Erin Manning: Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy. Technologies of Lived Abstraction (2009)

With Relationscapes, Erin Manning offers a new philosophy of movement challenging the idea that movement is simple displacement in space, knowable only in terms of the actual. Exploring the relation between sensation and thought through the prisms of dance, cinema, art, and new media, Manning argues for the intensity of movement. From this idea of intensity—the incipiency at the heart of movement—Manning develops the concept of preacceleration, which makes palpable how movement creates relational intervals out of which displacements take form.

Discussing her theory of incipient movement in terms of dance and relational movement, Manning describes choreographic practices that work to develop with a body in movement rather than simply stabilizing that body into patterns of displacement. She examines the movement-images of Leni Riefenstahl, Étienne-Jules Marey, and Norman McLaren (drawing on Bergson’s idea of duration), and explores the dot-paintings of contemporary Australian Aboriginal artists. Turning to language, Manning proposes a theory of prearticulation claiming that language’s affective force depends on a concept of thought in motion.

Relationscapes is a radically empirical book, working directly out of examples and delving into the complexity of relations these examples suggest. It takes a “Whiteheadian perspective,” recognizing Whitehead’s importance and his influence on process philosophers of the late twentieth century—Deleuze and Guattari in particular. Relationscapes is truly a transdisciplinary book, not aiming to cover the ground of a particular discipline but making clear how the specificity of a particular inquiry can alter key questions that emerge in the interstices between disciplines. It will be of special interest to scholars in new media, philosophy, dance studies, film theory, and art history.

Publisher MIT Press, 2009
ISBN 026213490X, 9780262134903
272 pages

publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2013-1-29)

Alessandro Ludovico (ed.): Ubermorgen.com. Media Hacking vs. Conceptual Art (2009)

“This is the first time for the complete works of the artist-duo UBERMORGEN.COM – lizvlx and Hans Bernhard – to be presented in printed form and subjected to critical scrutiny.

To mark the tenth anniversary of UBERMORGEN.COM, a number of internationally respected critics, curators and artists focus on these border-liners in the global mass media and their radical actions on the precipice of the international art world. The interplay of concept art, software art, fine art, media hacking, net art and media activism makes UBERMORGEN-COM a hybrid gesamtkunstwerk within the contemporary European media-art avant-garde.

With texts and interviews by and with Inke Arns, Florian Cramer, Raffael Dörig, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Peter Weibel and others.”

Publisher Merian, Basel, March 2009
ISBN 9783856164607
208 pages

Review: Rob Myers (Furtherfield, 2009).

Publisher

PDF (22 MB, updated on 2020-6-3)

Charles Green: The Third Hand. Collaboration in Art from Conceptualism to Postmodernism (2001)

A major reevaluation of collaboration’s role in art since 1968.

The lone artist is a worn cliché of art history but one that still defines how we think about the production of art. Since the 1960s, however, a number of artists have challenged this image by embarking on long-term collaborations that dramatically altered the terms of artistic identity. In The Third Hand, Charles Green offers a sustained critical examination of collaboration in international contemporary art, tracing its origins from the evolution of conceptual art in the 1960s into such stylistic labels as Earth Art, Systems Art, Body Art, and Performance Art. During this critical period, artists around the world began testing the limits of what art could be, how it might be produced, and who the artist is. Collaboration emerged as a prime way to reframe these questions.

Green looks at three distinct types of collaboration: the highly bureaucratic identities created by Joseph Kosuth, Ian Burn, Mel Ramsden and other members of Art & Language in the late 1960s; the close-knit relationships based on marriage or lifetime partnership as practiced by the Boyle Family—Anne and Patrick Poirier, Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison; and couples-like Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Gilbert & George, or Marina Abramovic and Ulay—who developed third identities, effacing the individual artists almost entirely. These collaborations, Green contends, resulted in new and, at times, extreme authorial models that continue to inform current thinking about artistic identity and to illuminate the origins of postmodern art, suggesting, in the process, a new genealogy for art in the twenty-first century.

Published by the University of Minnesota Press, 2001
ISBN 0868405884, 9780868405889
248 pages

publisher
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PDF (updated on 2012-8-3)