Gary Indiana: Utopia’s Debris: Selected Essays (2008)
Filed under book | Tags: · architecture, art, cinema, film, literature, popular culture
Gary Indiana is one of America’s leading cultural critics—a public intellectual who has written key essays on every aspect of American culture. Utopia’s Debris comprises selections of his very best work, revealing him to be an enormously acute, frequently scabrous, and always brilliant observer of the best and worst America has to offer. His writings range from popular culture—trash novels, architectural wonders and horrors—to appreciations of the best of modern literature, art, and cinema. They include his convincing (and highly entertaining) debunking of fashionable conspiracy theories, a spirited and contrarian defense of Bill Clinton’s autobiography, a Mencken-like examination of the rise of Arnold Schwarzenegger and the politics of celebrity in what Indiana calls the Age of Contempt. A postmodern Emerson, Indiana wields scalpel-sharp wit and a fealty to logic on issues in which, all too often, irrationalism and emotionalism hold sway. At times rigorously serious, at other times whimsical, Indiana’s most conspicuous feature is skepticism—his wildly satirical contempt for conventional wisdom.
Publisher Basic Books, 2008
ISBN 046500248X, 9780465002481
315 pages
Bernard Cache: Earth Moves: The Furnishing of Territories (1995)
Filed under book | Tags: · abstract art, architecture, art, deconstruction, image, space, urbanism
Earth Moves, Bernard Cache’s first major work, conceptualizes a series of architectural images as vehicles for two important developments. First, he offers a new understanding of the architectural image itself. Following Gilles Deleuze and Henri Bergson, he develops an account of the image that is nonrepresentational and constructive—images as constituents of a primary, image world, of which subjectivity itself is a special kind of image. Second, Cache redefines architecture beyond building proper to include cinematic, pictoral, and other framings.
Complementary to this classification, Cache offers what is to date the only Deleuzean architectural development of the “fold,” a form and concept that has become important over the last few years. For Cache, as for Deleuze, what is significant about the fold is that it provides a way to rethink the relationship between interior and exterior, between past and present, and between architecture and the urban.
Translation of an unpublished French manuscript written in 1983 under the title Terre meuble.
Translated by Anne Boyman
Edited by Michael Speaks
Publisher MIT Press, 1995
Writing Architecture series
ISBN 0262531305, 9780262531306
153 pages
Andrea Gleiniger, Angelika Hilbeck, Jill Scott (eds.): Transdiscourse 1: Mediated Environments (2011)
Filed under book | Tags: · agriculture, architecture, art and science, climate crisis, design, documentary film, eco art, ecology, energy, environment, permaculture, recycling
– Encourages critical reflections that shed light on how combinations of art, architecture, technology and science could directly impact urban societies and their rural alternative
– Discusses the know-how-transfer between the arts and the sciences is facilitated
Mediated Environments addresses the problem that society interprets our environment through conditioned and constructed representations of mainstream media and not in a transdisciplinary way with the help of artists, architects, filmmakers, cultural theorists and scientists. The writers who come from these various backgrounds all wish to give media artists, designers and writers a new role in relation to the pressing issues of urban and rural life: ones that can address the challenges of human psychology, recycling, agricultural production, climate chaos and energy conservation. The main aims were to focus on the potentials of creative work to raise public awareness and to find new discourses that can be shared within the areas of mediated architecture, eco art, experimental documentary film, eco-emergent design and art and science collaborations. The editors believe that a closer transdisciplinary working relationship could encourage a more tangible approach to these problems of the future.
Publisher Springer, 2011
Producer Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK)
ISBN 3709102871, 9783709102879
216 pages