Book Works 2008
176 pages ISBN 9781870699969
15 x 21.5 cm English text. Softcover
Initiated by a series of events and discussions during the exhibition ‘Gest’ — at the Stanley Picker Gallery, Kingston University, this book Gest: Laboratory of Synthesis, includes a range of essays and interviews bringing together philosophers, artists, theorists and critics to discuss new approaches to art writing. It operates in the widening gap between the mainstream art magazine and the academic journal in order to create new conjunctions and productive disjunctions between theory and practice out of which new voices and new modes of art writing emerge.
Contributors include: Jennifer Allen, Eric Alliez, Devrim Bayar, Dan Fox, Rainer Ganahl, Johnny Golding, Peter Osborne, Anne Pontégnie, Nina Power, Ralph Rugoff, John Russell and Dirk Snauwaert.
RRP £9.95
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Serpents Tail 2006
240 pages ISBN 1852429267
13 x 19.5 cm English text. Softcover
Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, and Andy Warhol all wrote fiction - but there has never previously been a compllation of the prose of British artists. "The Alpine Fantasy of Victor B and Other Stories" brings together seventeen of Britain's leading contemporary artists in one collection. Moving, humorous and sometimes deeply macabre, these stories deal with dementia, mortality, mass murder and madness. A young woman derails a Virgin train, killing twenty people, as an experiment in conquering death; a boy fakes an accident to get the attention of the girl of his dreams; an alpine hiker advocates murder as an environmental clean-up solution; and time goes backwards as we witness the 'unlynching' of a paedophile by the local neighbourhood watch. Challenging and expanding notions of art and what artists do, "The Alpine Fantasy of Victor B and Other Stories" is a haunting exploration of the impulses that drive today's artists.
RRP 8.99
10% online price saving Price: £8.09
JPR | Ringier 2008
128 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 9783037640166
10.5 x 16.5 cm English text. Softcover
In the last several years, collectors have come to the forefront of the art scene, becoming key figures, if not stealing the spotlight from curators and institutions. But speculation, stratospheric prices, opinionated leadership, and the spectacle of collecting are only some of the many facets of the current reality. For many collectors contemporary art is essentially an aesthetic and intellectual adventure—thus the construction of each collection a personal journey and a singular statement. In an attempt to map the contours of this archipelago, the present volume gathers interviews with 40 collectors from Europe, the Americas, and Asia, revealing some recurring motivations while emphasizing differences of approach. Price: £7.00
Sternberg Press 2009
175 pages B&W reprodcutions. ISBN 9781933128627
16 x 22 cm English text. Softcover
As is so often the case, it is the poets, and to a certain extent the philosophers, who lead us deeper into the labyrinth of hunger. They have the right distance from the requirements with which the community-engendering meal is connected, either because they are outside the community, or because they have an appetite and a hunger that constantly exceed the boundaries of culture’s sacrosanct regulatory scheme. As a matter of custom, they have adopted a melancholic position, unable to forget the Golden Age of Saturn, an era associated with images of an infinitely rich, flowing abundance—a memory, so easily projected onto the future qua utopia, before which the world in its present form can easily fade into a pale backdrop.
Originally published in Swedish in 1992, As a Weasel Sucks Eggs examines the enigmatic relation of melancholia to an early kind of cannibalism, which psychoanalysis, in particular, stressed. It contains reading of, amongst others, Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Thomas Bernhard, Sigmund Freud, G. W. F. Hegel, and the Swedish poet Gunnar Ekelöf. The authors also quote Goethe and Rabelais, for whom food is a cosmic principle, the soil of fertility, on which all creation is based. In a transferred sense, food also plays that same role for the melancholiac—he who questions the normal order of things, who creates an other “unknown food,” with a variety of meanings. The authors “trace the desire for this other food through the ages, and scrutinize its relationship to both primitive sacrificial rites as well as contemporary anthropology, philosophy, and linguistic theory.”
Daniel Birnbaum is Director of the Städelschule and its Portikus gallery and Director of the Venice Biennale 2009. He is the author of several books on art and philosophy. Anders Olsson is a Swedish writer, professor of literature at Stockholm University, and member of the Swedish Academy that awards the Nobel Prize in Literature. Olsson has written some fifteen books on poetry and the history of literature. Price: £18.95
Fuel 2008
308 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 9780955862007
13 x 20 cm English text. Softcover
In his first work of fiction, artist Jake Chapman slashes the romantic novel down to bare bone and constructs is own disfigured version from the slaughtered remains.
Chlamydia Love is gifted her very own tropical island by her fiancé, where she develops a grudging adoration for its real owner, the enigmatic bestselling author, Helmut Mandragorass. A battle between her fiancé and Helmut ensues, for ownership of the island and ultimately for the love of Chlamydia.
This mercilessly subversive tale is illustrated by Chlamydia’s watercolours entitled Visions of Morass, images inspired by the island as she struggles with her feelings of agony and ecstasy.
RRP £16.95
10% online price saving Price: £15.25
JRP | Ringier 2008
160 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 9783905770834
16.5 x 23 cm English text. Hardcover
How can a political or social movement create so many positive changes, while simultaneously developing negative connotations? Such is the central paradox of feminism for the editors of this book. The dwindling interest of students to continue an academic career after their studies has been called ‘cooling out’ by Burton Clark.
The collaborative exhibition project took this term to describe the disinterest of young women toward ideas and forms of feminism. The exhibition, Cooling Out examined – through the works of contemporary female and male artists – the influences of the media, education, and existing social structures on the constitution of a gender identity.
RRP £20.00
10% online price saving Price: £18.00
OUT OF STOCK
Penguin 2009
336 pages ISBN 9780141022093
Why do people work hard, and take pride in what they do? This book, a philosophically-minded enquiry into practical activity of many different kinds past and present, is about what happens when people try to do a good job. It asks us to think about the true meaning of skill in the 'skills society' and argues that pure competition is a poor way to achieve quality work. Sennett suggests, instead, that there is a craftsman in every human being, which can sometimes be enormously motivating and inspiring - and can also in other circumstances make individuals obsessive and frustrated. The Craftsman shows how history has drawn fault-lines between craftsman and artist, maker and user, technique and expression, practice and theory, and that individuals' pride in their work, as well as modern society in general, suffers from these historical divisions. But the past lives of crafts and craftsmen show us ways of working (using tools, acquiring skills, thinking about materials) which provide rewarding alternative ways for people to utilise their talents. We need to recognise this if motivations are to be understood and lives made as fulfilling as possible.
RRP £9.99
5% online price saving Price: £9.49
Daniel Miller 2007
64 pages B&W reproductions. No ISBN
21 x 15 cm English text. Softcover
- Subject to paint foregrounds the act of painting itself.
- A new case is made for the path of drawing, with some surprising start-ups necessary to follow a painting through.
- This book has been described as the work of a comic realist.
Read this plea for art as luxury!
"These short pieces and their accompanying prints and drawings were put together after an exhibition at the Prince of Wales Drawing School, in London. They explore landscapes I've returned to and temporary studios I've left behind. They're an attempt to look under the surface of picture making, at motivations which were involved, and at factors beyond the artists control.
So the document has little claim to be a how-to-do-it manual or something to do with international style. The ideas and theories that interest this painter are bound up with local individuals and their subtle and extraordinary distinctions. This is more than an address to a notional art community. And the drawings are intended to be something unusual without being to puzzling for anyone to make sense of them." Price: £12.00
Thames & Hudson 2009
600 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 9780500093467
17 x 23 cm English text. Hardcover
Gerhard Richter is one of the foremost painters of his generation. This substantial volume makes available a comprehensive selection of Richter's texts, several published for the first time.
The book forms a brilliantly illuminating commentary on Richter's art, as well as providing a thought-provoking discussion on the status of art and the artist in society today.
A great deal has been written about the remarkable heterogeneity of Richter's work, his seemingly wilful and defiant movement between abstract and figurative modes of representation, and his use of a variety of methods of applying paint to canvas. Central to his work is a strong set of values which throughout his career he has expressed in extensive notes and writings, and in provocative and memorable public declarations in which he shows himself to be the master of the paradoxical statement.
These texts come from all periods of his career: letters and interviews; public statements about specific exhibitions; private reflections drawn from personal correspondence; answers to questions posed by critics; and excerpts from journals discussing the intentions, subjects, methods and sources of his work from various periods.
Complete with a comprehensive appendix, and accompanied by over a hundred photographs of artworks, works in progress, exhibition installations, colleagues and family.
RRP £36.00
10% online price saving Price: £32.40
Princeton Architectural Press 2009
216 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 9781568980157
16.5 x 26.5 cm English text. Softcover
In Bunker Archeology, urban philosopher and cultural theorist Paul Virilio turns his attention—and camera—to the ominous yet strangely compelling German bunkers from WW II that lie abandoned on the coast of France. These ghostly reminders of destruction and oppression prompt Virilio to consider the nature of war and existence, in relation to both the Second World War and contemporary times.
This is the first English-language translation of the French edition published in 1975 to accompany the exhibition of Paul Virilio's photographs at the Pompidou Center. The author's haunting photographs are accompanied by his analysis of the architecture of war in both philosophical and concrete terms. Virilio discusses fortresses and military space in general and the bunkers themselves, including facsimiles of original military maps and extracts from Hitler's "Directives of War." He also examines the role of Albert Speer, Hitler's architect, in the rise of the Third Reich.
RRP £28.00
10% online price saving Price: £25.20
Philadelphia Center for Arts 2006
184 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 9780970834614
16.5 x 23.5 cm English text. Softcover
Rising attendance at museums, along with increased press coverage in the age of the international biennial and the ‘blockbuster’ exhibition, has translated into a growing interest in how exhibitions are made. The new curatorial studies programmes springing up across Europe and North America often deal with theoretical issues, yet one of the central questions of curating frequently remains unframed: What makes an exhibition great? In this book, fourteen essays by active curators and historians address the issue head-on.
Focusing on the curation of contemporary art in North America and Europe, What Makes a Great Exhibition? includes essays by the prolific curator Robert Storr on the meaning of ‘exhibition’ and ‘exhibition-maker’; Studio Museum in Harlem director Thelma Golden writes on ethnically specific exhibitions; Dia Foundation curator Lynne Cooke shows how to firmly ground rarified aims; Iwona Blazwick details a century of trailblazing at London’s Whitechapel Art Gallery, where she is director; and curator Carlos Basualdo reflects on the need to establish a meaningful critical context for international biennials. Other writers address such issues as the labelling of exhibits, group exhibitions, exhibiting design, video and craft, as well as the way a venue’s architecture can influence the exhibitions it houses. What Makes a Great Exhibition? contains carefully considered answers to numerous questions of practice even as it raises more questions about exhibition-making today.
Stimulating thought about how curatorial objectives mesh with on-the-ground practicalities, this book is vital reading for arts professionals, students of art and curatorial studies, art historians, practising artists and anyone curious about exhibition-making today.
RRP £10.95
5% online price saving Price: £9.85
JRP | Ringier 2004
64 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 9782940271559
11.5 x 16.5 cm English text. Softcover
An American tradition, an "ice cream social" is an occasion for the members of a community to gather together to relax with friends and enjoy confectionery refreshments. David Robbins’ "Ice Cream Social" does all this while adding a layer of something else. It started in 1993 when a Baskin-Robbins ice cream "parlour" was used for an exhibition of paintings based on the company’s graphics. Over the following decade it expanded into live events, a TV pilot, and a feature movie script. These derivations, together with digital designs presented here along with a novella from 1998, map the full extent of this ironic utterance of a later over-praised "relations aesthetic."
In his famous 1986 work "Talent" (18 showbiz-style "headshots" of the New York art scene), David Robbins equated artists such as Cindy Sherman, Jeff Koons, and Richard Prince with entertainers; the ICS deepens this investigation into the relationship between art and entertainment. These two projects, as well as David Robbins’ practice in general, mark an important step in the critical genealogy of the entrance of the art system into the popular culture industry.
RRP £7.00
10% online price saving Price: £6.30
Semiotext(e) 2008
360 pages ISBN 9781584350552
15 x 23 cm English text. Softcover
Yesterday, the police interrogated me at length about the journal and the Situationist organization. It was only a beginning. This is, I think, one of the principle threats that came up quickly during the discussion: the police want to regard the SI as an association in order to set about its dissolution in France. I protested, emphasizing that the artistic movement was never legally constituted by moral individuals in a declared association. Not being constituted, the SI cannot be officially dissolved, but they tried to intimidate us heavily. It seems they take us for gangsters!
—from Correspondence
This volume traces the dynamic first years of the Situationist International movement—a cultural avant-garde that continues to inspire new generations of artists, theorists, and writers more than half a century later. Debord's letters—published here for the first time in English—provide a fascinating insider's view of just how this seemingly disorganized group drifting around a newly consumerized Paris became one of the most defining cultural movements of the twentieth century. Circumstances, personalities, and ambitions all come into play as the group develops its strategy of anarchic, conceptual, but highly political "intervention."
Brilliantly conceived, this collection of letters offers the best available introduction to the Situationist International movement by detailing, through original documents, how the group formed and defined its cultural mission: to bring about, "by any means possible, even artistic," a complete transformation of personal life within the Society of the Spectacle.
RRP £12.95
5% online price saving Price: £12.30
Aurum Press 2008
256 pages ISBN 9781845133900
15.5 x 20 cm English text. Softcover
These days artists like Damien Hirst and Tracy Emin are big business and major celebrities. But Gregor Muir knew them at the start of their careers - before people even talked about a movement called YBA. His unique memoir is the first history of the birth of the Young British Artists, and a slice of London subculture. Muir - who now runs a major London gallery - describes himself accurately as YBA's 'embedded journalist'. He was the only writer who happened to be in Shoreditch and Hoxton at the time when the White Cube Gallery was founded, and at that unique moment of recent history when a remarkable array of young artists - Hirst, the Chapman brothers, Sarah Lucas, Rachel Whiteread, Sam Taylor-Wood - all came together to produce a fresh, irreverent, wacky and quickly enormously popular form of art.Often it was notorious - Hirst's shark, Whiteread's House, Lucas' two fried eggs and a kebab - and incredibly newsworthy. Their hedonistic riotous world grew up in a then forgotten, down-at-heel part of East London. Back then Shoreditch was full of squats and grotty pubs, not groovy nightclubs. Muir tells the history of YBA up to the seminal Sensation show at the Royal Academy - a picaresque, hilarious story never before told. An Ian Sinclair for the modern art world, this is a memorable and unique piece of modern history. This work is: the first history of the Young British Artists; by the only 'embedded journalist' of the movement; the story of Hirst, Lucas and Emin before they were famous; an Iain Sinclair of the art world; and, a follow-up to Aurum's very successful $12 Million Stuffed Shark.
RRP £14.99
5% online price saving Price: £14.24
Book Works 2004
194 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 187069970X
19 x 25.5 cm English text. Softcover
Put About: A Critical Anthology on Independent Publishing presents a timely discussion about independent publishing and publishing by artists, focusing on books where the makers keep control of every aspect of production through to distribution. Combining an interest in what and why publishers and artists feel compelled to deliver such materials, together with the economic models, audience and networks of association that can give independent productions a wider cultural presence, this book features a broad range of written and visual pieces alongside 'case-studies' from a selection of contemporary international publishers. Contributors include: John Baldessari, Simon Bedwell, Michael Bracewell, Andrea Brady, Cabinet Magazine, Bonnie Camplin, Maurizio Cattelan, David Dibosa, Matthew Higgs, Stewart Home, Lucy Lippard, Emily King, Gunilla Klingberg, Jakob Kolding, John Miller, Paul D. Miller aka Dj Spooky, Aleksandra Mir, Stéphanie Moisdon, David Osbaldeston, Raymond Pettibon, Lynne Tillman, Nicolas Trembley, and Axel John Wieder.
RRP £16.50
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Princeton Architectural Press 2008
80 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 9781883584443
14 x 21.5 cm English text. Hardcover
When does an artist's creation become art, and where? Does it occur in the solitary confines of an artist's studio or does it require the context of an art gallery's white cube? What is the relationship between these two culturally charged spaces? How does the site of art's presentation shape the meaning and determine even the very possibility of its existence?
Studio and Cube is author Brian O'Doherty's long-awaited follow-up to his seminal 1976 essays for Artforum, republished in 1999 as Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space. That critically acclaimed volume dissected the abstract, white space of the art gallery, calling it "the archetypal image of twentieth century art." In Studio and Cube he expands his interpretation to include the artist's studio, tracking the relationship between the artwork and the artist from Vermeer through late modernism. O'Doherty reflects on the differing work spaces of Courbet, Matisse, Rothko, Bacon, Warhol, and many others. This is essential reading for anyone interested in the history and issues of art and the environment in which it is produced. Studio and Cube is the first in the series of FORuM Project Publications produced by the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture, at Columbia University.
RRP £15.00
10% online price saving Price: £13.50
JRP | Ringier 2009
298 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 9783037640128
Over the past few years the debate concerning the traditional relationships between art and design, largely based on a division of ground and on more or less accepted hierarchical relationships, has intensified. New intrigues have built up between art and design, different modalities have to be examined.
In this anthology based on a symposium, design specialists such as Paola Antonelli, Anthony Dunne, Alexandra Midal, Rick Poynor, and Alice Rawsthorn, and art specialists such as Paul Ardenne, Diedrich Diederichsen, and Hal Foster, deliver original contributions that enlighten this dialogue between art and design and question the autonomy of each field.
RRP £23.00 Price: £20.70
C T Editions 2008
144 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 9780954707125
RRP £14.95
10% online price saving Price: £13.45
80 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 9781568987781
Svetlana Boym's Architecture of the Off-Modern is an imaginative tour through the history and afterlife of Vladimir Tatlin's legendary but unbuilt Monument to the Third International of 1920. Generally considered to be the defining expression of architectural constructivism, the structure was envisioned as a towering symbol of modernity and a twisting, turning memorial and media center for the Bolshevik Revolution that would have dwarfed the Eiffel Tower. Boym traces the vicissitudes of Tatlin's tower from its reception in the 1920s to its privileged recall in "the reservoir of unofficial utopian dreams" of the Soviet era. Boym offers an alternative history of modernism, postulating the "architecture of adventure" as a poetic model for "third route" thinking about technology, history, and aesthetic culture.
MoMA, New York 2007
348 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 9780870707087
16 x 23.5 cm English text. Softcover
Throughout his career, the influential art photographer Jeff Wall has written periodically on a variety of subjects--from the work of his Vancouver colleagues, to the art of such diverse figures as Edouard Manet, On Kawara, and Dan Graham, to the important role of photography in Conceptual art. Wall's own work takes center stage in the many interviews he has granted over the past two decades. Both the essays and the interviews are indispensable to the study of Wall's work, which will be the subject of a major American traveling retrospective, with stops in New York, Chicago and San Francisco, throughout 2007. Thanks to Wall's wide-ranging curiosity, nimble mind, and articulate voice, the texts are also of considerable interest outside of the context of his own oeuvre. This generous selection of 14 essays and 23 interviews from the past 25 years is the first collection of Wall's texts to be published in English, and as such, is an instant collector's item. This affordable volume also includes 120 black-and-white illustrations for reference purposes.
This volume also includes the much sought-after Dan Graham's Kammerspiel
128 pages ISBN 9781906012038
With locations ranging from a murder scene outside a Covent Garden theatre to the Victorian explorer Sir John Franklin’s ship Terror frozen into the Arctic ice — and taking in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, a rural idyll in Somerset and an extraordinary Masonic ritual on the way - Index is a spellbinding novella that provokes curiosity and ultimately satisfies it with a poetics of mystery that transcends conventional narrative closure.
In the book fictionalised versions of the famous magician and forger Cagliostro; the revolutionary bigot Lord George Gordon; Marie Antoinette and the transvestite spy Chevalier D’Eon, are woven into a thematic exploration of revolution, repression, seduction and death. The use of uncredited ‘found’ texts and deliberate forgeries blur the line between what might have happened and what is merely imagined. Mapped onto this web of memory and imagination are Roland and Julie, the survivors of a king’s unsuccessful experiment to uncover the truth about human nature and the original spoken language.
Bridget Penney was born in Edinburgh, lived in London and settled in Brighton. She is the author of one previously published book 'Honeymoon with Death' (Polygon, Edinburgh 1991), which was short-listed for the Saltire Society Scottish First Book of the Year Award.
RRP £8.00
10% online price saving Price: £7.20
160 pages ISBN 9783905829563
15 x 21 cm English text. Softcover
A former anthropologist, Susan Hiller has been a pioneer in exploring the arena between the art domain and the world in general. Her involvement in art and feminism, her postcolonial analyses of cultural politics are foregrounded in this volume which brings together previously published texts and interviews, improvised talks, papers, invitational keynote lectures, discussion with other artists, etc.
The collection of texts documents Susan Hiller’s incisive interventions un current debates around the shifting roles of art and theory, shedding new light on the interface between critical writing and visual art practice.
Science, magic, the sense, (mis)understandings, and the continuing lure of psychoanalysis are among the subjects that Hiller interrogates. Structured in three sections, the book, simultaneously wide-ranging, worldly, and deeply personal, may read as portrait of the artist as public intellectual.
