Svetlana Boym: Architecture of the Off-Modern (2008)

“Svetlana Boym’s Architecture of the Off-Modern is an imaginative tour through the history and afterlife of Vladimir Tatlin’s legendary but unbuilt Monument to the Third International of 1920. Generally considered to be the defining expression of architectural constructivism, the structure was envisioned as a towering symbol of modernity and a twisting, turning memorial and media center for the Bolshevik Revolution that would have dwarfed the Eiffel Tower. Boym traces the vicissitudes of Tatlin’s tower from its reception in the 1920s to its privileged recall in ‘the reservoir of unofficial utopian dreams’ of the Soviet era. Boym offers an alternative history of modernism, postulating the ‘architecture of adventure’ as a poetic model for ‘third-route’ thinking about technology, history, and aesthetic culture.”

Publisher Buell Center / FORuM Project, and Princeton Architectural Press, NY, 2008
ISBN 1616891033, 9781568987781
80 pages

Review: Brian Dillon (Frieze, 2008).

Publisher

PDF

Alfred Gell: Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (1998)

“Alfred Gell puts forward an anthropological theory of visual art seen as a form of instrumental action: the making of things as a means of influencing the thoughts and actions of others. He argues that existing anthropological and aesthetic theories take an overwhelmingly passive point of view, and questions the criteria that accord art status only to a certain class of objects and not to others. The anthropology of art is here reformulated as the anthropology of a category of action: Gell shows how art objects embody complex intentionalities and mediate social agency. He explores the psychology of patterns and perceptions, art and personhood, the control of knowledge, and the interpretation of meaning, drawing upon a diversity of artistic traditions-European, Indian, Polynesian, Melanesian, and Australian.”

With a Foreword by Nicholas Thomas
Publisher Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1998
ISBN 0198280149, 9780198280149
272 pages
via mrcds

Reviews: Michèle Coquet (L’Homme, 2001, FR), Kate Sharpe (European Journal of Archaeology, 2004), Jan Willem Noldus (Histara, 2009, FR), Gilles Bastin (Le Monde, 2009, FR), Christophe Domino (Le Journal des arts, 2009, FR), Pierre Charbonnier (Tina, 2010, FR), Marcel Alocco (PerformArts, 2010, FR), Agnès Giard (Libération, 2014, FR), Mylene Mizrahi (Proa, 2019, PT).

Critical analyses: Maurice Bloch (Terrain, 1999, FR), Robert Layton (Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2003), Ross Bowden (Oceania, 2004), Howard Morphy (Journal of Material Culture, 2009), Brigitte Derlon and Monique Jeudy-Ballini (Oceania, 2010).

Publisher

PDF (68 MB, updated on 2020-6-4)
EPUB (4 MB, added on 2014-9-14 via Marcell)

Lee Baxandall, Stefan Morawski (eds.): Marx & Engels on Literature and Art: A Selection of Writings (1973)

A concise compilation of texts divided into nine sections with a judicious introductory essay by Morawski.

Translations and selections by Lee Baxandall and Stefan Morawski
Introduction by Stefan Morawski
Publisher Telos Press, St. Louis/MI, 1973
ISBN 0914386026
175 pages
via Charles, in the Unlimited Edition

Review: M. L. Raina (Minnesota Review, 1975)
Marxist aesthetics on Monoskop wiki

PDF (5 MB, updated to an OCR’d version via Marcell Mars)

See also Margaret A. Rose’s Marx’s Lost Aesthetic: Karl Marx and the Visual Arts, 1984.