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The Tribe, the companion volume to Ralph Rumney's excellent The Consul is another fascinating slice of history concerning the ultra avant-garde's favourite sect. Jean-Michel Mension was a member of the Situationist International's precursor, the less political and more art focussed Lettrist International (which was founded in 1945 in Paris by the Romanian Jean-Isidore Isou as a reaction to Andre Breton's dictatorial control of the surrealist movement). Surrealism had become something of a cult of personality surrounding Breton and had drifted from its dada origins into mysticism. In 1956 at Alba in Italy a group of lettrists took an active part at the First World Congress of Liberated Artist...
Dans ces entretiens, Jean-Michel Mension évoque les années qui le menèrent à participer, de 1952 à 1954, à l'existence chaotique et alcoolisée de l'Internationale Situationniste. Dans un Saint-Germain-des-Prés aujourd'hui disparu, en compagnie de Guy Debord, mais aussi d’autres figures moins connues et souvent fascinantes, on découvre un Paris interdit : celui des marges, des bistrots et des truands. Dans le récit de cette avant-garde subversive, entre art, liberté sexuelle et dérèglements de tous les sens, on assiste à la naissance d'une révolte qui embrasera, plus d'une décennie plus tard, la jeunesse de Mai 68. Il paraît dans une nouvelle édition, illustrée d'une icon...
Over fifty years after the Situationist International appeared, its legacy continues to inspire activists, artists and theorists around the world. Such a legend has accrued to this movement that the story of the SI now demands to be told in a contemporary voice capable of putting it into the context of twenty-first-century struggles. McKenzie Wark delves into the Situationists' unacknowledged diversity, revealing a world as rich in practice as it is in theory. Tracing the group's development from the bohemian Paris of the '50s to the explosive days of May '68, Wark's take on the Situationists is biographically and historically rich, presenting the group as an ensemble creation, rather than t...
The Situationist International, who came to the fore during the Paris tumults of 1968, were revolutionary thinkers who continue to influence movements and philosophy into the twenty-first century. Mostly know for Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle as well as other key texts, the group was in fact hugely diverse and radical. In XXX McKenzie Wark explores the full range of the movement. At once an extraordinary counter history of radical praxis and a call to arms in the age of financial crisis and the resurgence of the streets Wark traces the group's development from the bohemian Paris of the '50s to the explosive days of May '68, Wark's take on the Situationists is biographically and h...
Absent the Archive is the first cultural history devoted to literary and visual representations of the police massacre of peaceful Algerian protesters. This corpus, or anarchive, includes a variety of cultural texts whose formal, diegetic, and discursive strategies represent the massacre and its erasure, its “becoming invisible,” and its afterlives as a trace, a memory, a sign.
Following her acclaimed history of the Situationist International up until the late sixties, The Beach Beneath the Street, McKenzie Wark returns with a companion volume which puts the late work of the Situationists in a broader and deeper context, charting their contemporary relevance and their deep critique of modernity. Wark builds on their work to map the historical stages of the society of the spectacle, from the diffuse to the integrated to what he calls the disintegrating spectacle. The Spectacle of Disintegration takes the reader through the critique of political aesthetics of former Situationist T.J. Clark, the Fourierist utopia of Raoul Vaneigem, Ren Vienet's earthy situationist cin...
The Washington Post hails Greil Marcus as our greatest cultural critic. Writing in the London Review of Books, D. D. Guttenplan calls him probably the most astute critic of American popular culture since Edmund Wilson. For nearly thirty years, he has written a remarkable column that has migrated from the Village Voice to Artforum, Salon, City Pages, Interview, and The Believer and currently appears in the Barnes & Noble Review. It has been a laboratory where Marcus has fearlessly explored and wittily dissected an enormous variety of cultural artifacts, from songs to books to movies to advertisements, teasing out from the welter of everyday objects what amounts to a de facto theory of cultural transmission. Published to complement the paperback edition of The History of Rock & Roll in Ten Songs, Real Life Rock reveals the critic in full: direct, erudite, funny, fierce, vivid, astute, uninhibited, and possessing an unerring instinct for art and fraud. The result is an indispensable volume packed with startling arguments and casual brilliance.
Europeanising Spaces in Paris, c. 1947-1962 examines the myriad urban, political and cultural forms in which ideas of Europe, and of what it meant to be European, were represented in Paris in the post-war era.
Since the early 2000s there has been an increase in artists who are walking as an essential part of their artistic practice. This book identifies the unique attributes of walking to develop a definition for walking as an artistic medium. Drawing on historical sources, such as the walks of the Romantic poets, Dadaists and Letterist/Situationist Internationals, it presents a practice based approach to walking focused on the radical memory of the medium. The book covers three contemporary organisations working to develop the artistic medium of walking—London’s Walking Artists Network, Scotland’s Walking Institute and New York City’s Walk Exchange—and looks at how these different organisation’s strategies contribute to the development of the artistic medium of walking. The book is framed by five walking exercises, and invites the reader to create a memory palace for the medium of walking as a practical exploration of artistic walking practices.