Elizabeth Ellsworth, Jamie Kruse (eds.): Making the Geologic Now: Responses to Material Conditions of Contemporary Life (2012)

Making the Geologic Now announces shifts in cultural sensibilities and practices. It offers early sightings of an increasingly widespread turn toward the geologic as source of explanation, motivation, and inspiration for creative responses to conditions of the present moment. In the spirit of a broadside, this edited collection circulates images and short essays from over 40 artists, designers, architects, scholars, and journalists who are actively exploring and creatively responding to the geologic depth of “now.” Contributors’ ideas and works are drawn from architecture, design, contemporary philosophy and art. They are offered as test sites for what might become thinkable or possible if humans were to collectively take up the geologic as our instructive co-designer—as a partner in designing thoughts, objects, systems, and experiences.

Recent natural and human-made events triggered by or triggering the geologic have made volatile earth forces sense-able and relevant with new levels of intensity. As a condition of contemporary life in 2012, the geologic “now” is lived as a cascade of events. Humans and what we build participate in their unfolding. Today, and unlike the environmental movements of the 1970s, the geologic counts as “the environment” and invites us to extend our active awareness of inhabitation out to the cosmos and down to the Earth’s iron core.

A new cultural sensibility is emerging. As we struggle to understand and meet new material realities of earth and life on earth, it becomes increasingly obvious that the geologic is not just about rocks. We now cohabit with the geologic in unprecedented ways, in teeming assemblages of exchange and interaction among geologic materials and forces and the bio, cosmo, socio, political, legal, economic, strategic, and imaginary. As a reading and viewing experience, Making the Geologic Now is designed to move through culture, sounding an alert from the unfolding edge of the “geologic turn” that is now propagating through contemporary ideas and practices.

Publisher Punctum Books, Brooklyn, New York, December 2012
Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 3.0 License
ISBN 9780615766362
262 pages

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Paper Monument: A Journal of Contemporary Art (2007–)

Paper Monument is a print journal of contemporary art published by n+1 and designed by Project Projects.

Edited by Dushko Petrovich and Roger White
Publisher n+1 Foundation, Brooklyn, New York
ISSN 1938-8918
84 pages each

Issue 1 (Fall 2007, HTML, updated on 2017-12-28)
Issue 2 (Fall 2008, HTML, updated on 2017-12-28)
Issue 3 (Spring 2010, HTML, added on 2014-2-10, updated on 2017-12-28)
Issue 4 (Summer 2013, HTML, added on 2017-12-28)

Cindy Sherman: The Complete Untitled Film Stills (2003)

“Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills is a series of black-and-white photographs created between 1977 and 1980. Witty, provocative, and searching, this lively catalogue of female roles inspired by the movies touches a vital nerve in our culture. This book marks the first time that the entire series has been published as a unified work. Sherman has arranged the sequence of the pictures, and has written a personal essay about their making. To the original sixty-nine Film Stills she has also added a seventieth, from a roll of film that for some years was lost. Includes 70 duotone images.”

Edited by David Frankel
Publisher The Museum of Modern Art, New York
164 pages
via f-f-t-t.com

Commentary: Judith Williamson (Screen, 1983).

Exhibition (1997)
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