$34.99
(available to order)
Summary:
In an era when technology, biology, and culture are becoming ever more closely connected, The Dada Cyborg explains how the cyborg as we know it today actually developed between 1918 and 1933 when German artists gave visual form to their utopian hopes and fantasies in a fearful response to World War I. In what could be termed a prehistory of the posthuman, Matthew Biro(...)
The Dada cyborg: vision of the new human in Weimar Berlin
Actions:
Price:
$34.99
(available to order)
Summary:
In an era when technology, biology, and culture are becoming ever more closely connected, The Dada Cyborg explains how the cyborg as we know it today actually developed between 1918 and 1933 when German artists gave visual form to their utopian hopes and fantasies in a fearful response to World War I. In what could be termed a prehistory of the posthuman, Matthew Biro shows the ways in which new forms of human existence were imagined in Germany between the two world wars through depictions of cyborgs. Examining the work of Hannah Höch, Raoul Hausmann, George Grosz, John Heartfield, Otto Dix, and Rudolf Schlichter, he reveals an innovative interpretation of the cyborg as a representative of hybrid identity, as well as a locus of new modes of awareness created by the impact of technology on human perception. Tracing the prevalence of cyborgs in German avant-garde art, Biro demonstrates how vision, hearing, touch, and embodiment were beginning to be reconceived during the Weimar Republic. Biro’s unique and interdisciplinary analysis offers a substantially new account of the Berlin Dada movement, one that integrates the group’s poetic, theoretical, and performative practices with its famous visual strategies of photomontage, assemblage, and mixed-media painting to reveal radical images of a “new human.”
Art Theory
$29.95
(available to order)
Summary:
In this book the author challenges the implicit authority of witnessing through the examination of a series of contemporary artworks, all of which make the act of witnessing visible, open to inspection and critique. Considering such artists as Marina Abramovic, James Luna, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Eduardo Kac, and Ann Hamilton, Blocker investigates the artists and(...)
Seeing witness: visuality and the ethnics of testimony
Actions:
Price:
$29.95
(available to order)
Summary:
In this book the author challenges the implicit authority of witnessing through the examination of a series of contemporary artworks, all of which make the act of witnessing visible, open to inspection and critique. Considering such artists as Marina Abramovic, James Luna, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Eduardo Kac, and Ann Hamilton, Blocker investigates the artists and spectators who look, the technologies they look with, and the forms of power and moral authority that permit their viewing.
Art Theory
Subterranean twin cities
$21.00
(available to order)
Summary:
In Subterranean Twin Cities, geologist, historian, and urban speleologist Greg Brick takes us on an adventurous, educational, and—thankfully—sanitary tour beneath the streets and into the myriad tunnels, caves, and industrial spaces that make up the Twin Cities’ fascinating and surprisingly vast underground landscape. Greg Brick has been exploring, researching, and(...)
Subterranean twin cities
Actions:
Price:
$21.00
(available to order)
Summary:
In Subterranean Twin Cities, geologist, historian, and urban speleologist Greg Brick takes us on an adventurous, educational, and—thankfully—sanitary tour beneath the streets and into the myriad tunnels, caves, and industrial spaces that make up the Twin Cities’ fascinating and surprisingly vast underground landscape. Greg Brick has been exploring, researching, and writing about the St. Paul and Minneapolis underground for more than two decades. The author of Iowa Underground: A Guide to the State’s Subterranean Treasures, he has worked as a hydrogeologist and geologist at environmental consulting firms around the country. His work has been featured in National Geographic Adventure Magazine as well as on the History Channel.
Urban Theory
Art and the end of apartheid
$35.95
(available to order)
Summary:
The first book to fully explore cosmopolitan modern art by black South Africans under apartheid Black South African artists have typically had their work labeled “African art” or “township art,” qualifiers that, when contrasted with simply “modernist art,” have been used to marginalize their work both in South Africa and internationally. In Art and the End of(...)
Art and the end of apartheid
Actions:
Price:
$35.95
(available to order)
Summary:
The first book to fully explore cosmopolitan modern art by black South Africans under apartheid Black South African artists have typically had their work labeled “African art” or “township art,” qualifiers that, when contrasted with simply “modernist art,” have been used to marginalize their work both in South Africa and internationally. In Art and the End of Apartheid,John Peffer considers in depth the work of black South African artists in the decades leading up to the end of apartheid in 1994. Peffer examines painting and graphic art, photography, avant-garde and performance art, and popular and protest art through artist collectives (such as the Thupelo Art Project and the Medu Art Ensemble) and individuals such as Durant Sihlali and Santu Mofokeng. He shows how South African artists imagined what “postapartheid” could mean during the time of apartheid, even as they struggled with immediate issues of censorship, militancy, street violence and torture, and, more broadly, the problem of self-representation and the social role of art.
Art Theory
L.A. under the influence
$44.95
(available to order)
Summary:
In the American city, property rights involve not one but numerous stakeholders, some connected to the parcel by title and others through less formal arrangements, whether political, economic, or cultural. Negotiations between these stakeholders over the use of property are frequently complicated, even convoluted. In L.A. under the Influence, Roger Sherman contends(...)
L.A. under the influence
Actions:
Price:
$44.95
(available to order)
Summary:
In the American city, property rights involve not one but numerous stakeholders, some connected to the parcel by title and others through less formal arrangements, whether political, economic, or cultural. Negotiations between these stakeholders over the use of property are frequently complicated, even convoluted. In L.A. under the Influence, Roger Sherman contends that it is these negotiations, rather than more commonly accepted factors like history, symbolism, and planning, that not only shape a city but also influence the development of its smallest common increment: the individual parcel.
