Joseph Beuys and history
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Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) was one of the most significant artists of the twentieth century—and one of the most controversial. Working in Germany in the aftermath of World War II, he explored a radically expanded concept of art through a practice that ranged from performative actions to large-scale sculptural ensembles. While some contemporaries found his claim that(...)
Joseph Beuys and history
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Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) was one of the most significant artists of the twentieth century—and one of the most controversial. Working in Germany in the aftermath of World War II, he explored a radically expanded concept of art through a practice that ranged from performative actions to large-scale sculptural ensembles. While some contemporaries found his claim that “everyone is an artist” liberating, even revolutionary, others accused him of fostering a dangerous cult of personality. In "Joseph Beuys and History", the first rigorous art historical study of the artist in English, Daniel Spaulding presents a striking new interpretation of Beuys’s work and career. By putting Beuys in the context of Germany’s postwar recovery, Spaulding shows that the artist’s superimposed biological, political, and economic metaphors offered a powerful way to think about the trajectory of human freedom, the place of art in capitalist modernity, and the possibility of an ecological aesthetics. At the same time, his oeuvre’s disquieting echoes of the Nazi past suggest that not everything could be reconciled in what Beuys called “social sculpture.”
Contemporary Art Monographs
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Rome is not only enriched by the works that have led it to be known as the "eternal city", or with those monuments that still preserve the stories of a strong people, such as the Colosseum, the Roman Forum or Castel Sant'Angelo. It is not only the symbolic center of Christianity thanks to St. Peter's Basilica, or the central and figurative hub of the Italian Republic(...)
Rome: on the road architecture guide
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Rome is not only enriched by the works that have led it to be known as the "eternal city", or with those monuments that still preserve the stories of a strong people, such as the Colosseum, the Roman Forum or Castel Sant'Angelo. It is not only the symbolic center of Christianity thanks to St. Peter's Basilica, or the central and figurative hub of the Italian Republic because of the Palazzo del Quirinale. The history, art, and culture of Rome tell the story of a process of restoration and innovation that sees the participation of some timeless places and the birth of other contemporary community services that join those already known to the public. During 1930s, the social and cultural revolution and call for functionality and practicality are represented by impressive modern public and residential works, as well as by major operations from architectural protagonists in the urban change of the capital. Works such as the university city of Sapienza and its institutes, or the EUR district tell the story of the formal transition between modernity and contemporaneity.
City Guides
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From the grandiose histories of monumental state building projects to the minutiae of street signs and corner cafés, from the rebuilding of capital cities to the provision of the humble public toilet, "Clean living under difficult circumstances" argues for the city as a socialist project. This essay collection spans a period from immediately before the 2008 financial(...)
Clean living in difficult circumstances
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From the grandiose histories of monumental state building projects to the minutiae of street signs and corner cafés, from the rebuilding of capital cities to the provision of the humble public toilet, "Clean living under difficult circumstances" argues for the city as a socialist project. This essay collection spans a period from immediately before the 2008 financial crash to the year of the pandemic. Against the business-as-usual responses to both crises, Owen Hatherley outlines a vision of the city as both a venue for political debate and dispute as well as a space of everyday experience, one that we shape as much as it shapes us. Incorporated here are the genres of memoir, history, music and film criticism, as well as portraits of figures who have inspired new ways of looking at cities, such as the architect Zaha Hadid, the activist and urbanist Jane Jacobs, and thinkers such as Mark Fisher and Adam Curtis. Throughout these pieces, Hatherley argues that the only way out of our difficult circumstances is to imagine and try to construct a better modernity.
Urban Theory
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Photography is one of the principal filters through which we engage the world. The contributors to this volume focus on Walter Benjamin's concept of the optical unconscious to investigate how photography has shaped history, modernity, perception, lived experience, politics, race, and human agency. In essays that range from examinations of Benjamin's and Sigmund Freud's(...)
