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During the Cold War era, the songs that Soviet citizens could listen to were ruthlessly controlled by the state. But a secret underground subculture of music lovers and bootleggers defied the censors, building recording machines and making their own records of forbidden jazz, rock 'n' roll, and Russian music, cut onto used hospital x-ray film. Foregrounding interviews(...)
Bone music: Soviet X-Ray audio
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During the Cold War era, the songs that Soviet citizens could listen to were ruthlessly controlled by the state. But a secret underground subculture of music lovers and bootleggers defied the censors, building recording machines and making their own records of forbidden jazz, rock 'n' roll, and Russian music, cut onto used hospital x-ray film. Foregrounding interviews and oral testimonies gathered over five years, this volume presents the stories of the original bone bootleggers, their customers, musicians, record collectors, and commentators, evoking a spirited resistance to a repressive culture of prohibition and punishment. Richly illustrated with dozens of new images of Soviet x-ray discs and sound letters, the book details how the bootleggers worked, outlining the technical precedents of their techniques, situating their discs in a revised history of recorded media, and bringing a wealth of compelling new detail.
Acoustics
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Born into the semiotic seductions of the 1980s, Scottish painter Lucy McKenzie reworks the iconography of that decade to foster associations between the most unlikely sources —East European propaganda murals, German abstract painting, Cold War imagery, industrial typefaces and 1980s synth-pop. To embellish this wide-ranging lexicon, she often collaborates with fashion(...)
Lucy Mckenzie : chêne de weekend, 2006-2009
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Born into the semiotic seductions of the 1980s, Scottish painter Lucy McKenzie reworks the iconography of that decade to foster associations between the most unlikely sources —East European propaganda murals, German abstract painting, Cold War imagery, industrial typefaces and 1980s synth-pop. To embellish this wide-ranging lexicon, she often collaborates with fashion designers, musicians and interior designers on works that have been exhibited as theatrical sets at museums in Edinburgh, San Francisco, New York and Cologne, winning her an international following. Chêne De Weekend introduces new paintings that reference nineteenth-century trompe l'oeil paintings used for interior design, part of McKenzie's participation in Atelier, an interior design collective. Alongside reproductions of works, it includes a fictional account of her study of trompe l'oeil and an homage to the fashion designer Beca Lipscombe, one of her collaborators in Atelier.
Contemporary Art Monographs
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Many societies have imagined going to live in space. What they want to do once they get up there—whether conquering the unknown, establishing space ''colonies,'' privatising the moon’s resources—reveals more than expected. In this fascinating radical history of space exploration, Fred Scharmen shows that often science and fiction have combined in the imagined dreams of(...)
Space forces: a critical history of life in outer space
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Many societies have imagined going to live in space. What they want to do once they get up there—whether conquering the unknown, establishing space ''colonies,'' privatising the moon’s resources—reveals more than expected. In this fascinating radical history of space exploration, Fred Scharmen shows that often science and fiction have combined in the imagined dreams of life in outer space, but these visions have real implications for life back on earth. For the Russian Cosmists of the 1890s space was a place to pursue human perfection away from the Earth. For others, such as Wernher Von Braun, it was an engineering task that combined, in the Space Race, the Cold War, and during World War II, with destructive geopolitics. Arthur C. Clarke, in his speculative books, offered an alternative vision of wonder that is indifferent to human interaction. Meanwhile NASA planned and managed the space station like an earthbound corporation. Today, the market has arrived into outer space and exploration is the plaything of superrich technology billionaires, who plan to privatise the mineral wealth for themselves. Are other worlds really possible? Bringing these figures and ideas together reveals a completely different story of our relationship with outer space, as well as the dangers of our current direction of extractive capitalism and colonisation.
Architectural Theory
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Reinhold Martin and Claire Zimmerman bring together essays from an array of scholars exploring the troubled relationship between architecture and antidemocratic politics. Comprising detailed case studies throughout the world spanning from the early nineteenth century to the present, "Architecture against Democracy" analyzes crucial occasions when the built environment has(...)
