Search

Title:
Jeff Wall

Actions:

• Buy book

Price:
$59.95
(available to order)

Summary:
Né en 1946 au Canada, Jeff Wall est devenu en quelques années l’un des artistes contemporains les plus célèbres au monde. Historien de l’art venu tardivement à la photographie, il est particulièrement connu pour ses grands caissons lumineux et ses gigantesques tirages noir et blanc. Il compte désormais parmi les figures incontournables des foires internationales dédiées à l’art contemporain. En jouant avec les références liées à l’histoire de l’art comme avec celles de la photographie, Jeff Wall questionne le statut de l’image aujourd’hui. De la nature morte aux paysages en passant par la reconstitution de tableaux historiques, ses œuvres fascinent autant par leurs effets spectaculaires que par les multiples niveaux de lectures qu’elles proposent.

Title:
Boris Groys: thinking in loop

Actions:

• Buy book

Price:
$48.00
(available to order)

Summary:
The topic of these videos by art historian and philosopher Boris Groys is, actually, video as a medium: the use of the image within the video, the analogy between video and essay, the difference between private and public use of the video, the video running in loop as a contemporary form of ritual.

Title:
On the new

Actions:

• Buy book

Price:
$26.95
(available to order)

Summary:
On the New looks at the economies of exchange and valuation that drive modern culture's key sites: the intellectual marketplace and the archive. As ideas move from one context to another, newness is created. This continuous shifting of the line that separates the valuable from the worthless, culture from profanity, is at the center of Boris Groys's investigation which aims to map the uncharted territory of what constitutes artistic innovation and what processes underpin its recognition and appropriation.

Title:
Becoming an artwork

Actions:

• Buy book

Price:
$15.95
(available in store)

Summary:
For some time, artists and intellectuals struggled for the sovereign right to present themselves to society in their own way – to become self-created works of art. Today everybody has not only a right but also an obligation to practice self-design. We are responsible for the way we present ourselves to others – and we cannot get rid of this aesthetic responsibility. However, we are not able to produce our own bodies. Before we begin to practice self-design, we find ourselves already designed by the gaze of others. That is why the practice of self-design mostly takes a critical and confrontational turn. We want to bring others to see us in the way we want to be seen – not only during our earthly life but also after our death. This is a complicated struggle, and the aim of this book is to describe and analyze it.

Title:
Ilka Kabakov: the man who flew into space from his apartment

Actions:

• Buy book

Price:
$18.95
(available to order)

Summary:
The fictitious hero of this 1984 installation is a lonely dreamer who develops an impossible project: to fly alone in cosmic space. But this dream is also an individual appropriation of a collective Soviet project and the official Soviet propaganda connected to it. Having built a makeshift slingshot, the hero apparently flies through the ceiling of his shabby room and vanishes into space. The miserable room and the primitive slingshot suggest the reality behind the Soviet utopia, in which where cosmic vision and the political project of the Communist revolution are seen as indissoluble. The Man who Flew into Space from His Apartment also raises questions of authorship in modernity. All of Kabakov's work is made in the name of other, fictitious artists. This reveals a hidden rule of the modern art system: only an artist who doesn't want to be an artist or who doesn't even know that he is an artist is a real artist—just as only an artwork that does not look like an artwork is a real artwork. The installation is a narrative, the documentation of a fictitious event. Boris Groys is Professor of Philosophy and Art Theory at the Academy for Design in Karlsruhe, Germany, and Global Professor at New York University.

Title:
Going public: e-flux journal

Actions:

• Buy book

Price:
$19.95
(available to order)

Summary:
If all things in the world can be considered as sources of aesthetic experience, then art no longer holds a privileged position. Rather, art comes between the subject and the world, and any aesthetic discourse used to legitimize art must also necessarily serve to undermine it. Following his recent books Art Power and The Communist Postscript, in Going Public Boris Groys looks to escape entrenched aesthetic and sociological understandings of art — which always assume the position of the spectator, of the consumer. Let us instead consider art from the position of the producer, who does not ask what it looks like or where it comes from, but why it exists in the first place.

Title:
Particular cases

Actions:

• Buy book

Price:
$34.95
(available to order)

Summary:
This collection of essays does not aim to illustrate a prefabricated theory of art, but rather follows the impulses given by artworks themselves. Philosopher and art critic Boris Groys writes about significant works and artists over the last century that have pushed his thinking in new directions. His compelling arguments do not try to replace the singular content or message of an artwork. Instead, his writings are inspired by art as a mind-changing practice--as if contemporary artists, completely secularized, can still produce a kind of conversion within the spectator.

Title:
Globus cassus

Actions:

• Buy book

Price:
$45.95
(available to order)

Summary:
Part flight of fancy, part Star Trek set, part seemingly drug-induced delusion, Globus Cassus is a solution to a global dilemma, which remains the same size while housing an ever-increasing global population. The catalyst for the project as described by its creator, artist Christian Waldvogel: "The rapidly increasing population notice that their planet will soon be too small. The Earth is dismantled to provide building material. This is taken away to create Globus Cassus, a new, much bigger habitat, thought out from scratch." And so begins the story of converting the Earth into a gigantic hollow structure. The project, precisely worked out and described in detail, breaks through the bounds of architecture to continue the story of our great contemporary Utopias. Globus Cassus is the core of the Swiss contribution to the 9th Architecture Biennale in Venice, and this book examines the novel project through a series of drawings, diagrams, and photographs of three-dimensional models.

Title:
Jeff Wall: L'édition complète

Actions:

• Buy book

Price:
$79.95
(available to order)

Summary:
Jeff Wall: l'édition complète présente l'intégralité des oeuvres de l'artiste, de The Destroyed Room, sa photographie révolutionnaire de 1978. à une série d'oeuvres présentées ici pour la première fois. Ces images sont accompagnées d'un recueil d'entretiens et de textes consacrés à son oeuvre.

Title:
In the flow

Actions:

• Buy book

Price:
$22.99
(available to order)

Summary:
In the early twentieth century, art and its institutions came under critique from a new democratic and egalitarian spirit. The notion of works of art as sacred objects was decried and subsequently they would be understood merely as things. This meant an attack on realism, as well as on the traditional preservative mission of the museum. Art theorist Boris Groys argues this led to the development of “direct realism”: an art that would not produce objects, but practices that would not survive. But for more than a century now, every advance in this direction has been quickly followed by new means of preserving art’s distinction. In this new work, Groys explores art in the age of the thingless medium, the Internet. Groys claims that if the techniques of mechanical reproduction gave us objects without aura, digital production generates aura without objects, transforming all its materials into vanishing markers of the transitory present.