This collection of essays, by a number of established scholars and artists, proposes new directions for Marxist cultural theory and the criticism of modern visual culture. It addresses a diverse range of topics, including the state and revolution, Communist and post-Communist aesthetics, Situationist thought and the avant-garde, subjectivity and commodification, and the politics and problems of contemporary artistic practice. The contributions also consider several other pressing questions in the visual arts, from the practice of digital culture to appropriations of critical theory, from the relations of art and the spectacle to architecture in the age of global modernity. This book on Marxism and art is not offered in a spirit of nostalgia: on the contrary, it testifies to the continuing vitality and confidence of historical materialist thought in the field of cultural theory and practice in the 21st century.

This book provides a history of Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), a large Britain-based chemical firm which was a major industrial player in the twentieth century. Once a model for Britain’s industrial reach and dominance, ICI collapsed in the mid-2000s, with some still profitable elements sold off to other chemical firms. The book focuses on the firm's origin site in the Northeast of England, around Middlesbrough, engaging the remnants of the company magazine, oral histories and social media posts, and material artifacts in the world, to relate a history of the social, environmental, cultural and imaginative and bodily impact of the presence (and then absence) of ICI. This unique work is open to coincidence and speculation, drawing on science fictional and urban myth narratives which emanate from the area. Through the lens of global narratives of industrial and philosophical innovation, it inquires into uncommon and diverse themes, such as the manufacture of Quorn, the place of photographic mediation of the factory, and industrial disease. Setting out from a context of heavy industry and material processing, the book seeks to stimulate poetic and creative thinking around the ways in which people's lives were enmeshed with synthetic chemicals and the dreams that seemed to ooze and seep from them as by-products.

Walter Benjamin's 1931 essay "A Short History of Photography" is a landmark in the understanding and criticism of the medium, offering surprising new takes on such photographic pioneers as David Octavius Hill and Nicephore Niepce and their aesthetic and technical achievements. On Photography presents a new translation of that essay along with a number of other writings by Benjamin, some of them presented in English for the first time. Translator and editor Esther Leslie sets Benjamin's work in context with prefaces to each piece and contributes a substantial introduction that considers Benjamin's engagement with photography in all its forms, including early commercial studio photography, the uses of photography in science, and much more.

Contemporary British artist Heather Phillipson works across video, sculpture, online projects, music, drawing, and poetry. She will be the next artist to exhibit work at the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square and has been selected as Tate Britain's 2021 Duveen Galleries commission. Other recent commissions include Sharjah Biennial 14 and the Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin, and her solo projects range from Art on the Underground's flagship site at Gloucester Road, an online work for the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and a major solo show at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art. This first monograph on the artist traces the evolution of her practice. Alongside the artist's own writings, the book will feature three newly-commissioned essays by writer and curator Laura McLean-Ferris, the experimental London-based writer Charlie Fox, and Professor Chus Martinez. The book explores the wide variety of media used by the artist to investigate the power structures and contradictions of contemporary life.

A fascinating survey of pioneering work in experimental cinema and art from 1905 to the present day, revealing the high stakes and transformative potential of these forms This generously illustrated publication surveys the work of filmmakers and artists who have pushed the material and conceptual boundaries of cinema. Over the past century, the material, optical, abstract, spatial, and tactile properties of film have been tested at a level of experimentation and utopian ambition that is generally unrecognized. Whether creating synesthetic or 3-D environments, projective or non-projective installations, generations of leading-edge artists have explored how technology transforms experience. The essays published here offer an intensive look at the themes of cinematic space, formats of the screen, animation and CGI, the body and the cyborg, and the materiality of film. Contributors place particular emphasis on the idea of the cinema as a sensorium and on the ways in which it defines the human body, both through representation and in relation to the projected image. An immersive plate section brings together rarely seen and previously unpublished stills, in addition to concept drawings from historic and contemporary films. Distributed for the Whitney Museum of American Art Exhibition Schedule: Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (10/28/16-02/05/17)

