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Diaries of an avatar: a Bible-style artist's book of writings by Martine Syms A new artist's book by California-based artist Martine Syms (born 1988), Shame Space explores the possibilities of narrative and identity, collecting journal writings by the artist from 2015 to 2017 in which she attempts to capture her shadow self, alongside image stills from the video project Ugly Plymouths. The text entries form the voiceover of Mythiccbeing (pronounced "my thick being'), a "black, upwardly mobile, violent, solipsistic, sociopathic, gender-neutral femme" digital avatar who has iterated across several of Syms' recent exhibitions. In Syms' installations, Mythiccbeing manifests variously in video, audio and as an interactive chatbot that responds to the viewer's communications with messages and animations. In Shame Space, the character's autofictional, diaristic commentary is gathered into 15 chapters. Its design updates the Bible format with its A5 size, embossed leather-textured cover and silver edge painting. The Ugly Plymouths still-image selection was coded using a programming script, such that the design, like the chatbot's SMS responses, is an exercise in machine automation.
A source book documenting five episodes of Martine Syms's seminal fragmented television series, She Mad. Works by Martine Syms explore how mass media shapes and frames identities and cultures. Drawing from early cinema, television, the internet, social media, and ambient footage produced by phones and surveillance, Syms addresses the ways in which representations of black identity and gender appear in the public imagination. She Mad gathers materials and documentation on Martine Syms’s seminal episodic project of the same name. Each episode of this series takes a different format, using various narrative formats, from sitcoms to TikTok videos, and includes filmed footage as well as researc...
New commissioned work by an important American contemporary artist using a multidisciplinary approach to examine issues of race and identity Produced for the Future Fields Commission in Time-Based Media by the multidisciplinary artist Martine Syms (b. 1988), Neural Swamp is an immersive video installation that builds upon Syms's interest in the proliferation, circulation, and consumption of images, as well as her continued research into machine systems that erase or make invisible Black bodies, voices, and narratives. The publication documents this new work, offering in-depth analysis and a visual essay that reflects the specific approach to images and text characterizing Syms's practice. Neural Swamp's multichannel presentation reveals its characters through their reading of a continually changing script, the variations determined by a text-generating model. Through these dynamic interactions, along with the installation's physical elements, Syms creates a kaleidoscopic view of the world and our complex relationship with one another and with technology.
On the work of three contemporary artist's-book publishers who have developed fresh ways of broaching politics in publishing This book documents Publishing as Practice, a residency at Ulises--a curatorial platform based in Philadelphia--that explores publishing as an incubator for new forms of editorial, curatorial and artistic practice. Over the course of two years, three publishers activated Ulises as an exhibition space and public programming hub, engaging the public through workshops, discussions and projects. Residents included Hardworking Goodlooking, the publishing arm of Philippines-based, social-practice platform The Office of Culture and Design; Dominica, an imprint run by Martine Syms dedicated to exploring Blackness as a topic, reference, marker and audience in visual culture; and Bidoun, a non-profit organization focused on art and culture from the Middle East and its diasporas. The book features a preface by David Senior, an essay by Gee Wesley and Ulises Carrión's 1975 publishing manifesto "The New Art of Making Books," alongside documentation of the works produced.
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An examination of how artists have combined performance and moving image for decades, anticipating our changing relation to images in the internet era. In Performing Image, Isobel Harbison examines how artists have combined performance and moving image in their work since the 1960s, and how this work anticipates our changing relations to images since the advent of smart phones and the spread of online prosumerism. Over this period, artists have used a variety of DIY modes of self-imaging and circulation—from home video to social media—suggesting how and why Western subjects might seek alternative platforms for self-expression and self-representation. In the course of her argument, Harbis...
Artworks, essays and poetry explore the racial implications of capitalist temporalities In 2019, the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania presented the experimental exhibition Colored People Time. Divided into three chapters--Mundane Futures, Quotidian Pasts, Banal Presents--it used the Black vernacular phrase "Colored People's Time" (CPT) to explore the ways that dominant notions of time have been used to control and condemn Black people. CPT names a political performance by Black people to evade and ridicule the enforcement of punctuality and productivity. Alongside reproductions of historical objects from the Black Panther Party, Sutton E. Griggs, the National I...
*A Financial Times Book of the Year* 'The first time I opened What Artists Wear, I gasped with pleasure. Imagine it as a kind of punk cousin to John Berger's Ways of Seeing, liberally illustrated with the most astonishing images of artists, decked out in finery or rags ... It transported me to somewhere glamorous, exciting, even revolutionary' Olivia Laing, Guardian Most of us live our lives in our clothes without realizing their power. But in the hands of artists, garments reveal themselves. They are pure tools of expression, storytelling, resistance and creativity: canvases on which to show who we really are. In What Artists Wear, style luminary Charlie Porter takes us on an invigorating, ...
Since the #MeToo movement, the masculine exercise of power has been closely scrutinised. The focus on ?toxic? masculinity impacts our perception of male sexuality, which substantially influences the self-image and self-esteem of men. Men are being shamed by others, and they also feel ashamed. This book explores both positions, examining the representation of male sexuality, nudity, fatherhood, violence, rape, fascism and virility, and men and war from male as well as female perspectives. It presents artworks that deal with the intricacies and contradictions of these sociocultural constructs and realities, and combines scholarly essays with short stories and personal testimonies. 00Exhibition: H401, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (23.10.2020 ? 31.01.2021).
Eminem as emblem of America throughout Alex Da Corte's oeuvre This book exhaustively documents Philadelphia-based installation artist Alex Da Corte's (born 1980) preoccupation with the musician Eminem across four exhibitions. From Detroit to Cologne, from an artist-run space to a major international museum, Da Corte's work parallels Eminem's career through his thirties, reappearing, evolving alongside America, explaining more of himself each time. Eminem's place in culture and his role in Da Corte's practice, as well as the larger story of American identity, is explored through recent and commissioned essays by Hilton Als, Charlie Fox, William Pym, Martine Syms and Moritz Wesseler, as well as manipulated found texts and an extensive Q&A with Danish filmmaker Jørgen Leth, whose 1982 work Andy Warhol Eating a Hamburger strongly informs the discussion. True Life is both an uncompromising reference book and a work of fantasy.