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Modern history is a history of aesthetizations – and every
aesthetization raises a claim of protection. We aestheticize and
want to protect almost everything, including Earth, oceans, the
atmosphere, rare animal species and exotic plants. Humans are no
exception. They also present themselves as objects of contemplation
that deserve admiration and care. For some time, artists and
intellectuals struggled for the sovereign right to present
themselves to society in their own way – to become self-created
works of art. Today everybody has not only a right but also an
obligation to practice self-design. We are responsible for the way
we present ourselves to others – and we cannot get rid of this
aesthetic responsibility. However, we are not able to produce our
own bodies. Before we begin to practice self-design, we find
ourselves already designed by the gaze of others. That is why the
practice of self-design mostly takes a critical and confrontational
turn. We want to bring others to see us in the way we want to be
seen – not only during our earthly life but also after our death.
This is a complicated struggle, and the aim of this book is to
describe and analyze it.
An interdisciplinary volume of essays identifying the impact of
technology on the age-old cultural practice of collecting as well
as the opportunities and pitfalls of collecting in the digital era.
Seminal to the rise of human cultures, the practice of collecting
is an expression of individual and societal self-understanding.
Through collections, cultures learn and grow. The introduction of
digital technology has accelerated this process and at the same
time changed how, what, and why we collect. Ever-expanding storage
capacities and the accumulation of unprecedented amounts of data
are part of a highly complex information economy in which
collecting has become even more important for the formation of the
past, present, and future. Museums, libraries, and archives have
adapted to the requirements of a digital environment, as has anyone
who browses the internet and stores information on hard drives or
cloud servers. In turn, companies follow the digital footprint we
leave behind. Today, collecting includes not only physical objects
but also the binary code that allows for their virtual
representation on screen. Collecting in the Twenty-First Century
identifies the impact of technology, both new and old, on the
cultural practice of collecting as well as the challenges and
opportunities of collecting in the digital era. Scholars from
German Studies, Media Studies, Museum Studies, Sound Studies,
Information Technology, and Art History as well as librarians and
preservationists offer insights into the most recent developments
in collecting practices.
A teacher to Jacques Lacan, Andre Breton, and Albert Camus, Kojeve
defined art as the act of extracting the beautiful from objective
reality. His poetic text, "The Concrete Paintings of Kandinsky,"
endorses nonrepresentational art as uniquely manifesting beauty.
Taking the paintings of his renowned uncle, Wassily Kandinsky, as
his inspiration, Kojeve suggests that in creating (rather than
replicating) beauty, the paintings are themselves complete
universes as concrete as the natural world. Kojeve's text considers
the utility and necessity of beauty in life, and ultimately poses
the involuted question: What is beauty? Including personal letters
between Kandinsky and his nephew, this book further elaborates the
unique relationship between artist and philosopher. An introduction
by Boris Groys contextualizes Kojeve's life and writings.
Since Plato, philosophers have dreamed of establishing a rational
state ruled through the power of language. In this radical and
disturbing account of Soviet philosophy, Boris Groys argues that
communism shares that dream and is best understood as an attempt to
replace financial with linguistic bonds as the cement uniting
society. The transformative power of language, the medium of
equality, is the key to any new communist revolution.
Our current culture is dominated by the ideology of creativity. One
is supposed to create the new and not to care about the things as
they are. This ideology legitimises the domination of the "creative
class" over the rest of the population that is predominantly
occupied by forms of care - medical care, child care, agriculture,
industrial maintenance and so on. We have a responsibility to care
for our own bodies, but here again our culture tends to thematize
the bodies of desire and to ignore the bodies of care - ill bodies
in need of self-care and social care. But the discussion of care
has a long philosophical tradition. The book retraces some episodes
of this tradition - beginning with Plato and ending with Alexander
Bogdanov through Hegel, Heidegger, Bataille and many others. The
central question discussed is: who should be the subject of care?
Should I care for myself or trust the others, the system, the
institutions? Here, the concept of the self-care becomes a
revolutionary principle that confronts the individual with the
dominating mechanisms of control.
The artistic tradition that emerged as a form of cultural
resistance in the 1970s changed during the transition from
socialism to capitalism. This volume presents the evolution of the
Moscow-based conceptual artist group called Collective Actions,
proposing it as a case-study for understanding the transformations
that took place in Eastern European art after the fall of the
Berlin Wall. Esanu introduces Moscow Conceptualism by performing a
close examination of the Collective Actions group's ten-volume
publication Journeys Outside the City and of the Dictionary of
Moscow Conceptualism. He analyzes above all the evolution of
Collective Actions through ten consecutive phases, discussing
changes that occur in each new volume of the Journeys. Compares the
part of the Journeys produced in the Soviet period with those
volumes assembled after the dissolution of the USSR. The concept of
"transition" and the activities of Soros Centers for Contemporary
Art are also analyzed.
