Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency
Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency

Author: Olivia Laing

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2020-05-12

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 1324005734

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“One of the finest writers of the new nonfiction” (Harper’s Bazaar) explores the role of art in our tumultuous modern era. In this remarkable, inspiring collection of essays, acclaimed writer and critic Olivia Laing makes a brilliant case for why art matters, especially in the turbulent political weather of the twenty-first century. Funny Weather brings together a career’s worth of Laing’s writing about art and culture, examining their role in our political and emotional lives. She profiles Jean-Michel Basquiat and Georgia O’Keeffe, reads Maggie Nelson and Sally Rooney, writes love letters to David Bowie and Freddie Mercury, and explores loneliness and technology, women and alcohol, sex and the body. With characteristic originality and compassion, she celebrates art as a force of resistance and repair, an antidote to a frightening political time. We’re often told that art can’t change anything. Laing argues that it can. Art changes how we see the world. It makes plain inequalities and it offers fertile new ways of living.

Bad New Days
Bad New Days

Author: Hal Foster

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2015-09-29

Total Pages: 239

ISBN-13: 1784781460

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One of the world’s leading art theorists dissects a quarter century of artistic practice Bad New Days examines the evolution of art and criticism in Western Europe and North America over the last twenty-five years, exploring their dynamic relation to the general condition of emergency instilled by neoliberalism and the war on terror. Considering the work of artists such as Thomas Hirschhorn, Tacita Dean, and Isa Genzken, and the writing of thinkers like Jacques Rancière, Bruno Latour, and Giorgio Agamben, Hal Foster shows the ways in which art has anticipated this condition, at times resisting the collapse of the social contract or gesturing toward its repair; at other times burlesquing it. Against the claim that art making has become so heterogeneous as to defy historical analysis, Foster argues that the critic must still articulate a clear account of the contemporary in all its complexity. To that end, he offers several paradigms for the art of recent years, which he terms “abject,” “archival,” “mimetic,” and “precarious.”

Art and Emergency
Art and Emergency

Author: Emilia Terracciano

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2017-10-30

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 178673270X

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During states of emergency, normal rules and rights are suspended, and force can often prevail. In these precarious intervals, when the human potential for violence can be released and rehearsed, images may also emerge. This book asks: what happens to art during a state of emergency? Investigating the uneasy relationship between aesthetics and political history, Emilia Terracciano traces a genealogy of modernism in colonial and postcolonial India; she explores catastrophic turning points in the history of twentieth-century India, via the art works which emerged from them. Art and Emergency reveals how the suspended, diagonal, fugitive lines of Nasreen Mohamedi's abstract compositions echo Partition's traumatic legacy; how the theatrical choreographies of Sunil Janah's photographs document desperate famine; and how Gaganendranath Tagore's lithographs respond to the wake of massacre. Making an innovative, important intervention into current debates on visual culture in South Asia, this book also furthers our understanding of the history of modernism.

Why Only Art Can Save Us
Why Only Art Can Save Us

Author: Santiago Zabala

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2017-09-05

Total Pages: 218

ISBN-13: 0231544960

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The state of emergency, according to thinkers such as Carl Schmidt, Walter Benjamin, and Giorgio Agamben, is at the heart of any theory of politics. But today the problem is not the crises that we do confront, which are often used by governments to legitimize themselves, but the ones that political realism stops us from recognizing as emergencies, from widespread surveillance to climate change to the systemic shocks of neoliberalism. We need a way of disrupting the existing order that can energize radical democratic action rather than reinforcing the status quo. In this provocative book, Santiago Zabala declares that in an age where the greatest emergency is the absence of emergency, only contemporary art’s capacity to alter reality can save us. Why Only Art Can Save Us advances a new aesthetics centered on the nature of the emergency that characterizes the twenty-first century. Zabala draws on Martin Heidegger’s distinction between works of art that rescue us from emergency and those that are rescuers into emergency. The former are a means of cultural politics, conservers of the status quo that conceal emergencies; the latter are disruptive events that thrust us into emergencies. Building on Arthur Danto, Jacques Rancière, and Gianni Vattimo, who made aesthetics more responsive to contemporary art, Zabala argues that works of art are not simply a means of elevating consumerism or contemplating beauty but are points of departure to change the world. Radical artists create works that disclose and demand active intervention in ongoing crises. Interpreting works of art that aim to propel us into absent emergencies, Zabala shows how art’s ability to create new realities is fundamental to the politics of radical democracy in the state of emergency that is the present.

