Charles Jencks, Karl Kropf (eds.): Theories and Manifestoes of Contemporary Architecture (1997)
Filed under book | Tags: · 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, architecture, city, history of architecture, manifesto, modernism, postmodernism, theory, urbanism
A survey of 120 texts on architecture from the late 1950s up to the mid-1990s, presented in excerpts organised into five sections.
Publisher Academy Editions, Chichester, UK, 1997
ISBN 0471976873
312 pages
via hindmnj
See also Ulrich Conrads (ed.), Programs and Manifestoes on 20th-Century Architecture, 1964/1970.
Comments (2)Andrey Kovalev: Russian Actionism, 1990-2000 (2007–) [RU, EN]
Filed under book | Tags: · 1990s, action art, art, art criticism, contemporary art, happening, performance, performance art, politics, russia
A survey of 450 performances, actions and happenings held in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg and elsewhere. Descriptions and photo documentation are accompanied by press coverage and testimonies of participants and witnesses.
A ten-page English summary published in Artchronika magazine is introduced as follows:
“The phrase “performance in the 1990s” immediately evokes several images: Oleg Kulik slaughtering a pig at Regina Gallery; Anatoly Osmolovsky sitting on the shoulder of the Mayakovsky monument; Oleg Kulik again, this time attacking passers-by like a rabid dog; Alexander Brener masturbating on the diving board at the Moscow swimming pool or calling out Boris Yeltsin to fight on Red Square; the barricade erected on Nikitskaya Ulitsa; members of the Radek group on top of Lenin’s mausoleum; the crucifixion of Oleg Mavromatti; and so on. These stories have become pure myth, retold with breathy excitement and longing for glory days lost to the past, or cited in various criminal court cases.”
Special issue of WAM (World Art Музей), 28-29, Moscow, 2007.
ISSN 1726-3050
416 pages
English excerpts
Published in Artchronika, Spring-Summer 2008, pp 108-117
Российский акционизм. 1990-2000 (Russian, 2007, 21 MB)
Gestures of an Era, or the Era of Gestures (English, 2008)
Masha Gessen: The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin (2012)
Filed under book | Tags: · 1990s, 2000s, biography, communism, economy, history, intelligence agency, mass media, military, politics, russian, war
Handpicked in 1999 by the ‘Family’ surrounding an ailing and increasingly unpopular Boris Yeltsin, Vladimir Putin, with very little governmental or administrative experience beyond having served as deputy mayor of St Petersburg, seemed like the perfect choice in the eyes of an oligarchy bent on moulding the president’s successor to its own designs. Suddenly the boy who had scrapped his way through post-war Leningrad schoolyards, dreaming of ruling the world, was a public figure, and his popularity soared. Russia and an infatuated West were determined to see the progressive leader of their dreams, even as with ruthless efficiency Putin dismantled the country’s media, wrested control and wealth from the country’s burgeoning business class, and decimated the fragile mechanisms of democracy. Within a few brief years, virtually every obstacle to his unbridled control was removed and every opposing voice silenced, with political rivals and critics driven into exile or to the grave. As a journalist living in Moscow, Masha Gessen experienced this history firsthand, and for The Man Without a Face she has drawn on information and sources no other writer has tapped. Her horrifying and spellbinding account of how this ‘faceless’ man manoeuvred his way into absolute – and absolutely corrupt – power will stand as a classic of narrative non-fiction.
Publisher Riverhead Books, 2012
EISBN 9781101560600
Video interview with the author (52 min, Sydney Writers Festival, May 2012)
Review (Luke Harding, The Guardian, 2012)
Review (Anne Applebaum, The New York Review of Books, 2012)
Review (John Ehrman, Studies in Intelligence, 2014)