Leben, Stadt, Kunst – Potentiale im Alltag

Book published by Common – Journal für Kunst & Öffentlichkeit (2014)

Leben, Stadt, Kunst – Potentiale im Alltag« versammelt als Jahresausgabe 2014 des Onlinejournals »Common – Journal für Kunst & Öffentlichkeit« Beiträge aus verschiedenen disziplinären Blickwinkeln zu ... [more ▼]

Leben, Stadt, Kunst – Potentiale im Alltag« versammelt als Jahresausgabe 2014 des Onlinejournals »Common – Journal für Kunst & Öffentlichkeit« Beiträge aus verschiedenen disziplinären Blickwinkeln zu künstlerischen Verfahren in Sphären des Öffentlichen. Im Zentrum der vorgestellten Konzepte und Projekte steht die alltägliche Erfahrung der Stadt, der gelebte Raum. [less ▲]

Too Much World

Book published by Sternberg Press (2014)

Hito Steyerl is rightly considered one of the most exciting artists working today who speculates on the impact of the Internet and digitization on the fabric of our everyday lives. Her films and writings ... [more ▼]

Hito Steyerl is rightly considered one of the most exciting artists working today who speculates on the impact of the Internet and digitization on the fabric of our everyday lives. Her films and writings offer an astute, provocative, and often funny analysis of the dizzying speed with which images and data are reconfigured, altered, and dispersed, many times over, accelerating into infinity or crashing into oblivion. Published to accompany the artist’s survey exhibitions at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, and the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, Too Much World gathers a series of essays and close readings of Steyerl’s films from the past ten years. Newly commissioned texts by Sven Lütticken, Karen Archey, Ana Teixeira Pinto, and Nick Aikens, alongside writings by Thomas Elsaesser, Pablo Lafuente, David Riff, and Steyerl, are spliced with over one hundred pages of color stills. This publication is a charged slideshow of the artist’s extraordinary investigations into the status, circulation, and materiality of images. [less ▲]

Terms of Exhibiting (from A to Z)

Book published by Sternberg Press (2014)

This publication explores themes of the exhibition through its terms—not, however, to confine into isolated conceptual categories, but to interconnect. These terms characterize exhibiting and emphasize a ... [more ▼]

This publication explores themes of the exhibition through its terms—not, however, to confine into isolated conceptual categories, but to interconnect. These terms characterize exhibiting and emphasize a “between-ness.” Examining a term lays bare its ruptures, shifts, or recreations, as well as social, societal, and cultural changes that have the power to structure through historical conjecture. Almost fifty terms relevant to the making and discussion of exhibitions today have been compiled in Terms of Exhibiting (from A to Z), contributed by Liam Gillick, Manfred Hermes, Wojciech Kosma, Clemens von Wedemeyer, Tobias Vogt, Jochen Volz, and June Yap, among others. Six essays investigate key terms raised by the three-part exhibition series “Terms of Exhibiting, Producing, and Performing” at Kunsthaus Dresden in 2012. Jan Verwoert reflects on the division of labor in artistic production, while Anke te Heesen presents a survey of the museum, collection, and exhibition. Markus Miessen discusses the advantages of curating institutions and inventing structures rather than merely implementing or appropriating them. The book also includes essays by Kirsten Maar, Ursula Panhans-Bühler, and Lee Weng-Choy. Each of the twelve conversations with various artists places one term under scrutiny within the context of their own artistic interests and practices—with reference to the term presence, Daniel Knorr explains the significance of materialization for his own creative process, while Brian O’Doherty discusses invention in relation to his practice. Each term generates further insight and reflection into each individual art practice. [less ▲]

BEATRIZ COLOMINA Manifesto Architecture The Ghost of Mies

Book published by Sternberg Press (2014)

The history of the avant-garde (in art, architecture, literature) can’t be separated from the history of its engagement with mass media. It is not just that the avant-garde used media to publicize its ... [more ▼]

The history of the avant-garde (in art, architecture, literature) can’t be separated from the history of its engagement with mass media. It is not just that the avant-garde used media to publicize its work; the work did not exist before its publication. In architecture, Adolf Loos, Le Corbusier, and Mies van der Rohe came to be known through their influential writings and manifestos published in newspapers, journals, and little magazines. Entire groups, from Dada and Surrealism to De Stijl, became an effect of their manifestos. The manifesto was the site of self invention, innovation, and debate. Even buildings themselves could be manifestos. The most extreme and radical designs in the history of modern architecture were realized as pavilions in temporary exhibition. In the third book in the Critical Spatial Practice series, Beatriz Colomina traces the history of the modern architecture manifesto, with particular focus on Mies van der Rohe, and the play between the written and built work. This essay propels the manifesto form into the future, into an age where electronic media are the primary sites of debate, suggesting that new forms of manifesto are surely emerging along with new kinds of authorship, statement, exhibition, and debate. [less ▲]

