Julian Rosefeldt


Book Description

Domestic life, domestic interiors.




Julian Rosefeldt


Book Description

The thirteen part film installation Manifesto, produced by film and video artist Julian Rosefeldt is an homage to the explosive poetic power of key artist manifestos from the last 100 years.Australian actor Cate Blanchett plays 13 different characters who




After Cinema


Book Description

An informative, inspiring, richly illustrated book on contemporary moving-image art. This book sets out to use the latest technologies to short-circuit the universally understandable language of the mass media and to make art once again a critical mirror of its time. Around sixty artists from more than twenty countries are presented in eight chapters, that address social, political, and scientific themes (racism, climate change, capitalism, eccentricity, sex, zeitgeist, and fashionable and frightening technologies) in a way that is playful and innovative. HEINZ PETER SCHWERFEL (*1954) lives in Paris. He works as a journalist, filmmaker and curator, and is the author of books on artists (Georg Baselitz, Jannis Kounellis) and non-fiction books such as Kunst-Skandale and Kino und Kunst. As a filmmaker, he produced films about Christian Boltanski, Rebecca Horn, Anish Kapoor, Christoph Marthaler, Annette Messager, Bruce Nauman, Cees Nooteboom, and many others, as well as TV series for the art channel ARTE ( Design, Live Art). In addition, he curated exhibitions of work by Shirin Neshat, Julian Rosefeldt, and Loukia Alavanou (Greek pavilion, 2022 Venice Biennale).




On Perfection


Book Description

Based on a 2012 symposium on Perfection, held at the Whitechapel Gallery in East London, this book explores the ways in which artists engage with ideas of perfection, drawing on screenings, performances and discussions. The symposium featured the work of an eclectic group of artists and writers, who use photographic lenses of many kinds to create works that engage with or disrupt ideas of perfection. Framed from an artist’s perspective and spanning a diverse range of artworks that question how these ideas shape our personal identities and our social and political systems, On Perfection considers the multifaceted nature of lens-based practices.




Lee Lozano


Book Description

An examination of Lee Lozano's greatest experiment in art and endurance—a major work of art that might not exist at all. The artist Lee Lozano (1930–1999) began her career as a painter; her work rapidly evolved from figuration to abstraction. In the late 1960s, she created a major series of eleven monochromatic Wave paintings, her last in the medium. Despite her achievements as a painter, Lozano is best known for two acts of refusal, both of which she undertook as artworks: Untitled (General Strike Piece), begun in 1969, in which she cut herself off from the commercial art world for a time; and the so-called Boycott Piece, which began in 1971 as a month-long experiment intended to improve communication but became a permanent hiatus from speaking to or directly interacting with women. In this book, Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer examines Lozano's Dropout Piece, the culmination of her practice, her greatest experiment in art and endurance, encompassing all her withdrawals, and ending only with her burial in an unmarked grave. And yet, although Dropout Piece is among Lozano's most important works, it might not exist at all. There is no conventional artwork to be exhibited, no performance event to be documented. Lehrer-Graiwer views Dropout Piece as leveraging the artist's entire practice and embodying her creative intelligence, her radicality, and her intensity. Combining art history, analytical inquiry, and journalistic investigation, Lehrer-Graiwer examines not only Lozano's act of dropping out but also the evolution over time of Dropout Piece in the context of the artist's practice in New York and her subsequent life in Dallas.




Empire of Ruins


Book Description

Once symbols of the past, ruins have become ubiquitous signs of our future. Americans today encounter ruins in the media on a daily basis--images of abandoned factories and malls, toxic landscapes, devastating fires, hurricanes, and floods. In this sweeping study, Miles Orvell offers a new understanding of the spectacle of ruins in US culture, exploring how photographers, writers, painters, and filmmakers have responded to ruin and destruction, both real and imaginary, in an effort to make sense of the past and envision the future. Empire of Ruins explains why Americans in the nineteenth century yearned for the ruins of Rome and Egypt and how they portrayed a past as ancient and mysterious in the remains of Native American cultures. As the romance of ruins gave way to twentieth-century capitalism, older structures were demolished to make way for grander ones, a process interpreted by artists as a symptom of America's "creative destruction." In the late twentieth century, Americans began to inhabit a perpetual state of ruins, made visible by photographs of decaying inner cities, derelict factories and malls, and the waste lands of the mining industry. This interdisciplinary work focuses on how visual media have transformed disaster and decay into spectacles that compel our moral attention even as they balance horror and beauty. Looking to the future, Orvell considers the visual portrayal of climate ruins as we face the political and ethical responsibilities of our changing world. A wide-ranging work by an acclaimed urban, cultural, and photography scholar, Empire of Ruins offers a provocative and lavishly illustrated look at the American past, present, and future.




Marginalia


Book Description

'Marginalia' draws our attention towards the territory of the overseen elements coexisting in the realm of the book itself. Text and image content of several art books designed by Anja Lutz withdraw to let appear the nondescript details: the margins, the edges, the backgrounds, the spaces between the lines. Each book is unique in its choice of format, material, layout, and rhythm. The selected pages underwent a process of transformation in which with surgical precision Lutz dissects them, layer by layer, removing the vital parts and revealing their skeleton. The results are filigrane grids, fragments of images and traces of the layout that form intricately layered compositions of voids, exposing the hidden relations between the pages.




Dissent and the Dynamics of Cultural Change


Book Description

Dissent and the Dynamics of Cultural Change: Lessons from the Underground Presses of the Late Sixties, examines alternative presses’ critique of culture at a time of infamous transformation and revolution in the United States. In this new study, author Matthew Pifer seeks to delineate the structure of dissent to better understand how cultural change is realized, and explores the relationships between the public and those cultural institutions that define the values and social norms that shaped daily life.




OSTERMEIER


Book Description

Thomas Ostermeier is one of the best-known European theatre makers and is regarded by many as "the face of modern German theatre" (DIE ZEIT). His major Ibsen productions and his "Hamlet", starring Lars Eidinger tour the globe; Berlin's Schaubühne, where he has been the artistic head since 1999, is celebrated worldwide. In conversation with Gerhard Jörder, Thomas Ostermeier describes the path that led him to the theatre, which became "a kind of life saver" after early years riddled by conflict. Self-confident and self-critical, both declarative and ruminative, he recapitulates the early triumphs of the Deutsches Theater's Baracke offshoot, his difficult start at the Schaubühne and the growing success of his politically engaged realistic theatre, particularly among young audiences. He emerges as an outspoken critic of his generation's apolitical attitude, the postmodern mainstream and the narrow aesthetic discourse of German theatre, and a passionate supporter of the permanent institutions of culture, the ensemble concept and creative work with actors – the core of an understanding of contemporary theatre that focuses on people rather than forms.




Lesbian Cinema after Queer Theory


Book Description

The unprecedented increase in lesbian representation over the past two decades has, paradoxically, coincided with queer theory's radical transformation of the study of sexuality. In Lesbian Cinema after Queer Theory, Clara Bradbury-Rance argues that this contradictory context has yielded new kinds of cinematic language through which to give desire visual form. By offering close readings of key contemporary films such as Blue Is the Warmest Colour, Water Lilies and Carol alongside a broader filmography encompassing over 300 other films released between 1927 and 2018, the book provokes new ways of understanding a changing field of representation. Bradbury-Rance resists charting a narrative of representational progress or shoring up the lesbian's categorisation in the newly available terms of the visible. Instead, she argues for a feminist framework that can understand lesbianism's queerness. Drawing on a provocative theoretical and visual corpus, Lesbian Cinema after Queer Theory reveals the conditions of lesbian legibility in the twenty-first century.