3.99
Continuum 2002
208 pages ISBN 082645982X
12.5 x 18 cm English text. Hardcover
The Way of Love is an extraordinary analysis of language and human relations. Luce Irigaray, one of the world’s foremost philosophers, approaches both these issues from the perspective of sexual difference, which she has argued is perhaps the most fundamental question for our time.
The Way of Love asks the question: How can we love each other? Irigaray presents an extraordinary exploration of desire and the human heart. If Western philosophy has claimed to be a love of wisdom, it has forgotten to become a wisdom of love. We still lack words, gestures, ways of doing or thinking to approach one another as humans, to enter into dialogue, to build a world where we can live together. Globalization represents an opportunity but also a danger for humanity. Sameness has been the key to the construction of Western cultures and societies. Difference–beginning with sexual difference–can open up for us an era of inter-communication, from our most everyday exchanges to the universal interweaving of a democratic global community.
Proposing an understanding of philosophy as the wisdom of love and not just as the love of wisdom, Luce Irigaray explores the relation to one's self, to others and to the world. An engagement with the history of Western philosophy, The Way of Love offers us a new way to conceive of communication between subjects. At stake is nothing less than learning to respect and encourage human becoming, opening a horizon for a new stage in human history. Price: £16.99
256 pages ISBN 0826460216
15 x 23 English text. Softcover
"From beginning to end 'Walter Benjamin and Romanticism' engages in an intimate debate with the origin and legacy of German romanticism. This is the first volume in any language that has given this dense and difficult topic its due and will prove to be a valuable resource for anyone interested in the complex shape of Benjamin's thought."
--Peter Fenves, Northwestern University
Walter Benjamin and Romanticism explores the relationship between Walter Benjamin's literary and philosophical work and the tradition of German Romanticism, as well as Hölderlin and Goethe. Through a detailed and scholarly analysis of the major texts, the book explores the endurance of Benjamin's relationship to Romanticism, the residual presence of Romantic Goethean and Hölderlinian motifs in Benjamin's subsequent writings and how Benjamin's understanding of the relationship between criticism and Romanticism can still play a vital role in contemporary philosophical and literary practice. Price: £16.99
Skira Editore 2003
192 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 8884911117
14 x 19 cm English text. Softcover
Price: £12.95
Wallflower Press 2002
288 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 1903364477
15 x 20 cm English text. Softcover
The Undercut Reader is a collection of writing and visual works drawn from Undercut, the only UK magazine dedicated to artists' film and video from 1980 to 1990, combined with newly commissioned articles by leading critics in the field. Undercut critically explored the aesthetics and politics of film and video practices within the context of visual arts and independent cinema. While artists' film and video has become one of the most popular and compelling practices today, very little published material is available. This anthology thus provides a much needed context for the debates and practices of film and video in both the independent film sector and the visual arts.
The Undercut Reader explores themes of narrative and representation, feminist perspectives, questions of identity, film form, cultural and gay politics, experimental animation, landscape imagination and aesthetics, and includes major sections on East European, Russian and Latin American practices. It includes writing by, and on, Stuart Hood, Michael O'Pray, Sally Potter, Peter Gidal, Malcolm le Grice, Peter Wollen, Peter Kennard, Valie Export, Mona Hatoum, Patrick Keiller, The Straubs, Richard Long, John Hilliard, David Curtis, Christine Delphy, Isaac Julien, Ian Christie, Jacqueline Rose, Susan Hiller, Derek Jarman, Stan Brakhage and Cerith Wyn Evans. Price: £19.99
Manchester University Press 2003
400 pages ISBN 071905561X
15.5 x 23.5 cm English text. Softcover
This is the first book- length study of the uncanny; an important concept for contemporary thinking and debate across a range of disciplines and discourses, including literature, film, architecture, cultural studies, philosophy, psychoanalysis and queer theory. Much of this importance can be traced back to Freud's essay of 1919, 'The uncanny', where he was perhaps the first to foreground the distinctive nature of the uncanny as a feeling of something not simply weird or mysterious but, more specifically, as something strangely familiar.
