Books

 

BOOKS IN REVERSE CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER:
 

-Cultural Revolution: Aesthetic Practice after Autonomy (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2017)

This collection of essays focuses on aesthetic practice in a rapidly expanding cultural sphere, analyzing its transformation by the capitalist cultural revolution. In a present moment teeming with erosions—where even history and the human are called into question—Cultural Revolution: Aesthetic Practice after Autonomy reconsiders these changing values, for relegating such notions safely to the past betrays their possibilities for potential today.

The texts discuss practices that range from Black Mask to Subversive Aktion, from Krautonomy to Occupy, from the Wet Dream Film Festival in the early 1970s to Jonas Staal’s recently established New World Academy. Within these pages Scarlett Johansson meets Paul Chan, Walid Raad, and Hito Steyerl, and Dr. Zira from Planet of the Apes mingles with the likes of Paul Lafargue and Alexandre Kojève.

 
-History in Motion: Time in the Age of the Moving Image (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2013)

The moving image has irrevocably redefined our experience and construction of history. In the contemporary economy of time, history has become an image in motion, a series of events animated and performed through various media. Analyzing a variety of films, video pieces, and performances, History in Motion evaluates the impact that our changing experience of time has had on the actualization of history in the present. In the process, he considers the role of shock and suspense, of play and games, the rise and ubiquity of television, transformed notions of leisure and labor time, and a new natural history marked by climate change.

 
-Idols of the Market: Modern Iconoclasm and the Contemporary Spectacle (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2009)

This book-length essay stages a dialogue between religious and modern, secular critiques of images, and examines both the afterlife of religious elements in modern culture and possible responses to the current religious re-appropriation of Adorno’s critique of modern capitalist culture by Christian fundamentalists and radical Islamists.

 
–Secret Publicity: Essays on Contemporary Art (Rotterdam/Amsterdam: NAi Publishers/Fonds BKVB, 2006)

The book bears the date 2005 but was de facto published in February 2006: a collection of essays from the previous years, reworked for this publication, with a focus on art’s complicated and contradictory publicness. A Dutch edition, Geheime Publiciteit, was published simultaneously. Some of the essays from Secret Publicity have since been included in anthologies and readers. The book itself is  no longer in print, though of course it should be possible to track down a copy on the secondary market.