Close readings of ostensibly "blank" works-from unprinted pages to silent music-that point to a new understanding of media. In No Medium, Craig Dworkin looks at works that are blank, erased, clear, or silent, writing critically and substantively about works for which there would seem to be not only nothing to see but nothing to say. Examined closely, these ostensibly contentless works of art, literature, and music point to a new understanding of media and the limits of the artistic object. Dworkin considers works predicated on blank sheets of paper, from a fictional collection of poems in Jean Cocteau's Orphee to the actual publication of a ream of typing paper as a book of poetry; he compares Robert Rauschenberg's Erased De Kooning Drawing to the artist Nick Thurston's erased copy of Maurice Blanchot's The Space of Literature (in which only Thurston's marginalia were visible); and he scrutinizes the sexual politics of photographic representation and the implications of obscured or obliterated subjects of photographs. Reexamining the famous case of John Cage's 4'33", Dworkin links Cage's composition to Rauschenberg's White Paintings, Ken Friedman's Zen for Record (and Nam June Paik's Zen for Film), and other works, offering also a "guide to further listening" that surveys more than 100 scores and recordings of "silent" music. Dworkin argues that we should understand media not as blank, base things but as social events, and that there is no medium, understood in isolation, but only and always a plurality of media: interpretive activities taking place in socially inscribed space.

Gaps and the Creation of Ideas: An Artist's Book is a portrait of the space between things, whether those things be neurons, quotations, comic-book frames, or fragments in a collage. This twenty-year project is an artist's book composed by juxtaposing quotes and images with the author's thoughts in between. The book is structured to show analogies between disparate texts and images.There have always been gaps, but a focus on the space between things is virtually synonymous with modernity. Modernity itself is a story of gaps, as it is often characterized as a break. Around 1900, many independent strands of gap thought and experience interacted and interwove more intricately. Atoms, theories, women, Jewish people, collage, poetry, patchwork, and jazz figure prominently in these strands. The gap is a phenomenon that crosses the boundaries of neuroscience, rabbinic thinking, modern literary criticism, the structure of matter, art, and popular culture. This book explores many subjects, but it is ultimately a work of art.

From the 1960s until 2000, John Evans made a daily collage from scraps found on the streets of New York. Often whimsical and ironic, these combinations of packing labels, personal notes, photographs, business cards, ticket stubs, and other bits of ephemera encompass the bits and pieces of daily life.

Graffitecture is an exploration of what happens when graffiti, a highly innovative, wholly original art form rooted in urban culture, both clashes and commingles with the built environment. It is an essential publication for anyone interested in learning more about graffiti and its influence on art, graphic design, typography, popular culture, and communication.
Photographer and Graffitecture editor Doug Fogelson invited more than 40 prolific Chicago graffiti artists to manipulate over 60 of his photographs. The images depict interiors and exteriors of diverse, high-end spaces such as homes, hotels, office buildings, and stores (as well some of the more traditional places where graffiti occurs). In doing so artists were asked, What would YOU do here?
The Chicago based artists (include provocative figures such as the X-Men, Jeff Zimmerman, Chris Silva, Fact, Gusher, Michael Genovese, Sketcherone, Merdok and many others) manipulated the prints any way they saw fit. The results range from a pen-and-ink subway train riding through an office building lobby to a colorful, futuristic mural splashed on the screen at an empty home movie theater.
Graffitecture also examines graffiti's artistic and cultural significance through four essays written by Illinois-based professors and artists. John Jennings, a graphic design and urban studies professor at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, ponders mainstream society's appropriation of graffiti's unique typography. Bridgette R. McCullough, an art historian, Manet scholar, and professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, compares modern-day graffiti to abstract art. Another Art Institute professor, furniture designer/artist/curator Bridgette Buckley, examines the symbiotic relationship between architecture and illicit painting. Tim Hartford, president of Hartford Design, ponders the very meaning of graffiti and its place in history.
The collaborative images are presented in a full-color gallery while the essays are presented with Fogelson's black-and-white aerial panoramas of Chicago's landmarks and skyline. Designed by Dan De Los Monteros and David Castillo