Bataille, Leiris, Griaule, Einstein, Desnos, et al.: Encyclopædia Acephalica (1995)
Filed under book | Tags: · avant-garde, death, eroticism, materialism, surrealism
“The present volume contains two works: the Critical Dictionary first appeared in the magazine edited by Bataille, Documents, the second series of texts, the Da Costa Encyclopédique, was published anonymously after the liberation of Paris in 1947 by members of the Acéphale group and writers associated with the Surrealists. Both cover the essential concepts of Bataille and his associates: sacred sociology; scatology, death and the erotic; base materialism; the aesthetics of the formless; sacrifice, the festival and the politics of the tumult etc: a new description of the limits of being human. Humour, albeit, sardonic, is not absent from these remarkable redefinitions of the most heterogeneous objects or ideas: Camel, Church, Dust, Museum, Spittle, Skyscraper, Threshold, Work – to name but a few.
The Documents group was celebrated for joining together artists, authors, sociologists and ethnologists (among the most important of their time) in a literary and philosophical project. The Acéphale group was more mysterious, even its membership is only vaguely known, and its activities remain secret. The origins of the Da Costa only became known in 1993, the present volume reveals for the first time its principal compilers: Robert Lebel, Isabelle Waldberg and Marcel Duchamp, even so, the identity of the authors of a large part of it remain unknown.”
Assembled and introduced by Alastair Brotchie
Biographies by Dominique Lecoq
Translated by Iain White, et al.
Publisher Atlas Press, London, 1995
Atlas Arkhive: Documents of the Avant-Garde series, 3
ISBN 0947745872
176 pages
via esco_bar
PDF (removed on 2019-7-24 upon request from publisher)
See also scans of all issues of the magazines Documents and Acéphale on Monoskop wiki.
Comment (0)Robert J. Richards: The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary Thought (2008)
Filed under book | Tags: · aesthetics, biography, biology, darwinism, ecology, evolution, history of science, materialism, monism, science
“Prior to the First World War, more people learned of evolutionary theory from the voluminous writings of Charles Darwin’s foremost champion in Germany, Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), than from any other source, including the writings of Darwin himself. But, with detractors ranging from paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould to modern-day creationists and advocates of intelligent design, Haeckel is better known as a divisive figure than as a pioneering biologist. Robert J. Richards’s intellectual biography rehabilitates Haeckel, providing the most accurate measure of his science and art yet written, as well as a moving account of Haeckel’s eventful life.”
Publisher University of Chicago Press, 2008
ISBN 0226712192, 9780226712192
512 pages
Studies of Material Thinking journal, Vols. 1–9 (2007–13)
Filed under journal | Tags: · art, design, experimental art, materialism, philosophy, technology
Studies in Material Thinking is an international journal that reports on the peer reviewed work of artists, designers and writers. It is a vehicle to support the communication and critique of artistic and design research from the vantage point of both the materiality and the poetics of creative research. The journal aims to develop a series of divergent positions, critical approaches and contestations around the term ‘material thinking’, centred as it is on an understanding of making, invention, design, creative practice and research methodology.
Editor-in-chief: Nancy de Freitas
Associate editors: Eva Lutnæs, Maarit Mäkela, Alan Young
ISSN 1177-6234
Vol. 1:1: At the Intersection of Poesis and Praxis: Material thinking provocations (2007, PDF articles)
Vol. 1:2: Independent responses to Paul Carter’s Theory (2008, PDF articles)
Vol. 3: Material Thinking as Document (2009, PDF articles)
Vol. 4: Materiality of Drawing/Thinking (2010, PDF articles)
Vol. 5: (Im)materialising Time (2011, PDF articles)
Vol. 6: Research Outputs in Art and Design (2011, PDF articles)
Vol. 7: Where Art, Technology and Design Meet (2012, PDF articles)
Vol. 8: Experimental Arts (eds. Jill Bennett, Ross Harley, Douglas Kahn and Paul Thomas, 2012, PDF articles)
Vol. 9: Inside Making (eds. Nancy de Freitas and Eva Lutnæs, 2013, PDF articles)