John Roberts: Revolutionary Time and the Avant-Garde (2015)

“Why the avant-garde of art needs to be rehabilitated today

Since the decidedly bleak beginning of the twenty-first century, art practice has become increasingly politicized. Yet few have put forward a sustained defence of this development. Revolutionary Time and the Avant-Garde is the first book to look at the legacy of the avant-garde in relation to the deepening crisis of contemporary capitalism.

An invigorating revitalization of the Frankfurt School legacy, Roberts’s book defines and validates the avant-garde idea with an erudite acuity, providing a refined conceptual set of tools to engage critically with the most advanced art theorists of our day, such as Hal Foster, Andrew Benjamin, Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière, Paolo Virno, Claire Bishop, Michael Hardt, and Toni Negri.”

Publisher Verso, London, 2015
ISBN 9781781689134, 178168913X
xii+322 pages

Reviews: Noni Brynjolson (Field, 2015), Danica Radoshevich (Red Wedge, 2015), Kim Charnley (Platypus Review, 2016), Geoffrey Wildanger (LA Review of Books, 2016).

Publisher
WorldCat

HTML

A Bed, a Chair and a Table: Stories from the Poortgebouw (2017)

“A Bed, a Chair and a Table is a publication about the Poortgebouw, a former squat and vibrant living community located in the South of Rotterdam. In this book, oral histories from inside and outside the Poortgebouw are interlaced with material from various institutional and personal archives. By bringing together these tales of resilience, political struggle, frustration and friendship with historical documents, this book brings forward new perspectives about the Poortgebouw’s unique history and its importance in the contemporary city. The starting point of the book was the Autonomous Archive, a local archiving machine built from parts of different computers by the inhabitants of the Poortgebouw and a group of students from XPUB.

A Bed, a Chair and a Table is the fourth ‘Special Issue’ conceptualised, developed and produced by the students from the Experimental Publishing course (XPUB) of the Piet Zwart Institute Media Design Master. It provides a trigger for the reader to further explore the Poortgebouw’s past and to see this building, meet its community, and discuss a potential future amidst all of its complexities. It is a testament to the archive as not the end, but the beginning of a debate.”

Publisher XPUB, Rotterdam, and Meta/Books, Amsterdam, December 2017
ISBN 9789082118247
Special Issue series, 4
Peer Production License
193 pages

Archive (wiki)
Publisher

PDF, PDF (122 MB)

Museum Highlights: The Writings of Andrea Fraser (2005)

“Andrea Fraser’s work, writes Pierre Bourdieu in his foreword to Museum Highlights, is able to ‘trigger a social mechanism, a sort of machine infernale whose operation causes the hidden truth of social reality to reveal itself.’ It often does this by incorporating and inhabiting the social role it sets out to critique—as in a performance piece in which she leads a tour as a museum docent and describes the men’s room in the same elevated language that she uses to describe seventeenth-century Dutch paintings. Influenced by the interdisciplinarity of postmodernism, Fraser’s interventionist art draws on four primary artistic and intellectual frameworks—institutional critique, with its site-specific examination of cultural context; performance; feminism, with its investigation of identity formation; and Bourdieu’s reflexive sociology. Fraser’s writings form an integral part of her artistic practice, and this collection of texts written between 1985 and 2003—including the performance script for the docent’s tour that gives the book its title—both documents and represents her work.

The writings in Museum Highlights are arranged to reflect different aspects of Fraser’s artistic practice. They include essays that trace the development of critical ‘artistic practice’ as cultural resistance; performance scripts that explore art institutions and the public sphere; and texts that explore the ambivalent relationship of art to the economic and political interests of its time. The final piece, ‘Isn’t This a Wonderful Place? (A Tour of a Tour of the Guggenheim Bilbao),’ reflects on the role of museums in an era of globalization. Among the book’s 30 illustrations are stills from performance pieces, some never before published.”

Edited by Alexander Alberro
Publisher MIT Press, 2005
ISBN 0262062445, 9780262062442
xxxvii+291 pages

Reviews: Kirsi Peltomaki (Afterimage, 2005), Melissa Gronlund (Frieze, 2005), Louis Byrne (Art Book, 2007), N.A. Hayes (PopMatters, 2008).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (104 MB, no OCR)