La storia del rapporto tra l’arte e il “mondo delle notizie stampate” inizia con il Cubismo e con le avanguardie del primo Novecento, attraversa tutto il secolo e giunge fino a noi articolandosi in modi sempre nuovi. Su questo rapporto è incentrata la straordinaria collezione dei coniugi Annette e Peter Nobel, di cui questo catalogo presenta un’ampia e significativa selezione. Il saggio di Jean Baudrillard e gli altri saggi che accompagnano le 370 opere riprodotte non si limitano a ripercorre la storia di questo rapporto, ma ci aiutano a capire la rilevanza che esso assume nei nostri anni, in cui fotografie e notizie ci inseguono ovunque, veicolate non solo dalla stampa ma anche da smartphone, computer ecc., facendosi sempre più pervasive. Tra i numerosi artisti rappresentati: Jean Arp, John Baldessari, George Baselitz, Joseph Beuys, Alighiero e Boetti, Georges Braque, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Christo, Fortunato Depero, Walker Evans, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Urs Fischer, Gilbert & George, Nan Goldin, Richard Hamilton, John Heartfield, Thomas Hirschhorn, Dennis Hopper, Roni Horn, Alfredo Jaar, William Kentridge, Willem de Kooning, Joseph Kosuth, Jannis Kpunellis, Le Corbusier, Roy Lichtenstein, Joan Mirò, Gianni Motti, Sigmar Polke, Richard Prince, Man Ray, Gerhard Richter, Dieter Roth, Edward Ruscha, Kurt Schwitters, Cindy Sherman, David Shrigley, Roman Signer, Antoni Tàpies, Zhou Tiehai, Wolfgan Tillmans.

This is a book about the public display of death in contemporary culture. It consists of a series of essays on specific cases in which death is displayed in museums and in photography. The essays focus mainly on representations of violence and death in events in recent Israeli history, including the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Palestinian Intifada, and on the visual presence of traumatic events in Israeli culture throughout the twentieth century. They show how images of these events both shape and aestheticize the viewer’s experience of death. The book offers a new reading of the work of Walter Benjamin, particularly his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Engaging the disciplinary perspectives of philosophy, art history, cultural studies, and photographic theory, the book also draws upon the work of such writers as Jean Baudrillard, Pierre Bourdieu, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Jurgen Habermas, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and Jean-Luc Nancy.

Précédé de « Biosphère 2 », de Jean Baudrillard (1991) « Rejoignez les colonies de l’espace ! » proclamaient les publicités volantes dans les cieux noirs et pollués du Los Angeles cyberpunk de Blade Runner en 1982. À cette date, dans le vrai monde, ces « colonies » rangées dans les cartons à dessins de la NASA entonnent pourtant leur ultime chant du cygne. Cinq ans plus tôt, alors que le célèbre Stewart Brand avait mis un terme à son Whole Earth Catalog (1968-1972) au profit de CoEvolution Quaterly (1974-1985), les « villes pour 10 000 habitants » conçues par Gerard O’Neill pour l’agence spatiale défrayent les rédacteurs hippies, libertariens architectes, astronautes ou futurs entrepreneurs de la Silicon Valley. Fallait-il fuir notre planète à l’heure de la Bombe P et du « retour à la terre » ?

Visually appealing, conceptually startling, and intellectually engaging-these phrases aptly describe the art of Liliana Porter. Florencia Bazzano-Nelson’s study focuses on the principal theme in the Argentine-born artist’s work since the 1970s: her playful but subversive dismantling of the limits that separate everyday reality from the world of illusion and simulacra. Over the years, Porter’s own evolving interest in perception lead the author to explore a series of interconnected and timely issues in her artistic production, such as the representative function of art, the structural links between art and language, and the witty re-signification of the art-historical images and mass-produced kitsch figurines she has so often featured in her art. Strongly founded in critical theory, Bazzano-Nelson’s approach considers Porter’s art as the site of conceptually exciting dialogues with Jorge Luis Borges, René Magritte, Michel Foucault, and Jean Baudrillard. Her carefully crafted interdisciplinary analysis not only combines art-historical, literary, and theoretical perspectives but also addresses the artist’s work in different media, such as printmaking, conceptual art, photography, and film. Contents: Introduction; Liliana Porter’s personal journey; The Magritte Series; In search of imminemt revelations; The subversive inner child; Malice in wonderland; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.

