ART

Sharks, Death, Surfers - An Illustrated Companion

Sternberg Press 2018 ISBN 9783956794247 Acqn 29184
Pb 12x18cm 154pp 32ills 20col £19

We encounter the world through surfaces: the screen, the page, our skin, the ocean’s swell. Here
on the sea is the surfer, positioned at the edge of the collapsing wave. And lurking underneath in
a monstrous mirroring is the shark. When the two meet, carving along the surface, breaking
through the boundary, is when death appears.

Steering her analysis from the newspaper obituary in and out of literature and past cinema,
Melissa McCarthy investigates a fundamental aspect of the human condition: our state of being
between life and death, always in precarious and watery balance. Sharks, Death, Surfers: An
Illustrated Companion observes how sharks have been depicted over centuries and across
cultures, then flips the lens (and dissects the cornea) to consider what sharks see when they look
back.

These refracted lines of inquiry—optical, philosophical, historical—converge at the focal point

where we can fix the image of the surfer and the shark. This is the picture McCarthy ends up
framing: the cartilaginous companions gliding together in a perfect model of how to read,
navigate, and exist.

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Babette Mangolte - Selected Writings 1998-2015

Sternberg Press 2018 ISBN 9783956794186 Acqn 29100
Pb 12x18cm 384pp 125ills £21.50

Babette Mangolte is one of the most important experimental filmmakers of the last fifty years.
Influenced early on by Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera and the work of Stan Brakhage
and Jonas Mekas, in 1964 she began studies at the renowned Ecole nationale de la photographie
et de la cinematographie in Paris, as one of the school's first female students. In 1970, having
become disillusioned with the film scene in France, Mangolte moved to New York and became
involved in the avant-garde film and dance milieus of the Kitchen and the Anthology Film
Archives.

Selected Writings, 1998-2015 is a collection of texts by Mangold in which she reflects on her
practice as a photographer and filmmaker and her collaborative work with filmmakers, artists,
dancers, and choreographers. She provides insights into the techniques and methods she
created as well as her relationships with notable collaborators such as Marina Abramovic,
Chantal Akerman, Trisha Brown, and Yvonne Rainer.

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Intersubjectivity Vol II - Scripting the Human

Sternberg Press 2018 ISBN 9783956794346 Acqn 29182
Pb 19x25cm 160pp 47ills £15.50

Contributions by Avram Alpert, Hannah Black, Harry Burke, Lucky Dragons, Anselm Franke,
Boris Groys, Mashinka Firunts Hakopian, Sarah Harrison, Victoria Ivanova, Josh Kline, Erika
Landström, Goshka Macuga, Natasha Stagg, Jeanne Vaccaro

The second in a series of edited volumes on intersubjectivity, this collection of essays considers
the relationship between performance, subjectivity, and human agency. Certain texts explore the
ways in which performance is decoupled from human embodiment via forms of mediation,
mechanical reproduction, or simulation. Others seek to examine how performance is
conceptualized. Encompassing both historical and speculative perspectives, Scripting the Human
explores the ways in which non-human (or trans/post-human) entities complicate notions of
subjectivity and exert intersubjective pressures of their own on social, political, scientific, and
philosophical discourses. Might the interaction between two chatbots—whose behavioral patterns
are modeled on human traits—be intersubjective, or are they simply scripted? Can scripting the
human lead to transformative encounters or does it produce a closed system whose complexity
obscures its ultimate limitations? Ranging from the origins of contemporary conceptions of
intersubjectivity in continental philosophy to more recent formulations that derive from systems
theory, trans identity, and the emergent field of bot pedagogy, Scripting the Human approaches
intersubjectivity as both historical phenomenon and nascent mode of present-day relation.

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Hubert Fichte - The Black City

Sternberg Press 2018 ISBN 9783956794452 Acqn 29183
Hb 13x19cm 368pp 14ills £20.50

The Black City is a portrait of New York written by Hubert Fichte between 1978 and 1980. Fichte
researched the city as the center of the African diaspora, conducting interviews and composing
essays about syncretism in culture and the arts, material living conditions in the city, and political
and individual struggles based on race, class, and sexuality. His interview partners include
Michael Chisolm, arts educator and coordinator of the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition;
German émigré and artist Lil Picard; photographer Richard Avedon; Léopold Joseph, publisher of
the exile newspaper Haiti Observateur; and Teiji Ito, composer and Vodou initiate. The last
chapter of the book is a self-reflective literary analysis of Herodotus, the first white European to
write extensively of his travels and (desirous) encounters in Africa.

