Jimmie Durham: A Certain Lack of Coherence: Writings on Art and Cultural Politics (1993)

A collection of writings by the American Indian Movement activist, poet and contemporary artist.

“In 50 articles, reviews, polemics and poems, Durham attacks the bases of the US nation-state, its cowboys’n’indians foundation myths, its commercialisation of Indian wisdom, and the very impossibility of speaking about the Indian experience in English. For a people so massively colonised, victims of an ongoing genocide, art is no luxury. It is the necessarily tricky, duplicitous practice of the Coyote, revealing over and over again the ignorance of power and celebrating its own escapades and escapes.” (from a review by Sean Cubitt, Frieze, 1994)

Edited by Jean Fisher
Publisher Kala Press, London, 1993
ISBN 0947753044, 9780947753047
255 pages
via x

Review: Tony Godfrey (Art Book 1994).

WorldCat

PDF (15 MB, no OCR)
ARG

Mark Wigley: Constant’s New Babylon: The Hyper-Architecture of Desire (1998)

“From 1956 to 1974, the artist Constant Nieuwenhuys worked on a radical proposal for a future architecture. All traces of traditional buildings and social institutions would be abandoned. Everyone would drift through vast labyrinthine interiors and continuously reconstruct the spaces around them to satisfy any desire or stimulate new ones. Architecture becomes a pulsating display of group psychology. This monograph provides the first complete record of the project and includes a selection of texts by Constant and Guy Debord. Published on the occasion of the New Babylon retrospective at Witte de With, Rotterdam, in 1998.”

Publisher Witte de With, and 010 Publishers, Rotterdam, 1998
ISBN 9064503435, 9789064503436
256 pages

Publisher

PDF (removed on 2018-12-5 upon request of image copyright holder)

Richard Barbrook: Class Wargames: Ludic Subversion Against Spectacular Capitalism (2014)

“Why should radicals be interested in playing wargames? Surely the Left can have no interest in such militarist fantasies? Yet, Guy Debord – the leader of the Situationist International – placed such importance on his invention of The Game of War that he described it as the most significant of his accomplishments.

Intrigued by this claim, a multinational group of artists, activists and academics formed Class Wargames to investigate the political and strategic lessons that could be learnt from playing his ludic experiment. While the ideas of the Situationists continue to be highly influential in the development of subversive art and politics, relatively little attention has been paid to their strategic orientation. Determined to correct this deficiency, Class Wargames is committed to exploring how Debord used the metaphor of the Napoleonic battlefield to propagate a Situationist analysis of modern culture and politics. Inspired by his example its members have also hacked other military simulations: H.G. Wells’ Little Wars; Chris Peers’ Reds versus Reds and Richard Borg’s Commands & Colors. Playing wargames is not a diversion from politics: it is the training ground of tomorrow’s communist insurgents.

Fusing together historical research on avant-garde artists, political revolutionaries and military theorists with narratives of five years of public performances, Class Wargames provides a strategic and tactical manual for subverting the economic, political and ideological hierarchies of early-21st century neoliberal capitalism. The knowledge required to create a truly human civilisation is there to be discovered on the game board!” (from the back cover)

Publisher Minor Compositions, an imprint of Autonomedia, 2014
Creative Commons BY-NC 3.0 Licence
ISBN 9781570272936
444 pages
via Marcell

Publisher

PDF (8 MB)
Scribd
See also Guy Debord’s ‘The Game of War’ – The Film (26 min, c2011)