books
$42.95
(available to order)
Summary:
“All too often,” wrote disabled architect Ronald Mace, “designers don’t take the needs of disabled and elderly people into account.” Building Access investigates twentieth-century strategies for designing the world with disability in mind. Commonly understood in terms of curb cuts, automatic doors, Braille signs, and flexible kitchens, Universal Design purported to create(...)
Building access: universal design and the politics of disability
Actions:
Price:
$42.95
(available to order)
Summary:
“All too often,” wrote disabled architect Ronald Mace, “designers don’t take the needs of disabled and elderly people into account.” Building Access investigates twentieth-century strategies for designing the world with disability in mind. Commonly understood in terms of curb cuts, automatic doors, Braille signs, and flexible kitchens, Universal Design purported to create a built environment for everyone, not only the average citizen. But who counts as “everyone,” Aimi Hamraie asks, and how can designers know? Blending technoscience studies and design history with critical disability, race, and feminist theories, Building Access interrogates the historical, cultural, and theoretical contexts for these questions, offering a groundbreaking critical history of Universal Design. Hamraie reveals that the twentieth-century shift from “design for the average” to “design for all” took place through liberal political, economic, and scientific structures concerned with defining the disabled user and designing in its name. Tracing the co-evolution of accessible design for disabled veterans, a radical disability maker movement, disability rights law, and strategies for diversifying the architecture profession, Hamraie shows that Universal Design was not just an approach to creating new products or spaces, but also a sustained, understated activist movement challenging dominant understandings of disability in architecture, medicine, and society.
books
November 2017
Architectural Theory
$42.95
(available in store)
Summary:
The enormous popular interest in the world of fungi and the mycelium testifies to its tremendous resonance as a metaphor for new ways of thinking, new systems and behaviors. Taking its inspiration from this world, ''Let's Become Fungal!'' looks at a range of Indigenous practices from Latin America, the Caribbean and Asia that are rooted in multispecies collaboration,(...)
Environment and environmental theory
October 2023
Let's become fungal! Mycelium teachings and the arts: Based on conversations with indigenous wisdom keepers, artists, curators, feminists and mycologists
Actions:
Price:
$42.95
(available in store)
Summary:
The enormous popular interest in the world of fungi and the mycelium testifies to its tremendous resonance as a metaphor for new ways of thinking, new systems and behaviors. Taking its inspiration from this world, ''Let's Become Fungal!'' looks at a range of Indigenous practices from Latin America, the Caribbean and Asia that are rooted in multispecies collaboration, symbiosis, alliances, non-monetary resource exchange, decentralization, bottom-up methods and mutual dependency--all suggestive of the behavior of the mycelium. Each of the book's 12 chapters offers teachings on collaboration, decoloniality, nonlinearity, toxicity, mobilization, biomimicry, death and being nonbinary, while also examining the world of fungi. ''Let's Become Fungal!'' shows how fungi can inspire artists, collectives, organizations, educators, policymakers, designers, scientists, anthropologists, curators, urbanists, activists, gardeners, community leaders, farmers and others to become more fungal in their ways of working and being.
Environment and environmental theory
$49.95
(available to order)
Summary:
Seduced by Modernity is the first book devoted to the life and work of Canadian-born modernist photographer Margaret Watkins. Best known for art and advertising photography executed in New York in the 1920s, Watkins was active in the Clarence White school of photography and a participant in the shift from pictorialism to modernism. Mary O'Connor and Katherine Tweedie tell(...)
