Pop Politics: Activisms at 33 Revolutions, catalogue (2012) [English/Spanish]

The catalogue for an exhibition held at Madrid’s CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo from November 2012 to April 2013, curated by Iván López Munuera.

“The point of departure for Pop Politics is that the political agenda of the visual arts has in many occasions inherited and expanded the experiences of music. The exhibition shows how many artists and art theorists have from their own personal practice visited music, whether as makers, consumers, or critical agents. The exhibition is situated on the margins of the formal consideration of politics, that which refers to forms of government and processes of representation, the taking of decisions and their administration.” (from the Introduction)

With texts by Amparo Lasén, Ferrán Barenblit, Greil Marcus, Ivan López Munuera, José Manuel Costa, Kim Gordon, Lucy O’Brien, Peio Aguirre, and Simon Reynolds.

Publisher CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Madrid, 2012
ISBN 9788445134481
304 pages

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David McNally: Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism (2011)

Monsters of the Market investigates the rise of capitalism through the prism of the body-panics it arouses. Drawing on folklore, literature and popular culture, the book links tales of monstrosity from early-modern England, including Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, to a spate of recent vampire- and zombie-fables from sub-Saharan Africa, and it connects these to Marx’s persistent use of monster-metaphors in his descriptions of capitalism. Reading across these tales of the grotesque, Monsters of the Market offers a novel account of the cultural and corporeal economy of a global market-system. The book thus makes original contributions to political economy, cultural theory, commodification-studies and ‘body-theory’.

Publisher BRILL, 2011
Volume 30 of Historical Materialism Book Series
ISBN 9004201572, 9789004201576
308 pages

review (Mark Worrell, Marx & Philosophy)

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Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht: In 1926: Living at the Edge of Time (1997)

“Travel back to the year 1926 and into the rush of experiences that made people feel they were living on the edge of time. Touch a world where speed seemed the very essence of life. It is a year for which we have no expectations. It was not 1066 or 1588 or 1945, yet it was the year A. A. Milne published Winnie-the-Pooh and Alfred Hitchcock released his first successful film, The Lodger. A set of modern masters was at work–Jorge Luis Borges, Babe Ruth, Leni Riefenstahl, Ernest Hemingway, Josephine Baker, Greta Garbo, Franz Kafka, Gertrude Stein, Martin Heidegger–while factory workers, secretaries, engineers, architects, and Argentine cattle-ranchers were performing their daily tasks.

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht opens up the space-time continuum by exploring the realities of the day such as bars, boxing, movie palaces, elevators, automobiles, airplanes, hair gel, bullfighting, film stardom, dance crazes, and the surprise reappearance of King Tut after a three-thousand-year absence. From the vantage points of Berlin, Buenos Aires, and New York, Gumbrecht ranges widely through the worlds of Spain, Italy, France, and Latin America. The reader is allowed multiple itineraries, following various routes from one topic to another and ultimately becoming immersed in the activities, entertainments, and thought patterns of the citizens of 1926.

We learn what it is to be an “ugly American” in Paris by experiencing the first mass influx of American tourists into Europe. We visit assembly lines which turned men into machines. We relive a celebrated boxing match and see how Jack Dempsey was beaten yet walked away with the hearts of the fans. We hear the voice of Adolf Hitler condemning tight pants on young men. Gumbrecht conveys these fragments of history as a living network of new sensibilities, evoking in us the excitement of another era.”

Publisher Harvard University Press, 1997
ISBN 0674000552, 9780674000551
505 pages

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