Christina Lammer: Günter Brus. Kleine Narbenlehre: eine Leibgeschichte in drei Akten [German]

“Günter Brus’ Kleine Narbenlehre ist eine Folge von acht bisher unpublizierten Fotografien, vom Künstler jeweils mit einem kurzen, prägnanten Text versehen. Die Bilder zeigen Günter Brus in den Tagen nach einer schweren Operation (1999), noch als Patient, seine Narben, seine diversen Verschlauchungen. Ausgehend von dieser Bildfolge versucht Christina Lammer in diesem Buch die Nahtstelle zwischen dem selbst-bestimmten Körper des Künstlers in seinen Aktionen der Sechziger- und Siebzigerjahre und seiner Fremdbestimmung im medizinischen Kontext eines Krankenhauses, in dem er operiert wurde, kenntlich zu machen. Betonte Brus in seinen Selbstbemalungen und -verletzungen die Mittellinie des eigenen Leibs, markiert fast vierzig Jahre später eine Narbe, die vom Brustbein bis zum Unterbauch reicht, als Spur einer Krebsoperation seinen Oberkörper. Zwei Strukturen werden inhaltlich in Beziehung zu einander gesetzt: Narben und Schläuche. Aktionsskizzen und -partituren des Wiener Aktionisten werden analysiert und mit Fotos der durchgeführten Aktionen verglichen, um Aussagen über die Körpersprache sowie die Konditionierung des eigenen Leibs zu treffen.”

Foreword by Cathrin Pichler
Publisher Löcker, Vienna, 2007
ISBN 9783854094425
296 pages
via Corporealities.org

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Georges Canguilhem: A Vital Rationalist: Selected Writings (1994)

“Georges Canguilhem is one of France’s leading philosophers and historians of science. Trained as both a medical doctor and a philosopher, Canguilhem overlapped these practices to demonstrate that there could be no epistemology without concrete study of the actual development of the sciences and no worthwhile history of science without a philosophical understanding of the conceptual basis of all knowledge.

A Vital Rationalist brings together some of Canguilhem’s most important writings, including excerpts from previously unpublished manuscripts. Organized around the major themes and problems that have preoccupied Canguilhem throughout his intellectual career, this collection allows readers both familiar and unfamiliar with Canguilhem’s work access to a vast array of conceptual and concrete meditations on epistemology, methodology, science, and history. Although Canguilhem is a demanding writer, Delaporte succeeds in identifying the main lines of his thought with unrivaled clarity and maps out the complex and crucial place this thinker holds in the history of twentieth-century French thought.”

Edited by François Delaporte
Translated by Arthur Goldhammer
Introduction by Paul Rabinow
Critical bibliography by Camille Limoges
Publisher Zone Books, New York, 1994
This edition, 2000
ISBN 9780942299731
481 pages

Reviews: Levin (The Journal of the American Medical Association, 1994), Keller (Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 1996), Sutton (The British Journal for the History of Science, 1997).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (7 MB)

Trevor Pinch, Karin Bijsterveld (eds.): The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies (2011)

“Written by the leading scholars and researchers in the emerging field of sound studies, The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies offers new and fully engaging perspectives on the significance of sound in its material and cultural forms. The book considers sounds and music as experienced in such diverse settings as shop floors, laboratories, clinics, design studios, homes, and clubs, across an impressively broad range of historical periods and national and cultural contexts.

Science has traditionally been understood as a visual matter, a study which has historically been undertaken with optical technologies such as slides, graphs, and telescopes. This book questions that notion powerfully by showing how listening has contributed to scientific practice. Sounds have always been a part of human experience, shaping and transforming the world in which we live in ways that often go unnoticed. Sounds and music, the authors argue, are embedded in the fabric of everyday life, art, commerce, and politics in ways which impact our perception of the world. Through an extraordinarily diverse set of case studies, authors illustrate how sounds — from the sounds of industrialization, to the sounds of automobiles, to sounds in underwater music and hip-hop, to the sounds of nanotechnology — give rise to new forms listening practices. In addition, the book discusses the rise of new public problems such as noise pollution, hearing loss, and the “end” of the amateur musician that stem from the spread and appropriation of new sound- and music-related technologies, analog and digital, in many domains of life.”

Publisher Oxford University Press, 2011
ISBN 0199995818, 9780195388947
624 pages

Reviews: John F. Barber (Leonardo, 2012), Bruce Johnson (Popular Music, 2013), William Cheng (Journal of the American Musicological Society, 2014).

Companion website
Publisher

PDF, PDF (56 MB)