400 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 0826458513
15 x 23 cm English text. Paperback
Third Text has been the world's leading journal on art in the global context. Known for challenging received notions of art practice, art history, popular media and cultural theory, it has never accepted unquestioningly the claims of anti-racism, multiculturalism or postcolonialism. Similarly, Third Text has not only championed new artists from six continents, it has raised the critical temperature and the political stakes for art and cultural practice in the age of globalization.
This Reader brings together classic essays by some of the best-known critics in global art and cultural studies, together with some of the most exciting new voices to emerge over the last decades. Divided into sections that cover history, representation, identity, film, "post" theory, globalization, the Reader will be invaluable to students and teachers of art, cultural studies, media studies, postcolonialism and globalization.
Selected Contributors: Zygmunt Bauman, Rustom Bharucha, Zeynap Celik, James Clifford, Sean Cubitt, Jimmie Durham, Clifford Geertz, Stuart Hall, Kobener Mercer, Benita Parry, George Ritzer, Edward Said, Ziauddin Sardar, Julian Stallabrass, Slavoj Zizek. Price: £19.99
Routledge 2002
192 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 0415254957
15.5 x 23.5 cm English text.Softcover
Now published in a revised second edition, The Matter of Images searches through the resonances of the term 'representation', analysing images in terms of why they matter, what they are made of and the material realities they refer to. Richard Dyer's analyses consider representations of 'out' groups and traditionally dominant groups alike, and encompass the eclectic texts of contemporary culture, from royalty to serial killers, political correctnesss, representations of Empire and films such as Gilda, Papillon and The Night of the Living Dead. Essays new to the second edition discuss Lillian Gish as the ultimate white movie star, the representation of whiteness in the south in Birth of a Nation, and society's fascination with serial killers.
The Matter of Images is distinctive in its commitment to writing politically about contemporary culture, while insisting on the importance of understanding the formal qualities and complexity of the images it investigates. Price: £13.99
OUT OF STOCK
Semiotext(e) 2002
164 pages ISBN 158435013X
11.5 x 18 cm English text. Softcover
Crepuscular Dawn is distilled from a series of conversations between Sylvere Lotringer and the noted urbanist, critic, and political theorist, Paul Virilio.
From the book: "The accident is a new form of warfare. It is replacing revolution and war. Sarajevo triggered the First World War. New York is what Sarajevo was. September 11 opened Pandora's box. The first war of globalization will be the global accident, the total accident, including the accident of science. And it is on the way."
Paul Virilio Price: £8.50
NAi 2002
96 pages. ISBN
15 x 20 cm English text. Softcover
The National institute for Photography in the Netherlands (NFI) has invited six writers, scholars and experts, to devote an essay to the problems and potential of visual culture. The result is a digestible collection of texts which will not simply answer questions but will also broach numerous issues and points for discussion.
Texts by Jose van Dijck, Frits Gierstberg, Mariette Haveman, Warna Oosterbaan, Jeroen Stumpel, Pauline Terreehorst, Frank van Vree Price: £18.50
Reaktion 2003
192 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 1861891504
15 x 21 cm English text. Softcover
We all know what it is to dream, but we also know how difficult it is to describe or interpret dreams, or explain what they actually are. To attempt to articulate a dream is to realize how inadequate our words are to describe the experience. Dreams are beyond words, consisting of much more than what we can say about them.
In Dreamtelling, Pierre Sorlin does not deal with our nocturnal visions per se, but rather with what we say regarding them. He explores the influence of dreams on our imaginations, and the various – sometimes inconsistent, always imperfect – theories people have contrived to elucidate them. Sorlin shows how our accounts are built on recurrent patterns, but are also totally and entirely individual. He examines the urge to analyze night visions and why it is that some people have become experts in dream interpretation.
Many books have been published on the nature of dreams, on their psychological or biological origins and on their significance, but this book takes as its premise that all we can allege about nocturnal visions is based on dreamtelling. Sorlin shows how dreams arouse our creativity and how, in turn, our creativity influences our dream accounts. Dreamtelling is aimed at all those who not only dream, but are curious about the experience, and wonder why they feel compelled to analyze and recount their night visions.
