The Event of Art

Published: 09/03/2020

The Event of Art is available as an open-access ebook only (no print edition). The Event of Art presents, in fifty-two modular chapters and over eight hundred pages and images, the works of artist Marc Lafia. The book interweaves essays, notes, photographic archives, and a host of exhibitions wherein Lafia traverses his wide body of[…]

Metagestures

Published: 05/31/2019

What kinds of knowledge and understandings of the world can be generated – and shared – when we use para-academic techniques and sensibilities to decode or respond to relatively orthodox intellectual objects? And what worlds might be possible if we practiced scholarly work from a place of collaboration and pleasure, as joyful fellow explorers? In[…]

Nothing in MoMA

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Published: 09/22/2018

Nothing in MoMA is a series of photographs captured in areas of Manhattan museums in which there are no artworks, written words, or people. Addressing the “grammar that organizes and secures our scene of looking,” in the words of art historian David Joselit’s introduction, the book imagines a composite empty museum or a narrative of[…]

Finding Room in Beirut: Places of the Everyday

Published: 01/19/2019

Finding Room in Beirut: Places of the Everyday demonstrates why it is worth our while to explore the value and contemporary meaning of urban areas about to undergo complete renewal. Branching off from discourses surrounding the terrain vague, the book argues that large populated urban areas meet the criteria of the vague and constitute a[…]

Beta Exercise: The Theory and Practice of Osamu Kanemura

Published: 01/23/2019

Some photographers take pictures of cities that show no humans and the fact that none appear is somehow meaningful. But I have no interest in this kind of expression—the meaning that a desolate city suggests. I have no interest in photos that imply something. The possibility of the photograph that doesn’t imply anything, cut off[…]

Walk on the Beach: Things from the Sea, Volume 1

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Published: 06/17/2016

This volume brings together writing and imagery from the experimental “beachwalk” session(s) at the Third Biennial Meeting of the BABEL Working Group, On the Beach: Precariousness, Risk, Forms of Life, Affinity, and Play at the Edge of the World. We began with conversations about the sea. We meditated together on chance, discovery, agency, beauty, and[…]

Photography in the Middle: Dispatches on Media Ecologies and Aesthetics

Published: 10/31/2016

It’s easy to forget there’s a war on when the front line is everywhere encrypted in plain sight. Gathered in this book’s several chapters are dispatches on the role of photography in a War Universe, a space and time in which photographers such as Hilla Becher, Don McCullin and Eadweard Muybridge exist only insofar as[…]

Image Photograph

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Published: 07/01/2015

We no longer live in the society of the spectacle, passively seeing the world. Now we perform our very own spectacle in a society that demands it at every turn. We’ve become advertisements of ourselves, our own PR agents, continually putting on a performance and measuring it hour by hour. This is no longer the society[…]