Photography and the optical unconscious
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Photography is one of the principal filters through which we engage the world. The contributors to this volume focus on Walter Benjamin's concept of the optical unconscious to investigate how photography has shaped history, modernity, perception, lived experience, politics, race, and human agency. In essays that range from examinations of Benjamin's and Sigmund Freud's writings to the work of Kara Walker and Roland Barthes's famous Winter Garden photograph, the contributors explore what photography can teach us about the nature of the unconscious. They attend to side perceptions, develop latent images, discover things hidden in plain sight, focus on the disavowed, and perceive the slow. Of particular note are the ways race and colonialism have informed photography from its beginning. The volume also contains photographic portfolios by Zoe Leonard, Kelly Wood, and Kristan Horton, whose work speaks to the optical unconscious while demonstrating how photographs communicate on their own terms. The essays and portfolios in Photography and the Optical Unconscious create a collective and sustained assessment of Benjamin's influential concept, opening up new avenues for thinking about photography and the human psyche.
Theory of Photography
Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to the Soviet Union, 1921-1
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During the 1920s and 1930s, thousands of European and American writers, professionals, scientists, artists, and intellectuals made a pilgrimage to experience the "Soviet experiment" for themselves. ''Showcasing the Great Experiment'' explores the reception of these intellectuals and fellow-travelers and their cross-cultural and trans-ideological encounters in order to(...)
Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to the Soviet Union, 1921-1
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During the 1920s and 1930s, thousands of European and American writers, professionals, scientists, artists, and intellectuals made a pilgrimage to experience the "Soviet experiment" for themselves. ''Showcasing the Great Experiment'' explores the reception of these intellectuals and fellow-travelers and their cross-cultural and trans-ideological encounters in order to analyze Soviet attitudes towards the West. While many visitors were profoundly affected by their Soviet tours, so too was the Soviet system. The early experiences of building showcases and teaching outsiders to perceive the future-in-the-making constitute a neglected international part of the emergence of Stalinism at home. Michael David-Fox contends that each side critically examined the other, negotiating feelings of inferiority and superiority, admiration and enmity, emulation and rejection. By the time of the Great Purges, these tensions gave way to the dramatic triumph of xenophobia and isolationism; whereas in the twenties the new regime assumed it had much to learn from Western modernity, by the Stalinist thirties the Soviet order was declared superior in all respects.
Current Exhibitions
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From its title to its formal arrangement of language, Brad Feuerhelm's Dein Kampf suggests a commentary on our cyclical anxieties about ideology. Anxiety is implicit in his photographs and Berlin is their natural backdrop, being a city in which several ideologies collided in the twentieth century. The city exemplifies the quagmire of possibilities in which the tensions of(...)
Käthe Kollwitz: prints, process, politics
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From its title to its formal arrangement of language, Brad Feuerhelm's Dein Kampf suggests a commentary on our cyclical anxieties about ideology. Anxiety is implicit in his photographs and Berlin is their natural backdrop, being a city in which several ideologies collided in the twentieth century. The city exemplifies the quagmire of possibilities in which the tensions of historical narrative and contemporary political and ideological doubt are played out in visual motifs throughout the landscape. Fragments of the past and symbols of capitalist modernity underpin the work-banks, insurance companies and people as effigies of citizens appear as a cloaking miasma, the spectre of past, present and no future. The schema of the glitch and the appropriation methods in Feuerhelm's work are subtle enquiries into the contemporary conditions of fear and confusion. Loose associations about changing futures under technology, religion, immigration and the future of the photographic image also loom large. Dein Kampf is Feuerhelm's proposition about how we activate image and ideology in the book form. Includes text by Ulrich Baer.
Contemporary Art Monographs
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This volume from BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, combines handbook, dictionary, and anthology to investigate artistic practice aimed at achieving social change. With text and visual essays, definitions, exercises, interviews, and images, the contributors envision a praxis that is committed to experimenting with aesthetics and politics in ways that go beyond the conventions(...)
