Comparative Vandalism
Comparative Vandalism

Author: Peter Shield

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-10-26

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 0429828373

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First published in 1998, this volume is a study of Asger Jorn’s attempt to formulate the ‘first complete revision of the existing philosophical system’ from the standpoint of the artist in the period 1961-67. The Danish artist Asger Jorn (1914-73), painter, draughtsman, potter and sculptor, was one of the most prominent figures of his generation in Europe. His characteristic paintings were spontaneous, using energetic brushstrokes, splashing and spotting with a wide-ranging palette. Jorn’s eclectic intellect absorbed an astonishing range of influences and involved him in many causes, including an ambitious programme to re-publish, with commentary, material vital to Scandinavian cultural history. He was also a founder member of Cobra (1948-51) and subsequently several other international groupings, which coalesced in 1957 in the setting-up of the Situationist International with French and Italian writers and artists. Fascinated by the philosophical debate on the position of the artist in contemporary life and the artist’s relationship to the past, Jorn broke with the Situationist International in 1961 over the issue of whether an artist is an instigator of cultural change or only an instrument of political change. For the next four years, he committed himself to ‘a first complete revision of the existing philosophical system’ with the intention of placing the artist at the centre. Many of his ideas were first tried out in French in various Situationist publications and have since stirred considerable debate. His much more comprehensive texts in Danish of 1961-67 have never been made available in English. In Comparative Vandalism, Peter Shield offers the first detailed study of Jorn’s revision of modern philosophy, exploring the origins and formulation of his ideas. The book includes colour and black and white reproductions chosen from his mature work to illustrate the connection between his writing and painting.

Leaving The Twentieth Century
Leaving The Twentieth Century

Author: McKenzie Wark

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2024-08-20

Total Pages: 417

ISBN-13: 1804294861

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The highly-acclaimed history of the ground-breaking Situationist movement, in one volume for the first time The Situationist International, who came to the fore during the Paris tumults of 1968, were revolutionary thinkers who continue to influence movements and philosophy into the twenty-first century. Mostly know for Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle as well as other key texts, the group was in fact hugely diverse and radical. In Leaving The 20th Century McKenzie Wark explores the full range of the movement. At once an extraordinary counter history of radical praxis and a call to arms in the age of financial crisis and the resurgence of the streets Wark traces the group’s development from the bohemian Paris of the ’50s to the explosive days of May ’68, Wark’s take on the Situationists is biographically and historically rich, presenting the group as an ensemble creation, rather than the brainchild and dominion of its most famous member, Guy Debord. Roaming through Europe and the lives of those who made up the movement—including Constant, Asger Jorn, Michèle Bernstein, Alex Trocchi and Jacqueline De Jong—Wark uncovers an international movement riven with conflicting passions. She also follows the narrative beyond 1968 to show what happened after the movement disintegration exploring the lives and ideas of T.J. Clark, the Fourierist utopia of Raoul Vaneigem, René Vienet’s earthy situationist cinema, Gianfranco Sangunetti’s pranking of the Italian ruling class, Alice-Becker Ho’s account of the anonymous language of the Romany, Guy Debord’s late films and his surprising work as a game designer.

’Pataphysics Unrolled
’Pataphysics Unrolled

Author: Katie L. Price

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2022-03-16

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 0271091851

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In the 1890s, French poet and playwright Alfred Jarry founded pataphysics, the absurdist “science of imaginary solutions,” a concept that has been nominally recognized as the precursor to Dadaism, Surrealism, and the Theater of the Absurd, among other movements. Over a century after Jarry “made the gesture of dying,” Katie L. Price and Michael R. Taylor argue that it is time to take the comedic intervention of pataphysics seriously. ’Pataphysics Unrolled collects critical and creative essays to create an unauthorized account of pataphysical experimentation from its origins in the late nineteenth century through the contemporary moment. Reaching beyond the geographic and cultural boundaries normally associated with pataphysics, this volume presents rich readings of pataphysical syzygy, traces the influence of pataphysics across disciplines and outside of coteries such as the Collège de ’Pataphysique, and asks fundamental questions about the field of modern and contemporary studies that challenge distinctions between the modern and the postmodern, high and low culture, the serious and the comic. Touching on disciplines such as literature, art, architecture, education, music, and technology, this book reveals how pataphysics has been a platform and medium for persistent intellectual, poetic, conceptual, and artistic experimentation for over a century. In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume include Charles Bernstein, Marc Décimo, Adam Dickinson, Johanna Drucker, Craig Dworkin, Catherine Hansen, James Hendler, John Heon, Ted Hiebert, Andrew Hugill, Steve McCaffery, Seth McDowell, Jerome McGann, Anne M. Mulhall, Marcus O’Dair, Jean-Michel Rabaté, Orchid Tierney, and Brandon Walsh.