RRP £11.00
10% online price saving Price: £9.90
Verso 1996/2007
248 pages ISBN 9781844675814
The feature which distinguishes the great works of materialist thought, from Lucretius’ De rerum natura through Capital to the writings of Lacan, is their unfinished character: again and again they tackle their chosen problem. Schelling’s Weltalter drafts belong to this same series, with their repeated attempt at the formulation of the ‘beginning of the world,’ of the passage from the pre-symbolic pulsation of the Real to the universe of logos.
F.W.J. Schelling, the German idealist who for too long dwelled in the shadow of Kant and Hegel, was the first to formulate the post-idealist motifs of finitude, contingency and temporality. His unique work announces Marx's critique of speculative idealism, as well as the properly Freudian notion of drive, of a blind compulsion to repeat which can never be sublated in the ideal medium of language.
The Indivisible Remainder begins with a detailed examination of the two works in which Schelling's speculative audacity reached its peak: his essay on human freedom and his drafts on the “Ages of the World.” After reconstituting their line of argumentation, Slavoj Zizek confronts Schelling with Hegel, and concludes by throwing a Schellingian light on some “related matters”: the consequences of the computerization of daily life for sexual experience; cynicism as today's predominant form of ideology; the epistemological deadlocks of quantum physics.
Although the book is packed with examples from politics and popular culture — the unmistakable token of Zizek’s style — from Speed and Groundhog Day to Forrest Gump, it signals a major shift towards a systematic concern with the basic questions of philosophy and the roots of the crisis of our late-capitalist universe, centred around the enigma of modern subjectivity.
Slavoj Zizek is the author of The Sublime Object of Ideology, For They Know Not What They Do, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock), The Metastases of Enjoyment, The Plague of Fantasies, Mapping Ideology, The Fragile Absolute: Or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Is Worth Fighting For?, and The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology.
RRP 6.99
10% online price saving Price: £6.29
Beautiful Books 2008
352 pages Colour reproductions. 9781905636266
17 x 23 cm English text.. Hardcover
Rich and thought-provoking insight into the history of popular music by Bill Drummond, one of its most controversial exponents. In 17, Drummond analyses the past, present and possible future of music and the ways in which we hear and relate to it. He references his own contributions to the canon of popular music and he provides fascinating insider portraits of the industry and its protagonists. Above all, he questions our ideas of music and our attitude to sound, introducing readers to his new work, 17, which he will be performing throughout the UK in June 2008. Price: £12.99
Sternberg Press 2008
304 pagrs Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 9781933128399
15.5 x 21 cm English text. Softcover
Since the mid-nineties, contemporary art has been booming like never before. There is more of everything – more artists, more collectors, more galleries, more art fairs, more museums, more biennials, more interest, more industry, more pop, more hype. Some art professionals feel prompted by all this to reach for the revolvers of cultural pessimism: Mass Stupidity Is Killing Great Art! Others—often the same people a short while later—defect with all the greater abandon to the alleged enemy. The entrenched battle between defenders of art’s autonomy and champions of its merging with entertainment culture continues. There is more of everything, with one exception: criteria. Criteria with which the art of the moment can be understood, judged, praised and, if need be, damned—without getting bogged down in this eternal trench warfare.
In All of a Sudden. Things that Matter in Contemporary Art, Jörg Heiser provides a sharp summary of contemporary art since Marcel Duchamp. Using many artworks as example, the author shows that art is more than just a randomly chosen cultural field of activity in which to acquire a little specialist knowledge to show off with. “When it’s good,” he claims, “art hits where it hurts, striking at the heart of an ossified status quo by which it itself was brought forth. Perhaps this is something art since Modernism has in common with slapstick. Instead of just aiming to shock and outrage, it shows authority losing its grip. Instead of inflating itself, it deflates the pompous in the name of art.”
The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung finds the book “astonishingly enlightening.” The Frankfurter Rundschau praises Heiser for finally opening the eyes of his readers—something many of his colleagues have been unable to do.
Jörg Heiser (*1968) lives in Berlin. He is co-editor of frieze magazine, writes for the national daily Süddeutsche Zeitung, and is a frequent contributor to art catalogues and publications. He curated the exhibitions “Romantic Conceptualism” (2007, Kunsthalle Nürnberg, BAWAG Foundation Vienna) and “Funky Lessons” (2004/2005, BüroFriedrich Berlin, BAWAG Foundation Vienna).
National Gallery of Art, Washington 2008
536 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 9780894683138
21.5 x 31 cm English text. Softcover
This lavishly illustrated and astonishingly comprehensive volume stands as the definitive study of the influential but deliberately elusive international Dada movement of the early twentieth century. Organized according to the primary city centers where this shifting, quintessentially avant garde movement emerged, "Dada: Zurich, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, New York, Paris" features the work of 40 key artists, both infamous and lesser-known, including Louis Aragon, Hans Arp, Hugo Ball, Andre Breton, Otto Dix, Marcel Duchamp, Hannah Hoch, Man Ray, Tristan Tzara and Kurt Schwitters, to name just a few, in media spanning painting, sculpture, photography, collage, photomontage, prints and graphic work. Dynamically designed with an uncommon intelligence suited to the complexity of the movement itself, it contains hundreds of reproductions of works which, until the major traveling exhibition of 2005 and 2006 for which this book was originally produced, had for the most part never been seen in one place together. Documentary images, topical essays and an invaluable illustrated chronology of the movement make this volume uniquely essential, along with witty chronicles of events in each city center; a selected bibliography; and biographies of each artist accompanied by Dada-era photographs.
RRP £19.95
10% online price saving Price: £17.95
Taschen 2008
592 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 9783836505116
20 x 25 cm English/French/German text
Want a head start on the things you'll be seeing in art institutions a decade down the road? It's all in here, the very latest of the very best—and so fresh you can feel its pulse. A to Z magazine-style entries include captivating images of important recent work, short biographies, exhibition history and bibliographical information. The illustrated appendix features names and contact information for the galleries representing the artists featured, as well as primary market prices and examples of auction results. Think of this tome as a global go-round of the world's most influential galleries: a truly invaluable, invigorating, and intense experience.
Featured artists:
Tomma Abts, Franz Ackermann, Ai Weiwei, Doug Aitken, Haluk Akakçe, Allora & Calzadilla, Darren Almond, Pawel Althamer, David Altmejd, Hope Atherton, Banksy, Matthew Barney, Tim Berresheim, Cosima von Bonin, Monica Bonvicini, Cecily Brown, Glenn Brown, André Butzer, Cai Guo-Qiang, Maurizio Cattelan, Mat Collishaw, George Condo, Martin Creed, John Currin, Aaron Curry, Enrico David, Tacita Dean, Thomas Demand, Rineke Dijkstra, Nathalie Djurberg, Peter Doig, Marlene Dumas, Marcel Dzama, Martin Eder, Olafur Eliasson, Elmgreen & Dragset, Tracey Emin, Urs Fischer, Günther Förg, Walton Ford, Tom Friedman, Ellen Gallagher, Isa Genzken, Luis Gispert, Robert Gober, Douglas Gordon, Mark Grotjahn, Subodh Gupta, Andreas Gursky, Wade Guyton, Daniel Guzmán, Rachel Harrison, Mona Hatoum, Eberhard Havekost, Richard Hawkins, Jonathan Hernández, Arturo Herrera, Charline von Heyl, Thomas Hirschhorn, Damien Hirst, Andreas Hofer, Thomas Houseago, Huang Yong Ping, Pierre Huyghe, Mike Kelley, Terence Koh, Jeff Koons, Dr. Lakra, Ulrich Lamsfuß, Won Ju Lim, Vera Lutter, Marepe, Paul McCarthy, Josephine Meckseper, Jonathan Meese, Beatriz Milhazes, Sarah Morris, Ron Mueck, Takashi Murakami, Wangechi Mutu, Ernesto Neto, Frank Nitsche, Tim Noble & Sue Webster, Albert Oehlen, Chris Ofili, Paulina Olowska, Gabriel Orozco, Jorge Pardo, Manfred Pernice, Raymond Pettibon, Elizabeth Peyton, Richard Phillips, Richard Prince, Neo Rauch, Tobias Rehberger, Anselm Reyle, Daniel Richter, Thomas Ruff, Anri Sala, Wilhelm Sasnal, Matthias Schaufler, Thomas Scheibitz, Gregor Schneider, Raqib Shaw, Cindy Sherman, Santiago Sierra, Dash Snow, Rudolf Stingel, Thomas Struth, Mickalene Thomas, Wolfgang Tillmans, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Gert & Uwe Tobias, Fred Tomaselli, Janaina Tschäpe, Luc Tuymans, Piotr Uklan´ski, Francesco Vezzoli, Kara Walker, Jeff Wall, Rebecca Warren, Marnie Weber, Franz West, Pae White, Kehinde Wiley, Jonas Wood, Christopher Wool, Erwin Wurm, Xu Zhen, Yang Fudong, Toby Ziegler, Thomas Zipp
RRP £24.99 Price: £22.49
MIT Press 2008
224 pages ISBN 9780262072922
15 x 23 cm English text. Hardcover
Art has its own power in the world, and is as much a force in the power play of global politics today as it once was in the arena of cold war politics. Art, argues distinguished theoretician Boris Groys, is hardly a powerless commodity subject to the art market's fiats of inclusion and exclusion. In Art Power, Groys examines modern and contemporary art according to its ideological function. Art, Groys writes, is produced and brought before the public in two ways--as a commodity and as a tool of political propaganda. In the contemporary art scene, very little attention is paid to the latter function; the official and unofficial art of the former Soviet Union and other former Socialist states, for example, is largely excluded from the field of institutionally recognized art, usually on moral grounds (although, Groys points out, criticism of the morality of the market never leads to calls for a similar exclusion of art produced under market conditions).
Arguing for the inclusion of politically motivated art in contemporary art discourse, Groys considers art produced under totalitarianism, Socialism, and post-Communism. He also considers today’s mainstream Western art--which he finds behaving more and more according to the norms of ideological propaganda: produced and exhibited for the masses at international exhibitions, biennials, and festivals. Contemporary art, Groys argues, demonstrates its power by appropriating the iconoclastic gestures directed against itself--by positioning itself simultaneously as an image and as a critique of the image. In Art Power, Groys examines this fundamental appropriation that produces the paradoxical object of the modern artwork.
5% online price saving Price: £14.20
120 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 9781568987941
The Project of Autonomy radically rediscusses the concept of autonomy in politics and architecture by tracing a concise and polemical argument about its history in Italy in the 1960s and early 1970s. Architect and educator Pier Vittorio Aureli analyzes the position of the Operaism movement, formed by a group of intellectuals that produced a powerful and rigorous critique of capitalism and its intersections with two of the most radical architectural-urban theories of the day: Aldo Rossi's redefinition of the architecture of the city and Archizoom's No-stop City. Readers are introduced to major figures like Mario Tronti and Raniero Panzieri who have previously been little known in the English-speaking world, especially in an architectural context, and to the political motivations behind the theories of Rossi and Archizoom. The book draws on significant new source material, including recent interviews by the author and untranslated documents.
Black Dog Publishing 2008
240 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 9781906155391
23 x 28 cm English text. Hardcover
Collage: Assembling Contemporary Art is the first authoritative survey of the history of collage from its origins through to the latest work being produced by artists today. From the traditional ‘cut and paste’ method through to digital, three-dimensional and installation work, and in the incorporation of contemporary concerns such as environment and commercialism, collage is experiencing an exciting renaissance.
Collage draws together the work of influential artists to contextualize the art being produced today. Collage features the art of such internationally acclaimed artists as Picasso, Schwitters and Ernst, Hannah Hoch, Marta Rosler, John Stezaker, Richard Hamilton, Layla Curtis, David Salle, Eduardo Poalozzi, Javier Rodriguez, Robert Rauschenberg, David Thorpe, Fred Tomaselli and many more.
In addition to using works by these artists to provide a comprehensive overview of this exciting art form, Collage also includes essays written by artist and critic, Sally O’Reilly, artist Ian Monroe, and an interview
between critic and writer, David Lillington, and artist, John Stezaker, outlining the history of the medium and critically addressing how collage is being used throughout contemporary art today.
RRP £35.00
10% online price saving Price: £31.50
JRP/Ringier 2008
64 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 9783905701371
This publication derives from the first of a series of Symposium Merzbau at Cabaret Voltaire investigating the legacy of Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau in contemporary architecture, art and society. Included are contributions by art historians and critics such as Stefano Boeri, Peter Bissegger, Dietmar Elger, Yona Friedman, Thomas Hirschhorn, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Karin Orchard and Gwendolen Webster. Edited by Adrian Notz, Curator of Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Co-Director of Exhibitions and Programmes and Director of International Projects at Serpentine Gallery in London. Price: £7.00
Seagull Books 2008
112 pages ISBN 1905422695
13 x 18 cm English text. Softcover
“All my life I have seen only troubled times, extreme divisions in society, and immense destruction; I have taken part in these troubles.” --Guy Debord
Guy Debord is one of the 20th Century’s most prophetic critics. His bestselling work, Society of the Spectacle, decisively transformed debates on the shape of modernity, capitalism, and everyday life. Since his suicide in 1994, the accuracy and pertinence of his writings on those troubled times is ever more apparent.
A Sick Planet brings together three of his key essays. The Rise and Fall of the “Spectacular” Commodity-Economy is an analysis of the Watts riots in Los Angeles in the summer of 1965, when much of the city’s black population fought thousands of police and National Guard for several days. The Explosion Point of Ideology in China examines and celebrates the decomposition of bureaucratic power and its ideology in China. A Sick Planet presents an extremely prescient polemic on global environmental degradation. Price: £9.99
Reaktion 2008
256 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 9781861893420
15 x 20 cm English text. Softcover
'a major contribution to the literature on the filmmaker. Bird is thoroughly familiar with Russian sources unavailable to English readers and he has a remarkable sensitivity to the nuances of cinematic construction. His writing is lucid and consistently illuminates Tarkovksy's central preoccupation: "the tragic failure of spirituality . . . in conflict with its natural conditions."' –P. Adams Sitney, Professor of Visual Arts, Princeton University, and author of Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde 1943-2000
The films of Andrei Tarkovsky have been revered as ranking on a par with the masterpieces of Russia’s novelists and composers. His work, from films such as Ivan’s Childhood, Andrei Rublev, Solaris, Mirror, Nostalgia and Sacrifice, has had an enormous influence on the style of contemporary European film, with its open narrative structures and slow, pensive mood; yet Tarkovsky has remained an elusive subject for reflection and analysis. This book is a comprehensive, well-illustrated and much-needed account of Tarkovsky’s entire film output.
Robert Bird’s analysis is centred around a detailed account of Tarkovsky’s technique, which provides the best interpretive guide to both the director’s films and his theoretical speculations. Integrating his idiosyncratic ideas with his films’ irresistible sensuality, Bird highlights Tarkovsky’s fascination with the elusive correlation between cinematic representation and the more primeval perception of the world.
The book examines Tarkovsky’s films elementally, grouping them into four sections: Water, Fire, Earth, and Air. It also discusses Tarkovsky’s works for the radio, theatre and opera, and how he was in addition an accomplished actor, screenwriter, film theorist and diarist. The author’s claim, however, is that Tarkovsky was a filmmaker before all else, and this book examines what Tarkovsky’s cinema reveals about the medium in which he worked.
A thorough yet accessible study, with a wealth of images including stills from films as well as the director and crew on set, this book will be of interest to all fans of Tarkovsky, students of film studies, and readers interested in European and Russian cinema. Price: £15.95
Fuel 2007
160 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 9780955006166
17.5 x 25 cm English text. Hardcover
Across the world, libraries and institutions are just beginning to make their collections available online, much of this amazing material goes unnoticed by the casual surfer.
BibliOdyssey’s mission has been to search the dustier corners of the internet and retrieve these materials for our enjoyment. Thanks to the efforts of this singular weblog, a myriad of long-forgotten imagery has now resurfaced. Each of these fascinating images is accompanied by a commentary from PK, author and curator of BibliOdyssey, and a link to the source website.
With a foreword by artist Dinos Chapman, BibliOdyssey is a journey in discovery and delight – a true cabinet of curiosities
Canongate 2007
224 pages ISBN 9781841959306
13 x 21 cm English text. Softcover
In her debut collection of short stories, July introduces the possibility of a moment that can change everything. A child stands in the sidewalk; a woman lies motionless in bed beside her husband; a teacher pauses at the chalkboard; when suddenly the daily drone is disrupted by something completely unexpected. July's characters are awkward and often remote, yet they are also profoundly sympathetic. With great compassion and generosity she reveals the idiosyncrasies, vulnerability, longing, and odd logic that govern our lives. In "No One Belongs Here More Than You July" creates a deliriously hopeful universe where strangers hug and students swim across the kitchen floor. The same energy that captivates her film audiences is transposed into exhilarating new fiction.
RRP £7.99
5% online price saving Price: £7.59
Profile Books 2008
224 pages. ISBN 9781846680175
13.2 x 21.2cm English Text. Softcover
The premise of Zizek's theory is that the subjective violence we see - violence with a clear identifiable agent - is only the tip of an iceberg made up of 'systemic' violence, which is essentially the catastrophic consequence of the smooth functioning of our economic and political systems.
With the help of Marx, Engels, Sartre, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Lacan, Brecht and many more, Zizek examines the hidden causes of violence, delving into the supposed 'divine violence' which propels suicide bombers and the unseen 'systemic' violence which lies behind outbursts, from Parisian suburbia to New Orleans. For Zizek, the controversial truth is that sometimes doing nothing is the most violent thing you can do. He calls for a forceful confrontation with the vacuity of today's democracies - using an unconventional plethora of references: Hitchcock, Orwell, Fukuyama, Freud and more. Price: £12.99
Valiz 2007
184 pages ISBN 9789078088172
17 x 24 cm English text. Softcover
What do you think of when you consider the art of the past fifteen years? Video art. Computers and the internet. Globalization. Nomadism. Itinerant curators and biennale artists. Installation and process art. Powerpoint presentations. The multicultural society. Design. Magazines. Fashion. Lounges. The DJ, VJ and house culture. Blockbuster exhibitions in art galleries. Social works of art and socially engaged artists. This great diversity of art has, however, generated virtually no theoretical reflection or historical contextualization.
The contrast with previous decades could scarcely be starker. In the 1960s artists and critics fell over each other to come up with names, complete with theory and genealogy, for each new trend. Pop Art, Op Art, Minimal Art, Conceptual Art – they all had to have their own story.
In the 1990s it was mainly the art itself and the experience it provided that were key. And yet this ‘art without theory’ can, of course, be interpreted theoretically and put into a historical context.
Essays by Jennifer Allen, Sophie Berrebi, Claire Bishop, Beatrice von Bismarck, Maaike Bleeker, Jeroen Boomgaard, Nicolas Bourriaud, Deborah Cherry, Hal Foster, Vit Havránek, Mischa Rakier, Margriet Schavemakers, Marc Spiegler, Olav Velthuis, Kitty Zijlmans Price: £19.50
464 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 978190615504
20 x 25 cm English text. Hardcover
Tarkovsky provides a collection of accessible academic essays by leading film studies professionals. A challenging, broadly illustrated book that fully captures the essence of this cinematic pioneer.
“Juxtaposing a person with an environment that is boundless, collating him with a countless number of people passing by close to him and far away, relating a person to the whole world, that is the meaning of cinema.” Andrei Tarkovsky
Tarkovsky pays tribute to the substantial legacy of Andrei Tarkovsky, the most important Soviet filmmaker of the post-war era, and one of the world’s most renowned cinematic geniuses. His reputation has grown significantly since his death twenty years ago in Paris. Tarkovsky created spiritual, existential films of incredible beauty, repeatedly returning to themes of memory, dreams, childhood and Christianity. Hugely influential on directors such as David Lynch, Steven Soderburgh and Lars Von Trier, he is particularly known for his re-imagining of the science fiction genre in films such as Solaris and Stalker.
Tarkovsky provides a collection of accessible academic essays by leading film studies professionals that explore aspects of Tarkovsky's films including their sociological and psychological dimensions, their cinematic language and their rich symbolism. Contributions include the first ever English translation of Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous essay on the film Ivan’s Childhood, along with pieces by Harvard professor Stephanie Sandler, film critic and curator James Quandt and Evgeny Tsymbal, assistant director to Tarkovsky on Stalker.
Tarkovsky is illustrated with original stills along with studio shots, lobby cards, posters and other rare ephemera and contains a wealth of previously unseen material from Soviet archives making it the definitive text on Tarkovsky’s singularly complex body of work.
RRP £29.99
10% online price saving Price: £26.99
Cultureshock Media 2006
276 pages ISBN 9780954699918
14 x 20 cm English text. Hardcover
OWNING ART is a fascinating perspective on the intricacies of art collecting. The authors, Louisa Buck and Judith Greer, outline not only the practical matters associated with collecting art, but also - and maybe more importantly - the different theoretical aspects of collecting. I am not a collector of contemporary art, yet this insightful book introduced me to several different ways of thinking about contemporary art in particular and, more generally, about the shape of a collection. Buck and Greer emphasise choice and decision-making as privileged moments in the construction of an archive. Ultimately, OWNING ART moves beyond the point of purchase to demonstrate how a collection can be the physical trace that ties together taste, ability, access and human relationships.
