Janneke Adema: Living Books: Experiments in the Posthumanities (2021)

“Reimagining the scholarly book as living and collaborative—not as commodified and essentialized, but in all its dynamic materiality.

In this book, Janneke Adema proposes that we reimagine the scholarly book as a living and collaborative project—not as linear, bound, and fixed, but as fluid, remixed, and liquid, a space for experimentation. She presents a series of cutting-edge experiments in arts and humanities book publishing, showcasing the radical new forms that book-based scholarly work might take in the digital age. Adema’s proposed alternative futures for the scholarly book go beyond such print-based assumptions as fixity, stability, the single author, originality, and copyright, reaching instead for a dynamic and emergent materiality.

Adema suggests ways to unbind the book, describing experiments in scholarly book publishing with new forms of anonymous collaborative authorship, radical open access publishing, and processual, living, and remixed publications, among other practices. She doesn’t cast digital as the solution and print as the problem; the problem in scholarly publishing, she argues, is not print itself, but the way print has been commodified and essentialized. Adema explores alternative, more ethical models of authorship; constructs an alternative genealogy of openness; and examines opportunities for intervention in current cultures of knowledge production. Finally, asking why it is that we cut and bind our research together at all, she examines two book publishing projects that experiment with remix and reuse and try to rethink and reperform the book-apparatus by taking responsibility for the cuts they make.”

Publisher MIT Press, August 2021
Leonardo series
Creative Commons BY-NC 4.0 International License
ISBN 9780262046022, 0262046024
xiii+335 pages

Interview with author: Erzsébet Tóth-Czifra (Dariah Open, 2021).

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WorldCat

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OnCurating, 19: On Artistic and Curatorial Authorship (2013)

“This issue of On Curating brings together a range of interviews and essays, inspired by the symposium, “Why Artists Curate”, held by the Kunstbüro der Kunststiftung Baden-Württemberg in cooperation with Columbus Art Foundation in July 2011. The feedback from this conference prompted a discussion on authorship in contemporary art, from artists, curators and artist-curators.”

With essays by Marc James Léger and Dorothee Richter, and interviews with Artur Zmijewski (Anne Koskiluoma and Anna Krystyna Trzaska), Kristina Lee Podesva (Sophia Ribeiro), Raqs Media Collective (Chloé Nicolet-dit-Félix and Gulru Vardar), Mary Jane Jacob (Monika Molnár and Tanja Trampe), Valerie Smith (Jacqueline Falk and John Canciani), Gavin Wade (Michael Birchall and Nkule Mabaso), Fucking Good Art (Sheena Greene), Ute Meta Bauer and Yvonne P. Doderer (Annemarie Brand and Monika Molnár), Tania Bruguera (Ashraf Osman and Daniela N. Fuentes), and Marion von Osten (Charlotte Barnes).

Edited by Michael Birchall
With a Foreword by Winfried Stürzl
Publisher OnCurating.org, Zurich, June 2013
95 pages

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Patrick Greaney: Quotational Practices: Repeating the Future in Contemporary Art (2014)

“Literature and art have always depended on imitation, and in the past few decades quotation and appropriation have become dominant aesthetic practices. But critical methods have not kept pace with this development. Patrick Greaney reopens the debate about quotation and appropriation, shifting away from claims about the death of the author. In interpretations of art and literature from the 1960s to the present, Quotational Practices shows how artists and writers use quotation not to undermine authorship and originality, but to answer questions at the heart of twentieth-century philosophies of history.

Greaney argues that quotation is a technique employed by art and philosophy to build ties to the past and to possible futures. By exploring quotation’s links to gender, identity, and history, he offers new approaches to works by some of the most influential modern and contemporary artists, writers, and philosophers, including Walter Benjamin, Guy Debord, Michel Foucault, Marcel Broodthaers, Glenn Ligon, Sharon Hayes, and Vanessa Place.

Ultimately, Quotational Practices reveals innovative perspectives on canonical philosophical texts as well as art and literature in a wide range of genres and mediums—from concrete poetry and the artist’s book to performance, painting, and video art.”

Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 2014
ISBN 9780816687343, 081668734X
xiv+217 pages

Reviews: Laura Guy (Visual Studies, 2015), Adam Barbu (Rev Cult Theory, 2016).

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WorldCat

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