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The Frankfurt am Main Staedelschule, and its gallery Portikus, form a leading international center for experimental contemporary art. The Staedelschule was founded in 1817 by Johann Friedrich Staedel for the purpose of introducing students to his prodigous art collection. This publication is authored by contemporary Staedelschule professors and visiting lecturers,(...)
Art Theory
March 2008, Frankfurt, Cologne, Manchester, New York
Kunst lehren / Teaching art : Staedelschule Frankfurt/Main
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The Frankfurt am Main Staedelschule, and its gallery Portikus, form a leading international center for experimental contemporary art. The Staedelschule was founded in 1817 by Johann Friedrich Staedel for the purpose of introducing students to his prodigous art collection. This publication is authored by contemporary Staedelschule professors and visiting lecturers, including Pamela Lee, Niklas Maak, Jan Verwoert and Okwui Enwezor, who discuss what teaching art means in the context of a contemporary academy, and at what point the art market should be introduced in a student's education. It serves as an example of the kind of discourse available to Staedelschule students, as there is always in residence an impressive international cast of artworld practitioners. This volume is not only functional, however; it also includes a series of new photographs, produced especially for this project, by Wolfgang Tillmans.
Art Theory
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Painter Christopher Wool has written, "Some of the best stand-up performance I ever saw was Martin [Kippenberger] telling jokes in the back of some bar or restaurant." Which is not to dismiss the legendary German artist, who was at the forefront of the much-storied Cologne art scene of the early 1990s--Kippenberger, who died in 1997, used humor like a laser, to illuminate(...)
Model Martin Kippenberger: Utopia for Everyone
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Painter Christopher Wool has written, "Some of the best stand-up performance I ever saw was Martin [Kippenberger] telling jokes in the back of some bar or restaurant." Which is not to dismiss the legendary German artist, who was at the forefront of the much-storied Cologne art scene of the early 1990s--Kippenberger, who died in 1997, used humor like a laser, to illuminate power structures and taboos. One of the most important artists of the twentieth century, he not only worked in a variety of media--painting, sculpture, books and multiples--but, taking a cue from Joseph Beuys, actively tried to conceive new possibilities on which to model an art practice. This volume, published for an exhibition at Austria's acclaimed Kunsthaus Graz, includes incisive essays by curator and critic Daniel Birnbaum and linguist and writer Martin Prinzhorn, which examine the softer, more utopian side of the artist.
Contemporary Art Monographs
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How did art escape the deadlock of the Situationists' anti-art refusal? Did the relational artists, with their repetitions of Situationist slogans and techniques, outline a sustainable, micro-political alternative to Guy Debord's dream of surpassing art and realizing philosophy? Looking back at some of the Situationists' confrontations with the museum, this book traces a(...)
Life on Sirius: the Situationist International and the exhibition after art
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How did art escape the deadlock of the Situationists' anti-art refusal? Did the relational artists, with their repetitions of Situationist slogans and techniques, outline a sustainable, micro-political alternative to Guy Debord's dream of surpassing art and realizing philosophy? Looking back at some of the Situationists' confrontations with the museum, this book traces a path beyond the tragedy of negativity and the litany of recuperation. At the center is the concept of play; originally adopted as the principle of reconciled life, it returns as the lever of instrumentalization. But in the extraterrestial wasteland of the present, spaces of ludic coexistence and experimentation may remain possible, provided that pessimism can be adequately organized.
Art Theory
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Under Pressure gathers together the contributions to the same-titled conference held at the "Institut fuer Kunstkritik from 2006 to 2007". Can "exit" and "disobedience", as envisioned by Virno, be considered as options from an artistic point of view? And what would an insistence on "status" or long-term projects as invoked by Boltanski/Chiapello look like if artists(...)
