Without boredom, arguably there is no modernity: the current sense of the word emerged simultaneously with industrialisation, mass politics and consumerism. From Manet onwards, when art represents the everyday within modern life, encounters with tedium are inevitable. And from modernism's retreat into abstraction to subsequent demands placed on audiences, from the late 1960s to the present, the viewer's endurance of repetition, slowness or other forms of monotony has become an anticipated feature of gallery-going. In contemporary art, boredom is no longer viewed as a singular experience; rather, it is contingent on diverse social identifications and cultural positions, and extends from a malign condition to be struggled against, to an experience to be embraced, or explored as a site of resistance.In this anthology, the range of boredoms associated with our neoliberal moment is contextualized in a long view which encompasses the political critique of boredom in 1960s France; the simultaneous aesthetic embrace in the USA of silence, repetition or indifference in Fluxus, Pop, Minimalism and conceptual art; the development of feminist diagnoses of malaise in art, performance and film; Punk's social critique and its influence on theories of the postmodern; and the recognition from the end of the 1980s of a specific form of ennui experienced in former communist states. Today, with the emergence of new forms of labour alienation and personal intrusion, deadening forces extend even further into subjective experience, making the divide between a critical and an aesthetic use of boredom ever more tenuous.Artists surveyed include Chantal Akerman, Francis Alys, John Baldessari, Vanessa Beecroft, Bernadette Corporation, John Cage, Critical Art Ensemble, Merce Cunningham, Marcel Duchamp, Fischli & Weiss, Claire Fontaine, Dick Higgins, Jasper Johns, Donald Judd, Ilya Kabakov, Boris Mikhailov, Robert Morris, John Pilson, Sigmar Polke, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Rauschenberg, Ad Reinhardt, Gerhard Richter, Situationist International, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Andy Warhol, Faith Wilding, Janet Zweig.Writers include Ina Blom, Nicolas Bourriaud, Jennifer Doyle, Alla Efimova, Jonathan Flatley, Julian Jason Haladyn, The Invisible Committee, Jonathan D. Katz, Chris Kraus, Tan Lin, Sven Lutticken, John Miller, Agne Narusyte, Sianne Ngai, Peter Osborne, Patrice Petro, Christine Ross, Moira Roth, David Foster Wallace, Aleksandr Zinovyev.

This collection of essays revisits gender and urban modernity in nineteenth-century Paris in the wake of changes to the fabric of the city and social life. In rethinking the figure of the flaneur, the contributors apply the most current thinking in literature and urban studies to an examination of visual culture of the period, including painting, caricature, illustrated magazines, and posters. Using a variety of approaches, the collection re-examines the long-held belief that life in Paris was divided according to strict gender norms, with men free to roam in public space while women were restricted to the privacy of the domestic sphere. Framed by essays by Janet Wolff and Linda Nochlin - two scholars whose work has been central to the investigation of gender and representation in the nineteenth century - this collection brings together new methods of looking at visual culture with a more nuanced way of picturing city life. -- .

The Situationist International (SI), led by the revolutionary Guy Debord, were active throughout the 1950s and 60s. They published the journal Internationale Situationniste that included many incendiary texts on politics and art, and were a galvanizing force in the revolutions of May 1968. The importance of their work has been felt particularly in their revolutionary analysis of cities. The SI were responsible for utopian imaginings of the city, where its alienating effects from its routine use as a site of consumption and work were banished and it was instead to be turned into a place of play. Tom McDonough collects all the SI's key work in this area for an essential one-stop collection. Including such essential works as 'The Theory of the Derive', 'Formulary for a New Urbanism', and many previously untranslated texts, the book will also be strikingly illustrated by the images that were core to the Situationist project.

The graffiti of the French student and worker uprising of May 1968, capturing participatory politics in action. Graffiti itself became a form of freedom. -Julien Besancon, The Walls Have the Floor Fifty years ago, in 1968, barricades were erected in the streets of Paris for the first time since the Paris Commune of nearly one hundred years before. The events of May 1968 began with student protests against the Vietnam War and American imperialism, expanded to rebellion over student living conditions and resistance to capitalist consumerism. An uprising at the Sorbonne was followed by wildcat strikes across France, uniting students and workers and bringing the country's economy to a halt. There have been many accounts of these events. This book tells the story in a different way, through the graffiti inscribed by protestors as they protested. The graffiti collected here is by turns poetic, punning, hopeful, sarcastic, and crude. It quotes poets as often as it does political thinkers. Many wrote "I have nothing to write," signaling not their naivete but their desire to participate. Other anonymous declarations included "Prohibiting prohibited"; "The dream is reality"; "The walls have ears. Your ears have walls"; "Exaggeration is the beginning of invention"; "Comrades, you're nitpicking"; "You don't beg for the right to live, you take it"; and "I came/I saw/I believed." A meeting is called at the Grand Amphitheater of the Sorbonne: "Agenda: the worldwide revolution." This was interactive, participatory politics before Twitter and Facebook. Although the revolution of May 1968 didn't topple the government (Charles de Gaulle fled the country, only to return; in June, his party won a resounding electoral mandate), it made history. In The Walls Have the Floor, Julien Besancon collected traces of this history before the walls were painted over, and published this collection in July 1968 even as the paint was drying. Read today, the graffiti of 1968 captures, in a way no conventional history can, the defining spontaneity of the events.

Critical texts, translations, documents, and photographs on the work of the Situationist International. This volume is a revised and expanded version of a special issue of the journal October (Winter 1997) that was devoted to the work of the Situationist International (SI). The first section of the issue contained previously unpublished critical texts, and the second section contained translations of primary texts that had previously been unavailable in English. The emphasis was on the SI's profound engagement with the art and cultural politics of their time (1957-1972), with a strong argument for their primarily political and activist stance by two former members of the group, T. J. Clark and Donald Nicholson-Smith. Guy Debord and the Situationist International supplements both sections. It reprints important, hard to find essays by Giorgio Agamben, Libero Andreotti, Jonathan Crary, Thomas Y. Levin, Greil Marcus, and Tom McDonough and doubles the number of translations of primary texts, which now encompass a broader and more representative range of the SI's writings on culture and language. In a field still dominated by hagiography, the critical texts were selected for their willingness to confront critically the history and legacy of the SI. They examine the group within the broader framework of the historical and neo-avant-gardes and, beyond that, the postwar world in general. The translations trace the SI's reflections on the legacy of the avant-garde in art and architecture, particularly on the linguistic and spatial significance of montage aesthetics. Many of the translated works are by Guy Debord (1932-1994), the impresario of the SI, especially known for his book The Society of the Spectacle.