WARREN NEIDICH

The Glossary of Cognitive Activism

We live in a world of tremendous connectivity and little collectivity, leaving us witness to the diffuse degrading of personal freedoms. The resurgence of racism and sexism, the power of the global art market, the de-emphasis of theory and humanities curriculum in universities and the various assaults on privacy, such as digital profiling, are just a few examples of the strategy of normalization and governmentalization in the digital economy. That massive demonstrations against American and British involvement in the Iraq War had no effect is a direct result of our use of archaic forms of resistance to solve 21st-century problems. Artist/writer Warren Neidich’s thought-provoking and timely softcover publication Glossary of Cognitive Activism updates the epistemological foundations of resistance. Cognitive capitalism assumes that wealth production is the product of a brain highly attuned to hyper-branded, designed sensibilities. This project considers as antidote the role of diverse aesthetic production in the creation of diverse neural maps and network configurations.

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JOSHUA SIMON

Neomaterialism

Anna Altman (Ed.)

In this absorbing theoretical manifesto, Israeli curator Joshua Simon argues that we have moved into an economy of neomaterialism. Despite the rhetoric of dematerialization in art practices since the 1960s, the embodiment of materiality has actually just shifted: the focus of labor has moved from production to consumption, the commodity has become the historical subject and symbols now behave like materials. Here, Simon advocates for the unreadymade, sentimental value and the promise of the individual as a means for a vocabulary in this new economy of meaning. Reflecting on general intellect as labor and the subjugation of an overqualified generation to the neo-feudal order of debt finance, Neomaterialism merges traditions of epic communism with the communism that is already here.

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More from the Black Pocketbook Series

NET PIONEERS 1.0

Contextualizing Early Web-Based Art

Dieter Daniels and Gunther Reisinger

The hype around Net-based art began in the early 1990s, before the Internet had become a commodity. It developed in skeptical parallel to the rise and decline of the new economy. But why does this chapter of art history appear to end so suddenly? This idea-packed reader about media art history takes a new, interdisciplinary look at the historical, social, and economic dynamics of our contemporary, networked society. Editors Daniels and Reisinger, both experts in archiving, restoring and contextualizing Net-based art, have chosen essays resulting, partly, from the Ars Electronica 2007 conference, and partly from more recent approaches. Contributions cover a wide variety of topics, ranging from art-scholarly methodological debate and source-critical analysis, to media-philosophical aspects and technical and artistic innovations.

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Nicolas Bourriaud

Post-Production

Nicolas Bourriau

Post-Production is the most recent essay by French curator, art critic and writer Nicolas Bourriaud. Bourriaud examines the trend, since the early 1990s, in which an increasing number of artists interpret, reproduce, re-exhibit or use works produced by others, or available cultural products, as art. Post-Production responds to the chaos of global culture in the information age. Notions of originality and creation are blurred in this new cultural landscape.

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More from the White Pocketbook Series

THE NIGHT

Michèle Bernstein

“La Nuit is about the Paris of 1957—the one I see when I close my eyes (the nostalgic note). There’s no need to cry, it’s still there. We can piece together the image from the scattered pieces of the jigsaw. And if La Nuit is a love story, it’s not for him, or for her, or for someone else, or for me. It’s a love story, a story of lost love, for the streets.”

—Michèle Bernstein, from the new preface to The Night

Available for the first time in English, the 1961 French novel is the second by Michèle Bernstein, a founding member of radical avant-garde group The Situationist International and the first wife of Marxist theorist Guy Debord. Following All the King’s Horses, it was written for cash and again cannibalizes the plot of the classic novel Les Liaisons dangereuses, featuring the same characters as Bernstein’s debut: Gilles, Geneviève, Carole and Bertrand. The book parodies the style of the nouveau roman popular in France during the 1950s, with its elongated sentences and nonlinear sense of time and place. As its protagonists drift through the streets of Paris, through the entanglements of a ménage à trois, and the ennui of a summer holiday on the Côte d’Azur, The Night is littered with détournements—unattributed quotations and knowing winks at Situationist practices.

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

The Night and After the Night, Two-Volume Set

Available for the first time in English, the 1961 French novel is the second by Michèle Bernstein, a founding member of radical avant-garde group The Situationist International and the first wife of Marxist theorist Guy Debord. Following All the King’s Horses, it was written for cash and again cannibalizes the plot of the classic novel Les Liaisons dangereuses, featuring the same characters as Bernstein’s debut: Gilles, Geneviève, Carole and Bertrand. The book parodies the style of the nouveau roman popular in France during the 1950s, with its elongated sentences and nonlinear sense of time and place. As its protagonists drift through the streets of Paris, through the entanglements of a ménage à trois, and the ennui of a summer holiday on the Côte d’Azur, The Night is littered with détournements—unattributed quotations and knowing winks at Situationist practices.