Everything Is an Emergency
Everything Is an Emergency

Author: Jason Adam Katzenstein

Publisher: HarperCollins

Published: 2020-06-30

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 0062950096

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New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice “A brilliant, honest, necessary book that exposes the intricacies of the human brain while showing us the way creativity and friendship can anchor us. This is a must-read for anyone who has ever wondered if they see the world a little differently.” –Ada Limón A New Yorker cartoonist illustrates his lifelong struggle with OCD in cartoon vignettes frank and funny Jason Adam Katzenstein is just trying to live his life, but he keeps getting sidetracked by his over-active, anxious brain. Mundane events like shaking hands or sharing a drink snowball into absolute catastrophes. Jason has Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, a mental illness that compels him to perform rituals in order to protect himself from dangers that don’t really exist. He checks, washes, over-thinks, rinse, repeat. He does his best to hide his embarrassing compulsions, and sometimes this even works. He grows up, worries about his first kiss, falls in love with making cartoons, moves to New York City — which is magical and gross, etc. All the while, half his energy goes into living his life, while the other half is devoted to the increasingly ridiculous rituals he’s decided to maintain to keep himself from fully short-circuiting, Then, he fully short-circuits. At his absolute lowest, Jason finally decides to do the things he’s always been told to do to get better: exposure therapy and medication. These are the things that have always freaked him out, and they continue to freak him out. Also, they help him recover. Everything is an Emergency is a comic about all the self-destructive stories someone tells himself, over and over, until they start to seem true. In images surreal, witty, and confessional, Jason shows us that OCD can be funny, even when it feels like it’s ruining your life.

The Art of Emergency
The Art of Emergency

Author: Chérie Rivers Ndaliko

Publisher:

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 0190692324

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The Art of Emergency charts the maneuvers of art through conflict zones across the African continent. Advancing diverse models for artistic and humanitarian alliance, the volume urges conscientious deliberation on the role of aesthetics in crisis through intellectual engagement, artistic innovation, and administrative policy. Across Africa, artists increasingly turn to NGO sponsorship in pursuit of greater influence and funding, while simultaneously NGOs-both international and local-commission arts projects to buttress their interventions and achieve greater reach and marketability. The key values of artistic expression thus become "healing" and "sensitization," measured in turn by "impact" and "effectiveness." Such rubrics obscure the aesthetic complexities of the artworks and the power dynamics that inform their production. Clashes arise as foreign NGOs import foreign aesthetic models and preconceptions about their efficacy, alongside foreign interpretations of politics, medicine, psychology, trauma, memorialization, and so on. Meanwhile, each community embraces its own aesthetic precedents, often at odds with the intentions of humanitarian agencies. The arts are a sphere in which different worldviews enter into conflict and conversation. To tackle the consequences of aid agency arts deployment, volume editors Samuel Mark Anderson and Ch�rie Rivers Ndaliko assemble ten case studies from across the African continent employing multiple media including music, sculpture, photography, drama, storytelling, ritual, and protest marches. Organized under three widespread yet under-analyzed objectives for arts in emergency-demonstration, distribution, and remediation-each case offers a different disciplinary and methodological perspective on a common complication in NGO-sponsored creativity. By shifting the discourse on arts activism away from fixations on message and toward diverse investigations of aesthetics and power negotiations, The Art of Emergency brings into focus the conscious and unconscious configurations of humanitarian activism, the social lives it attempts to engage, and the often-fraught interactions between the two.

