Bøker i Urbanomic / Art Editions-serien

A reevaluation of Matisse that reveals the complex function of his work and thought in contemporary art's escape from the image, from traditional forms of art, and even from the art form itself.

A close analysis of the work of Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto reveals the fundamental stakes of a contemporary art in the process of undoing the image-form.The first volume of Éric Alliez and Jean-Claude Bonne's major work on contemporary art begins by outlining their exploratory and speculative project: not so much to produce a new "philosophy of art” as to enter into a space in-between philosophy and art—between a contemporary philosophy of contemporary art and an art contemporary with contemporary philosophy.But what exactly is the "contemporary”? And how can we make ourselves, philosophically, the contemporaries of works whose problematic nature no longer sits well under the categories of the "aesthetic,” inherited from romanticism?In these case-studies of an art-thought that is inseparable from the continued construction of the very concept of a "contemporary art,” philosophical analysis is continually displaced by the forces of works and practices of creation and reception that herald a new—processual and post-conceptual—configuration of art, with Matisse and Duchamp—Matisse-thought and Duchamp-thought—establishing a tension that, since the 1960s, has been "recharged” by the micropolitical options which have given rise to the critical and clinical problematisation of art.Moving through and beyond the thought of Deleuze and Guattari, the discovery of a diagrammatic regime of the contemporary synonymous with an undoing of the image of the aesthetic regime of art begins here with the work of Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto, as a close analysis of the diagrammatic forces at work in Leviathan Thot, Neto's major 2006 intervention in the Panthéon de la république, reveals the fundamental stakes of a contemporary art in the process of undoing the image-form.Neto's "anarchitectural denunciation” takes on the (Hobbesian) metaphysical enunciation of the Leviathan-state, which his monstrous "counter-installation” recalls and reproblematizes by placing all of the Panthéon's physical and metaphysical coordinates into and under tension. Grappling with this foreign body both critically and clinically, Alliez and Bonne reveal how the "Neto Operation” engages with nothing less than the image of power in its relation to the power of the image that animates it and endows it with a discursive existence.

An artist examines the plethora of Europe Squares, Europa Places, Places de l''Europe, and Europaplatzes and what they tell us about the ideality of “Europe.”If the built environment is a record of our modes of organization and the compromises we make in order to live together, then what are we to make of the plethora of Europe Squares, Europa Places, Places de l''Europe, and Europaplatzes? Public spaces that connect numerous disparate towns and cities through a “supersite” called Europe, they may appear as avatars of an idea in crisis, as “eurocentric values” and the concept of Europe as a unified political space are attacked and eroded from all sides.Atlas Europe Square documents a body of work by Swiss artist Yves Mettler who, since 2003, has engaged in an ongoing mapping and documentation of these sites, along with a series of projects triangulating between particular squares, interrogating their differing architectural, environmental, and public functions, and what they tell us about the ideality of “Europe” and the (im)possibility of its concrete instantiation.Here this work is extended into reflections on the relationship between art and public space, site-specificity, and the artist''s own implication in the imaginary of Europe as he becomes enmeshed in a network of projects, funds, and public bodies that seek to promote "European culture" through art.Alongside extensive photographic documentation, Atlas Europe Square contains texts by the artist alongside essays by Reza Negarestani, Teresa Pullano, Laurent Thévenot, and Stephen Zepke, discussing Mettler''s work.

A detailed examination of the motivations and precise coordinates of Duchamp's break from painting into the field of the linguistic sign.Matisse and Duchamp seem to incarnate ideal poles of the tension internal to modern art as it plunged into crisis the idea of the image—a polemical operation that opened the way to contemporary art's auto-problematization of experimental constructivism. Where Matisse subverted the aesthetic regime by bringing painting out of itself to invest its environment in a Bergsonian energetics of color, Duchamp cuts it off from the plastic arts through a reversal of Bergson's in-the-making. The readymade captures a literalized signifier of this perspective. Duchamp Looked At is an extraordinarily rich philosophical study that offers a startling new account of the dis/continuity between the problems of contemporary art and the new articulations Duchamp fabricated between image and idea, science and art, painting and language. Alliez and Bonne's meticulous archaeological survey rediscovers the real problems and motivations of "Duchamp-thought” through a close analysis of his entire oeuvre: from the Nudes in which the problem of representing movement is gradually displaced into the realm of the virtual, the image disqualified in favor of the diagram, to the pataphysical sciences of chance and the particular, the readymades, the Large Glass and Étant donnés—and beyond, as the artist carbonizes the gallery with 1200 Sacks of Coal and ties it up with Miles of String, in installations that take Duchamp beyond Duchamp.

An "operating manual for contemporary art" that addresses the work of Daniel Buren, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Günter Brus.The late 1960s saw a radical undoing of the image in—and of—art, as the questions of art began to be posed in entirely new terms. In this critical and clinical examination of the post-conceptual condition’s negotiations with the image, the body, capitalist semiotics, and the built environment, Éric Alliez and Jean-Claude Bonne trace the trajectories of three artists, three key entries in the lexicon that are also entryways into contemporary art understood as a ‘diagrammatic regime’ inextricably related, in particular, to architecture.  Daniel Buren systematically deconstructs all the forms of autonomy of art, through a tenacious in situ critique at once pragmatic and ontological operated by his "visual tool," traced here from its origins to recent major museum installations; Gordon Matta-Clark’s anarchitectural operation across site and non-site strikes at the functional foundations of architectural structuring, physical, social, and semiotic—a dis-organization and disorientation relayed by his photographic documentation of his projects. Viennese actionist Günter Brus’s action drawings/drawing actions and "stress tests" recircuit markmaking, representation, and corporeality, producing wordless "electroglyphs" that render visible the inscription of relations of force within the body. This "operating manual for contemporary art," richly illustrated and based throughout on close readings of the artists’ works, writings, and actions across their entire careers, is an indispensable diagram of the lines of flight opened up by contemporary art, as well as the omnipresent threat of its capture by anesthesia and dematerialization, spectacle, the dogma of “site-specificity,” and absorption into the neoliberal experience economy.

A beautifully produced anthology of crypto-artist, writer, and hacker Rhea Myers's pioneering blockchain art, along with a selection of her essays, reviews, and fictions.DAO? BTC? NFT? ETH? ART? WTF? HODL as OG crypto-artist, writer, and hacker Rhea Myers searches for faces in cryptographic hashes, follows a day in the life of a young shibe in the year 2032, and patiently explains why all art should be destructively uploaded to the blockchain. Now an acknowledged pioneer whose work has graced the auction room at Sotheby’s, Myers embarked on her first art projects focusing on blockchain tech in 2011, making her one of the first artists to engage in creative, speculative, and conceptual engagements with "the new internet." Proof of Work brings together annotated presentations of Myers’s blockchain artworks along with her essays, reviews, and fictions—a sustained critical encounter between the cultures and histories of the artworld and crypto-utopianism, technically accomplished but always generously demystifying and often mischievous.  Her deep understanding of the technical history and debates around blockchain technology is complemented by a broader sense of the crypto movement and the artistic and political sensibilities that accompanied its ascendancy. Remodeling the tropes of conceptual art and net.art to explore what blockchain technology reveals about our concepts of value, culture, and currency, Myers’s work has become required viewing for anyone interested in the future of art, consensus, law, and collectivity.