Hal Foster: Bad New Days: Art, Criticism, Emergency (2015)

“Bad New Days examines the evolution of art and criticism in Western Europe and North America over the last twenty-five years, exploring their dynamic relation to the general condition of emergency instilled by neoliberalism and the war on terror.

Considering the work of artists such as Thomas Hirschhorn, Tacita Dean, and Isa Genzken, and the writing of thinkers like Jacques Rancière, Bruno Latour, and Giorgio Agamben, Hal Foster shows the ways in which art has anticipated this condition, at times resisting the collapse of the social contract or gesturing toward its repair; at other times burlesquing it.

Against the claim that art making has become so heterogeneous as to defy historical analysis, Foster argues that the critic must still articulate a clear account of the contemporary in all its complexity. To that end, he offers several paradigms for the art of recent years, which he terms “abject,” “archival,” “mimetic,” and “precarious.””

Publisher Verso, London and New York, 2015
ISBN 1784781460, 9781784781460
208 pages

Presentation and discussion (video, The Kitchen, NYC, Sep 2015)
Interview (John Douglas Millar, Mute, Nov 2015)

Reviews: Mark Steven (Affirmations 2015), Brian Dillon (Guardian 2015), Rachel Wetzler (ArtNews 2015).

Publisher
WorldCat

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Henry Flynt: Down With Art (1968)

Henry Flynt‘s early publication (his “Concept Art” essay appeared in An Anthology in 1963 and he contributed to Wolf Vostell’s décollage the year prior) features his “Art or Brend” essay, letters/statements by Terry Riley (#2), Robert Morris (#3, #6), Walter De Maria (#7), Diane Wakoski (#8), Cornelius Cardew (#9) and Ben Vautier (#10), and a press release describing a demonstration undertaken by Flynt, Tony Conrad, Jack Smith and others in front of MoMA on February 27, 1963, followed by Flynt’s lecture the next day (#4).

Publisher Fluxpress, New York, 1968
[12] pages, 10 x 27 cm

PDF (2 MB)

Janet Roitman: Anti-Crisis (2013)

“Crisis is everywhere: in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and the Congo; in housing markets, money markets, financial systems, state budgets, and sovereign currencies. In Anti-Crisis, Janet Roitman steps back from the cycle of crisis production to ask not just why we declare so many crises but also what sort of analytical work the concept of crisis enables. What, she asks, are the stakes of crisis? Taking responses to the so-called subprime mortgage crisis of 2007–2008 as her case in point, Roitman engages with the work of thinkers ranging from Reinhart Koselleck to Michael Lewis, and from Thomas Hobbes to Robert Shiller. In the process, she questions the bases for claims to crisis and shows how crisis functions as a narrative device, or how the invocation of crisis in contemporary accounts of the financial meltdown enables particular narratives, raising certain questions while foreclosing others.”

Publisher Duke University Press, 2013
ISBN 9780822355120
176 pages

Reviews: Fokwang (Anthropology Southern Africa, 2014), McDonagh (LSE Review of Books, 2014), Engel (New Political Science, 2014).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (updated on 2019-10-11)