As a concept and a feeling, however, the uncanny has a complex history going back to at least the Enlightenment. Nicholas Royle offers a detailed historical account of the emergence of the uncanny, together with a series of close readings of different aspects of the topic. Following a major introductory historical and critical overview, there are chapters on the death drive, déjà-vu, 'silence, solitude and darkness', the fear of being buried alive, doubles, ghosts, cannibalism, telepathy and madness, as well as more 'applied' readings concerned, for example, with teaching, politics, film and religion. Price: £15.99
Routledge 2002
338 pages ISBN 0415222028
14 x 21.5 cm English text. Softcover
Key Writers on Art: The Twentieth Century provides a unique and authoritative guide to modern responses to art. Featuring 48 essays on major twentieth-century writers and thinkers, and written by an international panel of expert contributors, it introduces readers to the key approaches and analytical tools of contemporary art study and debate, including iconography, formalism, Marxism, feminism, semiotics, Freudian psychoanalysis, object-relations theory, aesthetics, the psychology of perception, and deconstruction.
Each entry includes:
* a critical essay
* a short biography
* a bibliography listing both primary and secondary texts
Unique in its range and accessibly written, this book, together with its companion volume Key Writers on Art: From Antiquity to the Nineteenth Century, provides an invaluable guide for students as well as general readers with an interest in art history, aesthetics and visual culture. Price: £12.99
University of California Press 2002
274 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 0520228677
15 x 20.5 cm English text. Softcover
In this groundbreaking work of incisive scholarship and analysis, Hannah Higgins explores the influential art movement Fluxus. Daring, disparate, contentious--Fluxus artists worked with minimal and prosaic materials now familiar in post-World War II art. Higgins describes the experience of Fluxus for viewers, even experiences resembling sensory assaults, as affirming transactions between self and world.
Fluxus began in the 1950s with artists from around the world who favored no single style or medium but displayed an inclination to experiment. Two formats are unique to Fluxus: a type of performance art called the Event, and the Fluxkit multiple, a collection of everyday objects or inexpensive printed cards collected in a box that viewers explore privately. Higgins examines these two setups to bring to life the Fluxus experience, how it works, and how and why it's important. She does so by moving out from the art itself in what she describes as a series of concentric circles: to the artists who create Fluxus, to the creative movements related to Fluxus (and critics' and curators' perceptions and reception of them), to the lessons of Fluxus art for pedagogy in general.
Although it was commonly associated with political and cultural activism in the 1960s, Fluxus struggled against being pigeonholed in these too-prescriptive and narrow terms. Higgins, the daughter of the Fluxus artists Alison Knowles and Dick Higgins, makes the most of her personal connection to the movement by sharing her firsthand experience, bringing an astounding immediacy to her writing and a palpable commitment to shedding light on what Fluxus is and why it matters. Price: £19.95
Verso 2002
224 pages ISBN 1859844561
cm English text. Softcover
Reification is the process by which an idea is transformed into a thing. A useful metaphor for the effects of capitialism on society, it offers a materialist or physical explanation for a wide range of ideological phenomena from branding and national identity, to racial and sexual prejudice, to recent concepts like spin and globalization.
At a time when such phenomena define our world to an unprecedented degree, the concept of reification ought to enjoy greater currency than ever. Yet recent thinkers have expressed deep reservations about the concept and the term has become marginalized in the humanities and social sciences.
Eschewing this trend, Timothy Bewes opens up a new formulation of the theory, claiming that, in this highly reflective age of late capitalism, reification itself is inseparable from the anxiety people feel towards it. Drawing upon work by Lukacs, Kierkegaard, Proust, and Melville, among others, he outlines a theory that promises to close the gap between politics and truth, art and experience, and philosophy and real life. Price: £17.00
Reaktion 2002
224 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 1861891431
14 x 21. 5 English text. Softcover
During the last twenty years, digital techno-logy has begun to touch on almost every aspect of our lives. Nowadays most forms of mass media, television, recorded music and film are produced and even distributed digitally; and these media are beginning to converge with digital forms, such as the internet, the World Wide Web, and video games, to produce a seamless digital mediascape. At work we are surrounded by technology, whether in offices or in supermarkets and factories, where almost every aspect of planning, design, marketing, production and distribution is monitored or controlled digitally.
In Digital Culture Charlie Gere articulates the degree to which our everyday lives are becoming dominated by digital technology, whether in terms of leisure, work or bureaucracy. This dominance is reflected in other areas, including the worlds of finance, technology, scientific research, media and telecommunications. Out of this situation a particular set of cultural responses has emerged, for example, in art, music, design, film, literature and elsewhere.
This book offers a new perspective on digital culture by examining its development, and reveals that, despite appearances, it is neither radically new, nor ultimately technologically driven. The author traces its roots to the late 18th century, and shows how it sprang from a number of impulses, including the information needs of industrial capitalism and contemporary warfare, avant-garde artistic practice, counter-cultural experimentation, radical philosophy and sub-cultural style. It is these conditions that produced both digital technology and digital culture, and which have determined how they develop. Price: £12.95
