Bøker i Semiotext(e) / Active Agents-serien

A multigenre investigation of the personal and cultural annals of memory, identity, and spectatorship, both on and off the screen.In exchange for studying what each fraudulent cell looks like under a merciless commercial and commodified lens, viewers enable late-capitalism to run more smoothly by calling in with their votes, as is the case with Reality TV. From the inside, secrecy appears eradicated, as though secrets or coded transparencies comprise the totality of injustice, rather than just one part. Justice is reduced to a vantage point. We see and we see and we see ad infinitum.—from Picture CycleWith her debut collection Beauty Talk & Monsters (2007), Masha Tupitsyn established a new genre of hybrid writing that melded film criticism, philosophy, and autobiography. Picture Cycle continues Tupitsyn's multigenre investigation of the personal and cultural annals of memory, identity, and spectatorship, both on and off the screen. Composed over a ten-year period, Picture Cycle is a pioneering collection whose sharp and knowing vignette-like essays form a critical autobiography of the daily images in our lives. Deftly covering a range of theoretical and cinematic frameworks, Tupitsyn traces here the quickly vanishing line between onscreen and offscreen, predigital and postdigital. The result is a unique intellectual study of the uncanny formation of our life's biographies through images.

Gary Indiana's collected columns of art criticism from the Village Voice, documenting, from the front lines, the 1980s New York art scene.In 1985, the Village Voice offered me a job as senior art critic. This made my life easier and lousy at the same time. I now had to actually enter all those galleries instead of peeking in the windows. At times, the only tangible perk was having the chump for a fifth of vodka whenever twenty more phonies had flattered my ass off in the course of a working week.—from Vile DaysFrom March 1985 through June 1988 in The Village Voice, Gary Indiana reimagined the weekly art column. Thirty years later, Vile Days brings together for the first time all of those vivid dispatches, too long stuck in archival limbo, so that the fire of Indiana's observations can burn again. In the midst of Reaganism, the grim toll of AIDS, and the frequent jingoism of postmodern theory, Indiana found a way to be the moment's Baudelaire. He turned the art review into a chronicle of life under siege.As a critic, Indiana combines his novelistic and theatrical gifts with a startling political acumen to assess art and the unruly environments that give it context. No one was better positioned to elucidate the work of key artists at crucial junctures of their early careers, from Sherrie Levine and Richard Prince to Jeff Koons and Cindy Sherman, among others. But Indiana also remained alert to the aesthetic consequence of sumo wrestling, flower shows, public art, corporate galleries, and furniture design. Edited and prefaced by Bruce Hainley, Vile Days provides an opportunity to track Indiana's emergence as one of the most prescient writers of his generation.

Exit strategies from the current financial crisis that may lead us toward a new horizon of constructing the common.

A poet and post-punk heroine writes on subjects ranging from Björk to Robert Smithson, from traveling in Iceland to walking in Thoreau's footsteps on Cape CodPoet and post-punk heroine Eileen Myles has always operated in the art, writing, and queer performance scenes as a kind of observant flaneur. Like Baudelaire's gentleman stroller, Myles travels the city—wandering on garbage-strewn New York streets in the heat of summer, drifting though the antiseptic malls of La Jolla, and riding in the van with Sister Spit—seeing it with a poet's eye for detail and with the consciousness that writing about art and culture has always been a social gesture. Culled by the poet from twenty years of art writing, the essays in The Importance of Being Iceland make a lush document of her—and our—lives in these contemporary crowds. Framed by Myles's account of her travels in Iceland, these essays posit inbetweenness as the most vital position from which to perceive culture as a whole, and a fluidity in national identity as the best model for writing and thinking about art and culture. The essays include fresh takes on Thoreau's Cape Cod walk, working class speech, James Schulyer and Björk, queer Russia and Robert Smithson; how-tos on writing an avant-garde poem and driving a battered Japanese car that resembles a menopausal body; and opinions on such widely ranging subjects as filmmaker Sadie Benning, actor Daniel Day-Lewis, Ted Berrigan's Sonnets, and flossing.

