BARRY SCHWABSKY

Words for Art: Criticism, History, Theory, Practice

The twenty book reviews and essays in this new title from Barry Schwabsky, longtime art critic for The Nation, were written across as many years and for as wide a breadth of publications. Though originally conceived as a book of essays on painting, Schwabsky’s diverse interests in literary theory (he cites giants Paul de Man and Roland Barthes as influences) and philosophy bring new perspectives to this collection. Walter Benjamin’s views on color, E. H. Gombrich’s theory of perception, Mel Bochner’s and Liz Kotz’s narratives of Conceptualism, and Sarah Thornton’s peregrinations in the “art world” are but a few of the topics explored. In an era of hyper-specialization and rigid academic protocols, Barry Schwabsky revives a form of criticism one imagined barely existed—a criticism of varied interests and passionate opinions.

Add to your order

SCULPTURE UNLIMITED

Eva Grubinger and Jörg Heiser

This reader – based on a symposium at the Department of Sculpture –Transmedial Space, University of Art and Design, Linz – poses profound questions about contemporary sculpture. With contributions by an international roster of artists, critics and curators, the texts look at expansions of the notion of sculpture – from Auguste Rodin to Rosalind Krauss and beyond – leading the viewer to think that the discipline has become defined by its near arbitrary malleability, since practically anything can be construed as sculpture. Yet interest in the history of sculpture seems to be experiencing a revival, including traditional techniques and production methods, which often appear appealing, even radical, in the age of the Internet and social media. Contributions by Jennifer Allen, Eva Grubinger, Jörg Heiser, Nikolaus Hirsch, Aleksandra Mir, Vivian Sky Rehberg, Jan Verwoert and more.

Add to your order

SCULPTURE UNLIMITED 2

Materiality in Times of Immateriality

Eva Grubinger & Jörg Heiser (Eds.)

Does so-called post-Internet art have a future? How does the Internet of Things relate to objects and things in art? How do current philosophical movements such as new materialism and object-oriented ontology affect our notion of the art object? While the first volume Sculpture Unlimited (2011) asked how the contemporary field of sculpture can be defined against its long history, the second volume looks at its present and future. Once again edited by Eva Grubinger and Jörg Heiser, with contributions by internationally reputed artists and scholars, this volume poses the following question: If we assume computers and algorithms increasingly control our lives, regulate social and communications traffic, and produce new materials and things, is space for artistic imagination and innovation increased or decreased? What is the place of art and sculpture if we don’t want to resort to maintaining aesthetic traditions? Additional essays by Mark Fisher, Nathalie Heinich, Mark Leckey, Jean-François Lyotard and Bernard Blistène, Jussi Parikka, Christiane Sauer and Timotheus Vermeulen.

Add to your order

The Seven Most Exciting Hours of Mr. Trier’s

Life in Twenty-four Chapters

KEREN CYTTER

The seven most exciting hours … is an adventure novel based on a true story told in a televised interview by the notorious Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier. Set around a Copenhagen hospital, it describes seven hours in the life of Tibor Klaus Trier—the filmmaker’s father—from the moment that his wife goes into labor early in the morning until Lars is born. The plot only then begins to thicken: car-jackings, family murder, zombies, Armageddon, and phantom diagnosis of cancer all vie for attention. Using classic slasher flicks and psychological pot-boilers–and a wink to Glenn Gould–as its guides, Cytter explores the metaphysical wildness of mind representative of von Trier’s work.

Add to your order

SEX, ART AND THE DOW JONES

Jean-Charles Massera

Add to your order

MARI SHAW

Words, Books, and the Spaces They Inhabit
The Noble Art of Collecting, Book One

Words, Books, and the Spaces They Inhabit is the first of Mari Shaw’s series The Noble Art of Collecting. With examples of unexpected collectors and serendipitous outcomes, Shaw investigates the obscure desires that shape art collecting and the public goodwill that results from it. What was lost when the scrolls in the ancient library of Alexandria were destroyed? How did Catherine the Great’s collecting change the way we think? How do Jeff Bezos and Amazon.com expand our appreciation of books as objects? Though the ways we communicate live and vary, history has been created, recorded, and preserved in writing. Words and the spaces that contain them are crucial to an empathetic understanding of our world.

