Machine-Age Exposition, catalogue (1927)

Poster, via Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library

Exhibition catalogue of the Machine-Age Exposition, held on May 16-28, 1927, at 119 West 57th Street in New York, and advertised as the first event bringing together “architecture, engineering, industrial arts and modern art.”

The exhibition was initiated by Jane Heap of The Little Review, a New York literary magazine, and organised along with Société des urbanistes, Brussels; U.S.S.R. Society of Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries; Kunstgewerbeschule, Vienna; Czlonkowie Group Praesens, Warsaw; Architects D.P.L.G, Paris; and Advisory American Section.

The volume contains a panorama of European and American architecture and art, with photo documentation, and following articles: “Foreword: Architecture of this Age” by Hugh Ferriss, “The Aesthetic of the Machine and Mechanical Introspection in Art” by Enrico Prampolini, “Machine and Art” by Alexander Archipenko, “The Americanization of Art” by Louis Lozowick, “French Architecture” by André Lurçat, “Architecture Opens Up Volume” by Szymon Syrkus, “Machine-Age Exposition” by Jane Heap, “The Poetry of Forces” by Mark Turbyfill, and “Modern Glass Construction” by Frederick L. Keppler.

The artists committee of the exhibition included Alexander Archipenko, Robert Chanler, Andrew Dasberg, Charles Demuth, Muriel Draper, Marcel Duchamp, Josef Frank, Hugh Ferriss, Louis Lozowick, André Lurçat, Elie Nadleman, Man Ray, Boardman Robinson, Charles Sheeler, Ralph Steiner, Szymon Syrkus and L. Van der Swallmen.

Represented countries: “America”, Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Poland and Russia.

Published in New York, 1927
44 pages
via Hagley Digital Archives

Commentary (E. B. White, The New Yorker, 1927): “That the machine is the tutelary symbol of the universal dynamism can be discovered at the Machine Age Exposition. […] Drawings, photographs, cubist and constructionist figures by reputable modern artists are side by side with cogs, motor boat propellers, Crane valves, insides of pianos and diving suits.”

Machine-Age Exposition at Monoskop wiki

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You Killed Me First: The Cinema of Transgression (2012) [English/German]

“Basically, in one sentence, give us the definition of the ‘Cinema of Transgression’.” Nick Zedd: “Fuck you.”

Nightmarish scenarios of violence, dramatic states of mind, and perverse sexual abysses – the films of the Cinema of Transgression that were consciously aimed at shock, provocation, and confrontation, bear witness to an extraordinary radicality. In the 1980s a group of filmmakers from the Lower East Side in New York went on a collision course with the conventions of American society. Transcending all moral or aesthetic boundaries, the low budget films reveal social hardship met with sociopolitical indifference. Sometimes shot with stolen camera equipment, the films contain strident analyses of life in the Lower East Side defined by criminality, brutality, drugs, AIDS, sex, and excess. The catalogue is published on the occasion of the worldwide first exhibition on the Cinema of Transgression, You Killed Me First at KW Institute of Contemporary Art in Berlin.

The catalogue includes contributions by Sylvère Lotringer, Carlo McCormick, Jonas Mekas, Susanne Pfeffer, Jack Sargeant, Nick Zedd and collages by Leonard Neumann LSD.

Edited by Susanne Pfeffer
Publisher KW Institute of Contemporary Art, Berlin, and Walther Koenig, Cologne, 2012
ISBN 3863351576
176 pages

Video from exhibition (3 min)

Exhibition
Publisher

PDF (110 MB, no OCR, updated on 2016-12-23)

an anti-catalog (1977)

“An Anti-Catalog was the work of the Catalog Committee of the group Artists Meeting for Cultural Change (AMCC). A landmark publication of the 1970s, its purpose was to protest the Whitney Museum of American Art’s bicentennial exhibition, which was titled Three Centuries of American Art. The Whitney show featured John D. Rockefeller III’s collection of mainly eighteenth and nineteenth-century American art–a collection that featured only one African American and one woman artist.

The Catalog Committee, which consisted of fifteen artists and two art historians, spent almost a year producing an eighty-page book containing articles and documents. Originally conceived as a critique of art historian E.P. Richardson’s catalog for the Whitney exhibition, the committee evolved ideas for pictorial essays that would encompass native American art, African-American art, art by women, critiques of pervasive class bias in the art world, and critical examinations of cultural institutions. As the committee wrote in its description of its project, ‘we share the belief that culture should no longer exist merely as an extension of the economic interests or the personal ‘tastes’ of the wealthy and powerful. Nor can we hope to transform culture outside of a struggle to transform the society from which it springs.’ Strong words that have lost little of their relevance for today’s cultural scene.” (Alan Wallach)

Written, designed, and produced by Rudolf Baranik, Sarina Bromberg, Sarah Charlesworth, Susanne Cohn, Carol Duncan, Shawn Gargagliano, Eunice Golden, Janet Koenig, Joseph Kosuth, Anthony McCall, Paul Pechter, Elaine Bendock Pelosini, Aaron Roseman, Larry Rosing, Ann Marie Rousseau, Alan Wallach, Walter Weissman.

Publisher Artists Meeting for Cultural Change, New York, 1977
80 pages
via Dark Matter Archives, via Primary Information

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