Radu Stern: Against Fashion: Clothing as Art 1850-1930 (1992–)

“An indispensable guide to the historical avant-garde’s appropriation of clothing as an art form; includes over 100 illustrations and an anthology of artists’ writings.

The late nineteenth-century invention of ‘fashion’ as we understand it today inspired avant-garde artists of the period to create an art form to counter commercial fashion. These artists saw clothing not as a symbol of class distinction but as a force for shaping experience—an opportunity to make things new, to go beyond the traditional boundaries of art. For many artists, therefore, dress design was too important to be left to the fashion designers; they would appropriate clothing as an art form that could break through the traditional boundaries of “pure” art to act directly on life.

Against Fashion is the history of the modern relationship between artists and this ideal ‘anti-fashion.’ Radu Stern traces the development of clothes as art by artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He discusses contributions to the new art form by various artistic movements of the historical avant-garde, including Art Nouveau, the Werkbund, Cubism, Futurism, Constructivism, and the Bauhaus; he examines the work of such key figures as Henry van de Velde, Gustav Klimt, and Sonia Delaunay. The book includes more than 100 illustrations, many in color, as well as an anthology of essential writings and documents by artists and writers of the period, some of them translated into English for the first time. The artists and works examined display a diversity of styles and ideas, but all share the desire to reject the mercantile logic of commercial fashion and replace it with a utopian ‘anti-fashion.'”

Originally published as A contre-courant: vêtements d’artistes / Gegen den Strich: Kleider von Künstlern, 1900-1940, Benteli, Bern, 1992.

Publisher MIT Press, 2004
ISBN 0262194937, 9780262194938
205 pages

Reviews: Robert Radford (The Art Book, 2004), Diana Crane (Modernism/Modernity, 2005), Elana Shapira (Studies in the Decorative Arts, 2005), Roy R. Behrens (Leonardo, 2005), Elana Shapira (West 86th, 2005), Jane Tynan (J Consumer Culture, 2005).

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WorldCat

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Thor Magnusson: Sonic Writing: Technologies of Material, Symbolic, and Signal Inscriptions (2019)

“Sonic Writing explores how contemporary music technologies trace their ancestry to previous forms of instruments and media. Studying the domains of instrument design, musical notation, and sound recording under the rubrics of material, symbolic, and signal inscriptions of sound, the book describes how these historical techniques of sonic writing are implemented in new digital music technologies. With a scope ranging from ancient Greek music theory, medieval notation, early modern scientific instrumentation to contemporary multimedia and artificial intelligence, it provides a theoretical grounding for further study and development of technologies of musical expression. The book draws a bespoke affinity and similarity between current musical practices and those from before the advent of notation and recording, stressing the importance of instrument design in the study of new music and projecting how new computational technologies, including machine learning, will transform our musical practices.

Sonic Writing offers a richly illustrated study of contemporary musical media, where interactivity, artificial intelligence, and networked devices disclose new possibilities for musical expression. Thor Magnusson provides a conceptual framework for the creation and analysis of this new musical work, arguing that contemporary sonic writing becomes a new form of material and symbolic design–one that is bound to be ephemeral, a system of fluid objects where technologies are continually redesigned in a fast cycle of innovation.”

Publisher Bloomsbury Academic, New York & London, 2019
ISBN 9781501313851, 1501313851
xiv+290 pages

Reviews: Gregory Taylor (Cycling ’74, 2019), Diana Chester (Interference, 2019).

Author’s research blog
Publisher
WorldCat

PDF
EPUB

Mike Kelley: Foul Perfection: Essays and Criticism / Minor Histories: Statements, Conversations, Proposals (2003-2004)

Collected writings Los Angeles artist Mike Kelley. The first volume contains his critical writings and commentary, the latter focuses on his own work.

“The work of artist Mike Kelley (1954-2012) embraced performance, installation, drawing, painting, video, and sculpture. Drawing distinctively on high art and vernacular traditions, including historical research, popular culture, and psychology, Kelley came to prominence in the 1980s with a series of sculptures composed of craft materials. His more recent work offered dialogues with architecture and with repressed memory syndrome, and a sustained inquiry into his own aesthetic and social history. The subjects on which Kelley wrote are as varied as his artistic media. They include the work of fellow artists, sound, caricature, the uncanny, UFOlogy, and gender-bending.

While the first volume, Foul Perfection, contains thematic essays and writings about other artists; the second collection concentrates on Kelley’s own work, ranging from texts in ‘voices’ that grew out of scripts for performance pieces to expository critical and autobiographical writings.”

Edited by John C. Welchman
Publisher MIT Press, 2003 and 2004
Writing Art series
ISBN 9780262112703, 0262112701 (1), 9780262112772, 0262112779 (2)
xx+238 and xxv+431 pages

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Publisher (2)
WorldCat (1)
WorldCat (1)

Volume 1
Volume 2