Emese Kürti: Screaming Hole: Poetry, Sound and Action as Intermedia Practice in the Work of Katalin Ladik (2017)

“This book focuses on the experimental practice of Katalin Ladik, a poet, performer and actress born in the former Yugoslavia. Her career as a poet writing in Hungarian language began in the intellectual circles of the neo-avant-garde journal Új Symposion (New Symposium) in Novi Sad, but the subversiveness of her feminine practice gave her a distinctive position in the whole Yugoslav neo-avant-garde scene as early as the late 1960s. At the same time, linearity was also being replaced in Ladik’s poetic works by an extended notion of poetry, as she realised her actionism in a complex and mutual intermedial relationship between poetry, sound and visuality. Her performances attracted lively attention not only on account of an interpretation of poetry and sound that was radically new both in Yugoslavia and abroad at the time; her use of the eroticized body also seemed to lack any predecessors in the local avant-garde of the day. Katalin Ladik, who synthesized the traditions of Balkan folk music and Hungarian folklore, could work supraethnically, as it were, in this multiethnic Yugoslav context, using the references of multiple cultures, which suited with persistently international spirit of the avant-garde.”

Translated by Katalin Orbán
Publisher acb ResearchLab, Budapest, 2017
ISBN 9789631283617, 9631283615
247 pages
via Author

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (36 MB)

bell hooks: Art on My Mind: Visual Politics (1995)

“In her first book about art and the “politics of the visual,” hooks, a writer known for her clarifying views on feminism and black women, addresses the deplorable absence of discourse on black artists, especially by black critics. Why, she asks, has art played a minimal role in the lives of most African Americans? With a firm grasp of the racial and cultural climate in which black aesthetics must grow, hooks offers some astute answers to that question and holds out hope for change. She then hones her aesthetic in her adept interpretations of the work and impact of black artists, including Romare Bearden, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Alison Saar, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Carrie Mae Weems, Lorna Simpson, and Margo Humphreys. Hooks also discusses portrayals of black women and men in art and, in an essay on photography, how the ‘struggle over images’ became part of the black liberation movement. Art matters, hooks assures us; it helps us forge our identities while forcing society to evolve from being exclusive to inclusive. As erudite and sophisticated as hooks is, she is also eminently readable, even exhilarating.” (Donna Seaman)

Publisher The New Press, New York, 1995
ISBN 1565842634, 9781565842632
xvi+224 pages
via Arch

Reviews: Okwui Enwezor (Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, 1996), Phoebe Farris (Art Journal, 1996), Publishers Weekly (1995), Kirkus Review (1995).

Author
Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (18 MB, updated on 2019-11-5)

Documenta X, the Book: Politics Poetics (1997)

“For the first time in the history of documenta, the companion publication attempts to go beyond a survey and interpretation of the exhibited works of art to document and analyze the cultural development of the western world from 1945 to 1997 in a rich selection of paintings, photos, plans, sketches, maps, essays, quotations, discussions, poems, philosophical essays and manifestos. The book unites the diverse forms of expression in an impressive collage. The artists of documenta X are introduced in a number of artist’s inserts. A provocative, enlivening and thoroughly current reader and reference work for anyone interested in the art and culture of our times.

Since 1955, the documenta exhibition in Kassel, Germany, has served as the world’s most important forum for contemporary art. This year’s series of interlocking exhibitions, conferences, performances, lectures, and – notably – publications will be the tenth documenta and the last of this century. Organized by the respected French curator Catherine David, documenta X is conceived as a manifestation culturelle including a program entitled “100 Days – 100 Guests” that will host an exceptional group of international figures. Acknowledging both the significance of its position at the end of the century and the dramatic aesthetic, technological, and political challenges facing culture in the future, Catherine David has carefully structured the programming for documenta X around two themes: first, a critical reflection on the development of culture since 1945, and, second, an interdisciplinary dialogue about the need for new categories of critical and political discourse. The question where culture stands today in the world serves as the focal intersection of these two organizing themes. Each previous documenta has had a profound impact on the art world: documenta X promises to serve as a genuinely international forum for artists, writers, and thinkers from all disciplines.

Conversations with: Benjamin Buchloh, New York; Andreas Branzi, Milan; Etienne Balibar, Paris; Jacques Rancière, Paris; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, New York Original contributions by: Peter Bürger, Bremen; Daniel Defert, Paris; Fabrizio Gallanti, Genoa; Serge Gruzinski, Paris; David Harvey, Baltimore; Masao Miyoshi, San Diego; Peter Noller and Klaus Ronneburger, Frankfurt; Hans-Joachim Ruckhaeberle, Berlin; Saskia Sassen, New York; Paul Sztulman, Paris, and others.”

Edited by documenta and Museum Fridericianum Veranstaltungs
Idea and conception by Catherine David and Jean-François Chevrier
Publisher Cantz, Ostfildern-Ruit, 1997
ISBN 3893229116, 9783893229116
830 pages
via Arch

Exh. reviews: Monica Amor (Third Text, 1997), Nancy Princenthal (Art/Text, 1997), Masao Miyoshi (New Left Review, 1998), Sabine Fabo (Leonardo, 1998), Kathryn Hixson (New Art Examiner, 1997), more.
Commentary: Universes in Universe (n.d.)

Exhibition website (archived by Vuk Cosic)
Exhibition archive
Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (74 MB)