Paul Sharits, Józef Robakowski: Attention: Light!, catalogue (2004)

“In the early 1980s, American artist Paul Sharits sent Józef Robakowski plans for a film entitled Attention: Light with the suggestion that Robakowski produce it in Poland. The film was to be a visual rendition of the Mazurka in F minor, Op. 68#4 by Frederick Chopin. Unfortunately, due to unmitigated circumstances including the imposition of martial law in Poland, Robakowski was unable to fulfill Sharits’ wish.

This unique project was eventually realised in 2004 and was the highlight of the program Attention: Light! held at the University at Buffalo’s Center for the Arts, and which featured works by Paul Sharits (T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G; Piece Mandala/End War; Word Movie-Flux Film 39; Tails) and Józef Robakowski (Test 1; Proba II/An Attempt II; 1,2,3,4…; Impulsatory/Impulsators; Video Piesni/Video Songs; Katy Energetyczne/The Energy Angles).

A black and white booklet, published in conjunction with the screening, features forwards by Edmund Cardoni (Hallwalls Executive Director) and Fritzie Brown (CEC ArtsLink Executive Director), essays by Joanna Raczynska (“Four Short Films by Paul Sharits”), Lukasz Ronduda (“Attention: Light!: Józef Robakowski’s Light Based Films and Video Works”), Józef Robakowski (“‘Art’ Friend-A Memoir”), Wieslaw Michalak (“Attention: Light! Technical Description”), and a coda by Malgorzata Potocka. The catalogue also features photos, film scores, and film stills.

Attention: Light was curated by CEC Arts Link curator in residence Lukasz Ronduda, and by Joanna Raczynska, Hallwalls Media Arts Director.”

Edited by Łukasz Ronduda
Publisher Hallwalls, Buffalo, NY, 2004
Design Marianka Dobkowska and Krzysiek Bielecki
ISBN 8388277634
44 pages

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Thomas Elsaesser (ed.): Harun Farocki: Working on the Sightlines (2004)

“For more than thirty years Harun Farocki has been a filmmaker, documentarist, film-essayist and installation artist. What preoccupies him above all is not so much an image of life, but the life of images, as they surround us in the newspapers, the cinema, history books, user manuals, posters, CCTV footage and advertising.

His vast oeuvre of some sixty films includes three feature films (Zwischen den Kriegen/Between the Wars, Etwas wird sichtbar: Vietnam/In Your Eyes: Vietnam, Wie Man sieht/As You See), essay films (e.g. Images of the World-Inscription of War), critical media-pieces, experimental work, children’s features for television, historical film essays (e.g. on Peter Lorre), `learning-films’ in the tradition of Brecht (e.g. Workers Leaving the Factory) and installation pieces (e.g. Still Life).

In this monograph, Elsaesser approaches Farocki’s work from different critical perspectives, as well as reflecting on his extraordinary biography. The volume is complemented by interviews, a selection of writings by Farocki and an annotated filmography.”

Publisher Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, 2004
Film Culture in Transition series
ISBN 905356635X, 9789053566350
379+[32] pages

OAPEN

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László Moholy-Nagy: The Art of Light (2010) [Spanish]

An artist and thinker of astounding energy and ability, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy was a true world citizen of the early twentieth century, an ambassador-at-large for Constructivism, Suprematism, Dada and the Bauhaus. He brought the same Constructivist optimism to every medium he tackled, from plexiglass and light sculpture to typography to his photographic experiments in color to his Suprematist canvases, his influential pedagogy at the Bauhaus and at the Institute of Design in Chicago. Moholy-Nagy’s concept of the arts as a totality, his pedagogy and his confidence in the new industrial culture that would level distinctions between art and craft led him into all fields of creative production. The ultimate modernist Renaissance man, Moholy-Nagy was prolific in so many realms that his detractors inevitably charged him with dilettantism. This accusation ignores his very real innovations in photography–for example his photograms–and light sculpture, as well as the fact that the artist’s aims possessed a conceptual unity in their common aspiration to make an “art of light.”

László Moholy-Nagy: The Art of Light presents Moholy-Nagy’s work in all of its glorious unity and diversity. Including more than 200 works, from painting, photography (black and white and color) and photograms to collages, films and graphic design, it emphasizes his greatest years of productivity, from 1922 to the end of his life. The Art of Light is the new definitive volume on this hero of modernism.

László Moholy-Nagy: El Arte de la Luz
Book coordination: Doménico Chiappe, Luisa Lucuix
Editor: Emilio Ruiz Mateo
Publisher: La Fábrica Editorial / Círculo de Bellas Artes, Madrid
ISBN: 8492841257, 9788492841424
264 pages

exhibition (Madrid, 2010)

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