Art Theory
January 1900, Berlin, New York
Under pressure : pictures, subjects, and the new spirit of capitalism
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Under Pressure gathers together the contributions to the same-titled conference held at the "Institut fuer Kunstkritik from 2006 to 2007". Can "exit" and "disobedience", as envisioned by Virno, be considered as options from an artistic point of view? And what would an insistence on "status" or long-term projects as invoked by Boltanski/Chiapello look like if artists were to take on this strategy? How much can one count on pictures alone, as Mitchell seems to do? And, can pictures really change the "ways of worldmaking"?
Art Theory
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Originally published in Swedish in 1992, this book examines the enigmatic relation of melancholia to an early kind of cannibalism, which psychoanalysis, in particular, stressed. It contains reading of, amongst others, Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Thomas Bernhard, Sigmund Freud, G. W. F. Hegel, and the Swedish poet Gunnar Ekelöf. The authors also quote Goethe and Rabelais,(...)
Art Theory
October 2008, Berlin, New York
As a weasel sucks eggs, an essay on melancholy and cannibalism
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Originally published in Swedish in 1992, this book examines the enigmatic relation of melancholia to an early kind of cannibalism, which psychoanalysis, in particular, stressed. It contains reading of, amongst others, Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Thomas Bernhard, Sigmund Freud, G. W. F. Hegel, and the Swedish poet Gunnar Ekelöf. The authors also quote Goethe and Rabelais, for whom food is a cosmic principle, the soil of fertility, on which all creation is based. In a transferred sense, food also plays that same role for the melancholiac he who questions the normal order of things, who creates an other unknown food, with a variety of meanings. The authors trace the desire for this other food through the ages, and scrutinize its relationship to both primitive sacrificial rites as well as contemporary anthropology, philosophy, and linguistic theory.
Art Theory
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The Swedish artist Hilma af Klint is one of the art world’s major rediscoveries of the twenty-first century. While the Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky has famously been credited for creating the first abstract artwork, this designation has been called into question with the resurfacing and renewed study of af Klint’s non-figurative paintings. In this captivating volume,(...)
Art Theory
January 2026
Hilma af Klint and Wassily Kandinsky: Dreams of the future
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The Swedish artist Hilma af Klint is one of the art world’s major rediscoveries of the twenty-first century. While the Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky has famously been credited for creating the first abstract artwork, this designation has been called into question with the resurfacing and renewed study of af Klint’s non-figurative paintings. In this captivating volume, the af Klint biographer and scholar Julia Voss and the curator and writer Daniel Birnbaum convey in depth the two artists’ nearly parallel development away from figuration and into the liberating, mystical vision of art. In this engrossing account of the affinities and divergences between af Klint and Kandinsky’s lives and work, supported by more than 100 illustrations, we are invited to witness the conditions in which the art world was forever changed.
Art Theory
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The significance of Jean-François Lyotard's innovative 1985 exhibition Les Immatériaux and the “curatorial turn” in critical theory. In 1985, the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard curated Les Immatériaux at Centre Georges Pompidou. Though widely misunderstood at the time, the exhibition marked a “curatorial turn” in critical theory. Through its experimental layout and(...)
Museums and Universal Exhibitions
March 2020
Spacing philosophy: Lyotard and the idea of the exhibition
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The significance of Jean-François Lyotard's innovative 1985 exhibition Les Immatériaux and the “curatorial turn” in critical theory. In 1985, the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard curated Les Immatériaux at Centre Georges Pompidou. Though widely misunderstood at the time, the exhibition marked a “curatorial turn” in critical theory. Through its experimental layout and hybrid presentation of objects, technologies, and ideas, this pioneering exploration of virtuality reflected on the exhibition as a medium of communication and anticipated a deeper engagement with immersive and digital space in both art and theory. In Spacing Philosophy, Daniel Birnbaum and Sven-Olov Wallenstein analyze the significance and logic of Lyotard's exhibition while contextualizing it in the history of exhibition practices, the philosophical tradition, and Lyotard's own work on aesthetics and phenomenology. Les Immatériaux can thus be seen as a culmination and materialization of a life's work as well as a primer for the many thought-exhibitions produced in the following decades.
Museums and Universal Exhibitions