Martha Rosler: Positions in the Life World (1999)

“Since the late 1960s, artist Martha Rosler has produced seminal works in the fields of photography, performance, video, installation, critical writing, and theory. Committed to an art that engages a public beyond the confines of the art world, Rosler investigates how socioeconomic realities and political ideologies dominate ordinary life. Her astute critical analyses are often cloaked in deadpan wit.

This book, which accompanies the first retrospective exhibition of Rosler’s work, contains seven color photo essays by Rosler; an excerpt from the curatorial project “If You Lived Here”; essays by Alexander Alberro, Catherine de Zegher, Sylvia Eiblmayr, Jodi Hauptman, and Annette Michelson; a conversation between Rosler and Benjamin Buchloh; and a biography/bibliography along with a complete list of art works.”

Edited by Catherine de Zegher
Publisher Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, and Generali Foundation, Vienna, 1999
ISBN 026204174X, 9780262041744
294 pages

Reviews: Blake Stimson (CAA, 2000), Ben Highmore (Art History, 2001).
Exh. reviews: Christian Kravagna (Artforum, 1999), Alison Rowley (n.paradoxa, 2001).

Exhibition (Generali, Vienna, 1999)
Exhibition (MACBA, Barcelona, 1999)
Exhibition (New Museum, NYC, 2000)
Distributor
WorldCat

PDF (126 MB)

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay: Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (2019)

“A passionately urgent call for all of us to unlearn imperialism and repair the violent world we share

In this theoretical tour-de-force, renowned scholar Ariella Aïsha Azoulay calls on us to recognize the imperial foundations of knowledge and to refuse its strictures and its many violences.

Azoulay argues that the institutions that make our world, from archives and museums to ideas of sovereignty and human rights to history itself, are all dependent on imperial modes of thinking. Imperialism has segmented populations into differentially governed groups, continually emphasized the possibility of progress while it tries to destroy what came before, and voraciously seeks out the new by sealing the past away in dusty archival boxes and the glass vitrines of museums.

By practicing what she calls potential history, Azoulay argues that we can still refuse the original imperial violence that shattered communities, lives, and worlds, from native peoples in the Americas at the moment of conquest to the Congo ruled by Belgium’s brutal King Léopold II, from dispossessed Palestinians in 1948 to displaced refugees in our own day. In Potential History, Azoulay travels alongside historical companions—an old Palestinian man who refused to leave his village in 1948, an anonymous woman in war-ravaged Berlin, looted objects and documents torn from their worlds and now housed in archives and museums—to chart the ways imperialism has sought to order time, space, and politics.

Rather than looking for a new future, Azoulay calls upon us to rewind history and unlearn our imperial rights, to continue to refuse imperial violence by making present what was invented as ‘past’ and making the repair of torn worlds the substance of politics.”

Publisher Verso Books, London, 2019
ISBN 9781788735711, 1788735714
656 pages

Interviews with author: Jadaliyya (2019), Brad Evans (LA Review of Books, 2020), Sabrina Alli (Guernica, 2020).

Reviews: Ian Wallace (Artforum, 2020), Guy Mannes-Abbott (Third Text, 2020), Louis Rogers (review31, 2020), Stephen Sheehi (Hyperallergic, 2020), Luke Urbain (InVisible Culture, 2020), Lunettes Rouges (Le Monde blog, 2020, FR, part 2), Sascha Crasnow (Field, 2022).

Roundtable: Gil Hochberg, Zoé Samudzi, Joshua Simon, Robert Yerachmiel Sniderman (Protocols, 2020).

Publisher
WorldCat

HTML (added on 2020-2-2)
EPUB (15 MB)

Bruce Conner: It’s All True (2016)

“Realist. Surrealist. Hippie. Punk. Bruce Conner (1933-2008) was all of these and more. A pioneer in experimental film, collage, photography, conceptual works, and paintings, he challenged the limitations of medium, genre, and style, constantly breaking new ground. Both of and ahead of his time, Conner continues to exert influence over artists working today. Bruce Conner: It’s All True was the first comprehensive retrospective of this pivotal American artist’s output, bringing together over 250 objects in various media, including film and video, works on paper, assemblages, photographs and photograms, performance, and more. Spanning his five-decade career, the exhibition presents aspects of Conner’s work that have rarely been seen before, from paintings he made in the 1950s to photos from the Bay Area punk scene in the 1970s to video work from the 2000s, as well as numerous works produced in the last decade of his life.”

With texts by Rachel Federman, Laura Hoptman, Kellie Jones, Michelle Barger, Roger Griffith and Megan Randall, Rachel Federman, Kristine Stiles, Rudolf Frieling, Gary Garrels, Diedrich Diederichsen, Stuart Comer, Johanna Gosse, a.o.

Edited by Rudolf Frieling and Gary Garrels
Publisher San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, in association with University of California Press, 2016
ISBN 9780520290563, 0520290569
384 pages

Review: Hugo Daniel (Critique d’art, 2017, FR).
Exh. reviews: Roberta Smith (New York Times), Andrea K. Scott (New Yorker), J. Hoberman (New York Review of Books), Matthew Biro (Brooklyn Rail), Maika Pollack (Aperture), Kristin M. Jones (Wall Street Journal), Kimberly Connerton (Aesthetica), Thomas Gladysz (Huff Post).

Exhibition (MoMA)
Exhibition (SFMOMA)
Exhibition (Reina Sofia)
Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (35 MB)