Hal Foster: Bad New Days: Art, Criticism, Emergency (2015)

“Bad New Days examines the evolution of art and criticism in Western Europe and North America over the last twenty-five years, exploring their dynamic relation to the general condition of emergency instilled by neoliberalism and the war on terror.

Considering the work of artists such as Thomas Hirschhorn, Tacita Dean, and Isa Genzken, and the writing of thinkers like Jacques Rancière, Bruno Latour, and Giorgio Agamben, Hal Foster shows the ways in which art has anticipated this condition, at times resisting the collapse of the social contract or gesturing toward its repair; at other times burlesquing it.

Against the claim that art making has become so heterogeneous as to defy historical analysis, Foster argues that the critic must still articulate a clear account of the contemporary in all its complexity. To that end, he offers several paradigms for the art of recent years, which he terms “abject,” “archival,” “mimetic,” and “precarious.””

Publisher Verso, London and New York, 2015
ISBN 1784781460, 9781784781460
208 pages

Presentation and discussion (video, The Kitchen, NYC, Sep 2015)
Interview (John Douglas Millar, Mute, Nov 2015)

Reviews: Mark Steven (Affirmations 2015), Brian Dillon (Guardian 2015), Rachel Wetzler (ArtNews 2015).

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Film Technique and Film Acting: The Cinema Writings of V.I. Pudovkin (1949–)

“Vsevolod Pudovkin was one of the leading Soviet film directors in the ‘golden age’ of silent cinema in the 1920s. His films – especially The Mother, The End of St Petersburg and Storm over Asia – are classics of silent cinema. Like Eisenstein, Pudovkin was also a major theorist of film. This translation of Pudovkin´s seminal writings brings together his two key books, Film Technique and Film Acting. The essays highlight the development of Pudovkin´s revolutionary thinking on scripts, directing, time, sound, and acting.”

Stanley Kubrick in a 1969 interview: “The most instructive book on film aesthetics I came across was Pudovkin’s Film Technique, which simply explained that editing was the aspect of film art form which was completely unique, and which separated it from all other art forms. The ability to show a simple action like a man cutting wheat from a number of angles in a brief moment, to be able to see it in a special way not possible except through film — that this is what it was all about. This is obvious, of course, but it’s so important it cannot be too strongly stressed. Pudovkin gives many clear examples of how good film editing enhances a scene, and I would recommend his book to anyone seriously interested in film technique.”

Translated by Ivor Montagu
Introduction by Lewis Jacobs
English edition first published in 1949
Publisher Vision Press, London, 1954
xviii+204+153 pages
via FC

WorldCat

JPGs, PDF, multiple formats (Internet Archive)

Bojana Cvejić, Goran Sergej Pristaš (eds.): Parallel Slalom: A Lexicon of Non-aligned Poetics (2013)

“What does it take to create one’s own concepts? What does it mean to own a concept? Parallel Slalom is an edited collection of essays that attempt to address these questions from the viewpoint of artistic and theoretical practices that have been developing since the 1960s, especially in the period after the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1991. Artists, dramaturges, theorists, editors, writers or ‘cultural workers’ who write or are written about in this volume don’t always belong to the same historical, geopolitical and cultural framework that the curator Ješa Denegri called, the ‘common Yugoslav cultural space’ also because a considerable number of writers come from contexts other than those in Eastern Europe. Yet they share a kind of thought that arises from within, or close to, artistic practice as a poetical instrument of looking past art into the production of political, social and aesthetic realms.”

“Among the concepts developed are: Americanism; artivisim; acting without publicizing; Chaplinism; cinema clubs; cinematic modes of action; contextual art; delay; delayed audience; digitality; East Dance Academy; generations; group sex; laziness; operation; politics of affection and uneasiness; proceduralism; protocol; radical amateurism; reconstruction, second-hand-knowledge; slideshow; temporary zones, shelters, and project spaces; tiger’s leap into history; unburdened, aesthetically; unlearned, terminally.”

Contributions by Ric Allsopp, Jonathan Beller, Ivana Bago, Bojana Cvejić, Isabel de Naveran, Tomislav Gotovac, Owen Hatherley, Ana Janevski, Janez Janša, Marko Kostanić, Bojana Kunst, Antonia Majača, Aldo Milohnić, Goran Sergej Pristaš, Mårten Spångberg, Mladen Stilinović, Miško Šuvaković, Terminally Unschooled, Terms study group, and Ana Vujanović.

Publisher Walking Theory ‒ TkH, Belgrade, and CDU – Centre for Drama Art, Zagreb, 2013
ISBN 8690589961, 9788690589968
411 pages
via Academia.edu

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