Andrew Benjamin: Writing Art and Architecture (2010)

“In his new book, the philosopher Andrew Benjamin turns his attention to architecture, design, sculpture, painting and writing. Drawing predominantly on a European tradition of modern philosophical criticism running from the German Romantics through Walter Benjamin and beyond, he offers a sequence of meditations on a diverse ensemble of works and themes: on the library and the house, on architectural theory, on Rachel Whiteread, Peter Eisenman, Anselm Kiefer, Peter Nielson, David Hawley, Terri Bird, Elizabeth Presa and others.

In Benjamin’s hands, criticism is bound up with judgment. Objects of criticism always become more than mere documents. These essays dissolve the prejudices that have determined our relation to aesthetic objects and to thought, releasing in their very care and attentiveness to the ‘objects themselves’ the unexpected potentialities such objects harbour. In his sensitivity to what he calls ‘the particularity of material events’, Benjamin’s writing comes to exemplify new possibilities for the contemporary practice of criticism itself.”

Publisher: Re.press, Melbourne, 1 October 2010
Transmission series
ISBN: 9780980668360 (pbk. with colour images)
ISBN-ebook: 9780980668377
Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 license
170 pages

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