Pocket Essentials 2006
160 pages ISBN 1904048617
12.5 x 18.5 cm English text. Hardcover
This book examines the origins of Psychogeography in the Situationist Movement of the 1950s, exploring the theoretical background and its political applications as well as the work of early practitioners such as Guy Debord and Raoul Vaneigem. Elsewhere, psychogeographic ideas continue to find retrospective validation in much earlier traditions from the visionary writing of William Blake and Thomas De Quincey to the rise of the flâneur on the streets of 19th century Paris and on through the avant-garde experimentation of the Surrealists. These precursors to Psychogeography are discussed here alongside their modern counterparts, for today these ideas hold greater currency than ever through the popularity of writers and filmmakers such as Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd, Stewart Home and Patrick Keiller.
From Urban Wandering to Cognitive Mapping, from the Dérive to Détournement, Psychogeography provides us with new ways of apprehending our surroundings, transforming the familiar streets of our everyday experience into something new and unexpected. This guide conducts the reader through this process, offering both an explanation and definition of the terms involved, an analysis of the key figures and their work as well as practical information on Psychogeographical groups and organisations. Price: £9.99
Allen Lane The Penguin Press 2007
576 pages ISBN 9780713998993
23.5 x 15.5 cm English text. Hardcover
This is a book about shock, and the way it's applied to countries and people. It is the unofficial story of how the 'free market' came to dominate the world from Chile to Russia, China to Iraq, South Africa to Britain.
It is a story radically different from the one usually told. Based on breakthrough historical research and four years of on-the-ground reporting, Naomi Klein explodes the myth that 'free markets' lead to 'free people'. She reveals that our world is increasingly in thrall to a little understood yet hugely influential ideology: the shock doctrine. This is a doctrine that sees moments of collective crisis as a 'window of opportunity'. With societies too terrified or disoriented to protect their own interests, the free market advances, using the trademark tactic of rapid-fire economic shock therapy. Often, a refusal to comply results in distinctly more corporeal shocks: the shock of the Taser gun, or the electric cattle prod. Our history is littered with events that have provided opportunities for the shock doctrine. From the 1970s dictatorships of South America, through the Falklands War, Tiananmen Square and the collapse of the Soviet Union, Naomi Klein reinterprets our past to trace the rise of disaster capitalism, a program of social and economic engineering advanced through shock. Playing out today around the world in Israel, Iraq, New Orleans and South-East Asia, The Shock Doctrine reveals the true beliefs that lie behind global policy and in doing so reframes our history and our present.
RRP £25.00
5% online price saving Price: £23.75
Wordsworth Trust 2007
240 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 9781905256211
14 x 21 cm English text. Softcover
Philip Guston rose to prominence in 1950s New York, alongside such figures as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko. This was the great abstract expressionist generation. In 1967, however, in what seemed like an act of treachery and folly to his colleagues and admirers, Guston abandoned abstraction. He left New York and settled in the small town of Woodstock. There, in isolation, he began the great series of figurative paintings that today are generally considered his greatest and most important work. Christopher Bucklow’s new book examines the coherent structure of the ‘world’ that Guston created during his last decade. It offers for the first time, a comprehensive account of how his symbolism operates and what it was intended to do. Bucklow shows the source of that intent was often not to be found in Guston’s conscious mind but somewhere he called The Lower Level.
RRP £18.00
10% online price saving Price: £16.20
Faber 2007
400 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. 9780571229857
16 x 23.5 cm English text. Hardcover
Re-make/Re-model is the fascinating and largely unknown story of the individuals and circumstances that would lead over a period of almost twenty years to the formation of Roxy Music - a group in which art, fashion and music would combine to create in the words of its inventor, Bryan Ferry, 'above all, a state of mind'.
Written with the assistance, for the first time, of all of those involved, including Bryan Ferry, Brian Eno, Andy Mackay and Phil Manzanera; the fashion designer Antony Price, the founding guru of pop art, and Bryan Ferry's tutor, Richard Hamilton, and many more, Re-make/Re-model is also the account of how pop art, the avant garde underground of the 1960s, and the heady slipstream of London in the 1960s was transformed into the fashion cults of revivalism, nostalgia and pop futurism in the early 1970s.
Roxy Music would achieve almost immediate success as a pop group which was a meticulously montaged selection of styles. Theatrical, arch, thrilling, clever, their debut album, released in 1972, would be hailed by critics as one of the best ever released. As important, the record would offer the blueprint for a modern revolt into style.
The story which has never been told is that of the interweaving networks of friendships, influences and ideas out of which Roxy Music emerged. This would be a world in which the ideas within fine art and the avant garde would be determinedly applied to the making of mainstream popular culture; a story in which, through the recollections and insights of the participants, we travel from the austerity years of Britain in the 1950s, through the liberations and revolutions offered to a new generation by art schools and pop culture, to pursue the notion, retrospectively summarised by Brian Eno, that, 'pop music is not about making music in any traditional sense of the word. It is about creating new, imaginary worlds, and inviting people to join them.'
From student digs and provincial nightclubs, to emerald-green eye shadow and fake leopard skin, Re-make/Re-model is the history of an era and the biography of an extraordinary idea.
Verso 2007
148 pages ISBN 9781844671076
15 x 21 cm English text. Hardcover
A leading philosopher presents a radical manifesto for the future of art and film
In The Future of the Image, Jacques Rancière develops a fascinating new concept of the image in contemporary art, showing how art and politics have always been intrinsically intertwined. Covering a range of art movements, and thinkers such as Foucault, Deleuze, Adorno, Barthes, Lyotard and Greenberg, Rancière argues that contemporary theorists of the image are suffering from religious tendencies. He suggests that there is a stark political choice in art: it can either reinforce a radical democracy, or create a new reactionary mysticism. For Rancière there is never a pure art: the aesthetic revolution will always embrace egalitarian ideals.
“His art lies in the rigor of his argument – its careful, precise unfolding – and at the same time not treating his reader, whether university professor or unemployed actress, as an imbecile.” – Kristin Ross
“Like all of Jacques Rancière’s texts, The Future of the Image is vertiginously precise.” – Les Cahiers du Cinéma
“In the face of impossible attempts to proceed with progressive ideas within the terms of postmodernist discourse, Rancière shows a way out of malaise.” – Liam Gillick
10% online price saving Price: £13.49
Rizzoli 2007
304 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 9780847829699
Over the past century, an art form has emerged that draws from the worlds of visual art and music. Sound art’s roots can be found in the experimental work of Italian Futurism, Dada, and later the Fluxus group and the pioneering efforts of the American composer and artist John Cage. In the wake of this groundbreaking work, sound art began to mature into a movement, and artists explored the interactive possibilities of sound and in turn created entirely new modes of experiencing and engaging with art. In this volume, the complete story of sound art is told by one of the country’s leading critics and scholars. The author traces the history of this form of art–highlighting the convergence of the indie world bands such as Sonic Youth with the art world–looking at the critical cross-pollination that has led to some of the most important and challenging art being produced today, including work by Christian Marclay, LaMonte Young, Janet Cardiff, Rodney Graham, and Laurie Anderson, among many others.
Black Dog Publishing 2007
160 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 9781906155162
18 x 24 cm English text
Artist Bob and Roberta Smith was recently appointed by Commissions East to oversee a project in which five artists were commissioned to create site-specific projects to transform open spaces in South Essex. Art U Need: My Part in the Public Art Revolution is an intimate account of this project, written in diary form. With sensitivity, candour and a great deal of humour, Bob Smith, and his alter ego, Roberta, ponder the nature and place of public art in today’s world.
5% online price saving Price: £18.95
Verso 1999/2007
82 pages ISBN 9781844675784
Written with his characteristic flair, Virillo’s latest book is a trenchant denunciation of the Kosovo war in which he successfully unites theory with a riveting study of the conflict. Tearing aside the veil of hypocrisy in which the USA and its allies wrapped the war, Virillo demonstrates that the nature of the bombing was set by strategic rather than ethical considerations.
Beneath the humanitarian rhetoric, Virillo sees a sinister innovation in the methods of waging war: territorial space is being replaced by orbital space in which a system of global telesurveillance is linked to the destructive power of bombers and missiles. Governments, the military and the media are becoming part of a seamless and self-justifying process linked by new information and arms technologies.
Passionate and political, Strategy of Deception is a vital examination not only of the war in Yugoslavia but also what Virillo calls our “fin-de-siécle infantilization” in which the reality of battle is reduced to flickering images on a screen.
“One of the most original thinkers of our time.” — Libération
448 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 0714846805
25 x 29 cm English text. Hardcover
A selection of 100 of the most significant emerging artists today.Sergio Edelsztein, Jens Hoffmann, Lisette Lagnado, Midori Matsui, Shamim Momin, Pi Li, Gloria Sutton, Olesya Turkina, Philippe Vergne, and The Wrong Gallery
Visit the feature website at www.phaidon.com/icecream
An exhibition-in-a-book that presents 100 contemporary artists
Selected by 10 internationally renowned curators, these artists will be the stars of tomorrow
Continuing the phenomenon established by cream (1988) Fresh Cream (2000) and Cream 3 (2003), Ice Cream identifies the most significant emerging figures in an often confusing world and acts as an expert guide to future trends
Each artist is featured over four pages with a selection of their most interesting work together with a commentary by the curator who selected them, an exhibition history, and a bibliography
Each curator has also selected a source artist who has inspired or influenced the younger generation, providing readers with a broader historical perspective
A must-have for art-world insiders, an essential soucebook for students and all those who follow the contemporary art scene
RRP £39.95
10% online price saving Price: £35.95
320 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 9781904772811
23 x 28 cm English text. Softcover
Drawing has recently gained greater attention due to the prominence of contemporary artists who use it as a final medium of expression, rather than as a preliminary tool for sketching ideas. Edited by artist Tania Kovats, The Drawing Book positions drawing as an essential vehicle for creativity, reaching through the discrepancies between its uses by architects, artists and scientists for a deeper truth about the nature of drawing.
The book is arranged around a number of central themes; measurement, nature, the city, dreams and the body; each one richly illustrated with images ranging from cave paintings to engineering diagrams. These run alongside numerous artists’ commentaries as well as three substantial essays, considering the history and current popularity of the medium. The result is a book that takes an entirely new approach to the age old medium of drawing.
Artists: William Blake, Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, Ingres, Paul Macarthy, Henry Moore, Chris Ofili, Grayson Perry, Kiki Smith, Leonardo Da Vinci, Rachel Whiteread, Sol Le Witt, et al. Essays by Charles Darwent, Kate Macfarlane and Katharine Stout
RRP £24.95
10% online price saving Price: £22.45
JRP/Ringier 2007
320 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 9783905701012
This publication brings together in one volume a selection of critical writings originally printed in magazines and exhibition catalogues. Renowned for his ingenious reinterpretation of conceptual and minimal art, Liam Gillick has often used print as a basis for artistic, theoretical or political intervention. He reveals himself here as a privileged witness of and major actor in the European scene, which emerged at the beginning of the 1990s, and which includes Philippe Parreno, Pierre Huyghe, Carsten Höller, Angela Bulloch, Douglas Gordon and Rirkrit Tiravanija. A key publication of artists’ discussions, references, and artistic engagements of the 1990s, it also allows an examination of the renewed importance at this time of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, John Baldessari and Allen Ruppersberg. Co-published with Les Presses du réel.
Verso 1995/2007
107 pages ISBN 9781844675777
This major French thinker gives politics back its original and necessary meaning: the organization of dissent.
“Rancière’s writings offer one of the few consistent conceptualizations of how we are to continue to resist.” — Slavoj Zizek
Jacques Racière is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris-VIII. His books include The Politics of Aesthetics, Short Voyages to the Land of the People and The Nights of Labor. His Hatred of Democracy is forthcoming from Verso.
344 pages ISBN 9781844675821
The renowned co-author of Empire with his classic study of the founder of modern philosophy—available in English for the first time.
“One of the most significant figures of current
political thought.” — New Statesman
Antonio Negri has taught philosophy and political science at the Universities of Padua and Paris; he has also been a political prisoner in Italy and a political refugee in France. He is the author of over thirty books, including Marx Beyond Marx, The Savage Anomaly, The Politics of Subversion, Insurgencies, Subversive Spinoza, and Time for Revolution, and, in collaboration with Michael Hardt, Labor of Dionysus, Empire and Multitude. He currently lives in Paris and Venice. His Books for Burning: Between Civil War and Democracy in 1970s Italy is also available from Verso.
Book Works 2006
176 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 8706999399
Communism is routinely defined as defeated and its conquest the subject of regular celebration. Caught in the disappointment and negative connotations of the past, it has become all but unthinkable. Make Everything New seeks to rescue the idea of Communism from this trap. Collaborating with artists, writers and collectives, this project has commissioned and collected counter-narratives, abstract and unrealistic ideas, engaged political commentary and satirical work, that presents neither an historical or comprehensive overview nor a requiem for the past. It is a collection of partial and subjective accounts of various creative practices, an experimental platform for ideas and an attempt to see in what ways the communist imagination can be materialised as art.
Contributors include: 16Beaver, Gopal Balakrishnan, Michael Blum, AA Bronson, Maria Eichorn, Factotum, Dmitry Gutov, Wu Ming, Aleksandra Mir, Sarah Pierce/The Metropolitan Complex, CK Rajan, Raqs Media Collective, Dont Rhine, Martha Rosler, Rob Stone, Alberto Toscano, and Klaus Weber.
RRP 15.99
10% online price saving Price: £14.39
Rachmaniinoff's 2005
86 pages B&W reproductions.ISBN 0954824016
14.5 x 21 cm English text
Afterthought is an engagement on the part of a younger generation of writers, curators and artists with some of the conceptual strategies of the 1960s and 1970s which continue to influence contemporary art.
The subjects covered include instruction pieces, conceptualism and curatorship, television and the museum and institutional critique; artists discussed include Yoko Ono, 'Orders & Co.', Hanne Darboven, Gerry Schum and Ursula Wevers, and many others. Price: £8.95
RSA 2007
280 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 9780901469571
17 x 24 cm English text. Hardcover
Today’s interdisciplinary understanding of ecology articulates a web of relations that goes way beyond ‘environmentalism’. Likewise, contemporary art is a radically diversified field, concerned with processes as varied as corporate politics, urban planning, agriculture, tourism, or ethnic justice. Accompanying the first year of the RSA’s Arts & Ecology programme, this compendium of essays, dialogues and commissioned projects by artists, ecologists, cultural theorists, activists and curators explores art’s varied modes of response to notions of territory, the Earth and the emergencies of 21st century. In part a genealogy of ‘land’ and what has been understood by ‘the environment’ since the 1960s the publication proposes and tests if and how our conceptions of art and artists are relevant to a global debate about the future of the planet, and where, how and why art might operate.
contributors include Jeffrey Kastner, Lucy Lippard, Cameron Sinclair, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Winona LaDuke, Jimmie Durham, the Worldwatch Institute, David Toop, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Thomas Hirschhorn, Stephanie Smith, Nils Norman, Platform, Kirstine Roepstorff, Michael Shellenberger, Ted Nordhaus
356 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 9781844670857
This extensively illustrated book is a lacerating account of the new British art scene which emerged in the 1990s, its legacy in the 21st century, and what it tells us about the fate of high art in contemporary society. High Art Lite takes a critical look at the phenomenal success of YBA, young British artists obsessed with commerce, mass media and the cult of personality—Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Marcus Harvey, Sarah Lucas, among others— and questions whether their success is at the price of dumbing down and selling out. In a new chapter, Stallabrass explains how YBA lost its critical immunity and explores the ways in which the leading YBA figures have altered their work in recent years.
“I cannot help but endorse his analysis of the high art lite tendency … its abject willingness to be fucked up by the cult of celebrity; fucked over by the 1990s boom in consumerism; fucked sideways by its adoption of the styles and modes of popular culture; and fucked to buggery by its co-option by a new Labourite idiotology.” — Will Self
“Stallabrass, in his Verrine blast against Britart, combines the early Berger’s fierce critique of consumerist contamination with the later Berger’s sense [of] art’s high purpose.” — Marina Warner, London Review of Books
“A withering attack on the avant-garde pretensions of current British Art.”— Sunday Times
Julian Stallabrass lectures in art history as the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London. He is author of Art Incorporated: The Story of Contemporary Art and Gargantua: Manufactured Mass Culture; he co-edits Occupational Hazard: Critical Writing on Recent British Art.
RRP 14.99
Dedalus 2006
372 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 1903517303
13 x 20 cm English text. Hardcover
The ultimate lifestyle guide for the people who want to transform the spirit of the age, or failing that, ignore it altogether. Featuring contributions by the bad, dangerous and eccentric free spirits of contemporary society, The Decadent Handbook will become the bible for the modern libertine. Contributors include Hari Kunzru,Tom Holland,Salena Godden,Michael Bywater, Lisa Hilton, Helen Walsh, Michael Bywater, Vanora Bennett, Medlar Lucan, Andrew Crumey, Durian Gray,Nicholas Royle,Mark Mason, Alan Jenkins and Robert Irwin.
Sternberg Press 2006
336 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 1933128135
11 x 17 cm English text. Softcover (various colours)
Self-organisation/counter-economic strategies was initiated by the artists' group Superflex, but it is not about them. It is about the many approaches to the creation, dissemination and maintenance of alternative models for social and economic organisation, and the practical and theoretical implications, consequences and possibilities of these self-organised structures. The counter-economic presented here are alternatives to classical capitalist economic organisations that exploit, or have been produced by, the existing global economic system.
Essays by ten writers cover a wide cross-section of activity, from new approaches to intellectual property and the implications of the free/open source software movement to political activism and the de facto self-organisation embodied in informal architecture and the so-called black economy.
RRP £17.95
11% online price saving Price: £15.95
Afterall Books 2006
165 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 9781846380037
In Richard Prince's 1977 work Untitled (couple), difference mixes uncannily with sameness. We can't quite tell whether the shiny couple we see is human or android; their clothing seems curiously out of date. Why do they fascinate us? What is it about their typicality that produces an impression of strangeness?
Michael Newman explores Prince's work and his revival of the image through photography--rephotographed reproduced photographs--after the impasses of conceptualism. Newman examines the relation of Prince's work to images appearing in illustrated magazines, advertising, and television during the artist's formative years and argues that the vintage TV series The Twilight Zone is crucial to understanding Prince's use of images in his work. He considers Prince's strategy of rephotographing photographs and looks at the theoretical, cultural, and critical implications of that practice. Drawing on previously unpublished material from a discussion he had with Prince in the early 1980s, Newman places Untitled (couple) within the context of Prince's writings and his other work including the famous Untitled (cowboy) series (rephotographed images of the iconic Marlboro man) and its expression of the role of fantasy in advertising. During the 1960s, structuralism recast the image as text; Prince's work, Newman argues, revived the image in such a way that it is irreducible to text.
Richard Prince is an artist based in New York known as a critic of and commentator on American consumer culture, including movies, advertisements, cartoons, and popular jokes.
Michael Newman is Associate Professor of Art History, Theory, and Criticism in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has published in ArtForum, Art in America, Parachute, and other journals and is coeditor of the book Rewriting Conceptual Art.
RRP 9.95
5% online price saving Price: £9.50
102 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 9781846380259
Joan Jonas approaches video as a drawing tool, a mirror, and a framing device. Since 1968, she has used video and performance to explore ways of seeing, the rhythms of ritual, and the archetypal authority of objects and gestures. With her influential 1976 work, I Want to Live in the Country (And Other Romances) Jonas nimbly structures an elliptical narrative that unmistakably establishes her voice and visual lexicon. I Want to Live in the Country features two locations--the untamed landscape of Nova Scotia and an artist's studio in New York City--as it examines themes of loss, displacement, time, and memory through still life compositions and Super-8 footage. Jonas creates a meditation of frames within frames, monitors within monitors, overlaid with poetic musings--a murmured story of the unconscious.
Jonas's influences have included the writing of Samuel Beckett, the films of Yasujiro Ozu, Japanese Noh theater, and the work of John Cage. Stripped down to intimate, indelible gestures, I Want to Live in the Country (And Other Romances) explores a Beckettian dilemma: "I am both the observer and the object that I observe. Which of the two is the real 'I'?" In this richly illustrated Afterall book, Susan Morgan examines the emergence of Jonas's original work from this synthesis of influences and ideas.
Joan Jonas, Professor of Visual Arts at MIT, is known for her pioneering video and performance art.
Susan Morgan has published widely in periodicals including Aperture, Metropolitan Home, Elle, and Real Life Magagine.