Pierre Sorlin is Professor of Sociology in Audiovisual Media, University of Paris III, and author of European Cinemas, European Societies (1991), Mass Media (1994) and Italian National Cinema (1996). Price: £12.95
Hatje Cantz 2002
412 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 3775790829
16.5 x 23 cm English txet. Softcover
Recently Democracy has been the watchword for a range of disparate, yet apparently convergent contestations and negotiations within the global order. This book seeks to present a context within which the interpretive and conceptual regimes around democracy as a field of study in politics, philosophy, and culture can be reargued against the claims of neo-liberal ideology with its market allies as the best possible solution to global governance. From this globalist viewpoint, democracy described as an unfinished project requires no structural changes, for it is complete in all its foundational features, and only small technical adjustments and minor tinkering is what it may need in the future. However this has been the way in which the main Western democracies see themselves - at best as "incomplete implementations" of equality and justice rather than limits, flaws, deadends, and problematics inscribed in the principles themselves. In response to this presumption, this book, by the force of the well argued positions of many of its illustrious contributors proceeds from the idea that Democracy Unrealized is a matter of bringing to light what liberal democracy promises but fails to deliver. The emphasis, then, is on potential for revision, revaluation of values, extension and creative transformation to keep in step with 21st century globalizing processes - the idea of an ever-open, essentially unfinishable project that in principle has fallen short of its ideals.
Texts by Iain Chambers, Boris Groys, Stuart Hall, Ernesto Laclau, Bhikku Parekh, Wole Soyinka, Slavoj Zizek amongst others. Price: £22.95
Lukas & Sternberg 2002
88 pages ISBN 0971119309
11 x 17 cm English text. Softcover
"Postproduction" is the most recent essay by French writer Nicolas Bourriaud. The author discusses how, since the early nineties, an ever increasing number of artworks have been created on the basis of preexisting works; more and more artists interpret, reproduce, re-exhibit, or use works made by others or available cultural products. This art of postproduction seems to respond to the proliferating chaos of global culture in the information age, which is characterized by an increase in the supply of works and the artworld's annexation of forms ignored or disdained until now. Price: £9.99
144 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 905662282X
12 x 20 cm English text. Softcover
Cover to Cover examines the phenomenon of artists' books. It examines the history of artists' book and places it in the context of art history. It concentrates particularly on artists' books created in the Netherlands, describes the leading motives of publishers, collectors and buyers. It pinpoints to what extent artists' books and catalogues are distinct from each other, and why one genre increasingly contains references to the other. The author considers the presentation issues and ventures to make a prediction about the future of the artists' book. By describing artists' books by Christian Boltanski, Lawrence Weiner, Richard Prince, Richard Long, Andy Warhol, Nan Hoover, Roy Villevoye, Walter van Beirendonck, Sol Lewitt and many other artists this book reveals the many possible publication forms that an artist's book can take. Cover to Cover strives to offer as broad as possible an overview of the genre and the discussions that surround it. Price: £14.95
Continuum 2002
240 pages ISBN 0826455670
15.5 x 22.5 cm English text. Softcover
Dreams and Drama charts new pathways in psychoanalytic thinking about art and the artist, both revising long-held views held in applied psychoanalysis and adding important new dimensions to clinical thinking about the artist and the artistic process. Roland investigates identity issues and inner struggles involved in the developing artistic career. In the second section he focuses on the use imagery by artists in the creative formation of poetic metaphors and paradoxes, and the metaphorical portrayal of the artist’s inner world. In a challenge to a pervasive assumption in psychoanalysis Roland argues that aesthetic form develops primarily to convey the artwork’s autonomous meanings rather than to give disguised expression to the artist’s inner world. In a third section Roland explores these themes in the context of the dramatic work of Pirandello and Pinter. Price: £16.99
The MIT Press
224 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 0262582155
14 x 19 cm English text. Softcover
Tracing a journey from the 1950s through the 1990s, N. Katherine Hayles uses the autobiographical persona of Kaye to explore how literature has transformed itself from inscriptions rendered as the flat durable marks of print to the dynamic images of CRT screens, from verbal texts to the diverse sensory modalities of multimedia works, from books to technotexts.
Weaving together Kaye's pseudo-autobiographical narrative with a theorization of contemporary literature in media-specific terms, Hayles examines the ways in which literary texts in every genre and period mutate as they are reconceived and rewritten for electronic formats. As electronic documents become more pervasive, print appears not as the sea in which we swim, transparent because we are so accustomed to its conventions, but rather as a medium with its own assumptions, specificities, and inscription practices. Hayles explores works that focus on the very inscription technologies that produce them, examining three writing machines in depth: Talan Memmott's groundbreaking electronic work Lexia to Perplexia, Mark Z. Danielewski's cult postprint novel House of Leaves, and Tom Phillips's artist's book A Humument. Hayles concludes by speculating on how technotexts affect the development of contemporary subjectivity. Price: £11.95
Gingko Press 2002
160 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN: 1584230509
18 x 23 cm English text. Hardcover
This is the book that first established Marshall McLuhan's reputation as one of the foremost critics of mass communications. This book demonstrates how mass entertainment and suggestion make information irrelevant, and shows how sex was first used to sell industrial hardware. We live in an age in which highly educated professionals dedicate themselves to the task of entering the collective public mind with the object of manipulating, exploiting, and controlling. In the mid-20th-century McLuhan was the first to draw attention to this phenomenon. Price: £30.00
