Patrizia C. McBride: The Chatter of the Visible: Montage and Narrative in Weimar Germany (2016)

“The Chatter of the Visible examines the paradoxical narrative features of the photo montage aesthetics of artists associated with Dada, Constructivism, and the New Objectivity. While montage strategies have commonly been associated with the purposeful interruption of and challenge to narrative consistency and continuity, McBride offers an historicized reappraisal of 1920s and 1930s German photo montage work to show that its peculiar mimicry was less a rejection of narrative and more an extension or permutation of it—a means for thinking in narrative textures exceeding constraints imposed by “flat” print media (especially the novel and other literary genres).

McBride’s contribution to the conversation around Weimar-era montage is in her situation of the form of the work as a discursive practice in its own right, which affords humans a new way to negotiate temporality; as a particular mode of thinking that productively relates the particular to the universal; or as a culturally specific form of cognition.”

Publisher University of Michigan Press, 2016
Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0
ISBN 9780472053032, 0472053035
x+236 pages

Publisher
OAPEN
WorldCat

PDF, PDF (94 MB)

Aleksei Gan: Constructivism (1922–) [RU, EN]

Through his co-founding with Varvara Stepanova and Alexander Rodchenko of the First Working Group of Constructivists (1921–4), and his publication of Constructivist principles in his book Konstruktivizm (1922), the Russian designer and art theorist Aleksei Gan played a leading role in the development of the Constructivist aesthetic. In his interpretation of Constructivism, which he saw as the creative counterpart to the socio-political tasks of the Revolution, Gan called for creative activity to be politicized to the maximum and for its artistic component to be minimized. His slogans included “we declare uncompromising war on art” and “death to art”, which he attempted to encapsulate in his designs for portable book kiosks, folding street stalls, exhibition posters and clothing, where the objects were reduced to the most simple and functional forms.

Konstruktivizm [Конструктивизм]
Publisher Tverskoe izdatel’stvo, Tver, Summer 1922
70 pages, 23.5 х 19.9 cm
Edition of 2000
via Andrey Kurilkin

Konstruktivizm (Russian, 1922, 23 MB)
Constructivism (English, trans. of extracts by John Bowlt, 1974)

More about Constructivism and Aleksei Gan.

Heather Davis, Etienne Turpin (eds.): Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies (2015)

“Taking as its premise that the proposed geologic epoch of the Anthropocene is necessarily an aesthetic event, this book explores the relationship between contemporary art and knowledge production in an era of ecological crisis, with contributions from artists, curators, theorists and activists.”

Contributors include Amy Balkin, Ursula Biemann, Amanda Boetzkes, Lindsay Bremner, Joshua Clover & Juliana Spahr, Heather Davis, Sara Dean, Elizabeth Ellsworth & Jamie Kruse (smudge studio), Irmgard Emmelhainz, Anselm Franke, Peter Galison, Fabien Giraud & Ida Soulard, Laurent Gutierrez & Valérie Portefaix (MAP Office), Terike Haapoja & Laura Gustafsson, Laura Hall, Ilana Halperin, Donna Haraway & Martha Kenney, Ho Tzu Nyen, Bruno Latour, Jeffrey Malecki, Mary Mattingly, Mixrice (Cho Jieun & Yang Chulmo), Natasha Myers, Jean-Luc Nancy & John Paul Ricco, Vincent Normand, Richard Pell & Emily Kutil, Tomás Saraceno, Sasha Engelmann & Bronislaw Szerszynski, Ada Smailbegovic, Karolina Sobecka, Zoe Todd, Richard Streitmatter-Tran & Vi Le, Anna-Sophie Springer, Sylvère Lotringer, Peter Sloterdijk, Etienne Turpin, Pinar Yoldas, and Una Chaudhuri, Fritz Ertl, Oliver Kellhammer & Marina Zurkow.

Publisher Open Humanities Press, 2015
Critical Climate Change series
Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 3.0 license
ISBN 1785420054, 9781785420054
402 pages

Review: Scott Volz (CAA Reviews, 2018).

Publisher
OAPEN
WorldCat

PDF, PDF, PDF, PDF (12 MB)
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