The cinematic has been a springboard for the work of many influential artists, including Victor Burgin, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Stan Douglas, Nan Goldin, Douglas Gordon, Cindy Sherman, and Jeff Wall, among others. Much recent cinema, meanwhile, is rich with references to contemporary photography. Video art has taken a photographic turn into pensive slowness; photography now has at its disposal the budgets and scale of cinema. This addition to Whitechapel’s Documents of Contemporary Art series surveys the rich history of creative interaction between the moving and the still photograph, tracing their ever-changing relationship since early modernism. Still photography—cinema’s ghostly parent—was eclipsed by the medium of film, but also set free. The rise of cinema obliged photography to make a virtue of its own stillness. Film, on the other hand, envied the simplicity, the lightness, and the precision of photography. Russian Constructivist filmmakers considered avant-garde cinema as a sequence of graphic “shots”; their Bauhaus, Constructivist and Futurist photographer contemporaries assembled photographs into a form of cinema on the page. In response to the rise of popular cinema, Henri Cartier-Bresson exalted the “decisive moment” of the still photograph. In the 1950s, reportage photography began to explore the possibility of snatching filmic fragments. Since the 1960s, conceptual and postconceptual artists have explored the narrative enigmas of the found film still. The Cinematic assembles key writings by artists and theorists from the 1920s on—including László Moholy-Nagy, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Victor Burgin, Jeff Wall, and Catherine David—documenting the photography-film dialogue that has enriched both media. Contributors: Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Raymond Bellour, Anton Giulio Bragaglia, Victor Burgin, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Catherine David, Thierry de Duve, Gilles Deleuze, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Philippe Dubois, Régis Durand, Sergei Eisenstein, Mike Figgis, Hollis Frampton, Susanne Gaensheimer, Nan Goldin, Chris Marker, Christian Metz, Laura Mulvey, László Moholy-Nagy, Beaumont Newhall, Uriel Orlow, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Constance Penley, Richard Prince, Steve Reich, Carlo Rim, Raul Ruiz, Susan Sontag, Blake Stimson, Michael Tarantino, Agnès Varda, Jeff Wall, Andy Warhol, and Peter Wollen.

Luca Trevisani’s (1979) beautiful, flamboyant book with its overlaid images, collages, and eccentric typo serves as an archive of his sources, readings and inspirations as well as a documentation of his recent works. “If Trevisani works quickly, it is the present-day condition that demands it; the awareness of being part of this constant flow of data, materials and images in transformation that does not permit the solid state. In the liquid modernity there is less and less space for definitive form: everything flows, really. It’s only a short leap from Heraclitus to bytes.” (Luca Cerizza) References include Klaus Bach, Berthold Burkhardt, and Frei Otto, Jean Baudrillard, Alice Munro, Petra Blaisse, Marco Belpoliti, Bruno Munari, Peter Sloterdijk.

This selection of 40 medium-format color photographs by Walter Niedermayr transports us into the world of perpetual ice–to Mount Titlis, the glacier which rises proudly above the boundaries of space and time, three thousand meters above sea level in the Swiss Alps. Only the human figures in colorful leisure attire which populate this alpine Shangri-la bear witness to the influence of civilization, transforming the alpine landscape–once the paradigm of an aesthetics of the sublime–into a trivial theme park governed by the laws of consumption. In Titlis, Niedermayr’s camera captures the aura of a mountain landscape that is no longer just a mountain landscape but a legend. The alpine setting in which the puppet-like figures of tourists appear are shaped by these clichés and bold idealizations of nature to such a great extent that subjective perception and feelings become mere platitudes. If Jean Baudrillard were a tourist in the Alps with a knack for taking pictures, these are the images he would make.

Published in conjunction with an exhibition at the ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany, this timely catalog of the emerging genre of surveillance art is the first to compile critical essays discussing the history of surveillance, dating from Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon in 1787 to the present. The catalog includes many well-known Western artists and offers exposure to some who are lesser known. Curator and coeditor Levin has gathered a mixture of important original and previously published essays by some of the most respected postmodern theorists in this collection, among them Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Victor Burgin, and Slavoj Zizek. The layout mirrors the sensibility of the exhibit but is distracting, with overlapping type that can actually make reading the book difficult. This mammoth catalog includes biographies of the artists and authors, 950 illustrations (350 in color), and an exhibition checklist.

This anthology presents over two decades of the most memorable issues and events of contemporary art as seen through the pages of Flash Art, the controversial, contradictory art magazine that has influenced both cultural taste and artistic development for twenty-one years. From Arte Povera, Process Art, Conceptual Art, Performance Art, and Post-Conceptualism to Pictures, the Transavantgarde, the East Village, and NeoConceptualism, Flash Art has functioned as both forum and catalyst for current art trends. The book includes such artists and theorists as Bernd and Hilla Becher, Rebecca Horn, Joseph Kosuth, John Baldessari, Gordon Matta-Clark, Sherrie Levine, Gilles Deleuze, Edward Ruscha, Mimmo Paladino, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Frank Stella, Julia Kristeva, Jean Baudrillard, Fredric Jameson, Jeff Koons, Donald Judd, Peter Halley, David Salle, Gerhard Richter, and Germano Celant. It documents the magazine’s policy and trajectory throughout the course of contemporary culture a policy that has been consistently concerned with capturing the new and the radical, transforming them inevitably, into the event.