Add to your order

JEREMY SIGLER

Carl Andre: Love Poet in Marxist Overalls

An insightful philosophical essay on the work of minimalist sculptor Carl Andre by Brooklyn-based poet and critic Jeremy Sigler (b.1968). While researching and editing the catalog for Andre’s recent retrospective at Dia Art Foundation, Sigler gleaned surprising new readings from a series of lost negatives that resurfaced at Dia. Shot by Andre’s close friend and collaborator Hollis Frampton in the 1960s, the photos depict small, carved wooden artworks—many lost or destroyed shortly after being photographed. Sigler draws connections between these early inchoate artworks and Andre’s later scatters, spills and floor pieces, all of which are analyzed through a compellingly personal lens. Writing on Andre’s poetry and his confounding book-length masterpiece, Stillanovel, Sigler further proposes that Andre’s greatest contribution may be to literature. Is it possible that one of the modern era’s greatest experimental love poets is hiding in plain sight, disguised as a unionized blue-chip art worker? Sigler taught at Yale University School of Arts, edited the Swiss art journal Parkett, and has published numerous books of poetry.

Add to your order

SIGNATURE STRENGTHS

Boy Vereecken (Ed.)

Signature Strengths was inspired by the direct approach to marketing of the No-Frills grocery store novels in the early 1980s, which employed the non-branding strategy of supermarket staples for the mass-marketing of genre fiction novels. Four complete books from the “generic” pulp fiction series titled Western, Mystery, Science Fiction, and Romance are reproduced in total in this artist book. The repackaging of these unique American pocket-book novels into a non-structured book is conceived and edited by designer, researcher and member of the Slavs and Tartars art collective Boy Vereecken. The only additional writing featured is a critical evaluation by Toronto-based writer Mark Mann on the fascinating experimental endeavor in genre writing and mass-market publishing.

Add to your order

THE SILENT UNIVERSITY

Towards a Transversal Pedagogy

Florian Malzacher, Ahmet Ögüt & Pelin Tan (Eds.)

Initiated by conceptual artist Ahmet Ögüt in 2012 as an autonomous educational platform for migrant academics, researchers and lecturers whose credentials would not otherwise be recognized, The Silent University includes branches in Amman, Athens, Hamburg, London, Mulheim/Ruhr and Stockholm. The second book from Sternberg on alternative learning centers, this comprehensive reader situates this much-needed educational initiative within the wider framework of migration policies, critical pedagogy, institutional engagement and socially engaged art projects. Including lectures, student statements and descriptions of the achievements and struggles of its current branches, it also serves as introduction for anyone wanting to be involved in the Silent University as contributors, lecturers, students in the existing branches, or by initiating new SUs: a need which is becoming urgent in more and more cities and countries all around the world. With contributions by Florian Malzacher, María do Mar Castro Varela, Chantal Mouffe, Ahmet Ögüt, Rubia Salgado and Pelin Tan.

Add to your order

THE SITE RESIDENCY

Lívia Páldi (Ed.)

The Site Residency (TSR) was imagined as an artists’ residency that would result in no material production, a program oriented toward “the secret world of doing nothing and its consequences.” Conceptually grounded in the theories and practices of withdrawal and critical questioning of creation, materiality and objectified artistic output—artistic strategies from the 1960s and ’70s—TSR offered an escape from rigid institutional structures and gallery/studio-based production. Introduced by Lívia Páldi and with a contribution by the residency’s conceptualizer, Sebastian Cichocki, this publication presents visual and textual materials by the residency’s three participating artists, Annika Eriksson, Susanne Kriemann and Agnieszka Polska, including literary fictions by ghostwriters who translated their experiences. TSR created the opportunity for various artistic and curatorial processes, fantasies and trajectories to intersect in unique and significant ways and the design of the book follows in this spirit, allowing the thought fragments, notes, stories and poetic observations of the participants to intertwine and inviting the reader into its free-floating conversation.

Add to your order