November 2021
Toward the not yet: art as public practice
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This volume from BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, combines handbook, dictionary, and anthology to investigate artistic practice aimed at achieving social change. With text and visual essays, definitions, exercises, interviews, and images, the contributors envision a praxis that is committed to experimenting with aesthetics and politics in ways that go beyond the conventions of Western modernity. These are practices that are interdisciplinary, theoretically informed, and politically driven, offering ways of "being together otherwise." Catalyzed by the work of artist Jeanne van Heeswijk, which focuses on radicalizing civic processes, ''Toward the not-yet' imagines and enacts alternative ways of conceiving the present and future. Contributors, among them notable artists, scholars, activists, and writers consider ways of participating in civic life, including "dreamscaping" and "radical listening"; the creation of safer spaces for humans and nonhumans; ways of radically shifting laws and policies; and tactics and methods of collective sanctuary. ''Toward the not-yet'' is part of BAK's series of BASICS readers, debuting a SUPERBASICS variation that is larger, with more visual content.
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With the advent of urbanization in the early modern period, the material worlds of children were vastly altered. In industrialized democracies, a broad consensus developed that children should not work, but rather learn and play in settings designed and built with these specific purposes in mind. Unregulated public spaces for children were no longer acceptable; and the(...)
Designing modern childhoods: history, space, and the material culture of children
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With the advent of urbanization in the early modern period, the material worlds of children were vastly altered. In industrialized democracies, a broad consensus developed that children should not work, but rather learn and play in settings designed and built with these specific purposes in mind. Unregulated public spaces for children were no longer acceptable; and the cultural landscapes of children's private lives were changed, with modifications in architecture and the objects of daily life. In Designing Modern Childhoods, architectural historians, social historians, social scientists, and architects examine the history and design of places and objects such as schools, hospitals, playgrounds, houses, cell phones, snowboards, and even the McDonald's Happy Meal. Special attention is given to how children use and interpret the spaces, buildings, and objects that are part of their lives, becoming themselves creators and carriers of culture. The authors extract common threads in children's understandings of their material worlds, but they also show how the experience of modernity varies for young people across time, through space, and according to age, gender, social class, race, and culture.
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January 2008
Architectural Theory
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230 pages : illustrations (some color) ; 27 cm
Princeton : Princeton University Press, [2024], ©2024
Portrait and place : photography in Senegal, 1840-1960 / Giulia Paoletti.
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230 pages : illustrations (some color) ; 27 cm
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Princeton : Princeton University Press, [2024], ©2024
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In the decades after World War II, from just prior to the revolution and into the mid-1980s, modernist architecture blossomed in Cuba, attracting both native talent and leading international architects from Europe. Havana Modern examines Cuban modernism’s highlights with a wealth of archival materials, photos and new scholarship. Edited by Rubén Gallo—author of Mexican(...)
Havana modern: Critical readings in Cuban architecture
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In the decades after World War II, from just prior to the revolution and into the mid-1980s, modernist architecture blossomed in Cuba, attracting both native talent and leading international architects from Europe. Havana Modern examines Cuban modernism’s highlights with a wealth of archival materials, photos and new scholarship. Edited by Rubén Gallo—author of Mexican Modernity (2005), Freud’s Mexico (2010) and Proust’s Latin Americans (2014)—the volume is arranged in 10 chapters authored by current and former Princeton faculty members and graduate students. These essays, which arose from seminars organized by Gallo and historian Beatriz Colomina, examine Max Abramovitz’s American Embassy; Richard Neutra’s De Schultess House; Martín Domínguez Esteban, Miguel Gastón and Emilio del Junco’s Radiocentro; Mies van Der Rohe’s office building for Ron Barcardí S.A.; Vittorio Garatti, Roberto Gottardi and Ricardo Porro’s National Art Schools for Havana; Mario Girona’s Coppelia Ice-cream parlor and park; Vittorio Garatti, Hugo D’Acosta and Sergio Baroni’s Cuban Pavilion at Expo 67; Antonio Quintana and Alberto Rodriguez’s "Edificio Experimental"; and Aleksandr Grigorievich Rochegov’s USRR Embassy. Havana Modern draws on history, politics, culture, literature and film to elucidate this outstandingly rich era in architectural history.
Architecture since 1900, Americas