Hito Steyerl: Circulacionismo. Circulationism (2014) [English/Spanish]
Filed under book, catalogue | Tags: · art, capitalism, contemporary art, documentary, image, internet, politics, video
“Using video installations and reflection in essays, Hito Steyerl presents a critical apparatus for analyzing the way in which the images produced by television, cinema and contemporary art are inscribed in a visual and economic regime. These are produced, circulated, distributed and consumed in a framework of audiovisual capitalism and form part of different institutional mechanisms of the art world, including the museum. From this perspective, the images are converted into a vehicle of social relations with an ambivalent status insofar as they are both commodity and means of political statement. A second problem raised by the artist is the truth condition of images. Her work repeatedly makes use of appropriated or poor-quality images, together with documentary-type elements, with the aim of questioning the relationship between documentary, reality and representation.”
This book contains Steyerl’s essays “Too much world: Is the Internet dead?” and “Theodore W. Adorno. Timeline”, and the essay “Weather for Liquidity” by Brian Kuan Wood.
Published on the occasion of the exhibition Hito Steyerl: Circulationism held from 27 September 2014 – 1 March 2015 at MUAC in Mexico City which brought together three of her recent works: Adorno’s Grey (2012), Museum as Battlefield (2012) and Liquidity Inc. (2014).
Publisher Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC), Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), Mexico City, 2014
Folio MUAC series, 23
ISBN 6070257545, 9786070257544
71 pages
Georges Bataille: Blue of Noon (1957–) [FR, EN, ES]
Filed under fiction | Tags: · death, eroticism, fascism, politics, sex, surrealism
“Set against the backdrop of Europe’s slide into fascism, this twentieth-century erotic classic takes the reader on a dark journey through the psyche of the pre-war French intelligentsia, torn between identification with the victims of history and the glamour of its victors. One of Bataille’s overtly political works, it explores the ambiguity of sex as a subversive force, bringing violence, power and death together in a terrifying unity. Written in 1935.”
Publisher Pauvert, Paris, 1957
215 pages
English edition
Translated by Harry Matthews
Publisher Marion Boyars, London, 1979
This edition Paladin Books, 1988
ISBN 0586086242
155 pages
Review: Kirkus (1979).
Commentary: David Fieni (2003).
Le bleu du ciel (French, 1957/1971)
Blue of Noon (English, trans. Harry Matthews, 1979, HTML, PDF)
El azul del cielo (Spanish, n.d.)
Barton Byg: Landscapes of Resistance: The German Films of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub (1995)
Filed under book | Tags: · avant-garde, cinema, film, film criticism, Frankfurt school, left, modernism, narrative, politics
“Fervently admired and frequently reviled, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet—who have lived and worked together since the 1950s—may well be the most uncompromising, not to say intransigent, filmmakers in the history of the medium. Their radical and deeply political films placed them as forerunners of the New German Cinema movement in the 1960s and influential figures in the subsequent explosion of the European avant-garde. In Landscapes of Resistance, Barton Byg fills a significant gap in modern German and European cinema studies by tracing the career of the two filmmakers and exploring their connection to German modernism, in particular their relationship to the Frankfurt School.
Although they are not German themselves, Straub and Huillet have used German material as the basis for the majority of their films. They have transcribed prose by Böll and Kafka, operas by Schoenberg, and verse dramas by Hölderlin. Byg explores how their work engages German culture with a critical distance and affection and confronts the artificiality of divisions between high and low culture.”
Publisher University of California Press, 1995
Open access
ISBN 0520089081, 9780520089082
xiii+303 pages
Reviews: Ulrich Kriest (Medienwissenschaft 1997, DE), Margret Eifler (The German Quarterly 2000).
Comment (0)