AESTHETIC POLITICS IN FASHION

Elke Gaugele (Ed.)

This critical anthology, volume 14, from the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna invites international scholars to debate fashion as a cultural phenomenon and meta-politic at the intersection of artistic, creative, economic and everyday practices. A variety of essays gathered into three sections—aesthetic economies, production of space and alternative aesthetic politics—include topics such as fashion and cultural commodification; the cooperation between the fashion industry and celebrity; the relationship between designer, body, clothing and space; the ethical turn in fashion; the roles of performance and whiteness in fashion today. Contributors locate fashion within the context of a variety of disciplines including art history, cultural sciences, sociology, design and fashion studies. Essays by Endora Comer-Arldt, Ilka Becker, Tanja Bradaric, Martina Fineder, Eva Flicker, Elke Gaugele, Birgit Haehnel, Alicia Kühl, Michael R. Müller, Sabina Muriale, Taro Ohmae, Barbara Schrödl, Ruby Sircar, Birke Sturm and Monica Titton

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AESTHETICS OF INSTALLATION ART

Juliane Rebentisch

“ This study of the philosophical underpinnings of installation art brilliantly reevaluates the concept of aesthetic autonomy as the very condition of the possibility of ‘art’ itself,” writes internationally prominent art historian Tom Holert. Writer Juliane Rebentisch’s captivating readings of Martin Heidegger, Theodor W. Adorno, Clement Greenberg, Rosalind E. Krauss, Jacques Derrida, Stanley Cavell and other luminaries push debates about ‘site specificity’ and ‘Institutional Critique’’ to argue that aesthetic autonomy and the public sphere in installation art are, in fact, inseparable. This indispensible book will rejuvenate and irrevocably change debates about the nature of aesthetic experience; the autonomy of art, modernism and postmodernism; and, through all of these, about installation art.

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AESTHETICS OF THE FLESH

Felix Ensslin & Charlotte Klink (Eds.)

The history of art is full of flesh: carnal scenes of flesh delight while positivistic images of science bare the human body on the operating table and Christian depictions of temptation and torture warn of the evils of fleshly pleasure. These are some of the connotations carried by the aesthetics of flesh. Based on a three-day symposium at the State Academy of Fine Arts, Stuttgart, Aesthetics of the Flesh traces the aesthetic concept of flesh in four sections: “Cut Power Matter,” “Form Cannibalism,” “Flesh Skin Surface,” and “Word Flesh Thought.” Essays inform from perspectives as diverse as art history, religion, psychoanalysis, psychology, materialist philosophy, phenomenology, surgery, film studies and literary studies. Contributors include Jennifer Allen, Sabeth Buchmann, Annett Busch, Nils Büttner, Marcus Coelen, Discoteca Flaming Star, Helmut Draxler, Felix Ensslin, Mechthild Fend, Susanne Leeb and Christoph Menke.

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AFTER THE NIGHT

Everyone Agrees

Using Michèle Bernstein’s text The Night (1961) as a score, the art and publishing collective Everyone Agrees has created a confounding and often hilarious meta-narrative wormhole. After The Night is centered on present-day London rather than countercultural Paris; chancing upon Bernstein at a party, our protagonists persuade her to collaborate on a modern-day adaptation of The Night, seeing it as their springboard to artistic acclaim. These would-be avatars muse on the contemporary relevance of Bernstein’s themes while haunting the events of the original story, hoping to gain inspiration. The failure of their novel plays out through emails pinging between London, Paris and New York, entirely removed from Situationist crusades against cultural homogeneity and consumer reification. Accompanying the text are captioned black-and-white images taken during a fashion festival in the south of France, where the project finally unravels for good. Part of the Common Objectives series.

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Related titles
The Night and After the Night, Two-Volume Set

AGAIN, A TIME MACHINE

From Distribution to Archive

Gavin Everall & Jane Rolo (Eds.)

Artists are playing with words again—raiding the archive, bringing the dead back to life. Quicker than the ever-elusive present, they are forging a practice that anticipates the past, forecasts possible histories and revisits alternative futures. This book presents an assemblage of material extending Book Works’ touring exhibition on just this theme: Again,  A  Time  Machine (2011-12). Contributions include artists’ pages, exploratory interviews, and a range of publisher and project space responses to the questions “Why Distribute?” “Why Archive?” Specifically engaging with the circuits of practice that have materialized in the form of books, writing, magazines, spoken word, performative research and archival practice, contributors include Maria Fusco, Dora García, Kenny Goldsmith, Melissa Gronlund, Ian Hunt, Mark Pawson, Laure Prouvost and Slavs and Tatars, and White Columns, among many others.

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AIRPLANES AND PARACHUTES

A Jonathan Napack Anthology

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A For Alibi

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ALL OF A SUDDEN

Things That Matter in Contemporary Art

Jörg Heiser

Contemporary art is booming: there are more artists, more collectors, more venues, more fairs, more museums and definitely more hype then ever before. What’s missing are criteria that define quality. That’s what Jörg Heiser explores in this wonderful critical book, in which he uses a sharp summary of contemporary art since Marcel Duchamp to make his points. “When it’s good,” Heiser claims, “art hits where it hurts, striking at the heart of an ossified status quo … 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.” Praised by critics as “astonishingly enlightening.”

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ALSO-SPACE, FROM HOT TO SOMETHING ELSE:

How Indonesian Art Initiatives Have Reinvented Networking

Reinaart Vanhoe

Although contemporary art in Indonesia is completely integrated within the global art discourse, the fundamental context of Indonesian artists is in fact quite different from that of the contemporary Western artistic practice—in which notions of individuality and “autonomy” play a key role. Indonesian initiatives tend to include more of an awareness of local networks, and a contextual (as opposed to purely conceptual) way of thinking and acting. This softcover book, Also-Space, From Hot to Something Else, focuses mainly on a Jakarta-based artists’ initiative called ruangrupa, and—to a lesser degree—on a number of other Indonesian artists and initiatives, as case studies of how Indonesian artists organize and manifest themselves individually and collectively. Reinaart Vanhoe (b. 1972, Belgium) lives in both Rotterdam (Holland) and Jakarta (Indonesia); his practice consists of research-based activities that Vanhoe translates into books, exhibitions, installations and films.

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AND/AS

Art and/as Research at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp

Els De bruyn & Johan Pas (Eds.)

In celebration of its rich history in the arts and design community, the 350-year-old Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp undertook assembling a five-year overview of its arts research programs. In both text and image, AND/AS reflects on what research in the arts means for the artist, for art education and for the art world. The comfortably sized and well-illustrated book offers at its core visual insight into the strategies, processes and results of artistic research in a variety of disciplines including photography, painting, video and installation, revealing the unique approach of artists-researchers at the Antwerp academy. Organized into sections by theme, including memory/archives, tools/instruments, art research and education lists, master classes, previous research projects, doctorates and publications, the publication is introduced by editors Els De bruyn and Johan Pas. A register with brief summaries at the end gives a clear overview of the research conducted between 2010 and 2015.

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