Hubert Fichte is considered one of Germany’s most important postwar authors. Often compared
to the work of Jean Genet and Kathy Acker, Fichte’s novels and nonfiction are exuberant and
erudite, contesting the stylistic and ethnographic norms of the time to locate a “utopic potential”
for poetic and political revolution in the cultural heritage and contemporary life of the African
diaspora. Fichte’s writing in The Black City provocatively exposes the complexities of its author’s
subjectivity in a manner that underscores the singularity of his writing while prompting questions
about how notions of exploitation, authority, and authenticity manifest themselves in pseudo-
ethnographic practices. Translated into English for the first time, The Black City is part of Fichte's
multivolume experimental literary cycle, The History of Sensitivity, which was left unfinished due
to his untimely death in 1986.

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Magali Reus - Hot Cottons As mist, Description

Sternberg Press 2018 ISBN 9783956794131 Acqn 29066
Pb 21x27cm 116pp 100col ills £21.95

This publication accompanies two exhibitions of recent sculptural work by the artist Magali Reus:
"Hot Cottons" (2017-18) at Bergen Kunsthall and "As mist, description," (2018) at the South
London Gallery. Featuring an essay by writer and curator Laura Mclean-Ferris and a poetic
response by writer and poet Quinn Latimer as well as a fully illustrated overview of Reus's work,
this catalogue provides an in-depth exploration of the artist's recent sculptural practice.

Producing a sculptural language that is both familiar yet unlocatable Reus draws heavily on the
past and present landscape of industry and fabrication, creating forms using a plethora of
materials that include: mesh, jesmonite, cotton, steel, rubber, leather. Interested in collaborative
processes of making, from virtual design to handmade fabrication, Reus combines sculptural
games with material explorations. Everyday materials are transformed with powder blues, pastel
greens, and dirty beiges. Reus's sculptures appear in a state of transition, in progress, mid-
function, restored, or destroyed. Autographs of famous athletes, graphics from an iconic
Norwegian matchbox, forms reminiscent of fire extinguishers, decorative ironwork, or modular
frameworks, all feature in Reus's sculptures transforming defined materials into newly
undefinable objects. Working with factories in Holland to develop specific fabrics, using complex
molding and weaving techniques, all the while drawing on the language of digital design Reus
navigates the contemporary post-industrial moment with playful unease, creating objects with
familiar yet fluid identities.

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Elizabeth Lebovici - The Name Of Philippe Thomas

Sternberg Press 2018 ISBN 9783956794315 Acqn 29036
Pb 12x18cm 112pp £7.95

With an introduction by Hanna Magauer

In the artistic activities of Philippe Thomas (1951-1995), there was a determination to disappear:
it was his procedure to transfer his title of author onto his collectors. This was the case when
selling an artwork, or whenever the author's credit was needed for a commissioned text, and in
the institutional co-operations that Thomas was a participant of. With this strategy Thomas
worked against his own historicization, erasing his name from the reigning European and North
American art fields and with prescience Thomas "put up obstacles to block his future
'googleability'" (Hanna Magauer). In recent years, the works and writings of the artist, who also
acted on behalf of the semi-fictional agency readymades belong to everyone_, again gained
greater visibility and as of current are being assigned a place in art history.

With this book, Elisabeth Lebovici elaborates on Thomas's strategy to cede and fictionalize
authorship and suggests a reading of his work that incorporates questions of gender and
reproduction, the multiplicity of the subjects involved, and the unbearable disappearance of
Thomas (who died of AIDS-related complications), into the process of enunciation. It is Lebovici's
suggestion that the performativity of Thomas's work requires two versions at once: "the one
where one enters into the fiction and the one where one observes the beauty of the arrangement
and the plot at work. The one where one is inside and the one where one contemplates it."

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Perhaps It Is High Time for a Xeno-Architecture to Match

Sternberg Press 2018 ISBN 9783956793875 Acqn 29084
Pb 13x19cm 192pp £13.25

Contributions by Armen Avanessian, Benjamin H. Bratton, Kathleen Ditzig, Daniel Falb, Anke
Henning, Victoria Ivanova, Markus Miessen, Luciana Parisi, Patricia Reed

"Xeno" speaks to the turn away from "what is" toward "what could be": the (as yet) unknown, the
alien-having been employed in recent years through such speculative-political approaches as
xenofeminism and xenopoetics. Perhaps It Is Time for a Xeno-architecture to Match documents a
conversation series from January to March 2017 that explored what an intervention of the xeno
might bring to bear on contemporary and future (infra)structure.

This book aims to unpack the prefix, probing what it entails-not merely rhetorically but also as a
means of practice, in an attempt to bring the ideas it contains more concretely into the domain of
architecture. It proposes to link the more philosophical discussions on the notion of xeno with
questions of instrumentalization and governance that are necessarily involved in the praxis of
architecture. And it relates the significance of legal architecture and technologically driven
transformation in the metaphysics of law back to the agenda of xeno-architecture. By researching
how architects, artists, thinkers, and activists operating in the spatial field might endorse a
process of "alienation" to confront global issues, this project attempts to re-radicalize spatial
practice.

