George Antheil: Bad Boy of Music (1945–)

9 April 2021, dusan

George Antheil (1900-1959) was a radical American composer active in the early part of 20th century. He was recognised by the Parisian avant-garde literary community as a musical spokesman for their ideas. In the late 1920s Antheil participated in the operatic renaissance in Germany, and, after his return to America in 1933, he attempted to synthesize an American musical idiom in his neoromantic film, symphonic, chamber, and operatic scores.

In his autobiography, Antheil gives a fascinating account of the creative activity in Berlin, Paris, Vienna, New York and Hollywood, discussing his encounters with Igor Stravinsky, Hedy Lamarr, James Joyce, Man Ray, Ezra Pound, Sylvia Beach, W.B. Yeats, Erik Satie, Pablo Picasso, Cecil B. DeMille, Fritz Lang, Salvador Dalí and others.

First published by Doubleday, Doran & Co., Garden City, NY, 1945
Published in the UK by Hurst & Blackett, London, 1947
Reprinted by National Book Association / Hutchinson & Co., London, 1949
295 pages
via Tom Whitwell

Reviews: Milfred Norton (Hollywood Quarterly, 1946), Linda Whitesitt (American Music, 1984).
Commentary: Guy Livingston (ABC Radio National, 2015).

WorldCat

PDF (12 MB)

Paul B. Preciado: An Apartment on Uranus: Chronicles of the Crossing (2019–) [FR, ES, EN]

5 July 2020, dusan

“A ‘dissident of the gender-sex binary system’ reflects on gender transitioning and political and cultural transitions in technoscientific capitalism.

Uranus, the frozen giant, is the coldest planet in the solar system as well as a deity in Greek mythology. It is also the inspiration for uranism, a concept coined by the writer Karl Heinrich Ulrich in 1864 to define the “third sex” and the rights of those who “love differently.” Following Ulrich, Paul B. Preciado dreams of an apartment on Uranus where he might live beyond existing power, gender and racial strictures invented by modernity. “My trans condition is a new form of uranism,” he writes. “I am not a man. I am not a woman. I am not heterosexual. I am not homosexual. I am not bisexual. I am a dissident of the gender-sex binary system. I am the multiplicity of the cosmos trapped in a binary political and epistemological system, shouting in front of you. I am a uranist confined inside the limits of technoscientific capitalism.”

This book recounts Preciado’s transformation from Beatriz into Paul B., but it is not only an account of gender transitioning. Preciado also considers political, cultural, and sexual transition, reflecting on issues that range from the rise of neo-fascism in Europe to the technological appropriation of the uterus, from the harassment of trans children to the role museums might play in the cultural revolution to come.”

French edition
Preface by Virginie Despentes
Publisher Bernard Grasset, Paris, 2019
ISBN 9782246820666, 2246820669
334 pages

Spanish edition
Introduction by Virginie Despentes
Publisher Anagrama, Barcelona, 2019
ISBN 9788433998767, 8433998765
309 pages

English edition
Foreword by Virginie Despentes
Translated by Charlotte Mandell
Publisher Semiotext(e), South Pasadena, CA, 2020
ISBN 9781635901139, 1635901138
263 pages

Reviews: Eugénie Bourlet (En attendant Nadeau, 2019, FR), Kevin Lambert (Spirale, 2020, FR), Pierre Niedergang (Diacritik, 2019, FR), Thomas Liano (French Studies, 2020, FR), Bernabé Sarabia (El Cultural, 2019, ES), Emilia Holstein (Feminacida, 2020, ES), Alexandra Marraccini (review31, 2020), Megan Milks (4Columns), Bryony White (Frieze, 2020), Kevin Brazil (ArtReview, 2020).

Publisher (FR)
Publisher (ES)
Distributor (EN)
WorldCat (EN)

Un appartement sur Uranus: chroniques de la traversée (French, 2019, MOBI, updated on 2021-4-13)
Un apartamento en Urano: crónicas del cruce (Spanish, 2019, updated on 2021-4-13)
An Apartment on Uranus: Chronicles of the Crossing (English, trans. Charlotte Mandell, 2020)

Karen Kurczynski: The Art and Politics of Asger Jorn: The Avant-Garde Won’t Give Up (2014)

25 April 2019, dusan

“Danish artist Asger Jorn has long been recognized for his founding contributions to the Cobra and Situationist International movements – yet art historical scholarship on Jorn has been sparse, particularly in English. This study offers a synthetic account of the essential phases of this artist’s career. It addresses his works in various media alongside his extensive writings and his collaborations with various artists’ groups from the 1940s through the mid-1960s. Situating Jorn’s work in an international, post-Second World War context, Karen Kurczynski reframes our understanding of the 1950s, away from the Abstract-Expressionist focus on individual expression, toward a more open-ended conception of art as a public engagement with contemporary culture and politics.”

Publisher Ashgate, 2014
ISBN 9781409431978, 1409431975
xiii+261 pages
via Situationist Library

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (13 MB)