Architecture against democracy: histories of the nationalist international
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Reinhold Martin and Claire Zimmerman bring together essays from an array of scholars exploring the troubled relationship between architecture and antidemocratic politics. Comprising detailed case studies throughout the world spanning from the early nineteenth century to the present, "Architecture against Democracy" analyzes crucial occasions when the built environment has been harnessed as an instrument of authoritarian power. Alongside chapters focusing on paradigmatic episodes from twentieth-century German and Italian fascism, the contributors examine historic and contemporary events and subjects that are organized thematically, including the founding of the Smithsonian Institution, Ellis Island infrastructure, the aftermath of the Paris Commune, Cold War West Germany and Iraq, Frank Lloyd Wright’s domestic architecture, and Istanbul’s Taksim Square. Through the range and depth of these accounts, "Architecture against Democracy" presents a selective overview of antidemocratic processes as they unfold in the built environment throughout Western modernity, offering an architectural history of the recent "nationalist international."
Architectural Theory
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This irreverent survey celebrates the more populist and enduring work in graphic and industrial design that was a product of the Soviet era - a period that remains politically sensitive and under-explored, yet whose influence on the objects and aesthetics of Russian life and thought has been profound. "Made in Russia" presents fifty such masterpieces, from pioneers of(...)
Made in Russia: unsung icons of Soviet design
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This irreverent survey celebrates the more populist and enduring work in graphic and industrial design that was a product of the Soviet era - a period that remains politically sensitive and under-explored, yet whose influence on the objects and aesthetics of Russian life and thought has been profound. "Made in Russia" presents fifty such masterpieces, from pioneers of Soviet technology such as the Sputnik, the Buran snowmobile, and the LOMO camera to icons of quotidian culture such as the fishnet shopping bag, the beveled glass, a Cold War-inspired arcade game, and Misha the Olympic bear. Edited by the journalist and author Michael Idov - a Soviet product himself - and including essays from Boris Kachka, Vitaly Komar, Gary Shteyngart, and Lara Vapnyar, the collection explores the provenance of these objects in the forgotten Soviet culture and the unique climate for design from which they could only have emerged.
Current Exhibitions
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In the late 1960s the world was faced with impending disaster: the height of the Cold War, the end of oil and the decline of great cities throughout the world. Out of this crisis came a new generation that hoped to build a better future, influenced by visions of geodesic domes, walking cities and a meaningful connection with nature. In this work of cultural history,(...)
Last futures: natures, technology and the end of architecture
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In the late 1960s the world was faced with impending disaster: the height of the Cold War, the end of oil and the decline of great cities throughout the world. Out of this crisis came a new generation that hoped to build a better future, influenced by visions of geodesic domes, walking cities and a meaningful connection with nature. In this work of cultural history, architect Douglas Murphy traces the lost archeology of the present day through the works of thinkers and designers such as Buckminster Fuller, the ecological pioneer Stewart Brand, the Archigram architects who envisioned the Plug-In City in the ’60s, as well as co-operatives in Vienna, communes in the Californian desert and protesters on the streets of Paris. In this mind-bending account of the last avant-garde, we see not just the source of our current problems but also some powerful alternative futures.
Architecture ecologies
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In the late 1960s the world was faced with impending disaster: the height of the Cold War, the end of oil and the decline of great cities throughout the world. Out of this crisis came a new generation that hoped to build a better future, influenced by visions of geodesic domes, walking cities and a meaningful connection with nature. In this brilliant work of cultural(...)
October 2015
Last futures : nature, technology and the end of architecture
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In the late 1960s the world was faced with impending disaster: the height of the Cold War, the end of oil and the decline of great cities throughout the world. Out of this crisis came a new generation that hoped to build a better future, influenced by visions of geodesic domes, walking cities and a meaningful connection with nature. In this brilliant work of cultural history, architect Douglas Murphy traces the lost archeology of the present day through the works of thinkers and designers such as Buckminster Fuller, the ecological pioneer Stewart Brand, the Archigram architects who envisioned the Plug-In City in the ’60s, as well as co-operatives in Vienna, communes in the Californian desert and protesters on the streets of Paris. In this mind-bending account of the last avant-garde, we see not just the source of our current problems but also some powerful alternative futures.