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Josephine Berry - Art and (Bare) Life: A Biopolitical Inquiry

Sternberg Press 2018 ISBN 9783956793936 Acqn 29156
Pb 14x23cm 328pp 45ills £21

Art and (Bare) Life: A Biopolitical Inquiry analyzes modern and contemporary art's drive to blur
with life, and how this is connected to the democratic state's biologized control of life. Art's
ambition to transform life intersects in striking ways with modern biopower's aim to normalize,
purify, judge, and transform life-rendering it bare. In these intersecting yet different orientations
toward life, this book finds the answer to the question: How did autonomous art become such an
effective tool of the capitalist state?

From today's "creative cities" to the birth of modern democracy and art in the French Revolution,
Art and (Bare) Life explores how the Enlightenment's discovery of life itself is mirrored in politics
and art. The galvanizing revelation that we are, in Michel Foucault's words, "a living species in a
living world," free to alter our environment to produce specific effects, is compared here to the
discovery that art is an autonomous system that can be piloted toward its own self-determined
ends-art for art's sake. But when both art and the capitalist state seek to change life rather than
reflect it, they find themselves set on a collision course.

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Ornament And Crime

Sternberg Press 2018 ISBN 9783956794094 Acqn 29070
Hb 24x28cm 92pp 32col ills £22.75

Contributions by Carl Andre, Meg O'Rourke, Caroline Weber, Lynn Zelevansky, Thea Westreich

The catalogue Ornament and Crime accompanies the group exhibition curated by Meg O'Rourke
at Eykyn Maclean in New York (May 2-June 15, 2018). With Adolf Loos's eponymous 1908
diatribe against excessive ornamentation as its guide, the exhibition draws on the tenets set forth
by Loos-simplicity, purity, freedom-with particular attention to their philosophical implications and
their persistence into the latter twentieth century. The catalogue traces a genealogy of form from
the dogmatism of Loos and Piet Mondrian; to the experimental systems of Yves Klein, the Zero
group, and Ad Reinhardt; and finally, to the austere formalism of Minimalism and Arte Povera.
When superficial surfaces and superfluous decorations are stripped away, the unknown is
opened up-into the void, that is, what lies beyond the surface; down to the elemental, a deeper
engagement with material that exceeds mere abstraction; and toward the eternal, where aesthetic
asceticism points toward spiritual and psychic transcendance. The texts comprise an introduction
by Meg O'Rourke, an historical essay by Lynn Zelevansky, a creative abecedarium by Caroline
Weber, and an interview with Carl Andre conducted by O'Rourke and Thea Westreich. They offer
historical context and draw out the resonances between the artworks represented, which are
included here in full-color standalone and installation views.

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Amalia Pica - Please Listen Hurry Othres Speak Better

Sternberg Press 2018 ISBN 9783956794278 Acqn 29075
Hb 22x29cm 128pp 95ills 83col £21.50

Contributions by Aileen Burns & Johan Lundh, Carolin Kochling, Rafael Ortega, Filipa Ramos,
Volker Sommer, Eugenio Viola

The catalogue please listen hurry others speak better accompanies solo exhibitions by Amalia
Pica at three venues: "ears to speak" at The Power Plant in Toronto and "please open hurry" at
the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, and Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts. Two threads in
Pica's practice are brought together: communication between humans and exchange between
species. The artist raises questions of mutual understanding through constructing forums that
address shared experience. Illustrations of primate and human social models and interpersonal
communication in the publication are accompanied by documentation of performances that enact
social hierarchies and animal-language studies. Volker Sommer writes about his work on animal
rights and the initiative to establish a "community of equals," and Filipa Ramos reflects on primate
anthropologists Jane Goodall and Gregory Bateson. A conversation between Carolin Kochling
and Pica considers her artistic practice, and Eugenio Viola and Pica discuss the performative
element of the artworks.

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Rainer Ganahl - Manhattan Marxism

Sternberg Press 2018 ISBN 9783956794117 Acqn 29150
Pb 21x30cm 768pp 620ills 120col £24.50

Edited by Rachel Corbett, Rainer Ganahl

Contributions by Arthur Fink, Rainer Ganahl, Liam Gillick, Johan Hartle, Steve Lyons, Antonio
Negri, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

The artist Rainer Ganahl has been creatively adapting the writings of Karl Marx to his own work
since the 1990s. The German philosopher's ideas have galvanized projects such as Ganahl's
irreverent fashion show Commes des Marxists, a series of obscene food sculptures inspired by
the "credit crunch" of 2008, and a Karl Marx fire extinguisher, which allows the thinker's wisdom
to be sprayed onto any conflict. There has never been a more fitting time, however, for the
release of this book, which appears on the 10th anniversary of the global financial crisis, and 200
years after Marx's birth. In more than 700 pages, Manhattan Marxism assembles essays, photos,
and other documentation from dozens of Ganahl's Marx-themed projects from the past decade.

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