John Beck, Ryan Bishop: Technocrats of the Imagination: Art, Technology, and the Military-Industrial Avant-Garde (2020)
Filed under book | Tags: · art and science, art history, avant-garde, bauhaus, cold war, cybernetics, democracy, liberalism, military, technology, war
“In Technocrats of the Imagination John Beck and Ryan Bishop explore the collaborations between the American avant-garde art world and the military-industrial complex during the 1960s, in which artists worked with scientists and engineers in universities, private labs, and museums. For artists, designers, and educators working with the likes of Bell Labs, the RAND Corporation, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, experiments in art and technology presaged not only a new aesthetic but a new utopian social order based on collective experimentation. In examining these projects’ promises and pitfalls and how they have inspired a new generation of collaborative labs populated by artists, engineers, and scientists, Beck and Bishop reveal the connections between the contemporary art world and the militarized lab model of research that has dominated the sciences since the 1950s.”
Publisher Duke University Press, Durham, 2020
Cultural Politics series
ISBN 9781478005957, 1478005955
viii+229 pages
Review: Lindsay Caplan (Art in America, 2020).
PDF, PDF (updated on 2022-1-16)
Comment (1)Journal of Aesthetics & Protest, 11: Newsletter (2020)
Filed under magazine | Tags: · activism, anti-fascism, art, autonomy, avant-garde, ecology, internationalism, politics
“Corona, Fascism, Climate Break-Down. Headlines all, and very real crises felt everywhere– things whose concerns work over situations at every scale of possible experience. We are interested in many things in regard to them, including how their nasty effects demand that we put our home affairs in order. Capacities for solidarity, meaningful mutual aid and actual justice emerge from the most intimate of places – that is, from between people and between people and other meaningful things.
This issue’s aim was to facilitate such work in intimate places; to do so, this issue serves primarily as a compilation of autonomously produced and locally distributed newsletters aimed at situating non-fascist thought and/or avant-garde cultural activity. We begin working on it in late 2018 and are completing it in June 2020.” (from Editorial)
Contributors: Hammam Aldouri, Out of the Woods, Nick Thoburn, Tools for Action, @.ac (Lancashire), Antifascist Culture (Athens), Never Again/Anti-Fascist Year (Warsaw), Around the Table, The Field (London), Black Book (Hong Kong), Casual School Collective (Canberra), Center for Enchantment (Albany), Critical Practice (Los Angeles), DSA Ecosocialist WG (Santa Cruz), Evening Class (London), Five Years (London), La Foresta/Evening Class (Rovereto), Pro Art Gallery and Common (Oakland), RIVAL (Thunder Bay), Terra Critica (Utrecht), We, TBD (Los Angeles), Woodbine (Ridgewood), Museum Adjacent (Torrance), Zizi de Vitruve (Strasbourg).
Editors: Marc Herbst, Robby Herbst, Amber Hickey, Claudia Firth
Publisher JOAAP, Leipzig / Los Angeles / London / Berlin / Waterville, ME, Jul 2020
99 pages
Kenneth Goldsmith: Duchamp Is My Lawyer: The Polemics, Pragmatics, and Poetics of UbuWeb (2020)
Filed under book | Tags: · abstraction, algorithm, appropriation, avant-garde, collage, conceptual writing, concrete poetry, copyright, digital library, digitisation, language, modernism, noise, piracy, shadow library, sound poetry, ubuweb, video art, visual poetry
“In 1996, during the relatively early days of the web, Kenneth Goldsmith created UbuWeb to post hard-to-find works of concrete poetry. What started out as a site to share works from a relatively obscure literary movement grew into an essential archive of twentieth- and twenty-first-century avant-garde and experimental literature, film, and music. Visitors around the world now have access to both obscure and canonical works, from artists such as Kara Walker, Yoko Ono, Pauline Oliveros, Samuel Beckett, Marcel Duchamp, Cecil Taylor, Glenn Ligon, William Burroughs, and Jean-Luc Godard.
In Duchamp Is My Lawyer, Goldsmith tells the history of UbuWeb, explaining the motivations behind its creation and how artistic works are archived, consumed, and distributed online. Based on his own experiences and interviews with a variety of experts, Goldsmith describes how the site navigates issues of copyright and the ways that UbuWeb challenges familiar configurations and histories of the avant-garde. The book also portrays the growth of other “shadow libraries” and includes a section on the artists whose works reflect the aims, aesthetics, and ethos of UbuWeb. Goldsmith concludes by contrasting UbuWeb’s commitment to the free-culture movement and giving access to a wide range of artistic works with today’s gatekeepers of algorithmic culture, such as Netflix, Amazon, and Spotify.”
Publisher Columbia University Press, New York, 2020
ISBN 9780231186940, 0231186940
x+318 pages
Reviews: Raphael Rubinstein (Art in America, 2020), Jan Baetens (Leonardo, 2020), Mark Athitakis (On the Seawall, 2020), Nick Soulsby (PopMatters, 2020), Alexander Adams (2020), Tomáš Hudák (3/4, 2020, SK), Cécile Marie-Castanet (Critique d’art, 2020, FR), Georg Fischer (iRights.info, 2020, DE), Gill Partington (London Review of Books, 2021), Daniel Morris (Williams Review, 2021), Andrew S. Taylor (American Book Review, 2022), Roi Tartakovsky (Common Knowledge, 2023).
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