Crudo
Crudo

Author: Olivia Laing

Publisher: Pan Macmillan

Published: 2018-06-28

Total Pages: 94

ISBN-13: 1509892850

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'I couldn't put it down' – Sally Rooney, author of Normal People Kathy is a writer. Kathy is getting married. It’s the summer of 2017 and the whole world is falling apart. Kathy spends the first summer of her forties trying to adjust to making a lifelong commitment – marriage. But it’s not only Kathy who is changing. Political, social and natural landscapes are all in peril. Fascism is on the rise, truth is dead, the planet is hotting up. Is it really worth learning to love when the end of the world is nigh? And how do you make art, let alone a life, when it could all end at any moment? From a Tuscan hotel for the super-rich to a politically-paralysed UK, Olivia Laing's first novel is a love letter, inspired by the life and work of Kathy Acker. It is a blistering rewire of the form and a brilliant, funny and emphatically raw account of love in the apocalypse. '[Crudo] will blow you away' – Deborah Levy, author of Hot Milk Winner of the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction Shortlisted for the Goldsmith's Prize and the Gordon Burn Prize

Building an Emergency Plan
Building an Emergency Plan

Author:

Publisher: Getty Publications

Published: 2000-02-03

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 089236551X

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Building an Emergency Plan provides a step-by-step guide that a cultural institution can follow to develop its own emergency preparedness and response strategy. This workbook is divided into three parts that address the three groups generally responsible for developing and implementing emergency procedures—institution directors, emergency preparedness managers, and departmental team leaders—and discuss the role each should play in devising and maintaining an effective emergency plan. Several chapters detail the practical aspects of communication, training, and forming teams to handle the safety of staff and visitors, collections, buildings, and records. Emergencies covered include natural events such as earthquakes or floods, as well as human-caused emergencies, such as fires that occur during renovation. Examples from the Barbados Museum and Historical Society, the Museo de Arte Popular Americano in Chile, the Mystic Seaport Museum in Connecticut, and the Seattle Art Museum show how cultural institutions have prepared for emergencies relevant to their sites, collections, and regions.

Emergency
Emergency

Author: Neil Strauss

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 2009-03-10

Total Pages: 436

ISBN-13: 0060898771

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Terrorist attacks. Natural disasters. Domestic crackdowns. Economic collapse. Riots. Wars. Disease. Starvation. What can you do when it all hits the fan? You can learn to be self-sufficient and survive without the system. **I've started to look at the world through apocalypse eyes.** So begins Neil Strauss's harrowing new book: his first full-length worksince the international bestseller The Game, and one of the most original-and provocative-narratives of the year. After the last few years of violence and terror, of ethnic and religious hatred, of tsunamis and hurricanes–and now of world financial meltdown–Strauss, like most of his generation, came to the sobering realization that, even in America, anything can happen. But rather than watch helplessly, he decided to do something about it. And so he spent three years traveling through a country that's lost its sense of safety, equipping himself with the tools necessary to save himself and his loved ones from an uncertain future. With the same quick wit and eye for cultural trends that marked The Game, The Dirt, and How to Make Love Like a Porn Star, Emergency traces Neil's white-knuckled journey through today's heart of darkness, as he sets out to move his life offshore, test his skills in the wild, and remake himself as a gun-toting, plane-flying, government-defying survivor. It's a tale of paranoid fantasies and crippling doubts, of shady lawyers and dangerous cult leaders, of billionaire gun nuts and survivalist superheroes, of weirdos, heroes, and ordinary citizens going off the grid. It's one man's story of a dangerous world–and how to stay alive in it. Before the next disaster strikes, you're going to want to read this book. And you'll want to do everything it suggests. Because tomorrow doesn't come with a guarantee...

140 Artists' Ideas for Planet Earth
140 Artists' Ideas for Planet Earth

Author: Hans Ulrich Obrist

Publisher: Penguin UK

Published: 2021-06-03

Total Pages: 253

ISBN-13: 0141995327

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Through 140 drawings, thought experiments, recipes, activist instructions, gardening ideas, insurgences and personal revolutions, artists who spend their lives thinking outside the box guide you to a new worldview; where you and the planet are one. Everything here is new. We invite you to rip out pages, to hang them up at home, to draw and scribble, to cook, to meditate, to take the book to your nearest green space. Featuring Olafur Eliasson, Etel Adnan, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Jane Fonda & Swoon, Judy Chicago, Black Quantum Futurism Collective, Vivienne Westwood, Cauleen Smith, Marina Abramovic, Karrabing Film Collective, and many more.