Marc James Léger (ed.): The Idea of the Avant Garde: And What It Means Today (2014)

8 October 2018, dusan

“This book is premised on the view that the idea of the avant garde has an increased importance in these times of global political crisis. Much cultural production today is shaped by a biopolitics that construes all creative and knowledge production in terms of capital accumulation. A different kind of culture is possible. This collection of writings, essays, interviews and artworks by many of today’s most radical cultural practitioners and astute commentators on matters avant garde mediates the different strategies and temporalities of avant-garde art and politics. Tracing diverse genealogies and trajectories, the book offers an inter-generational forum of ideas that covers different arts fields, from visual art, art activism, photography, film and architecture, to literature, theatre, performance, intermedia and music.”

Texts by Marc James Léger, Adrian Piper, Andrea Fraser, David Tomas, Catherine Lescarbeau, Hal Foster, Laura Mulvey, Bruce LaBruce, Santiago Sierra, Derek Horton, Christine Wertheim, Lyn Hejinian, Marjorie Perloff, Wu Ming 2, Nikolaus Müller-Schöll, Rabih Mroué, Judith Malina, Moe Angelos, Bill Brown, The Errorist International, Jonas Mekas, Thomas Elsaesser, Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt, Travis Wilkerson, Evan Mauro, Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, Gene Ray, John Roberts, Zanny Begg and Dmitry Vilensky, Owen Hatherley, Michael Webb, Mitchell Joachim, Beatriz Colomina, Boris Groys, Vitaly Komar, Victor Tupitsyn, Gregory Sholette and Krzysztof Wodiczko, Critical Art Ensemble, BAVO, Alexei Monroe, Jean-Hervé Péron, Chris Cutler, Charles Gaines, Jason Robinson, Sara Marcus, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Thanos Chrysakis, Kim Cascone, Marc Couroux, Thérèse Mastroiacovo, Chrysi Papaioannou, and Bill Dane.

Publisher Manchester University Press, Manchester, with Left Curve, Oakland, CA, 2014
ISBN 9780719096914, 071909691X
285 pages

Editor
Exhibition (2018)
Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (16 MB)

Nathan Brown: The Limits of Fabrication: Materials Science, Materialist Poetics (2017)

13 December 2017, dusan

“Poetry, or poiēsis, has long been understood as a practice of making. But how are experiments in the making of poetic forms related to formal making in science and engineering? The Limits of Fabrication takes up this question in the context of recent developments in nanoscale materials science, investigating concepts and ideologies of form at stake in new approaches to material construction. Tracing the direct pertinence of fields crucial to the new materials science (nanotechnology, biotechnology, crystallography, and geodesic design) in the work of Shanxing Wang, Caroline Bergvall, Christian Bök, and Ronald Johnson back to the midcentury development of Charles Olson’s ‘objectist’ poetics, Nathan Brown carves out a tradition of constructivist, nonorganic poetics that has developed in conversation with science and engineering.

While proposing a new approach to the relation of technē (craft, skill) and poiēsis (making, forming), this book also intervenes in philosophical debates concerning the concept of the object, the distinction between organic and inorganic matter, theories of self-organization, and the relation between ‘design’ and ‘nature’. Engaging with Heidegger, Agamben, Whitehead, Stiegler, and Nancy, Brown shows that materials science and materialist poetics offer crucial resources for thinking through the direction of contemporary materialist philosophy.”

Publisher Fordham University Press, New York, 2017
ISBN 9780823272990, 0823272990
xi+296 pages
via Memory of the World

Review: Tom Eyers (boundary2, 2017).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (26 MB)

Nathan Brown, Petar Milat (eds.): Poiesis (2017)

13 September 2017, dusan

A volume based on a three-day symposium of the same title held at MaMa, Zagreb, in 2015.

Contributions by Thomas Schestag, Branka Arsić, David Wills, Jed Rasula, Marie Gil, Alexi Kukuljevic, Amanda Holmes, Goran Sergej Pristaš, Julie Beth Napolin, Aaron Schuster, Dee Morris & Stephen Voyce, and Nathan Brown.

Publisher Multimedijalni institut, Zagreb, and Centre for Expanded Poetics (Concordia University), Montréal, 2017
ISBN 9789537372132
234+xxxiii pages

Publisher

PDF
See also Angela Rawlings’ book Si Tu (2017).