Johanna Drucker: The Century of Artists’ Books (1995)
Filed under book | Tags: · art criticism, artists book, book, publishing
“The seminal study of the development of artists’ books as a twentieth-century art form. By situating artists’ books within the context of developments in the visual arts, Drucker raises critical and theoretical issues as well as providing a historical overview of the medium. Within its pages, she explores more than two hundred individual books in relation to their structure, form, and conceptualization.”
Publisher Granary Books, New York, 1995
ISBN 1887123016, 9781887123013
xii+377 pages
Reviews: Kristine Markovich (Art Documentation, 1996), Paula Frosch (Library Journal, 1996), Buzz Spector (Art Journal, 1997), Tom Trusky (Afterimage, 1997), Eric T. Haskell (SubStance, 1997), Kranz (Bloomsbury Review, 2002).
Interview with author (Tate Shaw, The Journal of Artists’ Books, 2006).
PDF (74 MB)
Introduction to 2nd edition by Holland Cotter (2004, added on 2018-12-18)
Florian Cramer: Anti-Media: Ephemera on Speculative Arts (2013)
Filed under book | Tags: · art criticism, art history, literary criticism, media
“1. There is art, and there is anti-art.
2. If that is so, there must also be anti-media.
3. ‘Media’ as a term is as fuzzy as ‘art’.
4. Both ‘art’ and ‘media’ refuse to go away.
Anti-media is what remains if one debunks the notion of media but can’t get rid of it.
This book reflects on anti-copyright, porn, creative industries, post-punk, Arts and Crafts and constructivism, cooking as contemporary art, Oulipo, post-digitality, mezangelle, Anonymous and 4chan, Fluxus, amateurism, file sharing networks, pop culture, 17th century poetry, electroacoustic music, Neonazi communication guerilla, Rotterdam, romanticism, electronic literature, Mail Art, ontology, Super 8, Rosicrucianism and conceptual art.”
Publisher nai010 publishers, Rotterdam, and Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, 2013
Studies in Network Cultures series
ISBN 9789462080317, 9462080313
260 pages
Reviews: Regine Debaty (We Make Money Not Art, 2013), Alessandro Ludovico (Neural, 2014).
PDF (3 MB)
Comment (1)Marc James Léger: Don’t Network: The Avant Garde after Networks (2018)
Filed under book | Tags: · art criticism, art history, avant-garde, networks
“Explores the nature of avant garde art within contemporary capitalism
There is something rotten about network society. Although the information economy promises to create new forms of wealth and social cooperation, the real subsumption of labour under post-Fordism has instead produced a social factory of precarious labour and cybernetic surveillance. In this context people have turned to networks as an ersatz solution to social problems. Networks become the agent of history, a technological determinism that in the best-case scenario leads to post-capitalism but at worst leads to new forms of exploitation and inequality. Don’t Network proposes a third option to technocratic biocapitalism and social movement horizontalism, an analysis of the ways in which vanguard politics and avant-garde aesthetics can today challenge the ideologies of the network society.”
Publisher Minor Compositions, Wivenhoe, 2018
Open access
ISBN 9781570273391
352 pages