Art and Photography surveys a rich and important history, from the 1960s to the 21st century. Arranged thematically, it presents works by the most significant international artists who have explored and extended the boundaries of photography. This influential body of work by over 160 artists over four decades is contextualised in the “Documents” section by original artist’s statements and interviews, as well as lucid reflections on photography by major thinkers of our era such as Roland Barthes and Jean Baudrillard. Today photography is art’s pre-eminent medium. Photography pervades our visual culture. It has become what painting was in previous centuries: a universal language. Today’s photographers are internationally admired as “the painters of modern life”. Yet it took the whole of the 20th century for photography to reach this status. On its invention, the photograph was derided as a purely mechanical, “artless” medium which could never be considered among the fine arts. As the 20th century unfolded, Modernist movements experimented with the photograph and expanded its limits, yet still the art establishment held out. Only recently have the majority of art museums begun acquiring works of photography. In 1976, when the Museum of Modern Art, New York – one of the first institutions to collect photographs – staged a retrospective of the American colour photographer William Eggleston, this was a groundbreaking event: it was the first time colour photography had been exhibited, as art, in a major museum. This moment in the 1970s marked a dramatic sea change, but the tides had begun to turn in the early 1960s, when artists such as Andy Warhol, Ed Ruscha and Gerhard Richter used the everyday, mass-produced quality of the snapshot as a basis for their work. From this early adoption of photography for its “artless” qualities, artists have explored photography extensively ever since, ranging from Richard Prince and Cindy Sherman’s reflections on the visual messages of film and advertising, to the richly layered, ‘painterly’ genres of portraiture, landscape and still life in the work of Nan Goldin, Andreas Gursky, Roni Horn, Wolfgang Tillmans, Jeff Wall and others who have brought photography full circle, to the roles that painting fulfilled in past centuries.

To a group of architecture students at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris in the turbulent year 1968, the idea of the inflatable held a promise of mobility, movement, energy, and escape. Seeking to overturn the inertia and oppression that they believed characterized mainstream architecture, the Utopie group (as they called themselves) designed a series of pneumatic buildings, furniture, and environments, all heavily influenced by American military structures and comic books as well as by the work of Buckminster Fuller, Henri Lefebvre, Jean Baudrillard, and London’s Archigram. Though Utopie architects Jean Aubert, Jean-Paul Jungmann, and Antoine Stinco were unable to realize their dream of a society literally built on air, their fanciful, exuberant, witty, and highly detailed drawings remain some of the most extraordinary in modern architecture. The Inflatable Moment documents this fascinating intersection of architectural, social, and political history, as it presents a complete, annotated catalog of the designs of the Utopie architects alongside similar structures from the period. Essays on the pneumatic phenomenon and the intellectual history of the Utopie group are supplemented by reflections by the three architects, each written especially for this book.

The traditional landscape genre was radically transformed in the 1960s when many artists stopped merely representing the land and made their mark directly in the environment. Drawn by the vast uncultivated spaces of the desert and mountain as well as post-industrial wastelands, artists such as Michael Heizer, Nancy Holt or Robert Smithson moved earth to create colossal primal symbols. Others punctuated the horizon with man-made signposts, such as Christo’s “Running Fence” or Walter de Maria’s “Lightning Field”. Journeys became works of art for Richard Long whilst Dennis Oppenheim and Ana Mendieta immersed their bodies in the contours of the land. This text traces early developments to the present day, where artists are exploring eco-systems and the interface between industrial, urban and rural cultures. Alongside photographs, sketches and project notes, Kastner compiles an archive of statements by all the featured artists alongside related texts by art historians, critics, philosophers and cultural theorists including Jean Baudrillard, Edmund Burke, Guy Debord, Michael Fried, Dave Hickey, Rosalind Krauss, Lucy R. Lippard, Thomas McEvilley, Carolyn Merchant and Simon Schama.

Artists: MORA, Gilles, SEKAER, Peter, HILL, John T., MODOTTI, Tina, ALBERS, Patricia, STOURDZE, Sam, SAYAG, Alain, NIXON, Nicholas, GALASSI, Peter, FUKASE, Masahisa, YAMAGISHI, Koko, WESTON, Edward, TUGGENER, Jakob, GASSER, Martin, SOMMER, Frederick, DURAND, Régis, MATTER, Herbert, HEINECKEN, Robert, PITTS, Terence, STAHEL, Urs, ALBEROLA, Jean-Michel, DRAHOS, Tom, MILLET, Bernard, GRANCHER, Valéry, RONIS, Willy, BONHOMME, Pierre, RIGOLINI, Luciano, MILOVANOFF, Christian, BAZZOLI, François, BAUDRILLARD, Jean, GUNTHERT, André, CLERGUE, Lucien, ALDRICH, Stephen, COLEMAN, A.D., FURUYA, Seiichi, FABER, Monika, FUCHS, Daniel and Geo, WILLIAMS, Val, CALLE, Sophie