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This is the first book about the history, influences, and impact of the "Werkstatt für Photography" (Photography Workshop) founded by the Berlin photographer Michael Schmidt at the Volkshochschule Kreuzberg in 1976. In the midst of the Cold War, the Werkstatt initiated an artistic "airlift" to the United States, a democratic field of experimentation beyond the pale of(...)
Photography Collections
June 2017
Werkstatt für photographie 1976-1986
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This is the first book about the history, influences, and impact of the "Werkstatt für Photography" (Photography Workshop) founded by the Berlin photographer Michael Schmidt at the Volkshochschule Kreuzberg in 1976. In the midst of the Cold War, the Werkstatt initiated an artistic "airlift" to the United States, a democratic field of experimentation beyond the pale of traditional vocational and political-institutional standards. Those same years witnessed the establishment of infrastructures in West Germany that paved the way for the emancipation of photography as an art form. These included documenta 6 (1977), the first photo galleries and photography journals, and a number of pathbreaking exhibitions. Berlin, Hanover, and Essen played important roles in that process. All in all, the picture of a medium in transition emerges, a medium that developed an autonomous form of artistic authorship in the field of documentary. This book presents the story of German photography in the 1970s and 1980s, its international ties, its protagonists, and its networks.
Photography Collections
Shomei Tomatsu
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Casting a cold eye on postwar Japan, the raw, grainy and impressionistic photography of Shomei Tomatsu practically defined Japanese photography in the second half of the 20th century, greatly influencing Daido Moriyama, Nobuyoshi Araki and Takuma Nakihara. His best-known images are his portraits of people and street scenes from the 1950s, when the country struggled to(...)
Shomei Tomatsu
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Casting a cold eye on postwar Japan, the raw, grainy and impressionistic photography of Shomei Tomatsu practically defined Japanese photography in the second half of the 20th century, greatly influencing Daido Moriyama, Nobuyoshi Araki and Takuma Nakihara. His best-known images are his portraits of people and street scenes from the 1950s, when the country struggled to recover from World War II and US military presence was ubiquitous; his photographs of 1960s Japan; and throughout his career, his images of Okinawa, where he died in 2012. Tomatsu's most famous single photograph is probably Melted Bottle, Nagasaki, 1961, which depicts a beer bottle rendered grotesquely biomorphic by the nuclear blast that devastated Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. The American photographer and writer Leo Rubinfien described Tomatsu's Nagasaki images as "sad, haggard facts," noting that "beneath the surface there was a grief so great that any overt expression of sympathy would have been an insult."
Photography monographs
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Studies of the radical environmental politics of the 1960s have tended to downplay the extent to which much of that countercultural intellectual and social ferment continued into the 1970s and 1980s. Canadian Countercultures and the Environment adds to our knowledge of this understudied period. This collection contributes a sustained analysis of the beginning of major(...)
Canadian countercultures and the environment
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Studies of the radical environmental politics of the 1960s have tended to downplay the extent to which much of that countercultural intellectual and social ferment continued into the 1970s and 1980s. Canadian Countercultures and the Environment adds to our knowledge of this understudied period. This collection contributes a sustained analysis of the beginning of major environmental debates in this era and examines a range of issues related to broad environmental concerns, topics which emerged as key concerns in the context of Cold War military investments and experiments, the oil crisis of the 1970s, debates over gendered roles, and the increasing attention to urban pollution and pesticide use. No other publication dealing with this period covers the wide range of environmental topics (among others, activism, midwifery, organic farming, recycling, urban cycling, and communal living) or geographic locales, from Yukon to Atlantic Canada. Together, they demonstrate how this period influenced and informed environmental action and issues in ways that have had a long-term impact on Canadian society.
Architecture in Canada