Wallflower 2006
254 pages ISBN
"Filmosophy" is a provocative new manifesto for a radically philosophical way of understanding cinema. The book coalesces twentieth-century ideas of film as thought (from Hugo Munsterberg to Gilles Deleuze) into a practical theory of 'film-thinking', arguing that film style conveys poetic ideas through a constant dramatic 'intent' about the characters, spaces and events of film. With discussions of contemporary filmmakers such as Bela Tarr and the Dardenne brothers, this timely intervention into the study of film and philosophy will stir argument and discussion among both filmgoers and filmmakers alike.
RRP 15.00
5% online price saving Price: £14.25
MoMA, New York 2006
324 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 0870703714
24 x 28 cm English text. Hardcover
This survey explores ways artists across Europe have turned to printed mediums—including traditional etchings, lithographs, and screenprints as well as unusual book formats, editioned sculptural objects, postcards, and even shopping bags and record jackets—in a quest to expand their creative thinking. It presents the work of 118 artists, collectives, and journals from twenty countries organized in thematic sections. From Pop screenprints and fervent political statements to the reemergence of language and expressionist tendencies, these works demonstrate the vitality artists have brought to printed art in the contemporary period. Recent projects display the vibrancy of younger practitioners, with an added focus on the innovative output from Britain. The volume comprises an introduction, six essays, biographies of all the artists and publishers featured, a chronology, and an extensive bibliography. Also included are two artists' projects. Includes 350 color illustrations.
RRP £36.95
10% online price saving Price: £36.95
Flammarion 2006
384 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 9782080305244
18 x 25.5 cm English text. Hardcover
Available for the first time in English, an anecdotal review of the artistic movements that have taken place in France throughout the past four decades places key trends against a backdrop of the social and cultural changes that have occurred both within the country and internationally.
RRP £32.00
10% online price saving Price: £28.80
Rachmaninoff's / Zoo Art Fair 2006
132 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 0954824032
The New Art considers specific recent developments in contemporary art.
Issues include: appropriation; melancholy; “spectres of the past”; contemporary elaboration or staging of exhibitions involving video and installation (with reference to painting); visual and language intersections in artists’ works; the value of art fairs; the separate significance of works which explicitly involve themselves with the circumstance of their production and consequence of their dissemination; the slight denigration of performance and the reinstatement of forms of satire; “futurology”, “lacunae”, “ellipses” and so on. Artists and projects discussed include: Tomas Saraceno, John Bock, Doug Fishbone, Tino Sehgal, Anne Bean, Man in the Holocene, pablo internacional magazine, Jonathan Monk, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Bonnie Camplin, Steven Claydon, John Bock, Los Super Elegantes. Price: £14.95
Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Konig 2006
104 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 3865600778
13.5 x 21 cm English text. Softcover
Rem Koolhass is the optimistic and bold theoretician of contemporary architecture. In his talks with Hans-Ulrich Obrist he discusses his work in China – amongst others his spectacular and controversial concept for the headquarters of China Central Television in Beijing – and his designs for Prada shops, where consumption is staged like art. This book looks at Koolhaas’ role as counselor for the EU, as well as his views on architecture as metaphor and on the development of urbanism in the slipstream of globalization.
The Conversation Series of titles presents a number on interviews between Hans Ulrich Obrist and leading figures in art and architecture, including Robert Crumb, John Chamberlain, Rosemarie Trockel, Wolfgang Tillmans, Zaha Hadid and Gilbert & George. Price: £7.50
Black Dog Publishing 2006
160 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 9781904772545
21 x 26 cm English text. Softcover
Glasgow’s rapid industrial development in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries left a legacy of unemployment and cramped housing. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the Gorbals, just south of the river Clyde. Over the past 150 years, numerous efforts have been made to clean up the area; the Gorbals has been razed to the ground and rebuilt three times during this period, with the first two of these new ‘designed communities’ failing spectacularly.
The most recent initiative has involved the demolition of the infamous, monolithic 1960s tower blocks, designed by Basil Spence, and their replacement with modern, low-rise flats. Central to the success of this latest regeneration has been a unique artwork project that has created cultural continuity in an area undergoing massive change. More than 20 international artists have been commissioned by The Artworks Programme to work with architects, developers and the community in creating permanent and temporary artworks in the UK’s largest ‘Percent for Art’ scheme.
Arcade: Artists and Place-making is a compelling documentation by artists, academics, architects and writers of the work surrounding the regeneration of the Gorbals. Now at the tail end of this redevelopment, Arcade surveys and assesses these projects, and also raises wider questions about the role and impact artists have in the regeneration of urban spaces.
Through a fascinating and diverse range of texts Arcade asks fundamental questions about the ways that artists influence the political, economic and social structures of urban change, presenting a new direction in Public Art practice as a process-led discipline that explores fundamental questions abut the character, interpretation and expression of place and place-making. A thought provoking analysis of the creative currents in society that inform the redevelopment of so much contemporary urbanism.
Contributors include: Ross Birrell, Piers Gough, Ray McKenzie, Jim Colquhoun, Kathy Battista, Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith, Simon Sadler, Moira Jeffrey, Toby Paterson and John Calcutt, amongst others. Price: £19.95
Revolver 2006
208 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 9077288074
11 x 18 cm English text. Softcover
Report (Not Announcement) is a project by BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, in collaboration with e-flux (electronic flux corporation),
The Report consists of accounts and documents, namely reports, provided by artists, curators, and critics reflecting on their own ontological states of leaving and arriving from the zone of transition, non-belonging, and “suspension.” Under the condition of accelerated mobility and its imposed limits, Report (Not Announcement) explores the potential of what is bracketed off by the constant travels and movements by international cultural practitioners.
ed. by Binna Choii with contributions by Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla, Hüseyin Alptekin, Francis Alys, Ayreen Anastas & Rene Gabri, Taysir Batniji, Tobias Berger, Kyongfa Che, Sebastian Cichocki, Binna Choi, Heman Chong, Mariana Castillo Deball & Daniela Franco, Jeremiah Day, Guillaume Désanges, Omer Fast, Liam Gillick, gimhongsok, Marina Grzinic, Mika Hannula, Hou Hanru, Thomas Hirschhorn, Jens Hoffmann, Karl Holmqvist, Yukie Kamiya, Koo Jeong-A, Sebastian Diaz Morales, Angelika Nollert, Hans Ulrich Obrist & Philippe Parreno, Olu Oguibe, Oda Projesi(Özge Açikkol, Günes, Savas, Seçil Yersel), Kristofer Paetau & Rüdiger Heinze, Natasa Petresin, Francois Piron, Lisl Ponger, Raqs Media Collective, Martha Rosler, Nedko Solakov, Velina Stoykova, Kuang-Yu Tsui und Haegue Yang Price: £7.50
144 pages ISBN 386588220X
The book presents the responses of artists, theorists, scientists, etc. to the question, which questions they were currently asking themselves, as well as excerpts of the telephone conversations held with them about issues they consider urgent in our time.
With contributions by Marina Abramivic, Daniel Buren, Manuel DeLanda, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Jacques Ranciere, Martha Rosler, Gayatri Spivak, Lawrence Weiner, Carey Young and many more. Price: £7.50
Semiotext(e) 2006
328 pages ISBN 9781584350330
14.5 x 21.5 cm English text. Softcover
The Utopie group was born in 1966 at Henri Lefebvre's house in the Pyrenees. The eponymous journal edited by Hubert Tonka brought together sociologists Jean Baudrillard, René Lourau, and Catherine Cot, architects Jean Aubert, Jean-Paul Jungmann, Antoine Stinco, and landscape architect Isabelle Auricoste. Over the next decade, both in theory and in practice, the group articulated a radical ultra-leftist critique of architecture, urbanism, and everyday life. Utopia Deferred collects all of the essays Jean Baudrillard published in Utopie as well as recent interviews with Jean Baudrillard and Hubert Tonka.
Utopie served as a workshop for Baudrillard's thought. Many of the essays he first published in Utopie were seminal for some of his most shockingly original books: For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, The Mirror of Production, Simulations, Symbolic Exchange and Death, and In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities. But Utopie was also a topical journal and a political one; the topics of these essays are often torn from the headlines of the tumultuous decade following the uprisings of May 1968. Price: £11.95
Verso 2006
340 pages ISBN 9781844670895
14.5 x 20 cm English text. Hardcover
This collection of political essays from Alain Badiou analyses, with keen philosophical insight, some of the key events and debates that have come to pass in recent years. Political activism is a constant of Badiou's life and with customary acuity he delivers here precise analyses on the nature and limitation of the American adventurism in Iraq and the war in Kosovo, on the interconnection between the State, capitalism and cultural repression in the French government ban on headscarves, on the custom of voting, and on the status of the word "jew". This collection includes Badiou's sketch of a possible "fusion" of Germany and France into a figure beyond the nation-state, as well as the latest version of his manifesto for art. Finally, it includes two essays, more philosophical in style, on two momentous sequences of history, the Paris Commune and Cultural Revolution, in which he gives a highly original articulation of the conditions under which space can become a radically transformative event. Price: £17.99
Sternberg Press, New York/Berlin 2006
128 pages ISBN 1933128062
18 x 23.5 cm English text. Hardcover
“If art takes place in a contemporary art museum (where we expect it), what does it mean? Art should not be about filling spaces, but about necessities and urgencies.” Such are the principles conveyed by the visionary Hans Ulrich Obrist, seeking out ways to reinvent and invent museums of the 21st century. Newly edited by April Lamm, gathered together here are the seminal texts written by (what Douglas Gordon once aptly described) a “dontstop” curator. His exhibitions present, as Rem Koolhaas writes in his preface to these prefaces, “a heroic effort to preserve the traces of intelligence of the last 50 years, to make sense of the seemingly disjointed, a hedge against the systematic forgetting that is hidden at the core of the information age and which may, in fact, be its secret agenda.…”
A compendium of texts written between 1990 and 2006, here are exhibition case studies – “Hotel Carlton Palace,” “Cities on the Move,” “Do It,” “Utopia Station” – involving some of the more thought-provoking artists, architects, and scientists of our time such as Paul Chan, Alexander Dorner, Olafur Eliasson, Cao Fei, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Peter Fischli & David Weiss, Douglas Gordon, Pierre Huyghe, Qingyung Ma, Philippe Parreno, Cedric Price, Luc Steels, Rirkrit Tiravanija, among others, from Zurich to Guangzhou and back again. Designed by M/M (Paris), the cover depicts an original Gerhard Richter over-painted picture of Obrist himself. A must-have for anyone interested in the unusual strategies of a curator-at-large.
Obrist […] does not delimit or classify artistic geographical fields or spheres of activity. Instead his work revolves around the concept of positioning. Obrist positions himself, that is, his body within the force field of contemporary art, and he does so in order to intercept and modify the scattered materials that make up the sea of “dissolves” in which the boundaries between the roles are melting away.
Obrist has been working for years […] on the scattered materials of contemporary art. He is working on the existing state of things with the obsessive single-mindedness of one who knows that he cannot help but travel its entire length and breadth and who is waging a utopian struggle – and this is indeed a utopia in its pure form – against amnesia.
As the ultimate form of body art, mobile positioning is a battle to diminish the enormous, growing, and inevitable distance between (individual) memory and (collective) history.
Stefano Boeri, excerpt from a forthcoming review in domus 894, July/August 2006
Preface by Rem Koolhaas, afterword by Daniel Birnbaum, title by Douglas Gordon. Design: M/M (Paris) Price: £24.95
Continuum 2004
118 pages ISBN 0826489540
13.5 x 19 cm English text. Softcover
"The Politics of Aesthetics" rethinks the relation between art and politics, reclaiming "aesthetics" from its current narrow confines to reveal its significance for contemporary experience. Here, Jacques Ranciere develops a critical aesthetic that goes far beyond the paradigms of modernism and modernity and their 'posts' which still haunt us. Presented as a set of inter-linked interviews, "The Politics of Aesthetics" ranges across art and politics, the uses and abuses of modernity, the role of visual technologies, the relationship between history and fiction, utopias, the avant-garde and the three aesthetic regimes, which constitute the 'partitions of the
sensible.' Already translated into five languages, this English edition of "The Politics of Aesthetics" includes a new afterword by Slavoj Zizek and a new interview with Ranciere in which he situates his writing within the
context of the work of, amongst others, Foucault, Barthes, Ricoeur, Kristeva, Derrida, Badiou, Balibar and Zizek. Price: £9.99
Actar 2006
246 pages Colour and B&W reproductions, free DVD. ISBN 8495951983
17.5 x 24.5 cm English text. Hardcover
A "common place", a shared vision from Norway to Turkey, from Spain to Bulgaria, from Cyprus to Rumania, emerged from the more than fifty artists and projects documented in this book. Artists, institutions and society are searching for new relations to experiment unforeseen forms of cohabitation, mutual understanding and visions of the urban landscape. The book, organised in five thematic chapters, presents a European interpretation of public space resulting from complexity and difference, translation and memory. The enclosed DVD features the cycle of three documentary films that are part of the project. Price: £25.95
Continuum 2006
526 pages. ISBN 0826458319
13.5 x 20 cm English text. Hardcover
Being and Event is the greatest work of Alain Badiou, France's most important living philosopher. Long-awaited in translation, Being and Event makes available to an English-speaking readership Badiou's groundbreaking work on set theory - the cornerstone of his whole philosophy. The book makes the scope and aim of Badiou's whole philosophical project clear, enabling full comprehension of Badiou's significance for contemporary philosophy. Badiou draws upon and is fully engaged with the European philosophical tradition from Plato onwards; Being and Event deals with such key figures as Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hegel, Rousseau, Heidegger and Lacan. This wide-ranging book is organised in a careful, precise and novel manner, reflecting the philosophical rigour of Badiou's thought. Unlike many contemporary Continental philosophers, Badiou - who is also a novelist and dramatist - writes lucidly and cogently, making his work far more accessible and engaging than much philosophy, and actually a pleasure to read. This English language edition includes a new preface, written by Badiou himself, especially for this translation. Being and Event is a must-have for Badiou's significant following and anyone interested in contemporary Continental philosophy. Price: £16.99
Thames & Hudson 2006
224 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 050028606X
After a decade of art revolving around sensation and celebrity, New Art from London identifies the emergence of a more mature and motivated strain of artists. Although far from being a coherent generation of tyros with a manifesto, their work suggests, along with irony, wit and intelligence, a new sense of seriousness about art in Britain. Taking readers to the heart of British contemporary visual culture, this incisive and provocative survey will be essential reading for anyone involved or interested in art and its relationship to everyday life. Price: £14.95
Article Press 2006
220 pages ISBN 1873352190
The Interruptors are an elite squad of specialist Art operatives each with their own unique power and costume. The Artist-Educator, The Artist-Engineer, The Artist-Researcher, The Artist-Activist and The Collaborator all want to join their quest for Truth, Knowledge and a level 4 Existence.
Gavin Wade is alternately The Author, The Interrogator, The Artist-Curator and The Goddess hired to write up the notes of a vitally important symposia series called Interrupt organised by Arts Council England. Join him on an epic journey through Birmingham, Plymouth, Brockley, Manchester and Newcastle, the battle between The Woods and The Beach, a coup de picnic, the answer to Strategic Question #4. What are experiences?, the transformation of the World via Arts Council England policy, the covert Beach Art operations fighting against it and the 10 commandments of Socially Engaged Art! Price: £5.00
362 pages ISBN 0826471099
14.5 x 19.5 cm English text. Hardcover
The second volume of the key writings of leading contemporary cultural commentator, Slavoj Zizek. Collecting together a broad selection of Zizek's major writings on politics, The Universal Exception showcases his formidable range of interests and his style. The book includes his writings on such right-wing icons as Ayn Rand and Leni Riefenstahl; his take on the logic of capitalism and the condition of contemporary radical politics; and his views on major current global issues and events, including the Iraq war. Together with Interrogating the Real, the first volume of Zizek's selected writings, this collection offers a superb introduction to the work of this prolific, controversial and vastly entertaining cultural commentator. Price: £16.99
438 pages ISBN 1584350318
This title features notes and journal entries that document Guattari and Deleuze's collaboration on their 1972 book, "Anti-Oedipus." "The unconscious is not a theatre, but a factory," wrote Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in "Anti-Oedipus" (1972), instigating one of the most daring intellectual adventures of the last half-century. Together, the well-known philosopher and the activist-psychiatrist were updating both psychoanalysis and Marxism in light of a more radical and "constructivist" vision of capitalism: "Capitalism is the exterior limit of all societies, because it has no exterior limit itself. It works well as long as it keeps breaking down." Few people at the time believed, as they wrote in the often-quoted opening sentence of Rhizome, that "the two of us wrote "Anti-Oedipus" together." They added, "Since each of us was several, that became quite a crowd." These notes, addressed to Deleuze by Guattari in preparation for "Anti-Oedipus", and annotated by Deleuze, substantiate their claim, finally bringing out the factory behind the theatre. They reveal Guattari as an inventive, highly analytical, mathematically-minded "conceptor," arguably one of the most prolific and enigmatic figures in philosophy and sociopolitical theory today. "The Anti-Oedipus Papers" (1969-1973) are supplemented by substantial journal entries in which Guattari describes his turbulent relationship with his analyst and teacher Jacques Lacan, his apprehensions about the publication of "Anti-Oedipus" and accounts of his personal and professional life as a private analyst and codirector with Jean Oury of the experimental clinic Laborde (created in the 1950s). Price: £11.95
Aperture 2006
224 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 1931788839
15 x 22 cm English text. Hardcover
Japanese photographers have created a tradition strikingly different from that of their Western counterparts. Their work is based on ideas, rules, and aesthetics that are specific to Japanese culture but often little known in the West. Many photographers throughout the history of the medium in Japan - including master postwar photographers such as Daido Moriyama, Shomei Tomatsu, and Nobuyoshi Araki - have produced substantial bodies of written work that form an essential counterpart to their visual art. Setting Sun is an anthology of key texts written from the 1950s to the present by Moriyama, Tomatsu, and Araki, as well as by other leading Japanese photographers, including Masahisa Fukase, Takashi Homma, Eikoh Hosoe, Takuma Nakahira, and Hiroshi Sugimoto. The only anthology of its kind to appear in English, Setting Sun makes these texts available in translation to Western readers for the first time and provides a crucial context for photographers who have become increasingly well known and admired in the West. Each chapter in the anthology is devoted to a central idea or theme that is particular to Japanese photography, such as watashi shosetsu (or the "I novel"), the bonds between man and woman, the role of nostalgia, and the shadows of a war lost and of a culture jettisoning its past. These writings vary in form from diary entry to scholarly treatise, but all reflect a clear connection between word and image. This connection is so essential that no comprehensive consideration of Japanese photography can be complete without familiarity with these writings. Price: £16.50
Prestel 2006
256 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 3791333097
German-Jewish-born postminimalist painter and sculptor Eva Hesse died in 1970 at the age of 34. Her work has long been acknowledged by major museums, studied by young artists, and analyzed from a feminist perspective. In this book, a team of artists, curators, and art historians examines the range of Hesse's challenging work in drawing, painting, and sculpture. The book also features full-color reproductions of her sculptures- many too fragile to be exhibited-as well as photographs of her studio and life. This multi-faceted critique is an important contribution to our understanding of Eva Hesse. Price: £35.00
Afterall 2006
88 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 1846380014
This title is an extended illustrated account of Hollis Frampton's film exposing the fragility of cinema, marking a critical moment in art history when photography meets filmmaking. In his 1971 short film, "Nostalgia", American artist and writer Hollis Frampton overturned the conventional narrative roles of words and images. In his account of an artist's transformation from photographer to filmmaker, Frampton burns photographs he had taken and selected from his past along with one found photograph. A calm voice tells a story about an image, but the story is about the following image, not the one shown. Confounding comprehension still further, the narration begins and ends during the photograph's combustion; smoke and ashes get in our eyes while we are trying to make sense of the image and the narration - trying to remember the story that fits the image, trying to remember the image that fits the story... Frampton's "Nostalgia" is a formal masterpiece, long overlooked and understudied. It emerges from a body of film work that is rarely screened, the prints damaged and difficult to locate. Frampton's work is valued in artist filmmaking and film theory circles, but it has never taken its rightful place at the heart of modern art theory. This study will introduce a new generation to a critical moment in art history - when "Nostalgia" confirmed both the essence and fragility of cinema itself. Price: £9.95
96 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 1846380022
14.5 x 22 cm English text. Softcover
In 1975 Bas Jan Ader disappeared at sea while trying to sail from the East Coast of the United States to Europe as part of a project titled In Search of the Miraculous. Ader's considerable influence on later conceptual artists stems from the way in which he used the cool analytic and antisubjective aesthetics of conceptual art to explore experiences that would seem definitively subjective--the emotional intensity of tragedy and the romantic quest for the sublime. In Search of the Miraculous was conceived as a three-part project: a lonely nighttime walk from the hills of Los Angeles down to the sea, documented in photographs; the Atlantic crossing; a night walk through Amsterdam, mirroring the LA photographs.