Photography monographs
September 2007, Montreal Kingston London Ithica
Seduced by modernity : The photography of Margaret Watkins
Actions:
Price:
$49.95
(available to order)
Summary:
Seduced by Modernity is the first book devoted to the life and work of Canadian-born modernist photographer Margaret Watkins. Best known for art and advertising photography executed in New York in the 1920s, Watkins was active in the Clarence White school of photography and a participant in the shift from pictorialism to modernism. Mary O'Connor and Katherine Tweedie tell the story of a dedicated artist in difficult circumstances whose working life spanned a Victorian upbringing in Hamilton, Ontario, and the witnessing of the first Soviet Five-Year Plan. The authors use feminist and historical questions as well as close readings of the photographs to relate Watkins' work to questions of gender, modernity, and visual culture. Watkins' modernism, which involved experimentation and a radical focus on form, transgressed boundaries of conventional, high-art subject matter. Her focus was daily life and her photographs, whether an exploration of the objects in her New York kitchen or the public and industrial spaces of Glasgow, Paris, Cologne, Moscow, and Leningrad in the 1930s, strike a balance between abstraction and an evocation of the everyday, offering a unique gendered perspective on modernism and modernity. Seduced by Modernity makes available for the first time an extensive representation of Watkins' work in high-quality reproduction as part of an exemplary interdisciplinary study that honours an intrepid Canadian artist who refused to be confined by borders, convention, or gender.
Photography monographs
Data feminism
$39.95
(available to order)
Summary:
Today, data science is a form of power. It has been used to expose injustice, improve health outcomes, and topple governments. But it has also been used to discriminate, police, and surveil. This potential for good, on the one hand, and harm, on the other, makes it essential to ask: Data science by whom? Data science for whom? Data science with whose interests in mind?(...)
Archive, library and the digital
March 2020
Data feminism
Actions:
Price:
$39.95
(available to order)
Summary:
Today, data science is a form of power. It has been used to expose injustice, improve health outcomes, and topple governments. But it has also been used to discriminate, police, and surveil. This potential for good, on the one hand, and harm, on the other, makes it essential to ask: Data science by whom? Data science for whom? Data science with whose interests in mind? The narratives around big data and data science are overwhelmingly white, male, and techno-heroic. In ''Data feminism,'' Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren Klein present a new way of thinking about data science and data ethics—one that is informed by intersectional feminist thought. Illustrating data feminism in action, D'Ignazio and Klein show how challenges to the male/female binary can help challenge other hierarchical (and empirically wrong) classification systems. They explain how, for example, an understanding of emotion can expand our ideas about effective data visualization, and how the concept of invisible labor can expose the significant human efforts required by our automated systems. And they show why the data never, ever ''speak for themselves.'' ''Data feminism'' offers strategies for data scientists seeking to learn how feminism can help them work toward justice, and for feminists who want to focus their efforts on the growing field of data science. But ''Data feminism'' is about much more than gender. It is about power, about who has it and who doesn't, and about how those differentials of power can be challenged and changed.
Archive, library and the digital
$17.95
(available to order)
Summary:
Almost a half-century after Yayoi Kusama debuted her landmark installation Infinity Mirror Room - Phalli's Field (1965) in New York, the work remains challenging and unclassifiable. Shifting between the Pop-like and the Surreal, the Minimal and the metaphorical, the figurative and the abstract, the psychotic and the erotic, with references to "free love" and psychedelia,(...)
Yayoi Kusuma : Infinity mirror room - Phalli's Field
Actions:
Price:
$17.95
(available to order)
Summary:
Almost a half-century after Yayoi Kusama debuted her landmark installation Infinity Mirror Room - Phalli's Field (1965) in New York, the work remains challenging and unclassifiable. Shifting between the Pop-like and the Surreal, the Minimal and the metaphorical, the figurative and the abstract, the psychotic and the erotic, with references to "free love" and psychedelia, it seemed to embody all that the 1960s was about, while at the same time denying the prevailing aesthetics of its time. The installation itself was a room lined with mirrored panels and carpeted with several hundred brightly polka-dotted soft fabric protrusions into which the visitor was completely absorbed. Kusama simply called it "a sublime, miraculous field of phalluses." A precursor of performance-based feminist art practice, media pranksterism, and "Occupy" movements, Kusama (born in 1929) was once as well known as her admirers - Andy Warhol, Donald Judd, and Joseph Cornell. In this first monograph on an epoch-defining work, Jo Applin looks at the installation in detail and places it in the context of subsequent art practice and theory as well as Kusama's own (as she called it) "obsessional art." Applin also discusses Kusama's relationship to her contemporaries, particularly those working with environments, abstract-erotic sculpture, and mirrors, and those grappling with such issues as abstraction, eroticism, sexuality, and softness. The work of Lee Lozano, Claes Oldenburg, Louise Bourgeois, and Eva Hesse is seen anew when considered in relation to Yayoi Kusama's.
Art Theory
$50.95
(available to order)
Summary:
Over the past several decades, scholars in both the social sciences and humanities have moved beyond the idea that there is a "body proper": a singular, discrete biological organism with an individual psyche. They have begun to perceive embodiment as dynamic rather than static, as experiences that vary over time and across the world as they are shaped by discourses,(...)
Beyond the body proper: Reading the anthropology of material life
Actions:
Price:
$50.95
(available to order)
Summary:
Over the past several decades, scholars in both the social sciences and humanities have moved beyond the idea that there is a "body proper": a singular, discrete biological organism with an individual psyche. They have begun to perceive embodiment as dynamic rather than static, as experiences that vary over time and across the world as they are shaped by discourses, institutions, practices, technologies, and ideologies. What has emerged is a multiplicity of bodies, inviting a great many disciplinary points of view and modes of interpretation. The forty-seven readings presented in this volume range from classic works of social theory, history, and ethnography to more recent investigations into historical and contemporary modes of embodiment. "Beyond the body proper" includes nine sections conceptually organized around themes such as everyday life, sex and gender, and science. Each section is preceded by interpretive commentary by the volume’s editors. Within the collection are articles and book excerpts focused on bodies using tools and participating in rituals, on bodies walking and eating, and on the female circumcision controversy, as well as pieces on medical classifications, spirit possession, the commodification of body parts, in vitro fertilization, and an artist/anatomist’s "plastination" of cadavers for display. Materialist, phenomenological, and feminist perspectives on embodiment appear along with writings on interpretations of pain and the changing meanings of sexual intercourse. Essays on these topics and many others challenge Eurocentric assumptions about the body as they speak to each other and to the most influential contemporary trends in the human sciences.
Critical Theory
$14.00
(available to order)
Summary:
Admired by Marx and Engels, the Surrealists, the Situationists, Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes, the great utopian socialist Charles Fourier (1772-1837) has been many things to many people: a proto-feminist, a Surrealist ancestor, a cantankerous cosmologist, a social critic and humorist and to this day one of France's truest visionary thinkers. He was also, as this(...)
The hierarchies of cuckoldry and bankruptcy
Actions:
Price:
$14.00
(available to order)
Summary:
Admired by Marx and Engels, the Surrealists, the Situationists, Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes, the great utopian socialist Charles Fourier (1772-1837) has been many things to many people: a proto-feminist, a Surrealist ancestor, a cantankerous cosmologist, a social critic and humorist and to this day one of France's truest visionary thinkers. He was also, as this volume demonstrates, a maniacal taxonomist. In this zoological guidebook to cuckoldry and commerce, Fourier offers a caustic critique of the bankruptcy of marriage and the prostitution of the economy, and the hypocrisies of a civilization that over-regulates sexual congress while allowing the financial sector to screw over the public. Gathered together here for the first time are Fourier's two “Hierarchies” --humorously regimented parades of civilization's cheaters and cheated-on in the domestic sphere of sex and the economic sphere of buying and selling commodities. “The Hierarchy of Cuckoldry” --translated into English for the first time--presents 72 species of the male cuckold, ranging from such “common class” cases as the Health-Conscious Cuckolds, to the short-horned Sympathetic, Optimist and Mystical Cuckolds, and the Long-horned varieties of the Irate, Disgraced and Posthumous Cuckolds. For Fourier, these amount to 72 manifestations of women's “secret insurrection” against the institution of marriage. “The Hierarchy of Bankruptcy” presents 36 species of the fraudulent bankrupt: a range of Light, Grandiose, and Contemptible shades of financial manipulators who force creditors, cities and even nations to bail them out of ultimately profitable bankruptcies. In these attacks on the morality of monogamy and the perils of laissez-faire capitalism, Fourier's “Hierarchies” resonate uncannily with our contemporary world.
Critical Theory
$43.95
(available to order)
Summary:
For the past two decades Louise Lawler has been taking photographs of art in situ, from small black-and-white images of art in people's homes to large format glossy color pictures of art in museums and in auction houses. In addition she has produced a variety of objects-paperweights, etched drinking glasses, matchbooks, gallery announcements-all of which describe how art(...)
Photography monographs
October 2006, Cambridge, (MA), Columbus
Louise Lawler : twice untitled and other pictures (looking back)
Actions:
Price:
$43.95
(available to order)
Summary:
For the past two decades Louise Lawler has been taking photographs of art in situ, from small black-and-white images of art in people's homes to large format glossy color pictures of art in museums and in auction houses. In addition she has produced a variety of objects-paperweights, etched drinking glasses, matchbooks, gallery announcements-all of which describe how art comes to accrue value as it moves through various systems of exchange. Lawler's oeuvre was essential in creating an expanded field for photography, it was crucial in postmodern debates over theories of representation, it remains indelible within the field of institutional critique, and it has always been trenchant in its sustained commitment to a feminist vision of art, art history, and contemporary art practice. But Lawler is also an old-fashioned "artist's artist," long overdue for the kind of serious reconsideration and recognition that this volume affords. The very self-effacing nature of Lawler's practice, however, her continual suspicion about notions of authorship-and her sly disregard for museological conventions-have meant that she has resisted precisely the usual mid-career retrospective. "Twice untitled and other pictures", published in conjunction with Lawler's first major museum exhibition in the United States, organized by the Wexner Center for the Arts, eats away at the standard museum practices of chronology, linear development, and the presentation of masterpieces, opting instead to explore such themes and undercurrents in Lawler's practice as her relationship to sculpture, her long history of collaborative projects, her production of such ephemera as napkins, matchbooks, and announcement cards, and the steady political dimension of her work-which culminated most recently in works that are deeply critical of the American invasion of Iraq. With essays by art historian and political theorist Rosalyn Deutsche and curators Ann Goldstein and Helen Molesworth.
Photography monographs
Louise Bourgeois
$59.95
(available to order)
Summary:
One of the century's most distinguished artists, Louise Bourgeois is an utterly unique figure. Born in Paris in 1911, Bourgeois spent most of her career receiving little recognition from the art community. She has worked closely to many of the century's key artistic moments, from Surrealism to Abstract Expressionism to feminist art, and yet she remains distinct from all(...)
Contemporary Art Monographs
May 2003, London
Louise Bourgeois
Actions:
Price:
$59.95
(available to order)
Summary:
One of the century's most distinguished artists, Louise Bourgeois is an utterly unique figure. Born in Paris in 1911, Bourgeois spent most of her career receiving little recognition from the art community. She has worked closely to many of the century's key artistic moments, from Surrealism to Abstract Expressionism to feminist art, and yet she remains distinct from all of them. An extraordinarily influential sculptor, she has worked, often experimentally, with materials varying from alabaster, plaster, latex, bronze and marble. Bourgeois is equally admired for her intimate drawings, often combining fragments of text, and her highly personal writings, which often address her long and complex life story. With the backdrop of a conflicted and sexually complicated family upbringing, her struggles as an artist in a world reserved for men, as well as her experiences as a mother, the subject of her work is as broad as the materials in which she expresses them. Critic Paulo Herkenhoff (with Thyra Goodeve) has been in discussion with Bourgeois for many years. Topics in their interview range from her troubled relationship with her father, to men's fashions, to her recollections of Marcel Duchamp, whom she knew personally. Critic and curator Robert Storr's survey chronicles the unique trajectory of Bourgeois' work and life from a highly personal point of view. In his «Focus», critic Allan Schwartzman concentrates on Cell (You Better Grow Up) (1993), an intense cage-like space. For her «Artist's Choice» Bourgeois has selected extracts from the novel Bonjour Tristesse (1954) by Francoise Sagan, whose story about a young girl's response to her father's amorous relationships parallels to some degree the artist's own childhood experiences. The artist's writings include an early text, 'The Puritan', from 1947, alongside discussions of her own work, autobiographical writings and artist's projects.
Contemporary Art Monographs