The Atlas Group (1989-2004)


Book Description

Explores the contemporary history of Lebanon, scarred by civil war. Here, the author asks if and when experiences of a guerilla war can ever be documented.




Performing the Matrix


Book Description

Performing the Matrix. Mediating Cultural Performances presents a collection of case studies and analyses dealing with performances of the matrix that take up questions of identities and social thinking, visualization and perception, the discursive power of texts and historiographic paradigms, and artistic strategies of political intervention. Since 1999 The Matrix has become a popular catchword through the homonymous Wachowski brothers’ movie. As both a traditional concept and a popular phenomenon, ‹matrix› can take on a new value when reconsidered in the light of performance studies. A behind-the-scenes look at theatre, performance, political activism and events may reveal a productive mediating structure that can metaphorically be described as a matrix. This mediating structure and its materializations are fundamentally reshaping modern culture. Accordingly ‹politics of visibility›, ‹media networking›,‹telepresence› and ‹liveness› are considered to be understood as performances of the matrix. If so, how does this understanding of cultural performances ‹as always already mediatized› influence contemporary concepts of performance and media?




Walid Raad


Book Description

Lebanese artist Walid Raad is one of the leading artists of his generation and an influential voice in art from the Middle East. Published to accompany the first comprehensive exhibition of his work in the United States, this catalogue surveys three decades of Raad's unique practice in a variety of mediums - including photography, video and performance - and examines the critical intersections that have defined the notable career of this inventive artist. Beginning with his groundbreaking project The Altas Group (1989-2004), to his recent sweeping work on the history of art in the Arab world (2007-ongoing), the publication offers an overview of Raad's career and features his most momentous bodies of work. Essays by curators and scholars place Raad's art in the context of contemporary image making in photography and video, as well as art made in Lebanon since the 1960s; provide an overview of Raad's performance lectures in relationship to his oeuvre; and examine Raad's most recent bodies of work made in the Islamic galleries at the Louvre and Metropolitan Museum of Art, which explores the history, collecting, and display of historical and modern art and artifacts from the Arab world and Iran. A special 10 page contribution by Raad presents a fictional interview with multiple artists, which provides rare insight into the artist's working method and addresses various themes that run throughout his work.




Atlas of American Military History


Book Description

From the Battle of Bunker Hill to the Battle of Midway




Archive Everything


Book Description

How the archive evolved to include new technologies, practices, and media, and how it became the apparatus through which we map the everyday. In Archive Everything, Gabriella Giannachi traces the evolution of the archive into the apparatus through which we map the everyday. The archive, traditionally a body of documents or a site for the preservation of documents, changed over the centuries to encompass, often concurrently, a broad but interrelated number of practices not traditionally considered as archival. Archives now consist of not only documents and sites but also artworks, installations, museums, social media platforms, and mediated and mixed reality environments. Giannachi tracks the evolution of these diverse archival practices across the centuries. Archives today offer a multiplicity of viewing platforms to replay the past, capture the present, and map our presence. Giannachi uses archaeological practices to explore all the layers of the archive, analyzing Lynn Hershman Leeson's !Women Art Revolution project, a digital archive of feminist artists. She considers the archive as a memory laboratory, with case studies that include visitors' encounters with archival materials in the Jewish Museum in Berlin. She discusses the importance of participatory archiving, examining the “multimedia roadshow” Digital Diaspora Family Reunion as an example. She explores the use of the archive in works that express the relationship between ourselves and our environment, citing Andy Warhol and Ant Farm, among others. And she looks at the transmission of the archive through the body in performance, bioart, and database artworks, closing with a detailed analysis of Lynn Hershman Leeson's Infinity Engine.




The Aestheticization of History and the Butterfly Effect


Book Description

'The Aestheticization of History and the Butterfly Effect: Visual Arts Series' introduces the audience to philosophical concepts that broach the beginning of the history of Western thought in Plato and Aristotle to that of more modern thought in the theoretician Jacques Rancière in which the main conceptual framework of this anthology is predicated. The introduction is mainly concerned with Rancière’s concept of the distribution of the sensible, which is the arrangement of things accessible to our senses, what we experience in real-time and space— compartmentalization and categorization of all things. These things do not just involve tangible items, but audible speech, written language, and visibilities. Rancière’s theory of the regimes of art is undertaken as the unfolding of the distribution. Such is evoked in the various genres of visual art forms, from two-dimensional paintings to three-dimensional sculptures and architectures. Understanding the aesthetic regime of art is crucial for grasping how art performs time travel. One way of understanding this phenomenon is in terms of embodied philosophy imbued vis-à-vis art forms, which are subsequently challenged by contemporary artists. The contributing essays examine these reiterations, reevaluations—performances. Aesthetics is a term deriving from the 18th-century European Enlightenment. It is here that aesthetics as the study of beauty is probed for its political potential after the failure of the French Revolution. Many major thinkers during this period signed on to the aesthetic moment, recognizing that Reason in its present state failed to develop humankind beyond barbarism. J.E.B. Stuart's statue is part of an equestrian theme that approximates the Western canon of power and class in the pursuit of domination. But such power and domination will be dethroned in the restaging of history and the redistribution of said canon. This reimagining of the form not only alters perception but constitutes a new narrative.




Atlas of the Skies


Book Description

Journeying between the stars and planets in the discovery of the universe.




Color Chart


Book Description

Color Chart celebrates a paradox: the lush beauty that results when contemporary artists assign colour decisions to chance, readymade source or arbitrary system. Midway through the 20th century, long-held convictions regarding the spiritual truth or scientific validity of particular colours gave way to an excitement about colour as a mass-produced and standardized commercial product. The Romantic quest for personal expression instead became Andy Warhol's 'I want to be a machine'; the artistry of mixing pigments was eclipsed by Frank Stella's 'Straight out of the can; it can't get better than that'. This book, and the exhibition it accompanies, is the first devoted to this pivotal transformation, and features work by some forty artists ranging from Ellsworth Kelly and Gerhard Richter to Sherrie Levine and Damien Hirst.




Time and the Digital


Book Description

An original consideration of the temporal in digital art and aesthetics




In Times of War and Peace


Book Description

As photojournalists since the early 1980s, the Turnleys have covered most of the great conflicts of the past fifteen years, and have been published in the best-known newspapers and magazines. Very often, one of their photographs becomes the iconic representation of the event. This is a result of their spending extended periods in the regions they cover, getting to know the people and the way of life. During the three years David lived in South Africa, he showed apartheid as the prevailing system, its subsequent destruction, and the first elections of the new democratic state. Peter has pursued his interest in documenting the world's fourteen million refugees, and also photographed the fall of Communism in Russia and Eastern Europe. Together they photographed student dissidents in the months leading up to the Tiananmen Square massacre; their photographs of the massacre itself are among their most recognizable. Shining through all the photographs is the strength of individual character and hope against powerful social and political conflict.