Vidosava Golubović, Irina Subotić: Zenit, 1921-1926 (2008) [Serbian, English]

A monograph about the Yugoslav magazine Zenit whose founder and editor Ljubomir Micić was the main progenitor of the avant-garde in Croatia and Serbia during the first half of the 1920s.

“Through the relentless publication of manifestos and statements in issue after issue of Zenit, Micić gave shape to a specifically Yugoslav avant-garde aesthetics: Zenitism, counterpointing the redemptive force of the Balkanic-Slavic ‘barbarogenius’ over against the decadence of Western Europe. Over the course of its five years of publication, Zenit accreted successive influences from international Expressionism, Futurism, Dada, and Constructivism to advance its cultural-political goals. Its political orientations were similarly idiosyncratic, eclectic, and fluctuating: a blend of Serbian nationalism, pan-Slavism, pacificism, Bolshevism (though often celebrating the anti-Western Russian character of Lenin and Trotsky rather than their Soviet politics), mystical new-age thought, internationalism, and anarchism. Zenit managed to garner a significant degree of international attention both for its solicitation of work for publication and for its subsidiary activities, such as the First Zenit International Exhibition of New Art held in Belgrade in April 1924. The example of Zenit and the aesthetic ideology of Zenitism inspired other important publications across the region, such as the Hungarian-language journal Út and the Slovenian journal Tank, as well as individual practitioners of avant-garde such as the Dadaist poet Dragan Aleksić and the Slovenian cubo-futurist Srečko Kosovel.” (Source)

The book includes two lead essays by Vidosava Golubović and Irina Subotić in English translation (pp 469-484).

Publisher Narodna biblioteka Srbije, Belgrade; Institut za književnost i umetnost, Belgrade; and SKD Prosvjeta, Zagreb, 2008
ISBN 867035182X, 9788670351820
516 pages
via Dubravka/MoW

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PDF, PDF (17 MB)

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Wilhelm Worringer: Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style (1907–)

“In this text, Worringer identifies two opposing tendencies pervading the history of art from ancient times through the Enlightenment. He claims that in societies experiencing periods of anxiety and intense spirituality, such as those of ancient Egypt and the Middle Ages, artistic production tends toward a flat, crystalline ‘abstraction’, while cultures that are oriented toward science and the physical world, like ancient Greece and Renaissance Italy, are dominated by more naturalistic, embodied styles, which he grouped under the term ‘empathy’. As was traditional for art history at the time, Worringer’s book remained firmly engaged with the past, ignoring contemporaneous artistic production. Yet in the wake of its publication, Abstraction and Empathy came to be seen as fundamental for understanding the rise of Expressionism and the role of abstraction in the early twentieth century.”

First published as author’s dissertation entitled Abstraktion und Einfühlung, Heuser, Neuwied, 1907.

English edition
Translated by Michael Bullock
Publisher International University Press, New York, 1953
New edition with an Introduction by Hilton Kramer published by Ivan R. Dee, Chicago, 1997
ISBN 1566631777, 9781566631778
144 pages

WorldCat (EN)

Abstraktion und Einfühlung (German, 1907, further editions: 3rd, 1911, 11th, 1921)
Abstraction and Empathy (English, 1953/1997, 9 MB)

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Étienne Souriau: The Different Modes of Existence (1943–) [DE, EN]

“Exploring the aesthetic depths of the various modes of existence by one of France’s most heralded but forgotten thinkers of existential pluralism.

What relation is there between the existence of a work of art and that of a living being? Between the existence of an atom and that of a value like solidarity? These questions become our own each time a reality is established—whether it is a piece of music, someone we love, or a fictional character—and begins to take on an importance in our lives. Like William James or Gilles Deleuze, Souriau methodically defends the thesis of an existential pluralism. There are indeed different manners of existing and even different degrees or intensities of existence: from pure phenomena to objectivized things, by way of the virtual and the surexistent, to which works of art and the intellect, and even the very fact of morality, bear witness. Existence is polyphonic and, as a result, the world is considerably enriched and enlarged. Beyond all that exists in the ordinary sense of the term, it is necessary to allow for all sorts of virtual and ephemeral states, transitional realms, and barely begun realities, still in the making, all of which constitute so many “inter-worlds.””

First published as Les Différents modes d’existence, Alcan, Paris, 1943.

English edition
Translated by Erik Beranek and Tim Howles
Introduction by Isabelle Stengers and Bruno Latour
Publisher Univocal, Minneapolis, 2015
ISBN 9781937561505
240 pages
via wX

Reviews: Raymond A. Sangiolo (Études phil 1945 FR), Frédéric Keck (Le Monde 2009 FR).

Publisher (DE)
Publisher (EN)

Die verschiedenen Modi der Existenz (German, trans. Thomas Wäckerle, 2015, PDF)
The Different Modes of Existence (English, trans. Erik Beranek and Tim Howles, 2015)

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Hal Foster: Bad New Days: Art, Criticism, Emergency (2015)

“Bad New Days examines the evolution of art and criticism in Western Europe and North America over the last twenty-five years, exploring their dynamic relation to the general condition of emergency instilled by neoliberalism and the war on terror.

Considering the work of artists such as Thomas Hirschhorn, Tacita Dean, and Isa Genzken, and the writing of thinkers like Jacques Rancière, Bruno Latour, and Giorgio Agamben, Hal Foster shows the ways in which art has anticipated this condition, at times resisting the collapse of the social contract or gesturing toward its repair; at other times burlesquing it.

Against the claim that art making has become so heterogeneous as to defy historical analysis, Foster argues that the critic must still articulate a clear account of the contemporary in all its complexity. To that end, he offers several paradigms for the art of recent years, which he terms “abject,” “archival,” “mimetic,” and “precarious.””

Publisher Verso, London and New York, 2015
ISBN 1784781460, 9781784781460
208 pages

Presentation and discussion (video, The Kitchen, NYC, Sep 2015)
Interview (John Douglas Millar, Mute, Nov 2015)

Reviews: Mark Steven (Affirmations 2015), Brian Dillon (Guardian 2015), Rachel Wetzler (ArtNews 2015).

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Kaja Silverman: The Miracle of Analogy, or, The History of Photography, 1 (2015)

“The Miracle of Analogy is the first of a two-volume reconceptualization of photography. It argues that photography originates in what is seen, rather than in the human eye or the camera lens, and that it is the world’s primary way of revealing itself to us. Neither an index, representation, nor copy, as conventional studies would have it, the photographic image is an analogy. This principle obtains at every level of its being: a photograph analogizes its referent, the negative from which it is generated, every other print that is struck from that negative, and all of its digital “offspring.”

Photography is also unstoppably developmental, both at the level of the individual image and of medium. The photograph moves through time, in search of other “kin,” some of which may be visual, but others of which may be literary, architectural, philosophical, or literary. Finally, photography develops with us, and in response to us. It assumes historically legible forms, but when we divest them of their saving power, as we always seem to do, it goes elsewhere.

The present volume focuses on the nineteenth century and some of its contemporary progeny. It begins with the camera obscura, which morphed into chemical photography and lives on in digital form, and ends with Walter Benjamin. Key figures discussed along the way include Nicéphore Niépce, Louis Daguerre, William Fox-Talbot, Jeff Wall, and Joan Fontcuberta.”

Publisher Stanford University Press, 2015
ISBN 9780804794008
203 pages

Reviews: Todd Cronan (Nonsite 2014), Emily Una Weirich (ARLIS/NA 2015), Burke Hilsabeck (Critical Inquiry 2015).

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