This new English language edition is published in conjunction with the release of the 2013 title After the Night, which uses The Night as a score—a détournement or creative rewrite of the original text by art and publishing collective Everyone Agrees. These books are also available as a two-volume set.

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No internet, No Art

A Lunch Bytes Anthology

Melanie Buhler (Ed.)

No Internet, No Art opens up a discussion of the Internet’s effects on aesthetics, culture and artistic practice. Derived mainly from Lunch Bytes, the ongoing Washington, DC, series of events examining art and digital culture, this anthology draws from an extended network of curators, artists and experts. Prefaced by 14 interviews contextualizing important concepts and key statements on artistic practices and artworks, several themes are discussed by over 40 contributors exploring digital aesthetics, defining and curating Internet-related art, labor and work in digital societies, surveillance apparatuses, art-related Internet activism and what it currently means to be “social.” Featured authors include Kari Altmann, Natalie Bookchin, Andreas Broeckmann, Kenneth Goldsmith, Monica Lam, Nova Nicolas, Christiane Paul, Jon Rafman, Cornelia Sollfrank, Ben Vickers and Bernadette Wegenstein, among many more.

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NOT NOW! NOW!

Chronopolitics, Art & Research

Renate Lorenz (Ed.)

This issue from the ongoing publication series out of the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, Not Now! Now! engages the politics of time in art by examining historical narratives and memory, the unforeseen rhythms of time and the idea of visualizing time. The book connects postcolonial and queer debate around chrono-politics with artistic strategies involving temporal gaps and breaks— stutter time, citations and anachronisms, and collapses between time and meaning. An international group of art theorists, artists and artistic researchers highlight how temporal norms organize our biographies and intimate relations, as well as the handling of capital and cultural relations and suggest alternatives to entrenched concepts of what constitutes progressive and regressive cultures. A selection of artworks and recent debates in postcolonial and queer studies create the premise for this challenging conversation. Contributions by Jamika Ajalon, Ingrid Cogne, Elizabeth Freeman, Sharon Hayes, Suzana Milevska and more.

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O

A Prayer Book

Samuel Hasler

The incantation and repetition of prayers introduces young man’s isolated, creatively stifled existence in this fascinating work of creative fiction by artist Samuel Hasler. Deluded by the stagnating mythology of great European modernist artists, the protagonist escapes the drudgery of his supermarket night shift and travels to Moscow and Venice on a journey that causes him to reflect on his romantic ideals, his desire for a wild bohemian life, his crude libido, and his increasing doubts about his faith. The book operates as both story and theme, connecting performances, readings, installations and printing into a single body of work. Glasgow-based artist Hasler writes of his current material, “At the core of this series of investigative works in performance, text and image is a long-running research into faith.”

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HANS ULRICH OBRIST

The China Interviews

Curatorial pioneer Hans Ulrich Obrist has been an early and frequent observer of the Chinese avant-garde. Beginning with his groundbreaking 1996 exhibition Cities on the Move (co-curated with Hou Hanru), Obrist has engaged China’s leading artists, architects, filmmakers, and musicians in an ongoing dialogue about their work-its origins, evolutions, and connections to artistic movements internationally.

Conducted in Obrist’s signature interview format, these conversations lead to surprising revelations about how artistic practices in China have evolved. Spanning a decade but concentrated in 2006 and 2007 – a pivotal moment for contemporary art in China as international interest surged alongside an unprecedented pre-Olympic market upswing-these conversations present both a snapshot of an exuberant historical moment and a unique introduction to the work of the featured artists, as they explain and interpret their own trajectories in dialogue with this relentlessly sharp and inquisitive mind.

Compiled, edited, and painstakingly translated into English for the first time, the interviews are accompanied by over 200 full-color illustrations. Edited by Philip Tinari and Angie Baecker and with an introduction by Philip Tinari.

Artists included: Ai Weiwei, Big-Tail Elephant Group, Cao Chong’en, Cao Fei, Yung Ho Chang, Chen Zhen, Chu Yun, Ding Yi, Gu Dexin, Huang Yong Ping, Jia Zhangke, Liu Wei, Lu Chunsheng, Ma Qingyun, Wang Guangyi, Wang Jianwei, Wang Hui, Wu Shanzhuan, Xu Tan, Xu Zhen, Yan Jun, Yan Lei, Yang Fudong, Zhang Enli, Zheng Guogu, and Zhu Pei.

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