KELLER EASTERLING Subtraction

Book published by Sternberg Press (2014)

Unbuilding is the other half of building. Buildings, treated as currency, rapidly inflate and deflate in volatile financial markets. Cities expand and shrink; whether through the violence of planning ... [more ▼]

Unbuilding is the other half of building. Buildings, treated as currency, rapidly inflate and deflate in volatile financial markets. Cities expand and shrink; whether through the violence of planning utopias or war, they are also targets of urbicide. Repeatable spatial products quickly make new construction obsolete; the powerful bulldoze the disenfranchised; buildings can radiate negative real estate values and cause their surroundings to topple to the ground. Demolition has even become a spectacular entertainment. Keller Easterling’s volume in the Critical Spatial Practice series analyzes the urgency of building subtraction. Often treated as failure or loss, subtraction—when accepted as part of an exchange—can be growth. All over the world, sprawl and overdevelopment have attracted distended or failed markets and exhausted special landscapes. However, in failure, buildings can create their own alternative markets of durable spatial variables that can be managed and traded by citizens and cities rather than the global financial industry. These ebbs and flows—the appearance and disappearance of building—can be designed. Architects—trained to make the building machine lurch forward—may know something about how to put it into reverse. [less ▲]

Volume (Critical) no. 36 From Written Word to Practiced Word

in Written Word to Practiced Word (2013), 36

The critic is dead. Long live the network! So it goes in our world of diffuse and shared knowledge. But if criticism has evolved into criticisms, how can we interpret and learn from the babble of opinions ... [more ▼]

The critic is dead. Long live the network! So it goes in our world of diffuse and shared knowledge. But if criticism has evolved into criticisms, how can we interpret and learn from the babble of opinions? This dilemma comes in tandem with another: the crisis of publishing. With declining print sales and slashed subsidies, many critics are out of work. Two fundamental tasks lie ahead: reviving the productive value of criticism, and finding new profitable ways to broadcast it to the world. [less ▲]

Frieze

in Frieze d/e Does Berlin need a new Art School? : The Local School (2013)

Maya Poliitiline arhitekt: Markus Miessen & Kaasamise painaja

in Maya Poliitiline arhitekt: Markus Miessen & Kaasamise painaja (2013)

Gwangju Folly II

Book published by Hatje Cantz (2013)

Throughout history, follies have been used widely in architecture, visual arts, and literature as a provocation, a frivolous diversion or strategic place of madness and satire freed from the constraints ... [more ▼]

Throughout history, follies have been used widely in architecture, visual arts, and literature as a provocation, a frivolous diversion or strategic place of madness and satire freed from the constraints of societal norms. Since their initial inception in landscape gardens, follies have been used as medium or object, oscillating between aesthetic autonomy and social-political potential. Placed in contemporary cities, follies become critical tools to test the constitution and transformative potential of public space. Revisiting some of these historic sites, a series of eight newly commissioned follies forge links between every day uses and political practice linking contemporary Gwangju and a global political arena. The book takes the form of a glossary, situating the eight new Follies within a broader cultural discourse and presents the projects curated by Nikolaus Hirsch, Philipp Misselwitz, and Eui Young Chun as “foolosophy.” [less ▲]

Germaine Koh: Weather Systems

Book published by ABC Art Books (2013)

'Weather Systems' features work by the Vancouver-based artist from the past two decades as well as new works made specifically for the exhibition. Koh's artistic practice focuses on the interrelatedness ... [more ▼]

'Weather Systems' features work by the Vancouver-based artist from the past two decades as well as new works made specifically for the exhibition. Koh's artistic practice focuses on the interrelatedness of conditions in the built and natural environment that otherwise seem unrelated. Her work can even intervene in the institution itself to reveal tensions between the public and private realms, as in the case of 'Player's, a fog machine situated outdoors that transmits Morse code versions of data entered on a computer within the Gallery. By bringing together apparently unrelated activity and transposing one site onto another, Koh shifts expectations of these systems so they can be experienced from a new perspective. This generously illustrated oversized textured hardcover publication is in itself a work of art. [less ▲]