Women Artists: The Linda Nochlin Reader (2015)

“Linda Nochlin (1931-2017) was one of the most accessible, provocative, and innovative art historians of our time. In 1971 she published her essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”—a dramatic feminist call-to-arms that called traditional art historical practices into question and led to a major revision of the discipline.

Women Artists brings together twenty-nine essential essays from throughout Nochlin’s career, making this the definitive anthology of her writing about women in art. Included are her major thematic texts “Women Artists After the French Revolution” and “Starting from Scratch: The Beginnings of Feminist Art History,” as well as the landmark essay and its rejoinder “‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’ Thirty Years After.” These appear alongside monographic entries focusing on a selection of major women artists including Mary Cassatt, Louise Bourgeois, Cecily Brown, Kiki Smith, Miwa Yanagi, and Sophie Calle.

Women Artists also presents two new essays written specifically for this book and an interview with Nochlin investigating the position of women artists today.”

Edited by Maura Reilly
Publisher Thames & Hudson, London and New York, 2015
ISBN 9780500239292, 0500239290
472 pages

Reviews: Chris Kraus (NY Times, 2015), Publishers Weekly (2015).

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Stefano Harney, Fred Moten: The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (2013–) [EN, DE, ES, FR]

“In this series of essays Fred Moten and Stefano Harney draw on the theory and practice of the black radical tradition as it supports, inspires, and extends contemporary social and political thought and aesthetic critique. Today the general wealth of social life finds itself confronted by mutations in the mechanisms of control: the proliferation of capitalist logistics, governance by credit, and the management of pedagogy. Working from and within the social poesis of life in the undercommons Moten and Harney develop and expand an array of concepts: study, debt, surround, planning, and the shipped. On the fugitive path of an historical and global blackness, the essays in this volume unsettle and invite the reader to the self-organised ensembles of social life that are launched every day and every night amid the general antagonism of the undercommons.”

Introduction by Jack Halberstam
Publisher Minor Compositions, Wivenhoe, 2013
Open access
ISBN 9781570272677, 1570272670
165 pages

Reviews: onderwijs filosofie (2015, NL), Kris Cohen (open set, 2016), Lisa M. Corrigan (Philosophy & Rhetoric, 2019).
Commentary: David Wallace (New Yorker, 2018).
Interviews with authors: Transversal (2016, EN/DE), Cristina Rivera Garza, Marta Malo, and Juan Pablo Anaya (New Inquiry, 2018), Millenials Are Killing Capitalism (2020, podcast, part 2).

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The Undercommons (English, 2013, PDF)
Die Undercommons (German, trans. Birgit Mennel und Gerald Raunig, 2016, EPUB)
Los Abajocomunes: planear fugitivo y estudio negro (Spanish, trans. Cristina Rivera Garza, Marta Malo and Juan Pablo Anaya, Cooperativa Cráter Invertido and La Campechana Mental, 2017, EPUB) (added on 2019-6-5)
Les sous-communs (French, 2022, added on 2022-1-11)

Simon Sadler: The Situationist City (1998)

“From 1957 to 1972 the artistic and political movement known as the Situationist International (SI) worked aggressively to subvert the conservative ideology of the Western world. The movement’s broadside attack on “establishment” institutions and values left its mark upon the libertarian left, the counterculture, the revolutionary events of 1968, and more recent phenomena from punk to postmodernism. But over time it tended to obscure Situationism’s own founding principles. In this book, Simon Sadler investigates the artistic, architectural, and cultural theories that were once the foundations of Situationist thought, particularly as they applied to the form of the modern city.

According to the Situationists, the benign professionalism of architecture and design had led to a sterilization of the world that threatened to wipe out any sense of spontaneity or playfulness. The Situationists hankered after the “pioneer spirit” of the modernist period, when new ideas, such as those of Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche, still felt fresh and vital.

By the late fifties, movements such as British and American Pop Art and French Nouveau Ralisme had become intensely interested in everyday life, space, and mass culture. The SI aimed to convert this interest into a revolution—at the level of the city itself. Their principle for the reorganization of cities was simple and seductive: let the citizens themselves decide what spaces and architecture they want to live in and how they wish to live in them. This would instantly undermine the powers of state, bureaucracy, capital, and imperialism, thereby revolutionizing people’s everyday lives.

Simon Sadler searches for the Situationist City among the detritus of tracts, manifestos, and works of art that the SI left behind. The book is divided into three parts. The first, “The Naked City,” outlines the Situationist critique of the urban environment as it then existed. The second, “Formulary for a New Urbanism,” examines Situationist principles for the city and for city living. The third, “A New Babylon,” describes actual designs proposed for a Situationist City.”

Publisher MIT Press, 1998
ISBN 9780262193924
ix+233 pages
via heimitokunst, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Reviews: Andrew Hussey (LRB, 1999), Notbored (n.d.), Andy Merrifield (Harvard Design Mag, 2000), Rosemary Wakeman (French Polit Cult Soc, 2000), James L. Penner (TDR, 2001), Sarah Deyong (J Society Arch Hist, 2001), Benedict Seymour (Mute, 2004), Natasha Gershfield (Manchester School Arch, 2010).

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