The circumstances of his disappearance have led many interpreters to identify Ader (as a person) with the role of the tragic romantic hero. The cult status of the artist as a hero whose work is authenticated through his death, however, has obscured the fact that Ader's art was a critical investigation of precisely those romantic motives his persona has now come to be identified with. This book unpicks these ties in Ader's work in order to highlight the specific and unique way in which Ader explores the existential and emotional with an artistic approach that is as conceptual and analytic as it is poetic and personal. Price: £9.95
500 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 18463800057
20 x 25 cm English text. Softcover
The artistic map of Europe contains different degrees of detail and resolution. Italy, France, and Spain are presented in fine grain, but the Balkan peninsula is little more than a vague outline. England, Germany, and Scandinavia have many features filled in, but to the east of Germany things are blurred. Until recently, cities like Sofia, Odessa, Skopje, and Belgrade had next to no definition. Further to the East, Moscow comes into focus, but this is no compensation for the Baltics, sentenced for the last half-century to blank space.
In the West, virtually every move of the artist, the art market, and the art public is documented. But in Eastern Europe, no such system of documentation or communication exists. Instead, we encounter systems that are not only inaccessible to the West, but incongruous from one country to the next. Beside the official art histories there is often a whole series of stories and legends about "unofficial," unapproved art and artists. East Art Map: Contemporary Art and Eastern Europe is an ambitious attempt to reconstruct the missing histories of contemporary art in Eastern Europe from an East European and artistic perspective. It is perhaps the widest ranging art documentation project ever undertaken by the East on the East, involving a large network of artists, scholars, curators and critics coordinated by the IRWIN group over several years.
The editors invited eminent art critics, curators, and artists to present up to ten crucial art projects produced in their respective countries over the past 50 years. The choice of the particular artworks (many of them reproduced in color), artists, and events, as well as their presentation, was left exclusively to the individual selectors. In addition, the editors asked experts from both East and West to provide longer texts offering cross-cultural perspectives on the art of both regions. Price: £24.95
96 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 1846380049
The fictitious hero of this 1984 installation is a lonely dreamer who develops an impossible project: to fly alone in cosmic space. But this dream is also an individual appropriation of a collective Soviet project and the official Soviet propaganda connected to it. Having built a makeshift slingshot, the hero apparently flies through the ceiling of his shabby room and vanishes into space. The miserable room and the primitive slingshot suggest the reality behind the Soviet utopia, in which where cosmic vision and the political project of the Communist revolution are seen as indissoluble.
The Man who Flew into Space from His Apartment also raises questions of authorship in modernity. All of Kabakov's work is made in the name of other, fictitious artists. This reveals a hidden rule of the modern art system: only an artist who doesn't want to be an artist or who doesn't even know that he is an artist is a real artist--just as only an artwork that does not look like an artwork is a real artwork. The installation is a narrative, the documentation of a fictitious event. Price: £9.95
The MIT Press 2006
434 pasges. ISBN 0262240513
The Parallax View is Slavoj Zizek's most substantial theoretical work to appear in many years; Zizek himself describes it as his magnum opus. Parallax can be defined as the apparent displacement of an object, caused by a change in observational position. Zizek is interested in the "parallax gap" separating two points between which no synthesis or mediation is possible, linked by an "impossible short circuit" of levels that can never meet. From this consideration of parallax, Zizek begins a rehabilitation of dialectical materialism.
Modes of parallax can be seen in different domains of today's theory, from the wave-particle duality in quantum physics to the parallax of the unconscious in Freudian psychoanalysis between interpretations of the formation of the unconscious and theories of drives. In The Parallax View, Zizek, with his usual astonishing erudition, focuses on three main modes of parallax: the ontological difference, the ultimate parallax that conditions our very access to reality; the scientific parallax, the irreducible gap between the phenomenal experience of reality and its scientific explanation, which reaches its apogee in today's brain sciences (according to which "nobody is home" in the skull, just stacks of brain meat--a condition Zizek calls "the unbearable lightness of being no one"); and the political parallax, the social antagonism that allows for no common ground. Between his discussions of these three modes, Zizek offers interludes that deal with more specific topics--including an ethical act in a novel by Henry James and anti-anti-Semitism.
The Parallax View not only expands Zizek's Lacanian-Hegelian approach to new domains (notably cognitive brain sciences) but also provides the systematic exposition of the conceptual framework that underlies his entire work. Philosophical and theological analysis, detailed readings of literature, cinema, and music coexist with lively anecdotes and obscene jokes. Price: £16.95
The MIT Press/Iniva 2005
208 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 1899846417
17 x 21.5 cm English text. Softcover
This first book in the Annotating Art's Histories series revisits the period in which modernist attitudes took shape, examining the ways in which a shared history of art and ideas was experienced in different nations and cultures. Original essays by leading art historians and curators trace the dynamic interplay of cultures across the story of modern art, looking at moments of crisis and innovation in modernism's cross-cultural past. An account of colonialism and nationalism in Indian art from the 1890s to the 1920s, for example, suggests that cultural identities are constantly modifying one another in the very moment of their encounter and points to primitivism as a counter-discourse to modernism. A collision between modernism and colonialism in the design of a Bauhaus model housing project reveals the volatile conditions of European modernism in the 1930s. Discussions of the abstract painting of Norman Lewis and the collages of Romare Bearden illustrate the conflicted experiences and multiple affiliations of African American artists in the New York art world of the 1940s and 1950s. The first English translation of an influential essay in the Brazilian neoconcrete movement of the 1950s takes up concerns similar to those of North American minimalism in the 1960s. These and the other journeys into modernism's past described in Cosmopolitan Modernisms return to our contemporary moment with questions about modern art and modernity that we are only beginning to ask. Price: £15.95
NAi Publishers 2006
208 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 9056624679
Contemporary art absorbs an endless multitude of objects, images and discourses from the surrounding culture. Does this mean that art has forfeited its capacity to make a difference? Or does such a generic art in fact enable a critical and reflexive use of the imported material, and thus the development a critical publicness within the contemporary spectacle?
More than ever, the question is how art can be more than just a prestigious commodity – how it can create and maintain a space for difference in contemporary culture. To this end artists, attempts to reactivate impulses from the history of the avant-garde, and the essays on contemporary art in this collection also reflect upon various twentieth-century movements and artists such as Georges Bataille’s Collège de Sociologie, the Situationist International, Marcel Broodthaers and Andy Warhol. Price: £17.95
Phaidon 2005
808 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 0714845337
17 x 24.5 cm English text. Flexicover
Reading like a who’s who of the world’s most important players in contemporary art, pressPlay makes a fascinating stand-alone introduction to the current art scene and those associated with it. Comprising 50 personal encounters with the world’s most significant contemporary artists, interviewed by 50 of today’s key art thinkers, it is an excellent, highly readable survey of contemporary art in the artists’ own words. It includes highly established artists like Louise Bourgeois and Alex Katz, midcareer masters Richard Prince and Raymond Pettibon and the most exciting artists of the current generation. Price: £29.95
Dis Voir 2005
288 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 2914563205
16.5 x 21.5 cm English text. Softcover
In Black is a Color, contemporary art historian and curator Elvan Zabunyan proposes a new approach to contemporary art and its history through the practice of Black American artists from the Harlem Renaissance to today. Combining a historical study with probing critical analysis, Zabunyan traces the emergence of artistic identity in various forms of representation (painting, sculpture, photography, video, and performance). Close readings of the oeuvres of David Hammons, Adrian Piper, and others uncover the place of the body, urban space, and memory in the works of Black artists, who are represented with more than 130 images. Price: £20.50
406 pages ISBN-10 1844675491 ISBN-13 9781844675494
The giant of Ljubljana marshals some of the greatest thinkers of our age in support of a dazzling re-evaluation of Jacques Lacan.
It is well known that Jacques Lacan developed his ideas in dialogue with major European thought and art, past and present. Yet what if there is another frame of reference, rarely or never mentioned by Lacan, which influenced his thinking, and is crucial to its proper understanding? Zizek focuses on Lacan’s “silent partners,” those who provide a key to Lacanian theory, discussing his work in relation to the Pre-Socratics, Diderot, Hegel, Nietzsche, Hölderlin, Wagner, Turgenev, Kafka, Henry James, Artaud and Kiarostami.
As Zizek says, “The ultimate aim of the present volume is to instigate a new wave of Lacanian paranoia: to push readers to engage in the work of their own and start to discern Lacanian motifs everywhere, from politics to trash culture, from obscure ancient philosophers to contemporary Iranian filmmakers.”
“The giant of Ljubljana provides the best intellectual high since Anti-Oedipus.” — The Village Voice
“The Elvis of cultural theory.” — Chronicle of Higher Education
“Zizek leaves no social or natural phenomenon untheorized, and is master of the counterintuitive observation.” — New Yorker
Contributors include Alain Badiou, Bruno Bosteels, Joan Copjec, Mladen Dolar, Fredric Jameson, Silvia Ons, and Alenka Zupancic. Price: £19.99
The MIT Press
218 pages ISBN 0262541874
13.5 x 20 cm English text. Softcover
Plutarch tells the story of a man who plucked a nightingale and finding but little to eat exclaimed: "You are just a voice and nothing more." Plucking the feathers of meaning that cover the voice, dismantling the body from which the voice seems to emanate, resisting the Sirens' song of fascination with the voice, concentrating on "the voice and nothing more": this is the difficult task that philosopher Mladen Dolar relentlessly pursues in this seminal work.
The voice did not figure as a major philosophical topic until the 1960s, when Derrida and Lacan separately proposed it as a central theoretical concern. In A Voice and Nothing More Dolar goes beyond Derrida's idea of "phonocentrism" and revives and develops Lacan's claim that the voice is one of the paramount embodiments of the psychoanalytic object (objet a). Dolar proposes that, apart from the two commonly understood uses of the voice as a vehicle of meaning and as a source of aesthetic admiration, there is a third level of understanding: the voice as an object that can be seen as the lever of thought. He investigates the object voice on a number of different levels--the linguistics of the voice, the metaphysics of the voice, the ethics of the voice (with the voice of conscience), the paradoxical relation between the voice and the body, the politics of the voice--and he scrutinizes the uses of the voice in Freud and Kafka. With this foundational work, Dolar gives us a philosophically grounded theory of the voice as a Lacanian object-cause. Price: £12.95
The MIT Press / Roomade, Brussels 2005
368 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 0262220768
19.5 x 25 cm English text. Hardcover
Manifesta, the first itinerant European Biennial for Contemporary Art, emerged in a post-wall, globalizing Europe. Founded in 1993, it organized traveling exhibitions aimed at providing a new framework for cultural exchange and collaboration between artists and curators from across the continent. The Manifesta Decade marks Manifesta's ten years of exhibits with original essays, unpublished images, and texts that not only document the different Manifesta exhibits but also examine the cultural, curatorial, and political terrain of the Europe from which they sprang.
Including contributions from philosophers, historians, and anthropologists, interviews with architect Rem Koolhaas and historian Jacques Le Goff, and essays by such curators and writers as Okwui Enwezor, Boris Groys, Maria Hlavajova, and Hans Ulrich Obrist, the collection traces the cultural and political developments of Europe in the 1990s. It reflects the debates incited by exhibitions such as Magiciens de la Terre, Documenta, and After the Wall and explores the changing roles of curators and artists in the new geo-political context. The issues discussed include the effect of communism's collapse on Eastern Europe, the role of Biennials in the context of globalization, and the ephemerality of exhibitions versus the permanence of the museum. The book's second section traces the history of Manifesta, from its conceptual foundations and contributions to artistic practices of the 1990s to the relationship of a roving Biennial to themes of multiculturalism, migration and diaspora. At a moment when biennials continue to proliferate worldwide, The Manifesta Decade takes Manifesta as a case study to look critically at the landscape from which new exhibition paradigms have emerged. The book's 100 images, both color and black and white, include unpublished installation shots of each Manifesta exhibition. Price: £22.95
Faber and Faber 2006
576 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 057121570X
12.5 x 20 cm English text. Softcover
This is the essential book on post-punk music, and a must for any serious pop music fan. In this, the first book to take a big-picture view of the entire post-punk period, acclaimed author and music journalist Simon Reynolds recreates a time of tremendous urgency and idealism in pop music. Full of anecdote and insight, and featuring the likes of Joy Division, The Fall, Pere Ubu, PiL and Talking Heads, "Rip It Up and Start Again" stands as one of the most inspired and inspiring books on popular music ever written. This is a fascinating book to delight all the many fans of post-punk music, from New Wave to Ska and the New Romantics. With masses of glowing media attention for the original edition, "Rip It Up" has been universally hailed as the seminal text on this extraordinary period of music. It is an incredibly popular genre of music at the moment, following the success of bands such as Franz Ferdinand and Bloc Party. A CD compilation was released in February to coincide with the publication of the paperback, using the same cover artwork and featuring many of the tracks mentioned in the book. Price: £9.99
Semiotexte 2006
384 pages ISBN 1584350326
People tend to confuse winning freedom with conversion to capitalism. It is doubtful that the joys of capitalism are enough to free peoples.... The American "revolution" failed long ago, long before the Soviet one. Revolutionary situations and attempts are born of capitalism itself and will not soon disappear, alas. Philosophy remains tied to a revolutionary becoming that is not to be confused with the history of revolutions.
--from Two Regimes of Madness
Covering the last twenty years of Gilles Deleuze's life (1975-1995), the texts and interviews gathered in this volume complete those collected in Desert Islands and Other Texts (1953-1974) . This period saw the publication of his major works: A Thousand Plateaus (1980), Cinema I: Image-Movement (1983), Cinema II: Image-Time (1985), all leading through language, concept and art to What is Philosophy? (1991). Two Regimes of Madness also documents Deleuze's increasing involvement with politics (with Toni Negri, for example, the Italian philosopher and professor accused of associating with the Red Brigades). Both volumes were conceived by the author himself and will be his last. Michel Foucault famously wrote: "One day, perhaps, this century will be Deleuzian." This book provides a prodigious entry into the work of the most important philosopher of our time. Unlike Foucault, Deleuze never stopped digging further into the same furrow. Concepts for him came from life. He was a vitalist and remained one to the last. Price: £11.95
NAi Publishers 2005
184 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 9056624555
14.5 x 22.5 cm English text. Hardcover
Since the 1980s, documentary photography and film have been the subject of intense discussion. Their credibility and objectivity have called into question in all kinds of ways. The use of digital photography and video equipment among professionals and amateurs has increased awareness of how easy it is to manipulate documentary images. The confusion is increased further by the development of 'in-between' genres, such as the docudrama and reality TV.
The documentary image has also established a place in the world of art. It has found its way into museums and is exhibited there as art. Since then, the use and effect of the documentary image have been analysed, questioned and adapted by photographers, filmmakers and video artists for personal and socially engaged purposes.
Documentary Now! takes stock of the situation. What is the meaning of the documentary in the year 2005? What do we actually understand by 'documentary' these days? Which tendencies have emerged within documentary forms? Is it possible or desirable to define the term? And what is the social function of the documentary?
Prompted by these questions, renowned experts such as Olivier Lugon, Frits Gierstberg and Tom Holert share their views on the developments in the field of the documentary image. In addition, ten photographers and artists, including Walid Raad, Johan Grimonprez, Julika Rudelius and Allan Sekula, describe their personal approaches to the use of documentary film and photography.
Taking an inventory of the current state of affairs, Documentary Now! blasts new life into the debate about documentary film and photography. Price: £18.50
Hatje Cantz 2006
168 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN ISBN 3775717056
16.5 x 24 cm English text. Softcover
Harald Szeemann (1933-2005) was one of the most influential curators of the recent past. An entire generation of curators has been inspired by his independent way of creating exhibitions and his emphatic method of presenting contemporary art. In retrospect, Szeemann's infallible interest in artistic loners with strong attitudes and powerful personalities seems like a vehement contradiction of the kind of art market that focuses on trends and movements.
This volume describes the "Szeemann principle," the visions of an enlightened artistic curator, and provides an overview of the most important stations of his singular curatorial career: the legendary exhibitions "When Attitudes Become Form" and documenta 5, the great thematic explorations such as "Bachelor Machines" and " Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk," his discovery of the young Eastern European scenes, and the Biennials in Venice, Lyon, and Seville. Price: £19.99
360 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 0262033321
18 x 23 cm English text. Hardcover
How has the Internet, a medium that thrives on control, been accepted as a medium of freedom? Why is freedom increasingly indistinguishable from paranoid control? In Control and Freedom, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun explores the current political and technological coupling of freedom with control by tracing the emergence of the Internet as a mass medium. The parallel (and paranoid) myths of the Internet as total freedom/total control, she says, stem from our reduction of political problems into technological ones.
Drawing on the theories of Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault and analyzing such phenomena as Webcams and face-recognition technology, Chun argues that the relationship between control and freedom in networked contact is experienced and negotiated through sexuality and race. She traces the desire for cyberspace to cyberpunk fiction and maps the transformation of public/private into open/closed. Analyzing "pornocracy," she contends that it was through cyberporn and the government's attempts to regulate it that the Internet became a marketplace of ideas and commodities. Chun describes the way Internet promoters conflated technological empowerment with racial empowerment and, through close examinations of William Gibson's Neuromancer and Mamoru Oshii's Ghost in the Shell, she analyzes the management of interactivity in narratives of cyberspace.
The Internet's potential for democracy stems not from illusory promises of individual empowerment, Chun argues, but rather from the ways in which it exposes us to others (and to other machines) in ways we cannot control. Using fiber optic networks -- light coursing through glass tubes -- as metaphor and reality, Control and Freedom engages the rich philosophical tradition of light as a figure for knowledge, clarification, surveillance, and discipline, in order to argue that fiber-optic networks physically instantiate, and thus shatter, enlightenment. Price: £24.95
Thames & Hudson March 2005
704 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 0500238189
21.5 x 28 cm English text. Hardcover
In this groundbreaking and original work of scholarship, four of the most influential and provocative art historians of our time have come together to provide a comprehensive history of art in the 20th and 21s centuries, an age when artists have sought constantly to overturn the traditions of the past and expectations of the present in order to invent new practices and forms. Adopting an innovative year-by-year approach, Foster, Krauss, Bois and Buchloh present more than one hundred short essays, each focusing on a crucial event - such as the creation of a seminal work, the publication of an artistic manifesto, or the opening of a major exhibition - to tell the story of the dazzling diversity of practice and interpretation that characterized the art of the period. All the key turning-points and breakthroughs of modernism and postmodernism are explored in depth, as are the frequent and sustained antimodernist reactions that proposed alternative visions of art and the world. Illustrating the authors' fine texts are more than six hundred of the most important works of the century, most reproduced in full colour. The book's flexible structure and extensive cross-referencing allow readers to plot their own course through the book and to follow any one of the many narratives that unfold through the century, whether that be the history of a medium such as photography or painting, the development of art in a particular country, the influence of a movement such as Surrealism or feminism, or the emergence of a stylistic or conceptual category like abstraction or minimalism. Boxes give further background information on some of the important figures and issues surrounding the art. In their perceptive introductions, the four authors set out and explain the different methods of art history at work in the book, providing the reader with the conceptual tools to further his or her own study. Two roundtable discussions - one at mid-century, the other at the close of the book - consider some of the questions raised by the precding decades and look ahead to the art of the future. A glossary of terms and concepts completes this extraordinary volume. Price: £45.00
D.A.P. 2006
302 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 1933045264
17.5 x 24.5 cm English text. Flexicover
Broken Screen is comprised of informal conversations between artist Doug Aitken and a roster of 26 carefully chosen artists, filmmakers, designers, and architects. Part guidebook and part manifesto, the book takes a fresh look at what it's like to create work in a world that has become increasingly fragmentary. Through casual and direct discussions Broken Screen offers a detailed navigation through the ideas behind the important yet under-documented visual language of nonlinear narratives, split screens, and fragmentary visual planes that define the most progressive moving images today. Presented in 26 illustrated chapters, the focus here lies on the shattering of the linear narrative in the visual arts through the use of image-based work to articulate the speed and fragmentation of modern life. Perhaps best of all, Broken Screen is a unique opportunity for readers to learn the thoughts and personal beliefs of these artists in their own words and imagery, unencumbered by critical or commercial filters, and communicated in the manner of a conversation between friends. It also seeks to produce a cultural manifesto for new communication, expression, and understanding in both the present and future--much as Marshall McLuhan’s Medium is the Massage did. With its accessible conversational style, forward-thinking graphic design, and over 300 high-contrast images, Broken Screen extends across many disciplines including art, film, design, and architecture, and is sure to become an important document of our time. Price: £21.95
144 pages ISBN 1859845908
16 x 24.5 cm English text. Hardcover
The critique of everyday life is perhaps the richest, most prescient work by one of the twentieth century’s greatest philosophers. A historian and sociologist, Lefebvre developed his ideas over seven decades through intellectual confrontation with figures as diverse as Bergson, Breton, Sartre, Debord and Althusser.
Written at the birth of postwar consumerism, though only now translated into English, the Critique is a book of enormous range and subtlety. Lefebvre takes as his starting point and guide the “trivial” details of quotidian experience: an experience colonized by the commodity, shadowed by inauthenticity, yet which remains the only source of resistance and change. Whether he is exploring the commercialization of sex or the disappearance of rural festivities, analyzing Hegel or Charlie Chaplin, Lefebvre always returns to the ubiquity of alienation, the necessity of revolt. This is an enduringly radical book, untimely today only in its intransigence and optimism.
