Peter Gay: Weimar Culture: The Outsider As Insider (1968–) [EN, CR]

20 July 2014, dusan

First published in 1968, Weimar Culture is one of the masterworks of Peter Gay’s career. A study of German culture between the two wars, the book brilliantly traces the rise of the artistic, literary, and musical culture that bloomed ever so briefly in the 1920s amid the chaos of Germany’s tenuous post-World War I democracy, and crashed violently in the wake of Hitler’s rise to power. Despite the ephemeral nature of the Weimar democracy, the influence of its culture was profound and far-reaching, ushering in a modern sensibility in the arts that dominated Western culture for most of the twentieth century.

First published by Harper & Row, New York, 1968.
Publisher W. W. Norton, 2001
ISBN 0393322394, 9780393322392
205 pages
via chef

Review (Walter Laquer, The New York Times Books, 1968)
Review (Elizabeth Wiskemann, The Spectator, 1969)
Review (Sterling Fishman, History of Education Quarterly, 1970)

Publisher

Weimar Culture: The Outsider As Insider (English, 1968/2001, EPUB)
Weimarksa kultura: Isključenik kao uključenik (Croatian, trans. Danja Šilović-Karić, 1999, added on 2014-8-3)

Rudolf Arnheim: Art and Visual Perception (1954–) [EN, RU, PL, RO, ES, BR-PT]

12 May 2014, dusan

“Since its publication in 1954, this work has established itself as a classic. It casts the visual process in psychological terms and describes the creative way one’s eye organizes visual material according to specific psychological premises. In 1974 this book was revised and expanded, and since then it has continued to burnish Rudolf Arnheim’s reputation as a groundbreaking theoretician in the fields of art and psychology.”

Publisher University of California Press, 1954
Expanded and revised edition, 1974
ISBN 0520243838
508 pages

Interview with the author (Uta Grundmann, Cabinet, 2001)

Publisher (EN)

Art and Visual Perception (English, 1954/1974, 26 MB)
Iskusstvo i vizualnoe vospriyatie (Russian, trans. V.N. Samokhin, 1974/2000, DJVU, no OCR)
Sztuka i percepcja wzrokowa (Polish, trans. Jolanta Mach, 1978, 24 MB, no OCR, via nuitienne)
Arta si perceptia vizuala (Romanian, trans. Florin Ionescu, 1979, 35 MB, no OCR, via)
Arte y percepción visual (Spanish, trans. María Luisa Balseiro, 1979/1997, 43 MB)
Arte e percepção visual (Brazilian Portuguese, trans. Ivonne Terezinha de Faria, 1980/2005)

Craig Dworkin: No Medium (2013)

10 January 2014, dusan


(photo source)

“In No Medium, Craig Dworkin looks at works that are blank, erased, clear, or silent, writing critically and substantively about works for which there would seem to be not only nothing to see but nothing to say. Examined closely, these ostensibly contentless works of art, literature, and music point to a new understanding of media and the limits of the artistic object.

Dworkin considers works predicated on blank sheets of paper, from a fictional collection of poems in Jean Cocteau’s Orphée to the actual publication of a ream of typing paper as a book of poetry; he compares Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased De Kooning Drawing to the artist Nick Thurston’s erased copy of Maurice Blanchot’s The Space of Literature (in which only Thurston’s marginalia were visible); and he scrutinizes the sexual politics of photographic representation and the implications of obscured or obliterated subjects of photographs. Reexamining the famous case of John Cage’s 4’33”, Dworkin links Cage’s composition to Rauschenberg’s White Paintings, Ken Friedman’s Zen for Record (and Nam June Paik’s Zen for Film), and other works, offering also a “guide to further listening” that surveys more than 100 scores and recordings of “silent” music.

Dworkin argues that we should understand media not as blank, base things but as social events, and that there is no medium, understood in isolation, but only and always a plurality of media: interpretive activities taking place in socially inscribed space.”

Publisher MIT Press, 2013
ISBN 0262018705, 9780262018708
219 pages

Interview with the author (Critical Margins)
Author’s lecture at Penn Poetry & Poetics (video, 19 min)

Reviews: Johanna Drucker (Los Angeles Review of Books), Michael Leong (Hyperallergic).
Commentary: Richard Marshall (3:AM Magazine).

Publisher

EPUB