Textfield, Inc. » Criticism

On Acid: A Field Guide to Altered States

Textfield — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 01:38:05 +0000

William Rauscher and John Moeller, On Acid
A Field Guide to Altered States
Softcover, 100 pp., offset 4/3, 200 x 265 mm
Edition of 1000
ISBN 978-0-615-53398-8
Published by CCC

$15.00 · add to cart

On Acid presents a radically subjective re-edit of the history of drug experience, following the emergence of drugs as a technology and modernity’s conflicted obsessions with altered states. Tracing a path beginning with philosopher Benjamin Blood’s 1874 pamphlet ‘The Anesthetic Revelation and the Gist of Philosophy’ which declares the existence of a ‘majesty and supremacy unspeakable’ observable only after being dosed by nitrous oxide, On Acid assembles texts and images that draw a line connecting archival works by William James, Antonin Artaud, Timothy Leary, and various modernist explorers, to the practice of contemporary artists such as Rodney Graham, Francis Alÿs, Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe. Removed from the familiar cultural contexts of Haight-Ashbury and Grateful Dead psychedelia, On Acid is in itself an experimental program, a recursive acidic process that mirrors the deconstructive relations to counterculture cultivated in contemporary art. The book concludes with a series of new conversations with Freeman and Lowe, Hamilton Morris and Arik Roper.

The Artist as an Instigator of Changes in Social Cognition and Behaviour

Textfield — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 23:39:10 +0000

Stephen Willats, The Artist as an Instigator of Changes in Social Cognition and Behaviour
Softcover, 96 pp., offset 2/1, 130 x 210 mm
Edition of 1000
ISBN 978-0-9562605-6-7
Published by Occasional Papers

$18.00 · add to cart

Stephen Willats’ major essay The Artist as an Instigator of Changes in Social Cognition and Behaviour is re-issued for the first time by Occasional Papers. Published in 1973 by Gallery House, London — where Willats was Director of the Centre for Behavioural Art — and long out of print, the paper includes rigorous analyses of social forms of artistic production and descriptions of a number of projects by the artist.

The Form of the Book Book

Textfield — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 23:11:30 +0000

Sara De Bondt and Fraser Muggeridge, The Form of the Book Book
Softcover, 96 pp., offset 2/1, 140 x 230 mm
Second edition
ISBN 978-0-9562605-7-4
Published by Occasional Papers

$22.00 · add to cart

A collection of essays on book design by Catherine de Smet, James Goggin, Jenni Eneqvist, Roland Früh, Corina Neuenschwander, Sarah Gottlieb, Richard Hollis, Chrissie Charlton, Armand Mevis.

Ein Magazin über Orte 8

Textfield — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 17:59:30 +0000

Ein Magazin über Orte 8, Paradise
Softcover, 84 pp., offset 4/4, 210 x 270 mm
Edition of 1000
ISSN 1866-2331
Published by Ein Magazin über Orte

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Ein Magazin über Orte (A magazine about places) is published twice a year. It deals with a different location in every issue. The magazine collects works of various authors in the form of photographs, drawings and texts.

fillip 13

Textfield — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 17:58:53 +0000

fillip 13, Intangible Economies
Softcover, 116 pp., offset 4/1, 170 x 245 mm
Edition of 2000
ISSN 1715-3212
Published by Fillip

$15.00 · add to cart

Fillip 13 introduces Intangible Economies, a new, ongoing series broadening the notion of economy beyond its financial dimensions. The series focuses on the multifarious forms of exchange fuelled by affect and desire, speculatively investigating the fundamental role these affective transactions play in modes of representation and, accordingly, in cultural production.

This issue includes series texts by Candice Hopkins, Jan Verwoert, and series editor Antonia Hirsch. Forthcoming installments will include contributions by Hadley+Maxwell, Olaf Nicolai, and Monika Szewczyk, among others.

The issue also features a record of The AAAARG Library, a site-specific installation commissioned for Fillip 13 and the 2010 NY Art Book Fair. The Library, produced by artist Sean Dockray and curated by Jeff Khonsary, will be presented again this summer as part of Night Market, a Red76 project for the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams, MA.

Rich Texts: Selected Writing for Art

Textfield — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 00:19:50 +0000

John Kelsey, Rich Texts: Selected Writing for Art
Softcover, 248 pp., offset 2/1, 120 x 190 mm
Edition of 2000
ISBN 978-1-934105-23-8
Published by Sternberg Press

$20.00 · add to cart

Compiled for the first time here, essays by American critic, artist, gallerist and dealer John Kelsey convey some of the most poignant challenges in the art world and in the many social roles it creates. “When the critic chooses to become a smuggler, a hack, a cook, or an artist,” Kelsey said, “it’s maybe because criticism as such remains tied to an outmoded social relation.” Kelsey’s “rich texts” play the double role of explaining the art world and actively participating in it; they close the distance between the work of art and how we talk about it. These playful, elegant writings — many originally published in Artforum — embody a timelessness that strikes at the core of the contemporary art world. The newest edition from the terrific Institut fur Kunstkritik series.