Urban Theory
$29.95
(available in store)
Summary:
Challenging the pervasive idea that corporate capitalism corrupted the idealism of modernist architecture in the postwar era, this publication shows that architecture’s wartime partnership with corporate America was founded on shared anxieties and ideals. Business and architecture were brought together in innovative ways, as shown by Shanken’s reading of magazine(...)
Architectural Theory
February 2009, Minneapolis, London
194X : architecture, planning, and consumer culture on the american home front
Actions:
Price:
$29.95
(available in store)
Summary:
Challenging the pervasive idea that corporate capitalism corrupted the idealism of modernist architecture in the postwar era, this publication shows that architecture’s wartime partnership with corporate America was founded on shared anxieties and ideals. Business and architecture were brought together in innovative ways, as shown by Shanken’s reading of magazine advertisements for Revere Copper and Brass, U.S. Gypsum, General Electric, and other companies that prominently featured the work of leading progressive architects, including Louis I. Kahn, Eero Saarinen, and Walter Gropius.
Architectural Theory
$45.95
(available to order)
Summary:
Members of the Frankfurt School have had an enormous effect on Western thought, beginning soon after Max Horkheimer became the director of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt am Main in 1930. Also known as the Horkheimer Circle, the group included such eminent intellectuals as Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Leo Lowenthal, and(...)
The Frankfurt school in exile
Actions:
Price:
$45.95
(available to order)
Summary:
Members of the Frankfurt School have had an enormous effect on Western thought, beginning soon after Max Horkheimer became the director of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt am Main in 1930. Also known as the Horkheimer Circle, the group included such eminent intellectuals as Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Leo Lowenthal, and Friedrich Pollock. Fleeing Nazi oppression, Horkheimer moved the Institute and many of its affiliated scholars to Columbia University in 1934, where it remained until 1950. Until now, the conventional portrayal of the Institute has held that its members found refuge by relocating to Columbia but that they had little contact with, or impact on, American intellectual life. With insight and clarity, Thomas Wheatland demonstrates that the standard account is wrong. Based on deep archival research in Germany and in the United States, and on interviews conducted with luminaries such as Daniel Bell, Bernadine Dohrn, Peter Gay, Todd Gitlin, Nathan Glazer, Tom Hayden, Robert Merton, and others, Wheatland skillfully traces the profound connections between the Horkheimer Circle’s members and the intellectual life of the era. Reassessing the group’s involvement with the American New Left in the 1960s, he argues that Herbert Marcuse’s role was misunderstood in shaping the radical student movement’s agenda. More broadly, he illustrates how the Circle influenced American social thought and made an even more dramatic impression on German postwar sociology. Although much has been written about the Frankfurt School, this is the first book to closely examine the relationship between its members and their American contemporaries. The Frankfurt School in Exile uncovers an important but neglected dimension of the history of the Frankfurt School and adds immeasurably to our understanding of the contributions made by its émigrés to postwar intellectual life.
Critical Theory
$22.25
(available to order)
Summary:
In this book the author offers a critical, philosophical, and historical inquiry into the characteristics and consequences of this consumer subculture. For Azuma, one of Japan’s leading public intellectuals, otaku culture mirrors the transformations of postwar Japanese society and the nature of human behavior in the postmodern era. He traces otaku’s ascendancy to the(...)
Otaku: Japan's Database Animals
Actions:
Price:
$22.25
(available to order)
Summary:
In this book the author offers a critical, philosophical, and historical inquiry into the characteristics and consequences of this consumer subculture. For Azuma, one of Japan’s leading public intellectuals, otaku culture mirrors the transformations of postwar Japanese society and the nature of human behavior in the postmodern era. He traces otaku’s ascendancy to the distorted conditions created in Japan by the country’s phenomenal postwar modernization, its inability to come to terms with its defeat in the Second World War, and America’s subsequent cultural invasion. More broadly, Azuma argues that the consumption behavior of otaku is representative of the postmodern consumption of culture in general, which sacrifices the search for greater significance to almost animalistic instant gratification.
Architectural Theory
$32.50
(available to order)
Summary:
An intellectual event, Derrida and the Time of the Political marks the first time since Jacques Derrida’s death in 2004 that leading scholars have come together to critically assess the philosopher’s political and ethical writings. Skepticism about the import of deconstruction for political thought has been widespread among American critics since Derrida’s work became(...)
Critical Theory
January 2009, Durham, London
Derrida and the time of the political
Actions:
Price:
$32.50
(available to order)
Summary:
An intellectual event, Derrida and the Time of the Political marks the first time since Jacques Derrida’s death in 2004 that leading scholars have come together to critically assess the philosopher’s political and ethical writings. Skepticism about the import of deconstruction for political thought has been widespread among American critics since Derrida’s work became widely available in English in the late 1970s.
Critical Theory
$44.95
(available to order)
Summary:
Although of another place and time, the Bloomsbury group confronted issues that are remarkably current : international crises, war, the value of craft in an industrialized world, women’s rights, environmental protection, and the search for the true, the good, and the beautiful in their art and their lives. This publication, an exhibition catalog produced by the Herbert(...)
A room of their own : the Bloomsbury artists in American collections
Actions:
Price:
$44.95
(available to order)
Summary:
Although of another place and time, the Bloomsbury group confronted issues that are remarkably current : international crises, war, the value of craft in an industrialized world, women’s rights, environmental protection, and the search for the true, the good, and the beautiful in their art and their lives. This publication, an exhibition catalog produced by the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, examines the group’s responses to these issues, providing a valuable mirror on how people can address similar concerns today. A hundred years after the Bloomsbury group was established, their story still resonates and brings together a variety of interests across many artistic and intellectual pursuits.
Art Theory