The Beach Beneath the Street
The Beach Beneath the Street

Author: McKenzie Wark

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2015-05-05

Total Pages: 207

ISBN-13: 1781689407

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Over fifty years after the Situationist International appeared, its legacy continues to inspire activists, artists and theorists around the world. Such a legend has accrued to this movement that the story of the SI now demands to be told in a contemporary voice capable of putting it into the context of twenty-first-century struggles. McKenzie Wark delves into the Situationists’ unacknowledged diversity, revealing a world as rich in practice as it is in theory. Tracing the group’s development from the bohemian Paris of the ’50s to the explosive days of May ’68, Wark’s take on the Situationists is biographically and historically rich, presenting the group as an ensemble creation, rather than the brainchild and dominion of its most famous member, Guy Debord. Roaming through Europe and the lives of those who made up the movement – including Constant, Asger Jorn, Michèle Bernstein, Alex Trocchi and Jacqueline De Jong – Wark uncovers an international movement riven with conflicting passions. Accessible to those who have only just discovered the Situationists and filled with new insights, The Beach Beneath the Street rereads the group’s history in the light of our contemporary experience of communications, architecture, and everyday life. The Situationists tried to escape the world of twentieth-century spectacle and failed in the attempt. Wark argues that they may still help us to escape the twenty-first century, while we still can.

Quotational Practices
Quotational Practices

Author: Patrick Greaney

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2014-03-01

Total Pages: 207

ISBN-13: 1452941246

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Literature and art have always depended on imitation, and in the past few decades quotation and appropriation have become dominant aesthetic practices. But critical methods have not kept pace with this development. Patrick Greaney reopens the debate about quotation and appropriation, shifting away from naïve claims about the death of the author. In interpretations of art and literature from the 1960s to the present, Quotational Practices shows how artists and writers use quotation not to undermine authorship and originality, but to answer questions at the heart of twentieth-century philosophies of history. Greaney argues that quotation is a technique employed by art and philosophy to build ties to the past and to possible futures. By exploring quotation’s links to gender, identity, and history, he offers new approaches to works by some of the most influential modern and contemporary artists, writers, and philosophers, including Walter Benjamin, Guy Debord, Michel Foucault, Marcel Broodthaers, Glenn Ligon, Sharon Hayes, and Vanessa Place. Ultimately, Quotational Practices reveals innovative perspectives on canonical philosophical texts as well as art and literature in a wide range of genres and mediums—from concrete poetry and the artist’s book to performance, painting, and video art.

Code: Damp
Code: Damp

Author: Sophie Sleigh-Johnson

Publisher: Watkins Media Limited

Published: 2024-11-12

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 1915672430

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An alternative occult and esoteric history of England told through one of its most popular cultural forms: the comedy sitcom. Code: Damp is a sometimes-comedic field report that charts an esoteric code hidden within the twin poles of 1970s sitcoms Rising Damp and The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. Outlining how past cultural patterns condensate and repeat through technology, time is shown to be a damp condensation seeping through the centuries and out onto the telly. Interspersed with the author’s own photographs, prints, Holsten Pils cans, local newspaper entries and carrier bags, as well as a whole host of other characters, the work seems an antiquarian’s conceit that takes time travel as a metaphoric methodology. This is not media studies; more an allegory of all reality as (tele)visual recorded history, excavating the strata of haunted technology from which the fragile band of code comprising our sense of time is briefly emitted. Drawing connections between incidents of ancient and popular culture, from Mark E. Smith’s lyric— “They say damp records the past”—to Rising Damp’s (meta)physical structure of decay, the book finds damp’s temporal power manifest in everything from alchemy, mysticism, and parish folklore to pulp, Time Team, darts, the local newspaper and, of course, the sitcom. Merging the vast with the parochial, the occult with the comedic, Code: Damp tunes into the weird demands of damp as a time-traveling material at the intersections of comedy, myth and technology, taking all three as serious resources to better (dis)orient the ground we stand on.