How the work of Israeli writers today reflects the foundation myths of a Jewish state.The idea of the Jewish nation was conceived before the organization of the Zionist movement in the nineteenth century and continued long after the creation of the state of Israel. In The Words and the Land, post-Zionist Israeli historian Shlomo Sand examines how both Jewish and Israeli intellectuals contributed to this process. One by one, he identifies and calls into question the foundation myths of the Israeli state, beginning with the myth of a people forcibly uprooted, a people-race that began to wander the world in search of a land of asylum. This was a people that would define itself on a biological and "mythological-religious” basis, embodied in words that today feed Israeli political, literary, and historical writing: "exile,” "return,” and "ascent” (Alyah) to the land of its origins.Since 1948, most intellectuals in Israel have continued to accept this ethno-national image and embrace an exclusive state identity to which only Jewish people can belong. The first challenges to this dominant idea didn't appear in Israel until the 1980s, in the innovative work of the "post-Zionist” historians, who were bent on dismantling the nationalist historical myth and arguing for a state that would belong equally to all its citizens. Analyzing how Israeli intellectuals positioned themselves during the Gulf War and in the new era of communication technologies, Sand extends his analysis globally, looking at the status of intellectuals in all societies.

Video Green examines the explosion of late 1990s Los Angeles art driven by high-profile graduate programs.Video Green examines the explosion of late 1990s Los Angeles art driven by high-profile graduate programs. Probing the surface of art-critical buzzwords, Chris Kraus brilliantly chronicles how the City of Angels has suddenly become the epicenter of the international art world and a microcosm of the larger culture. Why is Los Angeles so completely divorced from other realities of the city? Shrewd, analytic and witty, Video Green is to the Los Angeles art world what Roland Barthes' Mythologies were to the society of the spectacle: the live autopsy of a ghost city.

In The Empire of Disorder, Alain Joxe offers the first truly comprehensive analysis of the new world disorder of the twenty-first century.

The first book-length monograph on Elaine Sturtevant, who has focused her career on the artistic copy.

A writer casts an acerbic, queer eye on the greats and the not-so-greats of Hollywood's Golden Age. Ronnie Reagan's bizarre legs are sufficient reason to watch John Loves Mary (1949), a picture so ordinaire it needs this bizarre touch. When the faces in this historic still from the Museum of Modern Art are cropped, Reagan could pass for a butch lez from the Women's Army Corps who is about to put the old make on a fluff (Patricia Neal).—from Cruising the MoviesCruising the Movies was Boyd McDonald's "sexual guide” to televised cinema, originally published by the Gay Presses of New York in 1985. The capstone of McDonald's prolific turn as a freelance film columnist for the magazine Christopher Street, Cruising the Movies collects the author's movie reviews of 1983-1985. This new, expanded edition also includes previously uncollected articles and a new introduction by William E. Jones.Eschewing new theatrical releases for the "oldies” once common as cheap programing on independent television stations, and more interested in starlets and supporting players than leading actors, McDonald casts an acerbic, queer eye on the greats and not-so-greats of Hollywood's Golden Age. Writing against the bleak backdrop of Reagan-era America, McDonald never ceases to find subversive, arousing delights in the comically chaste aesthetics imposed by the censorious Motion Picture Production Code of 1930-1968.Better known as the editor of the Straight to Hell paperback series—a compendia of real-life sexual stories that is part pornography, part ethnography—McDonald in his film writing reveals both his studious and sardonic sides. Many of the texts in Cruising the Movies were inspired by McDonald's attentive inspection of the now-shuttered MoMA Film Stills Archive, and his columns gloriously capture a bygone era in film fandom. Gay and subcultural, yet never reducible to a zany cult concern or mere camp, McDonald's "reviews” capture a lost art of queer cinephilia, recording a furtive obsession that once animated gay urban life. With lancing wit, Cruising celebrates gay subculture's profound embrace of mass culture, seeing film for what it is—a screen that reflects our fantasies, desires, and dreams.