Simon Morley (ed.): The Sublime (2010)

“In the contemporary world, where technology, spectacle, and excess seem to eclipse nature, the individual, and society, what might be the characteristics of a contemporary sublime? If there is any consensus, it is in the idea that the sublime represents a testing of limits to the point at which fixities begin to fragment. This anthology examines how contemporary artists and theorists explore ideas of the sublime, in relation to the unpresentable, transcendence, terror, nature, technology, the uncanny, and altered states.

Providing a philosophical and cultural context for discourse around the sublime in recent art, the book surveys the diverse and sometimes conflicting interpretations of the term as it has evolved from the writings of Longinus, Burke, and Kant to present-day writers and artists. The sublime underlies the nobility of Classicism, the awe of Romantic nature, and the terror of the Gothic. In the last half-century, the sublime has haunted postwar abstraction, returned from the repression of theoretical formalism, and has become a key term in critical discussions of human otherness and posthuman realms of nature and technology.”

Artists surveyed include: Marina Abramović, Joseph Beuys, Tacita Dean, Walter De Maria, A K Dolven, Olafur Eliasson, Andreas Gursky, Jitka Hanzlová, Gary Hill, Susan Hiller, Shirazeh Houshiary, Anish Kapoor, Mike Kelley, Anselm Kiefer, Yves Klein, Richard Long, Barnett Newman, Tony Oursler, Cornelia Parker, Gerhard Richter, Doris Salcedo, Lorna Simpson, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Fred Tomaselli, James Turrell, Luc Tuymans, Bill Viola, Zhang Huan

Writers include: Marco Belpoliti, John Berger, Paul Crowther, Jacques Derrida, Okwui Enwezor, Jean Fisher, Barbara Claire Freeman, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Doreet LeVitte-Harten, Eleanor Heartney, Lynn M. Herbert, Luce Irigaray, Fredric Jameson, Lee Joon, Julia Kristeva, Jean-François Lyotard, Thomas McEvilley, Vijay Mishra, David Morgan, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Rancière, Gene Ray, Robert Rosenblum, Philip Shaw, Marina Warner, Thomas Weiskel, Slavoj Žižek

Publisher Whitechapel Gallery, London, and MIT Press, 2010
Documents of Contemporary Art series
ISBN 0262513919, 9780262513913
237 pages

Publisher

PDF (6 MB, no OCR, updated on 2020-5-25)

Michael T. Saler: The Avant-Garde in Interwar England: Medieval Modernism and the London Underground (1999)

This book addresses modernism’s ties to tradition, commerce, nationalism, and spirituality through an analysis of the assimilation of visual modernism in England between 1910 and 1939. Specifically, The Avant-Garde in Interwar England explores the life of Frank Pick, managing director of the London Underground, whose patronage of modern artists, architects, and designers was guided by a desire to unite nineteenth-century arts and crafts with twentieth-century industry and mass culture. Saler demonstrates that modernism was widely associated in England with medievalism, and was also thought to have direct social, economic, and spiritual benefits for the nation.

Publisher Oxford University Press, 1999
ISBN 0195119665, 9780195119664
242 pages

publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2012-7-18)

De Stijl magazine (1917-1921) [Dutch]

De Stijl, Dutch for “The Style”, also known as neoplasticism, was a Dutch artistic movement founded in 1917. In a narrower sense, the term De Stijl is used to refer to a body of work from 1917 to 1931 founded in the Netherlands. De Stijl is also the name of a journal that was published by the Dutch painter, designer, writer, and critic Theo van Doesburg (1883–1931), propagating the group’s theories. Though the magazine never sold more than 300 copies, it had a strong influence on art in the Netherlands and abroad.

De Stijl: Maanblad gewijd aan de moderne beeldende vakken en kultuur
Edited by Theo van Doesburg
Published in Delft (1917-18) and Leiden (1918-21)

Issues in JPG and PDF