This third volume of the Critique of Everyday Life completes Lefebvre’s monumental project. It seeks to shed light on changes inscribed within everyday life, and at the same time to reveal certain virtualities of the everyday, taking into account the crisis of modernity but also the decisive assertion of technological modernism. Price: £20.00
The MIT Press 2005
340 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 0262195305
18 x 20.5 cm English text. Hardcover
Prosthesis -- pointing to an addition, replacement, extension, enhancement -- has become something of an all-purpose metaphor for the interactions of body and technology. Concerned with cybernetics, transplant technology, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality, among other cultural and scientific developments, "the prosthetic" conjures up a posthuman condition. In response to this, the 13 original essays in The Prosthetic Impulse reassert the phenomenological, material, and embodied nature of prosthesis without dismissing its metaphorical potential. They examine the historical and conceptual edge between the human and the posthuman -- between flesh and its accompanying technologies. Rather than tracking the transformation of one into the other, these essays address this borderline and the delicate dialectical situation in which it places us. Concentrating on this edge, the collection demonstrates how the human has been technologized and technology humanized.
The eclectic approach taken by The Prosthetic Impulse draws on disciplines ranging from gender studies, philosophy, and visual culture to psychoanalysis, cybertheory, and phenomenology. The first section, "Carnality: Between Phenomenology and the Biocultural" concentrates on the organic, describing a body that, by its very materiality, is always and already prosthetic. The second section, "Assembling: Internalization. Externalization," considers the technological qualities and peculiarities of prosthesis, raising questions about the ways in which film, photography, AI, drawing, and literature -- representation itself -- can be situated within the framework of a prosthetic discourse. Taken together, the essays suggest that prosthesis is material as well as metaphorical. "It is just a matter of pondering where the inelegant edges lie," the editors write, "and living them most wonderfully." Price: £22.95
Revolver 2005
122 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 3936919828
14 x 20 cm English text. Softcover
The symposium reflects on historical and actual models of art institutions and organisations that deal with production and circulation of art and ideas in an experimental and flexible way. It takes into consideration the complexity of artistic practises produced since the 60s that can adopt a wide range of variable formats, in many cases focused on strategies that establish relations between different systems or disciplines rather than producing a final visual object. How can these structures exist in places where there is not an established art institution, with an infra-structure present in regions such as Western Europe or the U.S.? How do you make these platforms possible and effective without making them into something with a permanent or rigid state? How do you use the support of an institution and still have space for production and circulation in an experimental and flexible way? On the other hand, how do you have a certain continuity without the support of an institution?
With contributions by Minerva Cuevas, Clémentine Deliss, Cristina Freire, Liam Gillick, Jaroslaw Kozlowski, Liam Gillick, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Barbara Steiner. Book designed by Liam Gillick Price: £18.50
Scalo 2005
454 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 3039390368 ISBN 13: 9783039390366
19 x 24.5 cm English text. Flexicover
In the early 1990s, the idea of contemporary art in China simply did not compute to a foreign audience. But in 1993, ten contemporary Chinese artists debuted at the 48th Venice Biennale. They were immediately hailed as progenitors of a Chinese "avant-garde." Their brightly colored, Pop Art-inspired paintings played with socialist motifs, parodied Mao, and gave a visual expression to the feelings of disaffected Chinese youth. They were everything western audiences expected of contemporary art from the People's Republic of China. But a number of critics were rather guarded in their opinions. Was this another flash-in-the-pan phenomenon just as Soviet art had been in the 1980s? Could a Chinese avant-garde maintain a distinct identity of its own and shake off its penchant for imitation? The answer is clearly "yes". The emergence of a market for their art transformed the lives of these avant-garde pioneers from rags to riches, from outcast to hero, from social pariah to cutting-edge cool in a Chinese society adapting to a new era. They did not change but China has changed. The ideology they once had to fight now propagates a cultural climate of laissez-faire that is tantamount to encouragement. Set against China's official program of modernization, "Nine Lives" paints a compelling picture of artists working beyond the pale of official culture, who started a new cultural revolution that is sweeping China today. Price: £24.95
Berg 2005
216 pages ISBN 1845203348
We are at war. Human cultures are divided into two basic types, two antagonistic forces, one based on symbolic exchange, which is dual and reciprocal, and one based on money and sign exchange, which is totalising. Non-western societies can create genuinely symbolic, durable cultures. But the western world-system, based on a logic of empire, is designed to create an integrated and sealed reality, to snap tight around the world and its image. If the first is indestructible and the second is irresistible, who can win and what will victory look like? The answer may lie in the capacity for violence in the world-system itself, threatening that system from within with the purest of symbolic forms, the challenge of resistance. The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact is the summation of Baudrillard's work over twenty years. It is the essential analysis of the fundamental conflict of our time. Price: £9.99
150 pages ISBN 0262693267
14 x 19 cm English text. Softcover
"Shaping Things is about created objects and the environment, which is to say, it's about everything," writes Bruce Sterling in this addition to the Mediawork Pamphlet series. He adds, "Seen from sufficient distance, this is a small topic."
Sterling offers a brilliant, often hilarious history of shaped things. We have moved from an age of artifacts, made by hand, through complex machines, to the current era of "gizmos." New forms of design and manufacture are appearing that lack historical precedent, he writes; but the production methods, using archaic forms of energy and materials that are finite and toxic, are not sustainable. The future will see a new kind of object -- we have the primitive forms of them now in our pockets and briefcases: user-alterable, baroquely multi-featured, and programmable -- that will be sustainable, enhanceable, and uniquely identifiable. Sterling coins the term "spime" for them, these future manufactured objects with informational support so extensive and rich that they are regarded as material instantiations of an immaterial system. Spimes are designed on screens, fabricated by digital means, and precisely tracked through space and time. They are made of substances that can be folded back into the production stream of future spimes, challenging all of us to become involved in their production. Spimes are coming, says Sterling. We will need these objects in order to live; we won't be able to surrender their advantages without awful consequences.
The vision of Shaping Things is given material form by the intricate design of Lorraine Wild. Shaping Things is for designers and thinkers, engineers and scientists, entrepreneurs and financiers -- and anyone who wants to understand and be part of the process of technosocial transformation.
Hugo Award-winning science fiction author and futurist Bruce Sterling has been called by Time "perhaps the sharpest observer of our media-choked culture working today in any genre." Three of his novels have been New York Times Notable Books of the Year, and he has been a contributing writer for Wired since its conception. In 2005 he is "Visionary-in-Residence" at Art Center College of Design, Pasadena. Price: £11.95
314 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 0262633159
15 x 23 cm Englisgh text
NSK is considered by many to be the last true avant-garde of the twentieth century and the most consistently challenging artistic force in Eastern Europe today. The acronym refers to Neue Slowenische Kunst, a Slovene collective that emerged in the wake of Tito's death and was shaped by the breakup of Yugoslavia. Its complex and disturbing work -- in fields including experimental music and theater, painting, philosophy, writing, performance, and design -- has an international following but a powerful and specific cultural context. Within the NSK organization are a number of divisions, the best-known of which is Laibach, an alternative music group known for its blending of popular culture with subversive politics, high art with underground provocation -- reflecting the political and cultural chaos of its time.
In Interrogation Machine, Alexei Monroe offers the first critical appraisal of the entire NSK phenomenon, from its elaborate organizational structure and its internal logics to its controversial public actions. The result is a fascinating portrait not only of NSK but of the complex political and cultural context within which it operates. Monroe analyzes the paradoxes, perplexities, and traumas of NSK's work at its deepest levels. His investigation of the relationships between conceptual content, stylistic method, and ideological subtext demonstrates the relevance of NSK in general and Laibach in particular to current debates about culture, power, war, politics, globalization, the marketplace, and life itself. As Slavoj Zizek writes in his foreword, "Today, the lesson of Laibach is more pertinent than ever."
Monroe uses a variety of theoretical and historical approaches, as is appropriate to the shifting and elusive nature of his subject. The use of theory reflects NSK's own theoretical engagement; it is also a valuable way to read the issues raised by the work. Neither oversimplifying nor uncritically mystifying, Monroe leaves intact the "gaps, contradictions, and shadows" inherent in his subject, demonstrating that "it should still be possible to appreciate the work as art that moves, confuses, agitates, or fascinates." Price: £22.95
Merrell 2005
240 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 1858942764
Francis Bacon (1909–1992) is widely regarded as one of the most important post-war painters, and his work is represented in major public collections worldwide. The extraordinarily rich contents of his studio at no. 7 Reece Mews, South Kensington, London, in which the artist worked from 1961 until his death, provided the impetus for many of his most important paintings. The studio contents totalled 7500 objects, among them books, photographs, artists’ materials, slashed canvases, works on paper and handwritten notes. Together they offer unprecedented insights into the source materials and working methods of one of the giants of modern art.
• The first in-depth study of Bacon’s studio, offering unprecedented insights into the significance on the artist’s work of the objects found there
• One of the most important and engaging contributions to the study of Bacon’s work ever published
• Profusely illustrated throughout, and beautifully produced
• Essential reading for curators, art historians, artists and anyone interested in the art and culture of the twentieth century Price: £35.00
Hodder & Stoughton 2005
250 pages ISBN 0340769440
Tracey Emin's STRANGELAND is her own space, lying between the Margate of her childhood, the Turkey of her forefathers and her own, private-public life in present-day London. Her writings, a combination of memoirs and confessions, are deeply intimate, yet powerfully engaging. Tracey retains a profoundly romantic world view, paired with an uncompromising honesty. Her capacity both to create controversies and to strike chords is unequalled in British life. A remarkable book, an extraordinary life — and a truly original, beautiful mind. Price: £14.99
Verso 2005
480 pages ISBN 18844670333
16.5 x 24 cm English text. Hardcover
“Fredric Jameson is America’s leading Marxist critic. A prodigiously energetic thinker whose writings sweep majestically from Sophocles to science fiction.” — Terry Eagleton
In an age of globalization characterized by the dizzying technologies of the First World, and the social disintegration of the Third, is the concept of utopia still meaningful? Archaeologies of the Future, Jameson’s most substantial work since Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, investigates the development of this form since Thomas More, and interrogates the functions of utopian thinking in a post-Communist age.
The relationship between utopia and science fiction is explored through the representations of otherness…alien life and alien worlds…and a study of the works of Philip K. Dick, Ursula LeGuin, William Gibson, Brian Aldiss, Kim Stanley Robinson and more. Jameson’s essential essays, including “The Desire Called Utopia,” conclude with an examination of the opposing positions on utopia and an assessment of its political value today.
Archaeologies of the Future is the third volume, after Postmodernism and A Singular Modernity, of Jameson’s project on the Poetics of Social Forms. Price: £20.00
Reaktion 2005
172 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 1861892616
Guy Debord (1931-1994) was one of the most important and intriguing intellectual figures of the twentieth century. Filmmaker and poet, urban critic and political theorist, adventurer and activist extraordinaire during Paris' May 1968 uprisings, Debord was simultaneously behind and ahead of his times. Best-known as guru of the avant-garde revolutionary movement the Situationist International (1957-72), and for a classic indictment of post-war capitalist consumerism The Society of the Spectacle (1967), Debord's life and work remains fascinating to this day. Yet the man himself remained elusive and enigmatic throughout his life. Master urban tactician in the 1950s, political muckraker, organizer and theorist during the 1960s, vagabond throughout the 1970s, fleeing to Spain and Italy, he lived as a recluse during the 1980s and early 1990s in an isolated farmhouse in Champot (Auvergne), behind a high stone wall. Guy Debord crosses over that Champot wall, pushes back Debord's shutters and peers through his windows. It crosses his threshold, drinks his wine, and listens to him talk. Andrew Merrifield focuses on the particulars of Debord's life, shedding light on this admirable yet apparently impenetrable figure, a free spirit who was radically at odds with life but at the same time loved many things in it, and thought them worth fighting for. The book reveals the dynamics of the man, his ideas, and his times' which have much to say to our own, equally troubled times. The ideas of Guy Debord, who died only 10 years ago, continue to expose the fragility of our democracy and the mismatch between people and political power today; this book shows that the lessons of Debord are as fresh, subversive, and relevant now as they were forty years ago. Price: £10.95
336 pages ISBN 1844670341
15.5 x 23.5 cm English text. Softcover
Long before Antonio Negri became famous around the world for his groundbreaking volume Empire, he was infamous across Europe for the incendiary writings contained in this book. Books for Burning consists of five pamphlets that Negri wrote between 1971 and 1977, which attempt to identify and draw lessons from new conditions of class struggle that emerged in the course of the 1970s.
Conceived as organizational hypotheses intended for debate among the members of the political movements Workers’ Power (Potere operaio) and Organized Autonomy (Autonomia organizzata), these texts were later misread and misrepresented by the Italian state in its attempt to frame Negri as responsible for the assassination of former Italian president Aldo Moro, as the leader of the Red Brigades, and as the mastermind of an armed insurrection against the state. In the more than twenty-five years since their first publication, these texts have lost none of their originality, relevance or power to shock.
In a new preface, Negri demonstrates how his controversial work on empire, biopolitics and immaterial labor developed out of concepts and strategies first outlined in this book, and an editorial introduction analyzes the role these texts played in Negri’s trial and in the criminalization of the Italian radical workers’ movement. Price: £16.00
V2_NAi Publishers 2005
288 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 9056623893
aRt&D: Research and Development in Art lays open a new investigative field of art that emerged in the last few decades as a result of media and technology influences. aRt&D introduces the diversity of this new art domain to a broader audience. It is the first book that is entirely dedicated to artistic research and development.
In the past decades a new international trend has emerged within the arts, usually referred to as 'electronic', 'digital', or 'interactive' art. In the 1980s, artists mainly worked with radio and video, where in the last fifteen years digital media and network technologies have emerged as their instruments of choice. This new art domain is characterized by collaboration between artists, designers, engineers and scientists, who join forces in researching and experimenting with new opportunities for using technology for artistic ends.
aRt&D: Research and Development in Art not only provides a unique insight in the art practice through essays in which artists write about their personal experiences, it also develops a theoretical framework for these projects. The book contains contributions by the award-winning performance group Blast Theory, media artist Thecla Schiphorst, art critics Josephine Bosma and Rudolf Frieling, media theorist Andy Cameron, curators Mark Hansen and Inke Arns, philosopher Andrew Benjamin, and many others. Timothy Druckrey, expert in this field, evaluates the importance of artistic research and development so far. aRt&D positions itself as a pioneering work: it is the first book ever published that focuses in depth on interdisciplinary research and development from an artistic perspective. Price: £15.95
Manifesta / Liverpool Biennal 2005
140 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 0953676161
Refugee – Who is The Host? Occupation: Unknown edited by Paul Domela, Liverpool Biennial’s Deputy Chief Executive, the publication documents a three-part series of discussions on visual art and contemporary curatorial work in a changing Europe.
Essays from theorists, artists and curators form a cultural dialogue, looking at the influence that social change, shaped by political, economic and religious developments, has had on arts practice.
Contributions include essays from Giorgio Agamben (Professor of Aesthetics, University of Verona, Italy), Nicolas Bourriaud (Director Palais de Tokyo, Paris), Eyal Weizman (architect, Tel Aviv) and Declan McGonagle (University of Ulster), amongst others.
The book was devised between and during the 2002 and 2004 Liverpool Biennials, and commissioned as part of the New European Network Programme, an initive of the International Foundation Manifesta and funded by the European Commission Culture 2000 Program Price: £12.00
320 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 0262062445
18.5 x 23.5 cm English text. Hardcover
Andrea Fraser's work, writes Pierre Bourdieu in his foreword to Museum Highlights, is able to "trigger a social mechanism, a sort of machine infernale whose operation causes the hidden truth of social reality to reveal itself." It often does this by incorporating and inhabiting the social role it sets out to critique -- as in a performance piece in which she leads a tour as a museum docent and describes the men's room in the same elevated language that she uses to describe seventeenth-century Dutch paintings. Influenced by the interdisciplinarity of postmodernism, Fraser's interventionist art draws on four primary artistic and intellectual frameworks -- institutional critique, with its site-specific examination of cultural context; performance; feminism, with its investigation of identity formation; and Bourdieu's reflexive sociology. Fraser's writings form an integral part of her artistic practice, and this collection of texts written between 1985 and 2003 -- including the performance script for the docent's tour that gives the book its title -- both documents and represents her work.
The writings in Museum Highlights are arranged to reflect different aspects of Fraser's artistic practice. They include essays that trace the development of critical "artistic practice" as cultural resistance; performance scripts that explore art institutions and the public sphere; and texts that explore the ambivalent relationship of art to the economic and political interests of its time. The final piece, "Isn't This a Wonderful Place? (A Tour of a Tour of the Guggenheim Bilbao)," reflects on the role of museums in an era of globalization. Among the book's 30 illustrations are stills from performance pieces, some never before published.
Alexander Alberro is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Florida. Price: £25.95
148 pages ISBN 1845202244
14 x 19.5 cm English text. Hardcover
Translated by Julie Rose, "City of Panic" takes the reader on a journey across the airy boulevards of Paris and into the crypt of its Metro. For Virilio, whose sense of cities was formed by earlier wars, Paris is both the City of Light and the City of Panic. Written in the shadow of war, "City of Panic" argues that cities everywhere have been the dedicated target of political and technological terror throughout the 20th Century. The wanton erasure of the past, the construction of identikit places, the proliferation of gated-communities, the ever-widening net of surveillance, the privatisation of what was public ...Now every metropolis is a war zone and every metropolis is the same. In this globalized and militarized everywhere, all citizens are becoming one citizen - saturated, standardized and synchronized - ever-more reliant on a media fabricating a world of fear. For the panic of the 21st century is simply the final phase of the pincer movement. Place-less, media-fed, panic-struck - welcome to the desert of the real. Price: £16.99
Art Space Gallery 2005
118 pages DVD Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 095496232X
"… I once had this idea of starting a magazine called Oil Painting. It wouldn’t discuss anything else, and a critic would write in the way a sports writer would write when looking at tennis. He would say, Beautiful ground stroke by God, look at the way he stroked that, and in that yellow, that Naples yellow" Malcolm Morley
Experiments in painting ‘live’ are rare. Malcolm Morley, whose words are quoted above, once attempted to paint his version of Raphael’s The School of Athens in front of an audience, but painting as a spectator sport is doomed to failure; the idea runs counter to the convention that the audience for a painting will view the results not the activity.
The popularisation of art’s conceptual dimension has tended to accentuate the division so that the audience’s first question on being confronted with unfamiliar art is What does it mean? With this exhibition, and the accompanying publication and DVD that features interviews with artists in their studios talking about their working practice, the intention is to defer that question. Rather than asking why these artists paint and what the paintings mean, it is being argued that the significance of the work may be better understood through an awareness of what they do: their working order, rhythm, habits and choices.
With a focus on six artists never before shown together, this exhibition will embrace the diversity and complexity of painting today, and maybe bring audience and artist a little closer together.
The publication will also include contributions from Tim Green (Tate Britain conservation department) and Jon Archdeacon (A.P. Fitzpatrick suppliers and researchers of artists materials) and will collect together stories about painting from a wide variety range of contributors: part treasury of anecdotes that may yield insight into practice, part rogues’ gallery of myths and misunderstandings that perhaps merely compound the mystery. But it is hoped that this will form the foundation of a new ‘archive’ of information about contemporary painting. Price: £10.00
Autonomedia 2004
336 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 1570271496
Cyberfeminism: Next Protocols invents and documents with approaches coming from art, theory and activism a cyberfeminism which is dedicated to the wilderness of precise critique and experimental thinking. It opens with the following questions: What are the everyday embodied conditions of women's lives as they are being altered by the new technologies and communications networks? What are new forms of oppression and of liberation? Has the digital medium - starting with the indecisiveness of the Turing test, and in its latest form when calculation-tasks have become autonomous data processing - taken the place of the subject? Can you tell: Where do you or the machine 'end'? From this starting point develops a multifaceted, very complex critique and analysis of the many intersections of power, gender, and technology in the digital age. Price: £12.99
Continuum 2005
348 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 0826464858
17 x 24.5 cm English text. Softcover
A major new textbook for students of contemporary American art and media, and modern American history. American Visual Cultures analyses the role of painting, photography, film, television, advertising, journalism and other visual media in the historical development of the United States from the Civil War to the present day. It offers a chronology of major debates and developments in modern US history and traces the social, political and economic factors that have shaped the development of visual forms and practices across time. Illustrated throughout, the book combines a wide range of critical approaches and is made up of new essays by internationally renowned scholars. A General Introduction, in which the editors discuss the theoretical and pedagogical approaches shaping the contemporary study of visual culture, with particular reference to the United States, is followed by four sections, each covering a defined chronological period: 1861-1929; 1929-1963; 1963-1980; 1980 to the present. Each section opens with an introduction by the editors, giving historical and cultural context and highlighting thematic and pedagogical links between essays. An annotated bibliography of suggested further reading completes this invaluable and unique resource for the student and teacher of modern American art, media and culture. Price: £19.99
Uitgeverij Debalie 2004
pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 9066173130
9.5 x 15 cm English text
Art reflects the society which gave birth to it. It is therefore not surprising that many new art forms have emerged in recent years (from computer art to neo-conceptualism and from business art to genomic art) which in form and content are rooted in the information society: the information arts. These information arts often defy several paradigms on which traditional art forms are based. Therefore we have to pose the question if there are other models of categorisation that provide us with a better insight in the arts. The traditional images of the skilled craftsman or the individual artistic genius do not fit information artists very well. They pose themselves as directors, mediators or researchers, and often organise themselves in collectives. To many young artists, these paradigm shifts come naturally. They react creatively on the society in which they live. It can be foreseen that the art world will evolve in directions which fit the new arts. This will however only happen when we develop new insights on the differences and similarities of these arts. Unsorted contributes to the emerging discussion in this field. Rather than having the pretensions of sorting it all out, this publication discloses some of the relevant questions. It focuses on the characteristics of the information arts – on the level of the work of individual artists and collectives, as well as on the level of their mutual relations. With contributions by Mitchell Whitelaw, Lev Manovich, Stephen Wilson, Arthur Elsenaar, tobias c. van Veen, goodwill. Price: £6.99
JRP Ringier / Migros Museum 2005
184 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 294027150X
16.5 x 23.5 cm English text. Hardcover
An anthology that emerged from a series of solo exhibitions by Kendell Geers, Olu Oguibe, Oladélé Bamgoyé, Mounir Fatmi, and Loulou Chérinet.