Wolfgang H Scholz (b. 1958) is a visual artist and film director.
His work spans more than three decades and encompasses apart from
painting many forms of expression, ranging from theatrical and
documentary films, sculpture, photography, and installations to
multimedia stage pieces. His central theme is the vision of an
imaginary arrival, and his work method is a form of decoding. Other
essential concepts that recur in Scholz's work include the
labyrinth, time, memories or localization and the questioning of
reality. The title The Void is taken from a Buddhist term for the
Fifth Element: The Void. Since 2010 Scholz has worked with Japanese
Butoh masters, creating several multimedia stage pieces and series
of photographic works on this theme. This volume includes a
conversation with Prof. Dr. Boris Groys of New York University, one
of the most important scholars of the arts and humanities of the
twentieth century. This dialogue is an essential text for
understanding the creative processes, references, and influences of
Wolfgang H Scholz concerning the philosophical and programmatic
themes of The Void. This book will be published to coincide with
exhibitions by the MACO - Museum of Contemporary Art Oaxaca (2019),
Mexico, the Museum Ex Teresa Arte Actual (2019), the gallery Casa
Galván - UAM - Universidad Autónoma metropolitana (2020) and in
collaboration with the presentations of the performance THE VOID at
the Butoh Festival Kyoto, Japan (July 2019) and at the Theatre CC
Los Talleres, Mexico City in 2019. Text in English with a Spanish
and German insert.
The first fully illustrated survey of participatory art and its key
practitioners, published in association with the San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art.
This new survey covers the rich and varied history of participatory
art, from early happenings and performances to current practices
that demand audience interaction. As the hallmarks of Web
2.0--browsing, sharing, collecting, producing--increasingly
permeate every aspect of society, this timely project reveals the
ways in which artists and viewers have approached the creation of
open works of art. The featured artists include Marina Abramovic
and Ulay, Vito Acconci, Joseph Beuys, John Cage, Janet Cardiff,
Lygia Clark, Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz, Dan Graham, Hans
Haacke, Allan Kaprow, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Antoni Muntadas, Yoko
Ono, Nam June Paik, and Erwin Wurm.
Original essays by Rudolf Frieling, Boris Groys, Robert Atkins, and
Lev Manovich identify seminal moments in participatory practice
from the 1950s to the present day. A rich array of plates introduce
work by all the artists in the accompanying exhibition, with
reproductions of significant projects by other major figures--from
Helio Oiticica, Joan Jonas, and Gordon Matta-Clark to Rirkrit
Tiravanija and SUPERFLEX--rounding out the survey. 215 color
illustrations.
The public generally regards the media with suspicion and
distrust. Therefore, the media's primary concern is to regain that
trust through the production of sincerity. Advancing the field of
media studies in a truly innovative way, Boris Groys focuses on the
media's affect of sincerity and its manufacture of trust to appease
skeptics.
Groys identifies forms of media sincerity and its effect on
politics, culture, society, and conceptions of the self. He relies
on different philosophical writings thematizing the gaze of the
other, from the theories of Heidegger, Sartre, Mauss, and Bataille
to the poststructuralist formulations of Lacan and Derrida. He also
considers media "states of exception" and their creation of effects
of sincerity -- a strategy that feeds the media's predilection for
the extraordinary and the sensational, further fueling the public's
suspicions. Emphasizing the media's production of emotion over the
presentation (or lack thereof) of "facts," Groys launches a timely
study boldly challenging the presumed authenticity of the media's
worldview.
A TLS Book of the Year 2017 In this, the first anthology of Russian
contemporary art writing to be published outside Russia, many of
the country's most prominent contemporary artists, writers,
philosophers, curators and historians come together to examine the
region's contemporary art, culture and and theory. With
contributions from Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Boris Groys, Dmitri
Prigov, Anton Vidokle, Keti Chukhrov, Oxana Timofeeva, Pavel
Pepperstein, Arseny Zhilyaev and Masha Sumnina amongst many others,
this definitive collection reveals a compelling portrait of a
vibrant and complex culture: one built on a contradicting dialectic
between the material and the ideal, and battling its own histories
and ideologies.
