Matthew Fuller: How to Sleep: The Art, Biology and Culture of Unconsciousness (2018)

“Sleep is quite a popular activity, indeed most humans spend around a third of their lives asleep. However, cultural, political, or aesthetic thought tends to remain concerned with the interpretation and actions of those who are awake. How to Sleep argues instead that sleep is a complex vital phenomena with a dynamic aesthetic and biological consistency.

Arguing through examples drawn from contemporary, modern and renaissance art; from literature; film and computational media, and bringing these into relation with the history and findings of sleep science, this book argues for a new interplay between biology and culture. Meditations on sex, exhaustion, drugs, hormones and scientific instruments all play their part in this wide-ranging exposition of sleep as an ecology of interacting processes.

How to Sleep builds on the interlocking of theory, experience and experiment so that the text itself is a lively articulation of bodies, organs and the aesthetic systems that interact with them. This book won’t enhance your sleeping skills, but will give you something surprising to think about whilst being ostensibly awake.”

Publisher Bloomsbury Academic, London, 2018
Lines series
ISBN 1474288707, 9781474288705
192 pages

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Jindřich Štyrský: Emilie Comes to Me in a Dream (1933/1997)

Jindřich Štyrský (1899–1942) was a painter, poet, photographer, collage artist and editor. A founding member of The Surrealist Group of Czechoslovakia he edited Erotická revue that included illustrations by well-known Czech artists and had an imprint called Edice 69 (Edition 69) where Emilie přichází ke mně ve snu, a portfolio of 10 erotic surrealist photo-collages, appeared in 1933 as its sixth and final volume. Štyrský believed that in pornography he had found a destabilizing medium that could be used to subvert established social and artistic norms. Bohuslav Brouk, a psychoanalyst affiliated with the Czech surrealists, contributed an afterword in which he commented forcefully on the subject of pornography as art. Despite its small run of 69 copies, the book is now considered a masterpiece of Czech Surrealism.

This new edition contains 12 collages, two of which were edited out from the original.

New edition
With an afterword by Bohuslav Brouk
Publisher Ubu Gallery, New York, 1997
35 pages
via Oh Top Book Photobooks

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (low res, 5 MB)
See also collection of 21 collages in Centre Pompidou

R. Bruce Elder: Dada, Surrealism, and the Cinematic Effect (2013)

“This book deals with the early intellectual reception of the cinema and the manner in which art theorists, philosophers, cultural theorists, and especially artists of the first decades of the twentieth century responded to its advent. While the idea persists that early writers on film were troubled by the cinema’s lowly form, this work proposes that there was another, largely unrecognized, strain in the reception of it. Far from anxious about film’s provenance in popular entertainment, some writers and artists proclaimed that the cinema was the most important art for the moderns, as it exemplified the vibrancy of contemporary life.

This view of the cinema was especially common among those whose commitments were to advanced artistic practices. Their notions about how to recast the art media (or the forms forged from those media’s materials) and the urgency of doing so formed the principal part of the conceptual core of the artistic programs advanced by the vanguard art movements of the first half of the twentieth century. This book, a companion to the author’s previous, Harmony & Dissent, examines the Dada and Surrealist movements as responses to the advent of the cinema.”

Publisher Wilfrid Laurier University Press, Waterloo, 2013
Film and Media Studies series
ISBN 9781554586257, 1554586259
x+765 pages

Reviews: John W. Locke (Canadian J of Film Studies 2014), Robin Walz (Canadian J of History 2014), Bart Testa (U Toronto Quarterly 2015).

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WorldCat

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