Essay

Conceived around an anthropology of the object, this book proposes to follow the course of royal objects of Abomey, former capital of the pre-colonial Kingdom of Dahomey (in present-day Benin).

This collection assembles key essays of Reiner Schürmann centering on the concepts of anarchy and the singularization to come. Setting out from the question of the status of practical philosophy at the end of metaphysics, these texts track the crucial role of Schürmann's engagement with the work of Michel Foucault between 1983 and 1991.

It is a form of spiritual revolt that Spanish architect Carlos Martí Arís highlights through a transversal analysis of different artistic expressions that combine to enrich his reflection.

The reissue, in a new translation, of one of the most important essays of Latin American poetry from the historical avant-gardes.

This book traces the career of Kara Walker (born in 1969), the most internationally recognized African-American artist since Jean-Michel Basquiat, and explores the history of the reception of a work that faces the limits of representation, challenging the question of the figuration of the black body.

The reconciliation of art and life, at the heart of the reflection and practice of many modern and contemporary movements.

Jean Dubuffet, Art Brut, and the primitivist paradigm.

A critical look at the place and stakes of representations of the war of independence in the contemporary construction of the French and Algerian art scene.

A seminal text of Contemporary Mexican poetry, inspired by the Tarahumara and peyote rituals. Included in appendix is the first manifesto of infra-realism, written by Anaya in 1975.

The historical-memorial narrative in comics, from Art Spiegelman to Marjane Satrapi, as a new form of representation of History, between individual and collective memory.

How did autonomous art become such an effective tool of the capitalist state? A thorough analysis of the connection between contemporary art and modern biopower.

Philosopher Ludger Schwarte presents a critical essay against the notion of contemporaneity in art and pleads for a renewed temporality: an art of futurity.

French art historian Anne Lafont delivers an unpublished study on the close and paradoxical relations of art and race in the Enlightenment. A new voice in current works on issues of race, art, images and colonization.

It is a hundred and fifty years since Hector Berlioz is caught between storm and passion, violence and adolescence. This book wants to get out of these cliches, even to sink into others.

A critical examination of the relationship between aesthetics and politics through the iconic figure of Carla Lonzi (1931-1982), an innovative art critic and one of the founders of neo-feminism in Italy.

An investigation into the artistic and political issues of participatory art since the 1990s.

20 proposals for the intersection of artistic practice and research in academic milieu.

An an extensive analysis of the advent of Christian visual culture in the Kingdom of Kongo and its and development across four centuries.

Marcel Duchamp, Henri-Pierre Roché, and the Neuf Moules Mâlic (Nine Malic Moulds): the genesis, the history and the destiny of an artwork as exceptional as the relation between an artist and his collector, of which it was the vector.

Two studies by the pionneer of the popular music studies.

A history of photography through its accidents.

A philosophy of decolonization that intends to show how, in knowledge and the arts, the past can be passed.

The growth of thought on ornament, applied arts and architecture in the industrial age, between ornamental impulse and decorative project.

Based on a set of mostly unpublished archives, this book focuses on the role played by art dealers at the turn of the last century in the definition, promotion and circulation of African objects as artworks, in Europe and the United States.

“Primitivism” as a tool for analysis of post-war French society, between a modernization and decolonization movement, and possible forms of resistance.

An essay on Adolfo Bioy Casares' novel.

Why has there been so much interest in “surplus value” in recent years? In “The Outside Can't Go Outside”, artist Merlin Carpenter considers how this term has been inserted into contemporary art theory following the financial crisis of 2007/8.

An essay by Frédéric Valabrègue on the American avant-garde artist, one of the main actors of the Fluxus movement.

A collection of texts about time and artists working with it.

A collection of texts about space and artists working with it.

Six essays dealing with still rarely discussed aspects of the work of Joseph Beuys, Max Bill, Fischli | Weiss and Ai Weiwei, but also Jules Verne, in their relationship with the various artistic concepts of Marcel Duchamp.

The encounters between the most prominent French philosophers of the 1960s and 1970s and the artists of their times, most particularly the protagonists of the Narrative Figuration movement.

The history of capitalism of the 1960s revisited in the light of the artworks that challenged it.

An in-depth and circumstantial study of the work of Franz Radziwill (1895-1983), a major and controversial representative of “magical realism” in painting.

A landmark study on the psychological effects of oppression on Black Americans during the 1940s.

A historiographical study of German art theorist, writer and activist Carl Einstein (1885-1940), that also explores several layers of the history of the early twentieth century, and proposes a critical reflection on some epistemological tropisms of today.

In this essay, professor Peter G. Rowe gives an overall description of how new technologies transformed the field of architectural design, addressing issues such as the precision and incompleteness of information, schema theory and heuristics.

Comparative Studies of Neo-Avant-Gardes in a Bipolar World.

This book, the first major publication in English devoted to the Korean critic and art historian Lee Yil (1932-1997), is a collection of texts on aesthetics, theory and history of art by the main observer of “Dansaekhwa”, or Korean monochrome. It also brings together essays and monographic prefaces that gave wide coverage to artists who had been active from the end of the Korean war up until the mid-1990s.

Eight essays on the German avant-gardes (Hugo Ball, Max Beckmann, Marcel Breuer, Franz Marc, Merzbau, Expressionnism, Dada…).

The first French translation of the landmark work by media theorist Friedrich Kittler.

An introduction to media theory.

This collection of texts offers a philosophical and textual analysis of the work of butō dance creator, Hijikata Tatsumi. The author, the philosopher and translator Uno Kuniichi, gives a deterritorializing reading of the Japanese dancer and choreographer, linking him to figures like Genet or Artaud, while restoring his own specificity.

A reflection on the relationship between language and photography.

How media and new technologies affect our sense of the present.

In her brilliant essay, Helen Molesworth pinpoints the significance of the return of the handmade in Duchamp's artistic oeuvre of his later years and, at the same time, and for the very first time, makes this fundamental paradigmatic change the focal point of academic debate.

The essays gathered in this volume explore interactivity in art, in a historical and interdisciplinary perspective.

An ethnological study of witchcraft in West Africa, based on field research conducted in five countries between 1994 and 2000.