John Beck, Ryan Bishop: Technocrats of the Imagination: Art, Technology, and the Military-Industrial Avant-Garde (2020)

“In Technocrats of the Imagination John Beck and Ryan Bishop explore the collaborations between the American avant-garde art world and the military-industrial complex during the 1960s, in which artists worked with scientists and engineers in universities, private labs, and museums. For artists, designers, and educators working with the likes of Bell Labs, the RAND Corporation, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, experiments in art and technology presaged not only a new aesthetic but a new utopian social order based on collective experimentation. In examining these projects’ promises and pitfalls and how they have inspired a new generation of collaborative labs populated by artists, engineers, and scientists, Beck and Bishop reveal the connections between the contemporary art world and the militarized lab model of research that has dominated the sciences since the 1950s.”

Publisher Duke University Press, Durham, 2020
Cultural Politics series
ISBN 9781478005957, 1478005955
viii+229 pages

Review: Lindsay Caplan (Art in America, 2020).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF, PDF (updated on 2022-1-16)

Ana Janevski, Roxana Marcoci, Ksenia Nouril (eds.): Art and Theory of Post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe: A Critical Anthology (2018)

“The fall of the Berlin Wall and the ripple effects felt over the following years from Bucharest to Prague to Moscow demarcate a significant moment when artists were able to publicly reassess their histories and question the opposition between the former East and the former West. Art and Theory of Post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe takes the pivotal political changes between 1989 and 1991 as its departure point to reflect on the effects that communism’s disintegration across Central and Eastern Europe—including the Soviet Union’s fifteen republics—had on the art practices, criticism, and cultural production of the following decades.

This book presents a selection of the period’s key voices that have introduced recent critical perspectives. Particular attention is given to the research and viewpoints of a new generation of artists, scholars, and curators who have advanced fresh critical perspectives and who are rewriting their own histories. Their examination of artistic practices and systems of cultural production proposes distinct outlooks for acting in the contemporary world while simultaneously rethinking the significance of the socialist legacy on art today.”

Contributors: Branislava Andjelkovic, Edit András, Inke Arns, Marius Babias, Zdenka Badovinac, Ivana Bago, Zbynek Baladrán, Claire Bishop, Luchezar Boyadjiev, Andreas Broeckmann, Boris Buden, Ilya Budraitskis, Ondrej Chrobák, Keti Chukhrov, Kim Conaty, Cosmin Costinas, Eda Cufer, Bojana Cvejic, Ekaterina Degot, Branislav Dimitrijevic, Michelle Elligott, Octavian Esanu, Yevgeniy Fiks, Meghan Forbes, Maja Fowkes, Reuben Fowkes, Boris Groys, Daniel Grún, Marina Gržinic, Vít Havránek, Jon Hendricks, IRWIN (Miran Mohar, Andrej Savski, Roman Uranjek, and Borut Vogelnik), Sanja Ivekovic, Ana Janevski, David Joselit, Tímea Junghaus, Klara Kemp-Welch, Juliet Kinchin, Zofia Kulik, Andres Kurg, Katalin Ladik, Václav Magid, Eva Majewska, David Maljkovic, Roxana Marcoci, Lina Michelkevice, Aldo Milohnic, Viktor Misiano, Rastko Mocnik, Magdalena Moskalewicz, Deimantas Narkevicius, Ksenia Nouril, Ewa Opalka, Martina Pachmanová, Bojana Pejic, Dan Perjovschi, Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez, Piotr Piotrowski, Bojana Piškur, David Platzker, Paulina Pobocha, Tomáš Pospiszyl, Lýdia Pribišová, Oleksiy Radynski, Karol Radziszewski, Christian Rattemeyer, Cristina Ricupero, Georg Schöllhammer, David Senior, Alina ?erban, Slavs and Tatars, Sven Spieker, Tamas St.Auby, Zuzana Štefková, Jakub Stejskal, Mladen Stilinovic, subREAL, Tomás Svoboda, Ovidiu Ṯichindeleanu, Margarita Tupitsyn, Gediminas Urbonas, Nomeda Urbonas, Jonas Valatkevicius, Jelena Vesic, Dmitry Vilensky, Raluca Voinea, What, How & for Whom (Ivet Curlin, Ana Devic, Nataša Ilic, and Sabina Sabolovic), Igor Zabel, Artur Zmijewski.

Publisher Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2018
Primary Documents series
ISBN 9781633450646, 1633450643
408 pages

Reviews: Vesna Vuković (Zivot umjetnosti, 2018), Denisa Tomkova (H-Net, 2019), Milena Tomic (Slavonic and East European Review, 2019), Joanna Mardal (Junctions, 2019), Anežka Bartlová (Art & Antiques, 2019, CZ).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (14 MB, updated on 2022-5-4)

Coronavirus and Philosophers (2020) [IT, EN, ES]

Debate on the current Coronavirus (COVID-19) events and the state of exception sparkled by Giorgio Agamben’s article with contributions from Jean-Luc Nancy, Roberto Esposito, Sergio Benvenuto, Divya Dwivedi, Shaj Mohan, Rocco Ronchi, Massimo de Carolis, and others, in the Italian journal Antinomie. Included is an excerpt from Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish on the measures taken in the wake of a plague in the 17th century.

English translations of selected texts have been published by the European Journal of Psychoanalysis.

An expanded edition in Spanish was edited by Pablo Amadeo and published by ASPO (Aislamiento Social Preventivo y Obligatorio).

Paradoxia epidemica (Italian, HTML)
Coronavirus and Philosophers (English, Mar 2020, HTML, subsequent texts)
Sopa de Wuhan (Spanish, 29 Mar 2020, PDF, added on 2020-4-18)