Reaching beyond the dialectic of difference typical of so many exhibitions of “non-Western” artists, this project aims to reconstruct a definition of contemporary African positions.
With texts by Fernando Alvim, Heike Munder, Ulf Wuggenig, Simon Njami, Olu Oguibe, Loulou Cherinet, Mounir Fatmi Price: £22.00
462 pages ISBN 1845200594
This book puts a finger on the nerve of culture by delving into the social life of touch, our most elusive yet most vital sense. From the tortures of the Inquisition to the corporeal comforts of modernity and from the tactile therapies of Asian medicine to the virtual tactility of cyberspace, The Book of Touch offers excursions into a sensory territory both foreign and familiar. How are masculine and feminine identities shaped by touch? What are the tactile experiences of the blind, or the autistic? How is touch developed differently across cultures? What are the boundaries of pain and pleasure? Is there a politics of touch? Bringing together classic writings and new work, this is an essential guide for anyone interested in the body, the senses and the experiential world. Price: £19.99
346 pages ISBN 0262072602
Open source software is considered by many to be a novelty and the open source movement a revolution. Yet the collaborative creation of knowledge has gone on for as long as humans have been able to communicate. CODE looks at the collaborative model of creativity -- with examples ranging from collective ownership in indigenous societies to free software, academic science, and the human genome project -- and finds it an alternative to proprietary frameworks for creativity based on strong intellectual property rights.
Intellectual property rights, argues Rishab Ghosh in his introduction, were ostensibly developed to increase creativity; but today, policy decisions that treat knowledge and art as if they were physical forms of property actually threaten to decrease creativity, limit public access to creativity, and discourage collaborative creativity. "Newton should have had to pay a license fee before being allowed even to see how tall the 'shoulders of giants' were, let alone to stand upon them," he writes.
The contributors to CODE, from such diverse fields as economics, anthropology, law, and software development, examine collaborative creativity from a variety of perspectives, looking at new and old forms of creative collaboration and the mechanisms emerging to study them. Discussing the philosophically resonant issues of ownership, property, and the commons, they ask if the increasing application of the language of property rights to knowledge and creativity constitutes a second enclosure movement -- or if the worldwide acclaim for free software signifies a renaissance of the commons. Two concluding chapters offer concrete possibilities for both alternatives, with one proposing the establishment of "positive intellectual rights" to information and another issuing a warning against the threats to networked knowledge posed by globalization. Price: £24.95
312 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 0262140896
The art of Louise Bourgeois stages a dynamic encounter between modern art and psychoanalysis, argues Mignon Nixon in the first full-scale critical study of the artist's work. A pivotal figure in twentieth-century art, Louise Bourgeois (b. 1911, France) emigrated to New York in 1938 and is still actively working and exhibiting today. From Bourgeois's formative struggle with the "father figures" of surrealism, including Andre Breton and Marcel Duchamp, to her galvanizing role in the feminist art movement of the 1970s, to her subsequent emergence as a leading voice in postmodernism, this book explores the artist's responses to war, dislocation, and motherhood, to the predicament of the "woman artist" and the politics of sexual and social liberation, as a dialogue with psychoanalysis.
Convinced that she could express "deeper things in three dimensions," Bourgeois abandoned painting for sculpture in the 1940s, founding her art in one of the twentieth century's most radical and controversial accounts of subjectivity, the object relations psychoanalysis of Melanie Klein. Rejecting the Oedipal narratives of Freud and the dream imagery of surrealism for the object world of the infantile drives, Bourgeois turned to the child analysis pioneered by Klein, the figure Julia Kristeva has called "the boldest reformer in the history of modern psychoanalysis." With Klein, Bourgeois thinks the negative -- fragmentation, splitting, and formlessness -- where we might least expect to find it, in the corporeal fantasies of mother and child. This turn to the mother and the death drive at once in child psychoanalysis, Nixon contends, not only finds powerful expression in Bourgeois's art, but is echoed in the work of other artists, including Marcel Duchamp, Jasper Johns, Yayoi Kusama, and Eva Hesse, and in a return to Klein in recent art.
"Fantastic reality," Bourgeois calls the condition of her art. Starting from Bourgeois's investigation, through a multiplicity of forms and materials, of the problem of subjectivity on the very threshold of emergence, this book argues for a new psychoanalytic story of modern art.
Mignon Nixon is Senior Lecturer at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London. Price: £25.95
344 pages B&W reproductons. ISBN 026204224X
In recent years, visual culture has emerged as a growing and important interdisciplinary field of study. Visual culture regards images as central to the representation of meaning in the world. It encompasses "high" art without an assumption of its higher status. But despite the current proliferation of studies and programs in visual culture, there seems to be no consensus within the field itself as to its scope and objectives, definitions, and methods. In Visual Culture, Margaret Dikovitskaya offers an overview of this new area of study in order to reconcile its diverse theoretical positions and understand its potential for further research. Her aim is to show how visual culture can avoid what she defines as the Scylla and Charybdis that threaten it: the lack of a specific object of study (given its departure from the traditional hierarchies of art history) and the expansion of the field to the point of incoherence as it seems to subsume everything related to the cultural and the visual.
Dikovitskaya gives us an archaeology of visual culture, examining the "cultural turn" away from art history and the emergence of visual studies. Drawing on responses to questionnaires, oral histories, and interviews with the field's leading scholars, she discusses first the field's history, theoretical frameworks, and methods, and then examines four programs and courses in visual culture -- those at the University of Rochester, the University of Chicago, the University of California at Irvine, and the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Bringing together considerations of theory and practice, Dikovitskaya charts the future of visual culture programs in the twenty-first century.
Margaret Dikovitskaya is John W. Kluge Research Fellow at the Library of Congress. She was an Izaak Walton Killam Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of British Columbia in 2003. Price: £25.95
Routledge 2005
280 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 0415278546
13.99
Why does art matter to us, and what makes it good? Why is the role of imagination so important in art? Illustrated with carefully chosen colour and black-and-white plates of examples from Michaelangelo to Matisse and Poussin to Pollock, Revealing Art takes us on a compelling and provocative journey. Matthew Kieran explores some of the most important questions we can ask ourselves about art: how can art inspire us or disgust us? Is artistic judgement simply a matter of taste? Can art be immoral or obscene, and should it be censored? He brings such abstract issues to life with fascinating discussions of individual paintings, photographs and sculptures, such as Michelangelo's Pieta, Andres Serrano's Piss Christ and Francis Bacon's powerful paintings of the Pope. He also suggests some answers to problems that any one in an art gallery or museum is likely to ask themselves: what is a beautiful work of art, and can art really reveal something true about our own nature? Revealing Art is ideal for anyone interested in debates about art today, or who has simply stood in front of a painting and felt baffled. Price: £13.99
266 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 026206247X
In Media Ecologies, Matthew Fuller asks what happens when media systems interact. Complex objects such as media systems --understood here as processes, or elements in a composition as much as "things" -- have become informational as much as physical, but without losing any of their fundamental materiality. Fuller looks at this multiplicitous materiality -- how it can be sensed, made use of, and how it makes other possibilities tangible. He investigates the ways the different qualities in media systems can be said to mix and interrelate, and, as he writes, "to produce patterns, dangers, and potentials."
Fuller draws on texts by Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze as well as writings by Friedrich Nietzsche, Marshall McLuhan, Donna Haraway, Friedrich Kittler, and others, to define and extend the idea of "media ecology." Arguing that the only way to find out about what happens when media systems interact is to carry out such interactions, Fuller traces a series of media ecologies -- "taking every path in a labyrinth simultaneously," as he describes one chapter. He looks at contemporary London-based pirate radio and its interweaving of high- and low-tech media systems; the "medial will to power" illustrated by "the camera that ate itself"; how, as seen in a range of compelling interpretations of new media works, the capacities and behaviors of media objects are affected when they are in "abnormal" relationships with other objects; and each step in a sequence of Web pages, Cctv -- world wide watch, that encourages viewers to report crimes seen via webcams.
Contributing to debates around standardization, cultural evolution, cybernetic culture, and surveillance, and inventing a politically challenging aesthetic that links them, Media Ecologies, with its various narrative speeds, scales, frames of references, and voices, does not offer the academically traditional unifying framework; rather, Fuller says, it proposes to capture "an explosion of activity and ideas to which it hopes to add an echo."
Matthew Fuller is Reader in Media Design, Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam. He is the author of Behind the Blip: Essays on the Culture of Software. Price: £22.95
Black Dog Publishing 2005
192 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 190477220X
21 x 27 cm English text. Softcover
Re Views Artists and Public Space celebrates the tenth anniversary of the public art commissioning agency Artpoint. Comprising an extensive review of Artpoint’s projects Re Views focuses on the artists’ experience within public art practice. Featuring works by Alison Turnbull, Thomas Heatherwick, Michael Craig-Martin, Jacqui Poncelet, Simon Patterson and a range of writers, curators and critics, the book explores the importance of research, the relation of public space to the built environment, and artistic practices beyond the studio. Addressing the subject of public art from the artists’ perspective and emphasising process as well as the resulting work, Re Views represents a unique approach to public art projects within the context of critical debate.
Contributors: Edward Allington, Sian Ede, Peter Freeman, Thomas Heatherwick, John Kippin, Chris Murray, Simon Patterson, Jacqui Poncelet, Peter Randall-Page,
Simon Read, Louise Short, Alison Turnbull, Dominic Williams, et al Price: £19.95
Charta 2004
96 pages ISBN 8881585073
The essays gathered in this book are the result of an historical-anthropological observation: after the crisis in narration, carefully analyzed in the past by François Lyotard, we confront ourselves today with the tendency, in contemporary artistic creation characterized by expression, of discourse re-invention efforts. In fact, artists, through their work, concentrate on the real experience of their own personal history--contextualizing it in historical, cultural, and social situations. All the examples presented in this book are the product of an anthropological outlook on man and raise the reader’s awareness of the micro-community experiences that are nothing but the reflection of micro-utopias born from the absence of the great teleological utopias.
Includes texts on Pedro Cabrita Reis, Gilbert & George, Ilya Kabakov, Michelangelo Pistoletto and Franz West amongst others Price: £18.50
Manchester Unviersity Press 2005
144 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 0719070635
23 x 30.5 cm English text. Softcover
This beautifully designed large format paperback, with over 200 full colour illustrations, contains the full transcript of the award-winning film DERRIDA, along with essays by the filmmakers and Nicolas Royle, and a Q and A session with the philospher. Reviews of the film:
'Fascinating.'
The Independent
'Dick and Ziering have created a priceless historical record of one of the 20th and 21st century's great minds at work.'
Film Threat Price: £17.99
The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design 2005
296 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 0919616410
Modernism and Modernity: The Vancouver Conference Papers, was originally published as the proceedings from a conference held in Vancouver, in 1983. Due to its popularity, this reprint is being issued with the same insightful and intriguing papers by Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, T.J. Clark, Hollis Clayson, Thomas Crow, Nicole Dubreuil-Blondin, Clement Greenberg, Henri Lefebvre, Marcelin Pleynet, Allan Sekula, Paul Hayes Tucker, and John Wilson Foster, all of which constitute a major contribution to the rethinking of the history and debates concerning modernism and modernity. Once novelties in the 1980s, many of these essays and theories in this illustrated reader are today regarded as modern classics.
Essays by T.J. Clark, Hollis Clayson, Nicole Dubreuil-Blondin,Thomas Crow, Clement Greenberg, John Wilson Foster, Allan Sekula, Henri Lefebvre, Marcelin Pleynet, Paul Hayes Tucker, et al. Price: £19.95
Yale University Press 2005
250 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 0300109334
17 x 23.5 cm English text. Softcover
In April 2002 the Philadelphia Museum of Art held a symposium in conjunction with a major retrospective of the work of Barnett Newman (1905-1970). This volume publishes the proceedings of the event. With contributions from notable specialists in the field, including art historians, museum curators, critics, conservators, and fellow artists, the book pays homage to Newman and sheds new light on his work as a theoretician and innovator.
The essays collected in Rediscovering Barnett Newman discuss the artist's famous "zip", his late series of paintings "The Stations of the Cross", the temporal aspect of his works, his painting technique, and his sculptural oeuvre, among other topics. As a whole, this wide-ranging collection provides new perspectives on one of the twentieth century's greatest artists, whose work continues to inspire and to speak to contemporary audiences. Price: £16.00
240 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 0919616429
21.5 x 28 cm English text. Softcover
Originally published in 1975, this collection of Donald Judd's writings is a sought-after classic. His uncompromising reviews avoid the familiar generalizations so often associated with artistic styles emerging during the 1950s and 60s. Here, Judd discusses in detail the work of more than 500 artists showing in New York at that time, and provides a critical account of this significant era in American art. While addressing the social and political ramifications of art production, the writings focus on the work of Jackson Pollock, Kasimir Malevich, Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, John Chamberlain, Larry Poons, Kenneth Noland, and Claes Oldenburg. His 1965 "Specific Objects" essay, discussions of sculptural thought in the 60s, is included as well as Judd’s notorious polemical essay, "Imperialism, Nationalism, Regionalism." Price: £35.00
Blackwell publishing 2005
220 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 0631232842
It has recently become apparent that criticism is in trouble. Either commodification is deemed to have killed it off, or it has become institutionally routine. This book explores contemporary approaches that have sought to renew criticism's energies in the wake of a theatrical turn in recent visual arts practice and the emergence of a performative arts writing over the past decade or so. Issues addressed include the performing of art's histories: the consequences for criticism of embracing boredom, distraction, and other "queer" forms of (in)attention: and the importance of exploring writerly process in responding to aesthetic experience. Bringing together newly commissioned work from the fields of art history, performance studies, and visual culture with the writings of contemporary artists, After Criticism provides a set of experimental essays that demonstrate how the critical might live on as a vital and efficacious force within contemporary culture. Price: £16.99
232 pages ISBN 0826479324
Deleuze is now regarded as the most radical and influential of contemporary hilosophers. Here Manuel DeLanda makes sense of Deleuze for both analytic and continental thought, for both science and philosophy.
Price: £9.99
486 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 0262033283
Networked collaborations of artists did not begin on the Internet. In this multidisciplinary look at the practice of art that takes place across a distance - geographical, temporal, or emotional - theorists and practitioners examine the ways that art, activism, and media fundamentally reconfigured each other in experimental networked projects of the 1970s and 1980s. By providing a context for this work - showing that it was shaped by varying mixes of social relations, cultural strategies, and political and aesthetic concerns - At a Distance effectively refutes the widely accepted idea that networked art is technologically determined. Doing so, it provides the historical grounding needed for a more complete understanding of today's practices of Internet art and activism and suggests the possibilities inherent in networked practice. At a Distance traces the history and theory of such experimental art projects as mail art, sound and radio art, telematic art, assemblings, and Fluxus. Although the projects differed, a conceptual questioning of the "art object," combined with a political undermining of dominant art institutional practices, animated most distance art. After a section that sets this work in historical and critical perspective, the book presents artists and others involved in this art "re-viewing" their work - including experiments in "mini FM," telerobotics, networked psychoanalysis, and interactive book construction. Finally, the book recasts the history of networks from the perspectives of politics, aesthetics, economics, and cross-cultural analysis. Price: £25.95
ARTicle Press / Ikon Gallery 2005
52 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 1873352735
19 x 23.5 cm English text. Softcover
With contributions by Katherin Bohm, Ian Davenport, Bernard Frize, Katherina Grosse, Beatriz Milhazes, George Shaw and Jonathan Watkins.
"It is not uninteresting to reflect on the medium of painting at this time when the line drawn between art and everything else is virtually erased. Ideas concerning a separated space for art are superceded by assertions of continuity between experiences inside and outside art galleries and museums..." Jonathan Watkins Price: £8.00
228 pages ISBN 0826478425
Negative Horizon is Paul Virilio's most original and unified exploration of the key themes and ideas running through his work and thought. Provocatively and forcefully written, it sets out Virilio's theory of dromoscopy: a means of apprehending speed and its pivotal - and potentially destructive - role in contemporary global society. Applying this theory to Western political and military history, Virilio exposes a compulsion to accelerate, and the rise of a politics of time - encapsulated in the importance accorded to speed - over territorial politics of space. Moving through human history from the cave paintings at Lascaux that depict the first hunters, through the domestication of animals and the building of the first roads, to the 'stealth technologies' deployed in contemporary warfare, Virilio shows how resistance to speed and movement has consistently been eroded, and the physical world adapted, in order to satisfy the urge to move further and faster. In exposing what he believes to be the consequences of this constant acceleration for human sensory perception and, ultimately, global democracy, Virilio offers a vision of history and politics as disturbing as it is original. This new translation by Michael Degener makes available in English for the first time, one of Virilio's seminal works - set to be required reading for anyone interested in the rise of new technologies and the direction of global politics. Price: £16.99
Revolver/eflux 2004
368 pages ISBN 3865880010
14.5 x 19.5 cm English text. Softcover
With Do It in hand, you will be able to make a work of (someone else's) art yourself. Since 1993 Do It has provided its public with how-to pages of instructions written by 168 of the most important artists and writers working today. Some of the projects are historic classics brought forward especially for the occasion, but most of the contributions being imagined here are new. Do it has grown in stages, springing up around the world in 45 museums and art centers in Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Australia. The time has come to summarize the results in a book that is part manual, part cookbook, part do-it-yourself kit. Here it is. It has only just begun!
with contributions by:
Marina Abramovic, Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla, Pawel Althamer, Carl Andre, John Armleder, David Askevold, Pablo Azul, John Baldessari, Matthew Barney, Joze Barsi , Dara Birnbaum, Michel Blazy, Mel Bochner, John Bock, Christian Boltanski, Inaki Bonillas, Louise Bourgeois, Joan Brossa, Mircea Cantor, Cao Fei, Maurizio Cattelan, John Chamberlain, Jay Chung, Amy E. Cohen and Francisco J. Varela, Douglas Coupland, Meg Cranston, Critical Art Ensemble, Minerva Cuevas, Tacita Dean, Wilson Diaz, Diller + Scofidio, Trisha Donnelly, Heri Dono, Jimmie Durham, Maria Eichhorn, Olafur Eliasson, Elmgreen & Dragset, Ayse Erkmen, Tim Etchells, Peter Fischli & David Weiss, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Hreinn Fridfinnsson, Yona Friedman, Paul-Armand Gette, Jef Geys, Gilbert & George, Simryn Gill, Liam Gillick, Edouard Glissant, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Leon Golub, Douglas Gordon, Tomislav Gotovac, Dan Graham, Joseph Grigely, Ulrike Grossarth, Marie-Ange Guilleminot, Richard Hamilton, Mona Hatoum, Federico Herrero, Roger Hiorns, Shere Hite, Richard Hoeck, Roald Hoffmann, Carsten Holler, Jonathan Horowitz, Hu Fang, Huang Yong Ping, Pierre Huyghe, Fabrice Hybert, Marisel Jimenez, Joan Jonas, Ilya Kabakov, Steve Kaltenbach, Allan Kaprow, Gulsun Karamustafa, Chitti Kasemkitvatana, Mike Kelley, Hassan Khan, Kim Soo-Ja, Ben Kinmont, Alison Knowles, Jiri Kolar, Julius Koller, Koo Jeong-a, Gabriel Kuri, Surasi Kusolwong, Bertrand Lavier, Xavier Le Roy, Sol LeWitt, Eric van Lieshout, Tzay-Chuen Lim, Annibal Lopez, Sylvere Lotringer, Jorge Macchi, Robert MacPherson, Christian Marclay, Enzo Mari, Eva Marisaldi, Chris Marker, Paul McCarthy, Cildo Meireles, Jonas Mekas, Feng Mengbo, Annette Messager, Olaf Metzel, John Miller, Jonathan Monk, Robert Morris, Valerie Mrejen, Otto Muhl, Eileen Myles, Deimantas Narkevicius , Antonio Negri, Max Neuhaus, Roman Ondak, Yoko Ono, Damian Ortega, Pepon Osorio, Nam June Paik, Lygia Pape, Philippe Parreno, Cesare Pietroiusti, Steven Pippin, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Tadej Pogacar & P.A.RA.S.I.T.E. Museum, Marjetica Potrc, Cedric Price, Emilio Prini, Raul Quintanilla, David Reed, Tobias Rehberger, Pedro Reyes, Jason Rhoades, Pipilotti Rist, Ugo Rondinone, Martha Rosler, Ed Ruscha, Anri Sala, Sam Samore, Tomas Saraceno, Joe Scanlan, Tomas Schmit, Thomas Schutte, Tino Sehgal, Rupert Sheldrake, Andreas Slominski, Michael Smith, Nancy Spero, Bruce Sterling, Hugo Suter, Pascale Marthine Tayou, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Yasunao Tone, Rosemarie Trockel, Uri Tzaig, Anton Vidokle, Clemens von Wedemeyer, Lawrence Weiner, Franz West, Emmett Williams, Erwin Wurm, Cerith Wyn Evans, Yang Zhenzhong. Price: £19.95
Thames & Hudson 2004
224 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 0500203806
With some of the most important artists and key works, this is an ideal introduction to the twenty-first century’s dominant art form.
