Julian Stallabrass: Contemporary Art: A Very Short Introduction (2006)

“Bloody toy soldiers, gilded shopping carts, and embroidered tents. Contemporary art is supposed to be a realm of freedom where artists shock, break taboos, flout generally received ideas, and switch between confronting viewers with works of great emotional profundity and jaw-dropping triviality. But away from shock tactics in the gallery, there are many unanswered questions. Who is really running the art world? What effect has America’s growing political and cultural dominance had on art?

Julian Stallabrass takes us inside the international art world to answer these questions, and to argue that behind contemporary art’s variety and apparent unpredictability lies a grim uniformity. Its mysteries are all too easily explained, its depths much shallower than they seem. Contemporary art seeks to bamboozle its viewers while being the willing slave of business and government.”

Publisher Oxford University Press, 2006
Volume 146 of Very short introductions
ISBN 0192806467, 9780192806468
154 pages

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Mario Carpo: The Alphabet and the Algorithm (2011)

“Digital technologies have already changed architecture—architectural form as well as the way architecture is designed and built. But if the digital is a revolution, which tradition is being revolutionized? If it is a “paradigm shift,” which architectural paradigm is shifting? In The Alphabet and the Algorithm, Mario Carpo points to one key practice of modernity: the making of identical copies. Carpo highlights two instances of identicality crucial to the shaping of modern architecture: in the fifteenth century, Leon Battista Alberti’s invention of architectural design—the humanistic idea of building as the identical replication of an author’s intentions; and, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the mass production of identical copies from mechanical master models, matrixes, imprints, or molds.

The modern power of the identical, Carpo argues, has come to an end with the rise of digital technologies. All that is digital is variable. In architecture, this means the end of notational limitations, of mechanical standardization, and possibly of the Albertian, authorial way of building by design. Charting the rise and fall of the paradigm of identicality, Carpo compares new forms of postindustrial, digital craftsmanship to traditional hand-making, and to the cultures and technologies of variations that existed before the coming of machine-made, identical copies. Carpo reviews the unfolding of digitally based design and construction from the early 1990s to the present, and suggests a new agenda for architecture in an age of variable media, generic objects, and participatory authorship.”

Publisher MIT Press, 2011
Writing Architecture series
ISBN 0262515806, 9780262515801
190 pages

Reviews: Aureli (Architectural Review, 2011), Djalali (2011), Abrahamson (2011), Diamanti (2012), Allen (Reviews in Cultural Theory, 2014).

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Simon Morley (ed.): The Sublime (2010)

“In the contemporary world, where technology, spectacle, and excess seem to eclipse nature, the individual, and society, what might be the characteristics of a contemporary sublime? If there is any consensus, it is in the idea that the sublime represents a testing of limits to the point at which fixities begin to fragment. This anthology examines how contemporary artists and theorists explore ideas of the sublime, in relation to the unpresentable, transcendence, terror, nature, technology, the uncanny, and altered states.

Providing a philosophical and cultural context for discourse around the sublime in recent art, the book surveys the diverse and sometimes conflicting interpretations of the term as it has evolved from the writings of Longinus, Burke, and Kant to present-day writers and artists. The sublime underlies the nobility of Classicism, the awe of Romantic nature, and the terror of the Gothic. In the last half-century, the sublime has haunted postwar abstraction, returned from the repression of theoretical formalism, and has become a key term in critical discussions of human otherness and posthuman realms of nature and technology.”

Artists surveyed include: Marina Abramović, Joseph Beuys, Tacita Dean, Walter De Maria, A K Dolven, Olafur Eliasson, Andreas Gursky, Jitka Hanzlová, Gary Hill, Susan Hiller, Shirazeh Houshiary, Anish Kapoor, Mike Kelley, Anselm Kiefer, Yves Klein, Richard Long, Barnett Newman, Tony Oursler, Cornelia Parker, Gerhard Richter, Doris Salcedo, Lorna Simpson, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Fred Tomaselli, James Turrell, Luc Tuymans, Bill Viola, Zhang Huan

Writers include: Marco Belpoliti, John Berger, Paul Crowther, Jacques Derrida, Okwui Enwezor, Jean Fisher, Barbara Claire Freeman, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Doreet LeVitte-Harten, Eleanor Heartney, Lynn M. Herbert, Luce Irigaray, Fredric Jameson, Lee Joon, Julia Kristeva, Jean-François Lyotard, Thomas McEvilley, Vijay Mishra, David Morgan, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Rancière, Gene Ray, Robert Rosenblum, Philip Shaw, Marina Warner, Thomas Weiskel, Slavoj Žižek

Publisher Whitechapel Gallery, London, and MIT Press, 2010
Documents of Contemporary Art series
ISBN 0262513919, 9780262513913
237 pages

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PDF (6 MB, no OCR, updated on 2020-5-25)