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Andrei Monastyrski - Elementary Poetry (Paperback)
Andrei Monastyrski; Edited by Brian Droitcour; Translated by Brian Droitcour; Edited by Yelena Kalinsky; Translated by Yelena Kalinsky; Introduction by …
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R712
Discovery Miles 7 120
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Ships in 12 - 19 working days
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In the early 20th century, art and its institutions came under
critique from a new democratic and egalitarian spirit. In an age of
secularism and materialism, artworks would be understood as merely
things among other things. This meant an attack on the techniques
of realism, and the traditional mission of the museum, both
designed shield a small class of objects from the entropic fate
awaiting everything else-and the development of an approach that
Boris Groys calls "direct realism": an art that would not produce
objects, but practices that could enter the flow of time to live
and die like the rest of us. But for more than a century now, every
advance in this direction has been quickly followed by new means of
preserving art's distinction. In this major new work, Groys, one of
the world's leading art theorists, charts the paradoxes produced by
this tension, which continues to structure the production and
reception of new art. The internet, the latest medium through which
artists have attempted to disavow this special status, inverts the
most notorious consequence of early modernist developments. If the
techniques of mechanical reproduction gave us objects without aura,
digital production generates aura without objects, transforming all
its materials into vanishing markers of the transitory present.
From the ruins of communism, Boris Groys emerges to provoke our
interest in the aesthetic goals pursued with such catastrophic
consequences by its founders. Interpreting totalitarian art and
literature in the context of cultural history, this brilliant essay
likens totalitarian aims to the modernists' goal of producing
world-transformative art. In this new edition, Groys revisits the
debate that the book has stimulated since its first publication.
In the early twentieth century, art and its institutions came under
critique from a new democratic and egalitarian spirit. The notion
of works of art as sacred objects was decried and subsequently they
would be understood merely as things. This meant an attack on
realism, as well as on the traditional preservative mission of the
museum. Acclaimed art theorist Boris Groys argues this led to the
development of "direct realism": an art that would not produce
objects, but practices (from performance art to relational
aesthetics) that would not survive. But for more than a century
now, every advance in this direction has been quickly followed by
new means of preserving art's distinction. In this major new work,
Groys charts the paradoxes produced by this tension, and explores
art in the age of the thingless medium, the Internet. Groys claims
that if the techniques of mechanical reproduction gave us objects
without aura, digital production generates aura without objects,
transforming all its materials into vanishing markers of the
transitory present.
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On the New (Paperback)
Boris Groys; Translated by G.M. Goshgarian
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R596
Discovery Miles 5 960
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Ships in 12 - 19 working days
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"On the New" looks at the economies of exchange and valuation that
drive modern culture's key sites: the intellectual marketplace and
the archive. As ideas move from one context to another, newness is
created. This continuous shifting of the line that separates the
valuable from the worthless, culture from profanity, is at the
center of Boris Groys's investigation which aims to map the
uncharted territory of what constitutes artistic innovation and
what processes underpin its recognition and appropriation.
The Moscow Metro is a unique place. With a network of 400
kilometers of lines, exceptionally deep tunnels and stations, and
nearly nine million passengers a day, it is one of the most heavily
frequented underground subway systems in the world. Katharina
Gruzei explored it over several years and now presents an
aesthetically fascinating and socioculturally remarkable
photographic survey. Ideologically charged and symbolic of Russia's
eventful history, the Metro was started as a prestige project and
simultaneously conceived to also be used as a bunker. It was always
intended as a place for people to congregate and is still today a
living space where social, political and societal tendencies are
made legible. With her photo series, the artist enables an
extraordinary journey through time and space in the underground of
Moscow, a metropolis of millions.
A new book by Boris Groys acknowledges the problem and potential of
art's complex relationship to power. Art has its own power in the
world, and is as much a force in the power play of global politics
today as it once was in the arena of cold war politics. Art, argues
the distinguished theoretician Boris Groys, is hardly a powerless
commodity subject to the art market's fiats of inclusion and
exclusion. In Art Power, Groys examines modern and contemporary art
according to its ideological function. Art, Groys writes, is
produced and brought before the public in two ways-as a commodity
and as a tool of political propaganda. In the contemporary art
scene, very little attention is paid to the latter function.
Arguing for the inclusion of politically motivated art in
contemporary art discourse, Groys considers art produced under
totalitarianism, Socialism, and post-Communism. He also considers
today's mainstream Western art-which he finds behaving more and
more according the norms of ideological propaganda: produced and
exhibited for the masses at international exhibitions, biennials,
and festivals. Contemporary art, Groys argues, demonstrates its
power by appropriating the iconoclastic gestures directed against
itself-by positioning itself simultaneously as an image and as a
critique of the image. In Art Power, Groys examines this
fundamental appropriation that produces the paradoxical object of
the modern artwork.
"Open" 22 investigates how transparency and secrecy are intertwined
in modern-day society and explores how they relate to the public
and the civic, using WikiLeaks as a test case. The contributors
consider transparency as fetish and the ideal of the free flow of
information.
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