Walter Benjamin, critic, essayist, translator, philosopher one of the twentieth century's most influential intellectuals continues to intrigue today. His work stimulates a profusion of responses in the form of new novels, operas, films and artworks, as well as a never-abating production of academic texts. In this new biography, the first to be written in over a decade, author Esther Leslie uses the recently published entirety of Benjamin's correspondence, drawing on his numerous diaries and autobiographical works, in order to provide a careful account of his circumstances and thoughts. Benjamin had many interests: he cherished childhood and its trappings; had a passion for the displacement and novelty of travel; toys; cities; trick-books; and, ships; all are given due attention as the author weaves Benjamin's wayward apperceptions into the narrative of a life lived. She follows Benjamin as he travels from Berlin to Capri, Ibiza, Riga, Moscow, Paris, and finally the Spanish border where he died in 1940. The author acknowledges Benjamin's thesis that personal histories can be traced only in the context of social milieus, economic forces, technological shifts, and historical events, and seamlessly interweaves biographical details with an accessible yet concentrated account of Benjamin's intellectual development, drawing a colourful portrait of a capacious intellect trapped in increasingly hostile circumstances. Leslie's meticulous attention to Benjamin's political, intellectual, geographical and cultural journeying challenges the populist depiction of the intellectual as a tragic and lonely figure. Walter Benjamin restores its subject to his proper place as an artistic combatant and a man desirous of and relishing experience.

With ruminations on drawing, colour and caricature, on the political meaning of fairy-tales, talking animals and human beings as machines, Hollywood Flatlands brings to light the links between animation, avant-garde art and modernist criticism. Focusing on the work of aesthetic and political revolutionaries of the inter-war period, Esther Leslie reveals how the animation of commodities can be studied as a journey into modernity in cinema. She looks afresh at the links between the Soviet Constructivists and the Bauhaus, for instance, and those between Walter Benjamin and cinematic abstraction. She also provides new interpretations of the writings of Siegfried Kracauer on animation, shows how Theodor Adorno's and Max Horkheimer's film viewing affected their intellectual development, and reconsiders Sergei Eisenstein's famous handshake with Mickey Mouse at Disney's Hyperion Studios in 1930.

Mad Pride is set to become the first great civil liberties movement of the 21st century. Sick of discrimination, marginalisation, medication and being treated like shit, psychiatric patients are preparing to rise from the ghettos and make the world a fit place to live in. Featuring 24 authors - including Nick Blinko, Luther Blissett, Chris P and Fatma Durmush - boasting about the wild things they've done when they've been losing it and sharing their accounts of liberation through madness, this collection celebrates madness in all its forms as a means to all-out social revolution. Tough, uncompromising, subversive and very funny, this is a book that no one in their right mind will read. It reveals that madness, normally considered an unglamorous subject, is in fact all about sex, drugs, and rock n roll!

In looking at the entirety of Walter Benjamin's work - rather than the four or five essays available in English which tend to form the Benjamin "canon" - this book offers insights into a key 20th-century political thinker. It aims to reposition Benjamin's work in its historical and political context. In the examination of his commentary on the politics and aesthetics of technology, from his work on 19th-century industrial culture and his analyses of the Nazi deployment of the bomber, the book recontexturalizes Benjamin's writings.

The metropolis is a site of endless making and unmaking. From the attempt to imagine a city-symphony to the cinematic tradition that runs from Walter Ruttmann to Terence Davies, Restless Cities traces the idiosyncratic character of the metropolitan city from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first-century megalopolis. With explorations of phenomena including nightwalking, urbicide, property, commuting and recycling, this wide-ranging new book identifies and traces the patterns that have defined everyday life in the modern city and its effect on us as individuals. Bringing together some of the most significant cultural writers of our time, Restless Cities is an illuminating, revelatory journey to the heart of our metropolitan world.

In the mid 1920s Lukacs wrote a sustained and passionate response to Stalin's onslaught on his earlier seminal work History and Class Consciousness. Unpublished at the time, Lukacs himself thought that the text had been destroyed. However, a group of researchers recently found the manuscript gathering dust in the newly opened archives of the CPSU in Moscow. Now for the first time, this fascinating, polemical and intense text is available in English. It is a crucial part of a hidden intellectual history and will transform interpretations of Lukacs's oeuvre.