Stephen Johnstone (ed.): The Everyday (2008)

“Numerous international exhibitions and biennales have born witness to the range of contemporary art engaged with the everyday and its antecedents in Dada and Surrealism, Pop, Situationism and Fluxus. Art’s turn to the ordinary is symptomatic of a desire to address things in the world, rather than the history and institutions of art. It shows a recognition of ordinary dignity or the accidentally miraculous; an engagement with a new kind of anthropology; an immersion in the pleasures of popular culture; or a meditation on what happens, when nothing happens. The celebration of the everyday has oppositional and dissident overtones, offering a voice to the silenced and proposing possibilities for change. This collection of writings by artists, theorists and critics assembles for the first time a comprehensive anthology on the everyday in the world of contemporary art.”

Publisher Whitechapel, 2008
Documents of Contemporary Art series
ISBN 0262600749, 9780262600743
239 pages

Publisher

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Nicholas Gane: The Future of Social Theory (2004)

“The basic concept of society has come under attack – political acts, critical theory, new media and even history itself have undermined what we think of as the social. The Future of Social Theory brings together new interviews with the world’s leading social theorists on what society means today: Zygmunt Bauman, John Urry, Saska Sassen, Bruno Latour, Scott Lash, Nikolas Rose, Judith Butler and Francoise Verges. The topics covered include: liquid modernization and the individualization of the society; the shift towards global forms of chaos and complexity; the displacement of the social into global city networks; the shift away from a theory of the social to a theory of space; the transformation of society with the rise of new technology; the continuing influence of historical forms of political power; society as a gendered idea; and society as a product of Empire.”

Publisher Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004
ISBN 0826470661, 9780826470669
210 pages

Publisher

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George Gessert: Green Light: Toward an Art of Evolution (2010)

Humans have bred plants and animals with an eye to aesthetics for centuries: flowers are selected for colorful blossoms or luxuriant foliage; racehorses are bred for the elegance of their frames. Hybridized plants were first exhibited as fine art in 1936, when the Museum of Modern Art in New York showed Edward Steichen’s hybrid delphiniums. Since then, bio art has become a genre; artists work with a variety of living things, including plants, animals, bacteria, slime molds, and fungi. Many commentators have addressed the social and political concerns raised by making art out of living material. In Green Light, however, George Gessert examines the role that aesthetic perception has played in bio art and other interventions in evolution.

Gessert looks at a variety of life forms that humans have helped shape, focusing on plants—the most widely domesticated form of life and the one that has been crucial to his own work as an artist. We learn about Onagadori chickens, bred to have tail feathers twenty or more feet long; pleasure gardens of the Aztecs, cultivated for intoxicating fragrance; Darwin’s relationship to the arts; the rise and fall of eugenics; the aesthetic standards promoted by national plant societies; a daffodil that looks like a rose; and praise for weeds and wildflowers. Gessert surveys recent bio art and its accompanying philosophical problems, the “slow art” of plant breeding, and how to create new life that takes into account what we know about ecology, aesthetics, and ourselves.

Publisher MIT Press, 2010
Leonardo Books series
ISBN 0262014149, 9780262014144
233 pages

publisher
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