The Art and Politics of Asger Jorn
The Art and Politics of Asger Jorn

Author: Karen Kurczynski

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-05

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 135154652X

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A leading figure of the postwar avant-garde, Danish artist Asger Jorn has long been recognized for his founding contributions to the Cobra and Situationist International movements - yet art historical scholarship on Jorn has been sparse, particularly in English. This study corrects that imbalance, offering a synthetic account of the essential phases of this prolific artist?s career. It addresses his works in various media alongside his extensive writings and his collaborations with various artists' groups from the 1940s through the mid-1960s. Situating Jorn's work in an international, post-Second World War context, Karen Kurczynski reframes our understanding of the 1950s, away from the Abstract-Expressionist focus on individual expression, toward a more open-ended conception of art as a public engagement with contemporary culture and politics. Kurczynski engages with issues of interest to twenty-first-century artists and scholars, highlighting Jorn's proposition that the sensory address of art and its complex relationship to popular media can have a direct social impact. Perhaps most significantly, this study foregrounds Jorn's assertion that creativity is crucial to subjectivity itself in our increasingly mediated 'Society of the Spectacle.'

Against Value in the Arts and Education
Against Value in the Arts and Education

Author: Sam Ladkin

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2016-05-18

Total Pages: 448

ISBN-13: 1783484918

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Against Value in the Arts and Education proposes that it is often the staunchest defenders of art who do it the most harm, by suppressing or mollifying its dissenting voice, by neutralizing its painful truths, and by instrumentalizing its ambivalence. The result is that rather than expanding the autonomy of thought and feeling of the artist and the audience, art’s defenders make art self-satisfied, or otherwise an echo-chamber for the limited and limiting self-description of people’s lives lived in an “audit culture”, a culture pervaded by the direct and indirect excrescence of practices of accountability. This book diagnoses the counter-intuitive effects of the rhetoric of value. It posits that the auditing of values pervades the fabric of people’s work-lives, their education, and increasingly their everyday experience. The book uncovers figures of resentment, disenchantment and alienation fostered by the dogma of value. It argues instead that value judgments can behave insidiously, and incorporate aesthetic, ethical or ideological values fundamentally opposed to the “value” they purportedly name and describe. The collection contains contributions from leading scholars in the UK and US with contributions from anthropology, the history of art, literature, education, musicology, political science, and philosophy.

In the Beginning is the Icon
In the Beginning is the Icon

Author: Sigurd Bergmann

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-08

Total Pages: 315

ISBN-13: 1134948875

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Icons provide depictions of God or encounters with the divine that enable reflection and prayer. 'In the Beginning is the Icon' explores the value of these images for a theology of liberation. Iconology, art theory, philosophical aesthetics, art history and anthropology are integrated with rigorous theological reflection to argue that the creation and observation of pictures can have a liberating effect on humanity. In presenting art from across the world, 'In the Beginning is the Icon' reflects the ethnocentricity of both art and religious studies and offers a new cross-cultural approach to the theology of art.

Off-Screen Cinema
Off-Screen Cinema

Author: Kaira M. Cabañas

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2015-01-26

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 022617462X

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One of the most important avant-garde movements of postwar Paris was Lettrism, which crucially built an interest in the relationship between writing and image into projects in poetry, painting, and especially cinema. Highly influential, the Lettrists served as a bridge of sorts between the earlier works of the Dadaists and Surrealists and the later Conceptual artists. Off-Screen Cinema is the first monograph in English of the Lettrists. Offering a full portrait of the avant-garde scene of 1950s Paris, it focuses on the film works of key Lettrist figures like Gil J Wolman, Maurice Lemaître, François Dufrêne, and especially the movement's founder, Isidore Isou, a Romanian immigrant whose “discrepant editing” deliberately uncoupled image and sound. Through Cabañas's history, we see not only the full scope of the Lettrist project, but also its clear influence on Situationism, the French New Wave, the New Realists, as well as American filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage.