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Has COVID-19 ushered in the end of the office? Or is it the office’s final triumph? For decades, futurologists have prophesied a boundaryless working world, freed from the cramped confines of the office. During the COVID-19 crisis, employees around the globe got a taste of it. Confined by lockdown to their homes, they met, mingled, collaborated, and created(...)
The momentous, uneventful day: A requiem for the office
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Has COVID-19 ushered in the end of the office? Or is it the office’s final triumph? For decades, futurologists have prophesied a boundaryless working world, freed from the cramped confines of the office. During the COVID-19 crisis, employees around the globe got a taste of it. Confined by lockdown to their homes, they met, mingled, collaborated, and created electronically. At length, they returned to something approaching normality. Or had they glimpsed the normal to come? In''The momentous, uneventful day,'' Gideon Haigh reflects on our ambivalent relationship to office work and office life, how we ended up with the offices we have, how they have reflected our best and worst instincts, and how these might be affected by a world in a time of contagion. Like the factory in the nineteenth century, the office was the characteristic building form of the twentieth, reshaping our cities, redirecting our lives. We all have a stake in how it will change in the twenty-first. Enlivened by copious citations from literature, film, memoir, and corporate history, and interspersed with relevant images,''The momentous, uneventful day'' is the ideal companion for a lively current debate about the role offices will play in the future.
Critical Theory
In praise of copying
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This book is devoted to a deceptively simple but original argument: that copying is an essential part of being human, that the ability to copy is worthy of celebration, and that, without recognizing how integral copying is to being human, we cannot understand ourselves or the world we live in. In spite of the laws, stigmas, and anxieties attached to it, the word(...)
In praise of copying
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This book is devoted to a deceptively simple but original argument: that copying is an essential part of being human, that the ability to copy is worthy of celebration, and that, without recognizing how integral copying is to being human, we cannot understand ourselves or the world we live in. In spite of the laws, stigmas, and anxieties attached to it, the word “copying” permeates contemporary culture, shaping discourse on issues from hip hop to digitization to gender reassignment, and is particularly crucial in legal debates concerning intellectual property and copyright. Yet as a philosophical concept, copying remains poorly understood. Working comparatively across cultures and times, Marcus Boon undertakes an examination of what this word means—historically, culturally, philosophically—and why it fills us with fear and fascination. He argues that the dominant legal-political structures that define copying today obscure much broader processes of imitation that have constituted human communities for ages and continue to shape various subcultures today. Drawing on contemporary art, music and film, the history of aesthetics, critical theory, and Buddhist philosophy and practice, In Praise of Copying seeks to show how and why copying works, what the sources of its power are, and the political stakes of renegotiating the way we value copying in the age of globalization.
Critical Theory
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Ernst Schwitters (1918-1996) began his career in photography in his teens, converting the family bathroom into a darkroom with the consent of his parents, Kurt and Helma Schwitters, at the age of 15 - by which time Ernst was already experimenting with photograms, following a visit from family friend Man Ray. His father encouraged him to undergo formal training in(...)
The colors of Norway, 1943-1963
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Ernst Schwitters (1918-1996) began his career in photography in his teens, converting the family bathroom into a darkroom with the consent of his parents, Kurt and Helma Schwitters, at the age of 15 - by which time Ernst was already experimenting with photograms, following a visit from family friend Man Ray. His father encouraged him to undergo formal training in photography, but Ernst declined, preferring to teach himself, and by 1930 he was already participating in international exhibitions, having found his preferred subject matter in the landscapes of Norway and England. Having led the Schwitters family's migration from Nazi Germany to Norway, Ernst was to receive great acclaim there for both his landscape and architectural photography, and was also able to establish financial security through assignments for the Norwegian advertising agency SS-UNU-Foto. It is little known that Schwitters is one of color photography's pioneers: he began working with color film in 1943, and within two decades, he had created more than 10,000 slides, many of which have been digitally restored for this new volume. The only monograph on the photographer currently in print, the publication debuts Schwitters' vast oeuvre of color landscape photography, and also includes a fascinating account of the digital restoration process that allowed for their publication here.
Photography monographs
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La découverte scientifique et la maîtrise de l'électricité ont bouleversé notre société au même titre que l'invention de l'écriture alphabétique durant l'Antiquité et de l'imprimerie à caractères mobiles au XVe siècle. Il ne s'agit pas seulement d'un phénomène naturel mis au service de l'homme par la science, mais d'un élément central de l'épistémè moderne : l'électricité(...)
Critical Theory
September 2011
L'ère électrique / The electric age
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La découverte scientifique et la maîtrise de l'électricité ont bouleversé notre société au même titre que l'invention de l'écriture alphabétique durant l'Antiquité et de l'imprimerie à caractères mobiles au XVe siècle. Il ne s'agit pas seulement d'un phénomène naturel mis au service de l'homme par la science, mais d'un élément central de l'épistémè moderne : l'électricité a inspiré des écrivains et des artistes, a servi de force d'impulsion au monde de l'industrie et de l'innovation et a redéfini les comportements sociaux. En explorant l'incidence de l'électricité sur le savoir, les pratiques sociales, les médias, la vie sociale et les expériences personnelles, cet ouvrage tente d'en saisir les aspects techniques et culturels dans toute leur complexité. -- The scientific discovery and mastery of electricity created as many important changes in modern society as did the invention of alphabetical writing in antiquity and movable type in the fifteenth century. It is more than a natural phenomenon that science has harnessed for human use; it is a central feature of the modern episteme. It has inspired writers and artists, propelled industry and innovation, and reshaped human social behaviour. Looking at a variety of topics including film, politics, and contemporary art, this volume explores the impact of electricity on knowledge, social practices, media, community life, and subjective experience.
Critical Theory
Klaus Scherübel: VOL.13
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Faisant suite à une série d’expositions monographiques présentée entre 2008 et 2011 en Europe et en Amérique du Nord, cette publication propose un premier aperçu de l’œuvre multiforme de l’artiste austro-canadien Klaus Scherübel. Ancrée dans la tradition de l’art conceptuel, la pratique de Scherübel résiste à toute catégorisation facile. Son travail propose une(...)
Klaus Scherübel: VOL.13
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Faisant suite à une série d’expositions monographiques présentée entre 2008 et 2011 en Europe et en Amérique du Nord, cette publication propose un premier aperçu de l’œuvre multiforme de l’artiste austro-canadien Klaus Scherübel. Ancrée dans la tradition de l’art conceptuel, la pratique de Scherübel résiste à toute catégorisation facile. Son travail propose une investigation systématique de l’activité artistique mettant en question les frontières séparant les fonctions d’artiste, d’historien, de conservateur, d’éditeur, de commanditaire ou de spectateur. En utilisant une variété de stratégies esthétiques, ses entreprises artistiques reconsidèrent des œuvres, des concepts et des genres issues des arts visuels, de la littérature du cinéma et de la télévision. VOL. 13 documente et analyse quelques uns de ses projets les plus connus des vingt dernières années incluant la série Untitled (The Artist at Work) ainsi que ses projets de livre dédiés aux entreprises littéraires et conceptuels du poète français Stéphane Mallarmé et de l’écrivain fictif Jack Torrance tiré du film d’horreur The Shining. Il contient des essais de Jean-François Chevrier et de Patrice Loubier ainsi qu’une entrevue entre Helmut Draxler et l’artiste. Scherübel a personnellement pris en charge la conception de cet ouvrage, nous offrant tout autant une publication sur sa démarche autoréflexive qu’un prolongement de celle-ci.
Contemporary Art Monographs
Francesca Woodman's notebook
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The American photographer Francesca Woodman (1958-1981) spent a brief portion of her childhood in the countryside around Florence, living with her parents in an old farm whose dilapidated interiors were later to influence the backdrops of her mesmerizing self-portraits. In 1977 she returned to Italy, studying in Rome on a year-long RISD honors program. During this tenure,(...)
Francesca Woodman's notebook
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The American photographer Francesca Woodman (1958-1981) spent a brief portion of her childhood in the countryside around Florence, living with her parents in an old farm whose dilapidated interiors were later to influence the backdrops of her mesmerizing self-portraits. In 1977 she returned to Italy, studying in Rome on a year-long RISD honors program. During this tenure, Woodman found five tattered school exercise books, printed in 1906, side-stapled and inscribed in fine cursive penmanship with notes from physics lectures or poems in English and Italian. To these evocative objects, Woodman--already fully formed as the photographer we recognize and admire today--added her characteristic black-and-white photographs, either as small paper prints or as prints made on transparent film that allows the writing beneath to show through, further embellishing them with her own captions or remarks. This facsimile edition of one of these notebooks was selected for publication by Woodman's mother and father as an artist's book of particular beauty and revelatory content that provides unprecedented insight into the emphatically narrative logic of Woodman's photography. Housed in a lightweight printed box, it includes an afterword by George Woodman, Francesca's father, that contextualizes the work within the photographer's artist's book production.
Contemporary Art Monographs
books
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In Soviet Salvage, Catherine Walworth explores how artists on the margins of the Constructivist movement of the 1920s rejected “elitist” media and imagined a new world, knitting together avant-garde art, imperial castoffs, and everyday life. Applying anthropological models borrowed from Claude Lévi-Strauss, Walworth shows that his mythmaker typologies—the “engineer”(...)
Soviet salvage: Imperial debris, revolutionary reuse, and Russian Constructivism
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In Soviet Salvage, Catherine Walworth explores how artists on the margins of the Constructivist movement of the 1920s rejected “elitist” media and imagined a new world, knitting together avant-garde art, imperial castoffs, and everyday life. Applying anthropological models borrowed from Claude Lévi-Strauss, Walworth shows that his mythmaker typologies—the “engineer” and “bricoleur”—illustrate, respectively, the canonical Constructivists and artists on the movement’s margins who deployed a wide range of clever make-do tactics. Walworth explores the relationships of Nadezhda Lamanova, Esfir Shub, and others with Constructivists such as Aleksei Gan, Varvara Stepanova, and Aleksandr Rodchenko. Together, the work of these artists reflected the chaotic and often contradictory zeitgeist of the decade from 1918 to 1929 and redefined the concept of mass production. Reappropriated fragments of a former enemy era provided a wide range of play and possibility for these artists, and the resulting propaganda porcelain, film, fashion, and architecture tell a broader story of the unique political and economic pressures felt by their makers. An engaging multidisciplinary study of objects and their makers during the Soviet Union’s early years, this volume highlights a group of artists who hover like free radicals at the border of existing art-historical discussions of Constructivism and deepens our knowledge of Soviet art and material culture.
books
September 2018
Rice's architectural primer
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A beautifully packaged, idiosyncratic introduction to British building styles, by the acclaimed illustrator and architectural enthusiast Matthew Rice. Covering the grammar and vocabulary of British buildings and the evolution of styles from Norman castles to Norman Foster, the aim is to enable the reader to recognise, understand and date any British building. As(...)
Rice's architectural primer
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A beautifully packaged, idiosyncratic introduction to British building styles, by the acclaimed illustrator and architectural enthusiast Matthew Rice. Covering the grammar and vocabulary of British buildings and the evolution of styles from Norman castles to Norman Foster, the aim is to enable the reader to recognise, understand and date any British building. As Matthew Rice says, ‘Once you can speak any language, conversation can begin, but without it communications can only be brief and brutish. The same is the case with Architecture: an inability to describe the component parts of a building leaves one tongue-tied and unable to begin to discuss what is or is not exciting, dull or peculiar about it.’ With this book in your hand, pocket or car, buildings will break down beguilingly into their component parts, ready for inspection and discussion. There will be no more references to that curly bit on top of the thing with the square protrusions. Ungainly and inept descriptions will be a thing of the past and, fluent in the world of volutes, hood moulds, lobed architraves and bucrania, you will be able to leave a cathedral or country house with as much to talk about as a film or play.
History until 1900, Great Britain
The Bauhaus: #itsalldesign
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This volume offers a comprehensive overview of the extended concept of design that was initiated at the Bauhaus. Alongside rare exhibits from design, architecture, art, film and photography--some of which have never previously been published--the book documents the development processes as well as the socio-political concepts behind the Bauhaus. To underline their(...)
The Bauhaus: #itsalldesign
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This volume offers a comprehensive overview of the extended concept of design that was initiated at the Bauhaus. Alongside rare exhibits from design, architecture, art, film and photography--some of which have never previously been published--the book documents the development processes as well as the socio-political concepts behind the Bauhaus. To underline their relevance for today's creative practice, these ideas are contrasted to current themes in design such as the digital revolution, and the works of numerous present-day artists and designers. The lavishly illustrated publication features essays by renowned authors such as Arthur Rüegg and Jan Boelen, a glossary of the basic ideas behind design at the Bauhaus, as well as a detailed catalogue section. Among others, Olaf Nicolai, Adrian Sauer, Wilfried Kühn and Joseph Grima have created artistic works on the topic especially for the exhibition. Numerous short articles by distinguished designers, artists and architects from all over the world, who, with their ideas, projects and theories reflect on the topicality of the Bauhaus and its influence on 21st-century design, form part of this new and contemporary look at the movement. With works by Josef Albers, Marcel Breuer, Walter Gropius, Marianne Brandt, Wassily Kandinsky, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Herbert Bayer and many others.
Modernism
Fred Sandback: drawings
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The American Fred Sandback (1943–2003), regarded as one of the major sculptors of his generation, had from the beginning of his art career initially used drawings to formulate on paper his ideas of sculptural volumes. Soon he went from depicting isolated elements to thinking of sculpture in relationship to space and to exploring its possibilities on paper. In the 1980s,(...)
Fred Sandback: drawings
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The American Fred Sandback (1943–2003), regarded as one of the major sculptors of his generation, had from the beginning of his art career initially used drawings to formulate on paper his ideas of sculptural volumes. Soon he went from depicting isolated elements to thinking of sculpture in relationship to space and to exploring its possibilities on paper. In the 1980s, Sandback expanded his drawing vocabulary to include work in acrylic, in the pochoir technique or in pastel, which look much more pictorial in contrast to his earlier works on paper. The issue was now less about conceiving sculptures and more about modulating space. As regards sculpture, Sandback no longer thought of it as a given spatial volume, but as a sensual phenomenon per se, which he explored in the drawing. In his late drawings, Sandback moved away from the conditions of a coherent space in order to conceive of sculptures that are boundless from all sides. Only a specific section of the whole is intimated in the drawing, for which Sandback invented unusual techniques: actual incisions instead of drawn lines, for instance, or painterly traces on transparent film. This publication of Sandback’s drawings assembles works from over thirty years, supplemented by sculpture.
Contemporary Art Monographs