From conceptual art’s use of the banal and ‘artless’ snapshot to the carefully constructed tableaux of Jeff Wall, The Photograph as Contemporary Art considers the full range of ways that today’s artists engage with photography to make art.
Some artists, such as Sophie Calle and Erwin Wurm, use photography as a record of a real performance or everyday action, while others such as Yinka Shonibare and Gregory Crewdson stage invented scenes and narratives to tell fictional stories. Andreas Gursky, Thomas Demand and Rineke Dijkstra present a cool, seemingly objective view of the external world, while Nan Goldin and Wolfgang Tillmans offer up intimate details of their private lives. In the hands of Luc Delahaye and Allan Sekula, photography is a means of creating documentary, while for those such as Cindy Sherman and Gillian Wearing, the photograph becomes a repository of personal, social and cultural values in an image-saturated world. Price: £9.95
University of California Press 2004
280 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 0520243463
19.5 x 25.5 cm English text. Hardcover
Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art documents the growing presence of Buddhist perspectives in contemporary culture. This shift began in the nineteenth century and is now pervasive in many aspects of everyday experience. In the arts especially, the increasing importance of process over product has promoted a profound change in the relationship between artist and audience. But while artists have been among the most perceptive interpreters of Buddhism in the West, art historians and critics have been slow to develop the intellectual tools to analyze the impact of Buddhist concepts. This timely, multifaceted volume explores the relationships between Buddhist practice and the contemporary arts in lively essays by writers from a range of disciplines and in revealing interviews with some of the most influential artists of our time. Elucidating the common ground between the creative mind, the perceiving mind, and the meditative mind, the contributors tackle essential questions about the relationship of art and life. Among the writers are curators, art critics, educators, and Buddhist commentators in psychology, literature, and cognitive science. They consider the many Western artists today who recognize the Buddhist notion of emptiness, achieved through focused meditation, as a place of great creative potential for the making and experiencing of art. The artists featured in the interviews, all internationally recognized, include Maya Lin, Bill Viola, and Ann Hamilton. Extending earlier twentieth-century aesthetic interests in blurring the boundaries of art and life, the artists view art as a way of life, a daily practice, in ways parallel to that of the Buddhist practitioner. Their works, woven throughout the book, richly convey how Buddhism has been both a source for and a lens through which we now perceive art. Price: £29.95
Francoise Jonquet
360 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 0714844357
19 x 24 cm English text. Hardcover
Despite their notoriety, Gilbert & George have always been reluctant to speak publicly, and have only occasionally published manifestos or given interviews, many of which were collected into a volume published in 1997. However, over the last ten years they have developed a close friendship with the Paris-based author and critic, François Jonquet, and have held with him a long series of interviews in which they have been willing to talk more candidly than ever before about their lives, their work, their feelings and motives, their views on a whole range of subjects, and their reaction to the many controversies they have generated. Gilbert & George: Intimate Conversations is a distillation of all these conversations, and it presents a portrait of the artists which has never before been revealed to the public.
These conversations are a fascinating, compelling and important document that provides a unique and unprecedented insight into the personalities and creative processes of two artists who have earned both enormous popularity and venomous critical hostility. In thirteen freewheeling chapters within a loosely thematic and chronological framework, Gilbert & George talk candidly and uninhibitedly, sometimes serious, sometimes very funny, always sharp, lively and interesting. They explain the background and motivation behind their works, nearly 200 of which are illustrated with high-quality reproductions at the point in the text where they are discussed. The autobiographical sections are enriched with numerous documentary photographs from the artists’ own collection, including many family photographs which have never been published before.
Fascinating, compelling and always enjoyable to read, these conversations are also a major personal and critical testament from two significant and influential contemporary artists who are deeply serious about their work. It will be essential reading for teachers, students, and all those with an interest in contemporary art and the debates that rage around it. Price: £29.95
Revolver 2004
184 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 3937577459
18.5 x 26 cm English text. Hardcover
"Now What? Artists Write" presents a collection of texts written by artists. Over twenty international artists have been invited to engage with the subjects they deal with in their artistic practice on one hand, and the themes that permeate the project "Now What? Dreaming a better world in six parts" (of which the book is part six) on the other.
As we learn from art history, including the history of contemporary art, artists' writings have been a valuable resource for knowledge about art and its context(s). Texts by artists reach a level of accuracy that would otherwise remain undisclosed to us. As such, they have the capacity to fill discursive gaps between artistic thought and critical writing about art's manifestations.
"Now What? Artists Write!" is a document that presents the reader with an urgency to respond to the current momentum. It is meant to become a specific forum to voice the artists' (day)dreams as visions for the future. The book is a space for articulating, negotiating, or even testing ideas by involved artists not only about the world we know, but also about the world we strive to envision.
BAK – basis voor aktuele kunst; with contributions by Pawel Althamer, Tiong Ang, Ansuya Blom, Phil Collins, Flying City (Jeon Yongseok), Liam Gillick, Marina Grzinic, Sigudur Gudmundsson, Thomas Hirschorn, Hans van Houwelingen, Daniel Jewesbury, Job Koelewijn, Boris Ondreicka, Anatoly Osmolovsky, Maria Pask, Jan van de Pavert, Marko Peljhan, Manfred Pernice, Paul Perry, Willem de Rooij, Tino Sehgal, Fiona Tan, Thorvaldur Thorsteinsson and Sarah Tripp Price: £18.50
The MIT Press 2004
456 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 0262062429
How to imagine not only a new art or architecture but a new self or subject equal to them? In Prosthetic Gods, Hal Foster explores this question through the works and writings of such key modernists as Gauguin and Picasso, F. T. Marinetti and Wyndham Lewis, Adolf Loos and Max Ernst. These diverse figures were all fascinated by fictions of origin, either primordial and tribal or futuristic and technological. In this way, Foster argues, two forms came to dominate modernist art above all others: the primitive and the machine.
Foster begins with the primitivist fantasies of Gauguin and Picasso, which he examines through the Freudian lens of the primal scene. He then turns to the purist obsessions of the Viennese architect Loos, who abhorred all things primitive. Next Foster considers the technophilic subjects propounded by the futurist Marinetti and the vorticist Lewis. These "new egos" are further contrasted with the "bachelor machines" proposed by the dadaist Ernst. Foster also explores extrapolations from the art of the mentally ill in the aesthetic models of Ernst, Paul Klee, and Jean Dubuffet, as well as manipulations of the female body in the surrealist photography of Brassai, Man Ray, and Hans Bellmer. Finally, he examines the impulse to dissolve the conventions of art altogether in the drip paintings of Jackson Pollock, the scatter pieces of Robert Morris, and the earthworks of Robert Smithson, and traces the evocation of lost objects of desire in sculptural work from Marcel Duchamp and Alberto Giacometti to Robert Gober.
Although its title is drawn from Freud, Prosthetic Gods does not impose psychoanalytic theory on modernist art; rather, it sets the two into critical relation and scans the greater historical field that they share. Price: £22.95
Verso 2004
180 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 1859846653
14.5 x 22 cm English text. Hardcover
"Panegyric" is Debord's autobiography; here for the first time in English is the second volume, published together with the spare text of the first. A combination of poetry and precision, it tells of something even rarer; a life that refused to adjust to the dominant malignancies of its time. Price: £16.99
Thames & Hudson 2005
256 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 0500238200
23 x 28.5 cm English text. Hardcover
Francis Bacon famously found inspiration in photographs, film-stills and mass-media imagery. In Camera, a bravura accomplishment of original research, reveals how these new media informed some of Bacon’s most important paintings and triggered decisive turning-points in his stylistic development.
Martin Harrison, who was granted privileged and unparalleled access to unpublished material, provides a new understanding of the thought processes and working methods of the creator of one of the most compelling bodies of work in twentieth-century art. Bacon’s painting is considered in the context of key influences – film directors such as Sergei Eisenstein, photographers such as Eadweard Muybridge and masters such as Velázquez and Picasso. His work is also reviewed in the context of his contemporaries, including Freud, Rothko and Sutherland.
Sharp analysis – chronological and thematic – leads to startling insights into this complex, tortured and hugely creative genius and into the unique iconography of his art. Price: £35.00
176 pages ISBN 1861892179
12 x 20 cm English text. Softcover
Although boredom is something that we have all suffered from at some point in our lives, and has become one of the central preoccupations of our age, very few of us can explain precisely what it is. In this book Lars Svendsen examines the nature of boredom, how it originated, its history, how and why it afflicts us, and why we cannot seem to overcome it by any act of will. A diverse and vague phenomenon, described as anything from 'tame longing without any particular object' (Schopenhauer), 'a bestial and indefinable affliction' (Dostoevsky), to 'time's invasion of your world system' (Joseph Brodsky), boredom allows many interpretations. In exploring these, Lars Svendsen brings together observations from philosophy, literature, psychology, theology and popular culture, examining boredom's pre-Romantic manifestations in medieval torpor, philosophies of the subject from Pascal to Nietzsche, and modern related concepts of alienation and transgression, taking in texts by Samuel Beckett, J. G. Ballard, Andy Warhol and many others. He also puts forward an ethics for boredom, discussing what stance one can adopt towards boredom as well as how one ought not to do so. This book arose from the author's attempt to relax and do nothing. Finding this impossible, he thought it better to do something, so he wrote A Philosophy of Boredom. A witty and entertaining account that considers a serious issue, it will appeal to anyone who has ever felt bored, and wanted to know why. Price: £14.95
Cambridge University Press 2004
366 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 0521530873
18 x 25.5 cm English text. Softcover
Conceptual art was a loose collection of related practices that emerged worldwide during the 1960s and 1970s. It continues to be relevant to contemporary art and remains a lively topic of debate. The most striking features of conceptual art are its de-emphasis on the importance of the art object and its understanding of the role of language in shaping our knowledge of the world and our conception of art. This collection of essays deals with the issues that animated Conceptual art in the anglophone world. It offers readers a wealth of new research on the earliest international exhibitions of Conceptual art, new interpretation of some of its most important practitioners, and a reconsideration of the relationship between conceptual art and the intellectual and social context of the 1960s and 1970s. Of special note are the contributions focusing on the explicitly social and political aspirations of this influential avant-garde artistic practice. Price: £23.99
Taschen 2004
96 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 3822830607
18.5 x 23 cm English text. Softcover
Founded as a backlash against abstract expressionism, minimalism was characterized by simplified, stripped-down forms and materials used to express ideas in a direct and impersonal manner. By presenting objects as simple objects, minimal artists sought to communicate without referring to expressive or historical themes. This critical movement, which began in the 1960s and branched out into land art, performance art, and conceptual art, is still a major influence today.
Featured artists: Carl Andre, Stephen Antonakos, Jo Baer, Larry Bell, Ronald Bladen, Walter De Maria, Dan Flavin, Robert Grosvenor, Eva Hesse, Donald Judd, Gary Kuehn, Sol LeWitt, Robert Mangold, John McCracken, Robert Morris, Robert Ryman, Fred Sandback, Richard Serra, Tony Smith, Robert Smithson, Anne Truitt
Price: £4.99
JRP/Ringier 2004
192 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 2940271526
17.5 x 24.5 cm English/German text. Hardcover
An artist's project by Norma Jean, this volume takes the form of anthology focusing on the perception of the body in contemporary scientific, philisophical, and sociological discources. With texts by Edoardo Boncinelli, Frederico Boni, William S Burroughs, Kristina Forslund, Alessandra Galasso, Umberto Galimberti, Giovanni Maria Pace and Paul Virilio Price: £23.00
Yale University Press 2004
222 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 0300104014
20 x 26 cm English text. Hardcover
This landmark book offers a radical reinterpretation of the innovative art of the late 1950s and 1960s. Examining the work of major artists of the period - including Mark Rothko, Piero Manzoni, Agnes Martin, Dan Flavin, Eva Hesse, Blinky Palermo and Louise Bourgeois - Briony Fer focuses on the overriding tendency towards repetition and seriality that occurred at the moment of modernism's decline, gained ground in its aftermath and continues to shape much of the art seen today. Although seriality is mainly associated with American artists and with Minimalism, Fer broadens our understanding of it, looking at Minimalist seriality as only one crucially important strategy among several. She argues that repetition becomes generative of new modes and habits of making and looking; at stake is how we think about the artwork in relation to both temporality and subjectivity. Paying close attention to specific artworks, this timely critical reassessment offers a fresh perspective on a wide range of familiar and less familiar art. Price: £30.00
The MIT Press/October 2004
390 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 0262182319
Decoys and Disruptions is the first comprehensive collection of writings by American artist and critic Martha Rosler. Best known for her videos and photography, Rosler has also been an original and influential cultural critic and theorist for over twenty-five years. The writings collected here address such key topics as documentary photography, feminist art, video, government patronage of the arts, censorship, and the future of digitally based photographic media. Taken together, these thirteen essays not only show Rosler's importance as a critic but also offer an essential resource for readers interested in the issues confronting contemporary art. The essays in this collection illustrate Rosler's ongoing investigation into means of exposing truth and provoking change, providing a retrospective of characteristic issues in her work. Mixing analysis and wit, Rosler challenges many of the fundamental precepts of contemporary art practice. Her influential essay "In, around, and afterthoughts: on documentary photography" almost single-handedly dismantled the myth of liberal documentary photography when it appeared. Many of the essays in this volume have had a similarly wide-ranging influence; others are published here for the first time. Illustrating the essays are 81 images by Rosler and other artists. Price: £22.95
University of California Press 2005
400 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 0520242718
A Critical Cinema 4 is the fourth volume in Scott MacDonald's Critical Cinema series, the most extensive, in-depth exploration of independent cinema available in English. In this new set of interviews, MacDonald once again engages filmmakers in detailed discussions of their films and of the personal experiences and political and theoretical currents that have shaped their work. The interviews are arranged to express the remarkable diversity of modern independent cinema and the network of interconnections within the community of filmmakers.
A Critical Cinema 4 includes the most extensive interview with the late Stan Brakhage yet published; a conversation with P. Adams Sitney about his arrival on the New York independent film scene; a detailed discussion with Peter Kubelka about the experience of making Our African Journey; a conversation with Jill Godmilow and Harun Farocki on modern political documentary; Jim McBride's first extended published conversation in thirty years; a discussion with Abigail Child about her evolution from television documentarian to master editor; and the first extended interview with Chuck Workman. This volume also contains discussions with Chantal Akerman about her place trilogy; Lawrence Brose on his examination of Oscar Wilde's career; Hungarian Peter Forgács about his transformation of European home movies into video operas; Iranian-born Shirin Neshat on working between two cultures; and Ellen Spiro about exploring America with her video camera and her dog. Each interview is supplemented by an introductory overview of the filmmaker's contributions. A detailed filmography and a selected bibliography complete the volume. Price: £18.95
YProductions, Barcelona 2003
206 pages ISBN 8460904334
16.5 x 24cm. English/Spanish text. Softcover
This volume, which was published along a string of events named Producta1, contains a series of articles and essays by several authors analyzing contemporary cultural production. We do not believe that production can be understood from one point of view. That is why we compile articles belonging to different research fields, authors with divergent backgrounds and sometimes, antagonistic opinions. We understand that production carries with it a long and uncomfortable Marxist shadow, it is not our aim to criticize or take away credit from this notion, but after acknowledging this past, we want to give strength and update it, adding some notions that strict economicist ideology could not take on board. Notions such as care labor, which we consider basic to understand the structure that sustains production, a production which still has a heterosexual character. With the introduction of care ethics to the third sector, some authors argue that we need to value once more the human and emotional aspects which now, lubricate and, in many cases, is part of the machinery behind the production of surplus and objects.
We are facing a world which needs to be constantly revised, we need to generate situated critiques but at the same time, to spread and share knowledge, working towards a confluence of different thoughts and needs. This can help towards our intention to make certain aspects of this world better. This is also production.
Some of the texts here collected were extant and had been published elsewhere, we publish them next to some articles written thinking through this booklet.
None of the texts here contained have been translated for this book, that is why they are in Spanish and English, most of the times they are in the original language in which they were first written. The edition of this booklet has been funded by the Fundación 30kms, we appreciate and thank their collaboration in this project. We have designed a cooperative structure in which the work invested by the authors (that is, the texts) will be reattributed with the distribution of the whole of the benefits provided by the sale of the copies of these books.
www.yproductions.org Price: £9.99
Black Dog Publishing 2004
192 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 1904772064
19 x 25 cm English text. Softcover
Contemporary Art from Studio to Situation collects together texts and interviews with key artists, curators and writers involved in the issue of context and site-specificity in the contemporary international art scene. Included are artists such as Thomas Hirschhorn and Kathrin Boehm, who have - in very different ways - investigated the relationship between architecture and social interaction; Nicolas Bourriaud, the author of the influential book Relational Aesthetics; and cators from innovative art museums including Catherine David (currently at Witte de With, Rotterdam), whose extensive list of projects includes documenta X.
This book continues and expands on the critical investigations of writers such as Douglas Crimp, Rosalyn Deutsche, Brian Wallis and Lucy Lippard into the sfhifting relations between artist, institution, and practice/production. It is published as part of the Situations research project leb by the University of the West of England, in association with Arnolfini and Bristol City Council and is supported by the Arts Council of England.
Contributors: Kathrin Boehm, Nicolas Bourriaud, Daniel Buren, Nathan Coley, Juan Cruz, Minerva Cuevas, Adam Dant, Catherine David, Jimmie Durham, Thomas Hirschhorn, Aleksandra Mir, et al Price: £19.95
224 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 0500284725
American video and installation artist Bill Viola is one of the most popular artists in the world today, his rich imagery touching a nerve with large international audiences.
Here eminent critics examine the scope of Viola’s creations in an extensive appraisal of his work since the 1970s and for the first time allow us to properly assess his place within art history.
Viola returns art to what were once its fundamental concerns and gives it a relevance to the emotional and spiritual lives of ordinary people. But despite his interest in ‘old-fashioned’ values, his art is also an art of our time. The work is produced with the most innovative, most modern of media: high speed film, high-definition video, sophisticated recording and relation of sound and image, are put to use in ways that challenge the intellectual and artistic traditions of the last one hundred and fifty years. Price: £12.95
Reaktion 2004
300 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 1861892101
16 x 24 cm English text. Hardcover
A revealing, intimate and liberating portrait of the vagina.
Comprehensively explores the female sex in terms of culture, history, anatomy, medicine, psychology, and anthropology.
Blends references from art, literature and science with a light, humorous approach-the result will inform and entertain women and men alike.The Origin of the World is a fascinating study of female sexuality. Sexologist Jelto Drenth believes that sex is pleasurable and fulfilling, but that to enjoy it to the full you must know how it works. The author describes the workings of the vagina in simple language, giving an illustrated "guided tour," but this book is not merely a workshop manual for the bedroom. Drenth examines female sexuality historically, anatomically, anthropo-logically, and biologically, drawing on many sources including medical texts, myth, science fiction and fantasy, and feminist and lesbian literature, with illuminating critical observations. The book goes back to the Middle Ages, examines non-Western cultural practices, including clitoridectomy and virginity checks, tests Freud's theories on coitus, and deals at length with sexual desire, lovemaking, and orgasm. It explains how the vagina has been -worshipped-and also feared-throughout -history.
The Origin of the World brings together insights from the most diverse quarters, blending references from poetry and romantic literature with historical, anthropological, and medical data. A well-illustrated, truly encyclopedic work, it is at the same time a lightly written, humorous exploration of a subject close to us all. Women and men alike will learn a great deal, both about themselves and the opposite sex as well.
Jelto Drenth works as a sexologist at the Rutgers Foundation in Groningen, the Netherlands. Price: £19.95