Destroy This Memory

Textfield — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 03:46:47 +0000

Richard Misrach, Destroy This Memory
Hardcover, 140 pp., offset 4/4, 11.75 x 15.25 inches
Edition of 2000
ISBN 978-15971116-3-8
Published by Aperture

$65.00 · add to cart

Richard Misrach’s Destroy This Memory is an affecting reminder of the physical and psychological impact of Hurricane Katrina. Rather than simply surveying the damage, Misrach — who has photographed the region regularly since the 1970s, most notably for his ongoing Cancer Alley project — found himself drawn to the hurricane-inspired graffiti: messages scrawled in spray paint, crayons, chalk, or whatever materials happened to be on hand. At turns threatening, desperate, clinical, and even darkly humorous, the phrases he captured — the only text that appears in the book — offer unique and revealing human perspectives on the devastation and shock left in the wake of this disaster.

Destroy This Memory presents previously unpublished and starkly compelling material, all of which Misrach shot with his 4 MP pocket camera. Created between October and December 2005, this haunting series of images serves as a potent, unalloyed document of the raw experiences of those left to fend for themselves in the aftermath of Katrina.

Wait to Wait

Textfield — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 03:23:54 +0000

Boris Groys and Andro Wekua, Wait to Wait
Hardcover, 160 pp., offset 4/1, 135 x 196 mm
English and German
Edition of 2000
ISBN 978-3-03764-021-0
Published by JRP|Ringier, CK editions

$28.00 · add to cart

An unequal pair from the ranks of philosophy and contemporary art were brought to the table for debate. The celebrated Russian philosopher Boris Groys, and the young international artist from Georgia Andro Wekua, discussed their shared experiences in the Soviet system, the conditions governing production in contemporary art today, and the sensitivities of a generation of artists born in the 1970s, taking Wekua’s two large installations Wait to Wait and Get Out of My Room as examples.

Phenomena such as loneliness, doubles, repetitions, mirror images, and waiting are the central themes of this conversation, illustrated by pictures of the two installations and several collages by Wekua.

Individual Methodology

Textfield — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 03:20:43 +0000

Harald Szeemann, Individual Methodology
Softcover, 240 pp., offset 2/1, 160 x 230 mm
Edition of 2000
ISBN 9783905829099
Published by JRP|Ringier

$25.00 · add to cart

We owe our idea of the contemporary exhibition to Harald Szeemann — the first of the jet-setting international curators. From 1961 to 1969, he was Curator of the Kunsthalle Bern, where in 1968 he had the foresight to give Christo and Jeanne-Claude the opportunity to wrap the entire museum building. Szeemann’s groundbreaking 1969 exhibition When Attitudes Become Form, also at the Kunsthalle, introduced European audiences to artists like Joseph Beuys, Eva Hesse, Richard Serra and Lawrence Weiner. It also introduced the now-commonplace practice of curating an exhibition around a theme. Since Szeemann’s death in 2005, there has been research underway at his archive in Tessin, Switzerland. An invaluable resource, this volume provides access to previously unpublished plans, documents and photographs from the archive, along with important essays by Hal Foster and Jean-Marc Poinsot. There is also an informative interview with Tobia Bezzola — curator at the Kunsthauz Zurich and Szeemann’s collaborator for many years. Two of Szeemann’s most ambitious exhibitions are presented as case studies: Documenta V (1972) and L’Autre, the 4th Lyon Biennial (1997). A biography, an illustrated chronology of Szeemann’s exhibitions and a selection of his writings complete this exhaustive survey.

Selected Correspondences 2001-2010

Textfield — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 19:53:08 +0000

Walead Beshty, Selected Correspondences 2001-2010
Softcover, 128 pp., offset 4/1, 210 x 297 mm
Edition of 2000
ISBN 978-88-6208-135-1
Published by Damiani

$49.00 · add to cart

In 2001, Walead Beshty began documenting the Diplomatic Mission of the Republic of Iraq to the former German Democratic Republic in Berlin. Still protected as sovereign territory under the Vienna Conventions, the embassy has stood abandoned since the early 1990s as, in Beshty’s words, “a relic of two bygone regimes, unclaimable by any nation; a physical location marooned (by) symbolic shifts in global politics, a ruin set apart neitherby fences nor by millennia, but by the invisible and abstract mechanisms of international law”. The site inspired his ongoing engagement with the invisible and marginal territories of globalization which provide an important line through his photographic and sculptural work of the past decade. Selected Correspondences focuses on three bodies of photographic work — two that deal with the Embassy directly and a third, Transparencies, which continues the question of place and movement. The work has been exhibited at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, Tate Britain, London, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, among others, and is brought together here for the first time, accompanied by two new essays on the projects.