Rudolf Arnheim: Film as Art (1932/1957)

“This is a book of standards, a theory of film. The greater part of it is an adaptation of “Film als Kunst,” first published in 1932 in the original German and in English by Faber and Faber in 1933 – an edition long out of print but still in demand because it raises fundamental questions that the intervening years have by no means answered. This edition expands the original translation by four essays.”

Originally published as Film als Kunst by Ernst Rowohlt, Berlin, 1932.

Publisher University of California Press, 1957
ISBN 0520000358, 9780520000353
230 pages

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François Laruelle: The Concept of Non-Photography (2011) [English]

Myriads of negatives tell of the world, speaking among themselves, constituting a vast conversation, filling a photosphere that is located nowhere. But one single photo is enough to express the real that all photographers aspire one day to capture, without ever quite succeeding in doing so. Nevertheless, this real cohabits intimately with negatives, with clichés as embedded in our lives as they are imperceptible. Photographs are the thousand flat facets of an ungraspable identity that only shines – and sometimes very faintly – through something else. What more is there to a photo than a curious and prurient glance? And yet it is also a fascinating secret.

The Concept of Non-Photography develops a rigorous new thinking of the photograph in its relation to science, philosophy and art, and introduces the reader to all of the key concepts of Laruelle’s ‘non-philosophy’.

Translated from French by Robin Mackay
Publisher Urbanomic, United Kingdom, and Sequence Press, New York, 2011
ISBN 0983216916, 9780983216919
143 pages

review (Catherine Kron, DisMagazine)

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Download (English section of the book only; removed by the publisher on 2012-6-13)

Gwen Allen: Artists’ Magazines: An Alternative Space for Art (2011)

“Magazine publishing is an exercise in ephemerality and transience; each issue goes out in the world only to be rendered obsolete by the next. To publish a magazine is to enter into a heightened relationship with the present moment. During the 1960s and 1970s, magazines became an important new site of artistic practice, functioning as an alternative exhibition space for the dematerialized practices of conceptual art. Artists created works expressly for these mass-produced, hand-editioned pages, using the ephemerality and the materiality of the magazine to challenge the conventions of both artistic medium and gallery. In Artists’ Magazines, Gwen Allen looks at the most important of these magazines in their heyday (the 1960s to the 1980s) and compiles a comprehensive, illustrated directory of hundreds of others.

Among the magazines Allen examines are Aspen (1965–1971), a multimedia magazine in a box—issues included Super-8 films, flexi-disc records, critical writings, artists’ postage stamps, and collectible chapbooks; Avalanche (1970-1976), which expressed the countercultural character of the emerging SoHo art community through its interviews and artist-designed contributions; Art-Rite (1973-1978), an irreverent zine with a disposable, newsprint format; Real Life (1979-1994), published by Thomas Lawson and Susan Morgan as a forum for the Pictures generation; 0 to 9 (1967–1969), a mimeographed poetry magazine founded by Vito Acconci and Bernadette Meyer; FILE (1972–1989), founded by the Canadian collective General Idea, its cover design a sly parody of Life magazine; and Interfunktionen (1968–1975), founded to protest the conservative curatorial strategies of Documenta. These and the other magazines Allen examines expressed their differences from mainstream media in both form and content: they cast their homemade, DIY quality against the slickness of an Artforum, and they created work that defied the formalist orthodoxy of the day. (A work by John Baldessari from the late 1960s shows a photograph of Artforum, captioned “THIS IS NOT TO BE LOOKED AT.”) Artists’ Magazines, featuring abundant color illustrations of magazine covers and content, offers an essential guide to a little-explored medium.”

Publisher MIT Press, 2011
ISBN 0262015196, 9780262015196
300 pages

Reviews: Maarten van Gageldonk (Tijdschrift voor Tijdschriftstudies, 2012), Lucy Mulroney (West 86th, 2012), Alexander Provan (Bidoun, 2011), Dave Dyment (Magenta, 2012), Guy Crucianelli (PopMatters, 2011).

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PDF (removed on 2018-8-20 upon request from publisher)